Spirit Level

I've been a carpenter most of my life
and so have had occasion to use
what used to be called a spirit-level
but which today we call a level
–ditching spirit for the sake of efficiency
baby-with-bathwater-like as we
so often do, way past what's necessary

but the hole heaps up

this level is used to set things straight
to the plane of the horizon as with a beam
or plumb as with a stud to make sure
structure's right by spirit

you breathe deep and easy and hold the level
so the spirit bubble floats in the small arc of a glass flask
dead center which if placed upon a joist would say,
this floor is level

being on the level
good way to be

by Jim Culleny
Feb 7, 2010

This is an essay written by my 16 year old daughter, Sheherzad Raza Preisler. I am posting it today in honor of Black History Month:

Taking its lead from the 1957 Montgomery Bus Boycott, the 1960s in America was a major stride towards civil rights. Initially, the 1960s may appear to be a time of great cohesive progression towards equality. After close analysis, however, one sees the prevalence of different factions and changing strategies in the midst of resistance. The first half of the decade was characterized by legislation and nonviolent protests, however, as tensions grew, approaches that embraced violence became more popular, but the goal remained the same: equality for all. These different strategies, rather than being an impediment to success, were in fact necessary, because they combated different forms of resistance.

Early articulations of major groups and leaders promoted two major, overlapping ideal goals and strategies: to achieve total equality, through nonviolence and legislative action. In 1960, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee declared the necessity of nonviolence, arguing that it agreed with effective Judaic-Christian practices of unconditional love, even in the wake of oppression. In the following years, the Committee held numerous nonviolent sit-ins, many of which resulted in cruelty against the protesters, who never fought back. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led a march in Birmingham, Alabama, one of the most segregated cities, in 1963. Policemen such as Bull Connor met the protesters with vicious dogs and fire hoses. Dr. King was jailed, and in his April 1963 Letter from the Birmingham Jail, he explained that his intention was to bring Christ’s gospel of freedom throughout America through nonviolent gathering. Dr. King also refuted the idea that the protest intruded in Alabama state affairs, because every city in the United States was interconnected, and it was therefore his duty to promote equality everywhere. This vision of interconnectivity was also present in a June 1963 address to the American people made by President John F. Kennedy. In his address, Kennedy stated that compromising one’s freedom, compromises everyone’s lives.

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Better known as Momus, Nick Currie has, since the mid-1980s, led parallel careers in music (with 21 albums out so far), prose, art and journalism, exploring the nexuses between them while traveling the world and examining his favorite cultures. He has most recently turned toward traditional ink-and-paper publishing with two volumes, The Book of Jokes and The Book of Scotlands. Since 2004, he has written the blog Click Opera on his life, work and art adventures, which he closed on February 10, the eve of his 50th birthday. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes link]

I was thinking, reading your final post, about Brian Eno's diary that he published, at the end of which — just a year of daily personal diary entries — he says, “Oh, it's so good not to have to write this damn thing tomorrow.” Is there a similar feeling with the much larger effort you have just put the cap on?

It's not a relief at all, because blogging is the best thing I've done in years. I feel like it's the ending, and maybe the happy ending, or maybe the sad ending, of a very enjoyable thing. It's become an ingrained habit in me, so as soon as I knew I was putting the blog to bed, in came a great story, a conversation I was having with Ezra from Vampire Weekend and I thought, “Wow, this is a great update to that Vampire Weekend story we featured last year.” Then I thought, “Well, I can't do it, because the blog ends tomorrow.” It's frustrating.

And your introduction, calling me a former blogger; in a way, one reason I'm ending the blog is so that I don't get called “Nick Currie, blogger” anymore. But actually, it's even sadder to be the former blogger Nick Currie. I'm hoping that'll be a very brief interim period, and then I'll be known as Nick Currie, something else.

