Moral philosophers spend a good bit of their time reflecting on what they call moral dilemmas. It is not entirely clear—nothing in philosophy is ever entirely clear—how to characterize them. But the usual course is to consider a case in which an agent is faced with two courses of action, only one of which can be chosen, and are such that there seem to be compelling reasons for each choice. By itself this would seem to be just a hard case; one in which the reasons are roughly equivalent and it is difficult to tell which set of reasons is stronger. But some philosophers claim that the situation can be much worse than this. It can be the case that the reasons are such that neither set over-rides the other. Or at least that with resources available for thought we cannot make such a determination. A consequence of this is supposed to be that no matter what we do we will be doing something wrong or failing to do something that we are required to do.

Examples abound in the literature. Sartre’s case of the student who wants to join the resistance but has an aging mother who lives with, and depends, on him. Sophie’s Choice to pick which of her two children will be killed by the Nazi concentration camp guard. If she refuses to pick one , both will be killed. Recently, I ran across a book—The Lone Survivor—which is an account of a group of Navy Seals on a mission in Afghanistan told by the only survivor of a failed mission. It presents an account of a moral choice that this group of four men had to make. The case is interesting to think about since it raises a number of different issues which are relevant to the theoretical notion of a moral dilemma, as well as the practical issue of how to think about such difficult and terrible choices.

The four men set out on a mission to try and locate a local Taliban leader – the head of a heavily armed group of Taliban. They do not know what village he is in so plan to remain concealed in some appropriate spot on a sparsely covered high-up mountain until they spot him and attempt to kill him. They discover such a spot and remain concealed, and still, for many hours in the hot sun. If they are spotted from above they are dead ducks. But the area above them seems completely empty. After many hours they hear a noise of soft footsteps above them and a man, wearing a turban and carrying an ax almost stumbles over them. They point their rifles at him and tell him to sit down when suddenly a flock of goats comes trotting up the mountain accompanied by two other men–more precisely one man and a boy around fourteen years old. All three men are distinctly unfriendly—which might be explained by discovering a heavily armed group of soldiers camped out on their farm.

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When I set out to write a book on all the great and hidden stories on the periodic table, I figured I’d have to delve into some strange and uncomfortable history. There was the inevitable brush with the alchemists, and humankind’s almost instinctual lust for gold and silver. I even ended up mapping out the elements on the periodic table, to reflect the intellectual currents of the past few centuries. What I didn’t expect was how relevant all that history would seem today, how often the same themes would come up again and again in current events and the news. But if it’s anything, the periodic table is still a microcosm for understanding all the wonderful and horrible things about the world.

I had reason to think of this last month when McDonalds recalled over 13 million Shrek-themed drinking glasses after discovering in them high levels of cadmium, element forty-eight. Cadmium can undoubtedly be one of the most beautiful elements—it has a long history in art as a pigment, and helped old masters produce vibrant colors no other substances of the time could. Even today, some shades—like cadmium yellow—retain the name.

But as the famous biologist Edward O. Wilson once said “In the natural world, beautiful usually means deadly.” Wilson was referring to how the brightest colored snakes, frogs, and insects usually harbor the deadliest venoms. But his wisdom applies equally well to the periodic table. Cadmium is one of the more poisonous elements on the table, and has one of its most notorious histories. Yet we keep making the same mistakes with it again and again. In fact, the first widespread recall of consumer goods with cadmium also involved drinking glasses. (Plus ça change…)

Cadmium sits below zinc on the periodic table, which means pure cadmium looks and acts like zinc, including having the same shiny finish as zinc. So, in the 1940s, some manufacturers decided to plate drinking glasses with cadmium and sell them in department stores.

This was bad enough—some atoms of cadmium would naturally slough off every time somebody filled the glass—but became a big problem when summer rolled around and people began drinking fruit juices like lemonade. These acidic juices scraped cadmium atoms off the cup’s surface in droves, and people around America fell ill with intense pain and diarrhea. McDonalds didn’t line its Shrek glasses with cadmium—it was used in the brightly colored paints on the outside, calculated to attract children’s attentions. But in recalling the line, the fast-food company cited the same fear of children ingesting cadmium while they drank.

