by Quinn O'Neill

I’m getting fed up with all the potentially disease-causing crap in my food. Every day there are new reports in the media linking various food additives, components, and contaminants to diseases. The list is of suspects is long: acrylamide, arsenic, aspartame, bisphenol A, carrageenan, pesticides, artifical dyes, and high-fructose corn syrup, just to name a few. There are even naturally occurring compounds that may have cancer causing potential. Basil, for example, contains a number of alkenyl compounds, like estragole and isoeugenol, that appear to have carcinogenic effects in animals.

To be clear, I’m not saying that each or any of these compounds is necessarily harmful. Certainly, most of the media reports are sensational and unreliable. If you go straight to the scientific literature to do your own investigation, you’ll generally find this: some papers will claim that the substance is perfectly safe and some will suggest that it may cause a variety of undesirable health effects. Many of the papers suggesting safety will have been done by industry-funded researchers and there’ll probably be a few reviews that purport to consider all of the studies and conclude with a statement like this: “When all the research on aspartame, including evaluations in both the premarketing and postmarketing periods, is examined as a whole, it is clear that aspartame is safe, and there are no unresolved questions regarding its safety under conditions of intended use.”

Well, I think there are still a few unresolved questions, like can the NutraSweet company be trusted to evaluate the safety of a substance that makes them megabucks? And can we trust our regulating agencies to look out for us while they employ people with ties to industry? I’d say no and no to those questions, and maybe I’m a bit neurotic, but if there’s any doubt about the safety of a particular substance I’d rather not eat it. The most obvious alternative would be to buy organic, but this is a pricey option and there may be residues of potentially harmful pesticides, like copper sulfate, in organic food too.

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by Misha Lepetic

We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have
a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.
~William James

I recently went to a food security panel held by Columbia University’s Earth Institute. There was, as is customary with the Earth Institute, both much to celebrate – such as a nuanced understanding of climate change and its responses – and bemoan – such as the casual dismissal of organic agriculture and a whole-hearted endorsement of GMO crops. While the subject was the very real phenomenon of food insecurity of the developing world, I became curious about how our perceptions of food security in the developed world – and what constitutes a desirable food system – inform our views of the developing world. One small detail from the afternoon, concerning a specific kind of fragility, was especially striking, and forms a convenient basis for the following critique of certain institutional worldviews.

How quickly can a system crumble under pressure? The idea of fragility in food systems can be characterized in many ways, such as crop vulnerability to weather shocks, or falling yields due to environmental degradation or ever-more resistant pests. Fragility can also be more formally defined as the way in which a system is – oftentimes endogenously – vulnerable to disruption or outright breakdown, as defined by Charles Perrow’s important work on complex technological systems. But it was economic fragility that was the focus of the following chart, shared by the Earth Institute’s Jessica Fanzo, from FAO’s “The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2011” (p14):

Although this is only the lowest quintile of the population for each country, it makes clear the extent to which financial fragility is a determinant of food security. Any increase in food prices requires a significant additional portion of a family’s income in these countries, if they are to maintain the same level of caloric intake, let alone nutrition. More frequently, families are not able to spend more money on food, and must employ other strategies to make ends meet: fewer meals; less caloric or nutritional value in each meal; the reallocation of meals away from members who are not income earners; taking children out of schools when a family must choose between education and food (i.e., as a result of school fees); the preferencing of employment for children over education, etc.

This kind of anxiety is inherently difficult for people in the U.S. to envision. Just how foreign is the concept of food security is to us? Simply put, the United States’ citizens spend less of their income per capita on food than any other nation. Setting aside the arguments that have been amply made elsewhere about the fact that we as end-consumers do not pay for the “true cost” of food, there are three things worth pointing out: how little we pay; the consistency with which we pay so little; and the further invariability of how we spend our food money.

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by Morgan Meis

We were speaking of wolves. I don’t remember how the conversation started. Maybe the thought of wolves comes naturally when you look out across the Hudson River and see the tree line of Shodack Island. There are no people on Shodack Island, no structures. On Shodack Island, the trees and the plants and the animals get to do it however they like. When you look out at the tree line of Shodack Island you think, “There could be anything on the other side of those trees.” In fact, there are no wolves on Shodack Island. There are no wolves to be found for thousands of miles from here, here being twenty miles south of Albany. The wolves were killed off long ago. It was one of the top priorities on the civilizational list. Kill the wolves. It has to be done. For the wolves are terror.

