by Evert Cilliers

If you'd have told me that America would ever spritz $65 billion of its annual taxes and manpower into yet another country's civil war, I would've said you're articulating via the IQ of your sphincter. Wasn't our own Civil War painful enough?

If you'd have told me that this civil war was a fight over who controls the world's opium production, and that we'd picked the losing side in this battle of criminals, I would've said your cerebellum is on an intravenous drip of LSD spiked with toad venom.

That sort of dumbass bellicosity happened back in the 19th century, when Britain smuggled opium into China and got into two wars with China about it.

America is a dumbass nation, for sure: we use most of our spare time to follow the lives of pretty but dim bulbs in Hollywood, and millions of us will be reading a book credited to Sarah Palin, the current all-time queen of dumbosity.

But we can't be THAT dumb, can we?

Or that criminal. It would be like backing one side of the Mafia against another, where both are equally bad.

Yet we are.

In fact, we are responsible for the whole dumbolical return of Afghanistan to form as the major supplier of illegal drugs to a grateful planet of barbecued minds.

Before we got involved in Afghanistan, its opium industry was on its knees, down by 94%, because its crazy Taliban government, besides banning music and snuffing women who had sex outside of marriage, didn't like drugs either.

But we jumped in there, and toppled the Taliban from their puritan perch — something to do with the fact that they were harboring Osama Bin Laden, whose handover to us they were willing to negotiate, but our dumbfuck administration wasn't.

And so, without the crazy Taliban government around to tell them what not to do, the Afghan people got down to what they do best, which is growing opium, and they could again more or less feed themselves.

Read more »

Making Way
—Narragansett Bay 1960

We part from the dock
slow as disengaging lovers
one landlocked the other a
floater who won’t be
kept at bay

The diminishing pier slides back
its bollards and planks deploy
to some other place not here
but to a distancing otherworld—
the tether breaks
as stern-first we pass the
channel buoy

….Quarter back, the O-D says.
….Quarter back, aye sir,
….and we slip away

….Steer two one zero, half ahead.
….Two one zero, half ahead, aye sir,
….and we slow-slide down
….the gleaming bay

The sun’s so keen it indicates
a tern on the roof of a big estate
a half mile away
with its long lawn hill
off the starboard bow
which slopes down clear
through the wind-wove air
to a point where jades meet blues
…………….–which passes now
as we part the sea while
making way

Further south the sea’s first chops
begin to unsettle our sheltered
adolescent cruise

Near the harbor mouth all decks
rise then make their first
supplicating bows to whatever
god it is that intervenes
to call-off wrecks
—we’re juggled gently first in
Neptune’s law as
pitches rolls & heaves
meet yaws

Gray billows diesel from our raked stacks
Halyards snap against the mast’s steel
Gulls abundantly rise & reel
over the white chaos of our wake’s track

Sunlight splinters
into rippled billions
upon each breaker’s
sequined breast
before it folds
in a white rush falling
to the soul percussion
of a bow-wave’s
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,shush shush shush

by Jim Culleny; Nov, 2009

David Schneider

In September of 2008, we found a safe-house of ruination, and blessed it. My girlfriend and I had wandered over to the Bruckner Bar, Grill & Gallery, which over the past couple of years had become a hub for the South Bronx's rising art scene.

Inside, people were streaming out from the opening reception of a full-gallery exhibition unfortunately titled “The Catcher in the Eye,” a collaborative “visual novel” by Garrett Klein, Kenneth Park, Melissa Starke, Jon-Paul Rodriguez and Marcin Wlodarczyk. Astonishingly, no visual record of this exhibition seems to exist on the internet, so I'll try to describe what I recall from it.

