Huddled in certain city areas all around Metro Manila, motels have taken on a different kind of notoriety. They have huge flashy signs, spelling out specific hour promos, and sometimes feature Christmas lights in the middle of the year. Attendants position themselves on the driveway, ready to direct cars to empty rooms. Beyond providing respite for travelers, motels are a favorite destination of lovers and everyone in need of a quick romantic getaway, availing of the per hour rates which have gone lower and lower over the years. The signs which often feature lovers sleeping peacefully, or pictures of roses and wine, can be availed of for as low as two hundred pesos (less than five US dollars), for the standard three hours.

These motels feel like an adult’s version of a theme park, with each featuring its own packages, themes, promises. The buildings huddle together, compressed into one area, as if asked politely, to contain themselves. Certain cities are famous for having their own motel centers. Pasay City is famous for its pollution and its petty crimes, its cheap late night entertainment of seedy bars and a quick five minute ride to the motel of your choice. These forms of entertainment, susceptible to police raids and Phoenix-style resurrections, are also a quick ride away from century old Churches.

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by Liam Heneghan

“Industries have been migrating steadily from the larger cities, leaving behind a lazarus stratum of the urban population that exists partly on the dole, partly on crime, partly on the sick fat of the city… Nothing more visibly reveals the overall decay of the modern city than the ubiquitous filth and garbage in its streets, the noise and massive congestion that fills its thoroughfares, the apathy of its population toward civic issues and the ghastly indifference of the individual toward the physical violence that is publicly inflicted on the other members of the community.” Murray Bookchin (1979) Limits of the City Black Rose Books (reprinted in 1996).

“The more it [the city] concentrates the necessities of life the more unlivable it becomes. The notion that happiness is possible in a city, that life there is more intense, pleasure is enhanced, and leisure time more abundant is mystification and myth.” Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, 2003 (1970)

Despite our brooding discontent, our lingering sense that our environing world is in decline, that the world around us is aflame with war, famine, disease, climate weirdness, that our cities are unlivable, that our economies are doomed to collapse, that we are brotherly and sisterly no more, that under our use and abuse, nature’s web is frayed and weary; despite all of this, surely our best days should be ahead of us?

We are, after all, a vernal species, freshly minted by evolutionary processes dating back no more than a couple of hundred thousand years. If a species typically sticks around a million years, by simple calculation we have run less than a quarter of our course. Can we really have squandered all of our chances so very soon? In a recent project poet Chris Green and I ask, paraphrasing Seamus Heaney, if poets, artists, creative writers, philosophers, and photographers, can help redress the environmental problems that beset us. Artists who live where the flames rise highest, that is in cities – seemingly the very epicenter of our crises, cannot necessarily be appealed to for succor in tough times. Good art after all may do very little, but by the reckless blaze of good work, surely we can see the new terrain in all its ambiguity and complexity, and re-envision the task ahead in a more hopeful way than we have become used to.

Our natural proclivities equip us for debacle and solution in seemingly equal measure. Primates, such as we are, are characterized by generalized natures, there is little that is distinctive about all of us other than our lack of distinction. Said another way we have evolutionary suppleness – a commitment to innovation. We humans, for instance, having no specialized defense mechanisms – we exude no toxic or noisome chemicals, our teeth may gnash but rarely assail, we have no carapace to shield our moist vulnerability. Biological features noteworthy about us are extensions of our beastly condition: we are mobile, and we have brains swollen like ripe fruit atop erect bodies; clever apes that we are, we have perfected the manipulation of the surrounding world in a manner that extends our reach beyond bodily limitations – technology, another extension of primate innovation, is our ecology. For ninety-nine percent of our history we exclusively gathered, and occasionally hunted, and our numbers were modest; we lived within the confines of local ecological systems. Though perennially extending our range, pullulating out from our African home-range to encompass much of the inhabitable earth, we have generally been more constrained by nature, than we were a strain on nature. A mere geological moment ago, everything changed. Ten thousand years ago we became dramatically less mobile, we cultivated and accumulated rather than collected, we domesticated plants and animals, and indeed we ultimately domesticated ourselves. The reverberations of this agricultural revolution, this domestication revolution, are still omnipresent. Anthropologists inform us that civilization and its accoutrements: permanent architecture, metallurgy, writing, villages, towns and cities, are aftershocks of the agricultural revolution.

About one year ago, a decided marker in the quarter million year gestation of this species was reached. Our primate tendencies of mobility, braininess, dexterousness, and suppleness, characteristics that had served us handsomely on the savannas of the world had resulted in the completion of the following colossal transition: we had now become an urban species. More than fifty per cent of the world’s population now lives in cities!

