by Misha Lepetic

“Cultures aren’t fixed or fixable. They are barely measurable…
Culture is not so much what you plan but what you get away with.”
~ Marcus Westbury

One could do worse than to think about a city as an endlessly frustrating exercise in the ongoing, suboptimal allocation of space, capital and – let’s not forget – humanity. Oftentimes we find ourselves contemplating extremes of density and sprawl, and occasionally the stark juxtaposition of the two (such as this notorious image which, despite having made the rounds over the last few years, has lost little of its shock value). These vistas further enervate us if we contemplate them from a divine, that is to say, aerial perspective. From this point of view, we become, by default, would-be SimCity urban planners, and consider that our benevolence, made manifest in the form of design, usually in the form of urban master planning, should at least be heeded, if not respected by those who we expect to live in our cities. This is the privilege and/or responsibility that this particular kind of view affords. At the same time, the obvious juxtapositions of sprawl and slum, of waste and want, re-assert the fundamental futility, and therefore irrationality, of many of our planning efforts. This may be conveniently summarized by the parental plea, “Can’t you kids just sit still for a moment?”

So, what gives? I have three examples in mind, although there are many more, the catalogue of which amounts to a comprehensive list of reasons that the more skeptical among us might call “Why You Can Never Win,” and the more optimistic might term “Why We Should Always Try Harder.”

At any rate, in the first case, what gives is, quite literally, the ground itself.

Informal settlements, to which I will informally refer as slums, are by definition built in undesirable places; citizens whose desire to live in proximity to city centers is contradicted by their inability to afford “legitimate” colonization of these spaces. Another significant attribute of slums is that services, such as transportation routes and public spaces, are foregone for the opportunity of proximity; the lack of zoning or property ownership results in even greater density. Finally and most critically, slums are oftentimes built in plainly dangerous locations, exposed to natural forces that can have disastrous consequences where not even the dead are spared.

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by Rishidev Chaudhuri

My first winter that could properly be called such seemed to be spent in frozen Northern wastelands, where the world was covered in snow and the sun seemed to leave for the day after lunch (recalling the work habits of a number of my relatives). The scenery alternated between the bleakly restrained (snow stretching under a wintry horizon, broken by an occasional shrub) and the melodramatically self-indulgent (winds howling around buildings in the night; afternoon blizzards). My initial reaction was delight. Winter is a much mythologized season and, like many a tropical child, I grew up with winter tales from books and movies. Two weeks in, after the inevitable disillusionment, I opted for the honorable exit and retreated to bed with a couple of bottles of brandy and a heavy blanket. Various circumstances forced me out after a few days (struggle with classes, the non-alcohol necessities of a fallen world) and like so many desperate people before me, I attempted to redeem the world in food.

There are several different culinary strategies for encountering the extremities of weather. The first and most classical involves hecatombs and frenzied appeals for divine intervention. Despite its old world charm, it is both expensive (especially for a student) and often fails spectacularly. In our latter day, god-devoid world we are left with the usual artistic options of fantasy and escapism on the one hand and of realism (that wanders between the brutal and the lyric) on the other. The escapist strategy (whimsical defiance, if you prefer; I prefer) evokes the productions of warmth and sun, letting displaced summer food alight on the palate amidst the barren winter wind. This is made easier by the wonders of the modern world, which allow us avocados and the occasional decent tomato in winter (one of the grandest triumphs of humanity over a world that does not love us)¹. The realist strategy is hearty comfort food. At the simpler end, this should be stodgy and meat-and-potatoes laden (the sort of medieval richness where Northern European peasants lurk behind each dish). At its grandest, it should sing of deeply concentrated flavors and long-reduced stocks.

What follows is something of an accidental hybrid. Its subcontinental origins and spice-heavy punctuation (ginger sweetness, the bite of chilli) suggest warmer lands and sunnier times. But at base its flavors are primarily warming – slow-braised meat, rounded onion sweetness, heavy dairy-warmed fat. This strategy drifts towards Orientalism, but remember that curry has a colonizing life of its own.

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by Quinn O'Neill

There’s been a lot of talk about reforming American K-12 science education and it’s getting difficult to take it seriously. Educators, scientists, and politicians have been sounding alarm bells over the state of American science education for decades. In 1983, the National Commission on Excellence in Education revealed the US to be trailing most other industrialized nations in science performance. The commission’s report began: “Our Nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world. […] What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur–others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments.” It almost sounds as if the level of educational attainment isn’t as important as the rest of the world being below it.