It was, but I was a little bit worried because I was approaching a one-to-one ratio. In other words, the things you would talk about and the things you would do would approach equality. Every single thing I would do in real life would end up getting written about. There is this saying that the unexamined life is not worth living. I forget who said that, but, actually, you know, it is worth living.
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“This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel”

Holden Caulfield would probably have two hemorrhages if he heard someone say this, but it’s true that even for thoughtful and otherwise independent people it simply feels good sometimes to know you’re doing the exact same thing as thousands of others. And judging by the book’s Amazon ranking (I saw it reach as high as #7), I wasn’t the only one rereading The Catcher in the Rye over the past two weeks. Despite my determination to read it, I have to admit that I expected to be put off by the book this time around, and I was. What I didn’t expect was that I wouldn’t be put off by what I’d dreaded going in—the sanctimonious tone—but by what I thought I would enjoy—the novel’s action, watching Holden run around and clash with people. Because I finally realized that, when it comes right down to it, Holden’s a jerk.

It started with one phrase in the book—“It killed me”—and the variations thereof. I say that phrase sometimes, and I never realized where I’d picked the phrase up. Holden says it dozens of times; aside from “phony,” it might be his pet phrase. But I (along with most people) say “It just about killed me” when something just about kills me with laughter, when I find something so absurd or incongruent I almost die in delighted shock. And in fact, far from Catcher being the somber treatise on how to live an authentic life that I remember being assured it was in high school, the book was disarmingly funny. Holden is a master of hyperbole, the comic exaggeration—a style of joke mostly lost on people who take the book a little seriously. But Holden generally doesn’t use “killed me” when he’s speaking of something uproarious. He uses it to point out shams, hypocrisies, or, most often, just plain normal human failings that offend his fragile sensibilities. Jesus Christ never laughed, and neither does Holden Caulfield. If we readers find ourselves laughing, we almost have to hide it from him.

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by Bliss Kern

February 2^nd saw the release of Don Delillo's Point Omega: A Novel. That the book claims to be “A Novel” is not surprising; this has become standard practice for denoting that a fictional work is literary (read: not genre) fiction. The heft of the distinction balanced against the lightness of the tome (a mere 117 pages) provokes the question: isn't it really A Short Novel or perhaps A Novella? Delillo himself declared in an interview with the New York Times that writing Point Omega was different from composing his longer works in that “this novel demanded economy.” That Point Omega carries the subtitle A Novel, despite the declaredly different “demands” of its form, suggests that we may have too few words to describe the wealth of prose fiction that makes up the majority of contemporary English language literature. What we need are more standardized and specific terms to delineate the fine distinctions of prose fiction genres.

Medium length fiction is a term I use to categorize a work based on bulk alone. It describes those works of fiction that contain somewhere between, very roughly, seventy and two hundred pages. While admittedly seventy pages is an arbitrary cut off point, one does begin to feel antsy if a short story much exceeds this length. The descriptions of people and places have often, in these cases, grown out of proportion with the events of the narrative and have therefore hobbled the pace that characterizes the short story. The broad scope of a novel, on the other hand, can rarely be fully fleshed out in fewer than two hundred pages, with all of the elaborated characters, settings, and interdependent causes and consequences that the reader expects when tempted by the word “novel.” It is not, however, the length alone that defines a given narrative. As author and critic George Fetherling has warned, defining one version of prose fiction against another based solely on length is “like insisting that a pony is a baby horse.” Medium length fiction must certainly be further categorized under the terms available to us. So far these are “novella” and “short novel,” each distinct from the other in form and objective, as I will describe below. (I leave novelette out of my list of available sub-genre labels because, despite my long residence in the strongholds of English academia and among lovers of literature, I have yet to hear it used a single time—it, like “fetch,” simply never caught on.)

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The photo to the right is of our family dog, Treetree (we stupidly allowed a 2 year old to name her and Treetree is what we ended up with.) She’s a yellow Labrador Retriever, a breed notoriously easy to train. Dog motivation, and particularly Lab motivation is pretty simple: they want to please their owners and extra food is always welcome, and so a carrot and stick approach works very well. They do a good job, they get a treat, they do a bad job and they are scolded. Despite the fact that Treetree is definitely not the smartest dog in the world, and that we were not the most consistent and industrious dog trainers ever, she’s a well trained dog; the carrot and stick approach of “if-then” turns out to be a good way to train a dog, but is it how we should be educating our children?

