by Tom Jacobs

How on earth did anyone get the idea that people can communicate with one another by letter! Of a distant person one can think, and of a person who is near one can catch hold – all else goes beyond human strength. Writing letters, however, means to denude oneself before the ghosts, something for which they greedily wait. Written kisses don’t reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by ghosts. It is on this ample nourishment that they multiply so enormously. Humanity senses this and fights against it in order to eliminate as far as possible the ghostly element between people and to create natural communication, the peace of souls; it has invented the railway, the motorcar, the aeroplane. But it’s no longer any good, these are evidently inventions made at the moment of crashing. The opposing side is so much calmer and stronger; after the postal service it has invented the telegraph, the telephone, the radiograph. The ghosts won’t starve, but we will perish (226).

~ Franz Kafka, “Letters to Felice”

I happened once, one fine summer afternoon several years ago, to be standing on a street corner in downtown Chicago, waiting for the light to change. I had taken a late lunch from my crappy temp job, and I usually bought a sandwich and then sought refuge from work in the Cultural Center, where daily lectures on a range of topics were given by graduate students from the University of Chicago. I had just listened to one of these as I gnawed on a turkey sandwich and was walking back to work through clouds of muddled thoughts about (in this case) ancient Greece and the use of masks in theater. This all had the effect of abstracting me from the modern realities of the skyscrapers that towered vaguely menacingly above me.

It was just then that I happened to look up and see a school bus slowly roll through the intersection before me. Perhaps it was on its way to a field trip to the Art Institute of Chicago. I saw a little boy, perhaps eight years old, sitting in the very last seat of the bus and looking directly at me. We held each other’s gaze for perhaps two seconds, and then, just as the bus lurched forward, and just as I was about to smile and return to mundane day, he put his hand up and gave me the finger.

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by Quinn O'Neill

The latest battle in the long standing war between evolution and creationism was lost in Louisiana last week. 17-year-old Zack Kopplin spearheaded a valiant effort to repeal Louisiana’s Science Education Act, an Act that opens the door to the teaching of Creationism in science classrooms. Tragically, the bill was shelved and the anti-evolution Act retained.

Some might wonder what could be so terrible about teaching students that we were created in our current form by a kind and loving God. It’s an idea that can help people to cope with mortality and uncertainty and offer a sense of purpose to our existence. It may seem pretty harmless.

The teaching of Creationism as science constitutes a tragic failure of science education for a number of reasons, some of which don’t get mentioned often enough. When debate bubbles up on the internet, it tends to revolve around what is and isn’t true, with talk of facts and evidence. Certainly evolution is true and there are reams and museums of supporting evidence; but the rejection of facts and evidence itself isn’t really tragic in my opinion, it’s just disappointing and frustrating.

The real tragedy has more to do with the power and utility of evolution than with its truth. Evolution is a potent concept that can transform the way we see the world and everything in it. In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, Daniel Dennett compares the concept to a sort of “universal acid” that’s so powerful it will inevitably eat through anything used to contain it. In Dennett's words, evolution “eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view, with most of the old landmarks still recognizable, but transformed in fundamental ways.”

But evolution doesn’t just change the way we look at things, it’s necessary for making sense of much of science. Major science organizations have acknowledged this vital role. The American Association for the Advancement of Science states:

“The modern concept of evolution provides a unifying principle for understanding the history of life on earth, relationships among all living things, and the dependence of life on the physical environment. While it is still far from clear how evolution works in every detail, the concept is so well established that it provides a framework for organizing most of the biological knowledge into a coherent picture.”¹

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by Misha Lepetic

I could tell you how many steps make up the streets rising like stairways, and the degree of the arcades’ curves, and what kind of zinc scales cover the roofs; but I already know this would be the same as telling you nothing.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 1974, p4

In the headlong rush to lead us to the promised land of the “Smart City” one finds a surprising amount of agreement between the radically different constituencies of public urban planners, global corporations and scruffy hackers. This should be enough to make anyone immediately suspicious. Often quite at odds, these entities – and it seems, most anyone else – contend that there is no end to the benefits associated with opening the sluices that hold back a vast ocean’s worth of data. Nevertheless, the city’s traditional imperviousness to measurement sets a high bar for anyone committed to its quantification, and its ambiguity and amorphousness will present a constant challenge to the validity and ownership of the data and the power thereby generated.

