Justin E. H. Smith

Be quick, Isaac! We haven't much time. At Five of the Clock old Doctor Squibb will be dissecting a Porpess at Queen's Lane Caffè-House. That's right, Isaac. A Porpess. A Grampus in miniature. And he's promised to donate the Blubber of it to whomsoever agrees to assist him. That will be you, Isaac. You will have enough Sea-Tallow to keep your candle burning throughout the Winter, so you can scribble, whatsoever it is that you scribble, late into the Night. Are you ready, then, Scribbler?

Quaery the First: Whether any have read the Treatise of the learnèd German physician Theophilus Glaubnix, entitled Alimentatio per rectum, which, being English'd, offers instructions for the feeding of the sick and infirm through their very anus. You've heard right, Isaac. The aft shaft. The anneau d'enfer. And whether it be in truth a serviceable port of Entry for e'en the bravest of Suppers, as Chops and Ale, or only for flaccid Puddings, bland Peas, &c.

Whether, moreover, it be true what we have heard, that in some parts of America the common Men and Women oppose the chirurgical inducement of abortio at every stage of a Woman's graviditas, e'en before the moment of empsychosis (which is universally known to occur upon the fortieth Day after the Parents' copulatio) wherein a humane Soul be divinely transduc'd into what before was naught but an homunculus having the outward Conformation of a li'l Manny-kin, but sharing no-wise in Man's true nature. Whether they have ever seen an Homuncule aborted in the first or second Month that is capable of e'en the roughest Imitation of humane Action, as going about in Hats and Cloaks, or playing a simple round of Sice-Deuce.

Whether there be any justice to the interdiction placed upon Marriage between Cousins in some of the American colonies, in view of the great Probability resulting therefrom of Monstrous births. And whether the Book of the Learnèd American doctor Percival Gudgeon is correct to assert, that a marriage twixt a man and his cousin's cousin yields up what is called a half-wit; while a marriage twixt the same man and his father's brother's daughter yields a quarter-wit; twixt him and his father's sister's daughter, an eighth-wit; twixt him and his mother's brother's daughter, a sixteenth-wit; and, finally, twixt him and his mother's sister's daughter, a pitiable creature: a thirty-second-wit. Whether, finally, it is true that marriage to one's very own Sister yields up naught but a Nit-Wit.

Whether it be true what we have heard, that on the Western side of far Tierra del Fuoco, Men may now marry Men, and Maidens Maidens. And whether this be an effect of their Antarctick situation, which bringeth about sundry other curiosities, as the backwards rotation of the aquatickal Vortex that follows upon the chasse d'eau in every house-hold's Toilette, the Going of handsom'ly costum'd birds upon two Feet only, entirely destitute of Flight, and still other topsey-turvey absurdities.

Whether the Irish be spontaneously generated from the the moist Peat that covers their Isle, or whether they along with the other Keltish nations be translated from the Italick lands, which Hypothesis doth better explain their roughness of Aspect, their weakness for Popery, &c.

Whether also there be such a geographical Boundary as is sometimes call'd the 'Hair-Belt', dividing the Lands to the South and the East –wherein the Men, nay, and e'en the Women, are cover'd with thick Bristles upon Fore-Arm, Chest, and Chin– from the Lands to the North and the West, where these Parts remain smooth and Milky on all but the coarsest Peasants.

Whether the horrible Rumour we have heard hath some Truth in it, that in places of Industry and Commerce Men are now requir'd to take leave of the very Labour for which they are paid in order to participate in 'Work-Shoppes' that instruct them in all manner of effeminate Foolishness, as how to appreciate working together with men from different Nations (yea, e'en the Nations of the Hair-Belt!), how to respect the unique Skills of cretins and dullards, how to refrain from groping e'en the pinkest and most swollen Bosoms of their washerwomen and tailoresses, &c. O Isaac, how quickly these 'Work-Shoppes' must degenerate into Laughter and Ribaldry!

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Jack Hues is the lead singer and, alongside Nick Feldman, primary collaborator of the rock group Wang Chung. Throughout the 1980s, Wang Chung released such albums as Points on the Curve, Mosaic, and The Warmer Side of Cool, as well as the soundtrack to William Friedkin’s film To Live and Die in L.A.. Now they’re back recording and touring again, having recently completed one U.S. tour and about to launch another in support of their new double EP, Abducted by the 80s. Colin Marshall originally conducted this interview on the public radio show and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3 with music] [iTunes link]

I've listened to this title track, “Abducted by the 80s”, a bunch of times. I'm not noticing a whole lot of fondness for the eighties coming through. I think about bands who first got popular in the eighties: some of them are using the eighties as their meal ticket, as nostalgia act; some of them — I think of Gary Numan, who would kill himself first. What are you feelings on the eighties?

The lyrics, if that's the right term, is a poem by a guy called Rob G. Rob is a sort of stand-up comedian/poet. I first came across this poem of his, “Abducted By the 80s”, when my daughter Violet went to see him when she was up at university. She said, “Dad, you've got to hear this track. It's so funny. You'll love it.” That very acidic take he's got on the eighties did appeal to me. He is relentlessly negative about it. But what's also interesting is just how resonant everything he says is as it passes through your consciousness. With the eighties, maybe now, it's not whether you love it or hate it; it's just how you reconcile yourself to it.

