When Lit Blew Into Bits

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It seems significant, somehow, that Infinite Jest—the big buzzy signature meganovel of the nineties—was set at the end of the aughts. Most of the book’s action appears to take place in 2009, which means that we’ve all just survived the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment. It also means that David Foster Wallace’s prophetic window has now (at least in the most literal sense) closed forever, in the same way Orwell’s did when we reached the actual 1984. And in fact Infinite Jest’s vision of the future does, these days, look slightly dated. One of the book’s nightmare scenarios is the existence of an entertainment so addictive that people watch it until they die—a film they access via a machine Wallace calls a “teleputer,” which turns out to be some kind of ungodly hybrid of HDTV, computer, telephone, and VCR; it crunches data on “3.6-MB diskettes” and plays films off actual physical cartridges. All of which carbon-dates the novel’s creation precisely back to the early-to-mid-nineties (it was published in 1996)—before the rise of iPhones or even DVDs, when the Internet was just beginning to percolate on our dial-up modems. (In mid-1993, there were only 130 websites, and most people didn’t even have a browser to visit them.) The DFW generation’s primary technological bugaboo was TV, a rival narrative engine that both attracted and repelled. (See Wallace’s classic essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” in which he calls TV “both medicine and poison.”) Novelists in the aughts, however, had to contend with a very different bugaboo. The technology that infinitely distracted us this decade, sometimes even to the point of death—the entertainment that tore us away from work and family and prevented us from immersing ourselves in complex meganovels from the noble old-timey decades of yore—was not a passive, cartridge-based viewing experience but largely a new form of reading: the massive archive of linked documents known as the World Wide Web. TV, in comparison, looks like a fairly simple adversary: Its flickering images lure readers away from books altogether. The Internet, on the other hand, invades literature on its home turf. It has created, in the last ten years, all kinds of new and potent rival genres of reading—the blog, the chat, the tweet, the comment thread—genres that seem not only to siphon our attention but to change the way our brains process text.

more from Sam Anderson at New York Magazine here.

Wednesday Poem

Lies

Lying to the young is wrong.
Proving to them that lies are true is wrong.
Telling them that God’s in his heaven
and all’s well with the world is wrong.
They know what you mean.
They are people.
Tell them difficulties can’t be counted,
and let them see not only what will be
but see with clarity these present times.
Say obstacles exist they must encounter,
sorrow comes, hardship happens.
The hell with it. Who never knew
the price of happiness will not be happy.
Forgive no error you recognize,
it will repeat itself, increase,
and afterward our pupils
will not forgive in us
what we forgave.

by Yevgeny Yevtushenko

from Yevtushenko; Collected Poems,
Penguin Books, 1952
translation Robin Milner-Gulland and Peter Levi

More Than Just a Bad Dream–A Nightmare’s Impact on the Waking Brain

From Scientific American:

Nightmares You awake with a pounding heart and clammy hands. Relax, you think to yourself—it was just a bad dream. But are nightmares truly benign? Psychologists aren’t so sure. Although some continue to believe nightmares reduce psychological tensions by letting the brain act out its fears, recent research suggests that nocturnal torments are more likely to increase anxiety in waking life.

In one study Australian researchers asked 624 high school students about their lives and nightmares during the past year and assessed their stress levels. It is well known that stressful experiences cause nightmares, but if night­mares serve to diffuse that tension, troubled sleepers should have an easier time coping with emotional ordeals. The study, published in the journal Dreaming, did not bear out that hypothesis: not only did nightmares not stave off anxiety, but people who reported being distressed about their dreams were even more likely to suffer from general anxiety than those who experienced an upsetting event such as the divorce of their parents.

More here.

In Search of the World’s Hardest Language

HardestLang In the Economist:

A CERTAIN genre of books about English extols the language’s supposed difficulty and idiosyncrasy. “Crazy English”, by an American folk-linguist, Richard Lederer, asks “how is it that your nose can run and your feet can smell?”. Bill Bryson’s “Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way” says that “English is full of booby traps for the unwary foreigner…Imagine being a foreigner and having to learn that in English one tells a lie but the truth.”

Such books are usually harmless, if slightly fact-challenged. You tell “a” lie but “the” truth in many languages, partly because many lies exist but truth is rather more definite. It may be natural to think that your own tongue is complex and mysterious. But English is pretty simple: verbs hardly conjugate; nouns pluralise easily (just add “s”, mostly) and there are no genders to remember.

