Instructions for Theatre-Goers

by Mara Jebsen

After Edward Hopper's Two On the Aisle, 1927

Two on the Aisle Edward HopperA dark theatre can curve round you like a snake
if you show early and the theatre’s sunk
in that deep-hush velvet, against which
a body feels bony, wrong.

Fold your coat squarely on the back
of your chair; un-crease a programme, don’t fret
about the vague clunk
behind the curtain. Pretend that actors
have no bodies at all. . .

And trust that if the night goes right, a click
will sound high up in the gut, when a story
blows up your life like a long hot noon.
Like a sundial. You stream for miles.

Briefly that star
is you. Enormous and singing
with numb, raw throat. Honed, hurting,
glorious, scared– of the movements
of time that will crack you
back to your body, now that you’re
just so much stretched shadow, glass. Brinked
to the-just-past-the-crest. Poised
to crash.

If you’re lucky you’ll find
you’ve been crying. Your spine
aches briefly in you chair; your cheeks
are wet. Try with a sweet pain to think
what you got. But it’s nothing
and gone. It’s the ruin you came for.

Islam, Colonization, Imperialism and so on

by Omar Ali

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At about 6 pm on Sunday evening, a young suicide bomber (said to be 18 years old) blew himself up in a crowd returning from the testosterone-heavy flag lowering ceremony held every evening at the India-Pakistan border at Wagah, near Lahore.

Presumably this young man (a true believer, since a fake believer would find it hard to explode in such circumstances) had wanted to target the ceremony itself (usually watched by up to 5000 people every day, most of them visitors from out of town) but the military had received prior intelligence that something like this may happen and there were 6 checkpoints and he was unable to get to the ceremony, so he waited around the shops about 500 yards away from the parade site and exploded when he felt he had enough bodies around him to make it worth his while.

About 60 innocent people died. Many of them women and children. Including 8 women from the same poor family from a village in central Punjab who were visiting relatives in Lahore and decided to go to the parade (whether as entertainment, or as patriotic theater, or both). The bombing was instantly claimed by more than one Jihadist organization but it is possible that Ehsanullah Ehsan’s claim will turn out to be true. He said it was a reaction against the military’s recent anti-terrorist operation (operation Zarb e Azb: “blow of the sword of the prophet”), that his group wants “an Islamic system of government” and that they would attack infidel regimes on both sides of the Indian-Pakistani border.

Read more »

Breaking 43 Years of Silence, the Last FBI Burglar Tells the Story of Her Years in the Underground

The following is excerpted and adapted from the epilogue to the paperback version of Betty Medsger’s The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI, out this month from Vintage Books.

Betty Medsger in TruthOut:

ScreenHunter_866 Nov. 02 20.51It was clear to Judi Feingold what she should do after she and seven other people broke into an FBI office near Philadelphia in 1971, removed every file and then anonymously distributed them to two members of Congress and three journalists:

Get out of town.

She took drastic steps. Remaining in Philadelphia seemed dangerous, so she left town and headed west, moved into the underground and lived under an assumed name, moving from place to place west of the Rockies for years, owning only a sleeping bag and what she could carry in her knapsack. As she was about to detach herself from her past geography and her personal connections, she called her parents and told them she had committed a nonviolent direct action “and was possibly being pursued by the federal government. I told them I could not be in touch by phone, and I would do my best to let them know how I was, but not where I was.”

During the forty-three years since the burglary, none of the other burglars knew anything about Feingold’s whereabouts. Efforts to find her in recent years had failed. Some even thought she might have died.

More here.

Burkina Faso’s Uprising Part of an Ongoing Wave of African Protests

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Zachariah Mampilly in The Monkey Cage (Issouf Sanogo/Agence France-Presse via Getty Images):

As events in Burkina Faso move ahead at breakneck pace, I’m struck by how much they encapsulate different political struggles that have defined African protest since the anti-colonial period. Political transformations across Africa have rarely come piecemeal. Instead, they tend to come in waves, sweeping across the region and leaving massive social transformations in their wake.

I am currently finishing a book on African protest with Adam Branch. In it, we examine the two prior waves of African protests and offer evidence that we are currently in the midst of a third. The first wave includes the nationalist protests of the 1950s, a set of uprisings that culminated in the formal independence of almost all African states. The second wave encompasses protests centered in West Africa that occurred between the mid-1980s to early 1990s. These protests, a response to brutal austerity measures imposed upon African states by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, sparked a major era of formal democratization across the continent. With only three democracies prior to the protests, by the mid-1990s Africa could boast 20 democracies, with numerous more states holding elections.

