Somewhere along the line I developed this thing about Ekphrastic poetry, exploring in word what a visual artist might have intended when he or she created their expressions, their work, their vision of understanding thatinvited me to look, to see, and think——
………………………………………… .
As if About A Painting
It takes many steps to top this mountain as if Olympus,
a prickly pine’s upon one nub, as if Zeus
pagoda house shed, as if Many Mansions
sky sun red some blue, as if Noon
some on steps are climbing, as if To move
calligraphy top right, as if A thought balloon
each stone makes this mountain higher, as if No problemnihil est
as if A scene of sheer improbable
as if It may just be Imagination I guess
by Jim Culleny 1/24/18
Painting: Country of origin: China Probable artist: Kuncan (Kun Can), Qing Dynasty
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“The essence of repression lies simply in turning something away, and keeping it at a distance, from the conscious.” –Freud, “Repression”
“Time and again, in conversation with friends, some of who have lost family members in this killing spree, there is a sense that one must be going mad: to see so plainly the destruction, the murdered children filmed and presented for the world to look upon and then to hear the leaders of virtually every Western nation contend that this is not happening, that whatever is happening is good and righteous and should continue and that in fact the well-bring of the Palestinian people demands this continue – it’s enough to feel like you’re losing your mind.” –Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
The characters in Kasuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go are living in the midst of an atrocity, but they certainly don’t act like it. They go through their lives in much the way we expect characters to do in realist novels; there’s fallings in love and out of it, slight and major misunderstandings, a bit of sex here and there, etc. But the jarring difference (spoiler ahead) is that the main characters are all clones, and their destiny is to have their organs harvested until the point that they “complete” – die, in other words. This is not, it is to be emphasised, a novel of resistance. It is a story about people immersed in a system which treats them reasonably well until the time comes to fulfill a purpose which will mean their destruction. In tone and plot, Ishiguro’s work is not really much different from a Thomas Hardy novel; the characters are locked within a social structure which is crushing them and will eventually destroy them, but from which they can see no means of escape. But if we shake our heads at the confines of 19th century social standards in one instance, that becomes (or at least it did my case) a yelp of rage once we come to Ishiguro’s heartbreaking conclusion. Do something! It’s right there and it’s wrong, don’t you see it? I shouted at the characters. Fight back! Protest! Run Away! But this is nonsense; the characters, and everyone else they encounter, clone or not, are caught within the matrix of “It’s just the way it is” and, as of course it is implied, so are we.
The triad of victim, perpetrator, and bystander presents itself oddly in Ishiguro’s novel, and the boundaries of each begin to blur. The protagonists are unquestionably victims, but their general stasis also presents them as near bystanders. They seem unable to adopt the cognitive tools necessary to escape their plight. They see, but do not see, the atrocity all around them. The perpetrators are, for the most part, distant entities, and themselves can play the role of the bystanders – they participate in a system they might disagree with, and perhaps try to mitigate its worst effects – but they participate all the same. Ishiguro does not seem to be making an overt political point here, but the sense of inevitability and helplessness everywhere in the novel, again as in a Hardy novel, either fills one with existential dread or a level of hope for some kind of speculative redemption. Read more »
There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say. —Hannah Arendt
A book should be an ice axe for the frozen sea within us. —Franz Kafka
…for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life. —Rainer Maria Rilke
Here’s a view I’ve heard or read many times: art is entertainment, its purpose is to provide pleasure and diversion. I think this is mainly wrong. While it contains a grain of truth, it overlooks the profound ways in which art can challenge and transform us. Art’s value lies beyond pleasure, in its capacity to question who we are and what we do. It may even say to us that we must change our lives.