English-speakers appreciate this when they try to learn other languages. A Spanish verb has six present-tense forms, and six each in the preterite, imperfect, future, conditional, subjunctive and two different past subjunctives, for a total of 48 forms. German has three genders, seemingly so random that Mark Twain wondered why “a young lady has no sex, but a turnip has”. (Mädchen is neuter, whereas Steckrübe is feminine.)

English spelling may be the most idiosyncratic, although French gives it a run for the money with 13 ways to spell the sound “o”: o, ot, ots, os, ocs, au, aux, aud, auds, eau, eaux, ho and ö. “Ghoti,” as wordsmiths have noted, could be pronounced “fish”: gh as in “cough”, o as in “women” and ti as in “motion”. But spelling is ancillary to a language’s real complexity; English is a relatively simple language, absurdly spelled.

Desperately Seeking Sam

Boylan_34.6_beckett Roger Boylan in Boston Review:

I could not have gone through the awful wretched mess of life without having left a stain upon the silence. –Samuel Beckett

The first and last time I saw Samuel Beckett, he was walking down a Paris street, the Rue Rémy Dumoncel. At least, I think it was Beckett. The height was right; the near-skeletal thinness was right; the location was right—near the nursing home where he died not long after. I think he was wearing a hat and coat, but I can’t be sure. It was twenty years ago.

Seen always from behind whithersoever he went. Same hat and coat as of old when he walked the roads. –Beckett, Stirrings Still

But I never got close enough to be certain. I was across the street, behind a row of parked cars, admiring, if memory serves, a silver Porsche. Unusually for July in Paris, it was a gray, drizzly day, what Parisians call “la grisaille,” and it was a bit misty, as if in November. Despite all that, I could easily have crossed over and asked my suspect if he was, in fact, the One True Sam. But I didn’t. I funked it. He disappeared. Six months later he was dead. And I had wanted to meet him for years.

I first learned of his work from Mr. Achkar, my French teacher in high school in Geneva, who was most enthusiastic about Oh les Beaux Jours (Happy Days), of which he’d seen the Paris premiere in 1961.

“What a play!” he enthused.

A woman sinks slowly into the earth while reciting the inanities of her everyday life … c’est magnifique! Does anyone understand as well as Beckett does the banality of tragedy and the tragedy of banality? This woman, she could be my wife: the eternal optimist despite all the evidence. Non, mais non, c’est magnifique.

There were the other plays, notably Waiting for Godot, that incomparable hymn to the vital nothingness of life (the play in which, in the words of the Irish critic Vivian Mercier, “nothing happens, twice”); Krapp’s Last Tape, Beckett’s melancholy homage to memory and failure; Rockaby, the tender death-lullaby; and the great Fin de Partie (Endgame), Mr. Achkar’s favorite—and mine.

If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans

Aquinas

PLANNING IS SOMETHING that people learned from God. The lesson might be said to have begun with the prescriptions God laid out for His earthly habitation among the Israelites: the Tabernacle that housed Him in the desert, and then the Temple that was His residence in Jerusalem. The dimensions of these structures were dictated by a divine blueprint. The Temple gave birth to a city, and from it emerged a civilization. We are descendants of this tradition, irrespective of such trivialities as whether one identifies as a “believer.” Its most obvious inheritors are those who shout of “God’s plan for you” from street corners and write “purpose-driven” books, people for whom the blueprint—and our basic need to follow it—is a raft in the ocean of time. But this tradition also finds resonance in something as ordinary as the practical virtue of prudence: the present’s responsible response to the uncertainties of the future, which Thomas Aquinas considered the highest of the cardinal virtues.

more from Nathan Schneider at Triple Canopy here.

Buy yourself a sequencer and let the games begin!

