by Alyssa Pelish

I.

I recently tried to pitch an essay that made use of, if not coined, the term “friendship porn.” The essay was basically about my massive consumption of a certain genre of TV show, which I had tried to make sense of by dipping into the literature on friendship — a phylum of work that includes treatises and lectures and meditations by big names like Cicero and Aristotle and Confucius and Kant, as well as papers by contemporary social scientists whose names are not yet in lights. However, as much as he liked my essay, the editor was bothered by the fact that this phenomenon I was discussing, this “friendship porn,” was dated. Friendship porn is old news, he told me. We want you to tell us what’s next. What’s the next big kind of “porn”? And although I tried to explain to him that my point was, look, friendship porn is timeless — he said no dice.

But I persist in believing that the phenomenon of friendship porn, regardless of how 1995 it is, hasn’t been adequately plumbed. The style sections have investigated the highest-profile categories of nouveau porn: the terms “food porn” and “torture porn” and “real estate porn” more or less trip off our tongues now. I accept them. I’ll admit that I’m not immune to the aesthetic pleasures of a well posed entree: my head can be turned by the stained glass slices of roasted beet against white china, drizzled with a citrus reduction, strewn with faintly toasted pignoli and garnished with pale leaves of escarole. So, too, will I page through a photo spread of tastefully renovated and cunningly designed breakfast nooks and turret rooms in the Times real estate section. But the kind of porn I’ve finally come around to admitting that I have, historically, been most susceptible to, is friendship porn. And lots of other people are, too, it would seem. Yet where is the Times style section feature? Where is the academic paper? Where is the Wikipedia entry? Granted, friendship porn is no longer new, but it warrants at least a modicum of pop-analysis.

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by S. Abbas Raza

This is my English version of Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz's Urdu rendition of a Turkish poem written by Nâzım Hikmet for his Russian wife Vera.

To Vera

She said come
She said stay
Smile, said she
Die, said she

I came
I stayed
Smiled
And died also.

by Akim Reinhardt

Last month, the national newspaper-cum-multi media endeavor Indian Country Today released its list of the worst five U.S. presidents vis a vis American Indians. As a professor of American Indian history, I was immediately curious about what they had come up with. The list, in order, reads:

Andrew Jackson
Dwight Eisenhower
George W. Bush, Jr.
Abraham Lincoln
Ulysses Grant

A list like this is designed to be debated, and I could make a case here or there. But quibles aside, there’s no debating the man at the top of the list: Andrew Jackson. Frankly, I would have been shocked if they had picked anyone other than Old Hickory. And indeed, few historians would disagree that he was the worst president for American Indians, and maybe by a longshot.

However, for a number of years now, I’ve been cantankerously telling anyone who will listen that Jackson wasn’t just the worst president vis a vis Indians; I think he’s actually the worst U.S. president of all time, period. And now seems like as good a time as any to make my case, which boils down to three major factors: his forementioned Indian policy; his economic policies; and his political legacy.

Indian Policies- When it comes to Indian affairs, there has been no shortage of presidential scoundrels. From George Washington to Zachary Taylor, a number of commanders-in-chief (including Jackson) literally killed Indians on their way to the nation’s highest elected office. Indeed, the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) nickname for Washington was “Town Destroyer.” Though the moniker dated back to at least the 1750s, Washington eventually lived up to it by ordering a campaign of total warfare against the Haudenosaunee during the Revolution. At his behest, Major General John Sullivan and the Continental Army destroyed no fewer than forty Haudenosaunee towns in 1779, spurring a horrific wave of disease, famine, and death. Father of the nation? To the Haudenosaunee, Washington was more like Darth Vader. And he was not alone. During the nation’s first century, a parade of presidents presided over a shockingly violent colonial conquest of the continent . So what sets Andrew Jackson apart?

Ethnic cleansing.