The gallery's bare-brick walls formed a coherent visual narrative, wrapping around the room. On the near left, an enormous stylized image in bright reds and yellows stormed up the wall – an image halfway inbetween superhero comics and Asian Communist propaganda posters, leading to Garrett Klein's nervous assemblages. Then, toward the back, a handful of Starke's severe abstract expressionist works were hallowed with ornate gilded frames. On the back right, broken Classical columns and fractured lintels collapsed down upon a chaos of intricately-detailed, tangled, junkyard mosaics (I believe by Wlodarczyk). By degrees, they rose along the wall to adorn a hazy, golden icon. This latter radiated with a primitive holiness, as if the prehistoric Lascaux painters had received a vision of the Madonna and Child in a Dead Sea cave.

Overly readable? Didactically discursive? Perhaps. But in September 2008, as the Presidential campaign accelerated in a crescendo of cacophonous triviality, as the worldwide capitalist engine exploded with a sickening lurch, this room seemed – at least to me – a rare repository of all the horrors and hopes of the moment. Bathed in dim blue and red light, and dashed with glints cascading from a disco ball, the room appeared a secret chamber of safety, in which artists and patrons nodded to one another, acknowledging: we can yet create beauty and meaning from the wreckage, we can yet dance in the chaos.

Read more »

Michael Blim

As the battle of the bedpans drags on, consuming what little is left of the short attention span of the Congress, Democrats are taking up financial reform.

Representative Barney Frank is responsible for legislation in the House and Senator Christopher Dodd in the Senate.

Neither of them is exactly presenting a profile in courage. Frank has virtually lifetime tenure in the House. Fall-out from arrests of a callboy network being run out of his Washington apartment in 1990 triggered his only electoral close call. Seventeen consecutive congressional election victories have enabled him to amass a lot of political clout and his role as the Democrats’ pivot person on financial reform has made him a leading recipient of campaign contributions. The Boston Globe (October 23) reported that Frank had raised $1.2 million thus far this year, even though the next election is still a year away. He is likely to double his total and pick up a bit more over the next 11 months.

Barney Frank is often called the smartest member of the House, something he has not cared to deny. He is apparently so smart that he thinks he can outsmart the financial and insurance companies that account for his campaign largesse by taking their money and giving nothing back in return. “I’m casting the same votes I was casting 20 years ago,” Frank tells the Globe. He stopped taking money from the top ten banks that took government money beginning last fall, and he will be giving $500,000 of his stash to the House Democratic campaign fund.

As smart as Barney Frank may be, he appears to lack common sense, for he must be the last person in America to believe in a free lunch. Who is the greater fool, his corporate campaign donors, who believe they are getting something for their money, or those of us Frank asks to believe that the contributions don’t figure in his votes and those of the rest of the House Democratic Party for whom he plays Santa Claus?

Read more »

by Colin Marshall

Quoth Abbas Kiarostami,

I don't like to engage in telling stories. I don't like to arouse the viewer emotionally or give him advice. I don't like to belittle him or burden him with a sense of guilt. Those are the things I don't like in the movies. I think a good film is one that has a lasting power and you start to reconstruct it right after you leave the theater. There are a lot of films that seem to be boring, but they are decent films. On the other hand, there are films that nail you to the seat and overwhelm you to the point that you forget everything, but you feel cheated later. These are the films that take you hostage. I absolutely don't like the films in which the filmmakers take their viewers hostage and provoke them. I prefer the films that put their audience to sleep in the theater. I think those films are kind enough to allow you a nice nap and not leave you disturbed when you leave the theater. Some films have made me doze off in the theater, but the same films have made me stay up at night, wake up thinking about them in the morning, and keep on thinking about them for weeks. Those are the kind of films I like.

Both the filmmaker's followers and detractors would agree that, yes, this little speech does indeed encapsulate his cinematic sensibility. The pro-Kiarostami crowd gets hooked by the characters and images that keep them up at night and distracted in the morning, while those on the anti-Kiarostami side of the fence… well, they fall asleep. No living director seems quite so critically divisive: some eminent observers of cinema as sharp as Roger Ebert have expressed nothing more than bored irritation at his pictures, while others, like Jonathan Rosenbaum, have gone so far as to author tomes on the man and include no fewer than four of his films on their all-time top 100.

