by Tom Jacobs

The sensuous world around [us] is, not a thing given direct from all eternity, remaining ever the same, but the product of industry and of the state of society; and, indeed, in the sense that it is an historical product, the result of the activity of whole succession of generations, each standing on the shoulders of the preceding one, developing its industry and intercourse, modifying its social system according to the changed needs. Even the objects of the simplest ‘sensuous certainty’ are only given [us] through social development, industry and commercial intercourse.

— Karl Marx, The German Ideology (1845-46)

11:59 to 12:00 Means, Well, What, Exactly…?

The end of 2011 means many things to many people. I don’t know exactly what it means to me. It was a fine year, I suppose. Full of fully realized anxieties but also moments of small triumphs. I did things that would make my mother proud, but I did many things that would no doubt shame her, as well. Based upon a very cursory review of my facebook friends’ posts, however, the turn of the calendar year seems to mean mostly an aggressive goodbye to a year one would prefer not to remember. (An exemplary post shows an image of the first two digits “20” juxtaposed with two upturned middle fingers, signifying both the missing “11” as well as a not so fond farewell to the departing calendar year). The desire to leave behind and to forget is counterbalanced by the desire to imagine ourselves fresh, innocent, and new. This is, of course, is complete silliness, but who of us doesn’t entertain this fantasy. We will change. We will relinquish the foul rag and boneshop of the soul and re-invent ourselves. Existence will become light and not heavy. Perhaps we and/or it will. But time grinds slowly into the future (as Steve Miller once said, in a slightly different register), and real change, the kind of change that allow us to step into a new, invented persona convincingly, requires trauma of some sort, I find. We need to be slapped once in a while.

Grace, the very thing that allows us to become more human, better, doesn’t come cheaply. This is something that I think I know. We need to suffer to understand. Understanding without suffering is like trying to understand pearl divers with scuba diving technology. Two different things. Not eternally opposed; but opposed nevertheless. One inhales deeply of the existent air and dives into the deep on a dive predicated upon human limitations; the other has a false cartridge of oxygen, swimming effortlessly amidst the coral and imbibing beauty with every oxygenated breath. Two different things. You get the idea.

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by Hartosh Singh Bal

Time Magazine declared it the year of the protester, clubbing together what was happening in regions as different as the Arab world, the US and India. While it is easy to find commonalities among the young, urban and largely middle-class protesters who came out on the streets, in some cases they were protesting against the tyranny of their governments and asking for democracy, in other cases they were protesting the shape democracy had come to acquire in their countries. The occupy Wall Street movement and the India against Corruption movement both represent similar sentiments. In the US the anger was directed against the influence of corporate on the democratic system largely through electoral funding, in India it was against corruption with the understanding that the source of high corruption was the cycle that went from the spending of vast sums of money (often illegally) for the elections to raising money when in power (often illegally) for the next elections.

As the countries making their way to democracy will find out in their own time, the funding of elections and its influence on the polity is the most problematic aspects of democracy. While much is made of local factors in estimating the cost of elections, much of the spending in elections is actually independent of such factors. Equalizing for the population size of each constituency and the difference in living standards gives a fair estimate across countries and time periods for election spending, especially in countries unconstrained by effective legislation on campaign spending, such as the US or India.

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by Haider Shahbaz (and his dear friend, Nicolas MMP)

I

Under the heading Autobiography, in a notebook otherwise empty, the surrealist scribbled:

To wage war with words on the fascists. My manifestos are my diaries; my diaries are my manifestos. An end to bourgeois essentialization. An end to mediocrity. Of the worlds that wine opens, those who piss clear know nothing.

II

It would be dishonest to claim that Jean-Baptiste Lucanor was anything other than what he was: a mediocre writer, a second-tier avant-gardist. The fact that he only appears in one of the photographs of the core Surrealist group attests to his existence as a fringe figure. But just like the study of animals does not limit itself to a few important species, neither should the study of literature. I present, therefore, Jean-Baptiste Lucanor’s life and a translation of his diaries and letters in the hope that the study of surrealism’s mediocre devotee enhances the field of literature.