***

Driving out to Albany Airport (a regional airport if there ever was one) to put Shuffy on a plane to visit her mother in Las Vegas you exit the NY State Throughway and get onto Wolf Road. There is a Hampton Inn on Wolf Road. There is a Holiday Inn on Wolf Road. There is a Moe’s Southwest Grill on Wolf Road. The Cheesecake Factory can be found just off of Wolf Road at the Colonie Center Shopping Mall. There are, needless to say, no wolves on Wolf Road. But there must have been once. Albany was founded in the 17^th century. It is a very old city by American standards. On the Department of Environmental Conservation website can be found the sentence, “The Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies waged war on wolves in 1631.” It was a successful war. Now, there aren’t even any memories. The wolves were eradicated so quickly that they are not part of the story.

That is something Shuffy brought up one morning while we were sitting on the deck of the second floor of my sister’s house in New Baltimore. The sun was coming up over the trees across the water on Shodack Island. We were drinking coffee from steamy cups. Steam was lifting off the surface of the Hudson River too. Or mist. Physics that morning was acting on the coffee and the river water in the same way. I was musing about how wolves seem to haunt the European imagination. It goes way back, I was speculating. All those old forests. The wolves were always lingering there at the edge of civilization, nipping at its heels. When European civilization wasn’t doing so well, when its defenses were down, it would be time for the wolves again. They could get the taste for human flesh. A frenzy is begun, wolves eating men and men killing wolves. That’s probably where the idea for werewolves got started, I was thinking aloud. There is a line in time and space where the margins of human living and the margins of wolf living overlap. That overlap marks a spot for violence. The distinction between wolf and man blurs and everything collapses into a mutual killing. Is there repressed guilt about that killing in the stories of werewolves? Man kills wolf just as mercilessly as wolf kills man. Does the lingering guilt come back in the idea of the wolfman, the human creature who becomes wolf in order to balance the scales, to do the work of the absent wolf?

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By Namit Arora

A two-part review of The Indian Ideology, October 2012, by Perry Anderson. Part 2 appeared on April 22.

‘Nations without a past are contradictions in terms,’ wrote Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm. Precursors to every modern nation are stories about its past and the present — stories full of invention, exclusion, and exaggeration — which help forge a ‘national consciousness’. Historians, wrote Hobsbawm, have ‘always been mixed up in politics’ and are ‘an essential component of nationalism’. They participate in shaping a nation’s mythos and self-perception. In his vivid analogy, ‘Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to heroin addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market.’ The more nationalist a historian, he held, the weaker his bid to be taken seriously as a historian.

But not all historians are equally complicit. Some are deeply skeptical of the dominant national histories and claims of nationhood. ‘Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation,’ wrote the scholar Ernst Renan. The skeptical historian may even see positive value in certain aspects of nationalism—its potential to bind diverse groups and inspire collective action, for instance—but she always sees a pressing need to inspect and critique its claims, assumptions, omissions, myths, and heroes. Scrutiny may reveal that a ‘cherished tradition’ is neither cherished, nor a tradition; likewise for supposedly ‘ancient’ origins and customs, traits and virtues, arts and culture, and other qualities of life and mind said to define the essence of a nation and its people. This approach is especially common among Marxist historians (their analytical orientation defines the genre, not their views on communism). The best of them know that there is no ultimately objective history, but who yet seek to write history from below and attempt to expose the actual conditions of social life, including the divisions, conflicts and oppressions that plague any nation.

This, then, is the vantage point of Marxist historian Perry Anderson’s magnificent and lucid new work, The Indian Ideology. What does the title refer to? In his own words, it ‘is another way of describing what is more popularly known as “The Idea of India”, which celebrates the democratic stability, multi-cultural unity, and impartial secularity of the Indian state as a national miracle.’ Anderson offers a critique of this idea.

