PASSIVITY

Two Birds of Paradise
On the Tree of Life
Dazzle the wall above
His king-size bed

He names the female bird
After my cousin Sofia
Heartless tease at fourteen
I too fancy her

Feigning sleep in his bedroom
On a corner chaise
My fingers tremble
Above combed fringes

Perched on a branch
The male yearns for flight
His one-eyed gaze fixed
Upon Grandfather’s hand

Fondling Sofia on the bed
The female flutters in midair
Plumes fanning out
Brilliant madder dyes

by Rafiq Kathwari, guest poet at 3Quarks Daily.

by Mara Jebsen

What has happened before can happen again– and so can what hasn’t.

— Bertolt Brecht

When I was in college, I wrote angry letters to the controversial and often political poet, Amiri Baraka. The letters were neither kept nor sent, but I remember what it was like to write them. I remember the yellow legal pads, crammed with inky scrawls.

In the old Mercer Street Books in the village, where I buy myself used plays and spy novels once a week, I spotted “Preface to A Twenty-Volume Suicide Note” heaped in the dusty Rare Books cabinet and bought it, for seventeen dollars and ninety-five cents. Opening the mildly aged volume, I had that strange feeling you get when you’re flooded with a whiff of more recent history. It is the sense that something was fresh and current in the time when your mother was younger than you are now. It has magic like moon-rocks because it's stylistically foreign, yet deeply known. In this case, so perfectly 1961, Village. A whole flavor of semi-bullshit, semi-real bohemia surrounds this little paperback. On the last page, Corinth books advertises Ginsberg’s Empty Mirror for a dollar twenty-five, and works by Kerouac and O’Hara for ninety-five cents. I remember as I thumb through it that Baraka wasn't yet Baraka; this book was written by a very young man. His name was Leroi Jones.

It is interesting to think about how and when you come across the seminal poems of your life. “And each night, I count the stars/and each night, I get the same number/ and when they will not come to be counted/I count the holes they leave”—These 28 words, in this order, have appeared, unbidden, at some of the most poignant moments of my life, arriving from beneath me like a wave, or seeming sometimes as if they'd never left; are more like an invisible walking companion whose steps match mine—company I will keep as long as memory holds.

Why was I angry? To remember properly, I have to contextualize those unsent letters with other unsent letters:

From Durham NC to Lome, Togo, 1997

Dear Mom,

I am taking another class in the Africana studies department. It kind of can’t believe this is happening/I am choosing this. Those tomes you and Kodjo lugged from Philadelphia to each of our houses in Lome always struck me as such a waste of time; so dry. The sex life of savages? Folktales from Cameroun? And now… They’re actually assigning me some of the same books. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. The Black Jacobins. And I’m into it. Will everything that bored me to tears when I was a kid come back and claim me? And would this be a happy or a sad thing?

I really, really love it here. But it is a strange place, haunted. Makes you want to write poems. Here is how I would describe Duke:

That place with its gothic architecture lit under floodlights at night like a stage; the whole of it a show. Magical-ghostly. At night black men came and planted. We’d wake in the morning to fully-grown beds of dusty miller, pansies, geraniums, azaeleas, rows and rows of sweet-smelling things I couldn’t name. At night black women cleaned the vomit from the bathrooms stalls and commons room, made us steaming trays of chicken and dumplings, macaroni and cheese; cabbage stewed down in butter to practically nothing; in the cranky mornings ladies in hairnets served up buttered grits, fat rashers of bacon and fluffy biscuits. One of them looks like Auntie Rogatthe.

I am hanging out mostly with these brilliant Asian and Latina girls. We are trying to figure out how American we are. We are trying to figure everything out. Poetry seems more and more interesting to me. Also, I met someone I really like. His name is x. I’ll tell you about it later

Love,

M

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Storm

whips crack over the
back of Massamet

lurid light
color of lime

May spits crazy
cat calls through
the wet lips of June

croaks
big threats

groans like distant trains
hauling mayhem up slopes

sky, a mad gymnast of electricity
tumbles and casts bolts
that land like T-Rex bones
upon a timpani

drums thump down under
circumambulating blasts of Jericho
let-loose spirit

uncorked jinn
flattens new corn low
upon a bed of fresh compost

god’s blow

blow god
blow!

god above god
below!

