Composting
.
this wonderstuff of natural declination
that'll grow my beets & beans and other rations

browner than the mere idea: good earth
archetypical as second life and virgin birth

more promising than the phantom wealth of nations
more essential than human beings of highest stations

shoveling this wonderstuff into my wagon
sifting it through hardware cloth

screening stems & stones until it's light and soft
to turn into my garden till my ass is dragging

to reap its harvest then until my light turns off
to lift that harvest to a sun that causes without ever bragging
.
.
by Jim Culleny
6/1/13

by Jalees Rehman

“Shorter sentences and simple words!” was the battle cry of all my English teachers. Their comments and corrections of our English-language essays and homework assignments were very predictable. Apparently, they had all sworn allegiance to the same secret Fraternal Order of Syntax Police. I am sure that students of the English language all over the world have heard similar advice from their teachers, but English teachers at German schools excel in their diligent use of linguistic guillotines to chop up sentences and words. The problem is that they have to teach English to students who think, write and breathe in German, the lego of languages.

Lego blocks invite the observer to grab them and build marvelously creative and complex structures. The German language similarly invites its users to construct composite words and composite sentences. A virtually unlimited number of composite nouns can be created in German, begetting new words which consist of two, three or more components with meanings that extend far beyond the sum of their parts. The famous composite German word “Schadenfreude” is now used worldwide to describe the shameful emotion of joy when observing harm befall others. It combines “Schaden” (harm or damage) and “Freude” (joy), and its allure lies in the honest labeling of a guilty pleasure and the inherent tension of combining two seemingly discordant words.

The lego-like qualities of German can also be easily applied to how sentences are structured. Commas are a German writer's best friends. A German sentence can contain numerous clauses and sub-clauses, weaving a quilt of truths, tangents and tangential truths, all combined into the serpentine splendor of a single sentence. Readers may not enjoy navigating their way through such verschachtelt sentences, but writers take great pleasure in envisioning a reader who unwraps a sentence as if opening a matryoshka doll only to find that the last word of a mammoth sentence negates its fore-shadowed meaning.

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East-facing Windows

this morning our bed is ablaze
in wanton light

the sun hammers our windows
rimmed by zero wide and open

unrestrained by nada
it’s really something nothing
spoken

even oceans are more miniscule
than this dawning sea immense and single
that starts the day with a silent gong

no thought breaks its breakers
no idea surfs its silver spilling splinters
no theorems curse its curls and crests
no theses trip its liquid sprinters

light alone
our tireless maker

our natural neutral
undertaker
.

Jim Culleny
5/18/13

by Quinn O'Neill

One of my windows overlooks a large grassy field that's shared among residents of my building. On sunny days, it's often strewn with young bikini-clad women, irradiating their flesh in order to achieve a darker complexion. Some people surely would appreciate the view; but being of the wrong sexual persuasion, having studied pathology, and having had a few friends who've had skin cancer, I can think only of the risks associated with their behavior.

Cancer is arguably the most serious consequence of excessive sun exposure. Worldwide, skin cancers comprise a third of diagnosed malignancies and most are attributable to over-exposure to UV radiation. Skin cancer comes in a number of varieties, the most common types being squamous cell carcinoma, basal cell carcinoma, and melanoma. These vary widely in their appearance, but all arise when cells within the epidermis – the outermost layer of the skin – proliferate in an unregulated fashion and invade the underlying tissue. They can kill either through extension to adjacent vital structures or by metastasizing to other organs.

Despite the risks associated with UV radiation, almost 28 million Americans visit sunbeds every year, with 70% of these being white women between the ages of 16 and 29 – the same demographic that turns up on the grass outside my window on sunny days. By their standards, the typical person affected by skin cancer might be considered old, but their own age group is not invulnerable. I've personally known a few people who've developed melanoma – the most deadly kind of skin cancer – close to or before the age of 30. I grew up in a town with a large population of pale Celtic descendents, so my experience isn't reflective of risk in the general population; however, it probably does reflect an increased risk of skin cancers among lighter complected people. Unfortunately, very fair people at high risk may also be the most likely to feel unacceptably pale and take to the lawn in a bikini.

