by Anjuli Raza Kolb

For me, moving into adulthood was and continues to be a series of amplifying revulsions as I find out more and more about what goes on in grown-ups’ secret lives. If this sounds peevish and stufepyingly lacking in empathy, it is. But I think it’s the reason that I am especially moved by stories that shuttle us to the outermost limits of what is morally and viscerally incorporable—can I love this person who likes Radiohead (no)? Can I love this person who is deceiving his affianced (yes)? Can I love this person who eats in this fashion, tongue preceding lips and teeth? Whose eyes change color? Who scales ice-cold hospital walls in an unseasonably light nightie with bare feet? Who, in sleepless hungry nights, kills middle-aged men to guzzle their blood and in the ensuing froth might be incapable of not also drinking me dry? Yes please.

Horror stories, and vampire tales in particular, are almost always read according to a series of circulating paranoias that range from the intensely personal to the anxious social. Disquiet about chastity, virginity, invasion of the domestic space, and contagion occupy the more intimate chambers of such paranoias. Xenophobia is one of the most obvious of the latter, more social agitations. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is the paradigm for such interpretations, obsessively detailing cultural and psychological difference through letters, physicians’ diaries, shipping bills, and journals. In what is perhaps the imprisoned solicitor Jonathan Harker’s most uncanny discovery in Castle Dracula, he learns that the Count is applying himself rigorously to the study of English culture and idiom, revealing not only the monster’s focus and drive, but also the promise of an unidentifiable and dangerous assimilation about to take place—an intimate and secret invasion that activates all the more personal, antigenic panics on the other end of the spectrum.

What’s interesting to me about vampire stories is how they cut two paths around a particularly feminine adolescent narcissism with which I am uncomfortably familiar. On the front side, they model a generosity of spirit and a maternal instinct that allows especially sensitive, brainy, outsidery beauties to fantasize about what amounts to gestating and/or breast-feeding (neck-feeding? blood-nursing? lactation station at the blood bank?) anemic boys at the expense of their own strength. Like Bram Stoker’s Mina Harker and Lucy Westenra, and more recently Stephanie Meyer’s Isabella Swan from the Twilight series, these often-female subjects, defined by their independence and smarts, find themselves moved by the idea of becoming providers, life-lines. The failers-to-thrive they thusly nurse or dream of nursing—and herein lies the seduction for at least a century’s worth of voracious female readers—are paradoxically capable of puncturing the taut skin of their defenses, at throat and hotly thither.

At the back, there’s the promise that whatever ontological distance exists between two people can, if necessity or passion should force our hand, be eliminated by the quick and dirty trick of sharing a blood supply. In other words, a more thanatophilic version of my favorite flea from John Donne’s Songs and Sonnets who unites the speaker’s blood with his reluctant lover’s in its promiscuous gut to render them “more than married.” This sanguine exchange is, I think, equally heady to both vampire and victim because for each it can expeditiously turn the other into a version of the self, or at least a separate being infected with the self. Victims become vampires, and vampires make the blood of their prey circulate through their own veins becoming fully inhabited, at least until the next meal—a solution to solitude not entirely different from the tried and true umbilical connection between mother and foetus.

Read more »

by Bryant Urstadt

Here’s Harold L. Humes again, back from the dead this time, rising from the boiling mists of time like The Swamp Thing, dripping muddy secrets and forgotten brilliance and true madness. Nothing new about that, in a way. He was always showing up with his own invite, overstaying a welcome he had extended to himself. His appearance in a PBS documentary making the rounds of local public stations this winter is among the least strange of his drop-ins.

He appeared at James Jones’ funeral in 1978, with a boulder in the back of his station wagon, which required three men to unload. Jones was the author of From Here to Eternity, just the kind of bright literary lamp Humes would introduce himself to when he was alive. The boulder is still on the lawn in Bridgehampton. Fine, but… Humes had never met Jones.

He showed up at Random House in the mid-Fifties with a stellar novel, just moved in with his manuscript and his toothbrush and his motorcycle, which he wheeled into the lobby of the office of founder Bennett Cerf, when Random was located in the more motorcycle-friendly Villard Mansion, just behind St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Madison Avenue.

“You didn’t just meet Humes,” remembers Random House editor Bob Loomis, who edited Humes’ second novel, Men Die.

*

Loomis, now 80, is the embodiment of the legend of Random, having worked with everyone from William Styron to Toni Morrison, and he lobbied hard within Random to allow for last springs’ reissue of Men Die and Humes’ longer, better novel The Underground City. “He kind of entered your life. He used to sleep in our offices. He helped me move. He just became part of your day.”

Humes swept into the cafes of Paris in the late forties and early fifties, inserting himself into a crowd that included Irwin Shaw, James Baldwin, and everyone else, it sometimes seemed, who would otherwise have been living in Greenwich Village. Humes was at Le Dome in Paris one night in 1951, probably wearing the black velvet cape and carrying the silver-handled cane for which he became known in those days, tapping a 24-year-old Peter Matthiessen on the shoulder and introducing himself, and soon after teaming up with him to start Paris Review.

