by Quinn O'Neill

I’ve been busy lately, much busier than I’d like to be. A natural night owl, I’ve been forcing myself out of bed before the sun comes up and relying on caffeine to achieve normal levels of functioning. There’s seldom more than a cup of coffee standing between me and an embarrassing display of torpor that would see my glassy eyes staring blankly through my computer screen and drool puddling on the desk in front of me. I’ve mostly been occupied by things that don’t even interest me and it’s been over six months since I’ve read a book for pleasure or personal interest.

It’s seems respectable in Western society to be really busy. People who show up to work early, work long hours, come in on the weekends, and take their work home with them are described in flattering terms; they’re dedicated and hard working. The on-the-go, life-in-the-fast-lane way of living has been glamourized and marketed to us like fast food and squeezable tubes of yogurt. It’s not good for us, not as individuals and especially not as a civilization.

“I wish I hadn’t worked so hard” is a common regret of the dying. Palliative care nurse, Bronnie Ware, says that she heard this from every male patient that she cared for. Women also had this regret, she explains, but were less likely to have been the breadwinners, since her patients were of an older generation. The men regretted missing their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship for life on “the treadmill of a work existence”.

When we devote all of our time to one thing, we necessarily neglect other things and some of them are bound to be important. It may be our health or our family and friends, or we may lose touch with what’s going on in the world around us.

At the risk of looking like a slacker, I recently perused news items on my computer at work. Reading a headline, I announced to a colleague that it been 1000 days that Bradley Manning had been in jail without trial. “Who’s that?” she responded. She hadn’t heard of him or seen the Collateral Murder video. It seems a lot of people haven’t. Manning’s taken a huge risk and already paid a hefty price, because, as he put it, “I want people to see the truth … regardless of who they are … because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.” With a heavily biased media and a well-distracted public, truth is disappointingly impotent.

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by Misha Lepetic

“Look, I am not a philosopher, I am a strategist.”
~Guy Debord

What happens when a vision is so compelling that it becomes a nightmare? Is there ever a way out, let alone on the terms that the nightmare itself has set? These are oftentimes the questions that accompany any lengthier reading of Michel Foucault. But, as the saying goes, could reading his charismatic writing nevertheless be “necessary but not sufficient?” So, in all fairness, let’s begin with an icon.

Foucault’s notion of the Panopticon has attained the cultural status of a meme (heaven knows I fell for it a long time ago), but popular understanding has actually eroded the point of Foucault’s characterization of Bentham’s (in)famous prison design. It’s true that the Panopticon is a devilishly clever surveillance machine, but Foucault uses it as part of a much broader programme, that of re-conceptualizing the very nature of power. But as enticing as it is, let us set aside the Panopticon for the moment; there is another example that gives us equally fascinating insights into how Foucauldian power can be spatially conceptualized.

Early on in Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974-1975, Foucault describes the conventional, reductive view of power: it restricts, penalizes, excludes, or exiles us when we transgress. There is only so much power to go around, and what of it there is, is jealously guarded. But Foucault wants us to think of power in completely the opposite way: as a force, or perhaps even more appropriately, as an interest, that seeks to include, observe, and continuously generate knowledge. This knowledge, in turn, creates more power. It is a generative model of power, and to illustrate it, he draws upon the difference between how society has historically dealt with two kinds of threats to public health, namely lepers and plagues.

In the former case, power was exercised in the conventional sense: lepers were excluded from the rest of society, forced to wear bells around their necks to warn of their approach, and driven into quarantined colonies. In order to emphasize the finality of this act, those about to be cast out were “regularly accompanied by a kind of funeral ceremony during which individuals who had been declared leprous were declared dead [and which they themselves had to attend]” (p43-4, 53). This practice, which saw the leper exiled, dispossessed, and literally declared dead, persisted until the early eighteenth century.

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by Dave Maier

In my recent post on Nietzsche I referred to Platonism as “the ancient enemy,” and criticized certain kinds of naturalism for not overcoming it, or for even, ultimately, amounting to it themselves. In this post I consider the sense in which a robust anti-Platonism is a philosophical imperative for our post-medieval era.