Nationalism in India arose in the 19th century. A native elite, responding to British colonialism, began articulating a consciousness based on a new idea of India. Until then, despite civilizational continuities, the Subcontinent had no sense of itself as ‘India’, no national feeling based on political unity or a shared identity. Rival political units and ethnic groups abounded, divided by language, faith, caste, geography, history, and more. There was no historical awareness of the ancient empires of Mauryas or Guptas, or that the Buddha was Indian. This and much more of the Indian past would emerge via European scholarship, profoundly shaping ‘Hinduism’ and Hindu self-knowledge. Anderson surveys the rise of Indian nationalism and offers sharp vignettes of the minds and matters that drove Gandhi, Jinnah, Nehru, Bose, Ambedkar, Mountbatten and others. His analysis of the forces that led to Partition is astute and provocative. He assesses the performance of the independent nation-state and subjects Indian intellectuals to a withering critique for what he diagnoses as their comfort with ‘the Indian ideology’. Though not without shortcomings, Anderson has given us a masterwork of critical synthesis — trenchant, original, and bold — that should fuel discussion and debate for years ahead.

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By Elatia Harris

Cover photo of Brief, snow globe and screenshots from Brief, courtesy of Jaded Ibis Press

Alexandra Chasin is a Brooklyn-based writer who turned to fiction with her acclaimed collection, Kissed By (FC2, 2007). Her new work, Brief (Jaded Ibis Press, 2012), is an app novel for the iPad — the first-ever literary novel to take the form of an app. She is an Associate Professor of Literary Studies at Lang College, The New School.

ELATIA HARRIS: Alex, chance and probability are intimately involved in the experience of reading Brief, as well as a truly embodied participation by the reader. You can turn the page, for instance, but you can't turn back to the last page you just read and flipped away from. Its words and images would not be distributed that way again for an interval that it would almost take the 10,000 year clock to reckon. This not being able to go back seems to play with the idea of the personal history of the narrator, about whom we start finding out before personhood was achieved. The narrator has an unusual take on motivation, for someone who grew up and turned art vandal — wouldn't you say?

ALEXANDRA CHASIN: The initial impetus for writing Brief was to experiment with an anti-psychoanalytic account of individual personality and action. I wanted to extend, in the direction of absurdum, the proposition that we under-value historical and cultural forces as determinants of behavior. What if we are more formed by those forces than by the domestic and familial forces that psychoanalysis loves so much?

EH: The narrator is certainly at pains to establish that nothing exceptional occurred at home. Just TV, playdates, the Cold War, and the occasional crewcut — that sort of thing.

AC: The narrator's birthdate is, in effect, the starting point of Brief, and its location in time — that moment of cold-war psychosis, in which televisions made their way into every household, in which pop culture began to achieve truly mass proportions and to infiltrate the bastions of high-art. The nine months prior to the narrator's birthdate and the two years after, are effectively the time of the piece, their developments linked to — shown to be determining of — the development of an art vandal.

EH: The images speak to that era. They are furiously torn up, not to mention randomized, but they're evocative.

AC: Yes, I imagined the images having an evocative relation to the text and era, and also of the atmosphere in the courtroom where the narrative is set. The images are almost all manipulated — either fragmented or composited or abstracted — to exaggerate their oblique relation to the text. Maybe there is a similar obliquity in the relation of image and text in certain books by W.G. Sebald — Austerlitz and The Rings of Saturn.

EH: Being an app helps this along, of course…

AC: What the app does is constantly change the relationship of text to image, which reinforces visually a question the text raises about the radically changing status of the image in the early 1960s. The text argues that the convergence of a paranoid Cold-War psychology, the invasion of television into almost all U.S. households, and the turn from abstraction to pop and op art in the high-culture zone, would absolutely require a renegotiation of the status of the image. The operation of the app represents those historical changes in virtually every screen.

I'm always concerned with that kind of correspondence between form and content, or between content and medium. A great example is Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves, in which the book's typography and formatting serve the content of the narrative, often tracing the footsteps of the protagonist.

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by Omar Ali

Shias (mostly Twelver Shias, but also including smaller groups of Ismailis and Dawoodi Bohras, etc.) make up between 5 and 25% of Pakistan’s population. The exact number is not known because the census does not count them separately and pro and anti-Shia groups routinely exaggerate or downgrade the number of Shias in Pakistan (thus the most militant Sunni group, the Sipah e Sahaba, routinely uses the figure of 2% Shia, which is too low, while Shias sometimes claim they are 30% of the Muslim population, which is clearly too high).

