In the middle of last month, a colleague of mine, a writer, was run over by a five-ton military truck on a public street in Washington, D.C. Patrons at a restaurant nearby—it was dinner time, about 6 p.m., a nice day to dine outside—said the sound of her getting crushed beneath the wheels was stomach-sickening. She was sixty-eight years old and riding a bicycle, less a block from work. She wrote about lots of hard-core science and had been at the magazine since 1970, and so was well known; Francis Collins commented on her death. She also edited a breezier news section called Short Cuts, and I think she would have enjoyed and appreciated 3QD—she painted seriously on the side, and played music.

I admit I knew her (I’ll call her T.) less well as other people where we used to work together. And yet the news still stunned me. Stunned me in that way when everything gets very quiet and your focus narrows severely and you can suddenly concentrate very, very hard. Or rather, everything else seems to fall away, because what you’re concentrating on just doesn’t make sense, doesn’t jive with what was, until just then, real. D.C. has a pretty abysmal record of bikers and pedestrians getting run over by careless buses and trucks—the number of ghost bikes around town (memorials, painted white, one for each victim at the site of an accident) gets eerie. But T. died because people took far too much care, in the empty name of security.

You see, her workplace had the misfortune of being a half mile from the Washington Convention Center, where dozens of world leaders held a profoundly unproductive nuclear security summit in April. The big outcome, as you undoubtedly heard, was that all parties present denounced terrorism as “one of the most challenging threats to international security” and decided that it would be idea to make sure terrorists cannot get nuclear materials, starting in four years. Of course, they agreed to this in a non-binding resolution, so even that milquetoast agreement means little. Maybe, just maybe, a lot of the real work of international disarmament did get done those two days behind the scenes, and perhaps the summit sowed the seeds of future accords. But from all appearances, it achieved even less than the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference last year.

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The Algonquin tribes knew this moon as the
time to gather ripening strawberries
……………………………………–Old Farmer's Almanac

Strawberry Moon

I read you Strawberry Moon
you pull the sea in the summer
more than two-hundred-thousand miles
I see your reach is so long
your arm of gravity
your face of sunlight at midnight
they hold me too

But in the moon when the deer shed their horns
and the top of the world has leaned a little away
from the sun, the colder night
who has an edge on his voice
who cares so little for growing things
will make it seem like you'll break
unless you remember the heat
of the Strawberry Moon

I'm with you Strawberry Moon
I'm dark here down in your shadows
which move their edges like steel
when you're full and spilling silver on me
your arm of gravity your face
of sunlight at midnight
the hold me too

by Jim Culleny. 1971

By Evert Cilliers (aka Adam Ash)

Tea Partiers: angry independents? extreme conservatives? regular Republicans? racist crackers? none of the above?

Before I get down to telling you who and what the Tea Party movement is — because nobody seems to know, least of all the people IN the movement — allow me to lay a little philosophy on you.

All philosophies are about putting the world in a nutshell. “Class struggle.” “The invisible hand.” “Existence precedes essence.”

Myself, I like nutshell statements. They help thin the thickets of reality. No human can face unmediated reality and not want to die from the onslaught. It takes a Beckett to be brave enough to look at our bleak world bleakly; the rest of us need our simplifying generalizations and consoling constructions to fool ourselves into getting on with going on.

Just to be semi-functional and make some sense of it all, we absolutely NEED to stuff the actual mess of the Real into neat boxes of the Construct.

We're so small, us humans: we use the only thing we have, our minds, to simplify the vastness around us; we think in order to fit the big everything out there into our little heads.

That's why something as rich and sprawling as language is wont to collapse into well-worn cliches. We can't think without banal summations, dumb generalizations, blind ideologies, the cutting down of the everything-around forest to a few simple stripped-down tree statements. “Jesus died for my sins.” “The free market is the end of history.” “Obama is a socialist.” The very falseness of our thought constructs is what makes them useful; their effortlessly bogus effronteries allow us to continue on our not-so-merry way. It may be the reason why Zizek can review a movie without seeing it: he doesn't need the movie to interfere with what he thinks about it.