To recap briefly my argument put forward so far over the last few months: as traditional “left-brained” jobs get automated and outsourced to China and elsewhere, and as these countries themselves start to move into the innovation space, the US and other western countries need to be educating children in a whole new way. We are not educating our children to be creative, innovative, inventive leaders for the 21st century, we are not even improving our ability to compete in traditional left-brained-based activities with other countries. So, now let’s fantasize for a moment that the Department of Education wakes up and realizes how truly lacking the education system in this country is. They do away with standardized, multiple-choice exams; they do away with the traditional grading system until high school; they devise a curriculum that encourages children to be intellectually vibrant, academic risk-takers for life. Even if this were all to happen, I think that there would still be a part of the puzzle that would be missing: how to motivate children in this brave new world.

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by Evert Cilliers (aka Adam Ash)

America, Britain, France, Germany, China, Japan and Israel all have one thing in common: they're the only countries on earth who think they're better than anyone else.

America thinks its Constitution and economy and military make it better than anyone else. Britain thinks its Shakespeare and erstwhile empire and Beatles and sense of humor make it better than anyone else. France thinks its food and fashion and culture and Revolution make it better than anyone else. Germany thinks its Beethoven and philosophers and engineering and efficiency make it better than anyone else. Japan thinks its honor and work ethic and tech smarts and kawaii make it better than anyone else. Israel thinks its Jewish suffering make it better than anyone else. China thinks its size and growth make it better than anyone else.

Call them countries who suffer from a superiority complex.

Now, if you meet anyone at a party who thinks he or she is better than anyone else, your reaction is natural and immediate. You say to yourself under your breath, what an asshole, and move on.

But one thing we cannot do with these We're-Better-Than-Anyone-Else countries is avoid or ignore them. They're bigger and stronger than most other nations, unfortunately. So when they act like assholes, which is what feeling superior makes you do, their influence can be felt beyond their borders. Believing they are better than anyone else, they try to prescribe their better-than-anyone-else-ness to everybody else: they think the entire world should be like them.

One might think this superiority complex stems from overbearing nationalism, but it smacks more of racism because of how it Otherises other nations. These seven nations also happen to be the most racist nations on earth: the root of their superiority complex. The Japanese people, for instance, believe black people are inferior to them, when they don't even have any black people in Japan, and when they themselves aren't even Anglo-Saxons, who invented anti-black racism.

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Better to say Now

I almost didn't get up this morning
sleep

was so I-want-to-stay-here-the-world-is-fucked
but

there's still something blissful about breathing
and

notwithstanding what's all too typical in this world
I

opened my eyes and found you there
as

startlingly usual and knew that with you and our daughters
and

friends and the means to ambulate, see, hear, and help
I'd

miss a lot just sleeping, somnambulating, dreaming,
so

I threw back the covers and jumped into another
day

since opportunity may not be so abundant
in

the after-life or next-life if there are such things. Better so say
Now

by Jim Culleny, Feb, 14, 2010

Games and the idea of play have been obsessing me lately. Having recently exited academia—for a short while, at least—I've been able to give a little more time to this pastime. Wanting to go beyond my adoration of the intriguing, endless theme of wordplay, I thought a brief reflection on play and its various other sorts was in order.

For most of us, play starts in the cradle. If we're lucky, we keep it going a little longer, and perhaps make it part of our very selves and our lives. My recent fascination with play goes back to an Indian-summer day last autumn, when I picked up a copy of George Perec's Life a User's Manual. During an afternoon stroll I stopped in at 192 Books and was drawn to the cover—a perfectly sound reason to purchase a tome such as this. Soon after finishing that, once my misty eyes cleared, I devoured Species of Spaces. Perec's job as a crossword puzzle craftsman and master word player would suggest that I'm wholly underqualified to even begin talking on the subject, but it was his work that got me thinking about play in a serious way.

