by Jochen Szangolies

Sunil Rao, one half of the leading duo of the novel Prophet by Helen Macdonald and Sin Blanché, has a gift: he can tell trick from truth. Any fake is immediately obvious to him; any false statement revealed as such upon hearing it. Much more than a human lie detector, his abilities are not dependent on whether those making the statements—or indeed, anybody—know the truth: indeed, on occasion, he engages in accidental self-discovery, by uttering statements about himself and finding them true.

Rao, then, seems ideally suited to his secret service work, but, without giving away too much, things are more complicated than that. Nevertheless, somebody with his ability might seem to be an asset to have in your corner, in this age where simple truth seems under attack from multiple sides. Who wouldn’t want to read the news and just know what’s what? Know whether the latest fad diet delivers on its promise (although I’d venture a semi-educated guess there)? Perhaps even have a shot at the Big Questions™—God, life, the universe, and all that?

Indeed, to a scientist, philosopher, or any such habitual question-asker, perhaps nothing ought to seem more tantalizing than a direct mainline to truth. Mathematical physicist Geoffrey Dixon shows his literary sensibility when he begins his monograph Division Algebras: Octonions, Quaternions, Complex Numbers and the Algebraic Design of Physics with a series of brief ‘Screeds’ concerning a visitation by the Screen of Ultimate Truth, ready and waiting to spill the universe’s (mathematical, presumably) guts upon being prompted.

But what question to pose? Suppose you ask, as the physicist in Dixon’s Screed does, for the ultimate reason for the universe’s existence, only to be met with pages upon pages of incomprehensible symbols: what good is truth you don’t have the proper context for? Read more »

Celtic Knot

maybe you think I do not know
maybe you think I could not be
surely I’m not where I go
surely I am here with thee

but maybe moon is nothing old
maybe sun is never new
perhaps all stories have been one
maybe there’s no such thing as through

could be everything is here
could be everything is near
could be heaven is not far
could be now, just where we are

perhaps all maybes will be done
maybe all should-bes might be too
could be everything is one
within the shadow of we two

by Jim Culleny
3/24/12

by Rebecca Baumgartner

“So why are you learning German?” I don’t remember who first asked me this, but over the following two weeks, it was a question I’d answer about 60 times. 

And each time, I struggled to come up with a satisfying answer – and not just because of the limits of my intermediate-straining-towards-upper-intermediate German skills. The people around me, of various ages and life stages, had a variety of reasons for learning this language. Some had jobs in Germany or Switzerland and, although they mostly used English to get their work done, they felt excluded from casual conversations with their coworkers. Some had moved to a German-speaking country when their spouse found a job, and wanted to more fully participate in the culture they found themselves in.

Aside from a few people using the freedom of retirement and an empty nest to refresh a skill they’d last practiced during the Cold War, there weren’t many people studying German for the sake of studying German. When asked about my reasons, I usually said something along the lines of it being a hobby or something I was doing “just for fun” (a phrase that genuinely perplexed some people, usually after a 3-hour block of grammar lessons – “You think German is fun?”).

But the word “hobby” sounds too trivial, and the idea of having fun doesn’t really fit either. Every time I tried to answer this question, I butted my head against the walls of how Americans conceive of leisure time and what it’s for. Why am I spending my free time doing effectively more work? Am I just a masochist? What am I getting out of this, and is it worth it? Are my reasons less “real” than someone who needs to learn German for their career? Am I just a dilettante?  Read more »

by Derek Neal

There has been talk in recent years of what is termed “the internet novel.” The internet, or more precisely, the smartphone, poses a problem for novels. If a contemporary novel wants to seem realistic, or true to life, it must incorporate the internet in some way, because most people spend their days immersed in it. Characters, for example, must check their phones frequently. For example:

“I looked at my phone and scrolled through Instagram. Why did I do this? A habit, a reflex. I put the phone back in my pocket and scanned my eyes over the playground, a tinge of panic running through me until I spotted Lucy, swinging from the monkey bars. I watched for a bit until I reached in my pocket again, opening the Bumble notification that had just appeared.”

