Hummingbird Acetylene

The turquoise flame of a hummingbird’s head
is a blazing torch of acetylene

burning, as when my father put a welding tip to steel
joining parts of his world with the bluegreen flame
he held between

this hummingbird burns in afternoon light
at the mouth of a flower in god’s machine

jabbing her tip at a perfect hour
joining her flame to mine
in a darting iridescent sheen
.

by Jim Culleny
5/30/14

by Leanne Ogasawara

A city of heavenly gates, Jerusalem is also a city of ill-fated walls.

There are the multiple lives of the glorious city walls, finally re-built by the Sultan of Magnificence in the 16th century; and there is the wailing wall (in my opinion the most beautiful wall on earth) where the Jews go to pray and to remember; and of course there is the new wall, or barrier, built to separate the state from the West Bank. A 26 feet tall concrete monstrosity, it has been attacked by artists and opposed by many international organizations dedicated to conflict resolution, from the Red Cross and the UN to Amnesty International and the World Council of Churches.

When we were in Jerusalem, friends said, “you must visit Bethlehem.” Of course, we wanted to go. To get there from Jerusalem, we boarded Bus #24 from the “Arab Bus Station” outside Damascus Gate. We were told to bring our passports–though this bus drops you within the checkpoint, a bit outside of the town. The ugly Wall dominated the drive into Bethlehem, and I found myself thinking a lot about something I read in book about the history of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre that the Church could in many ways serve as a great model for conflict resolution in the region.

This is very funny, of course, to anyone who knows anything about the contentious history of the church! For the history of the church reads more like comedy or sometimes even melodrama than anything else…. Contributing to the tensions leading up to the Crimean war, down to today all rights of use and maintainance are divided between the main players: the Orthodox, the Armenians, the Roman Catholics and the Copts; with the Ethiopians having been pushed up on to the roof, where they still remain languishing (Chart here). Part of the War's conclusion saw the Status Quo Agreement put into effect whereby not one inch of the church can be changed without the agreement of all parties–and this is why, there has remained a ladder on the roof for well over a hundred years.It takes an awful lot to get all the sides to sit down together to talk, much less to agree to anything!

So bad was it that during the Ottoman times, the keys to the church were entrusted to two prominent Muslim families–whose descendents continue to open and shut the doors of the church each day.

Like always, fact is stranger than fiction. And yet, despite the fact that history has seen the religious groups come to blows again and again over the centuries (with vivid scenes of monks pulling out crucifixes and candletsicks to attack and murder each other right next to the Empty Tomb!); still, being there, I had to admit, I'd take the chaotic and crazy AD-HOC style of conflict resolution and mutual existence to that ugly wall anyday! I kind of saw the writer's point, is what I am saying. Indeed, people said again and again that it is in the Old City, where peoples have lived on top of each other for centuries–bickering nastily, but for the most people in mutual existence–that things were better.

It is, as the saying goes, the walls that divide. Even if it is effective in the short-term, over the long haul, all dialogue ends and relations sour when people are divided. Monologue being a symptom of the colonial imagination, I've never really been a fan of short-term performance/ stop-gap measures…

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by Sarah Firisen

Privacy; Do we have it? If we don’t, should we care? With the news today that the NSA is now collection millions of faces from web images and using face recognition software on them, I think the answer to the first question is clearly, no. But of course, the NSA, at least in this instance, is only making use of digital images of ourselves that we’ve allowed to proliferate on the web. For the all the ballyhoo about government spying, most of us are our own worst enemies. Most people in the Western world, me included, have huge digital footprints. Probably bigger than we even realize. I remember the early days of admitting that I regularly Google myself and the titters as if that was a vaguely dirty thing to do. But honestly, anyone who doesn’t regularly check to see what is out there about them is foolish.

And I don’t just mean Google your name, Google your photos and your phone number. It’s amazing how many people discount those last two. I do a fair amount of online dating these days and I usually do some preliminary searches on men that I’m considering meeting – I honestly consider this a very basic safety precaution. And it’s amazing what I can find in about 20 seconds. People tend to use the same photos for multiple purposes, so the photo that cute guy has used on Match.com is often also the same photo he uses on his LinkedIn and Facebook profiles. And what do you know, when I Google that photo and find his Facebook page, I see what a charming couple he and his wife Susan make and how thrilled they are to be celebrating their 10^th wedding anniversary.