By all accounts, Jean-Baptiste Lucanor had an unhappy childhood. Born in the small city of Tours on the twenty-first of December of 1900, he was the fifth and youngest child of a petit bourgeois marriage. The poet’s social position was thus privileged enough to encourage expectations, yet limited enough to all but guarantee that those expectations would be disappointed.

The story of Lucanor’s parents is rather tragic, and accordingly it forms the basis for Lucanor’s only novel, Le Jardin des Étoiles Tristes. The mother, a certain Marie Deschamps, fell sick with a mysterious illness after giving birth to the poet. Municipal records show that labor lasted almost thirty hours, and that the poor lady fell into a state of profound exhaustion after having kissed her “rather ugly child.” She would never recover, spending most of her remaining decade and a half in a tiny bed on the fourth floor, the only room in the house that had a clear view of the Cathedral.

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by Mara Jebsen

I have a good friend in the East, who comes to my shows and says, you sing a lot about the past, you can't live in the past, you know. I say to him, I can go outside and pick up a rock that's older than the oldest song you know, and bring it back in here and drop it on your foot. Now the past didn't go anywhere, did it? It's right here, right now.

–Utah Phillips (folk singer)

So. You are someone like me, which is to say you are reasonably young but already have in memory several distinct places or times which are irrevocably lost. In fact, when the new year starts to roll round, you can’t help but think of all the little worlds — the little phases planned, started, discarded, the fuzzy neighborhoods of your memory beginning to border on one another like they do in dreams. Dreams like the one in which you must get out of the car in the motel parking lot in some dreary part of America because the man whose face you cannot look at (because he is your future husband) says “I'm glad I took you on, hitchhiker, but this is where we part ways, ” and leans over you to open the door and you are forced to walk stiffly across the green sideways brooms of frozen grass at night through a long pasture towards Africa, towards the baobob tree under which your aunts and uncles are having a picnic on gold cloth with champagne flutes and dead pigs all lying on their sides—

Just then, as the soon-to-be-old year is drawing its last breaths, expiring by the hour–you will wake, clean your teeth, put on your day-clothes and go see what's going on at the Guggenheim.

It is Maurizio Cattelan: All

All.

A chaotic retrospective of every physical thing he did, strung up willy-nilly with rope and everywhere embellished with dirty dead pigeons.

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by Colin Eatock

“Q: Why did the Canadian cross the road? A: To get to the middle.” (a rare example of Canadian humour).

The year 2012 has a special significance in the relationship between Canada and the USA. It’s the bicentennial of the War of 1812: a comedy of military errors in which American forces invaded Canada (which was still a British colony), with the intention of annexing it. The attacks were repulsed – and at the end of the war, a peace treaty left borders unchanged. Ever since, Canadians have claimed victory in the war, while Americans prefer to say it was a draw.

Yet a cursory glance around Canada today gives the impression that the American invasion of Canada was a complete success. Americans visiting Canada find cities and towns full of the same kind of architecture, retail businesses and cars that they left at home. They find people who speak and dress like them, and eat the same food. And they find people who watch American films and listen to American music – and do not think of these things as foreign. (The one major exception is the province of Quebec, and I’ll talk about that shortly.) To some Americans, the idea that Canada is an independent country is an elaborate fiction.

Canadians resent this: we feel we are different, and we want our different-ness to be acknowledged. However, when pressed to name specific examples, we often find ourselves grasping at straws. We call the last letter of the alphabet “zed,” not “zee.” We celebrate Thanksgiving on the second Monday of October, not the fourth Thursday of November. Our federal police, the Mounties, wear red jackets and ride horses. The rules of Canadian football are somewhat different from the rules of American football. Canadians say “eh” a lot, and (we’re told) we pronounce the word “about” in a peculiar way.

But such petty distinctions do not a nation make – and Americans are right to dismiss such arguments as trivial. The fact remains that many parts of Canada look like they could readily be somewhere in the USA. That’s why American movies are sometimes filmed in Canada.

