Muhheakantuck

The river that flows both ways
flows through my house

Sometimes called paradox
—called Muhheakantuck by the Lenape
who knew that reversals in time
are not unusual,
just often misunderstood by we-
who-walk-away-from-understanding

The river that flows both ways
has two sources
…………….
one in front and one behind. It flows from
two horizons and meets here
in the middle turbulently sometimes
but not always —only when I speak with
forked tongue. At all other times it
comes together silently as one

The river that flows both ways
is like the god with two faces

—antipodal from beginning to end,
Janus, like Vishnu, drifts upon his raft
into the past and future at once
remembering and hoping

The river that flows both ways
has the properties of a mirror

whose face is a nexus as Alice knew
by walking through— call it Paradox,
a town, a place I lived once
in a time before this

The river that flows both ways
has nothing to do with imagination
or poetic conceits

The river that flows both ways
really falls from mountains

is caught by tides
and carried into estuaries

The river that flows both ways
flows through my house

like the Lenape
I'll just call it

Muhheakantuck

by Jim Culleny, May 27, 2010

Thanks to Frances Madeson for her comment on another poem
that lead me to this one.

Andrew Bujalski is the young director of the films Funny Ha Ha, Mutual Appreciation and Beeswax, which is newly available on DVD. Though Bujalski's funny, realistic movies are often considered by critics to be of a similar genius to other independently-produced pictures of the 2000s focusing on the personal relationships of twentysomethings, they possess an intellect and an aesthetic all their own. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes link]

Watching your three films, I feel like Beeswax is starkly distinct from the two that precede it, but I can't put my finger on exactly why. What would you say to that?

I would probably agree, for starters. Are you asking me to put my finger on it?

Yeah, obviously you're the closest person to that film in existence. I can't quite articulate why. It feels different. I can't exactly point to reasons why it's so different, but why do you think it's so different from Funny Ha Ha and Mutual Appreciation?

I could get into a million reasons, which are mostly minutia. One of the things about being so close to a film is, I do sort of see the forest for the trees and the trees for the leaves. I could start with technical things: we shot widescreen format, which we hadn't done on the earlier films. I could go into the fact there are twins at the center of it, which is very different, too, from the other films. All of them have been written for the people who ultimately played the leads, none of whom were professional actors but all of whom had a particular kind of charisma that I thought would translate onscreen.

Of course, those are very different kinds of charismas. That's another thing that's different about this film. What the Hathcher sisters, Tilly and Maggie, who play the twins in the film, brought to it is… there's something about their energy which is a little more inward, not quite like anything I was used to seeing on screen myself and was really interested to try to put at the center of a movie and see what happened. The audience has to lean forward a little bit to see what they're doing. I think — of course, I'm very attached to the film — I think they're miraculous in it. The rhythm of it is a little different. It's more plot-heavy, more exposition-heavy. Certainly, that was another challenge. I could go on and on.

This procedure of creating a film, of conceiving a film starting with the fact that you know somebody and wanted to see if they could carry a film, it's something you've talked about in othe r interviews and have done with the previous two films as well. What sort of things bring these people to your attention as possible leads, whether the Hatcher Sisters or the stars of Funny Ha Ha or Mutual Appreciation?

Maybe it comes from having spent too much time at the movies as a kid. It might not be healthy to look around the world and say, “How would this translate in the movies? What would this be like if I were asking it to hold together the center of a narrative?” I think everybody knows somebody who they think, “Oh, that guy could be a movie star.” Not that I've asked these people to be “movie stars” with everything that entails today.

In no case have I written films I thought were biographical of these people, per se. Beeswax is not the true story of the Hatchers any more than Funny Ha Ha is the story of Kate Dollenmayer and Mutual Appreciation is the story of Justin Rice. I took what I could imagine them projecting onscreen, how I imagined what they do in their ordinary lives, and translated that into the realm of the performer. I've noticed that, when you ask people to act — and this is probably true of professional actors as well — most people pick out something about themselves to exaggerate. People tend to want to do caricatures of themselves. You start from there, and then you can craft it in one direction or another. What is this essence of you that we can translate into a performance? Is there a story to be built around that?

Was the essence these actors would pick out from themselves and exaggerate the same thing you saw in them that you wanted to use? I can imagine that being ideal — they pick out the same thing you see — or they pick out something completely different, and you've got to make a different movie. Has that happened?

Certainly, yeah. There are surprises throughout the production process. Anything you try to boil down in concrete terms — there are always swerves and surprises. If somebody ate something weird for breakfast, they might come in in a different mood than you expected.