I've been trying to understand the Tea Party movement, and found it tough and confusing, a vexing bafflement. Tea Party people appear to have no core, no leader, no central anything to latch on to. No simple cliche to sum up the movement. Hence, impossible to think about or understand. Where's the Construct box to stuff them in? So I've invented a personal nutshell, which not only explains the Tea Party, but all American politics. Yep. I am here to verify, instruct, inform curiosity and carry report. Read on.

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Hello, my name is Sarah Firisen and I am a software developer and a writer. But wait, my name is also Bianca Zanetti and I used to be a fashion designer with a string of stores. No, I am not schizophrenic, I am Sarah in my real life and Bianca in my Second Life. My Second Life has not been so active in recent months, but in my virtual heyday I went to parties, art gallery openings and weddings. My husband, in real and virtual life, was very active in the “ROMA (SPQR)” world, owned a beautiful Roman villa that I built for him, and was even a Roman Senator for one term. During our virtual travels we made many friends and a few enemies. We met some really crazy people and some really great ones. Some of those friendships even carried over into our real lives and in one case we spent a lovely evening in the real Rome with the real life representation of one of our avatar friends.

People had a lot to say about our virtual social lives; many of them just didn’t understand how we could waste our time in this way and one person said, “I want to have real friendships with real people.” But here’s the thing, they were real people. Behind each cartoon avatar was a real person with a real story, real heartbreak, real issues, real insanity, real needs. It turned out that virtual friendships are much like real friendships, with perhaps a few unique twists; people lie, they exaggerate, they boast, on occasion you can believe you are friends with a twenty-five year woman, only to find out that she is actually a fifty-five year old man and, of course, they hook up and a few weeks later have a nasty, acrimonious break up. There is no doubt that for some people Second Life usage does seem to tread a fine line between entertainment and avoidance of real life problems and issues, but for most it is a chance to play out some (mostly harmless) fantasies and to connect with new people across the globe.

I raise the subject of my foray into virtual worlds because of a recent article in the New York Times discussing whether young people’s use of the social web and text messaging is eroding their ability to form and sustain “normal” friendships, “The question on researchers’ minds is whether all that texting, instant messaging and online social networking allows children to become more connected and supportive of their friends — or whether the quality of their interactions is being diminished without the intimacy and emotional give and take of regular, extended face-to-face time.”

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David Shields is a professor of English at the University of Washington and author of fiction, nonfiction and various hybrids thereof about sports, autobiography, celebrity and death. His new book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, uses collage writing to challenge preconceived ideas about form and genre in art, especially as they pertain to literature. Shields advocates disregarding these hardened constraints, a move which will allow art to use more of and become more like life itself. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes link]

In reading the book, which I really enjoyed, I try to picture what it would be like if I was reading in a complete vacuum, absent all the talk that's been going on around it — and there's been a whole lot of it, as you know. This is probably the 1,000th interview you've done about the book.

I think, okay, here's a book: 618 numbered sections, a lot of collage writing, a lot of remixing of writing from other sources, it advocates the spaces between genres, the spaces between forms, between truth and falsity. All this cool stuff that I like and think is important, but it would seem to me that it's going to be a niche book, it's going to be an academic book, maybe. Maybe it's not going to get a wide readership. But now, in the real world, this book is one of the most talked-about in recent memory. What do you think is going on here?

That's a good question. I totally agree with you! I was shocked that it was published by a commercial publisher. I got a tiny advance for it; I blush to mention how low it was, a virtually nominal advance. I think the publisher never expected it to have a great amount of attention either. I was, of course, hoping for it; every writer does with every book.

But what happened? I'm not sure. I couldn't point to a single review. Obviously it's gotten hundreds, even thousands, of reviews and blog mentions and things like that, but I can't point to a single review that was the catalyzing review. The only thing I would say is, I think to a certain degree, the book's arguments got cartoonized as two points: one, the novel is dead, and two, it's okay to steal stuff. Those are part of what I'm arguing — not even what I'm arguing in either case — but I think what happened is, those hot-button topics got grooved into the cultural discussion.

