by Tom Jacobs

Every explorer names his island Formosa, beautiful. To him it is beautiful because, being first, he has access to it and can see it for what it is.
~ Walker Percy, “The Loss of the Creature” (1966)

But my compass takes its cardinal point from tragedy.
~ Richard Rodriguez, “Late Victorians” (1990)

It is not down in any map; true places never are.
~ Herman Melville, Moby Dick (1851)

Although indigenous peoples have lived for at least the last three thousand years within striking distance of the North Pole, the idea of obtaining the northernmost summit of our planet never seemed to have presented an appealing or even an interesting proposition. As American and European explorers began passing through and occasionally staying with local communities during their tentative efforts to set foot on and poke a national flag into the North Pole around the turn of the twentieth century, Inuits and other locals must have asked themselves (if not the ghostly white fanatics) something to the effect, “what kind of crazy person would bother with such an enterprise? What could possibly be the motive, goal, or point of such a thing?” And it’s an undeniably strange proposition—risking death to plant one’s flag on a remote site of an almost purely symbolic nature if only to say that I/We’ve been there first. Aside from the obvious notions of national pride and some enlightenment idea of exploration, the question still remains: how have explorers justified such a silly mission? And why didn’t the North Pole draw the imagination of precisely those people who were in the best
position to attain it?

Questions like these imply further corollaries: how, at the turn of the last century, could anyone definitively prove that they were there anyway? A photograph? A diary? A chronicle of coordinates obtained and passed through? In an era of rampant confidence games and men, who would believe you even if you produced such evidence? The will to believe is, of course, always a powerful element in public credulity, and, as the competing stories of Frederick Cook and Robert Peary would illustrate, the conditions in the States were such that people were ready and willing to believe.

1908 was a big year for the North Pole. Although attempts had been made on this symbolic summit previously, 1908 saw American and European explorers began to make their way “polewards” in earnest and in such a way that this most inaccessible and meaningless of geo-symbolic spaces was, for the first time, at risk of becoming just another demystified and disenenchanted set of coordinates.

What is it about places like the North Pole (or Mount Everest, or the Moon) that so incite the imagination of Western explorers? It’s a dumb question, from many points of view—the simplest answer is that it is the more or less natural product of masculine narcissism: one goes there in order to say that one has been there, and then, perhaps, to reap whatever fame and rewards might follow. No doubt there’s truth to such an answer. But it somehow misses the more philosophical dimensions of the project—the sheer overdetermined plenitude of unmapped and unknown spaces that draws people into their magnetic influence. What damn fool’s errand sends people off on a nearly certain Arctic Death Trip?

Read more »

Aesthetic experience affects the senses, emotions, and intellect. It’s often associated with works of art, like paintings, dance, or music. Such experience is unique and personal; it depends not just on the artwork itself, but on the meaning that we attach to it and the feeling that this generates.

Van Gogh’s painting, Starlight over Rhone, has personal significance for me. The scene depicted reminds me of the nighttime view of Cape Breton Island from mainland Nova Scotia–a view that was familiar to me as a child. For me, the painting comes with poignant memories attached. Because these memories are uniquely mine, however, I wouldn’t expect others viewing it to have the same response. Such is the nature of aesthetic experience: an object with a single set of objectively identifiable features produces a unique experience for each observer.

While the role of subjectivity is well recognized in the artistic realm, art isn’t exceptional in its ability to create aesthetic experience. Such experience could be created by multicolored autumn foliage or an expansive view of the night sky. It can also be created by immaterial entities, like concepts.

Evolution is one such concept. By evolution, I mean “the scientific theory of evolution”–that concept that creates controversy in non-scientific circles despite an abundance of supporting evidence. Just as with a piece of art, we can present evolution to a group of people and they may each respond differently. Evolution comes with strings attached–preconceptions, associations, and implications. People’s perception of evolution isn’t shaped just by empirical facts, but by the meaning and feeling that they attach to it. Their response will be influenced by their worldview, personality traits, and a host of other factors.

It shouldn’t be surprising then that acceptance of evolution isn’t entirely dependent on comprehension and knowledge of evolution. Studies have shown that we can significantly improve people’s understanding of evolution without having much of an effect on their acceptance of it. A 2003 study of undergraduate biology students found no relation between knowledge and acceptance of evolution¹. A later study showed that increasing biology teachers’ knowledge of evolution had little effect on their views on the teaching of antievolutionary ideas². Despite improved understanding, the majority of teachers still favored the teaching of antievolutionary concepts. Understanding evolution and accepting it are not the same thing. It follows that improving acceptance of evolution requires strategies that aim beyond improved understanding.

