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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by Colin Marshall

Do even lovers of world cinema think much about Finland’s working class? Does Aki Kaurismäki think about much else? Clearly, when not thinking about Finland’s working class, he thinks about world cinema, even going so far as to produce a short film thanking Yasujirō Ozu for his influence. “So far I’ve made eleven lousy films,” the Finn says to a pair of portraits of the Japanese master, “and I’ve decided to make another thirty, because I refuse to go to my grave until I have proved to myself that I’ll never reach your level, Mr. Ozu.”

But Kaurismäki has reached Ozu’s level, at least by one particularly objective measure: drinking. Both filmmakers have gone on record measuring out their lives by number of glasses and bottles emptied. While Ozu and his collaborator Kōgo Noda might famously have put away 180 liters of sake in the process of writing each and every script, their films usually focused on characters who might only indulge in a couple rounds after work. Ozu’s people tend to operate under a slow but steady upward mobility, albeit one that sends subtly devastating waves through their long-established but delicate familial relationships. Kaurismäki’s people, who might easily drink instead of working, can count themselves lucky to have any kind of relationships at all.

In Finland as Kaurismäki uses it, you might just as well call the working class the drinking class. When he leaves his homeland for La Vie de Bohème, a part of that simple formula goes missing: the French playwright Marcel, the Albanian painter Rodolfo, and the Irish composer Schaunard want to create and want to find women, but above all, they want not to work. At the point the film begins, getting jobs seems to have transcended the position of priority in their lives to become the unquestioned foundational principle of their lives. Though neither successful nor prosperous by any common definitions of the words, they nevertheless hold themselves up higher than, say, the still-teetering wreckages in the Kaurismäki-influenced Helsinki segment of Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth. As members of what you could call the non-working class, they skirt the standard set of human obligations with a kind of… style.

No wonder, then, that Kaurismäki set the movie in Paris, a city that even those who know little about it probably think of as the last word in habitats for the discerning layabout. Yet he came to find, of course, that the choice wasn’t quite his to make; after grinding away at adapting Henry Murger’s Scènes de la vie de bohème to the streets of his Helsinki — whether the director’s view of the city warrants the phrase “his beloved Helsinki” remains a matter of debate — Kaurismäki supposedly found that only Paris could host these particular stories. And so, as a result of the special brand of combined open-minded stubbornness and hard-laboring laziness at work here, we viewers find ourselves watching a mostly Finnish cast acting all this out on Parisian streets — with some important players who, lacking so much as a word of French, rely on phonetic memorization.

The freshly evicted Marcel carries, with what must be no small strain, the forbiddingly thick manuscript of his 21-act play. Rodolfo, looking at all times far more hangdog than his canine companion Baudelaire, paints large, stern, yet naïve-looking portraits while hoping that nobody will ask to see his nonexistent visa. Schaunard, who promptly claims Marcel’s semi-vacant apartment, toils over piano-based pieces the recreate the sounds of a traffic jam — all the sounds of a traffic jam. These fellows band together in their own informal way, making a team effort to keep one another in life’s refined pleasures while dedicating themselves to the subforms of art they’ve fashioned for themselves.

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IN ANOTHER COUNTRY

In Kashmir, half-asleep, Mother listens to the rain
In Manhattan, I feel her presence in the rain

A rooster precedes the Call to Prayer at Dawn
God is a name dropper: All names at once in the rain

Forsythia shrivel in a vase on her nightstand
On my windowsills wilted petals, a petulance in the rain

She must wonder when he will put on the kettle
Butter the crumpets, offer compliments to the rain

Awake, she veils her hair, says a prayer—across the seas
Water in my hands becomes a reverence in the rain

At Jewel House in Srinagar, Mother reshapes my ghazal
“No enjambments,” she says. Waah Waah I chant in the rain

“Rafiq,” I hear her call above the city din
The kettle whistles: Mother’s scent in the rain

For Agha Shahid Ali, Kashmiri-American Poet, on the 10th anniversary of his death: February 1949—December 2001. Rafiq Kathwari is a guest writer at 3 Quarks Daily.

