by Azra Raza

According to every convention, my friend Ifti was all wrong. He was born at the wrong time. He should have been born in 2150. He was born in the wrong country. He should have been born in Hollywood. He was born to the wrong parents. He should have been Tallulah Bankhead’s child. He was born to the wrong siblings. He should have been my sister. He was born in the wrong body. He should have been Marilyn Monroe. He was born to the wrong friends in Pakistan. His friends should have been Oscar Wilde, Dorothy Parker, Joan Crawford, Tennessee Williams, and Bette Davis. He was born to lead a life of luxury, dividing his time between the French Riviera and throwing extravagant parties in Manhattan. Instead he became a car salesman.

And if he had to become a car salesman, he should have been wearing the conventional salesman’s clothing. Ifti wore silks and brocades. He should have cinched his best car deals by groveling in front of clients. Instead, he succeeded by sassily telling Oprah Winfrey when she asked him how big the engine of the Mercedes was, “Are you going to sleep with it?” And when Mary Anne Childers asked him to open the trunk of the car she was buying from him, he famously remarked, “Honey, do it yourself, I just got my nails done.”

And while other salesmen were attending classes to polish up their PR skills, Ifti was busy being a gay activist. He created SANGAT, the organization devoted to Gays and Lesbians of South Asian origin. And why couldn’t SANGAT be content with their periodic display of solidarity by marching through town in the Annual Gay and Lesbian Pride Day Parade? Instead, Ifti raised funds to hire lawyers who have successfully fought cases to earn Immigration status for individuals seeking asylum because of their sexual preferences. And why did I regularly meet strangers in Ifti’s home who had found sanctuary in his ever-welcoming apartment?

Read more »

by Michael Blim

The goose that lays golden eggs has been considered a most valuable possession. But even more profitable is the privilege of taking the golden eggs laid by somebody else’s goose. The investment bankers and their associates now enjoy that privilege. They control the people through the people’s own money.

–Louis Brandeis, Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It (1914)

While the national debt struggle is getting the headlines, the bankers’ lobbyists in the backrooms of the Capitol are trying to undo the Dodd-Frank Act. It is a full-out assault ranging from trying to water down and if possible eliminate statute-mandated regulations to getting Republican members of Congress to chop big chunks off the budgets of the agencies that are trying to implement and enforce the new law. Taking Elizabeth Warren’s head was thrown in for good measure, and there were whispers that the President’s praetorian guard did not lament the passing of the President’s “dear friend.”

Almost a hundred years ago, Louis Brandeis and other progressive reformers were trying to break the hold the banks had on the American economy. Big bank power was near absolute, and their regard for government power scant. After Theodore Roosevelt in 1902 had sued to break up J.P. Morgan’s Northern Securities railroad trust, Morgan called on the President at the White House. “If we have done something wrong,” he said, “send your man to my man and they can fix it up.” Roosevelt refused, reflecting:

“That is a most illuminating illustration of the Wall Street point of view. Mr. Morgan could not help regarding me as a big rival operator who either intended to ruin all his interests or else could be induced to come to an agreement to ruin none.” (W.H. Brands, American Colossus, 2010, 547)

Not much has changed. The Wall Street moguls still don't take much guff from Presidents. Why should they? After the 2008 crash, the federal government bailed out the big banks, bent anti-trust rules to allow them to absorb competitors and increase market share, all the while the banks waged war to escape regulation, paid mind-boggling bonuses once again, and stiffed the very mortgage borrowers whom they ripped off and are now repossessing.

Read more »

by Quinn O'Neill

In a recent article for Big Think, David Ropeik argues that the risk posed by unvaccinated people is sufficient to justify coercing them into vaccinating. Measles is a potentially deadly disease and outbreaks are occurring due to declining vaccination rates, he reasons. “What does society do when one person’s behavior puts the greater community at risk? […] We make them stop.” I suppose it depends on the behavior and the degree of risk, but where vaccination is concerned, I disagree that coercive measures are warranted. While measles is not a fun disease and it can kill people, the sacrifice of individual autonomy isn't justified in this case.