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By Maniza Naqvi

When the sun sets over the river turning its waters the color of molten gold and then liquid black, like the uninterrupted, robust, gush that flows at the gas pump— then, —when you are alone in the confused maze of your thoughts of hatred and hubris –then— now that you have time on your hands, to fish, does the writing of a story occupy you? Because you would need to tell it won’t you? Sentence it in the way you want to? Flesh out the outlines of yet another murder most foul? Surely you do. Now that you have the perfect view for it: of a place where the hangman’s noose brought its cruel justice for the punishment of an assassin’s crime. Do you wonder about the quakes, the spewing of ash and how the earth has shuddered? Author of assassinations, do you hear the sound of anguish carried to you on the evening breeze as the earth stirs and the waters gurgle? It is a mother’s grief and a mother’s wrath. When the waters turn black, she weeps: This is my body, this is my blood. Now you in your defeat, weep, now you suffer. Do you hear her? It is Tomyris sending you a message. Do you know her? How could you? For you have always defended empire—not those who have fought against it.

Tomyris the queen of the Massagetae lived with her people in her homeland north of the Amu Darya. In 530 B.C Cyrus the Great prepared to occupy her lands and as a pretext offered to marry her. She turned him down. What need was there for marriage? The Massagetae held as sacred the secret of nature: they understood the intricate connection between individual choice and advantage to society. Each woman had one husband, but she slept with anyone of her choosing.

Upon her refusal, his ruse made useless, Cyrus prepared to attack and invade the Massagetae. A messenger carried her warning to him: “King of the Medes, cease to press this enterprise, for you cannot know if what you are doing will be of real advantage to you. Be content to rule in peace your own kingdom, and bear to see us reign over the countries that are ours to govern’. His-story tries to erase them—the warriors the defenders the defeaters of blood thirsty cruel men.

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by Randolyn Zinn

This past spring I arranged to meet Karen Swenson at The Century Club in Manhattan. As I climbed McKim, Mead and White’s splendid marble Beaux Arts staircase to the second floor, I saw her sitting at the far side of the library, catching up with The New York Times. Her long braid was wound in a tight chignon and she was dressed in red from head to toe—a chic wrap dress, tights and shoes to match, even her self-designed down coat was tinted a rich cerise. I thought, is this the same woman who leads Southeast Asian treks in sneakers and corduroys two months out of each year for the last 27?

A native New Yorker, Karen told me she was in town only briefly before winging off to Europe, having recently sold her Manhattan apartment. Her fondest wish was to relocate to a city boasting an opera house and a major airport. Two contenders remained: Venice and Barcelona (the eventual winner).

Her poems have been published by The New Yorker and many literary journals, as well as Saturday Review. Her latest book, her fifth, is entitled A PILGRIM INTO SILENCE. Because she is a world traveler, articles on the subject of sojourning have been enjoyed by those who read The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Recently she has taught at both her alma maters, Barnard and NYU.

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Greetings from sweltering Karachi,

As some of you know, I am spending the summer in Karachi. It's my first trip to the city of my birth in almost six years, and I've already been here a little over three weeks now. Here are a few things, picked rather arbitrarily, which I find to be very much the same as always:

1. The sounds of rickshaws, scooters, street-vendors hawking stuff in a loud and crisp tone particular to their trade, a variety of birds (especially the quarking of crows), truck horns, the hammering of workmen, and other voices and noises which combine with the dusty smell to produce an ever-present aural/olfactory ambience so typical of Karachi that I am aware I am home when I awaken in the morning even before I open my eyes.
2. The heat and the humidy: though by northeast-American standards it is quite extreme (many Pakistanis living in the West never return in May or June, so infernal are their memories of the blistering weather, and many such people asked me if I had lost my mind when they heard I was planning to arrive in Karachi a week before the summer solstice), I instantly found the weather comforting in a nostalgic way. Yes, both the heat and humidy are always there, but then they were always always-there when I lived here, and I am used to it. And we didn't have air-conditioning when I was growing up. We do now, at least for the hours that we have electricity (it cuts out 3-4 hours a day usually, sometimes more). The humidity is such that one almost swims through the air and one is drenched in sweat within a minute of stepping out of the shower, so it is a race to dry oneself quickly and step out of the fanless bathroom into the fanful bedroom before dressing. The ceiling fans here, by the way, are to ceiling fans in, say, your summer place in the Hamptons, what the jet engine of a Boeing 747 is to the propeller of a Cessna 172. If you had them in New York, you could blow-dry your hair into an early-Beatles mop in 45 seconds flat just by standing under one. Here, of course, one remains covered in a slimy film of dusty sweat even in the wind-tunnel-like conditions these fans generate. Heat rashes are common, and my lower legs are always itchy. Speaking of which, the best thing about extreme heat is that it keeps the mosquitos at bay. But, unfortunately, I know they are busy preparing for a massive assault and invasion in late July and August, just after the rains.
3. The food is the same but I had forgotten just how good it is. Actually “good” doesn't even begin to describe the paradisiacal gustatory delights on offer both at home (I am staying with my brother) and in restaurants here. In America everything new is said to taste like chicken but this is a ludicrous formulation because even chicken doesn't taste like chicken there. Here, chicken actually has a flavor, and it tastes like, well, chicken. Fruits and vegetables are all organic, small in size, have spots where they are starting to become overripe (because they are not bred to look good or ripened in refrigerated trucks on the way to the supermarket) and bursting with what seems to my long-deprived palate to be concentrated flavor. I was shocked to remember what a carrot is supposed to taste like, for example (not like cardboard, which is what you must think, you poor people). In terms of sophistication, Pakistani cuisine is to Italian what Nabokov is to Dr. Suess. Sorry, that's just how it is. (There are ten aromatic spices alone–not counting other kinds of spice and other ingredients–which go into a commonly eaten chicken curry.) The lovely smell of fresh and hearty naan coming out of any tandoor here instantly brings to my mind the futile desperation with which fancy bakeries like Bouchon cater to the pretentious of Manhattan, and how much I hate such effete gourmandizing.
4. I notice that without meaning to, or even realizing it, I have started cataloguing the effects of Karachi on all the senses, so I might as well mention the light: Karachi is just above the tropic of cancer, so the sun is only one-and-a-half degrees from completely vertically overhead near noon on June 21st, which results in a light the strength of which is literally stunning. To get a sense of it, turn the brightness knob on your TV (well, it probably isn't a knob, unless you have a pre-1980s TV, but you know what I mean) to max. That's what it looks like outside over here. Without sunglasses I get a headache in minutes. Heat stroke is a real risk of venturing outdoors in the afternoon. In general, the sun is a much angrier, less benign presence in these parts. In Urdu poetry sunshine is quite understandably a metaphor for adversity and difficulty, while the rainy season is romanticised into a symbol of joy and relief (from the sun). The light is very starkly beautiful though.
5. The traffic: while an enormous number of improvements have been made in the roadways, including the construction of many under- and overpasses, new roads, bridges, and installation of traffic lights and road signs, they have been overwhelmed by the even greater increase in the number of cars, trucks, buses, minibuses, vans, rickshaws, motorcycles, scooters, and unimaginable vehicles of types beyond my humble powers of description–not to mention the crowds of pedestrians swarming orthogonally across the streets everywhere (Karachi has more people than all of Israel and Switzerland combined, and also more than the next five-largest cities in Pakistan combined. In fact, it's larger than 160 of the world's 200-and-some countries). In other words, the traffic is still the same. Oddly enough, and possibly because I first learned to drive in Karachi at the age of 14, I feel very comfortable driving here. Traffic here flows much like the cells in blood vessels: chaotically but efficiently. Driving here is relaxing in a bizarre way, because it's so unencumbered by stultifying rules of any kind. Instead, one guides one's car toward one's destination using the sort of natural proprioceptive sense that one uses to guide one's own body through a crowd. And having the driver's seat on the right side of the car somehow automatically cues one to drive on the left side of the road (a vestige of British colonial days) so that's not a problem either.

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By Olivia Scheck

In 2005, Yasmine Issa was a 24-year-old homemaker, raising twin toddlers in Yonkers, New York. Having just divorced, the newly single mom, with no college degree or professional training, was also in need of a job.

So, like 2.8 million others, Issa enrolled at a for-profit postsecondary school – the kind that you see advertised on TV and highway billboards – called the Sanford-Brown Institute in White Plains.

The program, for people training to become ultrasound technicians, included 12 months of classes, a 6-month internship and the assistance of their career services center, all for around $32,000. Issa used her savings and child support payments to pay for half of the training and took out a federal student loan of $15,000 to pay the rest.

What Issa didn’t realize, until she’d finished the program and spent five months unsuccessfully searching for a job, was that the Sanford-Brown ultrasound program was not accredited by the American Registry for Diagnostic Medical Sonographers (ARDMS).