Yet, despite these earlier waves and the political transformations they initiated, African protests are often ignored. We document more than 90 popular uprisings in more than 40 African states since 2005. By our measure, the heralded North African protests of 2011 represented not the first ripple of a wave, but rather its crest, with 26 African countries (including Burkina Faso) experiencing popular protests that year. Since then, protests have continued but have rarely generated the sort of attention devoted to the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia. Why? Political change in the rest of Africa is often thought to result from violent conflict or external intervention. Africans themselves are presumed to be too rural, too ethnic or too poor for popular politics to lead to political transformation. Even today, as protests increasingly shake up ossified regimes and de facto one-party states, little attention is paid to the broader wave of protests unfolding across Africa and what it portends for the future of the continent.

More here.

The man with the golden blood

ScreenHunter_865 Nov. 02 20.33Meet the donors, patients, doctors and scientists involved in the complex global network of rare – and very rare – blood.

Penny Bailey in Mosaic:

His doctor drove him over the border. It was quicker that way: if the man donated in Switzerland, his blood would be delayed while paperwork was filled out and authorisations sought.

The nurse in Annemasse, France, could tell from the label on the blood bag destined for Paris that this blood was pretty unusual. But when she read the details closely, her eyes widened. Surely it was impossible for this man seated beside her to be alive, let alone apparently healthy?

Thomas smiled to himself. Very few people in the world knew his blood type did – could – exist. And even fewer shared it. In 50 years, researchers have turned up only 40 or so other people on the planet with the same precious, life-saving blood in their veins.

More here.

Home and History in the Fiction of Los Angeles

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Sarah-Jane Stratford in the LA Review of Books:

LOS ANGELES does not, perhaps, get enough credit for feeding the imaginations of science fiction writers. Our original cinematic visions of imagined futures — often dystopian wastelands — were shaped by their film locations on what was then undeveloped land outside Los Angeles. Even the futuristic worlds on soundstages called back to Los Angeles, a city whose rapid growth was multi-pronged and haphazard. But despite the sprawl and isolating car culture that fueled dystopian fancies, the city has certainly not been a dystopia. When we talk about the pace and occasionally impractical results of LA’s development, often conducted without long-term considerations, we tend to overlook the beauty, inventiveness, and quirky charm of so much of LA’s architecture. It’s no wonder Los Angeles has long been a home to writers who found comfort, space, and privacy to let their minds wander through the thicket of human experience.

Some of LA’s most inventive residents, like Ray Bradbury, attempted to use the conduit of literature to prevent LA from actually becoming the dystopian world it had helped people envision. But while LA’s isolation and tension, and excessive concrete, may themselves not have been a problem, they are being met with a new difficulty: mansionization. And as this trend gains apace, the city is in danger of inadvertently creating exactly the sort of desolate society it has excelled in rendering as entertainment.

Plenty of people knew that for over 50 years, Bradbury lived in the peaceful enclave of Cheviot Hills, nestled in West LA, but it was only when photos of his home were published prior to its sale this past June that admirers were able to revel in the writing sanctuary he’d carved for himself in the basement of the comparatively modest 1937 home. The story and photos were seen and discussed in newspapers around the world, and for a moment, people felt connected to the mechanics of story-making. Literature touches us, offers guidance as we wend our way through life’s daily labyrinth, and when a door is opened onto the business of its creation, we can’t help but feel awed and grateful, both for the work and the privilege of understanding its physical origin, even if we can’t — and shouldn’t — access the emotional nucleus. Bradbury’s house offered a glimpse not only of his own writing process, but also of the magical space that LA can make available to writers.

More here.

Keeping Sex Workers Quiet

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Alana Massey in Jacobin:

Just as opponents of reproductive self-determination rely heavily on the images of babies murdered by their mothers in an attempt to shame women seeking abortions, those that oppose sex work use the specter of trafficked young women to condemn any movement seeking to decriminalize sexual labor.

And because sex work activists are primarily female, they’re expected to have a sympathetic and thoughtful response to trafficking, to be a kind of caregiver for trafficking victims. As a result, arguments are reduced to caveats and apologies; discourses about labor rights take a backseat to those about trafficking.

To understand how labor conversations are so easily co-opted, a brief look at the current state of sex work discourse is instructive. In September, the International Human Trafficking, Prostitution, and Sex Work Conference was held in Toledo. It was hosted exclusively by anti-trafficking groups and prominently featured material framing all commercial sex as a form of slavery.

The Huffington Post recently aggregated a series of posts from Ravishlyentitled, “Is Sex Work Empowering or Enslaving?” and even in the absence of more nuanced or relevant options, it was considered progress by some that anyone thought to ask rather than preemptively conclude.