The risk of getting the measles in the US is very low.

Between 2001 and 2010, the US saw 692 cases. 292 of these were imported by travelers who caught the disease in another country. Since you can't blame your unvaccinated compatriots if you catch the measles in another country, we'll exclude these. That leaves 400 cases in 10 years out of approximately 297 million people. The odds of getting the measles in the US in a typical year are thus 0.13 in a million. Given that about 10% of the population is unvaccinated, the odds of an unvaccinated person getting the disease are about 1.3 in a million.¹ Note that the odds are higher for the unvaccinated, but 1.3 in a million is still extremely rare.

Of course, the risk is undoubtedly higher this year since there were over 150 cases reported by the end of June. However, the majority of these were foreign visitors and US residents who caught the disease abroad. Assuming half of these cases were acquired in the US and that current trends continue until year end, we could expect the odds of an unvaccinated person getting the measles this year to be about 4.9 in a million (150 in 30.9 million). These are pretty slim odds, measly even.

People often argue that it isn’t those who refuse vaccination they’re worried about, but those who are too young to be vaccinated, typically those under a year of age. About 15% of measles cases reported in the first half of this year affected children in this age group. This could end up being as many as 23 infants by year end (again using 150 as an estimate for the year total). So the chances of a child under age one getting the measles this year would be about 5.3 in a million.² To put this risk in perspective, these odds are about the same as the odds of dying from a fall down the stairs (5 in a million).³ Odds of dying from the measles are less than 1 in 1000 cases. So the odds of an infant getting the measles in the US and dying as a result are about 5.3 in a billion. Panic is not in order.

Read more »

Band of Saints

still in his garden
light
he apologized to his sunflowers

promising things would
change
he swore by all that’s right

that he would end his
war
with the earth that brings them forth

on stalks thick as
thieves
upon which bright heads

turn from north
leaves
open as palms of supplicating hands

in rows of six foot stems a
wall
dense as the barnside to the east

its shadow pall upon baptisia
space
and soil each umber face and corolla

together a mute coro de oro
true
as a band of saints to whom he

genuflects and greets
.

by Jim Culleny, 7/18/11

by Misha Lepetic

The world has not been at any time different than it is now.

– ślokavārtika

Lewis Mumford, perhaps the 20^th century’s most broad-ranging and eclectic thinker and critic concerned with the American urban experience, is remembered mostly as a messenger of modernism. Certainly, his open contempt of architectural ornament and of the City Beautiful movement in general was, like many of his counterparts, influenced by the dark and overwrought Victorian era that preceded it. However, modernism in general was enamored of the opportunities extended by new building materials and techniques – materials such as steel, glass and concrete that would be combined to create entirely new structures such as skyscrapers – which empowered it to leave behind the context of place. In contrast, Mumford’s concern was primarily humanistic, that is, one where an act of planning or design was primarily about the way in which the social life of a town, city or neighborhood could be understood, and only then improved.

Mumford was greatly influenced by Patrick Geddes, a peripatetic Scot whose diverse explorations lead him to apply Spencer’s idea of biological evolution to the investigation of society – that “society itself was an organism and that social progress was analogous to biological change” (Wojtowicz, p11). Mumford’s idea of the regional survey as the principal tool by which society, economy and nature could be holistically apprehended was derived directly from Geddes’s idiosyncratic, interdisciplinary style of thinking.

Along with Geddes, Mumford was also deeply influenced by Ebenezer Howard, who authored the Garden Cities movement, which was designed to combat inner city squalor by redesigning the urban concept into large towns of about 30,000 inhabitants, surrounded by an agricultural belt meant to make the city nearly self-sufficient (Howard was perhaps the last urban planner to take into account that people needed to eat as well as work, shop and sleep). These cities were meant to foster a deep and proximate connection to nature, and were intended to remain insular, their centers connected by light rail.