Scenes like this may occur in any contemporary novel without necessarily meeting the definition of an “internet novel.” To pass the threshold, the internet or the smartphone must play a pivotal role in the story, acting not as just a background item or a plot device, but as something that actively structures the consciousness of the characters. The characters’ inner lives must be conditioned in some way by their frequent use of the internet—in particular, social media via their phones—and this must then deeply affect their actions. In these novels, the idea that “the internet is not real life” is not true; the characters have crossed the Rubicon, as it were, to live in a universe where the internet and social media have been fully integrated with every other part of existence. This type of book, however, may be at odds with the reasons we read novels in the first place. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Barry Goldman

Psychologists tell us we are susceptible to the “just world fallacy.” We think the arc of history bends toward justice. We think people, ultimately, get what they deserve.

Historically, this belief led to the practice of trial by combat. God, you see, favors the just. Since that is so, we merely need to arrange a fight between the competing sides in a dispute, and God will reveal which side is right by seeing to it that the right side prevails. Trial by ordeal works on the same principle. Suppose two disputants appear with equally likely explanations for some state of affairs. Both accounts cannot be true. To resolve the question, the disputing parties can be, for example, required to grab a glowing hot iron bar and carry it for a specified distance. After a proscribed number of days, their resulting wounds can be examined and compared. The person whose burns appear less festering and septic will be the one who is favored by God and ipso facto the one whose account of the situation is true.

We don’t do it quite that way anymore. But the essence of the trial by ordeal and trial by combat is still with us. When we have disputes that we can’t resolve ourselves, we hire champions to go forth and do combat on our behalf. They do it in dark wool suits rather than suits of armor, but the principle is the same. Our faith in this arrangement is similar to our faith in capitalism. Just as the invisible hand of the market is believed to promote Prosperity, the adversarial system is believed to promote Justice. The two mechanisms are equally marvelous. Read more »

Batman? Batcat? Catbat? Bacatat? Frederica Krüger lazing in the sun in our kitchen.

by Paul Braterman

When people tell you what they are, believe them. In the 2021 Facebook posting attached below, still available [1], he tells us exactly what he is, and since, in May this year, Martyn Iles became Chief Ministry Officer at Answers in Genesis, the $28 million dollar a year concern that runs Kentucky’s Creation Museum and Ark Encounter and has its own private jet, we ought to pay attention. All the more so since the announcement just one month ago that he is now the designated successor to founder and CEO Ken Ham [2]. So here are his answers to the burning questions of our times, given in full to avoid the risk of quote mining, with my own commentary just in case there is any ambiguity about what is being said. And he saves the worst till last, when he explains exactly how it comes about that people disagree with him, and how we should look on such disagreement.

The answer to gender identity – “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” [Gen 1:27]

I share Iles’ concerns about the use of extreme clinical procedures, but for the very opposite reason. I do not believe in rigid gender roles, and think that people should be free to live as they wish, subject to the rights of others, without the need for mastectomy or castration. Iles, on the contrary, thinks that gender roles are God-given and rigid (more on that below), and that for that very reason people should stick to the roles that they were born for.

The answer to sexual orientation – “And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man… Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” [Gen 2:22, 24]

It is difficult to know what to make of this. Read more »

by Nils Peterson

My First Opera

My first opera was at the old Met, Cav. and Pag,  Cavalliera Rusticana  and Pagliacci, cheapest seat in the house, last row, last seat, highest balcony in a corner, view of the opposite wing almost as large as my view of the stage which, in truth, was interesting  – watching the preening before performing. At the intermission, I offered my seat to an older woman who was standing behind. As she thanked me, I could almost hear her thinking what a nice young man, but in truth, the tiny raked seat did not work with my six foot six frame and its basketball wrecked knees. I had been in agony, and her taking my seat and my standing was a blessing.

My Last Opera

As you get older you find there are things you just cannot do anymore. I have peripheral neuropathy. I was diagnosed with it when I was 65. It’s now almost a quarter of a century later.  My diminishment was slow. First I had to give up tennis, then golf. Finally, a few years ago, of all things, the opera. So here are some thoughts on that.

