After Mohammed Iqbal
Unveil your face
A star is witness
Stop flickering
Blaze
Illuminate
Be
How long will you beg like Moses on the mountain?
Fan the flame within you
Create a new Mecca with every speck of your embers
Rid yourself of idolatry
Observe the limits in this temple
Even if you want to boast
First create the confidence of Alexander
Then lust after the splendor of Darius
Translated from the Urdu by Rafiq Kathwari, guest poet at 3 Quarks Daily
by Elatia Harris
L., Cover, Girl in White, by Sue Hubbard, Cinnamon, 2012. The painting is Portrait of Myself on my Fifth Wedding Annivesary, by Paula Modersohn Becker, 1906, the Boettcherstrasse Museum, Bremen.
R., Sue Hubbard, photo by Derek Adams, suehubbard.com
Sue Hubbard is an award-winning poet, novelist and critic, based in London, who has written about contemporary art for 3 Quarks Daily since 2008. She is the author of Girl in White, a newly published work of fiction based on the life of Paula Modersohn Becker, a pioneering German painter who died in 1907 at age 31, a few days after giving birth. In her short time, Becker worked with enormous dedication to paint authentically, and to focus on subjects outside the usual range of German painting of her era. She did not live to see the great transition of which she was a part. Rather, questioning everything, demanding love and fulfillment as a woman as well as freedom as a painter, she was among those who got to the very edge of the Modern. At her death, over 400 paintings and hundreds of drawings were found in her studio.
ELATIA HARRIS: I am struck by how, as a critic and writer about art, you are very much in the trenches, illuminating the sometimes quite difficult art that is happening right now. Yet Girl in White is set in the early years of the 20th century. Did not only Paula Modersohn Becker but her era attract you?
SUE HUBBARD: It’s true I do write about contemporary art but I’m not a conventional art critic or an academic art historian. My first practice is as a poet. I started writing about art about 20 years ago, when a small magazine that published both art and poetry asked me to write about some artists. I have always seen art and poetry primarily as a form of exploration, a voyage of discovery to uncover the essential self. I am interested in artists and writers who push the boundaries, not for their own sake but to discover new things about the human condition. I’m attracted to the Romantics as well as to the early Moderns and existentialists, so I am quite at home with Paula, who was hungry to discover new things about herself and the possibilities of art.
Further
nothing is further
than a horizon
on a day at sea
storm surge nil, line beyond
the rock of swells
and slap of sea on hull
the horizon,
that crisp ring
that noose
a scalpel cut
between gray and gray
between realms
it cleaves high and low
it's a rift we never breach
but ever keep our eyes on
the edge we never reach
the prey we never snatch
a shore we never beach
a gate that’s never latched
the horizon is tight-lipped and taut
as a lute string strung from zip to zip
distant as a hoax
a hold we never grip
.
.
by Jim Culleny 9/7/12
by Mara Jebsen
These are the first two entries of a book of poem-essays inspired by the Oxford English Dictionary.
A is for Ardor
Ardor is life. The zeal in a line
down the centre of the body. The wick.
I ascend, with burning
eye. Ascend: to rise
over mountain and lesser; to take on, in some sky
the space of dominion. Now Animated.
Now moved
from within. Fully half of all ancestors
are women. Their brave, painted faces are hard
to know. The frame around mine,
and the frame around yours could melt – there was a song:
my grandma and your
grandma,
sitting by the fire-
then one set the other’s flag ablaze.
It happens that our ancestors are moving
in small circles, in skirts, in their different
houses. Let us will them: Leave their houses.
Burn flags together. Ancestor worship— is veneration
of those dead, whose blood we believe
is threads through our own; that even now they hold sway
over the affairs of the living. Ahankara, in Buddhism
is the false identification
of the true inner spirit with the body,
or mind, or outside
world.
It all burns off, except the wick, the promise
of fire. Are we ardent spirits,
like brandy and gin? I cannot picture
myself without a body. Dear
grandmama, most inflammable of
flammables; how is it I know
you are dancing like blazes in the waltz
of the beyond: when I spin, I burn; hands open, receiving
the gust of a gift called ardor.
By Maniza Naqvi
Burning the Koran was not a problem for some of the earliest and most revered Muslims considered to have been exemplary in their actions. In a manner of speaking, they were the forefathers of this tradition and had supremacy for burning the Koran in order, in their opinion, as a matter of necessity, to secure it.
