Justin E. H. Smith

[This is a short excerpt from my current book project, Language and Animals, about which you will be hearing more soon. –JEHS]

Some decades after M. F. K. Fisher, following Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, implored us to 'consider the oyster', David Foster Wallace asked us do the very same thing with a lobster. It was not at his request that I first did so, and neither was he the first to make the request. In the Essay on Classification of 1851, the Swiss zoologist Louis Agassiz also asked us to consider the lobster, but what he really wanted was something rather more radical: he wanted us to consider the lobster alone, to consider the world as if the lobster had no relatives, no exoskeletal cousins next to which we might be able to make some sort of sense of this odd creature:

[S]uppose, for instance, that our Lobster (Homarus americanus) were the only representative of that extraordinarily diversified type [the 'Articulata'], –how should we introduce that species of animal into our systems? Simply as a genus with one species by the side of all the other classes with their orders, families, etc., or as a family containing only one genus with one species, or as a class with one order and one genus, or as a class with one family and one genus? And should we acknowledge, by the side of Vertebrata, Mollusca, and Radiata, another type, Articulata, on account of the existence of that one Lobster, or would it be natural to call it by a single name, simply as a species, in contradistinction to all other animals? (Agassiz, Essay on Classification, London, 1859, 5).

If you think the lobster is peculiar, just imagine how peculiar, how utterly non-pareil, it would be if it were the only articulate (i.e., exoskeletal) animal in existence? How could we even begin to say what it is if there were nothing else like it?

We might ask something more radical still: Ecce homo. Consider the human. Next, consider the human alone, without any animal relatives, endoskeletal or otherwise. What would such a creature be like? Standing in relation to nothing that is like it, and at the same time not it, how would we know what sort of being we were beholding?

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By Haider Shahbaz

In 1917, Marcel Duchamp contributed Fountain, a urinal, to the exhibit of the Society of Independent Artists. The Society was ‘independent’ – but not that much. They rejected the urinal, insisting it was not art. Duchamp defended the piece by Mr. Mutt (his alter ego) in the following words: “Mr Mutt made the fountain with his own hands or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object.”

Gertrude Stein is similarly a characteristically modern writer in that she is producing art from everyday life. She is choosing everyday objects and then creating thoughts for them. Her work, ‘Tender Buttons’, is divided into three parts: Objects, Food, Rooms. The aim is to describe everyday objects and spaces that Stein is familiar with and lives in. These are domestic objects: A cup and saucer, a long dress, sugar, milk and rooms come together to be assembled in Stein’s mind and to leave it as written art. These domestic objects are the essential components of her everyday experience. However Stein does not simply borrow from experiences and people and try to reproduce them on paper in their traditional way of description. Stein is aiming for the pure self, the completely subjective rendition of the commonplace object as it exists inside her. In order to do this, she is breaking down life into its components of experience, into sights and sounds and resemblances and repetitions. For example, she describes a petticoat in a single line, extremely personally, as such: “A light white, a disgrace, an ink spot, a rosy charm.” Like Walker says, commenting on the Cezanne and Picasso stills hanging on Stein’s walls in Paris, “…this text is far from a literal transcription of the immediate sense-data that enter the ‘stream of consciousness.’ Like the Cezanne and Picasso still lifes of apples that hung on the walls of Stein’s atelier, it is a deliberate artistic model, not a naïve reproduction of the ‘real’.”(134, Gertrude Stein, Jayne L. Walker. UMP, Amherst, 1984). Thus, the petticoat becomes subjective, it becomes Stein’s interior, Stein’s ‘self’. ‘Tender Buttons’ is about this particular rendition of the commonplace into an artistic subjective model. For Stein, art is the rendition of everyday life into highly individualized descriptions of that life.

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by Tolu Ogunlesi, in The Huffington Post (photo from Wikipedia):

A few weeks ago, at the height of the News of the World scandal, I appeared on the BBC's World Have Your Say to talk about how – or if – unfolding events in the UK were shaping the way Nigerians regarded their colonial overlords. Not long after that I contributed to a Guardian article on a similar theme.