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The celebrated post-modernist Urdu writer Naiyer Masud’s book of stories The Essence of Camphor¹ begins with a black and white photograph of the author as a young boy of four to five years, lying on a bed facing the camera, eyes somewhat askew yet curious, clutching onto his favourite ball. Behind the bed, sheathed by an ornate bed cover upon which the young boy lays, is a table or a chest covered similarly and on which sits an alarm clock. A drape behind this clock completes this seemingly aphasic tableau, plain and perhaps white, but embellished with a floral pattern in its centre. The focal point of this image seems to be the clock – one’s attention is immediately drawn to it. The text below the photograph reveals that the author was very sickly then, suffering from a continuous fever for over forty days. All hopes of his survival were lost. Consequently, the author’s parents called in the famous Lucknowi photographer, Mirza Mughal Beg, to make a portrait of the dying child – a memento mori. The author had willed that his ball be buried alongside him in the grave that was to be his final resting place. Done in the western pictorialist style of deathbed/post-mortem photographs of the 19^th century, the clock’s centrality is not merely to mark a referential time of death, but also to symbolically represent the passage, and indeed, the very evanescence of life itself. The ornate bedcover and drapes act as embellishments, funerary accoutrements, to beautify the scene, to render it as the stage of an exalted, melancholic event in the creation of the idealized ‘mourning portrait’ – a relic for the bereaved with which they could grieve in a ‘novel and acute form(s)’² and retain the presence of their departed loved one.

But Naiyer Masud did not die (most fortuitously for us) and what was intended to be his last photograph turned out to be his very first portrait. In the Proustian render of the image, the talismanic ball, its underlying theme, its accompanying caption, and its surreal context, suffused with as intense a melancholic character as one can extrapolate from the archetypal untimely death of a masterful writer-in-making, this portrait of an artist as a near-dead young boy, is not so much moderated or tempered as it is instead amplified on a parallel plane to, suggest cunningly, a Borgesian duplicity of sorts – a literary trick, a fiction, a defeat of time, destiny and death itself. Perhaps emblematic of his writerly life, mimicking the spectral atmospherics of his stories, wherein ghostly psychological afflictions and unspoken incantations drift by in Lucknow’s old quarters, by-lanes, and the minds of the characters who inhabit the city and the narrative, the image, perhaps in shadowy pursuance of ‘the signs of the soul in men’³, can be read as a conceptualist artifice, invoking the conceits of many a literary and artistic prankster.

Susan Sontag informs us that ‘picture taking is an event in itself’; immortality is conferred on the event by the ‘image-world that bids to outlast us’.⁴ Further, she also argues that ‘photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are …touched with pathos’, and that ‘all photographs are memento-mori’. If that constitutes an emotive register there is always the claim to ‘another reality’; the native surrealism inherent in photographs is in part due to ‘its irrefutable pathos as a message from time past’.⁵

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“The sign of being at home is the ability to make oneself understood without too much difficulty, and to follow the reasoning of others without any need for long explanations.”
—Vincent Descombes, on Proust's narrator, and all of us

These people step into the room, in pairs or alone. They’re all the way from towns you’ve never heard of in Georgia and Kentucky and Oklahoma and Arkansas. From Kansas and Louisiana and Texas. They manufacture farm equipment, or they preach. Or they speak only Korean at home, and what they do for work – or used to do – never fits into this stilted conversation.

Welcome to Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters.

The old man who looks more like Nora’s grandpa than her father has his hair newly buzzed and wears the name of his equipment manufacturer on his shirt pocket and asks what good will it do them, what we’re teaching them. He really does mutter something about commie liberals a few times. I’m sort of amazed at how calmly I am able to answer him. He talks about a much older girl they have who went upstate for a teacher’s degree – and he guffaws at how Nora in seventh grade scored, well, so much higher on the SAT than the older girl did on the way to college. This funny knack his kid has, like how some people turn out double-jointed or ambidextrous.

The divorced father of the girl we’ve been calling Anastasia, from outside Plano, scratches out notes with a pencil and says very little. His hair is an artificial grey and his forehead shines. On the phone, his ex-wife is alternately condescending and irate. Stacy’s older sister didn’t do so great on her ACT, but she knew what she wanted to go to school for and it was easy to sign her up. But then, now, Stacy got this perfect score in seventh grade, and it seems like she’s good at mostly everything. And I don’t know what to do for her. The father’s face is like putty.