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Fresh Brim-Feather

Inside the eye of a new storm
are you lost? came the question;
came as a little nesting tornado, a
windy Matryoshka tucked
naturally within another;
a wind like the tiny tempests
that lift street leaves from gutters in fall
—a miniscule funnel by standards of
Tornado Alley but
if you’re small (as small
as a small thought)
the small question,
are you lost in this new storm?
is as mighty as a tsunami
gathered on a beach at your feet
its humping, horizon-lifting wave
poised in the instant before
yesterday-would-be-better

—then-there
in the shutter-click before
it rakes the landscape,
in the time before
too-late

……………. still

inside the eye of this new storm
everything’s familiar;
the heavens have not issued
new revelations
(news is always old-hat
but with a fresh brim-feather)
love and hate are ghosts with heartbeats
eternal as new babes, and
to be lost in a new storm
is as natural as breath & death
.

by Jim Culleny
3/11/12

by Liam Heneghan

To James White, botanist and teacher.

Though you might forgivably mistake a man for a tree at the level of gross morphology, nevertheless, a tree undeniably dwells in place whereas a person’s home is born in motion. Agnes Arber, the Cambridge plant anatomist and philosopher, remarked in her 1950 classic The Natural Philosophy of Plant Form that “among plants, form may be held to include something corresponding to behaviour in the zoological field.” If by behavior we refer to the sum of all the activities of an organism, then the manner in which a plant grows – marshalling its leaves to best secure light, disposing its roots to obtain nutrients and to harness it to the earth – is comparable to the more rambunctious activities that animals deploy for analogous purpose. The behavior of plants – the punctuated rhythms of their growth – is founded on the quite simple laws of cell division and extension. This was Arber’s lesson. And this, at eighteen, was the first conceptual framework that preoccupied me. If simplicity rules the world of plants, why not also true for animals, for people, for me?

Thirty years ago I took several wintery trips out to North Bull Island, a five-mile stretch of sand in Dublin Bay which formed in response to 18th Century engineering projects at the mouth of the River Liffey. Now a site of considerable conservation interest, I went along with fellow biology student Liam Dolan to observe the curious behavior of Armeria maritima roots. The plant, commonly known as sea pink, grew profusely on the dunes. The two Liams were at that time under the thrall of Jim White from the Botany Department at University College, Dublin and were both taking his course on the architecture of trees. To those of us who studied with White in the 1980s, he seemed like a visitor from another planet, one who pointed out the strangeness of his new home to the gaping residents, most of whom had never noticed the oddness of the world surrounding them. Jim’s lectures were marvels of erudition, scientific concision, and anecdote. Many years later when I worked in a Costa Rica, a well-known tropical forest researcher told me that he had only written one “fan letter” in his life and this was to James White. Anyway, we returned to White with our sketches and observations on the architectural patterns formed by sea pink roots. He was little incredulous at first – surely we were out looking at birds? In those days it was not uncommon for hale teens to spend their days traipsing out with binoculars to Bull Island to observe birds. It was unimaginable, apparently, that the youth would be looking at plant roots. Perhaps it’s best for a teacher not to sense the full measure of his impact, as it may constrain the random suggestions with which he peppers his lectures.

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Bolts of Light

The Sami have a hundred words for snow
I have few
Rivers of nuance flow from familiarity

I know the bite of my own bark
Toothless as a frog I sit upon my stone
I croak across my pond, the sun,
early spark and setting ember
knew what I have known
knows what I remember,
has seen it all, collecting as it burns
tells what it has shown
fastening with bolts of light
all love I never tendered
..

Jim Culleny
3/3/12

by Misha Lepetic

“In the dime stores and bus stations,
People talk of situations,
Read books, repeat quotations,
Draw conclusions on the wall”
~ Bob Dylan

Cities ceaselessly fascinate because of the problems they have solved over time – grand socio-infrastructural dilemmas such as property rights, water, sewage, electrification. But as cities grow and evolve, these solutions in turn generate new problems, or intensify existing ones, in ways that are both unpredictable and banal. Indeed, for cities to continue growing in any sense of the word, this will remain a permanent aspect of their discourse, and a precondition of their success. It would not be much of a stretch to say that, given global trends of urbanization, the ability of cities to continue planning and designing their way past new problems is not just essential for their own survival, but for that of humanity itself.

