by Alan Page

Mexico City traffic is a looped catastrophe, a rope that frays and frays but never snaps. Several years ago, hopelessly stuck in an utterly paralyzed Viaduct, it occurred to me that of all things made by man, our peculiar brand of traffic most resembled the Weather in all its unpredictable force and magnitude. It elicits the same kind of speculation, the same panicked scrambling for shelter.

What is most puzzling is that you can actually get used to something like this. And you do. You begin to associate sundown itself with the endless string of breaklights, the rasping of engines. We have all suffered this misery. And it’s strange, because after a while in this category of traffic, you know something inside you is hurting, you just don’t what it is. Added insult, (¡faltaba más!): there is something about this kind of suffering that is entirely incommunicable. (In this, it is similar to getting roiled by our homebrewed strain of bureaucracy.) Example: a close friend called, spitting with exasperation, after having to cross the city on a holiday weekend, Friday payday: 3 hours, as they say, at the speed of a turn of the wheel. And as he raged about how impossible it is to blablablá in this city, I did my polite damnedest to get him to stop, or shut up, or change the subject. It wasn’t that I was unsympathetic. Not in the least. But it wasn’t sympathy he as asking for, it was a call for empathy – for me to try to feel with him what he’d been through. And I’d rather sip hot tar.

I have been that call, and I have heard my interlocutor’s voice go slightly limp. And that’s when I know I will have neither redress, nor company, nor consolation. I submit to the members of the board: there is something the citizens of Mexico City know about traffic, something essential about it, about what it does to the human soul. And it is a knowledge so asphyxiating, so utterly noxious, that we expend a great deal of energy trying to white it out.

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by Colin Marshall

As an aesthetic-historical artifact, a primary source documenting the lost, oft-fetishized swinging jauntiness of early-1960s Western Europe, Cléo from 5 to 7 works. As a story that keys into the low-level dread and inklings of personal fraudulence that rise within us all from time to time — not too often, if we're lucky — it's more effective still. Agnès Varda pulls off an impressive balancing act by stacking a tale of fragile superficiality momentarily shaken by mortality's quake atop what's essentially a documentary of idealized Paris. (But if it's documentary footage, it by definition captures the real Paris rather than an ideal one; critics have surely tied elaborate mental knots about this before.) It's fiction in the foreground with fact in the background. The fiction, though, gets at something very real as well, albeit differently real, with a treatment that stands well apart from other films' before and since.

Cléopatre Victoire's bit of bad news hits her almost immediately, delivered via a tarot deck in this black-and-white picture's sole color sequence. Despite the fortuneteller's boilerplate buffer of hand-waving about change and transformation, Cléo knows full well what that card with the hunched, scythe-wielding skeleton predicts for her. Alas, for two whole days she's been trapped in a sickening limbo familiar to too many: Waiting For The Test Results. Though medical science will come through with the dirt on her possible cancer in a mere two hours, the prognostication confirms her worst fears: as many male (and envious female) heads are turned by her appearance and as many spins as her newly-cut pop single receives on the radio, she's a pretty blonde chanteuse whose days are numbered. The other cards reveal a heartening new acquaintance in her future, but the damage is done; impervious to reassurance, Cléo leaves despondent. (“She is doomed,” the prophet then tells a man, previously unseen, sitting in the next room.)

This would be more tragic if Cléo were at all sympathetic. “Ugliness is a kind of death,” she thinks to herself on the way out, checking out her own reflection in the foyer's mirror. “As long as I'm beautiful, I'm alive.” To label her as vain misses the point. It's not as if she has a tendency toward these moments of high aesthetic self-regard; most of her actions revolve around the examination and manipulation of her own surface. Even the tears shed at the close of her tarot appointment look timed and released to be maximially photogenic in the given context. Moments later, Cléo waltzes down the street, tractor-beaming the gazes of strangers, apparently her usual self. Hers is a broad, generic beauty, one that commands glances by the dozen but rarely provides a gateway to any substantive human contact. (Indeed, it may be an active repellent; she looks, by modern standards, imposingly, laboriously constructed, like her own wax museum figure.) It's no wonder she equates loss of beauty with loss of life — she's got nothing else.

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Part I of this piece appeared last week at 3QD and can be seen here.

by Stefany Anne Golberg

May 12

2pm

Bill was raised in a poor mountainous village in Zhejiang province (“Where is Hangzhou you will go there”), the son of tea farmers. He was allowed to leave his village and attend university in 1964 but his studies were cut short in 1966 by the Cultural Revolution. “We went mad, you know, we went mad,” he says over and over. He tells us he joined the youth militia and criticized the teachers he went to the city to learn from. He passes around his faded Red Guard armband, laughing at it. He sings about Our Great Leader (“we went mad, you know, we went mad”) and soon the bus driver joins in mechanically, paying more attention to the road. When Bill met his wife, she was a city girl in high school. Bill married her out of benevolence. She suffered in the country, we are told, though we’re not given details. Then suddenly, the Cultural Revolution is over and things start to change. Mao dies, Mao’s wife is arrested, and in return Bill’s wife is allowed to escape the rural toil of farming life. She moves to the city and a few years later in 1982—the government needing tour guides in the city as much as history teachers in the country—Bill and his son are allowed to join his wife, in the city where he resides today, still a tour guide at 64.

By the time Bill finishes his tale, half the bus is asleep with mouths gaping and eyes closed. A Canadian woman snores. Bill’s real name is Huang.

From the spotty window, the farms of Hubei province whiz by. Eight people dressed in unremarkable clothes stand before a gravestone in what appears to be a random spot in a field. A trio of horn players point their brass instruments into the blazing sun, their song silent from the tour bus.

6pm

Aboard the M.V. Emperor, where we will spend the next four days, we are assaulted by a long line of grinning uniformed crew members. Two haggard men in ripped t-shirts stumble into the crowd. They carry a load of heavy suitcases that dangle from a bamboo stick balanced on their shoulders. Among the tourists, there is an audible gasp and nervous giggling. They deposit the bags heavily and someone fumbles around in her pocket for a yuan or two. But the crooked men have already left.

May 13

6:53am

The peagreen Yangtze moves beneath us as we set sail upstream. The river is dotted with small pointy fishing boats. Brick shacks peek out between the trees that cover the surrounding high mountains. The air is alive with tiny white butterflies. You’ve seen it in pictures: the mist, the cliffs— it hasn’t changed for a while or so it seems. But the Yangtze is indeed is changing, it’s just that much of the past is already far beneath the surface.

8am

Our first breakfast on the ship is what has now become my daily morning fare: congee (white, black, corn, millet) topped with spicy pickled things. It is the only item that never seems to run out at the breakfast buffet. “There was some sort of earthquake yesterday,” a woman says.

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In reverse chronological order:

• Expand the Police Force, in Dawn, 9/2009
• Defending Dictatorship: Another View on Pakistan, in n + 1, 3/2008
• The Bhutto Dynasty Must End Now, in Foreign Policy in Focus, 1/2008
• Welcome to America…You’re Under Arrest, in The Smart Set, 1/2008

[S. Abbas Raza’s writing for 3QD can be seen here.]

Justin E. H. Smith

Maureen Dowd is in my bed. I can tell it's her. That shock of red hair spilling across the pillow, those red high heels kicked haphazardly onto the floor.

What is she doing in there?

I'm going to have to wake her up and ask her to leave. She'll think I'm afraid of intelligent women, but that's not true. My wife is very intelligent. In fact, that's just the problem: Maureen Dowd is not my wife.

Come to think of it, where is my wife? Did I shift possible worlds, into one in which I –or should I say my counterpart-me?– am married not to my wife, but to Maureen Dowd? Did my wife somehow metamorphose into Maureen Dowd while I was out getting her more flu capsules, like some Gregor Samsa, though with an infinitely more gruesome fate?

I suppose the only question that really matters is: am I now married to Maureen Dowd? Whether this marriage was sealed through world-shifting or through metamorphosis is of little interest, except perhaps to the metaphysicians. Perhaps they would tell me that in the latter case we're basically looking at a cosmic annulment by reason of change of substance. I married my wife after all, not my wife-or-whoever-my-wife-might-turn-into.

I'm just going to have to wake her up and get to the bottom of this. I hope she doesn't talk like she writes. That would be unbearable, especially if, metaphysically and legally, she is in fact my wife. Then I would have to put up with it. I would say: “I seem to have shifted possible worlds or something, for I don't recall ever marrying you, Ms. Dowd.” And she would reply: “What a pretty pickle,” or: “So, darling, is it going to be Taming of the Shrew, or more Mister Magoo?” or some other rhymed literary reference that I'll feel I ought to understand, yet won't.

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1.

Somewhere between growing up in farm country and leaving it, I watched my eight-year-old brother fall into a pile of afterbirth. One minute, we were poking the afterbirth with sticks—we couldn’t help ourselves, it was so strange, that pool of black milk, the recent discard of twin lambs—and the next minute, my brother was twitching in the grass, his sneaker anointed with the oddest of glues. He twitched for awhile, and when he stopped twitching he was initiated into the strange nature of hospitals, and after much in the way of cat-scan and examination, he was declared epileptic and released with a small vial of pills. At the time, no one could have convinced me—though I was old enough to know better—that those pills weren’t intended for the sole purpose of preventing my brother from turning into a lamb, as I’d seen him touched, comic-book style, by a substance capable of altering his genetic makeup. Whether I entertained this delusion because I would have preferred my brother as part-sheep—docile, wooly, and scarcely capable of competing for my parent’s affection—or because I believed the animal life to be more inviting than the human variety, remains up for debate.

2.

Emerson claimed that every word was once an animal, and when one is drawn to both words and animals with a frightening amount of affection, there is a temptation to elaborate on this system and transform the rules of grammar so that they might join another kingdom. What results is a cacophony of alphabet and heartbeat, furry vowels, clawed consonants. Sometimes nouns are horses and verbs are monkeys. On any given day, the fluctuations of adjectives are extreme, unpredictable, scampering from moth to snake to hamster. A school of fish is less institution, more living thesaurus, providing synonyms for what it might mean to be endangered or sublime.

3.

Words can be herded, animals, less so. I’ve attempted to blame my obsession on some crazed gene, an unavoidable blip in the familial blood. As children, we were surrounded by aunts and uncles capable of training possums and leading wild horses to makeshift pastures. But the origins of this gift were solely with my grandmother, Estelle, a high-haired little woman who once wore the bite-marks of a weaning kitten on her hand like strange jewelry. When she died in the living room after a long illness, the animals of the house were brought to her side, so that they could understand Our Loss. We watched them sniff her stillness curiously, obsessively, and the precise moment when grief occurred to them was obvious to us, and violently so. Howls went up, tongues came out, my grandmother’s cheek was licked with an alarming intensity, and shortly after, she was buried in her best dress with the ashes of her Great Dane, who’d once stood as the taller of the two while on tiptoe. At the reception that followed, my sister and I let the parrot do all the talking, and examined a beetle crushed at the curb by a mourner’s foot. Our familial tradition is pity for the roadside lost, our inheritance a moral conscience that has swapped the cartoonish hover of devil and angel with the perch of the warm-blooded, and the cold.

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By Stefany Anne Golberg

There’s a curious smell in Chinatown. It smells of fish and death and moldering cardboard. The streets teem with people moving and spinning like the Teacups ride at Disneyland. I try to keep up with my mother, father, and older brother but they are too quick for me. My father is looking for the perfect dim sum restaurant. People bump into me, there is no space in this part of town, not even for a little girl. In every city, anywhere we go, my father takes us to Chinatown. He loves Chinatown. He loves the food, loves the style, the smell, mostly the food.