He mentions many things people who were coming up in those days might consider embarrassing: the new romantic shoes, the Mel Gibson mullet. Often, people will say, especially in the U.K., “Oh, think back to when I was this terrible twentysomething in the eighties, I listened to the Human League” — I like the Human League, I'm not calling them out — “doing cocaine, doing all this.” Wang Chung is not among the things that embarrass them, typically. The name has become a catchphrase. No one seems to actually regret listening to Wang Chung. Do you get that same impression?

Well… no. I shouldn't say that, should I? And it's very nice of you to present it in that way. At the time, we did walk a line between being a sort of art-rock band — especially, that came out on To Live and Die in L.A. — but “Everybody Have Fun Tonight” is a mainstream record. We were intent that that was what we wanted to do. Some people find what we did a little on the irritating side, but what's interesting these days is that, with distance, certain things — even if they were irritating at the time — get this cloak of being “classic,” if you like. “Everybody Have Fun Tonight” falls into that.

It's an interesting time to be revisiting those tunes and producing new music under the Wang Chung logo. We're pleased we've remained enigmatic enough as a band to be able to continue to redefine ourselves in 2010. We haven't quite got ourselves pinned down everywhere. There are still people who give us the time of day, so that's great.

I find this fascinating, this issue of redefinition. Not 20 minutes ago, I was at a coffee shop getting a cup of tea, and on the speakers came Rick Astley with “Together Forever”. That guy's big hit came within a year or two of yours, and he's now treated as a human absurdity in many quarters. Wang Chung is certainly not. I don't mean to say nobody says, “Oh, I was listening to 'Everybody Have Fun Tonight', wasn't I a dumb youth?” But they don't treat you like Rick Astley, by any means.

No, no. But wasn't there something Rick was involved in recently, some online thing, that didn't do his reputation any good?

It's a prank you play online where you tell somebody a link is something enticing, but it ends up being one of his music videos.

Fortunately, we've avoided that one so far.

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Review of Partha Chatterjee's Empire and Nation: Selected Essays. Edited by Nivedita Menon. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. 368 pp.

By Ahmad Saidullah

I. Reclaiming The Nationalist Imagination

History may, as Sembene Ousmane alleged, create its own images but the quest is to find who owns these representations.

In the opening essay of Empire and Nation taken from his book The Nation and its Fragments, Partha Chatterjee agrees with Benedict Anderson’s thesis in Imagined Communities that nations, far from being objective entities, imagine themselves into being. However, he questions Anderson’s belief that all nations obey the western rationalist imagination in defining themselves.

Chatterjee asks “if nationalisms in the rest of the world have to choose their imagined community from certain ‘modular’ forms made available to them by Europe and the Americas, what do they have left to imagine?” Postcolonial societies, he argues, have been consigned forever by such views to, in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s phrase, “the waiting room of history” as consumers rather than producers of modernity.

Chatterjee suggests frameworks for studying different ways of seeing, knowing, experiencing and mapping India, with its complex past and contradictions and its own specific modalities of “our modernity,” that arise from the local imagination.

Chatterjee’s academic and epistemological aims are to distance Indian historiography from the knowledge generated by the British empirical tradition which places a universalized western subject at the centre of its discourses on India and to challenge establishment historians in Cambridge and Delhi who study the country through the agency and actions of its elite.

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Greil Marcus is a music journalist, critic, and observer of America. Though they span countless subjects, Marcus’ past books have been rooted in examinations of icons like Bob Dylan, the Sex Pistols, Elvis Presley, and Bill Clinton. In his latest release, When that Rough God Goes Riding: Listening to Van Morrison, he takes on the Irish singer-songwriter’s vast, varied catalogue, documenting his own responses to Morrison’s music as well as the far-flung cultural and psychological resonances it sets off. Colin Marshall originally conducted this interview on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes]

How much should we read into the fact that this book is about not the work of an American, but the work of an Irishman? Of course you've written about U.K. artists before — say, the Sex Pistols. Should we consider this a departure from your normal thread?

I don't know if it's a departure, or, if it were, if that would be of any interest or significance. I spent nine year writing a book about the European avant-garde. America is as subject I will never leave behind, but Van Morrison is a voice, someone I've been listening to for 45 years. It's not really important where he comes from.

I want to get an idea of the very beginning of your own career listening to him. Where does it start?

I was 20 years old, living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Van Morrison, with his band Them or on his own, had always been extraordinarily popular in the Bay Area. His song “Gloria”, which everybody knows, in 1965 was a national hit by a Chicago Band called Shadows of Knight. It was only in California that Them had the hit, that their verson got the most airplay. Now, of course, nobody remembers the Shadows of Knight, their version never gets played on the radio, and Van Morrison still does. I was here. It was on the radio. Not just that song, but “Mystic Eyes” and “Here Comes the Night”. They were all glamorous and big, and they had a desperation I wasn't hearing anywhere else. I was captivated.

That desperation — I want to hear more. How distinct was that from the musical context you heard Van Morrison in?

He sounded like somebody pursued, as if there was something at his back he had to get away from. There was a sense of jeopardy in his music. Whether that came from something personal or something he heard in John Lee Hooker that he particularly liked and wanted to emulate, I don't know. It became, as any stylistic theme or element becomes after a while, a thing in itself. Its source, whatever might've sparked it in the first place, becomes irrelevant. It becomes part of your style, your personality. That happened very quickly with him.

This gets at the type of criticism you write, and of the way you approach Van Morrison's work I so much enjoy. It's that it doesn't matter whether Van Morrison, in his life, actually did feel pursued, or what events might have made him feel desperation. Safe to say it doesn't interest you if the events of his life contributed to his music? It's about the music itself and nothing more, correct?

