by Gus Mitchell

(Read Pt. 1)

If there has been a decline in many parts of our culture in the last several years, and if we are increasingly bored by the infinitude of content offered us in exchange, then the blurring of art and content has a lot to do with it.

Increasingly, both societally and culturally, we can process only information, or as Mark Zuckerberg put it, via “information flow.” In the world of culture, this translates to awards, lists and listings, rankings, ratings, returns, engagement, traffic, clicks, likes, shares, subscriptions, metrics, algorithms, data, numbers. Mass culture is now nothing other than the content we feed into this nexus of informational processing.

But only imagination can transfigure information, reify it, make us feel it, make it mean or do something.

To return to that etymological ramble from last time, content in adjectival form is a feeling of a “fullness”, that feeling which Shakespeare associated with the “heart’s content.” But content, in this sense, and capitalism, are incompatible. In Capitalism and Desire, Todd McGowan writes that “those who are not continually seeking new objects of desire”, or those who “content themselves with outmoded objects and recognize the satisfaction embodied in the object’s failure to realize their desire…are not good consumers or producers” of the commodities that capitalism produces to fill the sense of emptiness it inculcates. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Breaking Point.

Digital photograph February 2022.

by Brooks Riley

by David Winner

“Forget skyscrapers, ice water, drinks, stockmakers, New York, half chewed cigars, and statues of liberty.  Think of camel bells, cyclamen and the last lions,” wrote Bill Barker, the commander of the northern province of mandate Palestine to his lover, my great Aunt Dorle in 1934, trying to encourage her to move from New York to the Middle East.  Dorle was entrenched in the New York music world by that point, working with the New York Philharmonic, but she had grown up a poor little rich girl from New York inspired by the tales of Scheherazade.  The Middle East was an enchanted place and Islam its enchanted religion.

But when I think of her travels in the Arab world in the twenties and thirties, it is nineteenth century composer and part time Orientalist Gioachino Rossini who comes to mind: his operas about traveling from the east to the west and visa-versa: Un Italiano in Algeria, Un Turco in Italia.   What would he have called Dorle, Una Fanciulla (young girl) Hebraica in Arabia?

Certainly, Dorle’s vision of The Orient had not progressed far beyond Rossini’s.  Georges Asfar, another lover in her prolific thirties (a Syrian Christian) encouraged her to think of him as her Muslim master.  Like Barker, he littered his letters with Arabic, the magical language of magical places.

I’ve carried something of that flame myself the few times I’ve traveled in the Arab world, but worse than my muted Orientalism, I’ve sometimes fallen prey to an even more dangerous trope, represented by Claire Danes as Carrie from Homeland, her blond hair disguised by a hijab, walking purposefully through devious Muslim spaces.

However sophisticated and well-traveled I see myself, I’ve fallen into sinkholes of fear and prejudice while traveling in what Dorle would have called the Orient. Read more »

The raging waters of the Eisack river flowing through Franzensfeste at twilight.

by William Benzon

I’ve now seen Maestro twice, spread out over four, maybe five, sittings. I suppose the fact that I haven’t watched it straight through in a single sitting might be taken as an indication that I didn’t find it…Didn’t find it what? Good, compelling, interesting, satisfying? If one or some combination of those is true, then why did I watch it twice? Maybe I found it disturbing and wanted to figure out what was bugging me? If it was disturbing, the disturbance was unconscious.

[That I didn’t watch the whole film in a single sitting is certainly an indication of the fact that I watched the film at home, in front of a small screen, instead of in a theater and with a large audience.]

Was I bugged? Yes, I was bugged, about the damned prosthetic nose. I kept reading that Bradley Cooper’s prosthetic offended some people. Bernstein’s kids defended it. There I am, watching the film. There’s the second scene where Bernstein is seated, gray hair, red shirt, smoking a cigarette, and talking about his (dead) wife. He had an intense almost vibrant tan, a color looking like it didn’t quite make the cut for Rudolph’s nose. Did he hang out in a tanning booth? That bugged me, a little.

I don’t know whether or not I’d have been bugged about the nose if I hadn’t heard so much about it. I never saw Bernstein live, but I certainly saw him on TV and saw lots of photos. As far as I recall I never gave two thoughts to his nose.

Now my father, he had a nose. We called it a Danish nose because his parents were from Denmark. Which was bigger, my father’s Danish nose, Bernstein’s (Jewish) nose, or Bradley Cooper’s prosthetic version of Bernstein’s (Jewish) nose? This is silly.