And earlier this year, Katha Pollitt wrote a review of Melissa Gira Grant’s Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work in which she hoped for another book entirely instead of critiquing the substance of Grant’s work: “Grant says barely a word about the women at the heart of this debate: those who are enslaved and coerced — illegal immigrants, young girls, runaways and throwaways, many of them survivors of sexual trauma, as well as transwomen and others cast out of mainstream society.”

With her highly visible status, Pollitt is free to determine the real heart of the debate around sexual labor — and overlook evidence showing most women in the sex industry do not feel more exploited than other workers.

The notable absence from most of these conversations is sex workers themselves, as Lindsay Roth, a sex worker activist with Project SAFE in Philadelphia, told me via email: “Anti-trafficking advocates usually are not asking the questions, they are setting the agenda. They do not engage with us. They have created a discourse that continues to engage with the women we work with as invisible.”

More here.

The Growing Pains of the Ancient Hajj

Dan Stone in National Geographic:

Mecca-from-above-990x610For centuries, beyond its role as a religious epicenter, Mecca was little more than a trading town. But as Mecca has grown and developed, the hajj—as the pilgrimage is called—has become more complicated. Since 2005, the leaders of Saudi Arabia, which consider Mecca one of the country’s greatest spiritual and economic assets, have launched an ambitious renewal project. For a decade, Mecca has slowly reinvented itself, starting with new hotels and shopping centers. The 120-floor Makkah Royal Clock Tower was completed in 2012, becoming the largest building in the historically one-story town. Longer term, the plan includes a $60 billion expansion to the grand mosque to accommodate pilgrims who, at the peak of the hajj, are forced by overcrowding to pray outside in the street. The country’s leaders, including King Abdullah ibn Abdulaziz, say that the renewal is necessary to handle the modern hajj. The number of pilgrims has risen from 200,000 in the 1960s to 3 million today, more than doubling the city’s population for a week. Accommodating all of them and ensuring their safety and public health, officials say, requires new buildings and better roads. In 2006, a stampede that killed 346 showed the hazards of large crowds on small streets. That same year, a concrete hotel collapsed killing more than 70 people. By 2040, the hajj is expected to double again to seven million pilgrims. Such large visitor populations represent an economic as well as a religious force. The pilgrims who come to pray also need a place to eat and sleep, especially as the ancient custom of Mecca’s Muslim residents hosting visiting pilgrims reaches its capacity. Each year, the 10-day hajj brings $10 billion into the Saudi economy, and analysts project it may become far more. Hotels near the grand mosque have been known to charge $700 per night. Souvenirs such as prayer beads and mats are as ubiquitous as they are expensive. A BBC report in 2012 found that to maximize profits, most religious souvenirs in Mecca were no longer made locally, but in China.

…Eyesores can be ignored; designer stores can be shunned. But a changing Mecca brings questions of how the centuries-old tradition of the pilgrimage itself could change. The word hajj in Arabic means “a great effort.” That effort—of walking through the holy sites and interacting with fellow Muslims to learn how Islam is practiced all over the world—is intended to deepen the pilgrim’s spirituality. Sardar, the author and Mecca scholar, argues that if that experience is diluted, the great virtue of traveling thousands of miles for a one-time experience may lose meaning. More people may show up, but with diminishing returns. Those who come will leave with less and less.

More here.

Sunday Poem

The Story of the Arjun and the Krishnachura

The Arjun tree stood alone in that field
An Aryan male – a pillar of aristocracy
All the other trees bowed to it
This was merely the beginning of the story

From somewhere came the Krishnachura seed
A few years later she was a young woman
A Santhal girl, with crimson in her hair
At once Arjun wanted her as his own

She was not a girl who would submit
In spring she dressed up without help, alone
She wasn't drawn to the Aryan male
She was busy making the buds bloom

Last night's flowers had fallen from her hair
Rippling leaves had woven clothes for her
Arjun – he was an Aryan male, who thought
Only he could claim beauty so fair

From the distance the Arjun tree could see
The Krishnachura's cascading heart
Bewitched by beauty, his perplexed eyes
Wondered when he'd find his way to it

I'd better finish this story quickly
The Krishnachura is far too obstinate
Her pride won't let her sell herself
She'd rather be a neighbour or a friend

The story isn't quite so simple
Arjun shed his bark, sheds it still
But the Santhal girl can shed blood
The Aryan male accepts he cannot win