Within this context, mobility must rank as a problem par excellence. Commentators have described slums as “cities that have failed to solve their mobility problem”. The free and rapid flow of people and goods is essential to the dynamic nature of any urban setting; and while the developed world looks on China’s growth with a mixture of awe and trepidation (and hope that they will keep buying our debt), it is also true that the media greets reports of things like a 10-day traffic jam with a certain amount of Schadenfreude. Amateurs! (On the other hand, the fact that there were no incidents of road rage reported during this traffic jam may have something to teach us about the virtues of a certain national temperament. Once, we too had a sense of humour about this.)

At any rate, the design problem is simple: How do you get people to use public transport more effectively?

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by Melanie Friedrichs

The Icarus Factor: Interpreting Financial Crisis through the Capacity-Output Cross

In finance, the “Icarus factor” describes the dangerous over-excitement that leads company managers to take on projects too risky or too ambitious for the company to handle. But can the story of Icarus apply to a bigger picture? Perhaps the economy is like a company; it can only handle so much real estate speculation, so many collateralized debt obligations, so much easy credit before it begins to get uncomfortably hot.

A Short Summary of The Capacity-Output Cross

Two weeks ago I introduced the “capacity-output cross,” a new way to conceptualize the causal role of money and finance that came from thinking about how classical theorists—Adam Smith, David Hume, John Maynard Keynes, F.A. Hayek, Milton Friedman—differ in their interpretations of the equation of exchange, MV = PQ. I renamed Q real output proposed a new term: capacity for exchange, roughly equal to M times potential V determined by the state of financial innovation and the strength of institutions. Neither quantity is measurable, but real output can be imagined as utility value of all goods and services produced during a given period of time, and capacity for exchange can be imagined as the amount of money available to be spent during a given period of time, recognizing that within that in any given period some dollars will be spent more than once.

I sketched economic history with the two lines. Capacity crosses Real Output, because it is usually easier to mine or print money or to improve institutions than it is to increase the efficiency of production and make more real value. The lines cross at different times in different markets and in different places, but as an example I suggested that the economy of northern Europe “crossed” during the expansion of coinage and banking during the 18th century, sometime around the time of Hume and Smith.

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by James McGirk

I do not follow contemporary cinema, but with the Oscars looming, I felt obliged to weigh in on the moving image as I experience it. Since I do not own a television and lack the sophistication and desire to sift through darknets and peer-to-peer file-sharing networks hunting for shows to download, I have resorted to Youtube’s never-ending supply of serial killer documentaries. Most are grainy and since the channels tend to abruptly disappear, are more than likely illegally uploaded. With any other genre this would be unbearable, but the crappiness of the viewing experience adds grit to these shows, which are usually collages of old photos and interviews, and the experience of watching a psychopathic killer delivered to justice becomes all the more deliciously unsettling.

After watching hundreds of these shows from all over the English-speaking world, I have begun to autopsy the peculiar relationship between the police, the bereaved, the media, and the public. There are remarkable differences between an Australian, an American, an English or even the rare Canadian depiction of society’s most heinous crime.

A serial killer is a murderer who has killed at least three people, with a refractory period, that is a length of time, between killings. There tends to also be a psychological motive, though many plunder their victims’ possessions, deep down serial killers kill because they want to or have to. The really famous ones often have a prurient interest in killing, and some of the most frenzied do horrific damage to their victims' bodies. These cases are full of sex, violence and vivid characters, and almost always have a thrilling conclusion in the form of a detective solving an increasingly violent series of murders. In other words, serial killers are the perfect fodder for television shows, or at least they would be if it weren’t for the fact that they must always balance on the narrow ledge between good taste, respect for the killers’ victims and the salacious detail their viewers crave; the latter element varies dramatically from country to country.

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by Haider Shahbaz

Kashif is a novelist who is afraid of novels: they all remind him of his failure at love. Novels, with the futility of each word, with the reflection of each phrase, with the silent spaces between sounds, remind him of nothing but loss. His novels are nothing but bloody fights with the memories of lost paradises and lost homes and lost loves.

