A mysterious, white-haired man casts a cautious glance over his shoulder and steps onto a train. Like a man on the lam, he has no fixed address and lives out of the rucksack that he carries. The man could be a character in a Hollywood film, maybe one of the Bourne series, but he isn’t. The man described is Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, an internet site for whistleblowers. And he’s right to be cautious.

Whistleblowing isn’t to be taken lightly. Mordechai Vanunu spent 18 years in prison, 11 of them in solitary confinement, for revealing details of Israel’s nuclear program to a UK newspaper. Amnesty International described Vanunu as a “prisoner of conscience” and he’s been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize a number of times. He’s paid a heavy price for his courageous actions.

Whistleblowers comprise an important and undervalued genre of hero. Just as traditional heroes, they demonstrate courage and bravery, and accept personal risks in the interests of others.

On a recent Veteran’s Day, I was struck by the extent to which we use the term “hero” to describe soldiers. I don’t disagree with this use, but it seems odd that the term is seldom qualified. What distinguishes our soldiers from the soldiers on the side that we’re fighting? How do we know that we’re the good guys?

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by Michael Blim

In the Chicago of the Daley dynasty, they have been disparaged as the “goo-goos.” They are the “good government” types whose passion for honesty and the pursuit of the public good have offended generations of political machine hacks whose motto for the great seal of the city, Mike Royko was fond of saying, consisted of the two word phrase “Where’s Mine?”

Good government in Chicago was and still is an honorable tradition. It produced Paul Douglas, Adlai Stevenson, Abner Mikva, and Barack Obama. It joined with Chicago’s black community to elect Harold Washington. With Jane Addams and John Dewey acting as its exemplary turn of the 20th century intellectuals and activists, Chicago’s good government movement is one of the taproots of American liberalism.

I confess that it has taken me a while to accept that Barack Obama, for better or worse, is a “goo-goo.” He is the latest in a distinguished line of pragmatist, intellectually inclined politicians who believe that the public interest can be served by intelligent decision-making based upon the analysis of facts and the implementation of technically sound rules and administration.

What is interesting about the new “goo-goo-ism” of Obama is that it is shorn of its more radical roots. The radical reformism and pacifism of Jane Addams and John Dewey, despite Obama’s community work that derives from their inspiration, is notably absent. Missing too is the New Deal version of good government: there is no left wing in the White House west wing as there was under Roosevelt. There is no one the likes of Frances Perkins, Harry Hopkins, or Raymond Moley, just to name a few that put a radical liberal edge on the New Deal, to push the Obama Administration from within toward more fundamental government guarantees for a people being battered by economic crisis and an inept political system.

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David Toop is a composer of sound, writer about sound, curator of sound and research fellow at the London College of Communication. His works in text include Ocean of Sound, Exotica, Haunted Weather and the Rap Attack books. His latest is Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener, which explores the sound of silent art. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes link]

The idea of doing a book about the sound of silent artworks — it's served you well. It's made an interesting book. It's made a book I've enjoyed reading, and presumably you've enjoyed writing. But there is a certain core absurdity to that idea that I'm sure is not lost upon you. Is that an advantage, the sheer humor, in a sense, of writing about the sound of things that are without sound?

Yeah, It's a kind of crazy idea. I was very conscious of it, particularly when I felt I was moving into areas that an art historian is really qualified to deal with. I thought, “Why hasn't this been written about?” Of course, one of the reasons it hasn't been written about before is because it doesn't exist. It's purely speculative.

For example, I write a lot about sound in 17th-century Dutch genre painting, the way acts of listening are represented. I hope I've made a convincing case. I was very conscious that these speculations, certainly based on research and intensive looking, but in the end, you can't hear the paintings. You can listen as intently as you like; there's no sound actually there. It's partly dependent on the development of an idea, for sure.

How accurately could I say the book is based on specifically your perceptions? After 40 years of intense listening, this is specifically about what David Toop hears in artwork?

It's certainly very personal. One other aspect of the book is the idea of sound as being very uncanny. I write a lot about, for example, sound in ghost stories and supernatural fiction, writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens. That, for me, connects with deep childhood experience. One of my first memories of sound is of lying in bed, feeling very frightened, hearing a sound; I didn't know what the source was. Just lying in bed as still as I could, as quietly as I could, believing I could hear somebody walking around my bed in the dark. What I was hearing would've been the normal sound that houses make in the night, creakings and groanings, the staple of horror films and ghost stories.

