by Sara Firisen

My daughter is a true fashionista; every day brings a new, interesting outfit. The other day she was wearing her Minnie Mouse ears as a hair accessory. As we drove home from school, she took them off, read the words stenciled inside the band, and said, “I got my Minnie mouse ears in Paris, but they say made in China and it's written in English. Why is everything made in China?” And all I could think was, “she has no idea how true that is.”

I have written before about the fact China and India, and of course other places, are increasingly no longer merely dominating areas like customer service helplines and IT outsourcing, but that they are stepping up their game and starting to take our innovation mat from under our feet as well. Recently, Thomas Friedman wrote about his interview with the chief executive of Intel Paul Otellini. Otellini explained, “Smart, skilled labor is everywhere now. Intel can thrive today — not just survive, but thrive — and never hire another American.” He quoted a 2009 by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, which “ranked the U.S. sixth among the top 40 industrialized nations in innovative competitiveness”. If you don’t think that is so bad, the study measured “‘the rate of change in innovation capacity’ over the last decade — in effect, how much countries were doing to make themselves more innovative for the future”, on this scale the US was rated last out of 40 nations. Last! If we really think that the state of education in the US isn’t a large part of this then we’re fooling ourselves.

Of all the criticisms that have been leveled at me since I started writing about innovation and education, one that really depressed me, was when I was accused of being an elitist. The actual criticism was “There is something very elitist about this whole article. We can't even motivate a large percentage of children to finish high school, and now we are supposed to prepare the (obviously elite) students to work toward better life goals.” This galled me because it so totally missed the point I was making: I’m very lucky, I can afford to send my children to a wonderful independent school where they are privileged enough to get the kind of progressive education that I believe will make them better prepared for the challenges of the truly global workplace that will confront them in 10 to 15 years. My question is, why doesn’t every child in the US get the same educational opportunities that I am lucky enough to be able to give my children?

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by Colin Marshall

Here we have a movie set on the spectacularly picturesque Yangtze River, each background a minor wonder of natural aesthetics, shot on the same digital video format used by cash-strapped film-student projects. It's a picture seemingly imbued with the hard realism of halting conversation and deep-seated yet somehow accepted character misery, yet it features a conspicuous flying saucer, a building launching off like a rocket, an out-of-place tightrope walker and inexplicable ballroom dancers on a bridge. Not only do its two searching protagonists, a man with a missing wife and a woman with a missing husband, never fall into one another's arms, neither one even gains awareness of the other's existence.

Clearly, Jia Zhangke, Still Life's director and a leading light of what's called the “Sixth Generation” of Chinese filmmakers, has the confidence for strong choices. Bred in an environment of meticulous state censorship, he and his cinematic cohort have acquired a skill set including, but not limited to, how to slip material of substance beneath the censors' radar and how to know when to say “Aw, the hell with it” — or the Mandarin equivalent thereof — and simply make the films one wanted to make in the first place. Yet another contradiction arises: despite being one of Jia's rare state-approved projects, it also looks through Western eyes like one of the most daming of his government's behavior.

The decaying riverside town of Fengjie plods through the process of gradual, deliberate self-destruction. As the Three Gorges Dam's construction grinds ahead just downstream, the water level rises, regularly rendering another, higher band of the city uninhabitable. Goverment employees show up to mark the newly projected water lines with plain, stern signage while de-construction workers tag the buildings slated for demolition with single characters in white spraypaint. Given its structures' pre-existing state of crumbliness and its people's air of thoroughgoing resignation, manually taking down Fengjie feels almost redundant.

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How would you choose to die if you could choose your own death? This isn’t a question that gets asked very often, but it’s an interesting and important one to consider. It’s probably safe to say that most of us would choose to die without suffering, at the end of a long life.

To some extent, we can choose our own deaths. When faced with an illness that is likely to be terminal, we don’t need to go out fighting. If one chooses instead to accept the terminal nature of the condition and make the most of his remaining time, palliative care may be the way to go.

If assisted suicide were an option, it would likely provide the most pleasant of deaths. Even with palliative care to minimize suffering in terminal illness, gradual demise can be unsettling for both the ill individual and for loved ones. Avoiding this experience could reasonably be a desirable option.