And now Humes, dead for 16 years, crashes 2008, his books up for reevaluation after forty years in the cooler of history; the subject of Doc, the documentary by daughter Immy Humes; and shedding awkward news about Matthiessen, who used Humes and their Paris Review as a front for his work with the CIA. (It was deeper than that, of course; in a way, it can be argued that Matthiessen was using the CIA as a front for living as a novelist in Paris.) Humes now is a weird Banquo pounding the literary table, asking us to listen, listen, to the story of his life, his work, and the birth of one of the country’s most important literary magazines.

Read more »

“The natives are restless” — I used to get indignant when I heard that paternalistic, sometimes cynical phrase. Now I try to smile. For one, I hear it a lot in my line of work, and it gets tiresome to always think ill of someone whose diction deceives her intentions. But mostly I smile because I want the cliché to mean something else, a portent for positive change, the end of calamitous rule, a new era for the meek. So when the meek turn restless, it should mean that justice is around the corner.

With last week's passing of Guinea's senile dictator, Lansana Conté, and the military coup that followed, the country is marking no deviation from a well-rehearsed choreography, enacted repeatedly since independence from the French in 1958. The dance moves are economical, simple for new generations of political elites to learn.

A leader emerges, accedes power bolstered by populist rhetoric, buys off the military, installs single-party rule. Cronyism flourishes, rule of law evaporates, the military shores up the trappings of statehood. Decades pass; the population languishes. Leader then dies, military resumes control until a new leader-puppet is found. For nine million Guineans, the spectacle and squalor continue.

Conté down for the count

Conté belonged to a dwindling species of wizened and paranoid leaders-for-life, whose ranks include Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and Omar Bongo of Gabon. Once hailed as liberators and visionaries, they became pathetic parables of 'absolute power corrupting absolutely'. The psychological path from flamboyant liberator to murderous despot is dramatic stuff, and was ably fictionalized in The Last King of Scotland. An excellent non-fiction account of Mobutu Sese Seko’s rise and fall is Mobutu, Roi du Zaire, by Thierry Michel.

Not so for Conté. A diabetic chain-smoker who rarely appeared in public, Conté was a garden-variety despot whose life and career will be quickly forgotten, even by Guineans. In the murky hours after Conté’s death, a military junta declared power. Western powers demanded an immediate return to civilian rule; a rote bit of finger wagging that has surely never produced a single result.

Alluding to the high propensity for carnage in this West African neighborhood, Senegalese President Wade recently appealed for acceptance of Guinea’s new military junta. Although highly predatory and wholly opportunistic, the Guinean national military arguably prevented the country from sliding into the chaos of its neighbors, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast, for whom Guinea served for years as a place of refuge.

The intent of Wade’s appeal is ambiguous. Another leader-for-life in the making and no friend of opposition parties or the free press, Wade's point may be that civilian rule and democracy are over-rated, and that in such places security is primordial. He may also be a proponent of 'negative solidarity', as my Burundian friends call it, between African leaders who defend one another till the bitter end. Witness the deafening silence from African leaders regarding Mugabe.

Read more »

by Jeff Strabone

It would be easy to laugh off Jennifer Aniston's problems. She's rich, famous, and able to have her pick of nearly all the men of the world and all the scripts of Hollywood. And what she's famous for is being funny. Her television sitcom ran for ten years, her movie comedies are big money-makers, and, for what it's worth, there was even a hairstyle named after one of her characters. But something about her disturbs me deeply. To put it simply, Jennifer Aniston represents one of the worst traits of the human race: the inability to forget.

Kierkegaard and Nietzsche wrote important statements on forgetting, but I prefer the simplicity of Rodgers and Hart's 1935 classic 'It's Easy to Remember'. Imagine it in Frank Sinatra's 1957 recording on his Close to You LP, arranged and conducted by Nelson Riddle:

Your sweet expression,
The smile you gave me,
The way you looked when we met,
It's easy to remember, but so hard to forget.

I hear you whisper,
'I'll always love you.'
I know it's over and yet,
It's easy to remember, but so hard to forget.

It is hard to forget, and all the more so when we fight it. Who wants to forget the way a lover's skin tastes, or the sounds she made, once the relationship ends and those sensations are no longer possible? Perhaps one reason we resist forgetting lovers, the special ones at least, is that we come to believe that we were better people with that person than we could be otherwise. It's not so much about losing them as it is about losing all that we were when we loved them. Without that special object of our affection, we fear lapsing into a heap of selfishness again.

But what if we had stayed together? Wouldn't we change anyway? Wouldn't we eventually forget, to paraphrase another great song from the 30's, why we ever tolerated the way he held his knife or the way she insisted on dancing 'til three? Love, unlike television, should not go out on a high note. When it does, it creates the illusion that one's bliss would have known no vicissitudes and that it can never be matched. Only by forgetting can we make ourselves available to what may come next and what, however inconceivable, may be even better.

Read more »

by Daniel Rourke

In Another city another me is writing; Another thought is unwinding.

