With apologies to T.C. Boyle

Elatia Harris

In the light from the only good lamp in the room, my widower sits on his end of our green couch, reading Proust.  I used to read it, too — I’d sit in the dark, scanning for the sexy bits, making Proust go fast.  But my widower’s on his thirteenth rereading now.  And in the shadows of the long room, I’m with him, watching everything he does.  If I’d known back in 1984 that I’d still be here, I mightn’t have bothered to die.  Might just have volunteered him for that bother instead.  Then I’d be flesh with a book in its lap in the light.

He’s sixty, my widower.  Already too old to die in his finest raiment — as I did, at a peachy twenty-nine.  However, his hair’s still black.  He hasn’t any new hobbies — just more of what he’s always liked: Proust and booze.  The TV’s still on, too, barely audible.  Over a thirsty sip from a tumbler of wine he shoots it a glance every now and then, though he doesn’t want diverting; if he could, he’d watch a show about a dark-haired man on a green couch who drinks and reads Proust.  There’re no women in his life — I was the last — and no boys.  Absolutely no boys, he swore.  And he wasn’t lying.  I know that now, for I’m inside his head when I choose, wedged into Broca’s area, or strung along those sub-cortical ganglia that are the seat of desire.  I’ve found him out: he doesn’t much like it with anyone, and he never did.  The page turns, the soft yellow musty page.  To him, it’s the rustle of black silk.

I want there to be a knock at the door.  It’s almost Valentine’s Day, and I’ve been here watching him drink alone for more than twenty years.  Mightn’t he welcome some hard-luck straggler from the Reagan era, an old friend whom I died too young to meet?  Robert!  Yes, Robert would be interesting.  Fleeing London, where he owes oodles in all the best clubs, he’d be needing a bed for the night.  Robert’s smashing — a male Princess Diana, wayward and blond, with shiny eyes and an aura of doom. 

Or, Barbara!  She’s pretty interesting, too.  A lunchtime hostess at a local bar and grille, Barbara has plans for my widower.  What a lot of money he must have, to be lunching bibulously every day right under her nose.  Shouldn’t he buy a house for her and her mildly retarded daughter? There’s one that would do nicely — Barbara buses by it on her way to work.  It has a third floor apartment, and she’d let my widower sack out up there.  He’d be like Mrs. Rochester, only quiet.

Oh, I’m antsy, and all set to make more of his life than he does, since I lack a personal fate.  Or, have already dealt myself one.  This world and the world beyond are too alike for my liking, my widower that heavier element around which I orbit still.  I sought only the extinction that knows not of itself, yet I continue in this limbo of limitless insight into precisely those conditions that were fatal to me.  Look — he shifts in his seat, crosses now his right leg over his left; he’ll do it back the other way in another twenty minutes.  Meanwhile, Proust has him by the short and curlies.

Albertine, Marcel the narrator’s shut-in, endlessly rearranges her few possessions, and Marcel’s wretched that her pass-times are those of a common criminal in lock-up when he would greatly prefer that she take in some improving reading.  Well, she can’t.  Settling down to read makes her eyes water; she yawns, lists, and falls deeply asleep.  Ah, Marcel won’t have it.  Though he’d look far to find a woman worse suited to him, he’ll do anything to keep this one awake.  That’s love — a trial to the soul, an assault on taste and judgment.  And my widower on his thirteenth rereading can still spare a tear for Marcel, on the cross for a woman so unworthy.  There’s the tear.  He lifts his chin, lest it trickle onto the page, and he looks at me without knowing it.  I contrive sometimes to be right in his line of sight.  I dangle in front of the tube, transparently, fatelessly, a jellyfish caught in a building wave on a surfers’ beach.  I am that unworthy girl.  My widower and Marcel are one.  He’s got it perfectly worked out.  He lowers his eyes, and reads on. 

I’d like to see something more happen to him — for him, that is.  Though I daren’t let myself hope for much, I’ve got hold of the idea that if his life became eventful I could leave.  Just get the hell out of Dodge.  And go where?  I don’t know; all I seem to know is more and more about the life I exited.  Useless knowledge, if I can’t cook something up with it. 

Come to that, I sure could use a spectral omelette.  Why not whoosh into the kitchen?  It’s just as I left it, but someone’s done the dishes.  And I won’t dirty them — I can’t.  I’ll just go through the motions, like a TV chef whose assistant forgot literally everything, who beats the air with a wire whisk and chats an omelette into being with her wrists.  Horrid, what’s in there — brown-edged deli turkey, a few mushy cherry tomatoes.  Watching my widower beaver away at Proust should irk me more than anything, but, actually, I hate it most when I’m in the kitchen, astrally racketing, and he plows right through me to graze from the fridge.  That’s dinner, and parting me to get it should at least raise gooseflesh on his seeking arms.   

A noise!  A cheerful noise!  I’m perfectly sure it’s the doorbell.  My widower hears it, too.  Without knowing it, he wants company, so he hears the bell, sometimes, when it isn’t really ringing.  I hear him hearing it, and hear also that it doesn’t ring.  This time, however, it’s ringing.  And he’s making for the door, book in hand, his forefinger marking the page.  Maybe it’s only the people downstairs asking him to keep an eye on the place while they take a weekend away.  I ought to drift out and have a look-see.  I’ve been wanting a visitor, too.  God, how I’ve been wanting one.

The scent of gardenias — and a few other things — enters the flat through the crack in the door that he opens as wide as the chain allows.  Moth balls. . . freshly risen croissants fragrant with Normandy butter.  My widower has a most discerning nose, and I’m folded like a condom into those deep cortical wrinkles that sort smells.  Ah!  Could it be the ginger-and-garbage scent of raccoons chowing down on the avocados in the garden?  It’s coonskin, all right, but washed in corn meal and sewn into a fur.  And a live rodent pong: long rats, of a size to be stewed with Aztec spices and gobbled up in Mexico for potency — we’ve been reading about that, too — long rats confined in a cage.  I hear their scaly feet scrambling furiously in the wood shavings. 

He flicks on the dim porch light and meets a pair of feverish eyes.  Wound around the neck and chin of his caller, a white silk scarf sets off rouged lips.  From the narrow shoulders hangs an ankle-length raccoon coat, redolent of mothballs and pinned, in the old way permissible for men, with a gardenia.  One white finger curls under the criss-crossed string of a patissier’s cardboard box.  The other hand closes around the padded leather strap of the cage, which twists and jerks.  The shoulders rise in a gentle Gallic shrug, as if to say, I’d offer my hand, but as you see, I come bearing gifts.  It’s Marcel!  Better than Robert, better than Barbara — it’s Marcel! 

My widower is loathe to shut the door — even for the time it takes to drop the chain and open it wide — on what could easily be a wet-brained fantasy, but is not.  Whose black hair is blacker? — he’s vainly wondering, as he regards Marcel’s lustreless brush, black as coal dust, and notices too the darkened lashes of the pained eyes.  It’s time for me to perform some astral karate — I’ve waited long enough — and I snap the chain. 

Hah!  I’m good with metal that’s been under a strain.  I could liberate the rats, too, but I think I won’t.  I’ll bide my time.  The shiny toe of Marcel’s dancing pump, a flat grosgrain bow at its vamp, rests on the door step.  Under the red silk stocking, his instep is blue with the poorly oxygenated blood veins of the heart patient.  Perhaps he’ll allow my widower to adore his naked foot — foot, not feet, for Marcel would never remove both shoes — later in the evening.  It’s very late now, or Marcel would not be here.

And he is here, slinking ahead of my widower, his long fur swaying as he lowers the croissant box and the cage to the coffee table.  The scent of Normandy butter never brought a maddened rat any relief, I think; that’s the secret of the exquisite adjacence of the two parcels.  Inside the apartment, fit always for no more than one person, we are now three.  My widower thinks to dowse the tube, but Marcel, seated on my shadowy end of the green couch, leans into it, pale face glowing.   

O widower! — who if not you deserves a visit from Marcel?  Your finger still marks your place in The Captive, and you know you should be reading it in French, but have drunk away the knack.  Broca’s area, seat of cognition and language, is flooded clean of French now; a thin layer of ammonia, corrosive to lucidity, separates your shrunken gray matter from its casing.  And you’ve years to go, till the ammonia’s as thick as ground fog, your brain stem an unsheathed serpent blind inside your spacious skull.  In time, in time.

I flutter over to the ficus; I’ve nothing to do with this.  Although it might have been nice of me to rustle up some cafe au lait for Marcel.  That’s all he drinks, widower.  He’s got that ethereal look, but he’s flesh, all right, weighing down the green cushion that used to be mine.  And he’s warm enough to shrug out of that fur. 

Surprise!  He’s wearing a satin Hawaiian shirt, and you’re one of the few ever to see his smooth elbows and small white biceps.  They’re like a girl’s, a fourteen year-old girl’s, the lawn tennis biceps of a Breton princess.  After another greedy sip, your fingers itch to pluck at his shell buttons — but the shirt?  It’s dull, to be Hawaiian, and lacking in palmy vignettes.  Swelling his thin chest, Marcel leans from my shadowy corner into your cone of light, and pulls the shirt tight by its tails.  Behold!  The tactful rosy dawn at Combray, the gray-blue storm of the true Ar-Mor, the dun wall in Delft with its ochreous patch an epiphanial yellow in the precise northern sun.  It’s Marcel, widower, leaning into your light, wearing all the hues of his world, and you do know better than to touch him. 

Again, I’m thinking of food — have we really nothing to offer him?  How pungent the air with pineapple and truffles — that salad of his fiercest longings, lurid yellow and black on glass plates among the gleaming glass knife-rests of Tante Leonie’s table.  I suppose I could cobble it up — you’d want it dressed in walnut oil with ciboulettes, we used to talk of it often — but it’s already a real presence in the apartment, not some olfactory hallucination of yours.  I’m guessing it’s the odor of Marcel himself in a state of arousal, for he’s clamped his kohl-rimmed eyes on the cage of rats.  Noisy in there.  Butter!  They want butter!

Ah!  Wait!  Just who is our guest?  Not Marcel the narrator — there’s been a change!  Wistful, smooth-elbowed Marcel is gone, and it’s Proust himself beside you now, rocking with the acute discomfort of genius, eyes ablaze with a million involuntary memories.  Proust!  Whose seclusion exceeded your own, who looked, when he did go out, like death in life — like last year’s gardenia, a wag of a duchess remarked — yet whose posthumous density and freshness is that of tropical fruit.         

And you’ve cottoned to it!  Gone from your face is that look imploring recognition from Marcel, a bemused being like yourself, mourning the unworthy creature who fled him.  Ah, yes — now you’re in awe.  You should be.  Monsieur Proust of the rats is here, avid frequenter of certain rather specialized brothels.  Oh, he craved nothing carnal there, just to sit after hours in a well-appointed room while an unshockable demi-mondaine with lavish body odor treated rats in a cage to stimulus.  To pain.  Torture, to be exact.  A reliable Parisian spotted him at it, and told another, who also told.  In fact he was often sighted there, until he desisted, and occupied subsequent nights with writing.  That padded strap on the jiggling cage, so easy on uncalloused hands:  I expect he totes it around eternity with him — that, the croissant box, and the gardenia his saintly attributes.  Ah!  He’s about to enlighten us.

Eez not true what zey say.  We both hear the words.  Though the rouged lips don’t move, the sound of his voice is low and clear and we recognize it.  Calm, non-insistent, he might be speaking with gentle regret of the weather, with no more regard for the squealing rats than if they were thunderheads gathering over a picnic in the Bois he didn’t care to attend.  I nevair wanted zem in pain.  Only to watch zem struggle for what zey could not have in a chamber from which zey could not escape.  Voila la condition humaine. 

The scent of pineapple and truffles mingles with the feral stink of the cage, the very odor of Proustian exertion.  For it’s not easy forcing sound through that fine-meshed barrier between worlds — I know — and Proust snuggles down into his fur, flinging a blue-veined wrist across his lashy shut lids.  Surrounding the cage are wood shavings like confetti on the coffee table — a little something to jog your memory in the morning.

Say, widower.  Now that Proust’s regrouping, what if you slid the string from the croissant box and fed the frantic rats a few buttery pills of still-warm dough?  Come on, be a man!  Look at their wet noses poking through the bars of the cage, look at their tongues.  They could struggle successfully for some of what they wanted if you rolled it up really small.  There’s your deli turkey, too.  They wouldn’t sneer at the brown edges.  Oh — widower? 

No soap.  My widower’s busy with the gorgeous prize of those who make it to the thirteenth rereading, and I won’t say it’s the pleasantest thing I ever saw. 

I return my attention to the rats.  What a sturdy cage.  Iron bars, Inquisition hinges, the heart-shaped padlock anything but a breeze.  Like the strap, the eight outside corners are padded, which mutes the sound of jiggling on a hard surface such as the coffee table, but I’ll bet the padding’s there to protect the Proustian thigh from jabs and bruises as he knocks about eternity with the cage.  I’m getting an idea I like, but in all decency, I should wait until my widower and Proust make it off the green couch and over to the dining table.  Eventually, they’ll stop for a snack — let them figure out what’s good to eat apres.  There’ll be just time for them to clamber atop the table when I snap that padlock.  Then, something shall finally have happened here, and I’ll pull right out — yes, I’ll pull right out — meeting extinction head-on like a train.

This story was posted with kind permission of Tima Smith, editor of Per Se, an anthology of fiction by students of the late Arthur Edelstein. For a closer look at Per Se, go to Amazon. To find out about the Arthur Edelstein Literary Fund, which awards a competition prize of $1000 annually to a writer of fiction, go to The Writing Site, and click on “contests.”

by Beth Ann Bovino

The financial markets marked the centennial of the Great Panic of 1907 by holding another panic.  David Wyss, chief economist at Standard and Poors (and my boss) asked whether it’s an accident that these crises often seem to occur in years ending in ‘7’?  He said that “we had financial problems in 1957, 1967, 1987, 1997, and 2007. That it’s hard to tell about 1977 because the whole decade was one long crisis (maybe just having a “7” is bad).” Going back further, 1937 was a bad year, as were 1897, 1907, and, of course, 1917, with the start of America’s participation in World War I.

So, what is it about “7”?  There’s the “Lucky 7” dice roll (of course, roll it the wrong time at a craps table and everyone loses their money).  According to luckymojo.com, 7 is also said to be found on a lot of hoodoo curio packaging, including 7-day candles, and that Lady Luck wears dice for earnings which always show 7 (the Irish-American World War Two version).   It sounds like numerology. And, of course, 1929 negates the picture.  But it’s still pretty spooky.  Given today’s financial crisis, I wanted to learn more (about panics not numerology).

The Panic of 1907 was a financial crisis in the United States. The stock market fell almost 50% from its peak in 1906, the economy was in recession, and there were numerous runs on banks and trust companies because of a retraction of loans by some banks. It started in New York, but then spread across the nation and led to the closings of banks and businesses. While the 1907 panic was the fourth panic in 34 years, the significance of the 1907 Panic as an economic event went far beyond the usual ‘crash and recovery’ story.  The severity of the downturn was one of the major reasons for the founding of the Federal Reserve System, as Congress decided that the U.S. can’t depend on the good will and ability of private bankers to gets banks to cooperate in a time of crisis.

One book I recommend is The Panic of 1907: Lessons Learned from the Market’s Perfect Storm, by Robert F. Bruner and Sean D. Carr. It is an academic study which analyzes the financial crisis that gave America the FDIC and the Federal Reserve. Seems pretty boring, right?  However, much of the book covers the events and personalities of the crisis, to make the account rival an episode from the T.V. show 24. The book begins with the earthquake of 1907.  It then follows the Heinze brothers’ failed effort, using borrowed money, to corner the copper market, which led to panic, the failure of banks and trusts and the impending bankruptcy of New York City. Add to this, J. Pierpont Morgan, the man who, superhero-style, was able to halt the spread of bank runs, though without a mask.

In their book, the authors point out the following disturbing similarities a hundred years later:  “War was fresh in mind. Immigration was fueling dramatic changes in society. New technologies were changing people’s everyday lives. Wall Street was wheeling and dealing…”  In the last chapter on theory, the authors describe which factors are required to develop a financial panic:  Buoyant Growth, Systemic Architecture, Inadequate Safety Buffers, Adverse Leadership, Real Economic Shock, Fear and Greed, Failure of Collective Action. They warned that many of these conditions are seen in 2007.  However, what was meant to be a warning, now describes what has just happened.

While the financial system has changed since 1907, the basic reliance on confidence remains. In addition, any long period of stability results in an underestimate of risk, which is followed by a sudden convulsion as risk perceptions return to more normal levels. When the market corrects, it usually overcorrects, at least temporarily.

The turmoil began in the subprime mortgage market, but has extended far beyond that to a general crisis of confidence. We are watching a classic run on the bank.  However, banks have been disintermediated by the short-term money markets, which have become a virtual bank. The central bank’s role in fighting bank runs has been well established, but needs to be extended to the money markets that now support the banking system.

This one will be likely to affect the economy less than in 1907 because the central banks have learned to handle liquidity squeezes better than in the past. We will have to see if Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke can do a better job than Mr. Morgan.

Bernanke and company seem to be trying.  Since August, the Fed has lowered interest rates by 100 basis points. They also announced the new Term Auction Facility on December 12th.  The measure is intended to provide liquidity to shore up markets that have been frozen by the current pressures in short-term lending markets.  Swap lines have been established to allow the transfer into other currencies… the coordination among the central banks seems like very good news, but the actual function of this auction facility remains unclear and markets remain skeptical.

Race and Music in America, Part II

Justin E. H. Smith

MC Hammer once boasted: “You’re ’87 and I’m ’89.”  With time, the force of this taunt has weakened considerably, and it should serve as a lesson to anyone who associates too strongly with the Zeitgeist.  Yet, whenever Hammer’s lyric replays in my mind, I find myself protesting: No, no, I too am ’89.  Then, or around then, is when everything more or less came together, when potentials became actual, when my fate became sealed.  It was also then that those surrounding me, and the intensity of everything they took seriously, appeared at the peak of their immortality.

Shostakovich for his part declared that all of his symphonies are, in the end, epitaphs.  He did not mean, in the spirit of a hip-hop toast, that through his music he would ‘bury’ his enemies and dance on their graves.  He meant that his friends were buried quite against his wishes, and that through his music he hoped to commemorate them.  Now I am not a composer of symphonies, but only, however much I resist the title, a composer of ‘posts’.  Nonetheless, I have recently developed the sense that no matter what topic I’m treating, everything I write comes out as a sort of obituary, even if the subject happens not to be dead (yet). 

Recently, death and my topic coincided all too perfectly.  Though the precise date cannot be determined, around the time I began working on my October essay on ‘race and music in America’, my childhood friend, Kyle ‘Tracker’ Brown, overweight, hard-living, music-mad, and black, died of a heart attack alone in his Sacramento apartment.  It was a rock-and-roll life, and death, except that Tracker was not a rock-and-roll star.  He was at best a local legend, and every locality has a few of those.  I’m sure there is more than one 20-year-old in Sacramento right now who is just as full of life and just as bound for local-legend status as Tracker ever was.

Nothing that has been written on any of Tracker’s memorial sites rises above the banalities you might expect to find in a high-school yearbook.  There is much talk of “all those crazy times we had,” and endless folkloric and disingenuous anticipation of some eventual reunion. Will I, I wonder, be able to do him any better?

*

There was a sort of totemism in the provincial teen counterculture of Sacramento of the 1980s, wherein each of the prominent kids was perceived to instantiate or stand in for some great music star unfathomably far away– in London, mostly, but also Scotland, New York, Berlin, places anyway none of us could really conceive as existing in the empirical realm.  The roles were determined by physiognomical and hairstyle-based resemblances, as well as by the elective affinities of the individual stand-ins.  Thus a certain Roger was held to be Peter Murphy, and a certain Jason was that one Ian guy from Echo and the Bunnymen.  There was a Jeff who was taken as Martin Gore, and a Stephanie who, it was understood, was Siouxsie Sioux herself. 

When I say that the teens were the stars, rather than that they bore a cultivated resemblance to them, I mean what I say.  The identity was so complete that, if some newcomer were to attempt to elbow in and claim to be instantiating some British goth idol who had already been claimed, the response would have been: no, that is not possible.  And if one could go back in time to inform them that within a few years ‘Robert Smith’ would find his only true calling as a data-entry specialist, and ‘Ian whats-his-name from the Cult’ as a drywall contractor, and ‘Nena Hagen’ as a dental hygienist, the response would no doubt also have been: no, that is not possible either.  It’s identity or death.

Now folk cultures around the world offer us numerous examples of just this sort of identity relation.  Marshall Sahlins relates for example how the 18th-century Hawai’ians subsumed Captain Cook upon his arrival into their understanding of the sky god Lono: he was an empirical instance of a transcendent deity.  The music scene of London looked no less transcendent from the vantage of 1980s Sacramento than Captain Cook’s London had to the Polynesians, and in the same degree as Captain Cook that scene’s local avatars seemed to pull off the miracle at the heart of so much religious experience: incarnation, pulling the stars down to earth, without extinguishing their glow.