With Beeswax, I had a vague notion of the story, but I hadn't begun to write it. I went to the girls and asked them if they would… first of all, it's a huge commitment. You're asking somebody who is not a professional actor to take quite a bit of time and quite a bit of emotional energy to give to a project like this. As we all get older, it becomes harder for people to find the time to do these. First, I asked if they would even be interested. They both seemed game for it. We did a little screen test, and at first I had a notion of what these two roles would be. We switched it.

We did one run-through of a scene with Maggie playing the small business owner and Tilly playing her sister, and then we did it again and switched the roles. My initial instinct had been to cast the opposite of the way I ended up actually doing the film. I thought I would have Maggie play Jeannie the small business owner, and it became clear from that screen test that what they were going to bring of themselves to the roles instinctually — it was much more interesting the opposite way. Tilly was bringing a certain reservation. There was an inwardness and even maybe a defensiveness that I thought could be really, really interesting, if we used it right, in the Jeannie role.

This was a situation where, early on in the process, before I'd written the script, where something made me think very differently about how I was going to approach this. That's at the macro level. On the micro level, when you're on set, you always have to be paying attention to what the actors are bringing, and looking for ways to make that make the film more interesting.
Read more »

Tetris and its Connection to Confucianism

By Angus McCullough

Tetris is a video game about clearing away what is unnecessary in the best possible way, accessible on almost every gaming console imaginable, on cellular phones and for free on the Internet. Perhaps you played it once on an ancient game system in your youth or maybe you play it whenever you're sitting at your desk at work. Alexei Pajitnov, the creator of Tetris, calls it the first “casual game”, meaning that it is timeless in just such a way: it is the same every time you play, without plot or characters to follow. The first time you played it in middle school is the same game that is probably programmed into your phone today. To compare Tetris to any other game is somehow wrong – it is a masterful test of how our brains function while trying to balance instinctual and intellectual challenges in real time. The major difference between Tetris and other games is the simplicity of its construction and complexity of play. Most importantly, it is a game that does not have a goal or end. There is no castle to storm or high score to achieve – the only way to end your game is to lose. The result of this simple and mildly daunting setup is that Tetris affords the user a repetitive task every time he or she picks it up: to play better than the last time. It has also been shown to have beneficial effects outside the game itself, making it a powerful tool for personal development, mirroring certain aspects of Confucian ritual.

Read more »

By Tolu Ogunlesi

A few weeks ago Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie wrote a piece for Canada’s The Globe and Mail newspaper, titled: A new Nigerian-ness is infusing the nation. In it she tells of Nigeria’s recent past, during which “[t]he future was a vision of impossibilities” and “the only thing to aspire to was a foreign visa.”

Adichie then goes on to comment on the remarkable changes that have taken place in the Nigerian psyche in recent years. “There is a growing collective confidence in our future, a new restorative sense of self…” she writes, in reference to the fast-rising Nigerian pop music industry.

Interestingly, another arena that has seen significant change, and provides evidence of an impressive cultural renaissance in Nigeria, is the one in which Adichie herself occupies a vantage spot: the literary arts. On a recent Saturday afternoon, the Silverbird Lifestyle Store in Victoria Island, was cramped with guests attending the 4^th edition of the monthly BookJam reading series; featuring Adichie, Kenyan’s Binyavanga Wainaina, and UK-based Nigerians Chuma Nwokolo and Sade Adeniran.

Lagos is suddenly a hot new destination for writers from all over the world – courtesy of the exploits and efforts of writers like Adichie. Her four-year-old annual Creative Writing workshop, sponsored by Nigeria’s oldest and biggest beer company (which before now appeared to be more at home with sponsoring music festivals and talent hunts) has brought Jason Cowley, Nathan Englander, Binyavanga Wainaina, Jackie Kay, Doreen Baingana and Dave Eggers to Lagos, to facilitate writing sessions. This year Ama Ata Aidoo, Niq Mhlongo and Chika Unigwe are the guest writers.

Read more »

By Omar Sarwar

Suicide bombing is one of the most passionately debated topics in academia, the government, and the intelligence community. The secondary literature on this subject has convincingly demonstrated that suicide bombing is sui generis in its historical contingency (rather than in its essence), that al-Qaeda’s practice of suicide bombing takes place in a globalized landscape which is at once moral and political, and that even the most murderous terrorists appropriate and objectify modern notions of humanity in describing their actions.

As part of my doctoral studies, I have written extensively about the the historiography of the global jihad movement. In the interest of conciseness, however, I present here a long overdue comparative review of what I believe to be the most provocative, controversial work on the global jihad, Faisal Devji’s The Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam and Global Politics (2008), and Talal Asad’s On Suicide Bombing (2006). My hope is that this analysis will offer a starting point on this website for further discussion about the moral and political logic of jihadi violence.

