In Part One of this article I wrote about the instability of the art-object. How its meaning moves, and inevitably cracks. In this follow-up I ponder text, the book, page and computer screen. Are they as stable as they appear? And how can we set them in motion?

Part Two

“There’s a way, it seems to me, that reality’s fractured right now, at least the reality that I live in. And the difficulty about… writing about that reality is that text is very linear and it’s very unified, and… I, anyway, am constantly on the lookout for ways to fracture the text that aren’t totally disorienting – I mean, you can take the lines and jumble them up and that’s nicely fractured, but nobody’s gonna read it.”

David Foster Wallace, PBS Interview, 1997

17^th Century print technology was rubbish. Type could be badly set, ink could be over-applied, misapplied or just plain missed. Paper quality varied enormously according to local resources, the luck of the seasons or even the miserly want of the print maker out to fill his pockets. There are probably thousands of lost masterpieces that failed to make it through history simply because of the wandering daydreams of the printer's apprentice. But from error, from edit and mis-identification have come some of the clearest truths of the early print age. Truths bound not in the perfect grain or resolute words of the page, but in the abundance of poor materials, spelling mistakes and smudge. In research libraries across the globe experts live for the discovery of copy errors, comparing each rare edition side-by-side with its sisters and cousins in the vain hope that some random mutation has made it intact across the centuries.

Since the invention of writing, and its evolutionary successor the printing-press, text has commanded an authority that far exceeds any other medium. By reducing the flowing staccato rhythms of speech to typographically identical indelible marks we managed, over the course of little more than 2000 years, to standardise the reading consciousness. But in our rush to commodify the textual experience we lost touch with the very material that allowed illiteracy to become the exception, rather than the rule. We forgot that it is the very fallibility of text and book that make them such powerful thinking technologies.

Read more »

By Maniza Naqvi

Today, the other, would be Estonia. And outside, not a sound, a moment worth savoring had come to town: as if in anticipation, as though they were all on the same side; same thoughts; same direction. Whatever happened today, it would happen to them together.

Jasna got out of bed—washed her face, changed into that gift from long ago a soft blue woolen dress; then brushed the tangled hair and slipped out the door and made her way down to the gallery on the first floor. Dizzy from the nausea that always came a day after each treatment, she gingerly negotiated the darkened stairwell, as best as she could. She clung to the balustrade, the cold marble of it, welcome, against her burning skin. The bells began to chime again. Six. Outside it was beginning to darken, the fog having settled in. The news on the television this morning had been all about the game. But it had also had the usual pronouncements of Dodik and Sladjzic and the ringing of hands by the International Community. Again. It was all Dodik and Sladjzic all day long every day.

In between all that, they had mentioned that he was in town. No news and now this! She had sat up with a jolt, in a panic, her hand reaching to touch her head as if he was just there at her door. She had reached for the wig and pulled it on as her fingers trembled over her cold skull. And then, after the shock of it, after she had calmed down, she spent the rest of hers imagining his day, she had charted its course sure that it would end with him visiting the gallery. If she knew him at all, she knew he would have to come. Her choice of the apartment just a floor above, the final place had been the right instinct. What else was there to show for having been here, for him and for her, if not that one painting in the gallery, hers of him?

Read more »

by Evert Cilliers

Problems come in two types: real and BS. Your kid snorting cocaine, that's a real problem. Unless she's living in your house, having a mother-in-law is not a real problem: it's a BS problem.

BS problems can infect entire nations, because they roam wider than herpes. Take illegal immigration. Perfectly natural: we've got work for people, Mexicans come over to do it, Americans pay them for it: no problem. However, some Americans don't like those Mexicans and some politicians want the votes of those Americans, so they make illegal immigration a BS problem. You want a real problem? One out of four kids don't finish high school. Solving that would be change I can believe in.

