by Maeve E. Adams

“I think therefore I’m Liberal”; “I think therefore I’m Dangerous”; “I think therefore I’m Single”; “I think therefore I’m Vegetarian”; and my personal favorite “I think therefore I’m Ham.” These phrases—emblazoned on t-shirts, billboards and, in the case of the latter, the headers of blogs—offer up perverse reinventions of Renee Descartes’ oft-cited (and oft-misunderstood) theory of human consciousness and existence, articulated in his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641).

These modern slogans do not, however, make much sense if we try to see them as a logical extension of Cartesian philosophy. Descartes’ theory is not strictly partisan, for starters. His excursus is, in part, an attempt to make sense of what makes all (or at least most) humans human—what makes them more than “rocks and turnips” (44) or “blueberries and doorknobs” (78), as Jonathan Kramnick might say, with characteristically wry humor, if he were writing about Descartes.

Kramnick’s new book, Actions and Objects: from Hobbes to Richardson (Stanford, 2010), from which I have borrowed these phrases, is not strictly about Cartesian philosophy. Kramnick’s delightfully written and keenly insightful new book is, however, about a series of related philosophical conundrums concerning human consciousness that preoccupied a wide array of writers in the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These writers run the whole gamut, from philosophers like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and David Hume to the poet known as Rochester and novelists Eliza Haywood and Samuel Richardson. In theorizing conceptions of consciousness, as Kramnick discusses, these writers debated attendant theories of existence, motivation, feeling and action that still preoccupy philosophers of mind today. In throwing a wide net, Kramnick’s book reminds us that these seemingly strictly philosophical questions were engaged by writers who came at them through a myriad of genres of writing.

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by Hartosh Singh Bal

Like so many others in India, I grew up on tales from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana and the books of Enid Blyton. Well produced children’s books with an Indian context were rare, and now looking back I’m not sure as children we needed such a context. Most children’s books are lived out in world of fantasy, where more things are possible than we ever allow ourselves to imagine as an adult. The Mahabharata and the Ramayana, related either as oral tales or in abridged and sanitized versions, fulfilled such a role admirably and even today I find the flying broomsticks, magic spells and talking animals of Harry Potter somewhat tame compared to all that I took for granted as a child.

In this world Enid Blyton fitted in admirably, I’d say Enid Blyton was a better children’s writer for those reading her in India than in England. For us the world she described was a land of fantasy as unreal and magical as Narnia or the Shires. Meals of tongue sandwich and lemonade at the bottom of the garden had a magical quality, now rather sadly and blandly dispelled after tasting tongue as an adult. In this magical world I now learn there were undertones of racism, but these were lost on us, a golliwog was just another inhabitant with no existence for us as a caricature. In the same way it was only as an adult that I registered that the Narnia books were an allegory, the Lion as a stand in for Christ was thankfully lost on us in India.

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By Syed Haider Shahbaz

“On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on.” Gabriel Garcia Marques, Chronicle of a Death Foretold.

“Before we had religion and other nonsense. Now for everyone there should be someone to whom one can speak frankly, for all the valour that one could have one becomes very alone.” Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Our lives are but the chronicles of a death foretold. Day to day, from birth, there is only one certainty: we will die. And so, like Marquez’s narrative, begins our journey; from the first sentence we know the end – the certainty of our death. Yet, the narrative is gripping. Life is compelling – in its own many small and mysterious ways. And what, after all, is compelling? How does Marquez make us read when he has whispered the end into our ears, casually, like the news of our death?

There are some things in life that they do not talk about in the classroom. One of them is holes. Not just any holes – bodily holes: assholes, vaginas, noses, sweat pores, mouths, ears, penises. Because of my friends, I became obsessed with holes. They liked peering in their assholes. At least, Martin did. He tried to write a poem about his asshole. The poem, well enough, made him fall in love with his asshole. Its darkness, its depth, its wrinkles and curves, the small pieces of shit stuck all over it. How manly, he said, he thought. Whenever he came out to drink whiskey in his ill-fitted plaid shirts, ginger hair, armed with an accent and a childish smile, he talked of his asshole. We all knew his asshole intimately and adored it as intensely as him. It became his muse. And we all peered into our assholes. Deep down, and smiled, privately.

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by Mara Jebsen

Part one, with photos by Syreeta Mcfadden (thebellepoque.tumblr.com)

1. I like the sound of poetisa!

2. Louise Bourgeois drove a screwdriver

down through my skull at the Guggenheim.

3. I am so proud to be une poete, the sun

makes a raging silver shape

out of a car, flips it

onto my retinas, shouts it there

incandescent, a good knife.