We can trace these intentions back to the notoriously misinterpreted statement allegedly made by Stewart Brand, that “information wants to be free.”* Setting aside humanity’s talent to anthropomorphize just about anything, we can nevertheless say that urban planners indeed want information to be free, since they believe that transparency is an easy substitute for accountability; corporations champion such freedom since information is increasingly equated with new and promising revenue streams and business models; and hackers believe information to be perhaps the only raw material required to forward their own agendas, regardless of which hat they happen to be wearing.

All three groups enjoy the simple joys of strictly linear thinking: that is to say, the more information there is, the better off we all are. But before we allow ourselves to be seduced by the resulting reams of eye candy, let us consider the anatomy of a successful exercise in urban visualization.

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Michael Blim

You know things have once again reached a pretty pass when you start recalling Seinfeld episodes in the midst of the morning newspaper read. By the end of this past week, it seemed to me that a goodly part of America had become Seinfeld’s Bizarro World, a place where down was up, left was right, and the violation of common sense a comic premise.

What’s funny on Seinfeld is very unfunny as a description of a country’s politics. Many nations slip in and out of Bizarro World. Cults of personality can create laugh riots, if you are not murdered or left to die tortured in a cell because you laughed out loud. Italy’s Berlusconi lives in a world so bizarre that he took to button-holing his G-8 colleagues last week in Deauville, France to complain about how “Communist” judges were persecuting him, as if being prosecuted for sleeping with 17-year olds were somehow nothing more a political setup.

If only America’s descent into Bizarro World were simply a Seinfeld episode, a story about nothing that like cotton candy melts in your mouth and disappears leaving nothing more than the disagreeable sensation of acute indigestion. But of course, it’s not. We need suffer those who don’t get the joke, and their insistent upside-down vision of the world sends the national gyroscope into a tizzy.

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By Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

Pragmatism is widely regarded as the Unites States’ only indigenous philosophical movement. Founded by a quirky and largely isolated genius, Charles Peirce, pragmatism was introduced as a method for clear thinking which insisted that all words and statements be understood in terms of concrete experience. It was popularized by William James in a series of lectures delivered in Boston and New York 1906 and 1907. Indeed, many of the connotations of the term as it is used in popular parlance derive from James’s writing; it was James who identified pragmatism with the doctrines the truth is what “works” and that statements should be accepted or rejected in part according to their success. Yet pragmatism received its most sustained articulation in the philosophy of John Dewey, who in the course of his long academic career incorporated central insights of Peirce and James into an all-embracing philosophical system of experimental naturalism. In Dewey’s hands, pragmatism became the philosophical basis for accounts of art, experience, mind, knowledge, language, communication, education, happiness, science, religion, and politics. And Dewey embodied the pragmatic commitment to unifying theory and practice. He was a tireless public intellectual whose activities ran the gamut from marching in support of women’s suffrage to helping to found the NAACP to presiding over the Trotsky trial in Mexico. It is with good reason, then, that contemporary philosophers who are most keen to ally themselves with this “classical” pragmatist movement tend to idolize Dewey.

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by Justin E. H. Smith

I get some of my best writing done at Charles de Gaulle International Airport, where I now sit.

