by Jeff Strabone

While the world waits for the second Iranian Revolution, it’s important to recall that Iran is not just a place of political turmoil, nuclear ambitions, and theocratic dictatorship. It is also a place of great poetry and cinema, as the work of Abbas Kiarostami reminds us. How timely then that he has a new film out called Shirin that adapts—sort of—a twelfth-century romance and offers the world a stunning new achievement: a feature-length film whose narrative is made up entirely of reaction shots.

Kiarostami’s career has been distinguished by relentless experimentation, particularly in recent years. His film ABC Africa (2001), about AIDS orphans in Uganda, includes seven minutes of nocturnal darkness. Ten (2002) consists of ten scenes shot in a car with cameras on the dashboard. In each scene, the actors drove through Tehran leaving the director and crew behind. Five (2003) has only five stationary shots depicting whatever passed in front of the camera.

Like Dreyer’s close-ups in La passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928) or Michael Snow’s zoom in Wavelength (1967), Shirin (2008) will join a very small group of films known for their singular use of a particular device. However dry or coldly formalist it may sound on paper, Shirin is a deeply moving film that follows the emotional narrative of a female audience’s reaction to watching a period melodrama full of the kind of romantic love that seems to be in short supply in modern Iran. 

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As usual, I am spending the summer in Evanston. My children and grand-children live in Chicago and no amount of whinging about winter weather (which comes in three kinds—cold, freezing, and how the fuck does anybody live here) could convince them to leave for California. And now that California seems to be going down the drain perhaps that is a reasonable decision.

As usual, when I spend the summer in Chicago, I try to catch up on the restaurant scene. This is no easy task as new places spring up like poppies and many of them are very good. Some of the necessary work is done by a number of blogs. The best of these are Chowhound and LTH Forum. The cognoscenti recognize the letters as standing for Little Three Happiness—an ancient dim sum establishment on Cermak in Chinatown.

The bloggers on these sites are generally quite reliable unlike the Yelpers who are too often like the commenters on many blogs—full of ignorance and glad to display it.

So we generally arrive with some short-list of places we want to try and there is always the joy of returning to old favorites which gives rise, in turn, to conflicts about whether to go someplace old which we know will be good or hazard a new one with the possibility of disappointment.

While Chicago is known for its high-end gastronomical temples—Alinea being the best known example—many of the most pleasurable experiences are places that we refer to as “the dump” with context making clear whether it is the Chinese Dump (Sun Wah on Argyle) or the Pakistani Dump (Ghareeb Nawaz on Devon).

My rule of thumb for Chicago restaurants is Q=1/P (where Q = quality and P = price).

The second rule is that the exceptions to the above mostly end in vowels. These include Alinea, Tru, Charlie Trotter (well the first name ends in a vowel), and, most recently a fantastic new place L2O which I cannot decide is a French restaurant with Japanese overtones or a Japanese restaurant with French ones and is, in any case, a tribute to seafood.

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By Maniza Naqvi

Our infallibility—our goddamn innocence, Eileen, the infallibility of—-of—of– our goddamn—-goddammit!

He had slurred-his words when he had called her in the middle of the night-it was 4.22 a.m. to be exact because she had seen the numbers glowing on the digital bedside clock built into the dashboard at her bedside.

Then he said: Wow! D'ya see that? That's some lightning. Storm's coming in.

She had managed to mumble an outraged: Stan, do you know what time—-

But he had hung up.

She had fallen asleep—knowing that this was just Stan—continuing on with an unfinished argument earlier in the evening when he had come over for dinner at the hotel.

In the morning a phone call from the Embassy had awakened her. It was the security officer telling her to spend the day in the hotel—the security alert for traveling anywhere outside the hotel was a level three—

With time to kill, she had spent an hour on the treadmill at the gym, showered and then made her way leisurely to breakfast at 8.00 am. Two of her breakfast companions, the daily newspapers, were handed to her by a welcoming and cheerful hostess at the entrance as she was ushered to her table. Coffee was poured for her—and a waiter fussed around her before leaving to attend to the next incoming guest.

For you everyone is CIA! He's CIA-she's CIA! Honestly!

Eileen hadn't meant to overhear the conversation but it was hard not to, the hotel was packed it seemed—and the breakfast room was overflowing with guests. The young woman, at the next table over, her hands lathered in henna patterns, her face, too made up for this time of the day, probably a bride, newlywed, and probably last night in ballroom two, had just exclaimed this in exasperation to her young husband. The bride groom—perhaps 26—was hunched over his plate and kept glancing over his shoulders suspiciously replied: Well you look around yourself, and tell me what you see? The bride and the bridegroom caught her looking at them—Eileen smiled — they looked at each other self consciously and giggled. He squeezed her hand and she reached out and touched his cheek.