Fun
Entertainment, at its core, is about diversion and pleasure. Fun. It occupies our attention, distracts us from boredom, and amuses. But many things in life can do that: food, games, conversation, idle distractions. If we define art solely as entertainment, we risk conflating it with any activity that gives pleasure, and end up with nothing distinctive about art. After all, I like to eat ice cream, have a hot shower, go for a walk and listen to Mozart. I enjoy all those things, but I’ve surely missed something about the specificity of the experiences if I just call them all just pleasure. That approach is ‘utilitarian flattening’: everything is about pleasure, and so anything one does is just for that goal: art as a tool for pleasure, a means to an end, a pleasant way to pass the time.
Passing the time: diverting, distracting: that entertainment? But passing the time isn’t always pleasurable. Anyone who has scrolled on their smart phone or flipped through videos on YouTube knows that diversion can be form of bored unpleasure, a way to pass time that leaves us emptier than when we started. If Art is to be entertaining it had better do more than that. Read more »
The world is scary right now. I know this to be true, and yet from 14 years of meditation exposure I also know to ask: is it scary… here and now? Here, where I’m writing, in the library of the campus music building, with its floor-to-ceiling glass windows overlooking a Zen garden (there was a big donor a while back), surrounded by books on the loves of Mozart and the many intricacies of the art of singing?
In Beyond Anxiety, sociologist and self-help author Martha Beck said she became free of anxiety once she realized most of her fears were based on things that were not actually in the room with her—things that were imagined. In an interview with Big Think, she said, “I remember one time, terrible things were happening in the world, as they always are, and I was sitting in meditation. I thought, ‘How could I be expected to feel calm under these circumstances?’ Another part of me said, ‘You mean the circumstances of your bedroom?’”
It’s true: my bedroom, my café, my music library is not in Minneapolis, or Gaza, or Tehran. The predator is not in the room with me. The predator is imagined, and yet at the same time, it is very real. In “A Brief for the Defense,” the poet Jack Gilbert writes:
Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
I’ve attended several world peace group meditations over the last few weeks: to transform human ego consciousness, to send love to all beings—is this what God wants? Read more »
Thanks to the failure of bioethics’ and billionaires going full Genghis Khan, a radical Marxist feminist’s dream is about to come true.
In her 1970 polemic The Dialectic of Sex Shulamith Firestone makes a radical argument even by radical Marxist feminist standards: Liberation from patriarchy requires liberation from biology. The cornerstone of her cybernetic communist utopia? Artificial wombs.
Now, of course, this was over fifty years ago and that other classic text of artificial wombs, Brave New World, was already forty years old when Firestone was writing. While making them a reality will require some serious capital-S Science, the problem has never, really, been one of technology. It’s that idea of artificial wombs is so repellent that, in a There is No Anti-Memetics Division kind of way, they are a self-defeating concept. Outside the most extreme thinkers like Firestone, the technology is so off-putting that little to no effort has been put into pursuing it, let alone banning it. We haven’t even made it past debating the precursors—stem cell research, animal cloning, IVF, surrogates, and designer babies.
Or we hadn’t. Ours is an era of leap-frogging. But in the few years, everything changed. It’s so early you can’t quite see it, but the market for artificial wombs is now here, without debate or discussion. Just as the once-science-fictional shot for obesity is here today, there will be push-button babies in a tomorrow closer than you think.
To understand how this has happened, you have to ask yourself not why artificial wombs now, but why don’t we have them already? And to answer that, you need to answer a stranger question still:
Why don’t billionaires have way more kids? Read more »
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We would certainly love for our pool of writers to reflect the diversity of our readers in every way, including gender, age, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, etc., and we encourage people of all kinds to apply. And we like unusual voices and varied viewpoints. So please send us something. What have you got to lose? Click on “Read more »” below…
One common theory of intelligence is that it is an emergent phenomenon. One-on-one, termites aren’t exactly geniuses. But get enough of them together, and they build incredibly elaborate communities that can be 30 meters across with sophisticated ventilation systems to control heating and cooling. And these communities can last for thousands of years.
It’s a bit of a mystery how this happens. After all, even the Frank Lloyd Wright of termites doesn’t know how to keep a towering nest from falling over, or the physics of passive HVAC design. Heck, they probably aren’t even aware of the far side of their nest. Nevertheless, amazingly, termites as a collective have evolved to do something far beyond their individual capabilities.