Without a degree from an ARDMS accredited program, which she could have obtained for half the price at a New Jersey community college, Issa was left with no job prospects and thousands in student loan debt, which was now accruing interest.

Issa related these facts late last month at a senate committee hearing on the ticking time bomb that is for-profit education. But, believe it or not, Issa’s testimony was not the day’s most distressing.

That honor belonged to Steven Eisman, the portfolio manager whose foresight about the subprime mortgage crisis was profiled in Michael Lewis’ book The Big Short.

“Until recently,” the matter-of-fact financier began his testimony. “I thought that there would never again be an opportunity to be involved with an industry as socially destructive as the subprime mortgage industry. I was wrong.”

What followed was a chilling account of how the for-profit education sector has managed to capture billions of taxpayer dollars while, in many cases, bankrupting the students it was meant to educate.

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by Evert Cilliers (aka Adam Ash)

Today there are three forms of terrorism threatening the world: political, financial and environmental terrorism. These three forms of terrorism are responsible for the destruction of human lives, livelihoods, property and the environment to a degree that rivals the ravages of war.

All three forms are executed by global, private-enterprise, non-state agents. Our inch-deep media have bestowed the moniker of terrorism on only one of these forms — the political-religious Al Qaeda variety — while leaving the other two off the hook.

This is a little like calling Ted Bundy a crazy serial killer and Jeffrey Dahmer a highly sensitive connoisseur of human protein.

Just consider the many attributes these three forms of terrorism have in common. All three are partly funded by tax dollars — via tax credits and subsidies, tax-payer bail-outs, and taxpayer-funded wars that serve as recruitment drives for political terrorists. All three expound a crazed fundamentalist faith affirming the rectitude of their respective causes. All three feel entitled to huge rewards for their destructive behaviors. All three leave it up to regular folks to clean up after them. All three are unapologetic about their activities (adding insult to injury, some may issue a belated apology to their victims). And all three display a bizarre indifference to human suffering, despite their rhetoric to the contrary.

Moreover, all three forms of terrorism have been enabled by one gaping sinkhole in the social fabric: they appear to have been aided, abetted and promoted by a lamentable lack of government oversight. In all three cases, the problem isn't too much government: it's too little government.

Here's a brief recap of the three forms of terrorism and their main achievements so far.

Political terrorism. Achievements: the death of 2,976 Americans in NYC on 9/11, and many other deaths in London, Madrid, Bali, India, and Iraq. Motive: anger at America's interference in the Middle East, including US backing of Israel against Palestinians and support of repressive Arab regimes, and US wars against Islamic states. Main agent of terrorism: Al Qaeda. Weapons: airplanes, suicide bombs, car bombs, IEDs, websites.

Financial terrorism. Achievements: Loss of 100 million jobs worldwide. Millions suffering from food insecurity. Wrecked economies. Many small business closings. A great loss of family homes. Motive: profit. Main agent of terrorism: Goldman Sachs. Weapons: speculative bubbles, debt securitization, unsafe derivatives, campaign contributions, regulatory capture, bad mortgages.

Environmental terrorism. Achievements: Bhopal, Exxon Valdez oil spill, Nigerian oil spills, Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Motive: profit. Main agent of terrorism: BP. Weapons: unsafe drilling practices, indifference to worker safety, 1960s clean-up technology, useless contingency plans, campaign contributions, takeover of regulatory agencies, misinformation about climate change, managerial indifference to risk and the environment.

Now let's take a look at the three main agents of terrorism in turn and see what government should be, but isn't, doing about them. In this order: Goldman Sachs, Al Qaeda and BP.

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1st Zucchini

Today I spied our first zucchini
which has followed its saffron flower
like a compliant stud swelling in shade
within a forest of coarse stubbled stems
under a tent of broad leaves
green as the second color of Christmas
a nativity here of the first order
all six inches of it looking to a future of sacrifice
in a sauté mingled with garlic and onions
growing now in the nest of nature
at the whim of god
. . .– for want of a satisfying
rational explanation
…………………
by Jim Culleny
July 4^th, 2010

Am I an elitist? Am I looking down from the perspective of a middle-class ivory tower when I write about education and the need to reform our education system in innovative ways to help graduate more students who are better equipped to compete in the new global economy? I’ve certainly sometimes been accused of that over the last 7 months of writing for 3 Quarks. It’s a criticism that gives me pause. My children can read above grade level, aren’t having discipline issues, aren’t struggling with math; is this why I can afford the luxury of worrying about whether or not they are having their right-brained skills nurtured, whether or not they are being encouraged to not shy away from failure, but instead to use it to learn and grow? One of the comments suggesting this went “We can't even motivate a large percentage of children to finish high school, and now we are suppose to prepare the (obviously elite) students to work toward better life goals.”

