¹⁵And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed.

¹⁶And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:

¹⁷And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

If Arizona’s draconian new law has put immigration back in the public consciousness, the proposal for a national “biometric ID” is about to trigger nightmares in this country’s Christian id. The Democrats who drafted a new immigration law aren’t just “tone deaf,” as blogger John Cole says (although they’re certainly that.) The bill’s content and language are going to terrify and outrage lots of evangelical Christians, and could even lead to violence.

Before they try to pass this law, there are a few videos they really ought to watch.

This bill couldn't be more inflammatory in both content and language to those who take their Gospel straight … and literal. A quick listen to what's currently being preached on YouTube and AM radio today will confirm that. And generations of kids from evangelicals families recall their terror at the dictatorship and disasters shown in the End Times films known collectively as the “Rapture” series. In these films, a world dictatorship demands that everyone identify themselves and be entered into a database while being marked with an “image of the beast.”

How will people who take these ideas as literal truth respond to the new law? As Congressional magazine The Hill reports, “Democratic leaders have proposed requiring every worker in the nation to carry a national identification card with biometric information, such as a fingerprint, within the next six years, according to a draft of the measure.” And the “biometric ID” system has been given a name that seems to come straight out of End Times prophecy.

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Laurie Brown and Andy Sheppard are the host and producer, respectively, of The Signal on CBC Radio 2. Since debuting in March of 2007, the program has evolved to provide a highly distinctive listening experience that offers two skillfully-curated hours of late-night contemporary music to listeners across Canada — and, via the internet, the world — that’s neither predictable nor easily genrefiable. Brown accompanies Sheppard’s unusual sonic selections with commentary that’s long impressed fans with its friendliness, intimacy and wealth of odd stories. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3, with music] [iTunes link]

I got hooked on this show when an American friend of mine who moved to Vancouver sent me a link and said, “You've got to hear this show they've got going up here.” I listened to it, and I was pretty immediately hooked. I've tried to spread the word to people who aren't Canadian and thus don't have a great knowledge of what the CBC puts out and why they should listen to it even if they aren't Canadian. But I've had a little problem describing what sort of music The Signal plays. All I can say is that “it's really good” and “you've got to listen.” “Modern” comes to mind, “contemporary” comes to mind, but these are vague words. What do you guys call it?

Laurie: It's just as hard for us as it is for you. This has been a real head-scratcher since the show went on the air. We've got lots of different names, and because we play so many genres of music, it's really easy to spout off a whole bunch of different things: “Oh, it's ambient, it's electronic, it's electronica, it's sort of freaky folk, it's avant-garde jazz, it's post-rock…” You can list and list and list. The thing that makes the most sense to me is, just think about late-night radio and think about the kind of music and the places you really want your brain to go at 10:00 through to midnight. “Late-night radio,” for me, makes more sense than anything else. Andy?

Andy: It's a trick, isn't it? We're programming a lot of music that exists at the intersection of different styles. I think that's the big thing I'm looking for. We're not going to play straight folk music or straight singer-songwriter or neo-classical music but music where the lines cross. You'll have a classical musician paired with a DJ or a world musician and an electronic artist. Those kind of crossover intersections I find the most compelling, and it's one of the ways I frame the idea of contemporary music. It's how people are making music now. What are they doing differently now, so it sounds like it's coming from this time?
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We humans have serious problems. Thousands of us starve to death every day, the planet is becoming progressively less habitable, and we're killing each other on a regular basis. Our way of life is detrimental to our well-being, and current trends don't bode well for posterity. It's time for change. I propose the following three-part plan.

Part 1: The Establishment of Clear Priorities

Our priorities guide our decision making, and our choices shape the world we live in. Every day, individuals, groups, organizations, and governments make decisions. We choose between what's healthy and what's easy, between what's kind and what's profitable, and between what's best for everyone and what's best for us. If optimizing collective well-being were most important to us, our decisions would lead us in this direction.