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by Misha Lepetic

“People say New Yorkers can't get along. Not true.
I saw two New Yorkers, complete strangers, sharing a cab.
One guy took the tires and the radio; the other guy took the engine.”
~ David Letterman

A few months ago, friends of mine moved to the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. The three of them signed a lease on a five-bedroom duplex, with the express purpose of leasing out the remaining two rooms on Airbnb, the service that allows people to rent out extra rooms or apartments on a short-term, informal basis. Since then, they have had a colorful assortment of travelers, tourists, students and businessmen tramp through their place. In return, the additional income has allowed them to live in a much larger and better appointed place than would have been otherwise possible.

The expense of renting an apartment in New York has been the stuff of legend for a long time now, but as this expense continues its inexorable climb, brokering sites such as Airbnb have inspired people, perhaps for the first time, to intentionally re-conceptualize their living space as a business model. In other words, what is generously known as the “sharing economy” is really the monetization of all those bits and pieces – your apartment, your car, your power tools – that used to sit around and just, well, be yours.

And then last week, New York Administrative Law Judge Clive Morrick ruled Airbnb illegal. Is this really a setback to all the annoying shouting about the “sharing economy”? Or is it more of a setback to Silicon Valley’s dogma that there is always another patch of contemporary life that, whether it knows it or not, is in need of disruption?

Actually, let’s first be clear about the ruling, since there has been much breathlessness in the media around this. The so-called “hotel law” violated by the respondent had been passed in 2010. Specifically, the law prohibits the right to charge for a stay of less than 29 days if the person renting out the space is not present. So the law still has plenty of loopholes; Airbnb is by no means “illegal.” But it is also worth mentioning that most leases explicitly prohibit any rentals – most New Yorkers don’t need such a “hotel law” to find themselves in violation of their lease (or even condo or coop rules). This of course has not stopped Airbnb from encouraging people to sign up; after all, the company gets roughly 10% per transaction and is currently estimated to be worth around $2.5bn.

However, the ruling does raise an important point about the informality. When one talks of the informal economy, one imagines vast and chaotic open-air markets in Argentina, or hardworking street vendors in Bangkok. The informal also takes the form of vast trading networks, such as the flow of computer equipment into and out of Paraguay, as richly described by Robert Neuwirth in The Stealth of Nations. But informality has always been here in the United States, too, and it is getting bigger and more important.

As James Surowiecki noted in a recent New Yorker piece, approximately $2 trillion dollars of income went unreported to the IRS last year. But what is really impressive is the rate at which off-the-books income is increasing: “in 1992, the I.R.S. estimated that the government was losing $80 billion a year in income-tax revenue. Its estimate for 2006 was $385 billion, almost five times as much” – and that is still probably an underestimate. It is also worth considering that, as the job market has stagnated since the 2008 crash, these numbers can only have continued to increase.

Hence the great attraction in monetizing assets such as the extra room in your apartment. As an exceptionally carefully executed brokering service, Airbnb found its sweet spot by taking the classifieds from Craigslist and bolting on a rating and feedback system pioneered by eBay, the grand-daddy of retail-based brokering sites. Trust and transparency are literally what make this market function. Airbnb will even send over a photographer to make your place’s listing look great – after all, unlike Craigslist, they have real skin in the game. (Of course, this same transparency makes easy pickings for anyone wanting to enforce laws like New York’s). More subtly, it’s worth examining the ideological role the individual is expected to play, as shown in the way Airbnb organizes consumption.

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by Liam Heneghan

Dedicated to the students who travel with Randall Honold and me to Wicklow, West Kerry, and Connemara, this summer, following in the footsteps of Synge.

