by Hasan Altaf

Reading about Pakistan has become, for me, a fraught experience. Every time I see the country mentioned in a headline, my first reaction – the news or analysis being so unending, and so uniformly disheartening – is to hold my breath. I don’t know how other people interpret our current ticking-time-bomb situation, but to me, it feels like a particularly bizarre and dramatic existential crisis, dragging on and on without end. I can never resist the articles, but it’s an exercise in masochism.

For that reason, I was both eager and anxious to read two recent collections of Pakistan-centered writing. The cover of Granta’s Pakistan issue, designed like one of the brightly painted trucks that were the representation of our country in what seems like a happier time, was a pleasant surprise; by itself, it did a great deal to alleviate my nervousness. The Life’s Too Short literary review was impressive for its novelty, its uniqueness – and its sheer audacity, too: In the middle of the madness, life goes on, life is lived, and life is always too short.

Beyond theme, the two collections have little in common, and they leave the reader with very different impressions. At first read, Granta seems more familiar, more in sync with other contemporary coverage of Pakistan. It’s not all beards and bombs, but none of the pieces seem too far away from the country we read about every day in the New York Times or the BBC – it has that sense to it, of bated breath, of decades of decay, of disaster around every corner.

The other anthology is kind of jarring; reading it, you would never know that this country has become a war zone, a deathtrap, a state whose list of failures grows by the day. In these stories, Pakistan is just a place, where people live and die, get by or don’t, fail and succeed, love and hate – as people do everywhere, anywhere. These are really the more familiar stories: what we did today, where we went, where we came from – but in the context of Pakistan, somehow I did not expect such ordinariness.

It would be oversimplifying to say that the difference between the two is that of macro and micro, capital-H History and ordinary stories. It’s more likely that the collections simply reflect their different intentions. Granta is geared to the “international market,” which in this context means, I imagine, the Western market, and that market has certain expectations from Pakistani writing. The Life’s Too Short anthology will probably not be read as much, outside of the country, and so does not have to meet those expectations.

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Which of the following would best be described as an hiatus?

Which of the following would most likely be considered a furlough?

For extra money, an hour or two most days, I pose variations of these questions over and over. Each of them, along with its set of possible answers, goes into the database of an on-line vocabulary-building tool. It's a pretty straightforward formula, the interrogative of multiple choice. However, what strikes me with each variation is the tense in which it must be formed: would be most likely to, would best be described as, would most likely. Always the conditional – to signal, I suppose, that these are all hypothetical instances – and thus the words here deployed are equivalent to blanks in a loaded gun: they make the same sound but do not pierce us in any way.

And so I compose these questions, one after another, ten to fifteen an hour, careful to insert the conditional, as if I were setting up a practice shooting range, a multiple choice of clay pigeons and cardboard targets. I do wonder, though, how effective this sort of vocabulary building will be for its subscribers. (I have no concrete research before me, but I suspect that learning vocabulary outside of its natural habitat¹ is somewhat analogous to swallowing vitamin pills instead of eating actual vegetables: less is absorbed.) But to be perfectly candid, I'm not so much concerned about the improved verbal scores of these potential subscribers as I am just a bit saddened each time I confine another word to a purely hypothetical existence.

“Philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday,” Wittgenstein so quaintly tells us in his Philosophical Investigations. He was getting at how difficult it is to actually learn much at all about words and their attendant conventions once you've removed them from the everday speech and printed page that is their office – once you're fanning an isolated word with the palm front of philosophical analysis.² And certainly the practice shooting range of this vocabulary-building tool is just such a holiday setting. Being presented with a cursory definition of a word, its part of speech, and then asked to identify the most plausible instantiation of it in a lineup of four, is hardly akin to encountering it under workaday circumstances. But this, of course, is true of any number of tools and programs aimed at improving one's vocabulary. What really underscores the disparity between holiday and workaday, it seems, is the use here of the conditional tense – that single block of would – that confines each word to something like a cryogenic chamber of unreality.³

Which of the following would most likely be considered a sabbatical?

