Category: The Dish

A Poem For Sunday

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“Meeting at Night” by Robert Browning (1812-1889):

The grey sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon large and low;
And the startled little waves that leap
In fiery ringlets from their sleep,
As I gain the cove with pushing prow,
And quench its speed i’ the slushy sand.

Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;
Three fields to cross till a farm appears;
A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
And blue spurt of a lighted match,
And a voice less loud, through its joys and fears,
Than the two hearts beating each to each!

(Photo by Martin Cathrae)

Longing For A Better Class Of Tycoon

Pondering the strange phenomenon of the super-rich claiming to be a persecuted minority – the venture capitalist Tom Perkins and Kenneth Langone, the co-founder of Home Depot, for example, both “compared populist attacks on the wealthy to the Nazis’ attacks on the Jews” – James Surowiecki looks back to when the one-percent weren’t so obtuse:

A century ago, industrial magnates played a central role in the Progressive movement, working with unions, supporting workmen’s compensation laws and laws against child labor, and often pushing for more government regulation.

This wasn’t altruism; as a classic analysis by the historian James Weinstein showed, the reforms were intended to co-opt public pressure and avert more radical measures. Still, they materially improved the lives of ordinary workers. And they sprang from a pragmatic belief that the robustness of capitalism as a whole depended on wide distribution of the fruits of the system.

Similar attitudes prevailed in the postwar era, as [sociologist Mark] Mizruchi has documented. Corporate leaders formed an organization called the Committee for Economic Development, which played a central role in the forging of postwar consensus politics, accepting strong unions, bigger government, and the rise of the welfare state. … Corporations supported policies that might have been costly in the short term in order to strengthen the system as a whole. The C.E.D. called for tax increases to pay for the Korean War and it supported some of L.B.J.’s Great Society. As Mizruchi put it, “They believed that in order to maintain their privileges, they had to insure that ordinary Americans were having their needs met.”

That all changed beginning in the seventies, when the business community, wrestling with shrinking profits and tougher foreign competition, lurched to the right. Today, there are no centrist business organizations with any real political clout, and the only business lobbies that matter in Washington are those pushing an agenda of lower taxes and less regulation.

This World Of Light And Shadow

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Storm photographer Mitch Dobrowner describes his vocation in an interview:

PP: Let’s talk about your storm photography. Why storms? Is it because of the unique light and cloud formations you’re able to capture? Or is it more of a thrill-seeking venture?

MD: Yeah, it’s always about the light. My main focus has always been landscape photography. I have always loved just sitting out in nature, hearing the wind blow and watching the light changing. I study the light and see photography as an exercise in painting with light and shadows. In inclement weather, light and shadows are always changing. … A storm is like a person. It’s born when the conditions are right, at birth it is fragile — it can die — but once it decides it’s going to live it turns unpredictable and can become violent. Eventually it matures and takes form, then ages and dies. No two storms are born in the same exactly way — and no two storms will ever look (or act) the same.

When I’m out there I always hear the mantra spoken by Edward Abbey, “Our job is to record, each in his own way, this world of light and shadow and time that will never come again exactly as it is today.” …

PP: What advice would you have for others who want to photograph storms? What are the tricks of the trade you’ve learned by doing this work?

MD: No tricks, just respect Mother Nature and the people that live in the area in which these storms take place. Oh, and you should try to stay out of the way of lightning.

See more of Dobrowner’s work here.

Wed Again

Rachel Vorona Cote ended a “brief and sad” marriage to her first husband when she was 25. She reflects on how she got over worrying about a second wedding:

[S]omewhere along the way I learned that relationships don’t gain moral strength simply because they have endured. Relationships are too messy for such clean parallels. So much humiliation and self-loathing comes of treating divorce as the dark underbelly of intimacy. We don’t get one shot at long-term monogamy—if monogamy is even what we want. It occurred to me that, whether or not I wanted to remarry—and in the beginning I was not sure—divorce did not render impossible fifty years of mutual love and couch co-habitation.

By the week of my second wedding, I was stunned by the bigness of love surrounding me.

Part of me had feared that the celebration would feel uncomfortably familiar, but it didn’t and it wasn’t. My family and friends gathered around me, affirming our bond. … And while it is true that I love Paul in a way that I did not love my first husband—and that this affection shaped our wedding day—what is most important here is not comparative. I loved my first husband too, in the best way that I could in that moment, and I loved—still love—so much about our wedding. My wedding to Paul had nothing to do with my first; it was an exquisite day in the life of our own romance. The wedding was ours, and if it is not unconnected to the rest of my life, it still claims singularity—in the little particulars and in its celebration of a romance that can only be lived by Paul and me, together.

The Con Of “Spirituality”

Jeff Sharlet, author of the new collection Radiant Truths, address that idea in an interview:

Every piece collected here touches on transcendence, but not all are explicitly religious. Reading, I was reminded of friends who say “I’m spiritual, not religious.” You’ve written elsewhere that you’re averse to the word “spiritual,” in the sense that you don’t like seeing your books filed in the Spirituality section of libraries and bookstores. Why is that?

Because I’m a curmudgeon. Here’s this word that millions of people find lovely and liberating — an alternative to all that seems calcified about religion, and what do I do? I complain. I think that in nine out of ten cases “spirituality” is a con — not a con by the person invoking it, but a con on that person. It offers the illusion of individual choice, as if our beliefs, or our rejection of belief, could be formed in some pure Ayn Randian void. For better and worse we make our beliefs and live our beliefs together. That’s what you get with the word “religion,” which means to tie, to bind. You may not want to be bound! I don’t. But we are. We’re caught up in a great, complicated web of belief and ritual and custom. That’s what I’m interested in, not the delusion that I’m some kind of island.

