by Akim Reinhardt

I. A Sneeze for All Seasons
II. God Bless You
III. The Poetry of Sneezing
IV. Sneeze vs. Cough

Sternuisso ergo sum. I sneeze, therefore I am.

It defines me. It is at the core of my very existence. It is hell on Earth.

I. A Sneeze for All Seasons

Most people associate sneezing with a particular season, usually spring. For me, however, sneezing is hardly relegated to any quarter of the year. To the contrary, those respiratory convulsions afflict me all the year long. Spring is merely a furious crescendo of snot and burst blood vessels, with all the other seasons taking note and following suit to a lesser degree.

Summer. This would most likely be my annual respite from sneezing if not for my fellow Americans' horrid fetish for artificial environments. Once you move south of the upper Great Lakes or northern New England, air conditioning is King. Indeed, I now believe most people are pathetically weak, shrinking and wailing in the face of an 85F degree day (nearing 30C) as if Satan had finally triumphed and unleashed Hell's searing fireballs upon us.

In particular I look gravely askance upon those who set their thermostat at 72 in Winter and 68 in Summer. There really is no pleasing them, and their convoluted, soulless lives are so far removed from the of beauty of this world that I hope Mother Earth rejects them in the end, spitting their bones back out after they're buried.

My burning hatred for A/C is multi-faceted. To offer just a few complaints, it gives me a headache, it makes my face numb, it dries my natural perspiration into a fetid crust, and in any event, I'm a skinny fuck who prefers to be warm and adjusts easily to summer, even muggy ones here along the Chesapeake Bay.

But back to the point. Air conditioning sometimes induces sneezing fits. Probably not, Lord help me, if I'm just sitting in some vapid air conditioned box all day, breathing particulate matter and contemplating the finer points of a nuclear holocaust. But if I'm in and out of air conditioning on a hot day, perhaps doing some shopping, moving from natural warmth and humidity to the artificially dry and cool, and back again, a sneezing fit can descend upon me rather suddenly.

As best I can tell, it results from the ping pong of fluids loosening and tightening in my head. Much like muscles, my sinuses seem loose and relaxed on a warm day. Walking into some frigid little hell hole instantly tightens everything up. I leave, and everything is loose again, perhaps so loose that it demands instant expunging. The mucus, previously calm and unmolested, now descends in a torrent, accompanied by an onslaught of staccato explosions.

Man, that sucks.

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by Maniza Naqvi

The 50th anniversary of Dr. King's civil rights march on Washington is to be celebrated this week. The bullet points in the news are that Bradley Manning has been sentenced to 35 years in prison for leaking military documents and the White House hasn't stopped its military aid of US$1.3 billion to Egypt despite the military take over there and the killing of over one thousand citizens. Trouble is the poor White House is in a bind. Egypt doesn't need the weapons—it seems, it's the American contractors who do. US weapons contractors need the contracts for those weapons. If this aid is stopped, then the poor Pentagon Procurement office will be stuck in litigations for reneging on contracts and US weapons firms will suffer—Who knows which firms are involved and which senator in which State will be held accountable come election time. Fixing elections by changing voting rights might not be insurance enough. Civil liberties must take a back seat to commerce. You can't eat civil liberties. And elections aren't about civil liberties!

As I walk towards the statue of Lafayette on the Southwest corner of the park, I pass by the brick building which is on the blocked off street adjacent to the park on its eastern side and called Madison Place. I can see through to the courtyard, the wrought iron gates are open—a fountain gurgles in the courtyard—it is the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (here). This court, set up in 1982 during Reagan's reign, deals with litigation and appeals on money matters related to veterans claims, patents, intellectual property, tax, and international contracts. Interesting, that this should be the appeals court in such a prime location nestled so near the White House. I hesitate at the sight of the K-9 unit and Security but then I cross the street, go up the stairs and into the courtyard. There are windows of offices on three floors, which look down onto the courtyard, what a lovely setting this is, idyllic almost, with a shaded walk way to the side with tables and chairs: a quiet serene nook where perhaps anyone could come and sit and write, or have lunch.There's a certain whiff of southern sensibility here, a nod to Charleston, perhaps? This garden, the sound of the water gurgling–this discovery, the lack of time that I have to stay—make it familiar and even more special. How peaceful it is here.