In every American city, where people mostly travel alone, and eat alone, and shop alone in big big stores, there is almost always Chinatown, where people are packed together, and eat together, and are together. When I am a girl, Chinatown is a world that has been created for me and not for me at all, that I can go to and will never be mine. Chinatown is the rest of the world, its possibilities and its failures. Somewhere, there is a whole country of Chinatown that sustains this one, that creates the magnificent trinkets cluttering the streets, wonderful, beautiful crap, cheap props in a street play.

I learn to love Chinatown too, in any city, anywhere I go.

May 7

6:49pm
“I was a Red Guard member in 1966, saw Our Great Leader Chairman Mao in Tiannanmen Square,” Bill says with a big smile. “I tell you my life story, very sad. That’s why I’m writing a book! About all my life experience. There’s a picture of me in my Red Guard uniform during Cultural Revolution. I will show you!”

8pm
In the hotel room I turn on the television. On one channel there’s a great battle scene from ancient times. On another channel, a man in a suit sits behind a desk and angrily scolds another man, with his pistol. Another shows a march of bloodied soldiers and filthy extras—men, women, children—dragging themselves down a dirt road. There’s an elaborate Tang opera and an infomercial channel dedicated to selling products I can’t identify. Hu Jintao addresses a congress and advertisements for the Beijing Olympics pop up regularly. On the one English-speaking channel, Mongolians in folk costumes frolic through wide grassy fields. In the upper left-hand corner of most channels is a CCTV logo, the major state-run television broadcaster.

11pm
My mother meets me at the Jiangxian Grand Hotel in southern Beijing. She disappears into the elevator with her friend and I finish a late-night plate of bok choy in the empty Western-style restaurant, watching pink plastic lilypads bob in an artificial pond that overlooks the lobby.

May 8

4:30am
Neither my mother nor I can sleep. As she showers, there is a knock at the door. I throw on a robe and open it. A young man’s hands are full of soap cakes and mini bottles of shampoo. He eyes me nervously and says nothing. I hold out my hands and he dumps all the soaps in them. I close the door and put the soaps on the TV. “Who was at the door?” my mother asks. “It was a man with soaps,” I say. “I read that in China if you ask for something you get it immediately,” she says. “Did you ask for soaps?” I ask. She pauses and turns to me. “No,” she says, “I don’t think so.”

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The year in terror has been building and rising, but few expected it to rise to this dramatic crescendo. Boats, control rooms in key buildings, AK-47s, grenades, hostages. As I begin to write, my television continues to bleat the worn platitudes of so many blind men and women of Hindoostan panning reality with their telephoto lenses, over the muffled roar of helicopters and machine gun fire.

Terrorism is high impact and ethics-free anti-art using global media. My imagination has been leached and my insides need cleansing, like an extra travel day spent watching porn in a hotel room. Still, one must concede their mad genius, uniting a new day of mourning in India with the pilgrim feast of Thanksgiving in America, both doused in the same hot stream of media violence.

I am already getting unsolicited text-forwards from cousins and acquaintances. India is planning to bomb Pakistan, says one. My friend Usman, in London, texts me just as he has every time this year, in the wake of each terror strike: “All ok?” “We’re invading Pakistan, but otherwise all okay,” I squeeze out. I’m not sure how funny he found this, for he writes back, “Re: Invasion, ok good. I was worried in the post-Obama fervour the world was becoming too sensible.”

Traveling through Mumbai this week is like living in an alternative dystopic reality, where malls, hotels and airports are surrounded with metal detectors, and armed guards. The usual ceremonies of entry and departure from colonnaded porticos have been suspended, and everyone is being forced to walk the last five blocks to the single entry of their sealed building. In the wake of the attacks, any number of international trade and industry conferences have been cancelled throughout India. Skittish international capital is reevaluating the risk of doing business in India, and so the attacks are having their desired economic effect.

The news channels have been branding it “India’s 9/11.” It is media hyperbole, it serves an ideological intent to align with and perhaps out-victim the US and UK, and it makes it easier to suggest retaliatory military action within the borders of Pakistan. But the label also lingers while we struggle to come to grips with what it was all really about. Not the tragic repetition of someone else’s history, but perhaps a sign from the future.

The attacks exceed the everyday violence that we have become inured to in the subcontinent, even when it has communal intent, even when hundreds die. There is the daring, of course, not only to attack India by sea, but to hit out at the public palaces and perches of the rich and famous. There is the urban, architectural and maritime research, the cross-border planning, the wireless coordination of personnel and armaments. There is the lateral imagination to transform a self-involved metropolis that itself has often threatened to secede from the dirty Indian hinterland into a cowering and precarious place on the edge of a dangerous sea. The Indian people, of every class and region, want to know why this was done to them, and no one really has any ready answers.

The hard answer that Indians are looking for is that there can be no peace for a prosperity that one’s neighbors do not share in, and that we are destined to share not only our past inheritance, but also our future fortune.

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The highway of life displays warning axioms, which my brother in law (BIL) missed or just ignored. BIL, the unemployed-but-rich hedge fund manager, laments that he should have never studied finance, which initiated him to a life of greed and excess. He has just realized the truth in the fourth axiom of life: whatever you do at twenty-five, you will regret at fifty-five. He knows it is too late to change his career but probably he could improve his body, which reminds him of the third axiom: whatever you didn’t do at twenty-five will haunt you at fifty-five. In his case it is exercise.

Years at the debt swap desk has slouched his spine, drooped his shoulders and shrunk his chest. His biceps have the tone of dumplings and his quadriceps carry him only a few hundred yards before crying for rest. His belly seems to protrude beyond his area code. He is disgusted, he wants to get into shape and he wants to get fit.

BIL wants to achieve three goals: build his endurance, strengthen his body and live longer. The muscles of his body will have to wake up from years of sloth. He has to coerce his muscles into action; he has to stretch them, work them, and build them. It will help him if he understands how muscles work.

The basic unit of a muscle is its cell – a long spindle shaped structure often called a fiber, which contains energy yielding materials and thousands of rod shaped protein filaments that have the ability to contract. Muscle cells in a group form one cohesive functional motor unit and a muscle has numerous motor units. A single neuron – ‘motor neuron’ – controls one specific motor unit.

When the brain commands a muscle to contract, molecules of acetylcholine transmit this message through the motor neuron, generating an electrical impulse, which crosses the muscle cell membrane and travels through its interior channels. Protein filaments in the cell respond to the signal. They shorten in length by sliding over each other. Stimulus from one motor neuron contracts multiple cells in one motor unit and if more strength is needed multiple neurons participate and recruit many motor units. The result: a muscle contracts.

But brain cannot voluntarily contract of all the muscles; some are beyond its will. Heart, for example, beats to a different drummer – the autonomic nerves and chemicals in circulation. Heart also beats faster to respond to the oxygen needs of voluntary muscles.

What is the source energy supply to muscles? (Nature is wiser than one of the disastrous products of evolution – politicians – and unlike them nature has solved the energy problem of muscles.) A complex molecule – adenosine trriphospate or ATP – is the answer. Muscle cells contain a small amount of stored ATP, which suffices for first five seconds of activity. For next fifteen seconds of contraction the cell converts a precursor molecule – ADP – into ATP. If the vigorous activity lasts longer, muscle must manufacture new ATP. It does so by breaking down glucose.

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Frank P. Costa, Sr. is 91 years old and resides in the Home Sweet Home assisted living residence in Kingston, NY. Quite by accident, I saw my father in a TV ad for Home Sweet Home on a local TV station. I mentioned the TV ad to a cousin of mine and we talked about possible residuals that should go to his estate for the heirs to split. Of course, this was a ridiculous discussion and we got a good laugh out it. My father suffers from dementia and many of his memories of the past are no longer accessible to him in any detail. Having a discussion with him, of any consequence, is just about impossible now.

Dad was a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division of the U.S Army during World War II. He was in the 507th Parachute Infantry Regiment. His first combat jump was on the night of June 5-6, 1944 into Normandy France – D-Day, the allied invasion of Europe. The designated landing zone was the area around the small town of Ste. Maire Egliese. It was on the only main road to the fortified city and deep water port of Cherbourg, further west. Ste. Maire Egliese was the principal objective of the 82nd so that the Allied armies could prevent any German rescue or resupply of Cherbourg.

My father was positioned as the first soldier to exit the plane when the green light, the jump signal, was given. On his training jumps he was always faint and queasy in the aircraft. He couldn't wait to get out of the plane and into the fresh air. So the jump sergeant sat him next to the door of the C47. The triple A flak (anti-aircraft artillery) was so heavy, the pilot veered to avoid the danger and gave the jump signal at a purely arbitrary moment. Many of the pilots in the following planes, with other 507th paratroopers, followed the lead pilot's right turn. They landed more than 30 km from their intended drop zone.

Dad landed in a flooded field, up to his shoulders in water. He cut himself out of the risers on his parachute with his trench knife, but he lost his M1-A carbine. With the arrival of dawn, he spotted a church on high, dry ground and made his way out of the water. He regrouped with his regiment, part of it anyway, in the tiny hamlet of Graignes, maybe 15 km from Carentan. The village church with a tall bell tower was the most recognizable feature and occupied the highest elevation in generally flat terrain. The church was of typical medieval Norman design, but I don't know how old it was. One-hundred seventy-six soldiers (176) assembled, including a few from the 101st Airborne Division, the Screaming Eagles. There was one Army Airforce fighter pilot. None of the surviving vets remembers where the fighter pilot came from.

The 507th was a headquarters outfit. That meant they had mortars, 50 caliber 'light' machine guns, and lots of explosives. They also had a lot of communications equipment, but they were too far away to contact any of the allied units. They were completely cut off from all communications. They had some great officers with them – a Colonel ('Pip' Reed), a Captain, and number of Lieutenants. The first thing they did was ascertain where they were with the help of the locals. They were so far off the drop zone that their location was off their military map. After much deliberation and argument, Colonel Reed decided to stay and set up a defense perimeter, rather than try to get back to the friendly lines through unfamiliar terrain and mostly flooded fields.

The head of the French Resistance in the area was a Graignes farmer, named Regault. His second in command was the Mayor of the Hamlet. The trusted locals were instructed the night before, by Regault and the Mayor, that the invasion was coming and that they were expected to do their duty when the time came. Regault had two daughters, Yvette 18 and Marthe 12. They were to become heroes in their own right and save the lives of many of the Americans. The first thing the locals did was to scour the area for the equipment and supplies that were parachuted with the soldiers. They smuggled the equipment in their horse carts and wagons. The proprietor of the local restaurant, Mme. Brousier, organized her suppliers to bring in large quantities of food stuffs to feed the paratroopers. They had to smuggle and be discreet so as not to attract the attention of the German soldiers in the area. The Germans soon learned of the existence of the Americans, but did not know who they were, how many, or how they were equipped. Some of the young French girls ran off to alert their German soldier boy friends.

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by Jennifer Cody Epstein

Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to travel to Spain for a symposium hosted by the Libraries of Barcelona. Aptly titled Reading to Travel, Traveling to Read (link to the site here), it was comprised of three days of discussions amongst a broad panel of writers that included Marianne Pearl (wife of slain journalist Danny Pearl, foreign correspondent and author of A Mighty Heart), Clea Koff (forensic anthropologist for the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal in Rwanda, and author of The Bone Woman), and Chris Stewart (former Genesis drummer and author of Driving Over Lemons). The conversations—translated, UN-style, into French, English, Spanish and Catalan—were divided into roughly a dozen general topics, among them “Living to Travel,” “Ways of Spreading Passion for Travel,” and “Traveling as a Form of Creation.” My assigned topic, shared with Spanish fellow-author Anna Tortajada, was “Traveling as Research.”