Koran burning, it seems has proved handy for mining and oiling it for whatever its worth, whenever, whichever absolute power ruling over Muslim populations has faced any danger to its longevity. Fourteen hundred years later, Koran burning fueled divisions again; and was once again linked to reasons of security two years ago in September 2010 when there was much agony and fury about the odd call to burn copies of the Koran by an odd preacher in Florida. The President of the United States stepped in to plead with the preacher to not do this (here). And among the reasons the President gave in making his case was that it would endanger American troops fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. To have stopped the preacher outright from burning copies of the Koran would have been against the preacher’s rights of freedom of speech enshrined in the first amendment. The preacher was, quite correctly, free to do what he pleased it should not have mattered if he hurt sentiments. Sentiments are important but not as important as principles enshrined in the first amendment. This is what makes America: the rule of law that guarantees the freedom of speech, and together, the rule of law and freedom of speech, guarantee the strengthening of tolerance, a flourishing of opinions and civil liberties. The plea to not burn the Koran, however, wasn’t this, but rather couched in the justification that it would hurt the military troops and become a security risk because it would hurt sentiments! Anyway, a year and half later, earlier this year in February 2012, copies of the Koran were burned by Americans at a military base in Afghanistan. Protests and riots ensued and people were killed (here and here). These were people who probably had never had the opportunity to even learn how to read, let alone read or understand the Koran. It is not clear and no one seems to have investigated why there was a need to burn these copies or: why there were so many Korans at an American base or whether these were even copies of the Koran; or whether these were copies of the Bible in the Pashto language, which were being distributed by the US military to illiterate villagers who would not have known the difference as had been reported earlier (here, here , here , here and here) or why was there such religiosity at the base.
Destroying copies of the Koran has been a regular occurrence. In Pakistan alone, each year, for example in Lahore, hundreds of copies of the Koran are found lying in the bed of the main canal that runs through the city when it dries out—thrown in the water by the pious who want to rid themselves of torn copies of it—to do so in water is “allowed” by tradition and of course then there are the copies used by the pious for the purposes of securing their gains by using it as a prop and tool for black magic. In other parts of the country there are rivers where the same practice would occur and of course there is the sea in Karachi. The percentage for each form of piety’s purpose would be hard to determine though judging by the talk of black magic and superstition and the number of Mullahs involved, for a fee, in this booming business, I would imagine that the number of copies destroyed accordingly for this purpose outweigh any other reason.
by Kevin S. Baldwin
It was one of the most perfect autumn days I had ever experienced. Sunny, clear, with just a bit of crispness in the air, and a slight breeze. The colors of foliage and sky were super-saturated. It was one of those times where there was no doubt that it is great to be alive.
A cell phone rang and the moment evaporated. I was annoyed. Had technology made it so we could no longer sever ourselves from the world we have created, if only to enjoy the natural world for a few moments? I tried to calm my inner Luddite.
One of our party answered. There was a pause, and I slowly began to realize something big was up. I could make out a few words from the clearly agitated caller, like “twin towers”, “Pentagon” and “we're under attack.” It was still early in the morning and the full horror of the day had yet to unfold. Given that we didn't know much, we decided to cut short our journey and head back to shore.
As the Republican Party begins its national convention today in Florida, I offer this brief history of political conventions and examine their relevance to modern American politics.
The founders believed that in order for the republic to survive and be healthy, citizens must sublimate their selfish interests for the sake of the general welfare. In line with this, they imagined that the nation’s politicians would be citizen servants: men, who for a temporary period of time, sacrificed the profits and joys of their personal pursuits so that they might shoulder the responsibility of governing the nation, the states, and localities, offering their wisdom and insight for everyone’s benefit.
There was nothing of political parties in this vision. Neither the Articles of Confederation nor the U.S. Constitution made any mention of them. They are, in the strict sense of the term, extra-constitutional political organizations, and they are most decidedly not what the new nation’s architects had in mind when they fashioned this republic. Indeed, they did not even use the term “party” for the most part, instead referring to the political alliances that soon formed as “factions.” George Washington especially despised the new factionalism, even in its nascent form, and he refused to ally with any group. To this day, he is the only president listed on the roll of chief executives as Independent.
Perhaps it was näive of Washington and other purists to scoff at the emerging political gangs. Perhaps the constitution’s framers should have better anticipated this development and done something to temper it, to keep it from warping their beloved system of checks and balances. Regardless, the move towards modern parties was underway as the nation’s politicians began to lineup behind the philosophies and reputations of top leaders such as Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and John Adams.
