by Ram Manikkalingam

My senior editor Morgan Meis and I were watching Sri Lanka play Australia in the Cricket World Cup, in an Australian pub in New York city last month. Morgan accused me of being a nationalist, because I did not agree with Amnesty International’s (AI) campaign for international human rights monitors in Sri Lanka. He did not use nationalist here as a compliment. What he meant by a nationalist, was someone who said my country, right or wrong, i.e., my country whether or not it kills innocents and displaces hundreds of thousands, or develops the economy, and educates and feeds the poor.

As the armed conflict intensifies in Sri Lanka, several thousand were killed and about a thousand have disappeared in the past year. These disappearances and killings have primarily taken place at the hands of the Sri Lankan security forces, or their proxy militias. The Tamil Tigers, who have been fighting harshly, have also made a significant contribution. In addition, in the capital Colombo, dozens of minority Tamil businessmen have been kidnapped for ransom. These kidnappings involve a combination of lawless lawmen, ex Tamil militants and criminals. More recently, the Tamil Tigers launched their air force, bombing the main air force base and gas storage tanks. The economy is in a tailspin with a severe drop in tourism, risk of hyperinflation, low levels of investment and increasing cost of living. There is no doubt the situation in Sri Lanka has deteriorated, with the military clashes escalating and ordinary civilians suffering. Even the most sanguine observers, and nationalist minded, will find it hard to deny this.

This has led reputable national and international human rights organizations like Civil Rights Movement and the University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna), and Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, to call for the armed parties to respect the laws of war, and for the deployment of international human rights monitors to establish a presence in Sri Lanka and protect civilians. The idea (or hope) is that the presence of impartial outside witnesses will make the armed parties to the conflict, whether connected to the state or opposed to it, think twice before they kill and torture innocents or expel them from their homes. This has been the case in a number of other conflicts from El Salvador to Nepal. They hope that this experience can also prove to be true for Sri Lanka, easing suffering and reducing violence.

Picking up on this theme, Amnesty International, launched an international campaign around the World Cup Cricket to get the international public to call on the government and the rebels to accept international human rights monitors. The campaign was titled “Sri Lanka play by the rules”. Cricket, in Sri Lanka, as in much of South Asia, is not simply a passion. It is a way of life. Some might even say it is the only secular religion we have – sort of like French nationalism or Turkish secularism. In any case, AI gambled that with passions running high during the cricket world cup, it would be possible to highlight the deteriorating situation in Sri Lanka, and pressure or persuade the government and rebels into accepting the presence of human rights monitors. It did not quite work out this way and Amnesty’s campaign was a flop.

I also contributed to this failure, not in word, nor in deed, but in sentiment. Like most Sri Lankans, I was deeply discomfited by the campaign, if not opposed to it. I was torn, because I did support more active human rights monitoring, including international presence, if required, but did not like the use of the World Cup Cricket tournament as a venue to campaign for this. I wanted to support the Sri Lankan cricket team and enjoy cricket without Amnesty, and by extension Sri Lanka’s civil war, intruding on it. So Morgan accused me of being a Sri Lankan nationalist – defending my country right or wrong – and choosing my cricketing pleasure over the welfare of my people.

So why would someone like me, who sympathises with the purported objectives of Amnesty – an end to human rights violations in Sri Lanka – and even the means – international human rights monitoring – oppose its campaign during the world cup? Let me first set aside the two responses that I have heard that do not necessarily apply to me. One is the response made by an organization like the Free Media Movement that also criticized Amnesty. They had this to say: “Amnesty International’s actions at the Cricket World Cup, for the best of intent, may well result in the worst of outcomes for human rights activists in Sri Lanka. By raising the wrath of the government and fuelling the already powerful rhetoric of extreme nationalist forces in the country who are deeply and violently opposed to civil society advocacy and support of human rights, we regretfully note that Amnesty International’s ill-thought of campaign may end up severely discrediting the human rights movement in Sri Lanka.” Now while I do not disagree with this view of the Free Media Movement’s, I am a bit more nationalistic, at least according to Morgan, because I am saying something more. Not just that the campaign is bad, because it is not successful and is turning off many Sri Lankans, but that I myself am one of those Sri Lankans who is being turned off, by Amnesty’s campaign.

Others say it is bad to mix politics with sport, and therefore Amnesty’ campaign should be condemned for doing so. This is a facile response. After all politics and sport are often linked. And politicians like to take advantage of sports victories by their countrymen to increase their popularity. Prime Minister John Howard, who cannot really claim any credit for Australia’s victory at the World Cup, hosted the winning team to dinner, and sought to bask in the reflected glory. Moreover, I supported the sports boycott of apartheid South Africa, which had a racist regime and all White teams. And there is no doubt that the sports boycott contributed to the demise of apartheid there.

Sri Lanka, or at least its cricket team, is different. It is a multiethnic team with members from all communities – Muslim, Tamil and Sinhala. While there is clear discrimination against Tamils by the state, along linguistic and ethnic grounds, this is not the case in the selection of the cricket team. And there is a widespread consensus that it is successful, in part because there is a considerable degree of meritocracy in its selection. This is not to deny that because of the war there are fewer and fewer players from the war affected North and East being able to make the grade, in part because it is harder for schools and clubs to participate in national competition. But this is quite a bit different from saying that players are excluded simply because they belong to a particular ethnic or social group, as was the case in apartheid South Africa. So what then is my specific reason for opposing Amnesty’s campaign?

While there are many things that make me sad to be Sri Lankan – poverty, corruption, violations of human rights, authoritarianism, ethnic extremism, not to mention death and destruction – there are some things that make me happy to be Sri Lankan. Anyone visiting Sri Lanka will notice, in the early mornings and late afternoons, children going to and from school, in their crisp clean whites, whether they live in affluent urban settings or poor rural ones. It is hard to tell the wealthier children from the poorer ones, as they bicycle, bus, or walk to school in the hundreds of thousands. It is sight that always makes me feel good. Not because the schools have the best facilities, or every child is going to “make it”. But because I feel that whatever we may have done wrong, we have a society, where most children (if not the poorest of the poor) will learn to read and write, and have a real opportunity for a better life. And I feel proud to be part of a left tradition that helped set the foundation for a universal and free public education system that is able to provide for most Sri Lankan children.

And then there is cricket. We have a team, from a small poor South Asian country, that has been able to stand up to, and invariably defeat, the very best in the world. And this because we have chosen our cricketers, not on the basis of their class, ethnicity or regional background, but because of how well they can play the game. I am (only) a little embarrassed to admit this, but one of my heroes among, John Rawls, Antonio Gramsci, Salman Rushdie and Muhammad Ali, is Arjuna Ranatunga – the Captain of the Sri Lankan team that won the World Cup in 1996:

And like all Sri Lankans, I enjoy watching my country play cricket, and I particularly enjoy watching them win. And this in Sri Lanka is pretty much universal. On days when Sri Lanka is playing cricket, traffic comes to a complete stop, nobody works, and everyone is watching the game, except a few very superior souls. Cricket provides a uniquely common moment of enjoyment for all of us. Even strong Tamil supporters of the Tamil Tigers, cheer the Sri Lankan team in international competition, donning Sri Lanka cricket T-shirts, even as they give money to the Tigers to prosecute the war against the Sri Lankan state.

No doubt there is in cricket a moment of national escapism not entirely unlike a good bollywood movie. When we cheer the team, we forget the number of issues that divide us, plague us, drag us down, and make us depressed and sad, because of the state our country is in. But this moment of escapism is just that. It need not be seen as denial, because from the Free Media Movement, which opposes the campaign but enjoys cricket, to the Tamil Tiger supporter who supports the Tamil Tigers, but cheers the Sri Lankan cricket team, or the Sinhala nationalist who wants the Tigers defeated and supports the Sri Lankan team, the reality of the war and moment for choosing sides, is around the corner, as soon as the game ends. At this moment, Amnesty or anyone else, might have our attention, when they chip in to get us to address the mess we find ourselves in. But by interfering with our cricket before that, they risk marginalization by intruding on a moment of collective escapism, and pleasure, and dare I say pride, that all of us Sri Lankans share irrespective of whatever may divide us.

Elatia Harris

Last weekend in Reykjavik, the renowned French street theatre company, Royal de Luxe, enacted the latest episode in The Saga of the Giants, a outdoor drama for colossal, crane-operated marionettes that has since 1993 unfolded in continental Europe, the UK, Africa and South America. (For a detailed look at the company and a mind-boggling video, refer to my earlier 3QD article.) 

Each time Royal de Luxe plays a new location – and this was their Scandinavian debut – Jean-Luc Courcoult, the company director, writes a story especially for the people of that place, a simple story that will reach deeply into their trove of archetypes yet be understood by children under 10.  It must be performable by the Giants, too, who are between 20 and 40 feet high, made of carved wood and operated not only by cranes but by numerous actor-technicians manning pulleys and ropes, swarming all over the marionettes.  Learning this, one might assume there was a lid on the expressive potential of the Giants. There is, but not in the way that springs to mind.  And which is more important?  What a giant marionette does, or how it makes you feel watching it?  “For years, I wondered how one could tell a story to an entire town,” Courcoult has said.  “On a plane to Rio, the idea of using out-size marionettes came to me… People have believed in giants since the year dot.  Every culture on earth has stories about them.  I find the giant more powerful than God or religion – because it is more make-believe yet more human.”

The Geyser of Reykjavik

For Icelanders, Courcoult wrote “The Geyser of Reykjavik.” There being no natural geyser within city limits, one was created by jack-hammering a square at a foot-traffic nexus downtown, and, every half-hour or so, pumping water in a 3-storey surge into the air – routine mischief for Royal de Luxe.  The new geyser was accompanied by a hideous low growling sound, and ruined vehicles were seen all over town, pinned to the asphalt by a 15-foot fork, impaled on a tree, smashed from above by a concrete roadwork barrier.  Unusually for the company, which seeks always the advantage of surprise, bits of the story were allowed to circulate well before the show – rumors of an angry giant, with a giant daughter who would come to pacify him.  As Courcoult intended, the story dovetailed with the lore of Iceland’s deep past — the Eddas and the Sagas, so full of fateful encounters among giants, and between giants and gods.  The Royal de Luxe Giant was understood to be acting out his wrath in dreams or in some other brawling disinhibited state, the geyser wrung from the asphalt being only the first sign of him.

The full story would recall the Norse creation myths laid aside by Vikings on Iceland less than 1000 years ago, their conversion to the new faith coming reluctantly, and later than that of their mainland peers. As the original Giant in The Saga of the Giants was known to have fallen from the sky onto the city of Le Havre, the Giant of Reykjavik was said to sleep uneasily in the earth beneath the town, the angry Icelandic earth only a few tens of millions of years old and still churning, glaciers lurching and sliding over its hottest spots, volcanoes rising from its boulder-strewn lava fields.  Iceland straddles the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, part of the world-circling undersea mountain system that separates the North American from the Eurasian Continental Plate. These Plates shift precisely under Iceland, anchored to the Ridge like a clasp on a chain.  And beneath all this, interacting with it, there is the Icelandic plume, a self-buoyant hot upwelling of intensely primordial material from the Earth’s mantle into its crust.  Countless eruptions and quakes have formed and re-formed Iceland, girdling it with tiny newer islands, the last permanent one, Surtsey – named for Surtr, the furious Norse fire giant – rising from the sea in 1963.

Into this calamitous land – hellish, lunar, achingly beautiful — whose snowy terrain will buckle, split and flow until some unimaginably serene era imponderably far from now, the Royal de Luxe Giants have come to stir up the mythic past.  Fire giants and frost giants were in Viking days the personifications of extremes to be endured.  Nature was itself a battlefield, with the giants — the rock-hurling, venom-spewing giants, stupid and rageful — impossible for humans to defeat without the gods, their joined battle the cause of otherwise inexplicable natural phenomena.  The Reykjavik show, free to all comers and attracting thousands, was a battle of the giants for our own time, fought with noise and will and stealth in the narrow streets, by the freshwater lake and at the windy blue harbor of the world’s northernmost capital.

Another Mission for Little Girl Giant

Happily for Royal de Luxe, the giants of the Eddas and the Sagas were not always disastrous, nor the gods entirely well behaving.  There were more complex interactions between gods and giants — seduction, for instance — than battle.  Giants could be very wise, like Mimir, from whom Odin purchased for the price of an eye the ability to foresee the future, including Ragnarok, the end of the world.  Or they could be the last word in desirability, like Gerdr, a beautiful giantess wooed by Freyr, the Norse fertility god who sent her eleven golden apples and a golden arm ring before she would consent to be his wife.  For the Reykjavik show, Royal de Luxe took a cue from the ambiguities inhering in the very oldest legends, pitting Little Girl Giant – the 20-foot time-traveling child who had already eluded an elephant-borne sultan in London and chased down a hidden rhinoceros in Chile – against a fresh antagonist, her father.

Learning of her father’s destructive rampage at the Arctic’s edge, Little Girl Giant, suitcase in hand, came by water to Iceland, there to subdue him. The first anyone saw of her, she was resting from the journey in her pale pink nightdress, reclining in a deck chair atop a hexagonal 19th century bandstand by the lake.  Little Girl Giant routinely enjoys a levee that would make Louis XIV appear a figure of radiant simplicity. She commands, for one thing the Sun King lacked, her own camion de musique, a 20-foot float with rock musicians, Les Balayeurs du Desert, who follow her everywhere, playing selections from her personal album of characteristic tracks, Jules Verne Impact.  On Day One of the drama as the band geared up, she was tenderly helped into white ankle socks and the astonishing red iron-hinged shoes that are her hallmark: as with a stranger in a myth, it is by these shoes that she is known to take possession of a territory, and if she does not always wear them – she sleeps and dances barefoot – they are nonetheless always beside her.  Her one dress is that of a 10-year old school girl of the 1950s – innocence itself, and therefore alluring in the well-chronicled way that is, even so, startling.  It is leaf green, cap-sleeved, trimmed in white piping, and mothers and daughters have been seen — in Chile not in Reykjavik — to wear costumes as nearly matching it as they can contrive for a Royal de Luxe appearance in which she figures.  On this first morning of the show, she is a giantess with an entourage, gathering her powers for a day of reconnaissance in a new city, looking sleepily around her — at the lake, at the town, at her people.  It’s a Friday, so many but not all of her people are young children out of school just for her, brightly hatted to make them easy to keep in sight.

Negotiating the steep downward incline from the lake to the city center is more than Little Girl Giant can do on her own steam, though when walking on flat land she has a charming, natural, arm-swinging gait, and the actors counter-weighting her feet by means of ropes make no secret of how hard it is to produce this appearance of insouciance on her part.  Indeed, the appalling effort of keeping her on the march is a big part of the show. Poussez, poussez, the throaty, carnivalesque voice of the actor-boss barks out at his team, who are utterly choreographed, sweating inside their velvet livery, and making awful faces.  The noise they must endure is awful too, the iron hinges of the famous red shoes ringing on the cobblestones that line the city streets.  It’s a portentous sound barely disguised by the band’s amped music, and every decibel is a calculated result. The huge racketing feet, the beauty and gentleness of the face against the pointed rooftops, recall tales from the Brothers Grimm – and from much further back – speaking to the unfathomable divide between our lower and higher natures. Giants in themselves speak to this divide, the myth of the battle of the giants involving human effort and divine inspiration to overcome innate regressive tendencies. Beneath the cobblestones, conduits of boiling water from Iceland’s geothermal sources keep the surface of the streets too warm to freeze.  It is understood now by everyone thronging these streets that the angry father sought by the noisy daughter is in the earth just below, his gnashing distantly audible through the new geyser’s roar.  Can he hear her down there?  Can he know why she has come?

To stalk a furious father without having a pee is just too much. Crouching near the Lutheran Domkirkja in the center of town, toy-like in its relative size, Little Girl Giant makes water – lots of it – pleasing herself intensely and looking embarrassed not at all. The children in their knitted hats are wild with joy at this.  It’s time for the fabled lollipop, long and pink, causing Little Girl Giant to show her carnal aspect and her intricate and frightening tongue – something for the murmuring children to remember always, the aha! of it still years down the line.  Her eyes are slitted as she licks, her concentration perfect, she dips and all but swoons.  Uniquely at this time she seems alone, disconnected from her people, 20 feet above the city’s major shopping street with townsmen leaning out dormers at her yet somehow in a private space.  Finally, a red-liveried actor takes the thing away from her, and sated but brightening, she once again regards her surround, large-pupiled gaze resting for longer than usual on whatever is in its orbit.  If you are standing on a corner, which causes her to pivot and linger, this is the best moment to make eye contact with her, for she may give the thrilling appearance of personally taking you in. With eyes the size of searchlights, she can always sweep you, but the air of faint distraction caused at most other times by a multiplicity of foci does not just now obtain; you have beheld her in a private moment, and she will judge you like a cat.

Knowing When to Stop

Poussez!  Poussez! The boss’s raspy plosives tell the crew it’s time to lift Little Girl Giant onto the bed of a truck for a ride up the highest hill in town, surmounted by a true architectural one-off, the Hallsgrimkirkja — Reykjavik’s most imposing structure.  Begun in the 1940s, the cast concrete Hallsgrimkirkja owes a bit to the geysers, a bit to the Machine Age, and a bit more to the witch’s towers of Oz.  Seeing Little Girl Giant in its unlikely adjacence, it’s hard not to conceive of her as the Hyperborean Dorothy, trekking red-shod in dreams where she cannot waking go.  It is high noon, the most threatening hour to illusion, for the absence of shadow drains off gravitas to reveal the awful corroded fragility of the mind’s play.  Here, where the church – the campy, mathy and strangely moving church – is almost scaled to Little Girl Giant, the public space large enough to encompass her, the absurdity of the Giants kicks in.  Perhaps she agrees, for at this summit of the town, beneath a bronze statue of Leif Eriksson not a quarter of her size, she naps.  The music winds down, the crowds disperse.

Royal de Luxe Giants have always tended to nap, and they do it with abandon – head thrown back, hands grazing the ground, feet propped up.  Never unattended while napping, they nonetheless look unguarded. Having lost consciousness before you, they’ve disarmed you, and always at the perfect time, when you can probably not much longer suspend disbelief.  Sleeping or waking, the ceaseless motors in their chests cause their diaphragms to rise and fall – they do not miss a breath, ever.  And, lightly, they snore.  For the early evening show, in the light that will not subside for many hours yet, Little Girl Giant and her camion de musique will set up at the harbor, where, barefoot, she will be lifted by a crane to dance high in the air, the red-liveried actors struggling horribly with ropes to make her gyrate, point, kick and raise her arms, all of which she does energetically to loud percussive music on this pale-skied night before she finds and subdues her father. 

There was a levee, and there is also a couchee.  A 25-foot dormitory-style brass bed is rolled out onto a pier in the lee of low buildings, a windbreak for the night. The nightdress replaces the day dress, folded carefully into a basket.  Little Girl Giant shelters between a featherbed and a duvet. There, a new topographical element in the cityscape, she will spend the night, and her people will go home aware of her recumbent presence beside the slowly darkening waters of the harbor, and of her father dreaming destructively beneath the land.  But not just yet.  Les Chaussures! Les Chaussures! The boss calls out to the crew – the shoes, the shoes!  A rug is laid down at the side of the bed, and the red shoes, the symbol of the traveler, are placed squarely on it.  Without shoes, in the old legends, the journey is broken, and the traveler waits for Heaven to provide the means to continue.

A June to Remember

The Reverend Jon Steingrimsson — an eyewitness — recorded these memories of the Laki eruption in the south of Iceland in June, 1783. “This said week, and the two prior to it, more poison fell from the sky than words can describe: ash, volcanic hairs, rain full of sulfur and salt peter, all of it mixed with sand. The snouts, nostrils, and feet of livestock grazing or walking on the grass turned bright yellow and raw.  All water went tepid and light blue in color… All the earth’s plants burned, withered and turned gray, one after another, as the fire increased and neared the settlements.”

The old giants stirred that June at Laki in 1783, with ten eruptive episodes identified, the onset of each heralded by an earthquake swarm that increased in intensity until a new fissure opened. Fire fountains reached heights of 1400 meters, and lava poured from fissures at the rate of about 8,600 cubic meters per second, coming close to the discharge rate of the Amazon River. Shortly after the eruption began, lava reached the Skafta river gorge and flowed towards the lowlands, traveling 35 kilometers in only four days. And the effusion of lava continued to February of 1784.  Almost worse than this, and much further reaching, the convective eruption column of Laki carried gases to altitudes of 15 kilometers – gases that formed aerosols causing cooling in the Northern Hemisphere, possibly by as much as 1 degree C, a cooling that is the largest such volcanic-induced event in historic time.  As for the ash fall extending all the way to mainland Europe, in Iceland alone it led to wide-scale livestock loss, crop failure, and the death by famine of one quarter of the human population.

Today, Laki is a ten-fissured vent complex, each fissure covered by a continuous row of scoria cones, spatter cones, and tuff cones ranging in height from 40 to 70 meters. You can visit it on a “volcano tour,” minding where you step as always in Iceland when trekking over sites where seismic activity is both a vivid memory and a future certainty.  The world-historical and unusually well-documented Laki eruption occurred at a time that folklore had edged out myth – all that giants were supposed to be doing in Scandinavia by the 1700s was hurling rocks at churches. 

In our own time, Iceland — one of the most active volcanic regions on Earth — erupts and quakes, and non-Icelanders do not particularly hear about it.  Eleven volcanoes erupted between 1900 and 1998 alone, eruptions involving the effusion of basaltic lava.  Perpetually snowy, massive Hekla erupted in 2000, and Grimsvotn, near Laki, erupted as recently as 2004.  In fact, much of Iceland lies in the path of what geologists call a propagating rift.  Jules Verne, beloved inspiration of the Royal de Luxe 2005 show, The Sultan’s Elephant, chose the three-cratered volcano of Snaefell as the starting point for his Journey to the Center of the Earth.  In Verne’s own boyhood in Nantes, the Laki eruption and its impact on continental Europe would have been sufficiently within living memory that to enter the crater of an active Icelandic volcano was a most intrepid thing for a character in a novel to do.  For Royal de Luxe to bring a fire giant to Iceland speaks not only to its deep past but to its present way of life, which includes forms of preparedness – a special tax on everyone going to a common fund, for instance — for seismic events that produce chaos, swallowing up the homes of citizens.  Yet the ultimate form of preparedness, prediction, is a quest one must still battle with giants to succeed in.