Because, you see, what is never explicitly stated in these questions, but what's undeniably understood, is the condition for using the vocabulary word in question – the condition, of course, being actuality. If this weren't a practice shooting range; if you were ever to encounter these words in their natural habitat – each question implicitly (hauntingly) begins. The would that always follows, in the explicitly stated clause of the question, is that ghostly class of the conditional called the speculative, or counter-factual, conditional The Bedford Handbook's⁴ description of it gives me chills: speculative conditional sentences express unlikely, contrary-to-fact, or impossible conditions in the present or future. I.e., it is unlikely, contrary-to-fact, or even impossible that you, the type who subscribes to this kind of vocabulary-building tutelage, will ever, ever encounter these words in their natural habitat.⁵

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by Feisal Hussain Naqvi

Being a Shia means different things to different people. In my case, being a Shia means that if I am as professionally successful as I hope to be, someone will want to kill me. Or, to be less melodramatic, it means I can’t play golf on Ashura.

The fact that being a Shia means such wildly divergent and generally irrelevant things to me also indicates that I am not much of a Shia, which I confess to be true. The question then is, why do I feel compelled to identify myself as a Shia.

Before I try to answer, some background is in order. The roots of Shi’ism go deep into Islamic history, more specifically, into the issue of who was to succeed the Prophet as the leader of the Muslim community. Ali, the Prophet’s son in law, was favoured by one group while Abu Bakr, one of the Prophet’s closest companions was favoured by another. Ultimately, the group supporting Abu Bakr prevailed, so much so that Ali did not become Caliph until two other members of the community (Omar and Usman) had preceded him. When Ali did become Caliph, he faced a challenge led by Aisha, one of the Prophet’s wives (and also the daughter of Abu Bakr).

The schism worsened after the assassination of Ali in 661 AD. Ali was succeeded as Caliph by Muawiya, the governor of Syria under Ali. When Muawiya’s son, Yazid, took over as Caliph in 680 AD, the stage was set for another clash.

Shortly after Yazid’s accession to the caliphate, Ali’s son, Hussain, was called to Kufa (a city in present-day Iraq) by leaders of the community there. Hussain set off from Medina with his family and a small group of followers but he never made it to Kufa. Instead, at a place called Karbala, his family and he were surrounded by the armies of Yazid. For three days, Hussain and his family were not allowed access to water. On the 10^th day of the Islamic month of Muharram (now called Ashura), Hussain, his family and his followers were slaughtered to a man. The only survivors of the battle were the women of Hussain’s family and his son Zain ul Abedin, who had been too ill to accompany his father into battle.

The Shias, then, are those people who mourn the tragedy of Karbala and who believe that Ali should have succeeded the Prophet. But that is only the simplest aspect of Shi’ism. What Shias also believe is that the Prophet, Ali and his descendants (the Imams) were intrinsically superior to other humans and that they were thus qualified to lead the Muslims in a way that no other Muslim could ever match.

There is, of course, much more to Shi’ism than what I have just outlined. The point I was trying to make though is that mourning the martyrdom of Hussain is essential to the concept of being a Shia. Each community of Shias is different in its mourning rituals, but every year, the first ten days of Muharram bring to a halt the lives of devout Shias.

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Every year it seems, the weeks at the end of the calendar designated as the “Christmas Season” expand further and further in the direction of the blessed sunny months. Like a plodding, methodical, remorseless, invading imperial army, moving inward slowly and ineluctably towards the capital, grinding up territory with terrifying banality, the “Christmas Season's” expansion is relentless. I fear it shall not be content until it reaches the holy shrine of Memorial Day, which currently stands as an indefatigable bulwark, ushering in our unofficial beginning of summer, whether it be in long simmering Georgia or resplendently spring-like Wisconsin.