Read more »

by Colin Marshall

“Art is the concealment of art,” someone once said. Though sources conflict about exactly who that was, his words must have reached Sangsoo Hong, who toils to produce films that look and feel like nothing at all. This is a canny strategy to raise cinephiles’ eyebrows: plain people doing plain things, plainly portrayed? Then there must be something big and complex grinding away beneath the surface. While this way of thinking often leads straight to a dead end, the wall against which earnest film students beat their heads until their grad school fund runs dry, it pays off when applied to Hong, the most distinctive filmmaker to emerge out of South Korea’s cinematic boom of fifteen years and counting.

The Hong movie, of which ten specimens with a strong family resemblance now exist, is both a hard sell and an easy one. Spartanly unadorned, it’s built out of long, often unmoving shots of decidedly un-epic subjects. Its large stable of floundering creative types — writers, composers, filmmakers — pass the time hanging out in pubs, taking car and train trips, pounding bottle after bottle of liquor, stumbling into wanly unappealing sexual encounters, and blearily, unconvincingly, insisting upon their worthiness as artists, as lovers, as human beings. Their conversations are as outwardly inane as anything overheard on public transit or in hotel lobbies around the world. Despite the small scale of their problems, solutions refuse to budge from the hazy distance.

Yet it can all be so relatable. Though subject to a wide range of cultural and temperamental oddities — about which more later — Hong’s flighty monuments to frustration endure, in some sense, the same problems we all do. They want to stake out recognizable individualities, to do work that will make a mark on the cultural world, and to hook up with the men or women they’re particularly into — to connect, in various senses. But these broad desires are also vague, and they’re easily overwhelmed by the detritus of the moment. In Hong’s world, this detritus manifests as an endless stream of cigarettes, bottles of soju, chintz in all its forms, and sudden opportunities for sexual congress.

2000’s Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Hong’s third film, looks and feels different than the others but, with its chin up, covers the very same territory. Soo-jung, a screenwriter at a television station, draws the amorous attentions of both producer Young-soo and gallerist Jae-hoon. Soo-jung is the virgin of the title, and it’s on her to decide whether and whom to surrender the virginity in question. Jae-hoon pulls ahead of Young-soo early and rapidly, though neither candidate for deflorist comes off as a golden god. Soo-jung herself seems to be no prize, for that matter, with all her blank hesitancy and whiny vacillation. Why couldn’t all three have just stayed home?

The only possible answer: welcome to Hongland, a realm populated by the boisterous, the shiftless, the vainglorious, and the drunk. It’s a place where even the simplest plans, for everything from excursions to the mountains to halfhearted seduction schemes, have a way of haphazardly deflating in action. (While never framed in a classically comedic fashion, instances of this are often hilarious. In 2002’s Turning Gate, an entire group piles into a van, getting ready to head out just as one of them slams the door on their finger, memorably 86ing the whole excursion in an instant.) Men like Jae-hoon and Young-soo — not to mention women like Soo-jung — are par for the course. It’s only natural they’d get all entangled.

Read more »

Working Their Mojo
…..——A random report on a staus quo from the wild west

It’s hard to tell if we’re in the midst of a permanent downtick
or just in the throes of what used to be labeled a bad trip
—or if “going-to-hell-in-a-bucket” is apropos

I’ve almost given up wondering if we might eventually enter an uptick
or if we’'ll forever be holding the dry end of our dip sticks
—it’s hard to fathom what future fuel will be making our go go

I’ve just roughed-in a canvas which seems to be-coming a triptych
you need at least that much room to capture anything apocalyptic
—the subject surpasses the margins when painting a really big blow

Bumblers are manning the helm of a fervently split ship
officers even are begging magicians to dream up some new trick
—but ruses of shamans just work in the moment they’re in an illusionist’s show

One priest from Alaska looks good in high heels or mukluks and lipstick
she counts cash on her dogsled after doing her populist us-versus-them shtick
—she quit her governor job when the circus promised her more dough

It seems the captain believes his opponents are innocent apparatchiks
not corporate ass-licks bent on perks in the shape of some very fat checks
—it’s as if the chief’s been dumped in a bank of eyeball-deep snow

And here we are on the ground plowing through trying to manage to stay hip
in a media smoke-screen and stupor brought on by some very slick shits
—they’re engrossed hoarding gold for themselves not sweating while working their mojo

The last will be first in the end, while the first will be getting their wings clipped
so it says in the sayings of seers well known for not keeping their lips zipped
—but that's just a red herring to get everyone last to waltz to the Status Quo

by Jim Culleny, 11/12/10

Mojo: here

by Michael Blim

I get The Nation magazine whether I want to or not. Years ago, a close friend and I found ourselves separated by the geography of new jobs and career moves, and so we unknowingly gave each Nation subscriptions as going-away gifts. For me, it’s one of those things that I’ll read because it comes to my home free. That’s the beauty of giving: her gift is free to me, and mine to her. Since I don’t need expect my money’s worth, I can diss the magazine all I want, but still sneak a peek at it from time to time. The Nation is what used to be called a magazine of opinion. They tell you what to think, in other words. Given that we are bombarded with opinions daily, I prefer to collect facts, and keep my opinions to myself – or, well, share them with you.