Similarly, our individual neurons are each busy doing their own thing. They are responding to inputs and communicating with neighbors. From these simple cells and their many interconnections arises something greater than the sum of the parts: a person who can paint, create music, tell jokes, and build skyscrapers [1].
It is a founding dogma of the current AI bubble that scale is all you need: with enough data, computational power, and dollars, all you have to do is sit back and let super-intelligence emerge from the digital soup. Not really, of course. Progress in AI also involves a good dose of intelligent design.
Remarkably, sometimes you don’t need evolution or intelligent design. Read more »
“Happiness is that which all things aim at” according to Aristotle. All virtues – arete (ἀρετή) or “excellences” – are the mean between two extremes. We should choose courage over cowardice, sure, but also over being too bold. Stick to the tame middle.
Epicureans and Stoics counsel against risk and in favor of moderation and in cultivating simple tastes in all things.
Confucius was strongly against reckless behavior. The Daoist counseled, “He who knows when to stop does not find himself in danger.”
But it is Jeremy Bentham, the father of Utilitarianism, that I think about when I think about philosophy’s historical distaste for thrill-seeking. According to Bentham the only human good is happiness. Happiness is just pleasure minus pain. Just as we are morally obligated to seek, above all, the greatest happiness for the greatest number, for ourselves we should also want only happiness. Nietzsche retorted, “Man does not strive for happiness; only the Englishman does that.”
Unfair. John Stuart Mill took Bentham’s view of happiness a step further, unintentionally, providing a rare and beautiful thing: an actual argument for thrill-seeking. Read more »
This book has an ambitious and praiseworthy agenda, to discuss a wide range of specifically human characteristics, in the context of the selection pressures operating on our ancestors once the forests of East Africa were replaced by savanna. The more open terrain favoured bipedalism, and bipedalism led on to a cascade of further changes. These, we are told, included loss of fur, bulbous breasts, female orgasm, monogamy, large penis size, cooperation, and exclusive homosexuality. Anatomical side-effects of bipedalism gave us hands capable of fine movements, which in turn favoured the development of large brains, and hence prolonged infancy and the development of cooperative social structures. This evolution took place under circumstances very different from those under which almost all of us live today, and we need to understand the constraints imposed by our evolutionary pathway if we are to understand ourselves as we are now. The book is well produced, and fully illustrated with drawings and diagrams.
The approach is laudably multidisciplinary. As the author puts it, his aim is
“To facilitate an understanding of the origin of human traits, I draw upon evidence and inferences from fossils, genomics, phylogenetics, coalescence theory, analyses of calcium isotopes, and the anatomy and physiology of our ancestors and other animals.”
Cruzan follows the account of humans having emerged in East Africa, with more than one out-of-Africa migration, but anatomically modern humans outside Africa having most of their genetic material from a group that left there around 70,000 years ago. As a narrative device, he follows a fictional woman (Launua) from childhood to her eventual death, pointing out the specific challenges she is presented with, and the evolved abilities with which she overcomes them. Much of the argument is controversial, but this is not necessarily a bad thing, and the style makes the material accessible to a wide audience. I would warn the reader, however, that there are questions about his heavy use of selection at the clan level, and the assumption that the individual clans would have been highly inbred. There is some evidence that by 34,000 years ago, admittedly halfway between the time under discussion in the present, anatomically modern humans had formed networks that avoided inbreeding. More details (paywall) here.
Is your uncle racist? Is the American educational system? Are military beard standards? Is our president? I won’t try to answer those questions here. I don’t even know your uncle. Instead, I want to talk about what we mean when we use that term—and the confusion we experience as a result of the ways we use it. This won’t solve our underlying problems having to do with race; but it might help us address those problems more clearly.
The terms “racist” and “racism” appear daily in our political debates, social media, and institutional communications. They shape hiring decisions, educational curricula, and corporate policies. They can end careers, transform elections, and rupture communities. Yet for all their prominence—or perhaps because of it—we rarely pause to notice that we use these words in fundamentally different ways.