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by Leanne Ogasawara

According to my Japanese almanacs, of the four seasons, it is autumn alone which is heard before it is seen.

This can happen after a windless, blisteringly hot Japanese summer, when autumn arrives around the end of August. Ever so slight, it makes itself known by the sound of the stirring of the leaves in the trees–for autumn arrives carried by the wind.

秋来ぬと目にはさやかに見えぬども風の音にぞおどろかれぬる　　　

–藤原敏行朝臣

Nothing meets the eye
to demonstrate beyond a doubt
that autumn has come–
yet suddenly we are struck
just by the sound of the wind
— Fujiwara Toshiyuki no Ason

The great Sei Shonagon also reminds us to stop and listen:

秋は、夕暮。夕日のさして、山の端（は）いと近うなりたるに、烏の寝どころへ行くとて、三つ四つ、二つ三つなど、飛び急ぐさへあはれなり。まいて雁などの列ねたるがいと小さく見ゆるは、いとをかし。日入り果てて、風の音、虫の音など、はたいふべきにあらず。

“In autumn the evenings, when the glittering sun sinks close to the edge of the hills and the crows fly back to their nests in threes and fours and twos; more charming still is a file of wild geese, like specks in the distant sky. When the sun has set, one’s heart is moved by the sound of the wind and the hum of the insects

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by Joy Icayan

It’s a rainy morning in Manila, where sixty thousand people have converged in Luneta Park to protest against the misuse of the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF), regular allocations to legislators amounting to millions in pesos. The protest, dubbed the Million People March is happening around the country with key rallies in all three major islands. It has materialized following a series of events. Whistleblowers surfaced two months ago accusing a certain Janet Napoles of spearheading the transfer of PDAF money (amounting to P10 billion pesos) over the course of many years towards fake NGOs and fake projects. A friend of Janet Napoles’ daughter leaked pictures of her Instagram account showcasing her lavish lifestyle: luxury cars, bags, shopping trips. Then just a week ago, the country was besieged by monsoon rains which caused intense flooding in the metro and nearby provinces. As always when this happens, residents blamed politicians for lack of flood control mechanisms. But this time, the anger had a new dimension to it – corruption, through the misuse of taxpayers’ money (PDAF) or more commonly called pork barrel, had been allocated not for public projects but to support the lives of the few rich.

Perhaps like any colonialized developing country, the Philippines’ history has been one of protests. From the Spanish colonization, to the American and the Japanese to the protests against our own governments, protests took on a form of slow quiet simmering before finally coming to the fore. During the declaration of Martial Law and its human rights violations, activists trooped to the streets, denouncing the government. The deaths and disappearances of many activists silenced many. It was the death of popular opposition leader Benigno Aquino that rallied everyone to go to EDSA to remove the current dictator in what would be termed People Power 1. They harnessed the same People Power to remove President Joseph Estrada, accused of plunder in 2001.

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by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

The camera, on the roof of a teashop, was abandoned for two reasons:

In the winter mist of a Persian garden, the camera had caught a green-cloaked figure.

Then, at the moment a village lorry belched, tearing the song of a Snow Finch into confetti, there were five seconds of static on the camera before it ran out of battery.

Khidr — the “green one,” the wise, the longest-living saint of the road— is nearly impossible to pursue. I know that but I try. Often I’m woken up by the image of Khidr and the fur that shimmers green with him. What follows is an elusive map plotting the mornings I have lived and the ones yet to live. Mortality’s math is a fur map that smothers, so I rise and wander— the house, the street, land and sea.

And by wandering, rub against the possible particles of an answer— salts of the land are pounded desire, salts of the sea melt desire into shape. Between them, a green curtain that lifts and carries you into peace as if it were the planet’s mighty sail.

When the abrasions of the quest cool, I hear a footfall in the clock of my mortality. It is Khidr’s, who drank from the fountain of life to become the traveling sage, the saint of the lost. The metaphors are more real than me, and Khidr, a man of quest, is of common proportions and immeasurable grace.

I look for him in library lobbies, bazaars, cafes, festivals and conferences, on ferries and trains— all desolate places. Mortality’s helmeted shadow lengthens on my door. I recall that Alexander the Great wanted to conquer death after he had conquered the world. More fixed on finding the elixir of life than recognizing the journey itself as the elixir, he lost his way. When he lay dying he is said to have instructed his men to open his palms for all to see that he was leaving empty-handed; Khidr found the ancient fountain Aab e hayaat while quietly helping other children of the road find themselves. To get to the rest of the story, you must slowly climb the rickety ladder of wisdom.