Our choices reveal priorities that we might wish to deny. It would appear that convenience is more important to us than sustainability, that our happiness is more important than that of future generations, and that people in our country are more important than people in other countries.

Selfish behaviors may serve the interests of individuals in the present, but they lead to a society that is undesirable for the majority. These behaviors can be attributed to a lack of integrity and the absence of clear priorities. If our priorities aren't clear to us, then our decision making will be undermined. So, we need to establish clear priorities.

What do we, as a society, value the most? Well-being? Reason? Autonomy? It's not just our values, but the way we prioritize them that will guide ethical decision making. For example, if we value well-being more than autonomy, making helmets mandatory for cyclists would be a good idea. If we place greater value on the freedom to choose, we might keep helmets optional, but take steps to promote their use. The prioritization dictates the strategy.

I suggest the following as shared values (in order): human equality and sustainability, autonomy, collective well-being, and individual well-being.

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Michael Blim

Another breathless fortnight, another looming crisis averted.

It seems best to say averted, rather than solved. The massive Greek public debt is still there and will continue to grow. The new agreement promises to slow its growth by raising taxes, laying off government workers, reducing state salaries, and cutting pension benefits, among other actions. More loans from EU creditor countries and the IMF, a stand-in for the rest of Greeks international creditors, now guarantee the accumulated Greek government debt, much of which is held by European banks and the European Central Bank. The EU-IMF mission of mercy is thus an object lesson in collective self-interest, for the loans enable Greece to pay back the European banks, especially in Germany and France, that stood to lose billions without the new loans. European and world capital invested in Greece is saved, and its security enhanced. Rather than the debts endangering the finances of European and other world banks, the loans now return to the asset side of their ledgers, if not once more as silk purses, surely no longer as sow’s ears. And the assets actually multiply!

As yet another act in the world economic drama concludes, and another troop of actors prepares to take the stage, the basic point of the play is being lost. As speculative manias overtake other countries and/or other assets, and as instances of fecklessness and fraud feed the public demand for vengeance, we are overlooking the fact that we are living through the most massive redistribution of wealth rich societies such as ours have seen since the Gilded Age at the end of the 19^th Century. The massive debts of private capital are being socialized. States are taking on society’s debts at a rate not seen since the Second World War. They are creating public debt to pay off or at least absorb the debts arising from asset crashes, bank and brokerage failures and near-failures, and massive unemployment triggered by recession. Banks and other financial institutions could not carry their own debt, so now the government is carrying it for them, either directly or by providing them with new credit at no cost with which they can become profitable again. The banks and other brokerage institutions have effectively cleaned up their balance sheets with newly created public debt, while the U.S. and European central banks have laundered their bad debts.

We are talking about a whopping lot of debt. According to the IMF’s April Global Financial Stability Report, the seven largest Western capitalist economies and Japan (the so-called G7) now hold a public debt equal to between 110 and 120% of their combined gross domestic product. The world’s public debt is about 50% of the world’s gross product. Given the size of the G7s’ economies, their public debt constitutes a huge financial commitment for which their taxpayers now are directly responsible.

This extraordinary shift of debt from corporate capitalism to nation-states has not attracted the attention it deserves. It is unlikely that the United States will find itself in a debt-driven crisis of the magnitude proportionately that afflicts Greece now, but the transformation of US finance capital’s private debts into US public debt has created a crushing burden for American citizens for generations to come. And the wealthy, once more, will likely come out of the crisis unscathed, unlike the rest of us.