On Sunday I went to my last performance at the SF Opera. I’ve had a half season ticket there for more than 40 years and I’ve had the best cheap seat in the house ever since the restoration of the opera house after the earthquake. Right side of the right aisle in the wheelchair row. Room for my legs and a clear sight of the stage. My last opera was Carmen, a very different Carmen from the one I first saw, or the one I saw in LA with a somewhat over-aged Placido as the Jose (this wretched machine doesn’t want to accept Domingo’s first name. it keeps wanting to turn him into Placid). This production had Don Jose and Micaela taking selfies, and simulated oral sex. Both leads were really fine, though Carmen’s voice may have been just a little small, but just right in timbre. The staging was very physical, and she was very good. She had a slim athlete’s body and exuded sexuality. Pastias was a Mercedes driven on stage out of which a drunken outdoor picnic evolved. (I think I even smelled exhaust, though I can’t believe it was really driven on stage. They must have pushed it in some way.)

However, I left at the intermission to drive home towards San Jose. I just had sat enough, the drive up, the lunch, the first two acts, and the coming drive home, and my right leg was beginning to ache and swell a bit. And as I went over it in my mind, I didn’t want to see Micaela come to a ruined, jealous Don Jose, nor did I want to see him kill Carmen in the last act, though I would have liked to have seen the street scenes which I’ve sung when my chorale did opera choruses. Read more »

by Jonathan Kalb

Richard Gilman (1923-2006)—a revered and feared American critic of theater, film and fiction in the mid-century patrician grain of Eric Bentley, Stanley Kauffmann and Robert Brustein—was a self-absorbed titan of insecurity and the best writing teacher I ever had. Negotiating the minefield of this man’s mercurial moodiness, beginning at age 22, was one of the main galvanizing experiences of my pre-professional life.

Gilman’s signal teaching talent was showing others how to read their own writing well, which he called an “indispensable skill.” His and Kauffmann’s “Crit Workshops” at the Yale School of Drama—required every semester for three years—were tiny, intensive seminars devoted to upping our games. We crit students venerated these men because we wanted what they had: perches at the increasingly rare prestigious intellectual weeklies (such as The Nation and The New Republic) that were surviving the withering assaults of the media age in the 1980s. Each three-hour Crit session focused on a single student paper. Dick (as he introduced himself) never bothered with written comments. In his classes, he’d read the paper aloud in its entirety, leaning back in his plastic chair, chain-smoking cigarillos, and channel the writer’s voice with his own inflections, like a Brechtian actor supplementing a role with his savvy persona. Thus he performed the model intellectual, articulating, in a stream of unsparing interruptions and digressions, the manner and temper of the “generally intelligent mind” we were told we should write for.

This was a thrilling and terrifying experience. Dick would stop to remark on any formulation, image, or thought that bothered him, not only flagging our dangling participles, flaccid metaphors, and baggy digressions but also speculating on the reasons for them. He’d ask tetchily about our intentions and then, with biting humor, pronounce Olympian verdicts on our evasions, confusions, pretentions, and oceanic ignorance. This painful, merciless crucible was everything I’d hoped for from that storied school. Read more »

From David Winner’s first column about his poignant relationship with buildings and their ornamentation, to Angela Starita’s discussion of the Bengali/Italian/Uzbek gardens of Kensington, Brooklyn as well her own growing up with her Italian-born father who became a farmer in middle-age, our column centers around place and what it signifies: architecturally, historically, emotionally. We will try to interrogate buildings: factories, apartments, houses, cities. Sometimes we will enter inside their doors to focus on what goes on inside.

by David Winner

When Angela and I visited Paris for the first time in the early nineties, we stayed in a large house near the Parc Monceau owned by a friend of my great-aunt’s, Henri Louis de la Grange, Mahler scholar and bona fide baron. When Alain, a former lover of Henri Louis, had us to dinner one night, he complained about a recent visit to Cincinnati. Echoing Gertrude Stein’s famous “no there there,” comment, he dismissed the city as “provincial.” When I repeated the comment to Henri Louis later over dinner with my great-aunt, he disdained Alain, from Normandy, as provincial himself.

That memory begs two questions. What constitutes provincial, and where and what is “there?”

Many students at the community college where I teach come from former colonies of the Spanish empire. Provincial backwaters to some: think poor Zama in Antonio de Benedetto’s eponymous novel, stuck in murky Asuncion, desperate to get transferred to Buenos Aires. My students often refer to the capital city of their country not by its name – Santo Domingo, Quito, San Salvador – but simply as “the capital.” After moving to Jersey City within spitting distance of Manhattan, those cities remain capitals for them, the antitheses of provincial.