As a writer who’s worked mostly with foreign subjects, settings and characters, I found much to ponder in these quadralingual chats. One comment stood out for me in particular: French writer and professor Jean Soublin was recounting how he’d once traveled to study the music indigenous to different nations. “Of course, one couldn’t do that today,” he added. “Now, everyone listens to the same thing.”

The conversation didn’t extend to whether or not this was a good thing, though M. Soublin’s tone (and Gallic shrug) suggested the former. Still, as I explored Barcelona over the next few days, the thought lingered: Has globalization really changed the experience of travel? And is it always and necessarily for the worse?

For a number of reasons, the question was of particular interest at this moment in my life. I’d spent the last ten years on a novel studying the clash and merge of Western and Eastern politics and art, and had just launched into another examining the delicate cultural and political give-and-take in a Tokyo under American occupation. However, in all those years–years marked by the explosion of the internet and noisy, ongoing construction of the “Global Village”–I hadn’t actually left home. At least, not counting Canada (and who really counts Canada?). After spending most of my twenties abroad ( Japan, Thailand, Hong Kong and Italy) the triple-punch of poverty, grad school and new motherhood had kept me firmly tethered to Brooklyn. This– my first trip to Spain—was also my first abroad since a Tuscan honeymoon in 1998.

And while I certainly didn’t feel like I was home–or even in Canada–being abroad felt markedly different than I had remembered. It wasn’t just that music had changed, though it’s certainly true that every kiosk I passed seemed to spew the same, vague variety of World Pop. It was that Spain—or at least, the part of Spain near my hotel–seemed far more accessible; more familiar, than I’d expected. On my first sojourn down Carrer Rossello, I almost felt like I was on Madison Avenue. Sleek flagship stores—Chanel, Burberry, Prada, H&M—lined the well-kept sidewalks. Well-dressed women with small dogs abounded.

Through a combination of slow English and bad Italian, I found my way to Circuit City and purchased an electrical adaptor in the credit-card line. I found a SIMs card for my cellphone at a nearby Nokia store, and called home to wish my daughters good morning. I used the restroom at Burger King, paused (from habit) at a Starbucks but then retired to what seemed a more Spanish-style café. In retrospect, however, it was not so very unlike my favorite coffeespot in Cobble Hill, though the music wasn’t as good and half the customers were smoking. Still, the people—a mix of smartly-dressed professionals, foreign visitors, students and artsy types—felt familiar too.

After coffee, I went back to my hotel to change, then hopped on the subway for that night’s installment of “Traveling to Read.” Apart from trying to walk through the wrong turnstile at Diagonal station, I made it to the Library without incident, listened with interest to Ms. Pearl and M. Soublin, and afterwards had a terrific—if very late–dinner with them, symposium organizers and some other panelists. All-in-all, it struck me as an entirely easy and pleasant day–if not an exceptionally distinctive one. It certainly stood in stark contrast to my introduction to Kyoto, my first foreign city, and one in which I’d spent my sophomore year on homestay.

Stumbling through the old capital’s broad avenues, quiet shrines and shopping malls, I remember remembering Roland Barthe’s musings on travel in Empire of Signs. This situation (he’d written) is the very one in which a certain disturbance of the person occurs, a subversion of earlier readings, a shock of meaning, lacerated, extenuated to the point of its irreplaceable void…

And for me Japan was–at least at first—quite a shock. From food to fashion to the crisp cadence of the language; to the very posture and pace of the pedestrians, nothing–quite simply, nothing—felt familiar. For the first time in my life I felt fully an outsider, completely other; almost entirely without cultural or linguistic foothold. The simplest tasks—withdrawing money, finding the bathroom; using the bathroom (all those appliances! All those chirping automations!), making a phone call—seemed vast challenges. Even streetsign English (Fried chicken-drinks here; please remove shoes before being entered) felt like an entirely new language.

At that point, too—before cell phones; before internet; before the translation of hit pop songs into fifteen or more languages—home felt very, very overseas. Connecting with loved ones required lots of coins (Visa being a relatively new phenomenon there and then), a working payphone, and successful negotiation through polite-but-rapid Japanese operator instructions that were interspersed with cryptic-sounding clicks and beeps. Meals, for their part, could feel like an episode out of Fear Factor (“Do you know what this is?!” my homestay father would crow gleefully). And after dinner, all those bizarre TV reality shows!…

It can of course be argued (though I’m sure Europeans would rather not) that European and American cultures simply aren’t all that different; or at least, that they’re far more similar than are American and Asian cultures. And yet arriving in Italy four years later for another year abroad, I remember feeling almost as alienated there as I’d felt in those first weeks in Kyoto: Disconcerted by a foreign language. Confused by the lack of sugar substitutes. Caught off-guard when life shut down for siesta.

Now, twenty-odd years later here I was in Barcelona—phoning home while ambling down the Calle Escudellers. Shopping international franchises, and being offered not only Visa and Mastercard but the choice of paying in dollars or Euros. Logging into Facebook on the computer in the hotel lobby to find that the previous user had just been on Facebook, Spain. It certainly felt like globalization had sanded down some of the differences between our two cultures. But did that mean it was stripping away culture itself? Was the whole world, in fact, becoming like the fictional city of Trude, in Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities”: This was the first time I had come to Trude, but I already knew the hotel where I happened to be lodged; I had already heard and spoken my dialogues with the buyers and sellers of hardware; I had ended other days identically, looking through the same goblets at the same swaying navels… Why come to Trude? I asked myself. And I already wanted to leave.

Certainly, many Barcelonians with whom I spoke seemed to feel the same ennui as Calvino’s Marco Polo. At our symposium dinner, I had listened (at least, as much as my Italianized Spanish would permit) as city natives in our group bewailed the erosion of their Catalan culture. Friend and fellow writer James Canon, who’d just moved to the city, told of signs on La Rambla telling tourists to go home. (“Did they feel the same way about the Moors?” I asked, having just been informed that Spanish remains heavily Arabic-influenced. “I’m sure they did,” he said.)

And yet, as my visit continued throughout the week, I found myself wondering whether the ongoing construction of the Worldwide Village doesn’t cut both ways; whether, in fact, globalization actually eliminates cultural difference so much as provides tools to understand, even transcend, those differences. It may be crassly American of me, but seeing a Starbucks on La Rambla didn’t really detract from my overall pleasure in Spain—any more than the sushi shops on Calles Moles did. They all simply felt like part of a growing international lexicon that the U.S., Japan and Spain now shared, along with the rest of the world. In some ways—I’ll admit it—such sights were even oddly comforting; familiar signposts that seemed to remind us that while there was much to be learned from our differences, there was also something to be learned from our similar tastes.

I felt the same way chatting at the H&M sales rack with Spanish teens; commenting—in imperfect versions of one another’s language–on a cute style, a great price, the wait for a changing room. Or admiring—along with a multinational group of passersbys–Gaudi’s Casa Batllo on Passeig de Gracia. I felt it exclaiming over a Barbie doll I found in a toyshop, dressed not in cheesy lame an intricate, handmade Catalan costume that had clearly taken weeks (if not months) of loving care to create. And I felt it, finally, on my last night in Barcelona, spent listening to Spanish guitar at the Basilica del Pi.

It was a breathtaking performance of works by Albeniz, Tarrega and Sors. The audience clearly spoke at least a dozen different languages, though most were stunned (as was I) into silence; and the fluent arpeggios of the guitarist were occasionally underscored by the drunken songs of English footballers outside. For me, though, the night was magic; and no less Spanish for all the international ambience.

Later I ended up at Neri Restaurant on Calle Sant Sever, tucked away in the medieval alleyways of the Barri Gotic. The music there was less indigenously Spanish–a mellow blend of American alternative and Samba–and the food a fabulous fusion of Continental and Catalan. After my main course the waitress gave me a free glass of Spanish champagne to go with the night’s special dessert, which she announced with a flourish: American Brownie ala Mode.

“Don’t worry,” she added, seeing my bemused expression. “It’s all Spanish chocolate. And it’s delicious.”

And despite the title, it was.

Jennifer Cody Epstein’s other writing for 3QD can be seen here, and her own website is here.

////../
Kneedeep as Leaves
Jim Culleny

Today, in a java shop
among caffeinators, wired, I
received a poem from a friend
whom I've known since
it didn't seem important
to understand friendship

But now I do
and appreciate his calling me
into the world of this poem
(which is not his, but his
anyway because
he saw some truth in it
and supposed that
I might see it too)

With thanks I add it to
other truths that have blown against my door
now piled kneedeep as leaves,
but less brittle, in fall

///

(Interpretations is a new, occasional series of reflections on artworks, films, songs, signs, artifacts, and other items by Asad Raza and other contributors.)

In Maurizio Cattelan's Daddy Daddy, Pinocchio has met his end, floating face-down in the Guggenheim's fountain–presumably having jumped, fell, or been pushed off the ramparts of the museum's ascending spiral ramp. There is no clear cause, just a result: this body, the record of a dismal yet laughable turn of events, the death of a lovable Disney character. The sculpture is site-specific: for its memorable visual joke to work, it depends on the airy grandeur of Lloyd Wright's atrium. You have to be able to look up and see the many places from which a person, or a puppet, could fall. By imagining this disastrous outcome, the piece transforms the museum's spatial splendor into a droll vertigo. (Photo: The Guggenheim Museum.)

Blackly comic in tone, Daddy Daddy recalls the scenarios of many previous works by Cattelan. As with his stuffed squirrel suicide, posed face-down at a kitchen table with revolver in hand (Bidibidobidiboo, 1996), a cute character suitable for children meets an untimely end. Cattelan once displayed a rope made of bedsheets tied togther leading from the window to the ground below, having first used it to climb out of the gallery; Daddy Daddy also posits a hero paralyzed by the fear of inauthenticity (“Am I a real boy?”). Cattelan's work Now (2004), a life-size sculpture of a saintly, barefoot John F. Kennedy in a coffin, symbolizes a loss of hope and a sense of rightness with the world. In Untitled (2007), a horse is suspended in a sort of anti-majesty, its head having disappeared into the wall. Each of these works performs the characteristic Cattelan gesture: staging a climactic punch-line to a narrative of futility.

The use of Pinocchio is appropriate in another sense as well: Cattelan often represents himself mock-heroically as a liar and a thief. For an exhibition in Amsterdam in 1996 he stole the contents of another gallery and installed them in his own, entitling the piece Another Fucking Readymade. On the night before an opening of his in 1992, he went to the police falsely claiming his non-existent work had been stolen, then displayed the police report in the gallery. What better surrogate for himself in his work than the Italian boy-puppet, caught lying in a vain attempt to fit in and prove he belongs, that's he's a real boy? Daddy Daddy is a concise, witty summation of an anxious, futile desperation to succeed and belong.

In addition to these more obvious ways that Daddy Daddy represents a continuation of themes in Cattelan's work, there is another form of continuity operating here. This has to do with Pinocchio's being a puppet. Cattelan's sculptures are very frequently stuffed bodies of one kind or another. Many of his works include them in their most conventional form, taxidermized animals. Even works containing no mammalian forms, however, make reference to the stuffed body, as when he packed the rubble left by a terrorist bombing into large shipping bags (Lullaby, 1994)–a kind of macabre taxidermy that filled a soft container with fragmented detritus. Cattelan seems always drawn to depicting organic bodies as hollow containers, stuffed rather than living objects. The cartoon, which is our first point of reference for Pinocchio, is merely an extreme example this: a body delineated by an outline, but with no real interior.

There is, of course, a link between the Cattelan's narratives of demise and failure and his use of taxidermic or obviously cartoonish bodies to express them: both are ways of questioning holistic understandings of human identity. These hollow shapes disrupt a naturalized sense of ourselves as organic beings. They cast our psychological interiors as mere stuffing. And I think this literal emptying-out of the category of being touches something quite deep within the contemporary idea of what it means to be a person. The ideal of secular modernity is meritocracy: the goal of personhood is to travel upwards, achieving and accomplishing as much as one can without unfair impediment. Yet the meritocratic model renders social life as a competition for high status, which, by definition, remains scarce and graspable by only a few. An ideal meritocracy, then, must leave most of its constituents in the depressing position of having achieved second-rate status–a depression only made more acute in cases of fair and just competition.