Who, then, was Tracker?  Tracker was called ‘Tracker’ because he was said to track people down who were in need of a beating, and beat the shit out of them.  He grew to legend status by manifesting a powerful paradox: he was a massive black thug, and he was a tender sweetheart and a fan of music that was held to be rigidly, impregnably white.  Yet unlike his white cohort who, with the help of a little Aqua Net and black eyeliner took on an air of divinity, he remained more a sympathetic, if ambiguous, mythical creature than a god, something like a minotaur, or a beast that might help you to cross a river of fire, or might, depending on its whim, swallow you whole.  With respect to the instantiation of musicians, he was Ol’ Dirty Bastard before that meant anything, blabber-mouthed and genial like Louis Armstrong or Flava Flav, borderline insane like Sun Ra or Kool Keith, massive like Mingus (‘He looked like three men wearing a suit,’ Don De Lillo wrote); he spoke in that stream-of-consciousness, free-associative style that was once held to be a core component of Black Power, the verbal correlate of Pharaoh Sanders’ squonked answer to the tight organization of be-bop and cool jazz.  When Tracker happened to utter the adverb ‘absolutely’, he would follow it up with: “And absolute power corrupts absolutely.”  He learned that somewhere, filtered down from Bobby Seale or Huey Newton through Public Enemy or KRS-One to his ears, to his enthusiastic soul.

Try as I might, though Tracker introduced me to Joy Division, though he straightened his hair and coiffed it into a new-wave, eye-covering point, and though he actually made it to London, and even Scotland, by the mid-1990s, I still cannot think of him as standing in for anyone who is not American, and who is not black.  That is to say, Tracker was always more of a representative of a real and familiar type than a manifestation of something otherworldly and divine, better known by social science than by theology, secular, physical.  Come to think of it, his wasn’t so much a rock-and-roll death either, as when Kurt Cobain or Jim Morrison takes that final, almost imperceptible step from this world to the next, where in some important sense they always already belonged.  It was a public-health-crisis death.  As when a black man in America dies from lack of access to adequate health care. 

Somewhere Henry Louis Gates writes of the surprise that awaited him the first time he went to London and heard black men and women speaking in British accents.  He had certainly heard of the African diaspora, yet for him, somehow, to be black was essentially to be American.  Even for a Harvard professor the bridge to Britain seemed uncrossable.  Tracker crossed it, but nothing much changed.

*

I do not recall how Tracker and I first became friends.  At one point, early on, he was a big fat local legend, and then at some later point we found ourselves riding around together, listening to and commenting on cassette after cassette, and searching under the seats for enough coins to buy us another ten miles’ or so worth of gas.  This is what most of my memories of him involve.

Once Tracker and I were in the mobile home of the local DJ David X, and I played a mix tape I had made for them, superimposing Sinatra’s ‘Night and Day’ over the beat track from the 12″ of NWA’s ‘Express Yourself’.  Tracker did a funny dance and exclaimed how excellent it was.  David X said the two tracks were not synchronized well, and in any case it was on a crappy, lo-fi cassette, so it was definitely not going to be getting any club play on his watch. We left and drove around listening to that cassette and others: those wonderful, disposable, immortal cassettes!  He had just shoplifted Joy Division’s Substance, and was extolling its virtues to me as ‘Warsaw’ maxed out my little Datsun’s speakers.  I told him that Ian guy couldn’t sing, and he said I was missing the whole point, because he was pouring his heart out before he killed himself, and his natural talents mattered not at all. 

Once Tracker and I went to the home of my mother’s boyfriend, most likely because she was there and I was entirely out of gas money.  I was worried they’d be troubled by his presence, yet within a few seconds of our arrival, there was Tracker talking sports with my soon-to-be stepfather, all that I’m-a-Yankees-man-myself bullshit that I could never even begin to fake.  There was Tracker, speaking his natural language. 

Once there was a big party in the works.  A battalion of the Sacto Skins was said to be coming to beat up Chaz, who had defaulted on a loan, or looked at a skinhead the wrong way, or something.  Chaz had suffered a brain aneurysm, one side of his face drooped, and it was said that if he were punched but once, he would die.  So the plan was to invite a whole horde of Mexican gangsters, as well as Tracker, in order to fend off the attack (no one even considered simply cancelling the party, and as cowardly as I was I never even considered not going).  As the evening wore on, and the skinheads failed to show, the Mexicans began to grow unruly.  I stepped on a gangster’s foot by accident, and his friend said to me: “Hey, you stepped on my homey’s foot,” for at that time ‘homey’ was an authentic street term, and not the property of with-it youth ministers.  “What do you have to say to him?”  I said: Sorry.  He said: “Sorry? Is that all?”  And I said: I’m really, really sorry I stepped on your, uh, homey’s foot.  They let me off, but it was clear there was trouble brewing. 

If only the skinheads had arrived!  The Mexicans had been counting on them, and were boiling over with lust for a racially charged battle with white-power goons.  In the absence of these, Tracker probably seemed to them a suitable ersatz: racially charged in a different way, and in his dimensions something approaching a mob.  The next thing we knew the leader of the Mexicans was brandishing a bat, and he slammed it on the kitchen counter.  The white goths and new wavers and punk rockers formed a circle, cowering and clinging. “Come on, nigger!” the Mexican shouted. Tracker knew that word, and it worked to his rival’s clear disadvantage.  In a maneuver of brute force that I witnessed but have never comprehended, Tracker had his rival pinned to the ground, and the bat pinned to his throat, before any of us could register the sequence of events that led to this radical shift in the balance of power.  He was sitting on the boy, pressing into him with at least a few hundred of his pounds, and bellowing at him all manner of oaths and triumphal proclamations about not fucking with Tracker, about how nobody fucks with Tracker, etc.  Yes! we cheered.  This is why he is a local legend with a nickname, whereas I am just myself.

Once we were driving back to Sacramento from San Francisco –the City– and we had to slow down for a traffic accident somewhere near the Elvas Underpass.  As we we rode past at a crawl we saw a headless body in the middle of the road, wearing a flight jacket and a pair of oxblood Doc Martins.  The laces were black and not white, which signaled to us that the victim was not a Nazi skinhead, but rather a “SHARP”: a skinhead against racial prejudice.  (As I have already said, however, the boundaries were always very fluid.)  It had to be someone from our extended family of lowlifes, but, lacking a head, we could not tell who.  Tracker immediately began freaking out with a litany of holy-shits and no-fucking-ways, barely able to contain his glee at having arrived at the Elvas Underpass at just the right time.

We got the official story, if not the believable one, the next day.  Three boys, all of whom came from my high school, had been racing down Business 80 in a VW Bug.  Two of them, in the back seat, began fighting playfully.  At some point, this caused the back window to shatter, and one of the boys was “sucked out” by the “wind pressure” known to afflict Bugs travelling at high speeds.  They were in an original VW Beetle, probably built in the 1960s, but the scenario described was borrowed from the cinematic representation of a jumbo jet in crisis.  Tracker, anyway, liked the official account, and for as long as I knew him never missed an occasion to tell his eyewitness tale, and to discourse on the dangers of Bug-suction.

Death was all around us, as it no doubt is always and everywhere.  Yet for that brief chapter of life death was more a source of great chatter, of local myth-making, than any real threat.  If it seemed that death could never really take any of us, this is because local thinking about death was based on the primitive belief that, when one exits the empirical realm, one goes on being a member of the same local subculture that meant so much during life, just as the Marines will tell you at a funeral for one of their own that the Gates of Heaven are guarded by barkers of Semper Fi.  In order to truly remain “always faithful,” one must convince oneself that the gang so deserving of fidelity is, well, always relevant, even after one has cast off this mortal coil.  Of course it is not relevant, no more so than what one has for breakfast on the day of extreme unction, and death is at its most tragic when its victim has not yet been able to figure this out.

*

During the 1905 Russo-Japanese war, the Japanese, already enamored of Gerrman Romantic poetry and convinced of the Mongol origins of the Russians from the time of the Golden Horde, came up with caricatures showing themselves, the Japanese, as noble, broadly Aryan-looking warriors, and showing the Russians as slanty-eyed, buck-toothed cretins (think of Mickey Rourke in Breakfast at Tiffany’s).  In prejudice, imagination will always win out over the bare evidence of the senses. 

Here we see both the distorted perception of the other, as well as the distorted perception of oneself in the shadow of still another, admired other.  In Olympia, Leni Riefenstahl’s majestic 1936 documentary of the Berlin olympic games, many of the Japanese athletes, coaches, and spectators may be seen wearing perfectly round spectacles, concealing the epicanthic folds that might have set them apart from their hosts.  Was Tracker’s Thompson Twins coiffure something like these glasses?  Perhaps, but in neither case did the disguise really work.  The Aryan ‘race scientists’ spun themselves into the most implausible epicycles in order to account for the racial equality (or near-equality) of the Japanese to the Indo-Europeans, while reserving a decidedly lower rung on the hierarchy for their Chinese neighbors, just as, years later, Chinese merchants in Apartheid South Africa would be registered as ‘coloured’, while Japanese businessmen enjoyed their status as ‘honorary whites’.  At the same time, however much kamikaze pilots enjoyed citing Hölderlin in their suicide notes, the Japanese certainly never really bought into the racial order outlined by the Germans, on the German’s terms: to be an ‘honorary’ white is something very different from being white, and in many respects it only serves to highlight one’s non-whiteness still more.  As a black Depeche Mode fan, Tracker distinguished himself from the culture he was expected to inherit, but still more from the culture he adopted.  Recently, in the New York Times, a journalist proposed the horrid label ‘bapsters’, or perhaps it was ‘blipsters’, to describe black fans of Arcade Fire, Death Cab for Cutie, etc.  Being a mere hipster is not an option, just as in spite of an ancient history of cross-pollination in American music, for some reason mixed black-white bands always appear as a novelty. 

Tracker understood all this, and in consequence, I think, race was a large part of his self-presentation in interaction with his white peers.  Tracker’s Myspace page towards the end of his life introduced him as “Tracker: never blacker.”  Years earlier, he used to like to do a rap, from the passenger seat of my Datsun, in which he declared that “Tracker is the blacker/soul-sonic attacker,” whatever that may have meant.  He probably rhymed these two words more times than ‘cool’ and ‘school’ have been placed together in the entire history of advertising.  I thought of this when I first heard the sample included a few years ago in a piece by Miguel Trost Depedro, the Venezuelan experimental electronic musician better known as Kid 606, of a man announcing in an increasingly rapid, increasingly snipped, and increasingly noise-distorted voice:

I’m black y’all, and
I’m black y’all, and
I’m black and I’m black and I’m black y’all.

As the sample becomes more condensed and harsh (I’m black-black-black-black-black and I’m black), one feels that its meaning is simultaneously being reinforced and overcome, inflated and dismissed: is this what Hegel had in mind when he spoke of ‘sublation’?  In any case it seems like an odd thing to announce.  One would think Kid 606 was inventing, yet as I’ve said that brief sample was pretty much Tracker’s curriculum vitae. 

It is clear to me that Tracker enjoyed the roles race permitted him to play.  It may be regrettable that history offered him these roles, but that does not mean they were not enjoyable.  I’ve already said that race is just so much phlogiston: a scientifically bankrupt way of seeing the world that nonetheless permits its adherents to make sense of a wide range of phenomena.  (The one domain of life in which the concept of race still has some scientific legitimacy –health care– is one from which Tracker was evidently cut off.)  This phlogiston is often just as useful to those who break down the barriers of racism as it is for the racists themselves. 

*

Dare I call my dead friend ‘simple’?  Tracker was simple.  Up until his death in his mid-30’s, he remained a loyal attendee at the Burning Man Festival in the Nevada desert.  I have never been to Burning Man, but if I were to show up I imagine I would not be a big hit.  I would start talking about Caesar’s account of the original Wicker Man sacrifices among the ancient Celts, or about René Girard on le bouc émissaire or some goddamned thing, to the first exed-out techno-hippies I came across, and they would no doubt slink away from me as fast as they could, seeking the company of a genial, welcoming soul such as Tracker, who would not lecture them but would listen to them comprehendingly, uttering “it’s cool,” from time to time, and “absolutely,” and “absolute power corrupts absolutely,” and other affirmative non sequiturs.

In 2004 I came across Tracker on some primitive social-networking site, which after a few easy steps confirmed for us that we were “friends.”  I wrote him a short but long-thought-out note about what I had been up to and how much I’d like to hear his news.  He sent me back one or two incomplete sentences, filled with misspelled and feverish words, and included his phone number.  If this friendship was to be rekindled, he let me know, it was not going to be of the epistolary sort.  I was daunted by the vast difference that had grown up between our respective forms of self-expression, and I never contacted him again.

When I was 20 years old, I retreated into an intense period of isolation and reinvention.  I stopped frequenting places where folks like Tracker might show up, and I began to study ancient Greek, to interest myself in things like poetic scansion, Shklovsky’s formalism, and the Slavophiles-vs.-Westernizers debate.  At the time I had thought that a greater mastery of language, and languages, would bring me closer to the world and its inhabitants.  15 years on, I understand all this self-imposed Bildung has had just the opposite effect.  With one another my academic colleagues speak mostly of the relative virtues and drawbacks of their respective dental plans, and of whether or not their respective universities have on-site daycares.  With their students they speak awkwardly and expeditiously.  They would cross the street to avoid having to speak to Tracker at all.

My friendship with Tracker was based almost entirely on music: listening to it and talking about it.  That was a long time ago, before I really learned how to talk.  I thank God for that prelinguistic bliss, when friends were accessible directly, and death was mind-blowing in its impossibility.

Berlin, December 8, 2007

—

For an extensive archive of Justin Smith’s writing, please visit www.jehsmith.com.

Between northern Uganda and now Southern Sudan, heavily armed Nilotic pastoralists have been much on my plate these last two months. I wrote about Karamoja in November, a remote and volatile region of Uganda where life revolves around livestock, primarily the bovine variety. Tending and stealing cattle is how most Karamojong spend their time. I’m now in Southern Sudan where related Nilotic tribes live the same way, but in the context of a long civil war. Bullets fly and cattle reigns supreme.

In Karamoja, the Ugandan army is struggling to disarm the population and bring order and development to the region. Yet locals show little interest in Uganda the nation-state, or in being Ugandans at all. Life there is nasty, brutish and short, but the Karamojong don’t seem to want it any other way. Cattle raiding claims many innocent lives. Numerous others are killed during government disarmament exercises. The uniqueness of the region was slow to dawn on me, but when it did I laughed aloud at my pessimistic self, surprised to find joy in so raw and ruthless a place.

Make War, Save Culture

Few doubt that Karamojong culture is in crisis. Yet Karamojong insouciance is undaunted: people are usually stubborn and sometimes haughty, but always charming. Such healthy sentiments are rare in conflict zones where trauma, loss and destitution starve the spirit and erode the integrity of tradition and culture. Arms proliferation and constant violence is dividing old and young, but the performative aspects of Karamojong culture are far from dissipated.

Equally insouciant was their rejection of any identification with wider Uganda and of outsider efforts to sedentarize their lifestyle with schools, health clinics and cattle ranches (in lieu of nomadism). Within a regional context where civil war is common, the absence of any political agenda to their warlike lifestyle seemed quixotic, and therefore intriguing. If anything, their organized chaos prevents domination by any would-be master, allowing for an unmediated and merciless freedom. A wild ride, and definitely not safe for Starbucks.

This morning as my colleague and I sat under a tree waiting for a plane out of Rumbek, Sudan, our chat turned to why we were always returning to places like South Sudan and Karamoja. Work had brought us here, but who would actually want to come to such a place? A long silence of vacant staring followed. I noticed a desiccated frog skin lying in the dirt, suggesting oven-level air temperatures. My brain was not melting; it was cooking in its shell.

Finally, one of us managed to utter the obvious: “Life without [such places] would be too boring.” Sure, but why is this place a desirable destination? It wasn’t the adrenaline of ever-shifting lines in combat territory, the ephemeral alliances of armed groups and implication of neighbouring states, the threats to regional stability—bref, the play button of human existence stuck on fast forward. That part is seductive, but it’s also a ‘so what’—it happens in lots of countries. Infighting among the species is the Security Council’s daily bread.

Sudan and Karamoja surprise and fascinate because conflict conspires with a lack of infrastructure to produce a hermetically sealed human environment. As a counter example, Iraqi civilians are hostage to conflict just as much as the Karamojong. The difference is that Iraq was well-developed before the war, and basic infrastructure remains intact. Neither Southern Sudan nor Karamoja were ever developed: sun, moon, stars and earth are all you get here. Hunkered down and traumatized, Iraqis are still able to learn of goings-on in the wider world. Unlike people here, Iraqis know their crisis inside and out. They experience it firsthand, obviously. And access to media permits knowledge of how that experience is reported, interpreted and understood by the outside world.

The situation is entirely different here. There is no ‘reconstruction’ to speak of; everything must start from scratch. A handful of politicians and warlords aside, decades of conflict obstructs development and keeps Nilotic pastoralists inside a time capsule. Of course, IDPs and refugees may flee these crises, but often end up in some similarly isolated camp elsewhere in the region.

War and its tragedies definitely warp cultural institutions and destroy basic social bonds—here, Iraq, wherever armed conflict is sustained over time. But in the absence of modernity and its technoid trappings, many people in this part of Africa have nothing but the knowledge and practices they inherit from their immediate forbearers. Without the ‘friction’ of outside influence, these traditions move freely forward into the present, unencumbered by the challenge of difference and adaptation. This is not mystification or nostalgia. Like an experiment in social engineering left unattended for generations, ‘Karamoja’ is what happens when human existence is deprived of external stimuli to the point where ‘exterior’ is nowhere, a stealthy fiction.

Consternation in New Sudan

Life for many in Southern Sudan remains very traditional and appears undistorted by outside influences. This is not for lack of trying: the Khartoum government tried (unsuccessfully) to Islamicize the south for well over a decade, up to the ceasefire of 2005. The US and its allies supported the main southern rebel faction, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, throughout the North/South war that reignited in the early 1980s. Given the dominance of the Dinka tribe in the SPLA, splinter factions were inevitable, some of whom sided with the government at various times.

A Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) was reached in 2005, built around equitable distribution of oil revenue with the North from its extraction facilities in southern territory. Since then aid money has flowed in from every direction, inundating the nascent civilian administration, comprised chiefly of SPLA leaders, following the loss of its central figure and founder, John Garang, five months after the CPA. The South can vote on whether it will secede or continue as one with the North in a referendum scheduled for 2011. A unified Sudan (‘New Sudan’) was Garang’s personal vision; most southerners do not trust the North and have no historical or cultural bond to it politics or people.

I have worked in Sudan several times over the years, but have not been back in South since 1993, when I worked on the SPLA side of the war. Back then, Khartoum forces held key towns and SPLA controlled the bush. Cattle raiding went on, and the various tribes were in constant hostility.

The SPLA became increasingly homogenous, unrepresentative of the South’s diverse ethnic make-up. Yet the US, UK and the Scandinavians all supported Garang to the hilt; he was their ‘freedom fighter’ despite defending Mengistu’s Derg regime throughout all its atrocities and contrived famines in the 1980s. As head of the SPLA he was an autocrat whose administration ran Southern Sudan ‘out of his briefcase’, as we used to say, since he delegated to no one.

As a result, South Sudan today preaches democracy and tolerance but its government is neither democratic nor tolerant. ‘Be patient’, we are told, ‘the country is just starting’. On a personal level, there is something genuinely exciting about seeing the place liberated after two decades of fighting. The Sudanese conflict was the only one I worked in throughout the 1990s that made any sense to me. Somalia, Rwanda, Congo were all infused with ethnic grievance, not political vision.

Although it is near heresy to say this here, South Sudan stands a far greater chance at not repeating the same oppressive practices of the North now that Garang is dead. In the eyes of the US administration, he remains a deity; few see that their total investment in Garang the man created the conditions for the weak and ill-equipped administration in power today. Hundreds of millions of dollars of development aid does not a functional government make! It only fuels the dysfunction and clueless management so much in evidence here. Provided there is peace in the South (many internal conflicts remain), the road to a functional state will be very long.

Grease ‘em up and shoot!

We leave the South today and travel to the so-called Transitional Areas, whose fate as Northern or Southern states is pending national referendum in 2011. Literally on the border between North and South, these areas were arguably the most affected by the war, as their political affiliations were constantly suspect. Nuba is technically in Kordofan, a northern state, but its population are predominantly African, and SPLA support was strong during the war.

I last visited the area just as its ceasefire came into effect in 2002. North and South continued to fight, but the Nuba ceasefire laid the groundwork for the CPA that now covers the country (except Darfur).