That's absolutely right. I don't have any interest in the private lives of the people I am intrigued by and that I might end up writing about. To trace anybody's work, what they produce, what they put into the world, what you or I respond to, to somebody's life, their biography, is utterly reductionist. It's simply a way of protecting ourselves from the imagination, from the threat of the imagination. Some people are very uncomfortable with the idea they can be moved, they can be threatened, they can be thrilled by something that is just made up.

John Irving, the novelist, once said to me, “You know why that is? It's because people who don't have an imagination are terrified of people who do.” I don't know if that's true, but we live in culture of the memoir, where we're not supposed to believe anything unless it's documented that it actually happened. Never mind that most memoirs are more fictional than novels. We want that imprimatur: “This really happened. This is really true.” You can respond to it. You can feel “okay” about being moved by it. Whereas with art, whether music, movies, novels, painting, ultimately, to be moved by art, by something somebody has made up, is, from a certain perspective, to be tricked. To be fooled. You made me cry, and you just did it like you hypnotized me. I love that. Not everybody does.

This is intriguing when I think about what you quote Van Morrison as saying. You talk about interviewers asking him, “Who's Madame George? What's this and that about? What's the real source?” One of the lines that has so stuck with me that Morrison said was that these are fictions, short stories in musical form. It seems like, when an artist says something is fiction, it validates being tricked, in a sense. But people don't tend to read it that way?

I think people don't believe it. I was very struck by that statement, which he made just a year or so ago on a radio. I was listening to this program on NPR, and that's what he's saying. I think, for a lot of people, that must have come off as defensive or evasive. How could anything like the song “Madame George” on the album Astral Weeks, an album that came out in 1968, a song people have been listening to, discovering, passing on all that time, a song that has a life in the world, how can anything rendered with such passion and with such detail be made up? It's got to be true. There has to be a real Madame George in the life of the composer. That's one way of looking at things. It isn't mine. With very few exceptions, it isn't anything I want to read about, people investigating work on those terms.

Look, there are all kinds of people who suffer great traumas, who have life-changing experiences that become touchstones for them. Maybe they lost a parent or were in a terrible accident, laid up for five years, couldn't do anything but think. We say, “Well, that's what made this person who he or she is. That's what let do the work.” You know, all sorts of people experience traumas, and few people go on to produce something other people pay attention to. You can't trace any given work somebody produces to anything that happened in that person's life. It doesn't work.
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“Despite its mystic chic the square root of pi is indeterminate
and senseless, like many other things.” –Roshi Bob

On the Difficult Terminal Illness of a Beloved:

Black holes, Big Bang, Bada Bing,
quantum space, worm holes, theory of strings;
space is a smorgasbord of metaphors of things

Inside out, upside down, left and right,
geometry, calculus, depth and height;
Pythagoras’ spheres all sing in the dead of night

Who went where? What was what? Which was when?
Fortune and fame, persecution and plot, since time began
history alliterates again and again

Two plus two, four less four, nine times nine,
the square root of pi, theorems and proofs, the curve of a sine;
math is a simile for the shape of time

Bacteria, wisteria, DNA,
diphtheria, alstroemeria, the end of days;
biology’s an accident of come-what-mays
…………………………

Jim Culleny, 7/31/10

By Maniza Naqvi

Like sugar in tea.  It’s all good. Top kills and static kills, concrete and chemicals—have fixed everything, blocked it all, dissolved it all.  It’s all good.  Like sugar in tea– like blood in my veins– like the heroine in my blood-like the enemy in my head and like the prayers on my lips.  All the comforting things which keep me where I need to be: in that safe place reassured that it’s all for the good. No need to connect any dots.  

But when the sun sets on the harbor turning its waters the color of molten gold and then liquid black, like the uninterrupted, robust, gush that flows at the gas pump— and the dying light makes lovely the colors of the ships heavy with their goods, their cargo—waiting to leave—wheat and maize for food aid, tanks and men off to war on aircraft carriers and this stuff all this stuff in oil tankers—  then, —I think of him—how I kissed his face and said goodbye, hugged him and sent him from this port in a war ship to defend our way of life.  Because that’s what men like you told me—that sons like mine were doing: defending our way of life.  You told mothers like me and sons like mine that this was a fight for our freedom and liberty and theirs too. That we were as you always had told us, good.  Women like me, we were the true warriors, you said.  You cheered us on, gave us rallying speeches that Sparta had depended on women like me: women who bore children to be sent to war and who cheered their men on to do battle.  I took great pride in that, in being a warrior, defending my homeland from the enemy while sending off my men to battle them, over there, in theirs. And then came the messenger and a short while later, my son, he returned, my son. In a flag draped coffin.  Nothing else no one else came after that. The enemy, you said who would attack did not come for me to fight. And now here it comes, in this gulf, the stuff for which his blood was spilt.  This gulf that he has left is filled with my rage and anguish and sorrow. Here it comes, threatening our way of life: our goods, our god. 
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Recently, my husband received an email from a very casual acquaintance and wondered where this person lived. He Googled them, found their address and was presented, by Google Street view, with a picture of their house, and all within the space of 2 minutes. This exercise caused me to comment to him, “it must be really different dating these days” – we've been together 15 years – “it's so much harder for anyone to lie anymore.” I think about the tall tales I was told during my dating years, and that doesn't include the stories I didn't come to realize were exaggerations, at the very least. But now, you can Google someone and find out where they work, their political affiliation, see photos of their house, maybe their wife and kids! And that's before you follow them on Twitter or friend them on Facebook.

