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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by Rishidev Chaudhuri

I have a child's affection for color, for broad swathes of bright saturated colors, for unapologetic reds and greens and blues and yellows. And yet this strong visceral and emotional reaction often feels immature and undifferentiated. I never really learned the names of the colors properly. This is partly from an artist mother, who would always give me very specific answers when I asked for the name of a color (burnt sienna, cerulean), so that i never quite figured out the broad categories correctly, didn't really remember the specific terms, and came to experience the names of the colors as magical incantations that descended upon sensory impressions according to uncertain principles. And this is partly the result of decreased red-green sensitivity, so that while I can tell pure reds and greens apart easily, and can distinguish expanses of color, I start to stumble at blue with a little bit of red or green added, or at intermediate points along a red-green mixture, or at thin lines of color¹. Recently, I've been making graphs that require a large number of data traces on the same figure, and I need each trace to be a sufficiently different color that I can easily tell them apart. And so I've found myself paying more attention to the way colors are described and how to get them on a computer.

It has been known for some time that colors can be described by three numbers. If I show you light of a certain color and ask you to match it by combining lights of three other colors and varying their intensities, you'll typically be able to find a combination that looks indistinguishable. But the wavelengths you combine might be very different from the wavelengths I showed you. Light of the wavelength corresponding to yellow and light of the right combination of red and green wavelengths will look the same, even though they are physically quite different. This structure is reflected in the retina. For the most part, we have three types of color-sensitive cells (cones) and so make three measurements of any color we see, corresponding to light centered around three different wavelengths. Informally, these are said to be peaked around blue, green and red, though the peaks don't quite line up at these colors. Any information that isn't captured in these three numbers is literally invisible. Dogs and cats (and most mammals) measure only two numbers to make a color, rather than three, and seem to see like red-green colorblind people. There is some speculation that a subset of women have cones that make measurements at four frequencies and so differentiate colors that look identical to most people.

There are all sorts of complexities and caveats of course.

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by Edward B. Rackley

I scurried around the banks of the Potomac River, burying canned food, clothing and jugs of water in the cargo hatches of my kayak. My launch down the US eastern seaboard was imminent, a journey I’d been preparing for over a year. Weight distribution was the preoccupation of the moment, as the lay of the ballast would determine my tracking ability. Fighting for a straight line over unfamiliar waters in the following weeks would waste time and drain my stamina.

Dark cumulus crowded overhead, but a rainy departure didn’t bother me—a baptism of sorts and reminder that elemental immersion and climate exposure are a kayaker’s default mode. The East coast hurricane season was at its peak, and I’d be tracking storm developments on a weather radio. The draws of an autumn trip were cooler air temperatures and less solar intensity, with coastal waters retaining their summer warmth. The clouds of mosquitoes and biting flies would have thinned, the noisy summer beaches vacated. Raptors and Monarch butterflies had begun their southern migrations down the coast, and fauna would be fattening up for the winter—autumn is a time of preparation and epic distance. Deep winter with its quiet frozen landscape is my idea of perfection, but autumn offers clement temperatures, crisper air and favorable tradewinds for long distance kayaking. It was my final window before the big freeze.

The hatches were near capacity and a last-minute triage became necessary. Crouching to gather what wouldn’t fit in the boat (running shoes, books), several pairs of muddy boots shuffled into my peripheral field. I craned my neck to find I’d been surrounded by a mini flash-mob of weathered, disheveled characters—local fishermen curious about my hurried preparations and bright blue kayak. Murmuring amongst themselves and staring down at me, one finally spoke.

“Where you goin’ in that thing?” The Outer Banks.

“All the way to Carolina?” Yep.

A long silence. “Shee-ut.”

More silence. I was being assessed.

Finally an utterance, matter-of-factly: “Ballza steel.”

“Yep. Boy’s got ballza steel.”

The matter was settled. The group peeled away, still mumbling about my endeavor. An elderly man lingered at a distance, a solitary observer enjoying the river at this early hour. His large stooped frame was neatly dressed, graying afro cropped close to his skull. His clear eyes watched me from behind 70s era chrome-framed lenses. What did he see in me? I continued with final adjustments to bulkier cargo, securing them on deck with elastic webbing. When I looked up again, my observer had repaired to a nearby truck.

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by Namit Arora

A few years ago, my partner and I spent twelve days in Uganda. We visited two national parks to see chimpanzees and other animals, the Ssese Islands of Lake Victoria, the source of the Nile, the town of Jinja, and Kampala. As far as possible, we used the average citizen's mode of transportation and made no advance hotel reservations—choices that I think foster a greater engagement with the locals. As I often do when I travel, I shot some idiosyncratic video footage mostly as an aid to memory, akin to keeping a journal. Watching it again recently, I thought: why not make an amateur documentary? That's just what I did and here is the result (20 mins; also check out some pictures).

Why “Pearl of Africa”? Apparently, Winston Churchill, visiting Uganda at age 33, was so impressed by its mountains, valleys, greenery, lakes, wildlife, and friendly natives that he called it the “pearl of Africa”, and the name stuck. I have a rather low opinion of Churchill but I find nothing to quibble about in this case. I too loved my time in Uganda.

by Jeff Strabone

Another U.S. presidential election is upon us, and once again the electoral college looms large as a threat to the legitimacy of government and people's faith in democracy. On the eve of what may be another split between the electoral college and the nationwide popular vote total, we are no closer to a direct popular election than we were twelve years ago when the winner was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

But that may not be such a bad thing for those of us who want to see the electoral college abolished. In fact, the best chance for abolition may lie in sharing the pain by reversing the party polarity of the 2000 split: i.e., for President Obama to win the electoral college and Mitt Romney to win the popular vote. With the likelihood that the electoral college will favor the Democrats for at least the next few elections, our best hope may lie in a split that infuriates Republicans so deeply that they would clamor for reform as Democrats did after 2000.