.
by Jim Culleny
6/8/12

by Hasan Altaf

If you search on Google or Wikipedia for “Pierre Bourdieu,” the results will paint you a picture of a man who was very much a theorist, an intellectual in the fullest sense of the word. Bourdieu contributed to the disciplines of philosophy, sociology, anthropology, history, literature, and politics; he was influenced by Bachelard, Pascal, and Durkheim, and himself became an influence on younger intellectuals such as ‪Loïc Wacquant‬. In an obituary in the Guardian, after Bourdieu's death in 2002, Douglas Johnson described him as being “as important to the second half of the 20th century as Sartre had been to the generation before”; you could easily imagine an ivory-tower life. What cursory internet searches and obituaries do not reveal, however, is Bourdieu's beginnings as a photographer, and the importance of his photography to the rest of his work.

In Picturing Algeria: Pierre Bourdieu (Columbia University Press), the sociologist Franz Schultheis and the curator Christine Frisinghelli offer the reader an unprecedented selection of Bourdieu's photographs from Algeria, where he traveled for the first time as part of his national service, at twenty-five. He was to return again a few years later, as a lecturer at the University of Algiers, and he joined a research effort run by the Algerian arm of the French statistical institute. He helped produce two important books – one on labor migrants, and another that depicted the impact of brutal French resettlement policies. The photographs in Picturing Algeria date mostly from the time of this research, between 1957 and 1960, but they aren't just the snapshots of a researcher with a camera and some free time. Bourdieu's experiences in Algeria were to have a profound impact on his later life and work; as Craig Calhoun notes in his foreword, in Algeria Bourdieu was learning his trade, and “photography was one crucial way in which [he] gathered data – and developed his sociological eye.”

There is a strange kind of distance and balance in Bourdieu's photographs. Calhoun writes that “they are neither the completely naive snapshots of a newcomer nor products of a fully formed sociologist” – that is, they are neither picturesque, touristy snapshots, nor rote illustrations of theories. Even without any background information, the pictures suggest study, learning, research. They are usually square (he used a medium-format camera, rather than the standard Leica, partly to be more unobtrusive) and generally harshly lit – the highlights (a turban, a veil, a white teacup in the sun) can be almost painful. The picture that most struck me was of an elderly woman sitting in the dirt outside her home. She's sitting in the shade, but has one arm, elbow on her knee, stretched out, and in the sun her forearm bleaches transparent, pure white, like a negative or an X-ray.

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by S. Abbas Raza and Morgan Meis

Abbas: Some months ago when Morgan told me he was going to come and visit me in Südtirol from Sri Lanka in the first week of June, I stupidly agreed to go on an extended trek through the alps with him for several days. The idea was that we would hike to the tops of various peaks in the Italian alps around here, stay in huts overnight, and then move on to a different peak, doing this several times. Luckily, I quickly realized that neither he nor I was in good enough physical form to last more than at most one day of climbing followed by a day of coming down, plus I also realized that what the locals call “walks” could pose a severe challenge to my fear of heights. After consultations with my wife and a few other local denizens of Brixen whom I now suspect of being talking mountain goats disguised as humans, it was decided that we would do a hike/climb from the Seiser Alm to the Tierser Alpl Hütte, the red-roofed hut shown in the center of the picture above, stay there overnight, and come back down the next day. Lest you think this looks easy, consider that we were planning on coming over the ridge that you see directly behind the hut from the other side. We would then take the easier route coming down towards the lower left in the picture. You should also know that in the four years since moving to the Tyrol I’ve done lots of little two-hour hikes in the mountains, but never anything like this. I was scared. And as you’ll soon see, for good reason. [Click photos to enlarge a little bit.]

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by Sarah Firisen

I expected China to be different; exotic, challenging, overwhelming in its otherness. But, in many ways, it was depressingly familiar; the mall next to my apartment building had a Gap, an H&M, a Subway and a Baskin Robbins. The New York Pizza restaurant was always at least as busy as the excellent Dim Sum restaurant a few doors down from it. Beijing and Shanghai each have a 5th Avenue equivalent sporting a Louis Vuitton, an enormous Cartier, an equally huge Tiffanys, gigantic Apple stores and all the brands that you'd expect to accompany these. I saw a few Aston Martin and Porsche dealerships and it seemed like every other person was driving an Audi.