Following the 1983 report, most states responded by revising their curriculum content standards.¹ In 1990, the president and state governors adopted a new national goal: “By the year 2000, United States students will be the first in the world in mathematics and science achievement.”¹ The statement proved about as genuine as Obama’s promise to close Gitmo. In 2000, a new national commission conducted an investigation and concluded that the performance of U.S. students at the 12th-grade level, compared to their peers in other countries, was “disappointingly unchanged,” with the US placing 19th out of twenty-one countries studied.¹

Similar calls for reform were made in 2005 with the publication of the National Academy of Science’s report “Rising Above the Gathering Storm”, which made a number of promising recommendations. Those anticipating improvement were to be disappointed. A follow up report in 2010 stated that “In spite of the efforts of both those in government and the private sector, the outlook for America to compete for quality jobs has further deteriorated over the past five years.” It found little improvement and noted that US K-12 math and science was ranked 48th worldwide.

Poor K-12 science performance is nothing new, nor are reports that are steeped in panic and urgency. The alarmist tone of the 2010 follow up to “Gathering Storm” didn’t go unnoticed. As reported in a Nature News piece, Jerry Marschke, an economist at the State University of New York at Albany, suggested that the report painted an overly dire picture. He put it simply: “The way they wrap up their policy recommendations, they're trying to scare people.”

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by Shailja Patel

Rockstar goddess of postcolonial studies. Leading feminist Marxist scholar of our time. Gadfly of subaltern studies: her seminal paper, “Can The Subaltern Speak?” seeded a thousand dissertations. Irreverent, iconoclastic, unfailingly taboo-busting, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is a study in highwire intellectual risk-taking. As University Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University, one of the world’s most elitist academic institutions, she trains upper-class graduate imaginations for epistemological performance. At the other end of the global spectrum, she has, for three decades, pursued the painstaking, backbreaking project of creating and sustaining schools for rural children in Western Bengal.

I want to understand something about bypassing the necessity of good rich people solving the world’s problems. Good rich people are dependent on bad people for the money they use to do this. And the good rich people’s money mostly goes to bad rich people. Beggars receive material goods to some degree and remain beggars. My desire is to produce problem solvers, rather than solve problems. In order to do this, I must continue to teach teachers, current and future, with devotion and concentration, at the schools that produce the good rich people – Columbia University – and the beggars, seven unnamed elementary schools in rural Birbhum, a district in West Bengal. This work cannot be done with an interpreter, and India is multilingual. I must understand their desires, not their needs, and with understanding and love try to shift them. That is education in the humanities. (Spivak, 2010)

What Spivak does in Bengal is the opposite of philanthropy, or uplift. At the 2008 inaugural World Authors And Literary Translators’ Conference, in Stockholm, she called for unflinching examination of the conference theme: “Literature And Human Rights”.

I take this idea extremely seriously, so I am obliged to critique it rigorously. We are self-appointed moral entrepreneurs, our mission predicated on the failure of state and revolution. We fetishize literacy, health, employability, without inquiring rigorously into what they have effected, or how we deploy them, in our own lives.

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by Justin E. H. Smith

[For the first installment in this series, go here.]

The idea that there is a hierarchy or ladder of world cultures, with European culture at the top (often promoted to the status of 'civilization'), was a cornerstone of most Enlightenment philosophy. It was rejected in the era by a handful of counter-Enlightenment thinkers such as Herder, but it continued to reign in the burgeoning discipline of anthropology until the early-20th-century innovations of Franz Boas and others. It was only definitively displaced from anthropology in the decade or so after World War II. In philosophy today, by contrast, though everyone officially abjures the ladder model of human cultures, it continues to determine much of our reasoning about what counts as philosophy and what does not.

It is worth pointing out that all societies that have produced anything that we are able to easily recognize as philosophy are ladder societies. We might in fact argue, if not here, that philosophy as a discrete domain of activity in a society is itself a side-effect of inequality. The overwhelming authority of the church in medieval Europe, the caste system in ancient India, the control of intellectual life by the mandarin class in ancient China (meritocratically produced by the Confucian examination system, but still elite) present themselves as three compelling examples of the sort of social nexus that has left us with significant philosophical works. The fact that philosophy always comes from the top rungs of ladder societies could have something to do with the difficulty, in spite of our best intentions, of de-Eurocentrizing the current academic discipline of philosophy: New York, London, and the idyllic campuses that are an easy commute from these metropolises are the true locus of philosophy today, in just the same way that royal courts were in ancient India. It is as hard for us to think of the intellectual activity of, say, some village sage in postcolonial, third-worldified India as 'philosophy', as it would have been for a high-caste member of the literate elite to think of the folk beliefs of some forest-dwelling ādivāsī in this way.