Let me be clear (as our President likes to say): Plato deserves his exalted place in the philosophical pantheon. He's a terrific writer, and Platonism was a brilliant and timely synthesis of Pythagorean, Parmenidean, and Socratic ideas into the very backbone of European philosophical thought for some 2000 years. And I have nothing against the medieval worldview either, except what is entailed by the simple if as yet poorly understood fact that it's not the 13th century anymore.

But we cannot afford complacency. Modernity is stuck, and while Nietzsche's own construal of the problem as that of “nihilism” in the wake of the “death of God” is in many ways unhelpful, he was spot on in his perception of its urgency. What is right in Platonism must be detached from what is no longer useful in it, or we will never understand the ways in which, by now at least, we have torn ourselves apart. What is no longer useful in Platonism is what I call the “ancient enemy”. Our problem is that we can no longer see it for what it is. We see it when it is not there, and look right through it when it is.

Naturally I am taking some interpretive liberties to make my point, which can be made in other ways. In fact one of the difficulties here is that once you get that point, you could perfectly well present it as just as much a victory for Platonism as a defeat. (And that would even be okay, if the point stuck; but for reasons I will try to make clear, that seems most unlikely – so anti-Platonists let us be.) This makes the problem very difficult to state, so please bear with me as I display its difficulty in the most direct way: by struggling.

…

Hardly anybody today admits to being a Platonist. To do so invites the assumption that one subscribes to Plato's most well-known doctrine, the Theory of Forms (or Ideas), which literally no one does anymore. Here's the Philosophy 101 version of that theory. Each particular horse differs in many ways from each other horse; but what they share is that they are all horses. To be a horse is to “participate” (metekhein) in the Form or Idea of Horse, which (here's the weird part) is itself a horse – the perfect Horse, with none of the imperfections of merely physical horses. The Form of Horse is of course identical with itself, which is by definition the closest you can get to Ideal; so it must be a horse too, even more so, if you like, than any of the others.
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by James McGirk

Technology seeps into our imaginations, changes the way we think and the way we write. The novel may seem like a relic, a low-bandwidth version of virtual reality better suited to the 19th and 20th Centuries than today. But beneath its grim monochrome interface (a.k.a. “pages”) it glows like the neon-piped suits in Tron. Contemporary fiction is nearly as much a product of Silicon Valley as the integrated circuit.

Fiction, on a crass, fundamental level, isn’t much more than a container for a story. Most stories have already been told (by William Shakespeare—or at least it feels that way), so the challenge of writing fiction is to find a new way to contain a story. This experimental impulse is tempered by a reader’s ability to decode what is going on. As readers have grown more accustomed to following hyperlinks and leaping about the Internet, their ability to understand information out of sequence has changed too.

Consider three popular, experimental novels and the technology of the era: David Foster Wallace’s (1996) Infinite Jest was written at the dawn of the Internet Age. The Internet was in an ugly growth spurt then. Amateurs created most online content. Big chunks of the Internet blossomed and died seemingly overnight. It was common to see gaping holes where content was no longer compatible. Following hyperlinks from page to page felt jarring (particularly given how slow most connections were). Wallace wanted to compress information in the Infinite Jest but he didn’t want to disrupt his timeline. So he chose endnotes to digress with—a fairly conventional device, although one not often used for fiction. He even said (to The New Yorker): “I pray they are nothing like hypertext.”

Endnotes are hypertext, however. They just happen to predate the Internet and, since they are numbered, romp alongside the text in a linear fashion (and nestle at the end of chapters, where they won’t distract readers). That’s not the case for the digressions in Dave Eggers’ A Heart Breaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000). Eggers digresses like Wallace does, but his digressions actually separate from the text, sometimes even forming self-contained documents.

