by Ada Bronowski

Lightness comes in three F’s: finesse, flippancy and fantasy. The French are famous for the first. See how the delicate, sweet singer songwriter Alain Souchon transforms the heavyweight aphorism of André Malraux – the real-life French Indiana Jones who ended his career as minister for culture – from the desperate heroism of ‘I learnt that a life is worth nothing, but nothing is more valuable than life’ into the ethereal, refined song that even if you do not understand the words, you cannot help but feel the breezy weightless of: ‘La vie ne vaut rien, rien, … rien ne vaut la vie’ (life is worth nothing, nothing, …nothing is worth life’, here). The song is finesse incarnate if that already is not too much of an oxymoron since finesse is anything but carnal. The rich assonances of the refrain where ‘rien’ (nothing) rimes with ‘tiens’ (I hold) and echoes with ‘seins’ (breasts) lift the contradiction, making the breasts abstract and life concrete. The second, flippancy, is the sand British humour was built on from Bertie Wooster to Black Adder (was, alas, as David Stubbs shows in his recent Different Times: A History of British Comedy, that flippant British humour is now dead after Boris Johnson chose to do politics rather than comedy). It is the lightness that transforms despair into melancholy, the weight of the world on one’s shoulders into elegance and panache.

The third F is at the root of all lightness. Fantasy, etymologically, comes from the Greek word for light, phos – a word which already in antiquity contains the double-usage echoed in our English ‘lightness’: the shining light and what is detached from the heaviness of anchors.  Fantasy is the realm of the light in all its senses. It is what the light shows us: surfaces, glimmers and shimmers which we can never quite be sure are true, nor can we positively dismiss as false. It is the realm of an in-between that we cannot not wish that it could be real.

Surely if we can see it, it must be real? Read more »

by Rebecca Baumgartner

I was looking at a grammar worksheet my fourth-grader recently brought home, and the instructions said to “Underline the predicate of each sentence.” I paused for a moment. What exactly is a predicate, again? Is it a fancy way of saying verb phrase? Or direct object? Or…what, exactly?

You might think I felt embarrassed to not know this, since I am a wordsmith by trade and by training. On the contrary! I think it’s damning of the educational system that someone with degrees in English and linguistics, who reads and writes constantly, has not found it necessary or important to know what a predicate is. The onus is on the educators to prove that it is in fact necessary and important to know this kind of information.

I love language. I love understanding how it works – so much so, in fact, that I suffered through tedious graduate courses in syntax and morphology taught by people who hadn’t had fun in 30 years. But linguists don’t use the term “predicate” (at least not in the way kids are taught to use it). Normal people don’t use it, either. Hell, the only time I ever even refer to the parts of speech nowadays is when I play Mad Libs. 

So if a card-carrying linguist, erstwhile copyeditor, and hammer-wielding wordsmith has no need to know what a predicate is, the question is: Why does the school system, or the state, think my kid needs to know this stuff? Read more »

I just liked the various textures and colors and surfaces (rocks, bricks, cement, etc.) of this exterior wall of the fortress in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

by Tamuira Reid

Gordon, 74, Crown Heights, Retired Vet and Woodworker

I saw my best friend, my platoon mate in Nam, get his entire head blown off right in front of me. The whole thing. Nothing left from the neck up. A soldier, a kid really, suddenly without a head. It was there and then it was gone. He was there and then he was gone. Like everything else there, up for grabs. Nothing lasts forever was more like nothing lasts for a minute. No one lasted even if they made it out of there alive. But I don’t wanna get into that. Anyway, so me and him we’d been playing cards the night before and were talking shit like normal, probably about our women back home. He had a few but he was a good guy. Loved his country. Proud. Never questioned our government like some of the other guys did. Pure patriot. So he gets his head blown off and I’m telling you, that was the day I said to hell with all of this. We’re all gonna die out here and for what? Some problems you just can’t fix, no matter how many grenades you got. So I look at Israel and Palestine and that beef goes back longer than anyone here understands. You can’t just say “we own you” and then not think that maybe, maybe one day there will be a price on your head for that. Sleeping giants is what happened. Israel got too comfy thinking Palestine was accepting being owned. Never. Those motherfuckers will never accept that. They out for blood. Can’t say I blame them. The most dangerous people in the world are the ones who have nothing to lose because it’s all been taken from them. And the worst thing outside of death you can take from any man is his freedom. I’m an old Black man living in America. I’ve seen some shit. This country always likes a good villain. They need one. If it isn’t me, then it’s the Arab down the block, you know what I mean? But the US needs to stay out of this. Giving all this money to Israel to blow away anything that moves in Gaza sure looks a hell of a lot like 9/11. And how did that go for us? For the world? I served my country but I would not do it again blindly. My faith has limits. Vietnam destroyed my faith in a lot ways. I have faith in God but I would never put a uniform on again. I’m too damn old anyway. Read more »