Shias were not historically a “minority group” in the sense in which modern identity politics talks about “minorities” (a definition that, sometimes unconsciously, includes some sense of being oppressed/marginalized by the majority). Shias were part and parcel of the Pakistan movement and the “great leader” himself was at least nominally Shia. He was not a conventionally observant Muslim (e.g. he regularly drank alcohol and may have eaten pork) and was for the most part a fairly typical upper-class “Brown sahib”, English in dress and manners, but Indian in origin. He was born Ismaili Khoja but switched to the more mainstream Twelver sect; a conversion that he attested to in a written affidavit in some court. His conversion was said to be due to the Khoja Ismaili sect excommunicating his sisters for marrying non-Khojas.

In short, his position as a Shia was not a significant problem for him as he led the Muslim League’s movement for a separate Muslim state. Twelver Shias were well integrated into the Muslim elite, and in opposition to Hindus they were all fellow Muslims. The question of whether Jinnah was Shia or Sunni was occasionally asked but Jinnah always parried it with the fatuous stock reply “was the holy prophet Shia or Sunni?” This irrelevant (and in some ways, irreverent) reply generally worked because theologial fine print was not a priority for the superficially Anglicized North Indian Muslim elite. Their Muslim identity distinguished them from Hindus (and especially in North India, it was mixed with a certain anti-Indian racism, the assumption being that they themselves were “superior” Afghans, Turks, Persians, etc.). But foreshadowing the problems that would come later as the ideology of Pakistan matured, a Shia-Sunni distinction did arise when Jinnah died; his sister arranged a hurried Shia funeral inside the house, while the state arranged a larger Sunni funeral (led by an anti-shia cleric) in public. This event and his own studied avoidance of any specifically Shia observance in his life, has led to claims by anti-Shia activists that Jinnah was in fact Sunni. But years later, a court did get to rule on this issue and they ruled that he was Shia (property was involved). By the time his sister died in 1967, matters had become uglier and even an orderly Sunni funeral was not easily arranged.
Since then, things have become much worse. The leaders of the Muslim league in general and the great leader in particular seem to have thought that once a Muslim state had been founded, it would function as a kind of Muslimized version of British India. The same commissioners and deputy commissioners, selected by the same civil service examinations, would rule over the “common people” while a thin (and thinly educated) crust of Muslim landlords and other “Ashraaf” lorded it over them.

Having used Islam to separate themselves from their Hindu and Sikh neighbors, they might occasionally use it to strengthen the spirit of Jihad in Kashmir or carry out other nation-building projects but it was not seen as a potential problem. Some of them probably thought there would be something called Islamic law in Islamic Pakistan, but most of the push for sharia law came from mullahs who had strongly opposed Jinnah’s project on the logical grounds that no one as ignorant of Islam as Jinnah could possibly create an Islamic state…but they soon realized that this pork-eating, whisky drinking Shia had indeed done so, and they were then quick to move in and try to take ownership).

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by Rafiq Kathwari

After Iqbal via Nietzsche

My stuff is so vile. I am less than dust.
Your gleam rends the heart’s mirror.
My darkness lights the chafing dish
Before I am incinerated. A miner’s boot
Tramples my head, covering me with ashes.

Do you know the gist of my life?
A condensed sliver of smoke, transformed
Into a single spark, in feature and nature
Starlike, your every facet a splendor,
Light of the king’s eye, the dagger’s jewel.

Friend, be wise, the diamond replied, assume
A bezel’s dignity. Loam strives to harden
To fill my bosom with radiance. Burn
Because you are soft. Banish fear and grief.
Be hard as stone. Be diamond.

Rafiq Kathwari is a guest poet at 3Quarks Daily.

by Mara Jebsen

“Its disgusterous!”the BFG gurgled. “It's sickable. It's rotsome! It's maggotwise! Try it yourself, this foulsome snozzcumber!”