A further contradiction of the logic of meritocracy is that it rewards those who most fully internalize the fear of being second-rate: temperamental insecurity and anxiety about accomplishment, that is, are the motivating forces of the high achiever. This is also true of Daddy Daddy. Far from being the record of Cattelan's failure to thrive, it is the latest example of a great success: the achievement of extremely high status in the art world, which allows him to display his work in high-status cultural institutions. Thus Daddy Daddy is pleasing and surprising because it is redolent of the absurdity of contemporary life, which often allocates its greatest rewards to those who are most anxiously unable to be content with them–a situation Daddy Daddy comes close to parodying, with its transformation of angst into comedy.

As a consolation for the bleakness of professionalized social life, Cattelan offers his own example. As he has said of his vocation as an artist, “this is the one profession where I can be a little bit stupid and people will say, 'Thank you, thank you for being so stupid!'” This statement updates the familiar nineteenth-century concept of the aesthetic field as the opposite of the ruthlessness of the market. Art, in this understanding, is not a utopian alternative. It is an adjacent, but equally competitive, field to the professions–but one which values rather than represses reflections on the nature of “the game.” In keeping with this paradox, Cattelan is the ultimate professional unprofessional: he is unconcerned to demonstrate mastery of craft, except the twin crafts of directing fabricators to realize his ideas and eliciting support from curators and collaborators. His work, a series of sculptural vignettes or gestures, expresses not a poetics of mastery, but a comedics of failure. “Laughter is the whole of wisdom,” goes a line by the satirical novelist James Hamilton-Paterson. Cattelan's work tends to confirm this.

By PD Smith

December has a way of creeping up on you. It seems just a few weeks since summer was here and Abbas was making hay in the Alps.

2008 has been a year of fear and hope. Mighty financial institutions have collapsed overnight and America has elected its first African-American President. Apparently, Reinhold Niebuhr and Nietzsche are among Barack Obama’s favorite authors, although I can’t imagine he has had much time for reading this year. Which is a pity as there have been some great non-fiction titles published in 2008.

For me one of the most memorable was Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf (published in the UK this year by Icon). It’s an enthralling celebration of the science and “complex beauty of the reading process”. In evolutionary terms, reading is a recently acquired cultural invention that uses existing brain structures for a radically new skill. Unlike vision or speech, there is no direct genetic programme passing reading on to future generations. It is an unnatural process that has to be learnt by each individual.

As director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University in Boston, Wolf works with readers of all ages, but particularly those with dyslexia, a condition that proves “our brains were never wired to read”. Wolf therefore has much of practical value to say about why some people have difficulty reading and how to overcome this. Reading stories to pre-school children is crucial, she says, as it encourages the formation of circuits in the brain, as well as imparting essential information about fighting dragons and marrying princes.

Wolf's story of the development of the reading brain covers many fields, from linguistics, archaeology and education to history, literature and neuroscience. In particular, she highlights the brain's astonishing plasticity, its “protean capacity” to reorganise itself to learn new skills. According to Wolf, we are all born with the “capacity to change what is given to us by nature.” Right from the cradle we are “genetically poised for breakthroughs”. She memorably paraphrases Darwin: “biologically and intellectually, reading allows the species to go ‘beyond the information given’ to create endless thoughts most beautiful and wonderful”.

For thousands of years, the process of engaging with texts has enriched us, both existentially and – as Wolf's remarkable book shows – biologically. Different languages put their own unique stamp on the brain, creating distinctive brain networks. Reading Chinese requires a different set of neuronal connections from those needed to read English. As the writer Joseph Epstein has said, “we are what we read”. Doctors treating a bilingual person who developed alexia (inability to read) after a stroke found astonishing evidence of this. Although he could no longer read English, the patient was still able to read Chinese.

2008 was unquestionably China’s year. From terrible earthquakes to space walks and, of course, the Olympics, China was rarely out of the headlines. Out of this year’s red tide of titles about this endlessly fascinating country, I found two particularly memorable: China: A-Z, by Kai Strittmatter (Haus) and China: Empire of Living Symbols, by Cecilia Lindqvist (Da Capo). Both use language as a springboard to explore Chinese culture and history.

For Strittmatter, a German correspondent in Beijing for 10 years, China is “a land of contradictions”. (This reminds me of Bohr’s delightful comment: “How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.”) After spending two decades in a Maoist labour camp, author Zhang Xianliang says: “it’s because China is a mystery, that it's so dear to me”. He is now a member of the Communist party and a successful businessman. Bend, adapt and move on seems to be the lesson here. Perhaps the Chinese have learnt this philosophy from one of their most beautiful plants – bamboo.

“No plant moves me as profoundly as bamboo,” writes Lindqvist, “most of all the sound of its thin, dry leaves as they rustle in the wind.” I agree completely. One of the first things we did in our garden was plant bamboo. I can see it now from my desk, swaying sensuously. In storms it can be blown almost flat but the next day it is upright again. According to Lindqvist, the resilience of this wonderful grass taught the Chinese a powerful lesson about how to face difficulties: “Bend, adapt, of course, but never abandon ideals. Never be defeated. Other winds will blow, all in good time.”

There are, of course, many Chinas – it is a vast continent unified by a common language, standardised as far back as 221 BC. In Strittmatter’s “pocket dictionary” of Chinese culture, it is “the magic of the characters themselves” that tells the story of this paradoxical land. An entry in his book about the family (jia) highlights the importance of the Confucian virtue of service. For the Chinese that means “sometimes serving the state, generally the family, and always the parents”. In a discussion of chopsticks (kuai zi) he notes drily, and entirely accurately, that they are primarily an “instrument for measuring a foreigner's ability to integrate”. From gan bei (cheers) to why xiao zi (petty bourgeois) was once an insult but is now cool (ku), this is a delightfully witty and insightful guide to today's China.

Lindqvist’s remarkable study broke new ground when it was first published in Sweden nearly twenty years ago. Reissued this year, her book explores the origins of modern Chinese writing in pictures and objects over 3,000 years old, such as oracle bones. An art historian who spent her life studying Chinese culture, Lindqvist weaves archaeological evidence of the earliest Chinese characters together with the country's history to demonstrate China's unique cultural continuity. It's believed written language arose first in Mesopotamia, although Wolf cites recent evidence that suggests Egyptian hieroglyphs may be older than even Sumerian cuneiform writing. No one uses either today, but modern Chinese script is recognisably similar to the earliest forms of writing in the region. China “is a continuation in direct lineal descent from the culture that arose in the long valley of the Yellow River during the 5th millennium before the beginning of our calendar.”

Lindqvist shows how the oldest characters are representational (“man” depicts a person in profile and dates back to the earliest oracle bones) and these remain part of today's language. In this beautifully written and illustrated book, language and images come together to tell a common story about the rootedness of the modern script in the ancient signs. Drawing on her long experience of the country – its sights, sounds and tastes (including a few recipes, such as pork with bamboo, onions and dried mushrooms) – Lindqvist creates an evocative and compelling celebration of language as a carrier of culture.

Another book that memorably explored our love affair with language this year was Off the Page: Writers Talk About Beginnings, Endings and Everything in Between, edited by Carole Burns (Norton) As a non-fiction writer, I have immense admiration for what novelists do with language. It seems to me fiction is a kind of alchemy, a mix of science and magic, fact and poetry. Attempts to explain this process often fall flat. But not Burns’ book. She interviews 43 authors about the writing life, from the nuts and bolts of fiction (how to breathe life into a character) to more general comments on inspiration and influences. AS Byatt starts her novels with a “block of colour” (“Babel Tower is black and red, because of blood and destruction”). For Paul Auster the story comes first: “I find the book in the process of writing it”.

All agree on one thing: writing and rewriting is never easy. Joyce Carol Oates finds the first draft the hardest: it's “like hacking one's way through a thick jungle with something like a butter knife”. Richard Bausch recalls how he wrote an entire 800-page novel before deciding it was really a short story. The process of cutting it down to size was, he says, like passing a kidney stone. Ouch. “Everyone goes a little mad as a writer”, says Alison Smith, and most interviewees agree. Even Martin Amis admits to the occasional “crazy-scientist cackle” while writing.

I sympathise. After finishing my last book (it took over three years), I just wanted to lie in a dark room and listen to soothing music. But I guess all writers are suckers for punishment – I’ve just started researching a new book: a cultural history of cities. It’s a fascinating time to be writing about urban history – this year we officially became an urban species with more people living in cities than in rural areas. There are of course many wonderful books about urban history. John Reader’s excellent Cities (2004) for one, and Peter Hall’s masterly Cities in Civilization (1998) which focuses on cities as centres of innovation and creativity. Interestingly, Hall only mentions China a few times in 1169 pages – a sign, perhaps, of how fast the world is changing and the astonishing rate of urbanisation in recent years. By 2020, there will be ten cities with more than twenty million citizens, gargantuan cities such as Jakarta, Delhi, Mexico City, São Paulo, New York, and Tokyo.

As it turns out, 2008 has been a vintage year for urban studies. Gail Fenske’s beautifully illustrated biography of the Woolworth Building, The Skyscraper and the City (Chicago), is one of my favourites. It is a superb study of the New York skyscraper that became emblematic of the world’s first signature skyline. Cass Gilbert’s inspiring cathedral to commerce opened in 1913. This Gothic spire offered New Yorkers passing by on the sidewalk “an experience of sheer vertical ascent unrivalled by the taller but stepped-back skyscrapers of the 1920s”. Fenske tells the fascinating story of this building’s inspiration, design, construction and its place in the city that has come to define the modern metropolis. The pinnacled tower no longer dominates New York’s vertiginous skyline but it remains a monument to the soaring ambition of its owner and architect, as well as to human aspiration and the desire to conquer vertical space.

Once it was London that broke all urban records, from size to pollution. On Brick Lane by Rachel Lichtenstein (out in paperback from Penguin in the UK) is a wonderfully evocative and personal portrait of a part of the East End of London that has been home to successive waves of immigrants. Chicksand Street, off Brick Lane, is where Bram Stoker’s Dracula slept in a coffin of Transylvanian earth. In the seventeenth century the Huguenots arrived, later there were Jews from Eastern Europe (including Lichtenstein’s own grandparents) and now it is home to a thriving Bangladeshi community. An artist, Lichtenstein has lived and worked in Brick Lane since the 1990s. She evocatively weaves together her own experiences with those of her family and interviews with former and current residents, ranging from a Bangladeshi schoolgirl (“Brick Lane is like a part of Bangladesh”), to the footloose London author Iain Sinclair, who used to work in the 300-year-old Truman brewery, and the poet Stephen Watts, who tells her: “There is a tidal wave of sound and memory rushing down that street.”

The “sensory encounter” with cities is the subject of Dell Upton’s Another City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces in the New American Republic, published this year by Yale. The stench and cacophony of early nineteenth-century American cities must have been terrible, judging from Upton’s impressive research. Using travel journals, diaries, and letters he shows how the “insistent and importunate sights, sounds and smells surpassed anything previously known in the new nation”. To read his book is to be immersed in the sensations of the city.

In New York, “public porkers” roamed the streets up until the middle of the nineteenth century. Indeed, horses, cattle, and goats shared the city with their two-legged owners. Most American cities had no drainage systems and rubbish was thrown out into the street forming a putrefying heap known as “corporation pie”, until scavengers hired by the city disposed of it. Upton argues convincingly that the experience of living in noisy, stinking antebellum cities spurred a reformist desire in many urban communities to realize the ideal of a shining city upon a hill: “The relics of civilized life that bombarded the senses, and the mixed throngs that crowded the streets of antebellum cities, were the crucible within which city dwellers formed a sense of what it meant to be a citizen of a republican city.”