The Day of the Giant

Small wonder that on the morning of the day she would encounter her father, Little Girl Giant took time not for the usual levee but for lustration – a shower by the harbor lasting half an hour.  High on a hill above the lake, where the historical museum and the Universities are, her father was preparing for her, too.  In The Saga of the Giants, the big Giant is sometimes in a fix, parts of his 38-foot body hidden within fiery structures.  Once in Le Havre, for example, he was found in a burning house, head emerging from the roof, hands from dormers, looking no more perplexed than usual but even more trapped.  The Giant of Reykjavik was first seen around 10 a.m. on May 12, staring angrily into a pan of fire, the growling sounds familiar from the new geyser in town issuing from his lips, which also spat ashy water at bystanders. His lower body was confined inside an overturned bus of great size.

The big Giant never has the freedom of motion of that Little Girl Giant enjoys, and he had less even than was customary in Reykjavik, where there was literally no street wide enough for him to walk on within his scaffolding, a towering 6-storey affair that forbids the Giant to be ambulatory in all but a few cities in the world. Another difference between the original giant and the giant of Reykjavik is the head.  The face of the original Giant is a sorrowing, vigilant, blue-eyed countenance – rather Christ-like, and that’s no accident.  To see him walk within his scaffolding, regarding with incredulousness the humans far below, actors leaping on ropes from the scaffolding to lift his sandaled feet, is to be on his side. The Giant of Reykjavik, by contrast, was yellow of face and bald of head, his lips set in a sneer.  On either cheek were sinuous carvings like those on the Vaksala Runestone, and he wore a permanent and terrible frown. This was a creature to whom there was no appealing; the sight of him and the sound made babies cry. You’re not meant to hope this Giant will be spared, and you don’t hope it. You would like, instead, to see something bad happen to him.

Little Girl Giant has been charged with luring this furious, pagan father of hers off the land – his element  – and down to the water, her own.  For their first meeting, on the bridge across the lake, they size each other up – it’s a meeting from a fairy tale between an ogre father and an innocent offspring who have never before set eyes on one another.  Behind one of her inner tube-sized ears is a bouquet of fresh flowers – she is garlanded for this event like a sacrificial maiden, but otherwise wears her usual Lolita dress and her killer iron-hinged shoes.

This day will see several more encounters of the Giants, as the child lures the father through the town, always closer to the water, where the decisive encounter will take place.  Never once does the big Giant nap, and all day one notes still more differences between him and other players in The Saga of the Giants. But the failure to nap is what most sets him apart – the failure to make himself vulnerable.  Occasionally he down-focuses, as if auguring from his pan of fire – which never goes out. You feel that although he is malevolent, trapped and being hauled to his doom, he may yet be capable of one more awful feat, that perhaps he is not trapped in the vast bus but coiled in it. The question of what might ultimately happen is not really open, however — the rising generation will indeed subdue the old.  While this makes for less drama, it is a sign of a deeper affinity between the Giant of Reykjavik and the chthonic fire giants of Muspelheim – one could, with inspiration, outwit them, but not control them.  And there will always be another battle, as the myths attest.

In the bright evening, a high wind coming off the water, so that even in May thousands of Icelanders are in their down coats and fur hats, the scene at the harbor is played out.  Having lured her ogre father to the water’s very edge, Little Girl Giant, her camion de musique in tow, walks to the far end of the long pier where the battleship gray vessel of the Icelandic Coast Guard is tied up. The Giant cannot follow her there — she seems somehow under the protection of the long boat painted with Iceland’s flag.  She turns around and, facing him, lifts an arm.  That’s the sign for a horrifying-looking implement at the end of a heavy-duty crane to get the Giant’s head in its grip and tear it off – not before he looks menacingly at the crowd one last time. 

Ashy water gushes from his empty neck – almost another geyser, and it gushes for a long, long time.  The crane flings his grimacing head high in the air.  When it falls to the surface of the water, there are flames and gas and steam – the hellfire in broad daylight of which Royal de Luxe is justly proud, and which they always deliver.  Children howl and cheer, their parents buttoning them tighter into their down coats, for it’s not yet the end of the show, and it’s cold.

A tug rounds the corner of the pier, backing into the slip next to the Coast Guard’s boat.  In it are Little Girl Giant’s deck chair and her suitcase – stiff-sided creamy calfskin, it looks like, tagged and stickered from all the ports she’s traveled to.  Her work done, she heads for the tug resolutely, waving Queen Elizabeth-style as the crane lifts her from the pier into her chair.

The red-liveried actors jump into the tug after her, the better to settle her there, but also to be taken off themselves – they leave when she leaves, for they are not to be separated from her unless she sleeps, or, as happened last year in London, hurtles off into space-time.  Bright-eyed with victory, Little Girl Giant surveys her people but lingers not. The tug pulls out of the slip, fast gaining the end of the pier. 

Thinking that Royal de Luxe must now be done, you lift your eyes to a mountain across the blue bay — a table-top mountain, remnant of one of the subglacial eruptions commonly occurring in Iceland that can generate meltwater at twenty times the flow rate of the Amazon River. The discharge rate of water is actually a very fine topic for Icelandic conversations — you are in an island nation where thundering falls are named for horses’ manes, where half the structures are heated by geothermal power, where falling water is power, even in legend, and people can’t fail to be interested in it.  But Royal de Luxe is also interested in the possibilities of water, and Royal de Luxe is not done.  Two hoses on Little Girl Giant’s tug release streams at a certain angle to its jets, making the air in its wake trembling wet.  The sun is high, and a rainbow appears.  The Icelanders, cold in the wind, passionately fond of their history and folklore, wave off Little Girl Giant and the actors who operate her as the tug makes for wider water.  The music finally stops, the rainbow persists, and you are released. 

Bifrost, some of the Icelanders might be musing as they gather up their children to go home — Bifrost, the Rainbow Bridge, the only way there is for the giants to enter Asgard, the realm of the gods.

See also: ROYAL DE LUXE: THE SAGA OF THE GIANTS  (3QD, March 26, 2007)

Numerous Internet resources provide photo-documentation of Royal de Luxe events, most notably the Royal de Luxe Group on Flickr, administrated by Kris Blomme (a.k.a. KrieBel), who has compiled an excellent list of external links. http://www.flickr.com/groups/royaldeluxecentral/

For kind permission to use their work in today’s post, I want to thank, in the order their photos appear here, many photographers in Iceland: drengur1, Laufey Waage, Petur Fridgeirsson, Sigurros Engilbertsdottir, Jon Ragnarsson, Adalsteinn Eythorsson, Helgi Halldorsson/Freddi, Karl Gudmundsson, Villi Thorsteinsson, Haraldur Gudjonsson, Helga Eiriks, Elisabet Elma, and Asa Thordur. And one non-Icelandic photographer, Trey Ratliff, a fellow Texan.            

If the legacy of Patricia Highsmith could be said to live on through the work of any contemporary artist, it would surely be the British filmmaker Danny Boyle. Boyle, who has worked in a range of genres—from 2002’s zombie flick 28 Days Later to Millions, a wondrous children’s fable directed two years later—is a director with a vision. Much like Highsmith, he rarely treads lightly. His touch is definitive and recognizable to anyone acquainted with his work. However, his isn’t the first name you associate with the modern-day auteur. He, like Highsmith, is more an artist-craftsman than a flashy star—rarely do their personalities overwhelm their work—a director whose work appeals to those uninterested in film’s form but whose fan’s immediately recognize his narrative and visual style.

Through this interplay Boyle’s films bridge the gap between mainstream and independent movies. When they came out, his Shallow Grave (1994) and Trainspotting (1996) catered for a very different audience than The Beach (2000), as Boyle temporary abandoned the gritty Brit genre in favor of a glossy Leonardo DiCaprio blockbuster which, ultimately, earned him the most critical derision. Unlike many of his peers, Boyle traverses genre and thus creates two parallel audiences for his movies: the genre audience likely to only see one of his movies and uninterested in him as a filmmaker, and the audience comprising his fans. Typically, the former group tends to be more disappointed with his films than the latter, who have come to expect of the director certain key successes: a solid soundtrack, engaging story, and generally beautiful photography.

Boyle, it seems, falls just short of winning over the adulation of genre audiences. Like Highsmith, he suffers from a certain kind of carelessness with regard to narrative, requiring audience members to abandon logic (even that curious kind of movie-logic that allows us suspend belief and accept the undead and star wars alike). Perhaps this comes from fact that Boyle’s films try and establish practical explanations for unworldly situations: Sunshine sets out a long explanation regarding the looming death of the sun and the mechanics for our salvation. 28 Days Later doesn’t proffer a world in which zombies exist, but rather tries to explain their origin; begging more questions than it answers.

Boyle thus tries to weave a certain kind of drama out of extraordinary situations that relate to believable experiences and pedestrian concerns. Like Highsmith before him, Boyle is concerned with revealing threat in the quotidian. Both Boyle and Highsmith set out stories in recognizable worlds floating on an undercurrent of seething tension. Small gestures and brief moments disrupt the tension, causing dramatic action that is both shocking and, strangely, unsurprising. They share in Alfred Hitchcock’s fascination with ordinary accidentally implicated into worlds of horror and intrigue. Highsmith, whose work has been adapted for film countless times and has produced both Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951) and Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), and Boyle, who has collaborated extensively with novelist Alex Garland on Sunshine, 28 Days Later, and The Beach, are both figures whose work is both literary and filmic, rooted across media.

Each, however, is bound to their medium of choice through their formal sensibilities. Highsmith’s style is unmistakably literary and Boyle rather unabashedly exploits (cheap) film techniques. Somehow, he employs an MTV-pop-cum-Baz Luhrmann aesthetic with a surprising degree of grace—a signature style that unites his movies. The scenes in which the brilliant Christopher Eccleston loses his marbles in Shallow Grave; DiCaprio’s descent into his hyper-aware hunter state in The Beach; Cillian Murphy’s salvation of the human colony in 28 Days Later; and the dramatic final scene as Cillian Murphy once again comes to humanity’s salvation in Sunshine all share in a set of what have become Boyle’s signature trademark for narrative climax. These scenes feature blurry focusing, wildly mobile camerawork, rapid editing, and confused perspectives to achieve what can only be described as a frenetic environment. Boyle has maintained these techniques across a diverse group of cinematographers, from Alwin Kuchler (who shot Lynne Ramsay’s stunning Morvern Callar and Ratcatcher) to the superlative Anthony Dod Mantle (the preferred photographer of Dogme founders Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg), and while the films at large are totally different visually, Boyle’s style prevails over these moments.

The transformation of his protagonists reveals Boyle’s fascination with the Nietzschean übermensch. His themes of  nihilism and the abandonment of traditional moral systems all parallel the philosopher’s own interests, and are a extension of the same narratives crafted by Highsmith decades earlier. Like Tom Ripley or the hundreds of protagonists of Highsmith’s short stories, Boyle’s characters transcend their humanity during narrative climax to confront not only adversity, but the traditional worlds in which the narrative itself is grounded. Nietzsche’s influences over Boyle shouldn’t be passed off as merely an afterthought and the comparison isn’t meant to be heavy-handed, but it would be remiss not to at least acknowledge the commonality.

I also don’t mean to gush over Boyle by aligning him with figures as illustrious as Nietzsche or Patricia Highsmith. I mean only to explain why he warrants attention as a director and not the sum of his products. Highsmith, for example, has a remarkable ability to keep her verbal cool when describing horrific scenes. Her descent into violence isn’t marked stylistically or structurally, as is Boyle’s. Hers instead is a world whose very consistency renders its violence all the more terrifying. She doesn’t seek to disaggregate the horror from the tension nor the bloody from the quotidian. They are the same, and they are simultaneous. Boyle, on the other hand, creates a dichotomous world of climax and latency. His threat underlies both, yet he literalizes the expression “to break into chaos.” This is a choice, of course, yet in my mind one that detracts from the potential power of his carefully constructed situations. Ultimately, Boyle and Highsmith create worlds both pedestrian and accessible, that is until they reach the tipping point and our empathetic ties carry us through their terrifying descent. 

First, a few words on the neighborhood.  Inside the door, above a landscape of crushed-ice, a long wooden board has been affixed to the wall, the purpose of which quickly becomes clear.  Fish, having been selected from the tank in front, sail wriggling through the air, hit the board, bounce, skitter along it, hit the far inside wall, and fall to the ice below to be grabbed, alive, and filleted by the staff in back.  Below the plank that ensures the fishmongers’ accuracy, the heads of large salmon, recently detached, continue to yawn and gawp reflexively.   In front sit wooden baskets of soft-shell crabs, porgies, shrimp of all sizes, razor clams with their phallic, protruding siphons, and numerous flatfish, all whole and waiting for inspection by customers who wouldn’t think of buying a fish without checking its gills for redness and pressing its scaly sides for taut resilience.  Squeezed between the wall and the crab and lobster tanks sits a large black bucket, nearly the size of a garbage can, from which the topmost of many layers of frogs stare up.

Such is a typical fish stall on Mott Street, in downtown Manhattan.  But many other food shops south of Houston Street and east of Lafayette Street, of all cuisines and nationalities, share the stall’s intensity, if not always the sheer directness of the relationship between people and the animals they eat that obtains there.  In the window of Despana, a newish food boutique on Broome that specializes in Spanish delicacies such as paprikas, olives, cheeses, and oils, hangs a salt-cured pig’s hind leg, hoof and all, unmistakably a severed mammalian limb, waiting to be sliced into transparencies of Serrano ham.  Inside Dom’s, a nearby Italian grocer, chickens complete with head and feet (the better to be added to to your stockpot) lie in cases beneath gamy homemade sausages that age hanging from the ceiling.  The Essex Market’s Dominican butchers sell goat meat and oxtails, while pig stomachs and tripe are available nearby.  Not only the Sullivan Street bakery but the Balthazar bakery, Ceci-Cela, the Falai bakery and several others turn out impeccable breads.

Bangkok Grocery, the city’s best purveyor of galangal, shrimp pastes, lime leaves, fish sauces, and other Thai ingredients, is a few blocks below Canal on the San Francisco-esque, tilted Mosco Street.  Back up on Mott sits DiPalo’s, the legendary supplier of the best Parmigiano-Reggiano and other Italian artisanal products in this country.  Catty corner from it one can buy the city’s best Banh Mi, or Vietnamese sandwich, at Banh Mi Saigon Bakery.  (This opinion professionally corroborated by the always scintillating J. Slab at The Porkchop Express.)  Vegetable sellers and more fishmongers from China’s Fujian Province line Grand Street all the way to Hester, where a right turn brings you to Il Labatorio del Gelato, New York’s most lauded ice cream makers, and a little beyond that a wide-ranging chocolate shop where you can find most of the finest single-bean productions of Michel Cluizel, Valrhona, and other chocolate titans.  Next door is Alejandro Alcocer’s excellent food shop, Orange, and restaurant, Brown.  Over another block on Grand is Doughnut Plant, where Mark Singer makes his grandfather’s recipes using organic ingredients.  And back up to Houston sits Katz’s, the pastrami champion of New York City.

Back west a few blocks on Houston is the new Bowery Whole Foods.  Is it just me who finds still finds appending the word “Bowery” to such amenities as pricey supermarkets oxymoronic?  Or has the word Bowery already shed its downmarket connotations, or rather, already accrued the upmarket status into which downmarket connotations are now magically transformed?  Whichever confusing permutation it is, the branch itself comically interrupts perhaps the densest, most diverse, and best collection of individual food shops in the United States.  Whole Foods, the American food economy’s answer to Crate and Barrel, is no doubt a useful intervention in most suburban contexts in which there are thirty enormous chain pharmacies for every good butcher or fish shop.  If you live on the exurban outskirts of Columbus, Ohio, presumably Whole Foods appreciably increases the diversity of available food. 

But on Bowery and Houston, Whole Foods represents a much poorer form of food diversity than what is already there.  And, food shops are not just food shops: they are a solidified form of the social relationships that obtain between people in an particular place.  The unofficial little vegetable market that pops up on weekends on Forsyth Street under the Manhattan Bridge represents a food culture of inspecting produce and comparing adjacent vendors for the best price: the entire cacophony of traditional market culture.  It is the product and instantiation of the middle and working-class residents of Chinatown.  But don’t think I am making an argument about authenticity here.  Whole Foods is in no way a less natural emanation of a different class stratum: the professional and managerial upper-middle people who flow into downtown in increasing numbers.  These people, and their needs for organic baby food, large amounts of wildly expensive prepared lunchtime panini and salads, exist in symbiosis with Whole Foods.  As downtown New York tilts towards this population, and its fauxhemian pretensions, there is a natural influx of corporate franchises with bland, do-gooder brand identities that serve the casual American elite from Seattle to Cambridge.

But the Bowery Whole Foods tells us something remarkable about its shoppers: how ignorant they are of where they are and how alienated they are from food.  Perusing it, the thing that impresses you most is the pervasive labeling, the enormous amounts of information appended to everything.  Everywhere are little identificatory notes, signs overhead, brochures on what to do with their sausages (eat them?), glossy photos of the smiling man who supposedly dredged up your mussels or baited the hook upon which your (always already headless and filleted) wild salmon met its end.  This is food shopping for people who have come to trust only that which is mediated by text, addenda, explanations, certifications.  It is a website come to life, or a piece of life for those who prefer websites: each piece of signage functions as the hyperlink that clicks through to a capsule review. 

I once served some sliced raw albacore tuna doused in soy to a friend.  I had bought the fish not far from Whole Foods from Alex, the fisherman who had caught it and brought it the next day to the Greenmarket.  I’m lucky to live in a city where this is a humdrum and everyday transaction.  My friend, a film producer, remarked, “This is great!  But how did it get sterile?” 

“Sterile?” I asked.

“Yeah.  How does it get safe to eat?”

Food?  Sterile?  This is the alienation on which Whole Foods depends.  In the age of hysterical warning about the dangers of food, it comes as a surprise to find that fish can be pulled out of the water and eaten, raw.  No anti-bacterial soap or release form required. 

There is something else alienating about Whole Foods: it posits a universe in which we are all only consumers.  The holism its name gestures towards is not the holism of a community in which buyers and sellers know each other.  Instead, it’s purely about the foods themselves: one’s interest in food is projected as only another form of self-interest.  Industrial organic food production has many of the same faults as the conventional food industry; it doesn’t matter.  That organic food is roughly a third the price at socialist institutions like the Fourth Street Food Coop, or the superb Park Slope Food Coop, is also unimportant.  These neoliberal shoppers prefer the impersonal embrace of a corporate parent, disguised as some vague moral goodness.  Yet a principle like seasonality is sacrificed to the lure of exotic, irradiated produce available year-round.  Such are the characteristics of the so-called “foodies.”  Even the term suggests a cute and infantile hobby.  And it does seem infantile to shop at Whole Foods while all around you sits the very food cultures about which Whole Foods’ publicity materials fantasize.

Near Orchard Street, four blocks from Bowery and Houston Street, sits Russ and Daughters, a small shop crammed with smoked salmon, cured salmon, salmon roe, herring, chubs, sturgeon eggs, bagels, fruits and candies, mustards, cream cheeses, etc.  It is a legacy of a time when the Lower East Side was the world’s single densest agglomeration of people, and Jewish and Eastern European foodstuffs were for sale from pushcarts up and down Orchard Street.  The store started on such a pushcart, but this is no neighborhood of Jewish immigrants anymore.  Instead, Russ and Daughters has survived by becoming the best source for smoked fish and caviar in New York City, no mean achievement.  In a way, it and shops like it have produced the very market they now serve: the teeming Lower East Side’s taste for bagels and lox ended up colonizing the nation. 

In a world in which we’ve been socialized to distrust the claims of brands, we paradoxically require ever greater documentations of authenticity, ever wordier mediations between ourselves and things.  We don’t trust ourselves to be able to divine with our own eyes what an edible object is, whether it’s genetically modified, whether it contains omega-3, whether it’s safe for our children.  But the Lower East Side of New York has lasted against this tendency, thanks to the richness of its cultural inheritance.  It’s also due, frankly, to intrepidness of the people who have lived here, their lack of a need for handholding, and their willingness to seek out the new and the strange.  There is something beautiful about the fact that the greatest smoked salmon purveyor in the country operates on the very corner from which the taste for the foodstuff emanated.  It is a rare and appropriate historical congruence, and to me it represents what is fascinating and powerful about the food culture of this quadrant of New York City.  Whole Foods is not.

The rest of Dispatches.

First-class stamps cost two cents more today, but don’t worry, the USPS “forever stamp” is also making its debut. Few of us still use stamps, but as a fan of snail mail I’m grateful for this concession, even if it’s been created for no other reason than to appease disgruntled postal workers who’re tired of explaining the price hikes to increasingly aggressive customers. The fact that I can buy one for forty-one cents today and use it, say, forty-one years from now (if the US pseudo-empire and its postal service still exist) sounds like a great deal to me, ne’er you mind that the image is of the cracked Liberty Bell and the line “USA FIRST-CLASS FOREVER” creates a somewhat pathetic kind of poem. That little rectangle of paper, ink, and adhesive will effectively appreciate over time, and I won’t even have to monitor the investment. This brings me to some other goods hitting the market this week that will soon cost a few gazillion cents more.

Tomorrow, 15 May is the Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Sale, followed by Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale the day after. Both of these hot evening sales are accompanied by morning and afternoon sessions, which include works of implicitly less desirable/more attainable status. I’d not given the whole art auction universe much thought for a few years—ever since an insistent idealism about art hinted that my job assisting a private art dealer was perhaps better filled by an aesthetically disinterested economics grad—but having an outside glimpse of it again this past weekend was most enjoyable. Overlooking the apparently confused titles of these regal events (Jackson Pollock is a contemporary artist?) and focusing on some of the work, I left thrilled that these two premier auction houses deign to even open their doors to riffraff like me.

