by Alyssa Pelish

Robert McKee, in that how-to book called Story that everyone in L.A. quoted to me without citing, says that story is what the world demands of us. I won’t quibble with this. There’s also a popular theory which has it that narrative is really all about desire (to tell one’s story, to find out what happens next, to be heard, etc.). In L.A., as it happens, it was typically in bars and in bed that both McKee’s dictums and people’s screenplay pitches were repeated to me.

Everyone has their theory about stories, about why we tell them. And we do tell them —even though most of the stories we tell on a daily basis are more like the unedited spools of a voice mail message than like the intricate involutions of, say, The Faerie Queene or the latest Terry Gilroy screenplay, or even the simple symmetry of an Aesop’s fable. Most of our stories have no compelling climax, or they fizzle out before they conclude and bore our listeners before they’re over, or they’re needlessly repetitive, or nothing really happens in them. But still we tell them. We’re story-telling animals — homo narratus — is the happy conventional wisdom. It’s how we make sense of stuff. Or pass on information. Or entertain each other. Or learn. Or something. And so it’s there to wonder about, and to explain: why do we tell stories? What evolutionary purpose, what social purpose, what purpose at all does it serve?

This is an incredibly popular question. Game theorists and literary theorists and evolutionary biologists — everybody, at one time or another — have taken a stab at explaining it. When I lived in L.A., people handed McKee’s pronouncements to me. When I was in grad school, I was partial to Peter Brooks’ and Roland Barthes’ ideas on the subject. But I have no novel theory. I’m not here to float a revolutionary explanation for cocktail party anecdotes or campfire tales. The thing is, I’ve become fascinated by the profiles on online dating sites. This is mainly because they’re telling stories for such a transparent purpose. The self-summaries, the self-justifications, the lists of favorite things and unique skills and continents traveled: they all constitute parts of an autobiography composed for public consumption, and they’re all being told, of course, to seduce.

This is one of the sexier ideas of narrative theory — the pairing of narrative and desire. So it’s somewhat gratifying to see it played out so unequivocally, and on such a large scale, in a non-academic, even non-literary, setting. There is never any question about the role desire plays in these profiles. Even if you consider the most guileless among them, every single profile is written out of desire. And not just the sort of desire in the abstract that’s so often used as a titillating metaphor in literary studies; people write these profiles because they’re looking for, at the very least, a date — and at most, a mate.

Read more »

By Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash

1. MEN RAPE FROM LUST NOT RAGE

Let me start with a facetious declaration: the only reason I'm not a potential rapist is that I'm 5' 5″ and weigh a 125 pounds. Unless I go on a two-year weight-training regimen, most women would be able to fight me off successfully.

Which brings me to the point of why men rape. It's because they can. Men have physical power over women. They're bigger and stronger than their victims, so they rape them. Being pragmatic, men have availed themselves of this advantage since the dawn of man.

In fact, rape is as natural to mankind as nesting is to womankind. We may frown upon it now — thank heavens — but a few hundred years ago men were raping and pillaging like locusts tearing up a cornfield, which afforded them a pleasant diversion from burning women as witches or killing them not-so-softly via childbirth. Back then, men had absolute power over women; accordingly, so did their penises.

Did that mean they had anger issues with women? I don't think so. They just did what came naturally. In fact, I don't buy into the notion that men rape because they hate women. I think most rapists rape because they lust, not because they're mad at women. Of course there are some serial offenders who are psychopaths, with the empathy section of their brain MIA. But I believe rape is a different story for most Ivy League students who date-rape co-eds, or for army guys who rape fellow soldiers, or for Peace Corp volunteers who rape fellow volunteers. We're talking about thousands of nice, well-brought-up lads, who will go on to marry and have children, if they haven't done so already. I don't think they rape because they hate women, as comforting a notion as that may be to the ears of pop-psychology feminists. I think these men rape because they want a particular woman and have few qualms about forcing themselves upon that woman; they know they can get away with it. Their physical power makes them feel entitled to having their way with their lust object. Heck, they probably think they're doing their victims a favor by throwing them a boner. It's not hate or anger that makes them do it — they just want to screw a particular female. Some of these errant bastards will do it again. Some might even make a habit of it.