When we think of minds we think of intentions. Intentions that lie behind acts, acts that unfold at the recourse of agents: agents with minds. In short, when we look out at the world we see objects that are acted upon and entities that do the acting. This clear cut distinction between the 'done upon' and the 'doer' appears stable, but it hides one of the mightiest constraints of our world view. A logical stand-off that threatens to undermine the logical systems upon which it is based.

In Another city all matter pulses like a living organ, where time imposes significance upon the most dilapidated dwelling or murky gutter.

Take this article, for example. It is an unwinding spring of phonic sounds, encoded into a series of arbitrary symbols, stretching from left to right within an imaginary frame projected onto the surface of your computer screen. Here lies the perfect example of an artefact with intention behind it. A series of artefacts in fact, positioned by my mind and placed within a certain context (i.e. 3QD: a fascinating and widely read blog). As a collection, as an article, its intention is easy to distinguish. I wanted to say something, so I wrote an article, which I hoped would be read by a certain audience. But what of the intention of each individual object within the whole? What was the original intention of the letter 'A' for example? Do we decide that the intention is connected to all speakers of the English language, perhaps? Or maybe all literate members of the human race? Or maybe the human race as a whole?

Another city begins at the out-stretched tip of a human finger and ends as artefacts gathered from the dust. It is a spider-web, a precious ball of dung, a bare and crimson backside glinting in the jungle sun.

It would be short-sighted to claim that the letter 'A' is intention-less. At some point the shape of the letter 'A' was attached to the phonic value for the sound 'ay'. At some point the letter 'A' was placed at the front of a 26 letter string of arbitrary symbols. A separate, but connected artefact, later to be called 'The Alphabet'. There was intention behind these acts, and these acts were perpetrated by people or persons who – we hope – believed that their decisive acts mattered. The difference between my artifact – the one you now find yourself reading – and the letter 'A' is one of time, distance and – most importantly – appropriation. The alphabet is omnipresent, it is everyone's. It has become disconnected from the very idea of mind and intention. We have appropriated it into our sense of what being human is; into the scaffolding of our reality. Of course we still have to learn how to read, whether it be with the Western syllabic alphabet or the Chinese pictographic/logographic system. But we treat our writing system as an extension of language, of ourselves, and we do this quite naturally. For not one second do we question the intention behind the alphabet, even less so the letter 'A'.

Read more »

An imagined conversation between Tariq Ali and Benazir Bhutto.

By Maniza Naqvi

Act I: The Leftist and the Leader:

Scene/Stage: There is a screen at the back of the stage which plays the clip, of General Zia-ul-Haq, declaring Martial Law, on July 5, 1977.

When the speech ends, two spot lights have searched, found and trained themselves on two people on the stage. Two actors playing Tariq Ali and Benazir Bhutto stand a couple of feet apart from each other. They are a young Tariq Ali, in jeans and a young Benazir Bhutto also in jeans. Tariq Ali, stands, legs apart, and grabs his head in anger and frustration. Benazir crouches—holds her head and then reaches out her arms as though reaching for someone in grief and pain.

TA: Arghhhhhhhhhhh

BB: ———Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh.

Stage darkens.

Lights go up. In the middle of the stage, there are two podiums at a short distance from one another. Tariq Ali stands at one and Benazir at the other. Benazir wears a white dupatta covering her head –and a green colored shalwar-kameez. Tariq Ali is dressed the same way as before, in jeans. They have their backs to the audience and they face two screens at the back of the stage. In the foreground there is a single chair.

The screen in front of Benazir shows one of her typical political rallies. There are massive jubilant crowds of people waving banners and chanting slogans. The screen in front of Tariq Ali shows either a clip of a talk, or Tariq Ali leading the February 2003 anti war demonstrations.

There is the sound of people cheering and shouting her name. Her fists punch the air she makes movements that show that she is delivering an impassioned speech. There are cheers and slogans in both crowds. Benazir and Tariq Ali turn away from the screens and look at the audience and then turn around to face each other. They stand for a moment just looking at each other. Benazir adjusts her dupatta, in her characteristic way with both her hands. She moves forward away from the podium waving. A flash goes off-from a camera—then another and another. With each pop of the flash, the sound gets louder, till it segues into the sounds of explosions and gunshots.

Tariq Ali on his side of the stage instinctively ducks. Sound dies. Silence.

Benazir stands straight and still——She leaves the podium and makes her way to a chair in the foreground of the stage. Tariq Ali, shakes his head as he watches her go. He stays where he is but reaches out one arm in a futile gesture of trying to reach out to catch her. Then he stands his head bowed for a moment (a longish moment) before he looks across at her. He approaches her and stands gazing at her. She looks at him.

TA: Take that damn thing of your head, will you. Why do you wear it?

BB: (She looks at him slides it back from her head and smiles, and says in a forlorn voice): I’m afraid they won’t recognize me without it.

TA: Would you?

BB: You have the white head of hair—I have the white scarf—Moses and the Madonna.