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There is a recurring aversion on the part of American labels to foreign singers, and it sometimes amounts to a mutual distrust. Kylie Minogue, the tiny Australian who has annexed most of Europe, has had only three hits here. Girls Aloud, the devilishly clever flagship act of the producer Brian Higgins and his Xenomania production team, generally doesn’t release records outside Britain. For many such acts, the American mountain can sometimes appear like too much bother, since even superstars can’t gain purchase. But given the retro-eighties feel and Euro-friendly nature of the year’s biggest female star, Lady Gaga, why not admit an actual European, who is even more fond of the eighties, into the game? Anne Lilia Berge Strand, a Berlin-based Norwegian singer-songwriter known as Annie, has no American label behind her. Her second album, “Don’t Stop,” a brash, bright, and easily absorbed pop effort, was completed in 2008 but is only now being released, jointly, by Annie’s Totally Records and an independent label in Norway called Smalltown Supersound. (After working on an earlier version, Annie was dropped by Island in Europe.)

more from Sasha Frere-Jones at The New Yorker here.

A Scientist’s Infectious Enthusiasm

From Science:

Benjamin_tenOever_200x250 In late 2007, during the early months of his faculty position at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, Benjamin tenOever faced a wrinkle in his research plans. Experienced in looking at how cells respond to viruses, he'd set his sights on microRNA and how these small molecular segments that tweak protein expression might help cells fight off infection. After months of work, the project looked like it might be a dead end: They had found that microRNAs are produced as a virus infects a cell, but those sequences didn't make a difference in how a cell responded to its invader.

With the dilemma percolating in the back of his mind, tenOever had a eureka moment while shopping with his wife along Lexington Avenue in Manhattan: “Every cell has a pool of microRNAs, even if they didn't target the viruses,” he explains. So, he wondered, what if he flipped the idea around and engineered viruses that bound to the existing cellular microRNAs? Instead of trying to harness a cell's microRNAs to fight infection, he would be creating tools to tweak the immune response of an altered vaccine. The strategy could provide a stealth way to build attenuated viruses for producing vaccines. Since then, he and his colleagues have modified the sequences of influenza viruses to bind to a natural microRNA expressed in humans and mice, in essence developing a virus that's knocked down by the body's natural microRNA. What's more, the microRNA they chose is not expressed in chickens; therefore, the modified virus reproduces well in chicken eggs, potentially solving a common flu vaccine-production problem. They reported the work in the June issue of Nature Biotechnology.

More here.

Where Did the Time Go? Do Not Ask the Brain

Benedict Carey in The New York Times:

Time That most alarming New Year’s morning question — “Uh-oh, what did I do last night?” — can seem benign compared with those that may come later, like “Uh, what exactly did I do with the last year?” Or, “Hold on — did a decade just go by?” It did. Somewhere between trigonometry and colonoscopy, someone must have hit the fast-forward button. Time may march, or ebb, or sift, or creep, but in early January it feels as if it has bolted like an angry dinner guest, leaving conversations unfinished, relationships still stuck, bad habits unbroken, goals unachieved. “I think for many people, we think about our goals, and if nothing much has happened with those then suddenly it seems like it was just yesterday that we set them,” said Gal Zauberman, an associate professor of marketing at the Wharton School of Business.

Yet the sensation of passing time can be very different, Dr. Zauberman said, “depending on what you think about, and how.” In fact, scientists are not sure how the brain tracks time. One theory holds that it has a cluster of cells specialized to count off intervals of time; another that a wide array of neural processes act as an internal clock. Either way, studies find, this biological pacemaker has a poor grasp of longer intervals. Time does seem to slow to a trickle during an empty afternoon and race when the brain is engrossed in challenging work. Stimulants, including caffeine, tend to make people feel as if time is passing faster; complex jobs, like doing taxes, can seem to drag on longer than they actually do. And emotional events — a breakup, a promotion, a transformative trip abroad — tend to be perceived as more recent than they actually are, by months or even years. In short, some psychologists say, the findings support the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s observation that time “persists merely as a consequence of the events taking place in it.”

More here.

Drone attacks in Pakistan: Challenging some fabrications

Farhat Taj in the Daily Times:

ScreenHunter_01 Jan. 05 09.53 There is a deep abyss between the perceptions of the people of Waziristan, the most drone-hit area and the wider Pakistani society on the other side of the River Indus. For the latter, the US drone attacks on Waziristan are a violation of Pakistani’s sovereignty. Politicians, religious leaders, media analysts and anchorpersons express sensational clamour over the supposed ‘civilian casualties’ in the drone attacks. I have been discussing the issue of drone attacks with hundreds of people of Waziristan. They see the US drone attacks as their liberators from the clutches of the terrorists into which, they say, their state has wilfully thrown them. The purpose of today’s column is, one, to challenge the Pakistani and US media reports about the civilian casualties in the drone attacks and, two, to express the view of the people of Waziristan, who are equally terrified by the Taliban and the intelligence agencies of Pakistan. I personally met these people in the Pakhtunkhwa province, where they live as internally displaced persons (IDPs), and in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).