Internationally, real and BS problems contend like Tokyo and Godzilla, too. Real: Americans die every day in Iraq and Afghanistan. Why? Ask any politician this Tuesday, and they'll give you a reason. Ask them next Tuesday, you'll get a different reason. Whatever: the American penchant for sticking our nose in other people's business is a hellhole of hubris that makes a Greek tragedy look like a sitcom. Removing our troops from Iraq and Afghanistan so they don't die there like lab rats would be a change I can believe in, Mr. Babyface Barack.

Now for some BS: Iran. The problem? Iran is supposedly thinking of making supposed nuclear bombs. It's no problem that America, Russia, Britain, France, Israel, India, China and Pakistan actually HAVE the bomb, it's only a problem that Iran MAY get it. Talk about the pot calling the kettle a 100% saturated black.

What would be the problem if Iran had the bomb? Israel would squeal like an insurance company faced with a major surgery claim. Big deal. Israel actually has from 200 to 400 nuclear bombs, but we don't seem to mind, even given their record of bombing everyone around them. Iran has a record of not bombing anyone around them for thousands of years, except once when Saddam Hussein attacked them. Israel having the bomb is way scarier than Iran getting it.

Read more »

“Funny how naughty dentists always make that one mistake, isn't it?”

A recent article and broadcast on National Public Radio (US) described the proliferation of specialized police forces in the state of Texas, including one that was operated by the State Board of Dental Examiners. No true Monty Python fan could read that report without recalling the Eric Idle character known as Lemming of the BDA – “British Dental Association, that is.”

There's been some public debate about the growth of private police forces in North America, Europe,and throughout the world, and some discussion (though not enough) about the creation of private Fire Departments operated by insurance companies in the United States. But Texas may represent the leading edge of another governmental phenomenon. The issue there is not so much the outsourcing of a government function as it is the fractionation of that function among competing departments.

We don't have a word for this phenomenon yet. Maybe we should call it intrasourcing?

Whatever it's called, the question is this: Is this part of a wider phenomenon or just a Texas aberration, the product of that state's fascination with the breed of professional they still call (with pre-feminist brio) the “Lawman”?

Read more »

Editor's Note: Today we welcome a new writer to 3QD. Sue Hubbard is a freelance art writer based in London writing for a variety of publications from The Independent to the New Statesman. An award-winning poet, she has published two collections of poetry, Everything Begins with the Skin (Enitharmon) and Ghost Station (Salt), as well as a novel, Depth of Field (Dewi Lewis) and a recent collection of short stories, Rothko’s Red (Salt).

The Turner Prize at Tate Britain and Anish Kapoor at The Royal Academy

Sue Hubbard

Many factors have lead to London’s pre-eminence in the contemporary art world: the importance of Goldsmith’s College to the Hirst generation of YBAs, Saatchi’s ubiquitous influence as a collector, Jay Joplin’s White Cube gallery, the founding of the annual Frieze art fair, and of course, the Turner Prize, that annual award set up in 1984 to celebrate new developments in contemporary art presented each year to a British artist under fifty for an outstanding exhibition in the preceding twelve months. It has always been a controversial affair. There was, of course, that bed (it didn’t win) and Martin Creed’s minimal light bulbs that simply went on and off. Last year, the shortlist was universally derided as opaque and pretentious. But looking back over its history, love it or hate it, The Turner Prize has become a barometer of the British art scene. Those nominated, often previously unknown outside the art world, usually end up as household names.

This year the short list feels subtly different, not only is there an absence of videos (accident not design, it is claimed) but the work is thoughtful, complex, crafted and, in several cases, rather beautiful. There is little irony. Seriousness, it seems, is this season’s new black.

Glaswegian artist Lucy Skaer (the only woman) has named her installation Thames and Hudson, a reference to both those mighty rivers as well as to the celebrated art publisher. Yet, somehow, the whole feels made up of rather too many disparate parts. A dismantled chair has been used to make some rather obtuse prints, while her Black Alphabet is a version of Brancusi’s 1923 sculpture Bird in Space, caste 26 times in compressed coal dust – though her purpose and message remain rather a mystery. Her pièce de résistance, however, is the skull of an adult male sperm whale (a comparison with Damien Hirst’s formaldehyde shark is unavoidable) on loan from a Scottish museum. Suspended so that it is only partially visible through a series of screens, its sad bony hulk is reminiscent of those Victorian curiosities peered at through fairground peep holes.