Apart from a few newspaper editorials and columns, I didn't get the impression the average Nigerian had much of an opinion regarding the phone-hacking. (It's hard to say how much this may have had to do with the fact that Nigeria doesn't have a voicemail culture)

On the day David Cameron visited Lagos, while his citizens were demanding his urgent return home to deal with the crisis, Lagosians seemed more concerned about the traffic his presence in town was causing. “Why do they block the road [because] a dignitary is in town? Do they block roads in London when [Nigerian President Jonathan] visits?” one Facebook status queried.

The ongoing riots (like the parliamentary expenses scandal) are another matter though. Nigerians – like the rest of the world – have opinions about that. Some of it is self-deprecating (Blackberry messages joking that Nigerians-in-London are turning down an evacuation offer from their government; preferring a temporarily-burning London to their perpetually dysfunctional homeland); the rest drawing on something close to Schadenfreude (reports of the Gaddafi regime insisting that Mr. Cameron has “lost his legitimacy and must go”; and of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad describing Britain's treatment of the rioters as “savage”).

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morning. please don't
slide again. nothing truly
happened yet. shocking.
its shocking, the rate
so much nothing happens at. now through
the window, two pigeons flash
the full wing-work; the span of what
god gave them; circling, they switch
positions mid-air, my new favourite
band hits its drum and flute
solo : a bubbling like cold
water pipes a shudder of happiness
through me. candle, don't you
burn. clock, don't you tick, i want
another. . .

i've got it
bad. sour & sweet
tooth, great greedy
gut, eyeballs too big
for my life; want that big life
like a well-directed movie; string
of scenes. each more tender
& shining than the last; lets have a brother
& sister race through yellow grass to the brown
river; lets have a hero–brave-
chested, brooding, his truck
veering off the lackluster
path. lets have paris, moscow, romantic
montana, a pardoned
criminal blinking dust
in bald new light, and vastly different
moons preserved
in our windows every night. (some
weighty in syrup like canned
peaches, some slim
little wafer of paper. . .)

… oh between dreams, passions–everything's
ivory. bland & soaped & thudding
& all the happening happened already. so
lets have the crescendo
round this way again; i'm ready as always
to be lifted. let's live the life
made for us by the giants. they'll swing us
over the shoulder–
we'll get carried away.

by Hartosh Singh Bal

Somewhere near the town of Renala Khurd in Pakistan is a patch of land (a morabba to be exact) that once belonged to my family. In lieu of this land, through a series of land transfers, complicated but no more complicated than the history of the division of the subcontinent, my family now owns land, far less than a morabba but land nonetheless, on the outskirts of Amritsar. More or less 64 years ago to the day, a series of such transactions and the forced movement of millions of people, created the two countries of India and Pakistan.

My father, barely ten years old, was then staying in our native village of Sathiala, not far from the banks of the Beas and a short distance from the main railway line from Jalandhar to Lahore. Sathiala, like most of the villages in that area, was dominated by the Sikhs who owned much of the land. The Muslims were mostly from the artisan castes, dependant on the Sikh landlords. As the date set for Partition, August 15, 1947, approached, a large number of Sikhs from these villages began gathering together night after night to organize `tiks’ (attacks) on the Muslim processions headed to Pakistan. They would come together in large numbers, some carrying firearms, other armed with spears and daggers, often led by the local police inspector. Every night they would head out on their journey of murder and pillage, every morning they would divide the spoils.

Each day, my father and his elder brother, just out of school, would carry food for the Sikh and Hindu families travelling by train who had made it safely through similar massacres on the other side of the border. When the violence was but beginning, they made an attempt to offer some food to the Muslims in the trains headed in the other direction, no less famished, no less thirsty. Only the intercession of some men from their village saved them from the swords of their fellow Sikhs now drawn against them.