More here. [Thanks to David Schneider.]

James Cameron’s Avatar

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Morgan Vampire In retrospect, it was fitting that I saw James Cameron's new film Avatar at an IMAX 3-D theater in Las Vegas. Las Vegas is not a place for those with any nostalgia for simpler times. In Vegas, reality is something to be fabricated, played with, and reproduced in as many ridiculous ways as someone is willing to pay for. Robert Venturi, the architect who penned the famous postmodern manifesto Learning from Las Vegas, was never a fan of Minimalism or austerity. In response to Mies van der Rohe's architectural dictum “less is more,” Venturi quipped that “less is a bore.”

Likewise, Cameron has never been a prophet of restraint. From Terminator to Titanic, he likes things big, expensive, messy, and new. It was, thus, fully expected when Cameron told Dana Goodyear of The New Yorker that Avatar is, “the most complicated stuff anyone’s ever done.” Cameron's goal, in short, is to completely revolutionize cinema. He also thinks of cinema as largely a visceral and visual thing. Emotional complexity is not his strong suit. He wants people to see something new, like when they first discovered the moving image.

More here.

Notes from a journey with Barack Obama

By Tolu Ogunlesi

On January 20, 2009, Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th President of the Unites States of America

*

I stayed up all night to watch Barack Obama become the President-elect of the United States of America. At that time I lived in a hotel room in Uppsala, a Swedish University town, far away from home (Lagos). It was hard to feel that the Swedes were in any way excited at the prospects of the sort of momentous change that was about to be unleashed on the world.

Obama Inauguration by Tolu Ogunlesi 1

I recall comparing the apparently unconcerned Uppsala with the Lagos I left behind, a city throbbing with the nervous anticipation of History bearing down on it at top speed (even though nothing like that was happening). Even before I left two months earlier Nigeria had already been overrun by Obamastickers and Obamatalk. There was even an Obama fundraiser that brought in millions of naira; money we later learnt US campaign guidelines prohibited the Obama campaign from accepting. A friend told me that he would be attending a party hosted by the American Embassy in Lagos, where they would keep vigil as the election results came in.

*

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Knifers

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Elatia Harris

The child on the left rests her hand atop the head of the other, working her fingers gently through smooth hair like her own into the scalp. Her expression is inspectorial, proprietary – and openly so. The other gazes out at us – nonplussed, plotting. You know without being told that these two could have but one relation to each other: they are sisters. It is your sister, and only your sister, whom you may handle like this in the expectation she will take you back.

These are the Gainsborough girls, Mary and Margaret, as painted by their father, Thomas, in 1758. The double portraits Thomas Gainsborough left of Mary and Margaret, from early childhood through their late twenties – at which point he died, or surely he would have gone on painting his daughters – are the most penetrating exploration of the theme of two sisters that art has to show us. As well they might be, for it was just once that a great genius of English painting begat two nervous girls close in age, and trained his eye upon them for over a quarter of a century, recording their dominance play, their tremendous naturalness with each other – even when sisters pose, there is no posing – and, their striking individuation in late girlhood.

As they hurtled towards thirty, their father the painter did the only thing he could do – he sat them into single portraits, into superb examinations, like all great portraits, of the separateness, and the fatedness, of one being who exists apart from all others. Apart even from her sister. This is the job of portraiture, to fashion personality and character into that mute and singular appeal across centuries: Behold me — for I am yet present.

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The Poetry of Jason Boone (1971-2008)

Justin E. H. Smith

We are so presumptuous as to wish to be known by all the world and even by those who will arrive when we are no more. And we are so vain that the esteem of five or six people who surround us amuses us and renders us content.” –Blaise Pascal (tr. Jason Boone, the epigram to his 2002 poem, “Ho There, Raise Up the Tommy Lift!”)

