by Misha Lepetic

Detroit turned out to be heaven, but it also turned out to be hell.
~Marvin Gaye

Is Detroit alive or dead? It depends, I suppose, on your viewpoint, or what kind of attention you might be paying in the first place. In January, the New York Times previewed a brief little docu on scrap metal ‘salvagers’ in Detroit (or are they thieves? As always, this depends on your point of view). At any rate, it highlighted for me what are two emerging – and competing – narratives of Detroit. These two narratives – I’ll call them ‘ruin porn’ versus ‘our very own Berlin’ – provoke attention for two reasons. The first is the reminder that contradictory views can be maintained with equanimity within and about the same built environment. This is not so difficult to countenance, since cities do support many seemingly contradictory narratives. In fact, cities are exceptionally adept at this, and is one of the chief reasons what makes them so enjoyable. The second reason is more interesting, however, since it provides some insights into how we choose to look at cities.

Detroit’s ruin porn narrative has gotten lots of play over the years. I remember the first time I ever heard it, actually – as a punchline in the Kentucky Fried Movie, ca. 1977. Since then, as received wisdom would have it, Detroit has had plenty of time and opportunity to keep at this downward trajectory. More recently, art book browsers could enjoy a chorus line of weighty photo-essays appealing to our rubbernecking tendencies: please consider the fact that these three books were all published within the span of a year (although I have to ask, where is Robert Polidori when you really need him?).

Add to this list the Times’s featured doc-let, which is in fact a trailer for a feature-length effort called ‘Detropia’ recently shown at Sundance and soon to be premiering at the IFC Center in New York (I’m assuming that ‘detritus’+‘topia’=‘Detropia’. Got that? Ok, good). This is dystopia at its finest: when it’s not dark, everything is grey, muddy, cold and generally nicely prepped for the end of the world. When they’re not pulling down decrepit factory buildings for scrap using badly outclassed pickup trucks, these Detropians are a grumpy, hard-scrabble lot that crack wise while warming themselves by a trash fire. I don’t know about the rest of the film, but the city depicted in the trailer is a place where I wouldn’t settle for anyone less than Snake Plisskin as my tour guide cum personal security detail. In any case, all our narrative is missing is some Chinese guy in a shiny suit peeling off a few hundred yuan as payment, and we would be all set for globalization’s last act.

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by Quinn O'Neill

Making the rounds on facebook and twitter is this anonymous quotation: “True health care reform starts in your kitchen, not in Washington.” Where I've seen it posted on facebook, it’s accompanied by a photo of fresh fruits and vegetables and garners enthusiastic and positive responses.

It seems to be widely understood that you can ensure your own good health by eating fresh fruits and vegetables, avoiding junk food, exercising regularly, and not smoking. It’s an empowering idea that places the individual in charge of his own health, but there’s a flip side: if good health is attributable to the healthy choices that we make as individuals, then poor health must also be a choice.

This kind of thinking shapes our views on health care reform. If people choose to smoke, be sedentary, and consume an unhealthy diet, then why should the rest of us be expected to pay for their treatment when they end up with poor health? They made bad choices and so they should suffer the consequences.

The problem with this reasoning is that none of us makes decisions independently of our living conditions, and we have limited control over these conditions. We can’t blame children for learning unhealthy eating habits from their parents and we can’t blame a teenager who starts smoking as a result of peer pressure for being so desperate to fit in. Nor can we blame them for becoming unhealthy adults as a result of this early experience.

The most powerful influences on our health are not a matter of personal choice. They are well known to health care professionals as the “social determinants of health” and, unfortunately, they seem to be a well kept secret. “Health care” continues to be framed in public disourse as a system for providing medical services rather than a system for optimizing health within our society. If we care about health, we ought to be as interested in preventing illness as in treating it.

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by Namit Arora

A review of Pankaj Mishra’s “From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia”.

A few hundred years ago, a powerful cultural force arose in Western Europe that would later spread out and overwhelm much of the world. Fueled by a new spirit of individualism, inquiry, and innovation, it furthered personal ambition, a materialistic outlook, and competitive self-interest. This cultural force produced—and was in turn amplified by—scientific progress, the nation-state, advances in military and maritime technology, an escalating hunger for profit and raw materials, and secular institutions in education, governance, and finance, such as the joint-stock corporation.