I wonder if all this fuss about a schnoz is part of the shadow cast by the awful events of October 7th? Or the resurgence of antisemitism in the country? Did I know that Bernstein was Jewish the first time I became aware of him, perhaps from one of those Young People’s Concerts on TV or perhaps it was a more straightforwardly didactic program? I’m pretty sure I knew Louis Armstrong was black the first time I became aware of him. Couldn’t miss it. The color of his skin was as plain as the four-letter-word on your face. Read more »

by Sauleha Kamal

Narrating Pakistan: An Anthology of Contemporary Creative Writing sets a lofty aim for itself: “to explore the idea of Pakistan through contemporary stories—the term, the country, the nation, the identity…”. There have been a few attempts to anthologize Pakistan in the past few decades. Oxford University Press anthologies like I’ll Find My Way (2014), Muneeza Shamsie’s two collections (which the preface to this book mentions), Granta 112: Pakistan (2011) and, as far as academic explorations of Pakistan go, The Routledge Companion to Pakistani Anglophone Writing come to mind. Ultimately, this anthology sets itself apart by telling, not the story of Pakistan but the story of young Pakistan. The characters in these stories are often young people—children, teenagers and young adults—dealing with the trauma of confronting what is, what could have been and what will be. This anthology brings together various writers who write about everything from dreaming of casting off economic shackles—in small villages, giant metropolises and foreign cities that glitter with promise and danger—to confronting isolation—following the Coronavirus pandemic, immigration or a depressive episode. There are stories that explore humanity through the loneliness of the female experience in a patriarchal milieu and the difficulties of conceptualizing Muslim masculinity in post-9/11 America.

A story about young Pakistan today cannot be told without telling the story of leaving Pakistan, as more and more young Pakistanis do every year. Many of the stories in this anthology are about the consequences of leaving and the challenges of diasporic existence. Many of these stories deal with the alienation of being a person of color in places that are not too kind to people with the wrong skin color, to paraphrase the wording of multiple stories. The idea of the wrongness of an “epidermis” crops up in both Syed Kazim Ali Kazmi’s “Trans/Gress” and Saeed Ur Rehman’s “The Sharpness of Grass Blades”. The narrator in Aatif Rashid’s “Brown Mirror” yearns to peel off his brown skin. Read more »

Read more »

by Tim Sommers

(The butter robot realizing the sole purpose of its existence is to pass the butter.)

In the halcyon days of “self-driving cars are six months away,” you probably encountered this argument. “If self-driving cars work, they will be safer than cars driven by humans.” Sure. If, by “they work,” you mean that, among other things, they are safer than cars driven by humans, then, it follows, that they will be safer than cars driven by humans, if they work. That’s called begging the question. Unfortunately, the tech world has more than it’s share of such sophistries. AI, especially.

Exhibit #1

In a recent issue of The New Yorker, in an article linked to on 3 Quarks Daily, Geoffrey Hinton, the “Godfather of AI,” tells Joshua Rothman:

“‘People say, [of Large Language Models like ChatGPT that] It’s just glorified autocomplete…Now, let’s analyze that…Suppose you want to be really good at predicting the next word. If you want to be really good, you have to understand what’s being said. That’s the only way. So, by training something to be really good at predicting the next word, you’re actually forcing it to understand. Yes, it’s ‘autocomplete’—but you didn’t think through what it means to have a really good autocomplete.’ Hinton thinks that ‘large language models,’ such as GPT, which powers OpenAI’s chatbots, can comprehend the meanings of words and ideas.”

This is a morass of terrible reasoning. But before we even get into it, I have to say that thinking that an algorithm that works by calculating the odds of what the next word in a sentence will be “can comprehend the meanings of words and ideas” is a reductio ad absurdum of the rest. (In fairness, Rothman attributes that view to Hinton, but doesn’t quote him as saying that, so maybe that’s not really Rothman’s position. But it seems to be.)

Hinton says “training something to be really good at predicting the next word, you’re actually forcing it to understand.” There’s no support for the claim that the only way to be good at predicting the next word in a sentence is to understand what is being said. LMMs prove that, they don’t undermine it. Further, if anything, prior experience suggests the opposite. Calculators are not better at math than most people because they “understand” numbers. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Self Portrait in Praise of Shadows. Shalimar Bagh, Lahore, December 10, 2023.

Digital photograph.

by Ethan Seavey

I like the typewriter. 

