by James McGirk

Reviewing Hari Kunzru’s Gods Without Men in The New York Times, Douglas Coupland proposes, “what must undeniably be called a new literary genre. For lack of a better word let’s call it Translit.” Translit reflects “an aura-free universe in which all eras coexist at once—a state of possibly permanent atemporality given to us courtesy of the Internet.” Artists are responding to this, Coupland says, by mashing together time and place, an effect “not unlike watching a TV show that’s simultaneously happening on multiple channels, a story filmed in different eras using differing technologies, but which taken together tell the same story.

As a strategy this is not new. This new genre sounds a lot like Moby Dick, minus the throbbing heartbeat of Captain Ahab pursuing his white whale, or the multi-faceted storytelling of a Thousand-and-One Nights. Every novel is a soup of partially digested hanks of literary matter. A typical chapter is a hybrid of drama, description and transcribed speech. This soupiness is the reason why novels have defied easy categorization into genre since they evolved from the golden triad of Greek drama, tragedy and comedy.

Nailing down a new genre and coining a new term to slot into the canon is harmless fun. What is disturbing about this “Translit,” however, is Coupland's suggestion that it is an effective strategy for dealing with, “interconnectivity across time and space, just as interconnectedness defines the here and now.” The spacey refraction that Coupland is so impressed with is a feint and one that contemporary literature would do well to expose.

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by Hasan Altaf

Let England Shake (2011), the eighth album by the English singer PJ Harvey, was by itself already high concept: In the music industry in the twenty-first century, releasing an album that focuses so explicitly on history – on war, on England, on England and its wars – seems like a particularly dangerous gamble. Even for Harvey herself, much about the album was different from her previous work, including the instrument of choice (autoharp), the singing voice, and even the writing process – the lyrics were written and finalized before she began to write any music at all.

The only thing left to do with such an unconventional album might be to keep going along the same route, to heighten the high concept. Instead of filming traditional music videos, Harvey asked the British war photographer Seamus Murphy, whose photographs from Afghanistan she had admired, to make a few short films for some of the songs on the album. The end result of that process is a DVD, also titled Let England Shake, that collects all twelve of these films as a sort of film on its own.

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by Karen Swenson

A VISA TO TIBET

Sometimes getting into Tibet is a snap; sometimes it is a convoluted diplomatic maneuver out of an Eric Ambler spy novel. In 2007, on my 8^th trip to Tibet, it became the later because a group of young Americans, mistaking their egotistical urge for courage, flew in with a rolled up banner reading, “CHINA OUT OF TIBET,” unrolling it in the midst of Lhasa. They were thrown out of the country but those in the country suffered for their action. The Chinese banged the Tibetan door shut, an action at which they are expert. The pointless protest disrupted the tourist trade on which many Tibetans are dependent.

I flew from Shanghai, having ascertained that no Tibetan visas were being handed out there, to Chengdu, capital of Szechwan, hoping to find a way in, but every agent I talked to at the, unfortunately named, Traffic Hotel, next to the bus station on the cemented shores of the polluted Jin river said they wouldn’t be able to get me a Tibet visa for at least two weeks. Disgruntled, I wandered Chengdu seeing sights I had not visited in years. Prosperity had come to town in rouge and furbelows and the inhabitants were on a prolonged buying spree (this was before the earthquake) but prosperity had also brought interesting improvements to the park around Du Fu’s cottage in the form of archeological excavations that exposed the real cottages of the poet’s time and the refurbishing of a number of monasteries and temples. Between parks and temples I emailed a friend in New York expressing my irritability. He suggested I try the local CITS travel agency, a thing I would never have done on my own. There a young man, whose English name was Jim, signed me up for a five day Chinese tour of Tibet. I knew that given those five days and a little luck, I would find a Tibetan agent in Lhasa, able to get an extension on my visa, as well as a guide and car to go to Mount Kailash. It would be my 7^th time to Kailash.

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by Kevin S. Baldwin

I have to admit that I had never really paid much attention to reproductive issues until Rush Limbaugh's recent remarks about birth control and state mandates for transvaginal ultrasounds got me to thinking about what is really at stake: Wasted human potential. All that sexual activity taking place with nothing material resulting from it? How could I have missed it? Now that I have seen the light so to speak, I would like to suggest that Rush and company have really been thinking too small.

