When it comes to “memetics,” which some say is the new science of studying “memes,” consider me a skeptic. Doesn't a science need to have a clearly defined subject and verifiable findings? At this point the “meme” concept seems more or less to be where the “artificial intelligence” idea was twenty years ago: That is, it's not so much a hypothesis as it is an analogy – a somewhat vague and fluid analogy – one that lets people think in some new and smart ways but leaves them subject to flights of excessive rhetoric.

Which means it's useful … but not exactly real.

The uninitiated among you may be wondering what, exactly, is meant by the word “meme.” You're not alone. Meme advocates are still arguing about that. The word was first used by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene, as a contract of “mimeme” (meaning imitated behavior.) Dawkins was suggesting that cultural behaviors, reproduced as one person mimics the actions of another, could be considered analogous to genes.

What are some examples of memes? Opinions vary. But the word has caught on in the blogging and Internet world, where its definition seems to be indistinguishable from “fads” or “catchphrases.” Lolcats is described as a “meme” on the Web, for example, and so is “rickrolling.” Expressions like “Jump the shark” and “FAIL” are memes in the online universe, too. A more rigorous and universally agreed-upon definition appears to be lacking.

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by Steve Tignor

If you live in New York, there are, theoretically, an infinite number of reasons to vary your route home from work. Dozens of neighborhoods, hundreds of shops, thousands of bars can be explored with only the slightest detour from your particular beaten path. So why do I rarely, if ever, take the opportunity? Call it inertia, or lack of imagination, or, more realistically, the result of nine hours of staring at a computer and circling a mouse around. After that, whatever path gets me to my apartment and into a drink the fastest is the one I’m going to follow. More than once I’ve convinced myself to make a post-work side trip to, say, a book store in Union Square, only to emerge from a daydream and find myself walking up the steps at my normal stop in Brooklyn anyway. The best-laid plans are powerless in the face of the daily habits of the 9-to-5er. The upshot, sadly, is that the city where I work is seldom the city where I explore—it’s not the city where I see.

My office is in Murray Hill and I live in Cobble Hill in Brooklyn, which makes my best commuting option the 6 train to 14^th St., and then the 4 to Borough Hall, a wobblingly reliable 20-minute express shot down the east side. Late in the evening, though, the 4 can be exasperatingly slow, so slow that on some nights I’m compelled to throw routine to the wind and take the 6 two more stops, to the Bleecker St. station, where I can catch the F to Brooklyn.

Bleecker is less a proper station than a decaying, half-finished interstice that serves as a connector between the subway’s formerly competing systems, the IRT (i.e., the numbered trains) and the BMT (the lettered trains). It’s the only stop in the city where you can transfer between lines on one side—downtown—and not the other, a flaw that’s currently costing the MTA $134 million to rectify. The space’s most notable landmarks are two large, blue mosaics that date from the system’s proud opening in 1904. “Bleecker Street” is carved out at their centers with a beaming, capitalized pride that mocks the dilapidated state of the station today.

Jarring as they may be, those mosaics weren’t what caught my eye one recent evening after work.

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“These are tears of joy. I can die a happy woman. Though I don't feel much like dying today… Think harder. Write faster. Please take your time and hurry if you possibly can.”
–from reader F.M. on a previously posted poem: A Politically Incorrect Ode to Whitman

Steep Sigh

Walt Whitman’s ready nearby
tucked humbly among authors
I keep close upon my night stand
for the waking of my
night eye

You'll see him in this drawing
I made years ago, still stacked
(a bedrock source) while others
cycled in & out of this small
proximate collection
like many million moments
that have blindly come and
slid by

Yesterday I found a poem
which said well some things
I've thought as days have
gone by;
…….;…of Whitman
and the subject he so expertly
unravels and so surely
pins and spins and
re-ties

And funny you should mention
tears since this morning
without reason I
………………….had a sudden sob-fest
returning from the dump
after dropping off our rubbish in
my weekly, sloughing,
drive-by

It might have been the singer
in the dashboard or
the adolescent female walking
sadly postured
plying the left shoulder as I
whizzed by
………………(a clone of my granddaughter?)
or— ……….who knows what existential lever
I'd leaned upon too deeply in a
steep sigh?

by Jim Culleny, 7/26/09

Night Table; drawing by Jim Culleny, 1997

Michael Blim

Heard enough about those “little green shoots” of economic recovery? Not finding them in your backyard garden? Not popping up in between the cement slabs on your stoop?

Perhaps this is because the only place the green is sprouting is on Wall Street and on the balance sheets of several mega-banks. The Dow Jones has hit 9,000 again. Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan reported hefty profits. Seems like old times.

But these are new and perhaps even better times for the masters of the money universe. They now operate with a full and explicit federal guarantee against failure, and many have made back their government loans at little or no expense. Even though the banks and big financial firms working through them laid us low, the Obama Administration seems to have passed out “get out of jail cards” to their operators. Unless Andrew Cuomo decides to play spoiler, the miscreants who triggered the world financial crisis will be back living large in no time. This is also because the proposed Obama financial regulation regime is so weak that it is even described as toothless by that paragon of 18^th Century classical liberalism, the Economist.

Walk off Wall Street and you hit upon another world. Never mine no green shoots. There is instead massive die-off, as if the economic eco-zone had been ripped up by a financial Katrina and been left to molder.

