by James McGirk

“The reason why these agencies are coming out of the shadows is that they want to tell their story to the extent that they can,” says Peter Earnest, the founding director of the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. As to how an intelligence agency should go about telling its story when so much of that story is concealed from the public eye is easy, he says, “you simply don’t tell people the parts that are classified.” The problem with leaving holes in a story, however, particularly one as juicy as that of government espionage, is that those holes create a vacuum and that vacuum fills with rubbish, sinister, exceedingly compelling rubbish that supports an entire ecosystem of strange scavengers. The question is: are these scavengers a bug, a feature, or simply a sideshow to the story being told?

Given that bamboozlement is essentially an operational mandate for an intelligence agency, one wonders whether there might be something else going on. John le Carré called this addictive haze of paranoia the “Great Spy’s Dream.” Writing for the New Yorker in 2008, le Carré reflected on his first clandestine mission, a meeting with a Czechoslovakian double agent that was casually aborted when le Carré’s Browning automatic slipped from his waistband and dropped to the floor of an Austrian bar. Le Carré wonders whether his case officer might have invented the entire operation, “his composure astonished me. Not a word of rebuke.” Le Carré diagnoses a kind of delusional paranoia from the incident, “a condition that in the spook world, rather like a superbug in a hospital, is endemic, hard to detect, and harder still to eradicate.” He sees it contaminating the Iraq Dossier, pushing intelligence officers to produce the slam-dunk evidence for the Iraq War, and all because we, the public, want to believe in our spies, “no matter how many times they trip over their cloaks and leave their daggers on the train.” Yet something is going on out there.

Every American agency that employs someone other than a security guard to carry a gun has an unofficial fan club, with a character that is a funhouse reflection of its parent bureaucracy’s. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) the agency that built the Internet and invented stealth technology and god knows what else, attracts futurists with a sinister side, while the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms attracts gun geeks and inveterate smokers, while the U.S. Border Patrol’s various fan clubs are slightly xenophobic and frankly downright hysterical. The web is riddled with chat-rooms, archives and clipping services discussing the minutia of these agencies. They come in all flavors though there is a definite paranoid crunch to most of them. A left-leaning paranoiac interested in intelligence might be drawn to Cryptome.org, a storehouse of sinister government documents that predates Wikileaks, while his or her rightwing counterpart might visit a site like AmericanBorderPatrol.com. Belonging to and participating in these sites must be a sort of wish fulfillment. Particularly since the agencies with the most pull on the imagination belong to America’s intelligence community, especially Central Intelligence or CIA.

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by S. Abbas Raza

I spent a couple of days in Genoa recently and traveled along the coastline by boat to Portofino which is at the extreme lower right in the map below. It was very beautiful. I took some photos. Below the map are some of them without further commentary. [Click map/photos to enlarge a bit.]

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by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

I felt in the pit of my stomach the proximity to my school as the car approached the Air Force base and the diminutive Air Force planes in (almost pretty) earth tones became visible on the runway through the large gates. The car would now turn into the school lane and another day, the stuff of nightmares, would begin for me with the tension stomachache known in Urdu as “twisted stomach.”

The daily assembly at P.A.F school started with the music master leading an uninspired rendition of Iqbal's famous poem “lab peh ati,” a powerful lyric utilizing the classical metaphor of the devoted moth desiring the candle of knowledge; Iqbal's passionate verses warped into the whiney trill of children interested only in live experiments of their own vocal range, utterly oblivious to the poetry. The national anthem was sung, which, being mostly in Farsi, was beyond us Junior School students. In class five I would understand the anthem and admire the beauty of the words, and wonder why it had to be written in the high Urdu that no one understood, not that I would ever want to change the song; the clipped monosyllabic “qom,” “mulk” swelling into a crescendo with the lofty “sul-tan-at,” and drowning into the high note of “Pa-inda ta-binda baad” and then the decrescendo, the softening into a prayer “shaad baad manzil-e-Murad,” roughly translated as “may you happily find your noble destiny,” a prayer like a broken thing, open in its cracks to let in endless sadness— the sadness of an endlessly breaking people.

