Tyler Smith and David Bax host the film podcast Battleship Pretension. For over three years, Smith and Bax have explored on the show all aspects of cinema history, cinema appreciation, cinema technique, and cinema criticism, doing so with the freewheeling, humorous sensibility of the best late-night film school conversations.Colin Marshall originally conducted this interview on the public radio show and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes link]

To give people an idea of where you guys are coming from, we should start with your perspectives on film. What do you like? Your favorite filmmakers? Your defining film moments?

David Bax: I was drawn to film for the same reason that the sport I played when I was a kid was swimming: because it's not a team thing. Film is something you do in a dark room alone. It keeps you from having to talk to other people, and I was such an antisocial kid — it's not like they would have had me, that the social groups would have welcomed me in if I had applied. I wasn't a popular kid, so I watched movies all the time. The way I view films is very much personal, individual; I'm not really interested in the community aspect of it, which there is now with the internet. There's very much a community aspect. We're kind of on the outskirts of that, but it's not what got me into film. As far as defining moments, my favorite film of all time is Barton Fink. The reason is, I was at the grocery store video counter and saw the cover, and it had John Goodman on it. I always liked to watch comedies; I'm a comedy nerd as much as I am a movie nerd. I thought John Goodman was funny — I mean, King Ralph, you know —

Tyler Smith: He's very funny in Arachnophobia.

David Bax: He was. So I just picked it up, and it just blew my mind. It was so much more ambitious, otherworldly, and just plain old artistic than I Had come to expect from films. From that moment, that was my search. It was like a junkie looking for that high again. It also helped that this was the beginning of the age when the internet was readily available, so I could find discussions and writings about film. It was easy to research, and I had a library card.

You bring up a good way to frame this, which is that there's usually a film in any cinephile's life that was the one to expand their view of what film can do, that gave them new vistas, that first high you want to reach again. Tyler, what opened up your cinematic vistas?

Tyler Smith: It's odd; I have a very difficult time pinpointing a specific film or a specfic moment where I'm like, “This is what I want to do” or, “This my official passion.” I loved movies growing up. My parents went to a lot of movies. It was one of my favorite things to do. I saw as many movies as I could. I really loved them. Right around middle school, I started becoming very dissatisfied with the films aimed people at my age.

Which, at the time, were, like… ?

Tyler Smith: Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore. Don't get me wrong; looking back, they are very funny in moments.

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Intense battles are being waged over religion and its rightful place in society. There are debates over evolution and creationism, conflicts over the teaching of evolution in schools, and disagreement on matters of religious accommodation. People are passionate about their positions and the debates often get nasty. However, I think that the respective sides have more common ground than they realize.

Suppose you could choose either to maximize human rationality or to maximize human happiness. For most of us, even for the most strident advocates of reason and critical thinking, I suspect the choice would be happiness or well-being. Sam Harris, a well-known advocate of reason has suggested that maximizing human well-being ought to be the very foundation of our moral system. What would be the value of reason if it didn’t contribute to well-being?

Let’s assume that the value of reason ultimately lies in its ability to improve well-being. Reason and empiricism have brought us great scientific discoveries, lifesaving medicines, and technologies that make our lives longer and healthier. It’s undeniable that rationality can improve well-being.

It might seem, given these benefits, that improving rationality would improve well-being. But irrationality has its perks. Delusions can provide comfort. They can give us confidence, hope, or a sense of purpose. Superstitions can improve athletic performance, and psychics and astrologers can help people deal with the discomfort of not knowing what the future holds. The most rational objective, then, is not necessarily to have everyone be completely rational but rational to the extent that optimizes well-being.

If we are to be rational and scientific, we ought to appreciate the value of diversity and the role of evolution in shaping our minds. We are predisposed to delusional thinking because our brains have evolved this way; it was evolutionarily advantageous. It is human nature to be somewhat delusional. To expect people to be perfectly rational is to ask us to defy our own nature. It isn’t reasonable.

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by Michael Blim

The scene is a country cottage about three weeks ago. Family are over for a birthday celebration. Three little nephews are running everywhere with their mother and my sister’s adolescent dog, a Golden Retriever version of Scooby Doo, running after them. Their young adult cousins are absorbed in checking their iPhones and Blackberries. All collide.

Caleb, an incandescent bulb of a boy age five, stops abruptly and turns toward the IPhoners. He starts to rap and vamp to the Travis McCoy’s “I Wanna Be a Millionaire” playing on the IPhone.

In case you don’t know it, the song goes like this (pretty much):

No matter that “Forbes” comes out “Ford’s” Magazine in Caleb’s rendition. He’s got the right idea. He knows who’s a billionaire. By five years old, he already has a little mental list.

So do we all. The rich perform a pageant daily in American life. Their comings and goings, heralded on the TV gossip shows and hawked in the supermarket tabloids and in the (rich and famous) people pages of our dailies, mark our own. Their quotidian facts become our memory sticks. The rich become celebrities, celebrities become rich, and both in disproportionate numbers become politicians and run the country.

From their post at the apex of society, they are the objects of our desires. Or rather having what they have would make us like them, and that put us at the apex of society too. Even a five year old gets it.

Tocqueville found American avarice both remarkable and disturbing. Walden Pond exiles aside, not much has changed since the early days of the Republic. If anything, as Americans generally have become poorer over the past quarter century, their desire for wealth has increased.

