By Aditya Dev Sood

I am sitting inside a white cube, watching things familiar but different. I know this music, but there are no lyrics, nothing to anchor the sound flowing round and through me. These soldiers, their rhythms, they seem to be preparing for an event I was once at. Perhaps India's Republic Day, which I remember attending with my kid brother when he was about six, both of us sitting in grass in front of the VIP enclosure with passes that Captain Kumar had arranged for us while he was serving as ADC to the President. Perhaps the Beating of the Retreat, which is held in front of the old Viceroy's Palace, now the Rashtrapati Bhavan, and which ends with a spectacular drum detail, no two drummers in the same uniform or from the same regiment, North and South Block reverberating together, silhouetted by the camel brigade, whose mounted guards point submachine guns into the air as the flares come sailing down to close the ceremony. It is, of course, another country, another time, and these memories have been triggered by a haunting new video work by Shahzia Sikandar entitled Bending the Barrel (no still available).

There is something uncanny about the angle and depth of Sikandar's camera. The marching band is moving past without making much progress, as if depth had been flattened for framing the scene into a Mughal miniature painting. The music emanates from their instruments but the moment is intercut with other scenes — we are there but no longer there. Before there can be boredom there is a new anomie, introduced by Krugeresque text fragments that overlay the image plane, not with slogans, but with the impersonal and passively-voiced militarese that cannot but be recognized as the public pronouncements of the Army's leadership. This is an acute, biting piece, crafted without polemic, so much more powerful for being all quotation, all documentation, all juxtaposition.

The conductor's back is to me, his musicians stare at their sheets of music. They are seated on an elevated bandstand whose steps were coated last night in chuna, lime, to shine back in the sun a brilliant, almost blinding white, outshining the musician's spats and their neelam-washed white tunics. Framed by Sikandar, the musicians at first appear anonymous, ordered, regimented. But now and again she swoops in. At first this causes me to worry that some amateurism had caused a camera shudder. But she is neither zooming nor panning, but shifting frame, capturing in perfect detail a particular Army bandsman staring directly back at the recording lens, a new composition, a new picture within the picture. This is the delirious pleasure of experiencing cinema through the eyes of a miniaturist, who like others of her craft, can see, and can desire to see the whole as well the individual parts of creation with the same detail, the same interest. Sikandar's way of seeing is elucidated by her film-making, and newly educated, I want more of this vertigo.

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Douglas Henry Daniels, One O’clock Jump: The Unforgettable History of the Oklahoma City Blue Devils (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006, 274 pp.)

Frank Driggs and Chuck Haddix, Kansas City Jazz: From Ragtime to Bebop—A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005, xi + 274 pp.)

by Todd Bryant Weeks

The Oklahoma City Blue Devils, the ne plus ultra of all the territory bands, still command legendary status among generations of jazz musicians, scholars, critics, and collectors. The band’s undiminished reputation is based, in part, on the paucity of recorded evidence (a sole 78) but also on the illustrious assemblage of players who passed through the group’s ranks between 1923 and 1933. Many of these musicians (Walter Page, Buster Smith, Eddie Durham, Hot Lips Page, Count Basie, Jimmy Rushing, and Lester Young among them) were virtuosos who made definitive statements on their instruments, and in the process helped to redefine the notion of what it meant to swing. As a working big band, the Blue Devils could reputedly tackle complicated ensemble passages with the kind of precision and assurance unmatched in the highly competitive dance halls of Oklahoma City, Kansas City, and other towns from the Mexican border to Omaha. That they apparently worked from head arrangements only made them all the more remarkable. Several Blue Devils went on to become key members of the Bennie Moten Orchestra, and, in what is now the stuff of legend, Motenites went on to become Basieites. Accordingly, for those whose idea of swing begins and ends with Basie, the Blue Devils may be said to sit at the center of the big band Vorstellung. In addition, their commonwealth approach to running a band—the musicians shared equally in all profits and expenses—has long endeared them to writers who champion the notion of jazz as a democratic process.