In the ensuing centuries, European adventurers would subject many older, tradition-bound, and self-absorbed civilizations in Asia to the ravages of this aggressive and disruptive cultural force—and incidentally, to its refinements. Indeed by 1900, a minority of white Europeans had colonized much of Asia, controlling not just its political and economic life but also its cultural life in shaping the natives’ idea of themselves. The road to this widely resented domination—which the colonizers justified at home with theories of racial and cultural hierarchies, the white man’s burden, and plain old lies—was paved with countless imperial intrigues, extortionate treaties and taxation, skirmishes, plundering, drug dealing, massacres, and crushed mutinies. As Joseph Conrad wrote in 1902, ‘The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.’

In his engaging new work, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia, Pankaj Mishra chronicles ‘how some of the most intelligent and sensitive people in the East responded to the encroachments of the West (both physical and intellectual) on their societies.’ What did they see as the threats and the temptations of the West? What modes of resistance and internal reforms did they propose to meet this challenge? Mishra’s remarkable story, mostly untold in Western historiography, opens up important new vistas on the colonial West and the trajectories of Asians, whether in imperial Japan, nationalist and communist China, India, or Muslim countries from Turkey to Pakistan.

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by Rishidev Chaudhuri

It's strange how little I think about marbles now, since marbles, the objects themselves and the game we played with them, were a crucial part of my childhood. It's odd to think back on these colorful little metonyms of youth, mostly forgotten except when I stumble across one in some hidden drawer on a visit home, or dream of the school playground: huge, hot, dusty dry mud, flecked with brilliantly colored glass marbles (like some schoolboy reading of “The Doors of Perception”).

The marbles I remember were glass, with little swirls of color. I remember them as more beautiful than they surely were: clear bubbled glass enclosing small colored fragments, scattered starbursts, whirls and resplendent cosmic dust. But, as I was to learn later, we didn't have too many varieties. Most were a few variations on a simple pattern. There were also “milkies”, which were white marbles, more expensive and highly prized, but that cracked easily and broke hearts in doing so. Once, my father brought me some marbles from a trip to Australia. They were impossibly intricate, much more than the ones we had: a mixture of shiny surfaces, crystals, pockmarked little golf balls, and solid surfaces in multiple colors. I think this contributed to a complicated lifelong relationship with the West.

The marbles were sold in jars at the shop across the road, a small shack that had marbles, a few varieties of sticky sweets in jars and cheap cigarettes (sold individually, mostly to the boys a few years older). Like the sweets, the marbles lived in jars and I remember a disembodied hand plunging into the jar to pick out marbles for us; I guess I never paid attention to the person attached to that hand. The shopkeeper wouldn't allow us to choose which we got, and it was always exciting to examine them afterwards and see if any were special. When we had money we'd fill our pockets with them. They weighed you down, clinking in your pockets as you moved. The temptation to put your hand into your pocket and caress them was irresistible: smooth, cool spheres that shifted around your fingers and fell through them, that you could grab and release and rub through your hands and exult in. I'd pull them out in class to admire them (at great risk of confiscation): miniature artifacts from some alien civilization. I'd spend hours organizing them at home.

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Or, What is the Point of Writers' Desks?

by Mara Jebsen

I once had a friend who owned a studio in the city. It was angular and modern and comprised of all of about 350 square feet. Nevertheless, my friend, author of over a dozen books, managed to squeeze no fewer than four desks and a kitchen table in the space. This gave him the pleasing illusion that he had five perspectives from which to compose the next magnum opus. In fact, he had none. Or, I should say, I never saw him write in that studio.

Another friend of mine, a poet in possession of a nice room in Brooklyn, tells me she just had to clear all of her walls and surfaces and jam her desk against a window. The window’s view she then obscured with a black curtain. She did not want to be distracted beauty. She’d been feeling blocked for a while, and knickknacks were posing a problem.

I helped another writer friend move, once. That involved an appraisal of the desk he’d had since childhood, which he felt was important to keep, on account of very special graffiti he’d scratched into it. Upon inspection, the desk revealed very little graffiti, and what was there didn’t say what he had thought it said.

