by Misha Lepetic

There wasn't a damn thing I could do or say
Up in the skyway
~The Replacements

Walking has been much in the news lately, or rather, how little Americans seem to be doing it. It’s obvious that walking is good for individual health, but what should perhaps be even more emphasized is the importance of walking for the overall health of the urban fabric. So, in addition to asking ourselves the question of how we can get people to walk more, we also ought to consider equally beneficial ways for designing the built environment, such that all this walking will bring about a result for society. Walking may be an end in itself, but if it is only considered as such, we forego the opportunity that it is a means as well.

The history of walking in American cities is one of the steady erosion of an activity that was so natural that its importance was almost entirely tacit. It is always amazing to realize how malleable our norms are: during the automobile’s first few decades, pedestrian fatalities were commonly greeted with criminal charges such as ‘technical manslaughter’. Drivers were viewed with mistrust, considered reckless and even represented class division. However, pedestrians became increasingly regarded as impediments to the velocity of modern life, and economic progress became increasingly associated with the automobile and the infrastructure that made its hegemony possible.

How did this change come about? As Sarah Goodyear writes in the Atlantic Cities blog,

One key turning point…came in 1923 in Cincinnati. Citizens’ anger over pedestrian deaths gave rise to a referendum drive. It gathered some 7,000 signatures in support of a rule that would have required all vehicles in the city to be fitted with speed governors limiting them to 25 miles per hour.

Local auto clubs and dealers recognized that cars would be a lot harder to sell if there was a cap on their speed. So they went into overdrive in their campaign against the initiative. They sent letters to every individual with a car in the city, saying that the rule would condemn the U.S. to the fate of China, which they painted as the world’s most backward nation. They even hired pretty women to invite men to head to the polls and vote against the rule. And the measure failed…The industry lobbied [for] the adoption of traffic statutes to supplant common law. The statutes were designed to restrict pedestrian use of the street and give primacy to cars. The idea of “jaywalking” – a concept that had not really existed prior to 1920 – was enshrined in law.

This was the beginning of a long and effective campaign that saw walking legislated and planned almost out of existence. Even now, designers and planners are often hobbled by a perspective which continues to favour the automobile over pedestrian – most ironically, in the name of safety.

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Another Piece of Eternity

I’m peeling back a page reading a new day
by the light of a new sun
.
mom died years ago, or was it yesterday?
.
I once read something similar by Camus
but was too new to understand that time bleeds
.
its dyes are not fast but run
between years and sometimes like old cloth
the colors of time become homogenous
.
but here’s this day blaring like a fanfare
from a new horn crisp as frost on glass
its brink sharp as the edge of a blade
slicing off another piece of eternity
.
.
by Jim Culleny
4/29/12

by Quinn O'Neill

For months now, the Canadian province of Quebec has been astir with student demonstrations. The students are protesting a 75% increase in tuition to take place over the next 5 years. As opponents of the protests are quick to point out, tuition is actually much lower in Quebec than in any other Canadian province and would still be the lowest after the increase.

Reaction to the protests has been mixed and probably reflects a difference of opinion on the main function of education. For people who see education as a private good, the student protesters may appear to have an outrageous sense of entitlement. After all, if students are the ones who’ll benefit from the education, why shouldn’t they be expected to pay for it?

Others see education as a public good that plays an important role in a healthy, democratic society. If we’re going to let everyone vote and participate in important decision making that affects all of us, maybe it would be helpful if the public were well educated. Perhaps education would help people to better evaluate different sources of information, to understand important issues, and to make better decisions. A better educated society is also healthier and more productive.

Neither perspective is entirely wrong. Education is both a private and a public good, with significant benefits for the individual and for society as a whole. It is wrong, however, to suppose that education is only a private good, and this, unfortunately, seems to be a pervasive misconception.