It's not like I don't partially agree with those statements, but those are far more nuanced in my book. That's not even the ultimate target of the book. Frankly, the book just came at a time when it is talking about stuff that people are concerned about. The book probably came along at a time when these topics were really crucial. What's my point? My point is that the book got cartoonized and the book came along at a time that these things had to be talked about: what is the fate of writing now? How do we want to think about copyright in a digital age? How do we want to think about the blurring of genres? Do people still read conventional novels? The book articulates all that.

I do think the killer app of the book was the disclaimer and the citations in the back, in which I refuse to provide citations, but then, with a gun to my head, I provide citations. Somehow that became, without any planning on my part, the book's killer app.

You mean the pages at the end where you mark down, if you can remember, who the writing that you remix, revise and put together from other sources came from?

Yeah, and I also preface it with a disclaimer. That was the book's killer app, almost, where I say, “I didn't want to provide these citations. The citations are in microscopic type. Many of the citations are misleading. The publisher made me do it. Please, for the love of god, don't read the citations. Stop, read no farther.”

I think that somehow became a door that a lot of readers and critics and bloggers could enter, like, “Oh, okay. I can talk about all these issues of copyright which have been swirling around us for the last ten years, the last five years especially.” We're very confused about appropriation and copyright in literature, and that one-page disclaimer of mine became almost a Trojan Horse for people to enter the gates of the city.

The reason that's there, of course, is the writing you used from other sources, used for your own arguments. I like how that was done, and I like the arguments you use those in service of making. But here's the reaction I have, and maybe you, as the author of the book, think the same thing. What you say about how the novel as we know it isn't so relevant, about how genres aren't so relevant, about how they might hinder art, about how plots and stories may be hindering art — and the type of collage writing you use: should any of this stuff be controversial in 2010?

I agree with you. The book has received a lot of reactions, somewhat contradictory. Some, “My god, this is the most radical thing I've ever read. I can't believe you're talking about this stuff.” On the other hand, people like you, who are more forward-thinking, it's almost like, yawn, it's all self-evident. If the book hadn't had all those citation issues, the book might not have entered the jetstream the way it had.
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¹⁵And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed.

¹⁶And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:

¹⁷And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

If Arizona’s draconian new law has put immigration back in the public consciousness, the proposal for a national “biometric ID” is about to trigger nightmares in this country’s Christian id. The Democrats who drafted a new immigration law aren’t just “tone deaf,” as blogger John Cole says (although they’re certainly that.) The bill’s content and language are going to terrify and outrage lots of evangelical Christians, and could even lead to violence.

Before they try to pass this law, there are a few videos they really ought to watch.

This bill couldn't be more inflammatory in both content and language to those who take their Gospel straight … and literal. A quick listen to what's currently being preached on YouTube and AM radio today will confirm that. And generations of kids from evangelicals families recall their terror at the dictatorship and disasters shown in the End Times films known collectively as the “Rapture” series. In these films, a world dictatorship demands that everyone identify themselves and be entered into a database while being marked with an “image of the beast.”

How will people who take these ideas as literal truth respond to the new law? As Congressional magazine The Hill reports, “Democratic leaders have proposed requiring every worker in the nation to carry a national identification card with biometric information, such as a fingerprint, within the next six years, according to a draft of the measure.” And the “biometric ID” system has been given a name that seems to come straight out of End Times prophecy.