***************************

The greatest merit of Devji’s earlier work on the global jihad, Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity (2005), is its elucidation of al-Qaeda’s eclectic approach to Islamic theological and juridical traditions, the transnational and global horizons of its militancy, and its ambition to achieve globality by way of the media. In his latest monograph, Devji succeeds in affirming the existence of a global arena bereft of its own political institutions but within which al-Qaeda acquires force and legitimacy through its search for a politics that takes humanity as its object. Nonetheless, he fails to prove the ethical (or suprapolitical) sovereignty of suicide attacks, something crucial to the peculiarly modern coloration of the jihad.

Investigating the globalization and democratization of the jihad movement and the supremely ethical (as opposed to political) character of suicide bombings, Devji holds that al-Qaeda’s militants regard Muslim suffering as a humanitarian cause that, “like climate change or nuclear proliferation, must be addressed globally or not at all.”[1] The search for humanity lies at the heart of militant action and those who profess allegiance to al-Qaeda invoke humanity as both the agent and object of an as yet unrealized global politics.[2] They believe that Muslims are not members of a religious group but “the contemporary representatives of human suffering.”[3] Thus, Devji argues, al-Qaeda’s militants target their enemies not for maintaining heathen religious beliefs or atheistic secular convictions, but for “betraying their own vision of a world subject to human rights.”[4] Claims about humanity are far more central to militant rhetoric than the scriptural material whose medieval exoticism has preoccupied so many of those studying the global jihad movement.[5]

Terrorists have assumed humanity’s historical role, which in the past was part and parcel of the civilizing mission of European colonialism.

Read more »

Anna O. was the pseudonym of a patient of Josef Breuer, who published her case study in his book Studies on Hysteria, written in collaboration with Sigmund Freud. Her real name was Bertha Pappenheim (1859?1936), an Austrian-Jewish feminist and the founder of the Judischer Frauenbund (League of Jewish Women)

Psychological Science: Sigmund Freud – “A Dream of Undying Fame”

Norman Costa

I invited Louis Breger, PhD to join me in this article devoted to a discussion of Sigmund Freud. After my two-parter, “Sigmund Freud – Personal and Scientific Coward?” [PART 1, PART 2], I received an email from Dr. Breger. A friend directed him to 3Quarksdaily.com, and my second article. He had a few things to say about my article, including a couple of critical comments.

I recognized, immediately, that Breger knew a great deal about Freud – far more than I. Breger has been Professor of Psychoanalytic Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences Division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, from 1970 to the present, (currently, Emeritus Professor.) In 1990, with a group of colleagues, Dr. Breger created the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis (ICP) where he was the Founding President from 1990 to 1993.

After looking at the encouraging reviews of his books [DREAM, DARKNESS], I read “A DREAM OF UNDYING FAME.” It is an excellent, and very readable book. I recommend it to all interested in Freud, and the history of psychoanalysis. I've not yet read the biography, but I will.

Well, I couldn't let him get away after offering only a few comments. He has too much to tell us on the subject. He possesses a great deal of knowledge, and deeply informed views from a lifetime of work. So I asked Dr. Breger if he would contribute to my Monday Musings column on 3Quarksdaily.com. Very graciously, and generously, he agreed to write something for my readers. What follows is a discussion of his latest book and my two-part article on Freud. I will have a few comments following his well done and informative piece.

YOU WILL NOT BE DISAPPOINTED.

Read more »

“The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and
dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.”
………………–Tony Hayward, CEO British Petroleum, on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill

The Mean Density of a Corporate Brain Ghazal

One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
Shakespeare said —and not just in dreams if truth be told.

Devils on TV and on the radio —even in the street
ordinary demons walk among us terrors to behold.

Just yesterday someone I know remarked that we may be indiscreet
and inconsiderate of the earth; adding smugly: We may be bold.

We may have our wonton way with her without repercussion
even if we leave her desiccated —as God’s my witness, it’s foretold.

The earth’s ours to be consumed; to be sucked utterly to death.
We have the right, he said –being the prime plums in god’s fold.

So what if the earth bleeds into the sea? The sea’s huge enough
to handle whatever comes: run-off nitrogen, sludge, black gold.

As long as skulls are stuffed with want and hearts trussed in bottom lines
it’s just routine to deal in death and decimate the earth which rolls & rolls.

