Destination: Oklahoma

by James McGirk

Uhaul-truck-300x162Going West is an adventure. Maybe not as much as was when you had to take a covered wagon and float across the Mississippi and shoot bison along the way for food, but still, it’s a thrill. My wife and I decided we’d had enough of New York City. She’d been there almost fifteen years, I’d been there ten, and as ostensible creatives it seemed foolish to work 90 hours a week before we even began our “real work.” So we scraped together as much money as we could, borrowed a bit more from my folks, and piled our belongings into a 20’-UHaul—which is about as long of a truck as you can drive without needing a special license or a third axle. Our cats, we chased down and crammed into pet cages. We strapped the three of them into the seat between us, a tower of cat cages, and set off. Destination: Oklahoma.

Half an hour in, one of the cats pissed himself and it dripped all over the other two and my wife’s trousers. I had to admit that I felt a bit defeated. I could rationalize leaving the city as much as I liked, but it hurt to go. Coming there I had a vision of success: a sleek penthouse perched high above midtown and the sort of artsy, exciting life you’d imagine accompanying it—something with awesome city views and sleek modernist furniture and lots of restaurant dining. I’d wanted that life since I was a preteen. And after ten years in the city I never even came close to living it. And it’s hard to abandon a fantasy, but it was harder still to imagine ever being able to afford to live a comfortable life in New York, let alone a luxurious one. Oklahoma, on the other hand, was completely alien to me. Not quite the South, but not the West or Midwest either. We had a few connections out there and the cost of living was so much lower. If we were serious about making a life for ourselves as artists, why not go somewhere completely new?

The first day, the cab reeked of piss and the cats yowled every time we went over a bump or revved the engine too hard for them. We drove south. The weather was fair, cold but clear and not too windy. I hadn’t realized there was a trailer mode that automatically engaged when you started the engine. The truck kept trying to compensate for a non-existent load. The brakes were touchy; the acceleration so slow it was frightening trying to catch up with traffic after merging onto the freeway. Cars and trucks would race around us–it took minutes until we were going as fast as everyone else. We made it as far as Winchester, West Virginia that first night and found a comfortable inn to stay in. The manager let us bring our cats in. We let them roam free the room—a huge mistake. For the hotel and us.

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Monday Poem

Bibliophile

They say Hitler housed 16,000 books
in Berlin and Obersalzburg—
his dark jewels

In Obersalzburg and Berlin
his books did nothing for his soul
but drag it through the muck of his mind
so that in the end he became as much a victim
of his own immurement as Fortunato
did of Montresor in Amontillado

Predisposed, he heaped word upon word
building an edifice to suit himself. Unable to relate
he read everything that greased the skids of hate

He owned the Racial Typology of the German People,
the works of anti-semite Julius Lehmann,
and any pamphlet that arrived at preconclusions
—which proves:

a bookworm’s library may be vast
and worms may be well-read
but still be worms
at last
.

Jim Culleny
2008

Poem

INTERWEB

From: Linda@coolmaildotcom
“Dreamed about you and Sarah.
Never thought I’d miss you.
Thanks for watering the palm.”

From: Sarah@hootmaildotcom
“Bought you the perfect jumper,
It’s Cashmere, large, maroon.
The best is yet 2B.”

I float up Broadway
to tend to Linda’s palm.
Kneeling by her kitchen island
last year I said: “Marry me.”

Had she been cooking sole
in the juice of tangerines?
“O dear. How odd.
No, for the time being.”

To: Sarah@hootmaildotcom
“Yearn for your hug, luv.”
To: Linda@coolmaildotcom
“Chill out. Palm alive.”

by Rafiq Kathwari

More poems by Rafiq here.

Mourning (in)formation of Palestinian Collective Memory: A Mythopoetic Reclamation of Palestine, Part I

