by Richard Farr

I’m writing this 37,000 feet above Vestmannaeyjar, a chain of islands off Iceland’s south coast. Or so the screen tells me – I can’t see the view because I’m wedged into 38E, a middle seat at the back near the loos. The ambient noise and vibration are roughly what you’d experience with your back to the railing at Niagara. As if pleased with the roar, this part of the airframe wags intermittently, like the rear end of a hopeful dog. Objects made of metal have no right to be this flexible – especially not airtight objects that are essentially several thousand small tin trays tacked together. (Welded? Bolted? Riveted? What is a rivet anyway? How is it possible to reach my age with essentially no idea what a rivet is?) 

When I read Simon Winchester’s history of engineering, The Perfectionists, I must have missed the bit about rivets, but I did learn that the turbine blades in a jet engine have to be manufactured by advanced magi of the alchemical arts, who employ exotic alloys and mind-bogglingly fine tolerances to fight metal’s very natural desire to melt or shatter when spun at ferocious speeds inside a furnace. I try not to think about the fact that a manufacturing imperfection the size of a flea’s toenail could get me into a news story.

According to my watch we’re at 6,000 feet, but that’s only an indication of the lowered cabin pressure. It’s nothing, from a climber’s point of view, but presumably it explains why my head hurts, my hands look like a pair of lizard skin gloves, and half the passengers are farting. Read more »

Stardust

—on a celestial photo

look to the spiral arc of stars
of which the nearest star and you are part

and see your milky way
and climb your finite climb

and run your finite run
and whirl and turn and wind

while they spin their finite spin
and glow their finite glow

and give you finite light
to tell you what they know

of the stuff you’re of and in,
both brief and infinite

Jim Culleny
9/4/15, 7:10 am
Photograph by Dave Lane

Kathleen Ryan. Bad Lemon (Creep), 2019.

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by Mike Bendzela

The term “Little Apocalypse” is borrowed from New Testament studies, referring to the Olivet Discourse in Jerusalem. This speech first appeared around the year 70 CE, in Chapter 13 of the original written gospel, the Gospel of Mark. After the scene of the cleansing of the temple, before the Last Supper and the arrest, one of the disciples draws attention to the massive stones of the temple, evoking from Jesus the promise that the temple would be destroyed. They sit “on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple” (hence “Olivet Discourse”), and the disciples ask Jesus to elaborate, thus prompting his long monologue predicting the End, when “Heaven and earth will pass away,” a view to be developed later in what might be called the “Big Apocalypse,” the Book of Revelation.

“Apocalypse” in its Greek sense means an “unveiling,” particularly when a visionary prophet or writer is vouchsafed a revelation of God’s plan. Emily Dickinson’s vision of the cosmic order in the poem “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers” is much briefer than Jesus’s Little Apocalypse but is no less striking. Her vision extends beyond traditional Christian boilerplate imagery to encompass something distinctly more up-to-date.

The poem’s first stanza discloses a portrait of the Christian dead lying in their tombs, awaiting the End of Days:

Safe in their Alabaster Chambers—
Untouched by Morning—
and untouched by noon—
Sleep the meek members of the Resurrection,
Rafter of Satin and Roof of Stone—

The utter stasis of the scene is housed in a single inverted sentence, in which the predicate comes first, with the sentence’s only verb–“sleep”–continually delayed by those “untouched” phrases. Then, finally, appears the subject, “the meek members of the Resurrection,” lying there inertly near the end of the sentence. The whole thing is capped off with a metaphor of a dwelling, the “Satin” interiors of their coffins represented as “Rafter” and the “Stone” tomb covering as “Roof.” Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Ed Simon

Demonstrating the utility of a critical practice that’s sometimes obscured more than its venerable history would warrant, my 3 Quarks Daily column will be partially devoted to the practice of traditional close readings of poems, passages, dialogue, and even art. If you’re interested in seeing close readings on particular works of literature or pop culture, please email me at [email protected]