If we’re dumb as Gump, blind as Lear and demonic as a corporate brain
we’ll, tout de suite, smother and annihilate even our dreams if truth be told.

by Jim Culleny, 5/23/10

By Namit Arora

Why did democracy take root in India against all odds? What are its distinguishing features? What should we make of its attempts to combat inequalities among its people, especially via reservations? Over six decades later, how close is it to Ambedkar's inspiring vision of democracy?

The Republic of India began life as an unlikely nation. Gaining independence in 1947, India adopted a democratic form of governance, a liberal constitution, and secular public institutions (at least in intent if often not in practice). None of these sprang from a living indigenous tradition.[1] Rather, they were chosen by an elite class of Indians that had developed a taste for them via its exposure to the West, and had even acquired some experience in representative self-rule in the closing decades of the British Raj. Many observers thought the experiment was doomed to failure. Among them was the stodgy imperialist Winston Churchill, who felt that if the British left, India would ‘fall back quite rapidly through the centuries into the barbarism and privations of the Middle Ages.’ Indians were unfit to govern themselves, and needed ‘the sober and resolute forces of the British Empire.’

Doubters abounded for decades after independence. Unlike so many post-colonial nations, including those in South Asia, the continued existence of democracy in India—its fair elections and peaceful transfers of power—puzzled not just the lay observers, but it also became, according to historian Ramachandra Guha,

an anomaly for academic political science … That India ‘could sustain democratic institutions seems, on the face of it, highly improbable,’ wrote the distinguished political scientist Robert Dahl, adding: ‘It lacks all the favorable conditions.’ ‘India has a well-established reputation for violating social scientific generalizations,’ wrote another American scholar, adding, ‘Nonetheless, the findings of this article furnish grounds for skepticism regarding the viability of democracy in India.’ [2]

The naysayers rightly saw democracy as an outgrowth of a particular historical experience in the West, rooted in a consciousness we now call modernity. They spoke of the conditions thought to be necessary for the flourishing of democracy: an egalitarian social order, an ethos of individualism, and a culture of secular politics and pluralist tolerance. India had mostly the opposite: a deeply hierarchical social order, subservience of the individual to family and community, and a culture of political quietism, though it did have a kind of tolerance (more on this below). Only a tiny class of Indians saw themselves as citizens of a nation-state, or could lay claim to political participation. Nor had the masses agitated to be rid of the hundreds of kings in as many princely states of British India, though discontent did exist in pockets. Indians were notoriously diverse, with identities spanning caste, class, region, custom, language, religion, and more, all impediments to a shared ideal of citizenship. Indeed, how was democracy expected to survive in such inhospitable terrain?

Read more »

Alexander Theroux is the author of stories, poetry, essays, fables, critical studies and such novels as Three Wogs, Darconville's Cat, An Adultery and his latest, Laura Warholic: Or, The Sexual Intellectual, which came as Theroux's first novel in two decades. Rain Taxi calls the book “a massive, 878-page compendium of vituperation against contemporary society, jabs at pop culture, exposés of office politics, and exploration of life and love in modern times,” an encyclopedic novel that's “wandering, erudite, funny, opinionated, didactic, repetitive.” Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes link]

About the new book: you can't really understand it unless you get to know the characters, and you get to know them very well through the course of the book. The protagonist, Eugene Eyestones — tell us a little bit about him.

I've always been interested in a person that was both idealistic and something of a failure. Vladimir Nabokov once pointed out that every character is a little ramification of the author, so I've distributed some of my hostilities and fascinations and occasional quirks to him. I wanted to have him as a kind of raisonneur and a satirical point of departure for the multifarious views on life that are presented in the book. He's the thread through the book, which is not to say that he's normal or well-balanced.

You say you give him a few qualities, a few opinions of your own. Which ones are the most prominent in him that you took for yourself?

It's really hard to say, because, as Goethe once said, all writing is confession. In away, I've distributed myself throughout the book in various characters. John Keats once pointed out that Shakespeare maybe had a very empty personality, he might have been a very bland person, because he gave away his personality, the various voices that he had, to different people as various as Prospero, Lady Macbeth, you name it. I can't really say there's a one-to-one correspondence to much in Eyestones. His rooms, in many ways, echo mine: I have a lot of books, I have a portrait of Dostoevsky, blah blah blah.

But I think I can be found in other characters with equal force. There's an occasional shotgun in the corner, metaphorically speaking. My toothbrush over there, a particular vase in the room, but I can't deny that I'm in other places as well. I distributed myself throughout, and probably have as bland a personality as Keats argued Shakespeare had — not to make any major analogies here, by the way.

You talk about Eyestones' idealism. He has a huge number of ideals, strongly held. What ideals of his really define him for you?