The Architecture of Memory
Every room has its story—
the back of the house is darkest
but light floods the porch
where we sit after a long day
rising now and then from its steps,
momentarily leaving our drinks
to wander back through old doors
and rummage among the stuff we’ve stacked
against walls and under beds
reaching for the odd object
we’d just nudged with a recollection
as we sauntered through conversation,
as if a salvaged thought was a lamp
which, being disturbed,
clicks on automatically,
becomes a sun in a dimming universe
or lightning strike in a new storm,
either way a big brilliant thing
massive as the posts & beams
of a venerable house
—the bellied bones of time
upholding the spirit
of the place
.
by Jim Culleny
8/8/12
by Gautam Pemmaraju
Over two weeks ago, on August 11, a sizeable gathering of over 15,000 gathered at Azad Maidan, a public ground in Mumbai, to protest violence against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar/Burma and those of the northeastern Indian state of Assam. It was in early to mid July that violence broke out between sections of the multifaith indigenous Bodo people and migrant Bengali Muslims in Kokrajhar, Chirang & Dubhri districts of Assam displacing over 400,000 people, and earlier, 87 people were reportedly killed in ethnic clashes between Rohingya and Buddhists in Rakhine. The crowds were responding to a call by Raza Academy, a 25 year old Mumbai based organization, that has been actively mobilizing Muslims in the city protesting slights against their religious sentiments – from anti-George Bush public protests, announcing a cash prize of 100000 rupees for hurling a slipper at Salman Rushdie at the Jaipur Literary Festival early this year, seeking the revoking of a visa to the Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen, to protesting the presence in Mumbai of the Canada based Pakistani cleric Tahirul Qadri, accused of apostasy and of thanking Gujarat Chief Minister, Narendra Modi, for providing state security for his public gathering in Ahmedabad. (See Faisal Devji’s interesting piece on the Rushdie/Jaipur Lit Fest episode here).
by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash
The journalistic British invasion of the 80s and 90s brought us Tina Brown, Christopher Hitchens, Niall Ferguson and Rupert Murdoch — assholes all, who have lowered the intellectual tone of American journalism and brought us cheap sensationalism and provocation for the sake of provocation and nothing else.
One reason we Americans are so easily blinded by these assholes is simply their accents: Americans have always thought that the British accent denotes great intelligence. I mean, Shakespeare in a British accent sounds more elegant than played in American accents, doesn't it — despite the fact that the accent of Shakespeare's own time was probably closer to American than Brit.
The other reason is that, because of a British liberal arts education, which is superior to its US counterpart, these folks can display remarkable erudition. Unlike most American journalists, they've actually read a lot — enough to impress us Americans anyway.
The third reason is their intellectual smugness. We take this as a sign of their intellectual superiority, but it's nothing but an infuriatingly annoying British smug shallow high-table confidence that the Oxbridge snobs have used to condescend to us and intimidate us for ages.
The British have undoubtedly gained by the good riddance of these assholes to the US, but their gain is our loss. Let's see how deep this loss goes, by taking these assholes in turn.
by Sarah Firisen
That Mitt Romney runs from in vain
To prove no active role
Is clearly his goal
But to believe that is really a strain
While bailing the Olympic games out
The evidence shows he had clout
Bain's full owner it seems
But no part of their schemes
A technicality he says with a pout
We should just take good ole Mitt's word
That the lines really never got blurred
And those offshore accounts
That scored huge tax discounts?
Un-American. That's just absurd!
Nothing's more patriotic you know
Than to legally watch your wealth grow
To avoid as much tax
As you can to the max
And in Swiss banks more cash to stow
No one's prouder of country than he
It's just not where his money should be
That's the American way
There's no need to pay
When he can get away living tax-free
He says there's nothing more we can learn
By looking at past tax returns
It must be apparent
He's been quite transparent
Trust him, there's no need for concern
So does everyone have this all straight?
It's really not up for debate
The record on Bain
Is just not germane
To a perfectly legal tax rate!
by Joy Icayan
It’s like being in a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel.
The huge outcry, coming no less, from the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines stems from some provisions of the RH Bill: first that the government would be mandated to provide contraceptives and related materials to its constituents, second that the RH Bill proposes age appropriate sex education for the youth. The purpose of the bill is basic enough: to reduce the significant number of maternal deaths in the country, to provide women a choice to plan their families, to educate people so they can become responsible about their choices.
To provide a context, more than half of the population is living in poverty. Most cannot afford contraceptives; pregnant women often do not get decent prenatal or postnatal care. Unsafe abortions are rampant—and daily news tabloids often feature pictures of fetuses in trash cans. When they get especially brutal, sometimes they feature pictures of wire hangers and women with punctured insides—sob stories of a failed abortion.