First of all, I think that this comment misses my larger point: if school were less about rote memorization and instead involved a more integrated, creative curriculum, perhaps we would be better able to motivate more children to finish high school. But the comment does I think hint at a darker criticism: that I’m spouting some liberal, white, elite fantasy that is totally inapplicable to the kinds of educational issues that many schools, teachers and children face in this country, particularly in poor, urban areas.

I don’t agree, and I think to make that claim is to just throw in the towel rather than continuing to advocate for the right of every child to have the best possible education. Consider the Lyons Community School, a middle/high school in Brooklyn.

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Tan Lin is a poet, professor of English and creative writing at New Jersey City University and author of the books Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe, BlipSoak01 and Heath (Plagiarism/Outsource). His latest book, Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking, uses its form to escape the notions, conventions and structures of the traditional reading experience. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [download and show notes] [iTunes link]

I read Seven Controlled Vocabularies sequentially, front cover then the pages in the order they were bound, then the back cover, but it does seem I could have read in any order I wanted. Is there an optimal reading strategy for this book?

No, I think it’s about dispersing reading into a number of different environments. One of them, of course, is to do with bibliographic controls that establish various genres, like architecture or film. Also, it connects to online reading practices. People have argued — I think Nicholas Carr most recently — that online reading is much more distracted, conversions of information into short-term working memory and then into long-term memory are disrupted. The book is designed, in some sense, for a kind of skimming. Once you insert pictures into a book, I think you’re in a different sort of textual environment. The book is supposed to open up and free a little bit of space around linear reading practices.

I know this is a huge question to get into, but what is the prime way you’ve made it prompt readers to get around their usual, deeply, deeply, deeply ingrained reading practices?

Maybe the deeply ingrained reading practices have to do with how people read books. But on the other hand, you’re always free to skim, to highlight, to jump around in a book. Again, in an online environment, these things are multiplied exponentially. This book plays with those notions. In some ways, it’s about translating a book into a different kind of reading environment. Part of it has to do with social networking. Part of it has to do with the commodification of attention, perhaps. Part of it has to do with basic online reading practices. There doesn’t seem to be an ideal way to read this. Maybe there’s a distracted skimming going on throughout the book that’s encouraged, but also the insertion of, say, bibliographic controls — oh, this is about architecture, or, oh, this is about poetry, or this is about photography — those help to stabilize the reading practices.
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With Especial Attention to the Americans, the Muscovites, the Magyars, and Various Balkanic Peoples, touching particularly upon their Aspirations to Global Hegemony, and their Use of Air-Conditioning.

Justin E. H. Smith

Organic nationalism, which emerged towards the end of the 18th century, supposed, or at least implied, that a nation bears some essential relationship to a particular territory. In the most mythologized version of this belief, the nation is thought, or at least said, to have arisen directly out of the earth, to be literally autochthonous, springing up from the depths without any connection to neighboring groups. Moderate nationalists of the period, such as Johann Gottfried Herder, sought for a way to defend national distinctness without resorting to such crude myth, and while they did not pretend that a people is born directly from the soil, they still hoped to tie national character to the way it is forged over the course of history out of a particular geographical nexus.

A clear demonstration that we are not in fact like plants, rooted in our national soil, is our ability to get up, should we so choose, and go somewhere else. We do not wilt and die, though we also do not remain quite the same. I am an expatriate, and it grows harder with each passing year for me to maintain a personal sense of what being American must mean. I have lived outside of the US steadily for seven years, and spent large segments of the decade before that outside of the country as well. Although I am fully connected, via the internet, to the American media that keep that country's pulse around the clock, it is increasingly difficult for me to maintain any real interest in domestic issues. Unlike nearly all the Americans I know, I am not really made angry, for example, by Glenn Beck. Outraged reactions to the latest stupid thing he has said strike me, I dare say, as a bit undignified. He is a buffoon, and he occupies a niche that has its equivalent in every time and place. Let him do his thing, and let us not stay tuned in to the networks that give him voice.

