Sughra Raza. Self-portrait On Graffiti In The Rain. June 2023.
Digital photograph.
The World, The Text and the Reader
by Chris Horner
What should we look for in literature? And in the arts and humanities in general? It’s a large question with many answers, some better than others: entertainment, edification, elevation – and much more. A more limited question might be: what is the point of studying it?
Let’s stick with literature as our example.Think of all the students studying the novel, poetry, drama, essays and more. A multitude of students, teaching staff, departments and institutions. And an awful lot of money, much of it in the form of debt. Assuming that at least some of those who enrol and don’t go on to an academic career will want to go and read, see and listen to the things they wrote essays about in school and college, what is is it supposed to mean for them? I got to thinking about that after being present at a conversation about an author (DH Lawrence) between an academic and a reader who had obtained a degree in English and American literature over forty years ago. It went something like this:
Graduate: DH Lawrence is a very interesting writer.
Academic: I agree.
Graduate: The value of Lawrence is both in what he wants to say about life, and the way in which he says it – the art of the The Rainbow, Women in Love, the poetry – Lawrence has an urgent message for us about one’s life and how it might be more richly lived. How do your students respond to it?
Academic: Well, that’s not really what we are interested in at [well known UK university].
Reader: How can it not be?
Academic: We don’t approach any text with that kind of thing in mind. What we study and teach is the social and historical context in which it was produced, the the social background to the text’s production, the forces that shape and mark it: political, economic, questions of gender etc are all important aspects: the discursive and ideological forces that shaped it and made it part, or not part, of the canon.
Reader: But isn’t that missing the point of what DHL has to say? I think he has something to say to me. Of course he is open to criticism – but that’s what the study of literature is about, isn’t it? The questions of value that are raised in our reading of great literature?
Academic: it’s naive to just pick up a text and think of it as speaking to you in an unmediated way, just like that.
The conversation went on, but didn’t really get much further than the positions I’ve very roughly outlined above. The subject was literature but it could surely have been about all sorts of cultural production – the visual arts, for instance. Read more »
Catspeak
by Brooks Riley
My Father is Full of Stories
by Eric Bies
But—let’s be honest—to me he’s Dad.
It’s just the sentence seems better how I have it up there in the title, more satisfying given its slight alliterative lilt, more interesting, rhythmically, to frustrate what otherwise would render as absolute sing-song.
My father is full of stories.
He grew up on a modest farm in a city—a town? a village?—what Wikipedia informs me is an unincorporated community, boasting “no legally defined boundaries or population statistics.”
In January of 2024, Dad’s dad will turn a hundred and three—if I were Julius Caesar I’d say CIII—a rather remarkable number and a very respectable age for a member of our species.
Dad’s dad doesn’t often figure in Dad’s stories. This is because Dad’s stories have everything to do with being five or six years old in the early sixties, running free on a modest farm in an unincorporated community whose citizenry we can’t call numberless but simply unnumbered.
Suffice to say where Dad grew up was and remains right on the perilous edge of what soft-palmed suburbanites like myself rarely shy from dubbing Nowhere.
It’s an exceedingly picturesque Nowhere—the kind of place people like me go to be turkeys, tracing the mazes and lanes of green corn to stand open-mouthed and drooping-combed beneath unassailable stretches of blue—and there’s nowhere I can picture Dad’s stories springing from but there.
When I was a boy Dad told me what it was like when he was a boy. Read more »
Monday Photo
Glasses on a shelf in a restaurant in Brixen, South Tyrol.
Leading creationist organisation appoints conspiracy theorist to key position
by Paul Braterman
One month ago today, Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis appointed Martyn Iles, formerly director of the Australian Question Lobby, to the position of Chief Ministry Officer, ministry of course being Answers in Genesis’ core activity. Here’s why that matters.