The Nuba people are widely recognizable to outsiders thanks to the work of a single photographer, Leni Riefenstahl, who documented and glorified them in the late sixties and seventies. Khartoum regimes of the day used her coffee table books as diplomatic gifts, ostensibly to celebrate Sudanese diversity. In the subsequent turn toward sharia and Islamicization of the country under the National Islamic Front, the now-famous Nuba were targeted as backward and pagan, thus ripe for forced conversion and re-programming. 

Riefenstahl’s relationship with the Nuba is quite interesting, and is well covered in “The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl,” a 1993 German documentary. She manipulated their appearance for effect, which apparently they did not mind at the time. The Nuba do not grease themselves, for instance, either for beautification or for sport: their style of wrestling is still widely practiced both in Kordofan and in IDP camps in Khartoum where many fled the war. The Riefenstahl aesthetic was scrutinized in Susan Sontag’s “Fascinating Fascism” (1975).

We are running to the airstrip!

by Shiban Ganju

Super bugs excel in defying therapy just like super star Britney. Though antibiotic resistant bugs or ‘super bugs’ thrived before the super stars, yet unlike them they lay unnoticed – that is, till recently.

Microbes inhabited this planet long before humans. They were already experts in the game of ‘natural selection’ – an evolutionary survival strategy – before we learned the game of antibiotic attack. Microbes, like other organisms, mutate genetically and they do it often because they multiply fast – sometimes with a gap of only 15 minutes between generations. One random mutation would bestow the luck of antibiotic resistance.

When we vanquish the vulnerable microbes with an onslaught of antibiotics, the resistant mutated bugs thrive and proliferate with impunity. It is not that the bacteria ‘acquire’ resistance but the mutated bacteria have a survival advantage over the non-mutated bacteria. And that is evolution in action.

Bacteria interfere with the antibiotic action by altering themselves. For example, penicillin disrupts the cell wall of susceptible bacteria; the resistant microbes modify the structure of the cell wall so penicillin cannot bind to it.

Bacteria may mutate naturally to evolve such resistance, but more sinister is the way of the plasmid – a small circle of DNA, which can move between bacteria conferring resistance. A single altered plasmid can cause havoc. Over 12,000 people died of diarrhea in Guatemala in 1968 due to a strain of Shigella, which carried a plasmid resistant to four antibiotics.

The first super bug to exhibit antibiotic resistance was Staphylococcus aureus (SA), which often lives on our skin and inside our noses but can also inflict serious infections like boils, abscesses and toxic shock. The resistant variant of SA declared its existence just a few years after the mass production of penicillin in 1943. (Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin had forewarned this a few years earlier.) Trying to be one up, we invented methicillin to banish SA, which in its turn evolved into MRSA – methicillin resistant staphylococcal aureus. When we shot more antibiotics in vengeance against SA, unscathed MRSA proliferated. CDC claims that in 1974 only 2% SA infections was due to MRSA; by 1995 it was 22% and in 2004 it was 63%. Now MRSA is endemic in health care institutions and has made inroads into normal healthy population also. But we have hope in vancomycin – a drug of last resort for many infections, which is still lethal against MRSA. What will happen if MRSA becomes resistant to vancomycin?

One group of bacteria – enterococci, which reside in the normal intestines – has already rapidly turned resistant to vancomycin in the past 20 years. No vancomycin resistant enterococcus was reported in the US before 1989. What if this resistance is transmitted to MRSA? ‘Alarming’ is what some have called this scenario. The first two cases of vancomycin resistant SA were reported in 2002 from Michigan and Pennsylvania and the a third one, in 2004, from New York. Some more have been reported since. The crisis has just begun.

All microbes have potential to develop resistance to any antibiotic, any where in the world. Tuberculosis, malaria, ear infections are now less susceptible to old antibiotics. Another super bug, Streptococcus pneumoniae, a pneumonia-causing microbe, first exhibited its resistance to penicillin in 1967 in Papua New Guinea. Up to 1987 only 0.02 % of the strains of this bug were penicillin resistant, but by 1994, CDC reported it had climbed to 6.6%. In Hungary it got even worse: by 1976 more than 50% strains of this bug turned resistant because of unabashed use of penicillin in the prior decade.

Consider Japan: between 1953 and 1965, Shigella – a dysentery provoking bug – escalated its population resistant to streptomycin, tetracycline, sulfanilamide and chloramphenicol, from 0.2% to 58%.

The super bugs became ‘globalized’ much before we did. Southeast Asia exported its new strain of penicillin resistant gonorrhea bug to the USA when American soldiers returned home by 1976 carrying the bug with them

(Many centuries ago, syphilis had traveled in reverse direction on ships)

By now, globalization of infectious diseases is not a headline grabbing news. Antibiotic resistant bugs erupt frequently in remote parts of the world and travel to distant locations. That is because we have gone antibiotic crazy!

We shower our agriculture with ten times and stuff our animals with thirty times more antibiotics than we consume as humans. It is estimated, that we inundate the planet with 100 to 180 million kilos of antibiotics every year, which is probably enough for 25 billion courses of full treatment for every human four times a year.

We have reached a stage, where – if you watched TV lately – super bugs have replaced superstars at prime time. But there is a difference between a super bug and Britney Spears: she is merely self-destructive.

About 90,000 patients die every year in the USA of infections acquired in the hospitals and 70% of these microbes are resistant to at least one antibiotic. Our response: newer, more expensive, perhaps more toxic antibiotics and longer hospital stay.

We are lucky; this problem is not amenable to bipartisan-republican-democratic health care reform or we will never find a solution. Wisdom supplementing our scientific knowledge can control the crisis.

* Doctors should not prescribe antibiotics unless absolutely needed and should attempt to prescribe a specific antibiotic for the suspected pathogen as opposed to a ‘broad spectrum’ antibiotic, which targets many pathogens. A survey by the National Center for Health Statistics showed that the prescription of ‘broad spectrum’ antibiotics has increased even though the number of prescription has not.

* Parents should not demand antibiotics for their children. One study showed that doctors prescribe antibiotics five times more often, if they feel that the parents expect them. Indiscriminate use of antibiotics has made children the commonest target of resistant pathogens.

* Hospitals should have better internal surveillance systems and linkages with the other public health institutions. We really don’t have a grip on emerging resistance in the world. International reporting system and surveillance needs cooperation between nations

* Health care workers in hospitals should wash their hands between touching patients. This has been proven to be the single most effective way of controlling transmission in the hospitals.

* We need to curtail excessive antibiotic use in animals.

* Pharmaceutical companies need to build a pipeline of dugs against evolving infection. We were complacent 20 years ago, thinking that we had conquered infections and did not pursue the development of antimicrobials with vigor. In the mean time resistant pathogens multiplied and we have no drugs to counter some of them.

* Scientists need to look at new ways of handling infections: probiotics to build normal flora which can suppress the pathogens; phages which are pathogen specific and not broad spectrum like antibiotics; drugs that target molecules on bacteria to rener them ineffective without killing them; and above all prophylactic vaccines.

While we are pondering and planning, there is profit to be made. Gadget peddlers are cashing on the frenzy of fear – real and perceived.

Here are some products: special hand soaps like hands2go; nose cleaner – nasopore nasal wash; personalized ‘life saver’ pacifier for the kids and silver and copper dressings for wounds. Then there are special cleaning services that are ready to rush their swat teams to debug your office!

With recent flurry in the media, the time is right to capture public attention. We need ‘super star’ power to educate people. I vote for Britney; she will be a perfect model to tout these gadgets and be an ambassador for a campaign against super bugs. She personifies the destructive power of resistance to therapy.

by Tolu Ogunlesi

Social Networking and Serious Literature
Can never share the same Posture

– Poetry Police Manifesto

Recently I got a phone call from a friend. He needed a mutual friend’s phone number. Then, just before the call ended, he chipped in: “Yeah, regarding the Facebook Prize, I don’t know whether to congratulate you or to chide you… Facebook, isn’t that the dating site…?” He was referring to the 1st Facebook Poetry Competition, whose results were announced November 16, and in which I took the First Prize. My friend’s probably not alone in wondering about a “Facebook Poetry” Prize. The fact that “Facebook” and “Poetry” appear in the same phrase sets alarm-belIs ringing in many minds. I sent an email to friends informing them of my win. Most responded to congratulate me. But I imagine that not a few would have had the same questions hovering on their minds. After all, isn’t Facebook for poking, and throwing sheep and generally fooling around albeit in a very charming manner? Well, maybe we could extend the Facebook coverage to slam poetry/spoken word, and rap. And then, of course, Dating. If it’s the internet, then it’s got to include some dating. And who doesn’t know that the internet is the natural habitat of self-appointed, bull-spouting connoisseurs of everything from Penal Codes to Pre-adolescent Pornography to Poetic License. Which is why we should be concerned, alarmed even. And which is why we need the Police. One week after the announcement of the winners of the Facebook Poetry Prize, a certain Jill Rosen, who I presume to be a high-ranking member of the P.P stirred – on Facebook – complaining about the “quality” of the Facebook Prize winning poetry:

“Ahem, the winning poems are very very so-so, to put it mildly. Another of a million of pointless poetry competitions that encourage bad taste and mediocre poetry, and are judged by people with no taste and are made out to seem like a big deal…And no, I did not submit my poems and it’s not “sour grapes.” I’m just sad when the idea of poetry is debased by people without talent. Poetry is not a hamburger chain, you geeks”

And I smiled. Perhaps I’d have been the one saying that, had I not won. Ms. Rosen’s alarm is nothing new. That’s the job of every Defender of the Holy Kingdom of poetry. They come in various guises and disguises. The “Internet is spoiling Literature” School. The “Post-Quality” Literary Movement. When members of this movement think of the internet, the word “dumbing down” is what comes to their minds. In their beginning everything was Serious. Now Poetry has been rendered “pointless.” Mediocrity reigns. Ezra Pound, in the Golden Age of Poetry, declared “Literature is news that stays news.” Now, in the age of the internet, the boundaries are blurred, gone even. There is no “News” that stays News anymore – instead there are now blogs and search engines and portals and social networking sites, all intent on messing poetry and literature up. You’ll recognise the grumblers by their dismissive tones. All Ms. Rosen can say is the poems are “so-so.” Critic-speak at its most eloquent. Of course she knows what Real Poetry should be. I still can’t shake off the feeling that she’s lamenting simply because it’s “Facebook.” Truth is, there’ll always be loads of crap on the internet. That’s not news. Crap didn’t begin with the Age of Social Networking. Neither did allegations of crap. David Orr, Poet and literary columnist, writing in the New York Times Sunday Book Review months ago, had this to say about the Almighty New Yorker:

The New Yorker tends to run bad poems by excellent poets … many well-known poets don’t write what’s known in the poetry world as “the New Yorker poem” — basically an epiphany-centered lyric heavy on words like “water” and “light.”

Take that, or leave it. Or is it that simple? Well, my point is simple. To Generalise about Literature, as many so-called critics are wont to do, is unfair, and Absurd. If it’s Facebook poetry, or Bebo Fiction, it can’t be anything but crap. By the way one of the Judges of The Facebook Poetry Contest was Todd Swift, poetry editor of Nthposition, Core Tutor with The Poetry School and author of 4 collections of poetry. Certainly not a candidate for a “Hamburger-chain Poet” nomination.

Another “by the way.” This is not my first “social-networking” Literary Prize. Earlier this year I won a Bebo contest for Nanotales – short stories of less than 1,000 words. The 25 winning stories will be published in an anthology in 2008. The Judges of the contest (which was a collaboration between Guardian Unlimited and Bebo) were Sarah Crown, literary editor, Guardian Unlimited, Alan Yentob, creative director of the BBC; Caroline Michel, MD, William Morris agency; Franc Roddam, film director and founder of Ziji Publishing; Joanna Shields, President of Bebo, International; and Ziv Navoth, Nanotales author and concept creator. A press release from Bebo in May 2007 explained that Bebo and Guardian Unlimited teamed up “…to redefine the boundaries of literature.” Why shouldn’t they aspire to that? The Guardian Unlimited’s (my favourite literary site) monthly online Poetry Workshop (where submission is open to all, poets and pretenders alike) predates Facebook Poetry. And then, regarding crap subs to contests (the Facebook Poetry contest entries are available for public viewing on the Contest web-pages, which means that it is crapspotter-friendly), surely no one can prevent mediocre entries from being submitted to a contest. Even the $30,000 Nigeria Prize for Science hasn’t found a way to stop people from sending home-made bottles of wine for consideration.

Sadly, now that I have won the Facebook Poetry Contest, I realise that I am taking – or have in fact already taken – a big risk. I have made myself eligible for the dismissive tag of “Facebook poet.” Is that tag currently in existence? I don’t know. But I have a feeling that if it isn’t already, it soon will. There goes the “Facebook Poet.” Am I a Facebook Poet? Yes, I am. I won the first Facebook Contest, didn’t I? And am I excited by that? Yes, by the possibilities hanging on to it. There’s a cash prize of (a modest) $150, plus the new friends I’ve made – poets who have got in touch to congratulate me. And then there’s the publicity. Google and the other search engines will pick up the news, and spread it (hopefully) far and wide to the ends of the web. My ego will welcome the self-appointed title of “Facebook Poet Laureate” Social Networking sites are only one of the many platforms where I ply my art. I will never tire of submitting to magazines and journals, in print and online. I will continue to enter for poetry contests, to the extent that I know that they are not scams. And above all, I will continue to write poetry, and read poetry. And work at improving my craft. A few months ago, John Ashbery, arguably one of America’s most successful and most celebrated poets, committed the literary sacrilege of the century – by accepting to become the first Poet Laureate of MTV-U, the subsidiary of MTV Networks that broadcasts only on College Campuses; MTV-U-Tube if you please. I fear to imagine what the Poetry Police are plotting at the moment. Petitions asking the Pulitzer Prize Committee to strip him of his 1976 Award perhaps.

I think the words of Robert Archambeau, writing in the Samizdat blog, about the Ashbery appointment, capture my feelings best:

Good (if belated) news, everyone: John Ashbery’s been appointed poet laureate of MTV (really). On balance, I’ve got to say I think this is a good idea. Not only does it bring exposure to an important poet, it chips away at the old high culture/pop culture division, a cultural holdover that has shambled on far too long after Andy Warhol dealt it what should have been a mortal wound. More importantly, the idea of an MTV laureate (and of any corporate laureate, really) helps to de-sacralize the idea of laureateship by dislodging it from the marble mausoleum of Serious Civic Grandeur.

Serious Civic Grandeur. I like that. That, I think is what Jill Rosen was looking for in the Facebook Contest winning poems. She won’t find it. I end with a warning. For those outraged by the incursions of Social Networking into Literature, spare your anger for the future. For it will only get worse. Sorry. Long Live the New New “Laureateship.” You Tube, U R Next!

***

Tolu Ogunlesi was born in 1982. He is the author of a collection of poetry Listen to the Geckos Singing From a Balcony (Bewrite Books, UK, 2004). Apart from writing for Farafina and MADE magazines, his fiction and poetry have appeared in Wasafiri, The Obituary Tango (Caine Prize Anthology 2006), Sable, Orbis, Eclectica, and elsewhere, and are forthcoming in Poesia, Conceit Magazine and Absynthe Muse Review. In 2007 he won a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg poetry prize, and the Facebook Poetry Prize. He currently lives in Lagos, Nigeria.

Elatia Harris

Since my early parole from jail — where I’ve done forty of a ninety-day sentence for public lewdness – will take effect on the condition that I attend group therapy, I hardly demurred. It wasn’t the first time I’d been invited into a behavior mod routine, and I entered it gladly, full of powerful knowledge: I could resist any amount of reprogramming while making a fine show of compliance. Besides, I’m an artist with a keen eye for physiognomy, curious to learn whether a gaggle of women with nothing in common but the wish to pare down their jail sentences shared any telltale facial quirks. A salacious, slack-jawed grin, for instance? Darting eyes? Or a certain dignified reserve, like my own.

I was given emphatic instructions not to bring my sketchbook along to the first session, so I felt downright naked – and said so. That raised a laugh. At least half the women there, like me, had done time for disrobing in public, a regal offense having nothing to do with actual unprotected nakedness. One doesn’t disrobe on the teeming streets to achieve vulnerability – like the panic I feel when the means to make art are forbidden me – but to force one’s nakedness upon others, as Louis XIV did, and LBJ. To fascinate, to subjugate, it is necessary to show skin.

That, according to the group leader, who hand-waved us into a circle of paddle desks while seating herself on a table like a platform, was the whole problem. We were a roomful of women in late middle age – the youngest among us was fifty – who had arrogated unto ourselves the right to show society exactly that which it conspires never to see: our flesh falling from the bone, our graying pubes, our every last unseemly ripple. We were assembled, she assured us, not because we were garden-variety exhibitionists – oh, no — but women with an important message, albeit one that we must find some other way of delivering. You know, she averred, leaning back against the blackboard and – probably inadvertently — showing us a triangle of panty, I do understand the meaning of all this, and I don’t exactly disapprove.

Well.  I’m sure she’s very enlightened – twenty-nine, toned, and eager for cred with cons. But I dislike it when anyone in the hire of the County makes up to me, and I do not require her inexact disapproval for the things I may need to do. Startled eyes around me locked, however, lips pursed.  It was something new for the others in the group to consider the meaning of their actions, whereas I consider little but the meaning of mine.

We would be learning all about a subject unfamiliar to many of us, our leader said – empathy. Did we know what that was? She slid off the table, chalked the word across the blackboard in her big compassionate loopy hand, then stood away from it a bit. It might have been some gnostic symbol with tremendous attractive power, the way she turned to admire it. Empathy.  Roughly speaking, the ability to take in experience as if we were the very people we were not. Oh, not that we needed to become like these other people, no. But we needed to tell them our stories effectively.  To communicate with them in a way they would let in.  To do that, we had first to empathize with them.

Really? Well, it lies beyond my power to standardize any audience I may have – how should I know who they are? I wish, cleanly, to outrage them and make them feel a little closer to the grave – not to tell them my story.  My narration.   Our leader should understand that disrobing before an anxious hurried public such as one finds in the streets of our city at noon is a broad-brushed, imperious gesture.  And the public – my narratee – gets it. Without being over-smart about it or having to think too much, men in suits and women in dresses see the skull beneath the skin – my skin – and, shielding their eyes, they peep helplessly though their fingers, arrested, even sinking, as if stuck in wet cement. This is as complete an artistic transaction as I could possibly desire, and to bring it about, I do not empathize but perform. Does our leader suppose I can learn to make do with handing out tasteful Xeroxed poetry?

Whatever my objections, this is rehab and I feign insight.  I have yet to meet a do-gooder who doesn’t relish the florid dawn of insight on an offender’s face.  As a fiercely dedicated repeat offender, I’m under wraps these days.  I write poems, sure I do  – but my real art form is public lewdness. And when I regain the full freedom of the streets, I shall seek only increased exposure to my narratee. It’ll be cold outside by then – imagine.

Meanwhile, permission to bring my sketching materials to the group has been granted me, and I am commissioned to do turning point portraits of all willing members. When an offender feels she has moved on to a more effective form of communication with her narratee than a crime punishable by jail time, and when our leader concurs with her that she has done so – not always the same night – she may sit to me for a flattering and upbeat record of her big moment.

Who am I to say the conversion experiences of my fellow offenders are as disingenuous as my portraits of them? All I can know is that they will return unsupervised to the streets, where they will either revert to type or sublimate – for make no mistake, we are being coerced to sublimation here, and that’s the fastest way I know of for truth in art to be vitiated – while I am safely sketching, inured to an awful lot of malarkey. One of these nights, the leader will sidle up to me and tell me that I have a deep and soulful gift: if I can draw women at crucial stages in their self-discovery – spiritually naked, undefended, and therefore perfectly beautiful – then might I not lay aside my recidivism and go forth into the world, the art-enraptured world, my portfolio of aging jailbirds a magic carpet?

Well, I cannot begin to tell the County how much less silly its rehab programming would be if the social workers who staffed it knew dick about art. It is in my view a wrong of a high order to encourage talent-free offenders to write poetry and fiction, to draw or paint, and to take these products to the public as art. Many in our group are now tragically convinced that the public will be as enthralled by their narrations as it was repelled by their crimes. But the equation is of course doomed. So, what happens when I go back to my life, which is lonely, and write bad poetry, which is unread? Why wouldn’t that catapult me right back into high-impact misdemeanors and worse? For aren’t we now factoring in a tremendously cruel letdown?  Undone math – be it on the county’s head!