Caresses and Cuffs

Silence thick as her stews sometimes
filled my grandmother’s house
but for the cars on 15
hissing toward Picatinny
on a wet night
big black Packards or Buicks
heavy as a hard life,
Chevy’s wide whitewalls
spinning over asphalt on a two-lane
before the interstate sliced through
a table in her living room
cluttered with snaps of Jim and Jack
Howard Frank Velma Ruth
Gladys Leo Leroy Pat; the lot of them
in by-gone black and white
mugging hugging beaming being
young as they’d been for the ages
for their tiny taste of time
their vitality a temporal joke
their smooth skin taut as the sky
on a blue blue day
a pillow-piled day-bed
against the front wall under a window
kitty-corner from the brown coal stove
radiating from October
till the geometry of earth and sun
more befitted blood & breath
fat chairs stuffed as her turkeys
on big Thanksgivings
all in this mist of imagination
as real as a pin prick, as
bright and huge as a moon,
crisp as frost
—memory’s a terrible and tender thing
the way it claws and cradles the day
its shadows and light shifting
like shapes of an optical illusion
filled with mercies and accusations—
the caresses and cuffs of
the lord

by Jim Culleny
11/27/11

by Justin E. H. Smith

I enjoy spending time in those countries that are not big enough or important enough to have their own product packaging, and instead must share surface space with information in the sundry native tongues of neighboring countries. I remember standing in front of a microwave in Sarajevo, waiting for some ramen noodles to warm up, and thinking: Wow! I can study 20 languages at once, just skimming the ingredients of this so humble repast.

These noodles, in fact, were meant to be cast far and wide across a great swath of Eurasia, the entire part of it, in fact, that cannot be said to be truly either Europe or Asia, roughly from Albania in the west to Kazakhstan in the east. The languages one finds in between, marked out on the package by a little oval containing the official one- or two-letter country abbreviation ('H', 'RO', 'BH', 'KZ', etc.) are mostly Slavic and Turkic, with some representatives of Eastern Romance (Romanian, Moldovan), Caucasian (Georgian), Ural-Altaic (Hungarian), and a few true isolates such as Albanian –the native word for which is 'shqip' and which evidently evolved as the only surviving descendant of ancient Illyrian–, thrown into the mix. And, except in those few cases where the alphabet is unknown to me, I can learn how to say 'sodium carbonate' in all of these! ('Sodyum karbonat', 'natrij-karbonat', 'carbonat de sodiu', 'nátrium-karbonát', etc.)

These noodles are not fit for consumption in Europe proper, where packaging, other than in the so-called 'ethnic' stores, is meant to mirror national identity, which since 1789 has been wrapped up in the modern collective imagination with language: no nation, in fact, without linguistic uniformity. Western Europe cannot let itself descend into Balkanic lawlessness! Why, the unpoliced linguistic macédoine of the products they allow to circulate there: is this not a testimony of past violence and a portent of more to come?

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STARTING MY DESCENT

After a bomb rips the baggage claim
I sprout wings running on the tarmac.
Single file khakis blurring smashed
Gold of mustard flowers. My legs

Collapse. I roar over tips of Poplars, follow
The Jhelum upstream where Mother
Kneeling at the river’s source tears open
A pomegranate with bare hands. “Rubies

From my dowry stolen by the in-laws.”
Her dupatta undulates and she floats away
Reclined on the veil. I give chase, soaring
Above the Himalayas, depression fuming

The Pacific. I am the pallor of twilight
Starting my descent. A sign rises to greet me—
Gilded Cage For the Deranged.
“Wait,” a nurse says as I search for Mother,

“Why aren’t you already where you’re going?”

by Rafiq Kathwari, a guest writer at 3 Quarks Daily.

by Randolyn Zinn

Despite being a fan of Wim Wender’s previous films, I was frankly dubious when I heard about his latest project. Really, I wondered, the work of legendary choreographer Pina Bausch shot in 3D? Admittedly, my limited experience with this technology was a passing glimpse of computer-generated fantasy fluff for kids…but still, what was Wim Wenders thinking, I wondered?