It is true that human beings will always manage to adapt their behavior somewhat to the new technological circumstances, and I imagine that this new potential transparency doesn’t mean that men and women no longer lie about aspects of their lives on dates (or at any other time). However, I think it’s also true that the next generation will grow up in a world that is a radically different social experience. Whether its dating, working, college acceptance or friendship, the internet and social media are changing everything. It is now almost a given that part of a job interview process (and in some cases a college interview process) will include a review of an applicant’s digital profile. This raises the issue of digital memory; the web forgets nothing, no matter how much you want it to. The New York Times ran a piece recently about this very issue and nascent attempts to address this using, amongst other tools, an expiration date for certain digital content. Even if some of these methods are implemented, there is no doubt that our children are growing up in a world where it is increasingly difficult to run from a checkered past and remake a less than desirable reputation.

Will our children understand loneliness in the sense that previous generations did? In the world of texting, Facebook, Foursquare, etc., continuous connectivity to many other people is now the norm, however superficial these relationships may or may not be. If this kind of connectivity isn’t sufficient, there are various services, both paid and free, that are connecting people with new potential “friends”, or at least acquaintances: www.rentafriend.com, a relatively new service, allows users to do just that, rent a friend for an hour or so. Craigslist, long a means for people to connect for casual hookups, or to advertise a yard sale, also has a section called Strictly Platonic, which enables users to find someone to connect with for everything from phone chats regarding, “jobs, men, losing weight, goals we hope to accomplish”, to finding someone to go to the theater with.

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A Paris Review-style interview with E.O. Wilson

A score of books. Two Pulitzers. Papers that defined entire fields. So why did biologist Edward O. Wilson bother writing a novel? Because people need stories, he says. Wilson hopes his fictional debut from earlier this year, Anthill—about a young man from the South, militant ants, and the coupled fate of humans and nature—will help spark a conservation revolution.

Wilson met me at his Harvard office—a three-roomed cavern at the university’s natural history museum. “Harvard treats emeritus professors very well,” he observed. He showed me part of the world’s largest collection of ant papers, and a copy of his portrait for the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. He wore a blue/black checked shirt and slouched when he sat. His sentences were criss-crossed with asides and qualifications, and he squeezed in a few startlingly good impressions. Throughout our talk he sipped iced tea—or as Wilson, a native Alabaman, might say, sweet tea. When he spilled some on the table, he swept it onto the floor with his hand. “The difference between a book review and an interview,” he mused right before we started, “is like the difference between a handshake and a shot in the back.”

Edward Wilson: Fire away, and I’ll try to get back answers of decent interest, brevity, and so on.

Sam Kean: I’ve heard you say you have a policy of never taking any vacations. Was writing this book sort of a vacation for you?

EW: I would say in one sense I never take a vacation. I never go on a fishing trip. I never go to the beach except to study the ants who live in the sand. So in that sense I’ve never taken a vacation in my life. But I consider that most of the work I’ve done in my life is one continuous vacation. I don’t know how I’ve managed to get away with being paid for what I do. Because to me it’s a constant adventure and thrill.

And I have the advantage as a scientist, especially when working on ants, to do a search wherever I go. Even when I took my family on vacations—for them—and of course, I had to have leisure time with them!—I could do research wherever we went, because ants are ubiquitous. Even if you went to the beach somewhere, there are ant species. After all, they make up more than half the biomass of all insects. And ants are found form the arctic almost to the ends of the southern continents…

But here I am, nattering on about ants. We were talking about the book. Go ahead.

SK: So did you consider the book a vacation from science or a continuation of it?

EW: All three! That is, it combined all three of my key interests. One is science. Second is conservation of biodiversity. Third, is an exciting new experience: to plunge into a different mode of thinking and writing. Although maybe I should say that the mode of thinking is really not that different.

SK: Not that different from…?

EW: Science. Because the ideal scientist, I’ve always thought, is a person who thinks like a poet (or, if you wish, a novelist), who works like a bookkeeper, and—if he’s fortunate to be able to do so—who writes like a good journalist in explaining what has been found. But the difference between the creative process and writing science is that you don’t have the bookkeeper period.

On the other hand, if you have a science base, which this book certainly does, with the ant part, you can accomplish certain things. It’s the first time anyone has written of the cycles of the ant colonies as the ants themselves experience it—as best we can understand it from the science. And I think this is the first novel—it’s certainly the first southern novel—but it’s one of the very few American novels to pay close attention to the environment. Particularly the diversity of life in the environment.

Most novelists deal with the environment in phrases like, Went through the dark woods, looking for a dark path, you know, or, Found peace in a meadow filled with beautiful blooming flowers. That’s about as far as most novelists go. What I’ve done is to make the environment—and particularly that treasured habitat that a young Raphael Semmes Cody, the hero, spends the entire book designing and scheming and fighting to save—I made it virtually a character in the novel. Treated it as an entity, the ecosystem, almost as a character. So that in a sense it comes full circle to your question: The book has a lot of science in it.
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Verizon's street poster for Inception

Ben Walters (BW) & J. M. Tyree (JMT) have been talking about movies together since 1995, often amicably. They co-wrote a critical appreciation of The Big Lebowski for The British Film Institute’s Film Classics book series. They shared notes – via email, chat, and document sharing – on Christopher Nolan's Inception, in which Leonardo DiCaprio plays Dom Cobb, a corporate spy who retrieves secrets by invading targets' dreams. JMT watched it in San Francisco and BW saw it in London.