Eileen shifted her attention back to the newspapers——She scanned through them: The twelve Pakistani students arrested in Britain accused of plotting the worst terrorist attack in Britain's history—and all the hullaballoo in the newspapers and on TV and by the Government too—-it now appeared were innocent. No apologies from the British Government. Holbrooke was to be called to the Hague Tribunal to be cross examined in the war crimes trial of Karadzic to testify whether he had cut a deal with the war criminal. Karzai and Zardari were meeting in a conference presided over by Hillary Clinton in Washington DC. The Pakistani delegation was protesting the AF-PAK acronym. Hillary Clinton had made it clear—that unless Pakistan did something about the militants the US military would. Another drone attack in Bajaur–40 militants killed. Over 2 million people had been displaced in Swat. Photographs of babies, small children—– young and old women confined to the tents in the camps. A luxury hotel was being constructed nearby in Chitral by the same company which was doing brisk business in hotels in Kabul and Islamabad. General Mullen was warning about the Taliban being seventy miles from Islamabad. Again. The UNDP man kidnapped in Baluchistan had been released. One of the demands by the kidnappers belonging to the Baluchistan Liberation Army had been the release of 181 women—captured by the secret agencies. Discussions and plans were underway to sell thousands of acres of farm land, to foreign concerns based in the Middle-east— Fishermen's associations were demonstrating at Gwadar port over losing their access to the sea and their land rights—villagers were protesting for having been forcibly removed from the area. Altaf Hussain, based in London, had been visited by State department officials. Again. Altaf Hussain had given another tape recorded speech to his party workers sounding the alarm that the Taliban were waiting within Karachi to attack. And there was a news item about 45 rigs producing and supplying oil and gas across the country. The E&P companies would pay 12.5 % royalty and 40% income tax to the government. The Ministry of Energy had so far awarded 119 exploration licenses to public and private sector companies, while 100 new licenses with more incentives would be awarded under the new petroleum policy to local and foreign investors. Sixth largest coal reserves in the World. A memorandum of understanding presided over by Hillary Clinton was signed by Pakistan and Afghanistan in Washington DC to give India rights for transporting its goods through Pakistan to and from Afghanistan. At a tea time event organized at the Sindh Club Pervaiz Hoodbouy, had shown a scary video of madmen training and warned against the impending invasion of the Taliban. No doubt Eileen thought amused, nail biting and enthralled members must have listened to him while their Pathan drivers wait outside in the parking lot in the heat. Ahmed Rashid followed up on the same act at the Mohatta Palace, same audience, same servants waiting outside.–And Arundhati Roy too had made an appearance- to speak against the Taliban and to speak against the Americans at a Women's Action Forum meeting at the Karachi Press Club. Same audience, same servants waiting outside. Well,well, well—thought Eileen: Ms. Roy and the hoi polloi? Why on earth would Ms. Roy come to Pakistan to speak to Karachi's elite about Talibanization? Interesting. Eileen had never been a fan—but this was certainly useful. The photogenic opposition—singing from the same page as us on Talibanzation? Barrick Gold of Canada and Chile's Antofagasta planned to invest up to US$3 billion in a copper and gold mine at Reko Diq in the southwestern province of Balochistan. The single-largest foreign investment in Pakistan. But of course there were security concerns. More snippets on the oil and gas pipelines agreements between Pakistan, Iran, India, China. The usual lines about The Line of Control: a shot fired here—a shot fired there. A person had been shot dead in Badin for trespassing on a foreign concern's drilling site.

Nothing much there— Her attention reverted to the others in the restaurant. Bright, cheerful in the early morning, the room was transformed from the darkened restaurant atmosphere in the evenings. Now, white gauze blinds, delicately and intricately embroidered in white silk thread covered the ceiling to floor windows but let in suffused sunlight into the air conditioned room. Soft music, along with central air, though unfortunately the same four seasons Vivaldi tune over and over again— was soothing nonetheless. The guests talking amongst themselves created an energetic hopeful, happy hum of well being and assurance.

There, just beyond the young couple, were two tables occupied by military officers—one by Nato officers, the other by Pakistani officers. She recognized their nationalities and ranks from the colors of their uniforms and the stripes and braids at their shoulders and chests. At a third table sat a European General and a Pakistani General. A joint Nato-Pakistan conference was about to be kicked off in ballroom two.

The rest of the room was filled with laptop rollers—everyone in a business suit, the women graced theirs with scarves in deference to cultural sensitivities, several foreigners wore shalwar kameezes. Some looked corporate, they sat up straight—talked with their laptops open in front of them—the rest looked like bureaucrats—hunched over their cereals and newspapers. Bleary eyed and pale from long nights of staring at spread sheets and memos and the suffering from dysentery, no doubt. The chicken biryani and raitha she felt on the room service menu was a repeat intestinal offender. She watched as the six guys who came in every morning around this time, single file, made their way to the same space, in the shadow of a pillar-placed their keys on the table and headed for the buffet. Buffed and buzz cuts—resembling cyborgs, they seemed to be in residence at the hotel. They ate and it seemed went immediately back up to their rooms. They didn't seem to go anywhere else. She never saw any of them in the lobby, or in the other restaurants or the salon or spa, or bakery or gift shops, or at the pool, nor in the lawn or in the parking lot or in line with other guests at the security checks and metal detectors at the entrance to the hotel. They seemed to disappear right after breakfast, emerging only at the same time the next morning.

The atmosphere was having the desired effect on her. She had been uneasy these past few days. The visit to the refugee camp had been postponed. Now her nerves were steadily being soothed. The whole place had that effect on her. Someone had planned this place well. They had really understood the needs of their clients. The corridors of the hotel were decorated with modernized versions of Mughal miniatures of princes and princesses frolicking or in repose. Interspersed with these were the colorful vibrantly painted renditions of flowers, birds and animals and naïve scenes of the Khyber Pass; winding roads and snow peaks in Kashmir these “art works”, were the actual wooden panels, off of the trucks that plied the length and breadth of the country. From the port in Karachi: Keamari, to the Khyber Pass. Replicas of the stone statues of Buddha from Gandhara and Taxila stood amongst hot house orchids and lilies on console tables placed under large mirrors whose frames mimicked the intricately carved doorways oftenfound in rural villages. The intricate embroidered patterns which decorated traditional textiles all over the country had been industrially printed on to cushion covers and bedspreads—giving the sense of handicraft. Everything allowed the guests a sensation that they were experiencing culture and tradition without making them uncomfortable, everything was meant to be just enough— without being overpowering—it was captured, collected, muted for their viewing pleasure—a gentle reminder that conveyed to the guests that this was another country should they want it to be—but easily transferrable and in proximity to what was in their own comfort zone. Like the room service menu—burgers, fries, pizza, eggs any way you wanted, lomein noodles, pad thai—chicken vindaloo, chicken masala tikka, naan. The usual. Nothing unknown—nothing that would clash—scream out…

Still, ten days into her stay she had asked the hotel management for a change of rooms. At the price the hotel was charging, she had said to the young woman at the reception that the sounds of the drilling and the jack hammering throughout the day was unacceptable. The guest relations officer had taken the phone and had explained to her that they were fully occupied at the moment. Eileen had replied as calmly as she could that she would be down in a moment to have a word with him in person. You are welcome Madame he had replied—his voice all smiles.