Reproduction is far too important to be left to women. Let's face it, ovulating and menstruating once a month is the rate limiting step in this process. Even a woman who immediately became pregnant again upon giving birth could only reproduce about once a year. In contrast, males can produce millions of sperm per day. We've been so focused on issues surrounding pregnancies that we've missed far bigger issues like Onanism. Talk about wasted potential: All those little swimmers could have been contenders! Think about the possibilities if the 23 chromosomes in a sperm could be combined with 23 in another sperm (from another man of course; no inbreeding here, thank you very much.). It wouldn't be too hard to splice in some essential genes from X chromosomes to flesh things out. The 46 chromosomes needed for proper embryonic development would be in place. A small injection of Calcium or some other trigger could get the ball rolling in these “spermbryos.”

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I'm begging you please let this end
Decide which of these clowns you will send
Just take your pick
From Newt, Ron or Rick
Or Mitt who is able to bend

Into whatever candidate that you might need
For he's not met one belief he can't knead
If one doesn't thrill
Perhaps a different one will
Whatever it takes to succeed

So choose one of these men and please soon
For all of the fun's left the room
I used to enjoy
Whatever the ploy
For they clearly spelled GOP doom

But of recent I just can't get enthused
And I'm quite frankly rather bemused
Can these men really think
That their words are in sync
With the women who's rights they'd abuse?

Yes the election has come down to sex
And all women this truly should vex
Forget abortion these days
There are new trails to blaze
And women's rights muscles to flex

Do we all want our sex lives controlled
By these men who wag their fingers and scold
Who won't condemn Rush
Whose bile makes them gush
And who can't see this issue's fool's gold

They'll all fight for your every last gun
Make sure the healthcare law's undone
Denounce evolution
Increase earth's pollution
There's no real difference in the long run

So, I'm begging you please let this end
Decide which of these clowns you will send
Newt, Ron, Rick or Mitt
I don't care a whit
They all equally rile and offend

by Alyssa Pelish

I.

I recently tried to pitch an essay that made use of, if not coined, the term “friendship porn.” The essay was basically about my massive consumption of a certain genre of TV show, which I had tried to make sense of by dipping into the literature on friendship — a phylum of work that includes treatises and lectures and meditations by big names like Cicero and Aristotle and Confucius and Kant, as well as papers by contemporary social scientists whose names are not yet in lights. However, as much as he liked my essay, the editor was bothered by the fact that this phenomenon I was discussing, this “friendship porn,” was dated. Friendship porn is old news, he told me. We want you to tell us what’s next. What’s the next big kind of “porn”? And although I tried to explain to him that my point was, look, friendship porn is timeless — he said no dice.

But I persist in believing that the phenomenon of friendship porn, regardless of how 1995 it is, hasn’t been adequately plumbed. The style sections have investigated the highest-profile categories of nouveau porn: the terms “food porn” and “torture porn” and “real estate porn” more or less trip off our tongues now. I accept them. I’ll admit that I’m not immune to the aesthetic pleasures of a well posed entree: my head can be turned by the stained glass slices of roasted beet against white china, drizzled with a citrus reduction, strewn with faintly toasted pignoli and garnished with pale leaves of escarole. So, too, will I page through a photo spread of tastefully renovated and cunningly designed breakfast nooks and turret rooms in the Times real estate section. But the kind of porn I’ve finally come around to admitting that I have, historically, been most susceptible to, is friendship porn. And lots of other people are, too, it would seem. Yet where is the Times style section feature? Where is the academic paper? Where is the Wikipedia entry? Granted, friendship porn is no longer new, but it warrants at least a modicum of pop-analysis.

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by S. Abbas Raza

This is my English version of Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz's Urdu rendition of a Turkish poem written by Nâzım Hikmet for his Russian wife Vera.