But this had a very profound effect on me as a child. It stayed with me. I've come to the point now where I'm asking myself, “Why is this so powerful, this idea of sounds that can't be connected with their source?” Why is it so useful to filmmakers, to people writing these kinds of stories? You come to the idea that sound, because it's so intangible, because it's so transient, it's something that we can't grasp, we can't see. It always has this property of being unstable in some way, elusive, uncanny. That, to me, is fascinating. Of course, yes, it's the David Toop perspective on things. It goes right back to this time when I was a child, having this very personal experience. At the same time, I don't think that makes it an experience so personal that other people can't relate to it. This phenomenon of things that go bump in the night, creaking noises and fear of the unknown as heard through sounds is extremely common.

I was watching a film last night with my wife, Paranormal Activity, which was on the television. We'd seen it before at the cinema. I thought one of the striking things about this film is that there's nothing frightening in it — except for sound. I mean, you see absolutely nothing. You see nothing. Nothing terrifying really happens. Toward the end of the film, a few small things like bedclothes being dragged off the bed and so on, but mostly you're hearing strange sounds: knockings and so on. Some people find this film really frightening. I think it's a good illustration of how powerful this is, this notion that sound is somehow threatening, somehow strange and uncanny.
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by Sue Hubbard

The first work in Tate Modern’s retrospective of the Belgian artist Francis Alÿs is, fittingly, a chimera. Projected onto the wall is a 16mm film of a mirage shimmering on the horizon of a Patagonian desert highway. There is no sound, except for that of a tolling cathedral bell from another work in an adjacent gallery. Like the Yellow Brick Road, the image beckons with utopian possibilities. Yet, as modern sophisticates, we know, in our hearts, that such promises are unobtainable. It is at once a simple, seductive, sad and rather profound image. Entitled A Story of Deception 2003-6, it gives its name to the whole show.

So what is this ‘deception’ that preoccupies Francis Alÿs, a Belgian artist born in 1959, who trained as an architect before decamping to Mexico City in 1986? Essentially it appears to be the false hope and subsequent disillusionment at the heart of the modernist project, and the desire to find appropriate metaphors to reflect the urgent political, economic and spiritual crises of contemporary life. He invites us to assess the relationship between poetics and politics and question the underlying absurdity and ‘senselessness’ of everyday situations in order to create new spaces for alternative ways of thinking and doing.

There is a lightness of touch about his work, a slapstick quality that, like Beckett’s knock about tramps, belies its seriousness. In Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes Doing Something Leads to Nothing)1997, the artist pushes a block of ice around the dusty streets of Mexico City like some Dadaist Charlie Chaplin, until after nine hours he is left with nothing but a puddle. Alluding to the unproductive hardships that constitute the daily reality for most people living in the region, Alÿs avoids heavy political didacticism in favour of his own form of the theatre of the absurd. Life as a Sisyphusian struggle is revisited in his video Rehearsal I, 1999-2001. Here a plucky little red VW Beetle climbs a dusty slop on the impoverished outskirts of Tijuana, accompanied by the sound of a brass band rehearsing. Each time the band pauses the driver removes his foot from the pedal so that the little car slides defeated back down the slope. As an allegory for those struggling to reach the US border from Latin America it is a poignant image. Like the clown in the circus, who continually goes back for yet another custard pie to be thrown in his face, we cannot help but admire the little car’s heroic stoicism as an enactment of Beckett’s famous “fail again fail better.” After all what else is there to be done? Structured around the recording of the brass band’s rehearsal, the film evolves into an apparent comic narrative that highlights the difficulties of Latin American societies to resist western models of ‘development’ before they regress back, all too soon, into another economic crisis.

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By Tolu Ogunlesi

At a beer parlour, patiently waiting for Nigeria

to put Argentina on the flight back

to Buenos Aires; loud discussions on everything

from ash clouds to Diego’s immortal hand

of Goddamit! The TV proudly wears dark glasses,

drawing technicolour mockery

from the crowd, booze swirling

in our brains like a million Messi

own-goals, scored all at once.

Imagine watching the World

Cup in tones of grey! Then,

just as the match is about to resume,

she shows up (sandwiched between beer ads)

to face a berlin wall of leering eyes.

Not our fault, really. She is cute, plus

the beer. Before we can wonder what

cream or soap she wants our wives

to compel us to buy for them, she

has dropped it, her 250-kilo bomb.

She is positive, has been for five years.

But she is coping positively.

She wants us to stick to our wives,

and if we can’t, to sheath our strikers

in rubber jerseys.

“This thing is real man!” says one man

to another. “Look at her. You could never

tell who’s got it. If I saw her on the streets,

I’d pick her up in an instant!”

We laugh wildly. The way of men. Let

the match begin! But it is a man that rises

slowly from amidst us; to tell us it is no laughing

matter. “What is no laughing matter?”

The virus. The dreaded one. He should know

because he has carried it for two years,

the way we carry our prejudices, our love

for the game of the round leather; for

beautiful girls. Silence seeps from the cold bottles

in our hands, from the single fan blowing

heat upon us like an angry deity.

