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.

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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.

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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.

I was out on the Mississippi River about 10 miles North of Burlington, Iowa with some colleagues on what was essentially a fundraising expedition. We were accompanying a generous alum who had grown up on the river and was thinking of buying some riverfront property for his retirement that would be donated to the college for use as a biological field station upon his death. We had just shut off the small outboard motor and were slowly drifting south, with the water gently lapping against the side of the boat. We grabbed a few lotus plants that were floating on the water's surface that reflected the bright blue of the sky. Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer had nothing on us. It was beautiful. Peaceful.

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.

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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 Sarah Firisen

There once was a company Bain
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

Somewhere we got stuck in history. Condoms cause various diseases, pregnancies, the potential loss of your job, and an eternal life in hell, at least according to the leaders of my country. The Reproductive Health Bill has divided the Philippine population, made up of 80% Catholics into opposing sides, and muddled the conversation with statistics and sob stories, a crying politician, rallies, online appeals to the Creator so on, so forth.

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.)

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by Liam Heneghan

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.

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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

by Misha Lepetic

Detroit turned out to be heaven, but it also turned out to be hell.
~Marvin Gaye

Is Detroit alive or dead? It depends, I suppose, on your viewpoint, or what kind of attention you might be paying in the first place. In January, the New York Times previewed a brief little docu on scrap metal ‘salvagers’ in Detroit (or are they thieves? As always, this depends on your point of view). At any rate, it highlighted for me what are two emerging – and competing – narratives of Detroit. These two narratives – I’ll call them ‘ruin porn’ versus ‘our very own Berlin’ – provoke attention for two reasons. The first is the reminder that contradictory views can be maintained with equanimity within and about the same built environment. This is not so difficult to countenance, since cities do support many seemingly contradictory narratives. In fact, cities are exceptionally adept at this, and is one of the chief reasons what makes them so enjoyable. The second reason is more interesting, however, since it provides some insights into how we choose to look at cities.

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.

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by Quinn O'Neill

Making the rounds on facebook and twitter is this anonymous quotation: “True health care reform starts in your kitchen, not in Washington.” Where I've seen it posted on facebook, it’s accompanied by a photo of fresh fruits and vegetables and garners enthusiastic and positive responses.

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.

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by Namit Arora

A review of Pankaj Mishra’s “From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia”.

A few hundred years ago, a powerful cultural force arose in Western Europe that would later spread out and overwhelm much of the world. Fueled by a new spirit of individualism, inquiry, and innovation, it furthered personal ambition, a materialistic outlook, and competitive self-interest. This cultural force produced—and was in turn amplified by—scientific progress, the nation-state, advances in military and maritime technology, an escalating hunger for profit and raw materials, and secular institutions in education, governance, and finance, such as the joint-stock corporation.

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.

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by Rishidev Chaudhuri

It's strange how little I think about marbles now, since marbles, the objects themselves and the game we played with them, were a crucial part of my childhood. It's odd to think back on these colorful little metonyms of youth, mostly forgotten except when I stumble across one in some hidden drawer on a visit home, or dream of the school playground: huge, hot, dusty dry mud, flecked with brilliantly colored glass marbles (like some schoolboy reading of “The Doors of Perception”).

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.

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Or, What is the Point of Writers' Desks?

by Mara Jebsen

I once had a friend who owned a studio in the city. It was angular and modern and comprised of all of about 350 square feet. Nevertheless, my friend, author of over a dozen books, managed to squeeze no fewer than four desks and a kitchen table in the space. This gave him the pleasing illusion that he had five perspectives from which to compose the next magnum opus. In fact, he had none. Or, I should say, I never saw him write in that studio.

Another friend of mine, a poet in possession of a nice room in Brooklyn, tells me she just had to clear all of her walls and surfaces and jam her desk against a window. The window’s view she then obscured with a black curtain. She did not want to be distracted beauty. She’d been feeling blocked for a while, and knickknacks were posing a problem.

I helped another writer friend move, once. That involved an appraisal of the desk he’d had since childhood, which he felt was important to keep, on account of very special graffiti he’d scratched into it. Upon inspection, the desk revealed very little graffiti, and what was there didn’t say what he had thought it said.

I recognize all of this. Because of the peculiar wiring in my brain, it calls up a perversion of a Dr. Seuss rhyme. Like this:

Re: Magnum Opus

Will I write it in a train?
Will I write it in the rain?
Will I write it on a boat?
Will I write it with a goat?

Café’s are good. Though in Brooklyn, they are wont to be filled with children, some of which are too cute or too sticky or too rude and want to bump your computer. Babies, even quiet ones, are the worst, particularly for a writer with a sense of civic responsibility. For me, they are idea-kryptonite. I find myself worrying about them, with their erratic behaviors, and their general tendencies toward destruction.

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Confluence of Friends

We sit under the stars in wicker chairs
Only the light of galaxies reaches us,
that and the spare, streaked flash of meteors
in August. The dust of the Milky Way,
a cloud of packed suns separated by light years
disappearing behind the house roof south
and the trees north at Halberg's garden,
looks no more than smudge-like
in this billion-year gaze into the past
these touches of light having left home
when young until now after eons
they spark, aged but vital still,
in the space of eight eyes and four brains
igniting awed talk and cosmic laughs
in this eternal confluence of friends

by Jim Culleny
8/13/12