Because I so often find myself posting on holidays, I'd also like to make a nod to this (now past) Valentine's Day. One of my most beloved mentions of play occurs in the lighthearted yet entirely heartfelt context of a Queen song, “Play the Game”:

Open up your mind and let me step inside
Rest your weary head and let your heart decide
It's so easy when you know the rules
It's so easy all you have to do
Is fall in love
Play the game
Everybody play the game
Of love

Love is a game, life is a game—and only those who step up to play, regardless of whether they win or lose, will really feel any of it.

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A consideration of “Vampires with Dreaming Kids” and “The Girlfriend Experience”

David Schneider

These days, my life is lived on the hypermedia broadband, incessantly, obsessively. And occasionally, I have some remarkable experiences there. I'd like to tell you about two of them which chimed together.

Recently I discovered a quite extraordinary band just starting to run the Brooklyn club circuit. Their name is Twin Sister, made up of four guys and a girl, all friends from Long Island, between the ages of 20 and 26. They've just released an EP called “Vampires with Dreaming Kids,” and to my mind it's one of the most lushly considered “concept albums” I've heard in a long time: a great ascending arc of falling deeply in love, and that is a thing that is ever so difficult to talk about even when talking about music: to say so is a great risk: one is either wise, or deeply foolish. (And fools rush in, etcetera etcetera.)

I'd like to consider this EP in conjunction with Steven Soderbergh's “The Girlfriend Experience,” which I encountered directly after. I found myself watching “The Girlfriend Experience,” and toggling between that and “Vampires with Dreaming Kids” back and forth, so taken was I with the emotional and intellectual effect this had – for “Vampires with Dreaming Kids” and “The Girlfriend Experience” are diametrically opposed to one another in every respect but one: they are both true.

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For over two decades, Michael Silverblatt has hosted KCRW's Bookworm, the beloved public radio celebration of fiction and poetry featuring half-hour, one-on-one interviews with writers. Colin Marshall originally conducted this interview on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas [MP3] [iTunes link].

We've talked before about Bookworm listeners and how they consider the show to be their own special thing, their own little secret, a show presumably broadcast on a frequency only their ears can hear, a show for them. What do you chalk this up to, this perception that the show is for the individual you're talking to it about?

I think people are very surprised to find a show like that. I call it “the surprise at finding the real thing.” So many times, you hear the interview and you just know that the writer is talking to someone who hasn't read his book. Then you hear interviews like mine, and I've read the author's complete works. The sound of it being genuine, the likelihood of one of the mysteries about the book being answered and revealed. I think books are full of mysteries. I think readers need all kinds of information to help them read a book more deeply or more completely. I think the writer gets very charmed, enchanted, thrilled to be speaking to someone who really knows a good deal of what he knows of what he's done.

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by Quinn O'Neill

As the swine flu fiasco fades into the past, many people are breathing a sigh of relief; some because they were worried about getting sick, and some because they were sick of hearing about it. Since it all began, I’ve spent innumerable hours reading about the virus and vaccine. I read the peer-reviewed literature, newspaper articles, science blogs, magazine features, and vaccine package inserts. I read the unscientific stuff too; the conspiracy theories and the sensational reports of rare side effects.

I have come to a few conclusions. First of all, we can’t all make fully informed decisions about such issues. There is too much information and there are too many issues. Where do I stand on the issue of global warming? I hesitate to say; I spent all of my free time reading about the swine flu.

For many people, the quality of the information is as problematic as its quantity. The primary literature isn’t written in a way that is comprehensible for those who have no knowledge of medicine, statistics, and research design. The mainstream media conveys information in ways that are easier to understand, but the message ultimately depends on the source. Reports from the National Vaccine Information Center and the CDC in the United States, for example, would lead people to markedly different conclusions.

Perceptions of credibility are variable and subjective, and members of the public are ill-equipped to distinguish reliable evidence from sensationalism. For these reasons, it is crucial that the public be able to trust scientific authorities and government agencies to advise them appropriately. For a mass vaccination effort to be successful, people need to believe that authorities hold their health and safety as top priorities. Many people do not believe that this is the case. Their doubts may well be justified.