Martyn Iles, a lawyer by training, was the managing director of the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) from 2018 until he was abruptly sacked by the ACL Board in February 2023. Accounts of his dismissal differ. Iles described it as a result of difference in strategy; the Board wanted to move in a more political direction, making him in his own words “not the right person for that vision. I have always been a preacher first and politician second (or third…)”. The Board’s chair, however, denied that there had been any such change.
Answers in Genesis (AiG) is the world’s largest Young Earth Creationist organisation. AiG has a full-time working staff of 1200 and, according to its 2021 tax declaration, assets of almost $82 million. It owns the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter in Kentucky as well as other major assets, and its massive outreach programme includes formal publications, Answers magazine, and an extremely active website.
AiG is the property of Ken Ham, like Iles a product of Australian’s extreme Christian fundamentalist community. It was set up in 1994 after complex and litigious manoeuvres involving Ham and his previous associates, Creation Ministries International based mainly in Australia, and the Institute for Creation Research (ICR). ICR itself had been set up by Henry Morris, co-author of The Genesis Flood, when disputes arose among an earlier generation of Young Earth creationists. Read more »
A Queer Transcript of “Paris is Burning”
by Ethan Seavey
This is your sign to acknowledge that it is pride month and that pride comes from decades of unvalued work by Black and Latinx queer people and that pride month would not exist without their strength and that you should watch the film Paris is Burning because you’ve lived 23 years as a white queer person and keep hearing about it and you should listen to it now, because it’s temporarily available on the airline catalog of free movies (for pride month, to be taken away at the end of it…).
18 minutes and 20 seconds in: a voiceover.
When you’re a man and a woman, you can do ANYTHING [ANYTHING being a word enunciated and drawn out slowly, taffy-pulling, teeth-pulling]
you can-
you can almost have sex on the streets if you want to [if you want to, why would you want to, out in the middle of the pavement? the gays cannot understand this heterosexual urge because gays find comfort in bushes and forests and dark hideyholes in parks where you have the freedom to not be seen by anyone you don’t want to see you and to run away and blend back into crowds for safety—out in the street, that is a liberation I fear & do not want]
the most somebody gonna say is “hey you gotta hump for me?”
(clap) you know
but when you’re gay [syntactically intertwining “but” with the word “gay”; always an exception, always an oversight, always a “but when you’re” statement to explain to those who are not, always explaining ourselves, always defending ourselves]
you uh [gay hesitation]
you monitor everything you do [overthinking your gayness and whether it’s too excessive for this day in this place] Read more »
Monday, June 5, 2023
A Gallop Through a Horse’s Pedigree
by Mark Harvey
About five years I bought a quarter horse at an auction in Billings, Montana. The horse was a tall gray four-year-old and showed tremendous speed in the roping events prior to the auction. Kind of a hyped-up, ears-back creature but obviously athletic. Horse auctions are exciting because there’s a lot of money on the line, high stakes, and all kinds of ways things can go wrong. The very term “horse trader” implies clever rogues who have a million ways to disguise old injuries and have no qualms about fobbing off real outlaws as loyal steeds who will always meet you at the gate and never buck.
The horse I bought that day went for a good price and was a registered quarter horse. The name on his papers was JP Perry Bueno, which in the traditional style was a combination from the names of the horse’s sires and dams. His sire was Top Perry and his grandsire was Mr. Jess Perry (hence the JP). I assume the Bueno part was a play on the grandsire of his dam, which was Chicks Beduino. I decided to call him Tatonka for no good reason other than I liked the sound of it. I had looked at his lineage briefly and was familiar with some of his dams and sires but not all.