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by Rishidev Chaudhuri

Harold McGee's book, “On Food and Cooking”, changed the ways I cook and think about food (as it seems to have done for many people). Cooking can often seem obscure and unsystematic: recipes and tattered bits of kitchen wisdom abound, but general principles seem harder to come by. And learning to cook is a process of moving from recipes treated as self-contained procedures and rituals to be reenacted to seeing a collection of principles and techniques that can be deployed in various ways. “On Food and Cooking” is a book on the science of cooking: what happens when you brown meat, what happens when you cook asparagus, how dough rises, why coriander tastes the way it does. And its primary value, at least to me, was in dramatically moving me along the road to understanding some of the principles lying behind what we do with food. It's immediately liberating and almost exhilarating to look back on a number of recipes and times in the kitchen and realize what I was actually doing when I was following a particular set of instructions. Most of this food science information existed before but it was scattered through journals and history books. “On Food and Cooking” collects and curates it, and aims it at a broader audience than just the scientist or the historian or the professional cook.

The best example for how this book changed my thinking is its sections on the role of the egg. It is almost universally acknowledged that eggs, even accompanied by little else, are sublime and need not justify their ubiquity. But eggs also play supporting roles in a bewildering parade of dishes (especially in the cuisines of Europe), and in these they take on a variety of structural roles: changing the shape and form of food in addition to changing how it tastes. Making sense of this diversity of uses was enlightening: it allowed me to replace a number of disparate pieces of knowledge with some general principles and these principles then allowed me to think more creatively, beyond the confines of particular recipe patterns. And looking at the roles of eggs in food is also a wonderful lesson in chemistry and the strange hybrid states of matter that live everywhere in food.

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by Mara Jebsen

F. Scott Fitzgerald and Love in A Time of Supermen

Where does all this yearning come from?

—Pina Bausch, choreographer

A set of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels has come out from Penguin classics, and they look exactly as they ought. They are small, hard-backed volumes in thick cream paper lined with flashy stripes of silver or gold. Some men of my acquaintance—especially those with big hands—might feel silly reading them on the subway.

But that’s as it should be. There’s a sequined fustiness hanging around the idea of Scott Fitzgerald. Maybe there’s something exhausting about the eternal waltzing of debutantes in white linen; and of tall, stiff-stomached boys getting drunk to distraction. Or really what’s exhausting is imagining all those high-school students across America sailing their way through the bright sadness that is “The Great Gatsby.”

The idea of his work gives me this exhausted feeling because his stuff is both classic and a glam cash-cow, categorized in the same cloud of atmosphere in my head where I keep the Titanic. Soon we will have Leonardo DiCaprio in Baz Luhrman’s film version of Gatsby adding his entire DiCaprio-ness into the circle of atmosphere that surrounds Fitzgerald, both deepening and cheapening whatever is this peculiar quality down at the middle of it. Luhrman and DiCaprio, I’m sure, will extend the bright circle of frost that allures, but obscures the filament at the center.

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by Tom Jacobs

There is the apocryphal story in which Hemingway, sitting in a bar somewhere in Key West, is asked by an antagonistic admirer to follow his minimalism to its logical outcome and to tell a story in six words. As the story goes, Hemingway picks up a napkin and writes out the following words:

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

This is a pretty good story. The reader has to kind of inhabit it and fill in all that is unsaid (which is pretty much everything), but there’s an inexhaustible sadness there in the spaces between the words. Everything pared away until there’s almost nothing left. The iceberg theory of fiction.

The genre of short short fiction (or microfiction, or whatever one might want to call it) is itself kinda small, and little of it is worth reading. But there are exceptions.

There’s this: “Sticks,” by George Saunders, perhaps the greatest super short story I’ve ever read:

Here there is an entire novel’s worth of intrigue and emotional complexity and backstory and difficult familial relationships and unhappinesses and losses and redemptions. One can’t help but think of all those homes run by inexpressive and angry fathers who know something of love’s austere offices, these homes that suddenly erupt in holiday decorations that go waaay beyond the normal or expected. Rudolphs and Santas and baby Jesuses and lights and holly all over the place. This phenomenon…the phenomenon of the middle-to-lower-class father who has no creative outlet but finds an avenue in his front yard…this is an important aspect of contemporary life in the U.S., and one that needs more examination. There are dissertations here. And Saunders’ story is a most excellent jumping off point.