When philosophers try to get away from the ladder, as most agree for political reasons it is necessary to do, what they usually end up with is the museum, or perhaps, with apologies to André Malraux, the imaginary museum of philosophical multiculturalism. As the Soviets once did with the traditional costumes of their empire's ethnic minorities, those who aim to promote non-Western philosophy usually end up putting the Chinese and the Indians, and sometimes a slapped-together group they dub 'Africans' as well, in entirely separate, non-overlapping display cases, as if their philosophical traditions were just so many traditional costumes or pieces of pottery.

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by Hartosh Singh Bal

Two recent events, the removal of an essay on the many tellings of the Indian epic the Ramayana from the curriculum of Delhi University and the firebombing of a French newspaper for printing a cartoon of the Prophet in an edition devoted to a satirical look at the Shariat, share a surface resemblance. They have taken place in India and Western Europe, two diverse places but both places that take pride in a tradition of tolerance. While it is possible to read into the incidents the continuing religious intolerance for any examination of faith, it seems to make more sense to me to focus on the differences between the two events and what they say about the manner in which these two societies actually practice tolerance.

The essay removed from the curriculum at Delhi University was written by A.K. Ramanujan, at least in the Indian way of thinking a Hindu, drawing upon a long tradition in which the diversity within the faith is itself a source of tolerance. The opposition to this essay has come from the Hindu right, which is not a conservative but a radical force. It wants to historicize a tradition that is rooted in myth and storytelling. Uncomfortable with the elasticity of myth, they prefer the certainty they think history grants them. For them the figure of Rama, central to the epic, is not subject to the vagaries of storytelling and local lore, he is a historical figure with a kingdom and a birthplace.

This historicity is central to a version of Hinduism that goes by the name of hindutva and shores up the main opposition party in Indian, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Irrespective of its antecedents (it is a modern idea, born in the early twentieth century) it has come to command enough of a following to influence the norms that actually mediate tolerance in India. By tolerance, I do not just mean intellectual tolerance which however important is only a part of a wider idea. By tolerance I mean the wider idea that allows diverse ways of living to coexist in a society.

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—for Ricardo

Reply to a message from Ricardo who wrote:
How U b?
.
I b well enough

Work fairly regular— ’bout 4-5 hours a day at TSA,
plus a couple of side jobs drawing
lucky (to have work)
chug chug

Keep my hand in the writing game:
blogs, two local paper gigs
shooting my mouth off at greedy vampire windmills sucking global blood
working at finishing the downstairs room under the kitchen

Haven’t been writing poems though
It comes it goes
Breath comes till it won’t—
interesting set of circumstances without comprehensible explanation
mysterious as the sun shooting through the middle of nowhere
lifting us on swells of gravity

—it rose again today!
happy and bright
shining on silvery frost
bright and beautifuller
than any precious metal
a commodities speculator might hoard
grass beneath more verdant and moist
than the greenest lust of a banker
air crisper than a fresh
thousand dollar bill

as breathable as necessary
as fine
as sweet
..
…’bout you?

by Jim Culleny
11/6/11

By Usha Alexander

In a large mausoleum on Tiananmen Square, Beijing, lies a crystal sarcophagus containing the mortal remains of Mao Zedong. Every day, masses of Chinese citizens line up on this largest of the world’s public squares to view and pay tribute to him. An immense, framed portrait of Mao gazes beatifically upon them from the high walls of the once Forbidden City, a palace fortress at the edge of the square. A few years ago, I too had arrived hoping for a glimpse of the man—the spectacle of Mao’s refrigerated body held for me nearly as much morbid fascination as my interest in his legacy and place in the Chinese imagination.

As it happened, the mausoleum was closed for renovation. Disappointed, I mused that perhaps the real reason for closing the mausoleum was to hide the evidence that Mao had been turning in his grave of late: watching China grind from feudalism to communism to capitalism in a mere half century cannot be good for his repose. If “communism” means a classless society with a centrally planned economy in which the state owns the primary means of production, then poor old Mao—as the man who fought for it, forged it, and upheld it for decades—became irrelevant long ago. And though the frozen Mao may still be revered, the pulse of China throbs now to a different beat.