He is not done yet. Chuckling,

he tells of how, after discovering

his status, he began to count time

anew. B.V – before virus, A.V – after virus.

He says it without bitterness.

Then he sits down, quietly as he stood.

By this time the second half has started,

and King Kanu is strolling with the ball,

into the Argentinean goal area.

Only most of us no longer see the conquering King.

Instead, on that flickering screen, are roving shapes,

(out of a high school biology tome)

advancing swiftly, into the 18-yard box

of what looks to be the human body…

Kanu is unstoppable. Kanu is unslowdownable.

Kanu is unstoppable. Kanu is untackleable.

It is therefore yet another award-winning GOOOAL…

By Aditya Dev Sood

At my table were two diplomats and a cultural researcher. My own role was designated as 'designer.' We were told that there was a post-conflict situation in an African nation where the U.N. had been called in. Local institutions and forms of self-governance had been eroded during the long and bloody conflict. Child soldiers had been involved in the civil war on both sides, and the competing ends of Justice and Rehabilitation had both to be balanced. Our job was to plan the series of activities that would result in a contextually-appropriate program of activities for the U.N. teams working in the region. We had two hours.

We began by trying to itemize all the different internal and external stakeholders in the situation, from U.N. agencies to neighboring countries to international investors, and gave up once we got into double digits. Then we tried to bound the problem by trying to establish what kind of time-line and terms of reference we were working with. It seemed foolish to try to do anything in less than six weeks time, for meanwhile the country was burning, and the U.N. agencies would need a plan to start working with as soon as possible. But six weeks was also nowhere near enough time to collect meaningful cultural and socioeconomic data on twenty or thirty million people. We agreed that we would have to rely on secondary data from prior sociocultural research, while also involving regional and in-country experts. We also wanted U.N. agencies to pre-pone our terms of reference to a period well prior to the U.N. flag going up in the nation in question.

So we revised our ideal scenario again, to ensure that we had social and cultural data as well as resource personnel at hand for the region that would tell us enough about it before the conflict started. We would then be able to do highly targeted data gathering activities from the time the U.N. became responsible for the country. Very rapidly, we imagined, we would acquire preliminary data on combatants, local cultures of masculinity and violence, what in local terms were the cultural valences of 'laying down one’s arms' ? What threats to security were likely to be perceived by different local stakeholders? What could we therefore do to minimize the likelihood of their appearance? Even with all these insights, the diplomats reminded us, although we had established the possibility of local knowledge, we still had no program for action.

The cultural researcher among us proposed waiting for the data to come in, for in his experience, sanding the grains of culture could yield deep cultural insights, and these might then guide the on-ground actions of the state machinery. We conceded that such insights might arise, but worried that we could not leave the U.N. agencies hanging for weeks on end without a clear articulation about what steps we were going to take in translating that knowledge into a program for their action.

This is where design entered the picture.

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Peter Brunette was the Reynolds Professor of Film Studies and director of the Film Studies program at Wake Forest University. The author of books on such beloved filmmakers as Michelangelo Antonioni, Wong Kar-Wai and Roberto Rossellini, Brunette’s last book was on Austrian cinematic provocateur Michael Haneke. The latest published entry in the University of Illinois Press’ “Contemporary Film Directors” series, Michael Haneke examines in depth the art of and the ideas behind the auteur’s theatrical releases, from late-1980s and early-1990s works such as The Seventh Continent and Benny’s Video through his newest and best-known pictures Caché and The White Ribbon. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio show and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes link]

You’ve written books on on directors before — Antonioni, Rossellini, Wong Kar Wai. Where does Michael Haneke fit into this personal constellation of directors that summon enough of your interest to write a book about?

That’s a very great question. Every book I’ve ever written has come from a desire to understand an idea, more than anything else. People are always disappointed when they ask me biographical questions about a director I’ve written on, because I never know anything about their biography. I’m just fascinated by certain ideas that come up in their films and want to think about them more.

Are you fascinated about whatever ideas a certain filmmaker might happen to have, how filmmakers are driven by ideas, or are you fascinated by certain ideas, and thus the filmmakers that happen to work with those ideas?

I think it’s the former rather than the latter, because it’s not so much what the idea is, it’s that there’s an idea that attracts me. My very first book was on Roberto Rossellini, the Italian director, and what I was largely concerned with there was the whole question of realism. What do we mean when we say that a film is realistic? Out of that grew this book. Of course, it also gave me the chance to do my research in Italy, which was a bit calculated on my part, but I really was wondering about that idea of realism. The same thing with Haneke: it’s more the question of violence, the media critique. I’d heard about him for years before I actually wrote about him.

Did you get any chances to go to France or Germany with the Haneke research?