At that time in my life before I realized that such things are rare, I was paid, modestly it’s true, by Glenveagh National Park to travel on foot through parts of northern Donegal to collect and name insects. It is rare to have time on one’s hands, rare to love so fully what one does, and rare to have so little conception of what the future holds. I was, however, a little lonely. Each morning I walked transects across the lonely bog to net flies. In the evenings I had all to myself the park’s administration building which housed a research facility where I would gently boil the preserved flies in beakers of sodium hydroxide and mount their translucent parts in euparol, an aromatic embedding medium, on glass slides. At the other side of the building was the bunk room where I slept. I only rarely talked to another soul.

Seeking company was, therefore, one of my reasons for taking afternoon bicycle rides through the mountainy countryside surrounding the park and when I could I’d chat greedily with farmers standing at the edges of their fields. The occasional walker would also stop and turn on hearing my bicycle approach and would say a word or two to me about the weather. It was oftentimes quite warm on those summer afternoons though, not infrequently, an immeasurable bank of gauzy cloud would roll in from the north Atlantic and obscure the sun. At that time I conjectured that the fine-grained nature of the Irish countryside, the fact that one could see every speck at a distance, every flower popping out from among grassy bog, was because of the immense amount of moisture in the air. Everything in Ireland is viewed through a million wet lenses. I talked one late afternoon in July of 1987 with a farmer who had stopped from his labor to drink cold tea from a little glass bottle. More often than not though the little back roads in Donegal were deserted.

One afternoon I rode an ambitious route which brought me closer to the sea. Many years later I drove those roads with my father, and he and an aging fisherman from Bunbeg assessed my father’s Irish, the latter by glances of incomprehension, as they both looked out on the waves. As I rode my bicycle through one of those small villages back in 1987 a dog who took especial umbrage at me on my bicycle worried me quite persistently. I sped up as best I could with him nipping viciously at my heels. The dog knew the terrain better than I, of course, and as we passed by a house close to the edge of the village he ran up on an embankment at end of the garden. Within a moment or two he was running level with my head. I assumed he was about to take a flying leap at me but he left off the chase, the knowledge of his victory being, it would seem, enough to satisfy him.

Later that afternoon I puffed my way up an especially steep boreen. The afternoon was hot and the birds were quiet in the recesses of the hedges. The road eventually defeated me and I dismounted and pushed my bike up the hill. I walked by a little house at the garden gate of which a woman stood and looking out upon the road. I hello-ed her and she mutely greeted me. I continued on my way. As I made my way to the summit of the little hill I felt a thud on my shoulder and then heard a series of sharp clacks upon the tarmac road. Someone was throwing stones at me. Looking back I saw a small besuited man who had appeared at the door of the house. He bent down to pick up another handful of pebbles and loosed them in my direction. The woman-of-the-house maintained her stance, though now looked in my direction. After my first yelp, none of us uttered a thing. I worked my way up the hill, as one does in a nightmare where one laboriously runs to slow avail. Stones, close by, rained down. On gaining the top of the hill I jumped back on the bicycle and sped off downhill and away from my assailant. Later that day I made my way back to the park by another route and was unmolested by neither man nor dog.

That’s the story! That’s the story!

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by Omar Ali

The May 11th elections in Pakistan represented the first time that a civilian regime completed its term in office and held elections in which power will be transferred democratically to a new civilian regime. In a country where the security establishment has a long history of throwing out elected regimes and manipulating results, this in itself was an important landmark. For this (and for very little else, unfortunately) we can thank President Zardari and his coalition building skills and stubborn determination.

For my pre-election predictions, see here. For immediate post-result thoughts, see here.

In the short election campaign the Pakistan Tehreek e Insaf (PTI) of Imran Khan captured the imagination of the newly educated and elite classes but it did not have the time (and/or the ability) to catch up with the pre-poll favorite, the PMLN. The superior and far more detailed groundwork done by the PMLN while it ruled Punjab for 5 years, its stronger slate of candidates, its relatively energetic performance in the Punjab government, and Mian Nawaz Sharif’s improved reputation, (along with a PPP collapse) led to a PMLN landslide in Punjab. This has practically given the PMLN a simple majority in the national assembly in spite of having only a handful of seats outside Punjab. The newcomer PTI will form a coalition government in KP; PPP, with or without MQM, will rule again in Sindh; and Balochistan remains a unique case, completely outside the national mainstream.