As riches are hard to come by for everyone save a few, celebrity has become the Holy Grail. Today’s run-of-the-mill game shows like Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy are throwbacks to another era when a Groucho Marx joke and a couple grand framed the limits of our aspirations. They are quaint by comparison with the current reality show-contests. Contestants suffer every indignity imaginable in pursuit of fame, as well as of fortune. The hope is that one will deliver the other: even if being the “biggest loser” doesn’t make you rich, the celebrity gained in the contest might.

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By Maniza Naqvi

For weeks now the crescendo of bigotry has been steadily rising in volume and vitriol on the issue of whether mosques, Muslims and their faith Islam are legitimate in America. In this rising temperature in a country at war with itself and the world, in the season of elections, the practice of citizens of the United States for upholding the constitution is under test as is their tolerance of their American idea of society. However, this vitriol was only inevitable given what it has taken to get to this point. Americans have been marinated since 9/11 in relentless relaying of hatred, misinformation and fear by opportunists of all kinds: the fraudulent celebrity journalists and terrorism experts with their hyena grins and black turtleneck sweaters to celebrity experts on Islam marinated in their own complexities and ambitions. Much profit has been made of this which can only be sustained through prophets of every creed on the make.

Who the hell is “Imam” Feisal Abdul Rauf? Why this honorific title of “Imam”? What does it mean? Is Mr. Rauf the scion of a religiously anointed family and therefore referred to by his followers as their imam? Does he have such a following which refers to him as an imam or has appointed him their leader? Shi’as have Imams—but unless he is Imam Mahdi and he is not, he cannot be the Shi’a Imam—and unless he is the Aga Khan he cannot be the Ismaili Imam. Or is he, as the word can also be used, the caretaker of a specific mosque? Such an imam is responsible for the upkeep of the bricks and mortar of a mosque—and is paid through donotions for the job of leading the prayers by simply standing in front of the congregation to say and do exactly what the rest of the congregation is doing in the prescribed way. Such an imam of a mosque leads the prayer—he is not a leader. He does not design a prayer or a sermon. Is Mr. Feisal Rauf referred to as imam in that context? If so then he is not Imam Feisal. He is Mr. Rauf the imam of such and such mosque. In which case, the question becomes: in which mosque in New York is he an imam?

Is Mr. Rauf being referred to as an imam in anticipation of a mosque that doesn’t exist yet? Because he certainly is not a caretaker of any of the dozens of mosques in Manhattan or of any of the hundreds all over New York or in the Tri-state area or anywhere in the United States.

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By Namit Arora

An early goal of British imperialists in India was to create a class of local elites in their own image. They would be, wrote Thomas Macaulay, ‘interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.’ An elite class did emerge, not surprisingly from the socially dominant upper-caste Hindus of urban India.

As early as 1873, the social reformer Jotirao Phule had criticized the early colonial model of ‘high class education’ for creating a ‘virtual monopoly of all higher offices … by the Brahmins.’[1] These elites, chin-deep in caste identities, saw themselves as innately superior to other Indians, mirroring the class- and race-based prejudices of the British. No wonder they got along so well. In fact, European Orientalists, armed with new theories about the origins of Sanskrit and the influx of light-skinned people into the Subcontinent, saw these caste elites as their long separated Aryan brethren. The latter, only too glad with this association, soon emerged as native informants and collaborators in interpreting ‘Indian’ society and culture, and in shaping a historiography that selectively glorified its past and framed it as largely ‘tolerant’, ‘spiritual’, and ‘nonviolent’, except when rudely disrupted by Muslim invaders.

Later, when these elites opposed the British, they used the same language of political rights and liberalism that the Europeans preached at home but didn’t practice in their colonies. It was this class, led by Anglicized lawyers and bureaucrats, that succeeded the British. In the first Indian Parliament in 1952, Brahmins, who comprise less than 5 percent of the population, cornered almost 25 percent of the directly elected seats; altogether the upper castes, about 20 percent of the population, claimed over 85 percent of the seats.[2]

In a representative democracy, the idea of ‘representation’ implies that a politician, say, an upper-caste Hindu male, can and should fairly represent the interests of the entire electorate, including the lower castes, religious minorities, and women. But one can persuasively argue that this did not happen in the early decades of the Indian republic. Deep disparities along caste lines remained; religious minorities grew alienated and even declined socioeconomically; the vast majority of women remained marginal as before in political and economic realms. India was effectively a democracy of the few, by the few, for the few.

Since the 1970s, India has seen the rise of caste-based politics. Built on the idea that only a member of your own (or proximate) caste can represent your interests, its primary driver was the failure of upper-caste politicians to represent the lower castes, and the latter realizing the power of their vote. Votes began fragmenting along caste lines, not the least because—besides being central to one’s social identity—caste had long shaped one’s share of opportunity, deprivation, and discrimination in life.

When the lower castes began mobilizing and putting up their own candidates, the elites grew anxious and began decrying the rise of caste-based politics and ‘vote banks’. ‘So regressive!’ they complained, ‘a betrayal of the spirit and ideals of democracy!’ But of course, being founders and long-time practitioners of a supremacist politics of caste, with hardly an egalitarian bone in their bodies, they had played a rigged game all along, starting with language itself. ‘Vote banks’ were others, created by the new ‘caste-based parties’; the elites didn’t see their own upper-caste folk as a ‘vote bank’, though they all voted for upper-caste parties like the Congress and the BJP. A sense of entitlement prevented them from seeing that they had, contrary to a democratic ethos, long monopolized political power and opportunities based largely on caste. So now, their anxiety over the emerging caste-based politics betrayed, above all, a visceral fear—fear of the ‘impure’ masses, fear of losing their privileges, fear of being overrun by the boors. In no area is this anxiety more evident than in the debate on caste-based affirmative action, aka reservations, in public sector jobs and college admissions.

