by Jesse Smith

Touring Longwood Garden’s new Christmas show, Jim Sutton walked along a row of twelve poinsettias on display in a back corner of the main conservatory.

“This is a voluptuous one,” he said, stopping to finger the leaves of a poinsettia variety called ‘Vintage Red.’

Sutton is Display Designer for Longwood, a botanical garden in southeastern Pennsylvania, just outside of Philadelphia; it is considered by many to be one of the world’s premier gardens. Sutton oversees events such as January’s Orchid Extravaganza and the Chrysanthemum Festival in fall. His biggest job is “A Longwood Christmas,” the annual explosion of lights, trees, poinsettias, and traffic that attracts the garden’s largest crowds.

The official theme of this year’s show is “A Gingerbread Fantasy.” Gingerbread cookies decorate trees in the conservatory’s Exhibition Hall. A fake gingerbread scent is pumped into the Music Room, which features trees made of gingerbread shingles, a train painted gingerbread brown, and gingerbread recreations of the conservatory and du Pont home. The Tropical Terrace exhibits plants that produce gingerbread ingredients: ginger, sugar, cinnamon, allspice, and cloves.

Themes like “A Gingerbread Fantasy” distinguish one Longwood Christmas from another. They provide a concept through which the Gardens can tweak the traditional holiday tropes of trees and lights. But a particular kind of artistry arises in the more subtle variations of the iconic poinsettias that appear year after year. This year, “A Longwood Christmas” features more than 2,000.

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by Hasan Altaf

When I was in graduate school, in Baltimore, one of the poems I had to teach my own students was Robinson Jeffers's “The Purse-Seine.” Among both my classmates and the undergraduates it was one of the least popular poems, which should perhaps have been no surprise, since we were encouraged to use it as an illustration of the term “jeremiad”: “a long literary work… in which the author bitterly laments the state of society and its morals in a serious tone of sustained invective, and always contains a prophecy of society's imminent downfall.” My reaction was more mixed – I liked Jeffers's long lines; I liked his voice; I liked the imagery, the parallel between the phosphorescence of the shoals of fish and the lights of the city. The first two stanzas are seductive, almost hypnotic (“the crowded fish/know they are caught, and wildly beat from one wall to the other of their closing destiny the phosphorescent/water to a pool of flame, each beautiful slender body sheeted with flame”) – and then, in the third stanza, comes this:

“…we have built the great cities; now
There is no escape. We have gathered vast populations incapable of free survival, insulated
From the strong earth, each person in himself helpless, on all dependent. The circle is closed, and the net
Is being hauled in. They hardly feel the cords drawing, yet they shine already. The inevitable mass-disasters
Will not come in our time nor in our children's, but we and our children
Must watch the net draw narrower, government take all powers – or revolution, and the new government
Take more than all, add to kept bodies kept souls – or anarchy, the mass-disasters.”

And at that point the poem always lost me: Even a piece as otherwise lovely (to me, although in Baltimore I was in I believe a minority of one) as “The Purse-Seine” could never convince me to look at cities in that way, not just out of personal geographical preference but mostly because the analysis is both paranoid and in the end mistaken. One can make an argument for “insulation from the strong earth” and “government powers,” but to me it seems that cities are overwhelmingly a positive force, not a negative one. Of all the things humanity has created, of all of our achievements, cities always seem to me the highest.

Recently however I was in Pakistan, in Islamabad and Lahore, and for some reason I began to reconsider the poem.

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by Kevin S. Baldwin

My family recently watched Toy Story 3 (2010) on DVD. Somehow in the chaos of last summer we had missed seeing that Pixar offering in the theater; something we have done without fail for the last decade. Needless to say, it was a fabulous film: Great story, worked on multiple levels, was humorous, and so on. As I continued to reflect on the film, it struck me that Toy Story 3 may be the culmination (or nearly so) of a meta narrative-arc that began with its first feature length film, Toy Story, in 1995. Collectively, these films chronicle many of the concerns of the baby boomer generation as they have matured.