I could use my time here otherwise; I could learn the layout of the place, something that after countless visits remains entirely mysterious to me. I've made out at least a vague resemblance to some coiled viper that has, at intervals, swallowed several large rodents, causing it to bulge in spots and to narrow in others. The whole snake surrounds a mass of concrete curly-queues, traffic roundabouts at various elevations, each serving its own class of vehicle. Everything is concrete: concrete slabs of ceiling supported on concrete pillars, concrete ramps blocked off by concrete barriers. The ghost of General de Gaulle himself haunts this grey mess. It sings of French third-way-ism, flimsy viennoiseries at certain narrowings along the viper's vertebrae, sad succursales of the Hippopotamus chain at others; the shells of abandoned Minitel cabins: all the sagging, unsustainable sadness of a half-Soviet hybrid. It looks to be on the verge of collapse, and indeed great chunks of it have collapsed. Scrap metal litters the runways and has been known to trip up Concordes. The arrivals screens have been seen to report as retardé what they might more accurately have described as disparu.

I sit and stare at my computer screen and write because, in truth, this place terrifies me.

But I'm sitting here, obviously, because I've been going around France again, which means also going around exchanging bisous. This is problematic for me, as I am an American, and even among Americans am exceptionally awkward when it comes to physical contact. But over the years I've practiced, and have now reached the point where I am able to kiss strange cheeks with passable elegance.

But why all this kissing, anyway?

Something needs to be done to inaugurate social interaction. There must be some signalling of a transition from each doing his or her own thing, to each participating in a shared moment. The Japanese mark this transition by a subtle bow, Americans by a handshake (or sometimes a half-assed 'hug', a concept to which I'll return shortly); bonobos mark it by genital displays. But the merely visual presentation of the Japanese does not seem transformative enough, and in the bonobos' case it seems to misread the character of the impending interaction (or at least to read it in a way that human beings would rather not acknowledge too soon). The American handshake is indissociably linked to commercial interests, to deal-making and to vulgar Mammonism. One needs, as the Europeans have understood, to get the lips involved, to make a little suction noise that announces that two human bodies are in the same place doing the same thing, in order to set a properly human encounter in motion.

Some etymological considerations. The verb 'to kiss' in many languages is formed by onomatopoeia. In Sanskrit the verbal root is chumb– (giving us the lovely syllabic redoubling of the third-person singular perfect form: chuchumba, 'she kissed'). 'Kiss' and 'küssen' hear the sound differently than their Indo-European ancestor, but somehow no less accurately. When the verb is not onomatopoeic, it often emerges from a semantic cluster that is even more revealing than the natural sound of a kiss. Thus the Russian tselovat' is connected to tsel', which is to say 'target'. And isn't that what kiss-compressed lips in fact are? Isn't that what bodily orifices are?

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by Rafiq Kathwari

As arranged, they meet the first time.
He’s law student. She’s a child-bride.

She wears red— for rancor?
Head bowed, veiled little stars

In gold thread, waits on the bed
Like an arrow drawn on a bow.

Henna-touched hands, a mirror poised
On lap: A girl staring back.

If he sits beside her,
She will see him glance at her image.

In the courtyard, children sing
“Petals fall from almond trees.”

The singing could continue until
He displays a blood-stained sheet.

Footfalls on stairs, whispers,
Robes rustling, attar of roses;

His hand on her chin, her heart leaping;
He kisses her eyes closed.

“Stop. Sever the bond,” I scream,
“He’ll play possum, make you prey.”

The mirror slips from her fingers,
Bangles clash on her fleshy arms.

Rafiq Kathwari is a rebel Kashmiri-American poet who divides his time between New York, Dublin and
Srinagar. This poem is from his unpublished opus, My Mother’s Scribe.

Shell

To have only what we need

Space to the horizon
drawing us out

A songbird reminding us
there are more things in heaven and earth

The hawk that stalks it—
a taste of temporailty

A rock on which to sit when sweat comes;
a place to rest and consider the horizon

Wild blueberries whose blueness tantalizes;
whose juice becomes blood

A sun at zenith being warm:
comfort, mother of blueberries,
builder of lungs

A sweet suckable breeze
cool answer to a smothering other
bringer of invisible stuff from
respiring trees

A path under my feet between rocks and roots
following an incline to a bare ridge that appears and
disappears behind hemlock and pine, hovers over laurel,
is lost behind sharp outcrops, is sometimes clear as a bell