In the company of a painter I adore who’d suggested the trip, we first went to Christie’s, at Rockefeller Center. Strolling through two of the three preview floors, I was reminded how much Ruscha’s letters make me smile, and how Martin’s still verticals and horizontals can be too quiet for all but the most studied space. I’d expected to feel intimidated, but was glad to see that I wasn’t so out of place, remembering an observation Miranda July once made after discussing one of her short stories, something along the lines of “poor people who win the lottery don’t become different people, they just become poor people with tons of money.” So there we were, amid well-heeled and sandal-wearing families alike, lovers, art lovers, art investors, indifferent investors, and all sorts of folk keen to have a look at some incredible works before they’re sent to the auction block and disappear. Some will be whisked away into private homes forever, some will vanish into the buyer’s closet for a few months until they appreciate enough to be sent right back to the block, and a very few just might happily end up in a museum or collection where the public will still have access to them. After leaving that gallery I had worked at and moving on with life, the whole experience came vividly back to me last year as I unsuspectingly strolled through the National Gallery of Art and came across a piece the dealer I’d worked with had been offering when I left. It was like bumping into an acquaintance who’s moved away and you never expected to see again, and I was glad she’d (unintentionally) placed it where people could enjoy it.

Here I must take a moment to digress; for me, the real discovery at Christie’s was Matthias Weischer, one of the Leipzig School painters I’d heard a lot about but whose work I’d never seen in person. I considered getting the auction catalogue for this one piece, filled with echoes of De Chirico and other strange spaces I’d been thinking about lately, but wanted to travel lightly and knew there’d be other occasions to see him. Checking the Christie’s website I found some lofty, laughable text about it:
“In Familie O-Mittag…. all spatial bearings lost, viewers are left with the fascinating task of making sense of the layers of Weischer’s painting and grappling with the meaning of the inexplicable dark and foreboding coiled mass at the center of the work–a process which intelligently mirrors the manner in which many struggle to wade through the multiple strata of their everyday lives and wrestle with the often enigmatic recurring doubts of human existence.” I know nothing about dark and foreboding masses, but I love green boa-constrictor constructions, hovering floors, and dissolving bricks. And yeah, if it can mirror my struggle to wade through the strata of my everyday existence better than a little Lacanian analysis, maybe it is worth more than the $250–$350,000 estimate they’ve put forth… if only a fraction of that went to the work’s creator.

Leaving Christie’s and walking northeast to Sotheby’s singular palace (now quite contested real estate), a very different atmosphere greeted us. Joining what appeared to be a gregarious father-son duo asking if there were anything to see on the ninth floor during the elevator ride to the relatively new, rather sterile tenth floor, the space felt more like the new MoMA, as opposed to Christie’s more intimate spaces, until I turned a corner to see jewel-cases of diamonds tucked along a wall beside some of the paintings. As a big Marilyn fan I’ve nothing against diamonds, but their placement here seemed curious, even disruptive, next to the supposed works of art. The shopping mall atmosphere grew stronger as we descended to the lower floors, tucked into shadow behind the tall front atrium and connected by somehow incongruously loud escalators, where the paintings up for the morning and afternoon sales were cramped in around pre-Columbian artifacts, another branch of the diamond division, and some “Important Turner Watercolours from the Guy and Myriam Ullens Collection,” (as if Sotheby’s would sell anything that weren’t important).

The second preview, feeling more like an odd museum, had a more varied and vociferous public, and there was more mobile phone speculation to be overheard. Seeing an early Stella maze was a good welcome, and its blacks, greys, and whites good preparation for Richter’s charming Spanish nudies in the next room. As I looked at a Warhol flower piece set into one of Stella’s rainbow works thanks to the magical refraction of a prismlike Robert Irwin column, a young boy ran up, ducked between me and the column, and took my same stance to look through. He then called his parents, who’d just dismissed Not Pollock on the side wall, to do the same. The following room had Tom Friedman’s teeny self-portrait carved from Aspirin, and more Aspirin encapsulated in the transparent acrylic of a Tomaselli piece. Seeing on our way out that another, less fortunate Richter was relegated to a spot next to the escalator, then noting that it was a lithograph of a photograph of a painting of his, numbered 5 in an edition of 8, the relatively low $40–60,000 estimate on it made more sense. It was a fun afternoon.

The following evening I ran into my upstairs neighbors, two truly fine artists who’d ridden the ascending art market wave of the ’80s and weathered the consequential crash, and traded some not-so-fun reflections on precisely what is going on, where these works are coming from, going to, and why. These will be an exciting couple of days, and I’m glad to have had an inspiring peek at some beauties just briefly passing through.

Pevious Lunar Refractions here.

[Images courtesy of my camera, the USPS website, and Christie’s and Sotheby’s online catalogues.]

Of all the qualities a person may possess, be they inherently positive or negative, a useful place may be made for all them except loyalty. Loyalty is a willful act made at the behest of a superior, an act whose only guaranty is continued subservience. Loyalty imposes the impression of honor on outwardly unyielding faith in a poor idea or person.

A banker in his 30s gets a job with a maverick investor. Many quiet meetings and transactions surround the maverick’s method for picking investments. The banker is privy to many of these secrets and is well rewarded for his energetic and discreet compliance. He buys a stately house just out of the city. People say taxi and he thinks of a helicopter. A journalist discovers the method is grossly illegal. The banker stays on through the investigations; given his rewards he feels this is the just choice. His job has given him his possessions and blessed his resume; the maverick’s reputation must be preserved within a larger narrative. 

Every weekend a mother and father visit their daughter at a juvenile detention center. The bus takes three hours. The wait at the detention center is twice as long. They spin great webs of contexts that make sense of her crime, but they do not ultimately stand by or try to justify the crime itself. Sometimes they are not let into the center. Sometimes they are let in and she is moody and unmanageable. They go to see their daughter every weekend. They love her.

Peter Gotti, older brother of John Gotti, was the last head from a long generation of the Gambino crime family. He did not rule long, indicted with several other made men, all elderly, hunched over and harassed by their bodies. At trial there were as many turncoats as there were defendants, old men as well, trading their testimony and the mafia’s lifetime oath of loyalty, for however many less years in the cells for one cooperators are kept in for their own safety. Peter Gotti was found guilty, his appeal has been filed.

Zimbabwe. Burma. Any government from the 60s through the 80s whose leader had big dark glasses welded to his temples. All governments founded on loyalty, all corrupt and doomed. See the current American administration the comparison of which is no great stretch. One is to the others as stable, very rich America is to decidedly unstable, much poorer countries. Permanent war, the propagation of one party and the obfuscation of the press (worse states castrate the press, America’s was emasculated into impotence, left making excuses, “I swear this never happened before.”) are wholly unintelligent from the point of view of good government, and all are acts typical of governments crammed with loyalists. 

Minority groups are often what would be called loyal amongst each other. But this is the affection that comes from shared experience, spread out concentrically, because the minority experience is generally an unstable and/or subservient one. They care for each other because others don’t.

Two brother’s sit in a bar, one drunk. They love each other very much, talk to each other every day. The drunk brother gets in a verbal altercation and a fight is inevitable. The sober brother steps in, punching the man his brother faces, hurting him. A regrettable act of love.

An old man dies. One granddaughter loved the man so much she charges money she will not be able to pay back anytime soon, flying from another country to attend the funeral. Another granddaughter, who loved him equally and lives in the same town as the funeral, cannot leave her house she is so devastated. Neither qualifies as loyal or not, both are acts born from love.

A soldier lies wounded in an Army hospital, alive in a manner of speaking, burned his body over and sort of breathing. In 2003 his brigade marched from the Kuwaiti border to Baghdad where for a week they drove up and down a highway celebrating, shooting wildly. The soldier went home and was brought back by the Army for another year, then another year and a last year the beginning of which a bomb exploded under him. Many explosions could have done the same, but he always missed their acquaintance through luck and the help of other soldiers. His troop contains many personalities, some of whom he likes, others less so. No reward, except the company of these personalities, exists equivalent to what the soldier has seen and had to do. He regrets that he is not with his troop now. His is the saddest, sorriest love of all.

I'm not even going to bother sourcing the quote that initially spurred this column; we've all seen a hundred similar claims in press releases, news articles, blogs and so on:

It is an established fact that 98 percent of the DNA, or the code of life, is exactly the same between humans and chimpanzees. So the key to what it means to be human resides in that other 2 percent.

Argh. This meme, or trope, or whatever you want to call it, drives me crazy. Here's why:

Individual human genomes vary by about 0.08% at the single-nucleotide level, whereas human and chimpanzee genomes differ by about1-1.5% at the same level. This is misleading, though, because single-nucleotide comparison means aligning comparable sequences base-by-base and counting the differences. In order to line up the two sequences in the first place, you have to introduce gaps into each sequence to allow for insertions and deletions. Like this:

actgccggctaac-----gtaccTgtcaactggcatgcatgcaagtacc
actgccggcGaacggtccgtacccgtcaac--gcatgAatgcaagtacc

In this made-up example, three bases out of fifty are different (6%) but the gaps account for a further 7 bases' worth of difference (14%). Do this with enough regions of each genome to get a representative sample and you can estimate the degree of sequence identity between the two genomes. Of the optimally-aligned sections of our genomes, we share about 98.5-99% with chimps, but taking the gaps into account produces a rather lower figure of about 95%, something Roy Britten showed in 2002.

What both figures overlook, and tend to obscure, is differences in the organization of large sections of the genetic information: duplications, inversions, recombinations between and within chromosomes, insertions of retroviral sequences, species-specific genes and so on. There are a number of methods that allow us to measure such differences, but at the submicroscopic level¹ one of the newest and perhaps most powerful is representational oligonucleotide microarray analysis (ROMA). What ROMA does (there's a good explanatory paper here) is to compare reduced-complexity representations of two genomes. The average resolution is one probe every 35 kb. The authors say that 10-15 kb is feasible, but the more granular comparison may be more interesting, at least initially, because it shows the “big picture” — like zooming out on a map. (There is some tradeoff, of course; earlier lower-resolution studies found far fewer polymorphisms.)

When researchers at Cold Spring Harbor Labs used ROMA to investigate the differences between tumor and normal cells, they included a normal-normal control to establish lower limits of variability (the Science paper is here). What they found was that the genomes of normal individuals vary not just at the level of the individual nucleotide or even gene, but also on a much larger (though still submicroscopic) scale, with deletions and duplications from 100,000 b to 1 Mb (b = base, or more accurately base pair, a single “rung” on the familiar twisted rope ladder image of DNA).

(As an aside: how big is 100 kb – 1 Mb? The entire human genome is about 3000 Mb, and contains somewhere between 18,000 and 30,000 genes (estimates vary, but the newer the estimate the lower the number seems to be). For simplicity, say the “average gene” is about 100 kb (but note that this is a bit misleading, since a typical gene contains only a few hundred to several thousand bases of coding sequence, which may be spread out across hundreds of kb but is more usually contained within, say, a few tens of kb). So, 100-1000 kb is easily big enough to encompass a whole gene, or even quite a few entire genes. Indeed, the CSHL researchers found variation in some 70 genes, including the gene which causes Cohen syndrome and genes known to be involved in neurodevelopment, leukaemia, drug resistance in breast cancer and body weight regulation.)

The team compared twenty individual genomes and found 76 unique CNVs (copy number variants). The average CNV was 465 kb (median 222 kb) and individuals differed from each other by an average of 11 CNPs, but the authors provide multiple reasons to expect the observed CNPs to represent only a subset of the total, which they estimate to be 226 CNPs covering 44 Mb. In fact, more recent studies have discovered a total of 1237 CNVs covering more than 140 Mb. The authors of the linked review caution that most of these have not been validated by alternative methods or discovery in multiple unrelated individuals, so the final number will be considerably lower, and a slightly earlier review describes 563 “apparently unique” human CNVs.

So what happens if you make a similar² comparison between chimpanzees and humans? Perry et al. used array CGH (a technique closely related to ROMA) to compare the genomes of 20 unrelated chimpanzees, and found 355 CNVs; the same array (which covers about 12% of the human reference genome) was used in an earlier study of 55 unrelated human genomes, and found 255 CNVs. Of these, 74 CNVs were found in the same regions of the two genomes, and many of these CNVs were frequent in both species, indicating that certain regions may be particularly susceptible to this kind of variation. In their paper describing the draft chimpanzee genome, Mikkelson et al. provide a number of points of comparison with the human genome. In addition to providing the best available figure for single-nucleotide differences (1.23%), they estimate that insertions and deletions result in a difference of about 90 Mb, or 3%, between the two genomes. Earlier, Newman et al. used a bioinformatics approach to compare sequence data from the (at the time, unfinished) chimp genome with the human genome reference sequence. They found insertions/deletions amounting to about a 5% difference between human and chimp genomes, but they also found 174 submicroscopic sequence inversions spanning more than 450 Mb. It turns out that such inversions, sections of DNA whose orientation along the chromosome is reversed between the genomes being compared, are surprisingly frequent in humans and chimpanzees. Feuk et al. compared the current chimp draft with the human reference genome sequence and found 1,576 putative regions of inverted orientation, covering more than 154 Mb. Of the 23 of these inversions that were experimentally validated, three were polymorphic in humans. Similarly, Szamalek et al. made gene order comparisons between a set of 11,518 human and chimp genes and found 71 inversions; of the 5 validated inversions (spanning about 11.5 Mb and containing a total of 103 genes), three were polymorphic in the chimpanzee and one in humans. These studies strongly suggest that submicroscopic differences are an important source of genomic variation in, and between, humans and chimpanzees. Moreover, a large number of genes have been shown to be affected by submicroscopic changes, and CNVs and small-scale inversions have been associated with a wide variety of biological functions (see here and here for reviews). For instance, CNVs are estimated to affect over 3,000 human- or chimpanzee-specific genes, and known human CNVs include genes involved in drug detoxification (glutathione-S-transferase,cytochrome P450s),immune response and inflammation (leukocyte immunoglobulin-likereceptor, defensins), surface antigens (melanoma antigen gene,rhesus blood group gene families) and variation in drug responses and disease resistance/susceptibility.

I hope all this makes it clear that human and chimpanzee genomes are not “98% identical”, except at the relatively uninformative level of single-nucleotide comparisons. Indeed, the most meaningful differences between the two genomes are likely structural in nature, and cannot be neatly summed up as a percentage difference of any kind. I'm not even going to start on “what it means to be human” — that's a lifetime's worth of philosophy and molecular evolution. All I want to do here is to make the case that, whatever it is that differentiates us from chimpanzees, it is not to be found in that infamous 2%.

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¹ There are also much larger-scale differences, visible under a microscope, between the two genomes. These have been well characterized, and include the fusion of two ancestral chromosomes (analogous to chr. 12 and 13 in chimpanzees) to form human chromosome 2, extensive sequence duplications in chimpanzees relative to humans, and nine large pericentric inversions.

² I have not found a ROMA-based comparison between humans and chimpanzees, but all of the studies described focused on differences at roughly the same scale on which ROMA operates.

….

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

by Pervez Hoodbhoy

General Pervez Musharraf is now a desperate man. Dozens were left dead in the horrific carnage on May 12, initiated by his violent political allies in Karachi, the MQM, in an attempt to stem the popular protests against Musharraf’s dismissal of the chief justice of Pakistan. But this may still not buy him enough strength. Protests will continue. His “million man rally” in Islamabad, held on the same day, blatantly used the state’s full organizational machinery and was widely ridiculed. It was seen as a sign of his weakness rather than strength.

So what is Musharraf likely to do next?

Military generals and fanatical clerics have been symbiotically linked in Pakistan’s politics for decades. They have often needed and helped the other attain their respective goals. And they may soon need each other again – this time to set Islamabad ablaze. An engineered bloodbath that leads to the army’s intervention, and the declaration of a national emergency, could serve as excellent reason for postponing the October 2007 elections. Although Musharraf denies that he wants a postponement, a lengthy martial law may now be his only chance for a continuation of his dictatorial rule into its eighth year – and perhaps beyond.

This perverse strategy sounds almost unbelievable. A man who President George W. Bush describes as his “buddy” in the war against terror, and the celebrated author of an “enlightened moderate” version of Islam, Musharraf wears the two close assassination attempts on his life by religious extremists as a badge of honour. But his secret reliance upon the Taliban card – one that he has been accused of playing for years – increases as his authority and judgment weaken.

The signs of government engineered chaos are manifest. For many months now, here in the heart of Pakistan’s capital, vigilante groups from a government funded mosque, the Lal Masjid, have roamed the streets and bazaars as they impose Islamic morality and terrorize citizens in full view of the police. Openly sympathetic to the Taliban and tribal militants fighting the Pakistan army, the two cleric brothers who head Lal Masjid, Maulana Abdul Aziz and Maulana Abdur Rashid Ghazi, have attracted a core of banned militant organizations around them. These include the Jaish-e-Muhammad, considered to be the pioneer of suicide bombings in the region.

The clerics openly defy the state. Since Jan 21, 2007, baton wielding burqa-clad students of the Jamia Hafsa, the women’s Islamic university located next to Lal Masjid, have forcibly occupied a government building, the Children’s Library. In one of their many forays outside the seminary, this burqa brigade swooped upon a house, which they claimed was a brothel, and kidnapped 3 women and a baby.

Students of Jamia Hafsa (Women’s University) in Islamabad demonstrate for Shariah law

Victory for the Burqa Brigade

The male students of Islamabad’s many madrassas are even more active. They terrorize video shop owners, who they accuse of spreading pornography and vice. Newspapers have carried pictures of grand bonfires made with seized cassettes and CDs. Most video stores in Islamabad have now closed down. Their owners duly repented after a fresh campaign by militants on May 4 bombed a dozen music and video stores, barber shops and a girls school in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP).

Enjoying video burnings in Islamabad

The Pakistani state has shown astonishing patience. It showed its displeasure in Karachi with bullets, while other challengers have been hit with air and artillery power. But the Lal Masjid clerics operate with impunity. No attempt has been made to cut off their electricity, gas, phone, or website – or even to shut down their illegal FM radio station. The chief negotiator appointed by Musharraf, Chaudhry Shujaat Husain, described the burqa brigade kidnappers as “our daughters”, with whom negotiations would continue and against whom “no operation could be contemplated”.

Soon after they went on the warpath, the clerics realized that the government wanted to play ball. Their initial demand – the rebuilding of 8 illegally constructed mosques that had been knocked down by Islamabad’s civic administration – transformed into a demand for enforcing the Shariah in Pakistan. At a meeting held in the mosque on April 6, over 100 guest religious leaders from across the country pledged to die for the cause of Islam and Shariah. On April 12, (also reported in The News, Islamabad, April 24) in an FM broadcast from the Lal Masjid’s illegal FM station, the clerics issued a threat: “There will be suicide blasts in the nook and cranny of the country. We have weapons, grenades and we are expert in manufacturing bombs. We are not afraid of death”.

Confronting the state — with the state’s connivance

The Lal Masjid head cleric, a former student of my university in Islamabad, added the following chilling message for our women students in the same broadcast:

The government should abolish co-education. Quaid-e-Azam University has become a brothel. Its female professors and students roam in objectionable dresses. I think I will have to send my daughters of Jamia Hafsa to these immoral women. They will have to hide themselves in hijab otherwise they will be punished according to Islam. Our female students have not issued the threat of throwing acid on the uncovered faces of women. However, such a threat could be used for creating the fear of Islam among sinful women. There is no harm in it. There are far more horrible punishments in the hereafter for such women.

If the truth be told, QAU resembles a city of walking double-holed tents rather than the brothel of a sick mullah’s imagination. The last few bare-faced women are finding it more difficult by the day to resist. But then, that is precisely the aim of the Islamists. On May 7, a female teacher in the QAU history department was physically assaulted in her office by a bearded, Taliban-looking man who screamed that he had instructions from Allah. President Musharraf – who is the chancellor of QAU and often chooses to be involved in rather petty university administrative affairs – has made no comment on the recent developments.

What next? As Islamabad heads the way of Pakistan’s tribal towns, the next targets will be girls schools, internet cafes, bookshops and western clothing stores, followed by shops selling toilet paper, tampons, underwear, mannequins, and other un-Islamic goods.

In a sense, the inevitable is coming to pass. Until a few years ago, Islamabad was a quiet, orderly, modern city different from all others in Pakistan. Still earlier it was largely the abode of Pakistan’s hyper-elite and foreign diplomats. But the rapid transformation of its demography brought with it hundreds of mosques with multi-barrelled audio-cannons mounted on minarets, as well as scores of madrassas illegally constructed in what used to be public parks and green areas. Now, tens of thousands of their students with little prayer caps dutifully chant the Quran all day. In the evenings they roam in packs through the city’s streets and bazaars, gaping at store windows and lustfully ogling bare-faced women.

The stage for transforming Islamabad into a Taliban stronghold is being set. If at all it is to be prevented, resolute opposition from its citizens will be needed to prevent more Lal Masjids from creating their own shariah squads.

The responsibility for the current bout of religious terrorism in Islamabad falls squarely on General Musharraf’s government, which has clearly chosen to secretly sanction it. It is a desperate stratagem but it will not work. Musharraf is already a lame duck. His three principal intelligence agencies are split among themselves on many issues, as is his political party. The Americans have finally wearied of his cleverness in fighting for their dollars while secretly supporting the Taliban. When he exits – which may be sooner rather than later – Musharraf will have left a legacy that will last for generations. All this for a little more taste of power.

The author teaches physics at Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad. Pictures courtesy of Ishaque Choudhry.

by Beth Ann Bovino

The house party has started to wind down. The result of these excesses has finally started to appear. Big sub-prime mortgage lender New Century Financial has filed for bankruptcy, while tens of thousands of sub-prime borrowers are unable to make their payments. Defaults on these mortgages, which are granted to homebuyers with low credit scores, and who have bought their houses with little or no money down, have increased sharply with little signs of slowing down.

While it is obvious that homeowner defaults hurt mortgage-lenders and homeowners, these defaults must be put in a broader economic context. Questions include: How will they affect the broader housing markets? Will it spread into the larger economy? Who will be hurt and how? What will the impact of sub-prime problems damage credit availability? How can it be solved, and will the solution will be worse.