Toy Story (1995) was not only the first entirely computer generated feature length film, it was also a terrific story. Though clearly set in the mid-1990's it was in many ways an homage to the childhoods of the boomers who grew up in the 1950's. The main human character, Andy, has an active imagination that he puts to good use with his toys (who have lives of their own when they are not being played with). The toy's leader is Sheriff Woody, a 1950's era cowboy. All is well in the toy ecosystem until a new “space toy” appears in the form of Buzz Lightyear, who believes he really is an astronaut. Woody's jealousy leads to an adventure worthy of a Norse saga in which both he and Buzz are separated from Andy and nearly face annihilation at the hands of Andy's sadistic next door neighbor, Sid. Order is restored when Woody convinces Buzz that a toy has a duty to be a child's play-thing. Eventually, they join forces to get back to Andy.

At another level this character rivalry reflects the increasing planned obsolescence and consumerism that took hold in the 1950's and has since accelerated. “That which must be owned immediately” is discarded when the next big thing comes along. One existential question Toy Story seems to be asking is: “How does one stay relevant and useful in a world that craves the latest and greatest?” Andy and Buzz are after all, only toys; merely stuff. What is really important are relationships. One of the enigmatic aspects of Pixar's success is the degree to which the movies have been used to sell toys. (Full disclosure: I am staring at a Buzz Lightyear action figure that is sitting on the coffee table and a veritable traffic jam of Cars 2 characters on the windowsill, courtesy of my six year old).

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by Maniza Naqvi

Tucked away in the frenzy of Lahore’s traffic congested Mozang Chungi, a framer’s shop, narrow, dark and dusty, bears on its back wall a minor conceit from history. A slight, which made the freshly formed impressions of a newcomer, even a tough customer like me, obsolete. At least it does in my memory, an old and faded letter, dated a moment in the late 19th century and attesting to the fine quality of the shop's work, signed John Lockwood Kipling: Curator of the Lahore Museum and Principal of the Mayo School of Arts. Perhaps it’s all gone now, what with newer buildings encroaching on that old downtown area– I don't know. It used to be there when I was there way back in the eighties. “Le' go! Le' go!” I hear his voice. Tonight, as usual, a smattering of tiny twinkling mirrors wink and cover me, cautioning that the past is for the willing but it seems the only way to divine sleep.

The letter always caught my eye and was framed behind the tea and grime stained cloth covered counter. Must have been around the same time when his young son was in Lahore working as an assistant editor at the Civil and Military Gazette.

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by James McGirk

You never look directly at the face. Catch only glimpses of it and those glimpses are ever changing. One moment he is a she. The next there is a hissing void where a face should be. The only constant is an hourglass that hangs above its pillow, a cartoonish thing with the year 2011 stamped on one side and only five grains remaining and one of those grains is about to fall.

The patient is dying, that much is clear; fugues of stroboscopic flickers consume the body like a florescent light bar about to sputter out. He or she or whatever it is reaches for you and the flesh of its hand is mottled and moving, seven billion pixels buzzing, dots of different shades of brown that pale slightly at its northern extremities. A grain slips through the tip of the timer’s cone to fall among its three hundred and sixty brethren below. Only four remain.

He opens his mouth and static rushes out, a wave of white noise cascades around you and tumbles apart into twitter feeds and crumpled newspaper and television signals and radio waves; and it tries again, fills its lungs beneath its strange cloak – a garment that is mostly rotten rags and plain cotton but woven with silk thread and buttoned with diamond chips – and wheezes out the words, “There is still time.” You take in the detritus discarded beneath its bed; a layer of tinsel, the Chanukah candles melted down to nubs just below, the gnawed drumstick, the soggy firecrackers and drooping birthday hats wonder what could possibly surprise you after this.

A second grain tumbles through the timer. A new form shudders into view. This new manifestation contains larger pieces than its previous form, two hundred and four of them, some enormous, encompassing entire organs, others covering only sliver of nail. The face is a jagged diamond – flat on top with a gnarled bottom that is almost a beard. One facet is a black, another red, the third white, while its mouth is a green triangle that falls open to a smile that widens and splits its face into two pieces, and as you watch, the southern, bearded half blossoms into a new color scheme: a blue triangle, its expression squeezed into a yellow star.