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daily mud

when I’m down and most prone
to fall into the mire of meaning
I resort to the stars as if
they might pin a ribbon
on my chest: a reward
of understanding to come;
the wars of fidelity won

—as if I might win
the Medal of the Unknown’s
Honor for piety
instead of for keeping my head
in the machine of the moment
taking it in, knowing the bliss of a laugh,
tending the scrape on a daughter’s hand
or wound of her heart
feeding a poor mouth
shoeing a bare foot
taking little, chewing
cud

—as if there were some truth
greater, more sublime,
more holy, more worthy
of wonder than that found here
in our daily
mud
.

by Jim Culleny
8/12/11

By Ryan Sayre

I really can’t think of a better example of what we might call an anthropological ethos of urgency than a roadside postbox in the time of war. During the OAS terrorist campaigns in Algeria in the 1960s, a foreign journalist turns to a colleague with this story:

“I remember asking another Japanese reporter how he managed to file his stories. “I send many by post,“ he said. “Mine are not urgent news stories.“ As he talked, he pointed to a letterbox outside the Aletti Hotel, which, he told me, he always used. A sticker, in French, on the box, read: “Do not post letters here. Owing to the circumstances, collections have been discontinued since February 12.“ We were in May.

The anthropologist offering this anecdote gives it as a brief interlude of humor, a gentle ribbing of the journalistic field, a little snatch of good-humored racism. I wonder, however, whether, just for shits and giggles, we might hold our laughter for a moment and try taking the Japanese reporter at his word? What I mean is, let's just assume for a moment that he means what he says about the non-urgency of his dispatches. Let’s assume he parles French like a Bonaparte, has a semiotician’s eye for signage, and makes use of this out-of-service postbox for no reason other than that it strikes him as the most suitable place to store observations on a situation too liquid to be touched in the immediate present. The postbox in which our reporter stuffs his dispatches is a kind of time capsule, yes, but rather than the tin boxes we buried as children that wait idly for the arrival of some pre-established future date, these dispatches are attentively listening, devoting themselves to the moment when the ping of empty copper shell casings gives over to the jingle of a mailman’s steel keyring.

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By Meghan Rosen

Earlier this year, California became one of 48 states to legally allow the sale and use of the fumigant pesticide methyl iodide. Methyl iodide is the proposed replacement for methyl bromide, a chemical widely used in California’s production of conventional strawberries. (If you’ve ever driven by fields with rows and rows of tightly stretched black tarps, you may have already seen the fumigation process at work: a few weeks before planting, methyl bromide is pumped into the soil and sealed in with thick plastic sheets. It’s colorless, odorless, and highly toxic; within days the gas can wipe out thriving populations of microorganisms, insects, and weeds — effectively sterilizing the soil.)

As the nation’s largest producer of strawberries (nearly 90% are grown in California), any decision to overhaul pest control is big, time-consuming, and subject to massive environmental and toxicological review. So, why the switch? According to the EPA, methyl bromide is a significant ozone depleting substance. In California, where nearly 40,000 acres are devoted solely to strawberry growth (only 4% is organic) and ~200 pounds of methyl bromide are applied per acre, the potential for environmental impact is huge. (The EPA estimates that 50-95% of the noxious gas escapes during fumigation or is released into the environment when the plastic tarps are removed.)

In 1988, the United States ratified the Montreal Protocol, an international treaty intended to curb use of ozone-depleting substances like methyl bromide. One goal was to completely phase out methyl bromide by 2005, with the exception of ‘critical use exemptions’ for farmers who absolutely depended on the chemical for pest control.

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by James McGirk

When I heard the Federal Bureau of Investigation might have figured out the identity of seventies skyjacker D.B. Cooper I was really upset. Who among us hasn’t felt a smidge of sympathy for the outlaw? Well into my thirties, having finally completed my education and finding myself without short-term goals to strive for, a swelling waistline, and an unremarkable life unspooling before me, I can’t help but feel attracted to a life fueled by passion and brightened with sparks of decisive action, like leaping out the back of a Boeing 727 into a lightning storm.