When I brought the horse back to Colorado he was wired. New locales and new herds stress horses of any age. I was nervous riding him the first few times and, sure enough, he was high-strung and ready to rip at the lightest touch of the legs. But he was fun and could really run. He didn’t look like much of a quarter horse with his long legs and slim build. Read more »
Monday Poem
Newton’s 2nd Law & Uncommon Sense
3 things:
1. the future’s unknown,
2. I’ll never know what it meant till it’s past,
neither its force nor mass, nor
3. the speed with which its die is cast
moving straight ahead in time,
if nothing’s pulling me aside
I’ll move this way forever
in an infinite line
if I’m moving neither straight nor true
I’ll know I’m being dragged by force
—in the short run this may not matter,
but still, as math & human nature shows,
swerve I will (more foolish the faster)
if I swerve from true toward lies I’m chasing after,
which I haven’t had the sense to master,
it may very well become disaster, but
I’ll never know till what comes after
Jim Culleny, © 8/8/16
Oppenheimer IV: “Nim nim man”
by Ashutosh Jogalekar
This is the fourth in a series of posts about J. Robert Oppenheimer’s life and times. All the others can be found here.
Robert Oppenheimer, said Hans Bethe, “created the greatest school of theoretical physics America has ever known.” Coming from Bethe, a physicist of legendary stature who received the Nobel Prize for figuring out what makes the stars shine and who published papers well into his nineties, this was high praise. Before Oppenheimer, it was almost mandatory for young American physics students to go to Europe to study at the feet of masters like Bohr or Born. After Oppenheimer brought back the fire from the continent, they only had to go to California to bask in its glow. Today, while Oppenheimer is most famous as the father of the bomb, it is very likely that posterity will judge his creation of the American school of modern physics as his most important accomplishment.
When he graduated from Göttingen with his Ph.D. in 1927, Oppenheimer’s reputation preceded him. He received ten job offers from universities like Harvard, Princeton and Yale. He chose to go to the University of California, Berkeley. There were two reasons that drew him to what was then a promising but not superlative outpost of physics far from the Eastern centers. Berkeley was, in his words, “a desert”, a place with enormous potential but one which did not have a flourishing tradition of physics yet. The physics department there had already hired Ernest Lawrence, an experimentalist who would become, with his cyclotron, the father of ‘big science’ in the country. Now they wanted a theorist to match Lawrence’s experimental acumen. Oppenheimer who had proven that he could hold his own with the most important physicists in Europe was a logical choice. Read more »
A Returning Rudolf Rocker: An Interlude in a Series on Fascism
by David J. Lobina
Is Ron DeSantis a fascist? Well, no, not really, and the question itself is not a little ridiculous, but I will come back to this properly next month (and, can you even pronounce his name properly?). In the meantime, I thought I would revisit some ideas of Rudolf Rocker briefly, the anarchist thinker and activist I wrote about last year – I wrote about his fascinatingly rich life as well as about his most important work, his 1937 book, Nationalism and Culture.
I must confess that I was a little gutted that the two entries I wrote in June and July last seemed to receive rather little attention, as I believe Rocker’s life experience and intellectual output have much to offer to us, not least to understand and properly situate some of the recent events on the (far) right political spectrum. Rocker lived through actually existing fascism and Nazism, after all, and what he had to say about the nationalist phenomenon then remains relevant to this day.
As the title of Rocker’s 1937 book indicates, and I stressed when I wrote about it, the study was focused on the relationship between nationalism and culture, and in particular, on the question of how cultural creativity can develop and flourish within modern nation-states, a topic Rocker devoted half of his book to. Rocker was most interested in the nature of the creative output given the pressures a nation-state imposes on individuals. Read more »
Perceptions
Allison Elizabeth Taylor. Only Castles Burning, 2017.99 Exercises in Style
by John Allen Paulos
Raymond Queneau was a French novelist, poet, mathematician, and co-founder of the Oulipo group about which I wrote last year here. The group is primarily composed of French writers, mathematicians, and academics and explores the use of mathematical and quasi-mathematical techniques in literature. Their work is funny, experimental, weird, and thought-provoking.