The rot and decay of a near-dead economy lie all around us. There is universal acknowledgement that we will reach 10% unemployment in the fall. Every occupational category has been hit thus far, with rates of unemployment doubling since 2008 in computing, architecture, engineering, community and social services, health care technical services, construction, maintenance, repair, manufacturing, mining and transport. Already in double digits are food services, buildings and grounds maintenance, construction, farming, fishing, forestry, construction, mining, manufacturing and transport. In addition, state and local governments are laying off workers at unprecedented rates.

The unemployed are running out of benefits – an estimated 600,000 have run out of benefits since the recession began, and the rate at which workers will lose their benefits is growing exponentially as the stimulus package extension of benefits runs out.

I also counted 9 states and Puerto Rico as having forced furloughs of varying lengths on their workers thus far.

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By Alan Koenig

George “Cousin Georgie” Mayer, the last living member of my family to fight in WWII, died earlier this summer. In February of 1942, at the age of eighteen, he was drafted and spent the entire war fighting in the Pacific theater under General Douglas MacArthur.

Georgie saw continuous action — except for two periods of convalescence after contracting malaria — and his eventual return to Chicago after an absence of three years is a hallowed chapter of family legend. He died after a thirty year battle with leukemia. What’s unusual about his story is we know how it got him.

In late August or early September of 1945, on only his second day in occupied Japan, a “deuce and half” truck from his unit pulled up and some soldiers asked Georgie if he wanted to visit Hiroshima. In one of those historically haunting moments in which future consequences are unknown, he accepted. While recalcitrant about many of his battle experiences, Georgie was more forthcoming about visiting Hiroshima, mostly because there wasn’t all that much to tell.

“There was simply nothing there. All day long we walked around in dust, nothing but dust.”

Highly radioactive dust. The first atomic bomb had been dropped only about four weeks before his unit’s macabre visit. By the time Georgie was diagnosed in the late seventies, the VA administration was tracking the soldiers from that fateful truck as well as many other luckless American military tourists. A strange corollary to the epochal tragedy of Hiroshima: The VA deserves credit for the intensive care they gave him over three decades, care widely believed by my extended family to have extended his heroic life.

*

Alan Koenig is a Ph.D. student, teaching fellow, writer, and political analyst living in Queens, NY.

*

The Owls is a literary experiment that cross-posts here by the generosity of 3Quarksdaily. “A Deuce and a Half” forms part of an ongoing project called “Stamps” featuring writing and images about places. Other recent posts in the Stamps project have included a photograph by Frederick Schroeder, a poem by Kirsten Andersen, and an essay by Sean Hill. If you would like to get updates from The Owls, send an email with the word “Subscribe” to owlsmag[at]gmail[dot]com.

Self-portrait with Masks (detail), 1899, Menard Art Museum, Komaki City, Japan

Elatia Harris

James Ensor, the Belgian painter, died in 1949, having done his last searing work half a century earlier. The man in the sea of masks, above, was wrapping it up in the studio even as he painted this self-portrait at age 40. In two decades of furious industry, he had cast himself as Christ, as John the Baptist, as an insect, a skeleton and a herring. Crucified, beheaded, rattling but undead, made a meal of by critics or simply subhuman, he spared a thought for how he might appear a century after his birth. My Portrait in 1960, below, is an etching on woven paper. It's no self-portrait — the actual sight of his remains would necessarily be recorded by some other guy. This is just a nudge.

Ensor kick-started Surrealism and Expressionism, driving Flemish painting forward from its roots in the Renaissance to its foundational place in Modernism. In him, Bosch, Bruegel and even Rubens found an heir who would poke holes through the possibilities of paint, and figure forth a vision powerful enough to impel artists a century later to engage with it en route to terra incognita of their own. And that's not all. While it is common to feel repelled by art considered in exquisite taste in the late 19th century, uncommon it is for an artist of that era to step neatly outside taste once and forever, offending a certain high idea of painting with lasting sureness of touch. As the song, Meet James Ensor, written by They Might Be Giants, urges us — “Appreciate the man.”

With the first major Ensor show in the United States in more than 30 years, the Museum of Modern Art in New York makes that very easy to do, through September 21. I have had a lifetime with James Ensor, one of my mother's art gods. Mother was a Southern lady, the kind that naturally thrills to the transgressive in art. And I am brought to my knees, again and again, by this painter so utterly uningratiating.

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“Psychological Science: The [Non-]Theory of Psychological Testing – Part 1” can be found HERE.

Q & A

Q. If Psychological Test Theory (PTT) is not a theory but a tautology, then what should be substituted in it's place?

A. How about replacing it with a scientific, or observational theory. *

The story so far

No modern science begins with the assumption, explicitly or implicitly, of the reality of Plato's World of Ideal Forms. The one exception is testing and measurement in the social sciences, particularly psychological or mental testing. What is not appreciated by many, if not most, social scientists is that PTT assumptions like True Score, or Latent Trait, are not like literary dramatic license that gives weight and impact to the narrative. From the point of view of the philosophy of science, they are indistinguishable from Plato's Ideal Forms, and have no place in modern science.

Mathematical argument is found in all modern science. The social sciences are no exception. Scientists use mathematical argument in three ways:

1. It is used as a way to analyze, understand, and communicate data from observation;
2. Mathematical argument helps one hypothesize about data not yet observed; and
3. In the service of supplementing 1 and 2, properties of mathematical inventions and constructions are used as convenient substitutes for the undetermined properties of observed or hypothesized data.

PTT, however, tends to use mathematical inventions and constructions, not as a supplement to mathematical argument based on observation, but as a near total substitute for it. This is the tradition handed down to Western civilization from Pythagoras, that is both praised and lamented by Carl Sagan in his book and Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) video series, “Cosmos”.