On various internet forums, ardent science defenders tossed insults and ridicule at the anti-vaccine crowd. They raved about the “overwhelming evidence” and “solid science” as if they have read all of it and judged it for themselves. The heart of the problem, however, is not the evidence or the quality of it, but the perceived lack of credibility of the authorities. In this respect, and this respect alone, I do sympathize with the anti-vaccine perspective. The authorities who are supposed to be ensuring our health and safety do not have a good track record.

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Installment #1

by Edward B. Rackley

“Don’t share this image with anyone,” John Hart wrote after our first meeting, attaching a photo of a newly discovered species of primate. “The official scientific announcement isn’t out yet.” We had met in Washington as John was presenting his vision for a new national park in eastern DR Congo. The three river basins of the Tshuapa, Lomami and Lualaba Rivers (the ‘TL2’ in Hart-speak), all tributaries of the continent’s massive aquatic artery, the Congo River, contain the country’s most remote forests. Straddling Orientale and Maniema provinces, the planned protected area forms part of the largest continuous canopy remaining in Africa. Living almost continuously in these forests since 1973, John and Terese now devote all their time and resources to the TL2 project. “We have the largest forests on the continent,” the couple explained when I met them later in Kinshasa. “And these contain the only unmapped areas left in Africa.”

What makes conservation in Congo unique is that many of its protected species exist in no other country. Among the best known are the Congo peacock, bonobo, Grauer’s gorilla, northern white rhino, and okapi, though there are many others. It has the highest diversity of mammals in any African country (415 species); 28 of these are found only within its borders. Of more than one thousand bird species, 23 live only in DRC. More than 1300 species of butterfly have been identified, the highest for any African country. Of the more than 11,000 documented plant species, 3200 grow only on Congolese soil.

The TL2 project is the result of participatory demarcation involving lengthy negotiation and education of local communities, the vision being a bottom-up approach to conservation and park management. For the Harts, bottom-up means investing in “the people who will be here forever,” thus offering a better chance of lasting results. In many ways, bottom-up is the only way left to work in Congo given that the government’s official conservation body “can’t put together a research team to find out the state of gorillas today.” Last year’s BBC reports of silverback populations ‘stabilizing’ after years of rebel activity in their midst were premature and ill-founded. Parks like Garamba on the Sudanese border have seen their elephants hunted out entirely. Sub-species like the white rhino are functionally extinct (two males in Garamba, non-breeding females in zoos abroad), because efforts to save them by evacuation to neighboring countries were blocked by zealous local officials. Most international conservation efforts here are directed from abroad, and do not rely on or invest in local expertise.

From the beginning, John recalled, Terese and he always worked “from the people out,” his arms gesturing in a wide embrace. This meant relying on living stores of pygmy knowledge, who partnered with the Harts to map the biodiversity of the Ituri forest, in particular its okapi and duikers, in the mid-1980s. “We didn’t do anything solo; pygmies were integrated from the word go.” This melding of interests—living local knowledge with scientific hypotheses, data collection, and evidence—buried the classic image of “western field biologists watching and working on their own,” he reflected.

This human-centric, bottom-up approach has informed nearly 40 years of research and practice. Throughout the war and since, it has proven an effective operating model, able to deliver results in the face of weak national conservation institutions, intense poaching by armed groups, many of whom use the parks as a rear base, civilians seeking refuge in the parks, and increasing government implication in the giant resource grab at the core of Congo’s dysfunction. Replicating the model in similar ‘fragile states’ and ‘conflict countries’, labels that have applied to Congo for the last 15 years, is another possibility. There are nearly twenty such states in the sub-Saharan region, all witnessing a steady erosion of their parks and wildlife.

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Google recently introduced Google Voice, which routes calls among different lines, performs other screening and call handling tasks, and automatically generates a written record of each phone message using voice transcription software. I've had it for months. I'm not going to complain about the transcription software's high error rates, although lots of people do. It's free, for crying out loud. Where do people get off complaining so much about free stuff? They don't have to use it if they don't want to use it.

