by Joseph Carter Milholland

In my last column, I wrote about the interconnectedness of the literary canon. My argument was that canonical books are best read in the context of other canonical books – that we only fully appreciate a great work of literature when we also appreciate the other great works it is inextricably bound to – both the books that influenced it, and the books it influenced.

I will admit that this argument can lead one astray: if applied improperly, we lose sight of individual authors and individual works, and only focus on the narrative of literary history. Worse yet, we will arbitrarily force certain books to conform to our expectations of the canon, instead of reading them on their own terms. I do not think that there is anything in what I proposed that would necessarily lead to this kind of reading, but it is a very easy mistake to make (and one I will confess to having made in the past). To avoid making this mistake, I will now propose a complementary method for reading the canon: to seek out and understand the difference between what I call the “mainstream” and the “marginal.”

I am using the terms mainstream and the marginal to denote two types of literary artistry. Whenever we read a great book, there is a wide spectrum of ways in which we enjoy it: on the right end of this spectrum, we have the kinds of enjoyment that we can find in almost every great book, no matter where or when it was written; in the center is the ways in which the book reflects the finest features of a specific genre or literary tradition; and on the far left is the way in which that particular book gives us its own unique pleasures. The literary artistry that falls in the right hand end of this spectrum I call the mainstream, and the artistry on the left hand side I call the marginal. I realize this definition is abstract and somewhat cumbersome, so throughout this essay I will supply examples that I think better illuminate what I am getting at. My first example: the catharsis we experience at the end of great tragedy is an example of mainstream artistry; the caesura in Anglo-Saxon verse is an example of marginal artistry.

Some more clarifications are in order. Read more »

Shadow of red wine on tablecloth.

by Steve Gimbel and Gwydion Suilebhan

Harry Frankfurt, who died of congestive heart failure this July, was a rare academic philosopher whose work managed to shape popular discourse. During the Trump years, his explication of bullshit became a much used lens through which to view Trump’s post-truth political rhetoric, eventually becoming deeply associated with liberal politics.

Ironically, the original target of Frankfurt’s argument was an earlier “post-truth” movement: postmodernism, which became the heart of liberal political correctness in the 1980s and 1990s. Interestingly, that shift from a liberal to a conservative target illustrates the way in which postmodern machinery has infiltrated politics.

On “On Bullshit”

Frankfurt had an illustrious career as a philosopher, but his immortality rests on a cute and clever argument he published in his most famous piece, “On Bullshit.” In it, Frankfurt distinguishes between lying and bullshitting. Liars intentionally deceive, believing they know the truth and working to keep ownership of it to themselves. Bullshitters, on the other hand, are perfectly happy to convey the truth… as long as doing so serves their pragmatic rhetorical goals. Bullshitters want you to believe something and are comfortable using either truth OR lies to shape your views. Read more »

by Richard Farr

Early in life, when a child’s tender ear is supposed to be protected from blasphemy, I must have overheard someone say it’s only a game. 

I went to the kind of English boarding school at which rugby, patriotism and Christianity were serious business, competed with each other for our attention, and sometimes threatened to blur. You sensed that on any damp Wednesday afternoon, just before we hoofed it down to the games fields, a gowned Master might seek to ramp up our enthusiasm by reminding us of Jesus Christ’s game-winning try against the Zulus at Rorke’s Drift. Or that on Sunday the chaplain in his pulpit (we were High Church Anglican, very smells and bells) might decide to hold forth interminably on the significance of the Archangel Gabriel’s surprise appearance in the changing rooms after that excellent match against the Germans at El Alamein. 

Whether in chapel or on the sideline it was all about unity, the team, the sense of heartfelt belonging. That was what mattered. And I’m not complaining. OK, I am complaining, because I hated it. But perhaps that really is a good way to socialize adolescent boys. Certainly most of them seemed to take to it like ducks or pigs to their proverbial substances. But I knew early on that I didn’t want the team, or respect it, or feel that I belonged. Unluckily for me, or perhaps not, the more they insisted the more alienated I felt from the whole scheme. Luckily for me, there were other heroic misfits.  Read more »

by David J. Lobina

So, what is the role and place of Bustan Qaraaqa within the community they are based in? What connections have they made there? What volunteering, if any, have they promoted in other farms, or in general in the West Bank? And what is their place within the worldwide permaculture network, and of course, to begin with, within the occupation of the Palestinian territories?