Be reborn as an Arjun tree
Consider the Krishnachura a friend
Don't confuse me with others, upright one
When I bleed, shed your bark and call me then

by Mandakranta Sen
from: Hridhay Abadhya Meye
publisher: Ananda Publishers, Kolkata, 1999
translation: Arunava Sinha
from: After the Last Kiss
publisher: HarperCollins India

Peter ­Schneider’s ‘Berlin Now’ and Rory MacLean’s ‘Berlin’

1102-bks-KULISH-master675Nicholas Kulish at The New York Times:

For centuries Berlin has had something of a chip on its shoulder. It lacks the ancient ruins of Rome or the sophisticated beauty of Paris. It is landlocked and flat, with a climate that can be frigid, gray and unpleasant up to eight months out of the year. “Imagine Geneva, lost in a desert,” Balzac wrote in 1843, “and you have an idea of Berlin.”

That quotation surfaces in another book timed to the 25th anniversary of the fall of the wall by the Canadian travel writer Rory MacLean. With a few exceptions, “Berlin: Portrait of a City Through the Centuries” is a series of loose biographical sketches of both famous and everyday Berliners, past and present. The very first concerns a 15th-century poet and singer, Konrad von Cölln, who was prone to debauchery. He had his tongue cut out for defying Prince-Elector Irontooth, and was then executed.

MacLean sees the dualities of sex and violence, freedom and fascism as central to the city’s character and its appeal. A worker in a factory kitchen inadvertently kills herself trying to induce a miscarriage by eating the tips of 160 phosphorous matches.

more here.

When the Wall fell 25 years ago…

A53c7ad8-3134-46eb-90d8-b5f5a9b68b54Tony Barber at the Financial Times:

From its construction in 1961 to its destruction in 1989, the Berlin Wall was the world’s most compelling symbol of the moral and material bankruptcy of communism. Other dictatorships, from Albania to North Korea, laid mines and put up barbed wire to stop their oppressed peoples from fleeing to freedom. But no monument to incarceration was more visible and damning of its creators than the Wall, a hideous 156km-long complex of watchtowers, searchlights, anti-tank obstacles, dog patrols and ditches that cut through the once bustling centre of the historic German capital.

East German border guards, with the support of their Soviet-backed masters, fired upon scores of people who tried to escape over the Wall. They were responsible, during its 28-year life, for 136 Wall-related shootings and other deaths. Hundreds more were killed on the inner German border that divided West Germany from East Germany (the German Democratic Republic, or GDR). Right to the end, the East German communist party stuck to the brazen lies that there was no official policy of shooting would-be escapees, and that the Wall’s sole purpose was to repulse an attack from the “imperialist” west.

more here.

denis johnson, anarchy, madness

La-la-ca-1024-denis-johnson-003-jpg-20141029David L. Ulin at the LA Times:

This territory of anarchy and madness — let's call it derangement — is one to which Johnson has returned throughout his career. His 1992 collection “Jesus' Son,” which sits on a short shelf of the finest American fiction of the last quarter-century, traces in 11 spare, linked stories the experiences of a recovering drug addict trying to find a place in an incomprehensible world.

“Tree of Smoke,” which won a 2007 National Book Award, uses Vietnam as setting and metaphor, portraying derangement on a national scale.

“Reality is an impression, a belief,” Michael tells Nair in “The Laughing Monsters,” referring to the post-9/11 world in which the novel unfolds. In Johnson's view, however, this is less a political than a metaphysical posture, which makes “The Laughing Monsters” primarily a portrait of a character on the edge.

“I follow world events,” Johnson explains, “but I'm not obsessed with politics, and that's probably because — it's occurred to me more than once — as a white North American I find things on this planet ordered pretty much in my favor. But as a storyteller I'm drawn to realistic, contemporary situations and to figures caught up in danger and chaos.”

more here.

An interview with David Winters

Matt Jakubowski in his blog, Truce:

David Winters is a literary critic living in Cambridge, England. His reviews, essays and interviews have appeared in a wide variety of print and online publications, including the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, The Literary Review, The White Review, The Quarterly Conversation, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. A collection of his literary criticism, titled Infinite Fictions, is forthcoming from Zero Books in January 2015; it can be pre-ordered here. He is currently co-editor in chief of 3:AM Magazine, where he commissions criticism and nonfiction. He can be found online at davidwinters.uk.

I’d like to hear a little bit about your beginnings as a critic. Was there a particular experience that triggered your interest in writing criticism?