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3 Small Poems

A Good Poet's Boots

a good poet's subversive
—not to the point of blood in the streets
…………………………. necessarily

but to the point of burrowing beneath
his garden of conceits like an insistent vole
and killing those weeds at their roots

everyone in this way
can walk in a good poet’s boots

~~

Cabin Fever

besides the Bible
there are other books
besides the Koran

It’s not good to be cooped-up in any one book
during the winter of our discontent:

cabin fever

~~

Snow Mountain

The place is cool and distant

The air is clear of error

The vista wide and brimming

Everything is still

Undone

by Jim Culleny

by Leanne Ogasawara

Cities are smells, said the great Mahmoud Darwish:

Acre is the smell of iodine and spices. Haifa is the smell of pine and wrinkled sheets. Moscow is the smell of vodka on ice. Cairo is the smell of mango and ginger. Beirut is the smell of the sun, sea, smoke, and lemons. Paris is the smell of fresh bread, cheese, and derivations of enchantment. Damascus is the smell of jasmine and dried fruit. Tunis is the smell of night musk and salt. Rabat is the smell of henna, incense, and honey….

Each somehow singular, that cities have their own distinct and discrete smells, weather, feeling, music and mood is something immediately discernible to anyone who travels around the cities of India; of Southeast Asia; of Europe where –despite close proximity, the cultures/spirits/aurae/airs/colors– are so incredibly and beautifully different. Smells especially can so vividly evoke–or even “capture”– the spirit of a city; so that, as Darwish goes on to say, A city that cannot be known by its smell is unreliable.

So what of Indian cities? For me, Srinagar was perfumy: floral from flowers in bloom in gardens scattered around the city. But also it was the smell of sewage coming from the lake. Cardamom and spicy Kashmiri chai too. Delhi back then smelled sweet from the burning dung fires; smelled of exhaust too–even way back then. Shimla was freshly baked bread and heavenly deodar forests.

I still regret not making it to Lahore –for it must have been the most fragrant city of all. “Pearl of the Punjab” and “Paris of the East”–what does a nation do upon losing a city so perfumed in history as that one?

I just read an interesting essay by Vinayak Bharne called, “Anointed Cities.” It's such a great title, and the essay illuminates in just a few short pages something that is in many ways perhaps unique to the sub-continent. Typically, when we look at the history of cities, we find that they come into being for two main reasons: either for commercial reasons as place for trade (this was particularly so of the earliest ancient cities) or for political or even geopolitical reasons, as places for kings to better hold power. This is no different in India, but according to Bharne, India also has a history whereby small, wayside places of worship became the impetues for urbanization.

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By Liam Heneghan

“There are tories in science who regard imagination as a faculty to be avoided rather than employed. They observe its actions in weak vessels and are unduly impressed by its disasters” —John Tyndall, 1870

In his 1881 essay on Mental Imagery, Francis Galton noted that few Fellows of the Royal Society or members of the French Institute, when asked to do so, could imagine themselves sitting at the breakfast-table from which presumably they had only recently arisen. Members of the general public, women especially, fared much better, being able to conjure up vivid images of themselves enjoying their morning meal. From this Galton, an anthropologist, noted polymath, and eugenicist, concluded that learned men, bookish men, relying as they do on abstract thought, depend on mental images little, if at all.

In this rejection of the scientific role for the imagination Galton was in disagreement with Irish physicist John Tyndall who in a 1870 address to the British Association in Liverpool entitled The Scientific Use of the Imagination claimed that in explaining sensible phenomena, scientists habitually form mental images of that which is beyond the immediately sensible. “Newton’s passage from a falling apple to a falling moon”, Tyndall wrote, “was, at the outset, a leap of the prepared imagination.” The imagination, Tyndall claimed, is both the source of poetic genius and an instrument of discovery in science.

The role of the imagination is chemistry, is well enough known. In 1890 the German Chemical Society celebrated the discovery by Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz of the structure of benzene, a ring-shaped aromatic hydrocarbon. At this meeting Kekulé related that the structure of benzene came to him as a reverie of a snake seizing its own tail (the ancient symbol called the Ouroboros).

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by Misha Lepetic

“I never knew I had an inventive talent until phrenology told me so.
I was a stranger to myself until then.”
~Thomas Edison

The question of expertise is a fascinating and vexatious one. Who gets to be an expert? More accurately, who is allowed to be an expert? And what happens when expertise is, for lack of a more polite term, betrayed by one of its own? A recent New Yorker article pillorying Dr. Mehmet Oz provides some interesting lessons in this regard.