With daily bombings by the Taliban keeping a check on the ANP, PPP and (to some extent) the MQM, and with an insurgency and its frequently vicious suppression going on in Balochistan, traditional campaigning was mostly confined to Punjab. There, an almost millenarian excitement took hold of the middle class in the course of the PTI campaign; This phenomenon was most visible on social media and in the better neighborhoods of urban centers. Meeting each other at coffee spots and snack bars and pushing “like” buttons on each other’s facebook pages, the newly energized middle class supporters of Imran Khan managed to convince themselves that a complete root and branch renovation of Pakistan under brand new leadership was on the cards.

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by Tom Jacobs

There is a story that I want to tell you. It's about a man who lives alone at the edge of town. In a small house without much to recommend it. He finds that there is little for him to do other than to look out the window. Which is something that he does. A lot. Most every day and for most of each of those days. He looks out this window, examining the microscopy of the world outside his window, paying close attention. This is what he does. It provides a certain amount of pleasure to him.

Some begin to worry that he's losing his mind. He begins to think that he is approaching some kind of revelation. Who is to say which is which? Maybe it can be both.

He begins a project. He begins to examine the surfaces of his home, convinced that there is something beneath or behind. The floors, the walls, the ceilings. Eventually he finds himself in the basement, palpating a crack that runs through the middle of his foundation. He becomes convinced that there is something shouldering itself into the floor of his basement from below. So he begins to excavate. As he digs he finds what he believes to be a labyrinth. He excavates this labyrinth like an archaeologist over the course of many years. As he unearths the whole intricate thing he becomes convinced that there is some great secret there, some infinite thing of happiness and hope. He continues to excavate and explore the labyrinth but can never find his way through. Knowing in his heart that that he's uncovered something important, he goes out into the street to tell someone about it. This is the first time he's left his house for as long as he can remember.

The first person he finds is a man who lives down the block and happens to be passing by. He tells him about what he's found. The man is skeptical but intrigued.

Together they go back to his house so that he might show him his labyrinth. They explore the labyrinth. The man on the street had read somewhere that if you keep your hand on the wall, you will eventually find your way in (or out). Eventually they find the center of the labyrinth. At the center there is a door in the floor. They open the door and, holding hands, they walk together, through. And then they disappear and are never heard from again.

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by Mara Jebsen

Should poetry be whispered in the dark? Should it be a communion with the dead, transacted silently through the media of paper and lamplight? Ought it to roll out of the whale-mouths of men on stages (maybe grumpy orators in black fedoras?) Should it arrive from the mouths of girls in sequins and combat boots—or from the mouths of boys in sequins and combat boots—whose whiskey-voices crackle in the backs of bars? Should teachers with elbow patches pass it out in stacks? Does it die in the air if badly read?

The questions are both important and silly. Asking them is like comparing ways of worship. I can’t say that it is better to shout and clap your devotion than it is to believe one must preserve a holy silence. The question is always: how do you honor a text?

On a bright May Wednesday evening in New York, I left the writing class I teach in a dark movie-viewing room in the basement of the NYU’s Tisch building. I stopped in the hall to nervously apply red lipstick, and then I boarded the subway on a secret mission.

I met my co-conspirators beside a fountain in Bryant Park. It was one of those first Spring days in the city—when the late light is white-wine colored and everything feels about to explode. Two journalists with camera and microphone arrived to record our experiment, and their presence was both unnerving and comforting. The camera seemed to legitimize our odd project. But part of the project’s ethos is that it doesn’t need legitimizing.