Writing in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Frantz Fanon lamented ‘the unpreparedness of the elite, the lack of practical ties between them and the masses, their apathy, and, yes, their cowardice at the crucial moment in the struggle.’ These elites, he wrote, ‘simultaneously resisted the insidious agenda of colonialism and paved the way for the emergence of the current struggles.’

Fanon had in mind the post-colonial elites of North Africa, but his remark is no less apt for the Indians. India needed a real program of socioeconomic justice—via, say, land reform, universal education, and fighting caste discrimination. What legislation the elites did pass they didn’t push far enough. Instead, they consolidated their domination over politics, the economy, education, cultural institutions, and the media—for instance, the richest 10 percent monopolize more land now than in 1951.[3] Having done quite well for itself, self-congratulation has come easy to this class. In an attempt to restore some balance, this insider, dear reader, will now relate to you its benightedness.

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By Aditya Dev Sood

Brownian motion at a macro-scale. That's what my working week feels like these days. On Monday I flew from Delhi to Ahmedabad, the next day to Bangalore, a couple of days later to Patna via Calcutta. And now, after a tense hour's delay in Patna, while this decrepit Air-India plane was late arriving into that one-room box of an airport, we're finally off and away. We'll land in Delhi with just the right sliver of time for me to catch the only direct flight to Goa today. We'll be going for a friend's 40th birthday bash on the beach this holiday weekend.

There's hardly anyone on the flight, but they've bunched us up in some artificial pattern near the middle of the fuselage. The whole thing is like a too-vivid dream from my childhood, from the yucky yellow-orange of the seats to the squat, curvy stewardesses in saris that remind me of my teachers in elementary school. They're coming around now with a meal cart. Sir, veg or non-veg for your breakfast? shakahari, the guy next to me says, and then leans over me to receive his tray with shaking, uncertain hands. I'm thinking I'll have the parantha-s as well.

How does one open this, he asks me, holding up the micro-package of jam. I demonstrate by separating the aluminum layer from the plastic layer of my own packet and slowly pulling them apart. He's still going at it several times before I offer him my own packet. Now he's got the same problem with the butter serving, but instead of struggling with it he just offers it to me to open for him. I go back to my parantha-s, when a few minutes later he offers me his ketchup packet. I put my parantha down, wipe my greasy fingers and try to find the entry tear in the packet. The slit I'm making curves away from the pulpy body of the packet towards its edge, making no wound in the sac of ketchup. I hand it back to him wearily, knowing I won't be able to do any better. nahin hua bhai, kya karen? He puts it back down on his tray despondently.

Now he turns to me holding up the fruit cup, and I'm wondering if he's for real. I mean it's just a plastic airplane service cup, aged and flecked and speaking of that misplaced parsimony that only Air-India still excels in, but elegantly taped up all round with saran-wrap. iska kya hai, bus phad dijiye, I tell him. He looks at the object like its form, meaning and logic are only now becoming clear to him, his mind is reading it, and his whole body nods, yes yes, I can just tear the plastic and get to the fruit inside!

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The Space Between Now and Then

A breeze through the window at my back
now that summer has reached its august stage,
is cool, and the apple tree outside another window sways
near the purple plum and I as usual bring you coffee

and you’re still here as the cat springs from floor to sill
still here as crow caws on her breakfast hunt
still here as the conversation of birds begins again
still here as the scent of cut grass seeps through the screen
and I think of all the reasons you might not be;
ones heavy with grief and fear

Your twin wanes like a moon-slim crescent
but you remain still here, still here
against odds, waking, dear as the sun,
which is here again
rising, still warming, still here because
what seems temporal is everlasting
as the space between now and then

by Jim Culleny
August 4, 2010

Justin E. H. Smith

Be quick, Isaac! We haven't much time. At Five of the Clock old Doctor Squibb will be dissecting a Porpess at Queen's Lane Caffè-House. That's right, Isaac. A Porpess. A Grampus in miniature. And he's promised to donate the Blubber of it to whomsoever agrees to assist him. That will be you, Isaac. You will have enough Sea-Tallow to keep your candle burning throughout the Winter, so you can scribble, whatsoever it is that you scribble, late into the Night. Are you ready, then, Scribbler?

Quaery the First: Whether any have read the Treatise of the learnèd German physician Theophilus Glaubnix, entitled Alimentatio per rectum, which, being English'd, offers instructions for the feeding of the sick and infirm through their very anus. You've heard right, Isaac. The aft shaft. The anneau d'enfer. And whether it be in truth a serviceable port of Entry for e'en the bravest of Suppers, as Chops and Ale, or only for flaccid Puddings, bland Peas, &c.

Whether, moreover, it be true what we have heard, that in some parts of America the common Men and Women oppose the chirurgical inducement of abortio at every stage of a Woman's graviditas, e'en before the moment of empsychosis (which is universally known to occur upon the fortieth Day after the Parents' copulatio) wherein a humane Soul be divinely transduc'd into what before was naught but an homunculus having the outward Conformation of a li'l Manny-kin, but sharing no-wise in Man's true nature. Whether they have ever seen an Homuncule aborted in the first or second Month that is capable of e'en the roughest Imitation of humane Action, as going about in Hats and Cloaks, or playing a simple round of Sice-Deuce.