I was in Prep A, the kindergarten room with the overwhelming aroma of French toast (Pakistani French toast is much “eggier” and sweeter), and Rooh Afza, the super sweet herb drink in little chubby flasks. The smell came from a mountain of lunch boxes in a corner that the ayah arranged and fussed over. Here, in this room I spent one whole year learning little other than the fact that I was too fat to be selected for the role of the coveted “Dolly” for the class play on the annual Sports Day, and I must come to terms with the fact that the role of Miss Polly was good in its own way.

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by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

Not long ago, a few philosophers went out for lunch at a small café. As they ate, they argued about the morality of infanticide. Eventually another patron of the café approached the table of philosophers and asked indignantly, “What’s wrong with you people?”

Philosophers have always cultivated an antagonistic relationship with the society in which they work. But recently many philosophers, along with the American Philosophical Association (the principal professional organization for philosophers in the United States), have begun to clamor for philosophers to go public. Within the profession these days, the call for “public philosophy” is loud, but not clear. That is, it is difficult to discern precisely what is being called for, what it means for philosophy to be “public.” Here we want to identify a few possibilities.

First, the call for more public philosophy might be a call for philosophy in public. This would be the suggestion that philosophers should simply take themselves out of their offices and into more public settings. They should go about their usual business, but create and participate in forums where their academic work can be accessed by the general public. Our lunchers above were engaged in public philosophy in this sense. The result was not especially encouraging.

So it seems that the call for public philosophy is not simply a call for a change of scenery. “Public philosophy” must be a different kind of philosophy. Hence the idea that philosophers must go public is the idea that they must do something different from what they currently do. But there are many different kinds of thing that philosophers currently do. What must change in order for philosophy to be “public” in the requested sense?

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by Jalees Rehman

“The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.”

—Hannah Arendt

The recent revelations by the whistleblower Edward Snowden that the NSA (National Security Agency) is engaged in mass surveillance of private online communications between individuals by obtaining data from “internet corporations” such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft as part of a covert program called PRISM have resulted in widespread outrage and shock. The outrage is understandable, because such forms of surveillance constitute a major invasion of our privacy. The shock, on the other hand, is somewhat puzzling. In the past years, the Obama administration has repeatedly demonstrated that it is willing to continue or even expand the surveillance policies of the Bush government. The PATRIOT Act was renewed in 2011 under Obama and government intrusion into our personal lives is justified under the mantle of “national security”. We chuckle at the absurdity of obediently removing our shoes at airport security checkpoints and at the irony of having to place Hobbit-size toothpaste tubes into transparent bags for a government that seems to have little respect for transparency. Non-US-citizens who reside in or travel to the United States know that they can be detained by US authorities, but even US citizens who are critical of their government, such as the MacArthur Genius grantee Laura Poitras, are hassled by American authorities. Did anyone really believe that the Obama administration with its devastating track record of murdering hundreds of civilians – including many children – in drone attacks would have moral qualms about using the NSA to spy on individual citizens?

The Stasi analogy

One of the obvious analogies drawn in the aftermath of Snowden's assertions is the comparison between the NSA and the “Stasi”, the abbreviated nickname for the “Ministerium für Staatssicherheit” (Department of State Security) in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR or DDR). Articles referring to the “United Stasi of America” or the “Modern Day Stasi-State” make references to the massive surveillance apparatus of the East German Stasi, which monitored all forms of communications between citizens of East Germany, from wire-tapping apartments, offices, phones and secretly reading letters. The Stasi “perfected” the invasion of personal spaces – as exemplified in the Oscar-winning movie “The Lives of Others“. It is tempting to think of today's NSA monitoring of emails, Facebook posts or other social media interactions as a high-tech version of the Stasi legacy. A movie director may already be working on a screenplay for a movie about Snowden and the NSA called “The Bytes of Others“. However, there are some key differences between the surveillance conducted by the Stasi and the PRISM surveillance program of the NSA. The Stasi was a state-run organization which was responsible for amassing the data and creating profiles of the monitored citizens. It did not just rely on regular Stasi employees, but heavily relied on so called IMs – “inoffizielle Mitarbeiter” or “informelle Mitarbeiter” – informal informants. These informal informants were East German citizens who met with designated Stasi officers, reporting on the opinions and actions of their friends, colleagues and relatives and at times aiding the Stasi in promoting state propaganda. In the case of the PRISM program, the amassing of data is conducted by private “internet corporations” such as Facebook, Google and Microsoft, who then share some of the data with the state. Furthermore, instead of having to rely on informal informants like the Stasi, “internet corporations” simply rely on the users themselves who readily divulge their demographic information, opinions and interests to the corporations.