“Pythagoras…developed a method of mathematical deduction…. The modern tradition of mathematical argument, essential to all of science, owes much to Pythagoras.” Pp. 149-150.

“In the recognition by Pythagoras and Plato that the Cosmos is knowable, that there is a mathematical underpinning to nature, they greatly advanced the cause of science. But in the suppression of disquieting facts, the sense that science should be kept for a small elite, the distaste for experiment [emphasis mine], the embrace of mysticism…, they set back the human enterprise.” P. 155.

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By Namit Arora

I don’t know many books in which ‘Go west, young man!’ would be a call to go to India. One such book is Journey to the West, ‘China's most beloved novel of religious quest and picaresque adventure,’ published in the 1590s in the waning years of the Ming dynasty. The novel’s hero, ‘a mischievous monkey with human traits … accompanies the monk-hero on his action-filled travels to India in search of Buddhist scripture.’ [1] It allegorically presents pilgrims journeying toward India as individuals journeying toward enlightenment. [2]

The inspiration for this novel was a journey made by a 7th cent. CE Chinese man, Xuanzang. [3] Though raised in a conservative Confucian family near Chang’an (modern Xian), Xuanzang, at 13, followed his brother into the Buddhist monastic life (Buddhism had come to China around 2nd cent. CE). A precocious boy, he mastered his material so well that he was ordained a full monk when only 20. Disenchanted with the quality of Buddhist texts and teachers available to him, he decided to go west to India, to the cradle and thriving center of Buddhism itself. After a yearlong journey full of peril and adventure, across deserts and mountains, via Tashkent and Samarkand, meeting robbers and kings, debating Buddhists on the Silk Road and in Afghanistan—where he saw the majestic Bamiyan Buddhas—he reached what is now Pakistan.

He spent 17 years, from 629-645 CE, in the Indian subcontinent, traveling, visiting places associated with the Buddha’s life, learning Sanskrit, and studying with Buddhist masters, most notably at the Nalanda University in modern-day Bihar, one of the first great universities of the world, where subjects like grammar, logic, philosophy, metaphysics, astronomy, medicine, and theology were taught. His erudition seems to have brought him fame and royal patronage in India. In a convocation of religious scholars ‘in Harsha’s capital of Kannauj … Xuanzang allegedly defeated five hundred Brahmins, Jains, and heterodox Buddhists in spirited debate.’ [4]

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Hawks

East or west down the trail in fog
the bark of a distant dog

a meadow rolls off in that cloak
a cleft in its breast of a brook

deciduous trees to the north
a hawk in the fifth or the forth

scans for the twitch of a meal
not a stitch of remorse will it feel

as it falls on its prey like a bomb
with finesse and genetic aplomb

there are such people who prey
on an earth god created this way

by Jim Culleny; July 16,2009

Justin E. H. Smith

I am not all that fond of natural-law theory, as I tend to think that there are very few things about which nature sends us the loud-and-clear message: don't do it! In fact, I've narrowed the list down to just three: incest, coprophagy, and flying.

Now many readers will be surprised to see that last item tacked onto the list. After all, nearly everyone who can afford to do so flies on a regular basis, whereas sibling-marriage and shit-eating are nearly unheard of. But I fly roughly once a month, including an average of 2-3 round-trip transatlantic flights per year for the past 15 years, and every time I do it I think to myself: if there were a God, and he were to finally come and give us his list of rules, he would not tell us not to show cleavage, or drink alcohol, or any of the usual proscriptions. He would tell us, earth creatures, to get the hell out of the sky.

I am one of those irrational people, ridiculed by the sane, normal, and mature, who suffers from debilitating aviaphobia. By 'debilitating' I mean that I spend every minute of every flight convinced of imminent death. The suffering is so severe that even though there is no significant statistical danger of dying in an air disaster, I do fear that there is a real danger of physiological consequences stemming from the anxiety. People who don't understand will often tell me to learn a bit about the statistics of air accidents. Trust me, I know the statistics. Tell me the name of an airline, and I can list for you all of the fatal accidents in which it has been involved, when and where they happened, what was the mechanical cause.

There was a time when I could tell myself: that air disaster over there, in Indonesia, in Congo, in Siberia, has nothing to do with me. My sphere of concern has traditionally been North America between the Arctic and the tropical zones, the North Atlantic, and Western Europe. To some extent, I confess I still have a way of distancing myself from certain disasters: that was a Tupolev, I say. Anyone who gets on a Soviet-built airplane is just asking for it. But then I remember that my basic conviction about my own air travel is that I am asking for it too.

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by Jeff Strabone

While the world waits for the second Iranian Revolution, it’s important to recall that Iran is not just a place of political turmoil, nuclear ambitions, and theocratic dictatorship. It is also a place of great poetry and cinema, as the work of Abbas Kiarostami reminds us. How timely then that he has a new film out called Shirin that adapts—sort of—a twelfth-century romance and offers the world a stunning new achievement: a feature-length film whose narrative is made up entirely of reaction shots.

Kiarostami’s career has been distinguished by relentless experimentation, particularly in recent years. His film ABC Africa (2001), about AIDS orphans in Uganda, includes seven minutes of nocturnal darkness. Ten (2002) consists of ten scenes shot in a car with cameras on the dashboard. In each scene, the actors drove through Tehran leaving the director and crew behind. Five (2003) has only five stationary shots depicting whatever passed in front of the camera.