[Image Credit: Lucy Skaer, Thames and Hudson 2009, including Leviathan Edge 2009, on loan courtesy of the Trustees of the National Museums of Scotland. Photo credit: Sam Drake and Gabrielle Johnson, Tate Photography.]

Read more »

“… scientists (have been) able to trick (fruit) flies into having associative
memories of events they had not actually experienced.”
…………………………………………………… –Nature News, Oct 15, 2009

Which is Which or Who is Whom

They say fruit fly brains
may be made to have memories
of where they've never flown

I’m like a fruit fly in this way
since I remember things I’m not sure
(but feel) I’ve known

events that may be dreams,
or fictions so often told
they’re recollections, or

heart-breaking tales so well rehearsed
that empathetic neurons,
like the mushroom body
of a fruit fly brain,
are excited to the point of déjà vu
remembering an explicit past not mine but
maybe one experienced by you

hours that seem like yesterday
recalled as clearly
as if each sunrise you’ve seen
had been seen by me,
each brilliant tinted crimson fall,
each blazing summer,
each fresh green spring recalled
as if they’d been interred
within a nest of neurons
dark as a womb
to be resurrected
by a universal heart
not so particular about

which is which or
who is whom

by Jim Culleny
Oct 18,2009

by Colin Marshall

There's this farmer. He has a nice, beautiful farm, but one year there's a big drought. So he's got no money, and the landlord says, “Look, I don't give a shit whether you got money or not money — you're going to have to pay me.” So the farmer says, “I got no money!” The landlord says, “Look, money or no, you're going to pay me, even if you have to send your daughter up to me. The farmer says, “It's okay with me if she wants to go.” Well, the daughter doesn't want to go, so she goes up to the guy and says, “Look, I don't want to come here and you know that.” So the landlord says, “I'm a good guy. I'll give you a chance. You see those two doors over there? One leads outside; one leads right into my bedroom. You make a decision.” Well, he knows damn well both of those doors are going to lead right into his bedroom, and the girl knows that too. The girl says, “That door over there is not the door that leads outside.”

A “Chinese lantern riddle,” the protagonist of Wayne Wang's Chan is Missing calls this curious vignette. He's offered it by way of a solution to the mystery that has obsessed him, and it unsurprisingly fails to tie matters up. When Jo, the film's diminutive, deeply worried hero, relates the tale to Steve, his young nephew and sidekick, explaining that its heroine “was trying to use the negative to emphasize the positive,” Steve simply blows it off. “That stuff's too deep for me!” he laughs.

Jo and Steve are what the film calls “ABCs,” or “American-Born Chinese.” Raised and resident in San Francisco's Chinatown, they work as cabbies, ferrying around the locals and repeatedly explaining the distinction between Mandarin and Cantonese cuisine to tourists. Yearning to become their own bosses, they decide to found an uncle-and-nephew taxi company, but licenses are scarce. Forced into the secondary market, Jo scrapes together his and Steve's savings to sublease one from Chan Hung, an acquaintance of the “FOB,” or “Fresh Off the Boat,” persuasion. But when Jo hands over their money and tries to make contact with Chan to obtain the license, neither the fellow nor the license nor the money are anywhere to be found. Chan is, it seems, missing.

The puzzle sweeps Jo and Steve — but mostly Jo — into perhaps the most unusual noir mystery ever shot, not least because it takes place primarily in the daytime. The duo criss-cross Chinatown, eliciting leads from any community members who might once have come into contact with Chan and following them to whichever sketchy situation they might point. A sociology student hilariously provides her complicated academic interpretation of Chan's failed negotiations with a traffic cop — a result of allegedly incompatible “communication modes” — after running a red. The manager of a Manilatown senior center remembers Chan frequently stopping by, his pockets invariably packed with Hostess snacks, to listen to mariachi music. A political activist and head of a language school frames Chan's dilemma as typical: “He wanted to continue to be Chinese, to think Chinese.” (As opposed to other immigrants, who want to assimilate immediately: “that presents a problem — they're not white.”) His estranged wife, bemoaning that he never even wanted to apply for citizenship, pronounces him “too Chinese.” Chan's sponsor considers him, as Jo puts it, “another dumb Chinaman,” not realizing that he helped invent the first Chinese word-processing system.