The ladder is made of millions of weak magnets. I have yet to reach there but I hear the magnets are the voices of elders— the same voices we become adept at subduing.

The lorry has brought tourists to the teashop. Some are here for tea and sweets, some will buy postcards of the garden and pet the cats. Some know they are lost. They will keep their ear to the wall for broken songs, will strain to see through the mist.

Built by Thought

all that we are arises with our thoughts,
the Dhammapada says,
with our thoughts we make the world

………. one, tour the foundation
………. scraping down it’s roughness
………. with the edge of a hammer head
………. dissing the mason who left behind a lumpy job
………. who forgot what a trowel is for
………. who was halfway home already when he bent into his forms
………. smoothing like a dilettante, fatigue calling the shots,
………. the day’s dregs, the ache in his legs

with our thoughts we make the world

………. two, eyeball the foundation top
………. to get a handle on what he’s up against
………. noting bulges humps and dips, or not—
………. with luck he’s been left the work of a perfectionist,
………. a Michelangelic cement mechanic
………. doing god’s work as he smoothed loose Portland
………. to a chalkline while in the background,
………. the symphonic smell of oil-soaked wood
………. played to a concrete vibrator’s percussive drill
………. driving trapped air from aggregate,
………. time and chemistry turning wet concrete to stone
………. upon which a carpenter will set a sill

all that we are arises through our thoughts

………. three, set the sill straight to lines struck on the top of the wall
………. parallel and square and fix with bolts

the world is made with thought

………. four, make cycles to the lumber pile grabbing two at a time
………. snap to shoulder and carry over sun-baked soil raising dust
………. until the need for sweat and beams has been fulfilled
………. and the house is framed by god’s good must

all that we are by thought arises, says the Dhammapada.
we make the world with thoughts

………. thus a house, conceived and brought about
………. by hammer blows in the skull of a carpenter
………. driving nails through a sawyer’s vision of finished joists
………. its walls and roof arranged in architectural imagination, arises

………. because, as the Dhammapada says,
………. the world is brought about by thought

with our thoughts the world arises

………. when you think about it (as the verse apprises
………. and Buddha taught)
………. our home —our world, is built by thought
.

by Jim Culleny
8/16/13

by Liam Heneghan

1. On 16 June 1904 before leaving his home at 78 Eccles Street, Dublin, Leopold Bloom sat and took one of most momentous and leisurely shits in literature. Joyce reported: “Asquat on the cuckstool he folded out his paper.” Bloom browsed a while, then “midway, his last resistance, yielding he allowed his bowels to ease themselves quietly, as he read.” A significant portion of those people from whom I recently solicited information on their favorite sitting places side with Bloom on this one. They confide this seated pleasure as if it was their secret alone. My father, in contrast, claims his favorite place to sit was beside the Minister for Education in the Irish Dail (parliament) during question time. My mother’s sitting drinking coffee in front of The Colosseum. Mine is on the Old Kenmare Road, near Killarney, my back against a rock, facing the mountains, bog cotton fidgeting,a stream murmuring in the middle distance.

2. Dr Dov Sikirov, an Israeli internist, studied the straining forces applied by 28 healthily defecating volunteers when sitting versus squatting. The defecators were equipped with stop watches and were asked to subjectively assess the intensity of their efforts. Each volunteer recorded six shits, producing data on a grand total of 168 stools. All metrics indicated that sitting required the most excessively forceful evacuations. The reason for this is connected to the human anorectal angle, measured between the longitudinal axis of the anal canal and the posterior rectal line. At rest the angle is typically 90°; sitting keeps us in “continence mode” whereas squatting reduces the angle for a smoother launch. Dr Sikirov holds a patent for a Toilet device (US 7962973 B2) designed to facilitate defecation in a natural squatting posture over a conventional toilet bowl. Others recommend elevating the feet on a small stool.

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by Jalees Rehman

The “Reclaim Scientism” movement is gaining momentum. In his recent book “The Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions“, the American philosopher Alexander Rosenberg suggests that instead of viewing the word “scientism” as an epithet, atheists should expropriate it and use it as a positive term which describes their worldview. Rosenberg also provides a descriptive explanation of how the term “scientism” is currently used:

Scientism — noun; scientistic — adjective.