Like Dreyer’s close-ups in La passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928) or Michael Snow’s zoom in Wavelength (1967), Shirin (2008) will join a very small group of films known for their singular use of a particular device. However dry or coldly formalist it may sound on paper, Shirin is a deeply moving film that follows the emotional narrative of a female audience’s reaction to watching a period melodrama full of the kind of romantic love that seems to be in short supply in modern Iran. 

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As usual, I am spending the summer in Evanston. My children and grand-children live in Chicago and no amount of whinging about winter weather (which comes in three kinds—cold, freezing, and how the fuck does anybody live here) could convince them to leave for California. And now that California seems to be going down the drain perhaps that is a reasonable decision.

As usual, when I spend the summer in Chicago, I try to catch up on the restaurant scene. This is no easy task as new places spring up like poppies and many of them are very good. Some of the necessary work is done by a number of blogs. The best of these are Chowhound and LTH Forum. The cognoscenti recognize the letters as standing for Little Three Happiness—an ancient dim sum establishment on Cermak in Chinatown.

The bloggers on these sites are generally quite reliable unlike the Yelpers who are too often like the commenters on many blogs—full of ignorance and glad to display it.

So we generally arrive with some short-list of places we want to try and there is always the joy of returning to old favorites which gives rise, in turn, to conflicts about whether to go someplace old which we know will be good or hazard a new one with the possibility of disappointment.

While Chicago is known for its high-end gastronomical temples—Alinea being the best known example—many of the most pleasurable experiences are places that we refer to as “the dump” with context making clear whether it is the Chinese Dump (Sun Wah on Argyle) or the Pakistani Dump (Ghareeb Nawaz on Devon).

My rule of thumb for Chicago restaurants is Q=1/P (where Q = quality and P = price).

The second rule is that the exceptions to the above mostly end in vowels. These include Alinea, Tru, Charlie Trotter (well the first name ends in a vowel), and, most recently a fantastic new place L2O which I cannot decide is a French restaurant with Japanese overtones or a Japanese restaurant with French ones and is, in any case, a tribute to seafood.

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By Maniza Naqvi

Our infallibility—our goddamn innocence, Eileen, the infallibility of—-of—of– our goddamn—-goddammit!

He had slurred-his words when he had called her in the middle of the night-it was 4.22 a.m. to be exact because she had seen the numbers glowing on the digital bedside clock built into the dashboard at her bedside.

Then he said: Wow! D'ya see that? That's some lightning. Storm's coming in.

She had managed to mumble an outraged: Stan, do you know what time—-

But he had hung up.

She had fallen asleep—knowing that this was just Stan—continuing on with an unfinished argument earlier in the evening when he had come over for dinner at the hotel.

In the morning a phone call from the Embassy had awakened her. It was the security officer telling her to spend the day in the hotel—the security alert for traveling anywhere outside the hotel was a level three—

With time to kill, she had spent an hour on the treadmill at the gym, showered and then made her way leisurely to breakfast at 8.00 am. Two of her breakfast companions, the daily newspapers, were handed to her by a welcoming and cheerful hostess at the entrance as she was ushered to her table. Coffee was poured for her—and a waiter fussed around her before leaving to attend to the next incoming guest.

For you everyone is CIA! He's CIA-she's CIA! Honestly!

Eileen hadn't meant to overhear the conversation but it was hard not to, the hotel was packed it seemed—and the breakfast room was overflowing with guests. The young woman, at the next table over, her hands lathered in henna patterns, her face, too made up for this time of the day, probably a bride, newlywed, and probably last night in ballroom two, had just exclaimed this in exasperation to her young husband. The bride groom—perhaps 26—was hunched over his plate and kept glancing over his shoulders suspiciously replied: Well you look around yourself, and tell me what you see? The bride and the bridegroom caught her looking at them—Eileen smiled — they looked at each other self consciously and giggled. He squeezed her hand and she reached out and touched his cheek.

Eileen shifted her attention back to the newspapers——She scanned through them: The twelve Pakistani students arrested in Britain accused of plotting the worst terrorist attack in Britain's history—and all the hullaballoo in the newspapers and on TV and by the Government too—-it now appeared were innocent. No apologies from the British Government. Holbrooke was to be called to the Hague Tribunal to be cross examined in the war crimes trial of Karadzic to testify whether he had cut a deal with the war criminal. Karzai and Zardari were meeting in a conference presided over by Hillary Clinton in Washington DC. The Pakistani delegation was protesting the AF-PAK acronym. Hillary Clinton had made it clear—that unless Pakistan did something about the militants the US military would. Another drone attack in Bajaur–40 militants killed. Over 2 million people had been displaced in Swat. Photographs of babies, small children—– young and old women confined to the tents in the camps. A luxury hotel was being constructed nearby in Chitral by the same company which was doing brisk business in hotels in Kabul and Islamabad. General Mullen was warning about the Taliban being seventy miles from Islamabad. Again. The UNDP man kidnapped in Baluchistan had been released. One of the demands by the kidnappers belonging to the Baluchistan Liberation Army had been the release of 181 women—captured by the secret agencies. Discussions and plans were underway to sell thousands of acres of farm land, to foreign concerns based in the Middle-east— Fishermen's associations were demonstrating at Gwadar port over losing their access to the sea and their land rights—villagers were protesting for having been forcibly removed from the area. Altaf Hussain, based in London, had been visited by State department officials. Again. Altaf Hussain had given another tape recorded speech to his party workers sounding the alarm that the Taliban were waiting within Karachi to attack. And there was a news item about 45 rigs producing and supplying oil and gas across the country. The E&P companies would pay 12.5 % royalty and 40% income tax to the government. The Ministry of Energy had so far awarded 119 exploration licenses to public and private sector companies, while 100 new licenses with more incentives would be awarded under the new petroleum policy to local and foreign investors. Sixth largest coal reserves in the World. A memorandum of understanding presided over by Hillary Clinton was signed by Pakistan and Afghanistan in Washington DC to give India rights for transporting its goods through Pakistan to and from Afghanistan. At a tea time event organized at the Sindh Club Pervaiz Hoodbouy, had shown a scary video of madmen training and warned against the impending invasion of the Taliban. No doubt Eileen thought amused, nail biting and enthralled members must have listened to him while their Pathan drivers wait outside in the parking lot in the heat. Ahmed Rashid followed up on the same act at the Mohatta Palace, same audience, same servants waiting outside.–And Arundhati Roy too had made an appearance- to speak against the Taliban and to speak against the Americans at a Women's Action Forum meeting at the Karachi Press Club. Same audience, same servants waiting outside. Well,well, well—thought Eileen: Ms. Roy and the hoi polloi? Why on earth would Ms. Roy come to Pakistan to speak to Karachi's elite about Talibanization? Interesting. Eileen had never been a fan—but this was certainly useful. The photogenic opposition—singing from the same page as us on Talibanzation? Barrick Gold of Canada and Chile's Antofagasta planned to invest up to US$3 billion in a copper and gold mine at Reko Diq in the southwestern province of Balochistan. The single-largest foreign investment in Pakistan. But of course there were security concerns. More snippets on the oil and gas pipelines agreements between Pakistan, Iran, India, China. The usual lines about The Line of Control: a shot fired here—a shot fired there. A person had been shot dead in Badin for trespassing on a foreign concern's drilling site.