But it was not always this way. In days of yore, not even the most precocious child dared to speak of it before December, lest they incur the wrath of a Santa Clause who was still more associated with donations to the Salvation Army than frenzied 40% markdowns on garish clothing made by exploited Indonesian children; a stern, Teutonic St. Nick who really did keep two lists, who never dreamed of offering punch-card guarantees on the latest electronic do-dads, whose ire manifested itself in the form of coal lumps, who demanded to be placated not only with modesty and obedience but also with offerings of milk and cookies, and who seemed to more closely resemble a red-robed Karl M arx than some jolly, docile servant whose fetching and offering was at the beck and call of screaming, sugar-crazed children.

But that was then. Things were different. During the war there was rationing. Before that, during the Great Depression expectations were understandably minimal. If Santa showed up at all, you cried tears of joy, stared to the heavens, and thanked him earnestly for that raw wooden block with crudely drawn wheels. My friend Tom, who’s proudly pushing 90, remembers that the most amazing gift he would get each Christmas was an orange. Not an orange iPod, but the actual fruit, which was rare, delicious, and expensive.

And before the Depression? Hell, today’s consumer economy was just a twinkle in the cold, glassy eyes of early ad men. The portable vacuum cleaner was a modern fucking day miracle in 1907 when it was invented by a janitor in Canton, Ohio. His brother in-law was a saddle maker named William Hoover who, despite not being of Scottish descent, nonetheless figured out a way to make the new contraption look more like a bagpipe, and to make it sound just as sweet. A Wii and a NetFlix subscription? You’ve gotta be kidding me, right?

But after the war ended, another war began: a war against crass commercialism, spiraling consumer debt, and the guilt and shame born of unreasonable expectations. After the war. THE WAR. That’s when it all started to change. First the barrier got pushed back to Thanksgiving weekend, and the late November beachhead had been established. Then the weekend itself eroded, and the Friday after Thanksgiving yielded, in a precursor to the grotesque spectacle that is Black Friday. The dominoes continued to fall, and soon the entire month of November was occupied, marking Halloween as a new Last Stand. And by the 21st century, perhaps even sooner in some quarters, Christmas displays had begun to precede cardboard turkey cut-outs and pre-fabricated children’s costumes in stores.

Something inside you dies the first time you see a box of candy canes sitting on a store aisle with quiet confidence and indiscretion in late October.

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I live in a town of about 10,000 in the Midwest. The largest employer in the town is a pork processing facility that handles more than 9,000 hogs per day (the similarity of those two numbers is a bit disturbing). About a mile to the north is the plant's own sewage treatment facility to handle the voluminous waste of newly-processed and about-to-be-processed pigs. Across the highway, to the south of the plant, is a supermarket, and when the wind blows from the north, the complex aroma of viscera and feces is unavoidable as you walk towards the front door to shop. When bacon and hams are being smoked, hickory provides a more pleasing “finish” to the olfactory experience.

Recently, I was scanning the frozen meat section at the market when I happened across a package of pork chitterlings or “chitlins”: Pig intestines. What was astonishing about this particular package was that it was conspicuously labelled as being a “Product of Denmark”. After suppressing immediate thoughts of Shakespearean puns relating to “Hamlet” and “something being rotten in Denmark,” I gasped: Here I was literally across the street from a slaughterhouse and the chitlins came from half-way around the world?! Where were our local chitlins being sent? Did geography no longer matter?

This is not the first time I've been faced with the paradoxes of our industrial agricultural system. I once remember stopping at a grove-side fruit stand in Florida only to be offered bottled orange juice that contained something like “a reconstituted concentrate of a mixture of juices from Florida, California, & Brasil.” So much for fresh squeezed.

My great uncle, on my dad's side, was a citrus grower in central Florida for many years. When he started his grove just after WWII, oranges were still picked when ripe, shipped, and eaten. Soon thereafter, concentrate technology was developed. Fresh orange juice would be boiled down to a syrup, separated into its constituents, precisely reassembled to maintain quality control, and frozen for easy storage and transport (McPhee 1967). The concentrate could then be reconstituted and consumed at any time in the following year(s). Seasonality was no longer an issue for citrus sales, and production was scaled up to supply juice to make enough concentrate for an entire year for a huge national/international population.