Bath of Dreamings

JMT: Here's a mainstream picture we both looked forward to watching, Inception, Christopher Nolan’s summer hit. It's a trap to worry overly about a Hollywood blockbuster being a Hollywood blockbuster, but I feel baffled by the critical reaction. The people next to me at the multiplex were loudly oohing and ahhing over the film as though it were a display of fireworks. And since then I’ve talked to several very smart people who enjoyed the film. What did I miss?

BW: I've got to admit I'm not quite sure. Maybe people like having their legs pulled? With sumptuous production design?

JMT: The new Film Quarterly (Summer, 2010) has a thoughtful book review by Martin Fradley about the state of the contemporary film industry. It talks about Hollywood's “new auteurs” – deal-makers, producers, agents, and distributors. Maybe that's Christopher Nolan at this point, a corporate auteur, the total bundle – which is intriguing given how weird his films are.

BW: In a way I think that's the most interesting aspect of Inception – he has the clout and the industrial nous to mount a massive shaggy dog story like this. And it's certainly another exploration of his pet themes – the ways memory, identity and narrative shape our lived reality.

JMT: He doesn’t really “do” joyful moments of intimacy. Or humor.

Undone Minds

BW: No one comes to Nolan for hugs or chuckles. His films are meant to be conventionally satisfying riddle movies, by and large, within which frame he can explore more genuinely upsetting ideas of identity. When it works, it makes you question whether you actually have any right to your opinion about yourself. When it doesn't, it comes off as dull, pretentious, over-designed guff.

JMT: My frustration watching Inception was that it barely explores the fascinating pathways opened by its own premise.

BW: Yes, I had a similar feeling…

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Steven Moore is an author, a critic, and a former managing editor of Dalkey Archive Press and the Review of Contemporary Fiction. In his latest book, the first volume of The Novel: An Alternative History, Moore traces the development of long, adventurous fiction from its origin to the year 1600, paying special attention to unusual works that make innovative use of language. Colin Marshall originally conducted this interview on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes]

It's a remark people have made about the book, and that I believe you've also made yourself: it is called The Novel: An Alternative History, but it could also be called A History of the Alternative Novel. How true is that?

In my mind, I was doing two things at once. First of all, it's an alternative to the conventional history of the novel, which begins in 18th-century England and goes up to about 1920 and then James Joyce comes along and throws a monkey wrench into everything and invents the avant-garde novel. The problem with that is, the novel actually started way back in ancient Greece, and the avant-garde novel that Joyce allegedly invented has always been a property. There's crazy, avant-garde, weird, experimental novels going back almost to the very beginning. I'm writing about these ancient works, but all along I'm defending modern, innovative fiction, which often gets a bad rap. I want to point out that these modern avant-garde things are not deviations from the norm, but have always been part of the novel.

This opens up a big issue of just how it's come to be that a traditional history of the novel has become so narrow. This book of yours, the first part ends well before the traditional history begins. How much do you have to modify the “normal” definition of the novel to go back as far as you do.

It depends on what you mean by normal. The dictionary, and E.M. Forster in his famous Aspects of the Novel, says that a novel is any work of fiction longer than 50,000 words, or any book-length work of fiction. If you take that as your definition, you can go back as far as I do. However, you're right, some modern critics want to narrow that down to: a novel has to be realistic, it has to have a certain amount of psychological depth, it has to be set against a recognizable social or economic background, et cetera, et cetera. Why they want to do that, I don't know. I gues they wanted to distinguish the novel written by Flaubert or Henry James from something written in the Middle Ages, so they've come up with all these notions. If you just go by a basic definition, which most would agree, that a novel is just a book-length work of fiction, that opens all sorts of possibilities.

Someone who isn't familiar with this talk about what defines a novel, I'm sure they'll be surprised when they read your book, especially the introduction. They'll find out that, indeed, there has been some argument over what constitutes a proper novel. How closely were you following that before you set into this enormous project, the history of the novel?

I wasn't so much following arguments about the novel as I was simply noticing, throughout my life, that I kept stumbling across these older works of fiction that looked like novels to me, even though that's not what I learned in college. In college, the novel started in the 18th century. In bookstores, I would come across The Tale of Genji, an ancient Japanese novel, or Petronius' Satyricon, which comes from the very first century, or an Icelandic saga like Nial's Saga. I would look at them and say, well, this is fiction, book-length. They certainly looked like novels. I was responding to that, rather than following the academic debates that have been going on for the last century or two.

Starting this project, at what point in your research were you able to find a beginning for works that look like novels, to your own mind?

I knew there were ancient Greek novels. I'd seen a big fat book published by the University of California press called The Collected Ancient Greek Novels. Then I realized Nietzsche once compared Plato's dialogues to early novels, and I thought that was interesting. I came across a book of ancient Egyptian tales, and there's some ancient Egyptian scholars who say these are pretty much novels in everything but name; they have all the properties of novels. It was just looking at ancient fiction, which I've always had a slight interest in, and realizing a lot of those early writings had a lot of properties of the novel. Of course, there was no such thing as the novel per se then, so they were never labeled as such, but if you treat them as the fictional adventures of some character going through a set of dramatic sequences, which is what most novels are, you can look at something like Gilgamesh and say, “Yeah, this resembles a novel,” even though that's not what the author may have set out to do.