This was my first time. Members of PUP (Poets in Unexpected Places) have been performing poems on ferries, in laundromats and in subways around NYC for a while. I’ve known a number of its members for as long as ten years and asked to join the group months ago. But at the last minute I’d always chicken out.

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by James McGirk

The Moranbong Band is best imagined as a North Korean version of Celtic Woman: an all-female ensemble band swaddled in fetching formalwear, blasting highly produced, energetic nationalist kitsch. Of course, no matter how much vigorous fiddling Chloe, Lisa, Susan and Mairead can manage, Celtic Woman is unlikely to attract as much scrutiny from intelligence agencies as the Moranbong Band’s cover of Bill Conti’s “Gonna Fly Now”, which is perhaps better known as the theme from Rocky, and was performed – complete with a video backdrop featuring cuts of Sylvester Stallone working out – for none other than Kim Jong-un, the number one of the sinister and secretive Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Peculiar things have been crossing North Korea watchers’ desks lately. Witness The Sun’s revelation that Kim Jong-un’s father liked to nosh on hippo meat, spider and snake sushi. Or how in March, Kim Jong-un took time away from playing nuclear chicken to host flamboyant former NBA player Dennis Rodman. (Rodman says he’s been invited back for another visit in August.)

Decadent as this behavior might seem for the rulers of one of the world’s poorest countries, Kim Jong-un’s oddball behavior suggests a media-savvy spin on a classic diplomatic game. George Freidman, leading analyst and CEO of the geopolitical analysis firm STRATFOR, describes North Korea’s decades-old strategy of prying subsidies from its neighbors as “fearsome, weak and crazy.”

Fearsome is easy to understand. The South Korean capital, Seoul, is within howitzer-range of the DPRK’s enormous Cold War-vintage army. A sneak attack could kill hundreds of thousands of people and rip apart one of the world’s most important manufacturing centers. And that’s assuming the DPRK confines itself to conventional munitions: North Korea tested an atomic weapon in 2009 and probably has cheap, nasty weapons of mass destruction (germs and gas) stockpiled and ready to go. North Korea’s population is even scarier. They’re kept on the brink of starvation and forbidden from any contact with the outside world. Children are raised ready for war and taught to adore their leaders and obey without question. This is a frightful enemy, but it’s also a weak one.
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(Written in 1932 on Spanish soil,
mainly in the Mosque of Cordoba)

BY MOHAMMED IQBAL

I
Chain of day and night
Fashioner of events
Basis of life and death
Two tone silken thread
Fiber of attributes
Pitch of prospects
Chain of day and night
Sitting in judgment
Setting a value on us
When we're lacking
Death is your destiny
Death is my destiny
What else is reality
The flow of one age
Neither day nor night
All crafts vanish
Black and white fade
Annihilation the end

II
But in this form
Hues of eternal life
Splendor of man's love
Love is life's base
Death has no claim on love
Love itself the tide
Stemming the torrent
Love is unnamed eras
Love is Gabriel's breath
Love is the Prophet of God
Love is the Word of God
Love is the radiant rose
Love is raw wine
Love the goblet of kings
Love draws life's music
Love is passion for life
Love is fire of life

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by Carol A Westbrook

In a recent editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine1, Drs. Stavert and Lott used the tem, “The Bystander Effect,” to describe a new health care phenomenon, in which multiple physicians participate in the care of a patient, while none acknowledges primary responsibility for managing it. In their example, a patient was hospitalized with an undiagnosed, complicated illness, and over 40 physicians were involved in his care, yet none stepped forward to take charge.

The term “Bystander Effect” was coined after the 1964 stabbing murder of Kitty Genovese in New York City, which was witnessed by 38 people, none of whom intervened or called for help. The term refers to the tendency of people to be less likely to offer help in emergency situations when other people are present. In other words, it's not my problem, someone else can take charge.

Stavert and Lott argued that the Bystander Effect is becoming prevalent because of the way our system of hospital care has evolved. But I have noticed it is beginning to appear in the outpatient setting as well, where it is eroding the quality of medical care while increasing its expense.