After seeing the film the other day, I’m pleased to report that Wenders has given a great gift to the world. Not only is PINA one of the first European 3D movies ever made, it is also the world’s first 3D art house film. Even better, the film brings the work of Pina Bausch to a wider audience. During a good part of its 103 minutes, I felt like I was alongside the dancers, hearing them breathe. When they leapt, I felt their exhilarating takeoffs and landings in my own body. When a line of dancers crosses behind a gauzy scrim at one point, it seems to reach into the audience, inviting us to join in the dance. PINA opens in New York on December 23 and will be coming to a theater near you. Here's the trailer.

PINA – Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost – International Trailer from neueroadmovies on Vimeo.

Wim Wenders and Pina Bausch met in 1985 after the filmmaker saw her piece “Cafe Müller” in Venice. “There were people performing who moved me as I had never been moved before,” he has said. “I had a lump in my throat and after a few minutes of unbelieving amazement, I simply let go of my feelings and cried unrestrainedly. This had never happened to me before.”

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by Hartosh Singh Bal

The West came to know him in the sixties. The children of parents who had lived through a world war wanted no part of the old answers. With their disdain for everything their parents stood for, they searched for easy answers elsewhere. Among those offering such answers was this man named Rajneesh, who later preferred to be called Bhagwan and then Osho.

Rajneesh’s notoriety predated his Western disciples. In 1964 he had delivered a series of lectures in Bombay. The lectures became a book – From Sex to Superconsciouness. In the prudery of the India of his time it was a shocking title, little heed was paid to what he had actually written, here was an Indian Guru putting his whole heritage to shame. A nation struggling for respectability felt the shame, a tradition used to shore up their view of themselves was being sullied.

Strangely enough in the compilation of 1500 pages devoted to himself not once does Rajneesh speak of a romantic attraction or a sexual experience. In over half a million words, from the servant at his grandparents’ house to a professor in his college, he takes up every interaction that matters to him. There is no hint of a woman. The Rajneesh who delivered these lectures in 1965, at the age of 34 was in all likelihood a sexual novice. The book that first evoked sex in the public consciousness of modern India was probably written by a virgin.

It is only such naivety that would allow the man to imagine sexuality devoid of jealousy and betrayal. It is almost as if the man writing about removing jealousy from relationships, of sexuality as a burden without guilt, is hoping to create an ideal world removed from the constraints of his surroundings. In the small town where he grew up it was precisely the fear of these emotions and the disruptions they bring in their wake that had forced sexuality into spaces closed to most unmarried youth including Rajneesh. He wanted the sex, but he thought he could do away with its attendant emotions. Only a man who had lusted in the abstract could think so.

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Or: How Brett Ratner, Slajov Zizek, and Shane Battier Can Make a Poet Wish She’d Taken that Stats Class

by Mara Jebsen

Part I. To Have Your Cake and Eat It, Too

“Lets go see the dumbest movie we can find,” I said to a friend of mine, an actor. I’d had a personal disappointment. He was chivalrous and agreed to escort me. Then we were awkwardly alone in an enormous theatre in Times Square. For nearly two hours, we cringed through “Tower Heist”, in which a star-studded cast devotes their theatrical energies towards hiding their shame at the thuddingly unfunny nature of the lines. “The dumbest movie we can find?” I couldn't help it– in my head I began to think: “In movies, as perhaps in romance, you really ought to be careful what you wish for . . .”

The stars who drew us in (Ben Stiller, Eddie Murphy, Alan Alda, Matthew Broderick, among others) come together to make a heist movie that, for the longest time, has no heist in it. The film spends a while giving glimpses of the inner workings of an upscale hotel and delivering a pastiche of little sketches meant to allow Ben Stiller’s character, a sort of manager-concierge, to establish his relationships with the hotel staff. The multiracial cast of employees reveal themselves to be goodhearted, mock-able, sometimes stupid folk. Once its established who the villain is—the rich and charming, brilliant and evil Alan Alda character—the heist begins. But the machinations of it are so disappointing that one immediately develops nostalgia for the part of the movie that had no heist in it.