Nora’s mother, who must be a couple of decades younger than the old man, tells how the older girl was kind of lazy and used to ask her little sister how to spell out certain words and what they meant. Here was this nearly grown high school girl asking her little third-grade sister to check her homework for her, the mom remembers. The old man says maybe Nora’d like to go to work for the family business – though she’s got her eye on the city university. He snorts at this – the most expensive college in the state.

They ask me what they should do with Nora. I speak slowly because I’m sleep deprived, and they mistake this for calm and gravity.

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On Thanksgiving Day, 1970, Indians took Plymouth back from the Pilgrims.

It was the work of the American Indian Movement (AIM), which had been founded in 1968 by Dennis Banks and several other Anishinaabe men (more commonly known as “Ojibway” or “Chippewa”) living in Minneapolis. Banks and his partners originally formed AIM to help the local Indian population, which had grown substantially in many cities around the country since WWII. During the previous quarter-century, there had been two forces driving people away from reservations and towards urban centers. One was access to better paying jobs in the manufacturing sector, which had recuperated with the outbreak of war and grew during the heyday of America’s industrial might that followed. The other was a disingenuous federal program of the 1950s-60s called Relocation. The actual goal of federal policy makers had been to liquidate reservation populations by luring Indian people to distant cities with empty promises. The actual result had been the rise of Indian ghettos that cropped up in cities across America.

Inspired by the Civil Rights movement, the emerging Black Power movement, and a desire to re-connect with their Indian culture and heritage, early AIM efforts included openly monitoring the city police to prevent and report abuses against Indian people, fighting housing and job discrimination, and setting up Survival Schools: after school programs for Indian children where they could stay out of trouble, pick up tips on handling the city’s mean streets, and learn about Indian culture and history, topics that were still absent from most public school curricula.

Initial successes led to increased popularity and funding, and organizational expansion soon followed. In early 1970, a Cleveland chapter of AIM was founded by Russell Means, an Oglala Lakota Sioux from Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota who had mostly grown up in the Bay area of California after his father had taken a job at a defense plant during the war. As an adult, Means had gone back to South Dakota, briefly working as an accountant at the nearby Rosebud Reservation. By then, the failures of Relocation were obvious to all, and Indians were routinely using the program for their own purposes, not the government’s. In that vain, Means had used Relocation to move his family to Cleveland where he founded the Cleveland Indian Center in 1969.

Means had a forceful personality, tremendous charisma, and he was fearless in advocating for issues he believed in. He also brought to AIM an inspired appreciation for political theater. Though there would eventually develop a long history of tension and competition between them, Banks’ and Means’ talents, approaches, and interests dovetailed substantially, and the two of them would soon emerge as the Movement’s primary leaders and spokesmen. Thanksgiving Day, 1970 would provide them the opportunity to perform on a national stage for the first time.

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The late spring/early summer of 2010 was much wetter than normal in West Central Illinois. The sewer backed up into my basement while I was out of town. I returned home to an unmistakable smell and dismissed it as a “freak event” while I cleaned it up. A couple weeks later, I was home during a particularly Biblical downpour. The sewer began to back up again and, despite my best efforts to staunch the flow with a plunger, sewage poured out of my basement toilet with a ferocity that was reminiscent of the elevator scene in Stanley Kubrick's “The Shining” except in sepia-tone. When I called the city to remind them that I paid for sewage to be taken away from my house not delivered to it, I was told that May and June of 2010 were unusually wet and that the city's old-school combined system could not handle it (newer systems have separate pipes for sewage and storm run-off). The voice on the phone told me that we had received 24″ of rain in May and June. I checked the weather for 2010: In May we received 11.90″ and June 11.78″. I checked the climate records: The long term average for May was 4.27″ and the previous record for the month 11.29″ recorded in 1908. The long term average for June was 4.26″ and the previous monthly record of 13.97″ had been set in 1902. In other words, in two consecutive months we had nearly equaled or exceeded all time records, which were set over a century ago! This gave me something to think about as I squee-geed, shop-vacced, and Cloroxed my basement for the second time in as many weeks: How does a culture or civilization respond when all of its assumptions about the world (and the resulting necessary embodiment in infrastructure) no longer apply?

The instant flood and prospect of illness presented by the excrement got me thinking about two classic tales in the Old Testament: The Noahic Flood from Genesis and the Ten Plagues of Egypt from Exodus. As a Biologist I get some grief for being a scientist and for Science and Religion being incompatible. On the one hand, science is not known for supporting supernatural explanations of any kind. On the other hand, naturalistic accounts could explain some phenomena that appeared to be supernatural to people of the Old Testament.