The turmoil in sub-prime lending is significant. David Wyss the Chief Economist and my boss at Standard and Poor’s expects the weakness to last at least through the end of 2007 (see “We Call It Sub-prime for a Reason”). He said that “today’s losses have been propelled by a confluence of two factors—rising interest rates that have made mortgages more expensive since late 2005 and stagnating home prices, as opposed to the surging gains prior to 2006. Low interest rates or double-digit gains in home prices aren’t likely to return in the near-term”. Thus, conditions in the sub-prime market will probably get worse before they get better, with foreclosures likely near 12% by 2008.

The current problem is largely confined to the sub-prime adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM) mortgage market. In contrast, the fixed-rate market is showing no sign of strain. However, homeowners with adjustable-rate mortgages are coming under financial pressure. Although the economy remains generally strong and unemployment low, higher interest rates are squeezing mortgages that stretched too much to buy their homes. Foreclosure rates are rising, although they still remain moderate by historical standards and are far below their recent peaks in 2001 and 2002, during a recession. The impact from losses will be felt through the economy, though the extent of the damage is still unknown.

In Mortgage Holders

The recent drop in interest rates to historic lows generated enormous demand for housing. The housing boom led to record levels of home ownership, but it also led to record home prices as many Americans bought bigger homes than they could comfortably afford. It was affordable at a 5% mortgage interest rate, but hurts at the current 6.2%. Lenders also dramatically increased their number of mortgage products in order to reach more homebuyers, including those who they might otherwise have excluded. Most home mortgages are still high quality and unlikely candidates for default. But sub-prime loans and new forms of financing increased the overall risk.

Households, on average seem to be in good shape. Although household wealth remains well below its 1999 record ratio of 615% of after-tax income, at 575% it is still well above its historic average. Debt service payments are at a near-record 14.5% of household income, but seem manageable. But some households are likely to be in trouble. The 2004 Survey of Consumer Finances showed that 12.2% of U.S. households (up from 11.8% in 2001) have debt-service burdens that exceed 40% of their income (see CreditWeek, April 13, 2007 and April 25, 2007). It is likely that this category may also have a higher share of adjustable-rate mortgages.

As rates adjust upward more holders of adjustable rate sub-prime loans will likely be unable to pay their monthly bills. Adjustable rate mortgages are about one-fifth of new mortgages according to the Mortgage Bankers’ Association, but are a much higher share of sub-prime mortgages. In the past two years the sub-prime market accounts accounted for about 20% of all mortgages, and 40% of all adjustable-rate and interest-only home loans in 2006. The higher monthly payments are probably a factor in the rise in delinquency rates, which up sharply from last year. They are still well below their historical averages, much less their recession peaks. However, the 4.25 percentage point rise in short-term interest rates that began in mid-2004 has still not been completely passed through to mortgage holders, and more rough waters are likely ahead.

Impact on the Economy

The difficulties of sub-prime lenders will likely affect the economy because there will be more foreclosed houses on the market, on top of the unsold homes held by individuals, new home construction should drop even more. During the second half of 2006, declines in residential construction activity cut GDP growth by a full percentage point. Double-digit declines in residential construction will continue through most of 2007, depressing GDP. It will also exacerbate the loss of income in the construction industry.

So far the indirect impact of housing on the economy has been small. Consumers have not quit spending. Despite record consecutive months with the personal saving rate remaining below zero (-0.8% in March), Americans haven’t lost their appetite to accumulate more debt. However, the higher interest rates, more so than slower home appreciation, will probably cause the consumer to cut down on borrowing, and thus eventually spending. The strong stock market has offset the lower increase in housing wealth. However, this could be at risk if stock prices fall.

Whether the higher cost of borrowing and slower rise in the value of home equity will slow borrowing remains another big concern. Americans have been using their homes as ATM machines, through home equity loans and cash-out refinancings. The average American borrowed 3.5% of his income last year. Low interest rates made these loans cheap, especially since they were usually tax-deductible. With a slower housing market and higher interest rates, this will almost certainly slow. According to Freddie Mac, the amount consumers borrow against their homes to finance other activities could drop 20% and another 30% over the next two years. More homeowners will be faced with the choice of borrowing from other sources or not borrowing at all. While those with strong credit may be able to borrow from other sources, many sub-prime borrowers could find those alternatives closed to them.

Those outside the mainstream credit system, with no credit history, fall into the sub-prime group by default. They will likely face greater barriors to entry, simply because lenders currently lack the right tools to adequately assess the credit risk. The Brookings Institution and Political and Economic Research Council reported that new studies have developed ways to increase access to affordable credit by using alternative data in consumer credit reports. This could help reduce some of the roadblocks for this group in the future, but not in the near-term.

The Federal Reserve may begin cutting rates later in the year as markets expect. However, there has been little impact on long-term bond yields, and thus fixed-rate mortgages, since mid 2004, when the Fed began to tighten, so Fed cuts will also likely have little impact. Adjustable-rate mortgages will become cheaper, however, which will begin to help sales, and should moderate the impact on adjustable-rate borrowers.

Risks To The Recovery

Overall, lenders were way too enthusiastic in lending money to people who couldn’t really afford the payments. When investors have been too complacent about risk, and get stung, they often overreact and become too cautious. This impact could be compounded by legislative actions that would punish the lender for making bad loans. The lack of availability of mortgages could make a recovery in the housing market very difficult.

The biggest worry isn’t the sub-prime market itself, but the possibility that the housing market’s problems could be aggravated by a general recession, say, if oil prices surge. Increased legislation created to help homeowners, may also restrict the ability of lenders to write mortgages or impair the value of the collateral by restricting foreclosures. The market would likely react by making mortgages more expensive and harder to get.

A charitable way of describing Jessica Valenti’s book, Full Frontal Feminism, is that it fails to reach out to anyone. People who already read feminist weblogs, such as Valenti’s Feministing, will already know everything Valenti says in her book. People who do not will find it either incomprehensible or unappealing. Less charitably, Valenti’s writing ranges from weak to offputtingly juvenile, and uses bait and switch tactics that will not turn anyone feminist. If she wrote her book intending to trigger a new wave of feminism, fueled by women in their late teens or early twenties, that next wave will have to wait for a better activist.

Valenti’s starting point is that lately, young women do not identify as feminists because they consider it uncool. For them, feminism is for shrill old women who still fight the struggles of the 1970s; cool girls are post-feminists. If that is indeed how they think, then the best way to dispel the notion that feminism is dead is to show post-teens that it is cool to be a feminist. In the book, Valenti does it by deliberately using very informal language, by defining feminism to be the mere belief women deserve equal rights, and by discussing personal issues such as sex and attractiveness. Thus she not only has chapters devoted to sexual assault or reproductive rights or academic feminism, but also a chapter entitled “Feminists Do It Better.”

The book’s biggest problem is that in her attempt to be cool, Valenti surrenders any pretense to intellectual seriousness. She introduces one statistic as “Eighty frigging percent.” At one point, she introduces a conservative stance and responds only with, “Puke,” rather than with an argument. She repeatedly follows sentences with “Fuck it.” A good example of her language appears on page 102, when she criticizes Utah State Senator Chris Buttars, who called parental notification laws for abortion a matter of consequence. She reproduces his quote, and then adds a parenthetical remark, “The consequence of having the last name Buttars is apparently being a huge asshole. Appropriate.”

Another example appears in her chapter about sex on page 38, when she lists sex tips that include not only good ideas such as condom use but also the disclaimers “Don’t have sex with Republicans” and “don’t have sex with someone who is anti-choice.” Most people in her target audience are Democratic and pro-choice, but not nearly so shrill or partisan or with a strong liberal personal identity as to not dismiss Valenti the same way they would dismiss someone who advised them not to have sex with Southerners or Hispanics or poor people.

So on the one hand, Valenti ensures everyone who is looking for a serious introduction to feminism will ignore what she has to say. On the other, those swear words do not make Valenti look cool. To truly be cool, Valenti would have to talk about issues that truly interest most apolitical teenage or college-age American girls today, such as television shows or music with feminist themes. But she nowhere mentions Joss Whedon or Pink or Ani DiFranco. Instead of talking about those, or about other feminists who are familiar to many people who are well-versed in pop culture, she references issues from her own social circle of feminist weblogs, which hardly nobody knows about. MTV reaches 440 million households. The weblog with the highest traffic on the net, BoingBoing, averages a little more than five million pageviews a week; Feministing averages 150 thousand. The 98 or 99 percent of Valenti’s target audience that knows very little if anything about political blogs, much less feminist blogs, will have no idea why she quotes feminists bloggers whose name recognition is about the same as Valenti’s blog’s.

Unfortunately, the references that only people who read feminist blogs will get do not end with obscure quotes. At one point, when writing about abortion, she attacks South Dakota State Senator Bill Napoli, who justified his vote for a comprehensive abortion ban by saying abortion should only be permissible when the woman is a raped virgin. On page 95, she reproduces his full quote,

A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated.

So far, so good. But that is the second reference to Napoli in the book. The first one occurs in the middle of the preceding chapter, on page 68, where she says, “Remember our friend Bill Napoli on the only girl who should be able to get an abortion? The sodomized virgin?” People who read local South Dakota newspapers or watch local television might be familiar with that, as well as people who are well-versed in American abortion politics. Everyone else will find it incomprehensible.

Worse, Valenti misdiagnoses the stumbling block that keeps many non-feminists away from feminism. It is not coolness; political movements are never cool. This decade’s gay rights movement, whose success in normalizing homosexuality in American culture is staggering, is eschewing coolness, instead focusing on mundane and bourgeois rights such as marriage and military service. Rather, the stumbling block is censorship. The people in the penumbra of movement feminism, who a more skilled writer than Valenti could bring in, are by and large liberals who oppose censorship, including of pornography.

Feminism has gotten a lot of bad rep due to its homegrown anti-porn movement, which systematically scared liberals away in the 1970s and 80s. Since about 1990 that movement has waned, but Valenti never mentions that. The closest she comes to attacking anti-porn feminism is a short derisive reference to Ariel Levy, of Female Chauvinist Pigs fame. But Levy is not the best known feminist critic of sexual liberalism; Catharine MacKinnon is, followed by Andrea Dworkin. MacKinnon is by no means obscure, and chances are that Valenti’s readers have at least heard of her and her attempts to ban pornography, even if they are not familiar with her theory.

If Valenti had devoted a chapter to explaining that nobody in the feminist movement cares for MacKinnon anymore, the book might have been worth the ink it was printed on, despite the bad writing. But on the contrary, Valenti’s take on Levy gives off the impression that there is a serious current within the feminist movement that tells young women which sexual practices are feminist and which are not. In addition, in a way Valenti comes off as very similar to Levy. Levy is not MacKinnon; the brunt of her argument is not that certain sex acts are inherently degrading, but that the growth of sex-positivism has given girls only two choices, a raunch culture in which they cannot say no to any sex act and a puritan culture in which they cannot say yes. That is hardly different from what Valenti says later in the book when she commands her readers not to change their name when they marry, and rants about plastic surgery and liposuction.

That scolding could easily be justified using an appeal to the feminist principle that the personal is the political. But Valenti never mentions that principle by name. Instead, she prefers to define feminism around nearly universal notions of women’s rights, only to repeatedly allude to the notion that the personal is the political. In theory, this bait and switch tactic is meant to lure people by showing them how the movement’s goals are self-evident. In practice, there is nothing self-evident about those goals. The feminist theory of rape, which holds that sexual assault is a mechanism for all men to control all women, does not follow from the principle of gender equality, nor is it justified by evidence.

Feminists are not the only people who use those tactics. Much of the above paragraph applies to libertarians, with “women’s rights” replaced by “personal freedom.” Even more than feminists, libertarians like to pretend that their political prescriptions follow from trivial principles. And even more than feminists, libertarians have spectacularly failed to persuade people using those tactics. Every libertarian success in the last thirty years has come from pragmatic arguments about the failure of welfare or the benefits of low tax levels, rather than from anarcho-capitalist rants about the immorality of the income tax. The vast majority of people do not find taxation immoral and do not think politics belongs in bedrooms. Any movement that tries to mount a frontal assault against those people’s notions is doomed to failure.

Now, it is worth mentioning that there are plenty of books that are inaccessible to people who are not already in the group or movement, but are nonetheless well-written and informative once one knows the movement’s basic ideas. However, Full Frontal Feminism is not one of them. As noted on Feminist Review’s review, it only examines each issue very shallowly. Valenti may have failed to reach out to non-feminists, but she certainly succeeded in crafting a book that is even more useless to people inside the movement. Few of its statistics or quotes will be new to readers who are already politically motivated or involved in feminist activism. Even feminist blogs, which due to the limitations of the medium cannot delve very deeply into anything, routinely engage in more thoughtful and careful analysis than the book, and in almost all cases they also do so without liberally using swear words.

The statistics Valenti does use tend to be unsourced and at times false. The best example I know comes from the chapter on sexual assault. Valenti inflates the number of rapes in order to make her arguments about rape as a universal female experience seem more plausible. For example, she says on pp. 65-66,

[The National Crime Victimization Survey] shows that every two and a half minutes, someone is sexually assaulted in the United States, and that one in six women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape. (Keep in mind, rape is one of the most underreported crimes, so that statistic is likely too low.)

The statistic in question comes from a crime survey rather than from a police report, so it gets around the underreporting problem. That same survey even asks people if they reported the crime to the police, and its reporting rate figure, 38% for sexual assault and rape, is widely used in feminist circles. And even if the one in six statistic is true—the more recent statistics I have seen are closer to one in eight—it is a vestige of an era in which rape rates were far higher than today. If the rape rate in the US holds steady, the statistic will settle at one in twenty, and another one in twenty sexually assaulted but not raped. How can I believe her unsourced statistics about the economic losses women suffer when bearing children when the statistics she quotes that I do know something about fail to check out?

Despite Valenti’s intention to dispel myths about feminists, she only plays to stereotypes. She is about as shrill as one can get, and even when she is right, she comes off as unreasonable. The gratuitous swear words certainly do not help her image. She relegates issues affecting low-income and minority women to an almost marginal role, even as she accuses mainstream feminism of catering exclusively to the white middle class.

Valenti could have written a good book. If I had read the book but nothing else by her I would conclude that she cannot write, but in fact I have read some good things by her. In a promotional interview on Salon she hints that she understands the real problem young women have with sex-negative sentiments, even if she does not refer to MacKinnon by name. She could write a book that uses professional language, that talks about undercurrents of feminism within pop culture, that introduces the main ideas of political feminism without bait and switches, and that demonstrates that feminists today are anti-censorship. She could write a book that could appeal to young women interested in learning about feminism. Instead, she produced a low-quality rant that will not and probably should not get through to anyone who is not already familiar with everything she says.

Nobody loves a pedophile. No one. Not even their mothers.

American society prefers them dead – done in by fellow inmates incarcerated in some human inferno of a prison. If that doesn’t work, it’s perpetual ankle bracelets or indefinite incarceration. Out of shackles and out of prison, a registry of their names is kept, their houses noted, their neighbors notified.

I knew some pedophiles, or presumptive pedophiles, when I was 15. They are likely dead now, as the events I describe here happened forty years ago. I was a lonely, depressed gay kid. I knew what a homosexual was because my parents, to their embarrassment, took me to Gore Vidal’s play, The Best Man, in 1960. The play is Washington-based melodrama in which a presidential candidate’s homosexual past becomes a weapon used in blackmail against him. Though I never used the word, I knew what it meant all the same. I knew I was a homosexual too, but I only told it to myself. Moreover, to escape imagined annihilation at the hands of the male heterosexual mob, I worked hard to leave no traces of my true identity in any part of the world I inhabited.

Well, I suppose, almost. I found a sympathetic listener in my drama teacher. He was a remarkably self-assured man of about 45, I would guess. I might even say he was flamboyant, given that flamboyant in a drab suburban high school in 1963 meant dressing a couple notches above Robert Hall’s, wearing fashionable glasses, and using a very fine fountain pen instead of a cheap Papermate. He walked on his heels with his head held high. He had a wonderfully full voice, and yes, a high-pitched bit of a cackle. When he got mad, whether in class or in a rehearsal, he would slam the papers or the clipboard down, and walk away rather than at us, which I find all the more remarkable now having realized how many bullies I have faced in classrooms. He was a passionate man, full of spirit. You never would have known that he had gone to a small Methodist college.

He would drive me home after school. I would hang around his office with several others, or stop by to chat after the activity period that followed the regular school day. He would offer me a lift home, and in the confines of his big white Pontiac convertible, we would talk. I lived only a mile and a half away from school, so he would circle block after block as we talked, or I talked about me, for a very long time. I remember little of what we talked about, except for one time when I solicited his support for my decision not to ask a girl to the prom. It had been put about that she wanted me to ask her, but I didn’t want to, and he said it was okay not to invite her and not to go.

I loved talking with him. I never talked with him about being gay. It never occurred to me, as I felt so comfortable just being with him. Sometimes, he would laugh and grab and squeeze my knee very hard, like how I would tickle some one now with whom I had some degree of physical intimacy.

It only occurred to me that he was gay after his roommate made a pass at me, and I met my first pedophile. My drama teacher had taken a job in California and had gone on ahead to find a house, and his roommate was to follow. Meanwhile, the two of them had a friend who worked for the Educational Testing Service and knew a lot about colleges. My teacher left it that his roommate would be in touch with me over the summer to set up a meeting between their friend and me, so that I could get some sense of what schools would be best for me.

It was a good meeting. I realized later that I had met my first lesbian couple, and they were living in respectable suburban circumstances. I learned a lot, and he drove me home. On the way, we were stopped by a very long freight train passing. His hand found my knee, not in the jolly way of his lover, my drama teacher, but in a caress that gave his intention away immediately. I turned away and simply ignored him, feeling scornful. How odd, I think now: to be scornful instead of so many other things. I suppose scorn was not a feeling, but a defensive reaction – a pose to counter his move. The train moved on, and so did we, the caress withdrawn without comment.

Two days later, he called me at home. “What about dinner and a swim?” he asked. It was so easy to say no. I knew what he wanted, and I didn’t want it. My mother overheard the conversation, and wanted to know what it was about. I was certainly not going to tell her what was really going on, that I was gay and my drama teacher’s lover was hitting on me, but I didn’t feel the need to confess or plead for protection either. I told her my teacher’s friend had invited me out, but I didn’t want to go. I ignored her interest in knowing more, and walked out of the room.

With my drama teacher confessor gone, I felt very lonely my senior year. I had sung in the school choir for four years, and was invited to join the music honor society. I was no Caruso, especially after my voice changed, and the audition was to be a trial. The assistant choir director stayed after school to help me prepare a solo piece, and he coached me with a kind of friendly dismay. He wore red socks, he was roly-poly, he made mistakes on the piano when he was nervous (which was often given that our director was a tyrant), and students made fun of him.

He offered me a ride home. As we stopped in front of my house, he asked if I wouldn’t mind answering a few questions. A friend of his was doing a study on the onset of male puberty, and my responses would be useful. He began to sweat heavily, and his upper lip trembled. I looked right at him, though he looked straight ahead. Where on your body do you have hair now? Under your arms? Your chest? Your genitals? With each of his questions, what I thought was his unease grew. I suppose now it was his arousal that grew.

I answered his questions, though I didn’t really like them. Once more, though, I knew I was in contact with a man who wanted something sexual from me, even if in this case, hearing rather than touching was enough.

I think I was just a cubby to my drama teacher, somebody he wanted to squeeze and tickle and make happy. I suppose, on the other hand, that his roommate/boyfriend liked boys. Perhaps this makes him a candidate pedophile like the music teacher. They were in their forties, and I was 16 by my senior year. Do the math.

I would hardly call myself a model of self-possession in those days. It took another six years and some pretty big hard knocks to come out. But I had felt sufficiently self-possessed, it seems in retrospect, to understand what my teacher’s boyfriend and my music teacher wanted, and to do what I wanted. Or at least to head off what I didn’t want.

Others were not so lucky. Over the years, I have heard many accounts from friends and acquaintances, women and men, about fathers, step-fathers, uncles, cousins, and big brothers who took them sexually, mostly against their wills. There must be mothers involved too, but I have never heard anything of the sort first hand.

I have often wondered: Did I in fact get a free pass? Were these more near misses than they seemed to me at the time? Was this pedophilia lite? The teacher’s boyfriend and the music teacher surely were no avatars of evil, deserving mean justice in a prison cell. Though they were surely interested in boys, I will never know where these experiences fit into their lives, and whether they had any meaning for them at all. Likely not much, to judge from a distance now.

(The music teacher might be glad he lived in another age, I might add. Just this year at my old high school, a teacher was convicted of molesting a student, and my nephew gave testimony at the trial.)

Where evil is so often imputed, I offer a cautionary tale. It is only one story, so take it for what it is worth. My story, however, makes me wary of how easily we adjudge pedophiles evil, and of how quickly we consider them less than human. When they commit crimes, they should be punished. In our time, have they ever as a class gone unpunished or been under-punished? The bar marking the age of consent has been raised and lowered from time to time, and from place to place, but it seems likely to me that an adult having sex with an under-age person, if discovered, would be punished. Rape adds violence, and adds penalties. As a lay person, it seems to me that the law is getting clearer on adult sex with minors and on sexual violence against persons of any age.

What lies beneath the clarities of law are these particular facts of life, the near misses, the halting gestures of perhaps a candidate pedophile or two, and the resolve of a gay teenager who wanted to be near older gay men, but not have sex with them. I think it would be naïve still to believe that my choice alone was the deciding factor. The two men came near, one nearer than the other, but both pulled back of their volition too.

One might say that in each of these cases a line was crossed, especially from our vantage point today. Yet one might just as easily say that a line was drawn by me or by them – and observed by both sides. Is the would-be pedophile who draws back an avatar? Is he touched by evil too?

For me, the path from judgment to justice is less secure, though perhaps it is because I got off lightly. Exactly so. These events and the lack of distress they caused then and now have awakened in me, given these times, the need to urge more careful examination of the facts in cases of pedophilia. To recover reason and proportion and to see this part of the world more clearly would be best for all.