Given the dearth of research on southwestern jazz, aficionados have long awaited the publication of these books. The more problematic of the two is One O’Clock Jump: The Unforgettable History of the Oklahoma Blue Devils, by Douglas Henry Daniels, a professor of history and black studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Daniels’s narrative, interwoven with band members’ biographies, is a kind of patchwork of stories and assorted facts that occasionally cohere into a more composite picture of the Oklahoma City music world in the 1920s and 1930s. His previous jazz book, Lester Leaps In: The Life and Times of Lester “Pres” Young, demonstrated his facility with obscure sources (e.g., parish records in backwater communities like Woodville, Mississippi) and this new work is equally research-intensive. His genealogical research, which unearthed new data on Buster Smith, Hot Lips Page, and others, lends depth and authenticity to the book. He exhaustively plumbed the Oklahoma City Black Dispatch, Kansas City Call, Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Courier, and lesser-known papers such as the Sioux City Journal, the St. Louis Argus, and the Bluefield Daily Telegraph. He also interviewed Blue Devils Buster Smith, Leonard Chadwick, Le Roy “Snake” Whyte, and Abe Bolar extensively. Through this painstaking research, Daniels traces the band in its various incarnations from their early days in the dance halls and lodges of Oklahoma City to their final, infamous gig in the mountains of West Virginia. The author provides illuminating accounts of each musician’s early history, such as singer Jimmy Rushing’s 1920s Los Angeles period and his family life in the African American Oklahoma City neighborhood known as “Deep Deuce.” Here Rushing worked in a confectionary–sandwich shop operated by his father before becoming floor manager at the Blue Devils’ Oklahoma City headquarters, Slaughter’s Hall. On this gleaming dance floor, the youthful, trimmer “James” Rushing set the tempos for the musicians and demonstrated the latest steps for the dancers.

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By Maniza Naqvi

While Israeli F-18s created sonic booms and closed the open skies above; and the barbed wiring for the fences and the pre-fabricated planks for the wall surrounding Gaza steadily settled down as the facts on the ground; and while Colin Powell droned on about the “roadmap for peace” on CNN; and the searing heat of the day closed in; I made my way through the streets of the crowded city to the Arts and Crafts Village at the Gaza Municipality. It was the June of 2002.

I hated being in Gaza. Even though it was for a short time with the date for departure certain and with the ease of getting out assured, even then, I hated being there. I couldn't breath. The fear of the Israelis with their killing machines, overhead and all around, created an uncontrollable feeling of illness. I was eager and relieved to leave Gaza which I was going to do in a few hours and I was feeling guilty because my colleagues would stay on in this pressure cooker atmosphere. I was anxious about the upcoming ordeal at the check point for entering and leaving Gaza. Here insolent, battle geared and almost to the last one, oversexed and beautiful Israeli, boys and girls maybe no more then eighteen or nineteen years old, heavily armed and in military uniforms did mandatory time in the Israeli Defense Force as prison guards of the concentration camp of Gaza. Every young Israeli citizen does service in the military. This is how Israel has raised and trained its young. It has made them golden, muscular and cruel. Their job it seemed was to insult, humiliate, harass and terrorize anyone going in or out of Gaza. Any reference or suggestion to their being prison guards of a concentration camp with one and a half million inmates was only met with a cold almost vacant eyed stare of contempt, guffaws and a longer wait.

Weary, sweat soaked Palestinian men, women, the elderly, the sick, and children all waited outside in long lines of desperate people making futile attempts at getting out to their menial jobs as farm hands and construction workers on the now Israel owned land and settlements. They waited alongside the checkpoint barricades and in the crosshair of sharp shooters’ weapons trained on them. The foreigners, like me, trying to get in and who waited inside the checkpoint seemed merely to be essential menial workers too, who were part of a bigger more complex establishment which enabled the occupation to continue. Officials, bureaucrats, aid workers of international agencies took on the task and responsibility from the occupier of feeding and keeping alive an interned population of over 1.5 million people.

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Edward B. Rackley

Even the most subtle and complex artists can’t escape the crudity of synopsis. Grazing the critical literature surrounding Herzog’s films and career, two stock phrases repeat incessantly: ‘man vs. nature’ and ‘Heart of Darkness parable’. These signposts may guide the uninitiated, but as always the map is never the terrain.

Generically speaking, Herzog explores the complexity of man/nature relations in dozens of films and documentaries; his antipathy towards romanticism and Cinema Verité is well known. To reject both fantasy and empiricism as story telling vehicles, where does that leave a director? Because it blurs fact and fiction, Herzog’s method of documentary cinema is rogue. To contrast his approach with Cinema Verité, in interviews he cites the Heideggerian concept of ‘ecstatic truth’ (remember ‘unconcealment’, fellow philosophers?). The work of the author lies in finding friction between the facts, enough to create light or 'illumination' according to Herzog.