The third grain drops. You catch whiffs of gunsmoke and your eyes tear up as you inhale puffs of riot gas. Angry green boils erupt all over the patient's body. Even the shards that seemed the most stolid appear inflamed with activity. Seven red elephants stare up at a blue donkey with bat-like ears and they bare their tusks before stampeding toward one another. The patchwork skin begins to bubble and melt away, in the spots where it seemed the most solid, it sags and rots and tears open. Beneath the carapace there is mostly emptiness. But the space crisscrossed by thin wires, some crackling with sparks; others simply hanging, little strings of tinsel, gold and silver and bubbling veins of black crude.

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by Maniza Naqvi

“Books do make a room.” Or something like that, from a play—can’t recall which one—– a satirical jibe at the mindless tyranny of the self serving anti intellectual in society. Serving to this type of thinking with this type of laziness is hitched to a fine pitch for the American audience, in the packaging and selling of opinion, in my opinion, by a slimy toad: the blow hard, alcoholic—poser, social climber, wannabe—the unoriginal mediocre cheerleader of war and mass murder who made a career of being draped in mounds of other peoples’ books and supposedly having been himself well read and writing well, all the while being a fraud—and an Iago to America’s Othello. As if being surrounded by columns and piles of books, and having an ability to parrot quotes, and insults in a British accent—with a cigarette and a glass of whisky in hand somehow made him an intellectual. It did not. From all that has been written about him and what he wrote himself he was nothing more than a weak, trend following, power worshipping, fraud: third rate at school and third rate in life.

That toad’s words hitch him to being part of the language, literature and actions that define the racist, supremacist and fascist ethos of mass murderers who are obsessed with God all the while denying their real obsession as if to say: I don’t deny —my orientation—because I have a greater obsession than that which I need to hide: I actually do believe in a God—in a God for the right people–a white God.

The toad, an inebriated toxic decay wrapped inside the blubber of mid life crisis, appeared to himself, a legend, from a bar stool's smoky view of the mirror. So he hitched his sense of self to some confusion with Dorian Gray.

The event on September 11, 2001 allowed a gleeful toad such as him to unleash his proclivities of hatred unvarnished down the welcoming throat of an era of bloodletting.

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by Morgan Meis

At the moment, I’m angry with Christopher Hitchens. Not because he died. A man dies. And angry is not really the correct word, nor the correct emotion. I’m frustrated with Christopher Hitchens, troubled by him, moved by him, enamored of him and then repelled at the attraction.

The first time I met Christopher Hitchens was at a Harper’s Magazine Christmas party just before the start of the Iraq War. Bloomberg had recently banned smoking in New York City and the intellectuals were pissed. In those days, Harper’s parties happened down in the basement at Pravda. It was all very arch. Smoking ban be damned. Lewis Lapham and his band of merry lit boys were going to light up the smokes anyway. Hitch had a Scotch in one hand and a cigarette in the other. But you’ve seen him like that a thousand times, in person, in pictures, on TV. I stood in line to speak with him. The line was moving smoothly until a woman in a red dress half a size too small for all her stuff gummed up the works. You could hear the collective groan all along the line as she stepped up to the Hitch. This was going to take a while.

I gave him a copy of a review a friend and I had written about his recently published book, Letters to a Young Contrarian. The book is not very good, a fact he readily acknowledged. Really, my friend and I wrote the review to attack him for his abandonment of the Left. He didn’t care that we felt abandoned. Speaking with him, I came to understand that he really didn’t care. All the same, he appreciated the review, which was pretty smart. Hitch appreciated smart. Always.

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by Tom Jacobs

There is a wrongly attributed quote associated with Soren Kierkegaard that says something to the effect that life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards. I have found no evidence that he ever actually said or wrote this, but it is a sufficiently Kierkegaardian sentiment (by which I mean, a sentiment that stops you in your mental tracks and forces you to pause for a moment and reflect about what the hell you are doing with your life) that I will use it here. It points to an essential contradiction in our lives: we are always passing down the ringing grooves of history into the future while constantly looking backwards, trying to figure out what all of this experience means, what it adds up to. We pretend that we know what we are doing, but of course, we don’t.

The idea of repetition fascinated Kierkegaard. What does it mean to repeat something? And in what sense is can we really repeat anything in any meaningful way? Time has passed, things have changed, and we are not the same person we were even five minutes ago (I have always loved the idea that at a cellular level, we are literally not the same person we were seven years ago…every cell has been replaced. And seven seems a good number of years for some reason).