When she came down, the lobby, with its marble floors gleaming, its fountain at the center gently gurgling, was bustling with guests. A workshop on health, in ball room one, had just let out for a coffee break. Somewhere a guitar strummed. And someone had broken out in song in the crowd behind her, out of tune. Reaching the guest relations officer's desk, she had sat down on the upholstered chair and leaned forward to be heard over the racket. Lowering her voice, she delivered the magic words in a menacing tone: US Dollars. Listen up. The expansion that you've got going outside my window—that construction site–my dollars are paying for it—So, one word from me about feeling uncomfortable here, and your little monopoly on hotels in this town will be history. All I need to do is to let customers like me—know how I rate you guys and that's it. Do you understand? Do you hear me? So what will it be?

A room was soon found. But a pre-moving in inspection uncovered that it was situated directly above the main gate to the hotel, Enraged she had demanded of the guest relations officer whether he was in his right senses—placing her at this security risk location—after all hadn't the truck full of explosives slammed into the front gate of the Marriot Hotel? The guest relations officer, appearing shaken by her fury had apologized quickly and called reception to search for another room. A short five minutes yielded results. Another room, he said had just opened up, this time he assured her it would be to her satisfaction. It was. Situated at the back of the hotel, on the first floor, so that in the event of an incident—she would be able to jump. To restore her confidence in the hotel's commitment to her comfort, the management had sent up an overflowing complimentary fruit basket and an invitation for a Swedish massage at her convenience either in her room or at the hotel spa and salon. Upon inquiry she learned that the hotel only had male masseurs—the incident at the massage parlor two years ago by the crazies at the Lal masjid had forced the hotel, concerned about security, to let go of its female masseuses.

The need to change rooms, truth be told was that it wasn't the noise of drills and hammers banging that had bothered Eileen—valium handled that well enough at night— Besides the hum of the strong central air conditioning—the shut windows and the heavy double drapes dulled any noise from outside—even banished sunlight. Rather it was the early morning view, once she drew back the curtains, which spoiled things for her. From her window she could see the day laborers filing into the huge construction site for the hotel—shivering in the cold at that time—wrapped in large chaddars, their feet shod in tattered chapals. Their daily wage not even half the cost of her morning coffee. It made no sense for her and seemed unfair for her to have to start the day that way: feeling out of sorts.

Eileen had booked her complimentary massage for five p.m. before her dinner with Stan. That would give her enough time before dinner which she knew would no doubt be trying. And sure enough dinner with Stan had been vintage Stan. Afterwards, she had gone to bed early —the massage had relaxed her. Before going to bed, she had fired off a quick missive. The subject line: Assessment. The text was a simple one liner: Needs further probing.

Stan had arrived early, that evening. She met him at the Italian restaurant on the first floor. He had brought along an article for her to read about the killing of civilians by the military in Afghanistan.

She had glanced at the title and nodded before setting it aside and said: Terrible! What a mess huh? But these things happen—those guys are under a lot of stress—and they're all coming from really stressful backgrounds. I can understand that.

He had gulped down the beer, wiped the sides of his mouth with his thumb and index finger and considered her for a long moment—-The difference between you and me he had said—is that you try to understand the murderers.

Whose side are you on Stan?

Side, Eileen?

Yeah Stan, whose side are you on? Because there are sides—y'know. This is not a game—this is real, real stuff—there is bad stuff here—and we're fighting it.

Is that a fact?

Yes, Stan, that's a fact. A capital F—fact.

Uh huh? Bad stuff? Facts. At some point we forget don't we as to who is the source of our facts? Us. We start the chain—send a memo, remember?—Send a memo to report an incident—that sets of an avalanche of discussion till it builds into a body of work, then we turn that into a report There are press releases—–and then that turns into news—we provide photographs, videos, corroborating evidence. An incident occurs. More evidence. Pundits are born. They write more reports—books. Archives full of them. Hearings are held—panel discussions-think tanks take matters up. Facts. The same journalists that were there at the build-up to the Iraq war—suddenly show up here—or report about here from there. A story is built up slowly. And it brews and brews. We're master brewers. One thing's for sure Eileen, Game over. We're the best. We've won. Now what are we fighting for? Who are we fighting? And why?

What are you talking about?

I don't know Eileen. I don't know. The violence—the coldness of it all.

Are you kidding! Stan, surely you understand, we live in the most non violent times. The world has seen incredible violence—Tamerlane—Chengiz Khan. We are fortunate to live in the most non violent times—The only problem is that nowadays every blip that occurs in a war is reported over and over again and over magnified.

Is that right? Every blip?

Just trying to tell you that this is a much more humane and non violent fight then ever was fought before. Stan, don't be on the wrong side of history on this one. We created the swamp, no doubt about it. Okay? We're cleaning it up. Don't get on the wrong side of this Stan. Don't get on the wrong side of history on this.

He had laughed. I'm trying not to Eileen! He had shaken his head: You are so good Eileen. Leave this. You should come and live with me Eileen, stay at my place while you're here. This place gives me the creeps—this hotel—-look at the people in here.

I like it here Stan.

How could you? They're all just us.

That's why Stan. Who are you?

Just look at them Eileen? The Nato guys over there and their body guards in the lobby—The suits in that corner—cutting deals—reading the riot act on loans to some bigwigs in the Government. Buzz cuts—flashy ties—big briefcases—Living in this “Gilded guest house”—internet connected—CNN ready—air conditioned—sanitized—securitized— Everything just so—everything a fantasy of how it should be. The natives, always in the roles of the waiters, the bellhops, the cleaners, the housekeepers—the doormen–indulging our every whim, like nannies watching us in the playground—indulgently, encouragingly urging us on in our every attempt at screwing their country over and all the while wearing ridiculous costumes to indulge our notions of them. Do you think this place is filled with guests who are tourists appreciating what the natives cannot, or guests who are here for commerce and war, taking what the natives must not?

Are you going native as you say, Stan?

You can remain the guest Eileen or you could decide to sleep with them. Did you ever think of it Eileen?

Are you involved here with someone Stan?

Haven't you thought about it Eileen? Sleeping with any of them?

Who? The hotel's hired help?

No the generals, the President—the Ministers?

What's the difference Stan? They're all the same to me. There I said it for you.

Order another Murree brew Eileen, will you.

What number are you on Stan?

I don't know—eighth?