*

I visited Riga, the capital of Latvia, which spent much of its recent history as a backwater of the Russian then Soviet empires, in the summer of 1997 when Angela was doing a program for journalists in Finland. I took the ferry across the Baltic Sea to Estonia, then a bus to Riga. The Soviet Union had only recently fallen, and it felt like a distant, exotic destination. Except it wasn’t. The well-preserved Old Town with its late seventeenth century German architecture bustled with tourist life. Read more »

by Anton Cebalo

In the decade before World War I, the newspaper dominated life like it never would again. The radio was not yet fit for mass use, and neither was film or recording. It was then common for major cities to have a dozen or so morning papers competing for attention. Deceit, exaggeration, and gimmicks were typical, even expected, to boost readership. Rarely were reporters held to account.

This characterization is not mine but taken from Austrian writer Karl Kraus. Kraus believed this environment had to be held responsible for plunging Europe into war. He parodied its excesses in his 1918 play The Last Days of Mankind where he developed his signature montage style. In a time of upheaval, Kraus cut through the noise by repeating its own voice back at it, splicing quotes together into a new interpretation. As he recounted in the play’s preface, “the most improbable deeds reported here actually took place. The most implausible conversations… were spoken verbatim.” Kraus pursued a unique kind of literary realism with the perceptive eye of a documentarian, and in his crosshairs was the newspaper.

Like many writers and artists of the early 20th century—whose perspectives ring so familiar to us today—Kraus sought to dramatize how mass media, particularly the newspaper, was distorting the urban individual’s sense of place. Is it so surprising that writers and artists then, argues critic Lucy Sante, “took such pleasure in shredding it”? After all, the stakes were dire.

I have been reading Sante’s translation of one such “shredder”: Félix Fénéon. He is an individual who remained largely unknown during his life, but played an outsized role in modernism and early 20th-century literature. Fénéon found himself close to the heart of this media whirlwind I am describing, writing anonymously for the French newspaper Le Matin in 1906. But rather than get caught up in its bluster, he instead opted for an approach that was unique in its candor, simplicity, and intended speed of consumption. Read more »

Sughra Raza. At Totem Farm, April 2021.

Digital photograph.

by Gus Mitchell

This September marks 50 years since the deaths of three men. One died at the very beginning of the month, in Oxford, one in the middle, in Santiago, and one at the end, in Vienna.

Anyone likely to be reading this will have heard of J.R.R. Tolkien, who died on 2 September in Oxford, city of his life and work, aged 81. Unfortunately the contemporary world has absorbed Tolkien to an unhealthy extent that sweetens and ultimately sickens his achievement. His achievement was to create myth anew. I use that word order deliberately, as opposed to “created a new mythology”.

I don’t know how many people will have heard of Victor Jara. If they haven’t, they ought immediately to stop reading until they have given their full attention to “Manifiesto”, one of the really incomparable things ever committed to record. “Manifiesto” was recorded in August 1973. It was released posthumously; in its closing lines, Jara had written: “For a song has meaning / When it beats in the veins / Of a man who will die singing / Truthfully singing his songs.” And Jara was murdered the following month, on September 16^th, doing what he himself had predicted.

Many people will have heard of W.H. Auden. Another acronymous luminary of 20^th century British letters, he is also its greatest poet. Auden died on 29 September in Vienna, aged 66: rather lonely, estranged from his partner Chester Kallman, intending himself to make his way back to Oxford, and having likely swallowed his habitual nightly dose of barbiturate and vodka (his practice for three decades.) Auden was the kind of poet that doesn’t really exist anymore: a grand reflection of his age.

September also marks fifty years since the Pinochet coup in Chile, a coup supported by both the United States and the United Kingdom, and that would lead first to the deaths of the democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende, then at least two thousand more Chileans, and the torture and imprisonment of more than thirty thousand more. On the 12 September 1973, the morning after the coup and Allende’s suicide, Victor Jara, along with five thousand others were arrested by the fascists and taken as prisoners to the Estadio Chile in Santiago. Read more »