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by Mara Jebsen

One of Claire Messud's interviews for “The Woman Upstairs” has got a lot of people talking about literature and likeability, and about whether a book’s protagonist ought to be warm, and about whether expectations about that warmth are gendered. Messud, in a tone and with a vividness that ultimately pleased even the interviewer, took exception to a question about the pleasing-ness of her character, and gave with the following response:

“For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? Antigone? Raskolnikov? Any of the characters in The Corrections? Any of the characters in Infinite Jest? Any of the characters in anything Pynchon has ever written? Or Martin Amis? Or Orhan Pamuk? Or Alice Munro, for that matter? If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn’t ‘Is this a potential friend for me?’ but ‘Is this character alive?’ ”

So what shall we make of Jen Fein, the gossip columnist and protagonist of Renata Adler’s “Speedboat”? Jen is both likable and unlikable—but I keep reminding myself that that is not the question to ask. Jen, who considers the possibility that a rat she spotted in one part of New York City is likely the same rat she saw earlier, in another part of the city, seems to think in prose poems crammed with something between wit and wisdom. She rejects her mind’s own proposition about the rat, summarily, with this: “I think sanity, then, is the most profound moral option of our time.”

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by Rishidev Chaudhuri

Like some nervous Gnostic, I’m oppressed by matter, and I’m never as aware of it when I move. Then, more than ever, I seem to exist in a whirl of paper and clothes and small objects of no apparent purpose that all conspire to cloud my existence and subvert the clear paths of my reason. Every time I put something down I lose it. Every time I look away, matter accumulates in the interstices of my life, spills from behind me, wells up through the crevasses of my mind and wraps around my feet. Objects make me anxious. I need to consider each one carefully before I throw it away, in case I need it, and then I am relieved when it is gone. I devise organizational schemes and administrative techniques but matter is stubborn and slippery and in the absence of a neurosis-inducing constant vigilance it squirms away and will not be subdued. I think of this as I wade through all the matter that has accumulated in my life: all the stuff that I need to sort through, each object I need to sorrowfully consider and reject.

Thankfully, History is helping. I liked tapes and CDs, but I don’t miss them and I’m relieved that they’ve vanished into pure Spirit (or whatever their ultimate end is). It was always hard to tell what music I owned and hard to find it and hard to decide what to take where, and I constantly found CDs in strange places and they have hard edges. I hated writing by hand. It was slow and painful and brought back unpleasant memories of frantically scratching away in a school book. I love the rapid erasure and recreating of digital writing; I love the ease of structuring information liberated from a particular physical correlate. And I especially like that I don’t have to carry stacks of notes with me.

And yet, despite this progressive horror of the material, I seek out and accumulate books wherever I go, and I crave their presence. They follow me around, like expensive wallpaper that I need to feel settled in a place. They’re the first thing I think of when I think of my room or what I need to move, and not having my books around me marks transience. At this point, most of what I need to pack seems to be books. I buy more books than I need or will read. I travel with books I’ve already read and probably won’t read again. Deciding which books to take where is a weighty matter, like constructing an intellectual and emotional landscape that will determine my journey.

In theory, I find the idea of e-books somewhat compelling. They seem brisk and efficient and the idea that a single small object can contain hundreds of books is especially enticing as I contemplate moving a room full of bookshelves. And yet I never use them. I read fifty pages on an e-book reader once and it was pleasant, but I’ve never done it since. It doesn’t strike me as an imaginative possibility; it just doesn’t seem part of the possible configurations that my experience allows.