*

I should no doubt begin with what these days is known as a 'full disclosure': I was a friend of Jason Boone's for a short time, towards the end of the 1980s, when he would drive up through the valley from Fresno to Sacramento on weekends to go to rock shows at a night-spot called the Cattle Club, out near Highway 50, where I wasted a lot of time back then. The most peculiar thing about him, as I recall from that period, is that he always maintained that he absolutely loathed the music he heard at the Cattle Club, every bit of it, and yet he solidly refused to give any reason why he kept coming nonetheless.

“I hate guitars,” he would often announce. “I hate these flanel shirts and this whole beer and 'fuck yeah' thing.” The music was mostly what would come, within a few more years, to be called 'grunge', and featured many of the bands, then in an embryonic state, that were taking shape at that time in Seattle and touring up and down the West Coast. “The worst of all of them is this opening act called Nirvana,” Boone once said to me. “They open for Tad, who are almost as insufferably awful, but Tad's probably going somewhere. This is the end of the line for Nirvana. In ten years they'll be working shit jobs, installing cable TV, repairing copying machines, wishing they'd gone to college, and waxing nostalgic about their glory days. You can just sense it when you're watching these bands, you know, you can read their fates.” Is that why you watch them, even though you hate them? I asked. “Yes I suppose.”

It was more than anything else that halting, self-conscious “yes, I suppose,” instead of a thoughtless “yeah, I guess,” the elocution so much more natural in our shared milieu, that gave me a sense of Boone's own fate. He was dead wrong about Kurt Cobain, yet I was broadly right about him.

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BIL has ED

by Shiban Ganju

Erectile dysfunction I wish you all a happy new year and hope it starts on a lighter note; mine did.

After a year of worrying about the health reform – that wasn’t, and economic meltdown – that was, a phone call from brother in law (BIL) made me ruminate about sexually dysfunctional people. They are of two types: overachievers and underachievers. The news of our latest overachiever, Tiger Woods had caused considerable jealousy and anguish to BIL. Reason: Tiger ‘wood’ and BIL wouldn’t. Years at the hedge fund desk had sapped his libido into ‘libidon’t’.

I would not have found out about BIL’s problem, had he not fainted and fallen flat on his face. He phoned to tell me that he felt dizzy often and had fainted thrice. I was aware, that years of two-Marlboro-packs-a-day had smoke- grilled the arteries of his heart and legs into spastic narrow channels and now he had to take nitrate pills to relax them. Drugged vessels would dilate and ease the blood flow. But with drugs, bad always accompanies good. As a side effect – especially, if he stood up suddenly –his legs would accumulate all the blood gushing down with gravity; his blood pressure would drop and his blood- less head would swirl. Fainting spells pointed to excessive fall of blood pressure, which would spin him out of his senses.

Just to pick on him, I asked, “What other medicine are you on? Are you taking Cialis?”

“No, I am not.”

“Then it must be Levitra or Viagra.”

“How do you know?” he was surprised. The fact is, I didn’t know – until then.

“BIL, doubling your vessel dilators is a no-no.”

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Early Islam, Part 5: Epilogue

By Namit Arora

Part 1: The Rise of Islam / Part 2: The Golden Age of Islam
Part 3: The Path of Reason / Part 4: The Mystic Tide

(This five-part series on early Islamic history begins with the rise of Islam, shifts to its golden age, examines two key currents of early Islamic thought—rationalism and Sufi mysticism—and concludes with an epilogue. It builds on precursor essays I wrote at Stanford’s Green Library during a summer sabbatical years ago, and on subsequent travels in Islamic lands of the Middle East and beyond.)
__________________________________________

Al-Kindi Muslims discovered Greek thought hundreds of years before the Western Christians, yet it was the latter who eventually domesticated it. Why did the reverse not happen? Why did the golden age of Islam (approx. 9th-12th centuries)—led by luminaries such as al-Kindi, al-Farabi, Alhazen, al-Beruni, Omar Khayyam, Avicenna, and Averroës—wither away? Despite a terrific start, why did Greek rationalism fail to ignite more widely in Islam? In this epilogue, I’ll survey some answers that have been offered by historians and highlight one that I hold the most significant.