In last month’s entry, part of another series of articles of mine, though this time there is only two pieces, I framed the discussion in terms of the conflicts an international volunteer has to face when undertaking an activity, or indeed, an activism, in a place such as Palestine. One important conflict immediately arises, in fact, and this has to do with the realisation of the possible and very serious repercussions that one’s action may have on the native population, perhaps slightly counter-intuitively for some volunteers – they are there to be there to help by definition, are they not?

More often than not, as a matter of fact, a volunteer will be based overseas for a limited amount of time, and they will eventually return to the safety of their own country. The sort of activism that many carry out in Palestine, however, such as marching, attempts to stop demolitions and evictions, etc., whilst constituting cases that might indeed derive into serious consequences for the volunteer (police or army beatings, even gassing, sometimes arrest followed by criminal charges, and typically deportation), often pale in comparison with the repercussions for the population one is trying to assist.

It is doubtless the case that the Palestinians are particularly aware of this, and even though they do sometimes choose to encourage the participation of foreign volunteers anyway – their presence may limit the actions of the occupying forces, at least for the time they are there – this is not a choice that is taken lightly. Volunteering in a permaculture farm, with the aim to create a more sustainable and independent scenario, may appear to be world away from the more direct action activism I have just described, but some of the choices one faces in this case are not exempt of the clash between goals and visions that concerns me here, as we shall see. Read more »

Mithu Sen. Untitled, 2007.

Water color on paper.

More here, here, and here.

by Oliver Waters 

Part I of this series argued that transferring your personal identity to an artificial brain should be possible. It’s one thing however to preserve the informational content of your identity, and quite another for that content to be conscious. It would be a real shame if your new artificial self was getting about town as a zombified version of you: spending your wages, high fiving your friends – all with no inner subjective awareness.

In her book Artificial You (2019), the philosopher Susan Schneider entertains the possibility that entire alien civilisations may have taken the reckless gamble of transitioning to artificial brains and in the process inadvertently killed off their conscious minds. We would obviously prefer to avoid this nightmarish fate, and our best defence is a proper scientific theory of how consciousness works.

Many doubt that such a theory will arrive any time soon, with some claiming that consciousness is simply beyond our capacity to ever understand. There is also an intuitively compelling and popular notion that a scientific understanding of consciousness is impossible because we only have direct access to our own conscious minds. This view is largely motivated by a mistaken epistemology. Namely, an ‘empiricist’ view that the scientific process consists of building up a theoretical understanding of the world out of the components of raw, direct, sensory inputs. If you think of scientific knowledge as emerging this way, as a systematic reorganisation of what is available to your senses, then the realm of other conscious minds must forever remain out of reach.

But as the philosopher Karl Popper pointed out, ‘sensory inputs’ actually have no meaning unless they are part of a theoretical construct: observation is inextricably ‘theory-laden’. The theory doesn’t have to be a formal scientific theory, by the way. Your intuitive conception of what is going on in front of you (perceiving a sunset, for instance) counts perfectly well as ‘theorising’ in this context. Read more »

by Nate Sheff

We trained our dog Gemini using positive reinforcement techniques, “clicker training.” She can sit, give handshakes and high fives, roll over, and we never used negative reinforcement to teach her.

That’s all true, but what do I mean by negative reinforcement? A lot of us assume that it has something to do with punishment, whereas positive reinforcement involves rewarding good behavior, but this assumption isn’t strictly true. To reinforce a behavior is to make that behavior more likely. Giving Gemini a treat when she sits after I make a certain gesture positively reinforces the association between my gesture and her sitting, because it makes that behavior more likely next time I make the gesture. I’m introducing something Gemini wants to strengthen a particular connection between my gesture and her response. On the other hand, when I strengthen a connection by removing something she doesn’t want, I’m negatively reinforcing the behavior.

Punishment involves introducing something unpleasant to make a particular behavior less likely. Sternly telling Gemini that she’s not allowed to eat the cat food is my attempt to punish her, introducing something unpleasant (disappointed dad voice) to make a behavior less likely (eating her sisters’ food). This hasn’t worked yet – maybe I’m not doing the voice right – but my point is that punishment isn’t negative reinforcement. Reinforcement is about making a behavior more likely; punishment is about making a behavior less likely.