To provide a more personal context, we grew up fearing an unwanted pregnancy most of all. It was because you had no options—it meant your future was over. You couldn’t buy condoms because you weren’t supposed to know about sex. What we learned about sex, we learned from the crumpled magazines the boys managed to get from wherever and passed around. If you did get pregnant too early, it meant you were unchaste, dirty. Your saving grace was to get married soon. If you were the boy who got someone pregnant, it was your responsibility to ‘man up’ or marry the woman, regardless of your state of maturity. (There is also no divorce in the country.)
Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse
We all agree that civility in political argument is an increasingly scarce good. Yet it’s not clear precisely what civility is. On some accounts, civility is equivalent to conflict aversion; one is civil insofar as one is conciliatory and irenic in dealing with one’s political opponents. Civility in this sense seeks to deal with disagreement by disposing of it. Civility of this kind is little more than a call for compromise at the expense of one’s own commitments. Hence this kind of civility might be inconsistent with actually believing anything. To be sure, compromise among clashing viewpoints is frequently a fitting avenue to pursue once argument has reached an impasse. But when taken as a fundamental virtue of argument itself, compromise is vicious.
Another prevalent account of civility is focused on the tone one takes in arguing with one’s opponents. The thought is that when arguing, one must avoid overly hostile or antagonistic language. On this view, a paradigmatic case of incivility is name-calling and other forms of expression overtly aimed at belittling or insulting on one’s opponents. Now, there is no doubt that maintaining a civil tone when arguing is generally good policy. But a civil tone is not always required, and there are occasions where aggressive language is called for. Argument is a form of confrontation, one with words instead of weapons, and any norm that prevents argument from displaying the critical edges of disagreements undercuts what inspires the argument to begin with. Furthermore, it is possible to fail at proper argumentation and yet maintain a calm and respectful tone of voice. In fact, under certain circumstances, one patronizes one’s interlocutor precisely by sustaining one’s composure. If civility of tone has a purpose, it is to maintain conditions under which proper argument can commence; thus it is not itself a component of proper argument.
What we might remember most about the London 2012 Olympics are the medal ceremonies. The proud, the tearful, the exhausted, the awestruck, the lip-syncing, and occasionally the unimpressed. We might also call to mind the relative equanimity with which silver and bronze medalists tolerated the national anthems of the winning nation. Nobel laureate Konrad Lorenz (1903-1989), an Austrian zoologist and co-founder with Niko Tinbergen of the field of ethology – the biology of behavior – remarked in his popular book On Aggression (1966) that the Olympic Games are the only occasion when the playing of the anthem of another nation does not arouse hostility. Athletic ideals of fair play and chivalry, he said, balance out national enthusiasm. Olympic sports, you see, have all the virtues of war without all that unpleasant killing and plundering and, importantly, without aggravating international hatred. To surrogate for war, Olympic sports should be as dangerous as possible and should call for a measure of self-sacrifice. This being the case, one wonders why jousting is not an Olympic sport. Perhaps NBC simply chose not to screen it.
The destructive intensity of the aggressive drive that propels us to war is mankind’s hereditary evil, as Lorenz termed it, and its evolutionary origins can be sought in tribal conflict. In the early Stone Age intra-tribal skirmishes would have paid out some evolutionary dividends: dispersion of the population, the selection of the strong and especially in the defense of the brood. But in more contemporary times having overcome our most immediate environmental limitations, that is, not for the most part starving or being prey items, and now that we are equipped with weapons, a more dangerous, indeed an “evil” intra-specific selection prevails. What was once healthy for the species in the form of an instinctive behavior called “militant enthusiasm” has now turned pathological.
Much Occurred
.
Yesterday I burned some brush
took all day
dragging piles I’d cut
during two previous weekends
.
what a workout
ticker tickin like crazy
head in a straw fedora outwitting melanoma
generating smoke, much occurred
.
by Jim Culleny, April 2006
Detroit turned out to be heaven, but it also turned out to be hell.
~Marvin Gaye
Detroit’s ruin porn narrative has gotten lots of play over the years. I remember the first time I ever heard it, actually – as a punchline in the Kentucky Fried Movie, ca. 1977. Since then, as received wisdom would have it, Detroit has had plenty of time and opportunity to keep at this downward trajectory. More recently, art book browsers could enjoy a chorus line of weighty photo-essays appealing to our rubbernecking tendencies: please consider the fact that these three books were all published within the span of a year (although I have to ask, where is Robert Polidori when you really need him?).