So Stan, no one said you can't sleep with them—Please by all means do! Just make sure you don't forget what the terms of engagement are.

He had left early. Only to call back in the middle of the night waking her from her valium induced sleep:—Our infallibility—our goddamn innocence, Eileen!

No one had seen him or heard from him since. It had been three days. The café was closed. And the Embassy had informed her that unless he appeared in the next twenty four hours they would have to go public with a story.

Read : Losing the Plot (The Coffee Shop) Chapter One: https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/06/losing-the-plot.html

by Olivia Scheck

On June 25^th, one day after Mark Sanford’s press conference in which he confessed to a year-long affair with a woman in Argentina, David Brooks published an apparently unrelated column titled “Human Nature Today.”

Brooks’ column begins by identifying three “different views of human nature”: the economic view, the traditional Christian view, and the evolutionary psychology view, which he asserts “get[s] the most media attention.” He then lambastes the evolutionary psychology view, using as a proxy Geoffrey Miller, author of The Mating Mind and, more recently, Spent: Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behavior.

Summarizing Spent in terms so simplistic and out-of-context as to be absurd, Brooks’ writes “According to Miller, driving an Acura, Infiniti, Subaru or Volkswagen is a sign of high intelligence. Driving a Cadillac, Chrysler, Ford or Hummer is a sign of low intelligence…[and] teenage girls may cut themselves as a way to demonstrate their ability to withstand infections.”

Whether or not this is a fair account of Miller’s book, it is without question a misrepresentation of evolutionary psychology in general. Yet Brooks uses this review to usher in a new era of skepticism about “E.P.,” declaring that “Evolutionary psychology has had a good run. But now there is growing pushback.”

Specifically, Brooks notes, there is Sharon Begley’s Newsweek attack piece – a “takedown,” he calls it – entitled “Why Do We Rape, Kill and Sleep Around? The fault, dear Darwin, lies not in our ancestors, but in ourselves.” As the headline suggests, Begley’s article is riddled with naive accusations that evolutionary psychologists are genetic determinists. It even implies – bizarrely – that evolutionary psychologists have concocted their views in order to excuse, by dint of the naturalistic fallacy, their own bad behavior. “Let's not speculate,” Begley writes, “on the motives that (mostly male) evolutionary psychologists might have in asserting that their wives are programmed to not really care if they sleep around, and turn instead to the evidence.”

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David Schneider

I applied for a copywriting job the other day. The employer was a maker of some intriguing educational technologies, and needed someone to fully update the website's text, and determine a new voice for the firm that would be more appealing to buyers. It was a good job; and a not inconsiderable one. The firm, at the nexus of the technology and educational industries, had necessarily constructed a language that blended tech and ed terms into a rich and potent polysyllaby, really tasty for the search engines and industry insiders but a bit tough going for most other people.

I proposed that the ease of a product's language, deep within the soundings of each phrase, helps to sell the ease of using the product – take it a step further, introduce a little fun to the reading experience (beauty, wit, humor, attitude, individuality) and you've just connected a positive emotion to the logical and psychological idea of ease of use. That's marketing and advertising in a nutshell (or, at least, it should be). And teachers, the end users of this product, are probably overburdened enough with the challenges of technology; wouldn't they like a product that's easy to understand, easy to learn and use, and allow them to concentrate on the true arts of teaching? (Well, I 'm not sure about these things; they might really prefer the optimization of educational subjects' skill sets for successful threshold achievement of national graduated assessment agendas. It sounds more professional, at any rate. And it's up to the company whether I'm right or wrong.)

But then it came time to submit my application. As with any large or fully technologized company, these days, the firm had a proprietary online “human resources manager.” I could tell, from the way the app worked, that a human was likely to read my work only at a very late stage of the game; instead, a little Pac-Man was going to munch its way through my word-maze, gobbling up jargon keywords like Power Pellets. I panicked, and like a digital sariman on level 40, with the Four Ghosts of the Depression bearing down on me at bankruptcy speed, I raced through the tunnels of the Web looking for a conversion tool. Hey, fight fire with fire, right?

In the midst of this panic, I just had to laugh. Here I was, proposing to update a company's lexical machinery with a more efficient and user-friendly model, yet being thwarted from communicating that by the very systems associated with the industries' language machineries!

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by Michael Blim

There is something unforgivably lawyerly about Barack Obama.

I don’t begrudge his question parsing or the clarity it brings when he answers the a-bomb lobs of press and public. I really enjoy how he exposes the contradictions in the logic and arguments of others. Most recently, he simply nailed the insurance industry for arguing on the one hand that federal insurance by its nature would be inefficient and costly, while upholding on the other hand how a federal insurance option would drive them out of business. A nice piece of work that exposed the insurance industry position and also laid down a marker of what the industry can expect in the next round in the battle for national health care.

Obama was in grand form Monday afternoon, June 29, as he welcomed 250-odd gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people to the White House to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots and the birth of a movement. His wife, Michelle, played the straight woman for a couple of ice-breaker jokes and asides. As with other presidents, Obama used his wife’s presence to make the gathering informal and familial, a gesture that might have been touching had lgbt people had families with the same legal footing as Michelle and Barack have

Instead, to judge by the transcript, the event seemed forced. The guests were not invited to witness the signing of a bill or an executive order. No, this was a personal moment, the Obama family welcoming their lgbt friends and families. Though I do not want to demean the occasion, I would have preferred an event with another executive order signing, perhaps reversing “don’t ask, don’t tell,” without Michelle and the family circle chitchat. Because the President had nothing new to say, except to recite his campaign promises, you might think it unfair to think back to Harry Truman’s signing of the military desegregation order. Can you imagine Harry Truman beginning the ceremony with “well, Bess, Margaret and I ….?”

But the contrast clarifies many things. First, this was a feel-good event that substituted for an occasion devoted to law or policy. Second, it was condescending. Obama shifted the focus of the gathering from passing laws to “opening the hearts” of the “good and decent people in this country who don’t fully embrace their gay brothers and sisters…” The theme of moral suasion was swapped for law and policy. The implication too was the we had better get out there and help straight people get over their hatreds and ask them to give us access to the resources and protections they have acquired or have guaranteed to them. He singled out PTA participation as a salutary action undertaken by many lgbt parents to allay straight suspicions. Like the President and Michelle Obama, I come from Chicago, and that experience never taught me the value of the PTA over political power or Constitutional protection. I doubt it did them either.