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Translated from the Urdu by new 3QD writer Rafiq Kathwari:

WE WILL SEE

That promised day
Written into tablets of pre eternity

It’s inevitable
We, too, will see

Colossal mountains of tyranny
Floating like wisps of cotton

The earth shaking and rattling
Beneath our stomping feet

Swords of lightning clashing
Over the heads of despots

Idols flung out
From sacred monuments

Crowns tossed into the air
Thrones demolished

And we the pure and the rejected
Seated on cushions.

Only the name of God will remain
Who is both absent and present

The witness, the witnessed
A cry will rend the sky

“I am Truth”
Which is you as well as I

And the beloved of God will reign
You I We Us

Faiz Ahmed Faiz
San Francisco, 1979

Rafiq Kathwari is a rebel poet and social entrepreneur who divides his time between his adopted home New York and his native Kashmir, where he empowers artisans. Poke him on Facebook.

by Robert P. Baird

In a recent review of The Pale King, David Foster Wallace’s posthumously published “novel,” Garth Risk Hallberg writes:

In the end, Wallace’s body of work amounts to an extended philosophical experiment. Can “morally passionate, passionately moral” fiction help free us from the prisons we make? To judge solely by his suicide, the experiment would seem to have failed.

Of course Hallberg doesn’t end there; he goes on to say that “watching [Wallace] loosed one more time upon the fields of language, we’re apt to feel the way he felt at the end of his celebrated essay on Federer at Wimbledon: called to attention, called out of ourselves.” This is fine stuff, and credible: Hallberg is a serious and intelligent critic, and what he says about the fragments assembled into The Pale King fits the expectations established by Wallace’s earlier writing.

Still, it’s the earlier sentences that interest me more. In identifying a philosophical, even therapeutic aspiration in Wallace’s work, Hallberg is cashing out Wallace’s famous assertion that “fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.” Hallberg draws a line from Wallace’s art through his life to his death, a line we can trace with almost syllogistic precision: if Wallace’s life was the test of his art, and if his suicide marked a failure of his life, then so, too, must his death stand as a capital judgment on his art.

I admire this formula, even as I find myself troubled by it. I admire it because it lays out in especially stark terms a dilemma whose presence has imposed itself, often in unresolved and unsettling ways, on most of the reviews and reminiscences written in the runup to and aftermath of the publication of The Pale King. Hallberg’s great service is to name the question that all of us face in the wake of Wallace’s suicide: namely, how should his death affect the way we read his books?

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by Fred Zackel

Once at twilight I was Zorro. My neighbors called my mom. She called me into the house and explained how a ten year old with a black mask and a Daisy air rifle prowling through backyards at twilight in our neighborhood might be seen as something different in an adult’s eyes.

The astonishing amount of mythological stuff just goes to show the ancients had a ton of time to ruminate on odd, perhaps deviant, human behavior. These peoples are curious and imaginative and undogmatic, even without the precise knowledge of what they were describing, and they dreamed up stories to tell adults when the kids were in the room and listening.

We always lie in front of the kids. To hear some children's animal shows, we tried giving the dodo bird mouth-to-mouth resuscitation … and it didn't work. No. We extincted them. Some for food. And most for fun. Because we like hearing the discharge from our guns as we slaughtered them. Because we felt powerful killing from a distance. But mostly for the fun.

I saw a lovely silly wise-ass joke earlier this week. “Vegetarian is an old Indian word for lousy hunter.”

Remember hearing Aesop’s tale about the Fox and the Grapes? The tale goes over our heads these days, but twenty-six centuries ago, folks who heard it understood the gnawing hunger, despair, and denial of imminent death by starvation. The ancients didn’t have the massive amounts of cheap food that we have now.

Think again of the desperation within Aesop’s Fables. Foxes do not eat grapes unless no other food is available. The hunger of the fox for the grapes is impervious to reason. How loudly is your stomach growling? Sour grapes? Naw, that’s not what it was. In fact, the fox was too weak to jump high enough to reach a cluster of grapes on a trellis. As the fox walks away, regardless of what it says, starvation rules its future.

The fox walks off to die.

Aesop is noir, baby. Noir.

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by George Wilkinson

In the broadest sense, sleep is defined as a period of inactivity and loss of awareness. Most humans sleep 7–8 h per night, and if we are deprived of sleep, our cognitive performance, metabolism and health suffer. Sleep clearly contributes to several important physiological functions. Hypotheses for sleep benefits include overall rest and healing; cellular metabolism or replenishment; and brain-specific functions such as synaptic adjustments important for memory. Specifically, scientists believe our brains require sleep to process what we experienced during the day. However, the specific relationship between sleep hygiene and memory function remains controversial.