‘The truth of accountants’

In 1999 Herzog released a twelve-point manifesto called ‘Lessons of Darkness’, borrowing the title of his silent recording of devastated oil fields in Kuwait following the first Iraq war. Much of the manifesto is tongue in cheek, Point Three captures Herzog’s balancing act between fact and insight, where fact is a “rock beneath which greater truths hide.” Facts are superficial truths, the “truth of accountants,” the snapshots of tourists. To film facts and reject fabrication is to confuse fact for truth; such orthodoxies “plow only stones.” Illumination, the goal of successful cinema, happens because “facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.”

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by Morgan Meis

A friend put his finger on it exactly. You want the older trains, the trains with the compartments enclosing six or eight seats. You want the trains with the sun-washed drapes and the yellow-tinged headrest, marked by decades of not-so-recently-washed hair. You want the train with the sliding glass door that lets you into a narrow hallway along the left side of the train car. You would prefer the train with a rudimentary toilet that flushes by means of a foot pedal, in which, as a man, you can watch yourself pee straight down through the rusty tube onto the track rushing by in a ruffle of wooden slats below. Clickety-clak, clickety-clak. “Do not use the toilet while the train is in or near the station,” says the sign.

Europe is a train. The countries are all so close together, train close. A plane won’t do it, the fly by is too fast. You must fly over vast quantities of land or sea to get something out of an airplane ride. You have to stare out the window for hours at the unchanging surface of the ocean or the mesmerizing openness of the American plains. That’s when the immensity of it gets to you, that’s when you understand something about space. To understand space in Europe you have to be on a train.

You sit near the window in your compartment. There are the forward-sitters and the backward-sitters. Both have their logic. Forward-sitters like to see what is coming, they tend to feel positive about the European Union. Backward-sitters are a more melancholy lot. Benjaminian in temperament, they think of Europe as something you grab glimpses of after the fact, after it has already passed us by. Thus we see that space has something to do with time. Thomas Mann said it like this, “All good things take time; so do all great things. In other words, space will have its time. It is a familiar feeling with me that there is a sort of hubris, and a great superficiality, in those who would take away from space or stint it of the time naturally bound up with it.” That’s an extremely European thought. I’m not sure it’s even true, but I like that fact that he said it. Of course, Thomas Mann was Europe. I suppose then, by logical extension, that Mann was a train.

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Part Two: The Data Deluge
(Link to Part One)

By Daniel Rourke

Speed is the elegance of thought, which mocks stupidity, heavy and slow. Intelligence thinks and says the unexpected; it moves with the fly, with its flight. A fool is defined by predictability…

But if life is brief, luckily, thought travels as fast as the speed of light. In earlier times philosophers used the metaphor of light to express the clarity of thought; I would like to use it to express not only brilliance and purity but also speed. In this sense we are inventing right now a new Age of Enlightenment…

A lot of… incomprehension… comes simply from this speed. I am fairly glad to be living in the information age, since in it speed becomes once again a fundamental category of intelligence.

Michel Serres, Conversations on Science, Culture and Time

Human beings are often described as the great imitators:

We perceive the ant and the termite as part of nature. Their nests and mounds grow out of the Earth. Their actions are indicative of a hidden pattern being woven by natural forces from which we are separated. The termite mound is natural, and we, the eternal outsiders, sitting in our cottages, our apartments and our skyscrapers, are somehow not. Through religion, poetry, or the swift skill of the craftsman smearing pigment onto canvas, humans aim to encapsulate that quality of existence that defies simple description. The best art, or so it is said, brings us closer to attaining a higher truth about the world that remains elusive from language, that perhaps the termite itself embodies as part of its nature. Termite mounds are beautiful, but were built without a concept of beauty. Termite mounds are mathematically precise, yet crawling through their intricate catacombs cannot be found one termite in comprehension of even the simplest mathematical constituent. In short, humans imitate and termites merely are.

This extraordinary idea is partly responsible for what I referred to in Part One of this article as The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness. It leads us to consider not only the human organism as distinct from its surroundings, but it also forces us to separate human nature from its material artefacts. We understand the termite mound as integral to termite nature, but are quick to distinguish the axe, the wheel, the book, the skyscraper and the computer network from the human nature that bore them.