As we have seen in Greece, the fiscal crises of the states swept into the economic downturn and the public debt upturn will trigger political struggle at levels we have not witnessed in over a quarter century. The political legitimacy of many states will be directly threatened. As we have seen thus far in the United States, the organized opposition fueled by anger and resentment, and often sense of betrayal that citizens express is already coming from the right. This trend will likely strengthen, as the fiscal crises of the states seem unlikely to abate and the lefts throughout Europe, Japan, and the United States are very weak.

by Bliss Kern

Everyone knows that too many novels are published each year. I've read that one is released about every hour, which leaves even the fastest and most dedicated reader woefully unable to keep up with the market. One consequence of this deluge of words has been the development of a range of services targeted at letting each reader sift through the vast list of titles to find those must appreciated by others like them: Amazon comments; virtual, physical, and TV book clubs; Shelfari; endless new book review blogs, written by professionals and amateurs alike. By necessity, every reader has become an advocate, choosing novels we love and recommending them to others so that the stories that impressed us don't get lost in the textual flood. This constant need to listen to others to find our new favorites and to regularly champion them to others compels self-consciousness about our own literary tastes. I can now reel off a list of twelve of my favorite works of contemporary fiction without even thinking because their names are a cultural currency, invoked in all kinds of exchanges. I am of course not the only one. I recognize this habit in my friends and colleagues as well. While looking for common ground among us I have noticed an interesting phenomenon: a disproportionate number of the contemporary novelists about whom my demographic (urban, young thirties, educated) are excited are Jewish American. Is there some common thread among these texts that speaks to us? A new trend has developed in Jewish American fiction, one that holds out the universally tantalizing hope of integrating all of our complex cultural inputs into a single functional, even exciting, individual. Recent Jewish fiction has hit on the ability to describe exactly what it feels like to be that mythic creature: a modern American.

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By Namit Arora

(An excerpt from a novel in progress.)

On their way to China Town, they pass an area with red curtained massage parlors and hookers pacing the streets. They stop at a red light behind a BMW. A hooker approaches its curbside window, talks to the driver, and hops in. Ved notices Liz shaking her head in what appears to be disapproval.

‘Consenting adults!’ he reminds her.

‘You don’t need to tell me that,’ she says sharply.

‘Why the disapproval then?’

‘Because it is so sad. I just wish these women had other options.’

‘Maybe they do. Are they doing this against their will here in San Francisco?’

‘Just because they do this, quote-unquote, voluntarily, doesn’t mean they do it because they are happy to. It’s because they don’t recognize, or lack, other options. Or they are addicted to abuse, or full of self-loathing and given to self-destruction.’ Her voice bristles as she continues, ‘It doesn’t mean they like it, or choose it with a healthy frame of mind.’

‘But if they do it voluntarily—so let’s exclude the drug addicts—can we say we know better? Who should be allowed to save people from themselves? So many others don’t like their jobs either, or choose them with a healthy frame of mind. I have met …’

She sighs. ‘I know that line of reasoning, but taking a job flipping burgers is not quite comparable to letting a horny customer finger your private parts.’

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John Nathan is the Takashima Professor of Japanese Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Having relocated from the United States to Japan in the early 1960s to enroll as the first American regular student at the University of Tokyo, he became the translator of novels by such Japanese literary luminaries as Kenzaburo Oe and Yukio Mishima as well as a documentarian who revealed unseen corners of Japanese private life to America. He went on to write books on Mishima, the Sony corporation and Japan itself. His latest book is a memoir, Living Carelessly in Tokyo and Elsewhere. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3 part one] [MP3 part two] [iTunes link]

I was thinking about the idea of what I call “Japanophilia”, the affinity for, the attraction to, things Japanese. It seems like more the rule than the exception with modern kids in America. When you got into Japan — this was the early sixties — how common was it?

Not particularly. As a matter of fact, that's probably one of the reasons I was drawn to it so powerfully. It was really like, as I said in my book, having a pet monkey. Lots of kids studying Albert Camus, this, that and the other thing, Western philosophy and so on, but almost no one was studying or particularly interested in Japan in those days.

Was it that case that — you say this in your book — just seeing one character drawn was what led you into this whole life?

In an earlier draft of my memoir, I had written the truth about that: I set that story down with as much panache as I could manage, then I said, “Is that really what happened? I wonder if it is.” I've told the story fifty times, and now that I actually write it on the page, I question it.