Read more »

So here we are, celebrating our 5th Newton's Day at 3QD. Along with Richard Dawkins, we independently and simultaneously came upon the idea of celebrating Newton's Day on December 25th in 2004, and each year since then I have written a little something about Sir Isaac. Here are my posts from 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007. Today, I'll explain a simple but very useful mathematical technique called Newton's Method, discovered by Newton in 1669, though he published it later.

Newton's Method is a way of iteratively finding closer and closer solutions to a certain kind of mathematical equation (a real-valued function f(x), to be technical). We do this in the following way (it may help to look at the concrete example from Wikipedia in the graphic following my description of the general method, to better understand what I mean):

1. Take a guess at the solution (a value for x).
2. Plug in this value for x and see what f(x) is.
3. Draw a line tangent to the function at this point.
4. The point where this line intersects the x-axis is your new and improved value for x.
5. Take this new value for x and go back to step 2. (This repeating is called iteration.)

Have a look at the graph (from Wikipedia) on the right. The function f(x) is the curved line shown in blue. In other words, for any point x on the horizontal axis, the blue line shows the value of f(x) on the vertical axis. The root (or solution) of the function is where the function crosses the horizontal axis; in other words, where the value of f(x) is zero. In the graph here, this is the value marked X. So we take a guess, X_n, go up the dotted blue line to the function, and then calculate the tangent line to the function at that point. This is shown in red. We see where that line crosses the x-axis, and take that point, X_n+1, as our value for x in the next iteration. As you can see, X_n+1 is a better approximation of the actual root, X. When we repeat the process over and over, one can very quickly converge on the correct solution.

How exactly do we do this? Let me show you. We know from calculus (as did Newton, since he invented it) that the derivative of a function f(x) at given point, written f'(x_n), is just the slope of the tangent line at that point. But we also know that the slope of a line is just the “rise”, in this case, the value of f(x_n) (on the vertical axis), divided by the “run,” the amount we move from X_n+1 to X_n on the horizontal axis. Setting these two quantities as equal, we get this equation: the derivative of the function at X_n is equal to the value of the function at X_n divided by the distance between X_n and X_n+1. In proper algebraic notation:

f'(x_n) = f(x_n) / (X_n – X_n+1)

Mutiplying both sides by (X_n – X_n+1), we get:

(X_n – X_n+1) * f'(x_n) = f(x_n)

Dividing both sides by f'(x_n), we get:

(X_n – X_n+1) = f(x_n) / f'(x_n)

Subtracting X_n from both sides, we get:

– X_n+1 = f(x_n) / f'(x_n) – X_n

And finally, multiplying both sides by -1, we get:

X_n+1 = X_n – f(x_n) / f'(x_n)

So that's how once we make an initial guess X_n, we get our next value X_n+1. And then repeat the process.

Look at this nice example from Wikipedia, where one wants to find the square root of 612:

In each successive result on the right hand side above, the correct digits are underlined. As you can see, one converges to a very accurate (to nine significant digits) approximation rather quickly. Well, there you go. That's Newton's Method. Interestingly, since computers are very fast at doing this sort of iteration, Newton's Method has become even much more useful now than when he invented it.

Oh, and if you don't understand “derivatives”, just take my word for it: the derivative of the function “x² – 612” is “2x” and don't worry about the details… 🙂

I wish all of you a very happy holiday season, and also best wishes for a wonderful new year!

David Schneider

It's Christmastime, Solstice-time, that annual ritual of family and SADness. But whenever I get depressed, I remember that poets frequently intuit the nature of the world long before psychologists, physicists, biologists, mathematicians or theorists are able to parcel out their pieces into numbers, formulae, and systems. I remember, for example, how the German and British Romantic poets grasped an understanding of complexity, relativity, and organic growth that was largely alien to Enlightenment science and the Industrial Revolution – understandings we now take for granted in the scientific conceptions of Relativity Theory and Chaos Theory, which were devised, respectively, nearly 100 and 200 years later.

And so, as we return home to the faces yet more familiar than the years before, we return to Larkin. He was right. Your mom and dad fuck you up – and we might now understand why.

In a new theory that could revolutionize the practice of psychiatry, neuroscience and genetics, Bernard Crespi, a biologist at Simon Fraser University in Canada, and Christopher Badcock, a sociologist at the London School of Economics, propose – in essence – that men are stupid and women are crazy.

I joke. A bit. It's only that when an idea this elegant, this simple, and this beautiful is proposed, the mainstream press (and blog commenters) will try to publicize it using truisms – that blaspheme its beauty, and jeopardize the great conceptual leap that's been taken – which harm the reputation of Science.

But I digress.

Crespi and Badcock propose that

I think of Keats:

Read more »

///
House of an Evil Jin
Jim Culleny

Smoke snakes from house roofs
in lazy loops of loose thought

as idle as the wisps of dreamers
who burn to know why god has wrought

I drive by with windows open
the smell of char comes drifting in

It's more like March than January
so odd the way this year begins

Malingering smoke might mesmerize me
and lazy thought could do me in

as easy hours may hypnotize me
till my skull's the house of an evil jin
.