Read more »

by Tolu Ogunlesi

She was the only woman on the frontlines during Gulf War 1, surrounded by 43,000 men. So how did she cope with doing that thing that men can do in public but women can’t? “Nudity is tolerable, using the loo in front of other people isn’t,” she explained to a wine-sipping group of us gathered around her at a Nairobi house in August; as we awaited the start of a dinner party to end the 2009 Storymoja Hay Festival.

No war without Kate

In 2001 Britain’s Independent newspaper described Kate Adie OBE as “the best-known, most respected woman reporter in the UK.” She came to national prominence in 1980, reporting – from behind a car door – the siege of the Iranian embassy in London, in May 1980. In 1986 she covered the American bombing of Tripoli, and in 1989, in Tiananmen Square she was hit in the arm by a bullet which went on to kill a young man. During the first Gulf War a British newspaper published a cartoon showing two soldiers preparing to go into battle. “We can’t start yet, Kate Adie isn’t here,” one says to the other.

A day before the dinner party I had the privilege, alongside Ugandan journalist David Kaiza, of interviewing Adie in a packed tent on the grounds of Nairobi’s Impala Club. After four decades of reporting – which saw her rise from studio technician at a local BBC radio station in Durham to become the BBC’s Chief News Correspondent in 1989, covering wars everywhere from Armenia to Bosnia to Rwanda to the Middle East – she is eminently qualified to lecture on grand concepts like “news” and “war”.

“Ninety percent of wars are about land,” she said. “In the future it will be [about] land with water, land you can build on; live on.” She also hinted at the capacity of ‘war’ to feed the human predilection for euphemism – which would explain Kenya’s “post-election violence”, and Northern Ireland’s “troubles”.

The making of a journalist

But “international media” is one concept that doesn’t deserve an explanation. “There is no such thing as the international media,” she said.”You are all paid by somebody, you are all working for somebody… there is no such thing as international journalism reporting for the world. CNN’s target audience is middle America; it just happens that other people are subjected to it.” The BBC is “British in origin, and in orientation.” And for her “there really isn’t any kind of war that sees journalists as neutral. Whose side are you on – that’s the first question. Are you for us or against us?”

Read more »

By Namit Arora

Part 1: The Rise of Islam

(This five-part series on early Islamic history begins with the rise of Islam, shifts to its golden age, examines two key currents of early Islamic thought—rationalism and Sufi mysticism—and concludes with an epilogue. It builds on precursor essays I wrote at Stanford’s Green Library during a summer sabbatical years ago, and on subsequent travels in Islamic lands of the Middle East and beyond.)
__________________________________________

A great rebellion had overthrown the Umayyad Caliphate of Damascus in 750 CE, after which power shifted east to Baghdad—a city more Persian than Arab back then—reflecting the growing prominence of Persians in Islam. A new caliph, Abu Al-Abbas, a great-grandson of Muhammad’s uncle, founded the Abbasid dynasty, satisfying the fond desire of many rebels to get a caliph from the Prophet’s lineage. But their hopes were soon dashed when the new caliph began living up to his nickname, Al-Saffah—‘the blood-shedder’—by ruthlessly eradicating former allies like Abu Muslim. For the new regime, loyalty to the dynasty, and not the brotherhood of Islam, would be the basis of empire.