It’s not that I like the smell of books, or their weight, or the memories lying in bed and reading brings back, though I do like all of these things. It’s not just that I like walking into someone’s home and seeing their mind laid out on their bookshelves or that I like the physical act of lending a book and returning a book. It seems somehow baser, something not just pre-cognitive but pre-emotional, like that their material presence has so shaped my way of interacting with the world that their absence troubles the unity of my experience. I imagine this is what it is to have your world determined by a certain technology in its particularity and to suddenly realize that that technology is slipping away. This seems like a common sentiment among the people I know (though it’s often expressed as, and I think confused with, an aesthetic disagreement with e-books). Perhaps we’re already part of an older generation that starts to find the world it’s growing into dissonant. I recognize that at some point in my life I’ll have to move to reading books electronically. I don’t know how this moment will come or what sort of person I’ll be then. I’m not even sure what I’ll have left to put in my room.

LENIN IN THE PRESENCE OF GOD

a trans creation after Iqbal, by Rafiq Kathwari

God
Aha! Comrade Ulyanov—
Welcome! Or I should say,
Dobro Pozhalovat!

Lenin
You’re alive? But “God is dead,” they said.

God
I inhabit men’s heart, passion’s home,
and for a brief moment
the gods themselves swayed to your tune.

Lenin
So, this is the source of the babble in churches.

God
Command and Control,
Shock and Awe,
@NoGodButGod.

Lenin
I need a drink…

God
Heaven is not your local pub,
but we’ve a house white on tap,
Water of Life. Glass or Goblet?

Lenin
Shot glass. Neat.

God
Think of it as Korsvodka.
Red blush on your cheeks—
it’s not rouge. Is it?

Lenin
When will the boat of Capitalism sink?

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by Liam Heneghan

If I asked you to choose from among the several notable Irish William Kings who might possibly serve as first formulator of a hypothesis on the development of bog vegetation you might choose wrongly. The three candidates: William King soldier and politician, William King, geologist and natural scientist, and William King, Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin and Lord Justice…. I will give you a moment to reflect on your choices. Tick-tock.

William King, the soldier recorded nothing on bog matters. William King, geologist and naturalist, certainly had the credentials to make sage comment on the bogs and loughs of Ireland. This Mr King held the first chair of geology in Queens College, Galway (now University College Galway) and was later a professor of natural history, geology, and mineralogy. He established a place for geology in teaching across the curriculum in the arts, agriculture and the engineering faculty – an interdisciplinary teacher by any measure. He also lent his modest heft to Darwin, though apparently approving of a modified version of Darwin's thesis. An interesting and scholarly productive fellow; not uncontroversial either, having had to vacate his position at the Hancock Museum, in Newcastle. It appears that in addition to his curatorial duties, he was also a bustling private dealer in geological and biological specimens. The governing committee of the Hancock felt that this was inconsistent with his duties as a curator, and King resigned. As a 19th Century naturalist and geologist, who took a keen interest in matters beyond the confines of his own discipline, and had written on the geomorphology of the famed karsts-formation of the Burren, Co Clare, it would not have been surprising had he penned a note on the origins of a variety of topographic features, especially those whose origins were not clearly understood. Alas he is not our King for this William King (1809–1886) came two centuries too late to be a pioneer in the matter of bog speculation.

No, the William King that we are most concerned with was Church of Ireland Archbishop from 1703 till 1729. King was born 1650 in Antrim in Northern Ireland and studied at Trinity College Dublin getting his BA in 1671 and MA in 1673. At TCD he converted to Anglicanism and was ordained as a deacon in 1673 and priest in 1674. In 1679 he was appointed chancellor (and later Dean) of St Patrick's cathedral, Dublin, and rector of St Werburgh's Church, both iconic Dublin institutions. Like our previously discussed King, this King was also querulous, though on a grander political scale. During the Jacobite period from 1688 to 1691, King, then the senior Church of Ireland cleric in Ireland, declared his support for William of Orange. On suspicion of collusion he was jailed in Dublin Castle in July 1689 and incarcerated once again in 1690 as William’s forces marched towards Dublin. He was released shortly after the battle of the Boyne. The next year he was appointed Bishop of Derry. In 1703 he became Archbishop of Dublin.