by Derek Neal

In 1970, Pier Paolo Passolini directed a film titled Notes Towards an African Orestes, which presents footage about his attempt to make a movie based on the Oresteia set in Africa. The movie was never made. In the same way, this article will be about a series of essays, or perhaps a book, that may never be written.

I have an idea to write about artistic representations of Americans in Europe. The introduction, which will lay out the premise of the endeavor, will revolve around an anecdote from Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley. Ripley is, to my mind, the quintessential American. He bears many similarities to that other archetypal American, Jay Gatsby, in that both men believe they can erase history and create new lives for themselves, without realizing that the past is never past. This is the general American mindset, in contrast to the European one, which understands that present possibility is limited by history. Americans in films and novels go to Europe to discover this fact, and the extent to which they recognize this, or fail to recognize it, creates the drama driving the narrative forward.

The scene in Ripley which expresses this is when Tom attempts to read The Ambassadors by Henry James, only to be told that he’s not allowed to take books from the cabin class library, as he’s travelling in first class. Highsmith’s novel takes The Ambassadors and flips it on its head; in both novels, an American goes to Europe to retrieve a wayward citizen who has been “corrupted” by the old world, but in James’ novel, the protagonist achieves self-awareness, whereas in Highsmith’s, Ripley never does. These two paths are the two routes Americans can take in Europe, and this binary would provide a fitting organization for a book on Americans in Europe. Read more »

by Jeroen Bouterse

Without really looking into them, I have always felt sceptical of Kantian approaches to animal ethics. I never really trust them to play well with creatures who are different from us. Only recently, I cared to pick up a book to see what such an approach would actually look like in practice: Christine Korsgaard’s Fellow creatures (2018). An exciting and challenging reading experience, that not only made a very good case for Kantianism (of course), but also forced me to come to terms with some rather strange implications of my own views.

In very broad strokes, Korsgaard’s argument is as follows. We are a kind of creature that values things as important to us. We use those evaluations as reasons in our choices, and in doing that, we assign them importance in an absolute sense. This is why we ought to recognize that similar creatures are similarly sources of value (in a sense that what they assign importance to has a claim to being important not just ‘to them’, but absolutely). Now, other humans are similar to us in both respects – valuing things, and then using those values as reasons – while non-human animals are similar to us primarily in that they, too, assign importance to things. This is true even if they are not rational creatures and do not use their evaluative perspective on things as reasons. The argument, then, is that this animal capacity or activity is actually what we are recognizing as absolutely important when we make decisions based on reason, and that therefore our respect for our fellow creatures as sources of values stretches out not just to other humans, but to non-human animals as well.

All throughout the book, Korsgaard is careful to emphasize that subjects assign value; value is not simply ‘out there’ to be discovered. Simple-minded utilitarian that I am, I realized I slip into moral realist language and thinking rather easily. Among friends, you will sometimes hear me say that “suffering is bad”. Does this mean I believe that objective value is sprinkled over the planet, coinciding with sentient life or conscious experience? Read more »

by Rafaël Newman

I am not outside the language that structures me, but neither am I determined by the language that makes this ‘I’ possible. —Judith Butler

The force of recent attempts to increase minority visibility in the performing arts, principally in the US, by matching the identity of the performer with that of the role—in effect a form of affirmative action—has been diminished by a series of tabloid “scandals”: the casting of Jared Leto as a trans woman in Dallas Buyers Club criticized as “transmisogynistic”; the backlash against the non-Jewish Helen Mirren playing Golda Meir; or the foofaraw over Bradley Cooper’s prosthetic proboscis in Maestro. These attempts to increase minority visibility, no doubt well-meaning and long overdue, were taken ad absurdum with the Met’s 2019 choice of a Chinese soprano for the title role in Madama Butterfly, in a cringingly tone-deaf bid to make up for the tradition of Westerners singing the eponymous Japanese heroine.