A curling, troubled stream
—bubbling cache of rain

Cupped hands
to pull it in

This beholding
shell

by Jim Culleny
5/21/11

by Mara Jebsen

I’m somewhere in Brooklyn when Geko hands me a card emblazoned with two highly stylized yellow roosters. They’re facing off, beaks up in each other’s beaks—their potbellied, swaybacked, braggadocious bird-bodies suggestive of a cheerful cockfight. The words “Que Bajo?” are printed under the roosters, in a phrase that functions like a bat signal. It is an injunction to a set of city-folk in the know to break out the fedoras, the red lipsticks and the get-down dancing shoes.

The music, the whole set up—is an interesting urban phenomenon. DJs Uproot Andy and Geko Jones collect folkloric vocal tracks and drum-rhythms, pull them off dusty old records that were gathered from villages in Cuba and parts of West Africa, and lay them with instinctive genius over modern dance beats. Then they throw a party that travels up and down North and South American cities and lasts for years. The effect is unifying. It is hypnotic and belly-thumping, and it gets at some core ritualistic need to move the body both as one’s ancestors may have done, and in some startlingly modern way. This music, the more I think of it, provides the correct soundtrack, or even analogy, to accompany a mass love letter I’ve been meaning to compose for years.

I met Geko through the New York Performance Poets. I don’t remember meeting him, just like I don’t remember meeting the poets. When you ‘fall in’ with people, it really is like falling—hard to remember how it happens. But I do recall arriving splat in New York with the particular flat-broke recklessness of a very young person. It’s the kind of recklessness you get when you’ve been deadened by life after college and had a brush with illness. Under these conditions, one is offered a reckless New York practically incandescent with promise, but finds its famous shimmer also laced with those first dark inklings that a life can end too soon, and be far more easily misspent.

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By Fred Zackel

In Louisiana, Chinese were “expressly counted as white” until the 1870 census.

Ideas evolve over time. What used to be de rigueur can look stoopid and wicked.

In the Symposium, the guru Socrates thought that true desire is about giving birth to ideas.

The Greek word “paideia” pops up in mid 5th century BCE. It means “education” or “instruction.” The word (pronounced “py-dee-a”) comes from the Greek word “pais, paidos”: “the upbringing of a child.”

Academia world-wide stresses a program of Gen Ed courses to make us all better citizens.

“Know Thyself” and “Nothing in Excess” become our global starting blocks.

The word “Encyclopedia” is a combination of the Greek terms “enkyklios” or “complete
system/circle” and “paideia” or “education/learning.”

The Greeks expected our best efforts in Literature as well as in the Olympics.

The Humanities as a concept was formulated during the Renaissance, which means “rebirth” or “born again.” The phrase “studia humanitatus” becomes a touchstone then.

We study the Human to understand more fully what Being Human means. Being Human is thus the yardstick of the cosmos. We measure ourselves against the Divine (includes the Cosmos,) against the animal kingdom (of which, yes, we are still a part,) and against the Rational.

Being Human, we think with our guts. (We have learned this through brain imaging.) Then we find a reason to justify what we already believe and decided.

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by Hartosh Singh Bal

At a recent lunch with a writer from the US, discussing our common interest in rivers, I asked him what had led to his new project. He told me that he had first visited India several years ago and had toyed with several ideas, one involved travelling through the forested areas under Maoist influence, a journey that would take him from the South of India to the foothills of Himalayas, the second involved writing about the Narmada after a visit to some tribal villages on the verge of submergence. His agent in the US, he said, had told him to get real, no one would publish such books, and so now he was planning to travel down the Ganga.

It would not be the first such book, and the logic that drives it is the same logic that has led to a surfeit of books on Gandhi, Joseph Lelyveld’s recent contribution only one more in a long list. In this the world is only responding to the hold the Ganga and Gandhi have over the Indian popular imagination. The burning ghats, the loincloth, the fasts and the satyagraha, platitudes about the soul of India. In each case there is no shortage of outsiders eager to respond to our myths about ourselves.