I sort of was already there. I went to his press conference at Cannes last year. He’s actually Austrian, so I have spent some time in Vienna. He’s kind of a formidable figure. I had heard lots of things about how he scares people, so I stayed away from him. I wanted to stick to the films.

What are these stories you heard about him scaring people? You watch the movies and understand how the movies could scare people, but the man himself?

Apparently he can be a bit of a bear — maybe more than a bit — on the set. I’ve heard of various encounters with actors that he’s quite brutalized. The German version of Funny Games — he even talks about it in an interview that I translated for the book — the character played by Susanne Lothar is actually reduced to a quivering mass, a lump of humanity. He’s very proud of that; I think they did 20 takes of this one horrible torture scene. He got what he wanted. He’s just one of those guys who’s a very serious artist. You know, everything for art.

Aren’t there also the articles out there — I think of Anthony Lane’s recent one in the New Yorker — saying they expected the worst of Haneke’s behavior, but they actually found he acted somewhat happy in real life, and that came as a surprise?

That’s absolutely right. He has such a forbidding appearance — I don’t know if you’ve seen pictures of him — but he’s got this white hair and white beard and piercing look. He just looks like a German philosopher who is going to crack his ruler over your knuckles if you don’t give the right answer. But I have heard these stories that, in fact, in real life he’s quite nice. It’s when he’s on the set, apparently, and when he’s doing his artist’s thing, he really has to have it exactly the way he wants it.

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Tending tomato plants while the earth
bleeds into the Gulf of Mexico

Hunkered, hovering over you
clipping your lower leaves

leaving uncluttered five inch
fur-cloaked stems from soil to crown
I imagine your crimson future

your load of plump red planets
waiting to be plucked
weighted stalks drooping

—just a trellis keeping you
from collapse

the way the cosmos
is kept by the tension of heat and gravity
from collapse

the way we’re
kept by the tension of lust and love
the lust and love of all our senses
from collapse

the way nature,
if she is honored, keeps our being
from collapse

hovering here on my knees
hoping to taste the sweet juice
of your red future

by Jim Culleny
June 17, 2010

In April of 2008 I followed the story of Pope Benedict XVI visiting the United States. I was very interested in what he had to say about clergy sex abuse of minors. He set aside his homily at Holy Mass at Washington Nationals Stadium, Thursday, April 17, in Washington ,DC to address the problem.

The Pope's homily began with a commemoration of the first Catholic diocese in the United States, created by Pope Pius VII, and established in Baltimore, MD in 1789. For the most part, I found the content to be somewhat tame with religious abstractions, scriptural quotations that were not very illuminating to a listening audience, and exhortations that I did not feel were especially inspiring.

Finally, he addressed the problem of sex abuse of minors in “the Church in America.” At this point the tameness of the Pope's homily took on a weirdness.

“It is in the context of this hope born of God’s love and fidelity that I acknowledge the pain which the Church in America [emphasis mine] has experienced as a result of the sexual abuse of minors. No words of mine could describe the pain and harm inflicted by such abuse. It is important that those who have suffered be given loving pastoral attention. Nor can I adequately describe the damage that has occurred within the community of the Church. [emphasis mine] Great efforts have already been made to deal honestly and fairly [emphasis mine] with this tragic situation, and to ensure that children – whom our Lord loves so deeply (cf. Mk 10:14), and who are our greatest treasure – can grow up in a safe environment.”

Sex abuse of minors was limited to “the Church in America.” However, damage was done to “the community of the Church,” an expression of universality. I also noticed a slight emphasis or stressing in his speech, when he pronounced the word, “fairly.” I understood this to be a reference to large damage awards to date, with more to come. If my powers of emphasis/stress detection were working, I could have concluded that he was very, very concerned that future monetary damage awards might be 'unfair,' from the Church's point of view. Or, is he talking only about “the Church in America.”

The Popes' words bothered me because he could not talk about the horror in the Church without a reference the money the Church will have to pay the victims. At least he could have put his anxiety over damage awards into a different paragraph. Here's the rest of the paragraph.

“These efforts to protect children must continue. Yesterday I spoke with your Bishops about this. Today I encourage each of you to do what you can to foster healing and reconciliation, and to assist those who have been hurt. Also, I ask you to love your priests, and to affirm them in the excellent work that they do. And above all, pray that the Holy Spirit will pour out his gifts upon the Church, the gifts that lead to conversion, forgiveness and growth in holiness.”

At this point, I was wondering if the Pope had taken the time to educate himself on the traumatic nature of child sex abuse. Did he understand how the effects of this horror are manifest in victims? Did he know what is required to treat victims, and help them to heal, recover, and integrate? Has the Pope any idea of the consequences of PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) for children and minors who have been sexually abused? Did anyone on his staff arrange for the Pope, and others in the Curia, to receive instruction or briefings on the effects of child sex abuse for the victim?