Scientism has two related meanings, both of them pejorative. According to one of these meanings, scientism names the improper or mistaken application of scientific methods or findings outside their appropriate domain, especially to questions treated by the humanities. The second meaning is more common: Scientism is the exaggerated confidence in the methods of science as the most (or the only) reliable tools of inquiry, and an equally unfounded belief that at least the most well established of its findings are the only objective truths there are.

Rosenberg's explanation of “scientism” is helpful because it highlights the difference between science and scientism. Science refers to applying scientific methods as tools of inquiry to collect and interpret data, whereas “scientism” refers to cultural and ideological views promoting the primacy or superiority of scientific methods over all other tools of inquiry. Some scientists embrace scientistic views, in part because scientism provides a much-needed counterbalance to aggressive anti-science attitudes that are prevalent on both ends of the political spectrum and among some religious institutions. However, other scientists are concerned about propping up scientism as a bulwark against ideological science-bashing because it smacks of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Science is characterized by healthy skepticism, the dismantling of dogmatic views and a continuous process of introspection and self-criticism. Infusing science with ideological stances concerning the primacy of the scientific method could undermine the power of science which is rooted in its willingness to oppose ideological posturing.

As a scientist who investigates signaling mechanisms and the metabolic activity of stem cells, I am concerned about the rise of some movements that fall under the “scientism” umbrella, because they have the possibility to impede scientific discovery. Scientific progress relies on recognizing the limitations and flaws in existing scientific concepts and refuting scientific views that cannot be adequately explained by newer scientific observations. An exaggerated confidence in the validity of scientific findings could stifle such refutations. For example, some of the most widely cited scientific papers in the field of stem cell biology cannot be replicated, but they have had an enormous detrimental impact on the science and medicine, in part because of an exaggerated faith in the validity of some initial experiments.

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by Misha Lepetic

“The whole arrangement is as cozy and comfortable as the
front basement dining room of a first-class city residence.”
~ Scientific American, 1870

Is there anything that is not deserving of disruption by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs? Last week the world came to understand that in addition to pretty much everything else, high-speed rail is heading for a makeover. The irrepressible Elon Musk, founder of PayPal, Tesla Motors and SpaceX, unveiled, in a somewhat anticlimactic press conference, what is essentially a giant pneumatic tube for people. Also known as the Hyperloop, it intends to shoot people from Los Angeles to San Francisco in something like 35 minutes, at a top speed of nearly 800 miles per hour. Remarkably, Musk declared that he has no intention to build the thing; as John Oliver said on the Daily Show, “That's like saying ‘Hey, you know what we should do? Find a vaccine for cancer…Someone get on that! I'm just the ideas man.'” I suppose this is the flipside of what Musk generously termed the “open source” nature of the project. However, the proposal is worth examining both for its implicit attitudes towards what is being designed, and what the real purpose of the Hyperloop might be.

Once Musk had finally opened the kimono, the critics naturally pounced. It's easy to dish on a multi-billion-dollar design proposal that is all of 57 pages, and contains such breezy gems as: “short of figuring out real teleportation, which would of course be awesome (someone please do this), the only option for super fast travel is to build a tube over or under the ground that contains a special environment. This is where things get tricky” (p3). Tricky, indeed.

But it's not so much the technology, or Musk's indifference to building it, that is at issue here. Most of this has been developed and is fairly uncontroversial. In fact, the idea of using some combination of air or vacuum to propel people through tubes was successfully prototyped back in the 1870s. Of course, the issue of scale will certainly produce its own set of challenges, but this will arrive in due time. Nor is the cost “where things get tricky,” either: even though critics have called out the $6bn price tag as laughably low, since when has an infrastructure project ever been priced realistically?

What is more interesting to me is the way people themselves are considered in the design proposal.

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by Maniza Naqvi

A woman, her cart of belongings next to her, sits on a park bench, feeding the pigeons, squirrels and ducks. She throws bread crumbs to them, and calls out in a voice, cured by cigarettes and gin: “Have a nice day working for the war! You know we all work for the war! Even these pigeons are eating off the war!” She must be seventy, she wears a string of pearls, a checkered white and blue gingham dress, her eyes are bright blue, her hair silver and long, her skin tanned and weathered. I stare at her, for a moment I think I know her and then I move on.