It will be argued that there is little harm in either obsession but to do so is to forget that non-fiction in India is a genre that is constrained by the resources local publishers can offer. The possibility of devoting a couple of years to a subject and spending what is required on travel and research remains unlikely. Publishers abroad who do have the resources have limited bandwith, both in terms of money and in terms of interest in India. Give or take a few India books, this bandwith is largely exhausted by Gandhi and the Ganga. What is true of publishers and writers is as true of academics and academicians and the result is a neglect of people and places crucial to our existence as Indians.

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by Haider Shahbaz

Try listening to ‘Montezuma’ by the Fleet Foxes while reading this.

July, 2008.

Quick reply: Yes, was at the protest. No, did not get hurt. There is a certain quality about revenge. Walking and hanging on the sides of buses for more than 15 hours and than sitting in front of Parliament, watching the sun rise with half a million people and chanting for the hanging of a military dictator.

I am back in Islamabad. Exciting times here, but I am getting bored. Big Important things have stopped interesting me and seem impersonal. You know, apostrophes and spellings are tricky things: yesterday, my friend had to correct my spellings of “tommorrow”. I will never learn English.

P.S. The stars shine really brightly today, and another suicide bombing. Also, odd purposeless walks between Welsh fields all the way to a lighthouse are addictive.

July, 2009.

I was reading: Dadaism by Tristan Tzara.

One sentence reminded me of you, took me back, held me by the hand.

“Dada; abolition of logic, which is the dance of those impotent to create.”

To those stories, words and images; brushes, paints and whispers; flights. You must be still at it – weaving, moulding, negating, and creating. I hope you are still at it.

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by Dave Maier

As everybody knows, with the proper encouragement computers can make bleeps and bloops, and so: computer music! That's been true for many years, and there are plenty of histories of computer music which will tell you all about the Telharmonium, the Synket, and the RCA Mark II Sound Synthesizer (pictured here). This thing, which was once the state of the art, is the size of several refrigerators and was decidedly not a real-time sound production device. Nowadays, on the other hand, everyone who has a laptop, or even an iPad (or iPhone!), and access to the Internet, can download, often for free, sound generation and manipulation programs which make even the most powerful tools of the previous century look like TinkerToys. Yet our understanding of the significance and meaning of “computer music” remains mired in the compositional and ontological assumptions of the distant past.

This is unfortunate but entirely understandable. As plenty of wise guys have pointed out over the years, we rarely understand change as it happens and only get it, if at all, in retrospect. Still, we should try to keep up; so let's see what we can do. What is “computer music”, and why should we care?

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by Jen Paton

“Everyone’s uniting again. It’s a good scene,” says a young man in this clip, on the day the world found out about Osama Bin Ladin’s death.

One way to understand the news value of objectivity, that grail of modern news media, is that it has the goal of establishing the greatest distance between observer and observed. Sometimes, that distance is closed not by those behind the camera, but by those in front of it. Perhaps as we become more hypermediated as individuals, we collectively become more comfortable in front of a camera. When we are so comfortable, we become like performers, and objectivity becomes more elusive.

Many images radiate out from September 2001, the media event, but the celebrating young people of a few weeks ago form a symmetry with one series of images in particular: people celebrating for a TV camera, chanting for a TV camera, jubilating at death for a TV camera. It might have felt so ugly, so hurtful to see people celebrating death on that scale, but that is what we saw, the performance of joy.

The same performance happened three weeks ago, when one man died, and some Americans came out on the streets to celebrate, or to see how others were celebrating, or reacting. Not everyone was jubilant, or rowdy, but some were. Clayton McKlesky of the Dallas Morning News wrote, describing the scene in DC:

Folks were lighting cigars and holding signs declaring “Ding, dong! Osama's dead!” and “America, F%!& yeah!” I saw couples making out. Since when is the death of a terrorist a turn on?