My other great uncle, (on my mom’s side), served in a logistics unit during WWII. When Roosevelt set up a meeting with Churchill on a ship in the Atlantic in the months before we were drawn into the war, he wanted to serve ice cream. Roosevelt claimed he wanted to serve all-American fare but my uncle was convinced it was a not-so-subtle way of demonstrating to Churchill that the U.S. could deliver anything, anytime, anywhere on the planet. My great uncle was tasked with making sure there was ice cream to serve. They packed the ice cream into metal canisters that could be carried like munitions in airplane bomb bays. Unfortunately the air in the ice cream expanded at altitude and it leaked all over. After several trial runs they were able to pack the ice cream in so tight as to squeeze out most of the air and then seal the canisters. It worked: Churchill’s delegation was served ice cream and it made enough of an impact on them that his bodyguard commented on it in a draft of his memoirs (Borgwardt 2005). After the war, my great uncle enjoyed a successful career managing supply chains for garment manufacturers.

This was the Greatest Generation's legacy to us. They survived the Great Depression only to have to defeat fascism in the Atlantic and Pacific theaters. As they returned to civilian life, they made absolutely certain that their children, the baby-boomers, would never suffer hunger or want for anything. Roosevelt's vision of anything, anytime, anywhere was channeled into civilian goods, and in the subsequent decades we have elevated this expectation to a high art or perhaps even a pathological obsession. The global merchant marine fleet has nearly doubled in the last 30 years. The tonnage of vessels idled by the current recession just around the port of Singapore is about 41 million tons, which is about equivalent to entire world's merchant marine fleet in 1918, but only about 4% of today's fleet (Bradshear 2009)!

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One balmy evening in this decade's youth, I sat al fresco at a South Floridian restaurant with another couple. They were advancing to the further reaches of middle age; they had done well; they had prospered. As two men at our table cornered one another in conversation, the wife leaned toward me. Something flashed in the dusk. “Look,” she whispered, “Do you like my new diamond ring? I bought it as a present to myself. With my first Social Security check.”

“It's very beautiful,” I replied, thinking but saying nothing about those reports I'd recently heard – that Social Security would be bankrupt by the time I'd be eligible to collect. After all, she was entitled. Entitled to the money she'd earned, that was set aside for her; entitled to spend her money as she wished. “It's very beautiful,” I replied. “Good for you,” I said, thinking it was indeed rather lovely, that diamond we'd all just bought for her.

One chilly, rainy evening this November, I was talking turkey on Manhattan's Upper East Side. I was introduced to a lady who was advancing to the further reaches of middle age. She asked me what I did. I said I was a writer, on politics among other things.

“Oh yes?” she asked, with a certain delight in her smile. “Where do you stand?” And my mind flitted back (as it does) to all the events of our now decrepit decade. I stammered, with an inward, rueful smirk. And then surprising myself, I jovially blurted, “Well, I'm kinda of the opinion George W. Bush is the antichrist, and we can go from there,” scandalizing five people within earshot.

“Well, we're certainly not going to change one another's opinions at this point,” she said laughing. With a knowing chortle, I agreed, which somehow relaxed her and allowed her a conversational license. So we talked some more.

She said, “And you know, everything they're saying about global warming, 'the world our children and grandchildren will live in'? Well, I don't have any children, so what's it to me?”

Happy Thanksgiving.

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There’s probably a little bit of mean girl in all of us; everyone wants to be accepted, to be a member of the in crowd. And for there to be an “in” crowd, there have to be people who are left out. A sense of exclusivity can be intoxicating for adults, let alone kids, and we seem to have a very primal instinct for how to fabricate this exclusivity, how to make membership in a social group seem both desirable and almost unobtainable, almost.