But that's not my point. My point is, I think I've noticed something about these Google Voice transcriptions: I see an authorial sensibility taking form, like a face emerging from a cloud bank. These transcriptions can be read as poetry.

At its most accurate, Google Voice gives a surprising dignity to some simple messages merely by rendering them in written language. At its most interpretative, the results could give a Surrealist vertigo.

Roll over, Brion Gysin, and tell Bill Burroughs the news: There's a new sheriff in Cut-Up Land, and his motto is Don't Be Evil. Below are some real-life examples of this new poet's work, taken from my own phone messages. Since the transcript/poem often bears little resemblance to the actual words spoken, who are the real authors – the Voice, the callers, or some synergistic combination of forces beyond our limited understanding?

Here: Decide for yourself.

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by Michael Blim

Question: The Barack Obama Administration in its first year has been characterized by

1. fecklessness
2. inexperience
3. incompetence
4. all of the above
5. none of the above

My friends, as it used to be said in Chicago, vote early and often.

For my part, I’ll vote number 4. After all, incompetence and inexperience can be fixed by learning from mistakes and getting rid of the boobies.

There is no cure for fecklessness, or for the feckless which is probably more to the point.

Still competence and experience might make fecklessness less likely.

Each time I try to I try to sum up and draw the line on this Administration’s losses, with the hope of starting anew, I end up feeling like an idiot. I then stop listening to the TV and talking about politics with my friends while I stanch my losses, and then I try again.

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Robin Hanson is a professor of economics at George Mason University, research associate at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute and chief scientist at Consensus Point. He’s also the thinker behind Overcoming Bias, a popular blog about issues of honesty, signaling, disagreement, forecasting and the far future, around which a large rationality-centric community has developed on the internet. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio show and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes link]

If we are both honest truthseekers, we should not, over the course of this discussion, disagree. Is that correct?

It's more than this discussion. It would be any discussion between any two people who are honest truthseekers on any matter of fact, and it wouldn't have to be by the end of the discussion. It would be at any point in time. I should be able to pick a topic now and guess your next opinion on it. My guess of your next opinion should be the opinion I'm stating to you right now. If I say, “I think this interview will last an hour,” my best guess of what you'll say for the interview lasting should be an hour.

This is going to sound hard to get the mind around for somebody not familiar with what you've written. They'll say, “But people disagree all the time. Humanity is here, essentially, to disagree with one another.” How do you quickly get across to someone like that why there shouldn't theoretically be disagreement?

The whole reason this is interesting is that you have a theory that differs from behavior. It's a normative theory; it says what you should do. It doesn't say what you do do, but it gives you some idea of how we're going wrong. The key idea is that we should be respecting each other's opinions. That is, I don't know how you came to your opinion, I don't know what evidence it's based on, I don't know what reasoning you went through or analysis. I'm sure there's lots of noise and errors in the whole process, but nevertheless I think you were trying to estimate the truth, and that's the key point. When you tell me your opinion, I take that very seriously as a summary of all the things you know and think and have analyzed up to this point on that topic.

What gets in the way of the reality matching the theory? I could probably come out stating an opinion of mine as fact, I could be overstating the probability of some guess I'm making. That's one way this could go off the rails. Why else?

The first thing to notice is that theory and reality do match up, on lots of of ordinary topics we don't care about. It's when our pride or enthusiasm gets hyped up that we start to disagree. If you and I were walking down the street and I said, “I think there's a tree around the corner,” you probably wouldn't disagree with me there. If you said, “No there isn't,” I would say, “Oh, okay.” When our pride isn't on the line or we're working together on a project and we need to achieve something — maybe our job is at stake — we're much more likely to be reasonable. But when we talk about politics or religion or whatever we talk about on these radio shows, that's when we're much more likely to not be reasonable to find it more enjoyable to speak to listen.