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Laurie Brown and Andy Sheppard are the host and producer, respectively, of The Signal on CBC Radio 2. Since debuting in March of 2007, the program has evolved to provide a highly distinctive listening experience that offers two skillfully-curated hours of late-night contemporary music to listeners across Canada — and, via the internet, the world — that’s neither predictable nor easily genrefiable. Brown accompanies Sheppard’s unusual sonic selections with commentary that’s long impressed fans with its friendliness, intimacy and wealth of odd stories. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3, with music] [iTunes link]

I got hooked on this show when an American friend of mine who moved to Vancouver sent me a link and said, “You've got to hear this show they've got going up here.” I listened to it, and I was pretty immediately hooked. I've tried to spread the word to people who aren't Canadian and thus don't have a great knowledge of what the CBC puts out and why they should listen to it even if they aren't Canadian. But I've had a little problem describing what sort of music The Signal plays. All I can say is that “it's really good” and “you've got to listen.” “Modern” comes to mind, “contemporary” comes to mind, but these are vague words. What do you guys call it?

Laurie: It's just as hard for us as it is for you. This has been a real head-scratcher since the show went on the air. We've got lots of different names, and because we play so many genres of music, it's really easy to spout off a whole bunch of different things: “Oh, it's ambient, it's electronic, it's electronica, it's sort of freaky folk, it's avant-garde jazz, it's post-rock…” You can list and list and list. The thing that makes the most sense to me is, just think about late-night radio and think about the kind of music and the places you really want your brain to go at 10:00 through to midnight. “Late-night radio,” for me, makes more sense than anything else. Andy?

Andy: It's a trick, isn't it? We're programming a lot of music that exists at the intersection of different styles. I think that's the big thing I'm looking for. We're not going to play straight folk music or straight singer-songwriter or neo-classical music but music where the lines cross. You'll have a classical musician paired with a DJ or a world musician and an electronic artist. Those kind of crossover intersections I find the most compelling, and it's one of the ways I frame the idea of contemporary music. It's how people are making music now. What are they doing differently now, so it sounds like it's coming from this time?
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We humans have serious problems. Thousands of us starve to death every day, the planet is becoming progressively less habitable, and we're killing each other on a regular basis. Our way of life is detrimental to our well-being, and current trends don't bode well for posterity. It's time for change. I propose the following three-part plan.

Part 1: The Establishment of Clear Priorities

Our priorities guide our decision making, and our choices shape the world we live in. Every day, individuals, groups, organizations, and governments make decisions. We choose between what's healthy and what's easy, between what's kind and what's profitable, and between what's best for everyone and what's best for us. If optimizing collective well-being were most important to us, our decisions would lead us in this direction.

Our choices reveal priorities that we might wish to deny. It would appear that convenience is more important to us than sustainability, that our happiness is more important than that of future generations, and that people in our country are more important than people in other countries.

Selfish behaviors may serve the interests of individuals in the present, but they lead to a society that is undesirable for the majority. These behaviors can be attributed to a lack of integrity and the absence of clear priorities. If our priorities aren't clear to us, then our decision making will be undermined. So, we need to establish clear priorities.

What do we, as a society, value the most? Well-being? Reason? Autonomy? It's not just our values, but the way we prioritize them that will guide ethical decision making. For example, if we value well-being more than autonomy, making helmets mandatory for cyclists would be a good idea. If we place greater value on the freedom to choose, we might keep helmets optional, but take steps to promote their use. The prioritization dictates the strategy.

I suggest the following as shared values (in order): human equality and sustainability, autonomy, collective well-being, and individual well-being.

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Michael Blim

Another breathless fortnight, another looming crisis averted.

It seems best to say averted, rather than solved. The massive Greek public debt is still there and will continue to grow. The new agreement promises to slow its growth by raising taxes, laying off government workers, reducing state salaries, and cutting pension benefits, among other actions. More loans from EU creditor countries and the IMF, a stand-in for the rest of Greeks international creditors, now guarantee the accumulated Greek government debt, much of which is held by European banks and the European Central Bank. The EU-IMF mission of mercy is thus an object lesson in collective self-interest, for the loans enable Greece to pay back the European banks, especially in Germany and France, that stood to lose billions without the new loans. European and world capital invested in Greece is saved, and its security enhanced. Rather than the debts endangering the finances of European and other world banks, the loans now return to the asset side of their ledgers, if not once more as silk purses, surely no longer as sow’s ears. And the assets actually multiply!

