garden rock

“[T]he goal of a karesansui garden is to suggest magnificent scenes from nature by forming the shapes of various landscape elements such as waterfalls, mountains, islands and ocean … thus the garden expresses the vastness of nature in miniature, within a strictly limited space.”

- Kinsaku Nakane, designer, Tenshin-en, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

The best books I read in 2014 – fiction

For the record once again, my reading of fiction is pretty minimal. I always have a long list of books to attend to, and sadly (because I would love to read more) fiction keeps getting bumped off. So talking about the best fiction I read in a given year is a bit like talking about the best white truffle dish I ate that year. And then there’s my idiosyncratic choosiness, which leaves my few recommendations useful to a fairly limited audience. That established, I’m only going to talk about one novel and a single short story.

These are the fictional complement to the historical works I discussed in my previous post. Like good political history, good political fiction reveals the effects of political events – in this case, World War II and the Cold War – on people and their relationships. The first is a 1955 novel by May Sarton, Faithful Are the Wounds:



It tells of leftwing Harvard scholar Edward Cavan, his suicide in the midst of Cold War persecution (the character was based on F. O. Matthiessen),* and the ways his colleagues, students, relatives, and friends attempt to make sense of his death and to cope in its aftermath. There are probably too many characters for all of them to be fleshed out as fully as I’d have liked, but Sarton manages to present each of them sympathetically despite real political differences amongst them. She showed a real tenderness towards her characters (and settings!).

The story I enjoyed most last year impressed me with its moral self-awareness and self-questioning: Leó Szilárd’s 1949 “My Trial as a War Criminal,” in his 1961 volume The Voice of the Dolphins and Other Stories.



Szilárd presents an alternate history in which the Soviet Union, having later defeated the US by resorting to biological weapons, tries physicists like Szilárd and political leaders for their participation in the atomic weapons program and the bombing of civilian targets in World War II. In this and the other stories in the volume (which are generally wry, playful, and humanistic, and often prescient) he offers a model of humility and questioning, qualities which often seem dangerously lacking in today’s champions of science.

This post provides a nice summary of “My Trial as a War Criminal,” and this comment a thoughtful analysis of Szilárd’s artistic choices that resonates this month in particular. The author of that comment, a man named Gene Dannen, published literally yesterday a new article about Szilárd, his first love, and how he was forever changed by their relationship: “A Physicist’s Lost Love: Leo Szilard and Gerda Philipsborn.” Announcing its future publication a few months ago, Dannen wrote: “I don’t think anyone who reads the article will ever forget it.” In a lifetime of reading, I can’t remember any such claim made by an author about their own work, much less one made on a personal website, that turned out to be correct. However, having now read “A Physicist’s Lost Love,” I’ll be darned if it wasn’t so. It’s terrifically moving and inspiring, so thank you, Gene Dannen.

*There is now an F. O. Matthiessen Visiting Professorship of Gender and Sexuality at Harvard.

Adjunct organizing – the “metro strategy”

The casualization of academic labor in the US has reached extreme proportions. Adjuncts now constitute around 3/4 of teachers. The situation for the adjuncts themselves is of course bad: bad obviously for their ability to make a living and plan a life, bad for their health, bad for their psychological well-being and dignity (and that’s leaving aside the stress from the burden of student loans), bad for their work as teachers and mentors to their students, bad for their capacity to engage in scholarship, bad for their relationships in academe,… It’s also bad for students, of course. And bad for academic freedom and the future of scholars in politics.

Fortunately, a new organizing strategy by the SEIU might prove effective. These two articles describe adjuncts’ working conditions and the “metro strategy” of organizing adjuncts – otherwise isolated in temporary positions across various campuses – in entire urban areas:

• “Adjunct Faculty, Now in the Majority, Organize Citywide”

• “Mad Professors”

Promising news at long last.

Atheist inclusion in official memorials: some issues

Ophelia Benson relays a request from Dave Muscato of American Atheists concerning the exclusion of atheists and humanists from public memorials. This is an extremely important issue to me, and I think it’s great that it’s being taken on. This will be a positive-critical post. I have some criticisms of Muscato’s procedure, and I have some praise for this broader effort which, unavoidably in this case, takes the form of criticism of the Harvard Humanist Chaplai, uh, Community Project.

Muscato’s request seems clearly to be meant for the leaders and representatives of established organizations. They’re asked to submit statements, including information about the group they represent, some of which might be given by Greg Epstein to “public officials” (we’re not told who) in a private meeting. They’re then encouraged, almost as an afterthought, to solicit remarks from others, some of which might also be passed along.