A salutary, if ironic corrective to this essentialism is offered by casting members of “minority” groups—the term is (mis)used advisedly to include women—explicitly against type: Denzel Washington as Macbeth, for instance, or Glenda Jackson as King Lear. Ironic, because such creative, intentional miscasting replicates the very misprision criticized on the part of the hegemon, which allegedly seeks to reserve privilege to its own replicants at the cost of the subaltern. The maneuver is salutary, however, both morally and aesthetically, because it proactively rights a wrong of exclusion, while opening up new avenues for the interpretation of established works of art. Once such a creatively “wrong” choice is made, in other words, and a given Western canonical work is no longer the account of a particular (most often white, cis-male, hetero) subject, it becomes—although the term is regularly subject to post-structuralist suspicion—universal. And finally, by playing the hegemon, the subaltern reveals the political and linguistic constructedness of that hegemon’s subject position.

These were among the thoughts that preoccupied me as I prepared for a house concert last month with my friends Annina Haug and Edward Rushton. Read more »

by Gus Mitchell

1.

Art comes out of act. The act of making images, of making sounds, the act of making words and symbols. And these “acts” are really accretions, many individual “actions”, acts in a process, acts which don’t often seem like “acts” at all. The acts of doodling, of scribbling, of sketching, of humming, of reading, looking, listening, playing, feeling, thinking, sitting, talking, walking.

2.

The Greek verb artizein means “to prepare”. Aside from an obvious etymological reading––a work of art is something that has been fitted together by “skill” or “craft” implied in the Latin artem. The making of art, any art, means to engage in an incalculability of acts of preparation.

3.

“To prepare”, though, carries the sense of a forethought and foreseen nature to the act which is very often not part of the artistic process. We don’t know what we’re doing, a great deal or the time; at others, we don’t even know what we want. And if we do happen to have an idea before us, a definite plan to carry out, then we just has often have no sense of how to get there. None.

4.

This is where preparation meets iteration. If “art” as an act only arises out of and ultimately consists of preparations, it is then true that the “work of art” (a product and evidence of learning, skill, craft, and tradition) is the child of iteration. That is, of doing again. And again, and again and again.

5.

If nature’s glory and mystery is in its effortlessness, its spontaneity, what Daoism calls Ziran (“that which arises of itself”) then perhaps we might claim ours in sheer and bloody effort. (Beethoven, Nina Simone.) Read more »

Jeannette Ehlers. Black Bullets, 2012.

Installation view at Everson Museum facade, 2012.

Video, black and white.

More here and current show here.

by Terese Svoboda

How plastic – really plastic – gelatin presents as a food. Not only in the “easily molded” sense of a pliable art material but also its transparency. Walnuts and celery, the “nuts and bolts” of gelatin desserts, defy gravity, floating amidst the cheerful jewel-like plastic-looking splendor of the 1950’s, when gelatin was the king of desserts. Gelatin’s mid-century elegance belies its orgiastic sweetness, especially the lime flavor, which is downright otherworldly. If you stir it up hot, half diluted, gelatin lives up to its derelict reputation with regard to the sickbed and sugar, being thick and warm, twice as intoxicatingly sweet, and surely terrible for an invalid’s teeth, if not metabolism. In my novel,  Dog on Fire, I hypothesize that lime-flavored gelatin is the perfect murder weapon.

I considered many modus operandi, starting with freezing it into the shape of a dagger. However, such a weapon would quickly dissolve into a lime green, mellow yellow or ruby red puddle or, if undyed, at least clear gelid water, and its penetration would definitely leave a hole. Concuss the victim with gallons of gelatin dropped from a height? The abovementioned puddle would give it away, not to mention the victim’s crushed skull. Both methods could be accomplished with more simpler tools. The only totally invisible murder method is past the taste buds: poison-by-gelatin. This has two positive attributes as a murder weapon: it leaves no physical marks and its results can be somewhat timed. Ah, but the autopsy. Surely that would reveal the poison.

Not always. Read more »

by Paul Braterman

The Heartland Institute tells us that there is not, and cannot be, a climate crisis, because for most of the past 12,000 years the climate was warmer than it is today. A recent (October 5) posting by James Taylor, president of the Institute, states as follows (full text; fair use claimed):

CLIMATE CHANGE: The so-called climate crisis is a sham

There cannot be a climate crisis when temperatures are unusually cool.