As yet another act in the world economic drama concludes, and another troop of actors prepares to take the stage, the basic point of the play is being lost. As speculative manias overtake other countries and/or other assets, and as instances of fecklessness and fraud feed the public demand for vengeance, we are overlooking the fact that we are living through the most massive redistribution of wealth rich societies such as ours have seen since the Gilded Age at the end of the 19^th Century. The massive debts of private capital are being socialized. States are taking on society’s debts at a rate not seen since the Second World War. They are creating public debt to pay off or at least absorb the debts arising from asset crashes, bank and brokerage failures and near-failures, and massive unemployment triggered by recession. Banks and other financial institutions could not carry their own debt, so now the government is carrying it for them, either directly or by providing them with new credit at no cost with which they can become profitable again. The banks and other brokerage institutions have effectively cleaned up their balance sheets with newly created public debt, while the U.S. and European central banks have laundered their bad debts.

We are talking about a whopping lot of debt. According to the IMF’s April Global Financial Stability Report, the seven largest Western capitalist economies and Japan (the so-called G7) now hold a public debt equal to between 110 and 120% of their combined gross domestic product. The world’s public debt is about 50% of the world’s gross product. Given the size of the G7s’ economies, their public debt constitutes a huge financial commitment for which their taxpayers now are directly responsible.

This extraordinary shift of debt from corporate capitalism to nation-states has not attracted the attention it deserves. It is unlikely that the United States will find itself in a debt-driven crisis of the magnitude proportionately that afflicts Greece now, but the transformation of US finance capital’s private debts into US public debt has created a crushing burden for American citizens for generations to come. And the wealthy, once more, will likely come out of the crisis unscathed, unlike the rest of us.

As we have seen in Greece, the fiscal crises of the states swept into the economic downturn and the public debt upturn will trigger political struggle at levels we have not witnessed in over a quarter century. The political legitimacy of many states will be directly threatened. As we have seen thus far in the United States, the organized opposition fueled by anger and resentment, and often sense of betrayal that citizens express is already coming from the right. This trend will likely strengthen, as the fiscal crises of the states seem unlikely to abate and the lefts throughout Europe, Japan, and the United States are very weak.

by Bliss Kern

Everyone knows that too many novels are published each year. I've read that one is released about every hour, which leaves even the fastest and most dedicated reader woefully unable to keep up with the market. One consequence of this deluge of words has been the development of a range of services targeted at letting each reader sift through the vast list of titles to find those must appreciated by others like them: Amazon comments; virtual, physical, and TV book clubs; Shelfari; endless new book review blogs, written by professionals and amateurs alike. By necessity, every reader has become an advocate, choosing novels we love and recommending them to others so that the stories that impressed us don't get lost in the textual flood. This constant need to listen to others to find our new favorites and to regularly champion them to others compels self-consciousness about our own literary tastes. I can now reel off a list of twelve of my favorite works of contemporary fiction without even thinking because their names are a cultural currency, invoked in all kinds of exchanges. I am of course not the only one. I recognize this habit in my friends and colleagues as well. While looking for common ground among us I have noticed an interesting phenomenon: a disproportionate number of the contemporary novelists about whom my demographic (urban, young thirties, educated) are excited are Jewish American. Is there some common thread among these texts that speaks to us? A new trend has developed in Jewish American fiction, one that holds out the universally tantalizing hope of integrating all of our complex cultural inputs into a single functional, even exciting, individual. Recent Jewish fiction has hit on the ability to describe exactly what it feels like to be that mythic creature: a modern American.

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By Namit Arora

(An excerpt from a novel in progress.)

On their way to China Town, they pass an area with red curtained massage parlors and hookers pacing the streets. They stop at a red light behind a BMW. A hooker approaches its curbside window, talks to the driver, and hops in. Ved notices Liz shaking her head in what appears to be disapproval.