In front of the White House, another diaspora pleads and protests against a repressive regime, as if the White House were a temple, for such things. Helmeted curious tourists whoosh by on their Segways. A few days earlier, it was the Egyptian diaspora, here, demanding that the White House recognize the ouster of Morsi's government by the military as a coup d'etat. But this prime temple, the White House, has maintained a monumental Sphinx like silence on this term, surrounded as it is, perhaps, by so many edifices to Generals. Now over one thousand Egyptian protesters are dead at the hands of their military. Who manufactured the bullets, guns and gas? But there are balls and chains that stop the White House from breaking with its tradition of supporting the military in Egypt—weapons sales from US companies based on vouchers considered as aid to Egypt. This is the way the world is organized, trapped like insects in honey, unable to resist the viscosity of an elaborate system of commerce, war and aid: vouchers as aid to militaries overseas to purchase from the weapons industry —and subsidies to the food industry for surplus maize as aid to the impoverished citizenry of those places overseas.

I look at the sculpture of General Lafayette at the Southeast corner of the park, at whose base a statue of a woman, half crawling half naked, reaches up to him to hand him a sword: Lady Liberty, I presume.

Even so, there is another protest—a monumental piece de resistance —in fact, an act of supreme resistance installed, quite literally, in its own back yard.

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by Mara Jebsen

First day of May, and the roses on my block
all boiled into bloom, as if following a summons–
water-logged and lewd they nodded as I passed
and I wanted to touch them, but didn't have time–
Then I watched a rat pull an entire poppy-seed bagel
along subway tracks. He kept falling. I'd never seen
a rat so happy. Give us this day
our daily bread, I thought. But then came the next part:
something about forgiveness and daily
trespasses. When I was a kid, I found it silly. Only once
I'd trespassed on the way to school-drawn onto private
property– by roses, in fact–it was a rich person's garden
In Philadelphia. My mother had warned me
not to take the back-paths, but that's where I'd found
a secret city–whole shadow-alleys crammed with azaeleas
crocuses, roses, one actual
No Trespassing sign. It did not strike me
as bad to be there. It seemed a strange thing for God
to fuss about. Once, in a period after my college years,
I could not find a job and it made me weep. When I came home
I thought to myself: I am lost. I'm lost. In a big fat
onion. No one can find me
here. It is a wonderful thing to be in
the right place; to trust the arrival of daily
bread, tossed by some invisible
hand. After work, I saw a man
with his pants around his thighs
rest his bare bottom
on the warm concrete. His flesh was loose
and wasting; his head lolled forward like a rose.
I could not see his face. He was dreaming on the steps
of the the public library. I have been lately feeling
very grateful, as if all were falling
into place. May is the month of the possible,
of roses and bread.
Forgive me my daily trespasses.

by Omar Ali

The first thing that strikes you on landing in Pakistan after a few years is how much more “modern” it is and how dramatically (and frequently, painfully) it is changing with every passing day. One is reminded that Pakistan is as much a part of “rising Asia” as India, Bangladesh or Thailand and is not all about terrorists, conspiracy theories, Salafist nutjobs or the clash of civilizations. But since more qualified people are writing about the economics of rising Asia, the destruction of the environment, the breakdown of traditional society, the future of the planet, and the meaning of life, I will try not to step too much on their turf. And since there are countless articles (and more than one famous book) detailing the Westernized elite’s view of how the underclass lives and dies in rising Asia, I will not intrude too far on that well-trodden terrain either. Instead, without further ado, here are my personal and entirely anecdotal observations from 3 weeks in Pakistan.

1. The uncertainty is real and deep. Not only are people unsure about what may happen next, they are unsure about how uncertain they are! Someone can start off by saying life will go on, it will probably be more of the same, things will slowly get better but there will be no big sudden transformation. Then, as the conversation proceeds, report that he (or she) is afraid it’s all going to fall apart next year in one big apocalyptic disaster. A few minutes later, the same person confidently assures you that we are about to turn the corner and Pakistan will be the next China (or at least, the next Chinese colony, which is pretty much the same thing). If asked which of these three theories (more of the same, impending disaster or turning the Chinese corner) he thinks is more likely, he seems genuinely surprised to learn that he has just confidently predicted three different outcomes. This seemed like a new trend. Different people used to have different theories about what may come next but now the same person has many different theories and seems equally unsure about all of them. It did cross my mind that maybe this happens everywhere but is just more noticeable here. But the fact remains, it was more noticeable this time than it has ever been in the past.