When we act, through art, religion or with the rational structures of science, to interface with the world our imitative (mimetic) capacity has both subjective and objective consequence. Our revelations, our ideas, stories and models have life only insofar as they have a material to become invested through. The religion of the dance, the stone circle and the summer solstice is mimetically different to the religion of the sermon and the scripture because the way it interfaces with the world is different.

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“I’d like piano lessons,” said my daughter, and, yes, of course, I said, that would be terrific. She was only six. How could she know that she was giving me permission to relapse into yet another time-wasting obsession, with the possibility of acquiring yet another library on a subject? Now, under cover of being a good parent, I could once again dive into a literature, slip off to internet chat rooms late at night, wander into stores that had been around forever but that I had never had an excuse to explore, and contemplate an expensive purchase. But mainly I like to read about that kind of thing.

“Of course,” I said, benevolently, the noble father. But I was thrilled; such interests had been largely off limits since donning the responsible hoodie of the parent. In earlier years, I had been there with photography, wooden boats, ice hockey, tube amplifiers, all pursuits offering a deep literature, and the chance to spend money. Right away, I knew full well where I was headed: Worst of all are the Internet forums, where I will undoubtedly cruise late at night, recklessly picking up useful-seeming advice from strangers hiding behind screen names. (Why does Dennis care quite so much about the grey market, one must wonder?)

Not all interests spawn literature of equal quality. The literature of the tube amplifier and the literature of hockey are as one in their paucity. Tube amplifiers are lacking an oeuvre, certainly, because, well, they just kind of sit there. The dearth of good hockey writing is a little more mysterious, but it may be a sport that knocks the lyricism out of people.

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Gambling and science and story-telling have a complicated relationship. I have to admit upfront I’m biased: In my science days, I picked up some statistical reasoning skills, and even those modest skills were enough to more or less murder my fascination with gambling, a fascination tangled up with my (former) ability to fashion stories around winning gamblers. I’m a little bitter.

I had always vaguely known that red and black don’t politely take turns on the roulette wheel (“You go.” “I insist.”), and that aces and face cards had no choice but to be dealt out of the deck randomly; but I’d also been pretty good at pooh-poohing the word randomly. I’d written it off with a sort of anthropomorphic bluster, as if good old comfortable human order was winking at me beneath the gamblers’ binary gibberish of red-black-black-red-black, etc. If I just looked harder—why right there, a pattern! I suppose it’s the same rage for order that makes people hear voices in radio static and see the Virgin Mary ex nihilo in macaroni.

Honestly, I never gambled much, and only infrequently, but like many males I thought I would have been a pretty cool gambler, and successful. I like to stay up late and have drinks in disreputable places, after all. It didn’t help my career as a gambler that I’m not hard-wired for the neurological jolt that gamblers get when they win money, the maladaptive endorphin rush that wipes out the memory of their losses, even if the winnings don’t come close to covering. (A gambling joke: “I hope like hell I break even tonight. I can’t afford to lose any more money.”)

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“Hitler remained a serious reader all his life, spending much of his disposable income
on books during the 1920s and regularly passing quiet evenings in his library during
the 1930s and '40s, no matter how dreadful the orders he'd been giving during the day.”
–Michael Dirda’s review of “Hitler’s Private Library” by Timothy W. Ryback

Bibliophile

Jim Culleny

They say Hitler housed 16,000 books
in Berlin and Obersalzburg—
his dark jewels.

High over Berchtesgaden and in Berlin
his books did nothing for his soul
but drag it through the muck of his mind
so that in the end he became as much a victim
of his own immurement as Fortunato
did of Montresor in Amontillado

Predisposed, he heaped word upon word
building an edifice to suit himself.
Disinclined to relate, with everything he read
he greased his skids of hate.

He owned the Racial Typology of the German People,
the works of anti-Semite Julius Lehmann,
and any pamphlet that arrived at pre-conclusions
—which proves:

a bookworm’s library may be vast
and worms may be well-read
but still be worms at last

by Evert Cilliers

“Larry, I can never get an easy explanation from Tim Geithner. He's always looking down, like he's talking to his dick. Explain to me how his bidding thing works to buy toxic assets.”

“Mr President, we now call them legacy assets. Words matter.”

“Words be damned, Larry. This is me talking to YOU, not to some dopes in Congress or in Turkey.”