Bookstores don’t often make people’s heads snap around, but there’s a lot of competition along Venice’s engorged thoroughfare, Salizada del Fontego dei Tedeschi. Amid the temptations of gelato for breakfast and designer Italian clothes, anything less opulent than the window display at La Carta would go ignored.

The window was a triptych set back from the street and hooded from the Venice sun. Only an artificial light from inside, a flattering golden-brown bronze, illuminated it. The centerpiece was a replica yacht with white canvas sails, intricate rope rigging, and a hull as polished as a bowling alley lane. Surrounding the ship were the accoutrements of a belles lettres lifestyle ca. 1875. A box with iron tooling for personalized wax seals. A vase filled with pens you’d have to dip in ink and possibly sharpen with a knife. Ribbons. Letter openers capped with colored Murano glass. Leather-bound journals for gossip about duchesses. Magnifying glasses, and gyroscopes for paperweights in a pinch. It looked like an estate sale from some universe where Proust had become a ship’s captain.

As it did to others, La Carta’s window tugged me almost gravitationally, pulling my neck and torso it while my feet were still walking forward. Before setting out that morning I had pulled from my luggage a sheaf of papers, directions to half the bookstores in the city, and I made this my first stop. My mission was simple (if admittedly daft). I figured I’d absorb political, religious, and architectural Venice by osmosis, without really trying. I was looking for literary Venice. That sounds a bit precious, but even when I’m ignorant of the local language, I visit every bookstore I can on vacations: I simply grasp a foreign culture most easily through its books.

And I wanted to know what Venice would have been like for a bookish person now and in the past, what sorts of stores they visited and how they got their verbal fix. The knowledge seemed far from Doges’ palaces, secreted away on a bookshelf somewhere, and I wanted to pull the volume down and peek inside.

Read more »

Graphics by Kate Vrijmoet

Elatia Harris

It is 2 a.m., and I am in my reading chair, building a list of modifiers that people set on writing about their animals had better shun. Here are a few.

little
sweet
sweet little
angelic
sweet angelic little
furry
sweet angelic furry little
tiny
sweet tiny furry little angelic
so tiny
sweet furry little angelic [noun] that is so tiny

This is the stuff, and its wretched tenderness actually finds a more just expression, an expression more fevered still, in devotional painting. Hence, the dog retablos, based on my own animals. It’s not possible to be more dog-besotted than I am — and still have anything else going on, that is. I’m hoping to establish my bona fides that way with pictures, and to get somewhere else with words. Everybody feeling safer now?

The Dream

Describe a dream, lose a reader, Harold Robbins used to say. But this one’s different.

The morning of the dream, Lina, my poodle puppy, weighed in at 19.2 lbs. What if Lina got as big as a pony? In the early days of a global financial crisis we cannot fathom, I have taken on a moon-colored puppy that eats and eats. And I have had the dream I know is dreamt the length and breadth of my family-oriented neighborhood, where visible disturbances of prosperity are so very few. I dream I am asleep, and Lina enters my bedroom prowling for food. She takes fluid strides on her hind legs, her eyes avid, sweeping the room. She’s taller than a man, and spectrally thin under bright scant fur, as thin as the zoo bear that survived the siege of Sarajevo for 200 days, too weak to eat the apple a soldier finally brought her. My baby — rising up in her need, and enormous. And she cannot be sustained.

Okay, so I am in my reading chair. It is 2 a.m., and I am fending off the dream. Facing me, Lina sits in my lap on her haunches and hooks her forepaws over my shoulders, her long head level with mine and so close that I see two of her. But for my nightshirt, of the thinnest Indian cotton, we are fur to fur the length of our abdomens. Better not to write about the tongue-showing that goes on, except to say we’re both doing it. The veridical Lina, who still has a puppy tummy, erases anxieties as surely as if she licked them away. She gives off that deeply comforting poodle smell — of violets and civet, salt flats and fresh kelp, sun on white linen. She is my creature, my teething thriving creature, whose love bites are puncture wounds, who’s in a great, great mood. And we have a long way to go.

Read more »

Krzysztof Kotarski

My grandmother loves me very much. The feeling, of course, is mutual.

So, with that qualifier out of the way, please forgive the following anecdote. I am a good boy at heart, and my grandma’s English is poor enough that she will never read this.

In early June 2007, I flew to The Middle East (“The” has to be capitalized, for reasons that will become clear). I landed at Ben Gurion International Airport and made my way to Ra’anana, one of the satellite communities around Tel Aviv, where I presented an academic paper on a Polish journalist who interviewed the famous (and infamous) Avraham Stern shortly before his death.

My grandmother, who raised me in my youth and with whom I enjoy an Obama-ish relationship, was quite proud that I was presenting my research at an academic conference in a foreign country (“My grandson! Look at him!”). However, she was worried. A conference was great, she said, but why did it have to take place in what she still refers to as the Holy Land, which, in her mind, is a country of bombs, raids, irate settlers and marauding bulldozers, each liable to maim or kill her eldest grandson.

“Why don’t you present the paper in Canada?” she asked when I first told her about my trip. “Or come visit, and do it here?”

Although I had no answer for her at the time other than my customary “don’t worry,” I began to consider my grandmother’s anxieties.