In all, not many of these designs were executed, and New Yorkers wondering how far away one ought to build a Garden City are encouraged to visit Forest Hills Gardens, which is now a part of Queens. Rather, the modernist enterprise took off with full force, and the holistic approach that Geddes and Mumford sought was buried in the succeeding tidal waves of boom, bust, war and post-war prosperity.

Read more »

by Vivek Menezes

Not a single decade has passed, yet the circumstances of Francis Newton Souza’s last years already seem inconceivable.

I’ve been stewing about this since coverage of the death of “Nudist painter Lucian Freud” inexplicably spread across the Indian press right into my morning papers here, a media backwater that is by far the smallest state in the country. But it was the same across the subcontinent – even the most obscure regional publications marshalled a deeply respectful send-off for the British painter.

Yet when Freud’s one time rival for the 1950’s London spotlight, the monumentally brilliant Indian painter Francis Newton Souza, died on 28 March, 2002 during a trip to Bombay, the news barely caused a ripple anywhere in the world.

He founded the Bombay Progressives in 1947 – unquestionably the single most important 20th century development for Indian art – but when he died in the same city more than 50 years later, Souza's body was consigned to shabby Sewri Cemetery, where only the unattached are sent to be buried. The old man had been near-indigent, selling his best work from the 1950's and 60's for two and three thousand dollars. Most of the stragglers graveside were art dealers, already jostling to feed from the artist’s corpus. It took no time at all for them to push his work to knock down million-dollar records at auction, but the shameful truth is that Souza burned livid right to the end of his life, shot through with pain about being abandoned, and totally ignored by the same trampling hordes of instant cognoscenti that now like to pretend they knew and acknowledged his worth all along. That's just a blatant, barefaced lie.

Read more »

by Rishidev Chaudhuri

Among the meditative practices I’ve explored, Vipassana seems the one that is most easily seen as a principled way of exploring the structure of one’s experience and the one most easily separated from a religious or soteriological context. This is true even amongst the Buddhist meditations. For example, Zazen is fascinating but its goals seem different. It pays great attention to exactly how you should position your body but tells you little about what you should do with your mind. The idea seems to be that, since you are already enlightened, active exploration or instruction in mental technique is a hindrance, and you just need to recognize your inherent enlightenment. On the other end of the spectrum, the practices derived from the esoteric Buddhisms (like Shingon and the Tibetan schools) rely heavily on symbols and their unpacking. This is a simplistic classification and mindfulness meditation appears in the other Buddhist traditions (even if not as prominently), but it’s one that I think is roughly true.

The general principle in Vipassana is to train one’s attention through focus on a particular object and, once this is well-trained, to use it to observe the unfolding of experience. It’s effectively a systematic way of noticing experience. The breath is typically the chosen focus. As far as I can tell, this choice is semi-arbitrary but has a number of advantages. Apart from the comforting stamp of tradition, the breath is both ever-present but also changes with emotional and mental state, giving a good starting ground both for training concentration and for training mindfulness of the multiple aspects of one’s state.

So here’s a sketch of how you might start off:

Sit down (on a chair, on the floor, cross-legged or not, it doesn’t matter) and bring your attention to the edge of your nostrils, where your breath enters and leaves. Again, all you want is an anchor point that you can use to train your concentration and to return to when your mind starts to get swamped by thoughts. Other foci would work.

Read more »

Book Review: Dancing in the Glory of Monsters. The Collapse of Congo and the Great War of Africa, Jason K. Stearns (Public Affairs: 380pp, 2011)

by Edward B. Rackley

How best to make sense of Congo’s enduring crisis, a tale of daunting political complexity and extraordinary cruelty? Many writers have tried, for no other African country captivates the western literary imagination as much as Congo. This fascination long precedes Joseph Conrad, who indelibly described King Leopold’s Congo Free State over a century ago. But faithful subjects do not good art make, and most western writing on Congo is unreadable or, at best, unbearable.