Like so much in a memoir — which is really not so much about memory as it is about persona, it turns out when you actually write one — I think that's what happened. But it may be embellishment, to be honest with you. Certainly these two characters I do remember being drawn for me on a napkin by a Japanese kid who had come to Harvard.

It was a very unusual word. This word in English is “whitlow,” an infection beneath the finger- and toenails. I do think, at some point very early on, I stared at these two… pictures, basically, and thought to myself, “My god, these two things mean that? In that case, I want to learn more about this language.” I think there's some truth in that. Whether that's the only thing that impelled me to go check out a Japanese language class I couldn't say.
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Note: This narrative was created from three true stories. Each character is a combination of more than one real person. I changed names and story elements to preserve the privacy of individuals.

Part 1 of this story can be found HERE.

The story so far

My nephew, Samuel Anders, was arrested, at gun point, on a charge of domestic violence. His wife, Kara Thrace, called 911 after she was pushed by Samuel and fell over a chair. The 911 dispatcher asked if there was a firearm in the house. She answered, “Yes,” but didn't say that the pistol was hers, and that Samuel did not know where she hid it, under lock and key. The introduction of a firearm into this situation resulted in six police cars and a dozen officers surrounding the house and calling for Samuel to come out with his hands raised in the air.

Samuel was going to plead guilty, enroll in an anger management class, get counseling, be placed on probation for a year, and pay a fine. He called me to borrow $550 for his fine. When he described the events to me, it was clear he committed no crime. Kara overreacted to Samuel's leaving the house to avoid an argument with her. She ran up to him, blocked his exit, and thrust herself in his face while shouting insults. Samuel, reacting involuntarily and instinctively, threw up his hands. Kara was unhurt, locked herself in her bedroom, and called the police.

Following Samuel's release from jail, Kara went to the Assistant County Attorney, Cassandra Misandre, and asked that the charges be dropped. Kara explained she overreacted. She told of being emotionally distraught over her sister's death, she was depressed, and had been in severe pain from an anal fissure, for three weeks, at the time of the pushing incident. Misandre would not drop the charges.

I found a lawyer for Samuel and told him I would take care of all the legal bills. I retained Huntsville, Alabama attorney John Hunt “Thunderbolt” Morgan.

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Song Behind a Rear-Tined Tiller

They believed consciousness resided in the heart

Aristotle believed this, and the Egyptians
who scooped out dead Pharaoh's brain
through his nose with a spoon
and stuffed his skull with rags assuring
he would not be thinking in the other world
to which he'd travel by long boat
being wrapped in cloth, speechless, supine in gold,
embarked with a breathless retinue of slaves
through the hole at the end of the earth
to a place far in imagination

Here and now the sun climbs a trellis of trees
along a rail line on which, at irregular intervals,
a freight comes dragging coal behind three engines
or hauls ladened boxcars labeled J.B. Hunt,
or pulls chains of chemical tanks and steel containers
heavy with the inventions of consciousness
some inscribed with graffiti sprayed by
a deft hand in letters bold and color-nuanced
arranged with a master's touch
tuned to the songs of heart or brain
while the smell of blue-grey diesel
sparks a synapse between beats
and one step follows another
behind a rear-tined tiller
as I urge a throttle

Who knows who sings
through what instrument
–did Aristotle?

by Jim Culleny, 4/22/10

By Maniza Naqvi

A puck planted on the right ear a pucch pressed in on the left. The sound still explosive in my head, I close my eyes as the full body search begins.

Arms stretched, legs apart, I assume the first step for the warrior pose. And now there lodged behind my eyes like an invisible stowaway Beyla’s kiss rings like a needling alarm, like a drill which draws a sharpened line, splitting my mind. Beyla’s bangles, white from wrist to shoulder, still jangle in my memory. I remember the sight of her skin cracked by searing sun as though it were ancient parchment covered in scripture and stretched over her bones: x-ray thin.