To Vera

She said come
She said stay
Smile, said she
Die, said she

I came
I stayed
Smiled
And died also.

by Akim Reinhardt

Last month, the national newspaper-cum-multi media endeavor Indian Country Today released its list of the worst five U.S. presidents vis a vis American Indians. As a professor of American Indian history, I was immediately curious about what they had come up with. The list, in order, reads:

Andrew Jackson
Dwight Eisenhower
George W. Bush, Jr.
Abraham Lincoln
Ulysses Grant

A list like this is designed to be debated, and I could make a case here or there. But quibles aside, there’s no debating the man at the top of the list: Andrew Jackson. Frankly, I would have been shocked if they had picked anyone other than Old Hickory. And indeed, few historians would disagree that he was the worst president for American Indians, and maybe by a longshot.

However, for a number of years now, I’ve been cantankerously telling anyone who will listen that Jackson wasn’t just the worst president vis a vis Indians; I think he’s actually the worst U.S. president of all time, period. And now seems like as good a time as any to make my case, which boils down to three major factors: his forementioned Indian policy; his economic policies; and his political legacy.

Indian Policies- When it comes to Indian affairs, there has been no shortage of presidential scoundrels. From George Washington to Zachary Taylor, a number of commanders-in-chief (including Jackson) literally killed Indians on their way to the nation’s highest elected office. Indeed, the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) nickname for Washington was “Town Destroyer.” Though the moniker dated back to at least the 1750s, Washington eventually lived up to it by ordering a campaign of total warfare against the Haudenosaunee during the Revolution. At his behest, Major General John Sullivan and the Continental Army destroyed no fewer than forty Haudenosaunee towns in 1779, spurring a horrific wave of disease, famine, and death. Father of the nation? To the Haudenosaunee, Washington was more like Darth Vader. And he was not alone. During the nation’s first century, a parade of presidents presided over a shockingly violent colonial conquest of the continent . So what sets Andrew Jackson apart?

Ethnic cleansing.

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Fresh Brim-Feather

Inside the eye of a new storm
are you lost? came the question;
came as a little nesting tornado, a
windy Matryoshka tucked
naturally within another;
a wind like the tiny tempests
that lift street leaves from gutters in fall
—a miniscule funnel by standards of
Tornado Alley but
if you’re small (as small
as a small thought)
the small question,
are you lost in this new storm?
is as mighty as a tsunami
gathered on a beach at your feet
its humping, horizon-lifting wave
poised in the instant before
yesterday-would-be-better

—then-there
in the shutter-click before
it rakes the landscape,
in the time before
too-late

……………. still

inside the eye of this new storm
everything’s familiar;
the heavens have not issued
new revelations
(news is always old-hat
but with a fresh brim-feather)
love and hate are ghosts with heartbeats
eternal as new babes, and
to be lost in a new storm
is as natural as breath & death
.

by Jim Culleny
3/11/12

by Liam Heneghan

To James White, botanist and teacher.

Though you might forgivably mistake a man for a tree at the level of gross morphology, nevertheless, a tree undeniably dwells in place whereas a person’s home is born in motion. Agnes Arber, the Cambridge plant anatomist and philosopher, remarked in her 1950 classic The Natural Philosophy of Plant Form that “among plants, form may be held to include something corresponding to behaviour in the zoological field.” If by behavior we refer to the sum of all the activities of an organism, then the manner in which a plant grows – marshalling its leaves to best secure light, disposing its roots to obtain nutrients and to harness it to the earth – is comparable to the more rambunctious activities that animals deploy for analogous purpose. The behavior of plants – the punctuated rhythms of their growth – is founded on the quite simple laws of cell division and extension. This was Arber’s lesson. And this, at eighteen, was the first conceptual framework that preoccupied me. If simplicity rules the world of plants, why not also true for animals, for people, for me?