This semantic multiplicity creates dysfunction. We believe we are engaged in substantive disagreements about race and justice when we are often simply talking past one another. One person declares a policy racist, meaning it produces disparate outcomes; another hears an accusation of malicious intent and responds defensively. One person insists they are not racist, meaning they bear no personal animus; another hears a denial of systemic advantage and reacts with frustration. The confusion compounds: accusations of racism are met with accusations of bad faith, which generate accusations of fragility, which prompt accusations of ideological extremism. The cycle accelerates, positions harden, and the possibility of genuine exchange evaporates.
Before attempting to map these different uses, let me address two predictable responses. Read more »
One of my favorite ways of beginning the morning is by having Siri put on “Grand Canyon Suite” by Ferde Grofe. It’s pleasant and gives a sense of the day beginning and going on its way. Also, in the middle, if you’re an old guy like me, you’ll hear the music that used to introduce “Call For Phillip Morreez,” the voice of Johnny, the hotel bell boy calling across America inviting us all to smoke. At one time I wanted to be an ad man. I wonder if I would have refused to work on a cigarette ad at the possible cost of my job. Of course, the question wouldn’t have come up when I was younger and smoked, but if I had been older and knew better, what would I have done. In truth, I’m not sure. There are many ways of convincing yourself that you’re not doing a wrong thing.
I have the door to the patio outside my second floor flat (I like that British word better than the American apartment) to let some fresh air in in the morning. I never sit on my patio though it would often seem to be attractive except it overlooks Greenwood Avenue N where the traffic is constant and noisy. Just now a car went by claiming it’s place for a larger share of world domination by having its muffler removed. There are many of those and we live too by a fire house and emergency vehicles emerge both night and day. I’ve just ordered some earpods with a noise cancelling feature. Maybe that can recover lost space or at least the ability to listen to music with the door open.
I wanted to write this this morning because of a sentence in my notebook that I read in the NY Times Book Review. The book (it’s so long ago now, I can’t remember title or author) is about a woman’s attempt to live “an honest life. More than that,” actually: “a good life. You can do nothing or you can do better.” What a helpful last sentence. It relieves you from the burden of solving the world’s difficulties while offering a way to live well. “You can do nothing or do better.” I hope I can at least do something in some ways. While I was brooding over this, Facebook recovered something I wrote years ago, forgot about, but now find helpful. Read more »
Allan Rohan Crite. Sometimes I’m Up, Sometimes I’m Down. Illustration for Three Spirituals from Earth to Heaven (Cambridge, Mass., 1948),” 1937.
(Photographs of framed prints by Sughra Raza).
“… Back there in the ’30s, the concept of Blacks was usually of somebody up in Harlem, or the sharecropper from the Deep South, or what you might call the jazz Negro,” Crite said in a 1979 interview for the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. “But the ordinary person—you might say middle-class—you just didn’t hear about them. So what I did in my drawings was just to try to do the life of people as I saw them round about me.”
Crite’s “neighborhood paintings,” while his most famous works, are just one facet of a long and varied career. A devout Episcopalian, he combined his love of religious art with his affection for his city, creating urban vignettes with Christian themes.”
The Supreme Court’s power does not rest on brute force but on the power of authority. This power of authority heavily rests upon public perception of the Supreme Court’s legitimacy as a fair and impartial arbiter of the law. That perception has seriously eroded. With its current case docket that will address the breadth and limits of presidential power, the Supreme Court is at a crossroads on how it will be perceived by the American people. The country in turn is at a crossroads as a constitutional republic and democracy depending on how the Supreme Court rules and is perceived.
The Supreme Court’s Public Approval Rating is at a Historic Low
Polling by a variety of pollsters shows approval of the Supreme Court is at an all-time low. For example, the court’s Gallup poll approval rating was 39% in 2025–the lowest in Gallup’s years of polling on the question. The Economist in 2025 had the court’s approval rating even lower at 35%.