This is not to say that assisted suicide would be the best choice for everyone. If discomfort can be effectively managed through palliative care, the additional time could be valuable. One could get his affairs in order, make amends for regrets, and maybe do a few of those “things we’d like to do before we die”.

And, of course, do-it-yourself suicide in is always an option.

Most of us have a very strong aversion to death. Natural selection sees to it that those animals that are best able to avoid it survive longer and have more offspring. Aversion to death and strategies for its avoidance obviously confer survival benefits.

Aversion to death may also develop through associative learning. Death often follows painful and unpleasant circumstances, like illness or catastrophic injury. The temporal relationship with the distasteful circumstances reinforces the notion that death and suffering go hand in hand.

While our aversion to death is understandable, it isn’t entirely rational. The well established association between death and suffering is misleading. Death can be as easy as going to sleep. In fact, some people do die in their sleep.

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Victor Borge and the Player Piano

We lived on Oak Street when one day
my father came home with a white piano
big and heavy as a horse that had
two large pedals under its keyboard which
if you placed a paper roll titled Lady of Spain
between two spindles behind a sliding door
above the keys like a wood block in a lathe
and pumped with both feet the avatar
of Victor Borge would come to sit and play,
blacks and ivories (some like bad teeth)
succumbing to the ghosts of his hands
as you watched ascending and descending
perforations in the roll's paper
pass over a horizontal row of holes
in the smooth brass bar at eye level
likes flocks of geese coming and going
the pattern of perforations sliding from
top roll to bottom orchestrating the piano's
robot rendition of Lady of Spain
while Borge slap-sticked and cracked-wise
seated right where you sat,
your fingers floating over the keys
performing furious air arpeggios until you
walked your fingers off the high end
and dropped from seat to floor
pretending to be that funny man
with fingers as facile
in the adult manner of a
brilliant Danish clown

by Jim Culleny
Feb 22 2010

Victor Borge at the White House

By Namit Arora

An egalitarian ethos has not been a prominent feature of Indian civilization for at least a thousand years, when Buddhism began losing ground in South Asia. The dominant Hindu sensibility has long held that all men are created unequal, constituting not one but many moral communities, and possess varying natural rights and duties. The anthropologist Louis Dumont saw hierarchy as so central to Indian lives, whether in the family, the workplace, or the community, that he titled his 1966 treatise on Indian society, Homo Hierarchicus. Indeed, a host of hierarchical relationships—framed by traditional norms of deference, authority, and obligation—shape most Indians throughout their lives. In the Indian social realm, the primary institution of hierarchy is caste, or jati, of which thousands exist today. But where does caste, a blight of modern India, come from?

The Origins of Caste

How the institution of caste took root and spread is still a hotly debated question among scholars, but its story begins c. 1500 BCE with the arrival of the Indo-Aryans into what is now Pakistan. Data from disciplines like linguistics, philology, and archaeology strongly suggests that these bands of nomadic pastoralists came from further west. Upon arrival, they encountered long settled rural communities, which were perhaps divided into subgroups based on occupation, much like guilds—they were not hierarchical, hereditary, or endogamous. The Indo-Aryans, whose culture became dominant, introduced into the region their social pyramid with three classes, or varnas (‘color’): the Brahmins (priests and teachers), the Kshatriyas (warriors and rulers), and the Vaishyas (traders and merchants). They added a fourth varna after their arrival: the Shudras (laborers and artisans). All four divisions appear in the earliest known Indo-Aryan text, the Rig Veda (but not the word ‘varna’), and were no doubt a feature of the emerging Vedic society. ‘According to the Mahabharata, the “colors” associated with the four [varnas] were white, red, yellow and black; they sound more like symbolic shades meted out by those category-conscious brahmanical minds than skin pigments.’[1]

As the settled indigenous communities became part of the early Vedic society, they also adopted its principle of hierarchy—interwoven as it was with its cosmology, gods, and rituals—turning their own occupational subgroups into castes, or jatis. The main organizing principle of this hierarchy, proposed Dumont, had to do with ritual ‘purity’ and ‘pollution’ that members of each occupational subgroup were assigned at birth. The highest ‘purity’ points went to those associated with religious, intellectual, and administrative pursuits, the lowest to workers associated with dead bodies, human waste, tanneries, butchery, street cleaning, and such—most of these were in fact deemed too low to be part of the varna system at all, i.e., they were considered outcastes. Stated differently, ‘purity’ became a means of codifying social power relations using Brahmanical ‘knowledge’.