I was brought up by a completely lapsed Southern Baptist, thoroughly agnostic father and Bahá'í mother (who was herself the product of a non-practicing Jewish father and non-practicing Catholic mother). Not surprisingly, I decided at a pretty young age that everything in the Abrahamic tradition could be read metaphorically rather than strictly literally, so I was amazed when I began to realize there was a cottage industry of scientists who tried to explain things in the Bible using modern methods and methodologies. If for no other reason than that I could tell people that science supported some of the things in the Bible (and that therefore they were not completely opposed to each other), I began to save some articles and make some notes.

In the late 1990's a pair of geologists published a book that explained the Noahic flood as the flooding of land around the Black Sea as the Mediterranean rose from melting glacial ice sheets and spilled over the Bosporus and offered some compelling evidence to support their ideas. At about the same time, a pair of epidemiologists (Marr and Malloy, 1996) arrived at a plausible epidemiological explanation of the 10 plagues of Egypt. I would like to explore both of these hypotheses a bit and put together my own synthesis.

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by Terrance Tomkow

The Wall Street Journal reporting Peter Singer's new book tells us:

In his latest book, “The Life You Can Save,” Mr. Singer argues that failing to donate money to help the roughly 1 billion people suffering from poverty and preventable diseases is a moral offense equivalent to standing by as a child drowns because you don't want to ruin a nice pair of shoes.

Equivalent. But how bad is that I wonder? Given that Singer is on record saying there is “no intrinsic moral difference between killing and allowing to die” he would seem committed to saying that failing to donate is morally equivalent to drowning a child. Pretty bad!

Of course, not everyone denies moral significance to the difference between killing and allowing to die. Some philosophers distinguish between “negative” duties (e.g., not to drown children) and positive ones, (e.g., to save children from drowning), holding that positive duties are not as morally onerous as negative ones. But Singer's arguments pose a challenge for this position.

After all, this bystander who stands by while a child drowns (for the sake of his shoes!) is a bad man. Let us not mince words; he is a sonofabitch. If failing in positive duties makes us as bad as that guy, then the difference in weight between positive and negative duties must itself be morally slight.

I give negligible amounts to charity. So is Singer calling me a sonofabitch? Apparently. And you too, if you fail to donate money to the starving billion when you could (and you know you could).

Is there any way to defend ourselves?

Well, one problem with Singer's view is that no one really believes it. Not even Singer.

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When I saw him he had only a couple of months to live, and the days I spent at his chairside were hardly pleasant. He had adopted a mask of stoic resignation to his fate (the best way to induce guilt in the living), so I feigned a cheerful ignorance of it (the best way to induce envy in the dying).

I found him in The Wheatsheaf with a woman by his side, surrounded by sycophants and nursing a large whiskey. A Florence Nightingale of the single malt. He was talking about hurricanes.

“It’s no wonder Hurricane Alan caused so much damage. A wind with a crap name obviously has something to prove. Hurricane Robert – fine. Probably rattles a few roofs. Hurricane Alice – expends its fury at sea. But can you imagine Hurricane Darren? Or tropical storm Kylie? That’s when you run for the cellar. Fear an anticyclone with a chip on its shoulder!”

People sitting round his wheelchair proposed other names for storms, and laughed as he assessed their ferocity. “Hurricane Arnold? A closet queer. Expect gusty wind and localised flooding”. As the sun set over the Caribbean, the one English pub on the island was full of uncontrived mirth. Choosing a lull in the chatter, occasioned by one of his coughing fits, I suggested the name ‘Percy’. After all, that is what he’d christened me.

A dissolute life led to the full. That is how he’d like to be remembered, and the first part is literally true. He was soluble in anything. He certainly managed to wow my mother and her crazy family for a couple of years, and even though she hated him for the rest of her life, you could tell that all her attempts to love anyone else were futile. She certainly never remarried, and nor (as far as I know) did she ever seek a divorce.

So he started off Hurricane Percy with a huge pompous thunderstorm, but then he had the decency to stop mid-sentence when he recognised who I must be, and to the obvious astonishment of his woman and his disciples I wheeled him outside and sat on a bench next to him.

I had imagined this moment for most of my life, and yet neither of us could think of anything to say. He had coloured my life by his absence rather than his presence, and apart from a Y chromosome there was little I could think of that he’d actively done to influence me. I’d occasionally got a birthday present on April 25^th – a hundred dollar bill twice and a backgammon board also twice – but I was born in September. That’s his birthday.