A short lyric can be an ingenious device, a clever mechanism, an engine for generating multiple meanings – that’s the first axiom of my argument. The second axiom is that all truly great poetry is, at some level, about poetry itself (if not about the individual poem itself). Robert Bernard Hass’ “The Metaphysics of Presence,” which was published in the December 2023 issue of Poetry magazine, is an exemplary example of both of these aforementioned principles; a lyric that ironically draws attention to itself, to “Your hipster cynical voice” and to “clever puns,” but in the deferral between ultimate meaning and surfaces suggests a far more profound, if ineffable, lesson than the playfulness which the work itself initially implies.

The title of the work is consciously foreboding, with “The Metaphysics of Presence” sounding as if something that would be emblazoned on the spine of a door-stopper of continental philosophy. It’s not incidental, however, for that’s precisely and literally what Hass’ poem is concerned with, which is to say the relationship between what language represents and the thing-in-itself, between the sign and signified, the presence and the inevitable absence of words falling short of ultimate reality. To that end, “The Metaphysics of Presence” is a love poem. Hass even says so, writing in as straightforward a manner as is conceivable at the tenth line that “You’re in the presence of a love poem,” which is both accurate and not, and an example of a literal declaration in a poem that has fun with the incommensurability of literal declarations all while gesturing to something that lay beyond language. Read more »

At a pond in Vahrn, South Tyrol.

“These are dry,

didn’t you soak
the stems in a vase before

you came here?” Mother said
as I showered blood

red rose petals
on her grave.

by Rafiq Kathwari

by Carol A Westbrook

The sun has always been an object of fascination and interest, appearing as it does as a bright, shining sphere crossing the daytime sky. On Monday, April 8, many of us will have had the opportunity to see the sun in all its glory as the moon crosses between it and the earth, briefly revealing its spectacular halo, the solar corona. Although we tend to take the sun for granted, an event like this makes us stop and think of how little we know about this celestial object.

Primitive peoples recognized that the sun was the source of all the earth’s heat and light; it was as important as the air we breathe and the water we drink. The sun was necessary to raise food crops and forage. Who could grow a garden in the shade? The sun marked the days and the seasons with a predictable regularity providing security and structure to their lives. The longest days, the shortest days, and the two equinoxes, had a special significance to their lives as they delineated the seasons, and they celebrated these days with feasting and sacrifice and prayers to their gods; and they raised large and impressively accurate monuments to mark these days. Stonehenge inf England is the best known of these monuments, but there are many others such as the pyramid at Chichen Itza in Mexico which casts a shadow in the shape of a serpent climbing the pyramid at the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. It is perhaps this disruption in this regularity and dependability that tend to make solar eclipses such memorable—and perhaps frightening–events. Read more »

by Martin Butler

Recently I read an article which included the idea that nature can have rights, something I have to admit I had not come across before, despite a keen awareness that nature needs protecting. I discovered that this is a well-established point of view – there is a lengthy Wikipedia page on the topic. I found this rather odd – it seemed a misplaced use of the concept of a right. But it made me reflect that in the modern world the possession of rights is one of the few ethical ideals that is taken seriously wherever you happen to be on the political spectrum, so it’s understandable why those who want to protect nature might adopt the language of rights.

From the right to bear arms to transgender rights, rights matter across the board, having an authority that religious commandments, the claims of ‘social justice’, and other varieties of moral prescription seem to lack. The idea that we have rights is an unquestioned certainty, but rights are also often a source of considerable conflict in the modern world. Which rights do we actually possess? Do animals have rights? How can conflicting rights, which are presented as fixed, be reconciled? Do some rights automatically trump other rights? If so, how could a hierarchy of rights be devised? The language of rights, it seems, very quickly leads to dogmatism and impasse. Jeremy Bentham certainly had no time for rights:

Natural rights is simply nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense – nonsense on stilts.[1]