Most expertise, it can be reasonably argued, is cultivated and deployed within the context of occupational professions. For the purposes of created a baseline for the following discussion, let’s define a profession as “an organized body of experts who apply esoteric knowledge to particular cases.” This is according to Andrew Abbott, whose The System of Professions (1988) is the current sociological heavyweight when it comes to theorizing about professions.

Abbott contends that, in order to theorize this phenomenon effectively, sociology must look at professions in a holistic manner: prior research, which focused on the structure and function of individual professions, missed the larger point that the success or failure of any given profession was largely contingent upon the results of “interprofessional competition.” That is, when considered in isolation, professions make claims concerning their relevance for addressing social needs through the formation of associations, credentialing, the courting of favourable regulation, and so on. However, when viewed as a larger social phenomenon, it is apparent that these claims are subject to constant contention by other professions. There is, in fact, an ecology of professions.

As an example, while one might consider alcoholism to be an objective phenomenon centered around the over-consumption of drink by an individual, the subjective nature of alcoholism as a social phenomenon has been viewed alternatively as a moral or spiritual problem, a medical disease, a legal matter, and as a mental disorder. Respectively then, the responsibility to treat alcoholics was claimed by the clergy, doctors, lawyers and police, and psychiatrists. What is worth noting is that these professions actively partook in poaching the objective phenomenon at hand from one another. When a particular profession failed to deliver results, an opening was created for another group to take over, thereby adding to its social legitimacy and influence.

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by Quinn O'Neill

If you were a patient in a hospital, whom would you rather have caring for you: a healthy professional or someone who was febrile, coughing, and struggling to stay awake? If you’re like most people, you’d want to be treated by someone who seemed healthy. It's a no-brainer.

Unfortunately, health care professionals have a tendency to show up to work even when they have the flu or a flu-like illness. According to one study more than 80% of medical practioners and over 60% of nurses, nurse’s aides, allied professionals, and administrative staff do not routinely take sick leave when experiencing influenza-like illness (ILI).

Though paid sick leave policies aren’t the norm in the US, they can have a huge impact on the spread of disease. A study looking at the 2009 flu pandemic estimated that the absence of paid sick leave could add an additional 5 million cases of ILI in the general population. It's worth noting that ILI may be caused by a wide range of pathogens (in addition to influenza viruses) for which flu vaccination offers no protection.

The issue of sick leave – whether it’s paid or not, and whether or not it’s taken when it should be – is particularly interesting in the context of mandatory vaccination of health care workers. A number of employees were recently fired by an Indiana hospital for refusing the flu shot. This wasn't an isolated incident – 29 hospitals fired unvaccinated workers last year. It seems like a pretty extreme measure. Is it justified? In determining this, we should first consider a couple of other questions.

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by Tom Jacobs

Nobody knows anyone. Not that well.

~ Miller’s Crossing

The midnight thoughts we have when we are kids are amongst the most profound we will ever have, even if we are not in a position to understand them at the time. How do I know the color I see as red is the same color of red for you? What happens after you die? How do I know that my life is not a dream?

These are ridiculously important and childish questions. The kind of questions that used to keep you up at night and that now seem safely relegated to the category of pointlessness (in part because possibly unanswerable…what evidence could one ever marshal to “prove” or even convincingly argue one’s case one way or the other?). But the heart, and somewhere in the back of one’s mind, the mind too, knows, that these questions matter. They will not go away. But there’s work to do and subways to get and schedules to keep. Whether or not you really exist kinda fades into the shadows, along with one’s fear of ghosts. Hell, it’s not even in the background. It’s offstage, somewhere in the wings, occasionally whispering stage directions. But not much more than that. But still it whispers.

Sometimes the moon appears in the middle of the day, spang in the middle of the cerulean familiar. It’s always seemed a damned strange thing, this midday moon. It’s a nighttime thing, the moon, the sort of thing that draws out freaks and lunatics and people who are up to the devil’s business. And yet, the moon is there, hovering over the horizon, at midday no less, offering a kind of vague threat or prophecy. Geosynchronous with us, never letting us see its ass end. As Pink Floyd pointed out long ago, there’s a dark side to it, even if we never get to see it. And this is what creates and cultivates the notion of mystery. Things we know are there but have never seen. The substance of things hoped for, but have never felt or seen (to paraphrase).