He broke the ice by saying “I’m sorry”, and then “I’m dying”. Both turned out to be individually true, but at the time I thought they were connected. Actually, that was true too. He was truly sorry that he was dying.

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To someone from the subcontinent, it is hard to believe that Indian restaurant owners in the United States are not malicious, reactionary, or in thrall to an obscure formal ideology. How else to explain what seems to be a concerted effort to trivialize a noble family of cuisines, both by reducing them all to a monotonous handful of sauces, and by violating the general structural principles that make these meals meaningful? It is well known that Indian restaurant owners are at the forefront of the right-wing movement to construct a homogenous dehistoricized South Asian identity[1], and the tragedy of Bangladeshis cooking bad Punjabi food is lost on no one. But, for the moment, let us forget that this iteration of Indian food is a particular, abstracted and displaced version of the cuisine of the Punjab and its surroundings, and that it ignores most of the other cuisines of the subcontinent. And let us forget that “Indian” food really should mean South Asian food.

But how to explain this fetishism of particular signifiers, this combinatorial generation of a menu from {chicken, lamb, shrimp} and some handful of sauces, these ungrammatical and unpoetic culinary utterances? How to explain the same sauce applied, with minor variations, to produce aborted versions of the same dish under many different names. What drives such promiscuous corruption of the understanding? Whence such systemic violence?

Even the most materialistic among us must realize that if we have no hope of seizing the means of production, we can still hope to educate. The following curry is as an example, not an essential exemplar or generative grammar. All of these principles are violated somewhere; still, they are a glimpse into the overlapping set of rules and resemblances that make up the cuisines of South Asia, whose grandeur and allusive depth is matched only by those of the French and of the Japanese.

Finely slice a kilogram of onions and deep fry them in very hot oil until dark brown (not black) and crisp. Set them aside and strain the oil…

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by Tom Jacobs

Every explorer names his island Formosa, beautiful. To him it is beautiful because, being first, he has access to it and can see it for what it is.
~ Walker Percy, “The Loss of the Creature” (1966)

But my compass takes its cardinal point from tragedy.
~ Richard Rodriguez, “Late Victorians” (1990)

It is not down in any map; true places never are.
~ Herman Melville, Moby Dick (1851)

Although indigenous peoples have lived for at least the last three thousand years within striking distance of the North Pole, the idea of obtaining the northernmost summit of our planet never seemed to have presented an appealing or even an interesting proposition. As American and European explorers began passing through and occasionally staying with local communities during their tentative efforts to set foot on and poke a national flag into the North Pole around the turn of the twentieth century, Inuits and other locals must have asked themselves (if not the ghostly white fanatics) something to the effect, “what kind of crazy person would bother with such an enterprise? What could possibly be the motive, goal, or point of such a thing?” And it’s an undeniably strange proposition—risking death to plant one’s flag on a remote site of an almost purely symbolic nature if only to say that I/We’ve been there first. Aside from the obvious notions of national pride and some enlightenment idea of exploration, the question still remains: how have explorers justified such a silly mission? And why didn’t the North Pole draw the imagination of precisely those people who were in the best
position to attain it?

Questions like these imply further corollaries: how, at the turn of the last century, could anyone definitively prove that they were there anyway? A photograph? A diary? A chronicle of coordinates obtained and passed through? In an era of rampant confidence games and men, who would believe you even if you produced such evidence? The will to believe is, of course, always a powerful element in public credulity, and, as the competing stories of Frederick Cook and Robert Peary would illustrate, the conditions in the States were such that people were ready and willing to believe.

1908 was a big year for the North Pole. Although attempts had been made on this symbolic summit previously, 1908 saw American and European explorers began to make their way “polewards” in earnest and in such a way that this most inaccessible and meaningless of geo-symbolic spaces was, for the first time, at risk of becoming just another demystified and disenenchanted set of coordinates.

What is it about places like the North Pole (or Mount Everest, or the Moon) that so incite the imagination of Western explorers? It’s a dumb question, from many points of view—the simplest answer is that it is the more or less natural product of masculine narcissism: one goes there in order to say that one has been there, and then, perhaps, to reap whatever fame and rewards might follow. No doubt there’s truth to such an answer. But it somehow misses the more philosophical dimensions of the project—the sheer overdetermined plenitude of unmapped and unknown spaces that draws people into their magnetic influence. What damn fool’s errand sends people off on a nearly certain Arctic Death Trip?