Whether there be any justice to the interdiction placed upon Marriage between Cousins in some of the American colonies, in view of the great Probability resulting therefrom of Monstrous births. And whether the Book of the Learnèd American doctor Percival Gudgeon is correct to assert, that a marriage twixt a man and his cousin's cousin yields up what is called a half-wit; while a marriage twixt the same man and his father's brother's daughter yields a quarter-wit; twixt him and his father's sister's daughter, an eighth-wit; twixt him and his mother's brother's daughter, a sixteenth-wit; and, finally, twixt him and his mother's sister's daughter, a pitiable creature: a thirty-second-wit. Whether, finally, it is true that marriage to one's very own Sister yields up naught but a Nit-Wit.

Whether it be true what we have heard, that on the Western side of far Tierra del Fuoco, Men may now marry Men, and Maidens Maidens. And whether this be an effect of their Antarctick situation, which bringeth about sundry other curiosities, as the backwards rotation of the aquatickal Vortex that follows upon the chasse d'eau in every house-hold's Toilette, the Going of handsom'ly costum'd birds upon two Feet only, entirely destitute of Flight, and still other topsey-turvey absurdities.

Whether the Irish be spontaneously generated from the the moist Peat that covers their Isle, or whether they along with the other Keltish nations be translated from the Italick lands, which Hypothesis doth better explain their roughness of Aspect, their weakness for Popery, &c.

Whether also there be such a geographical Boundary as is sometimes call'd the 'Hair-Belt', dividing the Lands to the South and the East –wherein the Men, nay, and e'en the Women, are cover'd with thick Bristles upon Fore-Arm, Chest, and Chin– from the Lands to the North and the West, where these Parts remain smooth and Milky on all but the coarsest Peasants.

Whether the horrible Rumour we have heard hath some Truth in it, that in places of Industry and Commerce Men are now requir'd to take leave of the very Labour for which they are paid in order to participate in 'Work-Shoppes' that instruct them in all manner of effeminate Foolishness, as how to appreciate working together with men from different Nations (yea, e'en the Nations of the Hair-Belt!), how to respect the unique Skills of cretins and dullards, how to refrain from groping e'en the pinkest and most swollen Bosoms of their washerwomen and tailoresses, &c. O Isaac, how quickly these 'Work-Shoppes' must degenerate into Laughter and Ribaldry!

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Jack Hues is the lead singer and, alongside Nick Feldman, primary collaborator of the rock group Wang Chung. Throughout the 1980s, Wang Chung released such albums as Points on the Curve, Mosaic, and The Warmer Side of Cool, as well as the soundtrack to William Friedkin’s film To Live and Die in L.A.. Now they’re back recording and touring again, having recently completed one U.S. tour and about to launch another in support of their new double EP, Abducted by the 80s. Colin Marshall originally conducted this interview on the public radio show and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3 with music] [iTunes link]

I've listened to this title track, “Abducted by the 80s”, a bunch of times. I'm not noticing a whole lot of fondness for the eighties coming through. I think about bands who first got popular in the eighties: some of them are using the eighties as their meal ticket, as nostalgia act; some of them — I think of Gary Numan, who would kill himself first. What are you feelings on the eighties?

The lyrics, if that's the right term, is a poem by a guy called Rob G. Rob is a sort of stand-up comedian/poet. I first came across this poem of his, “Abducted By the 80s”, when my daughter Violet went to see him when she was up at university. She said, “Dad, you've got to hear this track. It's so funny. You'll love it.” That very acidic take he's got on the eighties did appeal to me. He is relentlessly negative about it. But what's also interesting is just how resonant everything he says is as it passes through your consciousness. With the eighties, maybe now, it's not whether you love it or hate it; it's just how you reconcile yourself to it.

He mentions many things people who were coming up in those days might consider embarrassing: the new romantic shoes, the Mel Gibson mullet. Often, people will say, especially in the U.K., “Oh, think back to when I was this terrible twentysomething in the eighties, I listened to the Human League” — I like the Human League, I'm not calling them out — “doing cocaine, doing all this.” Wang Chung is not among the things that embarrass them, typically. The name has become a catchphrase. No one seems to actually regret listening to Wang Chung. Do you get that same impression?

Well… no. I shouldn't say that, should I? And it's very nice of you to present it in that way. At the time, we did walk a line between being a sort of art-rock band — especially, that came out on To Live and Die in L.A. — but “Everybody Have Fun Tonight” is a mainstream record. We were intent that that was what we wanted to do. Some people find what we did a little on the irritating side, but what's interesting these days is that, with distance, certain things — even if they were irritating at the time — get this cloak of being “classic,” if you like. “Everybody Have Fun Tonight” falls into that.

It's an interesting time to be revisiting those tunes and producing new music under the Wang Chung logo. We're pleased we've remained enigmatic enough as a band to be able to continue to redefine ourselves in 2010. We haven't quite got ourselves pinned down everywhere. There are still people who give us the time of day, so that's great.

I find this fascinating, this issue of redefinition. Not 20 minutes ago, I was at a coffee shop getting a cup of tea, and on the speakers came Rick Astley with “Together Forever”. That guy's big hit came within a year or two of yours, and he's now treated as a human absurdity in many quarters. Wang Chung is certainly not. I don't mean to say nobody says, “Oh, I was listening to 'Everybody Have Fun Tonight', wasn't I a dumb youth?” But they don't treat you like Rick Astley, by any means.