I submit that it all depends on how you, the viewer, want to experience cinema. While it's entirely valid to ask that a movie grab you and yank you for a couple hours into a spectacle, an utterly fantastical escape from life couldn't be more different from what Kiarostami's selling. Per the quote above, he doesn't demand the audience's attention. If the audience gives it, excellent; he'll serve up the substance. But it makes no nevermind to him if they look away for a while. You experience a Kiarostami film, you see what you can see and you hear what you can hear, but only later does it grow within your mind into an entity that will affect you for years to come. Compare this to, say, a Hollywood disaster blockbuster, the sort so terrified you'll stop watching that its every detail looms several stories tall, whose events seem dreadfully important at the time but which washes clean from your memory immediately after viewing.

That model assumes an impenetrable bulkhead between cinema and life. You buy your ticket in order to reside temporarily in a totally foreign artificial space, ostensibly jammed with more motion, more color, more thrills and much more CGI than the real one to which you'll shortly shamble back. In Kiarostami's model, cinema is inseparable from life: one is the other, the other is one, and each draws heavily from its counterpart. Nowhere in the man's filmography does this worldview shine through more brightly than in Close-Up, a cinematic imitation of real events in which a real man's love of cinema leads to a bit of real-life fakery and fiction that's ultimately reconstructed with the aid of reality itself. If you find that too straightforward, wait until you read the next few paragraphs.

Read more »

Left: Sophie Calle, Etoile dancer at the Opera de Paris, Marie Agnes Gillot, (detail) Take Care of Yourself, 2007.

Image copyright ADAGP Courtesy Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris/Miami; Arndt & Partner. Berlin/Zurich; Koyanagi, Tokyo; Gallery Paula Cooper, NY

Right: John Baldessari, Pure Beauty 1966-68, acrylic on canvas, 1152.5 x 1152.5 x 34.9 mm.

Image copyright John Baldessari, Courtesy of Baldessari Studio and Glenstone

Sophie Calle at the Whitechapel until 3^rd January 2010

John Baldessari at Tate Modern until 10^th January 2010

Sue Hubbard

What do you do when your lover jilts you by email? Take to your bed and forget to wash, wander around in your pyjamas, cut up his suits or send him a poison pen letter? If you are an artist there is another option. You can shame him by turning his self-justifying text into a large scale conceptual art work using over 100 different women as allies. That is just what the French artist Sophie Calle does in her work Prenez Soin De Vous (Take Care of Yourself) where she has invited lawyers, actors, accountants, singers and psychologists to comment on her lover’s text though the lens of their professional vocabulary . A composer turns the letter into a musical score; a translator asks why her ex-partner uses the formal vous rather than tu, and what this says about their relationship, whilst a rifle shooter peppers the email with bullet holes.

Read more »

by Zaneb Khan Beams

It’s 4:45 PM on Friday. I’m covering a colleague’s phone calls while she’s out of the country, and there’s a newborn boy who needs phototherapy. This means he needs to be in the hospital in what looks like a miniature tanning bed for at least one night and one day. So, I call his parents and tell them the test results- their baby has a dangerously high bilirubin level.

Bilirubin is the by-product of red blood cells recycled through the liver and GI tract. Newborns’ livers are not efficient at recycling red blood cells, and the bilirubin by-products can accumulate in their bloodstream, cross their fragile blood-brain barrier, and cause kernicterus, ( serious permanent brain damage), or, in extreme cases, death. Neonatal Physiologic Hyperbilirubinemia represents a “bread and butter” pediatrics challenge. High bilirubin levels are easily and cheaply treated with UV light rays.