What about the earliest fictions you include in the book fascinate you the most?

The daring of them. This goes back to your first question about alternative fiction. These early fictions, especially Egyptian and Assyrian stuff, they're almost like avant-garde magical realist novels. They're more like García Marquez than John Updike, say. The freedom I saw there really interests me. This is the same freedom avant-garde writers adopt. As soon as literature started becoming written, critics came up with rules for poetry and drama. Anyone who was writing tales or longer fictions were pretty much free to do whatever they wanted. There was this real spirit of experimentalism, to use a modern term, in that early fiction, that fit in perfectly with my whole thesis: the avant-garde novel is not a modern aberration, but goes all the way back to the beginning. If anything, the conventional novel is the aberration. That's a very late development.

Could you say that we have it backwards, that what we see as normal is one current of many in terms of the way the novel has gone? We've focused so much on one subset, that has seemed to us to be the only thing?

Exactly. Without question, it's the most popular form of fiction, the conventional novel, the beginning, middle, end, and all that. It's the easiest to read, has the largest appeal, blah, blah, blah. But when you step back and look at the whole stream from ancient Egypt to what's being written now, it's just a tributary that goes off to the side. I wouldn't push it too hard, but the experimental novel is actually the main river. The conventional novel is a popular sidetrack.

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by Michael Blim

A bag of books for two bucks, said the sign. Deflation has hit the little Connecticut country library used book sales I haunt each summer. Imagine what you can stuff into a big supermarket paper bag, and then cross-rough it with a run of terrific books – a book of Giotto’s frescoes, Graham Greene’s The Comedians, three P.D. James mysteries, George F. Kennan’s Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin, a compilation of comic art propaganda that includes a study and pictures of Hansi: the Girl Who Loved the Swastika (the protagonist escapes Nazism by becoming a bride for Christ). All of these and A Guide to Thomas Aquinas.

All of these books bid for my affections, hoping for a quick conquest of my summer reading plans. Having laid hands on Robert Sherwood’s Hopkins and Roosevelt (1948) my fate was sealed. And fortunately for me, having spent as 3QD readers know the past two summers on first Hitler and then Stalin thanks to my library sales book buys.

What a delight to read the history of heroes once more. Sherwood tells the story of how Roosevelt and Hopkins, FDR’s alter ego insofar as he ever had one, battled the Great Depression and World War II together, with Hopkins the iron fist in Roosevelt’s velvet glove. The story is told with admiration and a beguiling humility. Though a successful playwright and a speechwriting White House denizen from 1940 onward, Sherwood never lost his awe of the two men, sharing intimate space and time with two persons who never shared their intimate thoughts with anyone.

Sherwood’s sense of wonder at what he observed is perhaps only exceeded by the reactions of a sympathetic reader. Hopkins, an Iowa-born New York social worker, put 4 million people to work in one month during the dark winter of 1933-34 and got 180,000 public works projects up and running in four. He put millions more to work with the Works Progress Administration, and after 1937 with half a stomach and successions of near-death crises due to chronic metabolic diseases left over after his bout with cancer, ran the Lend-Lease program that put ships, planes, tanks, and arms in the hands of a half a dozen of America’s allies in World War II and acted as FDR’s confidential agent with Churchill, Stalin, and their military and diplomatic staffs.

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“Black holes, Big Bang, Bada Bing, quantum space, worm holes, the Theory of Strings; space is a smorgasbord of metaphors of things.” –Roshi Bob, The Theory of Theories and Other Anomalies; Bench Press, 2011

Fun in Space
………………..
Call me nomad, but
rootlessness is my routine

From where I stand
space seems to beg for exploration
not occupation. Occupation of space
requires a military state of mind
Armies are trained for it. Individuals however,
grow dull and lethargic just occupying space

There’s no substitute for dynamism
when facing space

When I stumble upon a new chunk
I like to engage it many times over
laying out alternate trajectories
bisecting circles
flying off on tangents
or just nosing around looking for
shortcuts

If the wind’s right you might catch me
boogalooing along an hypotenuse
or oscillating between the foci of an ellipse
I go at it from all angles by any means

For example I’ve found a trampoline’s
a satisfying way to explore space:
up, down, up, down
Along similar lines (if you have the money)
a space shuttle is good too:
up, down, up, down

There are various ways to approach space
We can grid it off and tackle it one little corner at a time
or go at it whole, working it as Jackson Pollock would a canvas
What we choose depends upon our depth of indoctrination
or degree of personality disorder

Whatever our milieu, space can be an exhilarating place
–or is it places?

In fact space is full of surprises
(moving beyond bland Euclidean space that is;
the plainest of all geometries)
Still, you gotta hand it to the guy
Euclid’s space may be old hat,
but it’s a space that’s served us well over the years
Try getting from here to there without it

But what really psyches me
are novel topologies of space
There’s nothing more exhilarating
then space that pushes the envelope

Consider the quirky but tasty appeal of a torus
(the deep-fried cuisine of crime-stoppers),
the intriguing infinity of a Möbius strip,
or the warm and cozy feel
inside a conversation-laced pub
These are boundary-pushing spaces all, but
they’re nothing
up against the reality-bending possibilities
of warped space as given by Einstein
and can’t hold a candle
to the almost mystically
tangled theory of strings

Just the thought of Einsteinian or string space
neutralizes any residual sense of metaphysical claustrophobia
left over from grade-school catechism
under hard nuns

Me? I never miss the chance to savor space
With six point eight billion of us on the planet,
at our present rate of consumption,
you never know when
we might run out

by Jim Culleny
June 2007

Marriage can mean many different things to different people. For some, it’s all about the wedding – often an event with the pomp and opulence of a fairy tale ball. For others, it’s about the legal arrangement and the accompanying benefits, which could mean anything from health insurance to citizenship. Still for others, the most important part may be the commitment to sharing a life together.