This is a nice example of how technical terminology can be subtly misleading when we’re not careful. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Ed Simon

“Men intoxicated are sometimes stunned into sobriety.” —Lord Mansfield (1769)

Today marks eight years since I had my last drink. Or maybe yesterday marks that anniversary; I’m not sure. It was that kind of last drink. The kind of last drink that ends with the memory of concrete coming up to meet your head like a pillow, of red and blue lights reflected off the early morning pavement on the bridge near your house, the only sound cricket buzz in the dewy August hours before dawn. The kind of last drink that isn’t necessarily so different from the drink before it, but made only truly exemplary by the fact that there was never a drink after it (at least so far, God willing). My sobriety – as a choice, an identity, a life-raft – is something that those closest to me are aware of, and certainly any reader of my essays will note references to having quit drinking, especially if they’re similarly afflicted and are able to discern the liquor-soaked bread-crumbs that I sprinkle throughout my prose. But I’ve consciously avoided personalizing sobriety too much, out of fear of being a recovery writer, or of having to speak on behalf of a shockingly misunderstood group of people (there is cowardice in that position). Mostly, however, my relative silence is because we tribe of reformed dipsomaniacs are a superstitious lot, and if anything, that’s what keeps me from emphatically declaring my sobriety as such.

There are, for sure, certain concerns about propriety that have a tendency to gag these kinds of confessions – I’ve pissed in enough alleyways in three continents that you’d think the having done it would embarrass me more than the declaring of it, but here we are. There’s also, and this took some time to evolve, issues of humility. When I put together strings of sober time in the past, and over a decade and a half I tried to quit drinking thirteen times, with the longest tenure a mere five months, I was loudly and performatively on the wagon. In my experience that’s the sort of sobriety that serves the role of being antechamber to relapse, a pantomime of recovery posited around the sexy question of “Will he or won’t he drink again?” I remember sitting in bars during this time period – I still sat the bar drinking Diet Coke during that stretch – and having the bartender scatter half-empty scotch tumblers filled with iced tea around the bar so that when friends arrive, they’d think I’d started drinking again. Get it?! So, this time around I wanted to avoid the practical jokes, since in the back of my mind I’d already decided that the next visit to the bar wouldn’t necessarily have ice tea in those glasses. Which is only tangentially related to my code of relative silence for the last half-decade – I was scared that the declaration would negate itself, and I’d find myself passed out on my back on that sidewalk again. So, at the risk of challenging those forces that control that wheel of fate, let me introduce myself – my name is Ed and I’m an alcoholic. Read more »

Shadow self-portrait in the raging waters of the river Eisack as it flows through Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

by Carol A Westbrook

We bought a little house in a development called Timber Trails, Oak Brook, IL in December of 2019. Our house was old and in need of repair, but the lot was very large—almost an acre in size. It was full of ancient oak trees, some almost two centuries old, providing a canopy of some thirty to fifty feet high. Our backyard was immediately adjacent to York Woods, a Du Page County Forest preserve, through which Salt Creek flowed. Soon we felt that we lived in these woods, with woodland animals our nearest neighbors.

There were dozens of chipmunks and squirrels with their funny antics; hungry rabbits to raid the garden; raccoons to raid the trash cans; there even was a fat, grumpy groundhog who lived under the deck, ready for hibernation—we expected to see him in the spring. Were we surprised to find that he was a she, who was followed around the yard by two adorable baby groundhogs! There were a surprising number of birds, even in winter. The non-migratory birds included sparrows, robins, one variety of blue jays, and the rare flash of red with the “purty,purty” call of the cardinal. Of the large mammals, we saw the occasional coyote, and numerous white-tailed deer.

During the spring and summer we’d see deer in groups of two or three does with their young fawns, and an occasional yearling tagging along. They’d browse our garden plants and shrubs, moving along to cross the street, always at the “Deer Crossing” sign. In winter, deer do not hibernate; instead they sleep a lot, minimizing activity and conserving energy. On warmer days they will walk the neighborhood and browse whatever edible plant material they find—usually from the plants in my garden! Many of the lone females who are out in the winter, looking for food, are pregnant, since rut (the mating season) happens in November. Read more »

by Mike Bendzela

The funeral director is a good guy, both sedate and friendly. I wait for him to wrap up his service in advancing rain before driving up to the site to close the grave. The mourners depart the gravesite but do not leave the cemetery. They hang out near their pickup trucks, some talking animatedly.