This cannot be attributed simply to political party divisions. The Supreme Court has for decades been dominated by justices appointed by Republican presidents. Since 1910 there have been 11 chief justices. Nine of those were appointed by Republican presidents. Appointed for life, Republican appointed chief justices since 1910 have served for a total of a little over 100 years—Democratic appointed chief justices in turn have served for about 12. Since 1970, that is for more than half a century, the Supreme Court has continuously consisted of a majority of Republican appointed justices. Yet, despite this one-sided dominance, the Supreme Court received for several years favorable poll ratings and was afforded respect, sometimes even reverence, by the public. This has drastically changed.
The Supreme Court’s Declining Public Image is Due to Itself but also to Political Changes in the Supreme Court Justice Nomination Process
This erosion of public confidence in the Supreme Court was a long time in coming. A starting point is the Supreme Court’s 5 to 4 decision in Bush v. Gore –with the majority consisting solely of Republican appointed justices—that guaranteed Republican candidate Bush would become president. Republican appointed Justice Stevens in his dissent said the decision “can only lend credence to the most cynical appraisal of judges throughout the land.” Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who was in the majority, years later publicly declared the court’s decision was in retrospect probably a regrettable mistake that “stirred up the public” and “gave the court less than a perfect reputation.” Read more »
Walk through the architecture of memory which spaces are rooms of moments that define the layout of now. …………………………………… —Roshi Bob
The Architecture of Memory
every room has its story— the back of the house is darkest but light floods the porch where we sit after a long day rising now and then from its steps, momentarily leaving our drinks to wander back through old doors and rummage among the stuff we’ve stacked against walls and under beds reaching for the odd object we’d just nudged with a recollection as we moseyed through conversation, as if a salvaged thought were a lamp which, being disturbed, clicks on automatically, becomes a sun in a dimming universe or lightning strike in a new storm, either way a big brilliant thing massive as the posts & beams of a venerable house —the bellied bones of time upholding the spirit of the place ‘
by Jim Culleny 8/8/12, Edit:1/18/26
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Here’s your chance to say what you want to the large number of highly educated readers that make up 3QD’s international audience. Several of our regular columnists have had to cut back or even completely quit their columns for 3QD because of other personal and professional commitments and so we are looking for a few new voices. We do not pay, but it is a good chance to draw attention to subjects you are interested in, and to get feedback from us and from our readers.
We would certainly love for our pool of writers to reflect the diversity of our readers in every way, including gender, age, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, etc., and we encourage people of all kinds to apply. And we like unusual voices and varied viewpoints. So please send us something. What have you got to lose? Click on “Read more »” below…
For about six years now, since a cancer diagnosis put what really matters in life in perspective, I have finally made peace with myself and especially my body. I have accepted my directness in most situations, even though shyness and false innocence were valued in my adolescence, in the culture where I grew up. I have embraced being told that “I tell it as it is,” and learned to look away at the judgment that comes with that description: basically, not being savvy enough to enrobe the truth in a softer garment. Dancing around real issues and pretending the elephants are not lined up to enter the room has never been my strength, yet I also value the ability to soften blows when needed.
My body, unlike my mind, has had a different trajectory in this journey. From being looked at and leered at, to being touched and loved, to being sexualized, to being criticized, I finally began to recognize who I was, outside of my body. I took the reins I had given away freely to others and called her my own, reclaiming her and making her my friend and confidante instead of the burden she had become. I wrote a list of things I felt I had to apologize for, and every time my body felt unloved for whatever reason, either by me or by others, I went back to my list and comforted her.
Dear body,
I apologize for feeding you when you weren’t hungry for food, but wanted love and acceptance. Food and alcohol sometimes took the pain of loneliness away, especially during the long years of being the only parent in attendance at my youngest’s choir performance or at his soccer games. Food comforted my child and me as we navigated those years together. I created a pseudo family with some people, but I didn’t always feel connected to them, yet I thought it was better than not having anyone.