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after Mohammed Iqbal

“Why didn't you make me eternal?”
Beauty asked God one day,

who replied: “The world's fiction
is carved from nothingness.

In changing colors you were born:
true beauty is ephemeral.”

The moon overheard this dialogue,
beamed it to the morning star

who woke the dawn, whispering sky's secret
to the dewdrop, earth's guardian.

Dew drenched the rose petals,
and Spring left the garden weeping.

Mohammed Iqbal (1877 -1938) one of the two great South Asian poets of the
20th Century (the other was Faiz Ahmed Faiz) advocated ceaseless endeavor,
writing with equal ease in Persian, Urdu, and English. He was knighted by the
British but is rarely called Sir Mohammed.

Translated from the Urdu by Rafiq Kathwari, guest poet at 3Quarks Daily.

[Click Urdu version to enlarge.]

by Maniza Naqvi

Would this sentence be a fair illustration of the entire terms of engagement of the rest of the world with the United States? From Foreign to Economic to Defense Policy it is a narrative as though of a paid intercourse: “Baby, my cash money.”

This latest scandal, too will probably be obfuscated and news cycled out of our imaginations—but for this moment this paradigm is clear. Many complain that the US simply does not build relationships based on principles of social, human and cultural rights. The US engages only on the basis of financial transactions: it gets what it can’t get otherwise by simply buying it. If it is refused it simply removes the offending resister usually an elected leader of a country which has resources that the US wants and puts into place those who are compliant and willing to be paid for their services. And when, and if, they are not paid what they were told they would be paid, then well that’s when the whole thing becomes a conflict zone, like the corridor of the Hotel Caribe on the early morning after the “previous night’s intercourse.”

Ironically, this happened at an Economic Cooperation Summit where the agenda includes economic issues and those of Corruption and of Security or as it is called now Terrorism. The scandal around the Americans, involves 11 Secret Service agents and as many military personnel including green berets and so forth. Entrusted to protect the President of the United States the team had arrived in Cartegana ahead of the President who attended the Summit of the Americas conference organized by the 34-member Organization of American States.

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by Hannah Green

On Friday night, I watched John Oliver perform for a crowd of Northwestern students in an on-campus theater. “It’s hard to be in college right now,“ he said, “because of, you know, the world.” These words probably got the longest, or at least the most interesting response of the performance. Oliver looked at us in amusement for a moment as we laughed, then said, “That was a cathartic laugh.” He commented on the symphonic quality of our laughter as the initial hilarity of his words melted into recognition and subsequent despair.

At this moment, I felt an impulse of self-righteous self-pity. It was hard being a college student right now. The economy is bad, everyone’s weighing their options looking for realistic job opportunities, the American dream of creating your ideal career seems to be dying, from a very young age I haven’t trusted my government or electoral system at all, especially in matters of foreign policy, and even here in the US we seem to be losing our rights left and right. I remembered a dark, sleep-deprived Wednesday when I was fourteen. My high school US Government teacher turned on the television so that we could watch John Kerry’s concession speech. My friend and I had been volunteering, answering letters at Democratic Campaign Headquarters in DC. We sat in the back of the classroom, dressed all in black, and wept in each other’s arms. I hadn’t even liked Kerry that much, but I had wanted so badly for Bush to lose. “It’s good to see young people who care so much,” our teacher said to us kindly. I thought, “I will never give a crap about politics again.”

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by Jen Paton

Chimamanda Adichie has a talk called “the danger of the single story.” She says, the “single story [that] creates stereotypes…that are not untrue…but incomplete.”

Lena Dunham's Tiny Furniture

I watched three stories about American women this weekend: Lena Dunham's Tiny Furniture (2010), the Diablo Cody written Charlize Theron “comedy” Young Adult (2011), and the blockbustering, blistering Hunger Games (2012). I suppose the latter is only tenuously about an American woman, as it takes place in a dystopian post war America called Panem where teenagers fight to the death on national television. But anyway.