These parents knew their baby might have high bilirubin. Still, when I tell the baby’s mother he has to go to the hospital, she bursts into tears. I ask her why, and she describes a two year saga of problems with her health insurance provider, Blue Cross Blue Shield. Both parents in this family work in respectable jobs and receive health insurance “through their employer.” In other words, their employer negotiates a bulk rate for health insurance plans, and employees can buy insurance in bulk. Payment for the insurance comes out of their paychecks, and neither the employer nor the employee ends up paying income tax on dollars spent on health insurance. BCBS earns profits of about 30%. Win/ Win situation, right? Wrong. Blue Cross Blue Shield will pay for the medical care in the hospital, but not for being in the hospital. Room and board, at $600/ day, are not considered part of the baby’s treatment, and therefore not reimbursed.

Meanwhile, it’s almost close-of-business on a Friday, and I realize I need to get this baby home phototherapy equipment.

Read more »

Justin E. H. Smith

I.

In his Tristes Tropiques, composed in 1955, Claude Lévi-Strauss writes with characteristic humor of his decision, some years earlier, to study philosophy:

When I reached the top or 'philosophy' class in the lycée, I was vaguely in favour of a rationalistic monism, which I was prepared to justify and support; I therefore made great efforts to get into the section taught by Gustave Rodrigues, who had the reputation of being 'advanced'… After years of training, I now find myself intimately convinced of a few unsophisticated beliefs, not very different from those I held at the age of fifteen. Perhaps I see more clarly the inadequacy of these intellectual tools; at least they have an instrumental value which makes them suitable for the service I require of them.

Later, in a 1972 interview, he confesses that his decision to study philosophy was motivated by a sense that this discipline, more than any other, would enable him to remain non-committal, to continue to develop all his other interests, under the big-tent of a vaguely defined cluster of intellectual projects called 'philosophy'. This understanding of philosophy, I think, remains significant for our assessment of Lévi-Strauss's intellectual legacy.

For better or worse, while his approach may have made sense in the Paris of the 1920s, as I can personally attest it certainly would not in the New York or California of the 1990s (when I was a student of philosophy). Here, a different conception of philosophy and its boundaries reigned, and still reigns. As Jason Stanley recently reflected at the Leiter Report blog:

Many academics use the term 'philosopher' not as a description of the people working on the set of problems that occupy our time, but rather as a certain kind of honorific. As far as I can tell, on this usage, a philosopher is someone who constructs some kind of admirable general theory about a discipline – be it cultural criticism, history, literature, or politics. So while it would be odd for a philosopher to call themselves a literary critic because they work on interpretation, it is not unusual for English professors to describe themselves as philosophers. In contrast, we philosophers do not regard the term 'philosopher' as an honorific. We tend to think that there are many people who are really truly philosophers, but are pretty bad at what they do. We also think that there are many brilliant thinkers who are not philosophers.

Stanley argues in another post that his own philosophical tradition may be distinguished from a rival tradition, represented by Walter Benjamin, that might better be called 'anthropology' than 'philosophy':

Benjamin isn’t at all confused about metaphysics or the problem of intentionality. He just finds no interest in the question of how, by the use of language, one person can communicate something about the world to another. What’s interesting to him is how language is represented in human mythology, and what that reveals to us about the cultural significance of our practice of naming. This kind of question is one that is not apt to be taken up by a philosopher in the analytic tradition. Someone in my tradition might say that the issues that interest Benjamin are questions of anthropology rather than philosophy. Someone in Benjamin’s tradition might say that the issues that interest me are bourgeois.

Stanley makes two claims in these passages that interest me: first, that not just any abstract or broad-focused thinker may appropriately be called a 'philosopher', and, second, that much of the thinking that is called by some people 'philosophy', might better be called 'anthropology' to the extent that it is principally interested in questions of culture rather than, I take it, in transcultural features of the human mind and its connections to the world.

