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It only takes a glance to see where the Lightbone floor lamp got its monicker – the connection point between the spherical glass globes and the wooden sections. Inspired by a bamboo forest on a trip to Japan and designed by FÄRG & BLANCHE for Oblure, Lightbone was originally exhibited during Milan Design Week 2017 as part of the “Armour Mon Amour” exhibition. At that point of the conceptual phase, the floor lamp was textile and measured up to three meters tall! In the following years it’s continued to evolve into the product you see here.
“We are really happy that we were able to develop this version of the Lightbone together with Oblure,” said the designers, Fredrik Färg and Emma Marga Blanche. “This time in solid Oak and all made in Sweden.”
The floor lamp can easily be used next to a sofa, but also looks amazing in a group or two or three. Multiples begin to resemble a small forest or act to divide spaces in hospitality projects.
Lighbone is available in natural Oak with a Black stain, Smoked Oak, and Cobalt Blue. It’s also available in custom colors on request.
Black Oak
Cobalt Blue Oak
Natural Oak
Smoked Oak
To lean more about LIGHTBONE floor lamp, visit oblure.com.
Austin, Texas-based URBS Studio is joining us for July’s Designer Desktop with a background that’s cool-tempered but energizing. Through her interdisciplinary design studio, Alyson Beaton explores the urban culture that surrounds her. The details and detritus observed all contribute to the whole of the studio’s work: grids, grit, signs, symbols, rhythm, scribbles, weeds, chaos, order, and more. URBS translates these visual tales of urban renewal and environmental sustainability through spaces, textile collections, children’s products, and more. The man-made environments that are part of our everyday lives are constantly evolving in different ways, and most of it’s nothing you or I have control over. But we’ll never tire of seeing creativity rise from the most unexpected of places.
For this month’s Desktop, Beaton shares her Glimmer design inspired by “The glimmer of light that reflects off the glassy buildings when the sun hits just right.” The trippy design is paired with the quote, “While you are looking, you might as well listen, linger, and think about what you see,” from Jane Jacobs.
Download yours with the links below!
Town Square Text
Whichway Cover
Metropolis
Flaneur Cushion
Facade
Glimmer
Alyson Beaton, URBS Studio
DESKTOP: 1024×768 \\\ 1280×1024 \\\ 1680×1050 \\\ 1900×1200 \\\ 2560×1440
MOBILE: iPhone XS \\\ iPhone XS Max \\\ iPad Pro
Learn more about URBS Studio here and follow along on IG here.
View and download past Designer Desktops here.
Kevin Bacon singing songs to his goats is one of my favorite things on the internet. He started the series, which he calls "Goat Songs," at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 when he was spending a lot of time at his Connecticut farm–where he cares for goats, alpacas, and other animals. — Read the rest
In a conclusion to one of the most consequential Supreme Court sessions in many years, the Court released an opinion today on the Biden administration’s proposed plan to forgive up to $20,000 in federal student loan debt per borrower. After dismissing one case due to lack of standing from the plaintiffs, the Court voted 6-3 to block forgiveness in the second case (giving standing based on the servicer MOHELA).
This decision will have major implications for higher education policy. Here are the things that I will be looking for in the coming months and years:
Restarting student loan repayment was already going to be a nightmare, and this creates additional challenges. The first challenge is the sheer number of borrowers re-entering repayment. Roughly 43 million Americans have federal student debt, and the Biden administration estimated that about 20 million would have their loans completely forgiven by their proposal. I have little confidence that the Department of Education, student loan servicers, and colleges can smoothly handle 23 million borrowers that would have remained, let alone 43 million. Federal Student Aid badly needed additional resources to manage a return to repayment, but Republicans were only willing to provide the funds if it came with a rider blocking its use on debt relief. Since both parties agreed on no riders in last year’s omnibus spending bill, no additional funding was provided.
In an overlooked item due to yesterday’s important decision on college admissions, the Department of Education released information about how they plan to manage the return to repayment. ED plans to give a 90-day grace period for missed payments and is considering future grace periods. Needless to say, Republicans are not happy and may go to court to stop grace periods based on the agreement in this summer’s debt ceiling legislation.
How many borrowers are willing to start making payments? There is going to be a group of people who are livid about having to resume payments after not getting the loan forgiveness they were expecting. I am expecting a substantial group of borrowers to not make any payments until they get to the brink of default—which could take a while. These borrowers may still hold out hope for another forgiveness effort (more on that in the next section) and they may not proactively reach out to servicers to update their information if they have moved since March 2020. A particularly interesting group is the 20 million students who would have received complete forgiveness, as the frustration factor is likely higher among this group than among students who knew they would still have a balance remaining under this plan.