I once went to a little party at the Mount Vernon Hotel and Museum on the upper east side of Manhattan. It was built in 1799, back when the city ended pretty much at 14^th street and everything north of that was a kind of country retreat for the wealthy. There is a lovely little backyard garden and on this particular night I went with a friend to have free drinks (revolutionary era cocktails, actually) and to listen to a group of old geezer-musicians who specialize sea chanteys. They were truly great, and it was spectacularly beautiful summer night, and we sat there with a group of maybe forty other people, listening to this group singing surprisingly profane songs that were once sung aboard merchant ships when the new world was still relatively new. I had just moved out of my apartment and abandoned my roommate to move in with my then girlfriend. Since my old roommate was, like myself, a graduate student in the humanities, I figured he would love it. They were going to do it all again the next weekend. So I figured I’d invite him to the next party and repeat the experience.

Of course the second time around sucked. I was with a different person, the weather was crappy, and they had a different group of musicians. I actually apologized to him.

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by Sarah Firisen

There once was a writer called Hitch,
Whose contrarian urge had an itch,
He had no sacred cows,
No unbreakable vows,
No ideals too holy to ditch.

A brilliant but difficult sod,
Who took as his nemesis, God,
Perhaps a bold move to make,
He announced him “not great”,
Embracing the role, lightning rod.

But now our dear Christopher's dead,
Was it fags and the booze? obits said,
If it was, what the hell,
The wild ride was swell,
And no flip-flop on Hitch's death bed!

by Liam Heneghan

The recently dead rot much like money accumulates in banks (until recently, at least), only, of course, in reverse. A sage great-great-ancestor who had, for instance, set aside a few shillings for a distant descendant would, through the plausible alchemy of compound interest, have made that great-great-offspring a wealthy person indeed. In contrast, after death a body-heft of matter accumulated over the course of a lifetime is hustled away, rapidly at first, but leaving increasingly minute scraps of the carcass to linger on nature’s banquet table. It is as if Zeno had not shot an arrow but instead had ghoulishly slobbered down upon the departed, progressively diminishing the cadavers but never quite finishing his noisome meal. The soils of the world contain in tiny form, scraps of formerly living things going back many thousands of years. Perhaps these are the ghosts we sense when we are alone in the woods.

Before you rake away the final leaves of the autumn season, hold one up to the early winter light. Those patches where you see sky rather than leaf are the parts that had been consumed live, nibbled away by insects or occasionally browsed by mammals. But you may have to pick up several leaves to see any consumption at all! The eating of live plant material is rarer than one might suspect. It is almost as if most creatures, unlike us of course, have the decency to wait for other beings to die before they consume them. Ecologists have wondered why this is the case, asking in one formulation of the problem “why is the world green?” At the peak of the summer season the world is mysteriously like a large bowl of uneaten salad. The world it turns out is green for many reasons but a compelling one is that plants generally defend themselves quite resourcefully. The thorn upon the rose provides more than a pretty metaphor – this shrub knows exactly what to do with its aggressive pricks. And if one can neither run nor hide nor protrude a thorn, you might manufacture chemical weapons. Crush a cherry laurel leaf in your hand, wait a moment or so, and then inhale that aroma like toasted almond. It’s hydrogen cyanide, of course. “Don’t fuck with me” is one of the shrubbery’s less lovely messages.

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by Misha Lepetic

If you shut up truth, and bury it underground, it will but grow.
~Emile Zola

The underground – and particularly the urban underground – has always been a preferred site for writers and commentators to project their dystopian visions. After all, the underground has always implied illegality or illegitimacy – the underworld, while in reality transacting its business on the street or in skyscrapers far above it, has never ceased to be associated with the concealed nature of the subterranean.

Some of these visions were purely fiction, but nevertheless instructive. Around the turn of the last century, two works come to mind: E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops (1909) imagines a techno-dystopia where the population not only lives almost exclusively underground, but physical contact is shunned in favour of an experience that is wholly technologically mediated. H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) held an even more gruesome intimation – the underground race of the Morlocks operated the machinery that enabled the peaceful and passive surface-dwelling Eloi to prosper; in turn, the Eloi served as an uncomplaining and plentiful food source for the subterraneans.