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I.

When I fall asleep in a coffin posture, supine, with my feet tenting beneath the covers and my nose tracing a line up toward the wobbling ceiling fan, I frequently wake up a committed if unwilling Cartesian.

Like anyone else in R.E.M. sleep, as soon I slip under my brain starts sending hormonal relaxants to my muscles that anesthetize and effectively paralyze them. Problem is, when I wake up from R.E.M. only a fraction of me pops awake sometimes. It’s not a split between the left and right sides of my body, like a stroke patient, nor a top-bottom paraplegic split. And it’s nothing like a foot or hand falling asleep, then dethawing with that achy tingle. Mine is an old-fashioned, cogito-ergo mind-body bifurcation. Mentally, “I” pop right awake, and as a natural course of being awake this “I” sends signals for my legs and arms and mouth and eyes to yawn, or stretch, or see what time it is and whether I have to go to the bathroom. Those signals echo, ignored. My mind casts the spell again, but it turns out I cannot twiddle a toe or even flex a nostril, no matter how much I strain. Within seconds of the failure, I’m agonizingly aware of the discrepancy. It’s not a dream (there’s nothing fantastical happening), more like a huge karmic blunder, what being reincarnated as a park statue would feel like.

This rigor mortis is actually easy to shrug off, as long as—and here’s the philosophically troubling bit—the outside world intervenes. I can still sense my environment, like some sort of amoeba or slug—that’s a passive act—but the universe must change somehow. I’m powerless to effect change myself and will remain locked up, alone. A sudden alarm clock will unchain me, but not any noises that were already mewing when I “woke” up. A dramatic unmasking of a window might do it, but not the slow creep of the sun. The slightest nudge from my girlfriend will budge me (I suppose it’s the opposite of those little jerks she makes whenever she falls asleep), but the heat of an arm already draped across me is useless.

I told my girlfriend after my latest “attack,” when I woke panting, “If you ever see me lying there immobile and straining, or hear a strangled scream, you should shake me.” Just to be sure, I added, “Hard.”

“But everyone makes noises when they’re sleeping. How will I know?”

“It’s only when I’m rigid. And it’s only when I’m sleeping on my back.”

“Why only when you’re sleeping on your back?”

“I don’t know.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. And why would shaking you help?”

“It just does.” Too early to be having this conversation.

I should have told her that as long as the external world remains static, I’m trapped in my own mind. It’s the ultimate solipsism—except, unlike a real solipsist, I’m aware of being trapped, and get to glimpse what that would really be like. The oxymoron is part of the horror. And I’m lucky compared to some people. Posture makes no difference to them; they’re always vulnerable. Someone I ran track with in high school would slip into sleep paralysis not just in last few minutes of morning sleep, either, but in the middle of the night. He would have to lie there, awake and mute and rigid for hours, suffering like Philip Larkin in “Aubade” until his mother would notice his tardiness before school (“Shawn’s having a spell again …”) and rock him awake. Not the most restful nights, you can imagine. Others slip narcoleptically into this state while awake, a nod known as cataplexy. One poor cataplexic in England has been declared dead three times, and not just by movie ushers and petrol attendants: Her body locked itself up so tightly that medical professionals sadly shook their heads and began calling family members. The first time, age seventeen, she woke up in a morgue.

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—Miraculous power and marvelous activity,
drawing water and hewing wood.
–P’ang Yun

Talking With My Guru
….#1– Nothing to Lose

G: What exactly do you mean by emptiness?

Me: Nothing.

G: Then why are we wasting time
sitting round talking about it?

Take your tiny Tao shears
and snip emptiness out of Webster’s
and heave it into the void. It’s another
self-serving euphemism like time
or collateral damage.

Go cut some wood, draw some water,
and stop sound-biting things to death
–and travel light (and lightly)
till the sun goes down.

Nothing and emptiness
are for advanced students
with nothing to lose.

Jim Culleny; 2008

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First, let's state these facts about the human race, and more specifically, about the 5% of Americans in it:

1. People will believe any crap, and the facts are useless against a crap-filled belief system.

2. When one bunch of people looks at the problems of another bunch of people, they always ask: how can we make their problems all about us?

These are two of the most powerful operative correlatives that define the human condition.

Whatever is happening out there — the early passing of Michael Jackson, another puerile attempt to fix our healthcare system, or the drama of the Iran election — you can be pretty sure that your understanding of them will depend on these two operative correlatives. None of us — not even Chomsky, Heidegger or Foucault — are immune to their power.

And here's why:

We live in a world of stories, not a world of events.

Moreover:

We live in a world of stories told by a whole bunch of story-tellers.

Politicians. Philosophers. Experts. Pundits. Critics. Academics. The media. Bloggers. Wall Street. Main Street. Labor unions. Global capitalists. Etcetera.

These story-tellers tell us their stories so they can gain all sorts of goodies for themselves.

Votes. Ratings. Sales. Market shares. Wages. Bonuses. Grants. Nobel Prizes. And so on.

And we believe their stories.

Why?

We believe their stories NOT because they are TRUE stories, but because they are GOOD stories.

They appeal to our story-enjoying selves, the way comedies and tragedies about men, women and the gods appealed to the ancient Greeks, where the template for Western-minded stories was created.

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Multi-Use Area

By Elizabeth Bradfield

Would the day on the hay flats—
sun slight through clouds, grasses
just starting again from last year’s
grasses, geese and cranes bugling
over the marsh—have been better
without the old tires, the gutted couch
in a pullout, a moose slumped alongside,
meat taken but the head still attached?

I can close my eyes to the pop bottles,
booze bottles, and orange skeet shells
in the parking lot, along the river. Walk
past them. I can pretend my own steps
through the marsh convey a different
presence. But I can’t close my ears.
There, a white-fronted goose, there
a pintail, willow branches cracking

underfoot, F-14s from the base. And there, again,
the shotgun blast and whoop which I can’t
edit out, which I probably shouldn’t.
It stops when I walk into view. I stop
and stare across the flats through my
binoculars, thinking asshole. And of course
someone’s staring back at me
over a truck bed, thinking asshole.