He has an elevated view of women, although a lot of people would argue, vociferously, the opposite direction. His expectations are high. The genre of this novel is a satire. Through dramatic irony, I try to present him as a corrective to the wayward world, the quark-reversal world, the nutty world, the excessive world, the secular world. His point of view I like to think is balanced, although, as I say, a lot of people wouldn't agree. Laura Warholic attacks him three-quarters of the way through the book for a lot of lunatic excesses she finds in him, but a lot of those excesses and ideals — let's take one to make this clear.

He's kind of disbelieving in the possibility of democracy. Indeed, he sees it as a leveling force. I spent quite a bit of time on an essay on democracy in this book, which aims in the direction of trying to talk about couples. There's a certain kind of democracy required of people involved in coupledom. You have to settle on man and woman — in these days, man and man, whatever — he's kind of doubtful about the possibility of that being successful. That would be one example. There are many I could go into, but that would be one.
Read more »

So Yong Kim is the director of the feature films In Between Days and Treeless Mountain. The former, a portrait of the alienation of a teenage Korean girl newly relocated to Toronto, won a Special Jury Prize for Independent Vision at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. The latter, the story of a pair of very young sisters sent away from their home in Seoul to live with their remote, alcoholic Aunt and then with their grandparents in the countryside, won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at the 2009 Berlin International Film Festival, the Muhr Award at the 2008 Dubai International Film Festival and the Netpac Award at the 2008 Pusan International Film Festival. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes link]

Because the film has its, to an American, foreign setting — I talk to a lot of Americans about it, and they do get caught up in the fact that it is in Seoul and Heunghae, the foreignness of certain elements of it. — how much did you want to make a story rooted in its geographic location, rooted in place, and how much did you want to make one in themes that are more universal: childhood, sisterhood?

Ideally, what I always dreamed of, making this film — I wanted to set it in my hometown, which is Heunghae, Korea. When I first started writing the story in 2003 or so, certain events were based on my memory of the location when I grew up there in the seventies. It's quite a while back, so I wasn't really sure how much the country had changed or how much my hometown had changed. I just started from very basic elements in the story that I wanted to focus on, which were the journey these two sisters take, and the emotional journey they go through. In that sense, that's much more universal than the story being just a Korean story

I believe I read in a previous interview with you that the seed of the story that became Treeless Mountain was actually something you wrote in a creative writing class. How much did you start off with? What was the very beginning of just the idea of the story itself, before even combining it with details of your memory of Hunghae?

I've always felt that I'm not a very strong writer. I was taking this creative writing class and our teacher gave us an assignment. She said to write about something you remember in your childhood, something like that. The story I wrote was about these two sisters who were catching grasshoppers and grilling them. They weren't selling them in that short story, but they were grilling them and tasting it — how they ate the grashoppers and stuff, those details were in that story. That was Treeless Mountain; I drew this picture in a sketchbook and wrote “Treeless Mountain” back then. The title of the film stayed as that to the very end.

The treeless mountain was, then, an image you had, more than anything?

Yeah, it was a very quick drawing in my sketchbook of this hill and these two stick figures. They were holding a little branch, and I wrote, next to it, “Treeless Mountain”.

With the grilling of the grasshoppers — this is something I had to ask you — was that actually a pursuit you had as a kid?

Yeah, yeah! In the fall, the grasshopper season peaks. That's when the harvest happens; that's when they age and mature. That's when we used to run around, back in the old days in the country.

Is that a common thing there? The grasshopper-eating is something viewers get so hung up on. I do wonder: were they good?

They were good. You just have to make sure you grill it all the way through. It's a little nutty. To get our two young actors to eat them on set for the scenes, we had to have all the grown-ups around them eat one, to show them that, “Oh, it's really delicious.”

That is funny, because one of the things that kept coming up in my mind, watching this movie, is how often directors will say, “I'm never going to work with kids. I'll never work with kids. It's so hard.” I was reading about the task you had just working with these two, who sounded like they were more cooperative than most young actors. Then you actually have to get them to eat bugs. That's got to be harder than anything.

No, you know, you'd be surprised. I think it was harder to convince the grown-ups to eat the grasshoppers than the kids.

You convinced your whole crew to eat grasshoppers? That's the last thing I'll ask about the grasshoppers, I promise.