“Wait around awhile and you might be able to collect some returnables,” the director says. I look over: the mourners have already cracked open beers and canned “cocktails.”

Then I look at the urn, a small squat box made of “cultured marble,” perched on a pedestal over the pit I have dug and covered with plywood and hemlock boughs. “Forty is way too young,” I say. Before coming over, I searched the obituary online. Theoretically, I could have a son that age.

“Fentanyl, I’m pretty sure,” the director says, his tone lowered. “It’s worse than covid now.”

In 2021 and 2022, there were at least three covid victims interred in our cemetery; I know because I had to make out receipts for the families to receive government reimbursements for funeral expenses. I don’t know how many opioid deaths there have been.

“We have at least one of these going at any time now,” he says, meaning funerals for overdose deaths. “It’s that bad.”

As the rain picks up, the mourners scoot into their trucks with their beverages and drive off. No returnable deposits for me on this Day of Our Lord.

I put the urn into its hole in the same plot as the deceased man’s infant daughter. Yes, this place is a veritable garden of sorrow. Read more »

by Martin Butler

What do people want? Not such a simple question as it seems. Tom Turcich, the guy who recently walked around the world passing through 38 countries over seven years, claimed that from what he had experienced people just want to make a little money and hang out with their families, which sounds like a fairly hopeful conclusion, though we mustn’t forget that this was clearly not enough for Tom himself. If true, this simple answer leads on to other important questions. If most people have such modest wants, why would they care about the big political and ethical questions that philosophers agonise about? Might it be the case that equality, human rights, democratic representation and so on are pretty much beside the point for the majority? Why would those with a good enough life need to bother with such wider issues? We need to remember here that, historically, political ideals took off as real issues only when they entered people’s everyday lives rather than as abstract ideals debated by the intellectual few. The important struggles of the past – and present – have been prompted when people, or at least significant groups of them, were unable to enjoy an adequately resourced and secure life with their families which was not dependent on the whim of those in positions of power. So there certainly is a very clear connection between the modest wants that Tom Turcich identifies and the big political questions. He draws the conclusion that while people are on the whole good, he can’t say the same for the systems they often live under.

With the advent of mass media and the internet in particular our whole landscape has changed dramatically. For most of history the vast majority of people lived essentially local lives with little or no knowledge of a wider world picture. Now we  can know of the sufferings of people on the other side of the world as easily as we can the goings on in the next street or village, in fact often more easily. We can gain a sophisticated grasp of the latest scientific information on climate breakdown and the many other negative effects of humanity on the environment. The distinction between our own personal concerns and those issues which might be regarded as more remote and abstract becomes increasingly blurred. Read more »

by Ada Bronowski

It is a truth Disneylandly acknowledged that ‘when the world turns its back on you, you turn your back on the world’. A famous piece of advice given by the little meerkat from The Lion King encapsulates a philosophy that grounds not only the destinies of all the great Disney heroes, from the little mermaid to Pocahontas, but also a certain idea of the Good as a secret garden to be cultivated contra mundum, against and despite the world (and which eventually shall flourish and change it). An idea that perhaps above all others is losing its meaning for the vast majority of us today not only out of wild-capitalist callousness as from a basic instinct for survival which prefers to that Disney catchphrase, another old cartoon chestnut: ‘if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em’.

In a recent act of defiance, a French comedian, Blanche Gardin, whose award-winning one-woman shows have enshrined as one of the most fearless and successful straight-talking satirists of our times (and whom American audiences might have heard of by way of her indelible support and relationship with comedian Louis C.K.), stoked the embers of this dying idea. She publicly and provocatively turned down a job-offer from the TV platform Amazon Prime because the cachet was too high. This rebellious feat of virtue goes far beyond the rebuffing of a job. Gardin rebukes thereby a whole system, our world as it has become, in which big bucks flow senselessly for a select circle with no relation whatsoever with the real life of most people. She received a great deal of backlash from the ‘other side’, those who joined ‘em. If there is nobility in Gardin’s gesture, and if indeed it comes from a certain idea(l) of the Good, it is also suffused with the puritanical fire that Disney fantasies help keep alive but which only in fantasy worlds seem to yield happy endings. Read more »