The sheer complexity of Congo’s dramatic history is one contributing factor behind all the dreadful writing. Many an author sacrifices compelling narrative for rigorous scholarship, resulting in a turgid swamp of acronyms for all the armed groups, the Security Council Resolutions and the doomed peace deals. Epic chronicles like Africa’s World War (Gérard Prunier) may be valuable to scholars but are so microscopically detailed as to be opaque to non-specialists.

Adventure writing, the other main genre of Congo literature, is equally abundant and can carry a plot, but the stories glorify the exploits of the author and ignore the Congolese. “Watch me as I commune with gentle pygmies, wrestle crocodiles on the great Congo River, escape beheading by a throng of stoned child soldiers”— setting the bar for unbearable reading. Common to both schools is the absence of Congolese voice; for both, Congo is a neutral, muted stage for the author’s performance (scholarship, “survival”). Faced with such output, one thinks, the trampling of Congo just goes on and on.

Read more »

by Justin E. H. Smith

The first thing you need to understand about the BDSM community is that we are committed to one thing above all: mutual respect. We respect each other's kinks, and we seek to help one another to realize our fantasies.

Some people have fantasies of being dominated, and those of us who help them to realize these fantasies are not in the end looking to hurt them, or to abuse them, but only to help them. It might look cruel from the outside, but in the end it's all about respect (and mutual pleasure!).

Some in the community even affirm their commitment to mutual respect by taking a solemn vow. This is what my partner and I did early in our relationship (going strong since 2002). I said, “Laurence, I hereby swear to respect the integrity of your person, to respect your will, and your inherent right to realize your fantasies, and I promise to help you to realize them without harming or abusing you.” And he said, “Russell,” and then went on to recite the same little speech.

A central part of this commitment to mutual respect is the choice of what are called 'safe words': when the domination becomes too severe, when the fantasy pleasure begins to cross over into real displeasure, the submissive is able to call a halt to the session by exclaiming a word that has been agreed upon in advance, such as usufruct or plutonium, which signals that he has had enough, that the fun is over and he needs to be released.

For a long time this arrangement worked very well for us. I would have him gagged and bound, joyfully raising welts on his buttocks with a bushel of birch twigs, when suddenlly he would mutter through the bandana in his mouth: baleen! Some other day it would be corn pone, or carpetbagger, or drumlin, or orange roughie, but the message always came through loud and clear: Laurence couldn't take it anymore. Laurence had had enough. Cease and desist, Russell. It's about respect.

Read more »

by Hartosh Singh Bal

For a tradition that seems to extend back to the Harappan civilization, our lack of knowledge of some key aspects of Indic religions continues to be baffling. One problem, of course is our inability to unlock the world of the Harappans. Signage and seals are available in large number but so far progress in deciphering them has been slow. Over the past few years an acrimonious debate has been underway between those who claim that we can bring new tools to the job such as Rajesh Rao and those such as Steve Farmer who argue that the script is actually no more than signage and is not in fact a writing system.

This argument over the meaning that can be ascribed to signage is reminiscent of another area of Indic studies, which while not mysterious in the same way, remains baffling to me – the meaning of mantras.

The word mantra has entered the English language as a ritual chant, a magic formula repeated over and over. As a definition this only partially conveys the sense in which a large number of Indians even today understand the word. Perhaps, in no other part of the world does a non-tribal tradition lay so much stress on the power of particular Sanskrit words chanted in a particular order to harm or heal. The mantra is at the heart of most tradition of Gurus and disciple where the initiation is connected to the passing on of a guru-mantra tailored to the individual disciple, often unique to him. This is a tradition that extends to closely related religious forms, such as Tibetan Buddhism, which also lay great stress on mantras. This is as far as healing goes, the ability to harm is also explicitly identified with the term. In popular usage the entire phenomenon of spells, witchcraft etc are often subsumed under the practice of tantra-mantra.

Interesting though this may be from the sociological or anthropological point of view, I am more concerned by what a skeptic or a rationalist is to make of this. One possibility is to ignore this as so much mumbo-jumbo (or tantra-mantra) but to me that makes little sense when faced with a tradition that relies so much on experiential knowledge as a basis for belief. What possible experience could explain the origins of this belief in the power of mantras?