Leading up to the rebellion that had ousted the Umayyads, the Abbasids had made great play of the former’s addiction to wine and women. Now that they were themselves in power, their promise of a return to ‘true religion’ under the Prophet’s own family vanished into thin air; luxuries and irreligious behavior grew instead. The Abbasids, partly out of expediency, began patronizing a more liberal school of theology—the Mu’tazilah—much to the resentment of the Shiites and the orthodox Sunnis; it led to more crushed Shiite rebellions. [1]

The caliphs that followed Al-Abbas now presided over a loose collection of provinces, each with a governor and a bureaucracy similar to older Persian arrangements, where local satraps had a good deal of autonomy and power. Administration was divided into departments—or divans—headed by the vizier. The old Arab monopoly on power had passed—Islamized Persians began entering the higher echelons of leadership. The dominant Abbasid legal system—there were at least four to choose from, all proceeding from the Shari’ah but with significant variations nonetheless—became the Hanafi rite, the most liberal of the lot. In making civil laws and administering justice, it opposed overly literal readings of the Qur’an, relying instead on analogy, consensus, and judicial reasoning. [2]

In the ensuing decades came an era of relative peace. A general flourishing of agriculture and trade led to unprecedented prosperity and a huge burst of intellectual and cultural creativity, especially during the reigns of Haroon al-Rashid (786-809 CE) and al-Mamun (813-833 CE). This ushered in the ‘golden age’ of Islam;[3] Baghdad became the richest city in the world—only Constantinople came somewhat close. In A Short History of the Arab Peoples, Sir John Glubb wrote:

‘Their ships were by far the largest and the best appointed in Chinese waters or in the Indian Ocean. Under their highly developed banking system, an Arab businessman could cash a cheque in Canton on his bank account in Baghdad. [Wealthy women wore] lavish jewels and pearls, silks and embroidered fabrics. [A new upper class valued] exquisite carpets and cushions, the sparkling fountains, the soft music and the exotic perfumes of private apartments [of] musk, myrtle and jasmine …

Read more »

Towards a Philosophical History of Dogs

Justin E. H. Smith

What is it about the dogs? In recent philosophy everyone from John Searle to Donna Haraway has had something to say about them. And recent philosophy, as I never tire of insisting, is nothing new.

Now I have also been insisting for some time that there is no such animal as 'animals'. That is, when it is discovered, for example, that a chimpanzee in a zoo in Sweden is stockpiling stones to be thrown at a later hour, this does not prove, as the popular media would claim, that 'animals' are capable of conceptualizing and planning for the future. What a chimpanzee does says nothing at all about 'animals', but at most something about chimpanzees, and likely only about some chimpanzees, or indeed only one of them. Animals, I mean to say, need to be considered on a case-by-case basis.

Haraway, to her credit, recognizes this. Her take on the special case of dogs issues in the somewhat cryptic claim that “we have never been human” (a riff, I think, on Bruno Latour's We Have Never Been Modern). I understand this to mean that, for as long as there have been humans, the denotation of 'we' has never been understood to include all and only members of our species. It also includes dogs: we and they have co-evolved, and in a certain sense this puts our species closer to Canis lupus familiaris than to Pan troglodytes, not with respect to the tracing back of common ancestors, but with respect to recent history, the history of the past 15,000 years or so, the history that lingers in both of our memories, in which humans have been exercising intense selective pressure on dogs, and perhaps also dogs on humans. The result is that we have come out more like each other, behaviorally and expressively, than we are to either of our nearest cousins: the grey wolf in the case of dogs, and chimpanzees in the case of humans. The wolf is the dog's closest ancestor, but this implies no solidarity. Quite the contrary: the dogs are on our side.

Read more »

By Aditya Dev Sood

As we walk off the tarmac, the moon shines full and bright, lending the dark clouds of night a blue-black shimmer, a haunting presence. I hope this is an auspicious welcome to Bihar, the heart of that other India, which is not shining with the glow of liberalization and globalization of the past two decades. I’m here to set up fieldwork for a healthcare initiative in several rural districts of the state.