2. “Real life” economic calculations so consistently trump ideology that one can be excused for starting to believe in the crudest forms of Marxism. Of course, no one I met actually believes in crude Marxism because the people I met were anything but crude. A number of them claimed to be Marxist, but mostly in the latest postcolonial postmodern post-industrial sort of way. Anyway, coming back to “real life” in Pakistan: Islamists and anti-Islamists seem to run very similar (and similarly profitable) schools and colleges all over Pakistan. Friends who were in the Islamic student parties and friends who led their leftist opponents and battled on the streets with club and guns, now run the same private clinics and hospitals and take the same pharmaceutical junkets. Their children go to the same colleges and take the same Cambridge and SAT examinations to go to the same elite institutions of higher education in the developed world (of course, a world that now includes Shanghai and Singapore in addition to New York and London). They start businesses, launch careers and file patents the same way, though the Islamists all say Allah Hafiz and the leftists still resist by saying Khuda Hafiz. In short, capitalism is thriving. But the environment and social harmony are not. The water is literally undrinkable all across Pakistan. No one can drink tap water and avoid typhoid or hepatitis, but even if you only drink genuine Nestle bottled water, your dishes are still washed in tap water, your veggies are grown in raw sewage and your milk may be mixed with it. This probably sounds like typical expat griping, but this was the universal opinion of every doctor I met. Public health is a nightmare and since an unhealthy proportion of public intellectuals is either waiting for Mao or dreaming about the caliphate (see below), no one seems to be able to fix mundane things like water and sewage.

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by Quinn O'Neill

Cigarette smoking is an insidious and on-going public health disaster. If a new virus were killing as many people – more than 400, 000 Americans each year – there'd be widespread panic. Yet smoking-related deaths and disease garner little of the public's attention.

Perhaps we reason that smokers deserve the consequences of their actions because their habit is a choice. But according to the American Cancer Society, almost 90% of adult smokers take up the habit before the age of 18. Adolescents aren't known for their level headedness and a lifetime of addiction seems a harsh penalty for a bad teenage decision.

Tobacco advertising is an important influence on teens' smoking-related decisions. We like to believe that we make free choices as consumers, but the tobacco industry, which better appreciates how impressionable we really are, spends 8 to 10 billion dollars per year on marketing in the US alone. And it works. The CDC acknowledges that there is evidence of a causal relationship between advertising and tobacco use by young people. Studies confirm that teens are exposed to cigarette advertising and that these ads do increase their desire to smoke.

We would never allow ads to feature cartoon characters encouraging kids to drink toxic household cleaners; but for some reason, when it comes to smoking, we do tolerate the marketing of toxic substances to young people. Tobacco advertising will predictably influence teens' behaviors and many of the new smokers it creates will develop serious or fatal disease. The marketing of cigarettes is essentially criminal and it isn't those who succumb to its influence who deserve to be punished. Today's youngsters need protection from the sinister tactics of the tobacco industry. A complete ban on advertising would be ideal, but doesn't seem likely to happen anytime soon. The CDC offers suggestions on how to reduce the influence of these ads on teens, which may be especially useful to parents.

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by Brooks Riley

For years I lived in the Kunstareal, an area of Munich surrounded by museums, great museums, the kind that people travel thousands of miles to visit—the Lenbachgalerie with its Blue Rider painters, the Alte Pinakothek with its Dürers, Brueghels, Rubens, the Neue Pinakothek with its 19^th century European painters—to name just a few. I lived less than 5 minutes away from 10 museums and could explore the history of art from Greek and Roman times to the present day, as easily as I could pop around to the corner store.

When I first moved to the neighborhood I thought, ‘ How convenient, I can go anytime.’ ‘Anytime’ came to mean ‘almost never’. I suffered from the museum variation of the Parkinson principle: If work fills the amount of time allotted to it, then exploring the riches at my doorstep would take more than a decade.