It helps to me to think of Dante. Having reached the eighth circle of hell, and thus have practically imagined all the horror that evil can throw up at him, writes the following:

“The crowds, the countless, different mutilations,
had stunned my eyes and left them so confused
they wanted to keep looking and to weep,

But Virgil said: ‘What are you staring at?
Why do your eyes insist on drowning there
Below, among those wretched, broken shades?”
(Inferno, XXIX, 1-6)

Unlike the well loved and generally well reviewed ‘Lost in Translation’, Sophia Coppola’s ‘Marie Antoinette’ struck a mostly sour note with the critics. I take two essays, one in The New Yorker by Anthony Lane and one in the New York Review of Books by Daniel Mendelsohn to be indicative of the general position. They are both written by intelligent critics and both essays contain useful insights. Mendelsohn’s essay is more sympathetic to the movie. At least he is willing to admit that the idea of exploring the ‘inner life’ of Marie Antoinette is possible, if not explicitly interesting. Mendelsohn writes that, “there are scenes of great charm and freshness that suggest what it might have been like to be the immature and hapless object of so much imperial pomp”. Lane, by contrast, writes the following: “Coppola films Versailles with a flat acceptance, quickening at times into eager montage, and declares, in her notes on the film, that she sought to capture her heroine’s ‘inner experience’. Her what? This is like a manicurist claiming to capture the inner experience of your pinkie.”

In the final analysis, Lane and Mendelsohn both accuse Coppola of surrendering to the shallowness that she is portraying. They both seem dissatisfied by Coppola’s unwillingness to step outside of the experiences she conveys. Portraying Marie Antoinette must not be just about portraying that ‘inner life’, it must also be a critical reflection on the failure of that life, which is inextricably related to the failure of the ancien regime and the subsequent developments of the French Revolution. Coppola’s failure, then, is the failure to have said anything significant about the Revolution and its meaning. The movie, these critics seem to be saying, is utterly lacking in its own critical edge and because of that it amounts almost to an endorsement of the empty superficiality that Marie Antoinette herself embodied.

This same kind of criticism, in general, has been applied to a handful of filmmakers of recent vintage, most notably Wes Anderson. I remember a friend commenting about Anderson a few years ago that his filmmaking could be described as Mannerism. The comment stuck with me. Yet it is this same ‘Mannerism’ that rubs critics the wrong way both in Anderson’s films and in Coppola’s. So we might as well call them the New Mannerists.

Mannerism was a term first applied to painting of the late Renaissance. It got its name from the stylized, one might even say ‘affected’, way that the Mannerists painted. The Mannerists were interested in style itself. And those who criticize Mannerism tend to do so from the perspective that it is style simply for the sake of style. Thus the connection to the New Mannerists like Anderson and Coppola. In criticizing Coppola’s ‘Marie Antoinette’, Lane and Mendelsohn were essentially asking, ‘Where’s the substance?’.

But I think Mannerism has a pretty good response to that question. There is something light, even breezy, about Mannerist painting and the way it plays with style and surface, the way it seems comfortable in the world it is portraying. Mannerists are not ‘getting to the bottom of things’ in the way that some of the powerful painters of the early Renaissance do. But that is not to say that they aren’t getting at anything at all. And this applies to the New Mannerists as well. Coppola and Anderson make films that feel nothing like the great works of, say, Antonioni or even the New Wave directors or, for that matter, the films of Francis Ford Coppola. The New Mannerists are conveying a different kind of experience. They are interested in getting a certain feel or a mood right and they value achieving that sense of mood far above accomplishments in narrative or character development.

Mannerists in general are not compelled primarily by subject matter and the films of the New Mannerists are not ‘about’ things in the way that other films are. That is one of the things I find so remarkable about Coppola’s ‘Marie Antoinette’. There are few subjects of world history as fraught with content and meaning as the French Revolution. It’s a minefield one is expected to come to with strong positions and the goods to back them up. Coppola lets the camera drift around in scene after scene where we learn next to nothing about the events of the day. We simply see daily life as it unfolds.

Even when the Revolution itself begins to occur—a prime opportunity for drama and narrative arc—it does so in an oddly stilted way, as a kind of non sequitur. Mendelsohn criticizes the movie for precisely this reason. He writes,

“The final silent image in this movie, so filled as it is with striking and suggestive images, tells you more about Coppola, and perhaps our own historical moment, than it could possibly tell you about Marie Antoinette. It’s a mournful shot of the Queen’s state bedchamber at Versailles, ransacked by the revolutionary mob the night before the Queen and her family were forced to leave, its glittering chandeliers askew, its exquisite boiseries cracked and mangled. You’d never guess from this that men’s lives—those of the Queen’s guards—were also destroyed in that violence; their severed heads, stuck on pikes, were gleefully paraded before the procession bearing the royal family to Paris. But Coppola forlornly catalogs only the ruined bric-a-brac. As with the teenaged girls for whom she has such sympathy, her worst imagination of disaster, it would seem, is a messy bedroom.”

It is as if Coppola is not up to the serious events of the adult world and thus her movie must be a mockery of those events and that world. But that is not the truth that Coppola’s movie is after. Viewed from Marie Antoinette’s perspective, from her ‘inner experience’, there was no other way for the French Revolution to come about than as a non sequitur whose immediate result is best portrayed as a messy bedroom. To me, that scene in the messy bedroom is lovely, disturbing…true.

To say that the New Mannerists are good is not to say that they are the only game in town or that goodness must now be measured with a Mannerist criterion. But when New Mannerism is good it is exceptionally so and it is producing movies that capture something important about the mood of our time. It captures a gesture, a moment, the passing of a moment that gets at something about who we are right now. It isn’t a comprehensive picture, admittedly. The films of the New Mannerists succeed often in the degree to which they give us smallness, writ large.

There is a scene in Marie Antoinette, where she is riding in a carriage toward Versailles for the first time. Bored, she breathes onto the window, which leaves a steam mark that she proceeds to draw on, doodling absently as the motors of History churn away elsewhere. It is a moment just right, small and brilliant and beautiful.

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.

In The Guardian in March 2007 Ruth Padel listed what was styled as the top ten women poets, perhaps better noted below the headline as ‘her favourite poets who happen to be women’: Sappho, Dickinson, Bishop, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Plath, Carson, Duffy, Shapcott, Ní Dhomhnaill. Personally, I couldn’t think of anything more insulting than being gendered up in this way. Surely one is either a good poet or not, not a good woman poet or a top ten male poet. It is very easy to play these pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey listings—six critical booming bores, seven preposterous pronouncements on poetry at Bunyip Bollocks, five Collected Poems that would be better off halved, and so on. People have their own ideas about culture, and they seldom coincide with other points of view, which is just the way it should be.

Whilst I can agree with a large swathe of the poets listed as being very good poets, I can’t then refer to them as good woman poets. As far as I’m concerned, Dickinson sends nearly all poets down to the lower slopes of Helicon, whereas I have never understood wherein Sylvia Plath’s greatness is supposed to reside. I should very much like to say that I can see the greatness, but I can’t pretend. 

A bad habit has developed in some discussions of Australian literature—the reduction of writers to a supposedly representative handful who are then meant to stand in for the many. Subtle readings that bring out the complexity and breadth of Australian writing are not helped by this kind of simplification, and someone from another planet, or the United Kingdom, might get the idea that Australian poetry was restricted to a choice between two or three somewhat self-serving aesthetic billabongs. Professor Geoffrey Blainey’s well-known formulation that Australian history and culture had been formed under the pall of ‘the tyranny of distance’ had its literary equivalent in the strangely disjunct yoking of cosmopolitan yearnings and parochial machinations. With a smallish readership, and when some of the poets concerned also reviewed, the resulting attempts at creating instant canons of the various orthodoxies were probably inevitable.   

‘Woman poet’ in Australian literature used to mean Judith Wright, famous for her love lyrics and evocations of the Australian landscape, but even then it was an inaccurate  pinning down of history to a convenient holding pattern. Now, good as Wright is, I think there is one poet who is not only one of the best Australian poets, but one of the best poets of her time: Gwen Harwood. Harwood did not fetishise fashion accessories (Sitwell/Moore), get caught up in an historical terror (Akhmatova) or put herself conspicuously forward (Plath). Neither does she come trailing woe-is-me poisonous bon mots or turning her personal life into verbal stigmata. Born in Brisbane, Queensland, but spending most of her life in Tasmania, in Kettering, far from the madding crowd of supposed hot spots, she produced a remarkable body of poetry and librettos that still awaits its international due. Her poetic concerns were the suburban round, friendships, philosophy (Wittgenstein) and music. Her work is amenable to a wide readership and, though she is satirical—especially about academe—the warmth of her personality comes through. Harwood sometimes wrote under pseudonyms, the poems adhering to differing personas—Walter Lehmann, Francis Geyer, Miriam Stone, Timothy Kline. She was not above being rude with acrostics in poems to editors, but generally there is a clear bringing forth of the resolute certainties:

From A Young Writer’s Diary

A day, a night, a day, another night,
Frau Schmidt fingers her washing. It’s still damp.
Sunset hangs out its washing. That’s not right.
Four days without a word—a sort of cramp

stiffens the heavy sameness of my thoughts.
I read the paper I’ve already read.
(Horrible sentence). so-and-so reports   
from Moscow: Is the Russian Novel dead?

He can afford to travel, on that grant.
Rose, peach and saffron clouds invade the air.
A grand but natural style, that’s what I want.
Light comes from nowhere and from everywhere,

rinsing the secret pathos from this room
until materials say what they are.
My things summon the visions they become.
That wineglass flares like an exploding star.

The west, solid with colour, glows above
earth that seems a mere pretext for the sky.
I stare at the chrysanthemums with love.
Night falls. Hell stirs again, and so do I.

Frau Schmidt is beating schnitzel. I believe
she’s pregnant. Women have an easier life.
Blessed Franz Kafka, comfort me, receive
my prayer: What could I offer to a wife

or want from one? Grant me the honesty
of evil thoughts, of torture, nightmare, fear.
Messy poeticism clings to me
like sensual wax. Let me be quite sincere.

The banging stops. Frau Schmidt is practising
her English phrases in a lazy drawl.
She’ll never master them. I’ve heard her sing
sometimes, in her own tongue. Across the hall

life, life! They say that Hogarth tried to paint
The Happy Marriage and then gave it up.
I read the journal of my patron saint
and drink enchanting tortures from his cup:

last hopes of every kind, extremities.
Frau Schmidt comes out to put the spade away.
How like a gentle animal she is!
A night. A day. A night. Another day.

Deceptively simple, yet full of fierce solicitations.

Harwood’s mordant eye can work up a kind of invective, but generally she loves too much to really hate:

Suburban Sonnet

She practices a fugue, though it can matter
to no one now if she plays well or not.
Beside her on the floor two children chatter,
then scream and fight. She hushes them. A pot
boils over. As she rushes to the stove
Too late, a wave of nausea overpowers
subject and counter-subject. Zest and love
drain out with soapy water as she scours
the crusted milk. Her veins ache. Once she played
for Rubinstein, who yawned. The children caper
round a sprung mousetrap where a mouse lies dead.
When the soft corpse won’t move they seem afraid.
She comforts them; and wraps it in a paper
featuring: Tasty dishes from stale bread.

How good it is to come across a poet where there is no look-at-me subtext going on. Meditative, rueful, this is writing one can immediately relate to. Harwood’s philosophical bent has made her world the tangible one we all know: about the house, glimmers of beatitudes, thinking on the meaning of friendship, loves remembered, nature’s beauty holding off darknesses. Eloquent music. A memorable and hard-earned calm in the face of the telltale X-ray or the tragicomedy of having the large sensibility in the small-town environs. And there is passion too.

Carnal Knowledge l

Roll back, you fabulous animal
be human, sleep. I’ll call you up
from water’s dazzle, wheat-blond hills,
clear light and open-hearted roses,
this day’s extravagance of blue
stored like a pulsebeat in the skull.

Content to be your love, your fool,
your creature tender and obscene
I’ll bite sleep’s innocence away
and wake the flesh my fingers cup
to build a world from what’s to hand,
new energies of light and space

wings for blue distance, fins to sweep
the obscure caverns of your heart,
a tongue to lift your sweetness close
leaf-speech against the window-glass
a memory of chaos weeping
mute forces hammering for shape

sea-strip and sky-strip held apart
for earth to form its hills and roses
its landscapes from our blind caresses,
blue air, horizon, water-flow,
bone to my bone I grasp the world.
But what you are I do not know.

Reputations. Swings and roundabouts. It often all seems quite absurd. Yet genuine writing goes on, unaccompanied by the usual bling. In Tasmania the genuine writing went on, music and philosophy special joys close to hand, the Antarctic winds that sometimes blast Tasmania finally reaching Gwen Harwood in 1995.   

Since I cannot do justice to this poet here, I can only encourage others to discover Harwood’s poetry for themselves. The Collected Poems 1943–1995 of Gwen Harwood, edited by Alison Hoddinott and Gregory Kratzmann was published by the University of Queensland Press in 2003 ISBN 0 7022 3352 8.

When in the fall of 2002 Thalassa Ali was introduced to the crowd gathered for her debut reading at the Brookline Booksmith, a taste-making independent bookseller in Brookline, Ma., her agent, Jill Kneerim, admitted taking many months even to open the manuscript of A Singular Hostage, Book I in Ali’s Paradise Trilogy.  “Thalassa had by far the worst background I’d ever heard of for a novelist,” Kneerim explained.  “She was a Boston Brahmin and a stockbroker.”  That got a laugh, but no one walked out. And at the conclusion of the reading — I was there — when all suspicions as to what kind of novel it was had been banished, sales of A Singular Hostage were brisk.   

Thus began an unlikely literary career that would unfold over the next five years in the U.S., in Europe and ultimately in Pakistan, where as a bride and then a young widow, Thalassa Ali lived for many years and raised her children, and where, not coincidentally, The Paradise Trilogy is largely set.

The novels that make up the trilogy — A Singular Hostage, A Beggar at the Gate, and Companions of Paradise — tell the story of a young Englishwoman in the 1830s, Mariana Givens, a clergyman’s daughter haunted by the loss of her baby brother some years before.   Not without wondering what else fate may hold in store for her, Mariana is on the lookout for a husband in India, where a marriageable girl without a dowry can expect to nab a British officer and embark on a life of the utmost conventionality and Englishness.   Knowing only this much, you might feel set up for a ladylike novel of a Punjab that never was — the covers of the books seem to promise just that.   However, the opening scene of A Singular Hostage, wherein an elephant struggles under the absurd and horrible burden of British picnicking equipment, including a vast folded tent, leaves little doubt how the Empire is perceived in these pages.  Impressively researched historical novels of the Raj are easy enough to find, and readers looking mainly for that will hardly be let down by The Paradise Trilogy.   But there is more intimacy with life on the sub-continent and more relevance to issues in our own day than they may have bargained for here.   For Thalassa Ali did not merely research and observe the life that, decades later, she would write about, but entered it and lived it fully. The improbable result is an outwardly English novel that owes its essence to Sufism — and you simply surrender to the story.

A few weeks ago, after her return to Boston from Karachi, I conducted a wide-ranging conversation with Thalassa Ali.  The author is a student of military history, and we spoke of the First Afghan War that figures so prominently in her fiction.  Though The Paradise Trilogy was in the planning stages many years before 9/11, after that, how to write about Islam would be a freighted subject for historical novelists and for others.  Ali, a convert to Islam, spoke of her experience of the Sufi Path.  The question of Orientalism arose — can an Anglo-American writer setting a story of adventure and passionate quest in the time of the Raj evade this charge?  Should she?  Highlights of our conversation are posted below.

EH: Were you surprised to see your books finding such a large readership in Pakistan?

TA: Yes and no — the books are set mostly in Pakistan, and they’re suspenseful.   I wouldn’t necessarily expect an historical novel to appeal to younger readers when there’s so much good contemporary Pakistani fiction around, but then people like to read a well-researched book about their own history.   In the beginning, when I told people in Pakistan I was writing a novel set in 19th Century Lahore, the first question I got was, “Where are you doing your research?”  Readers also seem to be drawn to the books because they’re not only historical adventure stories, they’re Sufi allegories.    I have noticed that a new popular interest in Sufism has surfaced in Pakistan.   When I moved to Karachi in the 1960s no one spoke about it, but now things are different.   Someone came up to me after a reading in Karachi and said solemnly, “I have much to learn from you.”   Very flattering, but not necessarily the case!

EH: Something to do with Pakistan being modern enough by now that looking modern doesn’t count for as much?

TA: I’d like to know what other people think about that idea.   I would say that the Pakistanis I know are more conscious of their culture and history than they were 30 years ago, but I can’t say that the popularity of Sufism is because of that.   Perhaps there’s a general need all over the world for something more — something that satisfies the heart.   I read a little while ago that Jalaluddin Rumi is the most popular poet in the United States. 

EH: In all three novels, you write about a family of mystics in Lahore — they play a larger role in the trilogy than anyone other than your protagonist, and they live on very accepting terms with the supernatural. It took me back to reading Thomas Mann’s The Transposed Heads — the ease with which these characters slip into and out of that mode.   I’m wondering — what on earth can have prepared you to write about this?

TA:  I’ve been a Muslim for 23 years.   For seven of those years I was also a rigorous follower of the Sufi Path, getting up before dawn to do zikr.   Doing that taught me a lot about the country of the heart: about what is seen and what is unseen.   Also, my murshid, Syed Akhlaque Husain, was very interested in umls, practices like curing poisonous snakebite through recitation.   He taught me a great deal.   Every example of a supernatural event in my books is a genuine Sufi practice.  He also taught me not to put too much emphasis on these things.   A British reviewer once said that she liked my ‘matter-of-fact’ approach to mysticism.   I have Akhlaque to thank for that attitude.

EH:  How did you come to follow the Path?

TA: I read a lot of ‘fairy stories’ when I was young — a typical example would be the story of a young prince who is hunting with his brothers when they meet a beggar in the forest.  The brothers push him aside, but the young prince takes pity and gives the beggar something.   He then proves to be a sage who offers the prince a magic sword and sends him on a long journey towards a fabulous goal.   Those stories set fire to my imagination. Later, when I studied Sufi philosophy and poetry at Harvard, I realized that those fairy stories had been Sufi allegories. Madly in love with all of it, I resolved to embrace Islam and become a Sufi practitioner, but when I married my husband Bobby and came to live in Pakistan, I found that Sufism was not discussed.   It was close to a taboo subject.   It was 21 years before I found my murshid — 12 years after my husband Bobby died of a sudden heart attack.

EH: What year was that? I know the children were very young.

TA: In 1972.   My children were seven and four.   I stayed on for several years — the children were Pakistanis, and I wanted them to have the life they knew, but ultimately there was a political shift.  My friends began to leave for the Gulf, and I knew it was time for me to return to Boston.   It was very hard to do.   I can understand why the West is so lonely for many Pakistanis and others from South Asia.

EH: How often have you gone back to Pakistan since you left?

TA: I’ve gone back almost every other year since I left it.  Since I left the brokerage business, I’ve been able to go back for months at a time.   Bobby used to say that the one thing one absolutely had to do was attend weddings and funerals, so I do that as much as I can.   It was on one of those trips, in the middle of my stockbroker phase, that I met my murshid, and embraced Islam.   My children have kept me emotionally in Pakistan, too. They identify themselves as Pakistanis and Muslims, and always have. My son is a banker in London, and my daughter is producing the first indigenous educational television show for the children of the sub-continent — she travels constantly between Pakistan, India and New York.   It is a little different going back with a book or three to sell, though…

EH:  How did it feel to go back to Pakistan with the published novels?

TA: It was strange.  When I first went there, I was Bobby Hakim Jan’s American fiancee. Then I lived there as his wife and the mother of his children, and later as his young widow.   After that I was Thalassa the visitor, who kept up with people.   Now I’m someone who comes with an offering, a gift for Pakistan: a trilogy of books about this part of the world, and about the softer side of Islam.   Of course it’s up to the people whether they want the gift or not…

EH: I like these photos!   You’re the only writer I know who had a book party in Dubai. But what were some of the high spots of the book tour in Pakistan?

TA: I did four readings, a book signing and a lot of print and TV interviews — some 10 TV interviews in all — and a radio interview.   One highlight was being on a very popular television show that non-Pakistanis can’t believe exists — The Late Night Show with Begum Nawazish Ali. The hostess is a cross-dresser, and quite funny. We got along very well.   I was also interviewed by Dawn, The Friday Times, The Herald,  Newsline, SHE Magazine, and other periodicals.   This photo shows the most fun of all the events –a dramatic reading from Companions of Paradise in Rehana Saigol’s garden in Karachi.  Rehana is a well-known TV personality, President of the Pakistan Bridge Association and one of the most generous people alive. Imran Aslam, the other reader, is a journalist, and is now president of GEO TV, an influential news network. Afterwards there was a reception for several hundred people. Rehana put on a huge tea with pani pooris, fresh dahi burras, and other desi dishes, not to mention latte as well as tea. It was all very thrilling, and would have been fun even if people hadn’t been buying my books — which they were doing.

EH: You mentioned earlier that a well-researched historical fiction meant something in and of itself to Pakistanis.   Could you tell me a little about the research?  I’m especially curious about how you conducted research for the final volume, Companions of Paradise, which was set mainly in Afghanistan.

TA: I’d collected books on the 19th century in northwest India for over 20 years, not really knowing what I intended to do with them.   When these weren’t enough, I went to London, and spent a lot of time in the Oriental Collection of the British Library.  Lucky for me that my son lives in London! At one point I knew I would need an Afghan advisor, but Fatana Gailani, the only Afghan I knew well, was up to her ears in refugee work in Peshawar, and not likely to have time for my questions. Fortunately I was invited to a dinner to benefit Fatana’s organization. Determined to find my advisor, I spotted a well-dressed lady in the crowd and followed her, balancing my dinner plate, dodging other guests, hoping she was the right person.    I sat down, introduced myself and asked casually what she did.   She was a researcher, she said.   On what subject?  I asked.  History, she replied.   That’s how Kamar Habibi, who is also a linguist, became my friend and guide.   Throughout the writing of Companions of Paradise, she saved me from mistakes, offered nuances of language and thinking, and gave me an understanding of Afghanistan and Afghans that I would never have found otherwise.

EH: In the wake of the U.S. bombing campaign in October of 2001, you and several other Boston women, including me, formed an Internet-based fundraising group to send money for Afghan refugees to Fatana Gailani. Was Companions of Paradise in the works then?  What might we learn about the present from the period of the Afghan Wars that you were writing about?