Politics, religion — these are topics where people can hold opinions, but when they hold them, they don't actually act on them much of the time, is that correct?

That's true, although it also applies to topics that you do act on but where your pride is on the line. A CEO versus a subordinate director might disagree, or we might disagree about some actual business decision we're making, or about which restaurant we should go to and which is likely to be open and tasty. We disagree on things where we'd rather think that we're right. It's very pleasant and affirming to think we're right and they're wrong. We might rather indulge that feeling than actually be right.

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Forty Thousand Two Hundred Eight

I’m out here stacking days as if it were a sport
I’m up to forty thousand two hundred eight

I sweat memory. I’ve taken off my shirt,
I’m feeling great. But as I stack them up
they’re growing short

I tally what till now I’ve done

Not far from a stupa
I eye the spot where I’d begun
near an arbor vitae hedge
in a shade of catalpa

I’m looking for a bona fide antique

On spines of days my curate hands
feel to find the ones with bliss-laced hours
stitched with epiphanic seams

I come upon a few. They’re few
and far between

The sun’s past high. The pallid moon’s
a perfect ghost of round sentinel-still
upon a bald mountain ridge. I think
it might roll down

I breathe honeysuckle and see wisteria
clutch its pole twist up and round

I’d placed the pile with care
so as never to occlude the sun
yet carelessly have thrown
some days upon a previous one
then, too late, gone back to
square them up trying
to undo the done

by Jim Culleny,
January 2010

***

American Dan Hoyle lived in Nigeria for ten months in 2005/2006. During that time he was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Port Harcourt, in Nigeria’s restive delta region, the source of most of country’s wealth – and turmoil. He attributes the decision to come to Nigeria to a Professor at the Northwestern University, who, aware of his desire to study globalization (a 2002 grant was spent researching the activities of American companies in developing countries), stabbed at a map of the world and said: “If you want to study globalization, just go right here!” “Here” turned out to be Escravos, a region in the west of the Niger delta.

Hoyles obeyed, and his Nigerian sojourn in Nigeria inspired him to write TINGS DEY HAPPEN, an award-winning one-man performance piece set in the delta and exploring the complicated set-up that is the Nigerian oil industry. Nigerian ‘Poilitics’ if you will.

TINGS DEY HAPPEN is in Pidgin English. When I heard Hoyle was going to be performing in Nigeria, at the invitation of the State Department, I decided I had to see the show. More than anything, I was curious to see what Hoyle’s idea of pidgin amounted to. There is so much contrived stuff that passes for Pidgin English in popular culture, that I really didn’t have any significant expectations.
By the end of the 75 minute performance, which took place at the heavily guarded American Guest Quarters on the Ikoyi waterfront in Lagos, I was more than impressed. Hoyle’s pidgin is impressive, and as 'authentic' (I hesitate to use that word) as it gets.

Much has been written about the Niger delta. It is my guess that an entire publishing industry – academic papers, seminars, lectures financed by Universities and think-tanks mostly in Europe and America – is built on the workings – misworkings more like – of Nigerian oil.

This is not to mention the fact that the bulk of the news about Nigeria in the international media streams forth undistilled from the dark, polluted mangroves of the delta. The 18 – 24 November 1995 edition of the Economist bears as its headline: NIGERIA FOAMING WITH BLOOD. The accompanying image is of an oil rig from which blood is spewing forth, clearly at high pressure. The Financial Times journalist, Michael Peel’s A Swamp Full of Dollars: Paramilitaries and Pipelines at Nigeria’s Oil Frontier, was shortlisted for the Guardian UK’s first book Award in 2009. And then there is a growing genre of ‘Niger delta literature’, inspired by the cataclysmic events of the last decade and half (one of the landmark ones being the 1995 extra-judicial murder by the Abacha government of activist and writer Ken Saro Wiwa, arguably the most prominent environmental activists to emerge from the delta). Books like Kaine Agary’s novel, Yellow Yellow, and Ahmed Yerima’s play, Hard Ground (both winners of the Nigeria Prize for Literature) are set in the delta. A novel forthcoming from Helon Habila, (tentatively titled “Oil on Water”) is set against a background of violence and kidnapping in the delta.