While I certainly know Stanley is a first-rate philosopher, I do not at all share his conception of what philosophy itself is. If anything, my own understanding of the meaning of 'philosophy' is the one at work not in the United States today, nor in France in the 1920s, but rather in the title of the distinguished journal of the Royal Society of London, the Philosophical Transactions, which, since 1666, has been featuring articles on everything from the reproductive organs of eels, to the smelting of metals, to the causes of comets, to the nature of the passions, to the existence of God. It seems to me that if Stanley wants to make the case for a narrower conception of philosophy, he needs not only to argue against the misguided deployment of the word that we've certainly all heard at dinner parties, but also to explain why the very most recent self-description of a certain academic discipline in a certain part of the world should be permitted to cancel out so much accrued meaning in a word that has migrated and mutated across so many centuries, languages, and continents.

Read more »

by Gerald Dworkin

Hemingway was thought to have written the finest, very short, story. It was a classified advertisement whose text was “For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.” I have always been attracted to very miniature versions of linguistic expression. It is interesting to seek the minimum number of words for various categories. So, for example, I have never found a better, shorter sentence that Ring Lardner, Jr’s “Shut up, he explained.” For five words, I have Woody Allen’s “ I am two with Nature.” but once one has that many words available there must be many others. Best short Seder text: “They tried to kill us. We won. Let’s eat.”

For many years I have been collecting aphorisms, jokes, witty remarks, etc. for a someday-to-be published Common-Place Book. It is divided into two sections.; one on general Philosophy and the other on Morality. I do not restrict myself just to short passages. But I do tend to favor brief encounters. Ideally the upper limit would be something like Nietzsche’s limit on aphorisms. “ It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book—what everyone else does not say in a book.” One of his best “All truth is simple…is that not doubly a lie?” comes in at ten words.

So today I present a sampling, a taste, a nibbling of very short takes on Philosophy. If there is sufficient interest I will follow up with material from the Morality section. Where I know the source I give it. Where I do not I welcome information as to the original. I divide them, roughly, into categories although they are obvious enough that they could be omitted.

Definitions of Philosophy

You make a few distinctions. You clarify a few concepts. It’s a living.

Sydney Morgenbesser

The ungainly attempt to tackle questions that come naturally to children, using methods that come naturally to lawyers.

David Hills

[Philosophy is] an attempt to see how things, in the broadest possible sense of the term, hang together, in the broadest possible sense of the term.

W. Sellars

Philosophy is the cure for which there is no adequate disease.

Jerry Fodor

Read more »

by Shiban Ganju

Health care begets health; the two are inseparable. Experience of developed countries shows that disease is recession proof while national income is not; demand grows inexorably while funding shrinks. When the resources lag to fulfill the minimum need, health becomes a mere dream.

People of the world are unhappy with their national systems, no matter which country. In a survey done by the Commonwealth Fund in six OECD countries majority wanted either fundamental changes or to rebuild the system.

Adults with health problems; Commonwealth Fund survey 2005

World has evolved four models of health care financing: (1) Bismarck model: where employers and employees contribute into a not for profit fund and providers are usually private as in ‘Sickness funds’ system of Germany. (2) Beveridge model: government is both the payer and provider as in the UK and Cuba. (3) Single payer: government is the sole payer from funds collected though employee contribution and taxes. The providers are both private and public. Canada, Taiwan and South Korea have adopted this system. (4) Out of pocket model: where no organized risk pools exist and individual pay as they fall sick. Most of the low income countries do not have the resources to organize national financing systems for health care.

The US has evolved a pluralistic system. Government funds 46 percent, a private commercial insurance fund 35 percent and 13 percent is out of pocket as deductibles and co-pay. Providers are mostly private. Innovations like HMO capitation and health saving account have not dented the costs.

Read more »

Maniza Naqvi

I wrote this play in 1999. It was published in an anthology in 2005 and as a chapter in my novel A Matter of Detail in 2008.

That Sara Aziz!