Nothing much there— Her attention reverted to the others in the restaurant. Bright, cheerful in the early morning, the room was transformed from the darkened restaurant atmosphere in the evenings. Now, white gauze blinds, delicately and intricately embroidered in white silk thread covered the ceiling to floor windows but let in suffused sunlight into the air conditioned room. Soft music, along with central air, though unfortunately the same four seasons Vivaldi tune over and over again— was soothing nonetheless. The guests talking amongst themselves created an energetic hopeful, happy hum of well being and assurance.

There, just beyond the young couple, were two tables occupied by military officers—one by Nato officers, the other by Pakistani officers. She recognized their nationalities and ranks from the colors of their uniforms and the stripes and braids at their shoulders and chests. At a third table sat a European General and a Pakistani General. A joint Nato-Pakistan conference was about to be kicked off in ballroom two.

The rest of the room was filled with laptop rollers—everyone in a business suit, the women graced theirs with scarves in deference to cultural sensitivities, several foreigners wore shalwar kameezes. Some looked corporate, they sat up straight—talked with their laptops open in front of them—the rest looked like bureaucrats—hunched over their cereals and newspapers. Bleary eyed and pale from long nights of staring at spread sheets and memos and the suffering from dysentery, no doubt. The chicken biryani and raitha she felt on the room service menu was a repeat intestinal offender. She watched as the six guys who came in every morning around this time, single file, made their way to the same space, in the shadow of a pillar-placed their keys on the table and headed for the buffet. Buffed and buzz cuts—resembling cyborgs, they seemed to be in residence at the hotel. They ate and it seemed went immediately back up to their rooms. They didn't seem to go anywhere else. She never saw any of them in the lobby, or in the other restaurants or the salon or spa, or bakery or gift shops, or at the pool, nor in the lawn or in the parking lot or in line with other guests at the security checks and metal detectors at the entrance to the hotel. They seemed to disappear right after breakfast, emerging only at the same time the next morning.

The atmosphere was having the desired effect on her. She had been uneasy these past few days. The visit to the refugee camp had been postponed. Now her nerves were steadily being soothed. The whole place had that effect on her. Someone had planned this place well. They had really understood the needs of their clients. The corridors of the hotel were decorated with modernized versions of Mughal miniatures of princes and princesses frolicking or in repose. Interspersed with these were the colorful vibrantly painted renditions of flowers, birds and animals and naïve scenes of the Khyber Pass; winding roads and snow peaks in Kashmir these “art works”, were the actual wooden panels, off of the trucks that plied the length and breadth of the country. From the port in Karachi: Keamari, to the Khyber Pass. Replicas of the stone statues of Buddha from Gandhara and Taxila stood amongst hot house orchids and lilies on console tables placed under large mirrors whose frames mimicked the intricately carved doorways oftenfound in rural villages. The intricate embroidered patterns which decorated traditional textiles all over the country had been industrially printed on to cushion covers and bedspreads—giving the sense of handicraft. Everything allowed the guests a sensation that they were experiencing culture and tradition without making them uncomfortable, everything was meant to be just enough— without being overpowering—it was captured, collected, muted for their viewing pleasure—a gentle reminder that conveyed to the guests that this was another country should they want it to be—but easily transferrable and in proximity to what was in their own comfort zone. Like the room service menu—burgers, fries, pizza, eggs any way you wanted, lomein noodles, pad thai—chicken vindaloo, chicken masala tikka, naan. The usual. Nothing unknown—nothing that would clash—scream out…

Still, ten days into her stay she had asked the hotel management for a change of rooms. At the price the hotel was charging, she had said to the young woman at the reception that the sounds of the drilling and the jack hammering throughout the day was unacceptable. The guest relations officer had taken the phone and had explained to her that they were fully occupied at the moment. Eileen had replied as calmly as she could that she would be down in a moment to have a word with him in person. You are welcome Madame he had replied—his voice all smiles.