Stand still I am told. I shield myself inside that memory of bright sunlight, and shades of yellow, indigo, magenta and burnt earth. The kiss in my head undistilled, a discomfiting disturbance still. I think as I drift away: It’s a slim word. Still, a strong word. A good word. Even so. Even now. Quiet. Calm. Serene. Motion less. Breeze less. Yet. And so. Continuing. Continues.

Now, at the scanner machines I watch as the stuff sorter in a private security uniform wearing translucent disposable gloves, fishes out of my large handbag, a travel alarm clock, batteries, earphones tangled in so many keys— car, apartment and to the mailbox full of bills. An earring and a sheaf of papers appear next. A frangipani blossom, still moist, pressed inside a small black notebook flops out. There is a Spanish fan. She opens the fan, with both hands, unfurls it using her thumbs and sets it aside—painted geese against a dark blue sky—like the ones visiting Karachi from the frozen Siberia every winter. On the handle Espana painted in golden letters. A made in China, fan. I reach for the fan to show her how it’s done, the ratatat sudden sound of the unfurling, instant, with just one flick of my wrist—a trick I learned long ago in Manila, inflicts, in her, fear. Startled, she stops me—though I am done, “Don’t touch anything!” All I own—off limits to me, now weapons under her scrutiny and prying fingers—till she has judged them as benign; till her opinion has sterilized them; made them permissible to go on; all my stuff cleansed by a cleared and approved approver, till the next check point. She clucks her disapproval at the blossom—separates it out for disposal in a large trash bin which reminds me of the delete symbol on my email. In all this I give my head a vigorous shake, hoping to discard the ringing but it clings in there, undetected. She plucks up the imam zamin.

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by Bilal Tanweer

HOSHRUBA—The Land & the Tilism (Book One)
By Muhammad Husain Jah
Translated with Introduction and Notes by Musharraf Ali Farooqi
516 pages, Urdu Project
ISBN: 978-0978069551
Price: US $25

www.hoshruba.com

Can you think of a book you’ve read that begins with a warning? This is probably a first, for its exuberance if nothing else:

[This tale] has consumed whole generations of readers before you. And like all great tales, it is still hungry—ravenous, in fact—for more. You may not return from this campaign. Or come back so hardened you may never look at stories in quite the same way again.

It might seem an exaggeration, but here are the facts: this yarn was spun by two generations of storytellers and it is spread over eight thousand pages in its original Urdu language. At the height of its popularity in North India, it attracted legions of followers all the way from the aristocratic class down to the ordinary folk of the bazaar. In other words: this is a bloody carnival of a book, and everyone is invited.

Reading it, you immediately think of Borges’ remark on The Thousand and One Nights: “one feels like getting lost in [it], one knows entering that book one can forget one’s own poor human fate; one can enter a world, a world made of archetypal figures but also of individuals.”

That sums it up, really. Except, during the course of this narrative, our poor fate is in the hands of five tricksters, who are the heroes of the tale: they are spies, assassins, chameleons, and commandoes all rolled into one and their tricks usually involve elaborate plots to overcome the astounding magic of enemy sorcerers. But they aren’t your regular Bond-style smart guys; they are much flatter – types, as Borges puts it. And that’s how the narrative also goes: focused entirely on action and rooted firmly in absolute notions of good and evil, beauty and ugliness, love and loyalty, it lacks every nuance of psychology or empathy with the ‘other’ that you may think of. It is a tumbling, rollicking war machine that lusts after the triumph of good and will settle for nothing less than a thorough devastation of evil that is the enchanted Land of Hoshruba and its ruler, Emperor Sorcerer Afrasiyab.

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Pharaoh Khufu intends to secure his riches beyond the grave, and into the afterlife. He captures the greatest architect known in his kingdom, and forces him – through a threat to his entire people – to build him an impenetrable tomb: a Pyramid no thief can plunder. The architect sets to work, knowing that upon completion of the tomb he himself will be sealed inside with the dead Pharaoh. How is it possible to build the most secret catacomb, a labyrinth impossible to breach, without passing on its secret through the workers who build it?