Meet Ava, Sonia, Kulsum, and Shireen in four different levels but otally connected: From a sidewalk cafe where Ava who is a lawyer, is seated sipping her caffe latte, magazines scattered on the

Read more »

By Norman D. Costa

Note: The following is a true story, but the names of certain individuals, and other identifying details, have been changed.

Part 1 of this story can be found HERE.

The story so far: I learned to hit a bull’s eye with an M14 rifle in U. S. Marine Corps officer training at Quantico, Virginia, the summer between my sophomore and junior years at college. I still remember, and have recalled throughout my life, my thoughts at hitting a long range target on my third shot, using only two rounds to adjust my aiming point. I had the immediate realization that I just put a bullet through the head of someone who was 100 yards away. And it was easy. It also brought up a memory from six years earlier – a memory that had been entirely repressed, and now overwhelmed me on the rifle range. I had spent my early teens hanging out with Felix Crimmins, a mildly retarded neighbor boy, and hero-worshiping his father, Fred. Mr. Crimmins carried a 38 caliber revolver on his job as an armed toll booth collector in New York City. Felix’s mother, Lena, was to my naïve eye an embarrassing religious fanatic, sometimes neglecting to leave supper for her children while rushing out to her weekly meeting of the Holy Rosary Society. The scope of Lena’s hypocrisy, her betrayal, and the desperation it engendered in Fred, were beyond my ability to comprehend, though not to observe.

The Final Trip to the Farm

Felix (he was 16, and three years older than I) got permission from his mother, Walena (Lena) Crimmins, to invite me to come with the family on a long weekend visit to his grandparents. I had been there before, and going to the farm was like landing in our own personal theme park, except we made our own adventures, and the food and desserts were much better and free. Put a kid on an old farm with 112 acres, and a rain free summer day, and it's like dying and going to heaven. Felix's grandmother had been a pastry chef, and still supplied two restaurants and the one hotel in town. The confections at the farm were nonstop and the best in the world. The milking barn, tool and tractor sheds, wood shed, long unused pig sty and chicken coop, and farm equipment idle for years were made to order for discovery, preoccupation, and play. The woods, the hay fields now harvested by a neighbor farmer, and a creek with a swimming hole, were gifts from God Almighty for young explorers on safari.

The best part of the trip, itself, was sitting in the rear-facing back seat of the Ford station wagon with Felix. We were entertained by the panorama of things gone by, and making eye contact and getting a wave from the driver behind us. The front hood of a car is a huge obstruction to your view. Facing forward you adopted, unintentionally, some of the attentiveness and stress required to drive a car, like keeping eyes AND mind on the road. The rearward view was easy and relaxing on the eyes, and free of the stress of watching where you were going. In the days before car seat belts, seating arrangements could be as fluid as in the TV room at home. Fred and Lena Crimmins were in the front seat, Felix and I were in the back seat, and Penny (13) and Maureen (10) were in the middle seat, always. It was a different story with Tommy (7), Harry (3), and Michael (6 months). Tommy and Harry, at different times into the trip, could be in front with their mom and dad, in the middle with their sisters, or in the rear with Felix and me. The baby, Michael, was freely passed back and forth between the front and middle seats, but he never made it all the way to the back seat. The inside of the car was like a room at home with kids coming and going, and occasionally stepping on each other.

That Friday when we departed from the Crimmins's house, the only thing that seemed to be not normal was Mr. Crimmins. Fred was distracted and unfocused. He appeared a little sad. He didn't even offer a token rebuff to Lena who was complaining that he didn't know how to pack the car for a trip. “Stupido,” she used to call him. At another time he would be, at least, attentive to his children either to make sure everyone was all right, or issuing the usual threat to turn the car around unless good behavior was restored in the family vehicle. He had always been a very good driver, and took great pride in his car, which he kept in tip-top condition. Felix and I were always helping Fred Simonize his car on the weekends. For effect, he would throw water on the hood to impress upon someone, proudly, how the water beaded and danced. None of that pride in owning and operating a car was apparent the day we left for the final trip to the farm.