In recent decades, the issue of gay marriage has been widely debated. Should two men in a committed relationship enjoy the same benefits as a man and a woman in the same domestic arrangement? If it were simply an issue of basic human rights and equality, then the answer is clear – gays and lesbians are human, so human rights should apply. But gay marriage violates tradition, and tradition is important to many people.

Traditions are part of our history, part of our culture, and part of who we are. The degree to which we suffer to maintain traditions reflects their great importance. Maintaining tradition has been worth the pain of genital mutilation, ceremonial scarring, and foot binding. Nevertheless, traditional practices have been disappearing steadily. For example, in many places, women are now considered full persons. They’re allowed to work outside the home, to wear pants, and to vote. For those who value tradition, this is a trend that must stop.

One might argue that traditional practices should be abandoned when they no longer make sense. But as French mathematician Blaise Pascal recognized, the heart has its reasons that reason doesn’t understand. Some things are simply more important than reason, and for many, tradition is one of them.

If there is any doubt about the appropriateness or morality of same-sex marriages, we can always turn to religion for answers. According to many religions, marriage is supposed to be between a man and a woman. The woman is supposed to stay at home and be subservient and they should have lots of children. Some religions also advocate putting people to death for minor deviations from the traditional paradigm. Roman Catholicism seems to be tolerant of some deviations, like pedophilia, but not others, like homosexuality or the use of contraception.

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By Tolu Ogunlesi

1.

Africa their Africa

When Western tourists talk about Africa somehow it seems to me that what they really mean is East and Southern Africa, places like Namibia and Kenya and Botswana and parts of Uganda where you will find safaris and zebras and elephants and lakes in abundance.

When I think of Tourists' Africa I almost never think of Nigeria. Tourists stay away from a country like Nigeria – those masses of foreigners to be seen at the arrival terminal of the Lagos International Airport (MMIA) are diplomats and NGO-types and oil workers and journalists and researchers, and maybe spies. (And of course the occasional ‘Nigerian letter’ victim desperately hoping to recover a lost fortune). For most of them there will be the lure of money to be made / earned – as hardship allowance or crazy business profit. Nigeria is one country where foreigners come to make money, not fritter it away on guided tours and lakeside resorts.

In the Congo they will be aid workers and diamond-seeking businessmen and gorilla savers; ditto the Sudan (minus the gorilla-savers and businessmen). In Liberia and Sierra Leone they will be IMF and World Bank officials. In Guinea Bissau they will mostly be cocaine merchants and US drug enforcement agents.

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by Frans de Waal

For many years, anthropologists and biologists have been comparing the aggression of animals with human warfare. It started with Konrad Lorenz in the 1960s, and remains a popular endeavor. We have an aggressive instinct that leads to warfare, hence war will always be with us. This message was a bit hard to accept from Lorenz, an Austrian who served in the German army during WWII, but the debate continues as seen in the video above featuring interviews with Steven Pinker, Richard Wrangham, and myself.

Part of the problem is that modern warfare seems to have little to do with the raw aggressive instinct. Modern warfare rests on a tight hierarchical structure of many parties, not all of which are driven by aggression. In fact, most are just following orders. The decision to go to war is typically made by older men in the capital. When I look at a marching army, I don’t see aggression in action. I see the herd instinct: thousands of men in lock-step, willing to obey superiors.

In recent history, we have seen so much war-related death that we imagine that it must always have been like this, that warfare is written into our DNA. In the words of Winston Churchill: “The story of the human race is War. Except for brief and precarious interludes, there has never been peace in the world; and before history began, murderous strife was universal and unending.” But is Churchill’s warmongering state-of-nature any more plausible than Rousseau’s noble savage? Although archeological signs of individual murder go back hundreds of thousands of years, we lack similar evidence for warfare (such as graveyards with weapons embedded in a large number of skeletons) from before the agricultural revolution. Even the walls of Jericho — considered one of the first pieces of evidence of warfare and famous for having come tumbling down in the Old Testament — may have served mainly as protection against mudflows.

Long before this, our ancestors lived on a thinly populated planet, with altogether only a couple of million people. Before this, about 70,000 years ago, our lineage was at the edge of extinction living in scattered small bands. A study of mitochondrial DNA by genographer Doron Behar suggests: “Tiny bands of early humans developed in isolation from each other for as much as half of our entire history as a species.” These are hardly the sort of conditions to promote continuous warfare. My guess is that for our ancestors war was always a possibility, but that they followed the pattern of present-day hunter-gatherers, who do exactly the opposite of what Churchill surmised: they alternate long stretches of peace and harmony with brief interludes of violent confrontation.

Comparisons with apes hardly resolve this issue. Since it has been found that chimpanzees sometimes raid their neighbors and take their enemies’ lives, these apes have edged closer to the warrior image that we have of ourselves. Like us, chimps wage violent battles over territory. Genetically speaking, however, our species is exactly equally close to another ape, the bonobo, which does nothing of the kind. Bonobos can be unfriendly to their neighbors, but soon after a confrontation has begun, females often rush to the other side to have sex with both males and other females. Since it is hard to have sex and wage war at the same time, the scene rapidly turns into a peaceful gathering. Lethal aggression among bonobos has been unheard of.