No, no. But wasn't there something Rick was involved in recently, some online thing, that didn't do his reputation any good?

It's a prank you play online where you tell somebody a link is something enticing, but it ends up being one of his music videos.

Fortunately, we've avoided that one so far.

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Review of Partha Chatterjee's Empire and Nation: Selected Essays. Edited by Nivedita Menon. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. 368 pp.

By Ahmad Saidullah

I. Reclaiming The Nationalist Imagination

History may, as Sembene Ousmane alleged, create its own images but the quest is to find who owns these representations.

In the opening essay of Empire and Nation taken from his book The Nation and its Fragments, Partha Chatterjee agrees with Benedict Anderson’s thesis in Imagined Communities that nations, far from being objective entities, imagine themselves into being. However, he questions Anderson’s belief that all nations obey the western rationalist imagination in defining themselves.

Chatterjee asks “if nationalisms in the rest of the world have to choose their imagined community from certain ‘modular’ forms made available to them by Europe and the Americas, what do they have left to imagine?” Postcolonial societies, he argues, have been consigned forever by such views to, in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s phrase, “the waiting room of history” as consumers rather than producers of modernity.

Chatterjee suggests frameworks for studying different ways of seeing, knowing, experiencing and mapping India, with its complex past and contradictions and its own specific modalities of “our modernity,” that arise from the local imagination.

Chatterjee’s academic and epistemological aims are to distance Indian historiography from the knowledge generated by the British empirical tradition which places a universalized western subject at the centre of its discourses on India and to challenge establishment historians in Cambridge and Delhi who study the country through the agency and actions of its elite.

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Greil Marcus is a music journalist, critic, and observer of America. Though they span countless subjects, Marcus’ past books have been rooted in examinations of icons like Bob Dylan, the Sex Pistols, Elvis Presley, and Bill Clinton. In his latest release, When that Rough God Goes Riding: Listening to Van Morrison, he takes on the Irish singer-songwriter’s vast, varied catalogue, documenting his own responses to Morrison’s music as well as the far-flung cultural and psychological resonances it sets off. Colin Marshall originally conducted this interview on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes]

How much should we read into the fact that this book is about not the work of an American, but the work of an Irishman? Of course you've written about U.K. artists before — say, the Sex Pistols. Should we consider this a departure from your normal thread?

I don't know if it's a departure, or, if it were, if that would be of any interest or significance. I spent nine year writing a book about the European avant-garde. America is as subject I will never leave behind, but Van Morrison is a voice, someone I've been listening to for 45 years. It's not really important where he comes from.

I want to get an idea of the very beginning of your own career listening to him. Where does it start?

I was 20 years old, living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Van Morrison, with his band Them or on his own, had always been extraordinarily popular in the Bay Area. His song “Gloria”, which everybody knows, in 1965 was a national hit by a Chicago Band called Shadows of Knight. It was only in California that Them had the hit, that their verson got the most airplay. Now, of course, nobody remembers the Shadows of Knight, their version never gets played on the radio, and Van Morrison still does. I was here. It was on the radio. Not just that song, but “Mystic Eyes” and “Here Comes the Night”. They were all glamorous and big, and they had a desperation I wasn't hearing anywhere else. I was captivated.

That desperation — I want to hear more. How distinct was that from the musical context you heard Van Morrison in?

He sounded like somebody pursued, as if there was something at his back he had to get away from. There was a sense of jeopardy in his music. Whether that came from something personal or something he heard in John Lee Hooker that he particularly liked and wanted to emulate, I don't know. It became, as any stylistic theme or element becomes after a while, a thing in itself. Its source, whatever might've sparked it in the first place, becomes irrelevant. It becomes part of your style, your personality. That happened very quickly with him.

This gets at the type of criticism you write, and of the way you approach Van Morrison's work I so much enjoy. It's that it doesn't matter whether Van Morrison, in his life, actually did feel pursued, or what events might have made him feel desperation. Safe to say it doesn't interest you if the events of his life contributed to his music? It's about the music itself and nothing more, correct?

That's absolutely right. I don't have any interest in the private lives of the people I am intrigued by and that I might end up writing about. To trace anybody's work, what they produce, what they put into the world, what you or I respond to, to somebody's life, their biography, is utterly reductionist. It's simply a way of protecting ourselves from the imagination, from the threat of the imagination. Some people are very uncomfortable with the idea they can be moved, they can be threatened, they can be thrilled by something that is just made up.

John Irving, the novelist, once said to me, “You know why that is? It's because people who don't have an imagination are terrified of people who do.” I don't know if that's true, but we live in culture of the memoir, where we're not supposed to believe anything unless it's documented that it actually happened. Never mind that most memoirs are more fictional than novels. We want that imprimatur: “This really happened. This is really true.” You can respond to it. You can feel “okay” about being moved by it. Whereas with art, whether music, movies, novels, painting, ultimately, to be moved by art, by something somebody has made up, is, from a certain perspective, to be tricked. To be fooled. You made me cry, and you just did it like you hypnotized me. I love that. Not everybody does.

This is intriguing when I think about what you quote Van Morrison as saying. You talk about interviewers asking him, “Who's Madame George? What's this and that about? What's the real source?” One of the lines that has so stuck with me that Morrison said was that these are fictions, short stories in musical form. It seems like, when an artist says something is fiction, it validates being tricked, in a sense. But people don't tend to read it that way?