Expatriation, I mean to say, helps one to overcome the passions with understanding. As my identification with one or the other party to internal American conflicts diminishes, my perception grows sharper of the very long historical processes that give shape to current American life. Thus for example I often find myself trying to make sense for bewildered Europeans of western American crackpot libertarianism by arguing that it evolved directly from the settling of the frontier, with the ethnic cleansing and genocide that that involved, but also with a certain 'spirit' of freedom and individualism that cannot be valued nearly as much in dense urban centers. In turn, it seems reasonable to me to suppose that American imperialism, and the delusions of entitlement and superiority for which individual Americans abroad are so often criticized, flow directly from the late-18th and early-19th-century project of constructing America through expansion into the frontier. Oklahoma and the Phillipines and Iraq were just different stages of the same development, and this centuries-long process has something to do with the perception of the world, and of their place in it, often had by individual Americans.

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A mysterious, white-haired man casts a cautious glance over his shoulder and steps onto a train. Like a man on the lam, he has no fixed address and lives out of the rucksack that he carries. The man could be a character in a Hollywood film, maybe one of the Bourne series, but he isn’t. The man described is Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, an internet site for whistleblowers. And he’s right to be cautious.

Whistleblowing isn’t to be taken lightly. Mordechai Vanunu spent 18 years in prison, 11 of them in solitary confinement, for revealing details of Israel’s nuclear program to a UK newspaper. Amnesty International described Vanunu as a “prisoner of conscience” and he’s been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize a number of times. He’s paid a heavy price for his courageous actions.

Whistleblowers comprise an important and undervalued genre of hero. Just as traditional heroes, they demonstrate courage and bravery, and accept personal risks in the interests of others.

On a recent Veteran’s Day, I was struck by the extent to which we use the term “hero” to describe soldiers. I don’t disagree with this use, but it seems odd that the term is seldom qualified. What distinguishes our soldiers from the soldiers on the side that we’re fighting? How do we know that we’re the good guys?

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by Michael Blim

In the Chicago of the Daley dynasty, they have been disparaged as the “goo-goos.” They are the “good government” types whose passion for honesty and the pursuit of the public good have offended generations of political machine hacks whose motto for the great seal of the city, Mike Royko was fond of saying, consisted of the two word phrase “Where’s Mine?”

Good government in Chicago was and still is an honorable tradition. It produced Paul Douglas, Adlai Stevenson, Abner Mikva, and Barack Obama. It joined with Chicago’s black community to elect Harold Washington. With Jane Addams and John Dewey acting as its exemplary turn of the 20th century intellectuals and activists, Chicago’s good government movement is one of the taproots of American liberalism.

I confess that it has taken me a while to accept that Barack Obama, for better or worse, is a “goo-goo.” He is the latest in a distinguished line of pragmatist, intellectually inclined politicians who believe that the public interest can be served by intelligent decision-making based upon the analysis of facts and the implementation of technically sound rules and administration.

What is interesting about the new “goo-goo-ism” of Obama is that it is shorn of its more radical roots. The radical reformism and pacifism of Jane Addams and John Dewey, despite Obama’s community work that derives from their inspiration, is notably absent. Missing too is the New Deal version of good government: there is no left wing in the White House west wing as there was under Roosevelt. There is no one the likes of Frances Perkins, Harry Hopkins, or Raymond Moley, just to name a few that put a radical liberal edge on the New Deal, to push the Obama Administration from within toward more fundamental government guarantees for a people being battered by economic crisis and an inept political system.

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David Toop is a composer of sound, writer about sound, curator of sound and research fellow at the London College of Communication. His works in text include Ocean of Sound, Exotica, Haunted Weather and the Rap Attack books. His latest is Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener, which explores the sound of silent art. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes link]

The idea of doing a book about the sound of silent artworks — it's served you well. It's made an interesting book. It's made a book I've enjoyed reading, and presumably you've enjoyed writing. But there is a certain core absurdity to that idea that I'm sure is not lost upon you. Is that an advantage, the sheer humor, in a sense, of writing about the sound of things that are without sound?

Yeah, It's a kind of crazy idea. I was very conscious of it, particularly when I felt I was moving into areas that an art historian is really qualified to deal with. I thought, “Why hasn't this been written about?” Of course, one of the reasons it hasn't been written about before is because it doesn't exist. It's purely speculative.