It’s not that I had never been to any of these museums: On visits to Munich in my teens and twenties, I had gone to the Alte Pinakothek several times, long before I lived around the corner. I knew my favorite painter could be found there. I knew how emotional I could get, standing in front of the self-portrait from 1500, convinced that Dürer had painted it for me and me alone. He was looking at me, wasn’t he? Such narcissism thrives in the solitary contemplation of a painting, but the fear that I might be wrong wasn’t what kept me away. And my avoidance was never a case of ‘been there, done that’ but more of ‘want to, will do. . . whenever’.

It turns out that during all those years I stayed away, one of my favorite Dürer works, the Paumgartner Alterpiece triptych, was also absent, the victim of a sulfuric acid attack in 1988 by a deranged pensioner. Restoring the painting took 21 years. Had I known, how I would have missed the antithetical Paumgartner brothers who frame the central panel: the older, frumpy Stephan as an ineffectual St. George (the dragon at his feet looks still alive), the younger cocky Lukas as St. Eustace, upstaging his brother in both regalia and attitude. This gentle dose of Cain and Abel exposes an intriguing aspect of Dürer’s work, which is full of asides and painterly winks, among them, surely, the perspective oddities of the triptych’s central panel.

Dürer, Kandinsky, Friedrich, Schinkel and Co. were my neighbors all those years, waiting for me to drop by on my way to buy milk. They cried out to me in the night, “When are you coming to visit us?” The more they nagged, the more I resisted and the guiltier I felt, as though they were parents awaiting a long overdue visit from an only child.

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by Rafiq Kathwari

Srinagar, Kashmir, 14 August 1947 Thursday

At Midnight two dominions of Pakistan and Hindustan will take birth: Whole day busy with tomorrow's celebrations. Pakistan Government has instructed Superintendent Post Office Srinagar to fly the Pakistan flag tomorrow on all the post office buildings. The Kashmir government does not want this to happen. They are extremely perturbed over it — feverish political activity in this connection.

Tonight is Shab-e Qadar, what an auspicious night, and tomorrow is Jumatul-wida, when legally the two dominions will start to work. In fact, Pakistan Constituent Assembly met today and was addressed by Lord Mountbatten who, as the Governor General of Pakistan, read the Kings message. Then, our most beloved leader, Qaid–e-Azam Mohammed Ali Jinnah was sworn in, and then, the First Premier of Pakistan, Nawabzada Liaquat Ali Khan.

At midnight, my father (and a group of friends) sat attentively near the radio tuning to Lahore. The clock struck 12. The announcer approached the mike, and announced, “Pakistan Broadcasting Service.”

Pakistan has come into existence. Long Live Pakistan! Long Live Qaid-e-Azam, its architect and founder!

The proceeding started with recitation from the holy Quran, followed by Naat's. We all could not resist our tears for so much was the emotion and so piercing was every word spoken on the radio that we all of us actually went into a sort of trance. At 1 A.M. the Special Broadcast ended. After that, we talked till about 3 A.M.

Srinagar, Kashmir, 15 August 1947 Friday

Got up early at 6 A.M. From the early hour people were excited. We put on Pakistan flags, green with Crescent and a Star and a white strip representing the minorities. We also put up buntings. The Nationalist Musulmaans also decorating with red flags. Lots of excitement, some trouble, not much.

Went at about 11 a.m. to Amira Kadal — today everyone observed holiday. The whole city had a bride's appearance with green, red, and tricolor flags. Pakistan flags were hoisted on all the post offices, and that proved very great excitement to Musalmaans. Hundreds went to the post offices and saluted the flags.

At 1:30 p.m went to Jamia Masjid. Huge congregation there, a public meeting also held. We went in a procession of cars — all cars had Pakistan flags.

Returned from Jamia Masjid: I was now exhausted due to sleeplessness, hungry and thirsty. Went home. Had a rest until 7 p.m. [Two friends] came to pick me up from my home. We went to Lake View Hotel to attend the Pakistan Dinner Party. About 150 gentlemen responded. The dinner commenced with recitation from the Holy Quran, and ended successfully with more recitations under life size statues of Qaid-e-Azam.

My father, Khawja Gulam Mohammed Kathwari, kept a daily dairy from the day he entered Aligarh Muslim University in 1932 to the day he died in 1999. There will be many opportunities to share other pages.