ScreenHunter_864 Nov. 01 15.52Not a particular experience, so much as my general experience of reading—a basic love of reading being why anyone ends up a critic! For me, writing about books presented an opportunity—or perhaps just an excuse—to extend my engagement with the reading experience. What interests me most about that experience is its mystery—its opacity; its apparent distance from everyday reality. And really, thinking about my “beginnings” as a critic means thinking back to my earliest, murkiest memories of reading. Among those is an image of my father, sat on a bench in the garden of the house where I grew up, reading a paperback book. I must have been four or five. I’m not sure of the author—maybe Aldiss or Asimov; it doesn’t matter. What matters is my memory of his mood: sunlit, immersed in his book, he seemed serenely removed from the world. Maybe that’s what I’ve always sought in my reading: a kind of miraculous disappearance. Another memory: I’m sixteen, sitting in the same spot—my father is already four years dead—and I’m reading Kafka for the first time. Another: nineteen, same bench, different book—Roland Barthes. In both cases, I feel the same thing I think I saw on my father’s face, as a child. I can’t put a name to that feeling, but it’s the real reason I read, and the reason I write about what I read.

More here.

This Philosopher Wants to Change How You Think About Doing Good

Uri Bram in Cafe:

ScreenHunter_863 Nov. 01 13.22It's traditional to begin a profile of a Cambridge academic with a description of quads and spires and other quaint English-sounding things. But I meet Will MacAskill not at his college but in the nearby branch of Wetherspoons, a UK pub chain legendary for its improbable willingness to sell craft beer for one pound (one pound!) as an add-on to a burger meal. Everything about MacAskill is similarly unpretentious and amiable, in a highly Wetherspoons-esque way. He has a fondness for mild ales, a rollicking laugh, a warm Scottish accent and a manner that reminds you of the kid everyone likes in senior year of high school—not thepopular kid, mind, but the kid everyone actually likes. Oh: and, at 27 years old, he's already a superstar among his generation of philosophers. And he wants to revolutionize the way you think about doing good.

MacAskill started off thinking about altruism the same way most of us do: trying to balance his own ideas of the good life with a desire to give back to the world. His day-to-day life as an undergraduate in philosophy was happily consumed by obscure questions about language and logic, but when looking for summer work he sought out options with a social impact. He worked at a care home (once, among the hazards of the job, he was punched in the face by an old lady on steroids), volunteered as an English teacher at a school in Ethiopia, and worked for a major international development charity as a street fundraiser—what people in the U.K. call a chugger, a charity mugger. When MacAskill talks about his younger self, I can't help feeling a twinge of recognition of my own self now. “It was more a feeling of guilt that I wasn't really doing things,” says MacAskill. “I had this real ambivalence between normal pressures, but at the same time feeling that I ought to be doing more to make a difference.” He pauses, and frowns. “But then not really acting on that.”

More here.

Saturday Poem

Granizo

To have been gone so long
But to have forgotten hail,
its name in Spanish, granizo,
until a storm, as I drove
toward a place named Golondrinas,
eight miles from the main highway
because I was enchanted by the name
I was home again,
if only for a while, after eighteen years
I remembered my grandfather, his cornfield
Somehow granizo belongs to him
He named it each summer
as he sat and watched, defined its terror
An old enemy, the way only water,
if it isn't gentle rain, can be

by Leroy Quintana
from After Atzlan, Latino Poets of the Nineties
Godine Publishing, 1992

Standard burial and cremation take tons of energy and resources. So what’s the most environmentally sound way to deal with a dead person?

Shannon Palus in The Atlantic:

ScreenHunter_862 Nov. 01 12.48When Phil Olson was 20, he earned money in the family business by draining the blood from corpses. Using a long metal instrument, he sucked the fluid out of the organs, and pumped the empty space and the arteries full of three gallons of toxic embalming fluid. This process drains the corpse of nutrients and prevents it from being eaten by bacteria, at least until it’s put into the ground. Feebly encased in a few pounds of metal and wood, it wasn’t long until all the fluid and guts just leak back out.

Most of the bodies Olson prepared in his family's funeral home would then be buried in traditional cemeteries, below a lawn of grass that must be mowed, watered, sprayed with pesticides, and used for nothing else, theoretically until the end of time.

Cemeteries “are kind of like landfills for dead bodies,” says Olson. Today, as a philosopher at Virginia Tech, his work looks at the alternatives to traditional funeral practices. He has a lot to think about: The environmentally friendly funeral industry is booming, as people begin to consider the impacts their bodies might have once they’re dead. Each year, a million pounds of metal, wood, and concrete are put in the ground to shield dead bodies from the dirt that surrounds them. A single cremation requires about two SUV tanks worth of fuel. As people become increasingly concerned with the environment, many of them are starting to seek out ways to minimize the impact their body has once they’re done using it.

More here.