Everybody. All the producers. Everybody on set had to eat one.
Read more »

figure i : he stands opposite his rivals

You are the only one who can never see yourself apart from your image. In the reflection of a mirror, or the pigment of the photograph you entertain yourself. Every gaze you cast is mediated by a looking apparatus, by an image you must stand alongside. The gaze welcomes itself as a guest. The eye orders you to sit at its table, to share in the feast of one’s own image. The image stands beside the real, all the while eating at its table, stealing morsels from the feast it enables. The image is not reality, but the image is the only gesture you have in the direction of reality.

From the Greek pará-noos, he who suffers from paranoia has a mind beside itself. He is convinced that his partner conspires against him: a belief in turn organised by a conspiring mentality. I am confident that you are reading my mind: a position founded by my supposed reading of yours. The paranoid stand beside themselves; a part beside itself as part, conspiring against the whole. Paranoia is a kind of paradox, from the Greek pará-doxon, it stands beside the orthodox.

Read more »

By Maniza Naqvi

Bibi did you know? Were you just trying to go home? Were you tired of the wilderness and the roaming? Were you fatigued of that long journey ahead? Were you afraid that memories would erase and that history would fade your name from its page? And so, instead, did you court and embrace a martyr’s death? Did you? Were you pumped, and primed and prepped, to play that part? Bibi, the people were out on the streets, yes. They were out in the streets but not calling out for you. You knew, that, didn’t you? You no longer were the lead act for just being you. Benazir will return– Live Benazir, this rallying call, was no longer the main attraction, perhaps even in danger of slipping from their attention? It was now all about restoring the constitution. Could you see it in the rank and file? In their tone and in their eyes that they had outgrown you? That they might even feel they could go it alone without you? Could you sense that something was missing? Were you afraid to be left out in the cold—in that yawning gulf—left out of it all, left shopping in an over air conditioned Mall. Or watching it all, on television over a bowl of ice cream. The children grown and leaving the nest. The husband, let’s just say no longer in jail. So, what was next? Diets and self help books and surfing the internet? Safe bet, that boredom loomed large—the relegation to the irrelevance of a self exile. That sad and silent passing away in the Diaspora. The one hit movie– one time star? Were you afraid of that more than of anything else? An assassin’s bullet welcome to such a terrible end –such a mess? Would you have thought yourself condemned to a fate worse than death if you had not been killed instead? So then Bibi, if this were true, –you obliged them—and they did you.

If this were true. But it isn't. You were murdered.

Read more »

In the middle of last month, a colleague of mine, a writer, was run over by a five-ton military truck on a public street in Washington, D.C. Patrons at a restaurant nearby—it was dinner time, about 6 p.m., a nice day to dine outside—said the sound of her getting crushed beneath the wheels was stomach-sickening. She was sixty-eight years old and riding a bicycle, less a block from work. She wrote about lots of hard-core science and had been at the magazine since 1970, and so was well known; Francis Collins commented on her death. She also edited a breezier news section called Short Cuts, and I think she would have enjoyed and appreciated 3QD—she painted seriously on the side, and played music.

I admit I knew her (I’ll call her T.) less well as other people where we used to work together. And yet the news still stunned me. Stunned me in that way when everything gets very quiet and your focus narrows severely and you can suddenly concentrate very, very hard. Or rather, everything else seems to fall away, because what you’re concentrating on just doesn’t make sense, doesn’t jive with what was, until just then, real. D.C. has a pretty abysmal record of bikers and pedestrians getting run over by careless buses and trucks—the number of ghost bikes around town (memorials, painted white, one for each victim at the site of an accident) gets eerie. But T. died because people took far too much care, in the empty name of security.

You see, her workplace had the misfortune of being a half mile from the Washington Convention Center, where dozens of world leaders held a profoundly unproductive nuclear security summit in April. The big outcome, as you undoubtedly heard, was that all parties present denounced terrorism as “one of the most challenging threats to international security” and decided that it would be idea to make sure terrorists cannot get nuclear materials, starting in four years. Of course, they agreed to this in a non-binding resolution, so even that milquetoast agreement means little. Maybe, just maybe, a lot of the real work of international disarmament did get done those two days behind the scenes, and perhaps the summit sowed the seeds of future accords. But from all appearances, it achieved even less than the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference last year.

Read more »

The Algonquin tribes knew this moon as the
time to gather ripening strawberries
……………………………………–Old Farmer's Almanac

Strawberry Moon

I read you Strawberry Moon
you pull the sea in the summer
more than two-hundred-thousand miles
I see your reach is so long
your arm of gravity
your face of sunlight at midnight
they hold me too

But in the moon when the deer shed their horns
and the top of the world has leaned a little away
from the sun, the colder night
who has an edge on his voice
who cares so little for growing things
will make it seem like you'll break
unless you remember the heat
of the Strawberry Moon

I'm with you Strawberry Moon
I'm dark here down in your shadows
which move their edges like steel
when you're full and spilling silver on me
your arm of gravity your face
of sunlight at midnight
the hold me too

by Jim Culleny. 1971

By Evert Cilliers (aka Adam Ash)

Tea Partiers: angry independents? extreme conservatives? regular Republicans? racist crackers? none of the above?