When she came down, the lobby, with its marble floors gleaming, its fountain at the center gently gurgling, was bustling with guests. A workshop on health, in ball room one, had just let out for a coffee break. Somewhere a guitar strummed. And someone had broken out in song in the crowd behind her, out of tune. Reaching the guest relations officer's desk, she had sat down on the upholstered chair and leaned forward to be heard over the racket. Lowering her voice, she delivered the magic words in a menacing tone: US Dollars. Listen up. The expansion that you've got going outside my window—that construction site–my dollars are paying for it—So, one word from me about feeling uncomfortable here, and your little monopoly on hotels in this town will be history. All I need to do is to let customers like me—know how I rate you guys and that's it. Do you understand? Do you hear me? So what will it be?

A room was soon found. But a pre-moving in inspection uncovered that it was situated directly above the main gate to the hotel, Enraged she had demanded of the guest relations officer whether he was in his right senses—placing her at this security risk location—after all hadn't the truck full of explosives slammed into the front gate of the Marriot Hotel? The guest relations officer, appearing shaken by her fury had apologized quickly and called reception to search for another room. A short five minutes yielded results. Another room, he said had just opened up, this time he assured her it would be to her satisfaction. It was. Situated at the back of the hotel, on the first floor, so that in the event of an incident—she would be able to jump. To restore her confidence in the hotel's commitment to her comfort, the management had sent up an overflowing complimentary fruit basket and an invitation for a Swedish massage at her convenience either in her room or at the hotel spa and salon. Upon inquiry she learned that the hotel only had male masseurs—the incident at the massage parlor two years ago by the crazies at the Lal masjid had forced the hotel, concerned about security, to let go of its female masseuses.

The need to change rooms, truth be told was that it wasn't the noise of drills and hammers banging that had bothered Eileen—valium handled that well enough at night— Besides the hum of the strong central air conditioning—the shut windows and the heavy double drapes dulled any noise from outside—even banished sunlight. Rather it was the early morning view, once she drew back the curtains, which spoiled things for her. From her window she could see the day laborers filing into the huge construction site for the hotel—shivering in the cold at that time—wrapped in large chaddars, their feet shod in tattered chapals. Their daily wage not even half the cost of her morning coffee. It made no sense for her and seemed unfair for her to have to start the day that way: feeling out of sorts.

Eileen had booked her complimentary massage for five p.m. before her dinner with Stan. That would give her enough time before dinner which she knew would no doubt be trying. And sure enough dinner with Stan had been vintage Stan. Afterwards, she had gone to bed early —the massage had relaxed her. Before going to bed, she had fired off a quick missive. The subject line: Assessment. The text was a simple one liner: Needs further probing.

Stan had arrived early, that evening. She met him at the Italian restaurant on the first floor. He had brought along an article for her to read about the killing of civilians by the military in Afghanistan.

She had glanced at the title and nodded before setting it aside and said: Terrible! What a mess huh? But these things happen—those guys are under a lot of stress—and they're all coming from really stressful backgrounds. I can understand that.

He had gulped down the beer, wiped the sides of his mouth with his thumb and index finger and considered her for a long moment—-The difference between you and me he had said—is that you try to understand the murderers.

Whose side are you on Stan?

Side, Eileen?

Yeah Stan, whose side are you on? Because there are sides—y'know. This is not a game—this is real, real stuff—there is bad stuff here—and we're fighting it.

Is that a fact?

Yes, Stan, that's a fact. A capital F—fact.

Uh huh? Bad stuff? Facts. At some point we forget don't we as to who is the source of our facts? Us. We start the chain—send a memo, remember?—Send a memo to report an incident—that sets of an avalanche of discussion till it builds into a body of work, then we turn that into a report There are press releases—–and then that turns into news—we provide photographs, videos, corroborating evidence. An incident occurs. More evidence. Pundits are born. They write more reports—books. Archives full of them. Hearings are held—panel discussions-think tanks take matters up. Facts. The same journalists that were there at the build-up to the Iraq war—suddenly show up here—or report about here from there. A story is built up slowly. And it brews and brews. We're master brewers. One thing's for sure Eileen, Game over. We're the best. We've won. Now what are we fighting for? Who are we fighting? And why?

What are you talking about?

I don't know Eileen. I don't know. The violence—the coldness of it all.

Are you kidding! Stan, surely you understand, we live in the most non violent times. The world has seen incredible violence—Tamerlane—Chengiz Khan. We are fortunate to live in the most non violent times—The only problem is that nowadays every blip that occurs in a war is reported over and over again and over magnified.

Is that right? Every blip?

Just trying to tell you that this is a much more humane and non violent fight then ever was fought before. Stan, don't be on the wrong side of history on this one. We created the swamp, no doubt about it. Okay? We're cleaning it up. Don't get on the wrong side of this Stan. Don't get on the wrong side of history on this.

He had laughed. I'm trying not to Eileen! He had shaken his head: You are so good Eileen. Leave this. You should come and live with me Eileen, stay at my place while you're here. This place gives me the creeps—this hotel—-look at the people in here.

I like it here Stan.

How could you? They're all just us.

That's why Stan. Who are you?

Just look at them Eileen? The Nato guys over there and their body guards in the lobby—The suits in that corner—cutting deals—reading the riot act on loans to some bigwigs in the Government. Buzz cuts—flashy ties—big briefcases—Living in this “Gilded guest house”—internet connected—CNN ready—air conditioned—sanitized—securitized— Everything just so—everything a fantasy of how it should be. The natives, always in the roles of the waiters, the bellhops, the cleaners, the housekeepers—the doormen–indulging our every whim, like nannies watching us in the playground—indulgently, encouragingly urging us on in our every attempt at screwing their country over and all the while wearing ridiculous costumes to indulge our notions of them. Do you think this place is filled with guests who are tourists appreciating what the natives cannot, or guests who are here for commerce and war, taking what the natives must not?