In the classic Hollywood film, Land of the Pharaohs, such a conundrum is posed. The architect needs a team of workers that Khufu can trust, to construct the mechanism by which the tomb will close itself off to eternity. The Pharaoh has the solution: the workers he gives the architect have had their tongues cut out. In exchange for their devotion the slaves will accompany the architect and Khufu to the afterlife. No secret will pass their lips.

How do we pass on a message in a world with impenetrable borders? And in turn, how do we determine its secure transmission? The codes we devise become useless at certain horizons: if the slave cannot speak, he cannot exchange; if a being from another land does not know our language, it cannot understand us; if a message is encrypted, one must also pass on the method to crack it.

Sometimes the codes we devise to enslave, become apparatus in their own demise.

The tongue-less slave is still a liability in a literate society; in turn, a literate slave is a still liability in a digitised society. At every stage in the development of communication technologies human subjects have been relinquished power of one kind, only for a power of another kind to evolve and liberate them once again. The human body is the central locality for all information exchange. Even today, with our writing technologies, our radios, computers and nano-particles, it is the human form that dictates all particulars of scale and substance. What matters now is not the tongue – an organ reduced of its power by hieroglyphics and alphabets – yet in order to silence, corrupt regimes and over-zealous governments still effectively mutilate their subjects. In the West, information monoliths such as Google and Wikipedia help us mediate the space between discrete, complex reams of data. It is as if, in the modern age, to spite its people all China needed to do was cut off the equivalent of their tongue, building up around them a labyrinthine firewall that determines their silence; that reduces their identities to the status of tongueless slaves.

Sometimes to properly conceal something, one must devise a better way to encode it.

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David Sheppard is the author of On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno, the first and only biography of rock music's foremost intellectual “non-musician,” producer and cultural theorist. The book covers Eno's early life growing up in England listening to early soul records, his formative period in art school, his entrance into the public eye as the synthesizer player with Roxy Music and his career's subsequent fragmentation across the cultural landscape, into the realms of visual art, ambient music, record production (for the likes of U2, David Bowie, Talking Heads and Coldplay), writing and futurology. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes link]

This is a question coming from one Brian Fan to another, and it's one I've always had difficulty with: what is the concise answer that you give — say, when you were working on the book and they asked you want it was about and they didn't know who Brian Eno was, so they asked “Who's Brian Eno?”, what did you say?

I've yet to come up with the pat sentence that actually answers that, as indeed has Brian. I mention in the intro to the book that he got so fed up with trying to answer that question at dinner parties, explaining this enormously complex dilettante artist, cultural theorist, etc., etc. job description that he instead just said he was an accountant, which made people go away very, very quickly.

How did your own history with the enjoyment of Brian Eno's work begin? What was your introduction to him?

I came across him as a sort of callow youth, listening to punk rock records. He got all the mentions in the margins. I was aware of him in Roxy Music, but I was a bit too young for that, so it was a kind of ethereal presence initially. He got mentioned in dispatches by all sorts of people in punk rock. When I first got to hear his music, which in any serious capacity would have been about '78, what I heard sounded nothing like what I expected. I expected something far more severe and metallic.

Obviously I knew things like Low, the David Bowie record he'd worked on, and I'd never really associated his involvement in those records with the more calm and ethereal elements. Somehow I imagined him to be more Velvet Underground and less lift music — to be honest, when I first heard ambient music I, like many others, didn't fall immediately in love with it. I did think it was rather bland.

My initial reaction to Brian Eno was one of disappointment — one which quickly turned around. Something happened very shortly after that. I think it was just part of my growing up, actually. A light went on somehow, and it all suddenly made enormous sense. The more I investigated it, the more sense it made.