My thumb is more or less exactly the same size as the moon is. My thumb is actually usually bigger than the moon, depending on how far it is from my head when I point it towards the sky. How, then, do I know that the moon is, at least in relation to my thumb, immense? How do I know this?

Faith, mostly, with a bit of reason and textbook understanding of physics and geometry thrown in. Even if I was born yesterday (which I wasn’t…I age, I age, and it fills me with a sense of Gnosticism, the felt sense that something has been lost, something important with the advent of consciousness), but even if I was born yesterday, I would never believe you when you tell me that the moon is a moon, orbiting in some unlikely revolution around our earth. And you tell me the earth is four billion years old? Get outta here. But I do trust people who tell me so and I believe them. Why is this so? Is it worth anyone’s time to try to worry over or try to verify these things? Pragmatism comes to the fore to point our attention to things worth thinking about, even if on some deeper level, questions remain.

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That's All She Wrote

There sits my self
near a window in the sun
its feet up on a sill

There, beside the begonia
whose rose-tinged leaves are satin,
succulent and still

then, as now, taking down
and making up the tale of itself,
a concocting troubadour
in sight of a star above a pine,
past noon remembering,
telling the story of itself to itself
becoming itself,
spinning its character
from threads of the old and
new seconds it stitches into
its suit of being,
as clear as the nose
on the face of itself
(but strange too as it tells and tells),
who reads between the lines of itself
following the story's lead
back to the start of itself
in the beginning
before which, and beyond the end leaf,
there's nothing to tell itself
of itself —that's all she wrote
more would be as silent
as a song without a note

by Jim Culleny 1/23/13

by Mara Jebsen

In August in Philadelphia, the sun leaks across red bricks and washes them down in foamy hot colors like a peach set on fire. Grown-ups sit barefoot on stoops and kids skip under rainbows of fire hydrant spray, which veil their bare arms in incandescent mist. This happened in 1985, perhaps it happens now. It keeps on happening in the diamond in my mind.

My mother and I encountered the city of Brotherly Love in 1983. It did not begin well. That year, her father, a splendid Norwegian gentleman who carried great mischief and light inside him; whose dark hair bristled around his bald pate like Caesar’s wreath, died on a tennis court. He was not yet sixty. This catastrophe blew the universe into grayness, into a sort of deep ash-color that billowed and swallowed even my mother’s golden head.

We’d been living in Benin, in West Africa. When we arrived in Philly I was six; she was thirty-one. We’d just spent two years being jolly and tropical and adventurous. There had been sand castles and palm trees and parties and villages, and chickens to chase. There had been hundreds of friends for both of us, and bright, homemade cotton dresses, paper hats, a parrot, puppet theaters, and my mother had gone dancing under the palm trees to zouk music in her strappy high-heel sandals.

But she was a serious person, basically, and had gotten a spot as a PHD candidate in folklore at the University of Pennsylvania. We took a one-bedroom in the ugliest little stucco building on the last ‘nice’ street between South Philly and Center city, so that I could go to the ‘good’ public school. For two years we were sour and sad and serious.

In 2006, in New York, the poet Philip Levine told me, with that wicked and often charming humor of his, that my poem was “very interesting,” but that he “didn’t want to hear the memoirs of anyone under 40.” He didn’t say it mean. I was 26 and saw his point. I was getting ahead of myself—I wasn’t old enough to look back. Still I have that urge, because of the colors and the gemstone-feeling.

In 1986 these ‘colors’ came. I suppose this is acculturation? It really was as if the first two years were a muddy black and white, a dour Kansas, but 1986 was Oz. My mother got a part-time job as a delivery person for a florist. We drove every street in Philadelphia in a silver van crammed with Birds of Paradise. From about this moment my memories begin to form like a series of complicated kaleidoscopes, the red and yellow and green diamonds spinning

I am not sure that this is entirely a trick of memory.

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