As a note, with income-driven repayment, students at least in theory should be able to start making some payments. But adding an expense back to the monthly budget is painful and income-driven repayment is still complicated to navigate. So there will be challenges even among people who are not as upset about this decision.
How will Democrats respond? The progressive wing of the Democratic Party has been pressuring the Biden administration to forgive all student debt and immediately pivot to using the Higher Education Act instead of the HEROES Act. That is likely not happening given today’s court decision. But a few moderate Democrats voted in favor of a Republican-led resolution disapproving of debt forgiveness and ending the repayment pause. The Biden administration will point to its expanded income-driven repayment plan, which could also face legal challenges in light of this decision. Free college and debt forgiveness were key issues in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, and they will continue to be key issues in contested Democratic primaries for the next several years.
How will Republicans respond? By the time you read this, there will be plenty of press releases from Republican politicians celebrating the discussion. But there are still concerns about a future administration trying another avenue to forgiveness, particularly through income-driven repayment. There are some thoughtful efforts among Republicans to maintain income-driven repayment while reversing most of the Biden administration’s proposed changes. But Republicans are also seeking to limit borrowing for graduate students, which is something that I have been expecting for years.
This week’s Supreme Court decisions are likely to influence the direction of American higher education for years to come, and some of the influences are not going to be immediately obvious. But the items discussed above are going to play an outsized role in policy discussions for a good while.
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Pessoa in 1934. From Os Objectos de Fernando Pessoa | Fernando Pessoa’s Objects by Jerónimo Pizarro, Patricio Ferrari, and Antonio Cardiello. Courtesy of the Casa Fernando Pessoa and Dom Quixote.
On July 11, 1903, a long narrative poem called “The Miner’s Song” by Karl P. Effield appeared in the Natal Mercury, a weekly newspaper in Durban, South Africa. Effield—who claimed to be from Boston—was actually none other than the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, then a high school student in Durban. This was the first of Pessoa’s English-language fictitious authors to appear in print—the beginning of Pessoa’s unusual mode of self-othering. The adoption of different personae allowed him to go beyond a nom de plume, and take on unpopular, controversial, and even extreme points of view in both his poetry and prose.
While in South Africa, where Pessoa lived between 1896 and 1905, he sent another work to the Natal Mercury under the name of Charles Robert Anon, attempting without success to publish three political sonnets about the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. Pessoa’s early fictitious authors wrote in English, French, and Portuguese—the three languages he continued to use until he died, at age forty-seven. These first invented writers, which he would go on to call “heteronyms,” composed loose texts mostly in the form of first drafts; but others, like Bernardo Soares (whom Pessoa created around 1920) or the major heteronyms (Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis in 1914), produced a very solid body of work. By the time Pessoa was twenty-six years old, he had already invented a hundred literary personae.
Alberto Caeiro was the central fictitious figure of Pessoa’s literary universe. Born in Lisbon on April 16, 1889, Caeiro died of tuberculosis in 1915. Pessoa said that Caeiro poetically arrived in his life on March 8, 1914—which in a famous letter to the Portuguese literary critic Adolfo Casais Monteiro he described as a “triumphal day.” The poet and novelist Mário de Sá-Carneiro was one of Pessoa’s closest friends in Lisbon, and Caeiro (perhaps a pun on Sá-Carneiro’s name) seems to have come into being as a joke: “I thought I would play a trick on Sá-Carneiro and invent a bucolic poet of a rather complicated kind,” wrote Pessoa in the same letter. Caeiro’s “death” seems to have been influenced, in retrospect, by Sá-Carneiro’s suicide in Paris on April 26, 1916. As Pessoa wrote in the review Athena in 1924, “Those whom the gods love die young.” By that time, he had produced the body of poems for which Caeiro would be remembered—The Keeper of Sheep.
Courtesy of Tinta da china.
Then there was Álvaro de Campos, the most prolific and eccentric of Pessoa’s heteronyms. In the aforementioned letter to the critic, we find the most complete description of him: “Campos was born in Tavira, on October 15, 1890…. He is a naval engineer (by way of Glasgow)…, tall (5 feet, 74 inches—almost one more inch taller than me), thin and a bit prone to crouching…. [He is] between white and dark, vaguely like a Portuguese Jew; [his] hair, however, is smooth and normally pushed to the side, [he wears a] monocle…. He received an average high school education; then he was sent to Scotland to study engineering, first mechanics and then naval.” Álvaro de Campos was a self-indulgent and bisexual dandy who celebrated the modern world with its roaring of machines and the hustle and bustle of city life.