This seems a strangely and unnecessarily layered process, when much more direct means of seeking the contributions of the members of the community are readily at hand. (Even if some of these organizations didn’t have a sorry recent history of failing to engage, consult with, or respond to the criticisms of their supporters and people in the community generally, this would seem less than ideal.) A less hierarchical, more direct and open approach might also help to alert the community that there’s movement on the issue and get them active. Even if a private meeting with government officials is involved, that certainly doesn’t mean that grassroots public efforts and actions shouldn’t surround it. It can be about educating public officials while also being about educating everyone else, and there’s no reason the latter can’t supplement and accelerate the former.

That said, I’m pleased as punch that this is being raised as a key issue. As Muscato says:

Atheists are hurting from this news as much as anyone else, and part of the grieving process for atheists affected includes things such as representation at the official memorial service and in the community response. When memorial services include exclusively religious language, and especially when public officials use terms such as “godless” as a slur to describe these attacks, atheists who are affected are excluded and shut out from the community.

More than that, it casts grief and mourning as a religious, and not a fundamentally human, experience. For me, it’s not so much a matter of inclusion as it is of this aspect of monopolization. I think what we should have are secular community memorials in which religious groups can participate.

Which brings me to my criticism of the Harvard Humanists. Epstein’s response to the exclusion from the Boston memorial was consistent with the organization’s position in the past:

“The point of today was inclusion,” Epstein lamented. “All they had to do was say one word, or allow one official guest, and they didn’t. I can’t speak to their motivation. I hope it was a matter of ignorance.”

The HH have consistently attempted to identify and join with the “interfaith” community, and I’ve considered that approach unsound for a number of reasons. Epstein is plainly wrong here: the point of an interfaith event is by definition not inclusion. It’s inclusive only of faith (and, let’s be clear, not of all faiths by a long shot). The point is exclusion, both of people and organizations and more seriously of challenges to their monopolization of human experience and public rituals. That shouldn’t be brushed aside or minimized.

Epstein appears to be quietly asking for a seat at the faith table. I don’t think atheists should be included in official interfaith memorials. I don’t think there should be official, or officially endorsed, interfaith memorials. I don’t want us to have standing alongside faiths; I don’t want faiths to have that standing in the first place. There’s no more reason for us to accept religious public memorials than there is for us to accept religious public celebrations or religious public education.

(This is another problem with the procedure here: People might be unsure of whether to contribute statements or express support for this meeting since we don’t know how Epstein will be presenting the atheist position, and some of us have reason to suspect that it might not be in a manner we would support. I wouldn’t expect him to pass along my sentiments, but then this process doesn’t provide a meaningful space for me to air them.)

You could of course argue that this is a step in the right direction - that inclusion will lead to education and understanding and eventually to more or fully secular events. But I won’t accept, even tactically, an inclusion that requires styling atheism or humanism as some form of faith or respecting the conflation of religion and human experience.

Apologies to Rachel Carson and Louis Agassiz

…Or at least to the authors of their new biographies. They’ve been bumped down on my reading list by the publication of The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet.

For those in the Boston area, there will be a talk by the author, Lawrence J. Friedman, at Harvard Book Store this coming Tuesday (March 5) at 7:00 PM.

In related news, the Kindle version of Fromm’s The Art of Being recently became available.

I wouldn’t recommend beginning with this one, but it’s a fine accompaniment to To Have or To Be?.

Put a stop to "aversive therapy," Massachusetts

The Guardian reports:

The UN's special rapporteur on torture has made a formal approach to the US government over a special-needs school near Boston that inflicts electric shocks on autistic children as a form of behavioural control.

Juan Mendez has told the Guardian that he has opened discussions with the US mission to the UN in Geneva as a first step towards investigating the school.

The rapporteur plans to contact the US state department and has the option of reporting the matter to the UN human rights council.

Mendez said he was "very concerned" about the use of electric shocks, which are inflicted on autistic children through pads applied to their skin.

"The use of electricity on anyone's body raises the question of whether this is therapeutic or whether it inflicts pain and suffering tantamount to torture in violation of international law," he added....

The report does note: "As public anger builds, there are mounting political moves to restrict the school's activities. A bill that would ban aversive therapy has already passed the Massachusetts state senate and is now being considered by the house."

One more reason to like the Red Sox

Their support of LGBT anti-bullying campaigns:



Of course, the bigoted clowns don't like it:

The site itself and its companion site lead kids to homosexual pornography and homosexual groups with a history of targeting kids with graphic homosexual material. Far from "helping" troubled kids, these sites would add considerably to their psychological and medical trauma.