People are quick to give their phone numbers away, but many seem not to realize that if they’ve ever posted that number somewhere, on a bulletin board, on EBay, on Twitter, that number is going to link right back to who they are. It never ceases to astound me how easy it is to get some pretty identifying information on people very quickly and easily. It particularly amazes me when these people are clearly trying to cheat on a spouse or are lying about some other aspect of their lives. I cannot tell you how many men contact me online who are using photos of Bollywood actors as their profile photos and passing them off as their own. Yes, Bollywood actors seem to be the fake photos of choice, not sure why. I’m guessing that it’s because they’re usually good looking guys who aren’t well known in the west so men think they’ll get away with the lie. My one exception to this was the “gentleman” of a certain age who used a photo of John Gotti! And if you say that you’re Peter from New York who works in sales and I Google your photo and find it on the online bio of a neurology researcher who lives in California, I’m probably going to get suspicious and decline that friendly glass of wine you’ve offered.

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by Eric Byrd

Have you ever seen Sherman? It is necessary to see him in order to realize the Norse make-up of the man – the hauteur, noble, yet democratic: a hauteur I have always hoped I, too, might possess. (Whitman)

Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman are the conspicuous figures in the revolutionary re-founding of the United States. The victory of which they were the grand strategists and the most acclaimed media actors seemed to decide some of the fundamental questions the Founders had left to ambiguous laws and a faith in future compromise; a victory that eased, though it did not resolve, the existentially divisive “Negro Question” James Madison noted at the Constitutional Convention of 1787: “the States were divided into different interests not by their difference of size, but principally from their having or not having slaves. [Difference] did not lie between the large and small States: it lay between the Northern and Southern.”

In his essential orations – the Gettysburg Address, the Second Inaugural Address – Lincoln is a civic priest or poet, rhetorical guardian, keeper of ideals whose phrasemaking points to a transcendental order. He promised Americans that though their republic had collapsed in an orgy of violence, their ideals were imperishable, and waited be reborn from the bloody struggle. Grant, ancestor of all our taciturn gunslingers and laconic detectives, is the heroic everyman, the homely knight, the General-in-Chief who wore a private’s blouse in the field and appeared apolitical, ambitious of nothing beyond speedy victory, and so able to allay Americans’ traditional republican fear that a powerful general is a potential dictator.

Sherman is the scourge, the eccentric terror. The harsh style of his widely reprinted reports and official letters provided the public with a “vocabulary of the drastic,” wrote Charles Royster, and ensured that to many Unionists “his public character embodied the severity needed for the crushing of the rebellion.” He embodies that severity still, reduced to a now nearly anonymous aphorism (“War is Hell”), to the cinematic image of Atlanta in flames, and to the famous Matthew Brady portrait that made Evan S. Connell think of a “vulture with scrofula.” Of course Sherman, like Lincoln and Grant, is far more than his image, and a deeper study of the man is essential for the student of America’s consolidation and expansion. Sherman is one member of the late nineteenth century power elite who will tell you how the sausages were made, and in prose of nervous vehemence, half despairing, half gloating, with that note of philosophic detachment that creeps into discussions of the inevitable. He could also wax lyrical; the Mississippi River was to him a national Tree of Life, and he reminded a New Orleans correspondent that the city was

the root of a tree whose branches reach the beautiful fields of western New York, and the majestic cañons of the Yellowstone, and that with every draught of water you take the outflow of the pure lakes of Minnesota and the dripping dews of of the Alleghany and Rocky Mountains.

He was subject to bouts of depression and reread Shakespeare constantly; he ends his memoirs with lines from Jaques’ melancholic soliloquy. He was prominent in the ruin of the rebellious slaveholders and the destruction of the nomadic tribes that hunted on the Great Plains; and for someone perched on the usually euphemistic heights of American power, he was villainously candid about the requisite violence and terror, and he was full of personal paradoxes.

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by Bill Benzon

Over the past few years I’ve spent a great deal of time photographing graffiti in Jersey City, which is on the West bank of the Hudson River across from lower Manhattan. Most of that time I’ve photographed a handful of sites, over and over again, week after week, month after month. What I’ve seen is that things change. Of course the graffiti is eroded by the weather; in some cases it may also be “buffed” (eradicated) by the authorities. More likely, though, is that it will become over-written by other graffiti writers – that’s what they call themselves, by the way, writers, for their art is grounded in letters.

Even this piece, which looks like a green triceratops, is a name: “Joe”, shortened from “Japan Joe”, the nom de guerre of the writer:

It’s large; about 18 feet wide and seven feet high. Here you see a train going by:

Think of Japan Joe in that spot, working for several hours, surrounded by greenery, but also the large freight trains rumbling by. The trains and the greenery travel into his mind where they fuse into the image of a large green animal, the triceratops.

That’s the spirit of the place.