Now that he is eighty and has a pearly beard and a semi-bald head, Kashif is writing The Last Novel. He is writing his last novel on his first love: Monika. He wants to be done, for ever and ever, with memories of Monika. Once finished, he has decided, he will spend the rest of his days watching television. Or doing anything that will not remind him of his failure at love. And if everything, really everything everything, still reminded him of nothing but his failure at love, he will commit suicide. And be done with it.

One thing is certain: this novel– the one he is writing now – will be his last one, if he ever manages to finish it. Despite the tremendous success of his previous novels, this novel is to be the one that will complete all he wants to say about fear and beauty and memory. But before we talk of novels and suicides, we must talk of love. Kashif is thinking of love because his son, Rashid, is coming to visit him. Without admitting it to himself, Kashif has decided that his son is his last chance at succeeding in love. His last chance, in other words, of getting over his memories of failed love and finishing The Last Novel.

********************

Kashif lives alone, ridiculously alone, in his comfortable house in the countryside of Wales. Countless years ago, fifteen to be exact, on June 8^th, Kashif came here to write The Last Novel. He lives with nothing but books. Or should we say: memories and fear. They are strewn all over the place. They stack up against whole walls. They litter the floors of all the rooms. They sleep with him and eat with him and bathe with him and sit outside on the open porch with him. They are, in a word, everywhere.

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by Mara Jebsen

It came to me at the hairdresser’s. A sort of image-idea about birds and goodness. Karen had me in one of those retro-space-age bubble-things and the air was roaring around my ears, drying. “I grow blonder as I speak,” I kept thinking, though I wasn't speaking. Just thinking loudly through the rarified air.

Over by the window, Karen, all wrist, was erasing wings of silver-black from the temples of her client. The client’s beautiful beak-like nose grew ever more defined in the sun of the windowpane; the tufts drifting like feathers to the linoleum floor, mixing as they fell. They landed silver-brown in sunlight, like tree-bark in winter, like strokes of pencil-lead . . .

There were many women in the room: another client with hair like my sister’s (dry clouds springing from the skull; tall as an outstretched hand). I saw the hairdresser press a little piece between the knuckles of two outstretched fingers, and scissor a bit off. The girl’s eyes gleamed joyfully towards themselves in the mirror. Her hairdresser's own hair was similar, but oiled down to shaped curls. The women seemed ambivalent about this act of 'taming’; were more intent on the power of the raw material. And in its cutting, the space between them filled with camaraderie so palpable, it was nearly communion.

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On Seeing Bahadur Shah Zafar
The Last Mughal Emperor
1775 – 1862

The king is a subject—
A world
Reversed

Son of a pig—
A viceroy will take pleasure
In a king exposed

Bolstered on a charpoy—
Gaunt in white kurta;
Block-printed pajamas?

Long stem of a hookah—
A humid verandah
A garrison in Rangoon

Exiled—
O, Delhi,
The Red Fort

Yesterday –seems ages ago–
Court painters painted
His portrait for posterity

Slithers of their brush—
A halo “God’s Shadow”
Honorifics

Cross-legged regalia—
Woven gardens
Blooming beneath his feet

Subjects trembling—
In front of him as they had
In front of his father and his

The garden ravaged—
Zafar, a memory of his splendor
Restraint of his sigh, itself a sigh

Rafiq Kathwari is a Monday poet at 3Quarks Daily.

by Maniza Naqvi

“Life, Madam is full of little, little inconveniences.” The receptionist, in a soothing tone, wearing the uniform of a friendly welcoming smile had said. “I do apologize for the delay but please give us half an hour and your room will be ready. In the meantime please enjoy our hotel lobby café and complimentary welcoming tea.” He suggested, with a wave of his hand towards a space behind her. “It will only be a half hour.”

The white noise of the in house music tinkled in the background and beckoned her to be understanding and on good behavior. There was nothing to be done but wait. Her room wasn’t ready, her predecessor had left it in a mess apparently—hence the delay—and by the explanation given, she imagined that, floors had to be disinfected and so on.