My 7 year old daughter is a social butterfly; everyone wants to be Sasha’s friend. She has very strong opinions about what clothes are cool (none of mine, apparently), and what music is worth listening to – yes, she’s only 7! For Sasha, it’s not about fashion in the traditional sense that you can go and buy the latest styles off the rack. It’s about a very innate sense of how to put clothes together in a unique, funky way that is “cool”. She’s really very good at this and has a look all of her own. But she can make rather harsh judgements about people, including her parents and sister, who don’t share her aesthetic, and has been known to extend this judgement to girls in her class. At a recent parent-teacher conference, Sasha’s second grade teacher told us that there had been some less than ideal behavior towards another second grade girl, and Sasha was at its epicenter. It seems that the behavior leant more towards the exclusionary, rather than name calling, but even so. The teacher had spoken to Sasha and the other girls about it, and of course, we did as well, a few times. It seems that things are much better now.

Jostling for a place in the social hierarchy is never going to go away, its part of how humans, and other animals, interact with each other. But that doesn’t mean that we should just accept this and turn a blind eye. Particularly if, as this NY Times article points out, bullying of various sorts seems to be happening ever earlier these days.

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by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash

I usually write about politics here on 3QD, which often means trying to deal with my disappointment in America and the Disappointment-in-Chief Obama. But what with it being Christmas and all, I thought I should take this occasion to tell you a bedtime story for grownups. Here it is.

* * *

There was great consternation on the day the baby was born.

“I never saw anything on the scan,” Doctor Brown said.

“How would I be able to tell?” asked Jane, the mother.

“There’s nothing odd about me,” said the father, Bill. “I’m very normal.”

But there it was. The baby girl was not like other babies. In fact, she was like no other baby born in the history of babies.

Snugly against her back, folded down so neatly that you hardly noticed them, were two wings.

* * *

Jane passed her hand over the wings.

“She doesn’t feel like a Miranda to me,” she told her husband.

“Please, Jane,” said Bill. “We can’t do that again. First Jennifer, then Shirley, then Priscilla, then Rose, then Emily, then Babette, then Courtney, and finally Miranda. I like Miranda. It’s original. It’s not like Jennifer or Shirley or Priscilla or Rose or Emily or Babette or Courtney.”

“I want to call her Angel.”

“Angel?” asked Bill.

“Yes, dear. Angel.”

“Please, Jane,” said Bill, and sighed.

* * *

Angel has Bill’s nose and my eyes, thought Jane. But who do these wings belong to?

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by Tom Jacobs

One night more than a decade ago, I found myself alone in the apartment I shared with several friends from college in Minneapolis. It was one of those humid summer nights where the only reasonable thing to wear were one’s boxers and a t-shirt. I was, at the time, seeking to cultivate a pompadour; this was long before there were a raft of metrosexual hair products to assist in such a project, so I was reduced to buying bryl-creem from the local old-school pharmacy. Bryl-creem, by the way, reeks: whenever you see those black and white photographs of crooners from the ‘30s and ‘40s, know that they must have trailed clouds of vaporous, vaguely mint-smelling fog.

None of us were what you would call “gainfully employed” at the time, yet all of my roommates had gone out for the evening with their girlfriends. These were the days of what DeLillo calls “languor and drift,” when the notion of a “career” was a distant horizon that can be safely ignored for the brief but more intriguing possibilities of pursuing sensuous intensities an d simple drunkennesses with little thought or care for tomorrow’s hangover. I was, then, left to luxuriate in the pleasures of self-pitying loneliness and solitude. I thought that perhaps I would practice my pompadour in the bathroom mirror. This was an older apartment—perhaps built in the ‘30s—and the lighting wasn’t so good—everything was cast in a lovely golden haze, like the opening scenes of The Godfather with Don Corleone massaging his cat. In this flavescent light signaling nostalgia (or maybe I only remember it that way…ha!) I reached atop the medicine cabinet to grasp the foul-smelling pomade and inadvertently knocked it over. It fell behind the medicine cabinet, into one of those non-spaces like the walls that separated room from room, one of those unthought about regions that contain things like pipes and wires that we tend not to want to see or think about. Realizing that I had lost my bryl-creem and thus, my pompadour, I grabbed a flashlight and stood atop the commode to see if I could retrieve it from its crypt. Leaning over the sink I strained to see what had become of the tube; shining the light into the small crevice that separated the top of the medicine cabinet and mirror from the bathroom wall, I observed a range of other objects lying on the pink fiberglass insulation—a razor, what looked to be a receipt, a variety of q-tips, a comb, and a tube of hair gel, and other things that I can’t really remember.