A reader of my piece recently suggested I read Queneau’s 99 Exercises in Style. I’d read a lot of Oulipo’s writings, but never this collection of 99 retellings of the same simple anecdote. Each version is in a different style, if we interpret “style” loosely to encompass just about any variation in the telling. In almost all of the 99 variations the narrator gets on a bus in Paris, sees an argument between a long-necked man with an unusual hat and another passenger. Elsewhere and a while later the narrator sees the same man speaking with someone about button on his coat.
Queneau’s entries are clever, varied, and, taken in their entirety constitute a brilliant tour de force. The basic anecdote is banal, but that’s the point. Banality varied and repeated is far from banal. On a long overnight flight with nothing much to do, the entries inspired me to try my hand at writing a few of my own such short pieces rather than cite a sample of them from the book, many of which, incidentally, are only a half dozen sentences long. So here goes my comparatively feeble quota of stories a la Queneau, which are based on a different anecdote and set in Philadelphia. I hope other readers might be tempted to play with the idea as well, perhaps with the help of ChatGPT. Read more »
Catspeak
by Brooks Riley
The Constructive Culture of Gen X Cynicism
by Mindy Clegg
In a thread on a Gen X subreddit, a poster named QueenShewolf wondered about the truth of Gen X cynicism as her own Gen X siblings seemed far less “cynical and disconnected” than herself, a millennial. Some responded that they were certainly cynical, others felt they were merely realistic. Skepticism drove some of this more cynical or realistic worldview, based on their experiences growing up in the 70s and 80s. Many expressed distrust of institutions because of growing up during Watergate and the Reagan administration. Cynicism has its uses, according to the posters in the thread. Being at least a bit cynical about the world around you can help you engage more critically for one. But is too much cynicism dangerous for making positive social change? Has Gen X adoption of cynicism meant that our generation has been less engaged in larger social and political life, leaving it to other generations to shape? While there is some truth in the charges of ironic cynicism, some of that has been imposed on us from without. I argue that Gen X has made some positive contributions to our culture that are often overlooked. Our generation might be more cynical, but we also helped to create durable non and even anti-commercial culture, despite our paucity of numbers.
The term Generation X came to describe to the generation that was born from the mid-60s to early 80s. The term was popularized by Douglas Coupland, a baby boomer. Paula Gottula Miles said that he settled on the “X” to illustrate how this generation had no great existential experiences unifying them “unlike previous generations.” Instead, “they do have as a unifying childhood experience … a phenomenal rise in the divorce rates, and a national debt that went from the millions to the billions.” Such shared experiences (which are apparently less meaningful than wars or political assassinations) meant they shared a common cynicism, as illustrated by his work.1 But I would argue that Coupland ignored major events that had a formative impact, such as the Reagan era weapons build-up, the end of the Cold War itself, and several major conflicts that saw major acts of genocide (Yugoslavia and Rwanda). Read more »
Monday Photo
Elderflower tree, very long bench, wire fence, and sprinkler just next to tennis court #1 in Neustift, South Tyrol. I had a nice game there on Saturday.
On Outgrowing Books
by Mary Hrovat
There are many reasons to want to own a book. Most of them are straightforward: you can’t get it at the library, or you read the library’s copy and want your own copy to re-read or consult; you need it on hand as a reference; or it’s so beautiful that you want to be able to look at it whenever you like.
There are also more nebulous reasons for owning books that have to do with hopes, memories, and self-image—perhaps even illusions. I held onto my college textbooks for years after I graduated, even though I didn’t use my degree in my job. I finally got rid of most of them; space is always tight, and textbooks are typically bulky. Overall I suppose it was a good decision, but for years I missed my calculus textbook. I didn’t miss it for any practical reason. I never used calculus. I missed being the kind of person who needs to use calculus. I could probably pick up a calculus textbook easily enough at one of the used book sales held in my town, but there’s another reason I miss that book: It was mine. I carried it to class for four semesters; I worked the problems. It belonged to a past life that I still miss sometimes.