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by Dave Maier

When I was a grad student, I once made an off-color remark, or the equivalent, to a female colleague (I'll call her Jessica). It was in the library, in front of the circulation desk. We had been talking shop, and when I said that I had written something relevant to our discussion, she asked to see it, so I promised to put a copy in her department mailbox. At the end when I turned to go, she called after me to remind me about my paper: “Oh, and put your thing in my box.” I was ten feet away by this time, and after weighing my options for about 1.2 seconds, I walked back and stage-whispered, mock-offendedly, “Jessica, please!”

That looks terrible in print, doesn't it? At the time, since a) I got a nice laugh, and b) I was (and remain) convinced that (for myriad reasons most of which I can't get into here; but read on) she was not offended, I felt okay about it; but now I wish I hadn't said it. What do you really lose by forgoing a joke – even after so perfect a set-up – when the potential downside is so great?

I was naturally reminded of this by the recent events (if you don't know what I'm talking about, start here) which have the philosophical world (academic subsection) abuzz. Many of the most relevant issues have been thoroughly hashed out, if not entirely conclusively, on the blogs (esp. New Apps and the Philosophy Smoker). Not surprisingly perhaps, one theme in the comment threads has been (I paraphrase): “philosophy is/you (or we) philosophers are so messed up; here you/we are quibbling over abstract minutiae instead of acting/deciding what to do, like real people would.” Here's part of an actual comment: “All those years of arcane, fatuous debates about the trolley problem have blinded many philosophers to obvious ethical truths. If this is a good reflection of the sexual politics of your discipline, then your discipline is fucked.” Another complains about people demanding “Cartesian certainty” instead of accepting obvious facts. And yet we also have: “I'm thinking wow, these people have an awful lot to say about a case about which very little is actually known, but then again, they are philosophers: many of them have written entire books on the basis of no information, so two or three facts are more than enough to decide this matter.” (So basically we can't win: we either demand too many facts or make do with too few.)

At the risk of confirming the suspicion that philosophers are clueless jerks, I've got a few comments about the philosophical issues that came up in the discussions. In my defense I claim that any good points I might have made here about the real-world case have been made over and over again, and better than I could have, by certain commenters on the threads (including our own J. E. H. Smith). Go read what they said if that's what you're interested in. Here, abstract minutiae rule, so continue at your own risk.

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by Leanne Ogasawara

My old friend C. laments the way “play” is diminished in the West.

He says:

Western culture belittles play since it represents something very powerful to be controlled. Play represents quite fully: a journey, education, exploration to discover our full nature.

To live is to play… and as a adult “play” is taken away in order to keep people in the box… to prevent them from “journeying” to greater states of being.

His words interested me greatly since I have been struck by something similar upon my return here.

Sometimes I feel a little like Rip Van Winkle. Back in America after twenty years away, things sometimes take me aback, and I am always left wondering: Was it really always like this? Wasn't it different back when I was a kid? Wasn't life more playful back then? Why does everything feel so humorless now?

For my man Heidegger, play was crucial. And according to Heidegger, the essence of play has nothing whatsoever to do with “leisure providing an interlude from the seriousness of work.” Rather, “the mystery of play is the play of Being by which Being reveals and conceals itself.” That is a roundabout way of saying that the history and destiny (Geschick) of being unfolds in playfulness, and human beings in any given age are to “corresponsively participate in the play of the Geschick of being.”

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by James McGirk

After writing a spate of reasonably successful—and very autobiographical—novels, James Ellroy and Martin Amis took the cities surrounding them and used them as test beds, experimenting with new voices and forms and populating this familiar terrain with doppelgangers and villains and foils and sexual obsessions. Amis wrote three novels devoted to northwest London (and the chicer parts of Manhattan) known colloquially as “the London Trilogy”, while Ellroy revisited the Los Angeles neighborhoods he had prowled as a burglar to write his “L.A. Quartet.” Both used cities to refine distinctive writing styles. Yet despite their precocity, these immense literary efforts remain tethered to a biological fact in each of the author’s lives. A fact that pulses through the work and keeps it vital and exciting despite the fact that the novelists have essentially written the same novel over and over again.