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The year is 3010 and an interesting new species has evolved: a muscular, knuckle-walking primate with sparse body hair and a strikingly human face. It appears to be deformed, with extra non-functional limbs in various anatomical positions–like something out of a sci-fi horror story or a genetic engineering experiment gone wrong. The creatures are vicious. Individuals routinely attack and eat members of their own species.

This generally isn’t how we envision our species a thousand years from now. More typical scenarios feature technological advancements, like flying cars and intergalactic travel. We might imagine that future humans will have eliminated disease and extended our lifespans substantially.

It’s debatable as to which of these scenarios is more likely. And of course, both could be far off the mark. But this much is clear: there’s trouble ahead for our species if we continue on our current path. The problems that future generations will face are largely predictable.

Our environment is becoming increasingly toxic, with carcinogens and teratogens, allergens, hormone distrupters, and pharmaceuticals accumulating steadily. Such pollutants also build up in the tissues of animals that we eat and depend upon.

Food shortages are anticipated. With the population increasing at alarming rates, there’ll be a lot more human mouths to feed. Heavier reliance on meat will worsen environmental problems, making clean drinking water harder to find. Non-animal food sources may also be much scarcer. If honey bees succumb to the threats they currently face, we’ll lose most of the foods that depend on bees for pollination.

Disease will be rife. Infectious disease will likely rise with the loss of biodiversity. Authors of a paper published last year in BioScience suggested that biodiversity loss “can increase the incidence and distribution of infectious diseases affecting humans.”¹ Authors of a more recent paper appearing in Nature came to a similar conclusion, noting that, in many cases, biodiversity “seems to protect organisms, including humans, from transmission of infectious diseases.”² Increased population size and proximity to one another will exacerbate the problem.

Cancer and environmental diseases will be widespread due in part to the greater toxicity of the physical environment and the foods we eat. Genetic disease is also expected to rise sharply. Michael Lynch, in a recent paper published in PNAS, suggested that the accumulation of deleterious mutuations will have a profound impact on members of industrialized societies within a few hundred years.³ He states: “Without a reduction in the germline transmission of deleterious mutations, the mean phenotypes of the residents of industrialized nations are likely to be rather different in just two or three centuries, with significant incapacitation at the morphological, physiological, and neurobiological levels.”

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It’s probably unfashionable to say this, and it’s certainly a sign of a thoroughly colonized mind, but English is my favorite language. There are many reasons for this: the massive vocabulary, the puns, the double-streamed Germanic-Romance roots (so that ‘mistake’, ‘wood’ and ‘hue’ mean and evoke differently from ‘error’, ‘forest’ and ‘color’). But a large part of my affection for English lies in the sounds of the language.

This is a complicated thing to say about your first language. It’s much easier to know what a language sounds like when you don’t speak it, before comprehension has made the language transparent. It’s hard to reconstruct the way a language sounded before you learned it, and this is much more so if you grew up speaking it. Still, while some impressions are only available to a non-native speaker and others are irretrievably lost, others never leave or even wait to be discovered later on.