I recognize all of this. Because of the peculiar wiring in my brain, it calls up a perversion of a Dr. Seuss rhyme. Like this:

Re: Magnum Opus

Will I write it in a train?
Will I write it in the rain?
Will I write it on a boat?
Will I write it with a goat?

Café’s are good. Though in Brooklyn, they are wont to be filled with children, some of which are too cute or too sticky or too rude and want to bump your computer. Babies, even quiet ones, are the worst, particularly for a writer with a sense of civic responsibility. For me, they are idea-kryptonite. I find myself worrying about them, with their erratic behaviors, and their general tendencies toward destruction.

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Confluence of Friends

We sit under the stars in wicker chairs
Only the light of galaxies reaches us,
that and the spare, streaked flash of meteors
in August. The dust of the Milky Way,
a cloud of packed suns separated by light years
disappearing behind the house roof south
and the trees north at Halberg's garden,
looks no more than smudge-like
in this billion-year gaze into the past
these touches of light having left home
when young until now after eons
they spark, aged but vital still,
in the space of eight eyes and four brains
igniting awed talk and cosmic laughs
in this eternal confluence of friends

by Jim Culleny
8/13/12

by Ajay Chaudhary

[Photo by Abby Kluchin]

Note: Part I of this essay can be found here.

Sovereignty and the Superhero

Frank Miller is most frequently cited by film critics as the source for the “darker” Batman that has dominated the film series from the 1990s and Nolan’s trilogy. However, this isn’t entirely fair. Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams began the work of writing a serious, socially relevant Batman comic series in the 1970s that came to replace the image left by the campy 1960s live action television serial. Among many other innovations, O’Neill and Adams created Ras al-Ghul, his daughter Talia, the revitalized Joker, and, of course, Bane. Still, the most obvious materials that Nolan draws from are Miller’s groundbreaking The Dark Knight Returns (1986), Miller and David Mazzucchelli’s Batman: Year One (1987), and Miller and Lynn Varley’s The Dark Knight Strikes Again (2001), as well as significant materials from Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke (1988), the “Knightfall” story arc in the ongoing Batman comics series (with at least five authors) from 1993-1994, and Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s The Long Halloween (1996-1997) and Dark Victory (1999-2000.) Still, it is Miller’s influence on both the subsequent comics series themselves and the films that seems paramount. However, one of the key differences between Nolan’s Batman films and Miller’s “Dark Knight” series is that in Miller’s version, it is the Batman who realizes the limited nature of his definition of justice; it is the Batman who recruits and trains an army of “Batboys” to destabilize the state; it is the Batman who leads the charge for anarchy. However, The Dark Knight Strikes Again does not end with ambiguous anarchy as in V for Vendetta. In The Dark Knight Strikes Again, the Batman does all of this not to set up a more just democratic society, but to provoke the somewhat dim-witted Superman (Miller’s is far and away the best version of that character) to assume an ultimate fascistic protectorship over the entirety of the Earth, after Batman and Superman overthrow the regime of Lex Luthor and Brainiac (who have been governing behind a literal hologram of a fake president designed to look like Ronald Reagan).

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by Tom Jacobs

This last weekend I went on a two-day sailing expedition with a friend. I took the subway from Brooklyn to Grand Central and got a train to Connecticut and, it must be said, had no idea what I was doing or in for (thank god my friend did—an expert sailor, this guy). In the following days I felt as close to death or at least profound suffering/drowning as I’ve ever felt, and also experienced something close to the kind of sublimity that is only afforded when one is willing to enter those places that are decidedly not welcoming, that are not our home. This means the wilderness, those places that used to be “beyond geography” but which now, while mapped and navigable via GPS, refer either to mostly unpeopled, wooded, waterless places or that, as in this case, to the sea. I had a vague sense that I had no business being out there in a motorless sailboat, left to stasis or to the insanity of unpredictably wind gusts or counter currents or unfriendly waves, all depending upon the vagaries of the wind and weather, and in this I was quite correct. To be out in the open ocean on a sailboat is to realize that our everyday lives are wildly and ridiculously shielded from what used to be called “nature,” that slippery pre-modern concept that both calls to and repels us.