Read more »

by Jeff Strabone

Two weeks ago, the NBC television program 30 Rock devoted an episode to a theme on many Americans’ minds: executive pay (episode 59, broadcast October 15, 2009). In the episode, Kenneth the Page (played by Jack McBrayer) discovered that division head Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin) had received a huge corporate bonus with “All those zeroes!” while the pages were newly restricted from working overtime due to corporate cost-cutting. The ensuing argument between Kenneth and Jack followed the usual script: Jack said he was entitled to his massive bonus because of his talents, and Kenneth cited the unfairness of the income disparity between them.

The episode is funny, but it wholly misses the crux of the problem of excessive executive pay. It is not a question of merit, talent, fairness, or income disparity; it is a question of theft. Corporate executives are raiding their companies’ coffers, and the victims are you and me. What we have in the United States is no longer capitalism but klepto-capitalism: a system where publicly traded corporations are run not to produce value for shareholders but to provide loot for a new class of corporate mega-thieves. How do we stop this rampant pilfering, particularly in an era of American politics when at least half the nation’s political class is averse to government intervention in the economy? By being as greedy and as smart as the thieves.

Read more »

Icon

……………………………………………
…………………………………………….
I received a snap of Duke the Dog
in which duke in radiant atmosphere stands
quintessentially dog-like
……………………………………open-mouthed
lolling tongue four-square
paws planted in green earth
……………………………….…..expectant
poised to please …………………very Christ-like
in mist halo silent light still
………………………………. ….all aware

I’m yours
he barks standing by
………………………..

throw that last stick now
before I mount this brilliant torch
and rise to sit at dad’s right paw
: my father King who( tooth and claw)
salutes every risen pooch from
dog-heaven’s porch

for though it is mysteriously odd
dog spelled backward is always god

by Jim Culleny

photo by Jeff Grader, October, 2009

In Part One of this article I wrote about the instability of the art-object. How its meaning moves, and inevitably cracks. In this follow-up I ponder text, the book, page and computer screen. Are they as stable as they appear? And how can we set them in motion?

Part Two

“There’s a way, it seems to me, that reality’s fractured right now, at least the reality that I live in. And the difficulty about… writing about that reality is that text is very linear and it’s very unified, and… I, anyway, am constantly on the lookout for ways to fracture the text that aren’t totally disorienting – I mean, you can take the lines and jumble them up and that’s nicely fractured, but nobody’s gonna read it.”

David Foster Wallace, PBS Interview, 1997

17^th Century print technology was rubbish. Type could be badly set, ink could be over-applied, misapplied or just plain missed. Paper quality varied enormously according to local resources, the luck of the seasons or even the miserly want of the print maker out to fill his pockets. There are probably thousands of lost masterpieces that failed to make it through history simply because of the wandering daydreams of the printer's apprentice. But from error, from edit and mis-identification have come some of the clearest truths of the early print age. Truths bound not in the perfect grain or resolute words of the page, but in the abundance of poor materials, spelling mistakes and smudge. In research libraries across the globe experts live for the discovery of copy errors, comparing each rare edition side-by-side with its sisters and cousins in the vain hope that some random mutation has made it intact across the centuries.

Since the invention of writing, and its evolutionary successor the printing-press, text has commanded an authority that far exceeds any other medium. By reducing the flowing staccato rhythms of speech to typographically identical indelible marks we managed, over the course of little more than 2000 years, to standardise the reading consciousness. But in our rush to commodify the textual experience we lost touch with the very material that allowed illiteracy to become the exception, rather than the rule. We forgot that it is the very fallibility of text and book that make them such powerful thinking technologies.

Read more »

By Maniza Naqvi

Today, the other, would be Estonia. And outside, not a sound, a moment worth savoring had come to town: as if in anticipation, as though they were all on the same side; same thoughts; same direction. Whatever happened today, it would happen to them together.