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Aesthetic experience affects the senses, emotions, and intellect. It’s often associated with works of art, like paintings, dance, or music. Such experience is unique and personal; it depends not just on the artwork itself, but on the meaning that we attach to it and the feeling that this generates.

Van Gogh’s painting, Starlight over Rhone, has personal significance for me. The scene depicted reminds me of the nighttime view of Cape Breton Island from mainland Nova Scotia–a view that was familiar to me as a child. For me, the painting comes with poignant memories attached. Because these memories are uniquely mine, however, I wouldn’t expect others viewing it to have the same response. Such is the nature of aesthetic experience: an object with a single set of objectively identifiable features produces a unique experience for each observer.

While the role of subjectivity is well recognized in the artistic realm, art isn’t exceptional in its ability to create aesthetic experience. Such experience could be created by multicolored autumn foliage or an expansive view of the night sky. It can also be created by immaterial entities, like concepts.

Evolution is one such concept. By evolution, I mean “the scientific theory of evolution”–that concept that creates controversy in non-scientific circles despite an abundance of supporting evidence. Just as with a piece of art, we can present evolution to a group of people and they may each respond differently. Evolution comes with strings attached–preconceptions, associations, and implications. People’s perception of evolution isn’t shaped just by empirical facts, but by the meaning and feeling that they attach to it. Their response will be influenced by their worldview, personality traits, and a host of other factors.

It shouldn’t be surprising then that acceptance of evolution isn’t entirely dependent on comprehension and knowledge of evolution. Studies have shown that we can significantly improve people’s understanding of evolution without having much of an effect on their acceptance of it. A 2003 study of undergraduate biology students found no relation between knowledge and acceptance of evolution¹. A later study showed that increasing biology teachers’ knowledge of evolution had little effect on their views on the teaching of antievolutionary ideas². Despite improved understanding, the majority of teachers still favored the teaching of antievolutionary concepts. Understanding evolution and accepting it are not the same thing. It follows that improving acceptance of evolution requires strategies that aim beyond improved understanding.

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by Colin Marshall

“Art is the concealment of art,” someone once said. Though sources conflict about exactly who that was, his words must have reached Sangsoo Hong, who toils to produce films that look and feel like nothing at all. This is a canny strategy to raise cinephiles’ eyebrows: plain people doing plain things, plainly portrayed? Then there must be something big and complex grinding away beneath the surface. While this way of thinking often leads straight to a dead end, the wall against which earnest film students beat their heads until their grad school fund runs dry, it pays off when applied to Hong, the most distinctive filmmaker to emerge out of South Korea’s cinematic boom of fifteen years and counting.

The Hong movie, of which ten specimens with a strong family resemblance now exist, is both a hard sell and an easy one. Spartanly unadorned, it’s built out of long, often unmoving shots of decidedly un-epic subjects. Its large stable of floundering creative types — writers, composers, filmmakers — pass the time hanging out in pubs, taking car and train trips, pounding bottle after bottle of liquor, stumbling into wanly unappealing sexual encounters, and blearily, unconvincingly, insisting upon their worthiness as artists, as lovers, as human beings. Their conversations are as outwardly inane as anything overheard on public transit or in hotel lobbies around the world. Despite the small scale of their problems, solutions refuse to budge from the hazy distance.

Yet it can all be so relatable. Though subject to a wide range of cultural and temperamental oddities — about which more later — Hong’s flighty monuments to frustration endure, in some sense, the same problems we all do. They want to stake out recognizable individualities, to do work that will make a mark on the cultural world, and to hook up with the men or women they’re particularly into — to connect, in various senses. But these broad desires are also vague, and they’re easily overwhelmed by the detritus of the moment. In Hong’s world, this detritus manifests as an endless stream of cigarettes, bottles of soju, chintz in all its forms, and sudden opportunities for sexual congress.

2000’s Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Hong’s third film, looks and feels different than the others but, with its chin up, covers the very same territory. Soo-jung, a screenwriter at a television station, draws the amorous attentions of both producer Young-soo and gallerist Jae-hoon. Soo-jung is the virgin of the title, and it’s on her to decide whether and whom to surrender the virginity in question. Jae-hoon pulls ahead of Young-soo early and rapidly, though neither candidate for deflorist comes off as a golden god. Soo-jung herself seems to be no prize, for that matter, with all her blank hesitancy and whiny vacillation. Why couldn’t all three have just stayed home?