I get into the white Ambassador that has been assigned to me. The driver heats his engine for a bit, before coaxing it fully to life. kaun hotal chalaile? who hotel I get-go ya, he asks me, as we turn out of the airport parking lot. The language seems sweet, pleasing to my ears and easily disarms the gruff and combative khadi-boli attitude that I bring with me from Delhi. As we pull up to the ITDC hotel, my driver gestures to me to be careful in opening my door, lest I disturb the several women in their finery, who are even now getting out of a Maruti van and making their entrance into the hotel. The moment is striking for the sublime attunement that many Biharis seem to exhibit, towards one another’s consocial wellbeing. It is as if they have all known one another in generations past, which, in fact is true, given the long and continuous record of civilization in this region.

The word Bihar derives from vihara, monastery, truncated from brahmavihara, literally ‘an abode for the righteous, the benevolent, the kind.’ Bihar was the first monastic state, of which the Buddhist polities of Tibet, Sri Lanka and Thailand are contemporary, perhaps vestigial, examples. The region was once crosscut by a network of vihara-s, which provided religious, educational, health, and other social services to the laity around them. They served as an essential social and institutional infrastructure for the region’s ancient empires, the least of their functions having been the provision of hospitality for pilgrims, traders and visitors on official business to any local region.

My own hotel looks a mausoleum dating from the only India that existed in my childhood: white marble floors, shahi korma, and behind the reception, the time in New York, London and Osaka. If all this looks like the past to me, here in Bihar these State-run hotels might represent something like order and stability. Later in the night there are people whistling and chatting up and down the hallways and then, more ominously, people yelling incessantly, for over an hour, as if at a construction site. Sir, ve bhi guest hain, aap samajh lijiye hamari position. That the management cannot maintain decorum among its guests seems part of a larger problem abroad in the land.

Read more »

Note: The following is a true story, but the names of certain individuals, and other identifying details, have been changed.

A bullet through the head

The summer between my sophomore and junior years of college was the first of two six-week training programs at the Marines Corps officer training base at Quantico, Virginia. The second six-week training program, in the Marine Platoon Leader Class (PLC), is completed the following summer before graduation and acceptance of a commission in the USMC. The fourth week of my first summer was my first live fire training, which begins on the 100 yard rifle range. The Marine Corps takes rifle marksmanship far more seriously than any of the other three branches of the military. Every Marine officer must qualify each year as a rifleman. Failing to do so, the officer must write a letter to the Commandant of the Marine Corps and explain the unacceptable marksmanship. Coming to the attention of the top officer of the Corps would be auspicious, except for failure as a rifleman. The officer is expected to do whatever is necessary to re-qualify as soon as possible.

My training weapon was the M14, a redesign and upgrade of the WWII M1 Garand rifle. The most obvious difference was that the M14 was fitted with a bottom loading magazine that held up to 20 rounds. It was also modified to allow the rifleman to fire in fully automatic mode like a machine gun, BRRRRRRRRRRRT, with the flick of a selection lever. Otherwise, it was fired in semiautomatic mode like the M1. You squeezed the trigger once and fired one round at a time. One squeeze, one shot. With the firing of each round the spent cartridge shell was ejected, automatically, the next bullet was loaded into the firing chamber, and the weapon was ready for another squeeze of the trigger. The M14 rifle was designed to fire the 7.62 mm (30 caliber) ammunition that was standardized for all of the NATO countries. Another improvement was fitting a bi-pod under the rifle barrel for more stability when firing from a prone position.

Read more »

by Pervez Hoodbhoy

It was mid-October 1973 when, after a grueling 26-hour train ride from Karachi, I reached the physics department of Islamabad University (or Quaid-e-Azam University, as it is now known). As I dumped my luggage and “hold-all” in front of the chairman's office, a tall, handsome man with twinkling eyes looked at me curiously. He was wearing a bright orange Che Guevara t-shirt and shocking green pants. His long beard, though shorter than mine, was just as unruly and unkempt. We struck up a conversation. At 23, I had just graduated from MIT and was to be a lecturer in the department; he had already been teaching as associate professor for five years. The conversation turned out to be the beginning of a lifelong friendship. Together with Abdul Hameed Nayyar – also bearded at the time – we became known as the Sufis of Physics. Thirty six years later, when Faheem Hussain lost his battle against prostate cancer, our sadness was beyond measure.