I think people don't believe it. I was very struck by that statement, which he made just a year or so ago on a radio. I was listening to this program on NPR, and that's what he's saying. I think, for a lot of people, that must have come off as defensive or evasive. How could anything like the song “Madame George” on the album Astral Weeks, an album that came out in 1968, a song people have been listening to, discovering, passing on all that time, a song that has a life in the world, how can anything rendered with such passion and with such detail be made up? It's got to be true. There has to be a real Madame George in the life of the composer. That's one way of looking at things. It isn't mine. With very few exceptions, it isn't anything I want to read about, people investigating work on those terms.

Look, there are all kinds of people who suffer great traumas, who have life-changing experiences that become touchstones for them. Maybe they lost a parent or were in a terrible accident, laid up for five years, couldn't do anything but think. We say, “Well, that's what made this person who he or she is. That's what let do the work.” You know, all sorts of people experience traumas, and few people go on to produce something other people pay attention to. You can't trace any given work somebody produces to anything that happened in that person's life. It doesn't work.
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“Despite its mystic chic the square root of pi is indeterminate
and senseless, like many other things.” –Roshi Bob

On the Difficult Terminal Illness of a Beloved:

Black holes, Big Bang, Bada Bing,
quantum space, worm holes, theory of strings;
space is a smorgasbord of metaphors of things

Inside out, upside down, left and right,
geometry, calculus, depth and height;
Pythagoras’ spheres all sing in the dead of night

Who went where? What was what? Which was when?
Fortune and fame, persecution and plot, since time began
history alliterates again and again

Two plus two, four less four, nine times nine,
the square root of pi, theorems and proofs, the curve of a sine;
math is a simile for the shape of time

Bacteria, wisteria, DNA,
diphtheria, alstroemeria, the end of days;
biology’s an accident of come-what-mays
…………………………

Jim Culleny, 7/31/10

By Maniza Naqvi

Like sugar in tea.  It’s all good. Top kills and static kills, concrete and chemicals—have fixed everything, blocked it all, dissolved it all.  It’s all good.  Like sugar in tea– like blood in my veins– like the heroine in my blood-like the enemy in my head and like the prayers on my lips.  All the comforting things which keep me where I need to be: in that safe place reassured that it’s all for the good. No need to connect any dots.  

But when the sun sets on the harbor turning its waters the color of molten gold and then liquid black, like the uninterrupted, robust, gush that flows at the gas pump— and the dying light makes lovely the colors of the ships heavy with their goods, their cargo—waiting to leave—wheat and maize for food aid, tanks and men off to war on aircraft carriers and this stuff all this stuff in oil tankers—  then, —I think of him—how I kissed his face and said goodbye, hugged him and sent him from this port in a war ship to defend our way of life.  Because that’s what men like you told me—that sons like mine were doing: defending our way of life.  You told mothers like me and sons like mine that this was a fight for our freedom and liberty and theirs too. That we were as you always had told us, good.  Women like me, we were the true warriors, you said.  You cheered us on, gave us rallying speeches that Sparta had depended on women like me: women who bore children to be sent to war and who cheered their men on to do battle.  I took great pride in that, in being a warrior, defending my homeland from the enemy while sending off my men to battle them, over there, in theirs. And then came the messenger and a short while later, my son, he returned, my son. In a flag draped coffin.  Nothing else no one else came after that. The enemy, you said who would attack did not come for me to fight. And now here it comes, in this gulf, the stuff for which his blood was spilt.  This gulf that he has left is filled with my rage and anguish and sorrow. Here it comes, threatening our way of life: our goods, our god. 
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Recently, my husband received an email from a very casual acquaintance and wondered where this person lived. He Googled them, found their address and was presented, by Google Street view, with a picture of their house, and all within the space of 2 minutes. This exercise caused me to comment to him, “it must be really different dating these days” – we've been together 15 years – “it's so much harder for anyone to lie anymore.” I think about the tall tales I was told during my dating years, and that doesn't include the stories I didn't come to realize were exaggerations, at the very least. But now, you can Google someone and find out where they work, their political affiliation, see photos of their house, maybe their wife and kids! And that's before you follow them on Twitter or friend them on Facebook.

It is true that human beings will always manage to adapt their behavior somewhat to the new technological circumstances, and I imagine that this new potential transparency doesn’t mean that men and women no longer lie about aspects of their lives on dates (or at any other time). However, I think it’s also true that the next generation will grow up in a world that is a radically different social experience. Whether its dating, working, college acceptance or friendship, the internet and social media are changing everything. It is now almost a given that part of a job interview process (and in some cases a college interview process) will include a review of an applicant’s digital profile. This raises the issue of digital memory; the web forgets nothing, no matter how much you want it to. The New York Times ran a piece recently about this very issue and nascent attempts to address this using, amongst other tools, an expiration date for certain digital content. Even if some of these methods are implemented, there is no doubt that our children are growing up in a world where it is increasingly difficult to run from a checkered past and remake a less than desirable reputation.

Will our children understand loneliness in the sense that previous generations did? In the world of texting, Facebook, Foursquare, etc., continuous connectivity to many other people is now the norm, however superficial these relationships may or may not be. If this kind of connectivity isn’t sufficient, there are various services, both paid and free, that are connecting people with new potential “friends”, or at least acquaintances: www.rentafriend.com, a relatively new service, allows users to do just that, rent a friend for an hour or so. Craigslist, long a means for people to connect for casual hookups, or to advertise a yard sale, also has a section called Strictly Platonic, which enables users to find someone to connect with for everything from phone chats regarding, “jobs, men, losing weight, goals we hope to accomplish”, to finding someone to go to the theater with.