For example, I write a lot about sound in 17th-century Dutch genre painting, the way acts of listening are represented. I hope I've made a convincing case. I was very conscious that these speculations, certainly based on research and intensive looking, but in the end, you can't hear the paintings. You can listen as intently as you like; there's no sound actually there. It's partly dependent on the development of an idea, for sure.

How accurately could I say the book is based on specifically your perceptions? After 40 years of intense listening, this is specifically about what David Toop hears in artwork?

It's certainly very personal. One other aspect of the book is the idea of sound as being very uncanny. I write a lot about, for example, sound in ghost stories and supernatural fiction, writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens. That, for me, connects with deep childhood experience. One of my first memories of sound is of lying in bed, feeling very frightened, hearing a sound; I didn't know what the source was. Just lying in bed as still as I could, as quietly as I could, believing I could hear somebody walking around my bed in the dark. What I was hearing would've been the normal sound that houses make in the night, creakings and groanings, the staple of horror films and ghost stories.

But this had a very profound effect on me as a child. It stayed with me. I've come to the point now where I'm asking myself, “Why is this so powerful, this idea of sounds that can't be connected with their source?” Why is it so useful to filmmakers, to people writing these kinds of stories? You come to the idea that sound, because it's so intangible, because it's so transient, it's something that we can't grasp, we can't see. It always has this property of being unstable in some way, elusive, uncanny. That, to me, is fascinating. Of course, yes, it's the David Toop perspective on things. It goes right back to this time when I was a child, having this very personal experience. At the same time, I don't think that makes it an experience so personal that other people can't relate to it. This phenomenon of things that go bump in the night, creaking noises and fear of the unknown as heard through sounds is extremely common.

I was watching a film last night with my wife, Paranormal Activity, which was on the television. We'd seen it before at the cinema. I thought one of the striking things about this film is that there's nothing frightening in it — except for sound. I mean, you see absolutely nothing. You see nothing. Nothing terrifying really happens. Toward the end of the film, a few small things like bedclothes being dragged off the bed and so on, but mostly you're hearing strange sounds: knockings and so on. Some people find this film really frightening. I think it's a good illustration of how powerful this is, this notion that sound is somehow threatening, somehow strange and uncanny.
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by Sue Hubbard

The first work in Tate Modern’s retrospective of the Belgian artist Francis Alÿs is, fittingly, a chimera. Projected onto the wall is a 16mm film of a mirage shimmering on the horizon of a Patagonian desert highway. There is no sound, except for that of a tolling cathedral bell from another work in an adjacent gallery. Like the Yellow Brick Road, the image beckons with utopian possibilities. Yet, as modern sophisticates, we know, in our hearts, that such promises are unobtainable. It is at once a simple, seductive, sad and rather profound image. Entitled A Story of Deception 2003-6, it gives its name to the whole show.

So what is this ‘deception’ that preoccupies Francis Alÿs, a Belgian artist born in 1959, who trained as an architect before decamping to Mexico City in 1986? Essentially it appears to be the false hope and subsequent disillusionment at the heart of the modernist project, and the desire to find appropriate metaphors to reflect the urgent political, economic and spiritual crises of contemporary life. He invites us to assess the relationship between poetics and politics and question the underlying absurdity and ‘senselessness’ of everyday situations in order to create new spaces for alternative ways of thinking and doing.

There is a lightness of touch about his work, a slapstick quality that, like Beckett’s knock about tramps, belies its seriousness. In Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes Doing Something Leads to Nothing)1997, the artist pushes a block of ice around the dusty streets of Mexico City like some Dadaist Charlie Chaplin, until after nine hours he is left with nothing but a puddle. Alluding to the unproductive hardships that constitute the daily reality for most people living in the region, Alÿs avoids heavy political didacticism in favour of his own form of the theatre of the absurd. Life as a Sisyphusian struggle is revisited in his video Rehearsal I, 1999-2001. Here a plucky little red VW Beetle climbs a dusty slop on the impoverished outskirts of Tijuana, accompanied by the sound of a brass band rehearsing. Each time the band pauses the driver removes his foot from the pedal so that the little car slides defeated back down the slope. As an allegory for those struggling to reach the US border from Latin America it is a poignant image. Like the clown in the circus, who continually goes back for yet another custard pie to be thrown in his face, we cannot help but admire the little car’s heroic stoicism as an enactment of Beckett’s famous “fail again fail better.” After all what else is there to be done? Structured around the recording of the brass band’s rehearsal, the film evolves into an apparent comic narrative that highlights the difficulties of Latin American societies to resist western models of ‘development’ before they regress back, all too soon, into another economic crisis.