‘Consenting adults!’ he reminds her.

‘You don’t need to tell me that,’ she says sharply.

‘Why the disapproval then?’

‘Because it is so sad. I just wish these women had other options.’

‘Maybe they do. Are they doing this against their will here in San Francisco?’

‘Just because they do this, quote-unquote, voluntarily, doesn’t mean they do it because they are happy to. It’s because they don’t recognize, or lack, other options. Or they are addicted to abuse, or full of self-loathing and given to self-destruction.’ Her voice bristles as she continues, ‘It doesn’t mean they like it, or choose it with a healthy frame of mind.’

‘But if they do it voluntarily—so let’s exclude the drug addicts—can we say we know better? Who should be allowed to save people from themselves? So many others don’t like their jobs either, or choose them with a healthy frame of mind. I have met …’

She sighs. ‘I know that line of reasoning, but taking a job flipping burgers is not quite comparable to letting a horny customer finger your private parts.’

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John Nathan is the Takashima Professor of Japanese Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Having relocated from the United States to Japan in the early 1960s to enroll as the first American regular student at the University of Tokyo, he became the translator of novels by such Japanese literary luminaries as Kenzaburo Oe and Yukio Mishima as well as a documentarian who revealed unseen corners of Japanese private life to America. He went on to write books on Mishima, the Sony corporation and Japan itself. His latest book is a memoir, Living Carelessly in Tokyo and Elsewhere. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3 part one] [MP3 part two] [iTunes link]

I was thinking about the idea of what I call “Japanophilia”, the affinity for, the attraction to, things Japanese. It seems like more the rule than the exception with modern kids in America. When you got into Japan — this was the early sixties — how common was it?

Not particularly. As a matter of fact, that's probably one of the reasons I was drawn to it so powerfully. It was really like, as I said in my book, having a pet monkey. Lots of kids studying Albert Camus, this, that and the other thing, Western philosophy and so on, but almost no one was studying or particularly interested in Japan in those days.

Was it that case that — you say this in your book — just seeing one character drawn was what led you into this whole life?

In an earlier draft of my memoir, I had written the truth about that: I set that story down with as much panache as I could manage, then I said, “Is that really what happened? I wonder if it is.” I've told the story fifty times, and now that I actually write it on the page, I question it.

Like so much in a memoir — which is really not so much about memory as it is about persona, it turns out when you actually write one — I think that's what happened. But it may be embellishment, to be honest with you. Certainly these two characters I do remember being drawn for me on a napkin by a Japanese kid who had come to Harvard.

It was a very unusual word. This word in English is “whitlow,” an infection beneath the finger- and toenails. I do think, at some point very early on, I stared at these two… pictures, basically, and thought to myself, “My god, these two things mean that? In that case, I want to learn more about this language.” I think there's some truth in that. Whether that's the only thing that impelled me to go check out a Japanese language class I couldn't say.
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Note: This narrative was created from three true stories. Each character is a combination of more than one real person. I changed names and story elements to preserve the privacy of individuals.

Part 1 of this story can be found HERE.

The story so far

My nephew, Samuel Anders, was arrested, at gun point, on a charge of domestic violence. His wife, Kara Thrace, called 911 after she was pushed by Samuel and fell over a chair. The 911 dispatcher asked if there was a firearm in the house. She answered, “Yes,” but didn't say that the pistol was hers, and that Samuel did not know where she hid it, under lock and key. The introduction of a firearm into this situation resulted in six police cars and a dozen officers surrounding the house and calling for Samuel to come out with his hands raised in the air.

Samuel was going to plead guilty, enroll in an anger management class, get counseling, be placed on probation for a year, and pay a fine. He called me to borrow $550 for his fine. When he described the events to me, it was clear he committed no crime. Kara overreacted to Samuel's leaving the house to avoid an argument with her. She ran up to him, blocked his exit, and thrust herself in his face while shouting insults. Samuel, reacting involuntarily and instinctively, threw up his hands. Kara was unhurt, locked herself in her bedroom, and called the police.