Just last week, an elderly woman who is usually as quiet as I am spoke up, haggard in the fluorescent light of our meeting room, covered also with the sheen of panic. She lacked faith that anyone beyond ourselves would ever read her scribblings, as she called her poetry – and to my ear there was a thrilling clang of arrogance in her self-disparagement.  She had a narration, yes, but no narratee, as our group would not keep meeting for the rest of her life. So what was she to do with it, her narration? Type it up and wave it in the uncaring air? To read it aloud on street corners was perilously close to the behavior – disturbing the peace – that had landed her in jail in the first place. And she wasn’t at all sure she could read it aloud without shouting – a big, aboriginal shout, perchance to reach a narratee – thus disturbing the peace in a new and inadequately sublimated way. Did we all see? Oh, slouching in our paddle desks in a circle around her, paying sudden close attention to our stubby nails — did we see that she was now more afraid than ever to go forth?

Leaning back against the blackboard and showing us that triangle of panty, our leader had a ready answer. A narration doesn’t take place in a vacuum, she said. It is never a pure act of creation, a something brought forth from nothing, especially since one of its volatile components is the consciousness of the narratee. Even if we don’t intend it, even if we think we have no narratee. Did we not, all of us women, feel that much that we’d read by both men and women was written under a male stare? A comprehensive male stare that, like sunlight, fell on narrator and narratee alike?  Wriggling on her platform now, she bade us conceive of a new kind of narratee.  Since we were creating her consciousness as we wrote – yes, we were – seeding it with perceptions, might we not go the whole hog and invent her?  Why not work to escape the male stare entirely, by writing for a she-creature figured forth from our imaginations? I always write for my mother, anyway, one of the group volunteered. Oh, no you don’t, our leader assured her, your perception of your mother is not your mother. So even in addressing but one narratee, you invent her. What I ask is simply that you invent bigger than that!

Must she look human? It was the question on everyone’s lips! No, but she might look relaxed and enfolding – don’t you think? And perhaps she doesn’t loom and stare, but reclines and listens – and hears.

It was not for me to say that our leader had traded empathy for projection. Doodling wordlessly, I looked around at the sketchpads of others, where I saw much labial imagery, which disturbed me. Is a specifically feminine consciousness – even highly abstracted and only faintly, shaggily biomorphic – thought to be recumbent and oreficial, altogether easier to pitch a narration to than its masculine counterpart?  Is she less threatening and discerning than he – priapic, sneering, weaving this way and that to duck a direct hit? She oughtn’t to be – it’s much worse for her if bad stuff gets inside. The plain truth is, I’m not so choosy about my narratee: as an artist, I just want to knock you down.

The group is a sisterhood, you know, our leader tells us, under the protection of The Goddess. Heads go down, and nether-lips are chewed, because we can only be in for more theory.  I tune out, longing to return to the nursery, full of anatomically incorrect beige plush bears named Priscilla or Rupert for no other reason than because they were mine and I said so.  While I did not have to get myself locked up to learn all about The Goddess, the phrase is whispered like a password in the rehab areas of these confines.  It’s a sop, of course – what should we be worshiping here, the police?

Under intense pressure to cobble up that narratee, I try mightily to draw a bead on the narratee’s job.  It could be a big one, as big as that of the narrator, if she  — yes, call it she — were ever actually to do exactly as the narration directs her, and enter the full shattering gorgeousness of art not by stepping up to the looking glass but through it.  And when this happens, does the male stare seek shards of glass to lodge in his Cyclopean eye?  No more than the feminine listener craves these shards inside her penetralia. But I ask you, can there be real art, and a real understanding of real art without many such shards flying menacingly about and lodging where they may?  Oh, I doubt it. As an equal opportunity offender, I doubt it. That’s why I’m content to take my chances with the public. What it lacks in intelligence it makes up for in directness. If the group has taught me one thing, it’s that I do love an unsuspecting narratee.

I wonder, could I not finagle a few more nips and tucks in the terms of my parole? I’ve been so good, so very good. And I sorely need to stop hearing that The Goddess will fix my problems. What problems?

I wrote this note on Facebook while feeling somewhat contrarian. My rule here is that everything has to have a large number of defenders, and as small as possible a number of detractors. Of course everything here is culture-dependent; when a category makes sense only within a specific culture, I went with the West, or the United States.

Literature: Shakespeare. If they read Dan Brown in four hundred years, they’ll consider him profound, too.

Leaders: Churchill. He had a forty-year career as a military adventurer and an unabashed imperialist, and even during World War Two, he engaged in futile attempts to preserve the British Empire. And Giuliani, who took credit for things others did, and screwed up the few things that did fall under his responsibility.

Political movements: economic populism. It’s more often than not a cover for authoritarianism; the sort of leaders who help the poor the most are moderate social democrats like Roosevelt and Lula, not firebrands like Huey Long and Hugo Chávez. And new atheism, whose leaders openly express their political cluelessness.

Political issues: the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Israel and Palestine have ten million people between them; Congo has sixty, Myanmar fifty, and Sudan forty. Nice priorities, people.

Linguistics: the universal grammar. Every time a language violates it, Chomskyite grammarians incorporate its additional rules into their universal grammar, as if falsifiability has gone out of style.

Science: evolutionary psychology. It’s essentially a political reaction to academic Marxism, and about as rigorous as you’d expect from a politicized science.

Economics: Amartya Sen. Countries that follow his prescriptions may avoid famine, but none of them has achieved first world status. And Milton Friedman, whose economic prescriptions didn’t actually cause famine, but came fairly close to that in Chile.

Social science: fill-in-the-blank studies. If e.g. gender studies departments were really about studying gender relations rather than making feminists feel good, there wouldn’t be controversy whenever one of them appointed a male chair.

Philosophy: Peter Singer. His presentations about poverty and animal rights are as deep as my seventh grade geography textbooks, and about as interesting.

Popular science: ScienceBlogs. Politics gets more hits than science, so ScienceBlogs recruits screamers rather than interesting popularizers or important scientists.

Music: Elvis Presley. Even Britney Spears is less flashy and more talented.

Television: 24. Every season has been the worst season so far. Lost, which is a laundry list of clichés and plot holes. And Seinfeld, where the acting is so bad I could probably do better, and the writing is even worse.

Food: anything at a fancy restaurant. I’ll grant fancy restaurants that they’re tastier than McDonald’s, but they’re not any healthier, and they have nothing on small delis or homemade food.

Media: punditry. If I want someone to tell me how to think, it’s easier to just look up his issue profile than to read his fact-free tirades.

Books: political advocacy. See under media. George Lakoff deserves singular scorn for his armchair analysis of conservatism, but none of the others is much better.

Academics: core curricula. If you care about something you’ll take a class in it voluntarily; if you don’t, you’ll forget everything you learned five years down the line. And private schools at all levels, for being twice as expensive as equally good public schools.

Surely the American public supports the Hollywood writers in their labor struggles and fervently hopes that the writers’ strike be made permanent. Writing is work, and work is a dignified contribution to society. Making someone write for CBS’s drama Cane is an inhumane labor practice and I hope this strike puts an end to it once and for all.

All joking aside, the Hollywood writer’s strike has already begun to affect not only television but also moviemaking. The first high-profile casualty, Angels & Demons, the Prequel to the Da Vinci Code, has been postponed by Sony Pictures because they haven’t yet ironed out the script. Now, all due respect to the scriptwriter, who was awarded an Oscar for A Beautiful Mind, a challenging adaptation from a nonfiction book. In perfect sincerity, adapting something as dumb as Angels & Demons is quite a difficult task. Scriptwriters are actually performing a public service in helping us not read this sort of book. They should receive the literary equivalent of “combat pay” for added trauma in the line of duty, which I’m sure takes months or years off their lives. The writers, of course, are entirely in the right in their labor dispute: if they are going to sacrifice themselves in this fashion, the least Hollywood can do is pay them fairly.

But about Angels & Demons. Its main character, Harvard “symbologist” Robert Langdon, is the same protagonist from The Da Vinci Code, although A&D was in fact written first. The two stories – calling them “novels” would be pretentious, they are fictionalized bargain-basement conspiracy theories – couldn’t be more different. The secret society battling the Catholic Church in Angels & Demons is called The Illuminati, and its female lead is a mysterious and sexy Italian babe rather than a mysterious and sexy French babe.

Here is part of one of the opening chapters of Angels & Demons, excerpted from Dan Brown’s official website:

Robert Langdon awoke with a start from his nightmare. The phone beside his bed was ringing. Dazed, he picked up the receiver.

“Hello?”

“I’m looking for Robert Langdon,” a man’s voice said.

Langdon sat up in his empty bed [sic] and tried to clear his mind.

“This…is Robert Langdon.”

He squinted at his digital clock. It was 5:18 A.M.

“I must see you immediately.”

“Who is this?”

“My name is Maximilian Kohler. I’m a Discrete Particle Physicist.”

I imagine the screenplay adaptation of this early, crucial scene was trying. Perhaps the first draft read something like this:

Langdon awakens from bed, dazed. A phone is ringing.

Langdon: Hello?

Kohler: I’m looking for Robert Langdon.

Langdon sits up, trying to clear his mind.

Langdon: This…is Robert Langdon.

Langdon squints at his digital clock: 5:18 A.M.

Kohler: I must see you immediately.

Langdon: Who is this?

Kohler: My name is Maximilian Kohler. I’m a Discrete Particle Physicist.

Okay, this needs some refining. The Hollywood Guild writer’s craft involves compression, the deft conveyance of information within an aura of suspense. Here’s a hypothetical second draft:

Langdon awakens from bed, dazed, and picks up a ringing phone.

Kohler: This is Maximilian Kohler. I’m a Discrete Particle Physicist. I’m looking for Robert Langdon.

Langdon sits up, trying to clear his mind.

Langdon: This…is Robert Langdon.

Langdon squints at his digital clock: 5:18 A.M.

Kohler: I must see you immediately.

By the third draft, a sort of buzzing elegance must pervade a Guild-quality script. Perhaps something like this will emerge after hours of painstaking work:

A phone rings. Robert Langdon awakens from bed, dazed, and squints at his digital clock: 5:18 A.M.

Langdon: Langdon.

Kohler: Max Kohler here. I’m a scientist, but I badly need the help of a detective.

As long as these fictional drafts of the Angels & Demons script are being published in advance of the movie’s release, why not add a fictional Post-It Note to put on the very first page, reading, in the scrawl of a triumphant American craftsman and scriptwriter: By Jove, Dan Brown, I’ve made your characters sound human!

Anselm Kiefer, the enfant terrible of ambivalently postwar-wartime art, has undertaken an astoundingly architectural series of projects, constructing several towers in vastly different settings. These curious structures exude a sense of timelessness, yet also an undeniable timeliness. Like many of the themes he deals with, they have appeared in his paintings, photographs, books, and sculptures for more than a decade now. The question of whether their most recent, more sculptural manifestations are in fact architecture or not is less important than how he approaches them, and what that approach has to say about contemporary—and not-so-contemporary—architecture.
    I’ve followed these towers’ development in three key places, important not so much for their geographic locations as for their immediate topographic situations. I use situation in the broadest sense, indicating the prevailing cultural climate, as well as their physical surroundings and how they are set into them.

First is his laboratory, La Ribotte, at his home-studio in the Provencal town of Barjac. Here, amid more than forty-two “pavilions” and over two miles of tunnels in the course of creation on the estate of a former silkworm factory offered him by the French Ministry of Culture, he’s constructed and swiftly deconstructed a large grouping of towers. Significantly, they are all outdoors. The placid landscape of Provence is punctuated with these ambitious, (foolish?) pride-inspired architectonic shapes. There are shipping container forms cast in reinforced concrete, precariously stacked up to seven stories high. Some are spires, mere metal I-beam skeletons, traces of towers with impracticable stairs leading upward, yet obviously leading nowhere. Some (the earliest ones, I suppose, as they only appear here) are built of cinderblocks or similarly ancient bricklike forms, often in a checkerboard pattern of blocks with gaps of nothingness in between. Others—cast in what looks to be oversized concrete corduroy or from massive corrugated-metal matrices—are more solid, impenetrable on the ground floor, with iron reinforcement rods sticking like protective spikes out the side of each floor plate. Nevertheless, all have at least one window, door, a skylight hinting at a meteorite’s descent, a couple missing walls, or some other opening to the outside world.
     This epicenter of his experimentation, developed since his move here from Germany in the early nineties, ties together all of his many languages: there are staircases cast independently, laid on the ground, and set atop one another to form a pictogram of ocean waves (a similar, smoother outdoor sculpture has been installed at one of his collectors’ seaside estates in Southport, Connecticut); some of the stairs have stood up to reach otherwise isolated chambers high up in the towers; the surrounding fields themselves hint at, without visually resembling, the famously barren fields of his massive paintings; the blocks of the few towers built without being cast in modules look as though they were stripped from his mid-nineties Himmel-Erde (Heaven-Earth) series of painting and photographs, bricks that had in turn been recycled from Piranesi’s etchings and explorers’ old albumen photographs of Nineveh. Here he also manufactured the towers cast in miniature that have begun to appear on his monumental canvases, now making their public debut in an endless, echo-filled retrospective at the Guggenheim Bilbao.

Second is the Hangar Bicocca, a relatively new exhibition space in a former heavy industry-cum-hotspot neighborhood northeast of Milan’s city center. This grouping, dubbed The Seven Heavenly Palaces, made up of seven towers ranging from five- to seven-stories in height, sprouted up under the vast canopy of a former Pirelli industrial hangar. While the title, like so many of Kiefer’s recurring and oft-recycled names, hints at their supposedly celestial nature, their wrecked appearances betray a more infernal quality. The catalogue published on this singular work goes into detail about the names, but as with most of the names scrawled on his canvases, and now lit up in neon on these precarious-looking modular piles, I don’t feel they say as much as the visual clues do: stacks of his trademark lead-leafed books, a lead U-boat, and a glass model of Dürer’s melancholic octahedron, all set amid ticker tape–like glass strips inscribed with (literally) stellar numbers and numbered stones strewn about the ground.
    All cast within the hangar and assembled on-site, these particular towers differ from their French relatives in numerous ways, most of which I would attribute to their setting. I wandered through them a couple years ago, in the after-hour penumbra of the closed, barely-lit exhibition space, when a lax security guard didn’t feel the pieces (or their visitors’ lives) were worth much care. In catalogue photos they appear under harsh spotlights, like zombie actors returning to a stage without any audience waiting in the dark auditorium. In the partial light of my visit, however, they felt truly ruinous, and before them, between them, I really felt I lived there—as if Kiefer had transported me to the destroyed Deutschland he grew up in, born into a bombed-out town, studying in an eternal night in which no one spoke of what had taken place, and what was still silently going on. That was the first time he made me live in the work, instead of just wandering by, glimpsing the devastation in passing.

Third is the forecourt of the Royal Academy, one of Piccadilly’s more prestigious cultural centers, in the heart of London. Titled Jericho, these two towers stood for a brief period in the early months of 2007. They weren’t in fact identical twins, as one measured five stories, while the other dwarfed it at six. Both towered above the three-story, rigorously meted classical façade of the Academy. While I didn’t have the privilege of walking in and around them before they were taken down to make room for the rusty two-dimensional dinosaur cut-outs the Chapman Brothers had installed by the time of my visit (quite appropriate, given Kiefer’s beliefs about human, geologic, and cosmic time, claiming he has memory of the dinosaurs), I can only imagine what an impression experiencing them so physically would have made. The apertures of his towers’ windows echoed those of the Academy’s; his structures’ skewed, heavy house-of-cards walls served to emphasize the stable, indeed royally eternal elegance of the surrounding courtyard. He told a local paper they are the Academy in 200 years, a poetically rich, architecturally erroneous assessment of the scene.
    After hearing his comments about the installation of this most recent pair—the so-called twin towers the press so passionately pounced upon—it occurred to me that he has managed something few other sculptors have allowed themselves over the last thirty-odd years: he has produced and installed projects whose design pays little heed to their surroundings. It is almost as if he were unaware of, or simply doesn’t care about the ubiquitous Kraussian expanded field, the one that has so influenced sculptural discourse since the seventies. Is he perhaps a present-day proponent of that old übermodern Miesian idea that architecture is best composed and constructed independent of its setting? Does he see architecture’s ultimately autonomous essence—or the blind ambition of current iconic attempts at architecture—as distillable into these disgraceful towers, into this high-octane, ancient symbol of human hubris?

He does mention surroundings, but only when cornered into it. When an arts correspondent for London’s Independent asked what he thought, he said was thrilled by the unexpected dialogue the three elements immediately established with one another. In light of the many curious yet ultimately extraneous statements he’s dished out about his work in so many conversations over the past twenty years, it’s easy to get the misleading impression that words and poetic musings are a sufficient substitution for actually looking at his work. This series of towers refutes that, emphasizing how essential it is that we experience where it is they (and we) are, when we are, what we are. It hardly matters that he’s shrinking these powerful pieces down into diminutive modules collaged onto canvas, nor does it matter that almost everything you read about his work says more about his critics’ easy willingness to wander distractedly down a prosaic literary lane, reading Kiefer’s scrawled labels and sifting through Celan and Bachmann and Kabalic texts rather than really looking at his work. All that is indeed great reading, but he’s making visual pieces—and now sculptural, even architectural, forbidding, yet technically habitable projects—that deserve to be examined in their own right.

It may be easy to dismiss what appear to be two ruins slapped up in one of London’s fanciest, most courtly courtyards; the teetering towers in Provence’s otherwise lovely landscape might be perceived as an affront to any true architect’s attempt at designing even a single honest edifice; but the bleak buildings set into Milan’s barren postindustrial neighborhood of La Bicocca don’t allow us any escape. They are witnesses to Kiefer’s exploration of what humanity has done and devastatingly undone, over the past sixty years just as over the past six millennia. This is where we live, this is what we’ve done, and it’s all of our own design.

Australian poet and author Peter Nicholson writes 3QD’s Poetry and Culture column (see other columns here). There is an introduction to his work at peternicholson.com.au  and at the NLA.

The following is excerpted from Notebook, first published in A Dwelling Place, 1997, 49-60

If you’d really disordered all the senses, rationally or not—no Rimbaud.

Australia’s pitiless light—made for surrealist rites of spring.

If Goethe had workshopped Faust after holidaying in Silicon Valley, utilising interactive media technology, we still wouldn’t have a more relevant, finished or truer poem than the one we were left with.

The art of the first half of the twentieth century did not need to have its affective architecture stripped away by artists such as Tapiès and Xenakis. It remains a dynamic culture from which we still have an enormous amount to leam.

The word ‘poetic’ associates the enormity of existence with the grandeur of civilisation, that instinctive reach at the mutabilities of experience. Technique will never domesticate it and poets can’t really explain it.

A King Ludwig or a Kahnweiler will back horses others would run away from or have put down.

Prefer the blue jeans and Whitman to McDonald’s and Pound.

No need to feel queasy if rhetoric opens you up to the wound of existence. And no need to distrust that rhetoric either, the agency of eloquence out of which you try to perfect whatever you can of life and work.

The multiplicity of metaphoric imagery in poetry—paralleling the complexities revealed by quantum physics and Chaos Theory?

Celebrate, exult and mourn instead of recycling the tail-ends of modernism.

If paint is sometimes manipulated too easily, words can always be relied on to put up a fight.

There is arrhythmia in the heartbeat of patient poetry. The surgeon is preparing to graft on some emergency what?—traditional form? dismembered line? iambic pentameter? Prognosis?

To prefer Webern to Puccini, rather than the reverse, can also be seen as a failure of sensibility, whatever the Ensemble InterContemporain might think.

Perhaps traditional genres can no longer contain the Apollonian slippages and Dionysian spillages about us; yet poetry has always been able to accommodate any biological mess or technological marvel that came its way.

Read a good poem and you should find there the seeds of a Theory of Everything.

‘Wrong from the start’: who?

We don’t need any more virtual reality than that offered by a Lucian Freud painting, a history of the KKK or the view from our window.

If poetry spent a large part of its time in the twentieth century teaching people how to talk to themselves, then part of the function of poetry in the twenty-first century will be discovering ways in which we can talk with one another as well as to the other, whatever that other may be.

Not a nostalgia for world culture so much as a demand for it. Nationalism is the last refuge for writers who are content to manufacture cliches that make their readers self-satisfied and uncritical.

Is it amusing or alarming to watch rafts of people browbeaten by accusations of provincialism into thinking they’re antediluvian if they don’t get ecstatic about the junk culture churned out by our gorge and puke economies?

Pressure on the selectors, time in the blood bin, come in spinner—sporting analogies bring their own truth to Australian cultural endeavours.

Simplistic categorisations of sexuality, ethnicity or whatever—all you get out of that kind of force-feeding is a bad case of emperor’s clothes.

Poetry aspiring to the state of music? Surely not. Poetry aspires to its own expressive power, language heightened to a state of eloquence and memorability. Utilise ‘fizz, swish, gabble and verbiage’, but if that is all it reflects can your work be anything more than fashionable?

In the end, poetic raids on the inarticulate have to be articulated. Some poetry fails to make the crossover.