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A Paris Review-style interview with E.O. Wilson

A score of books. Two Pulitzers. Papers that defined entire fields. So why did biologist Edward O. Wilson bother writing a novel? Because people need stories, he says. Wilson hopes his fictional debut from earlier this year, Anthill—about a young man from the South, militant ants, and the coupled fate of humans and nature—will help spark a conservation revolution.

Wilson met me at his Harvard office—a three-roomed cavern at the university’s natural history museum. “Harvard treats emeritus professors very well,” he observed. He showed me part of the world’s largest collection of ant papers, and a copy of his portrait for the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. He wore a blue/black checked shirt and slouched when he sat. His sentences were criss-crossed with asides and qualifications, and he squeezed in a few startlingly good impressions. Throughout our talk he sipped iced tea—or as Wilson, a native Alabaman, might say, sweet tea. When he spilled some on the table, he swept it onto the floor with his hand. “The difference between a book review and an interview,” he mused right before we started, “is like the difference between a handshake and a shot in the back.”

Edward Wilson: Fire away, and I’ll try to get back answers of decent interest, brevity, and so on.

Sam Kean: I’ve heard you say you have a policy of never taking any vacations. Was writing this book sort of a vacation for you?

EW: I would say in one sense I never take a vacation. I never go on a fishing trip. I never go to the beach except to study the ants who live in the sand. So in that sense I’ve never taken a vacation in my life. But I consider that most of the work I’ve done in my life is one continuous vacation. I don’t know how I’ve managed to get away with being paid for what I do. Because to me it’s a constant adventure and thrill.

And I have the advantage as a scientist, especially when working on ants, to do a search wherever I go. Even when I took my family on vacations—for them—and of course, I had to have leisure time with them!—I could do research wherever we went, because ants are ubiquitous. Even if you went to the beach somewhere, there are ant species. After all, they make up more than half the biomass of all insects. And ants are found form the arctic almost to the ends of the southern continents…

But here I am, nattering on about ants. We were talking about the book. Go ahead.

SK: So did you consider the book a vacation from science or a continuation of it?

EW: All three! That is, it combined all three of my key interests. One is science. Second is conservation of biodiversity. Third, is an exciting new experience: to plunge into a different mode of thinking and writing. Although maybe I should say that the mode of thinking is really not that different.

SK: Not that different from…?

EW: Science. Because the ideal scientist, I’ve always thought, is a person who thinks like a poet (or, if you wish, a novelist), who works like a bookkeeper, and—if he’s fortunate to be able to do so—who writes like a good journalist in explaining what has been found. But the difference between the creative process and writing science is that you don’t have the bookkeeper period.

On the other hand, if you have a science base, which this book certainly does, with the ant part, you can accomplish certain things. It’s the first time anyone has written of the cycles of the ant colonies as the ants themselves experience it—as best we can understand it from the science. And I think this is the first novel—it’s certainly the first southern novel—but it’s one of the very few American novels to pay close attention to the environment. Particularly the diversity of life in the environment.

Most novelists deal with the environment in phrases like, Went through the dark woods, looking for a dark path, you know, or, Found peace in a meadow filled with beautiful blooming flowers. That’s about as far as most novelists go. What I’ve done is to make the environment—and particularly that treasured habitat that a young Raphael Semmes Cody, the hero, spends the entire book designing and scheming and fighting to save—I made it virtually a character in the novel. Treated it as an entity, the ecosystem, almost as a character. So that in a sense it comes full circle to your question: The book has a lot of science in it.
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Verizon's street poster for Inception

Ben Walters (BW) & J. M. Tyree (JMT) have been talking about movies together since 1995, often amicably. They co-wrote a critical appreciation of The Big Lebowski for The British Film Institute’s Film Classics book series. They shared notes – via email, chat, and document sharing – on Christopher Nolan's Inception, in which Leonardo DiCaprio plays Dom Cobb, a corporate spy who retrieves secrets by invading targets' dreams. JMT watched it in San Francisco and BW saw it in London.

Bath of Dreamings

JMT: Here's a mainstream picture we both looked forward to watching, Inception, Christopher Nolan’s summer hit. It's a trap to worry overly about a Hollywood blockbuster being a Hollywood blockbuster, but I feel baffled by the critical reaction. The people next to me at the multiplex were loudly oohing and ahhing over the film as though it were a display of fireworks. And since then I’ve talked to several very smart people who enjoyed the film. What did I miss?

BW: I've got to admit I'm not quite sure. Maybe people like having their legs pulled? With sumptuous production design?

JMT: The new Film Quarterly (Summer, 2010) has a thoughtful book review by Martin Fradley about the state of the contemporary film industry. It talks about Hollywood's “new auteurs” – deal-makers, producers, agents, and distributors. Maybe that's Christopher Nolan at this point, a corporate auteur, the total bundle – which is intriguing given how weird his films are.

BW: In a way I think that's the most interesting aspect of Inception – he has the clout and the industrial nous to mount a massive shaggy dog story like this. And it's certainly another exploration of his pet themes – the ways memory, identity and narrative shape our lived reality.

JMT: He doesn’t really “do” joyful moments of intimacy. Or humor.