Following Samuel's release from jail, Kara went to the Assistant County Attorney, Cassandra Misandre, and asked that the charges be dropped. Kara explained she overreacted. She told of being emotionally distraught over her sister's death, she was depressed, and had been in severe pain from an anal fissure, for three weeks, at the time of the pushing incident. Misandre would not drop the charges.

I found a lawyer for Samuel and told him I would take care of all the legal bills. I retained Huntsville, Alabama attorney John Hunt “Thunderbolt” Morgan.

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Song Behind a Rear-Tined Tiller

They believed consciousness resided in the heart

Aristotle believed this, and the Egyptians
who scooped out dead Pharaoh's brain
through his nose with a spoon
and stuffed his skull with rags assuring
he would not be thinking in the other world
to which he'd travel by long boat
being wrapped in cloth, speechless, supine in gold,
embarked with a breathless retinue of slaves
through the hole at the end of the earth
to a place far in imagination

Here and now the sun climbs a trellis of trees
along a rail line on which, at irregular intervals,
a freight comes dragging coal behind three engines
or hauls ladened boxcars labeled J.B. Hunt,
or pulls chains of chemical tanks and steel containers
heavy with the inventions of consciousness
some inscribed with graffiti sprayed by
a deft hand in letters bold and color-nuanced
arranged with a master's touch
tuned to the songs of heart or brain
while the smell of blue-grey diesel
sparks a synapse between beats
and one step follows another
behind a rear-tined tiller
as I urge a throttle

Who knows who sings
through what instrument
–did Aristotle?

by Jim Culleny, 4/22/10

By Maniza Naqvi

A puck planted on the right ear a pucch pressed in on the left. The sound still explosive in my head, I close my eyes as the full body search begins.

Arms stretched, legs apart, I assume the first step for the warrior pose. And now there lodged behind my eyes like an invisible stowaway Beyla’s kiss rings like a needling alarm, like a drill which draws a sharpened line, splitting my mind. Beyla’s bangles, white from wrist to shoulder, still jangle in my memory. I remember the sight of her skin cracked by searing sun as though it were ancient parchment covered in scripture and stretched over her bones: x-ray thin.

Stand still I am told. I shield myself inside that memory of bright sunlight, and shades of yellow, indigo, magenta and burnt earth. The kiss in my head undistilled, a discomfiting disturbance still. I think as I drift away: It’s a slim word. Still, a strong word. A good word. Even so. Even now. Quiet. Calm. Serene. Motion less. Breeze less. Yet. And so. Continuing. Continues.

Now, at the scanner machines I watch as the stuff sorter in a private security uniform wearing translucent disposable gloves, fishes out of my large handbag, a travel alarm clock, batteries, earphones tangled in so many keys— car, apartment and to the mailbox full of bills. An earring and a sheaf of papers appear next. A frangipani blossom, still moist, pressed inside a small black notebook flops out. There is a Spanish fan. She opens the fan, with both hands, unfurls it using her thumbs and sets it aside—painted geese against a dark blue sky—like the ones visiting Karachi from the frozen Siberia every winter. On the handle Espana painted in golden letters. A made in China, fan. I reach for the fan to show her how it’s done, the ratatat sudden sound of the unfurling, instant, with just one flick of my wrist—a trick I learned long ago in Manila, inflicts, in her, fear. Startled, she stops me—though I am done, “Don’t touch anything!” All I own—off limits to me, now weapons under her scrutiny and prying fingers—till she has judged them as benign; till her opinion has sterilized them; made them permissible to go on; all my stuff cleansed by a cleared and approved approver, till the next check point. She clucks her disapproval at the blossom—separates it out for disposal in a large trash bin which reminds me of the delete symbol on my email. In all this I give my head a vigorous shake, hoping to discard the ringing but it clings in there, undetected. She plucks up the imam zamin.