He wrote this in an essay entitled “Anarchical Fallacies; being an examination of the Declaration of Rights issued during the French Revolution”(1796). Interestingly, Bentham’s arguments have something in common with Karl Marx’s and Edmund Burke’s critiques of rights – and these two philosophers are at opposite ends of the political divide. Read more »

by Derek Neal

I was listening to “My Turn Now” from Atlantic Starr’s 1980 album Radiant when my friend complained that “they just say the same thing over and over again.” This is true. The part of the song that elicited this comment was near the end, when the lead singer and the backup vocalists engage in a call and response:

(Baby, it’s my turn)
Oh, it is my turn now
It’s my turn now
(It’s my turn now)
(Baby, it’s my turn)
I want the world to know
That love is the love you sow
(It’s my turn now)

This is, of course, what music does. Words are repeated, phrases are repeated, melodies are repeated, and the song gets stuck in our heads and we repeat it to ourselves. Techno music, which is one of my favorite genres, is often criticized as being too repetitive, usually due to its ever-present bass drum; what some listeners fail to realize, however, is that once you hear the bass drum enough you stop hearing it. It acts as a sort of metronome, keeping time while melodies, harmonies, and rhythmic elements give shape to the music. When something is repeated, its meaning changes. I’ll say it again: when something is repeated, its meaning changes. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Random Street Composition While Walking Home, March 2, 2024.

Digital photograph.

by Mike O’Brien

What a week it has been. I’m not referring to military outrages, legal bombshells or pop-cultural bombshells. Rather, I’m referring to the dozens of intensive (and intensely rewarding!) hours I spent catching up on my preferred corner of academic research: the empirical investigation of animal normativity. Big things are happening in this domain. Big things have been happening there for decades, but the pace has noticeably increased in the last two years, at least judging by the output of the authors I tend to follow.

Some of my readers may know that I am particularly interested in the work of Kristin Andrews, currently at York University in Toronto. I have covered some publications of hers in previous columns, most recently 2022’s “A pluralistic framework for the psychology of norms“, co-written with Evan Westra. Since then, no fewer than nine publications have been added to Andrews’ website, many co-authored with other movers and shakers in the burgeoning animal normativity scene. In addition to illustrating the current state of the field, the historical references in these recent publications (if I can call the 1970s and 1990s “historical” without sending a chill up the spines of my peers and elders) also trace the long trajectory of de-anthropocentrizing projects in cognitive and behavioural sciences. A particularly interesting antecedent is 1990’s “Towards a neurobiological theory of consciousness” by Francis Crick (!) and Christof Koch, which called for a program of research into consciousness that presupposed a neuronal rather than linguistic basis for conscious phenomena. A fortuitous proposal, in retrospect, accompanied by some rather interesting specific hypotheses about the underlying neuronal mechanics. Koch’s confidence in the material tractability of consciousness recently cost him a case of wine (presumably now sitting in David Chalmers’ cellar), although he should not be faulted for the mind-sharpening practice of attaching stakes to one’s bets.

To recap my previous coverage of Andrews’ work: In “A pluralistic framework…“, Andrews and Westra sketched out a conceptual toolkit for a research program that could investigate normativity in non-human animals. The main thrust of this project is to remove heavily concept-laden and human-specific definitions and criteria, and in their stead provide minimal, instrumentally serviceable tools that can be applied to a wide variety of animal behaviours. Read more »

by Joseph Shieber

Two of the happy discoveries I’ve made in the last two months or so are Brian Klaas’s and Dan Williams’s Substacks. Klaas is an American political scientist who has made his career in the UK, while Williams is a UK philosopher. Both writers have overlapping interests — chiefly, perhaps, in the role of tribal signaling in the formation of political beliefs.

I generally find myself in agreement with much of what both Klaas and Williams write. For this reason, it was significant for me to read posts by each of them, within days of each other, that I found deeply wrong. Both posts circled around the topic of the impoverishment of public discourse, though each post approached the topic from a distinct perspective.