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A couple of weeks ago I was invited to take part in a panel discussion on London based, arts radio station, Resonance FM. It was for The Thread, a lively show that aims to use speech and discussion as a tool for research, opening up new and unexpected angles through the unravelling of conversation.

The Thread‘s host, London Consortium researcher Seph Rodney, and I were lucky enough to share the discussion with Dr. Lane DeNicola, a lecturer and researcher in Digital Anthropology from University College London. We talked about encoding and decoding, about the politics of ownership and the implications for information technologies. We talked about inscriptions in stone, and the links we saw between the open-source software movement and genome sequencing.

Here is an edited transcript of the show, but I encourage you to visit The Thread‘s website, where you will shortly find a full audio recording of the conversation. The website also contains information about upcoming shows, as well as a rich archive of past conversations.

Inside Code: Encoding and decoding appear in contemporary context as a fundamental feature of technology, in our use of language and in our social interactions, from html to language coding and literary symbolism. How, and through what means, do people encode and decode?

This transcript is shared under a Creative Commons License

Seph Rodney: I wanted to start off the conversation by asking both my guests how it is that we get the kind of literacy that we have to decode writing. It seems to me that it’s everywhere, that we take it for granted. It seems that there’s a kind of decoding that happens in reading, isn’t there?

Lane DeNicola: Yes. I would say that one of the more interesting aspects of that are the material consequences. Whereas literacy before was largely a matter of human knowledge, understanding of a language, all the actual practices involved was a surface to mark on and an instrument to do the marking, whereas today, a great deal of the cultural content that is in circulation commonly involves technologies that are considerably more complex than a simple writing instrument. Things that individuals don’t really comprehend in the same way.

Seph: What are the technologies that are more complex? What’s coming to my mind is computer code.

Lane: Exactly. Apple’s Garage Band might be one example, these tools that many of us encounter as final products on YouTube. One of the things on the new program at UCL we have tried to give a broad exposure to is exactly how much communicating people are doing through these new forms, and how they take the place in some instances of more traditional modes of communication.

Seph: You’re calling it communication, and one of the things that occurred to me after talking to Daniel, and exchanging a few emails, was that he calls writing, at least, a system of exchange. I was thinking, wouldn’t that in other contexts be called communication, and maybe ten years ago we would have called it transmission? But why is it exchange for you?

Daniel Rourke: I just have a problem with the notion of communication because of this idea of passing on something which is mutual. I think to use the word exchange for me takes it down a notch almost, that I am passing something on, but I am not necessarily passing on what I intend to pass on. To take it back to the idea of a writing system, the history of writing wasn’t necessarily marks on a page. The technologies that emerged from say Babylonia of a little cone of clay that had markings on the outside, they said just as much about the body and about symbolic notions as they did about what it was the marks were meaning to say. So that’s why I use exchange I think. It opens up the meaning a bit.

Seph: Yeah. It doesn’t presume that there is a person transmitting and a person that’s receiving, necessarily? And it also says something about, what I thought was really fascinating, that there is so much more in the object than just the markings on a page. About how the materials tell us something about that particular age, that particular moment in history.

Lane: Yeah. Even in a contemporary context it may have been the case that the early days of the web were all about hypertext, but the great deal of what you call ‘exchange’ that is happening today, how are you going to qualify a group of people playing World of Warcraft simultaneously in this shared virtual space – calling that communication is a little bit limiting. In fact it is experienced much more as a joint space, or an exchange of things, more than simple information. It can be thought of as an exchange of experience, or of virtual artefacts for example.

Seph: That can happen certainly in simulated game play, but it also happens in the decoding of texts. Objects that come to us from antiquity. There is all this material to be decoded that’s wrapped up in the artefacts. It is also, how much we decode and what we decode has something to do with our moment in time.

Daniel: I think it might be worth picking an example out of the air, when we are talking about this.

Seph: OK

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Cinematographer Frederick Schroeder photographs Los Angeles at night. Schroeder's full series, Night Drive, can be viewed here at Flickr.

Todd Shimoda is the author of 365 Views of Mt. Fuji, The Fourth Treasure and now Oh!: A Mystery of Mono No Aware. Shimoda calls his stories “somewhat experimental, post-modernish, dealing with Asian or Asian-American themes to some degree, but also broad questions of existence,” or “philosophical mysteries.” His latest novel documents an embodies a search for the elusive Japanese literary concept of mono no aware. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio show and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes link]

These three novels of yours form a loose trilogy. The obvious way I can tie them together is to say all of them take place, in full or in part, in Japan. But in your own mind, what holds these books together?