She has never been to Israel, Palestine, Jordan or Egypt (my itinerary), and the last time she set foot in “The Middle East” was in the 1980s when she travelled to Libya to visit my grandfather who was among the Polish engineers helping the then-evil Gaddafi regime build highways in exchange for oil.

Read more »

by Evert Cilliers

There are two political figures in America who are masters of self-invention.

One is Arnold Schwarzenegger. The other is Barack Obama.

Arnold invented himself as a body builder, movie star, and Governor. Barack Obama invented himself as a black man, Christian, and President.

(A quick aside about self-invention. It's not starting over, which is the reason people immigrate to America. It goes further. For example, the two richest men in the world, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, didn't self-invent themselves. Bill Gates was fascinated by computers from an early age, and Warren Buffett started trading in his teens. They merely followed their destinies. On the other hand, the Jewish garment guys who started Hollywood not only invented new selves, they also invented a part of all of us.)

As a self-inventor, Arnold had it easier than Barack, because in his teens he discovered a role model: Steve Reeves, the muscleman who became a film star in Italian sword-and-sandal epics such as “Hercules.” Arnold deliberately went into body building to become a movie star.

Barack Obama had a more winding road to his current self-invention as our President. He had no role models, except for his mother: a sixties social rebel, unafraid of the Other (she married a black man from Kenya and an Indonesian), who set high educational and moral standards for herself and her son. But she gave him neither an identity nor a community.

Those he had to invent for himself.

He started as an anomaly. He grew up white, but he looked black.

Read more »

by Jason S. Bardi

The holiday season is upon us, and spending the weekend at the relatively unconnected house of a close relative makes me long for all those modern conveniences I take for granted: cell phones, PDAs, digital cable, and high-speed wireless. Lack of wireless is going to force me to find an internet café in a little while, as soon as I am done writing this. Meanwhile, being cut off from the Web is the perfect entry into telling the story of how our modern era of electronic communication came to be — its ancient origins — a story that I recount in my latest book “The Fifth Postulate,” which is hitting store shelves this month (published by John Wiley & Sons).

This year, 2008, is the 175th anniversary of electronic communication, though the anniversary passed quietly and went, to my knowledge, unnoticed. It was born 175 years ago thanks to a clever invention by the great mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, who in the 1830s invented an early working telegraph. Though he was never able to develop the technology further, he clearly saw its potential. A single tap, he would write, would enable instantaneous communication between distant cities.

Like many of the great discoveries Gauss made in his life, Gauss's telegraph was not appreciated until after his death. Neither was non-Euclidean geometry, another one of Gauss's great inventions. Both developments are featured in my new book.

Now here's the story:

The Sunday churchgoers in the town of Göttingen discovered a new feature adorning the steeple of their beloved St. John’s Church in 1833. Two lines of curved wires, one up to the top of the church and one down again on the other side, had been installed at the orders of the local celebrity scientist, Carl Friedrich Gauss, a man who in some depictions bears a strangely strikingly similar resemblance to Ebenezer Scrooge. He was, by all accounts, extremely un-Scrooge like as a scientist, and this was most apparent in his collaborations with those in his life with whom he shared scientific or mathematical interest. He devoted himself generously to such collaborations at various times in his life.

You have to understand that Gauss devoted himself to these collaborations despite the fact that he may not have had much to gain from any of them. There were none in his day and very few in the history of mathematics who could have taught him much of anything. Gauss is often grouped with Isaac Newton and Archimedes as one of the three greatest mathematicians in history. Gauss was, like those other two, a solitary genius who made his greatest discoveries while working alone, without ever consulting anyone else. While it is hard to know how Archimedes treated his collaborative peers, if indeed he had any, Isaac Newton struggled to maintain civility in the collaborations throughout his life. At times, his collaborations erupted into nasty disputes.

Somehow, though, Gauss managed to have several very fruitful collaborations, and one of the most fruitful was his work with a twenty-four-year-old scholar named William Weber, who arrived at Göttingen to be a professor of physics when gauss was in his 50s. Gauss was a patron of sorts for Weber. The death of a Göttingen professor had created a vacancy at the university, and the government bureaucrat in charge of filling it wisely asked Gauss whom he should hire. Gauss had met Weber four years earlier at a conference in Berlin, and he enthusiastically supported the young scholar for the position. Weber's arrival sparked the final period of great productivity in Gauss’s career.

Though Weber was half Gauss's age, their relationship quickly grew close. They became fast friends and were often dinner guests in each other’s homes. More than that, they had countless scientific discussions, performed experiments together, and started a journal to publish their results.

Read more »

///
Where Buddha Was
Jim Culleny

I thumb down the pile of books:

Paper Dance, 55 Latin Poets

Wislawa Szymborska, Poems
New and Collected

Poetry Like Bread (maybe the way
my mother made), Poets of the
Political Imagination

And Billy Collins Sailing Alone Around the
Room

which is pretty much what we all
do to a great extent

until, at the bottom: Precise V5,

which is not a book at all
but the label on the black pen

that lies there in
incandescent light at the
bottom of the ziggurat of books,
its axis aligned with their stepped spines
upon the golden oak table so perfectly. There

for a moment Buddha was.