My tour guide at the Great Wall of China, Leo, looked at my iPhone and asked, “4S?” I replied yes and he bemoaned the fact that his was only an iPhone 4. By the way, you can get great 3G phone reception at the Great Wall. The Pudong area in Shanghai, which was all farmland 20 years ago, is now adding fantastical skyscrapers so quickly that, when I left for a week to go to Beijing, I thought buildings would pop up while I was away.

There is restricted access to the Internet in China, but it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be and clearly the barriers are pretty easy to work around. Leo asked if I'd like to be his Facebook friend and told me he'd friend me when he got home and could get on the VPN that went around the country's firewall.

But in ways that I wasn't expecting, China was as foreign and incomprehensible as anywhere I've ever been in my life. In the roughly 5 weeks (on and off) that I was there, I had more truly inexplicable encounters and conversations than in the rest of my life put together. My colleague Diana and I coined a phrase, WTF in China (WTFIC). We'd say this to each other every time there was really nothing else to say because words failed us.

One day in Beijing, we were sitting in a taxi in heavy traffic. We noticed a few vendors going between the cars selling mobile phone car chargers. This seemed like a clever idea. Then Diana noticed that each vendor had chargers in one hand and a live turtle in the other. What was the deal with the turtles? Were they selling them? Were they a marketing gimmick? We emailed Leo, who had offered to help us post-tour with any questions. Before I got his reply back, I said to Diana, “you know, even once he answers us, we're not going to be any more illuminated. I just know it's going to be a WTF in China issue.” And indeed, this was Leo's answer, “For turtles, they are the symbol of longevity and fortune, so people may buy when they get bored in traffic!” Clearly, this answer made perfect logical sense to Leo. And to all the people sitting in rush hour traffic jams making a spur of the moment purchase of an animal that would probably outlive them.

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by Evan Selinger, Thomas Seager, and Jathan Sadowski

A highly publicized Journal of Personality and Social Psychology study depicts Millennials as more egoistic than Baby Boomers and Generation Xers. The research is flawed. The psychologists fail to see that kids today face new problems that previously weren’t imaginable and are responding to them in ways that older generations misunderstand.

The psychological study seems persuasive largely because the conclusions are supported by massive data. Investigators examined two nationally representative databases (Monitoring the Future and American Freshman surveys) containing information provided by 9.2 million high school and college students between 1966 and 2009. Such far-reaching longitudinal analysis seems to offer a perfect snapshot of generational attitudes on core civic issues.

Comparison makes Millennials look bad. According to the study, they aren’t just primed to consume more electricity and pass on community leadership. Overall, they’re ethically deficient: concerned less with the environment and keeping up with political affairs, while driven more by extrinsic values (money, fame, image) than intrinsic ones (self-acceptance, community, and group affiliation). The media couldn’t wait to spin these characterizations into headlines, running pieces like “Millenial Generation’s Non-Negotiables: Money, Fame, and Image” and “Young People Not So ‘Green’ After All”.

Jean Twenge, the study’s lead author, seems entitled to sit back with a told you so look on her face. For some time, she’s contested portrayals of Millennials as “Generation We.” The new study updates her anti-entitlement manifesto, Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled–And More Miserable than Ever Before, and she presents more damning information in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article accusing Millennials of declining empathy.

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by Vivek Menezes

Nigeen Lake 27/05/2012

I am writing this lakeside in Srinagar, at the end of a month-long stay in this amazing, ancient city, along with my wife and three young sons (12, 8, 4). This is high season in Kashmir – the authorities expect as many as two million tourists by the time winter sets in. But with the exception of Dal Lake – certainly one of the great marvels of the subcontinent – we’ve found ourselves just about the only “outsiders” almost everywhere we’ve gone. It has been quite a strange phenomenon, I think largely explained by the reluctance of most travel agents and tour operators to venture off a narrow beaten track that takes in Dal, the (vastly over-rated) Mughal Gardens, and day trips to trample snow in Gulmarg, etc. There needs to be more and better information about Srinagar made available for travellers, and over some time I hope to contribute some.