“I hear you, Mr President.”

“I need me some straight guy talk, Larry, not the slick stuff we put out for public consumption. Tell me how this bidding thing works.”

1. ANY WOMAN NAMED HILLARY

“Like this, Mr President. The chosen hedge funds bid for the legacy assets with money we lend them, and then they hold the assets for a profit that could make an AIG bonus look like chump change. If they lose on the deal, we make up the difference.”

“So the hedge funds win whatever happens — and we're screwed whatever happens?”

“As your top economist, I wouldn't put it like that, Mr President.”

“How would you put it?”

“We protect them against any loss so they can bet in comfort.”

“We make it a sure bet for them.”

“As sure as betting that you won't find any woman getting reamed by Bill Clinton answering to the name Hillary.”

“Watch it, Larry. You're here as an economist, not a court jester. I've got Joe Biden for that. So who loses?”

“The taxpayer, Mr President.”

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David Schneider

Last Sunday, April 4, Spring came to New York City. Sixty-two degrees it was, and calm in the bright sun of a cloudless sky. The city had been waiting.

The winter seemed unusually brutal and long. As late as March we got mugged by the winds Chicago-style – sucker-punched from the northeast, a roundhouse kick to the southwest quadrant, then a blow to the kidneys and thrown into traffic. The winter was long. But the city was waiting.

Rites were given: the cruellest month, 1968. No, the City said, the greatest respect that can now be paid is called celebration, and forward. Miniskirts and boots, scarves sun-yellow and lollypop red, out the door on the long stroll and the City was again a New Thing.

In the East Village, across 3rd Avenue from the regal brown bulk of the Cooper Union on Astor Place (where Lincoln and Rushdie have spoken) a new extension of Arts and Sciences is rising: titanium cladding on the north, glass-frame on the south, and a delicious titanium wave cascading down four storeys: its form says, We'll surf this. It adds a dangerous excitement to the new skyline of the Bowery, where a white sail of a condo rises. Behind it, the textured white boxes of the New Museum totter like blocks stacked by Modernism's gargantuan infant.

At Lincoln Center, the new Alice Tully Hall is a clean, white, graceful dagger of 21st-century elegance, angling its excellence to a fine point: the classical performing arts yet have a home in this new era; “In this silicon world, art remains organic,” the Alice Tully Hall says with its soaring wood interiors. Is it unfortunate, or symbolically meaningful, that its broad, 30-foot-tall windows look out upon, and reflect, ugly '70s tower blocks and bland '80s condos? What does it say about this Temple of the Performing Arts erected on a razed block of Puerto-Rican tenements where West Side Story was sourced?

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Krzysztof Kotarski

The first time I visited Berlin, things looked a little more like this.

Or maybe not. I was young then, so my memory could be playing tricks on me. I know that I was on the eastern side of the city, so the grey concrete slabs in the photo look right, but I suppose that it's all a matter of perspective. Since I took the photograph above in April 2009, I could walk up to the wall, face southeast, and take a picture from a 30 degree angle. Back then, that may not have been possible.

In any case, this is not a post about the past, but one about the present. (Funny, I just reread that sentence, and if I wrote “future” instead of “present”, I would have captured the modern Republican Zeitgeist rather well.) And today, we like to think that the wall, if it still stands, looks like this.

Of course, the reality is a little different. The wall is almost all gone, and in present-day Berlin, a famous Joseph Beuys phrase is sometimes interpreted in a rather literal way.

Indeed they are. And Berliners tend to see this as a mixed blessing (at best), even if it is probably much too late to have an academic discussion on the virtues of this particular form of democratic expression.

Whether Berliners like it or not, the city is famous for its ubiquitous graffiti, which ranges from great, to downright awful. Of course, how one judges such things is usually a function of one's age, one's level of tolerance for non-linear expression, or one's cultural or political sensibilities. Still, when considering the photo above, most probably agree that the Beuys quote falls into the “awful” category since it sits atop one of the 100+ murals painted by international artists on Mühlenstraße, along a 1.3 kilometre section of the Berlin Wall known as the East Side Gallery.

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Heidi Newfield's been getting a lot of press lately as the result of her five nominations for the Country Music Association awards. She's the former singer in a successful country band, Trick Pony. Now she's getting a lot of airplay for her new single “Johnny and June” (referring to Cash and Carter, respectively). She's a talented singer and songwriter. She's also the subject of some strangely unnatural photography poses.