Anthony Lane, in a New Yorker of a week or two ago, reviewed the film in the only ways it can be reviewed: by a) noting how it doesn’t quite hang together as a piece of entertainment, and b) pairing it with the new Gus Van Sant film, to read “Tower Heist” in terms of its accidental 'place' in history. Like all films, it is a cultural document, but in this case special because, as Lane points out, it is one of the first films to get caught up in the VOD debate.

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So, Socrates to young Plato said,”The things we think we know are like shadows
cast on the walls of a cave by a distant light of unseen things we do not know.”.

A Hole in The Banal
-For L.

You called last night troubled.
Looking for something in particular
(a pink balloon shaped like the heart
of your long dead cousin)
you'd stumbled upon a hole in the banal:
a weakened spot in the thin skin of our conceits
stretched so taut over the otherworld
a hint of it broke through and pierced
your shell of rapt doing
and you glimpsed the truth of shades
that dance upon the walls of caves
to music most often unheard
under the rush of jets,
behind the daily brushing of leaves against sky,
drowned by the litanies of radios,
made almost silent by
the roar of willed tornadoes
blowing through the aisles of malls,
muted by the fierce narcissism of war,
the accumulation of stuff thrown up
as dikes to keep the unspeakable sea at bay
and you wondered if perhaps Socrates was right
So I recalled for you a day driving to Colrain
when a song bled from the dash
so filled with poignancy my heart broke too
and I sobbed from the steel arched bridge
where two rivers meet to the office door
remembering my mother,
my father, and Danny my autistic brother,
hearing them hearing me sob
through a veil of ordinary tears and regret
saltier than the Dead Sea
This is where you and I meet, where we all meet,
on the beach of that sea, catching now and then
between horizon and surf, glimpses of creatures
breaking through, breaching the membrane
between worlds unexpectedly
as we wonder how the dancing shadows
on cave walls can be true

by Jim Culleny
11/14/11

Plato's allegory of the cave

by James McGirk

Our brains are filled with the whispering of objects, the shrieking presence of things we lust after or despise or simply want to ignore but can’t for all the noise. It seems impossible to write fiction without addressing it but so little does. Part of this is the nature of the medium. The contemporary novel or short story is a ghostly place, a necropolis where memories are dissected and pinned to the page.

“Anecdotes don't make good stories,” the great Canadian short story writer Alice Munro once told an interviewer, “Generally I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.”

Writing literary fiction is a bit like tunneling (minus the physical component). You gnaw a room out of the wall of the previous one, scaffold it with description and feed in a few disembodied voices, hoping the histories and hierarchies those voices are quibbling over create enough momentum to propel your reader into the next room. Munro takes this a step further, using the shape of those excavations to back engineer a second, deeper narrative structure from the first.

Hers is a second order of story, ideal for spelunking the complex residue of a lifetime of deep emotion, but one that seems to collapse the realm of the object. Unless an author like Munro is a pure technological determinist, a deep dive into character motivation seems unsuited to describing a world where the collective ache of consumer culture – and being left out of it – might manifest itself in something like the Occupy Wall Street movement. Yet it is not impossible to use intricately rendered characters as a way to roam the realm of material consciousness.

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Some Notes Made on Evacuation Day 2011

by Jen Paton

One hundred years from this moment, crowds in this same city would stand on the streets, in the rain, under “stars and stripes from every Flag-pole,” to commemorate this day, and to commemorate it for the last time on such a scale: “every tower, every steeple, every rooftop which commanded” river views would be “peopled with human beings,” and thousands would brave torrential rain to catch a glimpse of the festivities. Two hundred and twenty five years later, this would be the subject of a snarky Gawker Post. Two hundred and twenty eight years later, a humorous conversation in The Daily Show. But for now, in 1783, it’s just eight hundred guys waiting at Bowery, waiting for the signal.