To me, the most striking thing about English is its diversity of vowels, something I only noticed after many years of speaking the language. English, in many dialects, has about 15 vowels (not counting diphtongs). Listen to the vowels through these words: a, kit, dress, trap, lot, strut, foot, bath, nurse, fleece, thought, goose, goat, north[1]. There are languages that have more (Germanic ones tend to be vowel rich), but there aren’t many of them, and none that I know well enough to frame a sentence in. And compare this vowel list to the relative paucity of vowels in so many other languages. Hindi really has only about 9 or 10 vowels; Bengali, which has lost several long-short distinctions has slightly fewer (though lots of diphtongs). Some languages (including these two) do include extra vowels formed by nasalizing existing ones; these nasalized vowels often sound lovely, but feel very similar to their base vowels. It’s more a flourish than a genuinely new creation. Japanese and Spanish have about 4 or 5 apiece, and I’m told that Mandarin and Arabic have about 6.

English, then, is capable of exceptionally rich assonance and exuberant plays on vowel sound[2]. Listen to the interplay between the ‘ai’ sound in ‘light’, ‘shines’, ‘tides’ and ‘file’ with the ‘o’ in ‘no’, ‘broken’, ‘ghosts’, ‘glow’ and ‘bones’, and notice the diverse vowel background they’re embedded in:

“Light breaks where no sun shines;

Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart

Push in their tides;

And, broken ghosts with glow-worms in their heads,

The things of light

File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones.”

(From “Light breaks where no sun shines” – Dylan Thomas)

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I thought at first it was a bomb, but when I got up to the wreck I realised that the man had been speaking German, and it had been a ‘baum’ that had done for the car. It made more sense that it was a tree, as this road had been out of the fighting for days as far as I knew. (It also turned out that the dead guys were German, but I don’t suppose the Croat who told me changed the nationality of the tree on purpose.) Anyway, by the time I got there, they were just two pairs of feet sticking out from under a blanket and the tree was being cut up for logs. It must have happened about twenty minutes ago, because the people in the short traffic jam were already arguing. There was room to get a car round the wreck but not a lorry, and the drivers of the former were trying to get those of the latter to get out of the way. Someone in a blue serge uniform was shouting at everybody, including the dead Germans, and nobody was paying him any attention at all. He looked pretty old, and had no belt or epaulettes.

It was the guys from the village chopping up the tree who gave me the idea, because some of them began to turn their attention to the mangled car. They were the only ones there who seemed happy, and practical, and alive, and I like people like that. The thing to do was obviously to shunt the car off the road, where the rest of the useful bits of it could be best pirated and where it wouldn’t be blocking irate people with guns in their glove compartments.

It’s simple sign language to convey ‘move car from road into ditch’, and it was truly pleasing to see how easily an angry crowd can be transformed into a cooperative workforce when presented with a mission. It took less than a minute for ten of us to pick it up and manoeuvre it to the side, and without being asked several others kicked the debris after it. God knows who had pulled the Germans out and covered them up, but I’d lay money on the fact that no wallets or mobile phones will have been found on the bodies.

It was all smiles and laughter now, and someone even produced a bottle of slivovic. The man in uniform was still shouting occasionally, but as far as I could tell it was aimed even less specifically than before. I briefly wished I had my camera with me, because the sun had reappeared and was reflecting off the shards of the windscreen. It was shatterproof and had come off in one piece but in many pieces, stuck together by whatever they coat it with. Blood had filled all the little cracks, and the mid-afternoon sun danced and sparkled off the whole bits of glass, the tessera of the most beautiful mosaic I had ever seen.

But I realised that that sunny afternoon, that sudden comradeship, that tragedy for two families I had never met, that peculiar beauty – that is something a camera can never catch. Furthermore, the small new side to one’s character that such experiences create is young and impressionable, and readily lied to by photographs. I find most things are best left to memory, because even if you think you’ve forgotten something it’s usually in there somewhere, a problem of access not storage, sculpting the insides in subtle ways.

by Colin Marshall

On its surface, Night on Earth is nothing but people talking in taxicabs. The untold production hassle involved in this supposedly simple setup — towing gear, elaborate car-mounted lighting, routes to be driven and re-driven with each and every take — represents a truth about pretty much every Jim Jarmusch film: what doesn’t look like much in one sense turns out, in others, to actually be quite a lot. This holds especially true for for his choppier black-and-white pictures of the 1980s which, to the untrained eye, offered little more than slouchy characters walking, running, and standing around. Night on Earth is substantially glossier, in its own way, than those early projects, but it also manages to be more accessible than the even slicker productions that would follow. Purists might argue that, as penance, the movie has wound up as one of Jarmusch’s least seen; purists might argue that, but I won’t.