For some years now, the zeitgeist in China has been closer to what Deng Xiaoping, a successor to Mao, neatly voiced in 1993: “To get rich is glorious.” And today it seems that the only thing still communist about China is the name of the party that continues to rule it with an iron hand; for while China’s communist leaders have embraced capitalism with an astonishing zeal, they have not allowed the free flow of ideas and information within China. Ordinary citizens are actively kept in the dark even about the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square. As I stood on the square, among the crowds of locals and holiday makers, flying kites or striking “I was there!” poses in front of Mao’s portrait, it struck me that most of the people around me—and most Chinese nationals under the age of 35—do not even know about the event that transpired there.

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WHAT HAPPENED TO A WORLD

My mother cross-legged
On the verandah rug
Scent of mustard oil
Her glistening hair
Fat cook on bike
Midday tiffin to Father

I open my jaw to Maa
Purse my lips to moo
Fleece white as snow on K2
Bathe my lamb Maamoo
In an oval tin tub
Under the grand oak

Eid al-Adha
Day of sacrifice
The cook ropes Maamoo’s legs
Mother pulls at her hair
Pleading with Father
Knife at Maamoo’s throat

In the name of Allah
Father’s Bismillah
Blood crescent soaking grass
Mamoo’s head at my feet
Eyes reflecting light
Of dead stars

Rafiq Kathwari is a guest writer at 3 Quarks Daily.

by Mara Jebsen

…But really, since I exist at all, I believe that it is possible for people to…I've lived through impossible situations. So I believe in it. I just believe, and that's the magic…That's the whole thing, you talk about magic that's there to believe in, and it is there. But most people don't really believe it.

–Edie Sedgwick

This summer I had a crush on Edie Sedgwick. Recently, I tried to “be” both Edie and Andy Warhol for Halloween. It was easy, because he used to dress like her. The source of her ability to fascinate is hard to explain, even now that she's dead–and I imagine it was even harder for her devotees to explain back then. Over the summer, I read several books about Edie, all of which were half-dominated by glossy photos. In a short time, I developed the sort of crush good girls get on bad girls in Junior High. It just seemed sort of fascinating and marvelous that a person could be almost nothing at all but will and whimsy, and could empty themselves of anything but surface. By this I mean to to say that a young woman, very pained and twisted by the forces of childhood, could become a sort of Peter Pan and fly through New York as if there was no future.

She can hardly have been the first person to turn partying and the wearing of odd clothing into a primary form of expression, but she seems to have had a real gift (a curse-gift, of course, the kind of gift that kills you) for just that. A few writers attribute our whole fascination with androgyny (particularly, slim little boy-women) to Edie, which is maybe not the best legacy to have left on the world, but from what I've read, I can't imagine she intended for generations to copy her. And while its clear that her life in New York, and at the Factory, made her into a sort of combustible, dancing, fairy-machine that ran off of attention, I don't think that fame (at least, as we understand it now) can have held real attraction for her. I sometimes think I can understand what made her go, but have only been able to access that through poetry.

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by James McGirk

A large pile of garbage has accumulated outside my front door. One of my neighbors is fighting with our landlord. She leaves bags of refuse just outside of the receptacle, untied and upside down so as to better disgorge their payload of soiled panty-liners onto the pavement in front of our house. The cans are in a wire enclosure a few yards away, very easy to access; convenience and squeamishness are not the issue here.

This mischief is intentional. I know it is. Each arrangement is more shocking than the last, the woman has a serial killer’s flair for the grotesque. There is motive too. She was once employed by our landlord as the garbage-minder but was suddenly replaced. I can only assume she is baiting the city into fining him for violating New York's sanitary code. So far it hasn’t worked. She remains a tenant in good standing and the area is horrific. Armies of cockroaches scurry over discarded pizza boxes and piss-soaked kitty litter. And anybody on the block who feels their garbage is too nasty to keep in their own bin will happily dump it on ours. They don’t even bother doing it under cover of darkness any more.

I tell you all this because the other day I opened my door and found a jack-o-lantern sitting on my doorstep: A shitty one. A disgusting withered one collapsing in on itself with rot. At the time I was wearing heavy boots and my first impulse was destroy the thing. I swung my foot back, and was about to punt the thing into the road when I stopped myself. It was almost Halloween, and this unhygienic squash seemed as a fitting a tribute to the horrors I had experienced in New York City as any I could possibly hope for. And believe me there are horrors-a-plenty in this supposedly spic-and-span city.