…

But worse, the Boston Red Sox are helping the radical homosexual movement push their depraved agenda on troubled kids, many of whom probably need real help. They seem fine with that. By any rational measure, this is simply evil.

Evil?! No, that's the Yankees.

Nice!

[Sou

Oops, I mean [Source]

Puritan Monster

The other day, I finished Eve LaPlante's American Jezebel, a biography of Anne Hutchinson:



I won't review it now, and may not do so here at all. Still haven't decided, though I'll recommend it generally. (I will give in to the temptation to yet again recommend Linebaugh and Rediker's The Many-Headed Hydra:)



But I did want to share one story from the book that struck me. It concerns a stillbirth of Mary Dyer in Boston in 1637 and the responses to it:

Only three weeks before her trial, on a balmy October night in 1637, Hutchinson had sought and received private advice from [John] Cotton about a matter that, had the other ministers learned of it, would have caused an outcry. The matter was the birth of a deformed stillborn to a Boston couple, an event that most of their neighbors would have seen as evidence of God’s displeasure with the baby’s parents.

On October 17, Mary Dyer, the twenty-six-year-old wife of the milliner, William Dyer, went into labor two months before her due date and lost consciousness. The midwife Jane Hawkins, who was attending her at home, sent a man on horseback to summon Mistress Anne Hutchinson to assist in the birth. Later that evening, with both midwives present, Mary Dyer delivered a stillborn female with extensive deformities of the head, spinal column, and extremities.

To protect Mary and her husband from public shame, Hutchinson and Hawkins swaddled the tiny corpse, concealing its deformities. When Mary Dyer regained consciousness, the midwives told her only that her baby had died. But what to do with the body? Anne Hutchinson proposed that they bury it and not speak of it again. The risk of this, as both she and Jane Hawkins knew, was that if townspeople heard what had happened, they would suspect evil intent, which would only intensify the Dyers’ shame. English common law allowed a midwife to bury a dead baby in private, as long as ‘neither hog nor dog nor any other beast come into it’, but the Massachusetts court had forbidden this practice as a way of preventing attempts at abortion. Anne Hutchinson thought to ask Reverend Cotton for his advice.

Well past midnight, she walked from the Dyers’ house, at the corner of what is now Summer Street, to the Cottons’ gabled mansion…

…Anne tapped on the parlor window, and the minister let her in. in the candlelight, she described Mary Dyer’s birthing and requested his counsel.

Yes, conceal it, Cotton agreed, aware of the English custom and law. She thanked him and went back out into the night. Before dawn, she and Jane Hawkins buried the baby. According to one account, Cotton accompanied the midwives and dug the grave. A few other women who had been present at the difficult birth knew of the baby’s state. But no man in the colony save John Cotton, William Dyer, and probably Will Hutchinson knew that the midwives and the minister had conspired to save the Dyers additional pain (pp. 88-9).

This seemed to me so compassionate and moral. Hutchinson and the others weren't just concerned with protecting Dyer socially, but emotionally as well. There was nothing to be gained from their actions socially or - to their imaginations - with their deity, and in fact they took a great risk, motivated only, it appears, by the desire to spare others pain. Which is why I found the denouement so sickening:

[At the conclusion of her church trial, at which she was publicly excummunicated] Holding her head high, [Hutchinson] stood, turned, and walked swiftly to the meetinghouse door. Now she took the proffered hand of her friend Mary Dyer, whom she had aided after her difficult birth. A group of Anne’s supporters, shrunken by the many banishments, disenfranchisements, and voluntary exiles from the colony, clustered around the rude wooden door that led out to the late-winter light.

…[John] Winthrop was unaware, as he watched Mistresses Hutchinson and Dyer in the rear of the meetinghouse, of the events in October that had followed Dyer’s stillbirth. Within a week, however, word of the ‘monster’ that Dyer had borne – and that Hutchinson and Hawkins, with Cotton’s support, had secretly buried – would reach the governor, horrifying him. He had always admired the charming and attractive young Mary Dyer, but now she seemed ‘of a very proud spirit’, ‘much addicted to revelations’, and ‘notoriously infected with Mistress Hutchinson’s errors’. Of the Dyer baby, he would report in his journal:

It was so monstrous and misshapen as the like that scarce been heard of. It had no head but a face, which stood so low upon the breast, as the ears, which were like an ape’s, grew upon the shoulders.

The eyes stood far out, so did the mouth. The nose was hooking upward. The breast and back was full of sharp prickles, like a thornback [an ocean dweller with thornlike spines]. The navel and all the belly with the distinction of the sex were where lower part of the back and hips should have been, and those back parts were on the side the face stood.