The only possible answer: welcome to Hongland, a realm populated by the boisterous, the shiftless, the vainglorious, and the drunk. It’s a place where even the simplest plans, for everything from excursions to the mountains to halfhearted seduction schemes, have a way of haphazardly deflating in action. (While never framed in a classically comedic fashion, instances of this are often hilarious. In 2002’s Turning Gate, an entire group piles into a van, getting ready to head out just as one of them slams the door on their finger, memorably 86ing the whole excursion in an instant.) Men like Jae-hoon and Young-soo — not to mention women like Soo-jung — are par for the course. It’s only natural they’d get all entangled.

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Working Their Mojo
…..——A random report on a staus quo from the wild west

It’s hard to tell if we’re in the midst of a permanent downtick
or just in the throes of what used to be labeled a bad trip
—or if “going-to-hell-in-a-bucket” is apropos

I’ve almost given up wondering if we might eventually enter an uptick
or if we’'ll forever be holding the dry end of our dip sticks
—it’s hard to fathom what future fuel will be making our go go

I’ve just roughed-in a canvas which seems to be-coming a triptych
you need at least that much room to capture anything apocalyptic
—the subject surpasses the margins when painting a really big blow

Bumblers are manning the helm of a fervently split ship
officers even are begging magicians to dream up some new trick
—but ruses of shamans just work in the moment they’re in an illusionist’s show

One priest from Alaska looks good in high heels or mukluks and lipstick
she counts cash on her dogsled after doing her populist us-versus-them shtick
—she quit her governor job when the circus promised her more dough

It seems the captain believes his opponents are innocent apparatchiks
not corporate ass-licks bent on perks in the shape of some very fat checks
—it’s as if the chief’s been dumped in a bank of eyeball-deep snow

And here we are on the ground plowing through trying to manage to stay hip
in a media smoke-screen and stupor brought on by some very slick shits
—they’re engrossed hoarding gold for themselves not sweating while working their mojo

The last will be first in the end, while the first will be getting their wings clipped
so it says in the sayings of seers well known for not keeping their lips zipped
—but that's just a red herring to get everyone last to waltz to the Status Quo

by Jim Culleny, 11/12/10

Mojo: here

by Michael Blim

I get The Nation magazine whether I want to or not. Years ago, a close friend and I found ourselves separated by the geography of new jobs and career moves, and so we unknowingly gave each Nation subscriptions as going-away gifts. For me, it’s one of those things that I’ll read because it comes to my home free. That’s the beauty of giving: her gift is free to me, and mine to her. Since I don’t need expect my money’s worth, I can diss the magazine all I want, but still sneak a peek at it from time to time. The Nation is what used to be called a magazine of opinion. They tell you what to think, in other words. Given that we are bombarded with opinions daily, I prefer to collect facts, and keep my opinions to myself – or, well, share them with you.

Perhaps it was the graphic art accompanying Chris Hedges’ article, “City of Ruins” on Camden, New Jersey, in the November 22 issue of The Nation that slowed my eye. Hedges is a distinguished print journalist formerly with the New York Times who writes work that sticks with you.

As did this article. Hedges describes today’s Camden as one of America’s most dismal dystopias. It is achingly poor, dangerous, used up and thrown away. It’s a bomb shelter for its residents, 70,000 of whom live in a city with the highest crime and poverty rates of any city in the country. For those of you who live in Baltimore, Detroit, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Chicago, Oakland, St. Louis, Memphis, or Washington, D.C., and thought that portions of your city’s degradation knew no peers, consider the possibilities further down the food chain for the quality of life and for human dignity. In the seventies, I lived in a Philadelphia neighborhood nicknamed “the bottoms.” In a town full of bad neighborhoods, “the bottoms” was the worst.

Then I worked for a while in Camden. It was worse than “the bottoms.”

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A young man of my acquaintance, adequately nourished, and provided with a room and a gaming console appears to be sustainable, quite extraordinarily so, in the environmental sense. He has a small physical footprint. A few square feet of a pleasantly upholstered couch in an ill-lit room is all that is needed to sustain him. From this perch he can command vast legions of hobgoblins, medieval warlocks, sport heroes, and assorted heavily-armed movie characters. He can distract himself for days at a time, emerging from his room very occasionally, like a three-toed sloth, to pad to the latrine. An army of youth so employed needs little in the way of a great outdoors. Slightly soiled pajamas, or underpants, it seems, can suffice for clothing. The nutritional requirements of this battalion extend little beyond sodas and pop-tarts. In light of this, might it not be wise for us to reverse course, and rather than advocating strenuously, as many of us have, for urban kids to get out of doors to cultivate responsible environmental stewardship, might we not instead council the cultivation of obsessive gameplay, reclassifying it as environmentally laudable behavior?