Read more »

All men must escape at times from the deadly rhythm of their private thoughts. —Raymond Chandler

Last month I was a tourist for the first time in my life. I went to Athens and two islands in the Aegean sea. On the tiny island of AntiParos I felt a curious emptiness I associated with the matte heat of the blue air, and if I had a thought, it was that I could not think.

But you can’t stare at the sea endlessly. So I did what lots and lots of people do—I read detective novels.

And yesterday I devoured yet another Agatha Christie. And Saturday I watched the entire Bourne Trilogy in a sitting. At first I thought I was just maintaining the dusty mindlessness of my vacation. But no. The thing is I don’t know why I love detective novels, spy novels, thrillers–and I’m trying to get to the bottom of it.

And so, a little sleuthing. It turns out lots of wildly clever people have taken a stab at understanding the draw of the mystery, the thriller. But the results are disheartening.

Just last summer Joan Accocela did a piece in the New Yorker on Agatha Christie. It was sort of a bio piece, but the verdict on whether or not Christie was a ‘real artist’ (most of the time) seemed clear. It’s revealed that Christie herself understood her characters as little chess-pieces to be moved about committing murder willy-nilly. Acocella’s article implies that the pleasure we get from a suspense novel has more in common with the joy of completing a crossword than it has to do with art, or literature. And according to the biographical sketch, Christie is no help in this. I’m a poet, and as a supposedly ‘literary’ person who feels mildly guilty reading formulaic mysteries, my guilt is totally confirmed when I learn that the author felt guilty about writing them.

But what is going on here? Why would Christie and I repeatedly submit to this exchange of guilt- feelings, each sure that we are somehow superior to the shameful activity we’re engaged in?

Read more »

by Fred Zackel

Does your god have a penis?

No, really. Yes, I am going somewhere with this train of thought. See, for example, if Jesus was married, then He had to use His penis, or He really wasn’t married, was He? Oh. You don’t like the image in your imagination. Geez, you got a naughty mind.

A question of morality, you say? If we think it’s disgusting, then we mean it’s immoral. A good working definition right out of Evolutionary Psychology for a world of relativism.

Think of Osiris. In one version, he got chopped piece by piece by his enemy Set, who scattered the god’s pieces everywhere on the planet. Isis, who was Osiris’s sister and wife, scrambled around on all fours and found all the pieces of Osiris, save one. You guessed it. Her spouse’s penis. Think about it: Isis, the goddess of fertility with an impotent husband. Sheesh. That is the very definition of irony, right?

(I have noticed the God of Irony always seems to trump the God of Justice. I always wondered: Was Oedipus alive just to entertain the gods?)

I bring up Isis because wives are linked to their husbands’ penises; she cannot be his wife if he has no penis, right? Well, conventional wisdom says.

Read more »

by Haider Shahbaz

“To be exiled is not to disappear but to shrink, to slowly or quickly get smaller and smaller until we reach our real height, the true height of the self.” – Roberto Bolano, Exiles.

“You must remember that there is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.

I packed my bags, and came to Paris. I am trying to write. What better place to write, I thought? After all: Hemingway, Stein, Cowley, Joyce, Fitzgerald. Also, my introduction to American fiction: James Baldwin. He came to Paris so as not to commit suicide, and to write. Preparing for my writing, I read ‘A Moveable Feast’ and reread ‘The Sun Also Rises’. I got drunk. I went to the graves of Abelard and Heloise and Sartre and Beauvoir. I accepted Baudelaire as a prophet and became a flaneur. I visited the Latin Quarter and tried to sniff out the ghost of a young Danny the Red. I read about Malte Laurids Brigge and I read the essays of Benjamin. I got high while I read Baudelaire and Benjamin. I even saw Midnight in Paris: It was cute.

But I didn’t write. I couldn’t write – no words, no stories, came to my mind. Unfortunately dear reader, the history of my travel and my failure to write neither begins nor ends at Paris. It begins, in fact, with my first love.

Read more »