More recently, authors have mined the actual depths of our cities, and have constructed the world beneath our feet as a specific urban form. Some, like Margaret Morton’s Tunnel, are legitimate documents of underground misery. Others are largely fabrications that exploit our desire to believe that all sorts of unfortunate histories are unspooling themselves beneath our privileged lives. How could it be otherwise? All those homeless and crazy people have to go somewhere, and wouldn’t it be nice if they all congregated in their own communities, but had the tact to do it at a graceful remove from ourselves?

However, for architects and designers, what lies beneath the city is temptation. Especially for cities that formerly had nowhere to go but up, and have exhausted that resource, there remains increasingly nowhere else to go, but down. Thus a new form is not being co-created out necessity and survival, as above, but is being deliberately designed. What kind of a new form is this, and what are its chances of success?

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by Rishidev Chaudhuri

One of the first things I do when visiting a new city is to look at a map of the subway, if the city has one. The intimacy this brings is in many ways misleading (I will have learnt nothing about individual places) but from this I get not just a list of places but also some practical way of getting from one to the other. In some way the subway lines act as a scaffolding upon which to conceive of the space of the city. Metro lines and stations inhabit their space in a tangible fixed way, a way in which the more fluid bus routes and stops don't. And metros convert distance into time and reachability quite directly, unlike most other forms of city travel, where traffic, roads and quirks of geography mean that distances on a map don't necessarily correspond to travel times.

Of course the formalization that is created by and with a metro system changes both subjects and cities. Some of these changes stem from sets of administrative procedures, ranging from solutions to coordination problems (ticket buying; turnstiles; standing in lines) to the more arbitrary attempts at creating particular sorts of modern citizens (I remember reading that the Delhi metro employs people to make sure riders don't squat down on the floor instead of standing or sitting on the seats). And metros formalize space too, moving a city of capricious unpredictable neighborhoods, whose relationships to each other are founded primarily on social history and daily routine, towards a set of points laid out geographically. Or rather, towards a set of points laid out on a particular map, on a particular geography.

For most of the time I lived in Bangalore I never looked at a map of the city. I navigated along particular routes, with particular end-points, and the mental map of the city I had was patched together from these routes, without preferred spatial orientation or cardinal directions, and was made up of a series of relationships between a set of local maps rather than a single background space. In this I was quite typical. Most of the inhabitants navigate this way (as you realize if you ask for directions, especially to somewhere outside the neighborhood) and I think this is true of most third-world cities without well-organized and easily accessible public transportation.

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by Quinn O'Neill

Science kits made by the Australian company WILD! Science have been causing a bit of a stir in the blogosphere lately. The kits, marketed for boys or for girls, come in blue or pink packaging and differ in their content. The boys’ kits include names like “Hyperlauncher”, “Joke Soap”, “Weird Slime Lab”, and “Physics and Chemistry”. The girls’ kits focus on beauty, perfume, and magic with names like “Beautiful Blob Slime”, “Beauty Salon”, “Beauty Spa Lab”, “Perfect Perfume Lab”, “Luxury Soap Lab”, “Lip Balm Lab”, “Mystic (Krazy) Crystals”, and “Magical Crystal Oasis”.

Bloggers Phil Plait, Evelyn Mervine, and Janet Stemwedel offered some excellent commentary. The marketing of the girls’ kits, in particular, drew serious criticism. Perhaps we shouldn’t be promoting the idea that little girls ought to be pretty and so concerned with their appearance. And why is “Physics and Chemistry” only for boys? The Mystic and Magical Crystals Kits raise other questions. Is mysticism a girl thing? And if so, are girls naturally inclined to mysticism or is this the effect of socialization? These may be especially important questions to think about during the Christmas season, a season of gift giving that’s steeped in tradition, myth, and magic.

The idea that myths and fantasy are an important part of both childhood and Christmas is nothing new. In 1897, little Virginia O’Hanlon famously made a plea for the truth in her letter to the editor of The Sun: “Please tell me the truth,” she asked. “Is there a Santa Claus?” There seems to be a general perception even today that it would be cruel to shatter such a time-honoured Christmas myth for a child. As one might expect, the editor lied and went so far in his response to exclaim “Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies!” I wonder if the editor would have felt so inclined to also propagate the myth of fairies had the question come from a little boy. Regardless, Virginia wanted for the truth; it was adults who felt she shouldn’t have it. Why? Do adults lie and perpetuate such myths for children's sake or for their own?

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