If we take this pragmatic tack, setting aside our pious feelings about the “old environment” and the worthy pleasures to be found there, it is apparent that there are several tendencies in contemporary life that we might encourage rather than scorn. We have for too long decried our sedentary natures and the accompanying tendencies towards corpulence of body and spirit. Bloat a little, rest a little more; you are doing your bit for the environment. Applaud your small adventures in the great indoors – a peregrination from fridge to sofa will never have felt so good, and the lazy-boy is a fine environmental destination. Think of the gas saved compared with a trip to Yosemite – no planes, no trains, no automobiles. Even if your kids might like to romp in the corn fields of some distant rural hinterland, spare yourself the self-laceration. Quite simply a family ensconced in a moderately appointed metropolitan apartment may well have a smaller environmental cost than a family whizzing around in their so-called mini-van in some suburban Eden.

A back of the envelop calculation shows that the environmental footprint of the imm obile is smaller that of one in constant auto-motion. Whole earths can be saved by merely standing still[1].

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Cover of Home Boy, HarperCollins India edition, 2010, cover painting by Faiza Butt

Below, author photo by David Williams

Elatia Harris

In his excellent blog Work Product, Matt Wilkens ballparks the number of English language long form prose fiction volumes published globally, every year, at about 100,000. Not all these works aspire to the condition of literature, of course, but among those that do, Home Boy, by H.M. Naqvi, published last year, has famously pulled ahead of a great many of the rest. Consider that the author was top-seeded. A Lannan Fellow, a recipient of the Phelam Prize, a creative writing teacher at Boston University, an erstwhile banker and a slam poet, Naqvi was less likely to be overlooked than most first novelists. Home Boy, a distinctively American novel by a “card-carrying” Pakistani, has been taken to heart by readers around the world, with translations into Italian, German and, soon, Portuguese, following launches in New York, Karachi and Jaipur. Last month, Home Boy was short-listed for the prestigious and lucrative DSC Prize for South Asian Literature.

In the year since Home Boy was published, I have corresponded with Naqvi, who once wrote for this blog. We have had a long conversation about what is uniquely American about Home Boy; close readers will find it as American as Moby Dick, and much shorter. We talked about the fast-growing South Asian literary festival scene, and about the shifts in artistic intention the first year out has impelled. As well as writing fiction, Naqvi is a correspondent for the superb Global Post, with articles covering a Pakistan it's almost impossible to draw a bead on reading other English language newspapers. What are the tales of the dazzling year, for H.M. Naqvi? And what's next?

Left to right: Covers of the South Asian, German, Italian and American editions of Home Boy

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Justin E. H. Smith

Among the many distortions arising from the conceptualization of the human social world in terms of 'race' is the false belief this instills among lower status, historically disadvantaged 'white' people that they have something innate in common with all other 'white' people, and thus that their current disadvantage is the result of some exceptional injustice. This in contrast with the disadvantage of their non-white neighbors, which is, the reasoning goes, just in the nature of things. In the United States, ethnic difference among whites has been bleached out in the name of egalitarianism, and the only differences that are allowed to remain are the ones that are thought to be so pronounced in the phenotypes of 'non-white' groups that assimilation is ruled out on supposedly biological grounds. This seems a natural way of doing things for most Americans, while in fact it is anything but.

I think, in fact, that American whiteness is one symptom –if a milder one than ethnic cleansing and genocide– of the process that Michael Mann has identified as 'the dark side of democracy', where cultures within modern nation-states are forcibly homogenized, and informed by central planning that their identity is now simply the identity of a citizen of that state. The US has conducted itself in this regard very much like Turkey with its Kurdish minority, whose very existence the modern secular republic has practically denied. The one difference however is that it has been assumed in the United States that this homogenizing force can extend only up to the boundaries of 'race', and that whoever lies beyond those boundaries must remain eternally other (even if 'blacks' are deemed American, this is always a special variety of American, a marked category). The parameters of the social world in the American attempt at egalitarianism are set by some supposedly inflexible biological reality about human subtypes. In this respect the US has been, for better or worse, less audacious than Turkey in the democratic project of constructing citizens.

One problem with this sort of racially defined assimilationism is, obviously, that it groundlessly biologizes and essentializes the boundaries of social identity, and so guarantees that American society can never attain to real equality to the extent that the pseudoscientific myth of race continues to have a foothold. But another problem is that it constrains 'white' people to cognize their own social world in terms of a category that is not in fact rich enough to permit them to make sense of their own experiences.

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