by Sousan Hammad

3.-Nation-Estate-Olive-TreeIn May 2010 I was invited to a small exhibition in Nazareth where poet Taha Muhammad Ali and his former neighbor, both refugees from Saffuriya (a village 15 km from Haifa), were to speak at an inaugural museum on Nakba Day – the day on which Palestinians commemorate the nakba, or Disaster, that befell its people in 1948. [1] Before speaking, the neighbor, an elderly woman, wandered around tables that exhibited household items from historic Saffuriya: pots and scissors, mortars and mirrors, carpets and irons. Items that lay bare the very history she was going to speak about. As she walked around the room, crying, moving from object to object, the past emerged, not as a collection of artifacts, but as a nightmare, and it occurred to me that I was witnessing traces of the woman's first imaginations, where memories of her childhood soared around our bodies in a presence colliding with absence: the presence being the objects, and the absence its history. I wanted to reassure her, to tell her to ignore the fluorescent lights on the ceiling and our commemorative slogans and banners taped on the walls, to tell her this is it: this is the real Saffuriya. Perhaps she would think she returned (for it is every Palestinian's dream to return to their respective, but destroyed, village) but everything became a blur once she began to speak; she forgot her name, her age, her location. In Mohammad Bakri's film 1948, the poet Taha Ali is asked what Saffuriya means to him, and he responded: “When I visit Saffuriya I become excited and burst out crying, but when I think about Saffuriya the picture that forms in my memory is virtually imaginary, mysterious, hard to explain.”

This anecdote illustrates a recurring theme: much of the Palestinian narrative published today deals with the particular space of the past and, in so doing, raises questions of justice: the act of remembering historical Palestine is by definition an ethical act. The conventional literature and storytelling of Palestine serves thus a moral purpose, stemming from the fundamental sense of catastrophe, and tells again and again the story of a nightmare that occurred in, and is still trapped in, 1948: The Nakba.

But beyond the commemoration of the past, for Palestinians, the 1948 War dramatically and irreversibly changed their lives. Beyond the determinant moment in their lives, not only in history but also in memory, and thus identity, the Nakba has become a key site of Palestinian collective memory and as such a determining feature of identity. For the Palestinian, catastrophe is not just something of the past, it continues into the present.

[Photos by Larissa Sansour from her current project Nation Estate.]

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A philosopher in the age of science

Malcolm Thorndike Nicholson in Prospect:

Within the world of academic philosophy, Putnam is famous (perhaps notorious is the word) for his habit of changing his mind. His entry in the joke Philosophical Lexicon runs:

Hilary: A very brief but significant period in the intellectual career of a distinguished philosopher. “Oh, that’s what I thought three or four hilaries ago.

His longtime admirer Sidney Morgenbesser once quipped of Putman: “He’s a quantum philosopher. I can’t understand him and his position at the same time.”

ScreenHunter_142 Mar. 17 16.37This intellectual mutability extends to his politics and personal life. Born in 1926 to an intellectually gifted, middle-class Jewish family in Chicago, Putnam was raised an atheist and progressive. In the 1960s Putman was a vocal defender of the Civil Rights Movement, a critic of the American involvement in Vietnam, and a member of the communist Progressive Labor Party. By 1976 Putnam, after grappling with the human rights abuses by communists, left the PLP and gave up his support for Maoism. Both Putnam and his wife, the philosopher Ruth-Anna Putnam, returned to Judaism after decades of atheism. Putnam was 68 when he had his Bar Mitzvah.

Changing your mind in any situation, much less academic philosophy, is seen as a sort of weakness. It takes a very secure ego to end a debate with “well I think I may have been wrong.” Putnam’s shifts in position demonstrate not just his intellectual confidence, but also the virtue of seeing the bigger picture. Putnam is able to step back for a moment and see a particular position, say functionalism in philosophy of mind, and notice that it doesn’t quite fit in with a greater commitment in metaphysics and philosophy of language.

In Philosophy in an Age of Science Putnam wants us to take a step back and consider the relationship between two deeply entrenched ways of understanding the world. One, the scientific position, attempts to explain things in mind-independent and law-like terms. This is often called the descriptive or “is” position. The other, the moral position, attempts to explain things in mind-dependent and value-laced terms. This is often called the normative or “ought” position.

More here.

Don’t expect me to be sane anymore

Letter from Henry Miller to Anaïs Nin after a visit to Nin's home. From Letters of Note:

8494168401_fed6d2dd2d_oAugust 14, 1932

Anais:

Don't expect me to be sane anymore. Don't let's be sensible. It was a marriage at Louveciennes—you can't dispute it. I came away with pieces of you sticking to me; I am walking about, swimming, in an ocean of blood, your Andalusian blood, distilled and poisonous. Everything I do and say and think relates back to the marriage. I saw you as the mistress of your home, a Moor with a heavy face, a negress with a white body, eyes all over your skin, woman, woman, woman. I can't see how I can go on living away from you—these intermissions are death. How did it seem to you when Hugo came back? Was I still there? I can't picture you moving about with him as you did with me. Legs closed. Frailty. Sweet, treacherous acquiescence. Bird docility. You became a woman with me. I was almost terrified by it. You are not just thirty years old—you are a thousand years old.