You mention this intro was in the late seventies, when Brian was in the process of inventing and releasing the first ambient albums. For those in the audience who might not know, how did Brian enter the public eye? What things was he first famous for?

His introduction to the masses would have been through playing synthesizers with Roxy Music, certainly in the U.K. This was this very strange pop group, even for a time of very strange pop groups. Bryan Ferry was the lead singer and Brian Eno was this guy, a self-confessed non-musician, who played synthesizers and actually played a lot of the instruments in the band, more traditional, guitars and so forth, and filtered them through his electronic effects. This was a revolutionary thing to be seen in pop music in 1972, which is when they struck. They went swiftly to the top of the British charts. I think they took a bit longer to penetrate America.

That would've been Eno's calling card to the world, but he was only actually with Roxy Music for two albums. By 1973, he was off on his own. He'd fallen out with Brian Eno — with, uh, Bryan Ferry, rather, the singer. Probably less confusing with two Brians in the band, for one thing, but they had a conflict of interest over where the band was going. Bryan Ferry, I think, was always looking to be a more orthodox pop star, and was moving in that direction. Eno comes from an art school background, and wanted to pursue music that reflected that more. Ultimately, that's when he struck out on his own. But it would've been Roxy Music that first awakened the world to Brian Eno.

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Text and Photos by Jill McDonough

The first time I saw her, May 2, 1999, I felt like I had just been plunked down from a future in which we’d been together for decades, and I had to convince her it was me. The first time I heard her name felt like the first time I effortlessly understood overheard conversation in another language. Josey. Of course. Now everything made sense.

I won her over by writing her a poem called “Ghazal for Josey.” Every month when I repay some MFA tuition I feel smug about what a bargain I got.

An open relationship, quickly closing: only nobody you know, only out of town, only one time, only on jury duty, only sequestered, forget it.

When we had been together for six weeks I went to my friend Sudha’s wedding and got drunk and called Josey saying I want you to marry me and I think we should have a big Indian wedding like Sudha’s.

We are neither of us Indian.

On one of our first dates we were in the glass-bricked tunnel of Back Bay Station, on the Orange Line in Boston. And she sang the “O Mio Babbino Caro” aria from Gianni Schicchi because she liked the acoustics there. Mother. Fucker. Strangers cried out Brava!

We got civilly united in Vermont, had all the clerks of North Hero in tears. Party A Name: Josephine Alice Packard. Party B Name: Jill Susann McDonough. Josey made the skirt I wore out of an antique kimono.

I am married to the most competent person I have ever met, good at everything she has ever tried including teaching me how to use a drill, a dremel, a table saw, a jigsaw, a circular saw, a miter box, a powder actuated nail gun, a nail gun, a pneumatic stapler, a putty knife, a trowel, plaster, spackle, grout, wood filler, window glazing, drywall screws, perforated washers, a Boston shaker, a julep strainer, a Hawthorne strainer, a Tap-Icer, and a Lewis bag.

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by Ahmad Saidullah

Javier Marías. Your Face Tomorrow. Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa. London: Serpent’s Tail. Vol. I: Fever and Spear. 2005. 387 pp. Vol. II: Dance and Dream. 2006. 341 pp. Vol. III: Poison, Shadow and Farewell. 2009. 546 pp.

Javier Marías’ Your Face Tomorrow, a novel in three parts rather than a trilogy, according to its creator, reads like Henry James with the hiccups. Phrases are repeated in Edwardian cadences and counterposed as in fugues, sentences run on for several pages, and actions are cut out of time, their meanings opened to conjecture. Although Face has been compared to Remembrance of Things Past, it is not so much a roman-fleuve of mémoire involuntaire reaching into the recesses of time as an active speculation on ethics and history, less Erlebnis, more Erfahrung, to use Walter Benjamin’s distinctions between the immediate lived experience of an event and the fund of community memory one can draw upon to understand it.