James Ellroy’s mother was raped and brutally murdered when he was only ten years old, and the murder remains unsolved. At the time he was about as estranged from his mother as a ten-year-old could possibly be, and claims to have been delighted that she died because he was sent off to live with his father, an indulgent lowlife who passed away not long after. His dad gave him a copy of Jack Webb’s The Badge, and Ellroy became obsessed with a chapter about the murder of Elizabeth Short, better known as The Black Dahlia, a beautiful woman whose unsolved, grisly murder haunted Los Angeles ten years before Ellory’s mother was killed.

Ellroy began his quartet by reconstructing Betty Short’s murder. The Black Dahlia is told from the point of view of a policeman as he investigates Short’s murder. After that Ellroy’s novels become much more ambitious. The second in the series, The Big Nowhere, is narrated by a god-like omniscience, following three characters as they get sucked into a series of strange murders and political intrigue. The third novel, L.A. Confidential traverses eight years of Los Angeles history, ending on approximately the same day that Ellroy’s mother was killed. (Geneva Ellory died June 22, 1958. The last chapter of L.A. Confidential is date-less but occurs after a series of scenes set in April and is titled “After You’ve Gone”). Along the way, Ellroy experiments with techniques to compress information without sacrificing the velocity of his story (i.e. the pie crust), introducing documents, police reports, and newspaper clippings into his story. The final novel in the quartet, White Jazz, abandons traditional narrative completely. It’s impossibly dense with detail and takes the form of a reconstructed file, animated with clipped recollections, and ends with an epilogue that takes his enormous cast of characters and traces their lives back up to the present day.

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by Maniza Naqvi

What do Iran and Alaska have in common? Well for one thing, both have followed a similar path towards equity by sharing mineral revenues with citizens through the Alaska Permanent Fund and the Iran Citizens Income Scheme (here). Why aren't other countries, rich in mineral wealth and poverty doing the same? Because, the “journey”, which costly consultants want costly decision makers at costly aid conferences full of power point presentations and participants by the presidential suite loads, to take, is one of visualizing the eradication of poverty with truisms. This journey can be short and sweet: It would entail direct dividend payments from mineral wealth to citizens to become a reality across Africa and other parts of the world.

It's time to put the “mine” in mineral resources. If there ever was a sweet spot for perfect nationalization and poverty eradication then it would be through direct cash payments from natural resource revenues to the citizens of a country: a mechanism by which citizens of a nation, share in its wealth earnings while making sure that the earnings keep growing for future generations (here,here). It is a tantalizing prospect. (here,here)

Africa has mineral revenues and much more that can end poverty. It seems, that whatever the so called developed world craves, Africa already has: from mineral resources to yet to be discovered deposits of diamonds, oils, rare earth; to agriculture land (here, here and here); and even children (here andhere). Yet, whatever enriches the so called developed world from Africa seems to not benefit the continent itself enough or fast enough. Why is that? And what will need to be done to change it?

It is time to transform the discussion on economic growth drivers and development aid by adding into the equation the distribution of mineral and hydro carbons revenues (here). Yet this is left out of the latest discussions, in the public square of elite policy making (here andhere). Similarly the current discussions on the growth from the mining sector still revolves on direct and indirect jobs created through mining and Government investments in social and economic infrastructure on behalf of citizens. The discourse continues on without focusing on giving agency to individuals and providing them with the cash and the tools for making choices for how they spend or invest their cash for their social and economic wellbeing. Mineral rich countries may have had the potential for even greater gains in HD outcomes if they had adopted different policies for how they used mineral revenues.

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by S. Abbas Raza

No matter how many books we read about how coincidences are to be expected in our lives simply due to the sheer amount of information we are bombarded with every day (and psychological reasons that certain kinds of things become salient to us because of various mental traits we share as humans), it still never fails to surprise us when they happen. This is not a scholarly essay but simply a report of one such coincidence that astonished me just yesterday.

On Friday my wife and I went from the Südtirol to Genoa by train to spend the weekend with my sister who had traveled there from Boston to deliver a lecture at a medical conference. Before leaving home I threw a couple of books into my bag to read on the many trains we needed to take. We got there in the evening and ended up having a lovely weekend exploring Genoa and taking a boat to Portofino on Saturday to check out that lovely little town on the Italian Riviera. Yesterday afternoon, after a lunch of spicy doner kebabs, we got on a train from Genoa to Milan. We would then take a train from Milan to Verona, then another from there to Bolzano, and finally a short train ride on a fourth train to Brixen, where we live.