A gift from a friend. A manual 1963 Smith Corona Silent Super in sandalwood carrying case with keys I understand (letters and the space bar) and even keys I will never understand (SET and CLR). Yes it is the Super Silent but no it is not silent and in fact it is quite loud (when in use) which is fun for me. Tapping keys to be loud and writing to think out loud. 

Here are some snippets from the free flowing thoughts which come out of typewriter therapy:

_____

December the Fourth

most of us would have to agree, yes, that looking at people from very far away (through binoculars) is a creepy habit. but what is so wrong? seeing people without their knowledge, i suppose, but i do that all the time as a peer and it’s only wrong when i am a peer-er

i don’t see anything private because they are in public, after all, walking through the park or parking their cars

but still it’s wrong to spy on that man with a rounded chin and bright eyes, wearing camouflage swoveralls and approaching a parked car to let his dog out. a big black lab and manic pink tongue. 

it is wrong to watch the smile grow on the man’s face as he runs off with the lab

towards the patch of grass

such unforbidden unrestricted emotion, allowed by his solitude, complicated by me, a witness.  Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Steven Gimbel and Gwydion Suilebhan

Andrew Torba, Christian Nationalist founder of the rightwing social media site Gab, recently argued on his podcast that the fact that many of the most beloved Christmas songs were written by Jewish composers was part of a conspiracy to take Christ out of Christmas: to secularize one of the holiest Christian holidays and allow Jews to subtly infiltrate Christian-American culture with their own agenda. He might just be right.

There is, for example, a way of thinking about the 1964 stop-motion animated special Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer as a challenge to the White supremacist, Christian nationalist worldview that Torba champions. What if we thought of Rudolph as a progressive, inclusive retelling of Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle?

Rudolph’s Jewish Roots

We all know Dasher and Dancer, Prancer and Vixen, Comet and Cupid, and Donder and Blitzen, but can you recall the origin story of the most famous reindeer of all? Rudolph was created in 1939 by Jewish author Robert L. May, who was working as a copywriter for department store chain Montgomery Ward, which wanted to give holiday shoppers a Christmas-themed children’s book. In writing a seasonal twist on Hans Christian Anderson’s The Ugly Duckling, May dreamed up a new member of Santa’s team, and young Rudolph quickly became an indelible part of the American yuletide mythology.

May’s brother-in-law was a Jewish composer. Johnny Marks made his career creating some of the most iconic Christmas songs of all time, including “Rockin’ around the Christmas Tree,” “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day,” and “Have a Holly-Jolly Christmas.” In 1949, he put May’s story to music, and Gene Autry’s recording of Marks’ “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer” became both a chart-topping hit and a timeless American standard memorized by children across the country for generations. Read more »

Karachi.

A Remembering by Nils Peterson

Christmas Eve began with a carol sing at the big Presbyterian Church on Crescent Avenue which many of the rich town people attended. More cathedral than church. My brother and I went to Sunday school there when we were old enough because the small Lutheran church of our parents was not large enough to have one. My father was a chauffeur for one of the rich families.

The caroling was held in a large, handsome meeting room where, in the spring, the flower show would be held. A lot of chairs were set out and there’d be a big tree beautifully decorated and boxes of candy for the children to suck on when it was all over. I remember a particularly revolting lime-green ball sour enough and bitter enough to make even the greediest child spit it out. Some of the gathered Presbyterians had begun their celebrating before the sing, because after about the third carol, some wag would start calling for the “Hallelujah Chorus,” the last song in the songbook, and the calls, catcalls almost for the calls for it increased as the carols went on, grew until at last the leader with a sigh gave up and we hallelujahed our way out of there.

At home, the chauffeur’s apartment above the garage, there would be a supper of Swedish meatballs and boiled potatoes and lingonberry and sardines and cheeses and cookies At the right moment, we’d go down the stairs and, across the driveway to the path leading to the big house – crunch of gravel, full moon shining between tree branches, feel of tended grass – to the kitchen door where Marie, the cook, my father’s cousin and my godmother, waited to let us in. Anet is there, the downstairs maid, and Martha, the upstairs maid. They are “the girls,” the three live-in Swedish servants. Marie, the cook, was my father’s cousin, my godmother, and the one responsible for getting my father the chauffeur job in 1932 in the heart of the depression. He had been out of work since he and mother came back from visiting their parents in Sweden to show off how well they were doing in America. Shortly before their return, the stock market crashed. The year, of course, 1929.  Read more »