Here I am back and still smouldering with passion, like wine smoking. Not a passion any longer for flesh, but a complete hunger for you, a devouring hunger. I read the paper about suicides and murders and I understand it all thoroughly. I feel murderous, suicidal. I feel somehow that it is a disgrace to do nothing, to just bide one's time, to take it philosophically, to be sensible. Where has gone the time when men fought, killed, died for a glove, a glance, etc? (A victrola is playing that terrible aria from Madama Butterfly—”Some day he'll come!”)

More here.

Zuckerman Abridged

Max Ross in The New Yorker:

ZuckIn the late fall of 2004, Nathan Zuckerman, the American-Jewish novelist whose fictions aggressively scrutinized Jewish values (and subsequently caused him to be ostracized from the Jewish community), was found dead in his country estate—evidently the result of complications following a neurosurgical procedure. He was eighty-one years old. At the time, a number of mysteries remained concerning Zuckerman’s life. Why had he fled Manhattan for rural Massachusetts? How, after a series of marriages, had he come to live alone? After his novel “Carnovsky” made him rich and famous, had he merely quit publishing his work, or had he stopped writing altogether? While it was assumed these questions would never be answered, the recent discovery of hundreds of notebooks and journals hidden throughout Zuckerman’s home in the Berkshires explains, at least in part, the seclusion and silence that marked his final thirty-five years. Consumed by depression after his father’s death, in 1969, the author was, for a time, unable to produce anything he considered of value; and by the nineteen-nineties, when he began writing again, a neurodegenerative disorder was unravelling his mind. As a quartet of unearthed novels demonstrates, much of his prose was incoherent. Nevertheless, the notebooks and manuscripts provide an intimate glimpse of the author’s heretofore undocumented life—a life marked by ongoing filial resentment, self-deception, and tendencies toward seclusion buoyed by periods of intense sexual compulsion.

Nathan Zuckerman was born in 1933 in Newark, New Jersey, the son of Victor, an overbearingly permissive chiropodist, and Selma, a lover of gardening and mahjongg. He was followed four years later by Henry, who adored Nathan, although they became estranged later in life. The Zuckermans’ was a typical American Jewish household of the era. They believed that happiness could be attained only through academic achievement; that anti-Semitism was more muted than before, but still ubiquitous. Around the dinner table, Nathan’s parents discussed the perils of intermarriage, the problem of Santa Claus, and the injustice of medical-school quotas. From an early age Nathan collected donations door-to-door for the Jewish National Fund, and learned Hebrew at the Talmud Torah on Schley Street. All his friends were Jewish, all his schoolteachers were Jewish, and, to a boy who seldom left his neighborhood, the entire world seemed Jewish—suffocatingly so.

More here.

Events in the Future Seem Closer Than Those in the Past

From APS:

Future_vs_pastWe say that time flies, it marches on, it flows like a river — our descriptions of time are closely linked to our experiences of moving through space. Now, new research suggests that the illusions that influence how we perceive movement through space also influence our perception of time. The findings provide evidence that our experiences of space and time have even more in common than previously thought. The research, conducted by psychological scientist Eugene Caruso of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and colleagues, is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “It seemed to us that psychological scientists have neglected the important fact that, in everyday experience, people don’t evaluate the past and the future in exactly the same way,” says Caruso. From research on spatial perception, we know that people feel closer to objects they are moving toward than those they are moving away from, even if the objects are exactly the same distance away. Because our perceptions of time are grounded in our experiences of space, Caruso and his colleagues hypothesized that the same illusion should influence how we experience time, resulting in what they call a temporal Doppler effect.

Surveying college students and commuters at a train station, the researchers found that people perceived times in the future (i.e., one month and one year from now) as closer to the present than equidistant times in the past (i.e., one month and one year ago). Similarly, participants who completed an online survey one week before Valentine’s Day felt that the holiday was closer to the present than those who were surveyed a week after Valentine’s Day. These findings hint at the relationship between movement in space and perceptions of time; to establish a direct link between the two, the researchers conducted a fourth study using a virtual reality environment.