Courtesy of Tinta da china.
Pessoa links Campos to an array of literary influences, “in which Walt Whitman predominates, albeit below Caeiro’s,” and wrote that he had decided Campos to produce “several compositions, generally scandalous and irritating in nature, especially for Fernando Pessoa, who, in any case, produces and publishes them, however much he disagrees with such texts.” Undoubtedly Campos was Pessoa’s most sardonic and fierce of the heteronymic voice, sharing biographical facts with Nietzsche (also born on October 15) and affinities with Blake (“Like Blake, I want the close companionship of angels”)
The literary works of Campos may be split into three phases: the decadent (dandy) phase, the futuristic phase, and the pessimistic (existentialist) phase. Campos shows mixed affinities with Whitman and the Italian futurist F. T. Marinetti, mainly in the second phase: poems like “Triumphal Ode,” “Maritime Ode,” and “Ultimatum” praise the power of rising technology, the strength of machines, the dark side of industrial civilization, and an enigmatic love for machineries. In the last phase, Pessoa qua Campos reveals the emptiness and nostalgia that may come in the winter of one’s life. This was when he wrote poems such as “Lisbon Revisited” and “Tobacconist’s Shop,” the long, nihilistic poem of defeat written in 1928 and published five years later in the review presença. Considered one of the monuments of modernist poetry, it opens thus:
I’m nothing.
I’ll always be nothing.
I can’t even hope to be nothing.
That said, I have inside me all the dreams of the world.
Although Campos wrote poetry and prose in Portuguese, he also used English and French in some of his lines and titles. Among his most noteworthy prose writings we find “Notes in Memory of My Master Caeiro,” published in the Presença journal in 1931. In these notes, Campos offers an elucidating description of himself:
I am exasperatingly sensitive and exasperatingly intelligent. In this respect (apart from a smidgeon more sensibility and a smidgeon less intelligence) I resemble Fernando Pessoa; however, while in Fernando, sensibility and intelligence interpenetrate, merge and intersect, in me, they exist in parallel or, rather, they overlap. They are not spouses, they are estranged twins.
In the same letter to Casais Monteiro from 1935, Pessoa provides a detailed description of Ricardo Reis, his third major heteronym—defining him as a doctor from Porto, born in 1887, educated in a Jesuit college, and living in Brazil since 1919, out of fidelity to his monarchical ideals. Pessoa also adds to this portrait that Reis learned Latin through someone else’s education—probably with the Jesuits—and Greek by himself. These details serve to humanize the classicist Reis, the serious, measured, and semi-indolent Reis, who should embody a neoclassical theory opposed to “modern romanticism” and “neoclassicism in the manner of [Charles] Maurras.” Reis wrote epigrams and elegies, in addition to odes, and his poetry is largely characterized by the use of specific meters (especially the regular use of decasyllabic verses alternating, or not, with hexasyllables). Pessoa-cum-Reis wrote a substantial body of poetry and prose. Among the latter we find texts on paganism as well as the oft-cited essay “Milton Is Greater Than Shakespeare.” In his prose Reis makes a vehement claim to Hellenism and issues a firm condemnation of Christianity. He criticizes Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Oscar Wilde, among others—a kind of predecessor to contemporary neo-pagan aesthetes and theorists who are not entirely freed from Christian sentimentality.
Courtesy of Tinta da china.
***
Fernando Pessoa’s modernist epic is the result of a radical displacement of the subject, which he described as a “drama in people”—made up of the poetic trio and his other aliases who Pessoa gradually crafted between languages, a vast collection of books, and Lisbon—the beloved city of his birth.
Following the publication of The Book of Disquiet in 2017, I met with the New Directions vice president and senior editor Declan Spring in New York City suggesting that we bring out Pessoa’s major heteronyms in the same order that Pessoa himself had birthed them. Thus, we started with Alberto Caeiro, master of the coterie. While The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro came out in the summer of 2020, The Complete Works of Álvaro de Campos is forthcoming on July 4, 2023. These three Pessoa books—all including some facsimiles from the Pessoa papers held at the National Library of Portugal—will be followed by The Complete Works of Ricardo Reis.
