by Richard Farr

The past few days, I’ve been unable to get away from the sense that perhaps there’s something wrong with me. When so many people love Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, why have I found myself only deflated and disappointed by it? Many hours examining this question leave me unsure, so what follows is meant to describe a reaction more than persuade you to agree with it. 

Matt Damon is an actor it’s impossible not to like. His Charming Boyish Grin beats anyone this side of Harrison Ford, and unlike Ford he can also do both determination and vulnerability without hamming it up. That’s what made him such a perfect choice for Jason Bourne, and I have to think that Christopher Nolan or his casting gurus had that quality in mind. A clue here? They must have thought Odysseus was that same kind of hyper-competent modern man, with advanced MMA skills but enough inner turmoil to make him, as they say, relatable. But it seems to me that Homer’s Odysseus is in certain ways deeply unrelatable — bigger, more wily, more psychically powerful and more strange than any kick-butt action hero. And that problem of characterization leaks across the whole canvas.

Some bits of the film are genuinely visually original. The horse on the beach is an old cliché rescued and re-imagined. The cyclops is enjoyably frightening, in a large rubber monster kind of way. But the filmmakers were unwilling or unable to enter imaginatively into a world where the supernatural is real and yet still supernatural. Charlize Theron plays Calypso as a blandly winsome babe in a vacation commercial (“Come to Ogygia Island Resorts and forget all your troubles!”). Zendaya’s Athena is an ordinary woman with a frown who you might bump into at the grocery store. Samantha Morton gets more to chew on as Circe, but she isn’t even all that frightening while turning soldiers into swine, and later, sitting defeated at her table, she’s nothing but a bitter single with a cooking pot. In an especially pointless scene, the Laestrygonians in their silver armor look like the local Medieval Battle Reenactment Society. The Shades in Hades are the same people they were when alive, except that now they’re smeared all over with bitumenous gravel and resentment. There’s neither primal wonder nor primal horror in any of this. Read more »

Roldy Aguero Ablao. Talaya’ 3000, 2023.

Digital print.

More here and here.

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by Martin Butler

Rootedness, says Simone Weil,

…is perhaps the most important and least known human spiritual need. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being is rooted through their real, active and natural participation in the life of a collectivity that keeps alive treasures of the past and has aspirations for the future. This participation is natural in that it stems automatically from place, birth, occupation and those around them. Every human being needs to have multiple roots and to derive almost all their moral, intellectual and spiritual life from the environment to which they naturally belong.[1]

There is something paradoxical about Weil’s account. The idea that rootedness is a need, rather than simply a fact about human beings, implies that the need might not be met; and indeed, The Need for Roots, from which this quotation is taken, is a kind of manifesto for a society which recognises the importance of this need along with other moral and spiritual needs. Her discussion of the different kinds of uprootedness makes it clear that rootedness cannot be taken for granted, yet the quotation above suggests that rootedness is normal and natural. Being rooted comes through our ‘real, active and natural participation in the life of a collectivity’. It is ‘natural in that it stems automatically from place, birth, occupation and those around them.’ In other words it would be difficult not to have roots. If rootedness is natural and arises automatically why is this an issue at all? How could we be rootless? Read more »

A collage essay by River Lerner

A dam and a corset share a certain poetry. The opposing forces along their walls grant function: not only to contain or boundary, but to harness difference. Pressure makes a thing what it is.

The work of the world is common as mud.¹Piercy, Marge. “To Be of Use.” Circles on the Water: Selected Poems of Marge Piercy, Alfred A. Knopf, 1982.

Since being introduced to Marge Piercy’s poem “To Be of Use”, I have misread that line numerous times as: “The work of the world is covered in mud.”

The restraint of lace and the frustration of water sieve power. Separate the wheat from the chafe.

The work of a person is managing mud. Read more »

Footnotes

• 1
  Piercy, Marge. “To Be of Use.” Circles on the Water: Selected Poems of Marge Piercy, Alfred A. Knopf, 1982. ↩︎

Between Now and Then

No matter what,
every time we shift one foot
in front of the other
we’re on the road to
who knows where? it
can’t be helped

In this scheme of things,
—unless you introduce a
mystical element which is,
if not cheating, at least as
fictional as anything that
hasn’t happened yet—
in this scheme, all of this,
must not be about ultimate destination,
it must be about what occurs between
now and then.