Perhaps the worst idea out there for ending the reign of the electoral college is an effort called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC). The NPVIC reminds us of all that's wrong with the clause in the Constitution that leaves the choosing of the electors to the states. The more we mess with the state statutes governing the awarding of electoral votes, the more we may regress to a past when popular votes for U.S. President were not held at all by the states.

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APPETITES

For Ravi Shankar

He will bring you croissants in bed
Come to you as clouds
Gradually discover the moon
Unstring you knot by knot
Feast with you on the roof
Weave you out of yourself
Uncork your drunkenness
Into cups made from skulls
Wrap you in a robe of words
Chew on your spicy locks
As sometimes in the madhouse
Men gnaw on their chains

By Rafiq Kathwari, guest poet at 3Quarks Daily.

by Tom Jacobs

The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air. The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable. It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.”

~ David Foster Wallace

One of the things that Hurricane Sandy draws to our attention are all of the bureaucratic forces that quietly and almost imperceptibly but decisively shape our lives and the world we inhabit. Bureaucratic institutions like FEMA, City Hall, the NYPD, the Department of Sanitation, Con Edison, and so forth. Catastrophes tend to offer them a moment to step into the spotlight and either dazzle or utterly fail. One of the reasons their emergence in the public’s attention is interesting is that the work they do in non-catastrophic circumstances is so workmanlike and dull that it’s boring to even think about.

In one of the more amusing passages in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, a character mistakenly enters the wrong university classroom and finds himself developing an unexpected interest in accounting. The Jesuit accounting professor delivers remarkably fascinating reflections on the subject during his lectures, at one point making the following claim:

Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is… The truth is that the heroism of your childhood entertainments was not true valour. It was theatre. The grand gesture, the moment of choice, the mortal danger, the external foe, the climactic battle whose outcome resolves all – all designed to appear heroic, to excite and gratify an audience… Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality – there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire… actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested.

The real heroes, it seems, are perhaps not those who make grand gestures or defeat foes but rather people like accountants: those who toil in obscurity and make the wheels of commerce and bureaucracy turn. Wallace called his last novel a “portrait of bureaucracy,” and the portrait offers is both horrifying and hopeful. His work explores this dialectic of ecstasy and crushing boredom, and the relation of freedom and rigid structure. Most intriguing is the way he understands the ecstasies and freedoms to be found even in the most boring and structured of scenarios—like working for the IRS.

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by Anis Shivani

First fisting faggot,
we must outlaw reproduction
of everyone with a natural blonde,
except other. It is scary knowing
he has that football
to carry around.

Michelle Obama shakin her thang
to Beyonce’s song,
you go girl!

Terrorist fist bump
devolves into intimate
fisting for the Obamas.
He's really saying 69 sacks,
because they were talking about football.

Her character is blonde,
wears J.Crew and Theory suits (just one).
Tagg Romney whispered an apology
to Obama for wanting to punch
Michelle Obama nude redtube
candy everywhere (no, I’m not talking
about the blonde rookie, you pervs).

Three down, two to go:
Obama gives veiled threat to violent Syrian.
To re-elect Obama would be like the Titanic
backing up and hitting the iceberg again.

Blonde has given up the noc list
and I’ve been Valerie Plame’d.
Timberlake says taking blonde corporal
to the Marine Ball “changed my life.”

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by Mara Jebsen

The idea of civilization, bit by bit, helps holds together opposites, whose only former identity existed in the opposition to the Other.–Edouard Glissant

No one has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.–Zelda Fitzgerald

America is always far away, particularly in November. In November in New York, the mind bends toward California, or any way of imagining how chaotically big the country is. Is it possible to fathom that all of these people really belong together? This November, we are asked to consider the narratives and ideas that yoke us so uncomfortably. But we all seem to know different narratives and to consider them differently. For this reason, we should reflect on the rather remarkable combination of faith, apathy and sophistication that prevents us from resorting to bloodshed if we find ourselves governed by a party we dislike.

For some reason, in November, I become transfixed by the image of a transcontinental train. I think of the train tracks spanning from New Orleans to Los Angeles, carrying lots of hopeful and deperate families during the second wave of the Great Migration. I try to imagine this moment for this population: the first unsegregated streets, these first palms, the first blue glimpse of the Pacific. It is a moment in our history I do not know enough about.

Personally, I feel most patriotic when I am listening to Bob Dylan or Ray Charles. So much of American music seems to contain, and melodically resolve, our violent narratives within it. It makes one vainly wish that music could be a model; could be the idea that holds opposites together. All citizens, even musicians and poets, are occasionally called upon to test how much the heart can hold. Some artists can even make a career of it. I think of Whitman, containing, stretching, containing. I want to tell him: I, too, contain multitudes, but they don't always get along.

To expand the container, to even name the sensation of holding in your consciousness the idea of multitudes, the geographic vastness of this place, the strangeness of belonging to it, is very difficult. One November I mashed-up “Dying Swan” by the Duke Quartet, a snippet of Dylan lyrics, and a poem first published at fogged clarity as “Mirages,” but now renamed “America is Always Far Away.” I offer it in this container because I think it sounds a little like what it feels like to be here, now, nervous and determined, imagining America.

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