TA:  Actually, at that time I was writing Book II of the trilogy, A Beggar at the Gate, set mainly in Lahore.  It wasn’t until the U.S. had invaded Iraq that I began work on Companions of Paradise, and the parallels jumped out at me.   And they are indeed striking.   The most obvious are the politically driven British invasion of Afghanistan  — carefully explained by a series of lies — and their consistent misunderstanding and underestimation of the population of the country they now occupied, which led to military disaster.    We’ll have to see what happens this time around.

EH: I’ve been reading through the press about The Paradise Trilogy — in the States, in the U.K., where it was simultaneously published, and in Pakistan, where the U.K. edition was distributed. While the work has been well received and has obviously sold very well, some Pakistani writers who sincerely like the books want to talk about Orientalism — with you or without you. Is it ever a fruitful discussion?

TA:   Edward Said’s book has been with us for nearly 30 years, and he makes many excellent and accurate points for everyone to think about. It’s certainly an important issue.  Orientalism is at least in part about standing at a distance and regarding people as quaint and picturesque and not wanting them to change.   It’s about superiority.  I think sensitivity to slights is very refined at this stage in history, and some of what I wrote clearly set off alarm bells.  It could be partly due to the somewhat old-fashioned style of my writing, which is appropriate both to Sufi allegory and to the early Victorian era, but might appear to be exoticism.  It could also be that I used the word ‘native.’   I chose to do that because it was a usage belonging to the time and to the main character’s point of view when she first came to the Punjab, but it may have been an inflammatory choice.  Other mistakes popped out of some wrinkle in my past, too.  But I was a little amazed at that reaction, given my personal history, and that I had made a point of telling my story from both sides. That said — you write, you send what you write out into the world, and people have a perfect right to interpret it any way they like.

EH: You mentioned that you were pleased that young people in Pakistan were reading and enjoying your novels.   What else do you notice them reading there?

TA: There’s a real literary scene in Pakistan now — so much great stuff to read, compared to when I was young and living there.  I can’t talk about fiction in Urdu, but Mohsin Hamid is certainly the most brilliant and successful of the new crop of writers in English.  There are plenty of other young writers too.  Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography was short-listed for the Llewelyn Rhys Award.   Uzma Aslam Khan’s Trespassing was short-listed for  the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and Nadeem Aslam’s novel, Maps for Lost Lovers, won the Kuriyama Prize. I’m pleased and proud that amidst all this, there’s room for me too.

EH: Is it too soon to talk about another book from you?

TA: Definitely.  My mind is a complete blank that way.  But I hear that’s normal.  The Pakistan earthquake of October, 2005 has been occupying me lately.  After I finished Companions of Paradise, I joined a group of concerned Pakistanis in Boston who were raising money for the Bugna Goat Project, a livestock replacement program in six villages in Muzaffarabad, one of the areas hardest hit by the quake.   I went to Bugna last summer, and will probably go again before long.  We’re working with the Human Development Foundation, founded by a group of Pakistani-American physicians. They have adopted a total of 400 villages in all provinces of Pakistan.  The HDF will be celebrating their 10th anniversary with a conference on human development in Chicago later this month. This work is where my focus is right now.

EH: I’ve been hearing a lot about the HDF lately. One of the things I noticed about your site, www.thalassaali.com, was the links page of Web resources about the First Afghan War, Sufism, and the poetry of Rumi and Hafiz. I’m pretty convinced this is still your material, even after a trilogy. I’ll check back in with you about what’s next another time — thanks!

The Lomi-Ek

Justin E. H. Smith

To the great benefit of scholarship, an electronic version has finally been made available of Sir Thomas Fudge’s 1594 translation of the 15th-century Venetian explorer Girolamo Policarpo’s travel report on his detour north of the Silk Road.  Having gone looking for the lost Christian kingdom of Prester John, he wound up instead in the court of the great khan.  Here is a sample of Policarpo’s communication to his sponsors back in Venice, as transcribed for me by my assistant, Tanya Vainshtain (who, like so many Eastern European scholars, had resourcefully obtained a username and password for the “STaNS” digital archive at the University of Arizona long before I myself could get around to it, hell, long before I’d even heard of it):

You may take it as fact that there never was a Khan as mighty as the Khan of whom I am about to speak.

Yea, here is how this is so. He wears a necklace of an hundred pearls, pulled from oysters by divers in narrow straits, and he prays on them to his hundred gods.  For he is an idolater.

And his gods have blessed his land, which is called Fu, with mulberry trees that host the eag’rest mealy worms, spinning out the stuff for manufacture of the finest silks in fabricks big as mountains.

And you should know that there are other plants and stones, too, which give spices and salves you assuredly know not, as spodium, yea, and tutty.    

And you may be sure that there is pasturage aplenty for the grazing and chewing of hooved beasts, which in that land produce a musk so strong that, you should know, a Christian could scarce endure it.

You should also know that when the great Khan dies, an hundred of his slaves will be killed, and an hundred of their horses. And they will all be propped up on spikes piercing from arse to mouth ’round a great dining table on which will be served sundry game, as boar, stag, lynx, and coney.

And they will feast for seven days, or until a maggot drops from the great Khan’s nostril, whereupon it will be said, you should know, that he be no longer Khan, and was not so mighty withal.

There are several references in the treatise to an inferior people living within the khanate of Fu.  Though their identity remains unclear, many scholars believe them to be the ancestors of today’s Lomi-Ek, a group of about 80,000 people speaking a language isolate, with their own autonomous oblast‘ just to the Northeast of Vuta.  (Wikipedia wrongly identifies them as belonging to the Aral-Ultaic language family.  God knows I’m not going to be the one to make the correction. If I chimed in for every error I found, I would have to quit my job for lack of time.)

Policarpo writes of the Lomi-Ek (in Fudge’s rendering): “There never was a people as brutish as the people the Khan takes to him as slaves.  You should know that these people, which are called the Loomey-Ecke [‘i Luomecchi‘, in Policarpo’s original], love their horses far more than men should love their horses.” Some scholars believe that, whatever the factual basis of Policarpo’s report of a mass feast of the dead following the khan’s demise, it is highly likely that the Lomi-Ek were regularly sacrificed along with their horses.  Human and equine skeletal remains have been found together in mass graves, some with men buried in full riding regalia and in a mounted position upon their loyal steeds.

“Simon Le Bon of Duran Duran,” Tanya was now telling me in her cramped apartment back on Prospekt Vernadskogo after our largely unsuccessful jaunt out East, and after a few shotglasses of Moskovskaya chased by pickled cucumbers and pickled herring, scooped out of recycled jars and shoved down our throats to dull, by way of contrast, the alcohol’s jolt, “was once asked why rock stars marry supermodels.  For the same reason, he is reported to have replied, that dogs lick their own balls: because they can.”

I didn’t know why Tanya was talking about this rock star I’d never heard of, but she seemed intent on going somewhere with it.  I’d been planning to stay in Moscow for just one night as a guest in Tanya’s home before continuing back to Indiana. Tanya seemed to have been looking forward to bringing me home with her, and seized upon this opportunity to share her Russian pain.  Vodka, pickled herring, Vladimir Vysotsky barking from the cassette player about Taganka, Magadan, the 1980 Olympics, God knows what.  I knew the routine.  There’s no telling how this night will end up, I thought to myself.  We’re about the same age. My wife’s dead and buried in Davenport, Iowa. We’re both compulsive documenters, Tanya and I.  We’re both, though in very different ways and for very different reasons, obsessed with her father, and we’re both perpetually driven to the verge of emotional collapse by the sense that everything that matters is receding, irretrievably, into the past.

“Just how self-contained can a creature be?” Tanya went on, apparently prolonging the autofellating-dogs routine.  But then she switched tracks as abruptly as she’d started.  “In the Vedic tradition of India,” she announced, refilling our shot glasses, “the horse was the victim of a ritual sacrifice that was believed to keep the universe ticking along smoothly.  The horse was itself an embodiment of the cosmos.  It’s in the Upanishads.  The Brhadaranyaka, I think.  I’ll show you.”

Tanya slid a book out from under the couch.  It looked like Hare Krishna material, of which there was by now plenty in the streets of Moscow.  She began to read, translating haltingly, whether from the Sanskrit or from the Russian I don’t know: “Dawn is the head of the sacrificial horse. The sun is the eye of the sacrificial horse,” and so on, down through the horse’s breath, its mouth, its back and belly, its flanks, its ribs, its nostrils.  I lost focus at some point, but tuned back in for the conclusion after nearly every part of the poor creature had been listed and correlated with some feature of the cosmic or terrestrial landscape. “The food in his stomach is the sands,” she went on, “the rivers are his bowels, liver and lungs; the mountains, plants and trees are his hairs; when he yawns, it lightens, when he shakes himself, it thunders; when he urinates, it rains; speech is his voice.”

“Now the horse is an Asian creature, you know,” Tanya was lecturing me, for some unapparent reason, “though those of you who grew up on cowboy-and-Indian movies, and probably even the cowboys and Indians themselves, no doubt think it emerged from a distinctly Western-Hemispheric evolutionary line.  You once had rhinoceroses, and camels, and elephants, and glyptodonts of your own, after all, why couldn’t just one creature of equal stature and import have managed to hang on?

“The word for ‘horse’ in the various Turkic languages extending from Istanbul to western China,” Tanya continued, “is ‘at‘, very nearly the most basic and primitive sound a human voice can make.  Vowel, consonant, finish.  And the horse is itself something too basic and primitive from Anatolia to Outer Mongolia to command denotation by any sounds that take as long, or require as complicated an acrobatics of the tongue and teeth and lips, as cheval, or loshad’, or Pferd, or even horse.   At: a mere preposition in the language we are speaking now, so basic as to barely even count as a word.

“Now the Lomi-Ek, who as you know speak a language isolate, but who borrowed their word for ‘horse’ from their Turkic neighbors, have contracted it even further.  For them it is simply ‘a‘.  In some dialects it is shorter still: just a glottal stop, if you can believe that, without anything before or after it.  For the brief period of contact in the 16th century with the Saffavid dynasty to the southwest, during which Lomi-Ek was written in the Arabic script, ‘horse’ was spelled with a solitary ayn.  Now this curious spelling would of course never be permitted in Arabic itself, and even the distant Uighurs wouldn’t put the script of Mohammed to such odd uses.  But that’s the thing about alphabets: no one owns them, least of all God.  Anyway, if we were to transliterate poetry from this period and from the dialect I just mentioned, ‘horse’ would thus be represented by a mere apostrophe: ‘.  It barely leaves a trace on paper, yet for the Lomi-Ek it is everywhere.”

Tanya was right.  The horse was an important part of Asian life.  The 19th-century Lomi-Ek poet Baraqat Maqöb –briefly canonized in volumes of the literature of the Soviet peoples, only to be removed in the mid-1930s and forgotten until the 2003 publication by Duquesne University Press of an anthology of Great Nationalist Poets of North Asia, where he is hailed in Rosalind Needleman’s introduction as a genre-transcending, playful modernist, remarkably anticipating the European avant garde from his distant colonial outpost– captured in a short poem of 1893 the central place the horse occupied in his own traditional culture:

Lo but I’ve yet to praise the proud, tall horse [‘], Lord of the steppe, who doth desirously snuffle up the Zephyr through volcanic nostrils.   

Desire for what? Why, for a mare! And as he leaps over crag and crevice toward her who’s provoked him, he leaves behind a scattered trail of residue that our people call horse-madness.

And the peasant girls will come along, and collect the droplets, and mix them in bowls together with life-giving leaves only they know, and the leaves and the seed will feed the corn.

For our elders say the corn comes from the dead, but those older still say it comes from seed. 

And here we all know horse [‘], and we all know corn.  And here all the other words derive from ‘horse’ [‘] and ‘corn’.  Here the talk is always ‘horse [‘] this’, and ‘corn that’.

Here, indeed, they will tell you that the world itself is a giant horse [‘].

I asked Tanya what she thought of Maqöb, but by now she was busy shuffling through a pile of papers and notebooks on the coffee table.  I stretched out on the couch. After some minutes she produced a  yellowed Soviet report, of which I could just make out the year ‘1963’ on the cover.  Something about collective farms in the Lomi-Ek oblast‘.  Something about milk yields.  Why does she have this stuff just lying around?  Where are the Alice Munro novels and David Sedaris trifles Helen would have had instead?  Where is the New Yorker? Jesus I miss my wife. 

“What do you think I think?” was her unexpectedly angry response.  “By the 1930s,” Tanya set in, “the horse was valued among the Lomi-Ek, of course, though not as a microcosm of the whole of nature.  It was valued for its output.  Thus we learn, and I’m quoting here, that ‘the high milk yield of the Lomi-Ek horse is worthy of note. At the Karl Marx experimental farm of the Lomi-Ek Institute of Agriculture the mares produce 1200-1700 kg of marketable milk in a 6-month lactation.’ But hold on,” Tanya held forth, “this is my favorite part: ‘The  Lomi-Ek horse is also worthy of note as a good meat producer; the carcass weight of 6-month-olds is 105 kg, reaching 165 kg by 2.5 years of age and 228 kg in adults…” Tanya stopped reading, I suppose, when she saw my eyes were closed.  My bare feet were in her lap at the other end of the couch.  We stayed like this for some time.

“Can you imagine what violence these horsemeat factories must have done to the Lomi-Ek way of life?” she finally asked.  I opened my eyes.  I didn’t know how to answer. I was drunk.  “Everything dies,” Tanya replied for me.  “Isn’t it better to be sacrificed in the name of cosmic renewal than to have your carcass measured up for meat yield?”  Ty takaya krasivaya, I replied, my Russian finally deciding to come back at just the moment this dithering, eccentric old dame was magically transfigured by the vodka and the hour, and even, somehow, by her odd and interminable cri de coeur for the Lomi-Ek, into someone, if not desirable exactly, at least well-matched with me.  With my limited vocabulary, anyway, telling her she was ‘beautiful’ would have to do. 

Tanya’s face flushed red. I stood up, kissed her forehead, and stumbled to the bathroom.  My head was pounding.  I could feel the herring rising back up towards my esophagus, ready to reappear.  I kicked the toilet seat up and stared into the mirror behind the toilet.  I was rotund, grey and bearded, with fat jowls with ruptured blood vessels.  The very caricature of the tenured fool. When I urinate, it rains, I mumbled to myself.  Speech is my voice.

**

Previous installments in the Imaginary Tribes series may be found here:

Imaginary Tribes #1: The Yuktun

Imaginary Tribes #2: The Yamkut

For an extensive archive of Justin Smith’s writing, go to www.jehsmith.com.

Welcome to New Orleans–it is nearly two years after Hurricane Katrina, and your federal tax dollars are asleep on the job. You won’t disturb the slumber of dumb money should you come to Mardi Gras or Jazz Fest, two essential sources of local revenue, where you will register few traces of Katrina’s destructive power. Only by venturing beyond the warm embrace of the restored French Quarter, with its familiar old-world charms, can one experience the vast stretches of physical devastation and ruined lives that federal and state monies have yet to address.

Today the City Council and local government paint a prosperous, resilient image of New Orleans. It is, after all, cheaper to spin a hopeful message than to rebuild residential areas, schools, commercial centers and the levees to protect the city against future replays of the tragic storm. In the face of FEMA’s failure, and the less-documented, glacial slowness of the ‘Road Home’ program, the New Orleans power elite are cheerleading the city’s boot-strapped recovery efforts, while playing down remaining needs. This serves both to allure tourists frightened by the lawlessness of the Katrina aftermath and to minimize their own failures in leadership and management of the crisis response.

Hurricane Katrina struck the New Orleans area early morning August 29, 2005. The storm surge breached the city’s levees at multiple points, leaving 80 percent of the city submerged, tens of thousands of victims clinging to rooftops, and hundreds of thousands scattered to shelters around the country. Three weeks later, Hurricane Rita re-flooded much of the area.

The storm is estimated to have been responsible for $81.2 billion in damage, making it the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history. At least 1,836 people lost their lives in Hurricane Katrina and in the subsequent floods, making it the deadliest U.S. hurricane since the 1928 Okeechobee Hurricane. Katrina redistributed New Orleans’ population across the southern United States: Houston, Texas had an increase of 35,000 people; Mobile, Alabama gained over 24,000; Baton Rouge, Louisiana over 15,000; and Hammond, Louisiana received over 10,000, nearly doubling its size.

Recovery efforts across the Gulf region are almost wholly driven by volunteer relief and reconstruction agencies, some of them bootstrap operations that did not exist prior to the storm. Many are funded by private donations from churches and community non-profits across the country; others receive a mix of corporate one-time grants and government-stipended volunteer staffers for a few months at a time, who can serve the recovery effort to reduce their college tuition (Americorps and its affiliates: National Civilian Community Corps, Volunteers in Service to America). The most well-known volunteer agency working in the region is Habitat for Humanity, whose slow progress was the subject of a recent NY Times article.

As someone who works on disaster relief programs worldwide, I was invited to come for a month and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of various projects in New Orleans and Biloxi, two centers of urban devastation. The experience thus far has been surprisingly positive and inspiring, an unexpected antidote to my entrenched cynicism regarding relief efforts in places like Darfur or Congo, where I typically work.

The aftermath of crisis in New Orleans and Congo, for instance, is surprisingly similar, and I’ve pondered over some perhaps facile but nonetheless empirical truths about the dynamic of human response to extreme disasters. First there is the universal ineptitude of governments–big or small, inept or adept, rich or poor–to provide adequate protection and succor to victims of major disasters, natural or man-made. The repeated and insistent rejections by US authorities of foreign offers of Katrina assistance, despite appalling need and clear ineptitude on the ground, is a case in point. Some of these offers the USG later humbly accepted, but by then it was far too late. Government officials are the least pragmatic when lives are at stake: expect delays and denial, not action.

Also identical across disasters is the chorus of resignation heard from victims: no one hears our plight, no one will help us, nothing can be done, etc. I suspect this is conditioned by the individualized trauma of loss, a kind of PTSD, for the follow-on symptom or behavior to a crisis onset is often sheer inaction or a very elemental ‘just enough’ survival impulse. While the flight to safety is one common ‘just enough’ survival impulse, it is rarely organized and executed collectively, with the interests of all in primary view. The mass looting and predatory behavior in New Orleans mirrors what I’ve seen in many foreign conflicts where law and order are absent.

Group survival happens all the time in Hollywood, though. Take a movie like Troy: under seige, the community instinctively came together to defend itself. I’ve never seen such a mindful reaction to unfolding doom in nearly 20 years of disaster and conflict-related work. Crisis atomizes and disarms its victims: it scatters groups, disentegrates families. Communication fails; actions are never collective, but primarily individual. In the aftermath, groups of victims may coalesce to support and protect. We may know there is safety in numbers, but in the midst of crisis we dont behave that way.

For the recovery efforts in New Orleans and Biloxi, volunteer mobilization has been massive, attracting Americans and internationals from all walks of life. This outpouring of support in the form of citizen sweat equity, mostly provided by outsiders, has been the primary service model among relief and recovery agencies operating in the region. As one homeowner in the Gentilly area of East New Orleans joked, “We Rebels doin’ nothin’–only Yankees comin’ to fix this mess… .”

But the fact that Katrina recovery, such as it is, has been largely achieved through short-term, unskilled volunteer labor provided by outsiders invites a critique often directed at aid agencies working in developing countries: a vertical charity model (from haves to have-nots) is more efficient at providing a feel-good experience for volunteers than it is at meeting beneficiary needs. In other words, by refusing to engage the politics of suffering by denouncing perpetrators, exposing official corruption, failure or hypcrisy, and pursuing justice for victims, aid agencies become complicit with the causes of suffering they are there to address. The alternative–to provide succor to victims while exposing and denouncing the causes of their plight–may be confrontational, even politically dangerous, but it is this approach that won Doctors Without Borders the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999.

Having worked for Doctors Without Borders for many years, my conviction that the traditional charity model of most relief work perpetuates the power inequities responsible for suffering (thus making it a sweet-smelling means of maintaining the status quo), was unquestioned as I arrived in New Orleans for this review. I’ll share with you some of the ways that conviction has since been questioned by the quality of the recovery work seen here, and its novel use of Fortune 500 companies to finance the effort.

I’m evaluating a national volunteer-based, community development network based in Atlanta GA, called Hands On Network. The Hands On operational model is curiously apolitical: it is built on volunteer community service aimed at a variety of social problems, but it refrains from shaping or interpreting the experience it provides for the volunteers who come through its doors. Illiteracy among inner city youth, for instance, is a need that is met with volunteer tutoring programs–the phenomenon itself is not branded as a failure of public education, or a manifestation of institutionalized discrimination, or any other political interpretation.

Precisely by avoiding the activism informed by a politicization of socio-economic disparity in many American cities, Hands On is able to attract volunteers from across the political spectrum, from all walks of life. Their exclusive focus on service (‘Be the Change’ is their motto) has, in recent years, allowed Hands On to forge relationships with a number of corporations seeking to expand the limits of Corporate Social Responsibility beyond simple wealth redistribution in support of  a given social or environmental cause. Hands On takes willing CEOs and their army of drones and marshals them all into direct community service.

When Katrina hit, Hands On had no affiliates in the Gulf area, no existing relief program or prior experience in disaster response, but wanted to see what could be done. Several volunteers piled into cars and drove towards the storm’s epicenter, Pass Christian and Pascagoula, Mississippi. In the months that followed, the agency was able to establish operational bases in both cities, mobilize its national network of affiliates, and secure corporate donations of several million dollars.

Volunteers began pouring in (they house, feed and equip squads of 50 to 120 volunteers a day), and basic recovery projects began to take shape, resulting in two distinct operations: Hands On New Orleans and Hands On Gulf Coast in Biloxi. Unlike Habitat, they do not build new homes but focus on evacuees seeking to return who lack the means and knowledge to begin the reconstruction process. There is currently a six-month waiting list for their services in the areas of central and eastern New Orleans where they focus their efforts.

Rehabilitation of schools, public spaces (debris removal and murals–see photo above) such as parks, playgrounds and roads, and the gutting and de-molding of private homes form the bulk of their activities today, almost 20 months after the storm. Corporations such as Home Depot, Timberland, Target, and Cisco have contributed funds and spent weeks at a time working in projects organized by Hands On. Entertainment figures like Usher or the cast of The Guiding Light (yes, the soap opera) have come to participate and contribute, even to shoot footage and film episodes using Katrina recovery as a backdrop.