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by Jen Paton

Every Sunday morning, over the simulacra of breakfast burritos, we have brunch. Sometimes, talk turns to language skills, our relative proficiencies in Russian. This one guy knows Arabic, used to live in Cairo.

“How did you learn Arabic?” someone asks him. “How” was the question, not “why,” nonetheless:

“I think for the same reason everyone in our generation wanted to,” this guy of my generation says, trying to catch my eye.

I’m not having any of this answer, I already know. “After 9/11, I think…everyone just wondered how the hell this happened.”

No, no. I don't speak Arabic, we're not even in an Arabic speaking country right now, but I'm still, like, NO.

*

Be too nice. Probably suspiciously so. Smile during all interactions. Say thank you at the end of every social interaction and in particular every service related transaction. Thanks for bringing me water. Thanks for giving me change at the grocery store. Thanks for handing me my bag of groceries. Thanks for moving out of my way on this crowded public transport. Thanks for allowing me to order at this restaurant without it being terribly complicated. Thanks! You do mean this, by the way, you can’t help yourself. Find that your niceness sometimes impedes your ability to get things done here.

Alternatively, be too rude. Sometimes by accident, because you actually cannot speak. Sometimes on purpose: get unreasonably annoyed and huffy when you get water with gas instead of still water, with no lemon, and when people cannot understand you, which is often. Complain often about the food you are eating, expecting other Americans to agree. Laugh too loudly, even when sober. You can’t help yourself. Find that your rudeness sometimes impedes your ability to get things done here.

Wear clothes whose appropriateness you have not fully considered. Wear military fatigues. Wear a suit. Wear shorts. Wear spaghetti straps. Wear long sleeves you think are modest but forget to consider the tightness of your clothes. Wear flip-flops – people will stare. Wear urban sportswear that makes local teens envious, or giggly. Wear workout clothes that make grandmothers glare. Wear freshly ironed shirts under cashmere sweaters with dark slacks. If under 30, cultivate a well-traveled stubble that highlights the fact that, actually, you have been traveling all over, not just in the capital.

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by Maniza Naqvi

“@Time Square.”

Brian texted back: “Also.” But we were on opposite sides of the street and the police barricades were making it impossible to crossover.

The police, in their blue uniforms, wielding batons and shields, wearing bullet proof vests and helmets and even mounted on horseback strutted up and down several block of Broadway at Times Square as though they were on a catwalk of power showing off to the crowds their latest toys for holding back the crowds. Why on earth would they be on horseback in this day and age if not to show that they were capable of trampling people the good old fashioned way? “Beachwear!” Someone in the crowd shouted invoking the Wendy’s ads from decades ago which poked fun at the totalitarian State of the Soviet Union and its lack of imagination. I looked up at the hundreds of dazzling almost blinding electronic billboards over Time Square and realized the joke went even further. The Billboards overhead were selling only one product—discontent—eat this—drink this, wear this—listen to this, watch this—consume, consume, spend—spend–spend and you will be happy!

The protesting crowd good naturedly teased the posturing of the police “Join us! Join us!”Some of the cops smiled back awkwardly others pretended to be unfazed and tough, while others in white shirts looked as mean and tough as they were. In age and anxiety they mirrored the protestors. Whether a protester or a policeman—it seemed clear here that everyone needed to earn a paycheck. The men and women constituting the police force and the protesters shared the same issues of eroding salaries, pensions, social security and rising costs of mortgages, taxes and health insurance. The cops in their blue shirts or white shirts—outfitted with guns, batons, taser guns, pepper spray, plastic and metal handcuffs, walkie-talkies and the protestors accessorized with cardboard placards, American flags, cameras and ideals seemed equally like puppets in an elaborate street theater: as if all were bit parts in an overwhelming landscape of billboards flashing, blinking and winking while the ticker tape circling above announced “Occupy Wall Street Protests Goes Worldwide.” Thousands of cameras were flashing along with thousands of cell phone and video cameras and cameras of all sorts. Security surveillance cameras were everywhere in probably the most densely monitored, square in the world. A giant billboard in fact was flashing back our filmed images on a screen across from us along with a clothing advertisement. In itself, it was a slogan for the privatization of the State’s writ on infringement of privacy.

People, protests, property, parks, public, private, police, prisons, press, politics and permits. To those who are tone deaf these sound like disparate slogans. But the Occupy Wall Street protest movement across the country and across the globe has shown that these are all issues that can be funneled into one or two over arching concerns.

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