• Scientists have documented, and even the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has admitted, that temperatures were warmer than today throughout most of the time period that human civilization has existed.
• Temperatures would have to keep warming at their present pace for at least another century or two before we reach temperatures that were common during early human civilization.
• There can be no climate crisis – based on the notion of dangerously high temperatures – when humans have thrived in temperatures much warmer than today for most of the last 12,000 years.

None of this is true. Here is a graph of climate change in the past 12,000 years; note the value for 2016, on the right-hand axis of the main figure, as well as the rapid rise over the past century shown in the inset, which also shows the Mediaeval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. I have seen Heartland’s claim before, accompanied by graphs such as the one below, but without the insert and recent date, thus effectively suppressing everything that’s happened in the last century:

For people familiar with the Heartland Institute, this is just a dog bites man story. But it still matters, because it shows the extent to which discourse is being deliberately degraded. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by William Benzon

Oh, Ariela, daughter of the People of the Book, the work of the mind is our game!
–Miriam Yevick

I first became aware of Miriam Lipschutz Yevick through my interest in human perception and thought. I believed that her 1975 paper, Holographic or Fourier Logic, was quite important. David Hays and I gave it a prominent place in our 1988 paper, Principles and Development of Natural Intelligence, and in a related paper on metaphor.

Since Yevick’s work shares a mathematics with some work in machine vision and image recognition, I wondered whether or not that paper had been cited. Moreover, that work is relevant to current debates about the need for symbolic processing in artificial intelligence (AI). As recently as 2007 Yevick was arguing, albeit informally, that human thought requires both poetic, Gestalt, or holographic processing, on the one hand, and analytic, propositional, or logical on the other.

As far as I can tell, her work has been forgotten.

That is one thing. But there is more. I become curious about her, this woman, Miriam Lipschutz Yevick.

What about her? And so I began reading her 2012 memoire, A Testament for Ariela, which takes the form of letters she had written to her grand-daughter in a three-year period in the mid-1980s. The memoire says nothing about her mathematical ideas, though it does mention that in 1947 she became the fifth woman to get a mathematics Ph.D. from MIT. She also talks of her friendship and correspondence with David Bohm, who became a noted quantum theorist. It quickly became clear that she had not had an academic career worthy of her intellectual gifts. Yet she did not seem bitter about that. She had a rich and fulfilling life.

This essay is about both her life and her holographic logic. The work on holographic logic leads me to a harsh assessment of the current debate about artificial intelligence. Thinking about her life leads me to conclude with an optimistic look at the future: next year in Jerusalem. Read more »

One of these rocks is different from the others because it is a piece of bread. Can you tell which one? With haute cuisine it is often hard to tell the food from non-food which is part of the presentation!

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

At dusk, the shaft of light striking Rumi’s tomb is emollient as pale jade. It has been a long, hot day in Konya, I’ve been writing in a café-terrace overlooking the famed white and turquoise structure of the tomb-museum complex. I sip my tea slowly, facing the spare, elegant geometry of the building that appears as a simple, intimate inscription on the vast blue. For once I am studying Rumi’s verses in Persian, not repeating English translations or paraphrasing in Urdu. “Bash cho Shatranj rawan, khamush o khud jumla zaban,” “Walk like a chess piece, silently, become eloquence itself!” I’m reciting to myself in the din, in awe of the kind of magnetism that would pull one as a chess piece. Only the heart understands this logic, not any heart, but the one that has been broken open, the one that is led to the mystery in cogent silence.

For once, I am letting the music of Rumi’s diction guide me: “khamush” (silent) and “khud” (self), a sonic coaxing of paradox, two words beginning with the same consonant, the first ending in “sh’, a sound that evokes the hushing of the ego’s voice, the softly-fading whisper of self-annihilation, the second ending as a sonic anchor in “ud,” suggesting the triumph of the self as it sheds worldly desires, alchemizing from base to the gold it was meant to be. This meditation yields the word “khuda” or “God,” who is paradoxically both “closer than the jugular vein” and a “hidden treasure,” in the words of the Qur’an, to be revealed actively, painstakingly in the hidden recesses of the self– as Rumi and the Sufi tradition teach. The divine resides in the self’s silences and music, solitude and communion, longing and ecstasy. Rumi’s path to love passes through such paradox; to be a Darwish, is to “linger by the door,” content to make a home of the beloved’s threshold where he gives himself up to gnosis through praise. Read more »