Jasna got out of bed—washed her face, changed into that gift from long ago a soft blue woolen dress; then brushed the tangled hair and slipped out the door and made her way down to the gallery on the first floor. Dizzy from the nausea that always came a day after each treatment, she gingerly negotiated the darkened stairwell, as best as she could. She clung to the balustrade, the cold marble of it, welcome, against her burning skin. The bells began to chime again. Six. Outside it was beginning to darken, the fog having settled in. The news on the television this morning had been all about the game. But it had also had the usual pronouncements of Dodik and Sladjzic and the ringing of hands by the International Community. Again. It was all Dodik and Sladjzic all day long every day.

In between all that, they had mentioned that he was in town. No news and now this! She had sat up with a jolt, in a panic, her hand reaching to touch her head as if he was just there at her door. She had reached for the wig and pulled it on as her fingers trembled over her cold skull. And then, after the shock of it, after she had calmed down, she spent the rest of hers imagining his day, she had charted its course sure that it would end with him visiting the gallery. If she knew him at all, she knew he would have to come. Her choice of the apartment just a floor above, the final place had been the right instinct. What else was there to show for having been here, for him and for her, if not that one painting in the gallery, hers of him?

Read more »

by Evert Cilliers

Problems come in two types: real and BS. Your kid snorting cocaine, that's a real problem. Unless she's living in your house, having a mother-in-law is not a real problem: it's a BS problem.

BS problems can infect entire nations, because they roam wider than herpes. Take illegal immigration. Perfectly natural: we've got work for people, Mexicans come over to do it, Americans pay them for it: no problem. However, some Americans don't like those Mexicans and some politicians want the votes of those Americans, so they make illegal immigration a BS problem. You want a real problem? One out of four kids don't finish high school. Solving that would be change I can believe in.

Internationally, real and BS problems contend like Tokyo and Godzilla, too. Real: Americans die every day in Iraq and Afghanistan. Why? Ask any politician this Tuesday, and they'll give you a reason. Ask them next Tuesday, you'll get a different reason. Whatever: the American penchant for sticking our nose in other people's business is a hellhole of hubris that makes a Greek tragedy look like a sitcom. Removing our troops from Iraq and Afghanistan so they don't die there like lab rats would be a change I can believe in, Mr. Babyface Barack.

Now for some BS: Iran. The problem? Iran is supposedly thinking of making supposed nuclear bombs. It's no problem that America, Russia, Britain, France, Israel, India, China and Pakistan actually HAVE the bomb, it's only a problem that Iran MAY get it. Talk about the pot calling the kettle a 100% saturated black.

What would be the problem if Iran had the bomb? Israel would squeal like an insurance company faced with a major surgery claim. Big deal. Israel actually has from 200 to 400 nuclear bombs, but we don't seem to mind, even given their record of bombing everyone around them. Iran has a record of not bombing anyone around them for thousands of years, except once when Saddam Hussein attacked them. Israel having the bomb is way scarier than Iran getting it.

Read more »

“Funny how naughty dentists always make that one mistake, isn't it?”

A recent article and broadcast on National Public Radio (US) described the proliferation of specialized police forces in the state of Texas, including one that was operated by the State Board of Dental Examiners. No true Monty Python fan could read that report without recalling the Eric Idle character known as Lemming of the BDA – “British Dental Association, that is.”

There's been some public debate about the growth of private police forces in North America, Europe,and throughout the world, and some discussion (though not enough) about the creation of private Fire Departments operated by insurance companies in the United States. But Texas may represent the leading edge of another governmental phenomenon. The issue there is not so much the outsourcing of a government function as it is the fractionation of that function among competing departments.

We don't have a word for this phenomenon yet. Maybe we should call it intrasourcing?

Whatever it's called, the question is this: Is this part of a wider phenomenon or just a Texas aberration, the product of that state's fascination with the breed of professional they still call (with pre-feminist brio) the “Lawman”?

Read more »