And, in time, Japan Joe’s triceratops had been degraded by the weather to the point that Kemos and Jnub could go over it without insulting Joe:

Life goes on.

Thus I have come to understand the graffiti site as more than a physical place. It IS that, but the physical place is to be understood, perhaps, provisionally, as a resource accessed by the graffiti, and thus by the graffiti writer. The site is a confluence of physical, social, and aesthetic energy.

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by Matt McKenna

Much has been made of whether this summer's Godzilla movie is a pro-environmentalist film or an anti-environmentalist film. While both readings are plausible on a surface level, neither addresses the dominant public policy critique embedded within the biggest monster flick since last year's Pacific Rim. While the lack of an environmental focus in Godzilla will surely rankle those who watch the film in the hopes of affirming their respective worldviews (whatever those may be), less politically motivated moviegoers will be pleased to discover that the film grapples with the more interesting problem of establishing a culture of open, data-driven public policy.

Godzilla begins by showing glimpses of the monster within the jittering frames of 1950s archival footage. We soon learn that those atomic bomb tests performed during the Cold War weren't tests at all–they were attempts to kill a mysterious giant creature known as Godzilla. Flash forward to 1999 when Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) notices strange seismic activity while working at a nuclear power plant in Japan. When the seismic activity increases and the power plant collapses, a multinational governmental organization called Monarch quarantines the area and establishes a cover story about the plant being destroyed by an earthquake. Brody, skeptical of the official report, secretly researches the disaster and finds evidence for an enormous spider-like monster lurking about. Flash-forward once more to the present day where Brody finally has the opportunity to present his research to Monarch only to be interrupted a giant spider monster hatching from its giant spider monster egg. This creature subsequently spends its screen time and the film's budget destroying various American cities in search of the nuclear energy it needs to sustain its rampage. Conveniently for humans, however, Godzilla wakes up, rises from the depths of the ocean, and hunts the enormous spider for what appears to be sport.

With a plot like that, it would be easy to come to the conclusion that the Godzilla has aligned itself with environmentalists–mess with the environment and giant spiders will exterminate your species, it seems to say. At the same time, this message is undercut by the fact that a deus ex machina in the form of Godzilla appears and saves the day with no act of contrition required by humans. Why is Godzilla's environment-related message so muddled? Because there isn't one. When the first half of the film is taken into account, it becomes clear that Godzilla's primary message is actually a plea for policy makers to be less reactionary and more data-oriented.

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by Karen Engelmann

Memoir can be a dangerous choice for a writer; they reveal a slice of themselves that must cut deep in the extraction, but in the best examples, the genre is healing for both author and reader. Maria Chaudhuri's “Beloved Strangers” (Bloomsbury, 2014) is one such healing memoir. The story creates a circle from birth to rebirth, with Miss Chaudhuri's long and arduous journey into adulthood detailed in elegant and, at times, dreamlike prose.

Born to devout Muslin parents in Bangladesh — a newly formed nation still in turmoil from its own difficult birth — Miss Chaudhuri's prologue begins, literally, in the womb. In three brief, powerful passages set in different stages of her young life, the author introduces the theme of separation — a condition that is her greatest challenge and serves as the book's central query. The first passage is a poetic exploration of her own birth in Dhaka, the initial departure from the safety of the mother. The second examines a child's wish to run away, fueled by the wishes of the mother to be alone and free of the burdens of children. The third is a self-imposed displacement to a foreign land — the northeastern U.S and ultimately New York — the author describes as “rancid.” And yet a return to what was home in Bangladesh literally causes a kind of asphyxiation; the prodigal daughter cannot breath the air of her native city. In these first six pages, we enter a world where the author feels estranged from all that she is supposed to hold dear. Chaudhuri addresses this estrangement fearlessly, tackling topics like religion, familial dysfunction, gender roles, sex, depression and obsession with painful candor and surprising lyricism.

The author's questions regarding belonging begin with the family's strong religious traditions. Chaudhuri's innocent inquiries about God are rebuked and punished. She is taught to pray in Arabic — a foreign language that was only memorized and never learned or even translated. The pir sahib, a holy man who makes an annual visit to the family, tells the young Maria that he named her after a beautiful Christian slave that was a gift to the Prophet from the Byzantine Emperor. The pir's explanation is accompanied by a lecherous sexual tension that hints of intended pedophilia, arrested only by the arrival of her parents. Beauty, promiscuity, danger and desire are often connected in the work, a source of confusion and shame. When crowds of the devout arrive at the house to pray with the pir in the evening, the young Chaudhuri runs to the roof of the house to stare at the sky:

My grandmother said it was in the moment between twilight and darkness that all heavenly creatures left their earthly sojourns to fly back up to the heavens. The pink streaks in the sky were Heaven's doorway, flung open for the return of its inhabitants. I was always hunted down before the multi-colored easel of a sky had coagulated into a deep charcoal. (pg. 15)

Escape as a solution to life's problems is a method Chaudhuri dreams about often, inspired (and simultaneously terrified) by her mother's clearly expressed desire to escape the drudgery of home and family to pursue her own thwarted artistic dreams as a singer.