Actual crime is out of the question. I don’t want to hurt anybody, and my muscles have atrophied to the point were the thought of taking real life action is ludicrous, but as the dudgeon of white-collar work corrodes my body and seeps into my interior life I wonder whether there might be a way to fight back. Could living a life devoted to darkness and negativity act as a tonic, at least until the demon flows of testosterone ebb away?

What pushed me over the edge was reading “An Investment Manager’s View on the Top 1%,” an anonymous and possibly apocryphal investment manager’s account of his wealthy clients, written for the University of California Santa Cruz’s Who Rules America blog. In the United States an increasingly disproportionate fraction of the country’s wealth has accumulated in the richest sectors of society. The disparity itself wasn’t news to me, but I had never really considered what was inside of that top one percent.

Before reading the article, reaching that top percentile seemed like a feasible goal to me. I took it for granted that because I have degrees from snooty schools (granted both are in Writing, but I could always go back for a JD), reaching the highest echelons of society, i.e. making the required annual salary of $300K and accumulating a net worth of $1.2mm, seemed like realistic option to me. With a few years of hard work and a nice suit I thought access to the levers of society could be mine.

Turns out the top percentile is more spike than a plateau. The bottom half “largely include[s] physicians, attorneys, upper middle management, and small business people who have done well,” says the anonymous investment manager. “Most of those in the bottom half…lack power and global flexibility and are essentially well-compensated workhorses for the top 0.5%, just like the bottom 99%.”

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It’s depressing that I even know this, we say, sighing. The names of Charlie Sheen’s ex wives and goddesses, the nature of Wiener's tweets, or, until recently, what’s on Steve Buscemi’s stoop. But maybe we should just give up on wincing. We all love a good story, after all, just not always when it’s about us.

Earl Morris’ film Tabloid is about this. In his excavation of – or perhaps that’s too deep a word – of the “case of the manacled Mormon”, Morris has done his, as he tweeted, “level-headed best to capture what Joyce” McKinney, a vivacious Southern blonde who apparently kidnapped her ex-boyfriend Kirk Anderson, a Mormon, tied him to a bed and forced him to have sex in a Devonshire cabin for a weekend in 1977, “believed happened.”

The British press of course could not resist this story and McKinney’s self described “Kodak moment,” what she calls her innocent attempt to rescue the man she loved from the “cult” of Mormonism, became fodder for a bit of a tabloid war between the Daily Express, the Mirror, and others. The former took her side, that a great passion had been crushed by the brainwashing Mormon church, while the latter took the time to dig up her nude bondage photos, running a new one on the cover every day for a week.

When McKinney, vivacious and arresting even now, was released on bail, “the sky lit up with flashbulbs – I was a celebrity.” She met Keith Moon at a party, had some glamorous fun. But then, as she tells it, the nude pictures came out, she was slandered, and then jumped bail and fled to the United States – disguised as a deaf mute on a false passport, of course.

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By Maniza Naqvi

“Have I over egged the pudding?”

The room had become so silent that she thought she heard her thumb nail chip as she rubbed it anxiously against the lectern.

“No, really, have I?” A faint apology in her disarming tone as she searched the vast auditorium and tossed her freshly tinted red mane towards one shoulder and with her forefinger brushed aside a stray bang of wispy curls from her forehead and out of her eyes. She had taken extra care of her makeup this morning—a more golden glow a thicker mascara.

It would, to a sentence have been a cliché, if she had been asked to write how she felt about being here. The runners at dawn, the vast landscape, all golden elephant grass and table top mountains—that one acacia tree on the horizon—the constant summarizing of what it was like—well—like, like, that film of course with Robert Redford and Meryl Streep—-isn’t it, and oh the macchiatos, the finding oneself-and of course finding the proverbial soul mate—rugged, the face of a lion—yes but of course—and always never black—the realization that this was the source of the beginning of time—-and of religion.