Of course, building Utopia is easier said than done, as Robert H. Kargon and Arthur P. Molella show in Invented Edens: Techno-Cities of the Twentieth Century (MIT). Modernist reformers embraced technological solutions to solve nineteenth-century urban problems such as congestion, pollution and disease. From Ebenezer Howard’s seminal notion of the “Garden City” in the 1890s, to the new urbanist Celebration in Florida in the 1990s, Kargon and Molella argue that the techno-city was a bold social experiment, but one that in the end was doomed to failure. For despite using the latest technology, at the heart of these ideal cities was a nostalgic yearning for small-town life. What the authors term “techno-nostalgia” created a fatal fault line running through the techno-city: “the machine in the garden is a seductive dream, but a problematic reality”.

Kargon and Molella also discuss Oak Ridge in East Tennessee, a once secret city created as part of the Manhattan Project. The plan for this techno-city was inspired by the same nostalgic yearning for an idealized garden city, with tree-lined streets and “organic clusters” of houses. There is, however, a shocking irony about the fact that the people who lived in this utopian city were building a superweapon designed for one purpose – to annihilate cities.

The nuclear age is the subject of Nathan Hodge and Sharon Weinberger’s entertaining and informative A Nuclear Family Vacation : Travels in the World of Atomic Weaponry (Bloomsbury). Where are you going for your holidays next year? How about the Semipalatinsk Test Site in the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan? It is, apparently, a bona fide tourist destination. But remember to pack your Geiger counter and iodine tablets. As Hodge and Weinberger discover, the site is still highly radioactive. Most of the cold war scientists who lived in the nearby secret nuclear city of Kurchatov have now returned to Russia, but some technicians remain. Asked about the measures they took to protect themselves from radioactivity, one replies dryly: “Before every test, we drank grain alcohol.”

Hodge and Weinberger are a husband-and-wife team of defense reporters turned nuclear tourists. As the title suggests, the authors did indeed visit many of the places during their holidays: everywhere from Iran's Esfahan Uranium Conversion Facility, which supplies material to the top-secret uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, to the Nevada Test Site (a “sandbox for nuclear weapons designers”), and the Cheyenne Mountain bunker (“the ultimate cold war retreat”). In Los Alamos, where the first atomic bombs were designed, the authors noticed that the scientists sometimes had pictures of their favorite nuclear tests hanging above their desks and could describe, “in loving detail, the very personal reasons for their choices”. One scientist even named his son after the 1952 Ivy Mike H-bomb test. But Los Alamos hasn't designed a new nuke since the 1980s, and has become little more than a “repair shop for nuclear weapons”. The scientists are not happy: “the mood at the lab hovered somewhere between depression and despair”.

Revealingly, although Hodge and Weinberger interviewed many politicians and scientists, they failed to find anyone who could say what the purpose of the nuclear arsenal is now. The nuclear weapons industry, costing billions of dollars a year, is an enterprise that has “lost its way”. Their important conclusion is that it is time for the US to think the unthinkable and “explore practical options for eliminating the nuclear arsenal”.

No doubt that’s a policy Noam Chomsky would support. In Interventions, which appeared in the UK in paperback this year, he notes that the US spends as much on its military as the rest of the world combined. Another shocking fact: apparently the essays in this collection by one of today’s leading public intellectuals have been published in newspapers all around the world, but were largely ignored in the US. (Sounds like an opportunity for 3QD…)

According to Chomsky, the tacit assumption guiding all US foreign policy is now “we own the world, so what does it matter what others think?”. From Iraq and the war on terror, to Iran's nuclear ambitions and US support for Israel, he accuses Washington of accelerating the race to destruction. Hopefully, America will soon be turning over a new leaf under President Obama. Lead me to that radiant city upon a hill…

* * *

Read more of PD Smith's work at Kafka's mouse.

I’ve spent the weekend out in the cold, and as I sit here sipping a glass of hot water with a wedge of lemon, the song that’s been stuck in my head for the past few months returns yet again to mind. Unexpectedly, yet somehow logically, the taste of this citron chaud cold cure I first learned from a Parisian friend of mine has my ears ringing with “Un zeste de citron / Inceste de citron,” provisional titles for the song Serge (and Charlotte) Gainsbourg published some twenty-four years ago as “Lemon Incest.” I can already hear you saying, “Wow, it doesn’t take much…” but no, my mind isn’t always in the gutter—or, if it is, at least it’s in an artistic way. The material on Serge Gainsbourg—his discography, filmography, biography, bibliography, and various other -ographies of all sorts—is inexhaustible. Equally inexhaustible is my ability to listen to this particular song over and over and over; though this may be reason to worry—as if I needed yet another—I’ve decided my fascination with it is worth investigating for what it may have to say about the creative process (pun intended … and no, I didn’t say procreative process!).

I first heard Serge’s mellifluous voice flowing from the stereo in the apartment of a friend of a friend (merci, Elise); I’d just moved to New York—literally the day before—and the tracks on Couleur Café, a posthumous compilation expanding upon the eponymous 1964 EP, intrigued and disoriented me. Where did this music come from, Africa? French Guiana? France proper? But soon this city began its inexorable take-over of my life, and my memory of those beats ceded to more pressing questions: where am I, where have I come from, and just where do I want to go? All those questions most people ask themselves soon after arrival here. But then Serge—Gainsbourg père, one might call him, given his love of literature and painting, as well as the creative enterprises many of his family members have also undertaken—came back with a vengeance.

I See New York, New York U.S.A. (Oh, c’est haut!)

Upon moving here I had a brief stint in a bookshop. The pay was miserable, but never since my childhood evenings at the library had I been able to spend so much calm time totally surrounded by books. One day I came across book with sans serif pink and purple lettering and what looked to be a reclining nude—but male, smoking, and photographed rather than painted—on the cover. The subtitle of Sylvie Simmons’s biography Serge Gainsbourg: A Fistful of Gitanes said it all, and periodically over the next eight years I enquired about the book whenever I found myself in a bookstore: all had carried it at some point in the past, none had it in stock. This September I finally got lucky, and delved right into the pages between its fruity covers on the subway ride home that evening. Reflecting on the fact that in many respects, for all their promise, my later cubicle gigs never gave me as much future fodder as that humble little bookstore had, I was immensely grateful for my past servitude and current freedom … and for having finally found the bio.

I had an inkling that the difficulties and triumphs of any New Yorker paled in comparison to his, but I had no idea; were he alive still, he’d have turned eighty this year. As you can guess, given his dates (1928–1991), young Lucien Ginsburg—an evidently Jewish (albeit assimilated) aspiring painter in mid-century Paris who left high school and then the École des Beaux Arts to follow in his immigrant father’s footsteps to play in various piano bars—was in for a hard time. So how can anyone sublimate the experience of being forced to wear a patch that could get you shipped off to the camps, escaping to stay with a family of hospitable strangers in a small town hours away from home, and hiding behind a different family name? By turning it all—and yourself—into art, of course. It may have taken three decades, but all that, with his experience in the military added in to boot, became a source to be raided for his 1975 album Rock Around the Bunker, complete with song titles like “Nazi Rock,” “Yellow Star,” and “S.S. in Uruguay.” The whole thing was done to music reminiscent of the fifties and sung in a very Elvis-esque tone, though before long he decided on the more radical step of splitting himself in two by creating an alter ego (more on that later). This is one approach to creativity: be yourself, have that taken away; reinvent yourself, be someone else; assume the personae of others, and make them your own. Rock around the bunker that is your ego and your life.

(Lolli)Pop Genius

The idea of genius comes up repeatedly in his bio and many of his television appearances and interviews. I don’t know that Whitney Houston qualified for the epithet in the mid-eighties when he said she was a genius (see below), but in light of his considerable output, he unequivocally does. He appears not to have liked the term, or was at least too humble to ever have applied it to himself—though he had no qualms about taking credit for his ugliness, saying that “ugliness has more going for it than beauty does: it endures.” So what’s an ugly man obsessed with beauty to do? Expose everything in its own particular type of beauty. According to one interview, he gave up painting because “I wanted to have an artistic genius, and all I had was talent.” Being disinclined to settle for mediocrity, he must’ve rightly felt that in music, at least, he had more than talent going for him.

I’d twist the term genius to say it’s applicable to his work insofar as he’s captured the sense of genius loci as it might’ve been understood by the mythic Wandering Jew—the man who’s seen it all, experienced it all, lived a long time (and will, indeed, by condemnation or not, live on forever), all the while remaining somewhat excluded. In his oeuvre, Gainsbourg combines many traditions—rock, classical, jazz, reggae, rap—to create what many now consider one of the keystones of popular music; but it’s worth remembering that it wasn’t always popular, and certainly can’t be traced back to any one tradition. Instead, his genius was precisely that ability to transcend place and time (if not language), loot tradition for all it’s worth, and put out something that no one, anywhere, had ever heard before—say, a song for an innocent little girl about lollipops and how much she loves it when her lollipop’s anise-flavored sugar runs down her throat…. A tender France Gall won the 1966 Eurovision contest (an American Idol of sorts, sans painfully televised tryouts) with just such a song, and was later upset to learn that its lyrics could insinuate something other than her love of candy—could a nineteen-year-old back then really have been so pure, so much more naïve than today’s nineteen-year-old? And what’s wrong with a little insinuation when it leads to such sweet, scary, laughable clips as the one of young Gall and not-quite-so-young Gainsbourg singing that duet? One of my main criteria for whether something is art or not is how deeply it changes your idea of self and your life, and it sounds like this song changed France’s life deeply indeed. Over the years several more muses would come into his life to set the scandal bar slightly higher than it ever had been before.

Oh Daddy Oh (Daddy Oh…)

[Parental/filial advisory: this is the part with lemons and incest in it.] Gainsbourg had been married, had a child, and divorced by the time he met Jane Birkin, who had also been married, had a child, and divorced. Three years after briefly baring all at seventeen (take that, Mademoiselle Gall!) in a playful scene of Antonioni’s Blowup, Birkin found herself in Paris for a film test, and was set as heroine opposite Gainsbourg’s hero in Slogan. But I cannot go into everyone’s lengthy artistic c.v.s here: long story short, their union produced a daughter named Charlotte. She is now a singer, actress, and mother in her own right, after debuting at age thirteen (take that, Madame Birkin!) in the (in)famous “Lemon Incest,” the aforementioned 1984 duet with her father. While many people may be familiar with that song, not everyone knows that it also appeared as the last track of an album the two released together in 1986, Charlotte For Ever. My personal favorite is track three, “Oh Daddy Oh.” Aside from its catchy tune, it’s even more interesting when you hear some of the words this father puts into his daughter’s mouth:

Oh Daddy oh Daddy oh Oh Daddy oh Daddy oh

Tu te prends pour Alan Poe You take yourself for Edgar Poe

Huysmans Hoffmann et Rimbaud Huysmans Hoffmann and Rimbaud

Such references—to the Decadent author of Au Rebours (Against Nature), the poet in Offenbach’s semi-fictitious eponymous opera, and two other poets—says a lot about this particular Daddy, and his ability to make fun of himself via words penned to be tossed right back at him by his own daughter. Much as he was a musician, reading his lyrics one notes how he was equally a poet; not only that, but a poet who more often than not was capable of keeping remarkable rhyme schemes without having to break tradition, and while sustaining double, sometimes triple entendres. I suppose he left his revolutionary energies to the parts of his life that lay outside the strictly compositional precepts of verse writing—i.e., the sexual, political, and non-verbal artistic realms.