In recent years, seminal insights into the control and genetics of sleep have come from studies in flies, fish, and worms. Genetic screens have identified mutations that affect sleep across species, pointing to an evolutionarily conserved regulation of sleep. Moreover, a number of laboratories have identified sleep-dependent changes in gene expression, including in genes involved in learning and memory consolidation. A recent article in the open-access journal PLoS One explores the possible connection between memory and sleep in the regulation of one such gene, brain-type Fatty acid binding protein 7 (Fabp7), in sleep and long-term memory formation in flies.

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By Tolu Ogunlesi

Nigeria's ongoing general elections have placed it in the news in recent weeks – a blend of hopeful and depressing news. Politics is a 'grand' theme, and generally partial to generalisations. Broad strokes are inevitable – Nigeria as a country divided into a “largely Muslim North and a largely Christian South”; Nigeria as a “rich country of poor people” and land ripped apart by “post-election violence.”

It occured to me to present a portrait of an ordinary Nigerian, one of the multitudes of people who have, in an unprecedented demonstration of optimism, been trooping out since the beginning of April to cast their votes in the hope that they will have a say in the shaping of their future.

This woman you're about to meet is not rich. She's a 'struggling' Nigerian (one of tens of millions), and a hardworking one. Most importantly, she is not a “victim” — i.e she will not inspire your pity — despite the seeming toughness of the kind of life she has to live. I met and interviewed her three years ago (April 2008). I have no idea what she's up to today, or if she still sells food at that spot. The only thing I can say for sure is that not much has changed in Nigeria's economic circumstances, between then and now.

The hope is that the politicians being elected at this time will seek to bring genuine transformation to the lives of people like Iya Seun, and make it easier for them to live comfortable lives in the country they call home.

***

Lagos is the Land where the Sun Never Sets on the Hungry Human Stomach. Every vacant spot in every business district cries out (successfully) for occupation by a woman – or band of women – armed with firewood, giant steel pots, and a talent for kidnapping the affections of human stomachs.

Iya Seun (“Seun's mother”) is one of them. She makes a living selling fried yam, fish and bean-cakes (akara) next to a wall at one end of Olosa Street, Victoria Island, Lagos. I imagine that the smoke from her “kitchen” mingles happily with that emerging from the luxurious kitchens of the nearby 5-star Eko Hotels – evidence perhaps of the classlessness that distinguishes smoke from the human existence.

There are two questions on my mind as I speak with Iya Seun. I want to know why she doesn’t have a constructed stall (the standard makeshift affairs that dot the streets of Lagos, most commonly made from corrugated iron sheets, or wooden planks). And then I want to know why she operates a minimalist kitchen, offering “fast-food” instead of the more formidable local staples – Amala, Eba, Fufu – and even rice.

I soon discover that both questions have the same answer.

KAI.

“Kai!” is the Yoruba equivalent of “Don’t!” or “Stop it!” But in this instance it has far more forbidding implications. “KAI” is the abbreviation for the “Kick Against Indiscipline” Squad, the dreaded Lagos anti-vice squad known for harassing street traders and carting off their wares on a journey of no return.

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by Jen Paton

There is a scene in David Mitchell’s novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet where a British captain addresses his crew, men from all over the world. The Captain pauses “to let words trickle into other languages.”

The novel follows a Dutch clerk, Jacob De Zoet, at Dejima, the Dutch trading island off the coast of late 18^th and early 19^th Century Nagasaki. Mitchell’s book is full of translation and mistranslation: from Dutch to Japanese, English to Dutch. It is a problem implicit in the historical novel itself, and in history too, to translate the past to the present. It is a long way for meaning to trickle.

In the book’s Reader’s Guide, there is a short essay on historical fiction (don’t be embarrassed to read Reader’s Guides, they are often good), where Mitchell writes of the difficulties of putting words in the mouths of past people: to avoid “smacking of Blackadder” one “must create a sort of dialect – I call it Bygonese – which is inaccurate but plausible.”

One of the hardest things about studying history, and especially the distant past, is trying to understand not just the speech, but also the mindset of the people one reads, and reads about. The people of the past are just as foreign to us in history as in historical fiction. What did it feel like to enter Justinian’s Hagia Sophia? What beliefs, and how true to him, made a man carry a Saint’s bones, or a piece of wood from the ‘True Cross,’ thousands of miles? What made a noblewoman wear a hair shirt underneath her fine gowns? My favorite history book, Peter Brown’s The Rise of Western Christendom, is about these questions. It is satisfying for many reasons, but perhaps most of all because it makes Other the people of the past in a way that, to me, is more honest than is usual.