2. BHL AND DSK

A prick like Dominique Strauss-Kahn has most probably been leaping on French chambermaids all his life, and gotten away with it. The mistake he made was to try and rape an African immigrant in New York, a ballsy woman who was strong enough to fight back, and who let him stick his manhood in her mouth twice after he slapped her around a bit, but in the end she escaped.

Read more »

Pacquiao has achieved what most Philippine leaders have not—stop crime. For the duration of the Pacquiao fever at least. The widely shared sentiment is more than a joke. Every time Pacquiao goes to the boxing ring, everyone stays in their homes, glued to the television sets. Strangers in bars watching television become instant friends, hollering in unison for their hero.

Pacquiao seems to be all about winning. He has won in eight weight divisions, gathering ten world boxing titles, a feat matched by no other. In 2009, he was included in Time’s 2009 Most Influential People. He has recorded an album and starred in several box office movies. He has become a commercial model for all sorts of products—liquor, gadgets, shoes, milk. Politicians have tried to attach their names to his, hoping perhaps his charisma, his fame would rub off. His wife and mother have gone from being ordinary citizens to icons constantly seen on feature shows, their opinions sought after on issues of marriage, lifestlyle, fashion. He ran for a congressional seat, representing South Cotabato in 2007 and lost. When he ran again in 2011, this time representing Saranggani, he won.

All throughout his campaign he has identified poverty as his main focus. It would be the greatest fight of his life. The Philippines is a Third World Country, and most candidates identify poverty as the focus of their campaigns, but somehow with Pacquiao, there seemed to be a genuineness attached to it. This was after all, a man who was once poor, who did his best to make something better of himself. He was everyone’s hero. His media portrayal also didn’t hurt—his album was dedicated to the country; its lead single ‘Para Saiyo (roughly translated in English as ‘For You’) basically told of how he was talking the blows of his opponents as a sacrifice to his country. During his post-win interviews, he would often reiterate the sentiment, that he was glad to have been of service to his fellowmen—an act sometimes read as arrogance, a sense of bloated self importance.

Despite qualms of his inexperience in politics, Pacquiao has gotten the nods of environmentalists and NGOs when he took a stand to investigate illegal mining in Sarangani. Feared to be one of those lawmakers who would avoid discussions because of lack of knowledge, Pacquiao has proved critics wrong, speaking up in his much-derided English on bills, expressing his arguments the way he expressed himself before international media, with confidence and not a hint of shyness. That alone must have gathered enough respect for the boxer-turned-politician.

Read more »

by Tom Jacobs

How on earth did anyone get the idea that people can communicate with one another by letter! Of a distant person one can think, and of a person who is near one can catch hold – all else goes beyond human strength. Writing letters, however, means to denude oneself before the ghosts, something for which they greedily wait. Written kisses don’t reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by ghosts. It is on this ample nourishment that they multiply so enormously. Humanity senses this and fights against it in order to eliminate as far as possible the ghostly element between people and to create natural communication, the peace of souls; it has invented the railway, the motorcar, the aeroplane. But it’s no longer any good, these are evidently inventions made at the moment of crashing. The opposing side is so much calmer and stronger; after the postal service it has invented the telegraph, the telephone, the radiograph. The ghosts won’t starve, but we will perish (226).

~ Franz Kafka, “Letters to Felice”

I happened once, one fine summer afternoon several years ago, to be standing on a street corner in downtown Chicago, waiting for the light to change. I had taken a late lunch from my crappy temp job, and I usually bought a sandwich and then sought refuge from work in the Cultural Center, where daily lectures on a range of topics were given by graduate students from the University of Chicago. I had just listened to one of these as I gnawed on a turkey sandwich and was walking back to work through clouds of muddled thoughts about (in this case) ancient Greece and the use of masks in theater. This all had the effect of abstracting me from the modern realities of the skyscrapers that towered vaguely menacingly above me.

It was just then that I happened to look up and see a school bus slowly roll through the intersection before me. Perhaps it was on its way to a field trip to the Art Institute of Chicago. I saw a little boy, perhaps eight years old, sitting in the very last seat of the bus and looking directly at me. We held each other’s gaze for perhaps two seconds, and then, just as the bus lurched forward, and just as I was about to smile and return to mundane day, he put his hand up and gave me the finger.