But right now, because connectivity is deeply intermittent here, I am going to quickly post a few images, and scribble comments postcard-style

Our first few days in Kashmir couldn’t have been more eye-opening. This is because we became immediately immersed in the fourth annual festival hosted by the Dara-e-Shikoh Centre. The initiative of Jyotsna Singh, grand-daughter of the last monarch of Jammu and Kashmir, the event was mostly held outdoors, and had a terrifically positive energy. There were art, writing and puppetry workshops, training sessions for teachers and counsellors, and terrific interactions between the overwhelmingly young audience and visiting resource people, most notably Gopal Gandhi – grandson of the Mahatma, senior bureaucrat and diplomat, and author of several books, including a play about Dara, the Sufi Prince. It was a remarkably inclusive event, with every possible viewpoint freely exchanged with an unusual spirit of acceptance. Here at the Dara Shikoh Centre, I realized that this is actually a bedrock Kashmiri virtue. This was particularly underlined during a spellbinding performance by one of the last surviving Bhand Pather (folk entertainers) groups of Kashmir, directed by M. K. Raina. It turned out that most of the almost entirely Kashmiri audience had never seen such a performance – big-shots, students, security guards, drivers, all screamed with delight together all through the show. No translations needed for my kids either, they laughed along with everyone else.

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by Liam Heneghan

Quum fructus maturus semina dispergat. Linnæus, Philosophia Botanica, 1751

1. In The Beginning Was the Verb

In the beginning was the Verb, and the Verb was with God, and the Verb set all things in motion. More than just any Word (Latin verbum, word) the God who is, was, and shall be a Verb commuted motion of an Absolute form to Relative Motion. In the universe created of the Verb everything moves; absolutes have no meaning.

And some things rose and other things fell. Those which rose remained in constant motion until impeded and of those which fell some acquired spontaneous motion. These self-moved movers, called motile, include some cells, spores, the quadrupeds, and the bipeds. The Philosopher studied the motile keenly, since the prime mover and all that had risen remained less accessible to knowledge. Since the self-moved require the unmoving for motion they must themselves be, he concluded, comprised of a series of both fixed and moving parts at the seat of which is an unmoved mover – the animal soul. In this way the motile mimic the first mover.

Living things move and they share this characteristic with every other thing; stasis, that is, there can only ever be relative stasis. Movement differs from motility in as much as the latter, in its most fully expressed form, is movement where a purpose that goads, a desire that compels, and a body that advances, converge.

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Boy in an Apple Tree Grappling
with Happiness

sun through leaves shadows
on his face
as on a dappled stallion

time was a tick, a heartbeat
drawn out
long as the orbit of Uranus

84 to 1 of our years
slomo
heartbeat that sustains us

in a capsule with companions
in a memory
in a moment that contains us

thread of something through the raptures
of the changes of dominions that remains us

in our sky nearby a star affirms
holds feet to fire
a blistering gold medallion
.

by Jim Culleny
5/26/12

by Misha Lepetic

There wasn't a damn thing I could do or say
Up in the skyway
~The Replacements

An empty downtown, with boarded-up shops and desolate sidewalks, is truly a sad sight to behold. It is also symptomatic of much larger forces, namely the flight from the urban core into the suburbs that wound up decimating the vitality of American cities during the second half of the 20^th century. Last month I argued that the urban form of the skywalk was a partial and misguided response to reviving the emptied-out downtowns of American cities. In most instances these structures, which sought to connect buildings without touching the street, were a prolonged, painful failure, because they further segregated street life and did not succeed in drawing people back into that urban core, at least in a way that could be considered dynamic and responsive to the larger needs of the urban fabric. In a sense, much was expected of skywalks, but in fact they were little more than a Band-Aid, and served to only exacerbate the problem through the fundamentally anti-social tendencies that underlie their design and use.

And yet, like any other urban form, skywalks are agnostic – what determines their success is not just their design and implementation, but also the problem that they seek to address. It is perhaps more accurate to say that skywalks, along with many other forms of intervention in the urban built environment, reveal the question that designers have posed themselves, believing that that question, whatever it might be, is in fact the correct and most pressing one. So, in the case of American cities, skywalks were employed to revive downtowns, and, generally speaking, failed. Other cities around the world have enlisted skywalks not because there is too little density, but because there is too much. Does this new context increase the possibility of success? In order to understand what a difference a difference makes, we first need to consider the forces that shaped cities in the West, and what the difference might be between this phenomenon and that of the global urban South.

