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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by Misha Lepetic

“I'm afraid my Japanese is a little rusty.”

~ Raymond Burr, Godzilla, King of Monsters

Sixty years on, is it still possible to care about Godzilla? Anyone who has consented to suffer through the latest defibrillation of the Godzilla franchise should set aside a few minutes to ponder the ongoing relevance of the venerable reptilian revenant. The prognosis is grim: for me, about the only thing that still registered a few days after seeing the new offering was a vague sense of satisfaction that San Francisco had been returned to a pre-gentrified state, and that Las Vegas would likely have to be given up as a total loss. As with robots and comic books, what do the Japanese know that we don't?

Back in 1954, Godzilla – or Gojira, to go by the original Japanese name, a portmanteau of gorira (‘gorilla') and kujira (‘whale') – was the most expensive film ever made in Japan. It was also an ad hoc idea shot on a tight timeline because Toho Studios needed to fill a hole in its production pipeline. Its popularity took everyone by surprise, becoming the eighth-most attended film in Japan that year. And yet, to this day Godzilla remains a poignant work of filmmaking. Enduring questions of science, technology and society are raised. A gently compelling love triangle moves gradually from subplot to the fore, and a quiet feat of self-sacrifice guarantees Tokyo's (temporary) redemption. The monster itself possesses an inscrutable rage, and, towards the end of the film, an inescapable air of melancholy, if not outright pathos.

It's common knowledge that the Godzilla myth was predicated upon several apocalyptic events. The first, of course, is the 1945 detonation of atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the ensuing fire, destruction and especially irradiation. The second, which explicitly inspired the film, was the detonation of the first H-bomb in the Marshall Islands on March 1^st, 1954. The fishing boat Daigo Fukuryū Maru (Lucky Dragon No. 5) was caught up in fallout created by a detonation that was two to three times larger than expected, but the ship returned to port and distributed its catch of tuna before being quarantined, only to have one of its crew died of radiation exposure in the following months. The death, as well as the poisoned fish that had entered the food supply, fueled Japan's anxiety towards nuclear weapons and especially of the Americans handling them. In fact, the first ship to be lost in the opening minutes of Godzilla is a fishing boat off the coast of Tokyo, a direct reference to the Lucky Dragon.

So it seems that the lynchpin of the film is the Ursprung of anxiety and the form that that anxiety actually takes. The unbridled nature of the aquatic lizard, and the arbitrary destruction it wreaks by virtue of that nature, are inseparable from the mystery of its existence. While the sea of flame that engulfs Tokyo was meant to directly invoke the preceding war (and not necessarily the nuclear subgenre per se), Godzilla asks for nothing, wants nothing, and has no discernible purpose or end. Unlike subsequent films, it is not seeking food or a mate; nor is it battling rivals or attempting to reach a spot that Tokyo just happens to be occupying. It is a sole remnant of a lost ecosystem that, at its acme, did not include humanity. So if it is so foreign, what does Godzilla really represent? The question is made clearer by contrasting Godzilla with the further development of the franchise, or rather by what is lost in that development.

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by Jalees Rehman

Konrad Heitkamp was taken aback by the extraordinary ordinariness present in the lobby of the Zurich hotel. In November of 1943, life in Zurich seemed unperturbed by the fact that the countries surrounding Switzerland were embroiled in one of the most devastating wars in the history of the world. Heitkamp realized that as the coach of the FC Bayern München soccer team, he was one of the privileged few who could bask in this oasis of normalcy for a few days before he would have to head back home to Munich. He surveyed the lobby and began waving his hand at some of his players standing across the vestibule. Hopefully, the Gestapo men watching him thought of this as an innocuous gesture, a soccer team coach acknowledging the arrival of his players and performing a headcount. But he could not bank on it.

The Gestapo must have known that for the past weeks, Heitkamp and his players were forward to the friendly match against the Swiss national soccer team because it would give them a chance to finally see their friend Kurt Landauer again. Before the team embarked on their trip to Zurich, the Gestapo had ordered all Bayern München players to attend a special “education” session in Gestapo headquarters of Munich. The team was informed that the Gestapo would accompany the team on their brief trip to Switzerland. The Gestapo explicitly forbade the team members to have any contact with German emigrants in Switzerland.

The Nazis were always weary of any potential contacts between Germans and German emigrants who were seen as traitors and collaborators of the Allied forces. But FC Bayern München was a special thorn in the flesh of the Nazi machinery. Nazis routinely referred to FC Bayern München as a “Judenclub” (“Jew Club”), because German Jews had held some of the key leadership positions. The club won its first German national soccer championship in 1932 under the leadership of the Jewish club president Kurt Landauer and the coach Richard Dombi, an Austrian Jew. Only a few months later in January 1933, Hitler came to power and soon all leaders of Jewish origin were forced to give up their leadership positions.