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by Tamuira Reid

Mary hears voices. Voices that awaken her from a deep, dark sleep. Voices that pull and laugh and tug. Voices that make her lock and unlock doors. Wash clean dishes. Fold and unfold clothes. Voices that make her tired.

There's an orange one. A tan one. A red one. A handful of white ones. She knows them by heart. Their purposes. Their functions. Her dysfunction. Standing over the kitchen counter-top, underwear but no bra, she faces the breakfast of pills staring back at her, a little army of soldiers going off to war.

There's a three-year-old somewhere in the back of the house, knee-deep in a pile of dirty clothes and linen, searching for his dinosaur, Pickles, who he'll flush down the toilet, because not only is he missing a leg, but a tail too. His daily routine consists mostly of flushing stuff down the toilet and hiding things from his mom. Car keys are buried in the soil of houseplants. Lipstick goes under a mattress (only after it is noted that “Rock Star Red” looks as good on his forehead as it does on the wall). Photo albums are dismantled, displayed, black and white pictures colored-in with a half-broken crayon. Baby dolls dismembered. Credit cards and day planners and unbalanced checkbooks stashed inside a toy box, under a bathroom sink, in the exhaust pipe of a life-sized motorcycle.

The voices make mornings hard.

Scrambled eggs take an hour to cook, shaking hands pick out bits of shell, burnt toast going unnoticed until the wail of a smoke alarm cuts into her consciousness.

She's making the day's “To Do” list, a mental log of errands to run, phone calls to make, appointments she won't keep. Her back and arms ache, the dark circles around her eyes intensifying, making her look old. L'Oreal concealer is added to the list of “Things To Buy”, and she massages the circles with the tips of her fingers, trying to rub the age out.

The boy wants cheese.

“No cheese for breakfast.”

“But I wancheeze mama! Cheeze! Cheeze! Cheeze!”

She plugs in the old Hoover, the one she bought at the flea market last year, while he triumphantly bites into a block of cheddar, legs stretched out in front of him, sitting intently on the cold morning linoleum. Mama's cleaning things again.

The voices make living difficult.

Long nights of drinking take a toll on the house. Empty bottles crowd coffee and end tables, tipping over forgotten ashtrays and discarded cups of soda, smashed butts and brown liquid falling to the floor. She'll later wrap these wine bottles in tissue paper and give them as Christmas presents to her family and friends, erasing any doubt there'd been about the status of her drinking. I'll quickly stuff a tapered candle into mine, Look – It makes a great candleholder. After dessert I'll offer to drive Mary home only to detour at the corner bar, a dank, smoky room and I won't think twice about buying her a beer, and I won't think twice about buying her another one and I won't think, just don't think about it, that this is wrong, that there is something inherently terrible about watching her drink. Because this is what friends do. This is normal.

They whisper.

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by Liam Heneghan

“Metempsychosis. They believed you could be changed into a tree from grief”

(Ulysses, James Joyce)

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by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

A single feather, milky blue, just fallen on my threshold, is from a Turkestan hill dove flying south from China to Peshawar, I imagine, though it is more likely to have been shed by a buttonquail which is common in these parts.

There is no house or door, only a threshold with the listening capacity of a mystic; there is unstoppable song and news in the hubbub. My impatience will keep me from staying by the threshold. I’ll fly over it like a bird from India or Afghanistan, or I’ll cross back and forth like local ants and lizards, run by the small animal clock inside me.

When I migrate, something of the threshold will migrate with me.

Made from melting the musk of each passerby with protolithic time, this threshold is neither a construction or a destruction but a slow composite of both. Along the Silk Road— the moving marketplace across Asia, Africa and Europe— Peshawar has been an important outpost: here, what is stolen by opium, is filled back in by shady trees planted by pilgrims; what is healed and made whole with medicinal tea and Sufi poetry, is pulverized by gun powder; there are rare gems and there are bullets. Sometimes trade and war ride each other’s shoulders. A third companion, the storyteller, is often a few paces ahead or behind.

Qissa Khawani Bazaar or “the market of the storytellers” has teashops where traders, craftsmen, monks, poets, warriors, spies, scholars, pilgrims, thieves and builders traveling the Silk Road, have, for long, gathered to exchange stories.