Yet outward appearances can be deceiving. A person who knows very little about marine biology might think that the shark and the dolphin are closely related species, because they are similar in size and form. But of course the shark is a fish, and the dolphin is a mammal: they are entirely dissimilar on the inside. And so it is with Canada and the USA. The similarities are obvious and abundant, while the differences are subtle yet profound.

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by S. Abbas Raza

This post is for 3QD friend and supporter Robert Pinsky.

At one pole of the axis representing how literal poetry translations should be are figures like Vladimir Nabokov who believed that poetry must be translated as literally as possible without any interpretive liberties taken or attempts to preserve rhythm or the spirit of the thing in any other way by the translator. His 1965 translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin into English was so strictly faithful to the Russian that it exasperated and infuriated critics and started a long-running feud between Nabokov and Edmund Wilson. In his translations of one of the greatest 20th century Urdu poets, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, the Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali sits on the other pole of that axis, allowing himself a rather fair degree of freedom in his renderings. Below, on the left, I have translated one of my favorite poems by Faiz, written in beautiful, courageous defiance while he was a political prisoner in Pakistan. I have tried to keep it as close to the original as possible and it is pretty much a word-for-word translation. For comparison, I give Agha Shahid Ali's version on the right.

A PRISON EVENING

Night descends on a spiral
staircase of evening stars;
a breeze passes by
as tenderly as if
someone had said a loving thing.

The countryless trees
of the prison courtyard
are absorbed in drawing
pictures and patterns
on a shirtfront of sky.

On the shoulders of heaven
shines the lovely hand
of beneficent moonlight,
dissolving into dust the watery stars,
dissolving the blueness of sky in the starry light.

In greenish corners
shimmer sky-blue shadows
in the way that the waves
of the pain of separation
from my lover arrive in my heart.

My mind continually says to my heart:
so sweet is life at this very moment
that those who prepare
the poisons of cruelty
cannot be victorious today or tomorrow.

So what if they managed
to put out the candles
in the places where lovers meet;
let us see if they can ever
extinguish the moon.

************************************

The Urdu original of Faiz's poem is below.

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by Jesse Smith

Touring Longwood Garden’s new Christmas show, Jim Sutton walked along a row of twelve poinsettias on display in a back corner of the main conservatory.

“This is a voluptuous one,” he said, stopping to finger the leaves of a poinsettia variety called ‘Vintage Red.’

Sutton is Display Designer for Longwood, a botanical garden in southeastern Pennsylvania, just outside of Philadelphia; it is considered by many to be one of the world’s premier gardens. Sutton oversees events such as January’s Orchid Extravaganza and the Chrysanthemum Festival in fall. His biggest job is “A Longwood Christmas,” the annual explosion of lights, trees, poinsettias, and traffic that attracts the garden’s largest crowds.

The official theme of this year’s show is “A Gingerbread Fantasy.” Gingerbread cookies decorate trees in the conservatory’s Exhibition Hall. A fake gingerbread scent is pumped into the Music Room, which features trees made of gingerbread shingles, a train painted gingerbread brown, and gingerbread recreations of the conservatory and du Pont home. The Tropical Terrace exhibits plants that produce gingerbread ingredients: ginger, sugar, cinnamon, allspice, and cloves.

Themes like “A Gingerbread Fantasy” distinguish one Longwood Christmas from another. They provide a concept through which the Gardens can tweak the traditional holiday tropes of trees and lights. But a particular kind of artistry arises in the more subtle variations of the iconic poinsettias that appear year after year. This year, “A Longwood Christmas” features more than 2,000.