Consider this image:

Here the hapless Ms. Newfield, who is a dynamic and dominant performer on stage, is reduced her to a physical position of submission, artificiality, and objectification. The photographer has placed her in a pigeon-toed stance, backed into a corner, with her hands pressed against each wall. Her blouse is suggestively open, revealing the top of her bra line. She is photographed from above, as if she's staring upward at a viewer who is larger and more dominant. Her face is radiating what used to be called a “come hither” stance.

In other words, she's been subjugated.

Then there's this image:

Here Ms. Newfield is perched on a couch, with her feet once again pigeon-toed. She is cantilevered forward and to one side, which gives her an unnatural center of balance. This picture has less of a sexual undertone. The primary subtext appears to be, “I'm off balance.”

This author was once one of the subjects of the photo shoot for a corporate brochure. The photographer asked me to perch on a desk, lean over a “colleague” seated at the desk, and point to the piece of paper she was holding in her hand. The shoot was interrupted while he taped my tie to my shirt, causing it to seemingly defy gravity. Then he insisted I increase my angle of attack on the paper until I, too, had lost my center of gravity. Finally the inevitable words came:

“Look natural.”

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Michael Blim

Banks have never been good to my family. My father’s father lost his life savings in a Depression bank failure. He lost his house shortly thereafter.

Three of my uncles worked for banks. They were Irish, or Scots-Irish, and their parents were cops, postal workers, and telephone operators. They were Irishmen who wanted to join the WASP world, and banks were their points of entry. All three made vice-president of their respective banks, but one was later fired, and the other two were forced to retire for health reasons.

They worked through the sixties and into the seventies in local Chicago and suburban Chicago banks. The banks weren’t small for their time, but they look like pygmies from the vantage point of today. Local banks were protected, and indeed my uncles were protected by Illinois law that until 1985 forbade “branch banking,” whereby a bank could operate out of multiple locations. The downtown, money-center banks stalked the local banks relentless, buying their shares privately, seeking confederates on their boards, and linking them to big loan syndicates. But the big banks couldn’t take over the local banks, and the local banks continued on servicing their local business communities and writing local mortgages that remained part of their asset portfolio. The local banks were dull, stable, and profitable.

Throughout the sixties and seventies, my uncles would warn me that branch banking was coming. The downtown Chicago money-center banks with their Fortune 500 clients and political influence, they said, were votes away from getting their way in state legislature. The spectacular failure of the Continental Illinois Bank, then the country’s 7^th largest bank, in 1984, scared the state political class into granting limited branch banking in 1985. By 1993, state law provided that a bank could operate at an unlimited number of locations statewide. Federal law in 1994 opened up the country to unlimited branch banking. My uncles’ banks became branches of money-center and soon national banks, and each uncle left his bank, each in his own unhappy way.

Fifteen years later, America’s banks had become so few and so big that the government dared not let them fail.

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Time Enough
Jim Culleny

A clock and you me alone in a room with time
to settle accounts, still time enough to bare and binge,
to rewrite ends, swapping thoughts that make us cringe,
some so hot & fierce they make our memories singe.

The clock and I are willing but the flesh is weak.
I worry what the wound in you might speak.

Before the snow of last night’s furies melt
love would not be a bad wrap,
tell me what you felt.

I see crystals heaped three inches deep
on a branch of the Magnolia tree
where they thaw and drop for you and me

by Colin Marshall

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by Anjuli Raza Kolb

Patricia Highsmith, whose belated literary celebrity everyone is tearing their hair over, has these exquisite miniatures of horror that are so deadpan in their brevity that they often read like news items or reports, nearly unwritten. They lack even the tiniest indulgence in atmospheric detail or the fast and loose literary pop-psychology that sometimes comes with free indirect discourse. Some of them hardly bother with character. “The Hand,” published in her 1974 collection Little Tales of Misogyny is one such miniature. The story is about a grave misunderstanding; a two-part breakdown in the Herculean effort of language to haul around meaning. It begins, “a young man asked a father for his daughter’s hand, and received it in a box—her left hand,” and expires a page and a quarter later as the young man, “feeling now he was insane beyond repair, since he could make contact with nothing, refused to eat for many days, and at last lay on his bed with his face to the wall, and died.”