Sleep deprived, she sits nursing her second cup of jasmine tea, struggling not to fall asleep in the armchair which was placed near a large potted fern.

“I thought it was you! What are you doing here?”

She starts and looks up, she hasn’t seen him in over a year—he looks the same—bloated belly, bloated face–too much whiskey. His mane of once, grey hair now white and thinning. The trade mark denim shirt still in place, the urban legend, himself.

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by Jeff Strabone

Brown v. Board of Education. The Voting Rights Act. Miranda v. Arizona. Roe v. Wade. Texas v. Johnson. The Americans with Disabilities Act. Same-sex marriage. Looked at one way, the past several decades in the United States have been an almost uninterrupted series of victories for the American left and its activist model of advancing civil right and civil liberties through litigation and legislation.

Looked at another way—in terms of tax justice, financial regulation, and income disparity—the economic right wing has dominated American politics for the past thirty-plus years. In the face of little popular resistance and with assistance from both major political parties, the richest Americans and the most powerful corporations have had a free hand to rewrite the tax code and the banking laws to enrich themselves, endanger the world economy, and deprive government of the revenues it would need to, as the Constitution puts it, ‘promote the general welfare’.

As income inequality in the States approaches banana-republic levels, Americans are finally having a long-overdue national conversation about taxes, banking laws, and economic justice, but why were we not having this conversation all along? The singular focus on civil rights without a comparable commitment to tax justice may also be the greatest failure of the American left. While it is inarguably a great achievement that any child, regardless of color, can now swim in a public pool, that opportunity means little if tax revenues shrink to the point where cities can no longer afford to open the pools, let alone build new ones.

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“When the rich get too rich and the poor
get too poor, there is a way.”
…………….. —Pearle Buck, The Good Earth
.
Quake

when the rich get too rich
the sky falls
when the poor get too poor

there is a way:

see what breaks
over a fault when plate
pushes plate

even stacked bullion falls

it’s a grim scene
when all work meets
at an edge
when what’s raw
surges volcanic through
stone pipes stifled hope
singes the landscape,
plows plantations
under, sinks
mistaken dreams,
exhaults valleys, scours peaks
so they’re buzz-cut
as a military head —when
even air burns
all suck equally
from a bountiful
karmic void

when the rich get too rich
day leaves
when the poor get too poor

wide night comes
.

by Jim Culleny 2/9/12

by Rishidev Chaudhuri

Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez's “Perfumes” is an intriguing (and rather wonderful) collection of reviews of various scents. It is hard to write about smell while avoiding cliches: smell is almost always seen as a primitive, noble-savage sort of sense, pre-verbal and inextricably linked to sex and memory. They, on the other hand, start with the assumption that smell should be taken seriously as an artistic medium, and that viewing perfume simply as bottled memory or barely sublimated sexual enticement is misleading. Perfume is not simply mimetic, not simply trying to smell like the natural world, and we should take olfactory abstraction as seriously as we do visual abstraction. This makes for an often odd collection of perfume reviews. After all, what does one make of reviews like these:

“The result was the powderiest, rootiest, most sinister iris imaginable, a huge gray ostrich-feather boa to wear with purple devore velvet at a poet's funeral”

“The surprise effect of Le Feu d'Issey is total. Smelling it is like pressing the play button on a frantic video clip of unconnected objects that fly past one's nose at warp speed: fresh baguette, lime peel, clean wet linen, shower soap, hot stone, salty skin, even a fleeting touch of vitamin B, and no doubt a few other UFOs that this reviewer failed to catch the first few times.”

“Maurice Roucel has a knack for putting together perfumes that feel haunted by the ghostly presence of a woman: Lyra was a compact, husky-voiced Parisienne, Tocade a tanned, free-as-air Amazon…. However it did constrain the woman inside Envy to be at once seraphic and sub-urban, complete with the sort of suppressed anger that such a creature would feel at being reincarnated as a florist in Eastern New Jersey.”

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