Anyway, so we got on the train to Milan and found seats. I took out my copy of Leonard Mlodinow's excellent book The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives and started reading. At one point I was reading about a guy called Geralomo Cardano who wrote the first book ever on the theory of randomness in the mid-sixteenth century called The Book on Games of Chance. Leonard Mlodinow writes about him:

In the years leading up to 1576, an oddly attired old man could be found roving with a strange, irregular gait up and down the streets of Rome, shouting occasionally to no one in particular and being listened to by no one at all. He had once been celebrated throughout Europe, a famous astrologer, physician to nobles of the court, chair of medicine at the university of Pavia. (p. 41)

Reading this rather vivid description of the man I went into a sort of reverie imagining the distinguished but eccentric chair of medicine at the University of Pavia. For some reason, I imagined Pavia (which I really had never heard of before) to be close to Florence (my Italian geography is terrible) and I was imagining our man Cardano striding through streets laid down on rolling hills near the Arno river to make house calls on patients while carrying a doctor's bag full of potions and instruments. This made me think that perhaps I will visit Pavia next time I am in Florence and I thought also of looking it up on the internet when we got home. I was strangely gripped by a curiosity about what Pavia looks like.

I was jolted out of my extended daydream by the train having slowed down and finally jerking to a stop. We were at some small station in a small city about 20 minutes south of Milan. I stared at the scene outside and at the city beyond the station as the train started moving again. It was then that I saw the name on a large sign at the end of the platform as we passed by: yes, believe it or not, it was Pavia.

I exclaimed something incoherent out loud and told my wife what had happened while I tried to get my camera out and photograph the sign at the end of the platform but it was too late. It did give me a little shiver though. A little thrill. For a second it was almost as if Leonard Mlodinow and the world had conspired to teach me a small lesson about randomness even though, I know, I know well that they did not.

[The image at the top shows a somewhat impressionistic photo I shot a bit later out of the high-speed train window somewhere between Pavia and Milan.]

Composting
.
this wonderstuff of natural declination
that'll grow my beets & beans and other rations

browner than the mere idea: good earth
archetypical as second life and virgin birth

more promising than the phantom wealth of nations
more essential than human beings of highest stations

shoveling this wonderstuff into my wagon
sifting it through hardware cloth

screening stems & stones until it's light and soft
to turn into my garden till my ass is dragging

to reap its harvest then until my light turns off
to lift that harvest to a sun that causes without ever bragging
.
.
by Jim Culleny
6/1/13

by Jalees Rehman

“Shorter sentences and simple words!” was the battle cry of all my English teachers. Their comments and corrections of our English-language essays and homework assignments were very predictable. Apparently, they had all sworn allegiance to the same secret Fraternal Order of Syntax Police. I am sure that students of the English language all over the world have heard similar advice from their teachers, but English teachers at German schools excel in their diligent use of linguistic guillotines to chop up sentences and words. The problem is that they have to teach English to students who think, write and breathe in German, the lego of languages.

Lego blocks invite the observer to grab them and build marvelously creative and complex structures. The German language similarly invites its users to construct composite words and composite sentences. A virtually unlimited number of composite nouns can be created in German, begetting new words which consist of two, three or more components with meanings that extend far beyond the sum of their parts. The famous composite German word “Schadenfreude” is now used worldwide to describe the shameful emotion of joy when observing harm befall others. It combines “Schaden” (harm or damage) and “Freude” (joy), and its allure lies in the honest labeling of a guilty pleasure and the inherent tension of combining two seemingly discordant words.

The lego-like qualities of German can also be easily applied to how sentences are structured. Commas are a German writer's best friends. A German sentence can contain numerous clauses and sub-clauses, weaving a quilt of truths, tangents and tangential truths, all combined into the serpentine splendor of a single sentence. Readers may not enjoy navigating their way through such verschachtelt sentences, but writers take great pleasure in envisioning a reader who unwraps a sentence as if opening a matryoshka doll only to find that the last word of a mammoth sentence negates its fore-shadowed meaning.

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