Though the moral viewpoint underpinning satire can be offputting, being acerbic and sardonic is another way of showing hope for and love of peoples and nations.

Palaeontologists on the lookout for fossils and bones tend to think that culture is a product predetermined by social factors. Talk about the sacred is so much mumbo jumbo for them. And this ratiocinative approach has crept into literary criticism. Any decent artist won’t be drinking from that poisoned well.

‘Two roads diverged’: memoir, biography, performance; poem, painting, composition.

Surfing the super-information highway—you will eventually be dumped. In that bruised place reach for some poetry to save you from technological intransigence.

Hip-hop, heavy metal, Bob Dylan—the poetry there coming from the sound of words and music together, not from words alone.

While poets trying to flesh out part of the immensity and strangeness of life must expect to be misunderstood, readers shouldn’t interpret their work too literally since poetry intuits experience irrationally. Somewhere down the literary pathway writers’ and readers’ expectations eventually meet.

Poetry brings into metaphoric resonance a different kind of reality. Its dissociations leave you harvesting forms and feelings beyond the Q.E.D. world of Euclidean theorem, nearer a transcendent cyberspace.

Artists make things while critics and intellectuals interpret the things made, activities largely incompatible. Apart from writers like Coleridge and Baudelaire, very few poets are capable of pulling off that double act convincingly.

Part of life in the you beaut country is spent pretending that existence is all sunshine and roses, culture splashing about in shallows, never losing its footing.

Beckett thought Hölderlin got better when he dropped the ‘spurious magnificence’. But surely every artist should have some of that magnificence in their work.

Does being grown up mean accepting a world without absolutes? Even in the apparent dead-ends of our time there is a spiritual poetry you can give voice to, a poetry that differentiates between good and evil, that is either well or badly achieved and that doesn’t distrust language.

Strange to see people getting worked up about novels and poems published ages ago but not giving a damn about lakes of bodies, starvation and genocide.

To feel things deeply is often painful and therefore it is not surprising to find some contemporary art avoiding anything essential, where one does not have to feel much at all, merely empathise with theories and techniques, sound and fury, anaesthetised by culture rather than awakened to new perceptions.

A point on a sphere is neither ‘down under’ nor ‘up over’. ‘Down under’ is a cliched reference to Australia that has outlived its usefulness for both Eurocentrics and nationalists.

Aspirations beyond the mundane, in which one may seek to name truth, beauty or hope, will seem old hat and pretentious to those residents of Grub Street who have tried to reduce poetry to the status of a language game. There are more open-minded and perceptive readers with interested members of the general public. And, after all, doesn’t a poet want to be read by this public, those people who are the poet’s shadow-self, the so-called common readers who feel and think without theoretical blinkers attached, and whose instinct is for art that embraces the sunlight as well as the shadow.

All that contradictory sea spray and desert heat, blue sky optimism and convict-originated cynicism in the land of the Dreamtime, has made some Australians either brightened with sensibility or as forlorn as a cow’s whitened carcass, as unforgiving as an existentialist at a Maquis reunion.

Of all artists, a poet must believe in the blessings of words. Words are the centrepiece of civilisation and the poet is therefore an essential member of civilised society. And words, used well, loved well, contain within them the tragic and spiritual emblems of a divinity we sometimes rise to, beyond the denominator of the profit margin and the limitations we set on our humanity.

Build It and They Will Come: Massachusetts Universal Health Insurance

Michael Blim

Last time, I wrote about a world without the rich. Among other things, I pointed out, not too originally I thought, that the rich do as much as they can to make society work for them, the effect of which is to make things worse for everyone else. They also are pretty successful at getting everyone else to think as they do. This includes getting us to believe that they are superior beings and deserving of their money and power.

For them to be superior, the rest of us by default must be inferior. Since we do not want to believe that we are inferior, we dedicate great energies to prove we are not by aping the rich and passing along the stigma of inferiority to any other persons or groups we can. Emulating the rich, the middle classes, for instance, press their brief that they are among the more superior after the rich, and thus they deserve their cut of the money, power, and privilege that they have been able to garner. Those below them, just as the rich figure themselves, are the less or not deserving. Working class and poor people have what little they have because they don’t deserve better.

This is the common sense of American society, and other societies such as our own with enormous economic inequality. It is also good, if banal sociology.

Most people forget the premise of the argument: that the rich make society work for them in part by getting us to believe that they are more deserving of everyone else. There is the indispensable and buried – and false — premise. Every comedian knows that a joke is only as good as the absurdity of its premise. The trick is the audience accepts the premise because they expect a good joke. If the audience buys the premise, they’ll buy the bit, and the joke is funny. “So, there were these two geese standing by the drinking fountain, and one says to the other…” Think New Yorker cartoon.

The problem with the belief in the deserving rich and the undeserving poor is that it is factually false, and when it is used to deny persons the fundamental necessities of life, it is pernicious.

Working class and poor people live in an American society that begrudges them basic necessities. To cover the malice entailed by this stance, the society following the cue of the rich and the institutions they control argue that working class and poor people are fundamentally undeserving. The rich and others who consider themselves superior conclude that these same working class and poor people are so deluded or incapable that they don’t look after their own interests. They don’t seize upon opportunities for betterment. They trap themselves in a cycle of poor education, low salaries, no savings, no benefits, and poor housing.

So, what is one to make of the fact that when the Commonwealth of Massachusetts offers anyone who cannot afford health insurance subsidized premiums and access to basic health care, the program becomes over-subscribed with persons who want to improve their health status and avoid financial ruin? Why have they grabbed the Commonwealth’s helping hand in such numbers and with such enthusiasm?

The Commonwealth originally hoped to enroll 136 thousand people in the new program that comes into force at the end of this year. It now estimates that at least 180 thousand persons will enroll by next June – a 32% more than the Commonwealth had expected. As one state senator remarked: “It’s a good problem to have – people are getting insured and hopefully getting care.” (Boston Globe, 11/18/07, 1)

Massachusetts, as the Globe reports, has committed itself to subsidizing insurance for persons who do not receive coverage on the job and who earn less than 300% of the federal poverty level. This means that a person earning less than $31,000 is eligible for subsidy. The state pays for the total health insurance build for very low income residents.

Over-subscription has the state agency responsible for the program worried about funding and cost increases, which is to be expected.

But there are several points that should be underscored.

First, if we build it, they will come. Massachusetts is providing universal access to health insurance, and by doing so, to health care itself. Everyone is eligible for help if they need it. People responded immediately and participated far above expectations because they were convinced that the program would meet one of their most fundamental needs.

Second, the Commonwealth wanted the program to succeed. So, it did what any other vendor with a product would do: it hired an ad agency that got the word out to people in need. You can apply on line. You can link to insurance providers for enrollment. You can do it all by phone too.

Third, the new law contains “incentives.” Every Massachusetts citizen must have health insurance. The key is that the Commonwealth enables citizens to meet the insurance requirement by connecting them with insurance plans that could meet their needs. People are offered assistance in sorting out insurance plans, benefits, and their ability to pay.

Fourth, because the Commonwealth recognizes universal access to health care is a paramount responsibility of government, no stigma is attached to participation. Quite the opposite: it is your civic duty in Massachusetts to participate, and you are rewarded – not denigrated – for doing so.

There will be no head shaking and muttering in the emergency room as when people on Medicaid seek treatment. No eye rolling as when a grocery store customer pays with a Food Stamps credit card. No implicit condemnation passed on persons for living in public housing or being on income support.

Honoring people’s rights, treating people with dignity, AND providing them access to the human necessity of health care liberates one crucial part of people’s lives from the blame game of a class-biased society whose motto is that if you are not rich, you are lacking something. In the case of working class and poor people, they are adjudged to lack the good sense to secure their necessities, to take advantage of opportunities, and to seek better lives. Working class and poor people by virtue of their infirmities and collective inferiority are told over and over again that they get what they deserve — fewer resources and poorer life chances.

In Massachusetts as regards health care, everyone regardless of privilege has the hope of getting what s/he deserves – health care and a better chance of a decent and fulfilling life.

Changes of this sort, as fundamental to human happiness as they are, will not bring forth in a burst “a world without the rich,” the subject of my last column. I will have more to say about how to make that world in the future.

But there can be small blessings along the way – as I hope Massachusetts can provide in the coming years for all of its citizens.

Finally, thanks to all of you who wrote in about the “world without the rich” column several weeks ago. You added immensely to the discussion for which I am just glad to have so briefly started.

This post is dedicated to Asad Raza, the first 3QD foodie to ask me about truffles.

Elatia Harris

The two images above come from distant eras when that rare and coveted underground fungus, the truffle, was in more abundant supply than at present. The gatherer on the left, in the Tacuinum Sanitatis, a medieval herbal treatise at the Bibliotheque Rouen (thanks to BibliOdyssey), seems to have happened upon a trove of squash ball-sized truffles, positioned conveniently above ground. More realistically, the 19th century diggers on the right, aided by poodles, search among the roots of an oak, where a black truffle — the ultimate prize of French gastronomy — may occasionally be found about six inches below the surface. (Readers interested in a 4000-year overview of human/truffle relations, including the truffle’s extensively documented use as a love food, are referred to my earlier 3QD article.)

Since the truffle harvest of today is down more than twenty-fold from 100 years ago, down incalculably from the time of the Tacuinum Sanitatis, the hunt is nothing like so easy as it appears in either scene above, and is conducted according to very different rules. Typically, hunters go out before dawn accompanied not by humans but by trained dogs or pigs — who cannot tell what they know about the spot, or come back to it on their own when the hunter is no longer about. With the exception of the legendary truffle-hunting virgins of Perigord, who ceased to flourish in the early 20th century, a human has not quite the nose for finding truffles, however violently she desires to eat them.

I used to see tiny tins of conserved truffles — about the diameter of napkin rings, under lock and key at fancy grocers — long before I saw a fresh one, and am deeply delighted to report that I lost no time eating the first fresh one I ever saw.  Read about what that felt like here. Fresh or conserved, there are about 60 varieties of black and white truffles in Europe. Most of them, you want to watch out for — they are mildly pleasant at best, occasionally nasty and always pricey. The only truffles of earth-moving gastronomic interest are T. Melanosporum, the black truffle of Perigord that is never far away when you’re nearing the summit of French cuisine, and T. Magnatum, the white truffle of Alba that adds such mystery and wildness to the simple but luxurious ways of northern Italian cooking. Look hard at the photos, for it’s truffle season again, and by the end of this article, you will know how to choose and prepare one for yourself.

Civetta and Kiki

First, however, meet the four-footed finders.

There is no truffle dog in the sense of a breed dedicated to that pursuit. Any trainable dog will do.  Looked at a certain way, truffling is but an exercise in advanced obedience training, since dogs are not naturally attracted to truffles but can be worked up into a passion to obey. Nevertheless, some breeds show a faster aptitude than others.  Since the 1700’€™s, poodles have excelled at the training, as detailed by Doebel in his Jaegerpractica, 1746.  Whatever its breed, the dog must be praised feelingly when it does find a truffle, rewarded not only with a display of love but with a bit of cheese. For much in the way of a natural orientation to the outdoors is taken from the truffle dog; to effect its unswerving focus on truffles, it has been systematically desensitized to squirrels and birds and other distractions that make up a full life for a hunting dog.

The Lagotto Romagnolo, a water dog that is a poodle cousin, is the truffle dog of choice in Piedmont and in the white truffle country of Tuscany, around San Miniato. A curly-haired, medium-sized dog of unusual avidity and good nature, the Lagotto is best embodied by Civetta (cheeVETTah), the current All-Italy champion truffle dog whose face may recall, to some dog lovers, that of an enraptured German Renaissance madonna.

A truffling pig like Kiki — the fourth pig owned by the famous Marthe Delon of Perigord to be so named — may only with care be compared to Civetta or any truffle dog. Pigs need no training to find truffles.  In fact, humans probably owe the discovery of truffles to pigs rooting around for them, and almost certainly first started to go after them in imitation of pigs. Mme. Delon has gone on record saying that she rewards Kiki — actually, all her Kikis — with truffle-scented suppers, but never with the real thing. And soon, it will be time for Kiki IV to join her namesakes on the family table as ham — the ultimate fate of most truffling pigs.

There are truffle hunters in the South of France who prefer hunting with dogs to hunting with pigs — it’€™s really a personal matter, and either beast is regarded as hugely valuable. The female of the species is in both cases the better finder.  And I have not read that at the end of a successful hunt it is necessary to make much of the sow, showering her with love and gratitude to keep her going. She has, after all, obeyed her instincts, not her master.

Is Now the Time for My Truffle?

Every year about this time, intense curiosity about the taste of a fresh truffle can propel a foodie into a zone of true bewilderment.  How to tell whether you have trained your eye on the right kind? Who to buy it from? How to optimize your possession of it?

First and worst of all, it is necessary to confront the brute fact of cost: buying a truffle the size of a medium dog’s nose is no less expensive than buying a horribly good wine. We’ll break it out later, but think high two digits just to deal yourself in. Like that bottle of wine that lets you murmur, Oh! So this is what it is — oh!, like that sunset on Santorini, the true truffle is epiphanial, one of those things that leaves you not as you were before. If you believe this kind of experience is sometimes free and sometimes very costly, but always worth it, then you will enjoy taking your preparedness for the truffle up a notch by reading the interview below.

Meet Greg Troughton

Imagine my delight when right in my backyard I met a professional foodie, Greg Troughton, who knew more about truffles — and many other food items — than I did. 

Greg grew up in New England, which he loves for its history, landscape and  culinary offers.  He has a BS in Biochemistry, and spent his years in school working in restaurants. After a stint in biotech, the food industry called to him, and he does often approach food from a scientific perspective.  Five years in restaurant kitchens gave way to Formaggio Kitchen in Cambridge, where he concentrated on local produce and specialty imports.  He has lived and traveled in Europe, and is currently at Whole Foods Market.  In February, he begins work on an MBA, with a focus on the food industry, in particular the market for local producers and food supply chain management.  He and his wife, Annie, live in Newton, MA, with their large mutt and shy cat.  For the last couple of years Greg has been the go-to guy for truffles in my neighborhood, cheek by jowl to Harvard.

In talking with Greg, I wanted a fresh perspective on some of the truffle lore I’ve been gathering since the night of my first encounter with T. Melanosporum. At that long ago time, truffles tended to be paired with lobster — oh, it’s not wrong — or foie gras, or chopped into a sauce madere.  Today there are truffle treatments both simpler and more interesting than those.  And, as scarcity and price increase, there is more truffle fraud. So it’s especially important now to be an informed consumer who knows just how far a truffle will go. Although Greg and I do not touch on history’s most formidable truffle-fanciers, I’ve included visuals of eight of them, from Khufu to Proust.

ELATIA HARRIS: Provided you constructed the right dinner around a truffle, how would you describe the difference a truffle could make?

GREG TROUGHTON: At a base level truffles impart a complexity of flavor to food that is so rarely experienced in everyday eating.  Add to that the long history of the hunt, the exotic terroir and the expense of truffles, and you stage an unusual element of excitement at dinner. 

EH: Tell me a little more about terroir.

GT: An expression of place, this term has come to reflect not only the land on which the food was grown or raised, but the culture and history behind the food.

EH: Then you can taste terroir? Do certain truffles taste like where they’€™re from in that way?

GT: Magnatum pico, often known as the white “Alba” truffle, and Melanosporum, often known as the black “Perigord” truffle, are not exclusively gathered in those places. What is really important is that the truffle you are purchasing is of the true Latin variety.  Northwest Spain, southern France, Italy — Magnatum and Melanosporum can be found all over these regions. “Alba” and “Perigord” have become marketing jargon.

EH: So, for example, the Tuscans and the Piedmontese warring over who has the true white truffle is kind of pointless if both regions produce T. Magnatum.  I’ve read about Carlo Vittadini, the Milanese physician who classified truffles into almost 60 varieties in the mid-1800’s.  When he called something a T. Magnatum, that’s a specific morphological type, and nothing to do with a market. How do you know you’€™re getting that?

GT: Find a distributor who understands that the quality lies in the variety, not just the locale, and you’re on the right track.

EH: Assuming you can examine a fresh truffle up close and personal before you buy it, what should you be looking for?  Or, should I say, sniffing for? First white, then black…

GT: Freshness is key.  I want to see my vender bring out an airtight sealed mason jar and I want to see the truffles wrapped in dry paper towel — not stored in rice.  The truffles should be dry and free of many holes.  Broken sides are fine — sometimes that is where the truffle was cut.  White truffles should be creamy to slightly yellowish brown depending on the tree from under which they were harvested.  Some of the most popular are oak, linden and chestnut.  But most important is smell.  Again, depending on the tree, each will have a distinct aroma.  Naturally it takes a long time to distinguish among particular “trees,” but you should try to smell a few.  As a vender I work with my suppliers to provide customers with a “€œbest guess.”  As a buyer, if a seller were to offer this information, it tells me they have done their homework.  All white truffles are extremely heady — open a jar in a crowded store and you will sure get some stares.  You’€™ll know then who’€™s a fan and who’s not.  White truffles from under oak trees are more dominant in aroma, while the linden and chestnut are subtler.  White truffles are more perishable than blacks and go soft faster.   Again, freshness is key.  Black truffles are more difficult to discern.  Find those that are firm with few holes and give a pleasing aroma.  I like my black truffles to smell complex — chocolate, spice, a slightly headiness. I steer clear of those that have a stringent or chemical smell.  Make sure your vender lets you handle them and smell them right up to your nose€ — after all, if a four-legged beast can dig these up, I’€™m sure your nose isn’€™t the health hazard!

EH: If you’re not going to use the truffle the night of the day you buy it, how do you keep it in tip-top condition for a while?

GT: It should really be eaten ASAP, but it can last a while under the right conditions — I’€™ve seen truffles go 2 weeks.  Store them in an airtight container, wrapped individually in paper towel, in the fridge.  Change the towel every day or two.  Add a few farm eggs to the container and because of the porous nature of eggshells you’ll get truffle-flavored eggs as a bonus.

EH: What are some of the best uses for the white truffle? Can it ever be overwhelmed?

GT: White truffles are generally kings when it comes to dominant flavors. Think eggs, simple soups, some game. My perfect truffle dinners, black or white, are big, winter food. Given their utter in-your-face aroma I prefer to pair white truffles with more subtle flavors — an egg course is great. Simply scrambled farm eggs with white truffle is divine.  Soups of parsnip and potatoes are great pairings as well.  White truffles also go well with foie gras — two big flavor champs battling it out I guess, but it’€™s a lot to handle. You either love it or hate it. 

EH: I saw an Orson Welles look-alike in Rome having white truffles grated over a slab of rare roast beef.  It seemed like a better idea to grate them over pasta — once I’d had that, I couldn’t think about anything else for a week. I also had them in a salad with a rather lemony vinaigrette — very tender lettuces, sauteed artichoke bottoms, and lots of chives. Astonishing.

GT: Food and the meal experience in particular are subjective to person, place, history and, importantly, to present company. The very idea that dinner will be served with such a rare, historical and pricey accoutrement lends a note of the astonishing to the event. A white truffle is going be astonishing whatever you grate it on.

EH: But simpler is better?

GT: I think so. And remember — don’t cook it. Just let whatever you’€™re adding it to warm it gently.

EH: Now what about the black truffle?

GT: While the white truffle is the billboard star, the black truffle plays the supporting role, but without that role the show wouldn’t be such a hit. It depends what you are in the mood for. I like black truffles paired with roasted meats, potatoes, game, some rich seafood like scallops.  Black truffles can enhance the meatiness and roasted flavor of meats — they are aromatic and bold while at the same time complimentary to other flavors.  Some of my acquaintances who are more intimately involved in the trade say that while they are less expensive, true connoisseurs prefer black truffles to white.  You decide. On the plate, truffles are all nose — a steaming short rib with black truffles gives off an intoxicating, heady aroma. Black truffles shaved over sizzling meat is perfect.

EH: At L’Astrance, Pascal Barbot does a celery soup with black truffle puree and Parmesan foam.  I haven’t tried making foam yet.  And Alain Passard does slow-poached Breton lobster with sauce vin jaune, smoked potatoes and shaved black truffles.  But I’€™m getting carried away.

GT: Would you have wanted those things your first time with a truffle?

EH: Um, no. And the emphasis here is on what you could make with truffles for yourself and your friends that wouldn’€™t be so complex you couldn’t have fun, too.  As long as we’re menu-planning, are there some wine recommendations for dishes involving truffles? Let’s talk about this on the plane of the ideal, and then on the plane of the approachable, OK?