Add to this list the Times’s featured doc-let, which is in fact a trailer for a feature-length effort called ‘Detropia’ recently shown at Sundance and soon to be premiering at the IFC Center in New York (I’m assuming that ‘detritus’+‘topia’=‘Detropia’. Got that? Ok, good). This is dystopia at its finest: when it’s not dark, everything is grey, muddy, cold and generally nicely prepped for the end of the world. When they’re not pulling down decrepit factory buildings for scrap using badly outclassed pickup trucks, these Detropians are a grumpy, hard-scrabble lot that crack wise while warming themselves by a trash fire. I don’t know about the rest of the film, but the city depicted in the trailer is a place where I wouldn’t settle for anyone less than Snake Plisskin as my tour guide cum personal security detail. In any case, all our narrative is missing is some Chinese guy in a shiny suit peeling off a few hundred yuan as payment, and we would be all set for globalization’s last act.
by Quinn O'Neill
It seems to be widely understood that you can ensure your own good health by eating fresh fruits and vegetables, avoiding junk food, exercising regularly, and not smoking. It’s an empowering idea that places the individual in charge of his own health, but there’s a flip side: if good health is attributable to the healthy choices that we make as individuals, then poor health must also be a choice.
This kind of thinking shapes our views on health care reform. If people choose to smoke, be sedentary, and consume an unhealthy diet, then why should the rest of us be expected to pay for their treatment when they end up with poor health? They made bad choices and so they should suffer the consequences.
The problem with this reasoning is that none of us makes decisions independently of our living conditions, and we have limited control over these conditions. We can’t blame children for learning unhealthy eating habits from their parents and we can’t blame a teenager who starts smoking as a result of peer pressure for being so desperate to fit in. Nor can we blame them for becoming unhealthy adults as a result of this early experience.
The most powerful influences on our health are not a matter of personal choice. They are well known to health care professionals as the “social determinants of health” and, unfortunately, they seem to be a well kept secret. “Health care” continues to be framed in public disourse as a system for providing medical services rather than a system for optimizing health within our society. If we care about health, we ought to be as interested in preventing illness as in treating it.
by Namit Arora
A review of Pankaj Mishra’s “From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia”.
In the ensuing centuries, European adventurers would subject many older, tradition-bound, and self-absorbed civilizations in Asia to the ravages of this aggressive and disruptive cultural force—and incidentally, to its refinements. Indeed by 1900, a minority of white Europeans had colonized much of Asia, controlling not just its political and economic life but also its cultural life in shaping the natives’ idea of themselves. The road to this widely resented domination—which the colonizers justified at home with theories of racial and cultural hierarchies, the white man’s burden, and plain old lies—was paved with countless imperial intrigues, extortionate treaties and taxation, skirmishes, plundering, drug dealing, massacres, and crushed mutinies. As Joseph Conrad wrote in 1902, ‘The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.’
In his engaging new work, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia, Pankaj Mishra chronicles ‘how some of the most intelligent and sensitive people in the East responded to the encroachments of the West (both physical and intellectual) on their societies.’ What did they see as the threats and the temptations of the West? What modes of resistance and internal reforms did they propose to meet this challenge? Mishra’s remarkable story, mostly untold in Western historiography, opens up important new vistas on the colonial West and the trajectories of Asians, whether in imperial Japan, nationalist and communist China, India, or Muslim countries from Turkey to Pakistan.
by Rishidev Chaudhuri
The marbles I remember were glass, with little swirls of color. I remember them as more beautiful than they surely were: clear bubbled glass enclosing small colored fragments, scattered starbursts, whirls and resplendent cosmic dust. But, as I was to learn later, we didn't have too many varieties. Most were a few variations on a simple pattern. There were also “milkies”, which were white marbles, more expensive and highly prized, but that cracked easily and broke hearts in doing so. Once, my father brought me some marbles from a trip to Australia. They were impossibly intricate, much more than the ones we had: a mixture of shiny surfaces, crystals, pockmarked little golf balls, and solid surfaces in multiple colors. I think this contributed to a complicated lifelong relationship with the West.
The marbles were sold in jars at the shop across the road, a small shack that had marbles, a few varieties of sticky sweets in jars and cheap cigarettes (sold individually, mostly to the boys a few years older). Like the sweets, the marbles lived in jars and I remember a disembodied hand plunging into the jar to pick out marbles for us; I guess I never paid attention to the person attached to that hand. The shopkeeper wouldn't allow us to choose which we got, and it was always exciting to examine them afterwards and see if any were special. When we had money we'd fill our pockets with them. They weighed you down, clinking in your pockets as you moved. The temptation to put your hand into your pocket and caress them was irresistible: smooth, cool spheres that shifted around your fingers and fell through them, that you could grab and release and rub through your hands and exult in. I'd pull them out in class to admire them (at great risk of confiscation): miniature artifacts from some alien civilization. I'd spend hours organizing them at home.