Jim Culleny
4/7/18

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by Rafaël Newman

Not quite 25 years ago, on September 15, 2001, I took my six-year-old daughter to the opera. Her mother had arranged the outing, in part because it was clear how much Hella was beginning to enjoy musical theater—a pleasure I had learned from my own parents—and in part because, in the final weeks of her pregnancy with our second child, Caroline simply needed a few hours to herself.

The tickets to that evening’s performance of Die Entführung aus dem Serail at Opernhaus Zürich had been purchased at some point during the summer of 2001, well before September 11. By the time Hella and I attended the production, four days after what would soon come to be known as 9/11, everything had changed; and Mozart’s 1782 opera, which mainly concerns two pairs of lovers escaping from danger but also stages a confrontation between the Christian and Muslim worlds, had taken on a new, more urgent aspect.

When, therefore, the Swiss actor Peter Arens, in the speaking role of Bassa Selim, a convert to Islam and an Ottoman despot, made his celebrated final-act speech extolling clemency, in Zurich on September 15, 2001, he spoke directly to the audience rather than to the onstage character he was meant to be addressing. [E]s wäre ein weit grösser Vergnügen eine erlittene Ungerechtigkeit durch Wohlthaten zu vergelten, als Laster mit Lastern tilgen, Arens said as Selim: “It is a far greater pleasure to repay injustices suffered by good deeds than to compensate evil by more evil”, ostensibly renouncing vengeance on the son of his enemy and allowing him to return to Spain with the woman they both love, but in fact making an unmistakable plea for moderation in the American military campaign against Afghanistan that was gearing up that very moment. To amplify the point, in both 1782 and 2001, the four lovers respond with a quartet: “Nothing is as ugly as vengeance.”

In the event, of course, Selim’s/Arens’s implicit plea, and others more overt, in the international press and on the street, went unheard in Washington. What is more, when the US President’s thirst for revenge was ultimately unslaked in Afghanistan, George Bush Jr. would go on, in 2003, to resume and extend his father’s earlier war on Iraq with a trumped-up mission to find and destroy non-existent WMDs there. There ensued a Second Gulf War that lasted for eight years, until 2011, when US troops were withdrawn from Iraq. Read more »

by Priya Malhotra

Mira remembers her third birthday party as a scene of almost extravagant happiness. There was a cream-puff cake, tier upon tier of it, which in memory has acquired the architectural grandeur of a wedding cake. Helium balloons floated close to the ceiling, their ribbons dangling into the room. She remembers presents, noise, people fussing over her—the peculiar exhilaration of being three and understanding that, for one afternoon at least, the world had arranged itself around you.

Her mother remembers the same party.

Only she remembers a miserable child.

Mira’s father had been unable to attend. According to her mother, Mira spent much of the afternoon crying for him. The celebrated cake barely interested her. Neither did the balloons. What her mother remembers is trying to coax an inconsolable three-year-old into enjoying a party in which the absence of her father seemed to eclipse everything else.

Could one of these accounts simply be wrong? That strikes me as an overly simplistic question. Memory is not generally obedient to binaries such as right and wrong, particularly when what we are remembering is not merely an event but the way that event registered in a particular consciousness: what drew our attention, what mattered to us, what delighted or wounded us, and what barely registered at all.

Facts, of course, are another matter. Mira’s father was either at the party or he wasn’t. The party took place on a particular day and at a particular place; the cake had some ascertainable number of tiers. Where and when something happened, and often what happened, are not matters of personal interpretation. This becomes especially important when memory moves beyond private life into history, crime, politics or other consequential matters, where competing recollections cannot be allowed to replace truth.

But facts occupy surprisingly little of the territory we mean when we say, I remember. Read more »

by Eric Feigenbaum

As a child of Southern California, I knew the importance of water conservation from a young age. During my high school years, the state was experiencing one of its regular extreme droughts and we were encouraged to take five-minute showers – turning off the water to lather and shampoo.