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James McGirk

A year and decade after the turn of the century, things looked dire in the United States of America, but not that dire: the economy was stagnant after an exuberant but lopsided decade of prosperity, job opportunities for graduates and social climbers had dwindled to a few openings changing bedpans for the large, parasitic over-class of aging boomers, and the gleam of enthusiasm following Barack Obama’s presidency had faded quickly. But the fact that *that* and a few years of hardship was all it took for open revolt among the most highly educated, entitled generation of Americans ever to be born would have been quite unimaginable at the time. That the change they got was not at all what they were expecting is one of the great ironies of our age.

The second clamor for change was born in the creative class; brought to term by the poets, as all good revolutions are, if not precisely not in the usual way. This revolution was born from a coalition with a notorious group of email spammers. Perhaps this requires a little explantation. Let us back up a little.

Since the introduction of fax machines and the Internet into Nigeria and other English-speaking third-world countries, mysterious missives would materialize in the inboxes of the industrialized world. These would purport to be from high-ranking bureaucrats, deposed princelings and other dubious figures, and ask recipients for permission to transmit a few million dollars of embezzled funds into their bank accounts in exchange for a hefty cut. If a mark agreed, he or she would be asked for a moderate advance of funds to cover transaction fees… This was known as a 419 scam, and, given the ludicrous spellings of their messages, these emails weren’t considered much of a threat, and indeed were something of a joke (at first).

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by Hasan Altaf

All throughout That Girl in Yellow Boots, Kalki Koechlin stomps around Bombay in a pair of mustard-yellow Doc Martens until, at the end, devoid of hope, dreams destroyed, illusions shattered, etc., she takes them off and climbs into a rickshaw clutching them to her chest. The Doffing Of The Boots turns out to have a complete lack of resonance: The Docs are practical and fashion-forward but really not much else.

I went into the movie with high expectations – an Anurag Kashyap film, a Kalki Koechlin vehicle, a project that was clearly a labor of love, written by the director and the star – and left disappointed. The meaninglessness of the boots is obviously a minor complaint (sometimes an eggcup really is just an eggcup, although then why would you put your eggcup in the title?), but it seems to me emblematic of many of the weaknesses of the movie: Nothing really resonates, nothing really means anything, nothing really counts. Much like Koechlin’s Ruth, we plod through the movie in our boots until the plot twists a bit at the end, and then we take them off and go home.

I still can’t quite decide what the problem of the movie is, but I’ve narrowed it down to two completely contradictory possibilities: Either there is too much in it, or not enough. The basic plot is theoretically interesting – girl travels to foreign land looking for missing father, discovers deep dark family secret – but the meat isn’t there, and the outlines aren’t enough, on their own. Everything is sketched in so quickly that it becomes almost generic.

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by Ryan Sayre

Sitting in a circle around my computer with Kumagaya and his fellow fishermen at an evacuation center up north, we watched footage taken by him of the tsunami coming in. A good number of clinical terms offer themselves up to help understand Mr. Kumagaya's seemingly untroubled manner when explaning whose boat that was being pulled under now, whose fishing nets washed inland there, whose homes brought out to sea over yonder. Why is the mood closer to good humor than sorrow, nearer to excitement than despair? We can guess what words diagnosis will throw at us; words like 'shock' and 'truama'. But these terms are of limited use. The creases on Kumagaya's sun-beaten cheeks hold his visage to a single benign expression, sorrow having little room in it. It is a face reminicent of Basho's line, fishes weep with tearful eyes. Sorrow would be filtered immediately out of his face by the creases just as the salty tears of basho's fish are devoured by the vastness of the salt-sea the moment they spill from the eye. Where does all the sorrow go without the possibility for outer expression?

A few days ago my dearest informant and quasi-host father, with whom I am staying at present, took me aside to demand a strict outwardly emotional suspension. I was given orders not to offer tears, hugs, or even a listening ear to my host mother when she returned the following day from the funeral services for her father who had died the previous week. I was to use with her a certain one-word greeting generally offered after a long day’s work, a road-trip, or any minor daily task at all. This simple recognition of fatigue was the only one made permissable to me. I forced myself to agree that talk does indeed have something monstrous in it, all its energies being directed to the ear, leaving the rest of the body, and the rest of the enormous event, adrift. My host father was inviting me into a more delicate kind of care, a non-event-based care, an abeyant care. He was offering me in on a relationship honoring silence precisely where to me talk would seem most in order.

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