Before I get down to telling you who and what the Tea Party movement is — because nobody seems to know, least of all the people IN the movement — allow me to lay a little philosophy on you.

All philosophies are about putting the world in a nutshell. “Class struggle.” “The invisible hand.” “Existence precedes essence.”

Myself, I like nutshell statements. They help thin the thickets of reality. No human can face unmediated reality and not want to die from the onslaught. It takes a Beckett to be brave enough to look at our bleak world bleakly; the rest of us need our simplifying generalizations and consoling constructions to fool ourselves into getting on with going on.

Just to be semi-functional and make some sense of it all, we absolutely NEED to stuff the actual mess of the Real into neat boxes of the Construct.

We're so small, us humans: we use the only thing we have, our minds, to simplify the vastness around us; we think in order to fit the big everything out there into our little heads.

That's why something as rich and sprawling as language is wont to collapse into well-worn cliches. We can't think without banal summations, dumb generalizations, blind ideologies, the cutting down of the everything-around forest to a few simple stripped-down tree statements. “Jesus died for my sins.” “The free market is the end of history.” “Obama is a socialist.” The very falseness of our thought constructs is what makes them useful; their effortlessly bogus effronteries allow us to continue on our not-so-merry way. It may be the reason why Zizek can review a movie without seeing it: he doesn't need the movie to interfere with what he thinks about it.

I've been trying to understand the Tea Party movement, and found it tough and confusing, a vexing bafflement. Tea Party people appear to have no core, no leader, no central anything to latch on to. No simple cliche to sum up the movement. Hence, impossible to think about or understand. Where's the Construct box to stuff them in? So I've invented a personal nutshell, which not only explains the Tea Party, but all American politics. Yep. I am here to verify, instruct, inform curiosity and carry report. Read on.

Read more »

Hello, my name is Sarah Firisen and I am a software developer and a writer. But wait, my name is also Bianca Zanetti and I used to be a fashion designer with a string of stores. No, I am not schizophrenic, I am Sarah in my real life and Bianca in my Second Life. My Second Life has not been so active in recent months, but in my virtual heyday I went to parties, art gallery openings and weddings. My husband, in real and virtual life, was very active in the “ROMA (SPQR)” world, owned a beautiful Roman villa that I built for him, and was even a Roman Senator for one term. During our virtual travels we made many friends and a few enemies. We met some really crazy people and some really great ones. Some of those friendships even carried over into our real lives and in one case we spent a lovely evening in the real Rome with the real life representation of one of our avatar friends.

People had a lot to say about our virtual social lives; many of them just didn’t understand how we could waste our time in this way and one person said, “I want to have real friendships with real people.” But here’s the thing, they were real people. Behind each cartoon avatar was a real person with a real story, real heartbreak, real issues, real insanity, real needs. It turned out that virtual friendships are much like real friendships, with perhaps a few unique twists; people lie, they exaggerate, they boast, on occasion you can believe you are friends with a twenty-five year woman, only to find out that she is actually a fifty-five year old man and, of course, they hook up and a few weeks later have a nasty, acrimonious break up. There is no doubt that for some people Second Life usage does seem to tread a fine line between entertainment and avoidance of real life problems and issues, but for most it is a chance to play out some (mostly harmless) fantasies and to connect with new people across the globe.

I raise the subject of my foray into virtual worlds because of a recent article in the New York Times discussing whether young people’s use of the social web and text messaging is eroding their ability to form and sustain “normal” friendships, “The question on researchers’ minds is whether all that texting, instant messaging and online social networking allows children to become more connected and supportive of their friends — or whether the quality of their interactions is being diminished without the intimacy and emotional give and take of regular, extended face-to-face time.”

Read more »

David Shields is a professor of English at the University of Washington and author of fiction, nonfiction and various hybrids thereof about sports, autobiography, celebrity and death. His new book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, uses collage writing to challenge preconceived ideas about form and genre in art, especially as they pertain to literature. Shields advocates disregarding these hardened constraints, a move which will allow art to use more of and become more like life itself. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes link]

In reading the book, which I really enjoyed, I try to picture what it would be like if I was reading in a complete vacuum, absent all the talk that's been going on around it — and there's been a whole lot of it, as you know. This is probably the 1,000th interview you've done about the book.

