Clouds above Berlin this past Thursday.

by Barbara Fischkin

It was the summer of 1961. I was six years old. My mother and I had arrived in Omaha the night before, flying out of what was still “Idlewild,” not JFK International Airport, as it is now named. We would visit relatives with roots in the same Eastern European shtetl as my mother. Unlike most of the family, this branch had left the New York area for the cornfields of the American Midwest.

The relatives—Max and his wife, Sarah, their grown children Geraldine and Stanley and a bachelor brother, Sam—were the only Jewish people on their street. My mother told me this before we left—to prepare me. She knew that coming from the Midwood section of Brooklyn, I would find this odd. No other Jews? My mind, though, was fixated on adventure, being so far from New York for the first time, meeting new cousins and taking my first airplane ride.

Cousin Sarah, her hair already white, told me she had never been on an airplane. I remember the envious tone in her voice. I noticed her tone carried a signal that I was too young, thus undeserving, to have been granted this privilege.

I blew that off, as kids do at an age when guilt does not, or should not, get in the way of a good time. My mother suggested that I go across the street to play with a little girl who lived in a big house. I probably guessed she wasn’t Jewish but my mind was still fixated on this new adventure. Read more »

Standing Under Without Understanding

Horizon’s circle, beyond which
you can see no further in any direction
other than up, hems us in, but
looking up you can see forever,
or as far as lightspeed allows,
or until more time passes or,
more accurately, until
it shifts again, now.

But by then, you yourself may have passed,
whatever that means, since “to pass”
is merely an oblique expression that hints of
standing under without understanding,
although there’s so much in life that shows
the truth of things spoken is deficient, yet
has become second nature, and acceptable.

We’ve become creatures of
holy misunderstandings and
miss the mark, we sin, and
live by those misunderstandings

………….. up,
looking

rather than around
and in

Jim Culleny 9/21/21

Firelei Baez. Untitled (A Corrected Chart of Hispaniola with the Windward Passage), 2020.

Oil and acrylic on archival printed canvas.

More here, here, and here.

by Rafaël Newman

Those of us employed in the city of Zurich got some extra time off last week. Every year, on the third Monday in April following the vernal equinox, the Zentralkomitee der Zünfte Zürichs—the Central Committee of Zurich Guilds, also known by its German initialism ZZZ—stages Sechseläuten, a festival featuring a parade and a bonfire. The event, whose pronunciation in the local dialect—Sächsilüüt—makes it sound a good deal sexier and lewder than it actually is, draws in equal parts on history, historicizing revival, and mythology, and is advertised by its promoters, with a prudent hedge, as “the largest Swiss Volksfest in Zurich.”

First the history. During the 14th century, in what would one day become Switzerland’s biggest city, the tradesmen’s guilds used their growing economic might to challenge the local patriciate and were able to establish a power-sharing arrangement, with the guilds and the nobles organized into a council with variously weighted competencies. Rudolf Brun (c. 1290-1360), the leader of the guild revolution in 1336 and Zurich’s first independent mayor, is commemorated in the name of a bridge over the Limmat in the Altstadt, on the route of the Sechseläuten parade.

Brun’s newfangled corporate oligarchy lasted into the 19th century, when, as the power of the guilds was waning amid the rise of capitalism and popular democratic ambitions, the traditional medieval and Renaissance costumes of the guildsmen began to be trooped each spring as a reminder of their bygone importance: this is the historicizing element in the etiology of Sechseläuten, akin to the “revival” and marketing of allegedly traditional tribal tartans in the early modern period in Scotland, as local Scottish power had in fact been weakened.

And finally, there is the festival’s mythological source: in memory of what the ZZZ insists on calling a “heathen” custom, the advent of spring in Zurich is celebrated in mid-April with winter burned in effigy, in a recreation of a putatively prehistoric rite. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

Trout (I think) in a pond in Vahrn, South Tyrol.

by Marie Snyder

In the West, it feels like we have never lived outside of a system of pseudo-feudalism, a time without peasantry, slavery, or the working poor labouring for the benefit of Kings, land barons, or factory owners. For thousands of years, the exploitation of people appeared necessary to some of the best minds, which shifted as we developed machinery and technology. But now we’re in the realm of drones, 3-D printers, and AI. Once we have the technology that can mine for lithium and coltan at the push of a button, then exploitation of human resources should all but be obliterated, leaving humans to paint and write poetry, right?? Unless, of course, the tactic of keeping people at bare subsistence levels is also a means to control the masses.  