Not prone to celebrate the flowering of a social conscience among CEOs, rap stars or soap opera stars, I continue to wonder at how quickly I’ve come to qualify the impact of Hands On programming as positive and uniquely vital to Katrina recovery. But I’ve been looking at their work for almost a month now–meeting beneficiaries, talking to volunteers, corporate and non-profit partners, and debating with Hands On staff–and have gathered a lot of first hand evidence of their impact. Although a number of technical issues remain, it is genuinely uplifting to see how a bootstrap operation built on a dubious alliance between ordinary volunteers and corporate largesse can result in tangible improvements for the people whose lives were ruined by Katrina and the federal failure that followed.

Jane Jacobs attained a certain degree of fame after she published her iconoclastic approach to city planning in The Death and Life of American Cities in 1961. Subsequently she wrote two more books about cities that eclipsed The Death and Life in their level of iconoclasm; sadly, those books are still exceedingly off-mainstream. The first of the two, The Economy of Cities (1970), introduces the ideas that the basic unit of macroeconomics is not the nation but the city, and that economic development always begins in cities. The second, Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984), takes the idea to the next level and talks about broader city regions, inter-city trade, the rise and fall of cities’ economies, and cities in relation to nations.

Jacobs’ ideas are sufficiently unknown that I am going to spend half this article just summarizing the two books. If you’ve read them, feel free to skip to the second half, though the first half might still give you a glimpse into how I mentally organize those points before I critique them.

The starting point of The Economy of Cities is that development comes from cities. It begins with a (weak) archeological argument that even the agricultural revolution was an urban renovation, with small trading posts functioning as cities in the preagricultural age. From there, Jacobs builds her points into a considerably stronger thesis that a certain level of population density is necessary to sustain economic development. It ranges from very difficult to impossible to put a factory on the ground without a network of urban suppliers. When Henry Ford tried producing every part of his automobiles at one site, he failed. Only when he changed his operation to assembling car parts produced in other factories, which formed part of Detroit’s manufacturing network, did he succeed.

At the same time, Jacobs makes it clear that development can only happen in one way: import replacement. A city develops by having entrepreneurs and inventors take apart imported goods and learn how they work and how to produce parts for them until they can produce them more cheaply than they can be imported. The example she keeps referring to is Tokyo’s bicycle industry, which replaced American imports with local production. Once a city replaces an import, it can use the extra money it gets to import other, typically more expensive goods, triggering further import replacement. This process is coupled to the full cycle of division of labor, in which division of labor involves adding new work, which in turn triggers more division of labor, and so on.

Finally, Jacobs warns, these processes can never work outside cities. Programs meant to develop agricultural countries by creating jobs in rural areas, most spectacularly the Great Leap Forward, invariably flop. This includes many softer programs for rural development, notably the green revolution and birth control. The green revolution’s productivity increases displaced the rural poor without creating city jobs to compensate, Jacobs says. And birth control does not matter so much given that Japan, Western Europe, and the eastern US have high population densities without widespread poverty.

In Cities and the Wealth of Nations, Jacobs broadens her theory. First, she defines a city region, a penumbra of a city that appears to reach somewhat beyond its metropolitan area. Within that city region, the city’s economic development spills over without wrecking society too much. This is based on five factors: the city’s thirst for supplies of primary goods, job creation, productivity increases, transplants, and capital formation.

The most interesting factor, supplies, contrasts cities with supply regions—for example, oil-producing states—which are temporarily wealthy due to their richness of primary goods, and then crash once the goods run out or are replaced with alternatives. That, Jacobs says, is what places Saudi Arabia in the third world. It is economically passive, while the US is not.

More in general, she divides the world into productive and passive regions. Productive regions, i.e. vibrant cities, are in the first world; passive ones, including all rural areas as well as economically dead cities such as Pittsburgh, are in the third world, and only appear comfortable because of subsidies from Jacobs’ first world. In that third world, stagflation, defined as high prices and not enough work, is endemic. She gives the example of Portugal, where unemployment is high and the prices, while low by American standards, are out of the population’s reach. The problem, then, is that mainstream economists mistook the boom of the 19th century and much of the 20th century for a constant economic condition, not realizing that stagflation was perfectly normal.

Much of the rest of the book is devoted to fleshing out her earlier ideas more in full. She talks more about how productivity increases can hurt rural areas by making too many people redundant. She integrates trade into city development, showing how cities grow by not only replacing imports but also exporting goods. She continues her historical narrative, skipping from the agricultural revolution to medieval Europe; her main argument is that Venice developed by trading not only with Constantinople but also with other cities in then backward Europe, and in general cities should not become colonies to bigger cities by only trading with them but also create their own mini-networks of cities.

While she gives some examples of how cities can stab themselves in the back in The Economy of Cities, it is only in the later book that she develops that into a coherent idea, which, incidentally, is also where she is weakest. First, currency feedback is crucial in telling cities when to import and when to replace imports, so national currencies at best depress all cities but one—London in Britain, Paris in France, Milan in Italy, and so on—and at worst create a total disharmony of economic feedback, as in multi-city countries like the US. In developing countries, national currencies are pegged to rural goods or primary supplies, which tend to strengthen the currency beyond what the cities can take without deindustrializing. One major reason Singapore developed so fast is that it was kicked out of Malaysia for political reasons and subsequently used its own currency. The US and Japan needed explicit tariffs to protect local industry; in Singapore (and Hong Kong), this tariff was called the national currency.

Further, cities can stifle themselves by engaging in various forms of discrimination, including against small businesses. Caste systems and racial and gender inequality rob the city of needed talent. Regulations such as ground rules established in New York in the 1960s, wherein the city let firms bid on the redevelopment of 37 buildings in Harlem but only if they could bid on all 37 at once, ensure blighted neighborhoods cannot develop their own talent. In the US it is so egregious that in The Economy of Cities, Jacobs quotes a civil rights activist who says government interference with slum development causes so many problems it would be better if it left black neighborhoods alone entirely.

In Cities and the Wealth of Nations, Jacobs also introduces the idea of transactions of decline. These are forms of spending that on paper increase GDP but in practice never produce any innovation or further growth. She identifies three such transactions: military spending, subsidies to rural hinterlands, and trade with backward countries. Military spending can help the economy when it is temporary, but otherwise it is a drag since it produces nothing. The same applies to subsidies to the hinterland and loans to third world countries that can never pay them back. All three are preoccupations of great empires, which is why cities tend to have cycles of growth, followed by imperialism, followed by decline.

Before criticizing the specifics of Jacobs’ argument, let me say that I think the basic notion that cities are the basic units of macroeconomics makes some sense. There is no special reason for nations to be the basic unit, especially not in the age of the European Union and the Euro. Urban areas and city regions are natural units defined economically and socially, independent of arbitrary political boundaries. Nations—and, incidentally, city limits—are not. In addition, let me note that there are many sub-issues I cannot address for space constraints. My above summary has 1,100 words; Mark Rosenfelder’s has more than 6,000 and still misses some important points.

The weakest point in Jacobs’ argument is the exact definition of import replacement and when it occurs. She peppers her writing with examples of when cities replace imports and when they do not, without a shred of evidence that this is in fact what happens. It is subtle and remote enough in the two books I am dealing with here, which is why I only noticed it upon reading Dark Age Ahead (2004). In that book, she talks about Canada’s rapid economic growth in the early 2000s as an example of import replacement in Toronto. The sum total of the evidence she includes there is an anecdote of an office chair with “Made in Canada” printed on it. The evidence she gives that some city in the US or Britain underwent a surge of import replacement in the 1840s is even thinner.

In fact, her example of Toronto’s import replacement shows how fragile her analysis is. One of the major factors behind Canada’s recent growth is the fact that Alberta is sitting on more oil than is present in the entire Middle East, albeit in tar sand form, which is more expensive to produce than Saudi crude. Increasing development of tar sands is causing labor shortages in much of Alberta, which then translate to reduced unemployment in other provinces, which send migrant workers to tar sand mining operations.

Second, the three transactions of decline she identifies are not the only or even the most costly types of spending that do not produce wealth. Health spending, debt interest, infrastructure repair, policing and internal security, and even some forms of welfare that go to the urban poor are just as economically unproductive. Much of this is covered by the difference between gross and net domestic product. The rest boils down to how much the city spends versus what level it could theoretically lower its spending to, which is itself a function of its wage level, or its existing level of economic development.

In fact, health spending dwarfs Jacobs’ three transactions of decline in almost every developed country. The US spends 4.5% of its GDP on defense, and New York’s tax imbalance with the state and federal governments, which significantly overlaps military spending, totals 5% of its gross city product. Aid to other countries, including loans, totals 0.2%. That compares with 15% of American GDP spent on health care. Although other developed countries spend closer to 9-10% of their GDP on health, they also spend closer to 1.5-2% of their GDP on the military. The only developed country that spends more on the military than on health is Singapore, which has no hinterland to subsidize (though Israel comes close, and also massively subsidizes settlers above and beyond IDF protection).

There are a few more areas in which Jacobs’ theory is fuzzy. It says nothing of how subsidies to poor regions can in fact produce innovation by investing in education. It entirely misses the fact that population pressure can impoverish countries, and at any rate birth control and family planning are necessary to move women from the production of babies to the production of new wealth. It dwells on manufacturing but says nothing about service economies. It is overall tailored to the 1980s, when the shock of American deindustrialization was at its peak, Germany and Japan were forward-looking innovators, China had barely recovered from Maoism, and Ronald Reagan was busy hiking military spending and running unsustainable deficits.

Two points of fuzziness stand out. The first is that Jacobs leaves cities undefined. It is implied that they all work like London or New York, that is have a core surrounded by rings of decreasingly urbanized areas. But that is not the only way for a city to arise. The biggest urban area in Germany is not Berlin, but the Ruhr, an agglomeration of many relatively small industrial cities, none of which dominates the region. On a larger scale, Jacobs leaves out megalopolises, which severely complicate her proposed scheme wherein each city region mints and prints its own currency. How can New York and Philadelphia have separate currencies when their metropolitan areas overlap?

The second fuzzy point is the definition of the third world. The third world is not defined by economic passivity, but by various social problems centered around poverty. Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Beijing, and Bangkok are perfectly dynamic, and fit perfectly into the third world. Moscow has gotten far more economically active since the fall of the Soviet Union, but its upsurge in poverty and breakdown in public health triggered a painful process of third-worldening spreading in Russia.

To some extent, it is hard to fault Jacobs for consistently preferring anecdotes to data. When the economic mainstream focuses on nations, it is very hard to find accurate data about the economies of cities. Jacobs is by and large forced to talk about import replacement in the almost magical terms she uses, invoking it whenever there is no other explanation for economic growth that fits her theory. And the historical overviews that stay away from handwaved import replacement are strong.

But the solution to problems with data is to look for empirical clues, such as the number of bicycles or cars or computers a developing country imports every year. Import replacement will occur whenever we see a decrease in the imports of a lower-level good without a corresponding decrease in its consumption. Supply-oriented growth will occur whenever increased exports of primary goods account for big enough a fraction of economic growth.

Jacobs’ policy suggestions span the entire gamut from politically insane to extremely cogent. It is not especially hard to divert subsidies to areas where they increase productivity: education, worker retraining, public transportation instead of roads and cars, direct scientific research rather than military research, minimum income as opposed to a mishmash of welfare programs that cost too much and reduce poverty too little. There, Jacobs is completely right. Her suggestion that budding empires not squelch city development in colonies the way Britain did in Ireland and tried to in the US could work, but is politically difficult to implement. In contrast, small currency regions will never work, and neither will ending trade with backward areas.

Make no mistake about it: Jacobs understands macroeconomics. Her theory has a fairly sound core, even if it requires tweaking to account for changes brought in the previous decade and in this one. The problems only start when she heaps onto the theory sundry sub-issues that only detract from it.

Elatia Harris

Until 1967, when the excavations of Prof. Spyridon Marinatos began to bring it to light, the clock had been stopped on the settlement of Akrotiri, on the Aegean island of Thera – better known as Santorini – for about 3600 years. Volcanic ash from the largest geological event of ancient times, several hundred feet of ash that would have taken fully two centuries to harden, had both destroyed and preserved the town, setting it apart from history for a very long time.

The precise dating of the event is a difficulty – one of those problems that arise when there’s a spread between archeological and geological data.  Though the Egyptians – this would have been about the time of Queen Hatshepsut – suffered no damage on record from the eruption, its ashy traces blew northeast to Anatolia, helping to date it to around 1600 B.C.E.  Its effects, including a tsunami that pounded the northern coast of Crete, would have been marked with awe throughout the eastern Mediterranean, and may have made an impact on weather systems as far away as China.  Examining a satellite photo of Thera, it is easy to see the outlines of the caldera, the vast undersea crater around which the present island takes form. The Thera Eruption, as it is called, was not the first from this furious caldera, several hundred thousand years old — only the first to impinge on civilization.

Who, then, lived on Thera?  Not that it was in those days called Thera; the name came into use well after the eruption.  The Therans had much but not everything in common with the palace-dwelling Minoans on Crete.  Thera being the southernmost island in the Cycladic arc, just about equidistant from mainland Greece and Asia Minor and 70 kilometers north of Crete, its roots in Cycladic culture went deep. Of Minoans in general, we know what we can infer from archeological sites, but we cannot read their language, written in the tormenting and fascinating script called Linear A, at which scholars have puzzled ever since the Phaistos Disc was unearthed on Crete one hundred years ago.  Shards covered with Linear A have been found on Thera, too, tantalizing in their mute abundance.

One of the most baffling losses pre-history confronts us with is our not knowing how an ancient people referred to itself, or what its place was called by those who lived there. We don’t know Minoan place names, or what the Minoans called themselves, and the sound of their speech is but a guess. We do know that the time of their late flourishing — roughly the middle centuries of the second millennium B.C.E. — corresponded to a period of internationalism and vigorous trade throughout the eastern Mediterranean and Near East.

This was the Late Bronze Age, and many of its gorgeous refinements were fully present on Thera. In the harbor there were 50-foot ships of cypress, with resinated linen-covered hulls and benches for 30 oarsmen. Thanks to the same geothermal activity that would one day disastrously increase, hot water ran in pipes through multi-storied houses with stone stairs. Ventilation was understood, with light wells sunk in blocks of dwellings. Then as now in the Mediterranean, staples were stored in gigantic ceramic jars – olive oil, grain, dried figs. There was intricate and characteristic jewelry – out-sized crescent earrings, for instance – and there was perfume, of coriander, almonds, bergamot and pine. Weaving was so fine that garments could be woven sheer and then embroidered. There were blue-toned vervet monkeys from Egypt, tall stone vases for lilies, and sufficient paint for many radiantly colored and figured walls — had there not been paint, we would know very little of the rest.

And there was saffron, the dark red thread linking so many ancient peoples.  Saffron is obtained by plucking the stigma — the female parts of the reproductive system of the saffron crocus – and drying it. The dried stigma are called saffron threads, and these are typically ground to a powder before or after being sold.  Harvesting and drying saffron is intensive labor, performed almost everywhere by women. Known and used since Neolithic times, the wild-growing crocus species that produces saffron, C. cartwrightianus, has given over to a cultivated species, C. sativus.  Numerous crocus species, some with mythological associations, bloom in the late winter, the spring and the fall.  C. cartwrightianus and C. sativus, with their petals of violet-blue, bloom in the late fall, a time of tremendous fecundity in both plant and animal life in the Mediterranean. It takes about 70,000 deep orange-red stigma to make a pound of saffron.  Always regarded as very, very precious, it is now mainly known as the world’s most expensive spice.  In its defense as a flavoring for food – the taste is epiphanial, and you only need a little.  More about that another time.  Its 4000-year history includes not only culinary applications, but use as a dye, a medicine, and a ritual substance.

Anyone looking for the cultic aspects of saffron had better begin with Akrotiri. Though history’s most ardent kiss – language that we can read – has not yet been bestowed here, the images on the walls tell us a story of their own.

In the building known as Xeste 3, larger and more decorated than any other in town, is a two-storied chamber of frescoes – true frescoes, painted on wet plaster for a time-defying bond – depicting women and girls gathering saffron crocus blooms, bringing them in baskets to a saffron-cushioned goddess seated on a three-tiered platform. It is by far the most splendid and evocative cycle of paintings from the ancient world to be discovered in our time, and a match for almost any painting from pre-classical antiquity.  Since the Aegean Late Bronze Age was a time of complex cross-currents in artistic influences, striking parallels between the Egyptian and Minoan painting styles are to be expected.  The precision with which landscape elements as large as harbors and as small as individual flowers were imagined and represented on Thera, however, is without peer in either Minoan civilization or Dynastic Egypt.

Xeste 3 was probably a public building – on an ashlar wall there is an altar surmounted by a painted pair of horns tipped and dripping in red and, below, a lustral basin, both too large for domestic use.  If public or semi-public rituals were performed here, then to what end? And in whose propitiation?

Mistress of the Animals

It is hard not to look at the goddess on the saffron cushion. Though her state of preservation is less than optimal, she is the focal point of the cycle. Necklaces with a duck and a dragonfly motif hang in an arc from her throat. Her blue and white costume is richly embroidered with a saffron crocus motif, the easily recognizable silhouette of the wild-growing C. cartwrightianus that is everywhere represented in Xeste 3 – clinging to rocks, garlanding its gatherers, piled into baskets, and patterning the creamy white field on which all the images are painted. The sheer visual inescapability of the crocus on these premises where rituals were enacted may represent its fragrance suffusing the atmosphere. A sign in Greek mythology of the presence of a deity is the scent of flowers, and one thousand years earlier on Thera, it may have meant the same, for the Greeks routinely endowed the Olympians with the attributes of far older gods.

To us, perhaps the most compelling aspect of the goddess is not her regalia, but her expression. Head turned in profile, her eye is starry with interest, her lips parted as if in speech with the blue monkey to her right offering a handful of saffron. A gryphon flanks her left, present only in paw and wing. While she commands girls to gather and bring her tribute, her companions are animals, on the same level of the platform as herself. We don’t know her name on Thera, but she is known to us anyhow: this is the Mistress of the Animals — potnia theron — one of the oldest goddesses of ancient times. A mountain deity of the Near East – the mountain here recalled by the three-tiered platform – potnia theron held sway over wild animals, the wild and the holy being, for purposes of propitiation, terribly similar. A fierce Nature Mother, she was allied with the animals, needing to be won over with worship to the side of the hunters. 

In her earliest known incarnations, potnia theron was wild and implacable to look at, anything but easy to sell on the idea that her creatures should be slaughtered to feed and clothe humans, and nothing at all like the luxuriously adorned beauty inclining her head to the ear of the monkey on the walls of Xeste 3.  It is probable that what we see represented here is the priestess of the cult – the most highly stationed woman in the town — standing in for the deity during the ritual, and in a moment of awful mystery, actually assuming her throne.  It was understood as a sacred performance, and doing just this was one of the major functions of cultic priests.  It still is, as, for instance, with the vicar empowered to forgive a penitent in the name of God at the end of a ritual confession, literally to hand out God’s forgiveness in His place.

Saffron from Thera

What role did saffron play here? In the thirty years since scholars began to study Xeste 3, their appreciation of this role has grown, but that is only to say conjecture ranges ever wider, for however lavish the visual clues there is a crucial absence of record. Perhaps, however, visual clues and the inferential processes they stimulate can point the way to an accurate understanding of what is seen.

Most educated guessing about the meaning of the paintings in Xeste 3 has tended towards the interpretation that fertility rites are being enacted, or coming of age ceremonies performed, even that a goddess is overseeing the production of perfume or spice. The youngest looking members of the troop of saffron-gathering girls have curious coiffures not seen elsewhere among Cycladic and Minoan peoples – banded heads with shaven, blue-painted skulls and long black locks at the forehead, ears and crown. Boys on Thera are painted this way too – it seems to have been a youth thing, no doubt fraught with meaning.  Based on documented head-shaving patterns and rituals in Asia Minor, more than one scholar has concluded that Xeste 3 might be where the youth of Thera dedicated its hair to the gods – the offering of hair, symbolic of one’s strength, being in many places in the ancient Near East the maximum offering that one could make. 

These guesses speak to Late Bronze Age folkways in a general sense; initiations were known to take place at childhood’s end, spices were ground, plants were processed for perfume and incense, and what the ancients did with their hair – how they considered it –was deeply meaningful to them. What has been until recently overlooked is the specific focus on saffron in this large chamber.  It’s everywhere, and because the flower that produces it, the saffron crocus, is extremely accurately represented it cannot be a generic flower motif, for lilies, irises and other flowers are elsewhere in Akrotiri painted with the same careful and characteristic attention to plant anatomy. But these others are not shown being handled by humans.

Could the Xeste 3 murals pertain to the dyeing of luxury goods?  Prof. Elizabeth Wayland Barber observes in Women’s Work: the First 20,000 Years (1994) that yellow was the color of women’s garments in the ancient world, with saffron the dye that produced those tonalities – from radiant warm yellow to deep orange-red – reserved for women of high status.  The use of saffron as a component in pigment goes back about 50,000 years to cave painting in Iraq, so the Therans were more likely simply to have used it as a dye than celebrated it as such. A young, blue-skulled priestess in a saffron robe is found on a wall of the West House, a nearby building at Akrotiri, and a long-haired woman suited in a tight-fitting saffron-colored costume raises her arm – signaling what? – on a wall of the House of the Ladies, also near Xeste 3.  Looking closely, it’s possible to see that the priestess’s lips and ear-tips are colored a deep orange-red, and on the cheek of the woman in fitted saffron clothing, there appears an emphatic red stain. Make-up? It’s probable that these facial markings are cultic, like the smudge of ash on the foreheads of Christians on Ash Wednesday, or the bindi on the foreheads of Hindu women, originally made of saffron paste, and a mark denoting both status and cultic affiliation.