Are you going native as you say, Stan?

You can remain the guest Eileen or you could decide to sleep with them. Did you ever think of it Eileen?

Are you involved here with someone Stan?

Haven't you thought about it Eileen? Sleeping with any of them?

Who? The hotel's hired help?

No the generals, the President—the Ministers?

What's the difference Stan? They're all the same to me. There I said it for you.

Order another Murree brew Eileen, will you.

What number are you on Stan?

I don't know—eighth?

So Stan, no one said you can't sleep with them—Please by all means do! Just make sure you don't forget what the terms of engagement are.

He had left early. Only to call back in the middle of the night waking her from her valium induced sleep:—Our infallibility—our goddamn innocence, Eileen!

No one had seen him or heard from him since. It had been three days. The café was closed. And the Embassy had informed her that unless he appeared in the next twenty four hours they would have to go public with a story.

Read : Losing the Plot (The Coffee Shop) Chapter One: https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/06/losing-the-plot.html

by Olivia Scheck

On June 25^th, one day after Mark Sanford’s press conference in which he confessed to a year-long affair with a woman in Argentina, David Brooks published an apparently unrelated column titled “Human Nature Today.”

Brooks’ column begins by identifying three “different views of human nature”: the economic view, the traditional Christian view, and the evolutionary psychology view, which he asserts “get[s] the most media attention.” He then lambastes the evolutionary psychology view, using as a proxy Geoffrey Miller, author of The Mating Mind and, more recently, Spent: Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behavior.

Summarizing Spent in terms so simplistic and out-of-context as to be absurd, Brooks’ writes “According to Miller, driving an Acura, Infiniti, Subaru or Volkswagen is a sign of high intelligence. Driving a Cadillac, Chrysler, Ford or Hummer is a sign of low intelligence…[and] teenage girls may cut themselves as a way to demonstrate their ability to withstand infections.”

Whether or not this is a fair account of Miller’s book, it is without question a misrepresentation of evolutionary psychology in general. Yet Brooks uses this review to usher in a new era of skepticism about “E.P.,” declaring that “Evolutionary psychology has had a good run. But now there is growing pushback.”

Specifically, Brooks notes, there is Sharon Begley’s Newsweek attack piece – a “takedown,” he calls it – entitled “Why Do We Rape, Kill and Sleep Around? The fault, dear Darwin, lies not in our ancestors, but in ourselves.” As the headline suggests, Begley’s article is riddled with naive accusations that evolutionary psychologists are genetic determinists. It even implies – bizarrely – that evolutionary psychologists have concocted their views in order to excuse, by dint of the naturalistic fallacy, their own bad behavior. “Let's not speculate,” Begley writes, “on the motives that (mostly male) evolutionary psychologists might have in asserting that their wives are programmed to not really care if they sleep around, and turn instead to the evidence.”

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David Schneider

I applied for a copywriting job the other day. The employer was a maker of some intriguing educational technologies, and needed someone to fully update the website's text, and determine a new voice for the firm that would be more appealing to buyers. It was a good job; and a not inconsiderable one. The firm, at the nexus of the technology and educational industries, had necessarily constructed a language that blended tech and ed terms into a rich and potent polysyllaby, really tasty for the search engines and industry insiders but a bit tough going for most other people.

I proposed that the ease of a product's language, deep within the soundings of each phrase, helps to sell the ease of using the product – take it a step further, introduce a little fun to the reading experience (beauty, wit, humor, attitude, individuality) and you've just connected a positive emotion to the logical and psychological idea of ease of use. That's marketing and advertising in a nutshell (or, at least, it should be). And teachers, the end users of this product, are probably overburdened enough with the challenges of technology; wouldn't they like a product that's easy to understand, easy to learn and use, and allow them to concentrate on the true arts of teaching? (Well, I 'm not sure about these things; they might really prefer the optimization of educational subjects' skill sets for successful threshold achievement of national graduated assessment agendas. It sounds more professional, at any rate. And it's up to the company whether I'm right or wrong.)

But then it came time to submit my application. As with any large or fully technologized company, these days, the firm had a proprietary online “human resources manager.” I could tell, from the way the app worked, that a human was likely to read my work only at a very late stage of the game; instead, a little Pac-Man was going to munch its way through my word-maze, gobbling up jargon keywords like Power Pellets. I panicked, and like a digital sariman on level 40, with the Four Ghosts of the Depression bearing down on me at bankruptcy speed, I raced through the tunnels of the Web looking for a conversion tool. Hey, fight fire with fire, right?

In the midst of this panic, I just had to laugh. Here I was, proposing to update a company's lexical machinery with a more efficient and user-friendly model, yet being thwarted from communicating that by the very systems associated with the industries' language machineries!

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by Michael Blim

There is something unforgivably lawyerly about Barack Obama.

I don’t begrudge his question parsing or the clarity it brings when he answers the a-bomb lobs of press and public. I really enjoy how he exposes the contradictions in the logic and arguments of others. Most recently, he simply nailed the insurance industry for arguing on the one hand that federal insurance by its nature would be inefficient and costly, while upholding on the other hand how a federal insurance option would drive them out of business. A nice piece of work that exposed the insurance industry position and also laid down a marker of what the industry can expect in the next round in the battle for national health care.