Kurt Landauer was one of the first to resign from the club presidency. He even lost his job as the manager of a Munich newspaper's advertising department, and was only able to find work in a textile shop owned by a Jewish family. In the wake of the anti-semitic pogroms in the night of the 9^th November 1938 (Kristallnacht oder Reichspogromnacht), this shop was attacked and devastated. Landauer was arrested and sent to the Dachau concentration camp. After a brief period of internment, he was released and he used this opportunity to emigrate to Switzerland and survived the Holocaust. Most of his siblings were less fortunate and were murdered by the Nazis.

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Dignity
.

…. I sit still in the garden
…. falling away
…. among Pat’s lilies falling too

…. hummingbird
…. tiny as a big bee
…. red-head harvesting
…. hovers, not falling, but
…. falling too, around a star bud
…. also falling at the fringe
…. of a galaxy freefalling
…. among what?

…. hummingbird slingshots to hydrangea
…. impossible wings against falling
…. invisibly against falling
…. determined as one oppressed
…. not to fall, or to fall
…. of her own choosing
…. by her own hand, losing
…. at her own calling

….by Jim Culleny
….5/15/14

by Lisa Lieberman

I could not swallow that idiotic bitterness that I should merely be innocent.

Imre Kertész, Fatelessness

Something akin to survivor's guilt is at the core of Imre Kertész's novel, Fatelessness (1975), a fictionalized account of the year he spent while still a teenager interned in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Published during the so-called “soft dictatorship” of the communist leader János Kádár, the book did not sell many copies in Hungary, and no wonder: György Köves, its young narrator, does not want us to feel sorry for him. “I was aware that I was about to start writing a novel that might easily turn into a tearjerker, not least because the novel's protagonist is a boy,” Kertész said in a recent interview.

He needn't have worried. György insists that he was complicit in his fate. “Everyone took steps as long as he was able to take a step; I too took my own steps, and not just in the queue at Birkenau, but even before that, here, at home.” This comes perilously close to admitting the charge that Jews went like sheep to the slaughter, that through their passivity, they colluded in their own destruction. As if anticipating the objection, Kertész voices it through one of his minor characters. Old Fleischmann, György's former neighbor, was not deported, escaped being murdered by the fascist Arrow Cross, and endured the siege of Budapest. He lived while others (including György's father) died, and yet he cannot hold himself to blame for his survival. “So it's us who're the guilty ones, is it? Us, the victims!” But György refuses to back down. Even though he recognizes the futility of explaining his views to those like old Fleischmann, who urge him to put the horrors of Auschwitz behind him in order to live, “it was not quite true,” he maintains stubbornly, “that the thing ‘came about'; we had gone along with it too.”

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by Debra Morris

“I remember when I really used to be into nostalgia.”

—Demetri Martin

And I remember when it began, about a year ago; when the artifacts of my past, most of them long gone, began to take on the shimmer of buried treasure. It's an odd sensation, to be struck by loss, to begin to see the world through the prism of what no longer exists. I can even imagine recollecting, in what I hope is the distant future, the first stirrings of nostalgia. “Grandma, tell me about your early-onset nostalgia. How did it feel when you first realized that no one under 25 could use a paper dictionary?”

For I seem to have grown very nostalgic lately (I humbly submit as evidence any one of my three posts for 3QD: see here, here, or here). Recently my husband and I were talking about something we wanted to write together, and we quickly realized that many of the touchstones for it—the objects, experiences, feelings, or points of reference that we wanted to discuss—were all things that had nearly disappeared within the space of our lives. It's not that we wished to resurrect them, or even imagined that they could be recreated. Rather, at least for me, the problem seemed to be that their disappearance left gaps where we might once have found knowledge, or even just know-how; tools or directions for coping with the challenges of parenthood, career, marriage, citizenship. Even tools for grappling with questions that, as academically trained theorists, we were used to engaging on a much more abstract level. An example: my husband is a devotee of 40s and 50s American cinema, and one thing that has caught his attention is that there used to be a whole range of jobs—careers, even, in that they were capable of sustaining a family; they conferred respectability; they carried an entire world of practice, sense-experience, and meaning in their wake—that no longer exist, though they featured in these films surprisingly often. The private eye was a stock character in film noir, of course, but so, my husband discovered to his surprise, was the milkman. (What, I wonder, can Thomas Piketty tell us about that?)

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