Whether intentionally or accidentally, Night on Earth proves difficult to write about without digging in the mothballs for a set of clichés tiring even to ponder. Taxicab stories force the lazy critic’s hand: if you don’t talk about the liminal state — the “non-place” — of such a temporary, disposable, rattly means of transit, you’ll probably talk about the distinctive short-term commercio-social dynamic between rider and driver. This is safer territory for a filmmaker like Jarmusch, whose deadly allergy to cliché demands that, for his own safety, he keep these risk factors at a distance. I assume the all-knowing, cigarette-bottomed, somehow unironically ironic deadpan stare of the 1970s NYC hipster by way of Akron scares them, as it would you or I.

Nevertheless, the forces of temperance seem to have come down just slightly harder on this film than on the rest of the Jarmusch canon. I consider it modern cinema’s loss, however slight, that Night on Earth lost its original title, Losangelesnewyorkparisromehelsinki. That word search, which contains the film’s five locations, wields the advantage of specificity, not to mention truth in advertising. Night, sure. Earth? Well, America’s biggest coastal cities, the two most romanticized ones in continental Europe, and one in, uh, Finland. It’s a point both for and against the movie that you wonder if Buenos Aires, Bombay, or Tokyo lay buried on a cutting room floor somewhere.

Each darkened city has its own cab, its own driver, and its own passengers; these form separate segments that, happily, share nothing else. It would have taken a certain art to tie all these vignettes together with common characters, incidents, or structures, but that’s not Jarmusch’s art. On the broadest level, each scene is about a different relationship between a cabbie and their fares, but these relationships are different enough that, in saying that, I’m not saying much of anything. Do I get any closer to the truth with the claim that that, in all five cities, Jarmusch harnesses the rich, creatively nourishing randomness generated by the matching of people in need of a ride with drivers in need of about fifteen bucks?

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Michael Blim

Suddenly the blue below turns to white and gray. We pass over the last of Lake Michigan and begin our descent into O’Hare, crisscrossing the orderly Chicago street grid, former corn farm townships since divided into smaller squares still, each comprising a family or two. Past the countless brown lawns, now covered with snow we go, skidding just a bit on the tarmac where little ice flows glow in the landing lights.

My parents’ house is about six miles from the airport. We may have passed above it, but one square looks like every other at a couple of thousand feet. I had tried in vain to find the expressway junctures, but like houses from above, every cloverleaf looks like every other too. Even a big, but rare patch of forest preserves, an odd and invented site on the prairie, doesn’t help me figure where we were or what I might have seen.

Best to have stuck with “white and gray.” Topography is destiny, if only for this trip to America’s self-proclaimed heartland.

Wherever I go, I read newspapers, as many as I can find and even in languages I don’t know. It’s true that the papers in unknown languages are like those infernal English crosswords, number and nameless, and for me thus clueless. Still I hope that I’ll pick up something, remembering even now my one great coup when marooned on an Adriatic island I deduced from Croatian that Sadam Hussein had invaded Kuwait. Compulsions, it seems, require little reinforcement.

My father gets two papers at home, the Daily Herald, a town daily, and the Chicago Tribune. Giving my mother’s advancing Alzheimer’s disease, he only has time now to glance at them, choosing the editorials and op-ed pages over the rest. To me, it’s like he eats the wrong part of the chicken. I have plenty of opinions and a low opinion of the opinions of others. I prefer the facts, such as they are.

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