Amethyst
—Puerto Rico, 1960

San Juan past the stone north walls of Morro
shanty roofs slide to the sea
white below beyond breakers
the sea spreads bluegreen north to New York

…… strewn across my bed the moon
…… through a window
…… lies across the sheets like a lover

the ship on rippleless lavenderglass swells
at dusk, the sky’s hue too
I am indistinct in this boundless
lifting/falling amethyst
.

by Jim Culleny, 8/9/13

by Usha Alexander

Two days in south Rajasthan with AMRIT Health Services, a not-for-profit initiative

“The demand to sacrifice a goat was not something we had expected as a precondition for setting up the clinic,” Dr. Pavitra Mohan explained. A pediatrician and public health professional, he was telling me about the initial days of setting up the first AMRIT Clinic in Bedawal, a Meena village in south Rajasthan that otherwise had no healthcare facility. The problem was that the building he had identified as adequate for his purpose was directly across from the village temple to their god, Hemliya Bavji, but it required major renovations, including the construction of a toilet, apparently the first in the village. Though the panchayat welcomed the clinic, several villagers refused to allow a toilet so near the temple, on religious grounds. To make matters worse, they also refused to allow trimming the sacred tree overhanging the building in order to build rooms on the roof for the healthcare workers to sleep at night. But after further talks and negotiations, they finally granted permission to build the clinic and trim the tree as well.

And so, in early 2013, AMRIT Clinic opened in Bedawal with a small team of qualified nurses and healthcare workers, who constitute the core of AMRIT Health Services (AHS) in the villages. They are supported by a doctor who visits once a week and is also available for telephone consultations on other days. Hoping for a view into the work of this organization—its context, its challenges, its benefits to the local population—my partner and I went for a visit in early August; our plan was to produce an introductory video about their work.

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ISRAELI PATROLS KILL 90 DOGS IN ARAB TOWN
—The New York Times, April 14, 1995

Mother, I’m living in sin with an Egyptian
Jew raised in Paris. We stroll in Central Park
Gaulois, her mutt, off the leash. Lucky he’s
not in Hebron, where gods kill dogs for sport.

by Rafiq Kathwari

by Maniza Naqvi

Opposite the White House, and across from the park, an entire block holds the flat and faceless, building of the Export and Import Bank of the United States (here), it is the color of khaki or a dead tree stump. It evokes a sense of a black and white film from the cold war about Eastern Europe– I almost expect subtitles to run beneath my gaze. It is responsible for providing financing for the foreign purchases of American goods and services. And across from it on the same street, hunkered down for the long haul, equally hued but embellished with Greek columns—I think ionic– is the Department of Veterans Affairs. It is responsible for taking care of the consequences of some of these purchases.

On the corner of that block, on some days at the entrance to the McPherson Square metro a street musician plays jazz on a horn— while on most days now, on the sidewalk in front of the building responsible for their welfare, a few stray left over “Occupiers”, veterans of these ongoing wars and past, still protest, looking like a heap of rags or lumps of dumped bodies—or body bags—as they take shelter from rain or cold, covered head to toe in their sleeping bags in the early mornings at the entrance to the Department's building. Nearby, large shiny bullet proof black sports utility vehicles, in the employees reserved parking slots on the street, provide a a sharp contrast to them and symbolize wealth, power and the capability to roll over bodies and crush them. On a large brass plate on the outside wall of the Department of Veterans Affairs the inscription quotes Abraham Lincoln: “To care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan.” I wonder if war was Lincoln's definition of battle or was his idea more profound than that—This man who himself was felled by an assassin's bullet and who left behind a widow and orphans. Was the notion of battle for Lincoln, the struggle to care for all on the basis of need and the un-decorated act that these stragglers, these society's lost souls, on the sidewalk were now engaged in?

One day as I walked by the Department of Veterans Affairs, on my way towards Lafayette Park and past the White House, my path was crossed by a trolley cart wheeled out from the building by janitors. The trolley was loaded with about three feet high painted wooden soldiers as though props for a pageant or the Nutcracker ballet. The wooden soldiers, some with broken parts, were being loaded into a truck, perhaps now useless, they were homeless and bound for a Park or perhaps for repair and storage until needed for another occasion. I turned to look back at several people, amputees, in wheel chairs who had come out, for a smoke and the warriors in their sleeping bags, as if discarded and broken props themselves, waiting to be picked up and loaded into a garbage truck.

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