One perspective of the past thousand years or so might look something like this: Peasants lived on the King’s land, first for free, then later in exchange for a portion of the food they grew or products they crafted. A tax on land started when the Lords realized they could profit more from keeping sheep than people, and peasants had to commodify their labour for the privilege of continuing to live where they had been born. Then we had some revolutions to usher in a whole new way of living, to be able to have individual property rights and to choose our leaders. The wealthy expanded their land into plantations and dragged over people from the colonies to work them in exchange for some food and shelter. It was different in intention than the King/peasant dynamic but not in result: lords allowing food and shelter on their land to people who already lived there in exchange for their labour carries different weight from landowners providing food and shelter to people they kidnapped in exchange for their labour. That type of enforced labour was never abolished, of course; it was merely outsourced to poorer countries and American prisons. More acknowledged today, we have the working poor who make just enough to barely pay for rent and food. Leaving a horrible job at Amazon isn’t a realistic choice without any possibility of saving money. They’re free in title but not in practice. They might very well still live on land belonging to their overlord! 

So, when did we have a democracy in which each person’s unmanipulated and unfettered vote counts as much as any other, or human rights in which we all have the right to food and shelter and certain freedoms. Did I blink and miss it?  Read more »

by David Winner

My history textbooks in junior high school in 1970s Virginia presented history pretty much as I understood it from what would have been the point of view of my parents, standard liberal white academics.  America’s racial original sins would have been muted but not ignored: slavery, indigenous genocide, Japanese internment camps.  But one day when I was poking around the school library, I discovered boxes of older textbooks that had only recently been replaced, which might now be on their way down to Florida.  Smiling black people who just happened to be enslaved kindly treated by the good white people of the South, particularly by heroic and benevolent Virginians such as Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.

If 1840 outside of Richmond, say, had really been like that what would it have looked like? Warm, smiley, friendly no violence or anger or retribution. Freedom, wealth, and privilege burdens that black people were lucky to avoid. The only possibility of such a universe, I would imagine, might have involved some sort of depraved mass lobotomization or heavy doses of obliterating narcotics. This vision of the old South was as impossible as it was untrue.

Flash forward to mid-fifties New York, Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley in the new Andrew Scott Netflix version is approached by a black man at a bar who says he has a job for him.  There is no reference to their races as if black people approaching white people and offering them work was a regular occurrence at that time.  In the Highsmith original, no such character exists.  Deeply racist,  Highsmith cast almost all non-white characters in her work as foolish and/or despicable. Read more »

NOTE: For the past six years, Joseph Shieber was a much-valued contributor here at 3QD. He wrote 73 essays for us which can be seen here. We are all saddened by his loss and wish to express our sympathy to his wife, Lesa, and his children, Samuel and Noa. This obituary is taken from here.

Joseph H. Shieber, April 7, 2024 of Wallingford, PA. Beloved husband of Lesa Shieber; proud father of Samuel and Noa; loving son of Benjamin and Eileen Shieber; devoted brother of William (Rebecca) Shieber and Jonathan (Kathleen) Shieber.

Joseph (“Joe”) Shieber was a loving husband and father, beloved son and brother, and respected Professor at Lafayette College. But that brief description does not encompass Joe’s remarkable impact on everyone he met.

Joe grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, within walking distance of LSU, where his dad, Professor Ben Shieber taught and his mom, Eileen Shieber, received her graduate degree. From the start, Joe was blessed with great intelligence, an even temperament, and a profound gift for friendship and love. Joe went to Yale College where he received his B.A. in Literature, while participating in the singing groups Tangled Up In Blue and the Whiffenpoofs. He then studied at the Free University in Berlin, where he received two Masters Degrees, in Mathematics and Philosophy, and Brown University, where he received a Ph.D. in Philosophy. His Brown graduation was blessed with a driving rain, and the Ph.D. recipients were forced to sit outside while an appropriate worthy person droned on with thoughts on how to lead a good life. Perhaps it was this experience which led to Joe’s research on effective (or ineffective) communications.