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by Bilal Tanweer

HOSHRUBA—The Land & the Tilism (Book One)
By Muhammad Husain Jah
Translated with Introduction and Notes by Musharraf Ali Farooqi
516 pages, Urdu Project
ISBN: 978-0978069551
Price: US $25

www.hoshruba.com

Can you think of a book you’ve read that begins with a warning? This is probably a first, for its exuberance if nothing else:

[This tale] has consumed whole generations of readers before you. And like all great tales, it is still hungry—ravenous, in fact—for more. You may not return from this campaign. Or come back so hardened you may never look at stories in quite the same way again.

It might seem an exaggeration, but here are the facts: this yarn was spun by two generations of storytellers and it is spread over eight thousand pages in its original Urdu language. At the height of its popularity in North India, it attracted legions of followers all the way from the aristocratic class down to the ordinary folk of the bazaar. In other words: this is a bloody carnival of a book, and everyone is invited.

Reading it, you immediately think of Borges’ remark on The Thousand and One Nights: “one feels like getting lost in [it], one knows entering that book one can forget one’s own poor human fate; one can enter a world, a world made of archetypal figures but also of individuals.”

That sums it up, really. Except, during the course of this narrative, our poor fate is in the hands of five tricksters, who are the heroes of the tale: they are spies, assassins, chameleons, and commandoes all rolled into one and their tricks usually involve elaborate plots to overcome the astounding magic of enemy sorcerers. But they aren’t your regular Bond-style smart guys; they are much flatter – types, as Borges puts it. And that’s how the narrative also goes: focused entirely on action and rooted firmly in absolute notions of good and evil, beauty and ugliness, love and loyalty, it lacks every nuance of psychology or empathy with the ‘other’ that you may think of. It is a tumbling, rollicking war machine that lusts after the triumph of good and will settle for nothing less than a thorough devastation of evil that is the enchanted Land of Hoshruba and its ruler, Emperor Sorcerer Afrasiyab.

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Pharaoh Khufu intends to secure his riches beyond the grave, and into the afterlife. He captures the greatest architect known in his kingdom, and forces him – through a threat to his entire people – to build him an impenetrable tomb: a Pyramid no thief can plunder. The architect sets to work, knowing that upon completion of the tomb he himself will be sealed inside with the dead Pharaoh. How is it possible to build the most secret catacomb, a labyrinth impossible to breach, without passing on its secret through the workers who build it?

In the classic Hollywood film, Land of the Pharaohs, such a conundrum is posed. The architect needs a team of workers that Khufu can trust, to construct the mechanism by which the tomb will close itself off to eternity. The Pharaoh has the solution: the workers he gives the architect have had their tongues cut out. In exchange for their devotion the slaves will accompany the architect and Khufu to the afterlife. No secret will pass their lips.

How do we pass on a message in a world with impenetrable borders? And in turn, how do we determine its secure transmission? The codes we devise become useless at certain horizons: if the slave cannot speak, he cannot exchange; if a being from another land does not know our language, it cannot understand us; if a message is encrypted, one must also pass on the method to crack it.

Sometimes the codes we devise to enslave, become apparatus in their own demise.

The tongue-less slave is still a liability in a literate society; in turn, a literate slave is a still liability in a digitised society. At every stage in the development of communication technologies human subjects have been relinquished power of one kind, only for a power of another kind to evolve and liberate them once again. The human body is the central locality for all information exchange. Even today, with our writing technologies, our radios, computers and nano-particles, it is the human form that dictates all particulars of scale and substance. What matters now is not the tongue – an organ reduced of its power by hieroglyphics and alphabets – yet in order to silence, corrupt regimes and over-zealous governments still effectively mutilate their subjects. In the West, information monoliths such as Google and Wikipedia help us mediate the space between discrete, complex reams of data. It is as if, in the modern age, to spite its people all China needed to do was cut off the equivalent of their tongue, building up around them a labyrinthine firewall that determines their silence; that reduces their identities to the status of tongueless slaves.

Sometimes to properly conceal something, one must devise a better way to encode it.

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