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Justin E. H. Smith

*

Books consulted for this essay:

John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century. 8th Edition. University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Robin Fox, Kinship and Marriage: An Anthropological Perspective. Cambridge University Press, 1967.

Maurice Godelier, Les métamorphoses de la parenté. Paris, Fayard, 2004.

Lewis Henry Morgan, Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family. London, 1871.

Martha C. Nussbaum, From Disgust to Humanity: Same-Sex Marriage and Constitutional Law. Oxford University Press, 2010.

Andrew Sullivan, Virtually Normal. An Argument About Homosexuality. Vintage, 1996.

Göran Therborn, Between Sex and Power: Family in the World, 1900-2000, Routledge, 2004.

*

I recently spelled out some of the reasons why I remain doubtful about the prospects for transforming marriage, worldwide, into a gender-indifferent institution. (It is only the worldwide perspective that interests me.) I have not heard, in reply, any substantive arguments against the reasons I give for my doubts, and I have therefore decided that it might be a good idea to try one more time, and this time to make my call for serious engagement more explicit. I would sincerely like to know whether there is something I am missing.

I have been alarmed to see a sort of orthodoxy emerge as if out of nowhere over just the past few years (many of you will be old enough to remember when, in the not-so-distant past, Andrew Sullivan was condemned as a betrayer and a domesticator of the gay spirit for his powerful defense of same-sex marriage in Virtually Normal; I hope no one will try to tell me that everyone who condemned him at the time was, wittingly or un-, an enemy of human rights). This orthodoxy, like its opposite and indeed like all orthodoxies, presumes that any questioning of it amounts to hostility. There is no room in either of the prevailing orthodoxies that have formed around the controversy over same-sex marriage for someone like me: someone who supports marriage equality, but doubts, based on a thorough but admittedly incomplete reading of historical and anthropological scholarship, that the concept of marriage is in fact flexible enough to ever be transformed in such a way that marriage will cease to be heterosexual by presumption.

That is, I believe that we are right to decide to make same-sex unions equal before the law, but that it is not up to us to decide that the primary meaning of 'marriage' will cease to be 'basic unit of kinship, involving the monogamous pair-bonding of a male and a female'. This meaning will remain primary not only because other-sex couples are, as everyone agrees, statistically more common than same-sex couples, but because there is a fairly rigid system of organization in societies throughout the world that continues to be based on a presumption of gender dimorphism, and that continues to take cross-gender pairings as the elementary units of social reality. This is not what I want (I personally couldn't be less interested in 'defending' traditional marriage, though as it happens I don't think it's going to need defending), but rather what I believe to be the case.

I also believe that the movement for marriage equality misunderstands its contingency and ignores the historical forces that brought it into being. One of the triggers of my coming-out as a skeptic occurred a few months ago, when I happened to be speaking with a group of acquaintances who are also outspoken defenders of marriage equality. When quite unexpectedly the topic of first-cousin marriage came up, they began snickering like little boys: like little boys I might add, who in the not so distant past found mirth in every occurrence of the word 'gay'. This caused me to note that there is a certain selectiveness in what counts among educated Western liberals as 'doing the right thing' (a phrase we hear so often, and have heard most recently in connection with the legalization of same-sex marriage in Argentina).

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By Usha Alexander

“In your marriage, who is the boss?” our driver, Arman, asked in a playfully provocative tone, like he was setting up the punchline of a joke.

My partner and I looked at each other, laughed, and shrugged. Arman belonged to the Minangkabau, the society recognized among anthropologists as the world’s largest and most stable surviving matriarchy* (though some prefer to call it a gylany, matrix, matrifocal or matricentric society, or something else to avoid conjuring images of mythical Amazons). Knowing this, I presumed his question was part of a routine entertainment for tourists.

“For us it is the woman who is boss,” he continued, predictably. “The woman has all the privileges; she owns everything. The men, we own nothing.”

I knew that the Minangkabau, like most Indonesians, are Muslims. In May 2009, one of the first things I noticed upon arriving in their homeland—a stretch of volcanic highlands running along the western coast of Sumatra—was that a higher percentage of women here wear the hijab (here called jilbab) than did further north, near Medan and around Lake Toba. In fact, well over half of the adult women covered their hair in public. But here, as elsewhere on Sumatra, the headscarf appears to be as much a fashion statement as a covering for modesty. It’s often brightly colored or festooned with beads, sequins, rhinestones, small brooches, lace, or shimmery ribbons. Many women sport styles with a dainty sun visor in the front. Pretty much anything you can do to a hat is done to the Sumatran jilbab.

These observations, and Arman’s good humor at his lack of patrimony, made me wonder how I should understand the Minangkabau matriarchaat (their word, borrowed from the Dutch). What truce had been struck between Islam and matriarchy?

§

In the small villages surrounding Mount Marapi, which lies at the center of the Minangkabau creation myths, Arman lead us down tangled lanes lined with traditional Minangkabau homes. Many of these were great wooden structures, some as much as 300 years old, tattered or rotting in places, patched or expanded upon over the years. These traditional homes are long, each enclosing a broad rectangular hall over an empty ground floor, once used to house livestock. Their roofs are arched to suggest the horns of a buffalo. There were newer dwellings too, without the ground floor for livestock, with SUVs parked out front, satellite dishes growing like mushrooms of modernity from balconies and awnings.

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