Once this road was a footpath for the people who lived here first, a bit later it was a road that led to the Dutch Governor General's farm. At one o'clock, in the distance, they heard the cannon fire, fired from the departing enemy ship, and this meant it was safe to enter New York City. They marched in, a newspaper would say a few weeks later, with “an inviolable regard to order and discipline, as Tyranny could never be enforced.” (qtd in Hood, 2004). Quite.

The occupying British commander, Sir Guy Carleton, now on a ship living the island, had received the orders to evacuate months before. It was a delicate operation: the Americans wanted military control of the city as soon as possible, the better to quell any lingering dissent there, but they also hoped to keep the British army and their own from exchanging fire in the process. Carleton had to pull out not only his troops, but the thousands of refugees loyal to him, who had been streaming into this city since rebel victory became assured, as well as the slaves liberated from the enemy who had sought refuge within its walls. He would leave with thousands of refugees, including 3000 freedmen, whom the British promised to “pay” the Americans for at Washington’s insistence and, apparently, never did. Some would settle in Nova Scotia, of which some would end up in Freetown, Sierra Leone.

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by Hasan Altaf

In their outlines, all of Joan Didion's novels seem more or less the same: The protagonist is always a woman, in some way “troubled”; there are always men, usually two, usually powerful in some way; there is sometimes a son but always a daughter, who is generally what the woman is “playing for,” as Maria Wyeth puts it in Play It As It Lays (1970): “What I play for here is Kate.” The stories of the troubled women torn between the two men and trying to save or reconnect with or find their children do not, in general, end happily; the children remain lost, the men too are gone (divorce, death, abandonment, some combination thereof), and at the end the woman we've been following is alone and still in some way “troubled.”

The first time I read Didion's novels, I read them all at once, and the similarities began to annoy me: If they were all going to be the same, what was the point in reading more than one? (There are other writers who do this, who write the same story time and time again, and those in general I abandon after the first; Didion's style is what always kept me coming back.) Recently, however, as a way of preparing for the publication of Blue Nights, I went back and reread the novels, starting with Run, River (1963) and ending with The Last Thing He Wanted (1996). The second read-through answered this question for me. It also answered another, perhaps more important question – what is the point for the writer in telling the same story so many times?

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by Kevin S. Baldwin

There is nothing quite like a serious illness or injury to focus one's mind on what is truly important. I recently injured my back (probably from lifting my 6 year old off the floor where he had fallen asleep). I do this about once a year, usually by forgetting to bend at the knees when lifting something. I bent my knees this time, but I guess it wasn't enough. I don't recall a pull or a pop, but over the next few days, things slowly deteriorated. I went from taking 2 Ibuprofen at a time to 4 at a time, and even that didn't help like it usually does.

Eventually, while climbing stairs, a turn on a landing threw my back into such spasms that I collapsed. Sweat began pouring off my face and I felt extremely nauseous. This was terra incognita for me. Had I ruptured a disc? (I guess I've been pretty lucky so far. I am pushing 50 yet have suffered no broken bones, major accidents, or diseases. I think I took a single Tylenol after my wisdom teeth were pulled). Suddenly, I was helpless and in agonizing pain.

Pain is one of these enigmatic aspects of existence. It serves a purpose, but there can be too much of a good thing. Pain and swelling keep you from moving or using an injured area so it can heal. Of course, a lot of pain is uncomfortable and has a way of consuming most or all of your mental bandwidth. People who are born without pain receptors tend to live short lives because of all the injuries they suffer without realizing it.

I remained crumpled on the landing while pondering my next move. Not enough room to stretch out: I would have to stand up. After several attempts that ended when my lower back locked-up, I finally convinced myself to work through that pain and made it back to being vertical. Standing was actually fairly comfortable as long as I didn't move. But I couldn't be stranded on the landing for the rest of the day. I ended up sitting down on the stairs and pushing myself up backwards one step at a time. I grabbed the handrails at the top of the stairs and managed to pull myself up and drag myself to the bedroom to lie down.

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