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By Usha Alexander

When I visited India the summer I turned 9, my grandmother took my siblings and me to a jeweler to select pendants to bring back to the US. My brother and sister chose the gold-tipped tiger claws, still available easily and guilt-free in India in the 1970s. But I found the tiger claws too “gee whiz”; I wanted something that was meaningfully Indian. So the jeweler trotted out his line of large, bright silver pendants shaped either as Om or swastika. I was drawn to the pleasing aesthetics of the swastika designs, with their symmetry and regularity of line; the Om was alright, but it didn’t do much for me. Still, I had a difficult time deciding to bring home the swastika, waffling on the matter until it grew late and even the jeweler was losing patience with me. In the end, I came away with the Om, which languished never-worn in my dresser drawer for years until I simply lost track of it. Something about the entire episode never sat quite right with me, but as a child I couldn’t puzzle out why.

I was probably in high school before it first dawned on me just what it was that kept me from the swastika that day: Growing up in an observant Brahmin household in the US (from which I’ve long since recovered), I felt an emotional dissonance around the symbol, which I associated with something like serenity, nurturance, and cosmic benevolence, and at the same time with “evil,” hatred, and genocide.

The word swastika can be translated as wellbeing (from the Sanskrit su, meaning good, and asti, meaning to be, plus the diminutive suffix, ka) and in most of the world the identical symbol (by whatever name) has long been associated with wellbeing and good luck. In South Asia, the swastika is found on artifacts dating back 4,500 years to the time of the Harappan Civilization, where it frequently occurs as a character in their symbol system. Even as Harappan culture faded into obscurity, the swastika was carried forward, becoming strongly associated with Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist religious traditions, an association that persists to this day throughout Asia. Especially in India, the swastika is the most ubiquitous of religious symbols.

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Justin E. H. Smith

The last time I went to a poetry reading, I was made to sit patiently as a preening, college-age jack-ass indignantly declaimed, in verse that could only be called 'free', his strong disapproval of Dick Cheney. A serious issue, to be sure, but certainly not serious in a way that gets my poetic imagination going. If I confess a sympathy for what Stefan George called 'pure aestheticism' in poetry, this is not because I believe myself to be above politics, but because I believe that poetry is above current events, and by 'current' I mean whatever social world human beings have managed to throw together for themselves, for now, until it comes apart. Leave engagement with that to prose, which is to say to the vastly greater part of what language does in this, what Walter Benjamin rightly called our 'prosaic age'. Prose is the (more or less) formally unrestricted use of natural language for the telling of captivating things about the world. The formal restrictions of poetry, by contrast, bring it about that whatever poetry says about the world, it is always also saying something about language. This means, among other things, that translating poetry is at least something quite close to writing poetry (unless we take Nabokov's hyper-literalist translation of Evgenii Onegin, which was meant precisely to illustrate that a true translation of one language's poetry into another can only come out as prose). Someone who has translated a novel, by contrast, certainly could not be said eo ipso to have written a novel.

What language is poetry about? Generally, it is about the language it is in. In translation, in turn, poetry is about the limitations of the fit of one language with another. These two facts together mean that, in writing poetry, in contrast with prose (more or less), it matters what language one is writing in. I have become convinced, in fact, that good poetry, the best poetry, is the poetry that seeks to lay bare the essence of the language that serves as its medium. Now I understand that from a historical-linguistic point of view languages do not have essences, but are ever-evolving accretions of borrowings, local adaptations, creolizations and mishearings, but that does not change the fact that, in terms of expressive power, 'life', 'earth', and 'kin' sound closer to the soul of English than, say, 'vitality', 'terrestrial', or 'family'. I have thus also come to appreciate the extent to which the essence of English is Anglo-Saxon and Germanic, and to think that no one understood his task as a poet better than Seamus Heaney, when he undertook to translate Beowulf into modern English, in part, as he explained, to come to better know not just the source language, but also the target language.

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