Obama was in grand form Monday afternoon, June 29, as he welcomed 250-odd gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people to the White House to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots and the birth of a movement. His wife, Michelle, played the straight woman for a couple of ice-breaker jokes and asides. As with other presidents, Obama used his wife’s presence to make the gathering informal and familial, a gesture that might have been touching had lgbt people had families with the same legal footing as Michelle and Barack have

Instead, to judge by the transcript, the event seemed forced. The guests were not invited to witness the signing of a bill or an executive order. No, this was a personal moment, the Obama family welcoming their lgbt friends and families. Though I do not want to demean the occasion, I would have preferred an event with another executive order signing, perhaps reversing “don’t ask, don’t tell,” without Michelle and the family circle chitchat. Because the President had nothing new to say, except to recite his campaign promises, you might think it unfair to think back to Harry Truman’s signing of the military desegregation order. Can you imagine Harry Truman beginning the ceremony with “well, Bess, Margaret and I ….?”

But the contrast clarifies many things. First, this was a feel-good event that substituted for an occasion devoted to law or policy. Second, it was condescending. Obama shifted the focus of the gathering from passing laws to “opening the hearts” of the “good and decent people in this country who don’t fully embrace their gay brothers and sisters…” The theme of moral suasion was swapped for law and policy. The implication too was the we had better get out there and help straight people get over their hatreds and ask them to give us access to the resources and protections they have acquired or have guaranteed to them. He singled out PTA participation as a salutary action undertaken by many lgbt parents to allay straight suspicions. Like the President and Michelle Obama, I come from Chicago, and that experience never taught me the value of the PTA over political power or Constitutional protection. I doubt it did them either.

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I.

When I fall asleep in a coffin posture, supine, with my feet tenting beneath the covers and my nose tracing a line up toward the wobbling ceiling fan, I frequently wake up a committed if unwilling Cartesian.

Like anyone else in R.E.M. sleep, as soon I slip under my brain starts sending hormonal relaxants to my muscles that anesthetize and effectively paralyze them. Problem is, when I wake up from R.E.M. only a fraction of me pops awake sometimes. It’s not a split between the left and right sides of my body, like a stroke patient, nor a top-bottom paraplegic split. And it’s nothing like a foot or hand falling asleep, then dethawing with that achy tingle. Mine is an old-fashioned, cogito-ergo mind-body bifurcation. Mentally, “I” pop right awake, and as a natural course of being awake this “I” sends signals for my legs and arms and mouth and eyes to yawn, or stretch, or see what time it is and whether I have to go to the bathroom. Those signals echo, ignored. My mind casts the spell again, but it turns out I cannot twiddle a toe or even flex a nostril, no matter how much I strain. Within seconds of the failure, I’m agonizingly aware of the discrepancy. It’s not a dream (there’s nothing fantastical happening), more like a huge karmic blunder, what being reincarnated as a park statue would feel like.

This rigor mortis is actually easy to shrug off, as long as—and here’s the philosophically troubling bit—the outside world intervenes. I can still sense my environment, like some sort of amoeba or slug—that’s a passive act—but the universe must change somehow. I’m powerless to effect change myself and will remain locked up, alone. A sudden alarm clock will unchain me, but not any noises that were already mewing when I “woke” up. A dramatic unmasking of a window might do it, but not the slow creep of the sun. The slightest nudge from my girlfriend will budge me (I suppose it’s the opposite of those little jerks she makes whenever she falls asleep), but the heat of an arm already draped across me is useless.

I told my girlfriend after my latest “attack,” when I woke panting, “If you ever see me lying there immobile and straining, or hear a strangled scream, you should shake me.” Just to be sure, I added, “Hard.”

“But everyone makes noises when they’re sleeping. How will I know?”

“It’s only when I’m rigid. And it’s only when I’m sleeping on my back.”

“Why only when you’re sleeping on your back?”

“I don’t know.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. And why would shaking you help?”

“It just does.” Too early to be having this conversation.

I should have told her that as long as the external world remains static, I’m trapped in my own mind. It’s the ultimate solipsism—except, unlike a real solipsist, I’m aware of being trapped, and get to glimpse what that would really be like. The oxymoron is part of the horror. And I’m lucky compared to some people. Posture makes no difference to them; they’re always vulnerable. Someone I ran track with in high school would slip into sleep paralysis not just in last few minutes of morning sleep, either, but in the middle of the night. He would have to lie there, awake and mute and rigid for hours, suffering like Philip Larkin in “Aubade” until his mother would notice his tardiness before school (“Shawn’s having a spell again …”) and rock him awake. Not the most restful nights, you can imagine. Others slip narcoleptically into this state while awake, a nod known as cataplexy. One poor cataplexic in England has been declared dead three times, and not just by movie ushers and petrol attendants: Her body locked itself up so tightly that medical professionals sadly shook their heads and began calling family members. The first time, age seventeen, she woke up in a morgue.

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—Miraculous power and marvelous activity,
drawing water and hewing wood.
–P’ang Yun

Talking With My Guru
….#1– Nothing to Lose

G: What exactly do you mean by emptiness?

Me: Nothing.

G: Then why are we wasting time
sitting round talking about it?

Take your tiny Tao shears
and snip emptiness out of Webster’s
and heave it into the void. It’s another
self-serving euphemism like time
or collateral damage.

Go cut some wood, draw some water,
and stop sound-biting things to death
–and travel light (and lightly)
till the sun goes down.

Nothing and emptiness
are for advanced students
with nothing to lose.

Jim Culleny; 2008

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