Earlier in this series, we saw how three contending currents of thought dominated the Islamic golden age—orthodoxy, rationalism, and mysticism—based on three different ways of looking at the world. Orthodoxy in Islam looked to the Qur’an to justify a whole way of life. A universal, durable code of behavior and personal conduct is an understandable human craving, and so much more comforting when God Himself shows up and lays it out in one’s own language! Orthodoxy is by no means limited to ‘revealed’ religions; it took root in Hinduism via its castes, priests, and rituals. Suffice it to say that humans have been drawn to narrow and exclusive systems of belief with a dismaying alacrity. [1] The orthodox, it’s worth pointing out, are not all that otherworldly. The mullahs, bishops, and pundits are rarely disengaged from their social milieu, as the mystics tend to be. The orthodox may covet the rewards of the other world but what happens in their own—as in what norms, practices, dogmas, and rituals are followed—is profoundly important to them. They care deeply about this world and, in their own way, struggle to improve it, sometimes even waging war over it.

Whirling dervish The mystics are rather different. They don’t care much for holy books or religious clerics, and receive God as a subjective experience, beyond the bounds of dogma. An essential mystical experience lies in the believer’s sobering realization of the inadequacy of reason in knowing God and his design. Love and devotion—even rapturous ecstasy—help bridge the enormous gulf he sees between him and God. Happiness comes not from material pleasures but from surrendering to the benevolent divine. He deals with existential angst by suppressing his self and ego. Mystical teachers across cultures have appealed to a non-dualistic approach to nature, in which everything in existence is not only interwoven but is a manifestation of the divine. Clearly, a mystical worldview does not engender ideas like competition, personal ambition, or democracy, nor does it preoccupy itself with theories of justice or science or critical inquiry. Instead, it eschews religious orthodoxy and furthers a tolerant, pacifist, and private faith, often alongside a gentle, dreamy, fatalistic detachment from the world. [2] Such otherworldly mysticism flowered in Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, and Eastern Christianity, but barely so in Western Christianity.

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Monday Poem

“Abraham said to his father and his people: 'What are these images to whose worship you cleave?'
They said: 'We found our fathers worshipping them.' He said: 'Certainly you have been, you and
your fathers, in manifest error.'”
Koran, Chapter 21, verses 52-54

The TughraThe Tughra 02

Loophole

Warnings in the Hadith
to make no image of God
or man or animal
are no match for the loophole
function of the human mind
which will overcome obstacles
like certainty
and threats of hellfire
to make real any
object of longing
mystic or material
as can easily be seen
in the lovely lyrical
portrait, the Tughra
(signature of Sulaiman
the Magnificent),
disguised as calligraphy,
a loophole allowed in
Muhammed’s line by men
who knew the futility of
banning beauty

by Jim Culleny,
January 2, 2009

Interactional Technologies of the Mindbody

By Aditya Dev Sood

Chiang mai correctional institute She begins with the soles of my feet, tracing out nodes and ridges into which all my wanderings in the world are graven. She is a rehabilitating prisoner at the Chiang Mai Women’s Correctional Facility, halfway out of the system, learning massage as a trade that may keep her out of trouble once she’s released. The massage parlour is a long shed of a room, grimly institutional, the green-blue sheets on the mattresses on the floor match the uniforms the masseuses are wearing. Her touch is light, I close my eyes, the memories and impressions she is unleashing are vivid, the idea of this piece has already taken form.

To be massaged by the opposite gender is a pleasure no longer available in India. Islamic social norms, the demise of courtly and courtesanal culture, Victorian prudence, and Gandhian puritanism have all surely conspired to ensure that when a man and woman are on a mattress together, it must be a flagrant scandal. But varieties of massage survive across East and South-East Asia, as techniques of wellness propagated in Buddhist monasteries, and now more widely available in more and less commercialized spas and treatment centers. The massage services offered by the Chiang Mai Women’s Prison may be a novelty, but they also demonstrate how widely and well established is the practice of massage in the culture and institutions of Thailand.

Mister, you lay down now, she said, without introducing herself. She is small and round, and reminds me of Lotta from the comic strip. I am wearing a kind of Karate outfit of cotton pyjama and jacket with two tie-strips, which I was given to wear before entering the massage hall. Here, six or eight mattresses sit on the floor, backpackers and travelers, all of us, laying upon them. They are melting away under Lotta’s hands, I am only dimly aware, my selfhood dissolving into pure patience, a knower only of pleasure.

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