Lena Dunham's Tiny Furniture takes place in the now, and is about a girl named Aura who rather than fighting to the death posts semi-nude videos of herself on Youtube in a bid at artistic expression. Aura, who comes home from college in Ohio to crash in her artist mom's (amazing) Tribeca apartment and figure out what to do next. (Artist Mom on film is Dunham's IRL Mom, as is the apartment her IRL apartment). Aura has her liberal arts degree, and in college made aforementioned arty Youtube videos where she undresses in fountains. Now she finds work as a restaurant hostess and flirts with lackluster dudes. Tiny Furniture is, as Glenn Kenney put it, “a largely adroit film concerning largely insufferable people.” Not a lot happens. But it does rather capture a certain kind of inertia of a certain kind of kid, someone really smart who doesn't really have the tools to get their act together because the consequences of not doing so are minimal. Dunham contends that her friends say the apartment looks smaller in real life, but in spite of this, she rather gets the smallness of the world she portrays, and pokes some fun at it.

And yet, and yet – it is so hard to get beyond our single stories. Dunham, whose TV show, Girls, about young women in Brooklyn premiered yesterday, made the Girls characters from Ann Arbor because “I was trying to choose places that felt like they weren’t New York but had weirdly analogous intellectual communities, so that if these girls appeared and they were quipping their heads off and they’d watched certain kinds of films since they were three, it would make sense.” Because of course, nobody else watches “certain kinds of films” or experiences culture except New Yorkers, and those lucky enough to live in a distant archipelago of college towns.

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Topology

I love the space of your soul
the way it tends up and out
like that wide field in Conway
near the sugarhouse
which one spring blossomed
with dandelions
so dense and profuse
its rising hump
in the morning sun
was a mound of gold
whose brilliance
was more fabulous
than that most coveted ore

I love the niches and coves
of a soul that billows
like vapor through a sugarhouse roof,
through its cupola

—your sugarhouse soul
its volumes and transformations
its rich continuity
sweetens the shape of me

I love a soul that pushes
envelopes…. . …. I love
the edgy ellipse of your
horizon harrowing soul

a soul both
now and soon
here and there
turned in turned out
which, if I follow its piper's
Mobius band,
will lead me round

not to the place I was
but to the better side
of where I am
.

by Jim Culleny
4/12/12

by James McGirk

The rocket had failed. Kim Jong-un snapped off his the monitor and turned to face his advisors. What could they possibly tell him? This was total failure. Five ashen men in uniform glittered in the gloom. They groveled and made excuses. Kim lifted a hand and batted the air as if to shoo a fly, and the men backed away slowly, heads bowed deeply in shame. He waited for them to leave and left the control room for his private chambers. The hallway smelled of sandalwood and cognac. Portraits lined the walls. That empty feeling that had welled up inside as he watched the explosion gradually filled with something more acrid and painful. Americans were sneering at his failure. Millions of skinny, eager peasants were depending on him and he had failed. His father and grandfather’s wide friendly faces peered down at him from the walls. Would he ever be as deft as his father at wriggling past the tentacles of the great powers? And if it came to it, would he be as a strong a warrior or as a grand marshal of industry as his grandfather? The thought of holding a Russian rifle and charging a line of American soldiers seemed too horrible to contemplate. He heard a rustle of fine fabric and footfalls approaching on the thick carpet.

“Brandy? Swiss chocolate? Pepsi Cola?” She was a sixteen-year-old drum majorette plucked from a parade by his father the year before. He shook his head and felt her enormous eyes slide off his face. It was so strange to be able to have anyone he could possibly want, even one of his brother’s wives if he so desired, even a foreigner, though the hard-faced Ukrainian blondes looked nothing like the sleek international students he remembered from high school. After three months in control, he was glutted and as bored with sex as anything else in his life. Besides there was so much else on his mind, he couldn’t focus: The six powers were pressing in, seizing assets, squelching vital inflows of capital, motor oil, and the luxurious necessities for living a civilized existence, and his near-neighbors in Burma, SLORC, their junta was loosening their grip and so far it hadn’t all gone to hell the way it had in Libya or Tunisia or Syria, or Cuba even; all over the world people were clamoring for self-determination, it was getting lonely, and he himself was lonely, his own brothers and sisters were frightened of him, and he couldn’t get much more out of them than sniveling and venomous little squibs of gossip about one another. The rocket would have been a fist streaking through the sky, eventually carrying a payload of instrumentation into outer space or delivering a deadly blow against distant foes.