Thirty years ago I took several wintery trips out to North Bull Island, a five-mile stretch of sand in Dublin Bay which formed in response to 18th Century engineering projects at the mouth of the River Liffey. Now a site of considerable conservation interest, I went along with fellow biology student Liam Dolan to observe the curious behavior of Armeria maritima roots. The plant, commonly known as sea pink, grew profusely on the dunes. The two Liams were at that time under the thrall of Jim White from the Botany Department at University College, Dublin and were both taking his course on the architecture of trees. To those of us who studied with White in the 1980s, he seemed like a visitor from another planet, one who pointed out the strangeness of his new home to the gaping residents, most of whom had never noticed the oddness of the world surrounding them. Jim’s lectures were marvels of erudition, scientific concision, and anecdote. Many years later when I worked in a Costa Rica, a well-known tropical forest researcher told me that he had only written one “fan letter” in his life and this was to James White. Anyway, we returned to White with our sketches and observations on the architectural patterns formed by sea pink roots. He was little incredulous at first – surely we were out looking at birds? In those days it was not uncommon for hale teens to spend their days traipsing out with binoculars to Bull Island to observe birds. It was unimaginable, apparently, that the youth would be looking at plant roots. Perhaps it’s best for a teacher not to sense the full measure of his impact, as it may constrain the random suggestions with which he peppers his lectures.

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Bolts of Light

The Sami have a hundred words for snow
I have few
Rivers of nuance flow from familiarity

I know the bite of my own bark
Toothless as a frog I sit upon my stone
I croak across my pond, the sun,
early spark and setting ember
knew what I have known
knows what I remember,
has seen it all, collecting as it burns
tells what it has shown
fastening with bolts of light
all love I never tendered
..

Jim Culleny
3/3/12

by Misha Lepetic

“In the dime stores and bus stations,
People talk of situations,
Read books, repeat quotations,
Draw conclusions on the wall”
~ Bob Dylan

Cities ceaselessly fascinate because of the problems they have solved over time – grand socio-infrastructural dilemmas such as property rights, water, sewage, electrification. But as cities grow and evolve, these solutions in turn generate new problems, or intensify existing ones, in ways that are both unpredictable and banal. Indeed, for cities to continue growing in any sense of the word, this will remain a permanent aspect of their discourse, and a precondition of their success. It would not be much of a stretch to say that, given global trends of urbanization, the ability of cities to continue planning and designing their way past new problems is not just essential for their own survival, but for that of humanity itself.

Within this context, mobility must rank as a problem par excellence. Commentators have described slums as “cities that have failed to solve their mobility problem”. The free and rapid flow of people and goods is essential to the dynamic nature of any urban setting; and while the developed world looks on China’s growth with a mixture of awe and trepidation (and hope that they will keep buying our debt), it is also true that the media greets reports of things like a 10-day traffic jam with a certain amount of Schadenfreude. Amateurs! (On the other hand, the fact that there were no incidents of road rage reported during this traffic jam may have something to teach us about the virtues of a certain national temperament. Once, we too had a sense of humour about this.)

At any rate, the design problem is simple: How do you get people to use public transport more effectively?

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by Melanie Friedrichs

The Icarus Factor: Interpreting Financial Crisis through the Capacity-Output Cross

In finance, the “Icarus factor” describes the dangerous over-excitement that leads company managers to take on projects too risky or too ambitious for the company to handle. But can the story of Icarus apply to a bigger picture? Perhaps the economy is like a company; it can only handle so much real estate speculation, so many collateralized debt obligations, so much easy credit before it begins to get uncomfortably hot.

A Short Summary of The Capacity-Output Cross

Two weeks ago I introduced the “capacity-output cross,” a new way to conceptualize the causal role of money and finance that came from thinking about how classical theorists—Adam Smith, David Hume, John Maynard Keynes, F.A. Hayek, Milton Friedman—differ in their interpretations of the equation of exchange, MV = PQ. I renamed Q real output proposed a new term: capacity for exchange, roughly equal to M times potential V determined by the state of financial innovation and the strength of institutions. Neither quantity is measurable, but real output can be imagined as utility value of all goods and services produced during a given period of time, and capacity for exchange can be imagined as the amount of money available to be spent during a given period of time, recognizing that within that in any given period some dollars will be spent more than once.

I sketched economic history with the two lines. Capacity crosses Real Output, because it is usually easier to mine or print money or to improve institutions than it is to increase the efficiency of production and make more real value. The lines cross at different times in different markets and in different places, but as an example I suggested that the economy of northern Europe “crossed” during the expansion of coinage and banking during the 18th century, sometime around the time of Hume and Smith.