“See,” he says, “I'm not so far-fetched
as you'd hoped.”
.

In the forties and fifties the Beats created a geography of the American imagination that continues to attract new generations. At the same time, a group of Soviet researchers wanted to re-engineer society with computers and communications. It remains to be seen whether either group’s intellectual heirs will shape our digital future, or whether real change will come from somewhere else altogether – like the Islamic world.

Fifty years ago Soviet and American cyberneticists were creating the theoretical framework for the Internet – or something like it – as an engine of social design. At the same time, the Beat writers were challenging the entire concept of social engineering in favor of more spontaneous ways of living.

So, a thought experiment: Would the Beats – those old American freethinkers – have taken to the Internet as a new medium of expression or rejected it as too dehumanizing? Would they have been bloggers?

Yeah, I know. It sounds like the set-up for a satirical piece: “Beatnik Blogs.” Or better yet, Beat Twitter. The 140-character limit might have attracted them the way that haiku did:

DULUOZ is watching his friends burn burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders

POETGUY is wondering how many windows Moloch has for eyes. Am figuring a thousand, give or take.

Blogs? They're linear, static. They're old lit. Twitter is new lit.

But these are questions of form. What about content? The Beats were drawn to geography – the road, the mountains, the rivers, and the cities.And there may never have been a time in history when it was possible to feel less connected to your actual geographic location than you can today. You can live large chunks of your life without it much mattering whether you’re in Los Angeles, Dubuque, or Teheran. Virtual “worlds” like Second Life and massively multiplayer games like World of Warcraft, are total immersion environments that absorb large amounts of time, money, and energy for their participants.

If aliens wanted to reprogram humanity for extraterrestrial slavery, they might have created something like the Internet. It severs us from daily interaction with the Earth, releases us from the need for face-to-face social contact. So, doesn't that make it dehumanizing? Wouldn’t the Beats have rejected it?

Read more »

by Maniza Naqvi

The nurse steps back after she finishes wrapping Danis’s head in a bandage of fresh white gauze. Danis is dying of brain cancer. He is dying gracefully despite the horrible pain. She takes a look at her handiwork and smiles as she strokes his head and thinks back to the thick mane of snowy white hair the kind that the men of his generation sport and which she had shaved off months ago at the time of Danis’s brain surgery. She sees the pain in his clouded blue eyes—which once must have sparkled before she knew him. There now you look like a Prince she says—from the Arabian nights! He winces and suppresses crying out in pain. She tells him that he has courage. He tells her that he has nothing of the sort, he has nothing to fear. Only those who fear need courage! He is confidant that God is waiting for him. She looks around her to see if the coast is clear—puts a finger to her lips conspiratorially, pulls a pack of cigarettes from her pocket. Then lights one and sticks it between his lips—letting him take a few puffs, while she readies the injection. Before each terrifyingly long needle he requests the nurse to say 'Bismillah' before administering the shot. He shuts his eyes as the nurse taps his vein on his wrist or his hand or in the crock of his elbow. Just as the needle punctures skin and moves further in a peaceful expression smoothens his yellowing and weathered pain-beaten face. For him God’s presence is evident in everything in his whole life—his birth, his health, his chances of survival—everything is based on God. For Danis, God is love and God is hope and against all odds God is present when there is nothing else to hold on to. Danis clings to hope. Reason, he says dismissively makes you want to die. Faith keeps you alive. Danis says this often. But then when the nurse leaves him to tend to others, he is quite capable of muttering that he is an atheist. He has to talk about God to the nurse—he tells others, so as not to make her lose her will for keeping him alive. Danis knows that hope is the most important and essential ingredient to human will and so it is he figures for those who are trying to save him. The least he can do in this worthy struggle is to do his bit of playing along. Atheists after all, respect above all, the human will.