As I lay next to my friend under a canvas tent that we (or “he,” really) erected on the boat that just barely accommodated both of us, cheek by jowl, and just as a massive thunderstorm passed by in the late afternoon, many things crossed my mind.

The most crucial of these was: “This is a rare experience.”

In an essay exploring the idea of rarity, Nicholson Baker speaks of the experience of having to write down a phone number on whatever surface presents itself at the moment as eligible for inscription—in his case, the blade of a Rubbermaid spatula (one could just as easily substitute the experience of listlessly doodling on the rubber midsole of one’s sneaker in mid-afternoon study hall in high school). He speaks of the incomparable pleasure of pressing the ballpoint of the pen against the yielding and squishy rubber of the rubbery blade (or shoe) and wonders whether this is the kind of shared experience that is rarely spoken of or even observed but that might provide some kind of tenuous community: “Infrequent events in the lives of total strangers are now linked; but the pleasure itself is too fragile, too incidental, too survive such forced affiliation undamaged.” In other words, as soon as this experience is discussed and made public, its rarity immediately departs.

What occurred to me as I drove home from Connecticut, however, is that this feeling of rarity was not, for once, connected to an object, but rather to an experience. That there is an important distinction to be made between rare experiences and rare objects or things.

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by Hasan Altaf

The cards are laid on the table right away in Shehan Karunatilaka's stunning debut novel, The Legend of Pradeep Mathew (Graywolf Press). The narrator, W. G. Karunasena – an aging, alcoholic former sportswriter, who has just been handed what amounts to a death sentence (if he limits himself to two drinks a day he can hope for one or two more years) – takes a moment to respectfully rebut the criticism that sports, in this case cricket, have no use or value: “Left-arm spinners cannot unclog your drains, teach your children or cure you of disease. But once in a while, the very best of them will bowl a ball that will bring an entire nation to its feet. And while there may be no practical use in that, there is most certainly value.”

Pradeep Mathew is in some ways like the great rock novels, the great books about Hollywood: From a specialized world, in this case that of cricket, it's adopted a jargon, a built-in store of legends and myths and stories. It's also very much in the vein of Moby-Dick or Don Quixote, a quest book – Wije's attempt to give the world (before liver and family fail him) what it really needs, “a half-decent documentary on Sri Lankan cricket,” and his obsession with the titular Mathew, whom he considers the greatest bowler of all time, are a kind of reversal of Ahab's hunt for the whale, Don Q. fighting for the honor of Dulcinea. Wije has his own Sancho Panza in his friend Ari, and for tilting at, the windmills of Sri Lankan TV, the mysteries and bureaucracies of power political and athletic, the bottle and the family (in particular, his son, Garfield – named for a cricketer and not, unfortunately, the cat; the depiction of this mostly nonexistent father-son relationship is among the finest I've seen in fiction recently: one of the final scenes in the novel, as Wije lies in the hospital, is absolutely perfect and perfectly-rendered).

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Limbo

big moon sky dish
amber as a goldfish
late summer, duskish,
mirror of our sun disk

cherry tree in our yard
many limbs akimbo
holds you in its trellis

as you wax in heaven
and
we wane in limbo
.

big moon at night is
a bubble in a jinn fizz,
the genie in a quiz that
trumps the ciphers of a math whiz

shuffles shadows in our yard
while we muse but who knows
what holds us in its trellis

as we burn
in
moon glow

by Jim Culleny
8/5/12

by James McGirk

There is a junk store a few doors down from my house. Actually it isn’t even a store; it is just an alley with a tarp stretched over it and a chicken wire gate in front to protect the merchandise, which is mostly old furniture and baby things.

There used to be a guard dog chained to the gate. His name was Roscoe. I detest dogs, for the most part, but Roscoe wasn’t bad. He was beautiful. A pit bull with a pink muzzle and fur that was mostly white but had a faint orange hue. Roscoe was ferocious; terrifying, the streetlamp was out on his side of the street and at night he would hurl himself against the fence if you so much as looked in his direction, let alone walk past him.