The lessons from history are viewed from different angles. Marías is taken with secrecy, trust, truth, with limning the “face” one shows in making choices in life, and with betrayals that wear the mask of friendship. He remembers those whose fates rested on their friends, neighbours, enemies and state authorities during the Spanish civil war and World War II, including George Orwell, Andreu Nin i Pérez, the Catalan POUMiste leader said to have been flayed to death by the Nationalists in Spain, and Marías’ own relatives and acquaintances. He reproduces photographs, posters and documents in evidence to blend the personal and historical with fiction like WG Sebald who called him a “twin writer.”

Like most of Marías’ titles, this comes from Shakespeare — a modern gloss on “what a disgrace is it to me to remember thy name, or to know thy face tomorrow,” words Hal uses to renounce his fellow carouser Poins. Marías borrows the contrasting lives of his father Julían, a philosopher and student of Ortega y Gasset, who appears as the narrator’s father Juan Deza, and Sir Peter Russell who is called Sir Peter Wheeler in the book. Betrayed by a close friend to Francoist authorities and accused of writing for Pravda and consorting with the Red Dean of Canterbury Hewlett Johnson, Julían Marías spent years in exile but chose to face life without rancour. The Russell-Wheeler character, an unmarried modern-language don at Oxford, wartime intelligence officer and Julían Marías’ friend, once saved an enemy agent from certain death. He is scarred, however, in the book by the memory of his “wife” who had killed herself when she found out she had unwittingly betrayed a friend’s husband’s Jewish origins to the fascists.

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Last month I got a new Facebook friend, my daughter. Later this month I’m going to my children’s school to talk to the 4th-8th graders (including my daughter) about the perils and opportunities of Social Media. This week, the New York Times published an article, “Teaching about the Web Includes Troublesome Parts” that addresses this very topic. This confluence of events has spurred me to articulate the reasons that we allowed her to get a Facebook account because these reasons go to the heart of what I believe about education and parenting.

There’s no doubt that the Internet can be a scary place to let children roam. Clearly, the growing prevalence of young people with cell phones and access to computers, while not the cause of bullying, makes it even easier to engage in and is often more devastating to the victim. Equally, the Internet doesn’t create pedophiles but it does mean that they often don’t have to leave the comfort of their living rooms to find innocent children. But the truth of the matter is that, as with all things involving parenting, wrapping children up in cotton wool and not allowing them a degree of freedom, even when there are potential risks involved, is usually not the answer to raising curious, self-confident, independent young people.

My feelings about the Internet in general and Social Media in particular are akin to my feelings about letting my daughter go into the movie theater with a friend while I wait outside in the mall, or letting her walk the quarter of a mile down the road to our neighbor’s farm with her sister; as a parent I am nervous, maybe even terrified, but I know that she has to learn how to interact with the world without me holding her hand every moment. We talk to her regularly about talking to strangers and inappropriate touching and behavior from adults and the need to tell us if anything in that vein ever happens, and now we have added to those talks discussions about the dangers of the online world. We arm our children with information, warn them frankly of the dangers, closely monitor their activities as far as we can, talk to them regularly about what’s going on in their lives and try to intervene early on and forcefully when situations do arise, before they get out of hand.

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No One in Particular

Are you looking at me? I say to the mountain
which moves as I run the tiller down the row.

But it may not be the mountain I address.

Are you talking to me? I say to the pale moon
which hangs in the blue sky like a ghost ball.

But maybe the moon is not the ghost in this conversation.

The Briggs & Stratton snorts. The Troy's deep-treaded
rubber turns. The Buddha in the engine barks. The tines
lift clumps of the secret earth buried under hard sod.

Are you censuring me? I say to the crow
who stands off like an incriminating shadow.

But the crow may not be the shade to whom I speak.

Soon spinach will be sprouting in these rows.
The prints I leave in the soil behind the tiller
will have been smoothed over by a rake.

Are you rattling my cage? I say to no one in particular
who is mute as the scent of dark humus overturned.

by Jim Culleny, 4/10/10