There's a playoff between a certain Japanese art form and a modern-day technology or science. In my first book, 365 Views of Mt. Fuji, there was the woodblock print artist and kind of a mad scientist in the world of robotics. There's a playoff between those two, arts and technology. The Fourth Treasure was about a shodo or calligraphy master in Japan. He has a stroke, so the science in this case is neuroscience, looking at the idea of what makes us a human being from a scientific point of view as well as from an artistic point of view. In Oh! the art form is mono no aware, a Japanese poetic term that deals with more the traditional Japanese-style poetry and literature. The technology, in this case, is social networking, specifically the use in Japan of suicide clubs, people that come together and discuss suicide.

This particular interaction of art and technology in your novels, is this something you think about when you look back at your books and say, “Yeah, that's what I did,” or was that what you wanted to do going into each of them?

A little bit of both. This mirrors my own life: other than in writing, my background is in engineering and educational technology, where I studied cognitive science. I've had both sides: the artistic form, as well as the science form. There's always been, in my own mind, a dichotomy or conflict going on between the two sides that want to control my life. At this point, the writing side is winning, but the other side always makes a little more money, so there's a trade-off between the two.

But the older I get, the more I'm willing to sacrifice any financial comfort for just getting the writing done. I'm moving toward that direction, but I still have one foot in technology and science. For my obsession or my passion, it's definitely my writing. I don't really write autobiographical things all, but I think that's probably the most autobiographical part of my writing: this idea of art versus science, or even modernity versus classical life.
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Seeding

Seeding in a cloud of black flies
kneeling and swatting

lettuce seeds dropping
small and humble as asterisks
noting other thoughts of legends
of a universe ripe with proteins
and photosynthesis

; of leaves enfolded on dinner plates
being lifted by forks slicked with vinegar and oil,
garnished with mystery,

sweet crisp and fresh as the day of
Let there be light

by Jim Culleny
June 11, 2010

Part One: Hosed.

By Maniza Naqvi

It’s hard to keep one crime in focus when so many others scream for attention. But every story which has the capacity to wound deeply is a hit. And because someone beloved is killed it lives on. Such a story is usually about a crime and its perpetrators.

The UN commission report on Benazir’s assassination says that in the absence of an “unfettered criminal investigation” in the murder of Benazir Bhutto and in the wake of the “abject failure” of the Government including the one in power now—to carry out an investigation with “vigour and integrity” there is “a proliferation of hypotheses regarding possible perpetrators. The Commission need not address each of these many theories in turn. It is sufficient to note that the proper response is an unfettered criminal investigation – a meaningful search for truth – which has thus far been frustrated.”[1]

Perpetrators. Perps and traitors. Every great box office hit and mythology is about assassins and betrayers. And every hypothesis about Benazir’s murder is about perpetrators and traitors. Every major hypothesis about her murder is about the quest for power by her family, or an international hit job or betrayal by associates. All of these are interlinked to one another –every one of them individually a story fit to play like a serial we've already seen on the screen like at the Bambino Cinema hall. And every story on the screen no matter how many times we’ve already seen it before, though fiction, rings true, is a “hit” because it continues to wound deeply.

The only way to get rid of the pain is to search for the truth.

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by Ahmad Saidullah

The Letters of Sylvia Beach. Edited by Keri Walsh. Foreword by Noel Riley Fitch. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. 347 pp. $29.95.

Sylvia Beach was an independent bookseller, a publisher, a literary agent and promoter. Noel Riley Fitch dubbed her “the midwife of literary modernism.” She opened Shakespeare and Company, “a little American bookshop on the Left Bank,” in a disused laundry on rue Dupuytren in 1919 on her third trip to Paris. Drawn by the cheap franc like other expats at the end of World War I, she chose the City of Lights over New York and London.

She was also drawn to Adrienne Monnier, owner of a literary bookstore La Maison des Amis des Livres in the Odéon quarter. In 1921, she moved Shakespeare and Company to 12 rue de l’Odéon, a few doors down from Adrienne’s shop. They would share their personal and professional lives until Adrienne’s death from an overdose of sleeping pills in 1955.

This was a remarkable turn for the daughter of a Presbyterian minister from “a leafy, flowery park [more] than a town,” as she described Princeton, New Jersey. Sylvia had not been to college or university and had grown up in an age before women got the right to vote in the US (she was active in the suffrage movement) and when chemists still sold Pink Pills for Pale People.

Culled mostly from the Princeton and Yale collections with some additions from the British Library, Keri Walsh has buttressed Beach’s letters with short biographies of 51 correspondents and a chronology. Beach’s life spanned two world wars, the Jazz Age, the Great Depression, and various social upheavals—what the Russian poet Tyutchev called “the fateful ages” of the world—but her letters, cautious as they are even those to her close friends Marion Peter and Carlotta Welles in the States, rarely give away any secrets.