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by Hasan Altaf

When I was in graduate school, in Baltimore, one of the poems I had to teach my own students was Robinson Jeffers's “The Purse-Seine.” Among both my classmates and the undergraduates it was one of the least popular poems, which should perhaps have been no surprise, since we were encouraged to use it as an illustration of the term “jeremiad”: “a long literary work… in which the author bitterly laments the state of society and its morals in a serious tone of sustained invective, and always contains a prophecy of society's imminent downfall.” My reaction was more mixed – I liked Jeffers's long lines; I liked his voice; I liked the imagery, the parallel between the phosphorescence of the shoals of fish and the lights of the city. The first two stanzas are seductive, almost hypnotic (“the crowded fish/know they are caught, and wildly beat from one wall to the other of their closing destiny the phosphorescent/water to a pool of flame, each beautiful slender body sheeted with flame”) – and then, in the third stanza, comes this:

“…we have built the great cities; now
There is no escape. We have gathered vast populations incapable of free survival, insulated
From the strong earth, each person in himself helpless, on all dependent. The circle is closed, and the net
Is being hauled in. They hardly feel the cords drawing, yet they shine already. The inevitable mass-disasters
Will not come in our time nor in our children's, but we and our children
Must watch the net draw narrower, government take all powers – or revolution, and the new government
Take more than all, add to kept bodies kept souls – or anarchy, the mass-disasters.”

And at that point the poem always lost me: Even a piece as otherwise lovely (to me, although in Baltimore I was in I believe a minority of one) as “The Purse-Seine” could never convince me to look at cities in that way, not just out of personal geographical preference but mostly because the analysis is both paranoid and in the end mistaken. One can make an argument for “insulation from the strong earth” and “government powers,” but to me it seems that cities are overwhelmingly a positive force, not a negative one. Of all the things humanity has created, of all of our achievements, cities always seem to me the highest.

Recently however I was in Pakistan, in Islamabad and Lahore, and for some reason I began to reconsider the poem.

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by Kevin S. Baldwin

My family recently watched Toy Story 3 (2010) on DVD. Somehow in the chaos of last summer we had missed seeing that Pixar offering in the theater; something we have done without fail for the last decade. Needless to say, it was a fabulous film: Great story, worked on multiple levels, was humorous, and so on. As I continued to reflect on the film, it struck me that Toy Story 3 may be the culmination (or nearly so) of a meta narrative-arc that began with its first feature length film, Toy Story, in 1995. Collectively, these films chronicle many of the concerns of the baby boomer generation as they have matured.

Toy Story (1995) was not only the first entirely computer generated feature length film, it was also a terrific story. Though clearly set in the mid-1990's it was in many ways an homage to the childhoods of the boomers who grew up in the 1950's. The main human character, Andy, has an active imagination that he puts to good use with his toys (who have lives of their own when they are not being played with). The toy's leader is Sheriff Woody, a 1950's era cowboy. All is well in the toy ecosystem until a new “space toy” appears in the form of Buzz Lightyear, who believes he really is an astronaut. Woody's jealousy leads to an adventure worthy of a Norse saga in which both he and Buzz are separated from Andy and nearly face annihilation at the hands of Andy's sadistic next door neighbor, Sid. Order is restored when Woody convinces Buzz that a toy has a duty to be a child's play-thing. Eventually, they join forces to get back to Andy.

At another level this character rivalry reflects the increasing planned obsolescence and consumerism that took hold in the 1950's and has since accelerated. “That which must be owned immediately” is discarded when the next big thing comes along. One existential question Toy Story seems to be asking is: “How does one stay relevant and useful in a world that craves the latest and greatest?” Andy and Buzz are after all, only toys; merely stuff. What is really important are relationships. One of the enigmatic aspects of Pixar's success is the degree to which the movies have been used to sell toys. (Full disclosure: I am staring at a Buzz Lightyear action figure that is sitting on the coffee table and a veritable traffic jam of Cars 2 characters on the windowsill, courtesy of my six year old).

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by Maniza Naqvi

Tucked away in the frenzy of Lahore’s traffic congested Mozang Chungi, a framer’s shop, narrow, dark and dusty, bears on its back wall a minor conceit from history. A slight, which made the freshly formed impressions of a newcomer, even a tough customer like me, obsolete. At least it does in my memory, an old and faded letter, dated a moment in the late 19th century and attesting to the fine quality of the shop's work, signed John Lockwood Kipling: Curator of the Lahore Museum and Principal of the Mayo School of Arts. Perhaps it’s all gone now, what with newer buildings encroaching on that old downtown area– I don't know. It used to be there when I was there way back in the eighties. “Le' go! Le' go!” I hear his voice. Tonight, as usual, a smattering of tiny twinkling mirrors wink and cover me, cautioning that the past is for the willing but it seems the only way to divine sleep.