Returning briefly to Birkin’s sparklingly blonde appearance in Blowup, another curious connection emerges: the brunette friend with whom she harasses the photographer is played by none other than Gillian Hills. Three years earlier, a nineteen-year-old blonde Hills (a familiar age, n’est pas?) had sung at Serge’s side in another episode that falls well into the category of his recurring theme of young women and old men, to directly quote his 1959 song “Jeunes femmes et vieux messieurs.” See this excerpt from their 1963 “Une petite tasse d’anxieté:”

[Elle:] [Her:]

Où m’emmenez-vous ? Where are you taking me?

Etes-vous donc devenu fou ? Have you gone crazy?

[Lui:] [Him:]

Un p’tit tour au bois A little ride through the woods

Si vous n’avez pas peur de moi If you’re not afraid of me…

[Elle:] [Her:]

Mais vous vous trompez You’re mistaken,

Je n’ suis pas celle que vous croyez I’m not what you take me for…

Between the sixties and the eighties, the Vieille Canaille’s young woman counterpart is seen in her transformation, over several albums, from uncooperative lass to instigating vixen, culminating in “Lemon Incest.” For those who are ready to accuse the old man of going too far, here’s the key verse, sung by Charlotte:

L’amour que nous n’ f’rons jamais ensemble The love we’ll never make (to one another)

Est le plus rare le plus troublant Is the most rare, the most troubling

Le plus pur le plus énivrant The purest, the most intoxicating

Sublime love is all of those things, and when a thirteen-year-old tells you so, how can you denounce it? Sure, she may not yet have the necessary life experience, but compare this to Marilyn’s songs from the fifties (especially her rendition of Cole Porter’s “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” in Some Like it Hot), and tell me these women didn’t fully determine the words they sang and how they sang them.

Now for that alter ego I mentioned earlier: a lot of artists are known for their multiple personalities, be they clinically certified or not. While Gainsbourg always kept things clean within the family, he was nevertheless a very open, free man. In the late seventies the highly cultured, somehow elegant (at least melodically speaking) Gainsbourg created an alter ego named Gainsbarre; the latter was a drunken lout, a provocateurconstantly enveloped in a blue-grey cloud of smoke issuing from the ever-present Gitane in his mouth, and loved to make appearances on live national television. Simmons points out that Gainsbarre came into being shortly after Birkin walked out on him, and it was only a few short years before he was even conducting interviews with himself, the civil, suit jacket–wearing Gainsbourg delving into the depths of the sunglass-masked, leather jacket–wearing Gainsbarre to discuss his/their courage, fears, having to wear a star… in short, a philosophical conversation.

Such moments showed Gainsbarre at his best, whereas his appearances on other TV shows often proved superlative in other, less flattering ways. The two most well known occasions were what I’ll call the Houston incident and the 500-Franc incident. In the first, he and Whitney Houston were guests on a popular talk show. Less than two minutes into it, after claiming his mic doesn’t work, he abruptly interrupts Michel Drucker, the interviewer/interpreter, saying “You are not Reagan, and I am not Gorbachev, so don’t try, eh! I said I want to fu*k her.” (Mais j’ai bien dit que je voulait la baiser.) The comparison he used for that scold is curious, and reveals a certain political awareness one might think such a drunken man wouldn’t have. To run with it, there are similarities: both Gainsbourg and Gorbachev were of Russian descent; both grew up under totalitarian regimes; both help foster a disintegration of barriers and greater cultural (not to say economic) exchange on many levels. But as far as I know, Gainsbourg never did a Vuitton ad.

But he did burn money in other, less fashionable ways. In the 500-Franc incident he was seen, again on live national television, illegally taking his lighter to a bill and burning roughly the same percentage of his total earning he paid in taxes. He’s careful to specify that he knows it’s illegal but doesn’t care, and, more importantly, that his anger stems from the fact that the government funnels the money into nuclear (energy and weapons) and other such wastes, not to the poor. Remind you of any other administration?

Un Role Model

Ultimately, Lucien Ginsburg/Serge Gainsbourg/Gainsbarre/Le Vieille Canaille was not just an unparalleled artist, but he was “un role model,” a linguistically mixed concept I’ll awkwardly translate, just as so many of his lyrics lose their grace in translation: in latter-day, anglo-filled French, un role model = a role model (un bon exemple); in English (sure, add the hyphen), he’s plainly an un-role model, the sort of man you might never want your son to take after, but undeniably a role model nonetheless—perhaps a role model of the sort clearly attested to by dozens of little boys on a children's TV show dressed up as him, complete with cigarette and (hopefully faux) glass of liquor in hand, five-o'clock shadows on their sunglass-clad faces, and greyed hair singing a modified version of one of his old songs as an homage.

To round out this picture of the young painter turned musician turned activist—the real renaissance man—along comes his (semi-autobiographical) novel Evguénie Sokolov, whose protagonist is a struggling young painter suffering from a terrible, chronic case of gas. He literally takes a shitty situation and harnesses his shortcoming to create pieces he terms “gasograms,” much like the surrealists’ automatic paintings (Gainsbourg adored Dalì). In both the book and the song, young Evguénie Sokolov, and by extension his creator, echoes the idea that taboos are simply time-dependant limits he’s unfettered by and will, on the contrary, turn to his advantage where possible.

For myself, in my own creative endeavors, the points and ideas I take from Gainsbourg’s songs and life are most encouraging. Critics often have an agenda that doesn’t apply to you. Critics are often wrong; when they aren’t wrong, it behooves you to find out why. Style both matters and doesn’t matter at all. The style of the day, in particular (i.e., the twist, les ye-ye), can be nice but is often forgettable. Smoking and drinking can facilitate great works of art. Smoking and drinking can kill you. Proper grammatical construction can be a hindrance (i.e., “Je t’aime, moi non plus,” “I love you, me neither”). Amid all the hot air—intestinal and otherwise—beauty (often masked in ugliness) reigns supreme.

For months I’ve been waiting for the right time to address this adoration I harbor for Serge, and it never comes, but as my citron chaud runs low I know I have a lot more to listen to before we’re done. Now I’m just waiting for some linguist or French music and lit specialist to begin the lexicography of Gainsbourg’s multi-entendres.

A previous 3QD link about Gainsbourg is here, and previous Lunar Refractions can be seen here.

All images courtesy of this site. More great clips can be watched here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

///
Pythagoras and me @ 2 am
Jim Culleny

I could be up all night
without a single line to write;
………………………
I might be ass-in-chair till 1st light
eyes propped with toothpicks.
………………………
Open, I might sit with digits
poised over a keyboard
………………………
like condors on thermals
scanning the earth for a bite

………………………

the desert page dry and white.
I might even catch some moon-talk.
………………………

She speaks, you know
—whispers to Venus when I turn my head.
………………………
So how might I know then what she said?
Telepathy, a poet’s curse, or worse.
………………………
Imagination, with its ears perked
for a little Music of the Spheres
………………………
(a defunct old idea that occurred to a Greek
once who was also up almost in tears
………………………
way past bedtime waiting for a theory
or the sense to hit the sheets).

///

Martha Nussbaum

President-elect Barack Obama will face many challenges in foreign policy, but forging a productive relationship with India will be high on that list. President Clinton took a keen interest in India, and, especially, in issues of rural development. He visited rural development projects with his usual zest and curiosity, taking a particularly keen interest in the situation of women. After his Presidency, Clinton has continued his work on issues of poverty and development. He was also virtually the only major international leader to stand up right after the Gujarat pogrom of 2002 and publicly condemn the perpetrators.

President Bush, by contrast, focused his efforts on the nuclear deal, more or less neglecting issues of poverty and development. One bright spot in the generally dismal record of his dealings with India, however, was the decision to deny a visa to Narendra Modi, who had been invited to lecture here by a group of Non-Resident Indians (NRI’s). The State Department cited his role in the Gujarat pogrom as its reason for denying him a diplomatic visa and revoking his tourist visa. This courageous stance in favor of human rights and against the perpetrators of a genocide was surprising but highly welome to the large number of U. S.-based scholars of India who had petitioned the State Department in this matter.

What course will President Obama choose? Will he, like Clinton, focus on poverty, quality of life, gender equality, and an end to the politics of hate? Or will he follow the lead of the NRI community, focusing on entrepreneurship and nuclear partnership? Much discussion, this week, has focused on Obama’s appointment of Sonal Shah to his transition team. I shall not add to the growing volume of commentary on Shah’s links to the VHP-A, since she has already issued one statement condeming the politics of hate, and will soon be invited to clarify her position further. Shah personally is involved with only the VHP-A’s relief efforts. There is room for concern, however, that someone with such close ties to an organization that has been complicit in terrorist activities against Muslims and Christians should hold such a prominent place. The whole issue deserves the further clarification that it will receive.

Instead of pursuing that question further, however, I should like to focus on a letter written by then-candidate Obama to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, dated September 23, 2008, and published in India Abroad, the October 10 issue. I address these remarks to my former University of Chicago Law School colleague in the spirit of the type of respectful yet searching criticism that I know he will recognize as a hallmark of our faculty workshops and discussions.

The Obama letter has three slightly disturbing characteristics.

First, the letter gives lengthy praise to the nuclear deal, without acknowledging the widespread debate about the wisdom of that deal in both nations. Perhaps, however, this silence simply reflects politeness: Obama is surely aware that Singh has been an enthusiastic backer of the deal, risking much political capital in the process.

Second, the letter speaks of future cooperation that will “tap the creativity and dynamism of our entrepreneurs, engineers and scientists,” particularly in the area of alternative energy sources, but never mentions a future partnership in the effort to eradicate poverty and illiteracy. This silence, unlike the first, cannot be explained by politeness, since Singh has devoted a great deal of attention to issues of rural poverty, and it is plausible to think that he could have gotten a lot further had he had more help from abroad.

Third, and most disturbing, the letter commiserates with Singh for the Delhi bomb blasts, but makes no mention of Gujarat or Orissa. Obama offers Singh:

“my condolences on the painful losses your citizens have suffered in the recent string of terrorist assaults. As I have said publicly, I deplore and condemn the vicious attacks perpetrated in New Delhi earlier this month, and on the Indian embassy in Kabul on July 7. The death and destruction is reprehensible, and you and your nation have my deepest sympathy. These cowardly acts of mass murder are a stark reminder that India suffers from the scourge of terrorism on a scale few other nations can imagine.”

Obama’s use of the word “terrorism” to describe acts thought to be perpetrated by Muslims, while not using that same word for acts perpetrated by Hindus, is ominous. Muslims suffer greatly in India, as elsewhere, from the stereotype of the violent Muslim, and both justice and truth demand that we all do what we can to undermine these stereotypes, bringing the guilty of all religions to justice, and protecting the innocent. (The recent refusals of local bar associations in India to defend Muslims accused of complicity in terrorism, under threat of violence, shows that the rule of law itself hangs in the balance.) Particularly odd is Obama’s omission of events in Orissa, which were and are ongoing. His phrase “the scourge of terrorism” is virtually Bushian in its suggestion that terrorism is a single thing (presumably Muslim) and that many nations suffer from that single thing. (Note that it is not even true that most world terrorism is caused by Muslims. Our University of Chicago colleague Robert Pape’s careful quantitative study of terrorism worldwide concludes that the Tamil Tigers, a secular political organization, are the bloodiest in the world. Moreover, Pape argues convincingly that even when religion is used as a screen for terror, the real motives are most often political, having to do with local conflicts.)