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By Tolu Ogunlesi

At a beer parlour, patiently waiting for Nigeria

to put Argentina on the flight back

to Buenos Aires; loud discussions on everything

from ash clouds to Diego’s immortal hand

of Goddamit! The TV proudly wears dark glasses,

drawing technicolour mockery

from the crowd, booze swirling

in our brains like a million Messi

own-goals, scored all at once.

Imagine watching the World

Cup in tones of grey! Then,

just as the match is about to resume,

she shows up (sandwiched between beer ads)

to face a berlin wall of leering eyes.

Not our fault, really. She is cute, plus

the beer. Before we can wonder what

cream or soap she wants our wives

to compel us to buy for them, she

has dropped it, her 250-kilo bomb.

She is positive, has been for five years.

But she is coping positively.

She wants us to stick to our wives,

and if we can’t, to sheath our strikers

in rubber jerseys.

“This thing is real man!” says one man

to another. “Look at her. You could never

tell who’s got it. If I saw her on the streets,

I’d pick her up in an instant!”

We laugh wildly. The way of men. Let

the match begin! But it is a man that rises

slowly from amidst us; to tell us it is no laughing

matter. “What is no laughing matter?”

The virus. The dreaded one. He should know

because he has carried it for two years,

the way we carry our prejudices, our love

for the game of the round leather; for

beautiful girls. Silence seeps from the cold bottles

in our hands, from the single fan blowing

heat upon us like an angry deity.

He is not done yet. Chuckling,

he tells of how, after discovering

his status, he began to count time

anew. B.V – before virus, A.V – after virus.

He says it without bitterness.

Then he sits down, quietly as he stood.

By this time the second half has started,

and King Kanu is strolling with the ball,

into the Argentinean goal area.

Only most of us no longer see the conquering King.

Instead, on that flickering screen, are roving shapes,

(out of a high school biology tome)

advancing swiftly, into the 18-yard box

of what looks to be the human body…

Kanu is unstoppable. Kanu is unslowdownable.

Kanu is unstoppable. Kanu is untackleable.

It is therefore yet another award-winning GOOOAL…

By Aditya Dev Sood

At my table were two diplomats and a cultural researcher. My own role was designated as 'designer.' We were told that there was a post-conflict situation in an African nation where the U.N. had been called in. Local institutions and forms of self-governance had been eroded during the long and bloody conflict. Child soldiers had been involved in the civil war on both sides, and the competing ends of Justice and Rehabilitation had both to be balanced. Our job was to plan the series of activities that would result in a contextually-appropriate program of activities for the U.N. teams working in the region. We had two hours.

We began by trying to itemize all the different internal and external stakeholders in the situation, from U.N. agencies to neighboring countries to international investors, and gave up once we got into double digits. Then we tried to bound the problem by trying to establish what kind of time-line and terms of reference we were working with. It seemed foolish to try to do anything in less than six weeks time, for meanwhile the country was burning, and the U.N. agencies would need a plan to start working with as soon as possible. But six weeks was also nowhere near enough time to collect meaningful cultural and socioeconomic data on twenty or thirty million people. We agreed that we would have to rely on secondary data from prior sociocultural research, while also involving regional and in-country experts. We also wanted U.N. agencies to pre-pone our terms of reference to a period well prior to the U.N. flag going up in the nation in question.

So we revised our ideal scenario again, to ensure that we had social and cultural data as well as resource personnel at hand for the region that would tell us enough about it before the conflict started. We would then be able to do highly targeted data gathering activities from the time the U.N. became responsible for the country. Very rapidly, we imagined, we would acquire preliminary data on combatants, local cultures of masculinity and violence, what in local terms were the cultural valences of 'laying down one’s arms' ? What threats to security were likely to be perceived by different local stakeholders? What could we therefore do to minimize the likelihood of their appearance? Even with all these insights, the diplomats reminded us, although we had established the possibility of local knowledge, we still had no program for action.

The cultural researcher among us proposed waiting for the data to come in, for in his experience, sanding the grains of culture could yield deep cultural insights, and these might then guide the on-ground actions of the state machinery. We conceded that such insights might arise, but worried that we could not leave the U.N. agencies hanging for weeks on end without a clear articulation about what steps we were going to take in translating that knowledge into a program for their action.

This is where design entered the picture.

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