The letter always caught my eye and was framed behind the tea and grime stained cloth covered counter. Must have been around the same time when his young son was in Lahore working as an assistant editor at the Civil and Military Gazette.

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by James McGirk

You never look directly at the face. Catch only glimpses of it and those glimpses are ever changing. One moment he is a she. The next there is a hissing void where a face should be. The only constant is an hourglass that hangs above its pillow, a cartoonish thing with the year 2011 stamped on one side and only five grains remaining and one of those grains is about to fall.

The patient is dying, that much is clear; fugues of stroboscopic flickers consume the body like a florescent light bar about to sputter out. He or she or whatever it is reaches for you and the flesh of its hand is mottled and moving, seven billion pixels buzzing, dots of different shades of brown that pale slightly at its northern extremities. A grain slips through the tip of the timer’s cone to fall among its three hundred and sixty brethren below. Only four remain.

He opens his mouth and static rushes out, a wave of white noise cascades around you and tumbles apart into twitter feeds and crumpled newspaper and television signals and radio waves; and it tries again, fills its lungs beneath its strange cloak – a garment that is mostly rotten rags and plain cotton but woven with silk thread and buttoned with diamond chips – and wheezes out the words, “There is still time.” You take in the detritus discarded beneath its bed; a layer of tinsel, the Chanukah candles melted down to nubs just below, the gnawed drumstick, the soggy firecrackers and drooping birthday hats wonder what could possibly surprise you after this.

A second grain tumbles through the timer. A new form shudders into view. This new manifestation contains larger pieces than its previous form, two hundred and four of them, some enormous, encompassing entire organs, others covering only sliver of nail. The face is a jagged diamond – flat on top with a gnarled bottom that is almost a beard. One facet is a black, another red, the third white, while its mouth is a green triangle that falls open to a smile that widens and splits its face into two pieces, and as you watch, the southern, bearded half blossoms into a new color scheme: a blue triangle, its expression squeezed into a yellow star.

The third grain drops. You catch whiffs of gunsmoke and your eyes tear up as you inhale puffs of riot gas. Angry green boils erupt all over the patient's body. Even the shards that seemed the most stolid appear inflamed with activity. Seven red elephants stare up at a blue donkey with bat-like ears and they bare their tusks before stampeding toward one another. The patchwork skin begins to bubble and melt away, in the spots where it seemed the most solid, it sags and rots and tears open. Beneath the carapace there is mostly emptiness. But the space crisscrossed by thin wires, some crackling with sparks; others simply hanging, little strings of tinsel, gold and silver and bubbling veins of black crude.

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by Maniza Naqvi

“Books do make a room.” Or something like that, from a play—can’t recall which one—– a satirical jibe at the mindless tyranny of the self serving anti intellectual in society. Serving to this type of thinking with this type of laziness is hitched to a fine pitch for the American audience, in the packaging and selling of opinion, in my opinion, by a slimy toad: the blow hard, alcoholic—poser, social climber, wannabe—the unoriginal mediocre cheerleader of war and mass murder who made a career of being draped in mounds of other peoples’ books and supposedly having been himself well read and writing well, all the while being a fraud—and an Iago to America’s Othello. As if being surrounded by columns and piles of books, and having an ability to parrot quotes, and insults in a British accent—with a cigarette and a glass of whisky in hand somehow made him an intellectual. It did not. From all that has been written about him and what he wrote himself he was nothing more than a weak, trend following, power worshipping, fraud: third rate at school and third rate in life.

That toad’s words hitch him to being part of the language, literature and actions that define the racist, supremacist and fascist ethos of mass murderers who are obsessed with God all the while denying their real obsession as if to say: I don’t deny —my orientation—because I have a greater obsession than that which I need to hide: I actually do believe in a God—in a God for the right people–a white God.