Obama’s letter was written during a campaign. Perhaps it reflects awareness of the priorities of NRI’s who were working hard in that campaign. At this point, however, he can start with a clean slate and decide how to order his priorities regarding India. Let us hope that, like Bill Clinton, he will give the center of his attention to issues of human development (poverty, gender equality, education, health), and that, when discussing the issue of religious violence, he will study carefully the violence in Gujarat and Orissa, learn all he can about the organizations of the Sangh Parivar, and adopt a policy that denounces religious violence in all its forms. To mention one immediate issue, it would be a disaster for global justice if Obama, as President, were to heed the demands of the diaspora community to grant Narendra Modi a visa — especially since the Tehelka expose has made so clear the cooperation of the government of the state of Gujarat in those horrendous acts of violence.

President Obama has repeatedly shown a deeply felt commitment to the eradication of a politics based upon hate. Can we have confidence that he will carry that commitment into his relationship with India, even when the demands of powerful leaders of the NRI community make that difficult? I certainly hope so.

Martha Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at The University of Chicago, and the author of The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future.

Azra Raza reviews Emily Post: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners by Laura Claridge

Laura Claridge’s enormously enjoyable, carefully researched, exhaustively annotated, insightful and engaging biography Emily Post: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of Manners, made two points very clear to me; first, from birth to death, we humans need constant guidance about how to behave, and second, minding our manners can overcome even some of our most glaring deficiencies. What is fascinating about the story of Post is how startlingly fresh the message of her little blue book, Etiquette, has remained since its first appearance in 1922 (Ms. Claridge points out that “the French word for ticket, used to remind citizens to distinguish between private and public space, was actually the source of the English word etiquette”) and how universal its relevance, transcending race and nationality. One review of Etiquette when it was first published began with Mathew Arnold’s statement “Conduct is three-fourths of life.” As Ms. Claridge puts it succinctly, “The subject hardly mattered: funerals or flower arrangements, broken hearts or broken glasses, Emily held her audience in esteem, and she meant to teach her readers, would-be “Best People,” whatever their background, race or creed, to do likewise.” For deep down, the real meaning of manners, according to Ms. Post, is a demonstration of sensitivity to the feelings of others. “Best Society is not a fellowship, nor does it seek to exclude those who are not of exalted birth, but it is an association of gentle-folk [in which] charm of manner…..and instinctive consideration for the feelings of others, are the credentials by which society the world over recognizes its chosen members.”

In 2002, my husband Harvey Preisler died. The aftermath was my own painful awakening to the woeful lack of even rudimentary knowledge about the correct or polite way to behave among the most well meaning friends and family members who came forward to offer their condolences. For example, one female friend, while crying her eyes out, (precisely the wrong thing to do, per Ms. Post) began by offering to take me out to a single’s bar. A surprisingly recurring comment, also meant to be well-meaning, but one which left me baffled about how to respond, was, “Sorry to hear Harvey died, but you are looking well!” Perhaps the most patently absurd was a message left on my answering machine by a colleague saying how sorry she was that my husband was dead, but, “Don’t worry, you will join him soon and then the two of you can live happily ever after in heaven.” I remember distinctly, the evening when I was getting ready for Harvey’s memorial service, just a little over 24 hours after his death. I picked up my wedding band and looked to my sisters for guidance, “Should I still wear this?” “Yes!” As Ms. Claridge writes, “Only Emily Post understood the power of routine to hold one’s raw emotions at bay.” No wonder Etiquette was “second only to the Bible as the book most often stolen from public libraries.” Post counseled the bereaved wisely in these words, “At no time does solemnity so posses our souls as when we stand deserted at the brink of darkness into which our loved one has gone. And the last place in the world where we would look for comfort at such a time is in the seeming artificiality of etiquette; yet it is in the moment of deepest sorrow that etiquette performs its most vital and real service.”

A testament to Ms. Claridge’s own extraordinary sensitivity is her careful recounting of the comfort Joan Didion derived from re-reading Post’s Etiquette when dealing with her own private grief. This is how Ms. Claridge describes it: “Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking identifies explicitly with Emily’s words about mourning. The unlikely pairing of Didion and Post was cited often in the impressive array of reviews showered on the bestseller, a winner of the National Book Award and a runner-up for the Pulitzer. Many journalists couldn’t understand why someone as edgy and postmodern as Didion chose Etiquette to succor her. Didion explained: she had been taught from childhood to “go to the literature” in “time of trouble,” and so she pursued everything she could find about death’s anguish: memoirs, novels, how-to books, inspirational tomes, The Merck Manual, ‘Nothing I read about grief seemed to exactly express the craziness of it,’ Didion says. The one thing that spoke to her, finally, was the “Funerals” Chapter in Emily Post’s blue book on etiquette. Only Emily Post understood the power of routine to hold one’s raw emotions at bay. Only Emily Post made suffering bearable.”

Ms. Claridge points out that “Ten years before she died, Emily Post would rank second only to Eleanor Roosevelt in a Pageant magazine list of the mid-century’s most powerful women in America, in which 272 women journalists judged the influence of the country’s prominent females.”

In keeping with the style and tradition of her previous two brilliant biographies, Tamara de Lempicka and Norman Rockwell, in Emily Post, Ms. Claridge once again provides the reader with invaluable lessons in the traditions and customs of a bygone age by painstakingly reconstructing the evolving historical landscape and the cultural context surrounding her subject. Daughter of the famous architect Bruce Price and Josephine Lee (whose father “Washington Lee possessed a post-war fortune in need of spending”), Emily Post had an enchanted childhood in the type of New York high society graphically portrayed by her contemporary writer Edith Wharton. One of my favorites, also an example of Ms. Claridge’s scrupulous research and attention to detail, is the section where she describes Emily’s association with the Statue of Liberty through her beloved “Uncle Frank” (Frank Hopkinson Smith). “Miss Liberty was a gift from the French government meant to stick in the British craw upon America’s centennial. Her arm and torch had been displayed in Madison Square Park, at Twenty-fourth Street, since 1876, the next seven years spent in a national campaign to finance the statue’s foundations. Now, the construction funded at last, Uncle Frank was the man of the hour. Almost daily it seemed, Hop Smith’s name appeared conspicuously in the city newspapers, as if he were as important as Liberty herself, whose concrete support would cost the government $8.94 per cubic yard. The end of the nineteenth century was an era of numbers, an age devoted to codifying and classifying, calculations were next to godliness. Expenses were meticulously detailed for the public: Frank Smith’s base required $51,000 to $52,000. To be made of concrete composed of sand, cement, and broken stones, it would measure 93 feet square at the bottom and 70 at the top and stand 48 feet, 8 inches high. The pedestal, rising to an altitude of 112 feet, would require a platform 67 feet square at the base and 40 at the top. Reciting the numbers reinforced the statue’s significance: Who would have thought so many layers compiled the Statue of Liberty’s foundation?” “While the statue’s foundation took form, Emily was allowed to explore the cavernous secret rooms in the monument’s hollow interior.”

Ms. Claridge’s detailed account of Post’s work routines which continued literally to her dying days, and her ability to adapt to the shifting times is nothing short of inspiring. Living through the Great Depression, stock market crashes, two World Wars, the tragic loss of a brilliant father, a philandering husband and a beloved son in the prime of his life, Ms. Claridge establishes beyond a shadow of doubt that Emily Post’s one powerful anchor continued to be her exceptional dedication to work. “When her son died, Emily lost her bearings. Her suffering alternately numbed and roiled her for months, and then she fought to find her way back. From the few accounts of this period, Emily’s ability to carry on depended upon her filling every moment of her day. From developing her garden skills, to working crossword puzzles, to writing, to creating intricate models for her friends’ architects: she wanted no time to reflect.” And further down, Ms. Claridge perceptively points out, “Shrewdly, she figured out a way to keep her loss at bay while staying connected to those she had loved: through writing a textbook on architecture, she would instruct others on the Bruce tradition” (both father and son were named Bruce).

It is this astonishing strength that only a few outstanding individuals among us manage to display in times of extreme crises that separates the extraordinary from the ordinary. And it is in this context, above everything else, that Emily Post reminds me most of none other than Ms. Claridge. While this remarkable writer was working on the Post biography, she was diagnosed with a particularly lethal form of brain tumor with little chance of survival beyond a few months. Despite the bleakest of outlooks, (at one point, her ICU physician called me to request that I counsel the family to “let nature take its course with Laura now”), Ms. Claridge not only defied all odds by surviving, she restarted her work on the book in a miraculously short period of time after her surgery. Even as her brain was being regularly assaulted by the insults of radiation and chemotherapy, Ms. Claridge found her own grounding in meticulously researching and recounting another great woman’s life story. The book Emily Post, recognized early for its merit through Harvard’s Neumann Foundation and cash award, is not only a fantastic personal achievement for Ms. Claridge, it also stands as the finest testament to the indomitable sublimity of the human spirit. Both Post and Claridge transmuted tragedy into constructive pursuits, thereby representing the best of good behavior in good times and bad.

Bravo Ms. Post. Long Live Ms. Claridge.

(Picture shows from left: Margit Oberrauch, Sughra Raza, Abbas Raza, Laura Claridge and Azra Raza).

Elatia Harris

One autumn decades ago, my then husband and I drove around France, hunting down art masterpieces. We were young and in no hurry to go home, on a mission to be swept off our feet. And France was very obliging that way.  We should have been happy — did we not live for love and art? I’ll never know how far from happy he was, but I was unhappy in spite of being in love and in France, and that’s pretty unhappy.

We came to Colmar, an Alsatian town of such reproachful quaintness that the locals might as well have wandered about in costume. The idea was to spend the day with the Isenheim Altarpiece, housed in the Musee d’Unterlinden, a modern structure built around the ruins of a Late Gothic convent. I knew the nearly 500 year-old work the way you do from art history class — tiny figures writhing inside churchy frames on a textbook page, 35 mm slides so old they reduced all European painting to a green, amber and russet wash on the pockmarked projection screen of the lecture hall. And I had come to know the painter, Matthias Grunewald — that’s a self-portrait under the title, above right — from his drawings, which had shown me I was in for something intense. You could count on German painting for that, couldn’t you?

Ready, as always, to be overwhelmed by painting, I made my way to the big light vaulted room where the Isenheim Altarpiece had been displayed ever since it narrowly escaped destruction by a mob in the French Revolution. I was geared up for a complex and imposing work about 12 feet across and 10 feet high, oil on huge panels made into hinged wings that opened out to three different views.  It could not possibly be seen all at once, art historians had written. Sometime after World War II, the hinged panels were dismantled and mounted free-standing, allowing you to walk among the three views: the Crucifixion, the Madonna and Child, the Annunciation, the Transfiguration, the concert of angels, the meeting in the desert of Paul the Anchorite and St. Anthony the Great. His demons.

Familiar territory, no? And, oh, had I not studied, believing my time with this work, though long in arriving, was as inevitable as the transit of Venus? I did not then understand that you could over-prepare for experience, grinding to powder your sense of encounter, building in a cosmic letdown as sturdy as a masonry ramp. This would not be the day I found out about that, however, for turning a corner into the big vaulted 700 year-old room in the Musee d’Unterlinden, I came face to face with an image of immeasurable suffering.

It was the Crucifixion, and it may be wrong to post a photo here, where few readers will take it to heart. For a long time, I have wanted to write for readers here about the Isenheim Altarpiece, but have stopped at two obstacles. First, while Internet photography is orders of magnitude better than any photos available to me back in the day, this work of art defies the camera like few others, defies it not like a painting but like an ocean. Second, it is not just religious painting, but passionately religious painting, and readers might be moved to dismiss it on those grounds, aided by photography that fails to draw them into that parallel world of freedom from the usual philosophical constraints.

Art is the direct language of the human condition, cutting through our stupefactions and sophistries with its matchless power to surprise. To do as I did, to go to Colmar and abide with these images, is to put yourself in the way of an infinite work of art, one that will throw you, and then haunt you, forever. It actually operates more like music — it will get you. It will show you the pain beyond naming and the love beyond love, and show you that you already know these things — and feel them, and are made of them — no matter what you think.