Read more »

by Quinn O'Neill

The latest battle in the long standing war between evolution and creationism was lost in Louisiana last week. 17-year-old Zack Kopplin spearheaded a valiant effort to repeal Louisiana’s Science Education Act, an Act that opens the door to the teaching of Creationism in science classrooms. Tragically, the bill was shelved and the anti-evolution Act retained.

Some might wonder what could be so terrible about teaching students that we were created in our current form by a kind and loving God. It’s an idea that can help people to cope with mortality and uncertainty and offer a sense of purpose to our existence. It may seem pretty harmless.

The teaching of Creationism as science constitutes a tragic failure of science education for a number of reasons, some of which don’t get mentioned often enough. When debate bubbles up on the internet, it tends to revolve around what is and isn’t true, with talk of facts and evidence. Certainly evolution is true and there are reams and museums of supporting evidence; but the rejection of facts and evidence itself isn’t really tragic in my opinion, it’s just disappointing and frustrating.

The real tragedy has more to do with the power and utility of evolution than with its truth. Evolution is a potent concept that can transform the way we see the world and everything in it. In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, Daniel Dennett compares the concept to a sort of “universal acid” that’s so powerful it will inevitably eat through anything used to contain it. In Dennett's words, evolution “eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view, with most of the old landmarks still recognizable, but transformed in fundamental ways.”

But evolution doesn’t just change the way we look at things, it’s necessary for making sense of much of science. Major science organizations have acknowledged this vital role. The American Association for the Advancement of Science states:

“The modern concept of evolution provides a unifying principle for understanding the history of life on earth, relationships among all living things, and the dependence of life on the physical environment. While it is still far from clear how evolution works in every detail, the concept is so well established that it provides a framework for organizing most of the biological knowledge into a coherent picture.”¹

Read more »

by Misha Lepetic

I could tell you how many steps make up the streets rising like stairways, and the degree of the arcades’ curves, and what kind of zinc scales cover the roofs; but I already know this would be the same as telling you nothing.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 1974, p4

In the headlong rush to lead us to the promised land of the “Smart City” one finds a surprising amount of agreement between the radically different constituencies of public urban planners, global corporations and scruffy hackers. This should be enough to make anyone immediately suspicious. Often quite at odds, these entities – and it seems, most anyone else – contend that there is no end to the benefits associated with opening the sluices that hold back a vast ocean’s worth of data. Nevertheless, the city’s traditional imperviousness to measurement sets a high bar for anyone committed to its quantification, and its ambiguity and amorphousness will present a constant challenge to the validity and ownership of the data and the power thereby generated.

We can trace these intentions back to the notoriously misinterpreted statement allegedly made by Stewart Brand, that “information wants to be free.”* Setting aside humanity’s talent to anthropomorphize just about anything, we can nevertheless say that urban planners indeed want information to be free, since they believe that transparency is an easy substitute for accountability; corporations champion such freedom since information is increasingly equated with new and promising revenue streams and business models; and hackers believe information to be perhaps the only raw material required to forward their own agendas, regardless of which hat they happen to be wearing.

All three groups enjoy the simple joys of strictly linear thinking: that is to say, the more information there is, the better off we all are. But before we allow ourselves to be seduced by the resulting reams of eye candy, let us consider the anatomy of a successful exercise in urban visualization.

Read more »

Michael Blim

You know things have once again reached a pretty pass when you start recalling Seinfeld episodes in the midst of the morning newspaper read. By the end of this past week, it seemed to me that a goodly part of America had become Seinfeld’s Bizarro World, a place where down was up, left was right, and the violation of common sense a comic premise.

What’s funny on Seinfeld is very unfunny as a description of a country’s politics. Many nations slip in and out of Bizarro World. Cults of personality can create laugh riots, if you are not murdered or left to die tortured in a cell because you laughed out loud. Italy’s Berlusconi lives in a world so bizarre that he took to button-holing his G-8 colleagues last week in Deauville, France to complain about how “Communist” judges were persecuting him, as if being prosecuted for sleeping with 17-year olds were somehow nothing more a political setup.