During the day he was kept chained beneath a shady tree beside the gate. For three years he would snarl and bark at me every single time I walked by past him. If he was on his chain he would all but choke himself to snap at me. But I grew accustomed to the treatment and seeing him and there were times, admittedly not many of them, but when it was really hot and he was splayed out and panting or when his muzzle was protruding through the wire when I felt sorry for him.

And then one day he was gone. There was big piece chunk of plywood where he used to sit and the fence had an ominous gouge in it. I asked the owner what had happened to Roscoe. He was stolen. Someone had come by and snipped open the fence and pulled the howling, snarling, snapping thing out and stuffed him into the back of a van. They had it on tape. The police were called and they couldn’t do a thing. Roscoe was gone and considering what usually happens to stolen dogs in a rough neighborhood, he probably wasn’t alive for more than a couple of days.

To me dogs are disgusting, I think they are servile and slobbery and in a city like New York, something that should have been banned before something like bucket-sized orders of soda pop or shortening. But I felt awful passing by the junk store and knowing my noble, beautiful, if rather truculent neighbor Roscoe would never bark me at again. So, as a way of channeling my grief, I suppose, I resolved to catalogue the other creatures I interact with in my very urban environment.

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by Kevin S. Baldwin

With the recent global economic troubles, bail-outs of various kinds, and hand-wringing about passing financial debt onto future generations, it seems like as good a time as any to think about other debts that may be at least as important. Don't get me wrong: I too am concerned about the long term implications of deficit spending by national, state, and local governments, but believe these may be overshadowed by what we are doing to the natural world.

Nearly 20 years ago, Mathis Wackernagel and his collaborators began formulating a measure of human impact on the earth's ecosystems. Eventually they arrived at an index called the “ecological footprint,” which summarizes food and fiber production, animal feed, timber harvest, fishing, infrastructure, and fossil fuel consumption and expresses this in “global hectares.” Thus a typical American would require nearly 10 global hectares in order to be supplied with all goods and services (Note how this compares to the global average of nearly 2.0 gha ecological footprint).

Using the index of ecological footprint, Wackernagel et al. 2002 estimated that humans crossed the threshold of sustainability into unsustainability around 1980 (see figure).

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by Ajay Chaudhary

Have you finally learned to do what is necessary? – Ras al-Ghul, Batman Begins (2005)

Oh, you. You just couldn't let me go, could you? This is what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object. You truly are incorruptible, aren't you? You won't kill me out of some misplaced sense of self-righteousness. And I won't kill you because you're just too much fun. I think you and I are destined to do this forever. – The Joker, The Dark Knight (2008)

Don't talk like one of them, you're not! Even if you'd like to be. To them, you're just a freak, like me. They need you right now. But when they don't, they'll cast you out, like a leper. See, their morals, their code… it's a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble. They're only as good as the world allows them to be. I'll show you, when the chips are down, these… these civilized people? They'll eat each other. See, I'm not a monster, I'm just ahead of the curve. – The Joker, The Dark Knight (2008)

Bane: Leave, you. Daggett: No, you stay here. I’m in charge. Bane [gently places his hand on Daggett’s shoulder]: Do you feel in charge? Daggett: I’ve paid you a small fortune. Bane: And you think this gives you power over me? – Bane and Daggett, The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

When Gotham is ashes…then you have my permission to die. – Bane, The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

Tell me where the trigger is…then you have my permission to die. – The Batman, The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

Sovereign is he who decides on the exception. – Carl Schmitt, “Definition of Sovereignty”, Political Theology (1922)

The pivotal moment in Christopher Nolan’s recently-completed Batman trilogy arrives in the second movie. The Batman is riding a rather ominous motorcycle of monstrous proportions at the Joker, who is armed with a gun and a bad suit. But the Joker is not shooting at the Batman. Instead, he squeezes off a few rounds into the ground and repeatedly mumbles, “Come on, I want you to do it, I want you to do it. Come on, hit me.” It’s iconic, it’s deeply disturbing, and there is a wonderful ambiguity to the statement. Is the Joker trying to make the point that he extols throughout the movie? Are order and morality – any morality, including Batman’s one rule against killing people – a bad joke? Or is this an inward, psychological self-hatred exploding outwards as rage? Does the Joker merely want an aggrandized, but surely final, death? Suicide-by-Batman? The horror of Nolan’s version of the Joker as portrayed by the late Heath Ledger is that we simply can’t know. It’s a lingering and terrifying vision. However, Nolan clearly communicates to us via his prologue, Batman Begins, and his conclusion, The Dark Knight Rises, that he is primarily interested in the first question: is order a bad joke? If not, how and why? This is the question that these three films tackle and, ultimately, the one they seek to answer. So it is something of a puzzle as to why so much critical writing on the most recent film has focused on questions of explicit economic theories and American partisan politics. I will attempt to explore this puzzle here.