Revolutionary, humanist, and scientist, Faheem Hussain embodied the political and social ferment of the late 1960's. With a Ph.D that he received in 1966 from Imperial College London, he had been well-placed for a solid career anywhere in the world. In a profession where names matter, he had worked under the famous P.T. Mathews in the group headed by the even better known Abdus Salam. After his degree, Faheem spent two years at the University of Chicago. This gave him a chance to work with some of the world's best physicists, but also brought him into contact with the American anti-Vietnam war movement and a powerful wave of revolutionary Marxist thinking. Even decades later, Faheem would describe himself as an “unreconstructed Marxist”. Participating in the mass anti-war demonstrations at UC had stirred his moral soul; he felt the urge to do more than just physics. Now married to Jane Steinfels, a like-minded soul who he met in Chicago, Faheem decided to return to Pakistan.

Read more »

Part One

by Daniel Rourke

“The spacetime of the lightcones and the fermions and scalar are connected to the chocolate grinder. The chocolate grinder receives octonionic structure from the water wheel.”

– Tony Smith, Valdosta Museum Website

In 1927 Marcel Duchamp's The Large Glass was broken in transit. The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, Duchamp's title for the piece, depicts a mechanical Bride in its upper section and nine abstract Bachelors in its lower. Duchamp took oil, lead, varnish and dust and sandwiched them between panes of glass. The Bachelors encounter their Bride in the presence of a large, gorgeous, chocolate grinder whose drums revolve in motions which seem to reach up, across the divide, to touch the ethereal Bride in her domain.

In 1936 Duchamp 'fixed' the broken Bride by repairing, rather than replacing, the shattered panes of glass. He claimed to like it better that way.

Today progenies of Duchamp invest time, thought and often a great many dollars in their own artworks. The successful ones amongst them package those artworks up in foam, plaster and cellophane to be moved, shipped and re-exhibited in multiple gallery spaces again and again. Without dwelling on the commodification of the artwork I want to build my own scheme for understanding these movements. I want to rest a little and draw the lines of desire that artworks traverse; the paths they take that human intent had nothing to do with; the archives they carry within themselves. For every map there are points we must plot, spaces and places in real space and time that require isolation and signification. We grab a GPS device and codify the crossroads where St. Martin's Place meets Trafalgar Square, marking carefully the precise angle via which Madonna on the Rocks will be fed through the clamouring crowds into the The National Gallery's mouth. Artworks live in motion, just as readily as they live in the gallery. In the dark recess of transit they sketch a hidden, secret life away from the viewing eye, becoming not 'art', but 'object' – traversing the gap between these concepts as they travel.

The Bride now rests out her Autumn years in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, waiting for gravity to release her chocolate grinder once again from its sandwich of (un)shattered glass.

Read more »

To Roof

Ah, to put a roofing spade
to desiccated shingles

To lean upon the spade-handle’s end
leveraging stubborn nails
from their impacted seats

To wrench my back

To abrade my bleeding hands again
stroking the asphalt’s pebbled face

To fight a wind while laying felt
which, like Ahab’s sails, would whisk me
to a mad roofer’s end

To slam my thumb once more

To slash my hands with flashing
imagining the course of rainwater
down a 4 square deck–
……… to place aluminum just so
as if I could plumb
a droplet’s depth

To race the advance of a front

To look skyward anxious
under gathering clouds

To become so unfocused in haste
my courses, like the venal
schemes of politicians, veer off
disordered and untrue
leaving poor substrate constituents
vulnerable to a deluge

Ah, but then, at last,
to button it up

To take the scaffold down
and store the ladder

To pack the tools and,
eye-balling the shingled slope,
wax smug

To hope again I’d out-danced
natural law

To think I’d punked Poseidon
(who pelts my roof with rain and hail)

To stride off then self-satisfied
and step upon a roofing nail

………………………

By Jim Culleny; Sept 27, 2009

Jim Carroll's recent death inspired as many eulogies and elegies as might be expected from the passing of a poet, rocker, and memorist, especially one whose reputation is so bound to a specific place (New York City) and time (the late 1970's and early 1980's). My friend Michael Lally, also an urban Catholic poet of major repute, drew some online flak for using Carroll's death as an opportunity for reflection – on Jim, himself, and his life in comparison to Jim's (they were both working-class Catholic boys who stormed the hipster-poetry barricades).