GT: I have a very basic approach here — if it grows together it goes together.  Get wines from the region and make them dish-appropriate.  White truffles are generally from Piedmont, so think big — like Barolo.  With black truffles, being sourced from France to North west Spain, I usually like burgundy and some Rhone wines.  Some Bordeaux can over do it with the truffles.  Ask your truffle vender where these particular truffle come from.  Can they tell you, or did they come from a distributor? This would mean they’€™ve been out of the ground longer and are less fresh.  Because I buy directly from one family, they can tell me per delivery where they sourced the truffles. With some vagueness that I won’t ever understand — like I can actually quit my job and responsibilities and go to Europe to pillage their secret site. Then, take this information to your trusted wine guru and get a wine from the same region.

EH: I’ve seen truffle-slicers in restaurants in Italy — if you can’t get your hands on one of those, what should you do?  And how should you do it?

GT: Truffles should be sliced ultra-paper-thin. If you try it with a knife and get thick pieces you are wasting money.  Truffle slicers are nice, but expensive and singular in their use.  I use a Japanese mandolin, the same tool with an adjustable blade that you use to slice potatoes thin. They are cheap, good all around tools that should be found in any kitchen supply store.  Just get simple one with a sharp adjustable blade. You don’t need 20 attachments.

EH: I see truffles priced by the ounce.  How far does an ounce of truffles go — used in some of the ways we’ve been discussing?

GT: An ounce goes a very long way. You could truffle one course for 10-12 friends with a whole ounce.  My advice is to get 4-6 friends and truffle two courses.  Better yet, store the truffle for a day with eggs and get three courses out of it.  You can spend only $75 to $100 and get the real thing for a bunch of people.

EH: Let’s talk about some of the considerations that influence price.

GT: My take here is that given all the recent press, the food world producers have seen a real potential in a growing market of young foodies. This has been great for artisan producers — it has allowed small vineyards to grow and market their products, it has supported long-standing traditions of wine making and truffle hunting.  But it does have its down side.  On the truffle end, the introduction of inoculated  trees to natural habitats, currently supporting dwindling supplies of Melanosporum and Magnatum pico has led to new crossbreeds of truffles that out-compete for nutrients and space.  So the truffle market has been flooded with inferior grade truffles that are identical in appearance Melanosporum and Magnatum pico being passed off as such to unknowing consumers looking to experience truffles at a slightly lesser cost.  Who am I to judge when it comes to spending a premium for, let’s face it, a rather ugly looking mushroom rooted by a pig or dog under some tree in a far away country?  But, as with champagne and caviar, I advocate the less is more strategy — you don’€™t need to have every course truffled. Get the real thing once in a season on one dish. You can get other varieties of truffles that grow naturally in season during the summer — they are lighter in aroma and simpler in complexity of flavor. As the saying goes, they are what they are.  My personal tastes for truffles revolve around winter nights, red wine, fireplaces, good friends, slowly simmered cuts of meat, and potatoes.  I’€™m not a summer truffle guy.  So I get the real thing when I can, usually once a year. Best to get it from someone you trust — at $1600-$3200 a pound, mistakes are not allowed!  Opt to cook at home instead of going out — you’ll see what you’ve been missing, and you’re sure to come out on top.

EH: Would your life be diminished if you didn’t know the taste of these things? 

GT: No, it would not.  It would just be different.  My grandparents have lived long, rich lives, and have never tasted such things and probably never will, but I’d be eternally happy to experience the fulfillment and pleasures that they have enjoyed.  That said, food is my thing.  I make my living in the industry and I enjoy it after work — it’€™s what gets me up in the morning.  So, if I didn’t know the taste of true truffles, caviar, foie gras, real French Brie, fresh bread, New England corn, local strawberries and on an on, I’€™d be doing my career and my life’s journey a disservice.  While many of these items are expensive, they don’t have to be exclusive to the wealthy.  As an example, when I got out of professional cooking, after about a year or so, I got a phone call from my old chef asking me if I’€™d be willing to do a shift that night for a meat cook who had to leave for a personal matter.   Anyone who has worked in a high end restaurant knows that working the busy station on the line during a Saturday night is hard enough, but after a year out of the business, that’€™s plain stupid.  Overcooking a VIP steak and having the entire service come to a crashing halt doesn’€™t make you a popular guy, especially when you’ve abandoned the profession for greener pastures.  With this in mind I was about to decline the offer when the chef made it a bit more enticing — I wouldn’t be getting paid in dollars, but my 10 hours of backbreaking, under-appreciated, adrenaline-addled, high heat cooking would be rewarded with a freshly dug 1 oz white truffle.  I was in that kitchen setting up my station in 20 minutes.  The point is — make some friends in the food industry, take some wine and cheese classes.  Bring a six-pack to your local gourmet food guys — they will remember you and maybe, just maybe let you in on the good stuff.

EH: Great! I’€™m waiting a few weeks till T. Melanosporum is here, however. That’€™ll give me some time to plan.  Also, I don’t want people turning me down, and getting the right 6 people on any given night is worse than air traffic control. What should I be thinking when I go shopping?

GT: Know what you want, how much you want to spend and what dishes you will be serving.  Talk with your local grocer, be it at a large store or a small gourmet operation.  Trust is key and trust comes with a personal relationship.  In my time I have seen very few if any intentional rip offs — just people who don’t necessarily have all the facts.  Watch how they store the truffles — how many do they have?  Do they “€œalways”€ have them? That’€™s a bad sign, because it usually means extra inventory.  Stay away from mail order — would you mail order fresh fish?  A personal, trusting relationship with your grocer is the key to getting any quality product.

EH: OK, let’€™s make it happen. Thanks!

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Staying Informed

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Never miss another world-historical truffle story again. Register with NYT.com (free), key “truffles” into the search box. The topic page will come up, with compendious news about truffles, including commentary and archival articles published in The New York Times. Go to the bottom right, where you will be invited to click on the truffle feed. Do so, and monitor developments from your homepage or reader.

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Food blogger extraordinaire Pim of Chez Pim goes to Perigord

http://chezpim.typepad.com/blogs/2007/03/marthe_delon_th.html

Pim encounters the Truffle Don in Italy

http://chezpim.typepad.com/blogs/2005/11/the_truffle_don.html

My earlier 3QD truffle article, “Shrooming in Late Capitalism: The Way of the Truffle”

http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2007/02/shrooming_in_la.html

Cooking Vacations in France, with Truffles

Patricia Wells

http://www.patriciawells.com/cooking/truffle-class-schedule.htm

Cooking with Friends

http://www.cookingwithfriends.com/the_news/the_truffle_hunt/the_truffle_hunt.html

US Truffle Venders I Personally Know and Trust

Formaggio Kitchen (Cambridge and Boston, MA and Essex Street, NYC)

http://www.formaggiokitchen.com

http://www.southendformaggio.com

Whole Foods (locations throughout USA)

http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com

By Edward B. Rackley

The Crowned Crane is Uganda’s national symbol. A majestically feathered, noble bird with piercing grey eyes, it moves with an erect, nervous strut. It is difficult to spot in the wild, yet all Ugandans know its features. Its crested silhouette is visible as the watermark on banknotes of every denomination. Its profile graces the nation’s red, yellow and black-striped flag, which is painted, pasted or flying almost everywhere one looks in Uganda.

As an index of state presence, a national flag incorporates the symbolic and the concrete. In the north of the country, a twenty-year insurgency by the Lord’s Resisistance Army saw Acholi extremists terrorizing their own people, ostensibly to radicalize or awaken them to the necessity of LRA ‘liberation’ of all Acholis. Then the national flag served only to remind Ugandans in LRA areas that they lived in a phantom state subjected to the terrors of mystical despotism. Today, the LRA have retreated and security is improving. A corresponding increase in local trade and mobility suggests lasting normalization is underway. The national flag, once an empty signifier, is now associated with the central government’s return and, by extension, with the tangible dividends of peace.

Insurgencies and rebellions have a long history in Uganda, some more violent than others. In the case of the LRA, dismemberment, sexual slavery and other atrocities were common; most were inflicted by Acholi child combatants on other Acholi children. Bringing mute agony upon innocent victims, especially children, exceeds the grasp of many a sentient mind, but insofar as many insurgencies in Uganda (and elsewhere in Africa) share an elemental grievance as their catalyst, there’s nothing exceptional or irrational about them. In each case, one or another region/ethnicity is marginalized from decision-making or the national budget. A saturation point is reached; it is time to act. Some strongman or another succumbs to delusions of political messianism. Visited by ‘laundry detergent dreams’, the rebel/messiah must now cleanse the state of its sins.

Your cattle, my guns

Under colonial rule and since independence, the Ugandan state flag has rarely flown over Karamoja, the remote and semi-arid northeastern region bordering Kenya and Sudan. Armed violence was first documented there among resident pastoralist tribes in the early 1900s. Muskets and rifles gradually replaced spears, bows and arrows. Violence spiked to new levels when automatic weapons flooded the area after Idi Amin’s local armories were abandoned in his 1979 flight from power. At the same time a regional arms market encompassing seven local nations saw escalating armament and munitions stockpiling among Karamoja’s disparate clans.

Today, few Ugandan flags are flying in Karamoja; there are no Crowned Cranes in the sky and little currency in circulation. Perched on the rim of the Great Rift Valley, Karamoja’s expanse of rugged low plains is hemmed in by gorgeous massifs, the occasional extinct volcano, and solemn stone monoliths. I first learned of Karamoja as a teenager, reading The Mountain People by British anthropologist Colin Turnbull. It described a small, vulnerable and cruel tribe, the Ik, living high on the mountainous terrain along the Kenyan border. The area has fascinated me ever since.

Karamojong warriors inflict violence indiscriminately on women and children. Boys as young as twelve carry weapons to protect their herds or to participate in inter-communal raiding. In cattle-raiding, the loss of life and destruction of property that ensues are neither religiously inspired nor ideological; Karamoja’s militant pastoralism shares nothing with the self-appointed messiahs of the LRA and their extermination of non-believers. And given the amount of firepower in Karamoja, a single large raid may result in the deaths of hundreds of people. Children are often abducted along with the cattle.

Much of the armed raiding is reportedly directed by seers and shamans, who divine immediate futures from the spilled intestines of slaughtered goats. They are said to share in the spoils of a successful cattle raid, compensation for their accurate prophecy. To ensure repeated success of the warriors or a successful planting season, children are reportedly abducted and sacrificed. Everyone I met to discuss the costs of militant pastoralism for women and children mentioned child sacrifices, genital cutting of pre-pubescent girls as a widely practiced maturation rite (girls are only then ‘available’ for marriage), and the occasional forced marriage of young girls for bride price–an attractive, hard-working and unschooled girl can bring 40 to 60 head of cattle. Even primary education is rejected by parents as it takes time away from herding and housework, and ‘makes children lazy’.

From the perspective of local communities, life is characterized by many features typically associated with armed conflict. These include large-scale military operations employing helicopter gunships, tanks, armed personnel carriers, heavy artillery and aerial bombardment, proliferation of UXOs, regular clashes between local “warriors” and government troops, frequent forced displacement, and military courts martial in place of civilian courts.

With estimates of between 30,000 to 200,000 illegal weapons in a region of almost one million people, President Museveni sent in the army to disarm the Karamojong and to restore order. The job was judged too great for the region’s 130 police officers, each armed with a pistol (that’s a ratio of 1 cop to 7300 citizens—the  international standard is 1:450). This Reuters photo captures a dejected Karamojong warrior caught in a cordon and search exercise.

The Black Spot

My travels around the region are escorted by military convoys of government soldiers. Based in Moroto, I spend equal time in Kaabong and Kotido districts where raids, ambushes and sniper attacks occur daily on the rocky roads.   

The natural environment is inhospitable to those unschooled in its extremes. Karamojong live in their own ‘gated communities’, called manyatta, a collection of mud and thatch huts surrounded by an imposing barrier made of local thorn bushes, which serve to protect inhabitants and livestock from external raids. Looking out over the plains, manyatta are invisible to the untrained eye; from the air they are unmistakable and iconic.

Despite the physical harshness of the place, a surprising variety and number of bird species thrive in the region. Their migration patterns are local and reflect the transhumance patterns of Karamojong pastoralists, who lead their cattle to grazing lands and watering areas according to seasonal fluctuations in rainfall. I managed to spot some of my favorite species on this trip: the African Hoopoe, the ever cheeky and curious ‘Go Away’ Bird whose raspy call sounds like ‘go away!’ barked through a megaphone. The Lilac-breasted Roller was another regular sighting, as were varieties of Kingfisher [click here for photos of these species].

But besides the heightened military presence, there is little sign that we are in Uganda. The landscape is identical to that of southern Sudan and northern Kenya, whose borders are nearby and unguarded. The region’s pastoralists have been crisscrossing between Kenya, Sudan and Uganda since long before these colonial demarcations were established. Transhumance patterns lead livestock and herders great distances in search of water points and grazing land. Protecting kin and assets on the move requires armed self-defense, given the cycles of raiding and counter-raiding long been practiced in the region.

Late one morning, I left Kotido for Kaabong with twenty or so soldiers in a three truck convoy. The landscape was lunar yet green from recent rains. My eyes scoured the landscape for birds, animals, people. It was also infamous raiding and ambushing country; one of the region’s well-known ‘no go zones’ where shepherds and their livestock dare not tread for fear of attack. Crucifixes marked the road where aid workers, priests, military and civilians had been killed in such activity. As we passed an extinct volcano I spotted a water point about 50 meters from the road. There was my all-time favourite raptor, the Secretary Bird, immobile and observing as our convoy broke the quiet of the thick heat and brilliant sunshine. 

A colleague I was riding with announced that we were entering the ‘black spot’. Crucifixes stood like goal posts marking the entrance and exit of this stretch of road, a gauntlet for us and a playing field for lurking snipers and would-be ambushers. I tried to keep a conversation going to distract us but no one would engage. The end of the gauntlet was an army detach on a hilltop after the last crucifix; after that ‘we were safe’.

No one else was on the road as we picked up speed, our body armor weighing heavy and hot inside the vehicle, our kevlar helmets bouncing up and down over the bumpy road. I spotted the huts and radio antenna of the detach on a rocky hilltop. As we approached, a commercial lorry stood parked in the middle of the road, a few people were milling around it. Soldiers were running down the hillside, apparently to meet those in the road. Relieved to be exiting the black spot, we slowed and asked what the matter was. Lots of gesticulation ensued, pointing at the truck with agitation. They had been shot at, repeatedly, about a kilometer earlier on the road.

Nothing we could do, so we drove on. Days later we passed through the same spot, stories of many such attacks and ambushes in our heads. Kevlar helmets bobbing, all of us sweating profusely under the body armor. About half-way back through the black spot, we got a puncture and had to pull over. I had to smile–this was the perfect ambush moment. We all stood in the sun, accepted our possible fate, some of us nonchalantly unzipping and peeing in the breeze. No one counted the crucifixes dotting the sides of the road.

In all my visits with locals, an estimated 75% of all rights violations or abuses involving children and women occurred during inter-communal raiding; only a minority result from government disarmament operations. This was significant, and underscored a bias in international human rights reporting that has long made me crazy. Recent reports and analysis from Save the Children, Human Rights Watch, and the Feinstein International Center (Tufts University) focus exclusively on government violations, passing over the slaughter of innocents by Karamojong in silence. This creates the unhelpful and unbalanced impression that all abuses are government, leaving those at the hands of Karamojong undocumented. Why this anti-government bias? Is the senseless carnage of Karamojong raiding to be condoned because somehow sacrosanct as ‘indigenous culture’?

Western liberal bias against African regimes as despotic and venal is most palpable in our human rights community, whose condemnations are a convenient luxury as they dont have a full time presence on the ground. For those of us who have to deal directly with such governments and their armies, as I often do, I see how discredited the moral high ground of the human rights movement is in the eyes of its intended audience, the Ugandan military in this case.

Getting information on abuses against children in Karamoja is near impossible. Because few people know their exact age or possess identification, only when a victim is manifestly pre-pubescent or a very early teenager can the term “child” is used in rights reporting. Traditional rites of passage, like genital cutting, serve to delineate the adult from the child; age in years is not used.

A long-term view

Emergence from the cycle of poverty and violence in Karamoja will not come from aid agencies but from a robust state presence, whose services must be widely available and tailored to the pastoralist social economy. State presence and services are exceedingly weak in both material and human resources; Karamoja does not attract government talent, most Ugandans fear the place as a certain death trap, and Karamojong are viewed as Neanderthals, as Pygmies or other indigenous folk are seen by majority populations elsewhere.

Spending time here and learning how the performance of local culture is warped through decades of armed violence, one appreciates how fragile social orders can be. As Valéry once said: “A civilization has the same fragility as a life.” What other commercial opportunities are there for people who’ve never been to school or learned a trade apart from armed survival, herding and raiding others’ livestock?

Perhaps Karamoja needs a political insurgency to make the depth of its crisis heard in Kampala. A fanciful notion, I realize, as for the Karamojong the Ugandan state does not exist. Their lives revolve around their herds, as is the case for other ethnic pastoralist groups in Sudan, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Somalia. Nor is there evidence that a successful insurgency leads to accelerated development: it’s not the Kampala government who’s rebuilding former LRA areas now that security has returned. The international community is doing it.

On a final note, I was not able to visit the Ik, although I did get close to them. I met aid workers and locals who encountered them regularly; apparently there are only 2000 or so left of the Ik. As a coping mechanism to deal with successive raiding and looting by larger more powerful groups, the Ik have stopped keeping livestock entirely, and do not bear arms. With nothing to steal, why stop over to kill and loot? In such a dire place as Karamoja, adopting extreme poverty as your self-defence mechanism is a desperate act indeed.

Prashant Keshavmurthy

Abdul Qadir Khan Bedil Dehlavi was among the most famous representatives of the so-called sabk-e hindi or “Indian style” of the Persian ghazal. Born in Patna or Azimabad in Bihar in eastern India in 1642, he spent much of his professional life in Mughal Delhi and died there in 1720. His style and imagery shares with others who practiced this kind of ghazal-composition an ingeniousness of metaphor and elaborateness of conceit, features that continue to endear his poetry to Persian-speakers in many Central Asian countries but disqualified him in his own lifetime in Iran.

Although barely read or even known in India today, Bedil has had a long afterlife in the brilliance and complexity of phrase of Ghalib’s Urdu and Persian poetry on which he exercised an influence. However, his poetry remains distinguished from that of others of the sabk-e hindi style of the ghazal in its thematic and Aristotelian preoccupation with the wonder aroused by the created world, a wonder that is inexhaustible by the desire that accompanies it to interpret that world. This hermeneutic inexhaustibility derives from the divine origins of creatures. Our gaze, arrested by these creaturely and defective mirrors of their superior creator, leads away to the thought of that creator and, by analogy, to an understanding of the act of human poetic creation, of Bedil himself as a poet-creator.

Bedil Dehlavi with my own translations:

bar nemiayad ba joz hich az mu’amma-ye hubab
lafz-e ma gar vashikafi mani-e harf magust

The bubble’s riddle throws up nothing at all.
Crack open my words and look-
it means ‘Don’t say it!’

*

safha-ye sada-ye hasti khatt-e nayrang nadasht
khiragi kard nazar-ha raqami paida shod

The world’s plain page
bore not one wondrous line.
The eyes started in surprise and
behold- a mark!

*

Bedil sokhanat nist joz insha-ye tahayyur
ku ayina ta safha-ye divan-e to bashad

Bedil, your poetry’s nothing but the creation of astonishment.
Show me a mirror that aspires to a page of your Divan.¹

[¹Divan is a collection of a poet’s complete works.]

*

keshti-e chashmam ke hayrat badban-e shawq-e ust
ta za khod jonbad mohiti az gohr avarda ast

My eye’s ship,
the sail of whose desire’s astonishment,
draws an ocean out of a pearl
that it might swell.

*

nahoft-e mani-e makshuf-e bi-tamolli-am
nabastan-e muzha afaq ra muamma kard

Unhesitatingly, I conceal unconcealed meanings.
Not blinking made a riddle of the world.

*

zang-e rukh-e ayina gasht ba safai badal
anbar-e afaq zad ghuta ba kafur-e nab

The mirror’s clouded face grew
suddenly clear.
The world’s ambergris plunged suddenly deep
into the purest camphor.

*

Prashant Keshavmurthy is a doctoral candidate in the department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures and Comparative Literature in Columbia University, New York.

What Philosophy Can Learn from Anthropology

Justin E. H. Smith

*

Books Consulted or Discussed in this Essay

Scott Atran, The Cognitive Foundations of Natural History: Towards an Anthropology of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

Barbara Duden, Der Frauenleib als öffentlicher Ort. Vom Missbrauch des Begriffs Leben (Munich, 1994).

Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973).

Ernest Gellner,  Anthropology and Politics: Revolutions in the Sacred Grove (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995).

Maurice Godelier, Métamorphoses de la parenté (Paris: Seuil, 2004).

G. E. R. Lloyd, Magic, Reason and Experience: Studies in the Origins and Development of Greek Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (Harper & Row, 1983).

Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).

Colin Scott, The Semiotics of Material Life among the Wemindji Cree Hunters (McGill University Thesis, 1983).