I think, okay, here's a book: 618 numbered sections, a lot of collage writing, a lot of remixing of writing from other sources, it advocates the spaces between genres, the spaces between forms, between truth and falsity. All this cool stuff that I like and think is important, but it would seem to me that it's going to be a niche book, it's going to be an academic book, maybe. Maybe it's not going to get a wide readership. But now, in the real world, this book is one of the most talked-about in recent memory. What do you think is going on here?

That's a good question. I totally agree with you! I was shocked that it was published by a commercial publisher. I got a tiny advance for it; I blush to mention how low it was, a virtually nominal advance. I think the publisher never expected it to have a great amount of attention either. I was, of course, hoping for it; every writer does with every book.

But what happened? I'm not sure. I couldn't point to a single review. Obviously it's gotten hundreds, even thousands, of reviews and blog mentions and things like that, but I can't point to a single review that was the catalyzing review. The only thing I would say is, I think to a certain degree, the book's arguments got cartoonized as two points: one, the novel is dead, and two, it's okay to steal stuff. Those are part of what I'm arguing — not even what I'm arguing in either case — but I think what happened is, those hot-button topics got grooved into the cultural discussion.

It's not like I don't partially agree with those statements, but those are far more nuanced in my book. That's not even the ultimate target of the book. Frankly, the book just came at a time when it is talking about stuff that people are concerned about. The book probably came along at a time when these topics were really crucial. What's my point? My point is that the book got cartoonized and the book came along at a time that these things had to be talked about: what is the fate of writing now? How do we want to think about copyright in a digital age? How do we want to think about the blurring of genres? Do people still read conventional novels? The book articulates all that.

I do think the killer app of the book was the disclaimer and the citations in the back, in which I refuse to provide citations, but then, with a gun to my head, I provide citations. Somehow that became, without any planning on my part, the book's killer app.

You mean the pages at the end where you mark down, if you can remember, who the writing that you remix, revise and put together from other sources came from?

Yeah, and I also preface it with a disclaimer. That was the book's killer app, almost, where I say, “I didn't want to provide these citations. The citations are in microscopic type. Many of the citations are misleading. The publisher made me do it. Please, for the love of god, don't read the citations. Stop, read no farther.”

I think that somehow became a door that a lot of readers and critics and bloggers could enter, like, “Oh, okay. I can talk about all these issues of copyright which have been swirling around us for the last ten years, the last five years especially.” We're very confused about appropriation and copyright in literature, and that one-page disclaimer of mine became almost a Trojan Horse for people to enter the gates of the city.

The reason that's there, of course, is the writing you used from other sources, used for your own arguments. I like how that was done, and I like the arguments you use those in service of making. But here's the reaction I have, and maybe you, as the author of the book, think the same thing. What you say about how the novel as we know it isn't so relevant, about how genres aren't so relevant, about how they might hinder art, about how plots and stories may be hindering art — and the type of collage writing you use: should any of this stuff be controversial in 2010?

I agree with you. The book has received a lot of reactions, somewhat contradictory. Some, “My god, this is the most radical thing I've ever read. I can't believe you're talking about this stuff.” On the other hand, people like you, who are more forward-thinking, it's almost like, yawn, it's all self-evident. If the book hadn't had all those citation issues, the book might not have entered the jetstream the way it had.
Read more »

¹⁵And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed.

¹⁶And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:

¹⁷And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

If Arizona’s draconian new law has put immigration back in the public consciousness, the proposal for a national “biometric ID” is about to trigger nightmares in this country’s Christian id. The Democrats who drafted a new immigration law aren’t just “tone deaf,” as blogger John Cole says (although they’re certainly that.) The bill’s content and language are going to terrify and outrage lots of evangelical Christians, and could even lead to violence.

Before they try to pass this law, there are a few videos they really ought to watch.

This bill couldn't be more inflammatory in both content and language to those who take their Gospel straight … and literal. A quick listen to what's currently being preached on YouTube and AM radio today will confirm that. And generations of kids from evangelicals families recall their terror at the dictatorship and disasters shown in the End Times films known collectively as the “Rapture” series. In these films, a world dictatorship demands that everyone identify themselves and be entered into a database while being marked with an “image of the beast.”

How will people who take these ideas as literal truth respond to the new law? As Congressional magazine The Hill reports, “Democratic leaders have proposed requiring every worker in the nation to carry a national identification card with biometric information, such as a fingerprint, within the next six years, according to a draft of the measure.” And the “biometric ID” system has been given a name that seems to come straight out of End Times prophecy.

Read more »