More here.

Sunday Poem

History as a Crescent Moon

The horns
of a bull
who was placed
before a mirror at the beginning
.. of human time;
. .. in his fury
at the challenge of his double,
.. he has, from
.. that time to this,
been throwing himself against
…………………………..the mirror, until..
. . by now it is
shivered into millions of pieces—
………………………….here an eye, there
a hoof or a tuft
of hair; here a small wet shard made
entirely of tears.
And up there, below the spilt milk of
.. the stars, one
. silver splinter—
parenthesis at the close of a long sentence,
new crescent,
beside it, red
asterisk of
Mars

by Eleanor Wilner
From: Poetry, Vol. 189, No. 4, January, 2007

Pakistan does not have an image problem

Saroop Ijaz in the Express Tribune:

ScreenHunter_141 Mar. 17 10.09How would it feel to lose everything and then hear that the real tragedy is that the image of this country has been tarnished? Your suffering and loss do not matter; you are just a marketing prop. You should, perhaps, be ashamed for having your houses burnt and bringing embarrassment to the Fatherland. Pakistan does not have an “image” problem. The gap in the conveyed image and reality is there, but it is the other way around. Pakistan should be thankful that most of the world does not read or hear the Urdu press, the local Friday Khutba [sermon in a mosque], banners on Hall Road, Lahore, or pamphlets in the Civil Courts. Pakistan has an image that is softer than it deserves.

More here.

Lunch with Noam Chomsky

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John McDermott talks to Noam Chomsky in the FT:

I am about to ask the professor about Hugo Chávez, who died the night before our lunch, but a waitress arrives and asks for our order. Chomsky chooses the clam chowder, and a salad with pecans, blue cheese, apples and a lot of adjectives. I go for tomato soup and a salmon salad. The professor asks for a cup of coffee and since we are about to discuss the late Venezuelan leader, I ask for a cup, too.

In 2006, Chávez recommended Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance to the UN General Assembly. “It’s a mixed story,” Chomsky says of Chávez’s legacy. He points to reduced poverty and increased literacy. “On the other hand there are plenty of problems,” such as violence and police corruption; he also mentions western hostility – in particular an attempted coup in 2002 supported by the US. America’s behaviour towards Caracas is obviously important in any assessment of Chávez but its appearance is an early signifier of a pattern in a Chomsky conversation: talk for long enough about politics with the professor and the probability of US foreign policy or National Socialism being mentioned approaches one.

I say that he hasn’t referred to Chávez’s human rights record. Some of Chomsky’s critics have accused him of going easy on the faults of autocrats so long as they are enemies of the US. Chomsky denies this vehemently: he spoke out against the consolidation of power by the state broadcaster; he protested the case of María Lourdes Afiuni, a judge who spent more than a year in prison awaiting trial for releasing a government critic. “And I do a million cases like that one.”

Still, Chomsky thinks about how hard to hit his targets. He admits as much as our soups arrive. “Suppose I criticise Iran. What impact does that have? The only impact it has is in fortifying those who want to carry out policies I don’t agree with, like bombing.” He argues that any criticisms about, say, Chávez, will invariably get into the mainstream media, whereas those he makes about the US will go unreported. This unfair treatment is the dissident’s lot, according to Chomsky. Intellectuals like to think of themselves as iconoclasts, he says. “But you take a look through history and it’s the exact opposite. The respected intellectuals are those who conform and serve power interests.”

Barack, a few travel tips for your upcoming trip to Israel

Amer Zahr in The Civil Arab:

ScreenHunter_140 Mar. 16 16.48Mr. President, I hear you are traveling to Israel next week. As a concerned patriotic American citizen of Palestinian descent, I have some pointers for you.

Now, I assume you’ll be flying into Tel Aviv. Usually, when non-Jews arrive there, especially if they are a little darker-skinned, they are asked to wait in a… let’s call it a “VIP Room.” Incidentally, the room is quite nice. There’s a water cooler, comfortable chairs, and a soda machine. It’s probably the only place in the world where you can be racially profiled and get an ice-cold Coca-Cola all at once.

To avoid the room, I would mention that you are the President of the United States. It might help.

You may get strip-searched. Saying you are an American doesn’t help much here. I’ve tried. I even sang the national anthem last time an Israeli soldier was looking down my pants. Right after I said, “Oh say can you see,” he said, “Not much.”