Update from a reader:

I guess I get what Mr. Sharlet means, but some of us don’t see the matter as being one of spirituality “vs.” religion. In the way that I look at it, faith has to be the deepest activity of “religion.”

Faith is that eternal ongoing journey for we mortal beings toward “Truth.” Spirituality can be another way of saying that, without getting bogged down in human prejudices toward particular religions. (If one thinks there might be other conscious life forms “out there” in our vast universe, does one assume they all have the “right” religion, or does one wonder how they approach their own journeys toward the ineffable Light?).

I get what Mr. Sharlet means about human responsibility via practical, proven means of association – aka religion. But religion has also had a lot to answer for over the centuries. Who are the very people who have broken the fundamental and basic promises to God that religious people say they are trying to keep? Often they’re the people who are merely “religious.” They are people who haven’t believed in their own connections to their Creator enough. They tend to be the people who worry about everyone else’s actions first, rather than seeing their challenge as being one of overcoming their own egos -fighting their own spiritual battles with the help of the Grace of God.

Religion can be a great thing if one doesn’t forget the faith that is supposed to live at the core of it. It can be a great thing if it unites the world’s peoples without dividing them. Some of us don’t think this is an impossible dream; it just requires the will to act on these ideals. For this reason, some of us think that focusing on what the various religions might have in common is a good thing: Faith, love, serving humankind (“even” in the form of one’s family and friends), actions that lead toward peace, justice, unity … even, God willing, a big dose of humility now and then.

So I guess while I think that the world would be, on the whole, in trouble without the good that religion (practiced the way it should) imparts, I have no problem discussing the deeper aspects of our relationship to our Creator, and how one lives one’s life, in terms of faith and spirituality – spirituality being another way of talking about “faith” in my view. In my own life, I think I’ve sensed the “Holy Spirit,” aka Love, active in a wide variety of religions; even if those religions might have added some goofy “man-made” ideas. This is why there can be so much confusion with religion – the Holy Spirit doesn’t “care” about man-made boundaries. It “blows” where it will, just as our physical sun shines down on “high” and “low” alike, or on the “good” and the “evil”.

Fishing For Philosophical Truths

Philosophy prof Robert Pasnau relays (NYT) a well-worn story usually told at the expense of his colleagues that goes something like this: Charles II summons a group of philosophers to ask them why a dead fish weighs more than a live one. After offering their creative, speculative answers, the king tells the philosophers that there was no difference between the two – and why didn’t they just weigh the fish? Pasnau rejects the implied criticism of his field:

The essence of philosophy is abstract reasoning – not because the philosopher is too lazy to attempt a more hands-on approach, but because the subjects at issue do not readily submit to it.

If we could simply weigh the fish, we gladly would. In recent centuries, philosophers in fact have discovered how to weigh that allegorical fish, in various fields, and on each occasion a new discipline has been born: physics in the 17th century; chemistry in the 18th; biology in the 19th and psychology in the 20th. The scientists, short on history but flush with their government grants and Nobel Prizes, cast an eye back on what remains of philosophy and skeptically ask: Why don’t you stop wasting your time and just weigh that fish?

It’s a question philosophers ask themselves all the time, and sometimes they despair.

How Pasnau frames his own defense of his field’s relevance:

[M]uch of what gives philosophy its continuing fascination is its connection with the humanities. To weigh the fish is doubtless desirable, but there is just as much to be learned in understanding where that fish came from, and in telling stories about where it might go.

If even philosophy is dismissed as a waste of time for being insufficiently scientific, where does that leave those other modes of humanistic inquiry? Reading Plato or Chekhov may not stop the planet from warming or cure a disease – or help build more accurate missiles – and it may not point the way toward a new science of ethics or will. Yet what of it? Does such inquiry not have a value of its own? That is of course itself a philosophical question.

Why Faith Belongs In Fiction

In an interview, Christopher Beha talks about why he chose to incorporate religion into his new novel Arts and Entertainments and why he thinks writers who exclude faith ignore a key part of life:

[T]he majority of people in this country (and on this earth) have sincerely held religious beliefs that they’ve integrated into their thoroughly modern lives. A quarter of the U.S. population — and 40 percent of the population of New York, where my novel is set — self-identify as Catholic. One of the most striking features of the city is that there are churches everywhere, from one of the world’s largest cathedrals to hundreds of storefront churches. And a bit of investigation will reveal that those churches fill up every Sunday. Not to mention the fact that there are more Jews in New York than in any other city in the world.

But for some reason the publishing industry in [New York] tends to view the introduction of religion into contemporary realist novels as a willful act that must have some strong rhetorical justification. From where I stand, the exclusion of religion is the willful act. Novelists never get asked why they don’t include religion in their books, or why the religion they do include — often just a species of madness — bears so little resemblance to religion as it is practiced by the majority of Americans. If they were asked, I suspect, most of these writers would not have a very good answer. It simply doesn’t occur to them. Whatever one’s beliefs, this seems like a basic failure of verisimilitude. Reality includes religion; realism should, too.

Feet Unbound

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Jo Farrell captures the last remaining survivors of China’s foot binding tradition:

Her toes were broken when she was a kid, then constantly bound to make them smaller until she couldn’t walk straight anymore. At the age of 88, Zhang Yun Ying is among the last witnesses of China’s infamous tradition of foot binding.

It has been recently brought to attention by a British photographer Jo Farrell who is already known for documenting endangered traditions and cultures. Her ongoing project “Living History” captures the lives of some of the last remaining women in China with bound feet. According to Farrell, in the past year alone, three women she’s been documenting have passed away so she feels it is “imperative to focus on recording their lives before it is too late”.

See more of her work here, here, and here.