Consider Mr. Miller, a fictional patient referred to me for anemia. I ordered blood tests, referred him for a colonoscopy, and scheduled a return visit in 2 weeks. During those two weeks, he also saw his cardiologist (heart), his orthopedist (joints), his urologist (prostate), his internist (blood pressure), his primary care physician (cholesterol). Mr. Miller is elderly and retired. When I asked him what he does with his leisure time, and he replied, “What free time? My wife and I spend most of our day in the doctor's office.” From my perspective, Mr. Miller received the expert attention of 7 highly trained medical specialists, and the best possible medical care in the world. From his perspective, he has to deal with two more doctors, more prescription medications to use up his limited income, and no assurance that any of this will make him feel better or live longer.

It is disheartening to see an elderly couple who measure out their days by the number of doctors' visits in a week. It is frustrating for their caregivers, who try their best to attend these multiple clinic visits. And it is dangerous, as multiple physicians may give contradictory recommendations, prescribe medications that interact, and overlook test results ordered by another doctor.

Mr. Miller is definitely getting more medical care than he would have received, say, 10 years ago. But is he getting better care? For that matter, is he even getting care?

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by Dave Maier

In a previous post I considered and rejected the idea that music and noise (= non-musical sound art) are entirely incompatible – that noise is the very negation of musical meaning. This left open the question of how these things might co-exist – or, turning the question around, how composers might make use of both resources in the same composition. Today I revisit that issue. If you've heard the podcasts I've posted here, you know what sort of compositions I'm talking about, even if I haven't been able to explain how or why they work. If you want to skip the theoretical blather and check out another fab mix (a bit noisier than usual this time), scroll down now.

In his book Aesthetics & Music, philosopher Andy Hamilton seems to position himself to answer this question, but then skirts it, on the way to what he takes to be more important questions which we will not discuss here. However, that he does even this much is interesting, given most philosophers' attitudes toward music, so let's take a look. The context is the traditional philosophical question of what music is. It's clearly an art of sound in some sense, but what makes a sound musical and/or artistic? According to Hamilton, the traditional assumption (“universalism”) that music is the only art of sound has gone together with another assumption “that music exploits as material a particular range of sounds, namely tones” (45). As music has “embraced more noise elements,” he says, these two assumptions have come apart. This allows a variety of positions on the matter. We might, for example, keep the former stipulation, but expand the range of “music” to accommodate the new forms it may now take (i.e. after a century of experimentation).

Hamilton, however, goes the other route: “[P]aradoxically, the tonal basis of music has been clarified by the rejection of instrumental puritanism. Thus I reassert that music is the art of tones, while rejecting universalism and recognizing an emergent non-musical sound art which takes non-tonal sounds as its material.” In support of this, he insists that the fact that any sounds can be incorporated into music doesn't mean that any sounds can constitute music. Music, he says, is on a continuum with non-musical sound art; which something is depends on which type of sound is “predominant”. However, “this distinction is not in any way evaluative and is not intended to mark any great metaphysical divide.”

Well, I'm glad to hear that, I suppose, but now I wonder what exactly we're supposed to take away from it. In the context, it seems like he's simply making whatever concessions he needs to make to recent musical/sound-artistic history in order to continue with his story about music as the art of tone. But that gray area between tone and noise is where I live, or at least hang out a lot, so that's what I want to hear about. It's not just a theoretical exception to be swept under the rug. How does this stuff work?

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fireflies
.
every time a new intersection’s built
around me
it winds up bristling with cameras

omniscient light poles sprout
a cornucopia of lenses spills out

a thousand robot retinas
recording everyday ephemera

the little things we do in cars
we might not want the world to know about

all snagged, digitized
and set in a binary log
for some bureaucratic lout
to survey, to scrutinize

to better get to know
the fireflies in his jar
.

by Jim Culleny
5/11/13