S. J. Tambiah, Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality (Cambridge, 1984).

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (New York: Macmillan, 1968).

*

I have gradually become convinced that historians of philosophy –my colleagues, and by training myself– are going about a cluster of very interesting questions in entirely the wrong way.  These questions, I think, may be much more adequately answered from within the discipline we call ‘anthropology’.

According to one widespread account, modernity came into being as a consequence of the sacrifice of nature.  The Scientific Revolution literally killed nature by transforming it from a living and holistic system of interconnected entities, human and non-human alike, acting intentionally in accordance with their natures, into a dead system of atomic particles being moved about, without intrinsic purposes, but only as a result of extrinsic physical forces.  This new scientific cosmology would also bring with it, the story goes, a new philosophical anthropology, as humans came to see themselves as radically separate from, and opposed to, a natural world in which they as thinking intelligent agents could have no part.  The world, which now operated according to entirely different laws than those that governed our own thinking, was ‘disenchanted’, as Max Weber would later put it, literally gutted of any cosmological significance –where cosmology is understood as some model of the interrelatedness of the heavens, the earth, animals, humans, super-human spiritual entities, and perhaps also God– and reduced simply to extended particles endowed with mass, figure, and motion. 

It is in broad outline this transformation that Carolyn Merchant bemoaned in her influential 1980 book, The Death of Nature, and it is this transformation that much recent ecological thinking aspires to undo.  One way out of the perceived dead-end of mechanistic thinking about nature has been to argue that mechanism is in fact inadequate to the task of scientifically explaining the systems in question. The study of certain implications of post-Einsteinian physics, or of certain problems of complexity in ecological systems, are examples of this.  Another way out of the dead-end has been to turn attention to models of nature generated by cultures that never explicitly adopted the basic assumptions of the scientific revolution that so transformed the West.  Indigenous science, in short, has presented itself to some as a possible source of lessons for thinking about nature that may help to correct some of the shortcomings of the mechanistic model we inherited from the 17th century.

But the legacy of the Scientific Revolution is of course, by now, everywhere, and it takes a strong and nostalgic imagination to see indigenous cultures as if they had preserved their ways intact since the pre-contact era.  As Marshall Sahlins writes: “Certain things of European provenance — not only horses, tobacco, bush knives, or cloth but even Chistianity — are still locally perceived as ‘traditional’ culture.” Living as we are long after the initial contact, 1492 and all that, it is very difficult –even in the light of excellent work by historical anthropologists– to separate the elements of an indigenous culture that pertain to it deeply, as a sort of cultural constant, from the elements of that culture that emerged adaptively in response to new, externally imposed circumstances.   There is also no shortage of compelling arguments to the effect that performing such a separation is either impossible or disrespectful to the contemporary indigenous culture’s effort to carve out a place for itself in the modern world.   

Thus development, or cultural adaptation to new realities, renders the project of Western self-criticism much more difficult than it may have appeared in the days when Montaigne could call upon the ‘Cannibals’ to measure the degree of conventionality of his own culture’s norms.  What thus  often happens when lessons are sought from indigenous cultures is that the difference between world-views is grossly exaggerated, with the indigenous world-view highly romanticized as one that is fully ‘in touch’ with the natural world, and with the scientific world-view facilely condemned as being the opposite of this, ‘out of touch’. 

These exaggerations stem, I think, from both a failure to take the role of development, as defined above, into consideration in thinking about comparative cosmology, as well as a general misunderstanding, both of the philosophical roots of the modern scientific or mechanistic model of nature, as well as of the extent to which this model is both continuous with those it follows upon in Western history, and overlapping with those in other parts of the world with which it has long co-existed.  The contrast between the West and the Rest, in sum, has generally been overstated, even if this contrast is not one with which we should hope to dispense altogether. 

The perceived immensity of the contrast turns on an overestimation of the difference between literal and metaphorical discourse, of the difference between absolutism and relativism, and of the uniqueness of scientific rationality among ways of conceptualizing the world.  Philosophers tend to assume that these differences can be investigated without stepping back from the culture that itself considers them important. It seems to me however that if philosophers wish either to critique or to defend and promote scientific rationality, they are going to have to dare to look closely, which is to say empirically, at the sort of practices with which it supposedly contrasts.  One way of stepping back from one’s own culture and getting a broader view is that of the historian, and this is why in my view historians of philosophy are already ahead of the curve among academic philosophers.  The past is a foreign country, and historians of philosophy are the worldly cousins of the small-town yokels doing strictly systematic philosophy.  Historians of ancient philosophy and science –unlike, for the most part, historians of the early modern period– have in general been ready to look at the origins of Western thought in context with an eye to just how much what has been called ‘the Greek miracle’ in fact overlapped with other, pre-Greek, supposedly merely mythological systems of thought in other eastern Mediterranean and Near Eastern cultures. 

For G. E. R. Lloyd, to cite one prominent example of this trend, to the extent that there was a ‘Greek miracle’ at all, this was a matter of a growing concern to distinguish between the different criteria for truth in different registers of speech, with an ultimate preference for the most literal register.  Thus Aristotle criticizes earlier philosophers, most often Empedocles, for saying things that may be, as he puts it, “acceptable for the purposes of poetry,” but not strictly speaking true.   Recently, Christian Wildberg has also argued that the fragment of Anaximander that has long been held up as the very first foray into natural philosophy in Western history was in fact a bit of poorly paraphrased poetry, referenced by Simplicius centuries after it was written.  That is, a supposed early attempt to explain the world as it actually is was in fact just another description of it, familiar from countless native traditions, in captivating, subjective images.  Eventually, anyway, at least one important component of the modern Scientific Revolution was already in place in ancient Greece: the distinction between literal and metaphorical claims, and the valorization of the former at the expense of the latter.  The former have the final say, whereas the latter are at best of use in certain local, circumscribed contexts.  In fact, it appears every culture makes some sort of distinction between different registers of speech that roughly maps onto this one; that of the Eastern James Bay Cree, for example, is between aatiyuuhkhaan and tipaachimunn, or myth and ‘tidings’, respectively.  But what appears to be novel in the Greek case is the exclusive identification of truth with the latter sort of speech.  That is, what Ernest Gellner called ‘the world of regular, morally neutral, magically unmanipulable fact’ came to be the only world to which true utterances pertained, while any other sort of utterance had to be either translated (demetaphorized), or discarded. 

The Scientific Revolution of the 17th century one-upped Aristotle by in turn denouncing many of his preferred descriptions of the world as mere poetry.  Thus Robert Boyle insisted in the 1660s that nature could not abhor a vacuum, since nature is not a person and so can’t abhor anything.  Yet not long after the minimalist program of mechanism was put into place, it started to come clear that perfect description of the natural world in terms of the mass, figure, and motion of fundamental particles was a pipe dream, and correlatively that there could be no description without some degree of what Aristotle would have wanted to relegate to poetry.  In such projects as botanical taxonomy, it was quickly recognized that grouping principles must be to some extent arbitrary, that is, based on morphological features of interest to us, rather than on some hidden affinities. It was just such hidden affinities that the new science had insisted on eradicating, so the only choice was either to stop describing nature altogether (at least beyond the level of the motion of particles– which may be the truest account but is seldom the most interesting one), or to acknowledge a degree of arbitrariness. 

Of course, none of this is news to philosophers. Yet they have been all too reluctant, in light of this old news, to turn their attention to the empirical data as to how different cultural groups throughout the world go about arbitrarily carving that world up, in the hopes of arriving at some understanding of the universal parameters of all possible world-carvings. Philosophers, unlike anthropologists, remain too committed to the Greek miracle to be able to allow such evidence to interest to them.  In my own work on the intersection of philosophy with the experimental life sciences in the 16th and 17th centuries, I have been intent to show the way in which cultural and historical context imposed limits on the range of philosophical positions taken up in the early modern period, and also to show how folk-scientific beliefs continued to play a role in the most refined philosophical and scientific debates about such questions as the nature of animal generation and fetal development.  Let me expand a little bit on this latter example.

Throughout his career Descartes complained of his embryological efforts that he was unable to produce a comprehensive treatise because it is a subject that simply will not permit him to treat it “in the manner of the rest,” that is, in terms of the size, figure, and motion of particles.   Yet he held boldly to the possibility of someday explaining embryogenesis in just this way:  “I expect some will say disdainfully,” he writes “that it is ridiculous to attribute such an important phenomenon as human procreation to such minor causes.  But what greater causes could be required than the eternal laws of nature?  Do we need the direct intervention of a mind?  What mind?  God himself?  Why then are monsters born?”  Descartes’ commitment to embryology by minor causes was indeed widely disdained.  Thus John Ray writes in his Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of His Creation of 1692 that generation “is so admirable and unaccountable, that neither the Atheists nor Mechanick Philosophers have attempted to declare the manner and process of it; but have (as I noted before) very cautiously and prudently broke off their Systems of Natural Philosophy here, and left this Point untoucht; and those Accounts which some of them have attempted to give of the Formation of a few of the Parts, are so excessively absurd and ridiculous, that they need no other Confutation than ha, ha, he.”

We may be able to better appreciate Ray’s dismay by briefly considering the Cartesian embryological program from an anthropological perspective.  Maurice Godelier, in his recent Metamorphoses of Kinship, argues that there is no traditional culture, anywhere, that believes that a man and a woman are sufficient to produce a child. At some point, whether before conception or during gestation, a supernatural force must intervene in the natural process in order to obtain distinctly human offspring.  To cite one of many possible examples from the Christian tradition, in the 12th century Hildegard von Bingen describes the ‘quickening’ of the human fetus on the fortieth day after conception as follows:  “[The fetus is] the complete form of a man which, by the secret decree and hidden will of God, receives the spirit while in the mother’s womb, at the instant justly chosen by God, when there appears a sphere of fire, which has no resemblance to any trait of the human body, and which takes possession of the heart of this form.”

Whether it is a gift of God or a gift of the gods, Godelier argues, a human child’s parents are never capable on their own, through the mere contribution of their respective bodily fluids, of producing a human child.  As Descartes puts it: insofar as I am a thinking thing, I am not my parents’ child.  Among the Baruya of New Guinea for example, the life principle of the group must be passed on through the transmission of semen from older males to newly pubescent ones (through ritualized homosexual fellatio), and when the semen is ultimately transmitted to the Baruya woman it is not just a fluid coming from the father, but indeed a principle produced and sustained by the society as a whole, which in turn can only be explained in relation to the cosmos as a whole.  A hard-nosed analysis could not fail to note that Descartes’s invocation of the immaterial soul transmitted by a Christian God in his account of human reproduction is no less a retreat into the domain of myth, peopled, as Godelier puts it, by invisible entities. 

In this connection, beyond an approach to the history of philosophy that emphasizes the context of discovery, as many already renegade specialists in the history of philosophy now recommend, it may also be fruitful to approach the history of philosophy from the perspective of comparative ethnography. Such an approach would not, of course, be totally new.  Wittgenstein famously took an interest in the difference between life-worlds that made possible claims such as that of the Sudanese Nuer that “twins are birds.”  His interest resulted in a cross-pollination from philosophy to anthropology in the work of Clifford Geertz and others.  Nonetheless, even though a sort of Wittgensteinianism is nearly orthodoxy in much academic philosophy today, today’s academic philosophers, unlike Wittgenstein, almost certainly have nothing to say about Nuer cosmology.  For Wittgenstein as for anthropologists, the interesting task was never to refute the Nuer claim that twins are birds, but rather to seek to understand the conditions under which such a claim could be found compelling.  And it is, I think, exactly in such a spirit that one must approach the claims of the Western scientific as well as pre-scientific philosophical tradition, such as the Anaxagorean doctrine that “the semen is a drop of the brain,” the Aristotelian view that “the sun and man generate man,” or Descartes’ argument that human bodies come into being through “minor causes” alone, while human souls are implanted directly and supernaturally by God. 

Barbara Duden has argued provocatively that, prior to the era of anatomical study, and even perhaps prior to the era of radiography and ultrasound, the fetus belonged to the same class of entities as, e.g., spirits, creatures of legend, and the dead.  It was, that is, invisible, and not part of the world of ‘regular, morally neutral, magically unmanipulable facts’, and hence its subjection to countless superstitious and natural-magical practices.  Here we see that what counts as an invisible entity is not always clear; it is a shifting category.  Nature spirits, creatures of legend, the dead, are on the list of things that, generally speaking, are admitted by traditional societies and excluded by science. 

Claims such as “twins are birds” tend to appear as meaningful only when a broader cosmological context of entities both within and without empirical nature is taken into consideration.  When Colin Scott sums up the James Bay Cree world-view as “a cosmology of generalized sentience, communication, and response,” he sees these relations as encompassing both the entities familiar to the everyday empirical world, and those that lie beyond it.  These relations were once central to the Western tradition, too, in the form of teleology, sympathy, and natural magic, respectively: precisely the three ingredients of Renaissance natural philosophy sought to expurgate in the Scientific Revolution.  It was over the course of the 17th century that belief in nonmechanical links between things in the world –and indeed beyond the world as commonly understood today– came to be seen as superstitious, and it was not until the mid-20th century that philosophers started to see that their modern forebears may have been a bit too hasty.  Thus Wittgenstein’s judgment that Frazer is mistaken to hold that magical rites are “mistakes.”  What counts as a magical rite at all can only be determined against the background of the whole body of knowledge in a culture.  Presumably, the more ultrasound machines there are, the fewer magical potions will be brewed for pregnant women; yet in the absence of such machines, different criteria of rationality must be brought to bear.  This much was obvious to Wittgenstein, yet somehow never really took hold in philosophy departments, even avowedly Wittgensteinian ones. 

At stake is whether there is one standard of rationality –that of exclusive devotion to the neutral, magically unmanipulable fact– and whether this has been, historically, the exclusive mark of cultures that trace themselves back to Greece.  Aristotle, as I’ve said, wanted to replace all aatiyuuhkhaan with tipaachimunn.  Yet he also argued at times for the superiority of poetic truth to historical truth, of Homer to Herodotus.  Thus in the Poetics he says that the historian –the person who collects ‘tidings’– deals only with what is the case, whereas the poet deals with the entire range of the possible.  Aristotle thus seems suspended between the view that myth or poetry contains the more profound truth, and the view that only ‘tidings’ are the sort of speech that can be said to bear truth.  It is in this connection interesting to note that younger more acculturated Cree distinguish between myth and tidings in terms of truth-value, while the more traditional elders refuse to do so.  Scott emphasizes the ‘ecological efficacy’ of myth and ritual, and cites one interviewee who notes that aatiyuuhkhaan “teaches a lesson… often occurs to a hunter.”  It seems that both this Cree hunter and the Aristotle of the Poetics recognize that there is something, if not more true, then at least more interesting than the neutral, unmanipulable fact invoked by Gellner.  And it is interesting not just because it is pleasing to the imagination, or lets one lazily fantasize about supernatural entities, but because it instructs one as to how to act.

It may be that such instruction is felt to be needed principally in the absence of scientific knowledge –again, the more ultrasounds, the fewer magical potions– but this does not necessarily mean that it functions merely as a locum tenens until something better comes along.  I suspect that the two always coexist –concrete empirical facts on the one hand, and on the other rituals that would make no prima facie sense to an outsider– and that if one wants to understand a culture one has to look into the way in which they coexist.  This goes for the culture that happened to produce academic philosophy departments as much as for the hunter-gatherers.   I also suspect that academic philosophy will continue to misunderstand itself for as long as it continues to exaggerate the distance of the brains that produce it from the brains that have spun out the cultural forms of interest to anthropologists. 

(For precise references for works cited, please contact the author.)

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For an extensive archive of Justin Smith’s writing, please visit www.jehsmith.com.

Herbert Muschamp’s recent death has inconveniently coincided with the opening of Beatriz Colomina’s ‘Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X-197X’ at the Architectural Association here in London. Inconvenient, perhaps a glib adjective given a death is involved, because both serve as reminders of the disappointing state of architectural criticism at present.

I should apologize. It’s an industry of which I’m a part. I’m also longing for a days of yore to which I hold no authority or first hand experience. Yes, another upstart whining about the state of such-and-such today. Remember how good it used to be?

But there is proof! Writers like Reyner Banham, Lewis Mumford, Alan Temko, and Ada Louise Huxtable continue to inspire: they disagreed with, and in some cases intensely disliked, one another, but theirs was a generation of dialogue within the industry; of vitriolic diatribes and hold-no-punches arguments, much of which played out on page and for public consumption.

When I was at the Architect’s Newspaper in New York a few years ago, we worked on a feature about architectural criticism. A writer spoke to Alan Temko, who was a critic at the San Francisco Chronicle for much of the latter half of the 20th century, just before his death. He said, ‘The need for good criticism has never been greater, but if you look around, it seems mighty sparse’. It’s a view, as I understand it, shared by many fading giants in the  field, and one that as a young member of the profession I find disheartening.

The power of criticism hasn’t waned: ideally it can bring issues to public awareness and effect change. Rather it’s the criticism itself that has languished. A younger member of staff at my current magazine recently spoke to both Beatriz Colomina, a Princeton-based academic who specializes in architecture and the media, and art critic Hal Foster. He was excited about both interviews, but down because, according to him, the message from both was that architectural journalism has become an insipid PR machine with little in the way of criticism or analysis. Heavy blow, but point taken.

It’s important to note that those days of yore weren’t without flaw. Muschamp, for example, was an over-the-top writer prone to linguistic flights of fancy and with his own set of darlings to whom no amount of praise was excessive. But he was readable and, even further, held a platform to look forward to.

I make no claim to be a Muschamp expert: I’m too young to have followed much of his career. When I first starting reading him (I dimly recall my first exposure as a college freshman: a column on New York’s Folk Art Museum by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien) I found his rather vulgar literary antics tiresome, but soon I realized that it kept bringing me back. He was the sort of Maureen Dowd of architecture—her ‘jaw-jaw about bang bang’ was his ‘supple social fabric’. Muschamp’s was a lexicon of tactility, richness, luxury and excess. It was embarrassing, but it was determined.

Cut to today. I can’t for the life of me think of one architecture critic whose writing I feel in any way inspired or obliged to pick up.

But why?

There are countless reasons, I’m sure. Right now the one I’m trying to stay away from (out of desperate hope, obviously) is a lack of talent present in our generation of writers.

Perhaps I’m just making excuses, but looking through old New Yorker columns by Mumford and reading early Banham, Huxtable etc., there seemed to be something easier about the issues faced in the mid-20th century than now. The advent of modernism was about an easily-identifiable discourse. It was neat—it aspired to specifically laid out ideals and had a straightforward relationship to context. This is not to say that while modernism flourished there were no other architectural styles, but the modern movement was a yardstick and formulated a modernism/other binary: The numerous groups associated with the utopian movement that took off during the 1960s including the metabolists, situationists, the technocrats, the mechanists ad infinitum were still determined by their umbrella descriptor and which most authors compared to modernism.

Urban issues were demarcated by a similar dichotomy. The debates involved divided participants into equally neat schools—Jane Jacobs warred with Robert Moses, Garden City idealist Frederic Osborn with the editors of the Architectural Review (a magazine, no less!)—it was a readily contentious time in which the future of urbanism and architecture were at junctures. The critic’s job, to weigh in on these issues and ideally fall on one side, was thus fairly determined.

Conversely, now architecture and urbanism are increasingly multivalent subjects. The number of aesthetic movements and schools at any given moment is both elastic and organic. Each style addresses a host of new issues, and their cross-fertilization generates innumerable sub-categories each part of a different critical discourse. How one compares neo-modernism with blobism with the rise of digitally generated designs with sustainability has yet to be effectively reconciled. Additionally, with the rise of critical regionalism, most sensible urbanists and architects recognize the importance of bespoke design in a local context—making it harder still to assess the success of a project without intimate knowledge of its place.

There are more forms of publication, too, between countless new magazines and, of course, the internet. The multivalence of architectural types is matched by the polyphony of voices responding. So many blogs, so many sites, so many magazines, so many books. In a recent interview with Richard Meier, Brett Steele (head of the Architectural Association) introduced the topic of architectural monographs. Meier responded by bemoaning the sheer number of monographs now. As the profession wears on it takes less and less to publish your work, and the associated buzz drowns out anything of meaning. The democratization of the metaphorical soapbox has made everyone a critic. This has its benefits, as no longer are we only able to access the opinions of members of the old-boys club, but it also drowns what could be key voices in a sea of babble.

While discussing the issue of climate change, most people now accept that a solution must involve either a tax or a permit system to reduce emissions and create the incentives for lower emission technologies.  Most people also assume that such policies must be coupled with active governmental regulation of certain industries, car-emissions standards, decommissioning of power-plants, alternative-fuel blending specifications, subsidies to research and countless other governmental enterprises.  My opinion is that governments around the world should work hard towards implementing a proper carbon market or tax system, and do absolutely nothing else. 