The arms and hands, with the thighs and legs, were as other children’s, but instead of toes it had upon each foot three claws, with talons like a young fowl. Upon the back above the belly it had two great holes, like mouths, and in each of them stuck out a piece of flesh.

It had no forehead, but in the place thereof, above the eyes, four horns, whereof two were above an inch long, hard, and sharp.

The infant’s condition is consistent with a severe birth anomaly, anencephaly, the partial or total absence of the brain, according to modern medical experts. The horns, talons, and prickles are, however, embellishment.

‘Many things were observable in the birth and discovery of this monster’, the governor would note. The Dyers were ‘Familists, and very active in maintaining their party. The midwife, one Hawkin’s wife, of St. Ives, was notorious for familiarity with the Devil, and is now a prime Familist. This monster was concealed by three persons about five months’. Intimating a communal revulsion like that later associated with the witches of Salem Village, Winthrop reported that most women present at the birth ‘were suddenly taken with such a violent vomiting, as they were forced to go home, others had their children taken with convulsions, and so were sent home, so as none were left at the time of the birth but the midwife and two others, whereof one fell asleep. At such time as the child died, the bed where in the mother lay shook so violently as all in the room perceived it’.

Learning of the birth, Winthrop would order that Mistress Hawkins be questioned and the corpse exhumed. ‘The child was taken up’ from its grave, he reported, ‘and though it was much corrupted, yet the horns and claws and holes in the back and some scales were found and seen of above a hundred persons’ (pp. 205-6).

Monster, indeed.

Honduras solidarity campaign on Twitter and Facebook today!

As I mentioned in a recent post, today is the Global Day of Action for Honduras. Now you can help to support the democratic resistance in Honduras on Facebook and Twitter! Grassroots International explains how:

On the Global Day of Action for Honduras, Donate your Facebook and Twitter Status

By Lindsay Shade

August 10th, 2009

Want to do something simple to help support Honduran democracy and keep the crisis in the public eye? Donate your status! It’s free, easy, and can make a huge impact. Right now, the corporate news media is mostly silent about what’s happening on the ground in Honduras and the role of US policy – both past and present. Even worse, some media outlets are spreading misinformation based on the junta’s campaign to justify their illegal coup.

Help people learn the truth behind the crisis and remember the plight of Honduran citizens by donating your Facebook and/or Twitter statuses on Tuesday, August 11th – the Global Day of Action for Honduras. Set your Facebook and Twitter status to:

“I stand in solidarity with social justice activists in Honduras. Get the facts and take action now by visiting www.grassrootsonline.org.”

President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have backed down from their initial condemnation of the coup, and are now advocating for a return to the ‘status quo.’ The status quo of US relations with Latin America has thus far had disastrous consequences for social justice aims. Please join us at this pivotal moment: Donate your status and take action on behalf of the human rights of Hondurans.

Please consider this small gesture to make your voice heard and to join others in helping restore democracy to Honduras. (A good way to get the word out about a great Boston-area organization, to boot.)

I also noted earlier that a Honduran speaking tour was coming to the US. Here's a nice summary of what was discussed at the local appearance in Open Media Boston.

For anyone in the area who can attend, they provide more details about today's solidarity picket on Park St.:

Local immigrant, labor, religious and human rights organizations have called a Informational Picket in Solidarity with the Honduran Resistance for Tuesday 8/11 from 4:30- 6 p.m. at the Park Street T entrance on the corner of Tremont and Park Sts. in downtown Boston. Check out http://www.hondurasresists.org/ for more information.

[Please note that I've added a list of links to news and commmentary about Honduras on the left.]

GLOBAL DAY OF ACTION FOR HONDURAS - this TUESDAY, AUGUST 11

Via Campesina has called for a Global Day of Action in solidarity with the Honduran resistance this Tuesday, August 11.

I haven’t been able to find a list of events in different cities (I’ll post it if I do), but one is organized by a coalition of groups here in Boston:

Tue. 8/11 - 4:30pm - 6pm - Park Street Boston, Informational picket in solidarity with the Honduran resistance

International Day of Action Called by the Committee in Solidarity with the Honduran Resistance, Proyecto Hondureno, CISPES-Boston, Boston May Day Committee

(Please send a note to info@hondurasresists.org to endorse and to participate)

http://www.hondurasresists.org

These events are coordinated with the culmination of large marches of Hondurans. For an interesting report on what’s happening on the ground there, see Al Giordano’s “Toppling a Coup, Part I: Dilemmas for the Honduras Regime.”