In translating Pessoa’s heteronyms, one thing we see clearly is the influence of reading on Pessoa’s plural and inquiring mind. I have no doubt that reading more than writing was his primary and long-lasting literary occupation. His marginalia are of great interest; so are his many influences. This is to say that the more we know about what Pessoa read and when, the better equipped we are as translators of his works—especially to see more clearly his poetical diction, meters, and rhythms at the core of each heteronymic voice.
Courtesy of tinta da china.
On November 29, 1935, while lying in bed at the Hôpital Saint Louis des Français, Fernando Pessoa wrote his last words: “I know not what to-morrow will bring.” In the translation of an epigram by Palladas of Alexandria, published in the first volume of the Greek Anthology and still in his private library, we read the following pencil-marked closing line: “To-day let me live well; none knows what may be to-morrow.” Whether this depicts the consummation of a life consecrated to literature or the memory of Pessoa, it reconfirms the fact that Pessoa’s writings emerged from an intense contact with a vast array of books. His work has reconfigured literature, including the way we look at literature. May our century be one for such multitudinous Pessoa.
The Complete Works of Álvaro de Campos by Fernando Pessoa, edited and introduced by Jerónimo Pizarro and Antonio Cardiello, and translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari, will be published by New Directions in July. Ferrari has translated Fernando Pessoa, Alejandra Pizarnik, and António Osório, among others. He is a polyglot poet, translator, and editor, resides in New York City, and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. Ferrari is currently working on “Elsehere,” a multilingual trilogy.
Poetry and prose quoted from The Complete Works of Álvaro de Campos (2023) and The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro (2020) by Fernando Pessoa. Used with permission of New Directions Publishing.
Over the past couple of months I’ve been spending a lot of time with Joan Didion. In addition to re-reading her collected nonfiction, I made my way through Tracy Daugherty’s Read more
The post A Material World first appeared on Society for US Intellectual History.
Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, has threatened to reconsider his state’s relationship with the College Board.
The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) is celebrating its 10-year anniversary, a great opportunity to reflect on how far we have come with open infrastructures for the distribution and discoverability of open access books (monographs, edited collections, and other long-form publications).
The post Guest Post — Towards Global Equity for Open Access Books appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
The debt ceiling legislation would end the pause on student loan payments on Aug. 30 at the latest.
I’ve been a little quiet here lately as this very difficult semester comes to a close. It was healing yesterday to spend some time with Dr. Fauci before our MSU doctoral convocation.
In his address he drew on lessons from the pandemic and encouraged graduates to expect the unexpected, to engage meaningfully with science, whatever their discipline may be, to resist the normalization of untruth, and, importantly, to find and prioritize joy in their lives.
This last resonated deeply with me – it reminded me of a passage from Robin Kimmerer’s book, Braiding Sweetgrass:
“We are showered everyday with gifts, but they are not meant for us to keep. Their life is in their movement, the inhale and exhale of our shared breath. Our work and our joy is to pass along the gifts and to trust that what we put out into the universe will always come back.”1
This is such a beautiful expression of the faith that animates a life committed to education. And it has been a gift to be reminded of it as this semester comes to a close.
Guest post by Sabine Carey, Marcela Ibáñez, and Eline Drury Løvlien
On April 10, 1998, various political parties in Northern Ireland, Great Britain, and the Republic of Ireland signed a peace deal ending decades of violent conflict. Twenty-five years later, the Good Friday Agreement remains an example of complex but successful peace negotiations that ended the conflict era known as The Troubles.
Since the agreement, Northern Ireland has experienced a sharp decline in violence. But sectarian divisions continue as a constant feature in everyday life. Peace walls remain in many cities, separating predominantly Catholic nationalists from predominantly Protestant unionist and loyalist neighborhoods. Brexit and the Northern Ireland protocol increased tensions between the previously warring communities, leading to an upsurge in sectarian violence, which has been a great cause of concern.
In March 2022, we conducted an online survey to understand attitudes toward sectarianism among Northern Ireland’s adult population. Our results show that sectarianism continues to impact perceptions and attitudes in Northern Ireland. The continued presence of paramilitaries is still a divisive issue that follows not just sectarian lines but also has a strong gender component.
Our findings show that the pattern of who identifies as Unionist or Nationalist closely resembles the patterns of who reports having a Protestant or Catholic background. Unionists prefer a closer political union with Great Britain and are predominantly Protestant, Nationalists are overwhelmingly Catholic and are in favor of joining the Republic of Ireland.