I’ve heard people use the term weeding to refer to the removal of books from library collections. In the collection development course I took in library school, I was taught to use the more formal terms deaccession and deaccessioning. The word withdrawal is also used. I agree that the word weeding isn’t suitable, not because it’s informal but because it suggests that the books being removed were never assets to the collection. I think pruning is better; when I decide to give away (or very occasionally throw away) some of my books, I’m removing things that no longer fit well enough to merit shelf space. Read more »
Simple Pleasures, Complicated Times
by David Greer
In the mid 1990s, I asked an assortment of people to describe their favorite simple pleasures. As I expected, the responses were wide-ranging, everything from feelings of accomplishment (perfecting a Chopin étude on the piano) to intimate moments (nursing a baby) to bringing order to chaos (the zen of vacuuming). There were innovative comforts (storing sheets in the freezer for hot summer nights) and quirky delights (reading Hegel at 3 am at the all-night diner) and uninhibited messy moments (eating watermelon shirtless on a sweltering day with juice and seeds dribbling down your chest).
I remember being struck both by how pleased interviewees were to be asked about their pleasures, which they often described eloquently and at length, and by what often seemed like faint embarrassment, as if there was something a little improper about feeling so attached to experiences that weren’t somehow useful or productive. Disapproval of the deliberate pursuit of pleasure is nothing new. The Athenian philosopher Epicurus built an entire treatise around the pursuit of pleasure in the third century BCE. He was roundly criticized for it then, and Epicureanism, though it has attracted followers for more than two thousand years, is still widely dismissed as a celebration of unrestrained hedonism. Not only could nothing be further from the truth, but Epicureanism may be the philosophy best equipped for the navigation of our present age of high anxiety. More on that later. Read more »
Invasive Mammal Found In North Country For First Time
by Mike Bendzela
It took a couple of million years, but any careful observer could have seen it coming.
One of the most destructive and invasive mammalian species in the world has been seen striding across the continent.
This primate was recently spotted at a watering hole in the northern territories, confirming its presence in the area for the first time.*
Until recently, the primate had penetrated only as far as the margins of the central mountains. It is believed to have originated on the eastern African continent.
Genus Homo is a bipedal, diurnal, omnivorous and predatory mammal that can survive for decades.
This new ape can form encampments on hill and in dale; in forests, prairies, or deserts; on tundra and on islands. It establishes semi-permanent colonies that feed on surrounding flora and fauna until they are depleted. Then it moves on.
Even though it produces small litters and spaces out births by years, it can go from hundreds to thousands to millions to billions of individuals in a geologically brief time.
Many characteristic traits of Homo set it apart from the other primates. Therewith, it dismantles the natural checks on its existence, one by one. Read more »
Monday, May 29, 2023
The Problem With Stories
by Thomas R. Wells
Human minds run on stories, in which things happen at a human level scale and for human meaningful reasons. But the actual world runs on causal processes, largely indifferent to humans’ feelings about them. The great breakthrough in human enlightenment was to develop techniques – empirical science – to allow us to grasp the real complexity of the world and to understand it in terms of the interaction of mindless (or at least unintentional) processes rather than humanly meaningful stories of, say, good vs evil. Hence, for example, the objectively superior neo-Darwinian account of adaptation by natural selection that has officially displaced premodern stories about human-like but bigger (‘God’) agents creating the world for reasons we can make sense of.
Science flourishes still, demonstrating the possibility for human minds to escape the fairy tale epistemology that we have inhabited for tens of thousands of years and to inquire systematically into the world, or at least to benefit from the work of those who do. But, as the evolution example illustrates, stories continue to exert a powerful psychological hold over human minds. Despite being one of the most educated societies in the world, surveys routinely find that only around a third of US adults accept the scientific account of evolution. Despite their deficiencies stories continue to dominate our minds, and hence the world that we build together with our minds via politics. From our thinking on the economy to identity politics to Covid to Climate Change to Climate Change activism, stories continue to blind us to reality and to generate mass conflict and stupidity. Read more »