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by Kevin S. Baldwin

It had been a perfect Fall day: Clear, crisp, and sunny. Then there was one of those moments (like Kennedy's assassination or 9/11) where you never forget what you were doing. A student had asked me a question that I did not have the answer to, but knew where to find, and I was pulling a book off the shelf in my office, when the phone rang.

“Hi, you don't know me, but your wife asked me to call you: She has been in a bad accident outside of town. There were four people in the van. Paramedics will call you in a few minutes.”

From his tone, I knew this wasn't a prank, so I waited. My mined raced: Had my wife picked up all three kids after school and headed out of town? The paramedics called and told me to go the local hospital, which I did. A few minutes later an ambulance pulled up and a friend of my wife (covered in blood and screaming in pain) and her daughter were carried in on body boards. Oh, that's right, they had talked about going shopping together. Thankfully, my older two kids were not involved, but where were my wife and four-and-a-half month old son? They had been life-flighted to a major hospital an hour away. I got in the car and drove.

When I arrived at the hospital, a helicopter was on the pad and a receptionist instructed me to wait for a minister in a room down the hall. Fearing the worst, my jaw dropped and my face fell. “Oh, don't worry, we do that for all the life-flight families,” she assured me. After a few minutes, the clergyman came in and took me to the ER, where a team was huddled around my wife. She was conscious, but clearly shaken-up. We both have pretty dark senses' of humor so I said “If you wanted a new minivan you could've just asked.” She looked back with total incomprehension, at which point I realized the severity of her concussion.

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by Hasan Altaf

The poet Kabir died in 1518, so it is jarring to open a translation of his writings and read the following line: “O pundit, your hairsplitting's/so much bullshit.” It is even stranger to look up and realize that the poem bears an epigraph (“It take a man that have the blues so to sing the blues”) from the American musician Lead Belly, who was not even born until 1888. A quick scan through the volume reveals more epigraphs (Pound, Coleridge), a dedication (one poem is for Geoff Dyer) and vocabulary that Kabir himself could not have come up with: “Smelling of aftershave/and deodorants/the body's a dried up well…” Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's Songs of Kabir is not, it is safe to say, your father's Kabir.

We have certain expectations when it comes to literature of this sort – the literature that we call “classical” or “ancient” or “historical” (to say nothing of that literature we call “sacred”): We want grandeur, pomp and circumstance; we want even a touch of the archaic – no thee-ing and thou-ing, necessarily, but some whiff of the past, something epic, removed from the mundane and the modern. Those translators who subvert this expectation and leave that desire unfulfilled are not always looked on kindly: A review of Anne Carson's An Oresteia, for example (Carson's, and indefinitely-articled, because she took one play each from Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides to refashion the story of the house of Atreus; call it a remix) took umbrage with her diction, her use of the word “car” rather than “carriage.” Agamemnon comes home from Troy in a car; what, did he roll up in a Volvo? Did he have to stop somewhere for gas before reaching Mycenae?

Mehrotra's Kabir has, at first, a similar effect. It's jarring to hear this poet speak in a language that is so simple, modern, familiar; Kabir should sound old and wise, like the saint he was, like a holy book or, at the very least, like Yoda. This Kabir, though, calls the pundit out on “bullshit” and ask the muezzin the simple question, “What's your problem?” In another poem, we get this: “I fucked young men/too numerous to count/and stayed a virgin” – it's like hearing your grandmother start speaking like your friends, using curses that could put them to shame.

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