*

Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of the books Interpretive Work (Arktoi) and the forthcoming Approaching Ice (Persea). She plasters the streets with collaborations published by Broadsided Press and works as a naturalist. “Multi-Use” was originally published in Interpretive Work (Arktoi/Red Hen Press, 2008), winner of the Audre Lord Award from the Publishing Triangle and shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award.

Read (or listen to) more of Elizabeth Bradfield's poems here >>

*

The Owls is a literary kind of site devoted mostly to collaborative writing projects. Poems, stories, and essays from The Owls appear on 3QD as a periodical feature.

The Owls site currently hosts a photostream by Frederick Schroeder, “Night Drive,” and “Screen Grabs,” an occasional column-by-Twitter-feed on movies by Ben Walters. Work by Jim Gavin, Morgan Meis, Amy Groshek, and Jill McDonough has appeared on the site in recent weeks as part of a project called “Stamps” that features writing about places. The Stamps project will continue this summer with a new post each week on The Owls site.

You may receive updates about writing projects at The Owls here at 3QD, via feed, or by putting the word “subscribe” in the subject heading of an email to owlsmag[at]gmail[dot]com.

by Colin Marshall

It's easy to see Killer of Sheep as a social tract, a cinematic essay on the boredom and hopelessness of black families in crumbling, industrial 1970s Watts — a bit too easy. Though Burnett's best-known film — and for 30 of the last 32 years, a seldom-seen one — provides a window of unparalleled clarity and style into its time and place, to read it as an elaborate argument about the entrapment of the urban black working class is to choose the most convenient but least interesting interpretation. The unambitious film writer can simply parse the images of the title character's endless sheep-skinning toil in the abattoir that employs him as metaphors for the lives of he and his wife, children and friends — grim, desensitizing and doomed — and call it a day. “And thus we see,” it's easy to imagine such a (likely non-American) critic pronouncing, “the poor forced into deadening oblivion, as lambs to the slaughter, by the callous society that surrounds them.”

Were that truly the extent of the movie's depth, you wouldn't be reading about it here. The “statement film” probably has its place — he admitted, wearily — though fictional cinema has always been a remarkably ineffective forum in which to make an argument, allowing the filmmaker to spread the sheen of truth, at least within their picture's world, on any old flight of fancy. Even documentary film lacks a firm barrier between sound reasoning and unhinged agitprop; it's no accident that the best members of the genre simply observe, casting off the nonsensical obligation to push a thesis. Charles Burnett seems, on some level, to have known this when he made Killer of Sheep, a latter-latter-day piece of neorealism with the aesthetic stylization of that subgenre and the unstaged feel of a nonfiction film.

Given that Burnett originally shot it as his UCLA film school thesis without intent to distribute or even publicly screen, it's all the more impressive to reflect on what the film does — or, to put it more precisely, to reflect on what the film doesn't do. It's a common filmmaker's temptation, especially among the young ones and those embedded in a film school environment, to peddle their own worldview and grind the axe through subtle — or, more often, hilariously yet unintentionally unsubtle — tricks of framing and causality. Either Burnett eschews this practice or performs it so well as to go undetected, though my money's on the former. While their efforts may often end in vain, he never for one moment appears to strip his characters of their agency; at no point do they come off as puppets carrying out a preordained design of modern struggle and malaise.

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As the Minute Clicks
Jim Culleny

A new night
(as they always are)
and cool —unlike June
in Jersey when I was green
but June anyway

anyway it comes
it’s June
it’s June
regardless of you

June then
June now
in mid-late evening
8:30 by the clock
—the night dark
almost

in the window the sky
glows grey behind
silhouettes of trees

slate-skin clouds
which if seen from a jet
would billow bright
in the light of the torch
that makes us tick

while underneath on
cloud-muffled earth what
makes us tick is a phantom
flame we imagine

we imagine it hints it’s here
right now in June

Brandenburg Concertos
from the other room

fountain water falling
nearby from a stone frog’s lips

cat darting
car passing

makes you wonder how
you’re doing as the minute
clicks

Amelia Vega dancing at Bar Cardamomo, Madrid. All photos courtesy of Randolyn Zinn.

Randolyn Zinn

The way she moves

her slender waist

pleases the eyes

and the soul.

— Abu l-Hajjaj ibn ‘Utba, 13th c., Sevilla

You go scattering,

as you walk,

roses and lilies.

— traditional flamenco Alegrias lyric

In Spain earlier this year, researching a collection of poems I am writing, it occurred to me that my quest to find flamenco puro might be as romantically ill conceived as clambering through the back woods of the Southern United States in search of the blues. A fool’s errand, because both flamenco and the blues share at least one common fate — professional integration into their respective cultures.

Before my trip, I had visions of coming upon a late night impromptu scene of music and dance in some smoky room in an Andalucían town, aficionados yelling their appreciative ¡olés! (the first syllable is pronounced ah for reasons I’ll get into later). In fact, I did stay up late watching all manner of flamenco performances in very smoky rooms to learn that the art has become somewhat of a career path, enjoying renewed interest today from artists and audiences not necessarily born in the Andalucían province of its ancestral beginnings. And the pure flamenco I had fantasized about finding proved elusive.

In the Beginning, Complexity Not Simplicity

Even though the word “flamenco” elicits a variety of images and sounds, perhaps cliché — dark-eyed women in long ruffled dresses clicking castanets and drilling the floor with rapid heelwork, a man hunched over his guitar plying its strings in the plaintive voicings of the ancient Phrygian scale — the art bears closer scrutiny. Born of strife between Christian, Jew, Gypsy and Muslim, whose ancient shared anguish is mirrored by the challenges of our own era, flamenco is one of the world’s first multi-cultural art forms.

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by Michael Blim

The bus Thursday night was late. I slumped back onto the bench as the four-hour trip to New York had just gotten longer. As I settled in, I noticed a young kid waiting too. He had a Sesame Street character sticking out of his pink backpack, and he wore pink tennis and a rainbow-colored belt. On the back pocket of his jeans was written “God loves gays.” He might have been eighteen.