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by David Alvarez

Juan Valdez notwithstanding, coffee is an Islamic invention. According to the most popular story about its origins, sometime in the fifteenth century a goat-herding monk named Kaldi discovered coffee in the Kingdom of Ayaman (Yemen). His goats were staying up all night, “frisking and dancing in an unusual manner.” The Prior was informed, the goats diligently tracked, and the cause of their rambunctious insomnia identified: red berries from the “kahwa” tree.

The Prior, apparently a curious and practical type, tried the berries himself by boiling them in water and drinking the brew. It kept him awake all night. To help his monks with their nocturnal devotions, he shared his concoction with them. They declared it a gift of providence, and coffee soon spread “throughout the whole kingdom” and “other nations and provinces of the East.”

The Islamic world gave us not only coffee but also something else rather important: democracy. Popular histories of coffee are wrong in two big ways. If you thought the Kaldi story was too enchanting to be accurate, you are right. That story is mostly bunk. But an even bigger story we tell ourselves about coffee is just as fantastic. The most celebrated institution of the European Enlightenment is the English coffeehouse. As “seats of English liberty,” where all were welcome to discuss the news and criticize art and politics, the English coffeehouse gets lots of praise for promoting modern democracy. But this coffeehouse ideal as a space of debate and political dissent comes not from the European Enlightenment but from the world of Islam.

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by Majid Maqbool

On days when I’m alone at home some vivid images and memories of my childhood rush back. They arrange themselves in disturbing ways, unsettling previous memories. Sometimes these memories write themselves in solitude. Sometimes they are forgotten, only to return later from the oblivion: in the middle of some conversation, for example, while travelling, or at night, in the dreams. Sometimes it’s too painful to write down compelling memories. Sometimes remembering them is the only way of making peace with them. And all these memories are unforgettable, lingering in some corner of mind, waiting to be summoned.

I write because I remember. Because what I remember makes me who I am.

I remember, for example, those military crackdowns that loomed large over my childhood like black clouds: people ordered out of their homes early in the morning by the Indian troops, and assembled in open fields and playgrounds. And then that fearful wait for the next order of the troops. The troops lining up people, one frightened person after another, in front of that dreaded army gypsy. And whenever a masked mukbir (informer) seated inside the guarded army vehicle made a particularly shrill signal or a coded gesture, the person paraded in front of him was immediately frisked away by the troops. Often, he never returned home.

In my school days I remember the Indian army convoys driving past our school bus made us to wait till all the army trucks drove ahead, first, always. Often that meant waiting for hours, and getting late for school. To pass those uneasy hours, I remember counting the army trucks that made up that long and uninterrupted line of that dreaded army convoy. I remember the games we would play in the school bus: How many military trucks went past us today? 50? 100? 150, 200….? We would often challenge each other with the count. I remember the small bets we had kept for successfully predicting the number of army trucks that drove past our school bus. Quite often, I lost count of them…

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There is no defense for a man who, in the excess of his wealth,
has kicked the great altar of Justice out of sight. —Aeschylus


Drought

Having done their green work
the grasses say to the sky,
We thirst

The sky is blue and silent,
clouds tease. They slide
silently under a brilliant sun
hoarding their wealth

they are the Himalayas of heaven
cold and distant,
imperious,
proud of their majesty,
their volume,
joining and unjoining their vapors
among their kind alone
holding it to themselves

they are vacant
as an empty page
void
while the grasses
need psalms of moisture

they billow above dry prairies
counting their vaulted droplets
saving whole seas for their own
rainy day

by Jim Culleny
7/29/12