All government efforts at subsidizing research, mandating blending-specifications or installing emissions standards are probably futile but more likely counter-productive.  Further, even if such measures could potentially prove positive, politically, they are likely to distract from the need to establish a proper market/tax system, which is the only way to solve the carbon crisis we face.  To illustrate this, I will discuss three of the most popular ideas that are suggested as courses of action for governments to take, and outline some problems with them.

1- Subsidizing research:

Everyone suggests that the government should spend billions of dollars researching alternative energy, and trying to find the next clean and cheap energy source that will solve all of our problems.  The analogy has often been made between the quest for new energy and The Manhattan Project.  This analogy is very inaccurate, however. The Manhattan Project aimed at achieving a single goal and appropriating it for the US government; the point was that this aim—a nuclear bomb—would be kept with the American government, and not released onto the market for people to sell and make profit off.  This is very different in the case of energy, where if we come across a new useful technology, it will have to be widely disseminated and applied for it to be effective.  As such, there is an enormous opportunity for profit to be made out of this and consequently, incentives for millions to look into a solution.

Another difference is that we fundamentally do not know from where the solutions to our carbon problems will come.  There are countless potential solutions and scenarios, and millions of people around the world working on devising the next big thing.  Whether this will come from hydroelectric, geothermal, nuclear energy, biofuels, carbon sequestration, liquefied gas or any combination of the above remains an open question that no one with any knowledge of energy could ever dare answer with any confidence.  Seeing as such, there are endless possibilities for research agendas that could uncover a sustainable and clean energy path for human use, and a government will simply not be able to know each one of these, or to fund them all.  And of course, no government will ever be able to truly determine when such a research effort is a “success”, since world consumption of energy is an enormous complex system whose complexity precludes it from being analyzed properly in a lab.  For a technology to be truly successful, the only way to demonstrate its success is for it to succeed in reducing carbon in the real world in a cost-effective manner.  Therefore, since the profit motive exists, and the governments of the world need to ensure that markets can capture the negative effects of carbon to produce this incentive, governments would do best to just align the incentives for innovation to “let a thousand flowers bloom” and allow everyone in the world to proceed with their innovation trying to minimize their costs.  When all the energies of every single consumer of carbon emissions in the world is dedicated to reducing carbon emissions and minimize costs, it is probably safe to trust that the collective intelligence of humans will be able to work on such a problem better than any government-funded project, no matter how big.

Finally, those who advocate large government spending forget something very important: governments have indeed spent a lot of money on such research, with results that are mixed at best.  Biofuels, on their own, have received subsidies over the last 5 years alone that match the total amount of money spent on the Manhattan Project.  All that this money has achieved so far is subsidize corn-farmers and allow them to continue producing ethanol from corn; an exercise as prudent as burning $100 bills, though much more harmful to the environment.  We have to remember that government subsidies for research will be directed according to political agendas, lobbies and special interests.  For every good dollar spent on research, there will be 10 spent on Iowa corn and other such white elephants.

2- Fuel-blending specifications:

One of the most popular fads in energy circles today concerns mandates of alternative-fuel-blending specifications.  If only we would mix enough renewable fuels with our gasoline, we are told; we will reduce emissions and solve the energy crisis in one shot.  This is not only wrong, but actually very dangerously counter-productive.  When mandates for such blending are passed, the government is artificially increasing demand for supposedly “sustainable” or “green” fuel and causing an enormous increase in its production.  To begin with, no one can know with much certainty whether such fuels are indeed “sustainable” or “renewable”, but it is highly likely that when demand for them is boosted by such mandates, their production processes will become very harmful to the environment.
The EU directive on biofuels is the best such example.  By mandating a 5.75% biodiesel blend in European diesel fuel, the EU has now increased the price of biodiesel to the extent that whole forests are being cut down in Indonesia and Malaysia to meet the market demand.  While this elaborate hoax is possibly reducing emissions from European tailpipes, it is increasing emissions from the production and transportation of fuels from all over the world, and more importantly, from the enormous amount of deforestation it causes.

Whether biodiesel will ever be an efficient fuel is not the main question here; it may indeed be a good fuel to utilize one day.  The point is: the only way we will ever know if it is indeed useful is by setting a market/tax system that internalizes all the emissions from the production of such fuels, and allows the market to determine what is best. Such a system would surely not result in massive deforestation in order to slightly reduce European tailpipe emissions.

3- Emission standards

The specter of mandating that all new cars be made with a certain level of emission standards is an initially attractive one.  It could, possibly, lead to reductions in the production of CO2.  But without a proper market/tax system that reduces the ability to emit CO2 everywhere in the economy, this effect is likely to be transitory: reduced fuel consumption in cars will probably be compensated with increased consumption of fuel in other sectors of the economy, unless we have an economy-wide tax or cap that limits total emissions of CO2. But once we have such a tax or cap, then it is pointless to waste our time figuring out emission standards for cars, since the tax or cap will reduce emissions all across the economy in a sufficient way, bringing about reductions in car emissions as well, if they were to be needed.  This same argument could be applied to mandates of efficiency on power-plants, airplanes, or any other major source of emissions.  Attempting to address these issues one sector at a time is similar to trying to squeeze a balloon: squeeze one side and the other bulges.

******
These measures, while they might appeal to voters and well-meaning environmentalists, constitute no more than what might be called environmental tokenism—they will show that you care, but they will not make any real difference to the world.

Perhaps the biggest problem with all of the above mechanisms is that they distract from very important and useful political momentum towards solving climate change.    Now that the battle of public opinion has been largely won, and most people in rich countries are sold on the need to act against climate change, we run a serious risk of being stuck in years—or decades—of hand-wringing environmental tokenism, where electorates continuously demand—and get—little incremental token steps that achieve nothing.

A US or European politician could probably pursue a very successful re-election strategy by continuing to give out subsidies in the form of “research funding” for their cronies, while delaying real action on a market or a tax that would force these cronies to act seriously on emissions, all while appeasing the public with all their spending and emissions-standards and meaningless regulations.  As such, a pretty sustainable political dynamic is set in place where different interests are met in different ways, and real action is never taken. 

What we need is to utilize a carbon tax or market that will lead to a sufficient reduction of emissions.  However, designing, implementing and monitoring such a system is by no means an easy feat.  I have so far deliberately blurred the distinction between a carbon tax and a carbon trading systems, though in reality, these are two very different things.  Governments need to decide which is the most effective form to use; what initial prices, quantities or tax rates to set; how to monitor this system, and how to ensure that it doesn’t cause too much economic turmoil. Perhaps even more difficult than all of this is trying to establish an international consensus around making such a system truly global in its reach, and doing so in a way that does not hinder the development of poor countries and make the poor of the world bear the majority of the burden.  These are all serious and complicated problems that will not be solved in a day.  The sooner we start working on them, the better.  The less time, money and political capital we waste on tokenism, the greater our chances of success.

If there is going to be real action on climate change, there is no alternative to reducing carbon emissions, and there is no better way to reduce carbon emissions than by enforcing a proper tax or market for carbon.  Everything else is at best time-wasting, but at worst dangerous fiddling while the planet burns.

For more of my writing, see TheSaifHouse

All cities and towns in the Südtirol (South Tyrol) have two names: a German and an Italian one. Indeed, the Südtirol itself is called Alto Adige in Italian. The largest city in the province (and its capital) is Bozen in German, Bolzano in Italian. The second-largest is Meran (German) or Merano (Italian). The third largest is where I live (and which is my wife Margit's birthplace) and it goes by the names Brixen and Bressanone. Now large is only a relative term. About as many people live in Brixen as work in the Empire State Building every day: ~20,000. Bozen, which is 40 kilometers to the south of us, has a population of a little over 100,000.

The streets in these cities and towns also have two names, German and Italian, and which is to be listed first on street signs has been a divisive and contentious concern in the past, the signs having been changed every few years for some time. (German names are now listed first, in a symbolic Italian bestowal of autonomy on its odd German-speaking province.) Half the Tyrol was annexed by Italy in 1919 according to the Treaty of Saint Germain, after the decisive defeat of the Austro-Hungarian army in 1918. The northern half of the Tyrol remains part of Austria to this day with Innsbruck as its capital. The population of the Südtirol, however, had an uncomfortable relationship with the Italian federal government, especially after the fascists adopted a policy of Italianization in the province after the mid-twenties. After WWII, and up until the 60s there was a small but active armed independence movement in the province. Since then, things have been relatively calm, and the German-speaking majority seems to live without explicit tension with the twenty-something percent Italians now amongst them. The removal of formal borders between Austria and Italy (because of the Schengen Treaty) and the adoption of a common currency have also made it possible for the Tyroleans in the north and the south to feel more united. And Austria provides special privileges to students from the Südtirol who wish to study at universities there, so a large number of students go there rather than attend Italian colleges. The medium of instruction at primary and secondary schools in the Südtirol is mostly German, but there are also Italian schools. But enough recent history. The city I am living in is a lot older than all this.

Brixen lies in the Eisacktal, which is the valley carved out by the river Eisack in the Alps. This basin was populated even in the stone age. The view from the balcony of my apartment in the photo below [all photos here are my own except the one of me, which was taken by Margit] shows the Eisack flowing in the foreground. In the background, the sun is rising from behind Plose, a peak of about 8,500 feet. My apartment is at about 2,000 feet above sea level.

The area was eventually captured by Drusus, the stepson of Emperor Augustus, and then in 15 B.C. incorporated into the Roman province of Rhaetia. (So I guess capture by the Italians is not such a new thing here.) After the fall of the Roman empire, it became part of the Bayern dukedom in 590. In 901 King Ludwig the Child donated it to Bishop Zacharias. The official modern birthday of the city of Brixen is September 13, 901.

In 970, the Bishop Albuin moved his residence from Saben (Klausen) to Brixen, and after the turn of the millennium (yeah, that millennium) a wall was built around the city. This past Thursday, Margit and I rode our bikes from Brixen to Klausen (about 12 km from our apartment) on a lovely bicycle path which runs next to the Eisack all the way, and then climbed straight up 800 feet to Saben (Bishop Abuin's former residence), which you can see at the top of the photograph below. You can also see Margit on her bike in the lower right hand corner.

Brixen became the capital of the province after Emperor Konrad II donated it to Bishop Hartwig in 1027, before most of the province was taken over by the Counts of Tirol in the 1200s. In some form or other, the Holy Roman spiritual princedom of Brixen, consisting of the small towns of Brixen, Klausen, Bruneck and some district courts, survived until its secularization in 1803. Almost all the historical information about Brixen given above was first gleaned (and then rechecked from other sources) from the informational pamphlet provided by the tourism office of Brixen. The pamphlet also states:

Brixen remained the center of art and education throughout the Middle Ages, gained civic self-administration on the threshold of modern times, lived on trade and craft and had to bear the accommodation of mercenaries. After 1803 Brixen became a little province town and its economic position did not recover until the beginning of tourism, favored by the mild climate and natural beauty of Brixen.

Today Brixen prides itself on its good reputation as a health spa, and as a place with a lot of art treasures and valuable collections.

The Rienz river empties into the Eisack at Brixen. The region is self-sufficient in electricity generated from these waters. In the photo below you can see the Eisack on the left (I am standing on a bridge across it) and the Rienz coming down on the right side. They join a couple of hundred meters behind where I am standing:

In the 10th century, a cathedral was built in Brixen, and this building today dominates the town square (known as the Domplatz). The photograph below shows the Domplatz from the south side of it looking north (the building with the green roof is the town hall):

The “Dom” of the Domplatz can be seen here (looking northeast from the south):

The Domplatz has various interesting features, such as this fountain sculpture designed by Martin Rainer:

or this Jesus:

And here is a closer look at the town hall (notice the German first, Italian second):

In 1909 a “Millennium Column” was built to celebrate a thousand years of the city's history. There is a statue of the Bishop Zacharias, and at the top a lamb, which is Brixen's heraldic symbol:

The old city center itself is very pretty with narrow meandering cobblestone streets (closed to motor traffic, but you can go on bicycles) lined with privately owned shops (sorry folks, no Gap Kids, Victoria's Secret, Banana Republic, or even a single McDonald's to be seen anywhere here) and cafes and other places that are clean and well-lighted:

There is a lot of tourism (mainly Germans, Austrians, and Italians) all year round. In the summer there is hiking and mountain climbing, biking, hang-gliding, etc., and in the winter some of the best skiing in Europe. Innsbruck, where the winter olympics have been held twice (1964, 1976) is only an hour away (I went on Friday and saw the outlandish and huge ski jump at Bergisel designed by Zaha Hadid there) by car through the Brenner Pass. The mountain behind my apartment in the first photo, Plose, has a ski run with a five thousand foot vertical drop on it. There are luxury hotels (and some cheaper ones) in Brixen to cater to the tourists. One of the oldest and best-known (and near my house) is The Elephant:

Now, for those of you who read my last column at 3QD, I am extremely happy to report that Frederica is COMPLETELY healthy and VERY happy in her new home:

Freddy pawing at a ball I have thrown, and in her typical nap position on our bed, on the right.

When she was a young girl, Margit received a bike as a birthday present which she apparently did not like because it was not stylish enough for her self-image. She never rode it, but her parents have kept it in good condition for more than a quarter century. It is now mine, and with pride I have named it Red Dragon:

This one-speed girls' bike gets me everywhere. Margit has her own 21-speed new bike, but the Silver Bullet (as she has named it) can never beat the Red Dragon!

All my previous Monday Musings can be seen here.

Ich wünsche euch eine gute Woche!

Michael Blim

Can you imagine a world without the rich?

You might say that the rich we have had as long as we have had the poor. As the incredulous swell in an old wine commercial said to the ingénue: “How do you think I got so rich?”

Most Americans today accept the rich as they do death and taxes as another one of life’s annoying basic facts. It is unusual for Americans to realize that we as a society are responsible for their existence. We believe what they tell us. Once again, an old commercial suffices: As John Houseman, bow-tied, and quintessentially the patrician Harvard law professor he once played put it about his client: “At Smith Barney, we make money the old fashioned way – we earn it!”

(Parenthetically, who among the moneychangers would dare run this ad now?)

We need not countenance their existence forever. One need not bring back Stalin to reduce or eliminate the rich. Scandinavian countries do quite well in minimizing their presence. And there is little mystery in how to reduce or eliminate the economic power of the rich. Steeply progressive income taxes, elimination of inherited wealth through estate taxes, and income redistribution along with a robust welfare state can do it.

If Americans examined the deeper damage that the rich do to society, perhaps they might be willing to try cutting the rich down to size.

Let’s look at how the rich damage American society.

First, they burn up resources. Andrew Hacker in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books paid tribute to John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society for its scathing critique of the lifestyles of the rich and its condemnation of how they squandered national resources on personal consumption. These resources, Galbraith argued, could be better put to solving the country’s social problems. As noted above, there are remedies that Americans thus far refuse to apply, and they are as obvious as they are ignored.

Second, the rich corrupt the major institutions of American society. It bears repeating that the rich don’t get rich or stay rich simply by making better widgets and saving the profits from their corporate endeavors. They make legislatures dysfunctional, regulatory authorities their watchdogs, and professions their poodles. They corrupt presidents. They even corrupt each other, as corporate heads are bribed with board positions and in turn protect the interests of the company that bribed them.

Consider their corruption of several essential marketplaces for goods and services. What is the recuperative value of a luxury hotel inside a major hospital, complete with chef and concierge services? That depends, I suppose, on what is being recuperated. In the hospital’s case, they recover money, they claim, and lots of it, when compared to serving those Medicaid-assisted poor and the Medicare-dependent elderly and disabled. Instead of lamenting low Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements, they are pandering to the rich. Often it is for more than just money for services rendered. There are new hospital wings and prestigious care centers and institutes to think about, and who better to hit on but the rich who have just spent a week at the local Plaza Hotel hospital?

If pampering patients makes them get well, then how can it be denied to others? But that isn’t the point of the white glove treatment, is it?

Even as doctors desert careers in internal medicine owing to perceived lower pay and longer hours, other internists open boutiques, shrink their practices to a quarter of their former sizes, and charge $3000 per person annual membership fees (See my column “Is There a Doctor in the House?”). Every time internists create boutiques, they diminish the number of doctors, already declining, that provide medical care for everyone else.

The rich even corrupt careers like hospital administration. A recent Boston Globe story disclosed that the presidents of Boston’s major teaching hospitals make near or over a million dollars each a year (NB: without bonuses added). The last time I checked, hospitals of this sort were non-profit institutions. One would think that the boards of these non-profit hospitals would blanch at paying them a million, if only for fear of bad publicity. Yet, as the boards are composed mostly of very rich people, they by practically class instinct would acknowledge that someone whom they employ with so much responsibility deserves a comparable reward. This, after all, is their divine right to ungodly compensation too, so the divine right must be defended everywhere, or it will eventually obtain nowhere.

The rich corrupt universities. Elite schools become elite schools because they service the elite. If that seems tautological, that’s because it’s causal, not casual. The rich made elite schools with their money, and the payback for their accumulated billions, according to Daniel Golden, Wall Street Journal reporter in his new book The Price of Admission, is legacy admissions for their heirs. The subtitle of his book could be “how George Bush got to Yale,” and perhaps how he managed to actually get “C” grades. (You have heard of the gentleman’s “C” haven’t you?) Golden shows how elite schools take in hefty percentages of legacy undergraduates. He also shows in the case of Duke how the university effectively solicited bribes by admitting rich students with the expectation that endowment money would follow from them and their families.

And we thought we lived in a meritocracy. Horatio Alger was right: the best way to succeed in business is to marry the boss’ doctor – or, it seems, play lacrosse at Dartmouth with his son.

But there is a third and perhaps the most insidious way whereby the rich corrupt American society. They corrupt the nature of society itself by turning their corrupting powers and dubious satisfactions into cultural standards for the rest of America. The great if largely forgotten social critic Thorstein Veblen in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) made this point precisely and with disarming if utterly cynical simplicity. Wealth, Veblen argued, was a source of honor, and thus having it created an invidious distinction. Others emulated the rich to achieve wealth and status. Seeing this, the rich manifest their dominance through conspicuous consumption, which also has the happy effect of controlling and corrupting American institutions, as I have suggested above in the cases of elite higher education and medical care.

Thus, for instance, philanthropy, though universally considered generous and altruistic, has a predatory component. It is, as the French sociologist Marcel Mauss would have noted, a gift that demands reciprocation – in this case power – in return. When Mike Bloomberg gives upwards of a billion dollars to the Johns Hopkins medical colossus, he receives respect in return, and probably influence in the future direction of the institution. Bill Gates, to take another case, is now one of a handful of the world’s most influential people directing global world health initiatives. Warren Buffett has decided that his friend Bill, Gates that is, should use his wealth in Gates-sponsored initiatives too. All of this is done without a whimper about the loss of democratic control of our priorities, and without a whisper of the impropriety of handing over state and in Gates’ case global sovereignty to the rich.

The rich also receive sanction for their wealth and the means by which they made it. Gates’ Microsoft may have been found by the European Community to have used monopoly power to kill off its competition, but this fact is buried on the financial pages. His philanthropy is strictly page one. And the rich actually claim their legitimacy from beyond the grave, a power for which every legacy student at Harvard rejoices. Everyone remembers that the great Andrew Carnegie, either out of soulful suffering or by virtue of his attachment to the strictures of Scottish Protestantism, gave away his total fortune. Those beautiful rural town libraries and several foundations are the result. Few remember how his steel company was responsible for the bloodiest and most lethal counterattack on a union strike in American history. With money, the rich not only predate the rest of society, but also produce a sanctifying grace that absolves their sins.

Go thou and do likewise, the rich can be heard to say. Instead of stripping the rich of their predatory and envy-making wealth, several hundred million Americans put their hopes and dreams into a chase after wealth and an orgy of conspicuous consumption. No more just social order emerges. No, instead the rich and their divine right are affirmed. After all, how can you be against wealth and predatory power if you chase it? Millions of American lives are wrecked in emulating the rich and pursuing their path. Millions more may not emulate the rich, but the rich and their wannabees economically and socially run them over anyway in the great chase for wealth and power. The poor, the working classes, hell, everyone in the bottom four fifths of American society are exploited by the rich at the same time they are upbraided for falling behind. You’d have to be a swell not to notice that the rich create a standard of living that only the rich can afford.

Ponder this and this observation of Thorstein Veblen’s:

“The fact that the usages, actions, and views of the well-to-do leisure class acquire the character of a prescriptive canon of conduct for the rest of society, gives added weight and reach to the conservative influence of that class. It makes it incumbent upon all reputable people to follow their lead. So that, by virtue of its high position as the avatar of good form, the wealthier class comes to exert a retarding influence upon social development far in excess of that which the simple numerical strength of the class would assign it. Its prescriptive example acts to greatly stiffen the resistance of all other classes against any innovation….” (Penguin Books, 1994, 200)

Feel stuck?