Her early efforts seem guileless. She sports a light, humorous touch with a few lapses into tweeisms (Sylvia used “somepin” for “something” throughout), like her quicksilver wit and turn of phrase in conversation. We learn how Sylvia and her sisters Cyprian and Holly were encouraged in the arts by their mother Eleanor who felt distant from her husband’s calling. The letters testify to their love of culture but the independence of the Beach girls shocked the parishioners. The Beaches were fond of travelling to Europe.

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by Edward B. Rackley

Once departed, many dictators are reviled and forgotten. Others are respected, even loved, long after their demise. Strange perhaps, and all the more so as their degree of popular endearment isn't always linked to their political deeds while alive, good or bad. A regular surprise in formerly autocratic states that I visit, the public estimation of departed dictators is more often arrived at through comparison with whatever political dispensation fills the void left in their wake. Few seem concerned by the human costs of a demagogue's quixotic quests or the excesses of his unreconstructed id. However Orwellian their experience, people tend to remember the good, not the bad.

In today's multi-polar world a full-blown autocrat is a rarity, although during the Cold War they multiplied like so many mushrooms. In Serbia, the jewel in the Yugoslav crown, Josip Broz Tito (1892-1980) is today neither despised nor idolized. Far greater concerns preoccupy the Serbian political imagination. With two former leaders in The Hague (Milosevic never left), a virulent nationalist movement and its stubborn denial of Kosovo independence, Serbia's ghosts are never quiet. Despite progress towards EU membership and greater economic integration of its ethnic minorities, a stable and prosperous Serbia is still very much a work in progress. While Tito cannot be blamed for Serb aggression and its ethnic cleansing campaigns in the 1990s, the breakup of the Balkans is directly related to the how and why of Tito's pursuit of a unified communist Yugoslav state.

And yet on Tito's birthday last week in Belgrade, I witnessed the malleability of national memory as public spectacle. Tito fans converged to celebrate the achievements of their former leader and to indulge their fondness for the cultish kitsch that accompanied his reign (1943-1980). In a large garden on the grounds of the former headquarters of the National Youth League, we were led to benches in the sun, and limitless beer. Trumpets blared and the Yugoslav flag was raised. No one stood as the former national anthem was sung, but all were smiling and singing along. A Tito impersonator bounded onto the stage, launching into a series of tongue-in-cheek speeches. “Everything is changing, except we who remain the same,” he declared to shouts, laughter and applause.

I too could be comrade for a day at this annual reminiscence, an indulgence my Serbian colleagues called “Yugo-nostalgia.” For revelers, the commemoration was more an expression of disappointment with Serbia's inability to meet popular expectations than a wish to resurrect the former Yugoslavia. For everyone there, some of whom were too young to have known Yugoslavia at all, it was a chance to toast the idealization of a warm, fuzzy, and less complicated era. But if life in contemporary Serbia was 'the morning after', life under Tito had been a prolonged honeymoon of state excess and exalted cult of personality–a powerful opiate of the masses in its own right. Given the bloody ordeal of Serbia's recent turbulence under Milosevic, the rosy afterglow of Tito's stewardship was an analgesic for a nation's wounded psyche.

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by Evert Cilliers (aka Adam Ash)

Let's start with a smattering of metaphors. The world needs the US like a fish needs a bicycle. Or rather: like a virgin needs a rapist.

There was a time, a century ago, when Turkey was known as the sick man of Europe. Today America might be called the psychopath of the planet.

Or a beehive collapse disorder in the ecology of politics.

Let's try an extended metaphor. America is like Heidegger being a Nazi: how could the begetter of Sein und Zeit, a man of supernatural intelligence, his head full of great ideas … how could he have fallen for all that Germanic-destiny-embodied-in-Der-Fuhrer claptrap? How can we Americans, our heads full of ideas of greatness, our hallowed constitution enshrining the freedom of the individual … how can we go forth and kill foreign individuals by the thousands on a pretty regular basis?

How could Heidegger have thought that ancient Greek and his German were the only languages worth thinking in? How can we think our country is the only indispensable nation worth emulating?

We happen to be the dark id of nations, yet we imagine we're the shiny superego.

We happen to drop more bombs on people than anyone, yet we believe we're crop-spraying the manna of freedom.

We happen to be Darth Vader, but we think we're Luke Skywalker.

Heck, while we're at it, let's carry our metaphors to a vulgar extreme: for the US to have a foreign policy is like putting a vagina on a rock. It seems like an interesting idea, and it softens the idea of a rock, but in the end, a rock is a rock, and who wants to sex it up with a rock?