'No thank you' Sophie said, backing away.—Roald Dahl

Readers of contemporary fiction might do well, from time to time, to dip back through the bookshelves of their childhoods to see what un-boring and un-foolish stuff is patiently waiting there. In my own shelves, there's magic, magic and grimness. Also, adventure. And beneath the magic and the adventure, a dark sort of wisdom that lurks enticingly. It is something like the sea–a blue and salt at the edge of consciousness that pulls–as if all children had the weak, seducible souls of sailors.

One such wisdom: the love between a very young person and a very old person is strange, unsentimental, prickly thing. In the old “Charlie and The Chocolate Factory” film, funny-faced Charlie and his sweet grandpa make a poignant pair, but Roald Dahl really explored this dynamic to its most comic and satisfying effect in the Big Friendly Giant. In it, a little bespectacled orphan, Sophie, and a giant hundreds of years old and dozens of feet tall befriend one another. “You mean you don't even know how old you are?” Sophie asks, early in the story. “No giant is knowing that,'the BFG said. 'All I is knowing about myself is that I is very old, very very old and crumply. Perhaps as old as the earth.”

Orphan and giant are two of the loneliest souls, each at the far reaches of life, and of no real use to anyone (though the giant, like Dahl, has elected to amuse himself by blowing dreams through a trumpet into the minds of sleeping children.) Otherwise, each is living a life simply awash in unkindnesses. The girl marks time in a cruel orphanage; the giant bears daily punishment as the 'runt' of a group of human-eating giants who crunch bones and slobber and tease (and seem like mythologized versions of bullies in a boys' boarding school.) Sophie and the giant bark at one another, arguing over proper English, eating filthsome snozzcumbers, and drinking delicious frobscottle that makes them fart until they float.

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Water Snapping Off Your Skin

That water snapping off your skin
in a shower

its warmth is the same energy
stoked in the sun

Its stoker is coy and cruel behind
the mask of creation

behind a bright sunrise
a fierce fire in his fist

Is the one

doing and undoing
damning or undamning
burning and unburning

This fire was
never begun

by Jim Culleny
from Blink
11/12/12

by Liam Heneghan

In Memoriam Patricia Monaghan, poet: your words are flame.

On August 19th 1833 Colonel Colbee Chamberlain Benton (1805-1880) left Chicago with Louis Ouilmette, a young man of French and Potawatomi heritage, to inform local Indian tribes that their federal annuities would be paid in September of that year. Benton’s trip, recorded in A visitor to Chicago in the Indian Days: Journal of the Far-Off West, was taken one year after the end of the Black Hawk war which ended most tribal resistance to white settlement of the Chicago area. That same year the Potawatomis, a tribe that dominated in the lands that became Chicago since the 1690s, relinquished their rights to their lands in Illinois. At that time the white settler population was little more than 150 people. A few years later in 1837 Chicago was chartered as a city.

That Benton’s journey was undertaken at time of tension between the indigenous and settler population is reflected in his descriptions of their trip. On the night of August 24th the pair of travelers passed through some oak groves and arrived at a small stream in a little prairie in Southeast Wisconsin and they camped there for the night. As night fell they heard Indians around their camp. Benton hid beside a large tree and at Ouilmette’s suggestion he removed his straw hat since it was “a good mark to shoot at.” Assessing the danger they found themselves in, Louis remarked that “there were occasionally some of the Sauks and Fox Indians wandering about in [that] part of the country, and from them [they] could not expect much mercy.”

Benton didn’t sleep that night. However, even if they had been “in danger of suffering from the power of their tomahawk and scalping knives” it was not fear that kept him awake. He remarked, in fact, there was something about their circumstances “so novel and romantic about it that it dispelled every fear…” He was far from home, everything looked “wild and terrible”, he was surrounded by “savages” and yet it all seemed “lovely and romantic and beautiful”. He felt happy.

So what kept Benton from his sleep? It was the noise! Some of the noise certainly may have emanated from the Indians who “mocked almost every wild animal.” But also there were unfamiliar birds calling, as well as foxes and raccoons. In the distance, wolves howled and the owls hooted in concert with the wolves. The mosquitoes added their part to “the music”. A sleepless, noisy, vaguely threatening night, and yet Benton declared that never before had he “passed a night so interestingly and so pleasantly…”

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For insulting the Quran, “'Thousands of people
dragged a Pakistani man … from a police station …
(and) beat him to death,' police said Wednesday.”