Flaunt it, baby, flaunt it, I thought. There’s still a very good chance you’ll get to New York in one piece. We’re almost normal now.

Four and a half hours later, the bus came bounding off the Williamsburg Bridge into Chinatown. It was one o’clock by the time I transferred at West 4^th Street. The C train was no longer running, the A train was stopping at Jay Street, and lovely shuttle buses were offered from thereon. As I boarded the train to Brooklyn, a bunch of drunken young revelers hopped on. They were a mess of plastered and tinted hair, and a few were prettily painted. Kids of several hues once more with rainbows, and these too were all right with the world.

Finally the shock of recognition hit: the Stonewall 40^th Anniversary was coming up Monday, and New York’s big Pride parade was on Sunday.

I had been oblivious. On the long bus ride, I had been reading the U.S. Justice Department’s June 11 brief supporting dismissal of a suit challenging the constitutionality of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). The motion to dismiss will be held this upcoming August 3.

I had been steaming. By the time the A train reached Brooklyn, it was as if I had the taste of Mexican mole negro, the bitter chocolate sauce, in my mouth. Yes, we were free, to which the rainbow kids could testify. But we had not secured our rights. And American society and we had fallen far short of liberation.

The Justice Department brief says it all. The Obama Justice Department brief says it all. I add the adjective “Obama” because even though Andrew Sullivan has noted that the brief’s author W. Scott Simpson is a Bush appointee and part of a trial team that defended the Partial Birth Abortion Act of 2003, Tony West, the Obama-appointed Assistant Attorney General, signed off on the brief. No one has yet called it a mistake.

The brief seeks dismissal of a suit by Andrew Smelt and Christopher Hammer alleging that their constitutional rights are violated by the provisions of DOMA that established for the first time in American history that marriage in the federal system of laws consists of a union between a man and a woman.

The brief is an exercise in deceit and disingenuousness. DOMA merely “codifies” tradition, Justice argues, even if the republic had survived without a federal definition of marriage for over 200 years, and even though marriage is a state and not a federal matter. DOMA, Justice avers, doesn’t prohibit same-sex couples from marrying: it just prevents same sex couples from any claim to benefits based on marriage, and it protects other states from having to provide benefits to same sex marriage partners who leave same sex marriage states and move to states without same-sex marriage.

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By Namit Arora

(A slightly modified version of this article appeared in Philosophy Now, Nov 2011. Here is the PDF.)

As a graduate student of computer engineering in the early 90s, I recall impassioned late night debates on whether machines can ever be intelligent—intelligent, as in mimicking the cognition, common sense, and problem-solving skills of ordinary humans. Scientists and bearded philosophers spoke of ‘humanoid robots.’ Neural network research was hot and one of my professors was a star in the field. A breakthrough seemed inevitable and imminent. Still, I felt certain that Artificial Intelligence (AI) was a doomed enterprise.

I argued out of intuition, from a sense of the immersive nature of our life: how much we subconsciously acquire and call upon to get through life; how we arrive at meaning and significance not in isolation but through embodied living, and how contextual, fluid, and intertwined this was with our moods, desires, experiences, selective memory, physical body, and so on. How can we program all this into a machine and have it pass the unrestricted Turing test? How could a machine that did not care about its existence as humans do, ever behave as humans do? Can a machine become socially and emotionally intelligent like us without viscerally knowing infatuation, joy, loss, suffering, the fear of death and disease? In hindsight, it seems fitting that I was then also drawn to Dostoevsky, Camus, and Kierkegaard.

My interlocutors countered that while extremely complex, the human brain is clearly an instance of matter, amenable to the laws of physics. They posited a reductionist and computational approach to the brain that many, including Steven Pinker and Daniel Dennett, continue to champion today. Our intelligence, and everything else that informed our being in the world, had to be somehow ‘coded’ in our brain’s circuitry, including the great many symbols, rules, and associations we relied on to get through a typical day. Was there any reason why we couldn’t ‘decode’ this, and reproduce intelligence in a machine some day? Couldn’t a future supercomputer mimic our entire neural circuitry and be as smart as us? Recently, Dennett declared in his sonorous voice, “We are robots made of robots made of robots made of robots.”

Today’s supercomputers are ten million times faster than those of the early 90s. But despite the big advances in computing, AI has fallen woefully short of its ambition and hype. Instead, we have “expert” systems that process predetermined inputs in specific domains, perform pattern matching and database lookups, and algorithmically learn to adapt their outputs. Examples include chess software, search engines, speech recognition, industrial and service robots, and traffic and weather forecasting systems. Machines have done well with a great many tasks that we ourselves can, or already do, pursue algorithmically—including many yet unbeknown to us—as in searching for the word “ersatz” in an essay, making cappuccino, restacking books in a library, navigating our car in a city, or landing a plane. But so much else that defines our intelligence remains well beyond machines—such as projecting our creativity and imagination to understand new contexts and their significance, or figuring out how and why new sensory stimuli are relevant or not. Why is AI in such a brain-dead state? Is there any hope for it? Let’s take a closer look.

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By Aditya Dev Sood

Akbar Shah had come to meet us. I can still see him, his untucked shirt fluttering in the wind, long arms strung at his sides, careful words, he needed this job. My main work is the rough-cut stone, he said, like you have all over the facade. But I can also do tiling. I'll manage the labor but the blade will be yours. Gurinder and I couldn't see that we had any other go anyways. The last contractor had been a disaster, requiring minute instruction but then sulking on being told what to do. He'd taken his men and tools off the job finally, and sent one of his other malik-s over to us to try and get his account settled. We told Akbar he was on the job and that yes, the blades were ours. Was he squinting in the sun, or did his eyes betray Chengez Khan and Timurlane as ancestors? He said he was from Poonch, one of the most northern districts in Kashmir, fatefully falling on this side of the Line of Control. His bearing and manner seemed sincere, but his eyes danced and he seemed always to be restraining his mustache from breaking out into a sly grin. What a name he has, said Gurinder to me later, and we'd had to laugh.