President Obama is the vagina on our rock. He talks pretty, and looks pretty, even to the hard cases out there, but in the end, America is still a hard rock, whose foreign policy consists of nothing less than killing foreign civilians by the thousands via bombs, drones and guns, or devastating the world economy via Wall Street. Plus we've got over 800 military bases all over the world — staging places to make it easier for us to kill foreigners.

I'm just trying to stick to the facts here. I'm trying to avoid reification — creating a thing out of an abstraction. I'm throwing out metaphors to head-butt our language into the Ding-an-Sich of what we do. We talk about America being all for promoting human rights and freedom — abstractions, abstractions, metaphors, metaphors — but the actual scientifically verifiable real-life strictly-data facticity of our foreign adventures, the realpolitik behind the screen of metaphors, the concrete here-and-now specificity of our being-in-the-world, comes down to this and this alone:

Thousands of dead bodies laid out in the morgues and graves of foreign lands, put there by our soldiers and their weapons.

Our foreign policy is to kill foreigners.

That's it.

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During the last year or so of the seemingly endless health care debate, there has been a lot of hand wringing and yelling about what’s needed to fix the health care system in the US. The funny thing is, if you read anybody who really knows anything about these things, who has thought deeply about these issues, there is a pretty simple, general consensus about the main thing that is wrong with health care in the US, and most of the world over – it isn’t based on outcomes. It’s a fee-for-service system that doesn’t reward anyone, doctors or patients, for better health outcomes. If that system were changed to some kind of pay-for-performance system with more accountability all round for the actual value derived out of the health system – cost relative to quality – this would be a really great first step in curing what ails us. Part of this paradigm shift is to put the patient at the center of their own health care, utilizing technology innovations to move towards “care anywhere” networks where the patient gets the care they need, where and when they need it.

Thinking and reading about this subject recently made me think about education and whether any of these concepts could be applied to this other broken US system. I’m particularly thinking about it this month as a lot of my local school boards vote whether or not to approve their budgets, budgets that have already been stripped down to the bare bones as services are canceled and any class or activity extraneous to the state testing regimen is threatened.

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Lee Gutkind is the founder and editor of Creative Nonfiction, the premiere journal of the eponymous genre of writing that combines the literary techniques of fiction with the reality of life itself. With its spring 2010 issue, it’s undergone a radical revision in look, feel and sensibility, shifting from academic journal to wider-interest magazine. He’s also the author of many books that fall under the creative nonfiction heading, exploring subjects like baseball, transplant surgeries and robotics. In Vanity Fair, James Wolcott dubbed Gutkind the “godfather” of creative nonfiction. His latest, the father-son memoir Truckin’ with Sam: A Father and Son, The Mick and The Dyl, Rockin’ and Rollin’, On the Road, comes out this summer. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes link]

I'm looking, right in front of me, at these two issues: one of the journal Creative Nonfiction and one of the new Creative Nonfiction magazine. These two could not look more different; for the same publication, the difference is striking in every dimension. What could've brought out such a radical change?

What brought about the change is the fact that the entire genre of creative nonfiction has changed over the past fifteen or sixteen years, and in fact the publishing industry and the writing community has changed as well. Everything is different. When I started Creative Nonfiction as a journal, the whole phrase “creative nonfiction,” hardly anybody'd ever heard of it, and when they heard of it, they made fun of it like James Wolcott did. It was something new.

It was especially of interest, but also of great resistance, in the academic world: writing programs, creative writing teachers or writers who worked in creative writing programs. People were interested, but they didn't quite know what it was, and didn't quite know if they wanted to buy into it. There were many literary journals that published scholarly essays, good fiction and terrific poetry. Some of our best fiction writers and poets started their careers by being published in literary journals. I thought, “Okay, why don't I start a literary journal featuring only narrative nonfiction — or 'creative nonfiction' — and that will give it some distinction and great deal of credibility.”

That's what I did fifteen or sixteen years ago: I started the journal, and in fact it helped a great deal, giving the genre credibility in the entire academic world. The thing about the academic world is, it is growing like crazy. The creative writing programs are, in many respects, the cash cows of English departments these days. As it turns out, the nonfiction programs are the leading producers in most writing programs and English departments. It was the right thing to do. The timing was right at that moment. Now, almost every literary journal publishes creative nonfiction. There are about 70 MFA programs giving degrees in creative nonfiction in the United States. Creative nonfiction is increasing in popularity throughout the world. I thought, “Now's the time to continue to publish really terrific essays, but also to start a magazine that can discuss the genre.”

Half of the new magazine is essays, and half is a collection of ideas and columns by terrific writers about what we're doing in this whole creative nonfiction world. Secondly, if I can go one step further, I wanted to take the journal idea and push it beyond just writers and editors and academic reading creative nonfiction. I want the world to read creative nonfiction. A magazine to readers who aren't necessarily writers is much more accessible. That was the the plan, and that's what we're trying to do.
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