Insulting Books

Is it even possible
to insult a book?

Has it a soul within its leaves
a heart that beats
an eye that winks
a cord running through its spine
descending from a thing that thinks?

Is a book of inky lines
(of characters not themselves sublime)
capable of being hurt or ridiculed
or cheapened by critiques
either of the wise, or fools?

Has it veins between its covers
salty with the blood of lovers?

Is there something in its pages
(even if put there by sages)
that warrants death to critics?

Is it a thing so lame that priestly brothers
(arrogant, imperious, parasitic)
who worship sheaves of ink on paper
must, for its sake, snuff the holy breath
of others?

by Jim Culleny

11/6/12

Related

by Maniza Naqvi

It is past the hour that Abbas usually rings the doorbell and she has been waiting for him, she is sure for a good two hours.

Not like him to miss a lesson without calling ahead. Not like him at all. It must be an unusually busy evening at the clinic. She keeps repeating this to her blurred image reflected on the black lacquered case of the console piano which stands against the baby blue of the freshly painted wall of the drawing room.

Noticing the color she recalls her specifications. “No, I do not care what Robbialac calls the paint, make sure it’s baby blue, Razzak, like the way it always was!” And her husband had made sure it was just that, and that the bedroom was the exact bottle green like the large glass vats sold in batli bazaar that she is so fond of and out of which she made many a lamp pedestal for the rooms in 43-G.

Now Hajrabai frets “What are we to do?” She has lit the candles and if Abbas should ring the bell now they will have to practice in this dim light. She has been of half a mind to take such liberties as to think that she will still go on with the lesson should he ring the bell now. What would have been the point of leaving 43-G and having come here, if she is going to do that? She quarrels with herself. She covers her head with the palloo of her cotton sari. She runs a finger along the edge of its border and examines the block print of grey and pink tiny geometrical designs. She smoothens with her other hand her white hair gathered in a tight bun at the nape of her neck.

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by Misha Lepetic

All the strange things
they come and go, as early warnings
Stranded starfish have no place to hide
~Peter Gabriel, “Here Comes The Flood”

It is entirely unsurprising that much of the post-Sandy talk around New York City has coagulated around the ideology of the technological fix. The optimism that is encoded in this perfectly human response inspires us to emerge better, stronger and wiser from disaster. However, there is a further subspecies of this response, which I will call the monolithic technological fix. Thus, in the wake of catastrophe, we seem to focus our attention on answering the question, “What is the one thing that we could do to ensure that this will never, ever happen again?” In this case of New York City and Sandy, the answer to this question has manifested itself, in full deus ex machina glory, in the form of a sea wall. This brings up two distinct but entangled issues: whether it is a good idea, simply on the face of it, and what this implies for the urban fabric.

Concerning the first point, there are, of course, many opinions as to where said seawall(s) would go. The daftest involve skirting all of Lower Manhattan with a retractable 16’ seawall, which, aside from expressing a certain opinion of the outer boroughs, only works provided all subsequent storm surges agree to play nicely and remain under 16’. Columbia University’s Vishan Chakrabarti speaks for the most commonly considered solution, which would be a series of barriers meant to bottleneck any incoming surge around the general vicinity of New York Harbor: “I think we seriously have to think about doing this in three places probably – at the Verrazano, at Perth Amboy and at Hells Gate – to really protect the city.”

Perhaps most dramatic is the 2009 proposal made by an engineering firm called the New York-New Jersey Outer Harbor Gateway, which would essentially create a causeway stretching from Sandy Hook in New Jersey to the Far Rockaways. As hydrologist Malcolm Bowman notes,

“The thing about the Outer Crossing is that it could have a multipurpose function. It could act as a four-lane highway plus a rail connection between northern New Jersey and Long Island. It could be a very interesting New York City bypass as well as a rapid rail connection with Kennedy airport. You could even make it toll road to pay for it.”

A scenic way to JFK, of course, until it gets washed away by the Son of Sandy.

The problems with building these sorts of giant walls are myriad, and I will only mention the most obvious: The length of time it would take to design and construct a seawall of any appreciable effectiveness is, given today’s bureaucracy and expense, wholly incommensurate with the increasing frequency of these kinds of storms.

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