Catholic and Nationalist identities appear to have a greater salience for the post-agreement generations than for older generations who lived through the Troubles. For Protestant and Unionist respondents, the opposite is the case, as religious background and community affiliation have a higher salience among older groups, particularly among men. Among the adults we surveyed, for men the modal age of those identifying as Unionists is 58 years, for women it is 46.
When asked about the greatest problem facing Northern Ireland today, sectarianism still features strongly among both communities. Today, the fault lines of the conflict seem to resonate more with those from a Catholic background than with those from a Protestant background. While Protestants were predominantly concerned with poverty and crime, among Catholics sectarianism emerged most often as the greatest concern. Just over 50 percent of Catholic respondents mentioned an aspect relating to the Troubles (sectarianism or paramilitaries) as the greatest problem today, compared to only 39 percent of Protestant respondents. Most Protestant respondents selected Brexit and the Northern Ireland Protocol as the greatest problem, reflecting concerns of the Protestant community discussed in a Political Violence At A Glance post from 2021.
To what extent does economic status drive concerns? Those who see themselves as belonging to a lower-income group were more likely to identify poverty and unemployment as the greatest problem. Concerns about sectarianism and (former) paramilitary groups appeared most prevalent among those who placed themselves in the high-income group.
The continued presence of Loyalist and Republican paramilitaries is a noticeable feature in post-conflict Northern Ireland. While they are predominantly associated with violence and crime, some view them as a source of security and stability. While our findings show that concerns about paramilitaries were more prevalent among high-income earners, the perception of paramilitaries has a significant gender component. Nearly 50 percent of male Catholic respondents attributed a controlling influence to paramilitaries in their area. And while most of them saw these groups as a source of fear and intimidation, 32 percent agreed that the paramilitaries kept their local area safe. But only 5 percent of female Catholic respondents felt similarly. This difference is not as stark between female and male Protestant respondents. Both groups were substantially less likely than male Catholics to consider paramilitary groups as a source of safety.
Different perceptions of armed groups by gender are not unique to Northern Ireland. A 2014 study on Colombia found significant differences between female and male perceptions of post-conflict politics and participation. Although there were no substantial gender differences in the overall support for the peace process in Colombia, female respondents reported higher levels of distrust and skepticism toward demobilization, forgiveness, and reconciliation and higher disapproval of the political participation of former FARC members. The effect was even greater for mothers and women victimized during the conflict.
Violent attacks have dampened the anniversary celebration of the peace agreement and 25 years of relative stability. The recent injury of a police detective by an IRA splinter group, reports of paramilitary-style attacks and the use of petrol bombs against the police, coupled with turf battles between Ulster factions are continuous reminders of the presence and power that paramilitary organizations still hold across Northern Ireland. Even today, communities are kept under siege through violence and ransom. The formal termination of violent conflicts through peace agreements, as in the case of the Good Friday Agreement and other prominent examples such as the 2016 Colombian Peace Accord, does not automatically imply the disbandment of armed organizations. The impact of the presence of (former) armed groups in people’s daily lives continues to be high in most post-conflict contexts.
Findings from surveys in other post-conflict environments mirror this long shadow of war. A study of Croat and Serbian youths showed the continued impact of the Yugoslav Wars on ethnic group identities and how continued communal segregation impacts inter-group ethnic attitudes towards out-groups. A recent study finds that a decade after the civil war in Sri Lanka people from previously warring sides have very different views of peace and security. Respondents who belong to the defeated minority ethnic group, the Tamils, provided a more negative assessment of security and ethnic relations than those from the victorious majority, the Sinhalese. They also reported seeing irregular armed groups in a more protective role rather than a threatening one, when they encountered them, as we show here. And in many post-war countries, it’s the police who threaten peace, as discussed in this post. A study on Liberia found that experiences during the war continued to impact perceptions of the police afterwards. Victims of rebel violence were later more trusting of the police, while victims of state-perpetrated violence were not.
Much research is rightly concerned about how to avoid the conflict trap. Yet even countries that avoid falling back into full-scale civil war oftentimes do not offer adequate security and peace for all groups of their civilian population. Continued vigilance of unequal experiences and perceptions of security are necessary to work towards meaningful and lasting peace.
Sabine C. Carey is Professor of Political Science at University of Mannheim. Marcela Ibáñez is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Chair of Political Economy and Development at the University of Zurich. Eline Drury Løvlien is Associate Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Department of Teacher Education.
This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) via the Collaborative Research Center 884 “Political Economy of Reforms” at the University of Mannheim.
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