We'd already been at this, what, three months? There were times it seemed like the biggest sculpture studio imaginable, but also days when wood would be fighting masonry, the electricity would fail, and then it would rain on the pieces of wood just polished and left to glint in the sun. Every other morning, it seemed, a whole side of my brain would cave in at these mundane, minute, coordinations that made up my business at Empire Estate, where I was renovating — gut-rehabbing — two adjacent row houses. This is why I'd hired Gurinder at the outset, a civil engineer who'd know how to manage all this stuff, and he gamely played the man of action, while I turned back to my Heidegger. I remember him once pulling live wires and closing them with his own hands in light rain, which requires the foolish courage of youth as well as insistent engineering will: this circuit will close, the damn lights will come on.

Akbar Shah was here to teach himself stone-tiling on our dime, but even he didn't pretend to know anything about grinding or polishing the stone he laid. For that we hired Kabir Shah and his brothers and nephews from Bihar. Channa Ram, the head-carpenter was from Punjab, but the rest of his team was also from Bihar. Banwari Lal, the painter-polisher was from Eastern Uttar Pradesh. Every time stone abutted wood, wall met floor, and Bihar met Kashmir, Gurinder and I would be called upon to mediate and dispense Solomonic wisdom, to get the teams back to work and this project back on track.

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Edward B. Rackley

Unlike in Latin America, where liberation theology was once an influential force, Christians in Africa rarely confront political oppression. On the surface, African Christian institutions claim not to meddle in affairs of the State. These days, ‘conversion of the heathens’ is passé, as Christianity is now a widespread and entrenched belief system. Churches of all denominations offer manifold development initiatives in education, health and agriculture. In many countries where the State has limited reach into rural areas, churches represent the sole link to the outside world for isolated communities.

But it’s only half the story to say that African Christian institutions are above political interests and the establishment of a modern State. Throughout colonial occupation, the Church completed the political and economic triangle that comprised the massive social engineering project of colonialism. Here was a hearts and minds program that worked—colonial control encapsulated Maslow’s entire hierarchy of needs. From material conditions, social space and into the spiritual realm, colonialism repackaged the indigenous African experience and replaced each dimension with a foreign substitute. Little has changed since independence: neither the school curricula nor the political dispensations (despite elections, ‘Big Men’ reign in a colonial style). Formerly vibrant traditional belief systems are now subaltern and syncretistic, fusing in curious ways with imported Christian ideas.

Where legitimate grievance has erupted in armed conflict, as in Congo, Rwanda and Sudan, the Church has been neither neutral nor salutary. In Rwanda and Congo, the Church actively fomented ethnic divisions (Hutu/Tutsi, Hema/Lendu), ultimately facilitating ethnic cleansing campaigns in both countries. During Southern Sudan’s famines in the 1990s, the Church leveraged its food distributions to starving animist populations against Bible study and conversion.

The failure of Congo’s recently elected officials to improve the suffering and destitution across the country aggravates an already desperate, vulnerable mindset. No surprise then that Congo is a breeding ground for rival evangelical Christian sects, many with massive US support, whose pastors implore their congregations to submit to divine providence. God, not human agency, will resolve Congo’s political morass. The sleep of reason is a powerful drug, and a convenient soporific to distract attention from Congo’s kleptocratic institutions. Political elites welcome the evangelical fervor—as long as pastors keep the population’s gaze focused on the heavens above. Liberation theology would never last a day here, because its proponents would find themselves muzzled in no time. Such is the story of Bundu Dia Kongo, an Afrocentric religiou s movement that dared to challenge State corruption and ineptitude.

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Justin E. H. Smith

A few nights ago I hosted a reception for an old friend, a respected scholar and most recently the author of Citation Techniques in Duns Scotus. We were celebrating the sale of the 100th copy of his book.

Now ordinarily this sort of event is attended by only the dustiest of academics, so you can easily imagine my surprise when a former colleague of mine –a newly minted global-justice theorist who left academic philosophy in order, as she put it, to 'work the Davos circuit'– showed up accompanied by the prize-winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.

The two of them had just come from the opening session of the ‘Mini Davos’ forum, which this year my adoptive city had the honor of hosting. My former colleague (let us call her ‘Juliette’) had just led a session on ‘The Universal Right to Clean Water’, in which her performance was judged by Stephen Harper, Desmond Tutu, and Bono alike to be of ‘Oscar calibre’.
“Water,” exclaimed Bill Gates, “now there's something people can get excited about.”
“She's gonna take this act all the way to Switzerland,” Bill Clinton himself was heard to say.

I had already known Friedman to be a small and twitchy man, and was now able to confirm that this is at best a mild understatement. Yet almost immediately I sensed that there was something unusual, that this man, however awkward he may ordinarily be, was at this very moment in a tremendous amount of discomfort.
“It's a pleasure to meet you Mr. Friedman,” I said smoothly and, I hoped, with just the right amount of ambiguous sarcasm. “I'm a big fan of The Lexus and the Olive Tree. It really captured the moment. When I read it I was like: forget about On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (and Always Have) in the Future Tense, it's Friedman who's really got his finger on the pulse.”
“Thanks,” Friedman groaned. “Call me Tom.”

This was all he managed to say, after which he just kept standing there, sweating and wincing. I imagined Juliette might be able to bring him back to life if I were to disappear, so I excused myself and went to mingle among the other guests. Things were proceeding as usual. Reginald, it seems, had read Gunther’s new book, Kenelm Digby’s Qualitative Corpuscularianism. The babysitter-deprived and therefore absent Gunther, Reginald reported to the crowd’s amusement and surprise, had based his study almost entirely upon The Nature of Bodies of 1644 while completely ignoring the Discourse concerning the Vegetation of Plants of 1661.

Thirty minutes in or so, when I simply could not stand to see my most distinguished guest suffering anymore, and when conversation with the others had weakened from Digby to dental insurance to daycare, I leaned in and, in a whispered tone, asked Juliette what was wrong. She knew the man better than I did, after all, and I had long known her to be what Nietzsche would call a penetrating 'psychologist'. Was she ever! Thomas Friedman, Juliette whispered to me discreetly in the elegant Ciceronian Latin she still retained from her years as a scholar of Imperial Stoicism, was in the throes of a fluxus ventris.

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