Perhaps it was the graphic art accompanying Chris Hedges’ article, “City of Ruins” on Camden, New Jersey, in the November 22 issue of The Nation that slowed my eye. Hedges is a distinguished print journalist formerly with the New York Times who writes work that sticks with you.

As did this article. Hedges describes today’s Camden as one of America’s most dismal dystopias. It is achingly poor, dangerous, used up and thrown away. It’s a bomb shelter for its residents, 70,000 of whom live in a city with the highest crime and poverty rates of any city in the country. For those of you who live in Baltimore, Detroit, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Chicago, Oakland, St. Louis, Memphis, or Washington, D.C., and thought that portions of your city’s degradation knew no peers, consider the possibilities further down the food chain for the quality of life and for human dignity. In the seventies, I lived in a Philadelphia neighborhood nicknamed “the bottoms.” In a town full of bad neighborhoods, “the bottoms” was the worst.

Then I worked for a while in Camden. It was worse than “the bottoms.”

Read more »

A young man of my acquaintance, adequately nourished, and provided with a room and a gaming console appears to be sustainable, quite extraordinarily so, in the environmental sense. He has a small physical footprint. A few square feet of a pleasantly upholstered couch in an ill-lit room is all that is needed to sustain him. From this perch he can command vast legions of hobgoblins, medieval warlocks, sport heroes, and assorted heavily-armed movie characters. He can distract himself for days at a time, emerging from his room very occasionally, like a three-toed sloth, to pad to the latrine. An army of youth so employed needs little in the way of a great outdoors. Slightly soiled pajamas, or underpants, it seems, can suffice for clothing. The nutritional requirements of this battalion extend little beyond sodas and pop-tarts. In light of this, might it not be wise for us to reverse course, and rather than advocating strenuously, as many of us have, for urban kids to get out of doors to cultivate responsible environmental stewardship, might we not instead council the cultivation of obsessive gameplay, reclassifying it as environmentally laudable behavior?

If we take this pragmatic tack, setting aside our pious feelings about the “old environment” and the worthy pleasures to be found there, it is apparent that there are several tendencies in contemporary life that we might encourage rather than scorn. We have for too long decried our sedentary natures and the accompanying tendencies towards corpulence of body and spirit. Bloat a little, rest a little more; you are doing your bit for the environment. Applaud your small adventures in the great indoors – a peregrination from fridge to sofa will never have felt so good, and the lazy-boy is a fine environmental destination. Think of the gas saved compared with a trip to Yosemite – no planes, no trains, no automobiles. Even if your kids might like to romp in the corn fields of some distant rural hinterland, spare yourself the self-laceration. Quite simply a family ensconced in a moderately appointed metropolitan apartment may well have a smaller environmental cost than a family whizzing around in their so-called mini-van in some suburban Eden.

A back of the envelop calculation shows that the environmental footprint of the imm obile is smaller that of one in constant auto-motion. Whole earths can be saved by merely standing still[1].

Read more »

Cover of Home Boy, HarperCollins India edition, 2010, cover painting by Faiza Butt

Below, author photo by David Williams

Elatia Harris

In his excellent blog Work Product, Matt Wilkens ballparks the number of English language long form prose fiction volumes published globally, every year, at about 100,000. Not all these works aspire to the condition of literature, of course, but among those that do, Home Boy, by H.M. Naqvi, published last year, has famously pulled ahead of a great many of the rest. Consider that the author was top-seeded. A Lannan Fellow, a recipient of the Phelam Prize, a creative writing teacher at Boston University, an erstwhile banker and a slam poet, Naqvi was less likely to be overlooked than most first novelists. Home Boy, a distinctively American novel by a “card-carrying” Pakistani, has been taken to heart by readers around the world, with translations into Italian, German and, soon, Portuguese, following launches in New York, Karachi and Jaipur. Last month, Home Boy was short-listed for the prestigious and lucrative DSC Prize for South Asian Literature.

In the year since Home Boy was published, I have corresponded with Naqvi, who once wrote for this blog. We have had a long conversation about what is uniquely American about Home Boy; close readers will find it as American as Moby Dick, and much shorter. We talked about the fast-growing South Asian literary festival scene, and about the shifts in artistic intention the first year out has impelled. As well as writing fiction, Naqvi is a correspondent for the superb Global Post, with articles covering a Pakistan it's almost impossible to draw a bead on reading other English language newspapers. What are the tales of the dazzling year, for H.M. Naqvi? And what's next?

Left to right: Covers of the South Asian, German, Italian and American editions of Home Boy

Read more »