By the time of the Thera Eruption, yet another supremely important use for saffron was known.  It was powerful medicine.  In about 1550 B.C., in the XVIII Dynasty, the Ebers Papyrus, not only a medical treatise but perhaps the first known complete book of any kind, was rolled up and placed between the thighs of a body prepared for burial in Egypt. It consists of over 3000 lines of text written in the cursive script called Hieratic, with 811 prescriptions and diagnoses interspersed with spells and incantations. It recommends saffron powder blended with beer as a poultice for women in difficult labor, and recognizes saffron as a diuretic, as well.

Prof. Jules Janick of the Department of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture at Purdue University writes that “the early medical arts were associated with the search for knowledge about healing substances on the one hand and magic and religion on the other.  Plants with strong tastes and odors (herbs and spices) that were seized upon to alleviate illness and enhance food were considered sources of power, and became associated with ritual, magic, and religion. The prehistoric discovery that certain plants are edible or have curative powers and others are inedible or cause harm is the origin of the healing professions and its practitioners — priest, physician and apothecary.  For thousands of years the role of the priest and the physician were combined.” 

The theory that diseases had natural rather than supernatural causes would not be expounded until Hippocrates, more than 1200 years after the Thera Eruption.  The notion that healing properties inhered in plants with or without divine intervention likewise belonged to a later, more rational era.  In the long meanwhile, medicine was magic assisted by careful observation.  And on Thera, the magicians were women.

In 2004, Dr. Gordon Bendersky, a cardiologist at the University of Pennsylvania, and Susan Ferrence, an art historian at Temple University, published in the journal Perspectives in Biology and Medicine an acclaimed article, “Therapy with Saffron and the Goddess of Thera,” in which they propose that the Akrotiri frescoes suggest the Therans had developed saffron as a versatile medicine.  Citing not only that the women in the frescoes are picking crocus flowers and emptying their elaborately detailed stigma — where its medicinal phytoactivity is concentrated — from small baskets to large ones, but that facing the goddess there is a seated girl with a bleeding foot and her hand to her head in the gesture that, in the Egyptian painting that influenced the artists of Akrotiri, indicates suffering, Bendersky and Ferrence hypothesize that “the program of Xeste 3 does not merely include the secondary medicinal value of saffron, but in fact emphasizes its primary therapeutic function, and exhibits the production sequence in cultic recognition of its precious curative value. The frescoes express a divinely encouraged concept – the medicinal healing that is the major function of saffron.”

Since ancient Eastern Mediterranean healers and worshippers often invoked a deity to potentiate a medicine, the paintings may promote the belief that the goddess depicted has conferred curative properties on the saffron. Benderski and Ferrence argue for the interpretation that saffron as a medicine could have originated on Thera at a slightly earlier time than the Ebers Papyrus catalogues its use, or at the very least, that Akrotiri was a major production center.  Interviewed for the New York Times about the findings presented by Bendersky and Ferrence, Dr. Ellen N. Davis, a professor of archaeology and specialist in the Mediterranean Bronze Age, said, “It’s the most valuable and convincing study of the medicinal uses of saffron in the ancient Mediterranean world.”

Over the next three and one half millennia, there would be written records from many cultures and countries about the use of saffron to treat over 90 illnesses – among these, menstrual disorders, melancholy, libido loss, eye diseases, liver diseases, wounds, joint pain and headache. Saffron appears in the botanical dictionary at Ashurbanipal’s library and in the Song of Songs. Alexander the Great bathed his battle wounds in it, Cleopatra bathed in it before meeting her lovers, Ayurvedic and Tibetan physicians prescribed it, and Western researchers have begun to study its active ingredients to determine whether its Bronze Age reputation as a curative substance is supported by modern science.  In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, saffron or its derivatives – crocin and crocetin – were shown to have anti-tumor activity against different malignancies in humans and animals both in vivo and in vitro. The potential success of saffron against many of the ills it was used to treat in antiquity has been confirmed by phytochemical studies and experimental evidence.

Was a Bronze Age island town capable of processing and packaging enough saffron to make it a major manufacturing center?  Bendersky and Ferrence point out that very little saffron would be necessary to achieve a therapeutic dose – just a few milligrams – and that there is such a thing as too much saffron, as the ancients would have known.

In 2006, two years after Bendersky and Ferrence had published their paper, a 3200-square-foot perfume factory dating to 2100 B.C.E. was discovered by an Italian team of archeologists at Pyrgos on Cyprus.  The complex had been destroyed by a major earthquake in 1850 B.C.E., but perfume bottles, mixing jugs and stills were preserved underneath the collapsed walls.  This discovery has enlarged once again our already impressive understanding of Bronze Age manufacturing and trade capabilities, and suggests that several hundred years later on Thera there would have been few technological obstacles to producing commercial quantities of saffron-based medicines.

The Thera Eruption

In the three decades that the world has been aware of it, Akrotiri has seen inevitable comparisons with Pompeii and Herculaneum, destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 C.E.  But the accuracy of the comparison is for many reasons imperfect. The Pompeiians were famously caught by surprise, the devastation occurring in the middle of normal town life, as the ash-preserved fallen figures attest.  Quite plainly, people dropped what they were doing and fled for their lives, with no time to gather up their valuables.  At nearby and slightly wealthier Herculaneum, they ran to the sea, where many of their bodies were found huddled along the coast.  Yet it was a much, much smaller eruption that caused all this destruction than the one 1600 years earlier on Thera. For the Theran Eruption, there had been years – perhaps decades — to prepare.

On the satellite map of Thera, two small islands in the crater can be seen – these are Nea Kameni and Palaia Kameni, and one may sail out to them to be closer to where the catastrophic eruption was centered, on a small island now vanished that was just to the north.  Here, the eruption that many times surpassed Vesuvius occurred.  It was four times bigger than even Krakatau in 1883, and roughly commensurate with the eruption of Mt. Tambora in 1815, which occasioned the well-documented “Year of No Summer.”

A geological event of this size cannot have gone unheralded, and it did not. A series of warning earthquakes must have prompted a mass evacuation from Thera. Only one body relating to the eruption has been found, on the island of Therasia just off northernmost Thera. If, as at Herculaneum, there are human remains on the coast of Thera – people who were not evacuated in time – they have yet to be found.  The kinds of metal artifacts that gave such a vivid picture of life at Pompeii have not been unearthed at Akrotiri – neither jewelry, nor weaponry, nor even a frying pan. Items of this kind were carried away by the Therans.  All they left, really, were their jars of grain and their painted walls.

It is not known where they went, or what kind of life they made as migrants to foreign shores, only that they got away in fairly good time.  While there is no reason to suppose that, panic-stricken, they plied their oars through hissing seas, there is the awful pathos of their foreknowledge: the mouth of hell would open to swallow up their world, and no Mistress of the Animals or Saffron Mother endowing plant parts with the magic to heal was any match for that.

To judge from the buckled stone stairs at Akrotiri, the warning quakes coming five or ten or twenty years before the eruption were hugely damaging, but not so bad it wasn’t worth it patching things up.  Everywhere in town during that interval, the work of repair was undertaken, even continued up to the time of the eruption, and the sheer scope of these repairs would have taken an organized and numerous population considerable effort to effect. In a bedroom of the West House, the location of the young priestess of the red-tipped ears and saffron robe, two vessels full of dried plaster and a third of dried paint were found; this room was in the process of redecoration when Akrotiri was abandoned once and for all.

None of those who left it, or their children, or their children’s children, would make a return trip, for once the ash from the volcanic plume reaching 40 kilometers into the sky had settled over the island, it would be sterile, every last plant extinguished, and uninhabitable for several hundred years.  Akrotiri, a world still striving for order and beauty when it came to its long-foreseen end, would go missing even from memory as the subsequent history of the island transpired.

Around 1100 B.C.E., the Phoenicians came, then the Dorians, the Athenians, the Romans. The island was called Kalliste — “beautiful one”— and Strogyli – “round one.”  In the middle ages, Venetian crusaders called it Santorini, after Saint Irene, a martyr of the Eastern Church.  This is the name that has stuck, although the Greeks call it Thera or Thira, too.  The unquiet caldera, the most active volcanic center in the South Aegean, last erupted in 1956, and will do again; sulphur and steam are often seen rising from Nea Kameni, dead center in the peaceful dark blue bay.  For many hundreds of years now, the saffron crocus has been back. You would find villagers to say it has always been there.  It is gathered every October, the stigma plucked from it and processed – a small local industry, run by women.

Coming: SAFFRON MOTHER, Part II

SELECTED RESOURCES FOR THIS ARTICLE

The White Goddess, by Robert Graves
The Masks of God, Vol. 3: Occidental Mythology, by Joseph Campbell
Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religion, by Walter Burkert

Online Resources:

http://www.therafoundation.org/
Beautifully designed and well-maintained site, rich in visual content relating to Akrotiri and Thera. Many learned articles posted on the Thera Eruption as well as on topics more specific to art, architecture, religion, social organization, technology.

http://projectsx.dartmouth.edu/history/bronze_age/lessons/les/17.html
Lectures on Prehistoric Archaeology of the Aegean from Dartmouth College. Excellent, readable overview.

http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/history/default.html
Lectures on the History of Horticulture, Lessons 1 –26, by Prof. Jules Janick of Purdue University

About a year ago I started working on an article about the use of vertical space in cities, confused over why, beyond the ground floor, most buildings are totally inaccessible except to their occupants. Without much confidence and convinced that I should engage in further exploration, I abandoned the piece and bottled up my frustration over what I perceived as a fundamental problem of urban design. I’ve spent the last year studying cities, and haven’t made much progress regarding this issue, so here we are. I’ve gone public with my complaint.

The problem is simple: most cities contain tall buildings (though, ironically, I’m writing this from Los Angeles), and yet despite sharing scale and parallel planes, these buildings rarely connect or contain any physical relationship to one another. The average city dweller only really enters vertical space for specific purposes, whether to go from his 16th floor apartment to his 42nd floor office or from his friend’s basement flat to the observation deck on the top of Rockefeller Center. That is to say, from private space to private space. This isn’t about rooftop restaurants or mid-building showrooms, but rather the problem of urban circulation that forces pedestrians down a stairwell, across the street, and up an elevator—ultimately and forever bound to move over a singular plane at the feet of the city.

With arguments abound over the state of public space in urban environments, especially in light of the recent mid-brow pop fascination with Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, these discussions have been limited to basic ideas about development, preservation, and the ever-present demand for parks. Why, though, does no one look up in cities to see the wealth of space and potential that looms overhead?

This silly rhetorical question is indeed that. Countless architects and planners have tried to conceive of ways to utilize above-ground space through a diverse range of measures. In the 1950s and 60s, just as Corbusian ideals of modernist planning were stroking the want of our rational selves, smaller movements of frustrated designers were forming across the globe. From England’s Utopianists and France’s Situationists to Italy’s Superstudio and Japan’s Metabolists a diverse array of designers were devising urban forms that proposed new networking systems to connect cities from the ground up.

Buildings would be connected by sweeping, dramatic bridges and pedestrian walkways. Pompidou Center–like stairs would span blocks and would begin at one building’s 20th floor and end at another’s penthouse. Bucky Fuller offered modular cities that could grow with need but within a pre-existing structural system that allowed buildings to float hundreds of feet over the ground. It was the city that might be born of a union between Jacobs herself and the creative team behind the Jetsons. These plans represented simultaneously everything that was right about what are known as “Paper Architects”—intellectuals whose radical designs are seldom realized—and everything that was wrong given their impossibility of execution. But comparable plans need not be so unattainable.

[Projects such as New York’s High Line present dynamic examples of off-the-ground development. An existing elevated railway cutting through 1.5 miles of New York’s West Side, shown in the picture on the right, is presently under renovation and will link to various galleries, apartment buildings, and hotels.]

Two years ago I saw a thesis at Wesleyan University where a student designed a fantastic proposal for a derelict waterfront neighborhood in Worcester, Massachusetts. The project addressed these issues with phenomenal clarity and pragmatic foresight. In it, a public park comprising a pedestrian walkway, gardens, and athletic facilities was incorporated over and through several adjacent warehouses, factories, and office buildings. Park-goers would enter one building and walk through floors of retail and restaurants, onto roofs where basketball and tennis courts were thoughtfully planned, and along (though above) the waterfront.

The simplicity of the proposal was remarkable: the traditional notion of the sidewalk with storefronts and services was stretched and pushed; in a sense rendered three-dimensional. This was no elevated pedestrian system, however. Those exist, without much success, in cities around the world. Two that spring to mind are constantly derided for their detrimental effects on the surrounding neighborhood, those in Minneapolis and in Los Angeles. These systems, though, do not a vertically-integrated city make.

On two recent trips, one to Shanghai and the other to Istanbul, I found interesting solutions to this problem of vertical space. Shanghai is host to an interesting phenomenon where restaurants, bars, and clubs are located on upper floors of office buildings. Not, like in America, the marketable roof-top venue, but rather on middle-floors, soaring thirty stories over the ground but under twenty others, sandwiched between offices. Here I found a convenient, profitable, and novel solution to the problem of desolate commercial neighborhoods in cities, a subject of constant study and debate. By attracting night-oriented retail, whole blocks that would be otherwise deserted were teeming and vibrant.

Istanbul, situated on a hilly landscape, features amenities and retail on atypical floors as in Shanghai, but complements this integration by bringing pedestrian circulation through buildings, connecting to others above and behind and forming mini-pathways up steep inclines in the topography. These developments have come about through a seemingly organic process due both to the store owners and nature of the urban economy of these cities. This same process has yet to occur here in the US, and likely won’t as the buildings in question are usually operated by corporate owners none too concerned with innovation.

And the issue becomes clear that what’s really preventing the realization of these types of developments is the issue of funding and responsibility. I’m sure many of you figured out this obvious problem from the get go. Barring any unforeseen hullabaloo, however, businesses would do well to let certain floors to retail. New York is a perfect example: while new office buildings continue to languish with unfilled vacancies, empty storefronts downtown continue to rent for far higher prices and are rare to encounter.

Simple policy strategies could finance the infrastructure needed for this type of system, and policy should support these types of endeavors. If you read the strategic plans of most major metropolises—I can say with certainty this is true for London, New York, and Los Angeles—you know that, increasingly, local governments are seeking out measures to encourage and ensure greater density in central urban spaces. In addition, a recent emphasis on the benefits of greenroofs has introduced a new playground, as it were, of experimentation in public space.

Before building taller and taller buildings, however, we should determine better ways to connect them efficiently and in a way that takes acknowledges and takes advantage of scale. While we’re in the midst of enormous construction booms across the globe, now seems as good a time as any to re-imagine how cities can work, how we can reduce sprawl, and how we can realize a future so idealistically conceived in the past.

Mildly desperate, my investment in writing a loss, I decided to get a job.

I was 27. The last person I had worked for, a lawyer, was (long story, I had zero to do with the mess) under indictment. My prior work experience was patchy, cash jobs I had taken for survival or taxable ones to satisfy around six months of a fleeting interest. I had refused to commit to the cruise ship of a discernible career and found no place on the deck of the merry and like-minded who, seeing themselves in me, would give me a chance. My friends were not far along enough in their careers to help and were weary anyway of what seemed like commitment issues on my part. I had no pedigree of any kind to fall back on. My parents were recently divorced and totally broke. I was broke and exhausted from not having enough control over whether I might be broke again. I longed for a quaint steadiness, one that I perceived as being under the governorship of a large relatively anonymous office.

The advice I received from the career services of my alma mater, from my mother, from friends and others, was to take my unrelated experiences as connected by skill sets within each that pointed towards a type of office place I could make a case for having always wanted and long prepared for. I chose law.

(Inevitably, suggestions of law school followed to which I demurred. Many a decent, restless brain grew tired of being alone and set off to law school. Some found a home, others a crematorium. Understanding of the law is useful for practical, social hermeneutics, but as a science it is far broader then it is profound and I disagree with the average lawyer’s only tenet—that all narratives are arguably equal. Besides, I needed money, pronto, not loans.)

I scoured the search engines, met with recruiters and alumni, fine tuned the list of specials called a resume, repeated and repeated my personal pitches and after two months received one offer, which I took.

For $41,500 (I scoffed at the original proposition of $40K), dental and all the overtime I could get, I became a paralegal at a Midtown law firm of some 40 lawyers that specialized in litigation and real estate. I was given a desk and existence as email address and phone extension. Not much happened the first week. I even asked the guy who hired me when I was going to get some work. Shortly thereafter I was swimming in recyclables.

Because our hours were all billed to clients and because I had to keep track of all my hours, I know that out of 125 days at the law firm, 96 were spent filing, 50 were spent indexing and over 25 were spent copying, entering data or running one word searches of pdf files with tens of thousands of pages to them, with considerable overlap of tasks over the course of the day. Occasionally, I was sent out of the office to deliver documents, usually to a court (on 27th and Madison is a tiny marble and wood galleon of a courthouse, free to the public and superlative), once to a kosher steakhouse to get a signature from a couple:

    Wife, “Why’s he interrupting dinner?”
    Husband, “He has something for us to sign.”
    Wife, “Will it get me in trouble?”
    Husband, “Just sign and keep eating.”

The trips out of the office were billed by my co-workers as the major perk to my role; I would be the only one who could get away from the office; I would be the only one who would not always have to engage in dreaded work. I never bought the idea behind this supposed perk, that work inherently sucks and by extension nothing is better than to leave work. The tasks I was given sucked big time for sure, and I did not have to step far back to think of much worse jobs (most of these have to do with killing or jerking off animals, to say nothing of the expedited death that comes with much of the developed worlds forced upon endeavors. My personal soft spot for worst job has always been with the weathered model who poses provocatively with shawarma, white sauce smeared on lamb shreds with gusto, on deli posters; wherever you are, babe, I got an acre on my wide heart waiting for you.). Still, averse as I am to the environment, I have never been convinced that to be in an office was to hand over an essential part of oneself for the duration of the time one spends under florescents. Cubiclitis, in my experience, was never a degenerative disease but a cold most everyone caught.

I did not make any major friends at the law firm, but I got along well enough. Denise from accounting told me about her daquiri infused weekends. Marcus, a fellow paralegal, a neocon with a flaccid Masters in German literature, was good for political talk in a two North ends of a magnet meet kind of way. I got a workplace nickname from a lawyer who trusted my efficiency, Alexcelente.  I had my water cooler conversations, was pulled into some important projects and emailed silly forwards. My workplace enthusiasm was drenched after I followed loud laughter to a cubicle with three people around a screen watching what turned out to be cat bloopers. This, the cat bloopers, happened a number of times, with different people, at all hours, cat bloopers. I bore the machine gun fire of the cultural epitaphs, “you’re fired”, “that was easy” and quotes from Goodfellas. I was condescended to more then I care to be and regularly kept late, far far past my tolerance for my dull tasks.

The lawyers were hardworking and generally cordial, with one requisite jerk screamer who, outside of his office, was pretty contained. They were almost all men and all white except for one black lawyer who lived with his door shut and a well-aged blond who was the sole member of their booming divorce practice and always had her door open. The secretaries were almost all women and fell into two categories: young mamacita’s surrounded by pictures of their kids and faded Mediterranean beauties consoled by pictures of their grandkids. A good portion of them kept candy I lived off of on their desks and almost all of them were nice as well.

For most, the community seemed to be the major draw of the office. Where the repetition of tasks and conversations stunted me and made me anxious, most were comforted by the familiarity of their roles and the personalities around them. Even many of the cases I worked on followed formulas so pervasive—fighting over a dead relative’s house, one brother ruins a family business but keeps all the money, the building of malls—and central to human nature that it was hard to tell them apart sometimes. This community seemed a decent enough attraction for the employees. On its best days the large office was a cousin of, two or four times removed, the kind of personalized neighborhood whose looming extinction people often point to but rarely offer winning solutions for. The office had policemen and mailmen, sports leagues and boards and local representatives, drunks and idiots. The Mom n’ Pop store was the old secretary who helped with the copy machine and in passing compared the easy-to-handle-once-you-get-used-to-them pitfalls of the machine with navigating a long life. This community, complaints of Monday aside, the general longing for a vacation or just taking in how emotionally engorged people would become with a long weekend on the way, kept the majority of my co-workers contented, if not quite fully so.

I was nowhere near content and in my entire time there learned only two things, both on the same occasion, one month into the job. On that occasion I attended a commercial real estate closing for a lawyer who could not be present or did not care to be. My assignment was to deliver checks and wait until the money went through. People have told me that residential real estate closings can be exciting, touching—a young couple buying a bigger apartment or, not long ago, flipping one for the money afforded by our faded housing boom. Commercial closings are bureaucratic affairs. One waits, hands over a check and waits some more; $50 million might be exchanged, but it could just as well be $50.
So, I was sitting in this conference room, checks in hand, on the 38th floor of a Midtown office building, with a long wait on the way and everyone else jibber-jabbering on their phones about what they were doing the next hour and the hour after that and thereafter, and I was looking out at all the tall buildings around me and I realized.

I realized what architects are getting at when they design these tall buildings and how New York never ceases to provide engaging angles from which to be viewed. Any space can be observed from an infinite number of angles, but life quickly teaches us that the majority of these angles are quite similar to each other. Except in New York, where the viewing experience rarely repeats itself, is often new and generally wonderful. And, I realized that I would never make it to the surface of the sea I had willfully decided to start at the near bottom of.

Five months after my thoughts in the conference room on the 38th floor, I left the firm to incredibly little fanfare. Writing a book for a combined two hours a week while being stuck at an office wasn’t cutting it. Ten months later the novel’s far from done. I’m still broke. I squatted for some time at a girlfriend’s. That ended. I stay at my mother’s. Some days I get a bunch of writing done. Some days I get a blissful amount of writing done. Some days I wonder at the purpose of writing a stupid book and wonder at what I am trying to achieve, devoted to a wilting form. Some days I set aside an hour to masturbate, turn it into three, read through several newspapers and a handful of, ehem, good blogs, and have meandering conversations with friends, some at an office, doing quite well (what was a sea to me is for them more like one of those knotted ropes hanging from the ceiling in gym class. They are scaling the rope quickly).
Which brings me to the trouble-free point of this here break from my writing. Do not take on a job that does not challenge you, no matter what your impression is of how the world works. This applies as much to the individual plying at a desk as to the idealist spinning like Samson in his mill around an art form he or she might be better served leaving for an engaging office. And if you do pick an unchallenging affair, your reasons for doing so must be very strong. In my case they were not.