It all made perfect sense since in fourth grade we learned about the great aqueducts that moved runoff from the Sierra Nevada snowpack to Southern California – our literal lifelines. While it isn’t true that it never rains in Southern California – and when it does it can be destructive – Los Angeles gets an average of 14.7 inches of rain per year. Hardly enough to sustain its population.

California perennially struggles with water and it seems is always trying to catch up with its needs.

Meanwhile, in Southeast Asia – just one degree north of the equator – Singapore receives an average of 85 to 95 inches of rain per year with a surge to 117.52 in 2025. With 287.4 square miles to its name – slightly smaller than the City of Los Angeles’ 469 square miles and significantly smaller than the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area’s 4853.1 square miles – it doesn’t seem like water would be one of Singapore’s issues.

But it has been – for more than 65 years. In fact, much like California, water is one of Singapore’s greatest vulnerabilities and perennial issues.

Really – Singapore’s water issues break down into two intertwined problems: independence and volume.

Volume was its original problem. Even before independence in 1965, Singapore did not have enough water to provide for its citizens and agriculture without supplementation. In 1961 and 1962 while still under British dominion, the Malayan mainland agreed to supply Singapore from two water sources under long-term agreements – one which elapsed in 2011 and the other which remains in effect until 2061 giving Singapore 250 million gallons per day (mgd).

Only, at present, Singapore operates at a baseline of 440 mgd. And as we can see, the clock on that important 250 mgs is ticking.

This is why from independence, founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew said, “Every other policy has to bend at the knees for our water survival.” Read more »

Shaft of sunlight over the mountains west of Brixen, South Tyrol.

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by Charles Siegel

In one of my first columns for 3 Quarks Daily, Don’t Deport Protesters, or Defund Universities, in My Name, I lamented the Trump administration’s efforts to, in its own words, “combat antisemitism” and “protect Jewish students from harassment and violence in the United States.”  The administration purported to be vindicating these goals by deporting student protesters — and protesters who weren’t students, such as our client Leqaa Kordia — and by indiscriminately cutting grant funding to universities.  I thought that such pious intonations from Trump and his henchmen were hypocritical in the extreme, given the presence of many blatant antisemites in the administration and in Republican circles generally.  I also wondered what on earth the connection was between ostensible concerns about antisemitism on the one hand, and slashing grant funding for medical, scientific and technological research on the other.  Finally, I noted that many, many Jewish organizations have denounced the funding cuts, as have thousands of Jewish professors.

Three weeks ago, a federal judge in Boston ruled in favor of Harvard, in one of the suits brought by the government against it over these feigned concerns.  This lawsuit is just one front in the larger battle between the administration and Harvard.  So far, the university is standing up to Trump, and refusing to cave by settling.  And Yale has not settled either, although it is said to be considering a settlement.

I realize, of course, that with the largest endowment of any university in the world by far, Harvard is uniquely able to stand up to Trump’s bullying.  One hopes that Yale, whose own endowment is the second-largest, will continue to resist as well.  The likes of Brown and Columbia will live in shame forever for capitulating, although they recently signed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of Harvard.

The ruling on August 13^th by Judge Richard Stearns came in a case officially entitled United States of America v. President and Fellows of Harvard College.  In this particular case, the government brought an “enforcement action” under the Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.  Yes, I know — it makes my head explode, too, when I read that Trump alleges that Harvard violated the Civil Rights Act.  Such a lawsuit might more properly be entitled Pot v. Kettle. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Michael Liss

My Jefferson is a giant, but a giant trammeled in a net, and obliged (he thought) to keep repairing and strengthening the coils of that net. —Garry Wills, “Negro President”

Late in his life, uncertain in his health, but sure in his pride, rummaging through the immense library of his memories, his soaring successes, and his every-day regrets, Thomas Jefferson had cause to define the words, his words, that Americans so justly celebrated.