If only America’s descent into Bizarro World were simply a Seinfeld episode, a story about nothing that like cotton candy melts in your mouth and disappears leaving nothing more than the disagreeable sensation of acute indigestion. But of course, it’s not. We need suffer those who don’t get the joke, and their insistent upside-down vision of the world sends the national gyroscope into a tizzy.

Read more »

By Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

Pragmatism is widely regarded as the Unites States’ only indigenous philosophical movement. Founded by a quirky and largely isolated genius, Charles Peirce, pragmatism was introduced as a method for clear thinking which insisted that all words and statements be understood in terms of concrete experience. It was popularized by William James in a series of lectures delivered in Boston and New York 1906 and 1907. Indeed, many of the connotations of the term as it is used in popular parlance derive from James’s writing; it was James who identified pragmatism with the doctrines the truth is what “works” and that statements should be accepted or rejected in part according to their success. Yet pragmatism received its most sustained articulation in the philosophy of John Dewey, who in the course of his long academic career incorporated central insights of Peirce and James into an all-embracing philosophical system of experimental naturalism. In Dewey’s hands, pragmatism became the philosophical basis for accounts of art, experience, mind, knowledge, language, communication, education, happiness, science, religion, and politics. And Dewey embodied the pragmatic commitment to unifying theory and practice. He was a tireless public intellectual whose activities ran the gamut from marching in support of women’s suffrage to helping to found the NAACP to presiding over the Trotsky trial in Mexico. It is with good reason, then, that contemporary philosophers who are most keen to ally themselves with this “classical” pragmatist movement tend to idolize Dewey.

Read more »

by Justin E. H. Smith

I get some of my best writing done at Charles de Gaulle International Airport, where I now sit.

I could use my time here otherwise; I could learn the layout of the place, something that after countless visits remains entirely mysterious to me. I've made out at least a vague resemblance to some coiled viper that has, at intervals, swallowed several large rodents, causing it to bulge in spots and to narrow in others. The whole snake surrounds a mass of concrete curly-queues, traffic roundabouts at various elevations, each serving its own class of vehicle. Everything is concrete: concrete slabs of ceiling supported on concrete pillars, concrete ramps blocked off by concrete barriers. The ghost of General de Gaulle himself haunts this grey mess. It sings of French third-way-ism, flimsy viennoiseries at certain narrowings along the viper's vertebrae, sad succursales of the Hippopotamus chain at others; the shells of abandoned Minitel cabins: all the sagging, unsustainable sadness of a half-Soviet hybrid. It looks to be on the verge of collapse, and indeed great chunks of it have collapsed. Scrap metal litters the runways and has been known to trip up Concordes. The arrivals screens have been seen to report as retardé what they might more accurately have described as disparu.

I sit and stare at my computer screen and write because, in truth, this place terrifies me.

But I'm sitting here, obviously, because I've been going around France again, which means also going around exchanging bisous. This is problematic for me, as I am an American, and even among Americans am exceptionally awkward when it comes to physical contact. But over the years I've practiced, and have now reached the point where I am able to kiss strange cheeks with passable elegance.

But why all this kissing, anyway?

Something needs to be done to inaugurate social interaction. There must be some signalling of a transition from each doing his or her own thing, to each participating in a shared moment. The Japanese mark this transition by a subtle bow, Americans by a handshake (or sometimes a half-assed 'hug', a concept to which I'll return shortly); bonobos mark it by genital displays. But the merely visual presentation of the Japanese does not seem transformative enough, and in the bonobos' case it seems to misread the character of the impending interaction (or at least to read it in a way that human beings would rather not acknowledge too soon). The American handshake is indissociably linked to commercial interests, to deal-making and to vulgar Mammonism. One needs, as the Europeans have understood, to get the lips involved, to make a little suction noise that announces that two human bodies are in the same place doing the same thing, in order to set a properly human encounter in motion.

Some etymological considerations. The verb 'to kiss' in many languages is formed by onomatopoeia. In Sanskrit the verbal root is chumb– (giving us the lovely syllabic redoubling of the third-person singular perfect form: chuchumba, 'she kissed'). 'Kiss' and 'küssen' hear the sound differently than their Indo-European ancestor, but somehow no less accurately. When the verb is not onomatopoeic, it often emerges from a semantic cluster that is even more revealing than the natural sound of a kiss. Thus the Russian tselovat' is connected to tsel', which is to say 'target'. And isn't that what kiss-compressed lips in fact are? Isn't that what bodily orifices are?