Danis thinks back to the pain and hurt and struggles of his life so that he can cast upon everyone who has played a leading role in his life, a gaze of compassion. All those, who, with their absences and their cruelties made the presence of God an absolute necessity in his life when he was just a small child. Danis tells the nurse these discoveries that he is making while lying in this hospital with its smell of antiseptic and its gleaming pale yellow and white walls. We are all people of faith in the Balkans, he tells her. Loved by God. From time to time we’ve changed teams but never lost love. Bogomils—the Bulgar eastern Christian church—the heresy they may have converted to Islam perhaps as a rebellion against the Vatican but maybe because of the Ottomans—who-ever, what ever the reason, love, spite, or oppression, no one ever betrayed God here. Betrayed each other, betrayed Tito, a wife, a husband, a lover, but never God. Danis, was a communist, but was always a true believer in the purpose of God. When there seemed none at all he believed completely in love and hope. And by his own description by all accounts he should have been a delinquent destined for a madhouse had it not been his deep instinct for survival and his constant companionship with Allah. Fortified, so, he chronicles what he has endured and overcome. All the cruelty: the last war, the illness, the death of family. And none of it—not the daily ups and downs with all the surgery—nor the war and its aftermath, none can surpass the cruelty and ever present pain that he suffered in his childhood at the hands of his parents. His father left him, for the love of another woman. Left Danis, his mother and a baby sister. What followed in the aftermath was the agony of suffering and of misplaced resentments the beatings that Danis endured from his parents. Danis was separated from his father by a social worker and a system that insisted on rules and not feelings. Danis remembered as though it was a fresh memory, how his mother’s new husband had beaten him when his mother was away during the day. How he had run away from home to his father’s house only streets away and how he had banged on the window with his tiny fists his face red and swollen from the beating and begged his father to take him back. How his father had kept Danis with him and fought against the social workers and his ex-wife and had finally prevailed in keeping his son. And then how his father’s successive wives came through Danis’ life wreaking havoc. His father sank into silence and a sadness interchangeable with unpredictable bouts of sudden rage and more beatings for Danis. Beatings for Danis, by women, for whom, he was never a good enough child. Danis had been a five year old for whom war had begun early in life. And for whom the horror of ethnic cleansing and war at the age of sixty years would not be as cruel or as memorable as the pain suffered in childhood. Now lying in his hospital bed he forgave his parents because they were young and had suffered cruelty in their own childhoods.

Read more »

by Michael Blim

In Washington, D.C., liberals are back, and so is J.M. Keynes. As financial panic has swept through the American economy, economists on the center-left who had drifted toward the doctrinaire neoliberalism of de-regulated markets and a state apparatus friendly to capitalist expansion have made a big course correction. Regulation is back, signaling a return to the last century progressive politics of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.

But as the threats of domestic deflation and a growing American output gap have put the fear of the Great Depression into the new Obama administration, the same liberal economists so taken with neoliberalism have embraced J.M. Keynes once more. The Keynes of massive fiscal stimulus, and to a lesser extent the Keynes of Bretton Woods, are now in desperate fashion.

We are likely about to see a finely tuned, more technically adept New Deal II. This time, though, Obama, unlike Franklin Roosevelt, will likely have fewer qualms about spending as much as it takes, nor apparently for as long as it takes. With two economic historians of the Great Depression close at hand, Ben Bernanke at the Federal Reserve and Christina Romer at the Council of Economic Advisors, Obama has doubtless internalized the lesson learned through Roosevelt’s mistake of calling off massive fiscal stimulus too soon and contributing to the 1937 plunge back into deep recession.

Of the liberal economists who are public figures, Larry Summers will probably turn out to be the most important, as he appears to have been become the de facto quarterback of the Obama economics team. His academic reputation rests upon rigorous empirical analysis of questions designed to upset conventional wisdom in a wide range of economic sub-fields. Formerly a deficit hawk and a defender of unregulated derivatives markets, Summers was one of the first (though Paul Krugman was way ahead of everyone) to recognize the gravity of the current crisis and quickly shifted onto Keynesian ground in calling for massive fiscal stimuli, and in particular redistributive strategies that would put resources into the hands of the working and middle classes.

Others have similarly forsaken neoliberalism’s strictures for liberalism’s largesse. Jeffrey Sachs, the economist who prescribed “shock therapy” for ailing Bolivia in 1983 and the same for former socialist countries such as Poland and Russia after 1989, now heads up the Earth Institute at Columbia University and is the Director of the United Nations Millennium Program. He represents a growing number of American economists that have been supporting direct American state intervention wherever vital economic interests are threatened by the current crisis. Sachs is currently pressing for direct economic relief for the U.S. auto industry, a position opposite to but consistent with his past remedies based upon state-centered economic activism.

Joseph Stiglitz, former chair of the Clinton Administration’s Council on Economic Advisors and former chief economist of the World Bank, won the Nobel Prize for showing the adverse and unexpected effects caused by asymmetries of information that often underlie market transactions. Not surprisingly, he is a vigorous advocate of the regulation of financial markets. He is also highly critical of the U.S. for abusing its hegemonic role and distorting capital markets and international trade for its own ends. In some respects, Stiglitz’s advocacy of fair trade for poor countries in the Doha round underscores the return of the Bretton Woods Keynes where trade, though free, is rationalized through international agreements and rules.

Stiglitz, Sachs, and Summers, the “three S’s,” (and perhaps adding Krugman, we couldemploy an accounting firm rhyme like “SSS & K”) highlight fairly the shift in economic belief and strategy brought on by the economic crisis and Obama’s victory.

Call it the “’New’ New Deal.” It consists of: (1) as much fiscal stimulus as necessary to push up demand and avoid deflation; (2) activist state intervention to save and/or restructure vital parts of the national economy; and (3) strong regulatory measures to curb abuses of markets and to assure that they function with maximum transparency and efficiency. Commitments to free trade with “fair trade” concessions for poor countries and assistance for dislocated workers in rich countries remain surprisingly strong, perhaps another legacy of the Keynesian analysis of the Great Depression that guides current thinking.

Will it be enough? Can the “’New’ New Deal” work this time?

There are some problems.

Read more »

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.

Read more »

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.

Read more »