Undone Minds

BW: No one comes to Nolan for hugs or chuckles. His films are meant to be conventionally satisfying riddle movies, by and large, within which frame he can explore more genuinely upsetting ideas of identity. When it works, it makes you question whether you actually have any right to your opinion about yourself. When it doesn't, it comes off as dull, pretentious, over-designed guff.

JMT: My frustration watching Inception was that it barely explores the fascinating pathways opened by its own premise.

BW: Yes, I had a similar feeling…

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Steven Moore is an author, a critic, and a former managing editor of Dalkey Archive Press and the Review of Contemporary Fiction. In his latest book, the first volume of The Novel: An Alternative History, Moore traces the development of long, adventurous fiction from its origin to the year 1600, paying special attention to unusual works that make innovative use of language. Colin Marshall originally conducted this interview on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes]

It's a remark people have made about the book, and that I believe you've also made yourself: it is called The Novel: An Alternative History, but it could also be called A History of the Alternative Novel. How true is that?

In my mind, I was doing two things at once. First of all, it's an alternative to the conventional history of the novel, which begins in 18th-century England and goes up to about 1920 and then James Joyce comes along and throws a monkey wrench into everything and invents the avant-garde novel. The problem with that is, the novel actually started way back in ancient Greece, and the avant-garde novel that Joyce allegedly invented has always been a property. There's crazy, avant-garde, weird, experimental novels going back almost to the very beginning. I'm writing about these ancient works, but all along I'm defending modern, innovative fiction, which often gets a bad rap. I want to point out that these modern avant-garde things are not deviations from the norm, but have always been part of the novel.

This opens up a big issue of just how it's come to be that a traditional history of the novel has become so narrow. This book of yours, the first part ends well before the traditional history begins. How much do you have to modify the “normal” definition of the novel to go back as far as you do.

It depends on what you mean by normal. The dictionary, and E.M. Forster in his famous Aspects of the Novel, says that a novel is any work of fiction longer than 50,000 words, or any book-length work of fiction. If you take that as your definition, you can go back as far as I do. However, you're right, some modern critics want to narrow that down to: a novel has to be realistic, it has to have a certain amount of psychological depth, it has to be set against a recognizable social or economic background, et cetera, et cetera. Why they want to do that, I don't know. I gues they wanted to distinguish the novel written by Flaubert or Henry James from something written in the Middle Ages, so they've come up with all these notions. If you just go by a basic definition, which most would agree, that a novel is just a book-length work of fiction, that opens all sorts of possibilities.

Someone who isn't familiar with this talk about what defines a novel, I'm sure they'll be surprised when they read your book, especially the introduction. They'll find out that, indeed, there has been some argument over what constitutes a proper novel. How closely were you following that before you set into this enormous project, the history of the novel?

I wasn't so much following arguments about the novel as I was simply noticing, throughout my life, that I kept stumbling across these older works of fiction that looked like novels to me, even though that's not what I learned in college. In college, the novel started in the 18th century. In bookstores, I would come across The Tale of Genji, an ancient Japanese novel, or Petronius' Satyricon, which comes from the very first century, or an Icelandic saga like Nial's Saga. I would look at them and say, well, this is fiction, book-length. They certainly looked like novels. I was responding to that, rather than following the academic debates that have been going on for the last century or two.

Starting this project, at what point in your research were you able to find a beginning for works that look like novels, to your own mind?

I knew there were ancient Greek novels. I'd seen a big fat book published by the University of California press called The Collected Ancient Greek Novels. Then I realized Nietzsche once compared Plato's dialogues to early novels, and I thought that was interesting. I came across a book of ancient Egyptian tales, and there's some ancient Egyptian scholars who say these are pretty much novels in everything but name; they have all the properties of novels. It was just looking at ancient fiction, which I've always had a slight interest in, and realizing a lot of those early writings had a lot of properties of the novel. Of course, there was no such thing as the novel per se then, so they were never labeled as such, but if you treat them as the fictional adventures of some character going through a set of dramatic sequences, which is what most novels are, you can look at something like Gilgamesh and say, “Yeah, this resembles a novel,” even though that's not what the author may have set out to do.

What about the earliest fictions you include in the book fascinate you the most?

The daring of them. This goes back to your first question about alternative fiction. These early fictions, especially Egyptian and Assyrian stuff, they're almost like avant-garde magical realist novels. They're more like García Marquez than John Updike, say. The freedom I saw there really interests me. This is the same freedom avant-garde writers adopt. As soon as literature started becoming written, critics came up with rules for poetry and drama. Anyone who was writing tales or longer fictions were pretty much free to do whatever they wanted. There was this real spirit of experimentalism, to use a modern term, in that early fiction, that fit in perfectly with my whole thesis: the avant-garde novel is not a modern aberration, but goes all the way back to the beginning. If anything, the conventional novel is the aberration. That's a very late development.

Could you say that we have it backwards, that what we see as normal is one current of many in terms of the way the novel has gone? We've focused so much on one subset, that has seemed to us to be the only thing?

Exactly. Without question, it's the most popular form of fiction, the conventional novel, the beginning, middle, end, and all that. It's the easiest to read, has the largest appeal, blah, blah, blah. But when you step back and look at the whole stream from ancient Egypt to what's being written now, it's just a tributary that goes off to the side. I wouldn't push it too hard, but the experimental novel is actually the main river. The conventional novel is a popular sidetrack.

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