I apologize for putting cigarette smoke in your face and lungs when you were younger and wanted to flirt, but was insecure. Smoking was a cover-all for stalling a difficult situation, ready to leave a risky place, and sometimes needing extra time to plan my exit. I smoked so much at an outdoor party one evening that the inside of my mouth hurt, yet I didn’t have the courage to say that I didn’t belong there. Trying hard to blend in and fit in, when all I needed was a familiar and kind person to hold my hand and lead me away. Read more »
One day you spot the young enchanter you’ve had a crush on for months, but haven’t yet found the gumption to speak to. Still, you’re affected in ways you’ve heard about forever. You know – maybe you feel your heart beat faster? Maybe you think it skips a beat or three? You know the feeling, no doubt. But is your heart actually beating faster, or skipping beats?
I’m no expert on such hypotheticals. But I will suggest here that if you had a choice, you might be better off with skipping, rather than faster beats. Because there’s a sense in which if your heart beats more quickly, your life shortens. Having said that, I also don’t want you to worry too much about the possibility. We’re not exactly talking about years, or months, or even days, shorter. We’re talking … well, I don’t know. But there is a point here, and I’ll return after a short digression.
Now you may have noticed that you, the human that you are, live somewhat longer than your pet budgerigar who is, I’m guessing, smaller than you. You live a whole lot longer than the pesky mosquito that buzzes in your ear at night – and that’s even if its existence doesn’t suddenly end between your palms. And what of your pet giant tortoise who is, I’m guessing, larger than you? He lives somewhat longer than you.
Noticing patterns like this – for it is a pattern – makes mathematicians (well, other scientists too) say “By Toutatis! We have a correlation!” (Words to that effect.) In this case, a correlation between body mass and life expectancy: the heavier an animal, the longer it lives. For example, you, about 1000 times heavier than your budgie, will live about 5.5 times longer than she does. Your tortoise, about five times heavier than you, will live two or three times longer than you.
In fact, a scientist in Switzerland called Max Kleiber found a double-edged correlation lurking here. Heavier animals don’t just live longer, their hearts beat slower too. Your pulse rate is at least twice as speedy as the tortoise’s, but 5.5 times slower than the budgie’s. (Why 5.5? That’s both interesting and contentious, but of that, another time).
Still from the 1998 Japanese supernatural psychological horror film Ringu directed by Hideo Nakata and written by Hiroshi Takahashi, based on the 1991 novel by Koji Suzuki.
Japanese horror rarely treats space as neutral background. Rooms, corridors, and thresholds do not simply contain events; they remember them. In many films, especially those that extend the legacy of kaidan jidaigeki into the present, architectural space functions as a kind of soft archive—absorbing gestures, voices, and injuries, then releasing them slowly back into the frame. Terror is not what enters the house; it is what the house has learned to hold.
This begins with an older grammar of place. In Edo-period ghost tales, the home is not a private refuge but a node in a dense network of obligation. Walls are thin, doors slide, and status is legible in the arrangement of rooms. Violence and humiliation unfold in spaces that never fully close. When a servant is beaten in a back corridor or a wife is cast out into a side yard, the architecture witnesses the act. Later, when a ghost reappears in that same corridor or at that same threshold, she is less an intruder than the room’s own memory made visible.
What distinguishes Japanese horror from many Western haunted-house narratives is this refusal to separate space from social structure. The cursed location is not evil in itself; it is overdetermined. A stairway is oppressive because it has channeled generations of unequal encounters up and down its steps. A tatami room feels haunted because it has seen too much bargaining, too many apologies offered in place of real repair. The supernatural does not burst through the floorboards; it condenses out of an atmosphere already thick with unspoken history. Read more »
a prickly pine’s upon one nub,
Dear Reader,
Allan Rohan Crite. Sometimes I’m Up, Sometimes I’m Down. Illustration for Three Spirituals from Earth to Heaven (Cambridge, Mass., 1948),” 1937. 
Dear Reader,