The narrative describing the development of American cities can be retold as a narrative of excessive space. When energy and labour are cheap, economic logic drives growth outward; it is always easier to build on virgin ground rather than re-organize an existing built environment. This is especially true when urban areas are not bounded by geographic obstacles such as water or mountains – a condition true of most mid-Western cities and not a few coastal ones.

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by Namit Arora

It is often said that humans are the only animals to use symbols. So many other claims of human uniqueness have fallen away—thoughts, emotions, intelligence, tool use, sense of fairness—what's so special about symbols, you ask? I share your skepticism, dear reader, and in the next few paragraphs I'll tell you why.

Let's begin by clarifying what “symbol” means here. One way to do this is to contrast symbols with signs. A sign, such as a red light, a grimace, a growl, or a thunderstorm, signifies something direct and tangible, making us think or act in response to the thing signified. Issuing and responding to signs is commonplace in Animalia. A symbol, on the other hand, is “something that represents something else by association, resemblance, or convention”. A symbol allows us to think about the thing or idea symbolized outside its immediate context, such as the word “water” for the liquid, “7” for a certain quantity, and “flag” for a community. What is symbolized doesn't even have to be real, such as God, and herein lies the power of symbols—they are the building blocks of abstract and reflective thought. Evidence of material symbols used by humans dates back at least 60-100K years, when burial objects and decorated beads start to appear in archaeological finds. Linguistic symbols were almost certainly in use long before then.

According to Susanne Langer, symbols serve “to liberate thought from the immediate stimuli of a physically present world; and that liberation marks the essential difference between human and nonhuman mentality … Words, pictures, and memory images are symbols that may be combined and varied in a thousand ways.” It is only through symbolic thought that we imagine the past or the future—mental time-travel, including episodic memory, requires the use of symbols. Indeed, language is really a system of symbolic communication, combining words (which are symbols) and syntax. If non-human animals lack symbols, what and how do they really think?

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My breathing system seems to be:
these lungs within; without: those trees
……………………….. —Inspiration.

Conjoined

There are mountains in this pic of withered leaves—
as from a satellite

and voids

in shadows they recede

but I see
brittle peaks

bright spines
curling from dead stems
dry as earth desiccated by the practices
of men:

light filaments
that have broadcast life and breath:

sucked dioxide carbon in,
transmuted it like alchemists then
expired it as oxygen

dry lungs of trees
alveoli complements

sister lungs as close and tight as twins; consider:

when that one dies
this one withers
.

by Jim Culleny
5/15/12

Withered Leaves

by Randolyn Zinn

Ed Bilous, the composer and teacher, met me the other day at Juilliard where he has created the Center for Innovation in the Arts. Last month he was awarded the William Schuman Chair at Juilliard and you will be able to watch a video of his stirring speech at the end of this interview where he makes the case for re-imagining our educational system with the arts placed at the center of the curriculum.

Ed and I met In the early 1980s when we were teaching artists together at Lincoln Center Institute–the aesthetic education program that matches artists with schoolteachers to prepare students for seeing productions of dance, theater and music.

Randolyn Zinn: What year was that exactly…?

Ed Bilous: Had to be between ‘81 and ’83. I was working on my PhD at Juilliard at the time.

RZ: Just think, no cell phones or Internet. The extent of personal technology were our SONY Walkmans and telephone answering machines with tiny reel-to-reel tapes inside. You couldn’t dial in for your messages from outside the house.

EB: That’s right.

RZ: So how did you become so adept with technology and its interface with music?

EB: Technology has always been a part of music making. The shift from harpsichord to piano was largely a technological revolution, as was the creation of the organ. When you think about early composers a thousand years ago, their resources were fairly undeveloped, basically just primitive string and wind instruments. Bit by bit, technological changes brought them to life in a way that allowed far more expressivity and creativity until we got the kind of instruments we see in the orchestra today. The transformation from harpsichord to piano is amazing. The harpsichord doesn’t really have dynamics; you play loud or you play soft, but you can’t really achieve a crescendo. Having that ability with the piano transformed music making and a whole new kind of playing and composing. Trumpets went from just being bugle-like things, cones of brass, to instruments with valves that allow all kinds of sophisticated chromatics and articulation. So…technology has always been a part of music.

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