The toad, an inebriated toxic decay wrapped inside the blubber of mid life crisis, appeared to himself, a legend, from a bar stool's smoky view of the mirror. So he hitched his sense of self to some confusion with Dorian Gray.

The event on September 11, 2001 allowed a gleeful toad such as him to unleash his proclivities of hatred unvarnished down the welcoming throat of an era of bloodletting.

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by Morgan Meis

At the moment, I’m angry with Christopher Hitchens. Not because he died. A man dies. And angry is not really the correct word, nor the correct emotion. I’m frustrated with Christopher Hitchens, troubled by him, moved by him, enamored of him and then repelled at the attraction.

The first time I met Christopher Hitchens was at a Harper’s Magazine Christmas party just before the start of the Iraq War. Bloomberg had recently banned smoking in New York City and the intellectuals were pissed. In those days, Harper’s parties happened down in the basement at Pravda. It was all very arch. Smoking ban be damned. Lewis Lapham and his band of merry lit boys were going to light up the smokes anyway. Hitch had a Scotch in one hand and a cigarette in the other. But you’ve seen him like that a thousand times, in person, in pictures, on TV. I stood in line to speak with him. The line was moving smoothly until a woman in a red dress half a size too small for all her stuff gummed up the works. You could hear the collective groan all along the line as she stepped up to the Hitch. This was going to take a while.

I gave him a copy of a review a friend and I had written about his recently published book, Letters to a Young Contrarian. The book is not very good, a fact he readily acknowledged. Really, my friend and I wrote the review to attack him for his abandonment of the Left. He didn’t care that we felt abandoned. Speaking with him, I came to understand that he really didn’t care. All the same, he appreciated the review, which was pretty smart. Hitch appreciated smart. Always.

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by Tom Jacobs

There is a wrongly attributed quote associated with Soren Kierkegaard that says something to the effect that life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards. I have found no evidence that he ever actually said or wrote this, but it is a sufficiently Kierkegaardian sentiment (by which I mean, a sentiment that stops you in your mental tracks and forces you to pause for a moment and reflect about what the hell you are doing with your life) that I will use it here. It points to an essential contradiction in our lives: we are always passing down the ringing grooves of history into the future while constantly looking backwards, trying to figure out what all of this experience means, what it adds up to. We pretend that we know what we are doing, but of course, we don’t.

The idea of repetition fascinated Kierkegaard. What does it mean to repeat something? And in what sense is can we really repeat anything in any meaningful way? Time has passed, things have changed, and we are not the same person we were even five minutes ago (I have always loved the idea that at a cellular level, we are literally not the same person we were seven years ago…every cell has been replaced. And seven seems a good number of years for some reason).

I once went to a little party at the Mount Vernon Hotel and Museum on the upper east side of Manhattan. It was built in 1799, back when the city ended pretty much at 14^th street and everything north of that was a kind of country retreat for the wealthy. There is a lovely little backyard garden and on this particular night I went with a friend to have free drinks (revolutionary era cocktails, actually) and to listen to a group of old geezer-musicians who specialize sea chanteys. They were truly great, and it was spectacularly beautiful summer night, and we sat there with a group of maybe forty other people, listening to this group singing surprisingly profane songs that were once sung aboard merchant ships when the new world was still relatively new. I had just moved out of my apartment and abandoned my roommate to move in with my then girlfriend. Since my old roommate was, like myself, a graduate student in the humanities, I figured he would love it. They were going to do it all again the next weekend. So I figured I’d invite him to the next party and repeat the experience.

Of course the second time around sucked. I was with a different person, the weather was crappy, and they had a different group of musicians. I actually apologized to him.

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by Sarah Firisen

There once was a writer called Hitch,
Whose contrarian urge had an itch,
He had no sacred cows,
No unbreakable vows,
No ideals too holy to ditch.

A brilliant but difficult sod,
Who took as his nemesis, God,
Perhaps a bold move to make,
He announced him “not great”,
Embracing the role, lightning rod.

But now our dear Christopher's dead,
Was it fags and the booze? obits said,
If it was, what the hell,
The wild ride was swell,
And no flip-flop on Hitch's death bed!