Klaas’s post, “The Death of Serious Politics,” decries the way in which politics “has become subsumed by scandals, outrage, discussions of rhetoric, culture wars, and, above all, focusing on who’s winning and losing at politics rather than who’s winning or losing at solving problems.”

Klaas rehearses the typical candidates for blame. He claims that “We’re governed by narcissistic political influencers who trade in the currencies of eyeballs and clicks, rather than measuring their acheivements by, say, children lifted out of poverty.” He laments “how many of our collective brain cells have been commandeered after being poisoned by Trump’s hateful venom.” He also targets “the full-blown, profit-seeking news industry embedded within the frenetic pace of American life.” Finally, he blames us — “media consumers with digitally shortened attention spans,” and “dopamine-addled consumers of snippets of information.”

Klaas, then, begins with the observation that our public discourse is impoverished and then provides a diagnosis: our politicians are vapid influencers, Trump has coarsened the discourse, the media is profit-driven and — because of this — focused on driving ratings, and we the media consumers only pay attention to superficial factoids, rather than substance.

As it so happened, a few days before Klaas published his post, Dan Williams published a post discussing the fact that “In politics, the truth is not self-evident. So why do we act as if it is?” Although the topic of Williams’s post might seem orthogonal to Klaas’s, the two are actually quite closely connected. To appreciate this, let’s first see what Williams has to say about what he sees as a “harmful delusion” that many people harbor about their political beliefs. Read more »

by Barry Goldman

Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others. —Groucho Marx

It’s easy to ridicule politicians for their lack of principle. Mitch McConnell comes immediately to mind. When Antonin Scalia died nine months before the 2016 election, President Obama nominated Merrick Garland to replace him on the Supreme Court. McConnell refused even to give Garland a hearing. He said, “The American people may well elect a president who decides to nominate Judge Garland for Senate consideration. The next president may also nominate someone very different. Either way, our view is this: Give the people a voice.”

Four years later when Ruth Bader Ginsberg died 47 days before the 2020 election, President Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett. The voice of the people did not figure in McConnell’s calculations. He fast-tracked Barrett’s nomination, cut off debate, and engineered her confirmation eight days before the election, after millions of Americans had voted.

Predictably, there were loud cries of hypocrisy. Just as predictably, they had no effect. The universe of politicians is not a good place to look for moral principle.

How about the courts? The whole idea of the rule of law is that laws are supposed to be based on principle, applied without fear or favor, and above politics. The reality, of course, is otherwise. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Rebecca Baumgartner

It feels like every week tech journalism brings us a dispatch about the “end” of something: we’re told now that we’re reaching the end of foreign-language education due to advances in AI translation. 

It’s true that no field of study is immune from journalistic swagger about our AI-saturated future, but this seems especially true for the arts and humanities, which have been said to be declining for a long time – and which, because their defenders struggle to articulate a compelling ROI, make them appear, to some people, ideal for outsourcing. According to this view, learning French is on a level with monotonously picking orders in a warehouse: If nobody wants to do it, let’s make the AI do it. And it seems that fewer and fewer of us want to learn French – and most other languages, too.

I think the world would be a better place if no human being had to pick orders in a warehouse ever again. By all means, let the robots knock themselves out trying to optimize how quickly we get our Amazon orders. They don’t have a soul to crush. But unlike the rote, mindless work that many humans currently have to do to make a living, creating and enjoying culture isn’t a burden we should rush to relieve ourselves of. Cultural products are not something that can – or should – be optimized in the way that AI models (and the humans behind them) lead us to believe they can.

By the way, it’s important to note that this has nothing to do with whether AI language models can translate a given text “correctly” (however that’s defined for a given text). It’s not even a question of whether the resulting translation is good or not, according to some normative standard of eloquence or naturalness.  Read more »