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by James McGirk

I do not follow contemporary cinema, but with the Oscars looming, I felt obliged to weigh in on the moving image as I experience it. Since I do not own a television and lack the sophistication and desire to sift through darknets and peer-to-peer file-sharing networks hunting for shows to download, I have resorted to Youtube’s never-ending supply of serial killer documentaries. Most are grainy and since the channels tend to abruptly disappear, are more than likely illegally uploaded. With any other genre this would be unbearable, but the crappiness of the viewing experience adds grit to these shows, which are usually collages of old photos and interviews, and the experience of watching a psychopathic killer delivered to justice becomes all the more deliciously unsettling.

After watching hundreds of these shows from all over the English-speaking world, I have begun to autopsy the peculiar relationship between the police, the bereaved, the media, and the public. There are remarkable differences between an Australian, an American, an English or even the rare Canadian depiction of society’s most heinous crime.

A serial killer is a murderer who has killed at least three people, with a refractory period, that is a length of time, between killings. There tends to also be a psychological motive, though many plunder their victims’ possessions, deep down serial killers kill because they want to or have to. The really famous ones often have a prurient interest in killing, and some of the most frenzied do horrific damage to their victims' bodies. These cases are full of sex, violence and vivid characters, and almost always have a thrilling conclusion in the form of a detective solving an increasingly violent series of murders. In other words, serial killers are the perfect fodder for television shows, or at least they would be if it weren’t for the fact that they must always balance on the narrow ledge between good taste, respect for the killers’ victims and the salacious detail their viewers crave; the latter element varies dramatically from country to country.

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by Haider Shahbaz

Kashif is a novelist who is afraid of novels: they all remind him of his failure at love. Novels, with the futility of each word, with the reflection of each phrase, with the silent spaces between sounds, remind him of nothing but loss. His novels are nothing but bloody fights with the memories of lost paradises and lost homes and lost loves.

Now that he is eighty and has a pearly beard and a semi-bald head, Kashif is writing The Last Novel. He is writing his last novel on his first love: Monika. He wants to be done, for ever and ever, with memories of Monika. Once finished, he has decided, he will spend the rest of his days watching television. Or doing anything that will not remind him of his failure at love. And if everything, really everything everything, still reminded him of nothing but his failure at love, he will commit suicide. And be done with it.

One thing is certain: this novel– the one he is writing now – will be his last one, if he ever manages to finish it. Despite the tremendous success of his previous novels, this novel is to be the one that will complete all he wants to say about fear and beauty and memory. But before we talk of novels and suicides, we must talk of love. Kashif is thinking of love because his son, Rashid, is coming to visit him. Without admitting it to himself, Kashif has decided that his son is his last chance at succeeding in love. His last chance, in other words, of getting over his memories of failed love and finishing The Last Novel.

********************

Kashif lives alone, ridiculously alone, in his comfortable house in the countryside of Wales. Countless years ago, fifteen to be exact, on June 8^th, Kashif came here to write The Last Novel. He lives with nothing but books. Or should we say: memories and fear. They are strewn all over the place. They stack up against whole walls. They litter the floors of all the rooms. They sleep with him and eat with him and bathe with him and sit outside on the open porch with him. They are, in a word, everywhere.

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by Mara Jebsen

It came to me at the hairdresser’s. A sort of image-idea about birds and goodness. Karen had me in one of those retro-space-age bubble-things and the air was roaring around my ears, drying. “I grow blonder as I speak,” I kept thinking, though I wasn't speaking. Just thinking loudly through the rarified air.

Over by the window, Karen, all wrist, was erasing wings of silver-black from the temples of her client. The client’s beautiful beak-like nose grew ever more defined in the sun of the windowpane; the tufts drifting like feathers to the linoleum floor, mixing as they fell. They landed silver-brown in sunlight, like tree-bark in winter, like strokes of pencil-lead . . .

There were many women in the room: another client with hair like my sister’s (dry clouds springing from the skull; tall as an outstretched hand). I saw the hairdresser press a little piece between the knuckles of two outstretched fingers, and scissor a bit off. The girl’s eyes gleamed joyfully towards themselves in the mirror. Her hairdresser's own hair was similar, but oiled down to shaped curls. The women seemed ambivalent about this act of 'taming’; were more intent on the power of the raw material. And in its cutting, the space between them filled with camaraderie so palpable, it was nearly communion.

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