Read more »

by Rafiq Kathwari

As arranged, they meet the first time.
He’s law student. She’s a child-bride.

She wears red— for rancor?
Head bowed, veiled little stars

In gold thread, waits on the bed
Like an arrow drawn on a bow.

Henna-touched hands, a mirror poised
On lap: A girl staring back.

If he sits beside her,
She will see him glance at her image.

In the courtyard, children sing
“Petals fall from almond trees.”

The singing could continue until
He displays a blood-stained sheet.

Footfalls on stairs, whispers,
Robes rustling, attar of roses;

His hand on her chin, her heart leaping;
He kisses her eyes closed.

“Stop. Sever the bond,” I scream,
“He’ll play possum, make you prey.”

The mirror slips from her fingers,
Bangles clash on her fleshy arms.

Rafiq Kathwari is a rebel Kashmiri-American poet who divides his time between New York, Dublin and
Srinagar. This poem is from his unpublished opus, My Mother’s Scribe.

Shell

To have only what we need

Space to the horizon
drawing us out

A songbird reminding us
there are more things in heaven and earth

The hawk that stalks it—
a taste of temporailty

A rock on which to sit when sweat comes;
a place to rest and consider the horizon

Wild blueberries whose blueness tantalizes;
whose juice becomes blood

A sun at zenith being warm:
comfort, mother of blueberries,
builder of lungs

A sweet suckable breeze
cool answer to a smothering other
bringer of invisible stuff from
respiring trees

A path under my feet between rocks and roots
following an incline to a bare ridge that appears and
disappears behind hemlock and pine, hovers over laurel,
is lost behind sharp outcrops, is sometimes clear as a bell

A curling, troubled stream
—bubbling cache of rain

Cupped hands
to pull it in

This beholding
shell

by Jim Culleny
5/21/11

by Mara Jebsen

I’m somewhere in Brooklyn when Geko hands me a card emblazoned with two highly stylized yellow roosters. They’re facing off, beaks up in each other’s beaks—their potbellied, swaybacked, braggadocious bird-bodies suggestive of a cheerful cockfight. The words “Que Bajo?” are printed under the roosters, in a phrase that functions like a bat signal. It is an injunction to a set of city-folk in the know to break out the fedoras, the red lipsticks and the get-down dancing shoes.

The music, the whole set up—is an interesting urban phenomenon. DJs Uproot Andy and Geko Jones collect folkloric vocal tracks and drum-rhythms, pull them off dusty old records that were gathered from villages in Cuba and parts of West Africa, and lay them with instinctive genius over modern dance beats. Then they throw a party that travels up and down North and South American cities and lasts for years. The effect is unifying. It is hypnotic and belly-thumping, and it gets at some core ritualistic need to move the body both as one’s ancestors may have done, and in some startlingly modern way. This music, the more I think of it, provides the correct soundtrack, or even analogy, to accompany a mass love letter I’ve been meaning to compose for years.

I met Geko through the New York Performance Poets. I don’t remember meeting him, just like I don’t remember meeting the poets. When you ‘fall in’ with people, it really is like falling—hard to remember how it happens. But I do recall arriving splat in New York with the particular flat-broke recklessness of a very young person. It’s the kind of recklessness you get when you’ve been deadened by life after college and had a brush with illness. Under these conditions, one is offered a reckless New York practically incandescent with promise, but finds its famous shimmer also laced with those first dark inklings that a life can end too soon, and be far more easily misspent.

Read more »

By Fred Zackel

In Louisiana, Chinese were “expressly counted as white” until the 1870 census.

Ideas evolve over time. What used to be de rigueur can look stoopid and wicked.

In the Symposium, the guru Socrates thought that true desire is about giving birth to ideas.

The Greek word “paideia” pops up in mid 5th century BCE. It means “education” or “instruction.” The word (pronounced “py-dee-a”) comes from the Greek word “pais, paidos”: “the upbringing of a child.”

Academia world-wide stresses a program of Gen Ed courses to make us all better citizens.

“Know Thyself” and “Nothing in Excess” become our global starting blocks.