Michael spoke honestly of his sense of competition with Jim, and I defended him in the “comments” section of his post, writing: “… for those who prefer to be true to a fallen writer's memory at the moment of his death, I would answer: What could be truer than that?” I then went on to tell my own story in relation to Jim's (who I didn't know):

“I, too, felt a lot of envy toward Jim Carroll. I had a manager and was trying to get a rock n roll record deal in NYC when he switched from spoken word to music and was signed in a heartbeat. He had the looks, the magnetism, the hipness … and then, all of a sudden, he had the deal with Rolling Stones Records. (I think it was Stones …) The truth is, my feelings had no more to do with Jim Carroll than perhaps yours did. He was a placeholder for some things inside of me that needed to get out. That's not his fault – but it's my story, which is ultimately the only one I'm qualified to write.”

Read more »

Will historians and archaeologists a few thousand years from now believe that scientists in the mid-twentieth century split the atom? That they even created a nuclear bomb? There’s a good chance the answer will be “no.” If nothing else, there’s reason to think this could be a contentious point among men and women of learning, debatable on both sides.

A span of thousands of years is both extremely short and impenetrably long. It’s short because human nature will not change much in that time. Which means our human tendency to discount the past and pooh-pooh the achievements of antique cultures will not have diminished. Dismissing technical achievements in the remote past is especially tempting. We’re willing to believe that people philandered and murdered and philosophized uselessly like we do today, but we conveniently reserve the notion of technical progress for ourselves. It’s really a poverty of imagination: They didn’t have the tools or libraries or scientific understanding we do today, so how could they have accomplished much? We tend to conflate science and technology, as if one cannot exist without the other. But without much science the Greeks did calculate the circumference of the earth; the Chinese did invent paper, gunpowder, and the printing press eons before Europeans; the Polynesians did navigate thousands of miles of open ocean on tiny barks; and the Egyptians (among many others) did log as much about the movement and appearance of stars and planets as astronomers know today. Nor are those special examples, or even unique—many technologies arose more than once.

Read more »

Krzysztof Kotarski

When Roman Polański was arrested this weekend, I immediately thought of this.

This is the genius of Dave Chappelle—that sentence could have been spoken in Polish, English or French, and “Nóż w wodzie”, “Chinatown” or “the Pianist” could fit in rather nicely in place of “Thriller” depending (of course) on one’s age and cultural demographic.

Read more »

A Good Beginning…

Excited as I was for autumn to arrive, it’s gotten off to an awful start. After spending three days bedridden with the first all-congesting cold to hit me this season, my head is still in a fog as thick as the one that shrouded the whole city this morning. But this season’s less-than-auspicious opener did afford me one thing I almost never grant myself: many hours of calm, quiet time to rest. This is something that comes hard to me, as I tend to fill what little down time I find doing anything but relaxing. Because I felt wretched enough that none of my usual pursuits—drawing, reading, strolling—were possible, I was left only one option: to just lie there and think.

After a few minutes indulging my mind’s fickle tides and following little thoughts to the most varied places imaginable, sleep swept in. This happened repeatedly, offering several veritable voyages as I lay cushioned between the conscious and unconscious. Early this afternoon brought me back to an episode from this past summer, walking through Milan’s little-known yet magnificent Bagatti Valsecchi Museum.

My visit was brief, as I’d gotten sidetracked on several tiny lanes before finally finding Via Gesù 5. I’d been additionally delayed in the museum’s two courtyards—ringed with intriguing inscriptions—so only made my way up the grand main stair with forty-odd minutes left before closing. It happened to be Friday, 31 July; the museum would be closed the entire month of August, and I was there for a whirlwind four-day work trip, so knew it was now or never.

Read more »