Although I am, despite many inhibitions, writing about the work of art that I find more powerful than any other, I am not alone in being superlatively moved by it. I am not alone, either, in appreciating the feebleness of words and photos to give an idea of it. It’s not about ideas — why would I want to give you an idea? For all I know I could be like the street ranter who — merely by quoting from it — gives you the very distinct idea not to read the Bible. There are works of art that are annihilating — blessedly so — to your powers to conjure them, and this is one of them. That annihilation can resolve to extreme curiosity about the painter. If it does, you’ll be almost on your own, out there with others who have been so curious they could find steady ground only in their imaginations. For of Matthias Grunewald — my software won’t make an umlaut over the “u,” but it doesn’t matter, because that’s not his real name — precious little is known.

Compared to Albrecht Durer, his almost exact contemporary, Mathis Gotthart or Nithart has barely a biography. There is no date of birth, and there was no teacher anyone can be sure of, although as a Rhinelander painting in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, Mathis must have known of Martin Schongauer. The plot of Paul Hindemith’s opera of the mid-1930’s, Mathis der Maler (Mathis the Painter), is counterfactual — except that it is established that Mathis was in great distress over the Peasants’ War. In the summer of 1525, when Mathis was within several years of the end of his life, 300,000 peasants rose up, from Muhlhausen in the north to Bern in the south. About 100,000 of these insurgents died, and not in battle, for, barely protesting, they were simply cut down. Order was restored, and for a long time after Mathis was known to wear a dark bandage over his face.

W. G. Sebald’s prose poem, After Nature, was published in 2003, shortly after he died, although it was written much earlier. Now, there’s a writer who can show you Mathis. In the first section of After Nature, “…As the Snow on the Alps,” Sebald enters the painter’s mind — I am convinced of it.  First, he quotes Dante.

                      Now go, the will within us being one:

                      You be my guide, Lord, master from this day,

                      I said to him; and when he, moved, led on

                      I entered on the steep wild-wooded way.

It is hard not to understand his use of these lines as both an allusion to the Dantesque themes in the Isenheim Altarpiece, and an invocation of the painter. How many people have summoned the painter to be their guide on the steep wild-wooded way?  They have seen the face of the painter in many presumed self-portraits, usually in St. Paul the Anchorite, below right. Alone in the Theban desert for almost 100 years, clothed and fed by a single palm tree until a raven began flying in with a daily ration of bread, Paul knew the contemplative life, and his grave was dug by lions. Adding decades to the face of the self-portrait drawing under the title, you can see the resemblance — but St. Anthony, too, below left, resembles the painter in a more courtly mode.

Sebald makes much of there being two of Mathis, one wilder than the other, one Grunewald, one Nithart. At the death of Mathis, Sebald tells what he left of wordly goods that were not paint, and then of paint, and then of luxury togs.

                                      lead white and albus,

                       Paris red, cinnabar, slate green,

                       mountain green, alchemy green, blue

                       vitreous pastes and minerals

                       from the Orient. Clothing, too,

                       beautiful, item: a gold-yellow pair of hose,

                       tunics, cinnamon-coloured, the lapels overlaid

                       in purpled velvet with black stitching,

                       a grey atlas doublet, a red slouch hat

                       and much exquisite adornment besides.

                       The estate in truth is that of two men, but

                       whether Grunewald, an inventor of singular

                       hues, shared his departed friend’s liking

                       for such gaudy arrayment

                       we cannot presume to say.

Mathis, painter of extremes, may have sensed a doubleness in his nature — more than most artists do, that is. Much more. In his self-portraits, Durer famously played up a likeness to Christ as most contemporaries would have recognized Him, but Mathis probably gave his own face to Lucifer. If it is Lucifer, blending in — sort of — with the musical angels who serenade the Madonna, sawing away at his instrument more timorously than the others, beringed as others are not, and more extravagantly befeathered than they.

A contemporary scholar, Dr. Ruth Mellinkoff, makes that argument and supports it soundly. I believe her because, although she was writing many, many years later, her interpretation corresponds to my own thinking the day I saw the Isenheim Altarpiece, and I am under no obligation to have better reasons than that for what I hold to be true of art. Is this not the very picture of a fallen angel setting about regaining insider status? Of a painter who is both insider and exile, dandy and damned? To have painted as Mathis did, you have to have known hell — you just don’t have to have ruled over it.

You must also have seen an eclipse, Sebald writes — “a catastrophic incursion of darkness.” In October of 1502, when Mathis was around 30, “the moon’s shadow slid over Eastern Europe,” and Mathis,

                              who repeatedly was in touch

                              with the Aschaffenburg Court Astrologer Johann Indagine,

                              will have travelled to see this event of the century,

                              awaited with great terror, the eclipse of the sun,

                              so will have become a witness to

                              the secret sickening away of the world,

This then is how Mathis imagined the state of erosion, after nature, that he painted, the “ruining of life that in the end will consume even the stones.”

Mathis believed in Salvation, so it is possible to see his masterpiece as darker, even, than he can have conceived of it himself or intended it to be seen. Among those tights and doublets and rings, among those glorious colors he left behind — colors reputed to have been different from those of other painters, but they were not: he only used them differently — were found Lutheran tracts. The Isenheim Altarpiece was completed two years before the Reformation got underway, and it was painted for a special purpose. The Antonite friars at Isenheim, whose Abbot commissioned the work from Mathis, were a medical order, tending the sick for whom there were no cures. There was a plague of ergotism in the land, and those who ate milled rye could become fantastically sick, losing their minds and rotting as if with leprosy before, unswiftly, they died.

As there was no cure, so there was no prevention — anyone, at any time, could become ill like that. When they did, they were brought to the chapel at Isenheim to have before them a testament to the redemptive power of suffering. They were lain down there the better to find meaning in torment, to place hope in a distant realm, to believe that the love of God included them still and would bear them up. This is where the enormous winged altarpiece, in those days, fit in.

Michael Blim

“The first man who, having fenced off a plot of land, thought of saying “this is mine” and found people simple enough to believe him was the real founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, how many miseries and horrors might the human race have been spared by the one who, upon pulling up the stakes or filling in the ditch, had shouted to his fellow men, “Beware of listening to this imposter; you are lost, if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and that the earth belongs to no one.”
–Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men”

Two weeks ago (see “Stop the Home Wrecking and Protect America’s Future, 3qd, 11/3/08), I argued that homeowners in trouble should be helped, and that helping them should necessarily trigger a discussion of whether it is wise and just to make homeowning a universal condition in America.

I think we should do both. Most people agree that homeowners in trouble should be helped, though many often carp about how undeserving homeowners will get over on any national solution that helps all. And providing housing has been national policy since the New Deal. The Federal Housing Act of 1934 sought to encourage improvement in housing standards and conditions” as well as “to provide a system of mutual mortgage insurance.” Successive acts of Congress in 1937, 1949, 1968, 1986, and 2008 affirmed and extended the national commitment to what the 1949 act called the national goal of “decent, safe, and sanitary” housing for all.

My column received several thoughtful responses. One I found especially challenging. The writer argued that favoring homeowners discriminated against renters, and that helping people own homes was encouraging the growth of a conservative class of property-rights protectors. To move forward, the writer argued, we need to be free from property, not encumbered and conditioned by it.

As the wonderful quotation from Rousseau suggests, my 3QD respondent’s beliefs find good company in a long political and philosophical tradition fearful of the reactionary effects on the human condition of property-owning. Suffice it to recall that Thomas More in Utopia abolished private property altogether. And though Rousseau’s position on property was in fact contradictory, his attack found voice among anarchists, socialist, and communists – in short, every major radical political movement of the 19th Century. Both the Russian and Chinese revolutions sought immediately to confiscate and collectivize private property at no little cost to its owners, and with few concessions to the masses that might have harbored a bit of desire for a touch of property too.

Today, not only some people on the left still feel that property-owning, in this case homeowning, nourishes the seeds of reaction in the bosom of the body politic, but others, notably on the right politically, resent policies that facilitate homeowning. “Political extortion” by left-wing organizations such as ACORN using the Community Reinvestment Act as their club, Villain Phil in a National Review editorial (September 22, 2008) argues, “’trumped businesses’ normal bottom-line concerns.” People, according to Villain, got mortgages without the requisite income, assets, or credit, and he attributes a reverse racisim, what he sees as the bending of the housing market by the Clinton administration to serve low-income, predominately minority residents of big cities, for the sub-crime crisis.

I would submit that both sides have it wrong.

Both sides need to acknowledge that not only is providing housing a 75-year old national priority, but the policy has supported the acquisition of housing by 70% of all American households. Homeowning is normative. I think it is also very reasonable to assume that homeowning is key to the American outline of the good life. Having a home too helps people support a stable household life and keep their housing costs down, or at least more stable, instead of finding themselves exposed to the much less controllable rental market.

My challenge to both sides then is: who are you to tell a grand majority of Americans whether they should or should not own homes? Do either of you really want to redefine the American Dream to suit your political ends, the latter putatively made to serve the people, without regard to the life choices they have made?

Those on the right might reflect on the fact that conservatives since the Reagan-Thatcher period have championed homeowning as the lynch pin of the ownership society. Even the present President Bush once envisioned it as the cornerstone to his attempts to return to a society in effect without government — a society in which everyone might be property-owners, and thereby solid conservative citizens. Where are these voices from the right now? Why is the Bush administration helping banks instead of homeowners, those new members of the “ownership society?” Explain to me why putting families in homes is not the most important thing a conservative administration can do, given its conservative healing powers.

Those on the left might reflect on their (and our) past. Does revolutionary socialism require that the people be dispossessed of all of their property down to and including their houses for the greater good? Or would justice be better served by extending homeowning to the remaining 30% without homes?

The 20th Century’s two greatest revolutions in terms of size and scope, the Russian and Chinese, committed unspeakable crimes as they confiscated the private property of the masses and created a state in which the people became abject subjects of a tyranny that still visits people’s memories and their children’s dreams. (See my column, My Summer with Stalin, for reflections on this topic). A patch of land, a small flat — these bits of life and their homely but personal accoutrements provide us with shelter for our spirits, some respite from the impressments of authority.

I would suggest to those taken with the revival of anarchist sentiments that while “property is theft,” homeowning provides some precious autonomy from the state. As derivative as the maxim “a man’s home is his castle” is of a certain possessive individualism, it is also the foundation in the Anglo-American world for the right to be left alone, as Justice Douglas put it. How does therefore homeowning not rise above class resentment and serve the greater end of a more just society?

If one must judge in theory, rather than relative to people’s preferences in a relatively democratic society, I would argue Rousseau had it wrong, and his cross-channel colleague Locke had it right. In fact, it was Locke who figured out something important about the relation of property to revolution. The totally dispossessed often lack the resources to mount a revolution, and even if successful are brought up shortly under one tyranny or another. Little property-holders, peasant with their plots, artisans with their workshops, workers with their modest bungalows, are often the one more capable of bringing on salubrious social change of greater as well as lesser intensities.

It is crucial that we re-point our politics toward homeownership — its protection in this perilous moment and its spread to all. This is the goose and gander of the thing for people on both sides of the question.

This is a ruinous time for many, and can get much worse.

If Lincoln is quoted in times of national division, Roosevelt is just the tonic for times of national peril:

“It is not in despair that I paint you that picture. I paint it for you in hope—because the Nation, seeing and understanding the injustice in it, proposes to paint it out. We are determined to make every American citizen the subject of his country’s interest and concern; and we will never regard any faithful law-abiding group within our borders as superfluous. The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”

–Franklin Roosevelt
Second Inaugural Speech
1937