The word “Encyclopedia” is a combination of the Greek terms “enkyklios” or “complete
system/circle” and “paideia” or “education/learning.”

The Greeks expected our best efforts in Literature as well as in the Olympics.

The Humanities as a concept was formulated during the Renaissance, which means “rebirth” or “born again.” The phrase “studia humanitatus” becomes a touchstone then.

We study the Human to understand more fully what Being Human means. Being Human is thus the yardstick of the cosmos. We measure ourselves against the Divine (includes the Cosmos,) against the animal kingdom (of which, yes, we are still a part,) and against the Rational.

Being Human, we think with our guts. (We have learned this through brain imaging.) Then we find a reason to justify what we already believe and decided.

Read more »

by Hartosh Singh Bal

At a recent lunch with a writer from the US, discussing our common interest in rivers, I asked him what had led to his new project. He told me that he had first visited India several years ago and had toyed with several ideas, one involved travelling through the forested areas under Maoist influence, a journey that would take him from the South of India to the foothills of Himalayas, the second involved writing about the Narmada after a visit to some tribal villages on the verge of submergence. His agent in the US, he said, had told him to get real, no one would publish such books, and so now he was planning to travel down the Ganga.

It would not be the first such book, and the logic that drives it is the same logic that has led to a surfeit of books on Gandhi, Joseph Lelyveld’s recent contribution only one more in a long list. In this the world is only responding to the hold the Ganga and Gandhi have over the Indian popular imagination. The burning ghats, the loincloth, the fasts and the satyagraha, platitudes about the soul of India. In each case there is no shortage of outsiders eager to respond to our myths about ourselves.

It will be argued that there is little harm in either obsession but to do so is to forget that non-fiction in India is a genre that is constrained by the resources local publishers can offer. The possibility of devoting a couple of years to a subject and spending what is required on travel and research remains unlikely. Publishers abroad who do have the resources have limited bandwith, both in terms of money and in terms of interest in India. Give or take a few India books, this bandwith is largely exhausted by Gandhi and the Ganga. What is true of publishers and writers is as true of academics and academicians and the result is a neglect of people and places crucial to our existence as Indians.

Read more »

by Haider Shahbaz

Try listening to ‘Montezuma’ by the Fleet Foxes while reading this.

July, 2008.

Quick reply: Yes, was at the protest. No, did not get hurt. There is a certain quality about revenge. Walking and hanging on the sides of buses for more than 15 hours and than sitting in front of Parliament, watching the sun rise with half a million people and chanting for the hanging of a military dictator.

I am back in Islamabad. Exciting times here, but I am getting bored. Big Important things have stopped interesting me and seem impersonal. You know, apostrophes and spellings are tricky things: yesterday, my friend had to correct my spellings of “tommorrow”. I will never learn English.

P.S. The stars shine really brightly today, and another suicide bombing. Also, odd purposeless walks between Welsh fields all the way to a lighthouse are addictive.

July, 2009.

I was reading: Dadaism by Tristan Tzara.

One sentence reminded me of you, took me back, held me by the hand.

“Dada; abolition of logic, which is the dance of those impotent to create.”

To those stories, words and images; brushes, paints and whispers; flights. You must be still at it – weaving, moulding, negating, and creating. I hope you are still at it.

Read more »

by Dave Maier

As everybody knows, with the proper encouragement computers can make bleeps and bloops, and so: computer music! That's been true for many years, and there are plenty of histories of computer music which will tell you all about the Telharmonium, the Synket, and the RCA Mark II Sound Synthesizer (pictured here). This thing, which was once the state of the art, is the size of several refrigerators and was decidedly not a real-time sound production device. Nowadays, on the other hand, everyone who has a laptop, or even an iPad (or iPhone!), and access to the Internet, can download, often for free, sound generation and manipulation programs which make even the most powerful tools of the previous century look like TinkerToys. Yet our understanding of the significance and meaning of “computer music” remains mired in the compositional and ontological assumptions of the distant past.

This is unfortunate but entirely understandable. As plenty of wise guys have pointed out over the years, we rarely understand change as it happens and only get it, if at all, in retrospect. Still, we should try to keep up; so let's see what we can do. What is “computer music”, and why should we care?

Read more »