Culture

#RaifBadawi Remains a Prisoner

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

For the eighth week in a row, Saudi writer, blogger, and activist Raif Badawi was not publicly flogged fifty times today for insulting his home country’s state religion. His official Twitter account broke the news as soon as it was confirmed:

No one is breathing a sigh of relief that this counts as sparing him, or that he is about to be freed. The 31-year-old husband and father has now spent 1000 days and two weeks in jail with little to no contact with the outside world. According to news reports, there was no reason given by Saudi officials for the delay.

Worse, his family is reporting that Raif may be about to face a re-trial on the charge of apostasy (renouncing one’s religion). If found guilty, he is to be publicly executed. Beheaded. He has been found innocent of this charge in the past, which is how and why weekly updates about his punishment for insulting his religion can even be written. Elham Manea, a passionate writer about human rights abuses, released a statement on behalf of his family:

Amnesty International’s press office also reported today that it has been denied access to Raif Badawi:

Read More

‘Despair has no wings …’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

To be is to despair and to despair is to remember the thousand tightly missed connections and not-yet completed conversations that will reveal themselves eventually as never really begun. The Surrealists got despair, perhaps better than most. They adopted Existentialism’s finer frustrations and rendered them with comedy, joy, and horror in sometimes strange proportions.

The comedy of coincidence and the tragedy of imminent abandonment dominate their work. Everyone is always alone, and this fact is simultaneously hilarious and horrifying in Surrealist Art.

André Breton, the founder of the movement, defined Surrealism as larger than a philosophy, deeper than mere art, an example of pure reason. His definition was both narrow and enormous, and it left his fellow writers, thinkers, and artists with the notion that they either were or were not Surrealists, whether they thought they were or not. If you said you were, you probably were not. The Surrealists did not reside in a safe and amusing world interrupted by slightly sad moments and then dinner; they lived fully in a horrifying and hilarious existence that demanded full attention, especially to one’s unconscious.
Read More

Henry Beston’s Cape Cod in Winter

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The photo above was taken at Nauset Beach on Cape Cod on a December afternoon in 2010; the white glaze covering the footprints is ice and snow, and the Atlantic has ice in it—some of the white caps were frozen, and the waves merely swelled them, shifted them.

Henry Beston wrote perhaps the best physical description of Cape Cod in the opening lines to his classic book “The Outermost House“: “East and ahead of the coast of North America, some thirty miles and more from the inner shores of Massachusetts, there stands in the open Atlantic the last fragment of an ancient and vanished land. For twenty miles this last and outer earth faces the ever hostile ocean in the form of a great eroded cliff of earth and clay, the undulations and levels of whose rim now stand a hundred, now a hundred and fifty feet above the tides. Worn by the breakers and the rains, and disintegrated by the wind, it still stands bold.” He depicts a heroic shoreline, a land that declares its own terms of surrender against a hostile, battering sea. Given that from the air Cape Cod resembles a single raised fist jutting into the sea, a heroic, Byronesque, cliff face is only appropriate.
Read More