McKlesky added that “the crowd seemed dominated by those hoping to grab the attention of news cameras.” The images of young people look so familiar – in that eerie glow of a TV camera’s light, jubilation and chanting would erupt, just like they did on the MTV program Total Request Live, which these kids must have seen on television in the late 1990s when they were just children, or on one of the same channels’ myriad Spring Breaks, when the camera pans the crowd and everyone yells and undulates and gestures back in victory.

It’s not about our emotions: whether we feel happy or sad or ambivalent about Bin Ladin’s death: it is how we express those emotions or ideas in that most public of spaces, that cold medium of television. And plenty of Americans expressed themselves as if they were on MTV in 1999. How comfortable we are now, in performance.

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by Ryan Sayre

I’d really like to have a peek at Osama Bin Laden's dental records. Not because I need proof of his death. It's simply that I am obsessed with the teeth of world historical figures. I'm fascinated with Hitler’s halitosis, Mao’s festering gumboils, Napoleon’s rotten maw. I like to think of this all in terms of a kind of orthodonto-politics, a historical approach by which the subject of dentition brings the loose chiclet teeth of historical processes into a smooth arch. The under bite of Saddam’s double allegedly who was allegedly hanged in his stead, the gap between Churchill's dentures made to preserve his signature lisp: these things are grist for the molars of a political history of teeth. So when I say I am interested in seeing Bin Laden's dental records for purposes of closure, you can rest assured that I am referring to the kind of closure that dentistry professionals call 'occlusion,' that is, how the teeth make contact with and lock against one another. I am interested not in questions of validation, but in whether there are trace-marks in the enamel of the words that left from this figure's mouth.

The question I’d like to play around with below involves stories told about teeth and the ways in which truth and truth telling is inscribed into and tugged out from mouths. Washington’s dentures contained no wood, but you could fill a medieval bestiary with all the animals used in his dentures. His mouth was a veritable zoo, stabling at different times donkey, mule, humans, horse, elephants and hippopotami. I think there is something regal in the fact that whenever Washington passed words from his throat, he spoke not only for himself but also out from the animal republic in his mouth.

What does it mean to speak out over the far side of one's teeth? Who is one speaking for when one speaks through one’s teeth? What is it to put words into one’s mouth?

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by Meghan Rosen

Dear 3QD Readers:

I had originally intended to post a review of Carl Zimmer’s latest contribution to the world of science writing, A Planet of Viruses, an excellent little book (just 94 pages from introduction to epilogue) that explores the vast realm and long history of some of Earth’s most fascinating life forms. Throughout the book, Zimmer’s knack for imagery helps provide an easy sense of scale (he tries in a variety of different ways, for example, to help readers grasp the enormous number of marine viruses compared to other ocean dwellers: “Viruses outnumber all other residents of the ocean by about 15 to one. If you put all of the viruses of the ocean on a scale, they would equal the weight of seventy-five million blue whales.”), and his focus on scientific research places each chapter comfortably in the space between popular science non-fiction and science textbook. In fact, I’d recommend it not only to those who like microbiology, but also to science educators looking to introduce students to our fascinating ‘planet of viruses’.

My detailed review, however, will have to wait until next month, because I was happily surprised with the early arrival of the newest addition to our family: a baby girl, born on the morning of May 13th. In honor of her birth (who said Friday the 13th was an unlucky day?), I’ve decided to post a review of a wonderful book I read this summer: Origins: How The Nine Months Before Birth Shape The Rest Of Our Lives. It seemed appropriate.

Origins:

I’m 131 pages into Origins, but was hooked after the first chapter. Annie Murphy Paul has written a book that every woman (expectant or not), father-to-be, scientist, science buff, and lover of babies will want to read. (As a female scientist who adores babies, you can see why it appealed to me.) Paul compiles and distills much of what is known about the environment’s effect on the embryo and relates it to her own experience navigating the murky, ever-changing waters of prenatal care. We follow her, month by month, as she explores the science behind each stage of fetal development.

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