What can have happened to the young man’s love? What abyss can have opened up with such demonic speed between language and meaning? How could this ubiquitous, socially ratified expression—to ask for a hand when one means a woman’s life, her fidelity, her reproductive organs and genetic material—fail to do its shifty dance of signification? How does the literal reveal the horror of the figural? With stories of such lucid succinctness, what one can say runs the risk of putting a leaden helmet on a fledgling bat, intercepting its tightly calibrated sonar and chucking it earthwards. But since the horror of this story is first, that of misprision—a mistake or misunderstanding, a miss, or maybe a mrs.—and second, of “making contact with nothing,” I think it’s more like rehab than assault to bring Roman Jakobson’s amputated poetics of aphasia together with Highsmith’s “stump concealed in a muff” (not joking!) to let them make phantom contact.

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By Aditya Dev Sood

The body has its ways, and jetlag is one of them. I want to sleep and it wants to drum its fingers on the bed springs to – what is this rhythm? – a kind of bhangda-fandango. I want to go dancing but it has already clocked off, tuned out, leaving me to text out my regrets while I tuck it to sleep. In my years of managing jetlag, I’ve come to understand that I can only coax my system gently, never force it into an artificial pattern, for it will only revolt, and push back with stubborn insouciance: “You thought we could stay up late, but you know what, it’s time to wakey wakey again! Hmm-hm-hm-hm-hm-hanh-hanh, hail to the conquering heroes, hail hail to Michigan, the leaders and the best! Feeling drowsy now?” Like the flailing parent of a rebel teenager, I’ve completely given up the fight of late, allowing my body-clock to set his own times, picking up after him, hoarding midnight snacks for when he wakes up hungry and demanding, allowing him to break evening appointments without explanation. Jetlag is evidence that whether or not I feel at home in the world, my mindbody-system enjoys a home in time, where it is housed in the rhythms of sleep, the routines of rousing, the comforts of food and the movements of bowel.

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Part 1 of “A Scientist Goes to an Ashram for a Personal Retreat” can be found HERE.

Part 2 of “A Scientist Goes to an Ashram for a Personal Retreat” can be found HERE.

(Note: I do not use the real names of people, nor do I identify the specific Ashram. I changed a few details. The purpose is to protect the privacy of the individuals. Readers who are familiar with this Ashram will probably recognize it.)

The Idea of God

God is an idea. God is a thought. God is a concept. God is an abstraction. The idea of God originated in the human mind. Like any other idea, it has no reality apart from the human mind's ability to conceive it, develop it, use it, and communicate it to others.

As with other powerful ideas, the idea of God manifests itself in human experience. The idea of God is observed in the affairs of humanity in ways that are small and large, obvious and subtle, assuaging and painful, creative and destructive, capricious and profound, vengeful and compassionate, loving and tyrannical, indifferent and personal.

The idea of God can inspire the most exquisite of humankind's devotional expressions in art, poetry, literature, architecture, music, and ritual. The idea of God can be usurped and reshaped into an instrument of the powerful and the greedy. The idea of God can intoxicate the spirit of humankind in an embrace of all creation as one. The idea of God can corrode peoples and cultures when forged by the sadist and hater into a sword of punishment, suffering, and murder.

Because God is an idea, it is accessible, along with other related ideas, to science and the scientist. Science is an approach to understanding nature and ourselves. Science has method and it has content. The method of science is systematic observation of phenomena, and the recording of data. The content of science comes from organizing information into a body of knowledge.

The basic function of science is to describe the properties of things. Things include ideas. Darwinian evolution is an idea. The particle nature of subatomic phenomenon is an idea. Mating ritual is an idea. Borderline personality disorder is an idea. Darwin described the origin of species in words and illustrations. Physicists describe quantum mechanics with differential equations. Social scientists describe a culture's mating rituals in words, videos, and cross cultural comparisons. Psychiatrists and psychologists describe mental disorders in statistically consistent patterns of behaviors and objective assessments.

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New Morning
Jim Culleny

First I check to see if the sun's up –yes.
There it is in the sash of the second window from the right
a third of the way across because it's the 25th of March.
It blazes in blue beyond imagination
radiating like a lover's heart.

Then I look left for you –you're there.
You under the blankets, a ridge undulating so much like
the mountain that has just produced the sun,
but rising and falling almost imperceptibly
still sleeping though the day's begun.

Third, I check to see if I breathe because it's clear
heaven's just another way of saying, “Here.”