But some stories tell themselves, like the story of the old Banyan tree chained by James Squid, a British military officer who got this tree in the Landi Kotal Cantonment “arrested” for lurching at him on a very drunken night: the punished tree’s shame is intensified by its caption “I am under arrest.” The tree is locked in history as is the British Raj’s moment of inebriation with power.

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by Paul Braterman

Science, it is often said, is restricted in principle to the search for natural causes. Is this a fundamental rule for doing science? Or merely a useful procedural guide, derived from experience? Is it even true? Or meaningful? Does it matter? These questions are addressed in an important series of papers in 2010, 2012, and 2014, by Maarten Boudry at the University of Ghent and his colleagues. They conclude that it matters a great deal, that the alleged restriction does not in fact exist, and that appealing to such a principle in argument is harmful to the cause of science. I agree.

I will deal with the first four questions in reverse order. Can we make a meaningful distinction between the natural and the supernatural? I was initially inclined to say no. If something occurs, it's part of nature. It is a law of nature that water doesn't turn into wine, but if you believe that the miracle of the wedding feast of Cana really happened, then you need to modify the law to say “Water doesn't turn into wine, except when Jesus tells it to.” Maarten persuaded me that this was not a helpful line to take. Like all attempts to define a problem out of existence, it is logically unassailable, but useless. It denies us access to the very distinction that we should be clarifying.

The question, however, is more difficult than it seems. After all, we do not know everything that there is to be known about nature. We readily apply the label “supernatural” to purported phenomena such as telekinesis or telepathy, in which mind is regarded as operating on matteror on other minds without material agency, but we do not have a satisfactory account of mind-matter relationships anyway. Other prime candidates for supernatural status, such as precognition and remote viewing, would if real involve transcending the usual space-time framework, but space and time are much less rigidly defined now than they seemed to be before Einstein. The limits of natural explanation have been extended in the past, by invoking action at a distance (gravity, then other forces), intrinsic randomness (quantum mechanics), and more recently particle entanglement (quantum mechanics again). Presumably they will be in the future, in ways yet undreamt of. So the fact that something cannot be explained by today's science need not force us to invoke the supernatural. What would, then? Boudry and Taner Edis suggest a test for what they call unphysical causation, but it is highly technical, with their criterion based on demonstrated access to uncomputable numbers (I will not attempt to reproduce their argument). However, they suggest some examples. What, for instance, if Lourdes started producing undeniable miracles in large numbers, including the regrowth of amputated limbs, but only for devout Catholics? What if all organisms were found to contain an identical section of DNA, whose diffraction pattern spelt out the message “© Yahweh 4004 BC”? What, I might add, if we really did start receiving messages from the dead?

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by Jonathan Kujawa

In September the New York Times reported on an interesting tidbit in the annual budget request by the National Security Agency (NSA). You can read the full NYT article here, but the relevant lines are highlighted in this image from the NYT's article:

NSA's Budget Request (image by the NYT)

The NSA claims to be able to insert hidden weaknesses into the cryptographic technologies which are used to keep our data safe on the internet. Admittedly, in recent weeks alone the NSA has been accused of interdicting internet routers during shipment and inserting bugging devices, targeting human rights groups, and recording all audio from phone calls to/from the Bahamas. By now it's hard to keep track of all the various outrages committed by the US government in the name of security.

So why do I want to talk about something which is, comparatively speaking, old news? First, because it is an ongoing issue and inserting weaknesses into widely used cryptographic schemes has the potential to affect everyone — not just those targeted by the NSA. If there are weaknesses, then other nefarious characters may be able to exploit them. So much for the “They aren't interested in me” and the “I have nothing to hide” arguments.

Second, this isn't a case of bureaucrats over-promising and under-delivering. If we dig into the mathematics we find plausible independent evidence that the US government did indeed insert a backdoor into a widely used cryptographic system. It seems there is at least one branch of the federal government who can deliver on their IT promises.

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The Earth is on fire, but it was not always this way. Billions of years ago at the time of primordial life's genesis the Earth lacked free oxygen in the atmosphere. The evolutionary rise of blue-green algae in the oceans led to the advent of oxygen. And so today every creature burns a little when it breaths. Oxygen is an extremely reactive element. From oxygen's perspective the earth is a pile of fuel waiting to burn. Consider what a single spark would ravage with no human intervention. Cities are piles of neatly stacked kindling and forests are scattered matchsticks. So it is somewhat of an amazement the entire thing doesn't just catch fire. Perhaps one day it will.

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