She would have written the speech, of course she would’ve had she known that she was to deliver one. But instead she had been asked at the last moment to give the closing statement for the conference, to fill in for the Chair, who was sick this morning. Food was blamed as always, though it was probably drink from the party last night, as always.

Was it the quote from Slavoj Zizek and the mention of the leather and zip masks in Alexander McQueen’s Savage Beauty exhibit at the Met? It was meant to be an icebreaker to help her with her extreme anxiety for public speaking.

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View from Marais Window: Footprints in the Snow, 2005, copyright Alison Harris

by Elatia Harris

In 1986, San Francisco-born David Downie, a scholar and multilingual translator, moved to Paris, into a real garret — a maid's room, in fact — to write himself into another way of life. Fresh from Milan, his marriage to a Milanese finished, he was still young enough for years more of getting it right. A quarter century later, his authority on matters Parisian is acknowledged by Jan Morris, Diane Johnson, and Mavis Gallant, to name only a few illustrious admirers.

To the intense delight of his readers, Paris, Paris: A Journey Into the City of Light, was reissued last April. Another book, Quiet Corners of Rome, came out in May. Rome is a noisy place, but David Downie and his wife, the photographer Alison Harris, rearrange that for us. Alison's ravishing photos of Paris and Rome are taken from these two books, and from an archive of images not otherwise available.

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by Alyssa Pelish

Robinson Crusoe is notable for a lot of reasons. It was one of the first English novels. It brings up stuff like cultural relativism and morality and providence with a capital P. Marx favorably critiqued its depiction of pre-capitalist man. It can be read as a big old allegory of British colonialism. And, of course, it’s the locus classicus of desert island tropes. Yet when I finally got around to reading it this summer, it recalled to me nothing so much as the contentment I’d felt at age eight-ish, sheltering in a makeshift lean-to of blankets and card table chairs as I shined a flashlight over the pages of another, though not entirely different, book.

Reading Robinson Crusoe, I found myself happily engrossed in Crusoe’s construction of his island dwelling — how he begins to hollow out a rock aside a hill and fashions a tented enclosure from the sails of his battered ship. He recounts how, upon having carved out a cave sufficient for himself, “into this fence or fortress…I carried all my riches, all my provisions, ammunition, and stores.” Contentedly, I read as Crusoe burrowed further into his cave, carving out numerous alcoves and crannies for storage and hiding. I read as he built up a barricade of turf around the cave, as he raised rafters from wall to cave entrance, thatching them with tree boughs. And, finally, I read how, after pulling in after himself the ladder he has crafted for the entrance to his cave, he declares himself “fortified…from all the world.”

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For a crash course in the tactics of persuasion, you can’t do much better than religion. Religious rhetoric is thick with arguments that win people over despite being logically flawed. Just a few of the most common:

Atheists, skeptics, and rationalists complain about arguments like these, and rightfully so. None of the above constitutes good evidence for the existence of a God. But there’s a reason religions use those appeals to authority, consequences, and fear — they work. The unfortunate truth is that people seem to be more susceptible to certain irrational arguments than they are to rational ones, which raises a troubling question for those of us who would like to combat false beliefs in society: Should we make the argument that constitutes the best evidence for the true claim, or the argument that’s most likely to persuade the person we’re talking to?

To be clear, I’m not talking about lying. I’m talking about making an argument which is true but which isn’t good evidence for the claim you’re trying to advance. So for example, let’s say I wanted to convince a Catholic of the truth of the theory of evolution. My first instinct might be to lay out the evidence for the theory, showing them examples of natural selection at work, pointing to examples of transitional fossils, and so on. If my goal is to change their belief, however, I’d probably be better off explaining that the Vatican’s position is that evolution is consistent with Catholic dogma. That appeal to authority is going to be more persuasive, for someone who already trusts the authority in question, than an appeal to the relevant evidence.

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