To escape this embarrassment, I would mention that you are the President of the United States. It might help.

In case they don’t already know, you might not want to tell Israeli security you are half-Muslim. As a fellow half-Muslim, I can tell you they don’t really care about the percentage. Any bit of Muslim freaks them out. And I’m not sure if you heard, but the fans of one of Israel’s soccer teams, Beitar Jerusalem, actually protested when the club signed two Muslim players. When one of them scored in a game last week, hundreds of fans actually walked out of the stadium. One of the fans later stated about the Muslim players, “It’s not racism. They just shouldn’t be here.” Hopefully, they don’t know your middle name is “Hussein.” Maybe they didn’t watch the inauguration.

In any case, I would mention that you are the President of the United States. It might help.

More here. [Thanks to John Ballard.]

Remembering Rachel Corrie

Ten years ago today Rachel Corrie was killed by an Israeli bulldozer. It is still worth having a look at Edward Said's article on the subject, which is also almost ten years old. From CounterPunch:

ScreenHunter_139 Mar. 16 16.21In early May, I was in Seattle lecturing for a few days. While there, I had dinner one night with Rachel Corrie’s parents and sister, who were still reeling from the shock of their daughter’s murder on March 16 in Gaza by an Israeli bulldozer. Mr. Corrie told me that he had himself driven bulldozers, although the one that killed his daughter deliberately because she was trying valiantly to protect a Palestinian home in Rafah from demolition was a 60 ton behemoth especially designed by Caterpillar for house demolitions, a far bigger machine than anything he had ever seen or driven. Two things struck me about my brief visit with the Corries. One was the story they told about their return to the US with their daughter’s body. They had immediately sought out their US Senators, Patty Murray and Mary Cantwell, both Democrats, told them their story and received the expected expressions of shock, outrage, anger and promises of investigations. After both women returned to Washington, the Corries never heard from them again, and the promised investigation simply didn’t materialize. As expected, the Israeli lobby had explained the realities to them, and both women simply begged off. An American citizen willfully murdered by the soldiers of a client state of the US without so much as an official peep or even the de rigeur investigation that had been promised her family.

But the second and far more important aspect of the Rachel Corrie story for me was the young woman’s action itself, heroic and dignified at the same time. Born and brought up in Olympia, a small city 60 miles south of Seattle, she had joined the International Solidarity Movement and gone to Gaza to stand with suffering human beings with whom she had never had any contact before.

More here. [Thanks to Najla Said.]

the great unmentionable

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Philip Roth knows he is running out of time. He speaks now of the end – certainly of the end of his writing life. He ought to have won the Nobel Prize long ago, but perhaps his work is simply too American for the august Swedes of the Nobel committee, who have grumbled about the parochialism of the American novel, of how it looks inward rather than out to the rest of the world. That is nonsense, of course. The greatest living American writers – Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo and, preeminently, Roth – are universalists who in radiant prose ask, again and again: what does it mean to be human and how should we act in a world that is as mysterious as it is indifferent to our fate? At the end of The Tempest, as he prepares to take his leave, Prospero, a magician of words, hints that “the story of my life” is ending, and now “Every third thought shall be my grave”. Roth has told the story of his life many times and in many different ways, and now he is done.

more from Jason Cowley at the FT here.

auster and coetzee talk sports

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For potential pen pals, these two famous writers might seem at first an unlikely pairing. Auster, the younger by seven years, is an enthusiast, or certainly I’ve always thought of him that way: his fascination with coincidences and odd circumstances; his bottomless bag of anecdotes; his championing of out-of-the-way books and films that always end up being very good. Meanwhile Coetzee, the Nobel Prize-winning South African, seems more of a skeptic, a fastidious thinker and uncompromising moralist, who strips away social and political conventions in search of an ethics of essential experience. Yet whatever their differences, real or perceived, what quickly becomes clear in the pages of “Here and Now” is that they have far more in common than not. They both love sports, for example, and the fact that they don’t love precisely the same sports, or love them for precisely the same reasons, is largely why they have so much to say to each other about them. Discussing the nature of sports’ appeal, Auster proposes they are “a kind of performance art.” Coetzee responds that his interest in sports is “ethical rather than aesthetic,” having to do with “the need for heroes that sports satisfy.”

more from Martin Riker at the NY Times here.