Joe then went off to teach Philosophy at Lafayette College. At the time of his death, Joe was the James Renwick Hogg Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy, which is quite the mouthful. Joe was a beloved teacher and colleague. He was, by his fellow faculty’s account, the smartest and best-read philosopher in a department made up of smart and well-read philosophers. Philosophers are conditioned to make the first statement, the fastest statement, and the best statement. Joe was not that way. Joe always waited, giving respect to those who were speaking. He was decent, and his intellectual generosity was “really honest.” Read more »

by David Greer

I used to visit our airport on Vancouver Island not to catch a flight but to hear the skylarks. I stood in the parking lot and looked up. The stares from passengers arriving and departing seemed a small price to pay for the reward of listening to the endless birdsong spilling from the sky above the terminal.

The Eurasian skylarks were all but invisible, hovering two or three hundred feet above me, but I was familiar with their routine. Male skylarks begin their song flight with a rapid ascendance to hovering altitude, where they deliver their unbroken melodious stream, lasting up to 20 minutes. The longer and more complicated the song, the greater the likelihood of impressing a potential mate. The grassy fields around the runways provided ideal nesting sites for one of the last remaining skylark populations in North America. Fortunately, whenever I visited, the airport sky seemed always to overflow with skylark song, albeit to an intermittent accompaniment of airplane engines.

Eurasian skylarks were introduced to several American states in the nineteenth century by European immigrants nostalgic for the birds of home. A further introduction to Vancouver Island in 1903 was sufficiently successful that the local skylark population had grown to more than a thousand by the early 1960s.

Although only the male skylarks engage in the aerial opera, the long-standing belief that courtship songs are primarily the province of male birds has been well and truly shattered. That theory likely arose from the fact that early naturalists primarily made their observations in temperate zones where male birds play a larger role in birdsong. But the majority of songbird species are tropical (unsurprising, given that birds evolved in the general vicinity of Australia), and a 2014 study of almost all songbird families demonstrated that female song not only occurs in more than two-thirds of those species but also may be just as long and complex as male song. Read more »

Replacing the Gates

If I’d broken the laws of light—
if I’d been caught by a black hole
and sent to prism,
would you visit me with spectral frequency
and split waves with me?
Would you help cleave white
into colors and set them free
to carom off of everything in sight
replacing the gates of hate
with rainbows?

by Jim Culleny

by Tim Sommers

The fella says, we must never forget that we are human. And as humans we must dream. And when we dream, we dream of money. —David Mamet/The Spanish Prisoner (1998)

Long after Jesus held up a coin with Caesar’s picture on it and wisely counseled giving back to Caesar what, very obviously, was Caesar’s (‘Didn’t you see the picture?’), Adam Smith tried to tell us that money was not invented by governments. Money, and economic life entire, come from “a certain propensity in human nature,” he says, “the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.” Smith gives a detailed account of how such barter might arise in a group of shepherds or hunters. He does not pretend that this is an actual group of which he has actual knowledge. But what genre of story is this then?

Although many economists have told the “money comes from barter” story as nonfiction, contemporary economics textbooks tell it neither as fact nor fiction, but as a hypothetical. To see the benefits of money, one textbook advises, “imagine a barter economy.” “In a complex society with many goods,” says another, money replaces barter, since “barter exchanges involve an intolerable amount of effort.” More poetically, one textbook asks us to imagine that we “have roosters, but…want roses.”

The trouble is, as anthropologist Caroline Humphrey points out, “No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing.” Never?

Barter societies, where they exist at any scale, are what happens (initially, briefly) to societies that once used money after their central government collapses. So, while economists would have you believe that barter initially arises from “a certain propensity in human nature,” but that, given barter’s intolerable complexity, barter gives rise naturally to money, and that the use of money leads to credit and debt, David Graber argues that, basically, the opposite is true. Read more »