The Declaration of Independence, he wrote in an 1825 letter to Henry Lee, was not original in the sense of creating “new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of,” but was instead “intended to be an expression of the [A]merican mind.”

Such was his grasp of that moment in 1776, such was the reach of his ambitions half a century later, that he could claim his words conveyed just that, in “terms so plain and firm, as to command their assent.”

Maybe he was right. Maybe the place the Declaration has for itself in American historical iconography is unassailable—it, too, commands assent. Lincoln thought so, both in his public words (“[f]our score and seven years ago”) and his private correspondence, as here, in an April 1859 letter to Henry L. Pierce and others:

All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.

Of course, politicians, and people, seek validation for themselves and their ideas in the unifying principles and heroes of the past. To say, “I’m with Tom” is to connect oneself to greatness. America, at its best, is a vision that is lit from within by great ideas. Do those ideas still retain their power when the vessel that holds them is a contradiction of the principles themselves? Read more »

by Angela Starita

The state of the world, it’s understood, has led to poor sleep habits and hours of doom scrolling. My own sleep is regularly ruined by my before-bed routine of doing puzzles and then watching YouTube videos or listening to podcasts, sometimes for hours. But my nighttime media consumption is rarely news–no suspects running across rooftops or deep dives on Supreme Court decisions. Instead, I’ve constructed a pre-sleep universe of private nostalgia to stanch a stream of saliva that wakes me at three, prompted by a boring list of fears, personal and universal, questions about mistakes made and life’s purpose. (The mighty limbic systems of doom scrollers is beyond my imagination.)

The most effective, most comforting, of my pre-bed listening comes from an app called LibriVox, where volunteers read books “in the public domain,” that is, books more than 80 years out of copyright. The site is driven by the premise that books should be available and free to all, with the inflated tag line “acoustical liberation of books in the public domain.”

On the face of it, the available selection is predictable: lots of Dickens and Austen, dozens of Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie mysteries. The choices are made by the readers who record themselves, then upload the recordings to the site. Each episode begins with a reader announcing their name and sometimes the title of the book and publisher. Occasionally, the books are read like radio plays with the readers introducing themselves at the start. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, for one, is read by a large group (friends? aspiring voice actors?) who each adopt a nom de lisant, among them Shrimpfish, Gary O., and, to underscore the olde timey nature of reading a book for a phone app, Mr. Beeswax Candle. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Darakht. Boston, September, 2026.

Digital photograph.

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by Jeroen Bouterse

The Brandmauer – the political ‘firewall’ against the German far-right party Alternative für Deutschland – is under duress. It has been clear for a while that the state election in Saxony-Anhalt on September 6^th would make government formation there without the AfD either difficult, extremely difficult, or arithmetically impossible. As I submit this column, it looks like the second.

Politicians and commentators are frantically reflecting, not just on the processes driving the electoral successes of the far right and on the future of democracy, but also on the wall metaphor. Some get technical. Asked about the durability of the Brandmauer in an interview with Der Spiegel, Saxony’s prime-minister Michael Kretschmer started lecturing on how fire-resistance is measured. “F60, for example, means that the building component can remain structurally sound for 60 minutes in the case of fire.” The journalist felt compelled to interject: “where are you going with this?”

In a volume of essays on the Brandmauer published this summer, almost all contributions happily explore the image. Some of them even refer, somewhat boldly, to that other wall that is among Germany’s core political memories. The Berlin Wall is the symbol of a failing political system, scared that its people would abandon it. It is also famous for falling at the hands of those people. Journalist Stefan Aust draws the lesson most directly: “just like the ‘anti-fascist protection wall’ did not save the GDR from the democratic collapse of socialism, the Brandmauer will not save the country from [the AfD].”

That it is imagined as a wall has now come to imply that the days of the taboo against the AfD may well be numbered. At best, its effect is temporary. That was Kretschmer’s point, of course; firewalls slow the fire down, but something else is needed to stop the actual fire. Still, this growing consensus on the limits of the Brandmauer does not answer the question of whether German politics presently needs something else in addition to the firewall, or something else instead of the firewall. Let’s try to answer that question here. Read more »