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On September 1, 1969, the English singer-songwriter and guitarist Nick Drake made his recording debut as his album Five Leaves Left shipped to record stores. Released on producer Joe Boyd's Witchseason label with backing by members of Fairport Convention and string arrangements by Harry Robinson and Drake's Cambridge chum Robert Kirby, the album stands as a haunting, pastoral portrait of the 21-year-old artist as a very young but startlingly musically adept young man. In the four decades since, the record has enchanted new generations of listeners and made insatiable Nick Drake fans of many.

Colin Marshall originally conducted these conversations with Trevor Dann, Patrick Humphries and Peter Hogan, authors of the three books published about Nick Drake, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Five Leaves Left's release on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes link]

Writer, broadcaster and head of the UK Radio Academy Trevor Dann is Nick Drake's newest biographer, having released Darker than the Deepest Sea: The Search for Nick Drake in 2006.

Can you give us a little background of the musical context of September 1969, the musical world in England into which Five Leaves Left was released?

I think that's a really good question, because people who write about the history of music tend to always concentrate on what was very popular at the time. They forget that there are always substantial undercurrents and smaller genres going on. 1969 people think of as being the year of the first Led Zeppelin album, the year of Woodstock and loud stuff, but aside from that there was a great fashion for rather bespoke, melancholy, quite, folk-y acoustic stuff.

In America, that was John Sebastian at Woodstock. In England, it was the folk revival of people like Cat Stevens. That's the genre into which Nick Drake's music fell, and it was a small market. It was not very popular. It became highly influential, but at the time, it was written about and talked about by the opinion-formers in music of the time.

Because so many of Nick Drake's current fans were, of course, not even around when his music was initially released, how different or similar was his music to that subgenre?

If you went back in time 40 years and switched the radio on, you would hear more music of the type you hear on Five Leaves Left than we now hear. I think that, although it's one of the great timeless records, it's nevertheless of its time more than historians think.

If you were listening to the John Peel show in England at the time, although you did hear what we would call rock music, even hard rock music, you also heard a lot of that kind of thing: John Martyn, even a rock band like Jethro Tull did a lot of acoustic-y kind of work. People were experimenting with what happened when you turned things down, after some years of experimenting with what happened to guitars and other instruments when you turned them up. Although it's become very timeless, I don't think it was as unique a sound as we now think.

I suppose this is the question Nick himself became obsessed with, but if it did fit into a genre, why didn't Five Leaves Left succeed as well as the average release in that genre?

Two simple reasons. One was, he didn't promote it. Even in those days, you had to make some kind of effort, even if your record wasn't being played much on the radio, even if you didn't have a single that could get you in the charts, you had to tour. And he hated touring. He tried it once or twice; he didn't like it. He was playing a kind of music that was very difficult to play in the student common room and at free festivals in those days, because amplification simply wasn't good enough.

He just didn't have the temperament, partly because he didn't have a very loud showbiz personality. Secondly, to be honest with you, he was rather arrogant about his music. I think he felt that it deserved to be listened to, and he didn't work hard enough to win an audience; he assumed that audience should be there for it.

The second reason is the number of problems the record had. It was promoted before it was available in the shops. The sleeve notes don't fit the track listing. The distribution wasn't very good. There were a lot of other technical reasons which meant, having committed everything he'd got to what he thought was this great work of art… it was like being Van Gogh. He'd given everything he could, and he wasn't popular. He hadn't made it. That was one of the reasons why he turned in on himself.
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Part 1 of “Psychological Science: Sigmund Freud – A Personal and Scientific Coward?” can be found HERE.

Note: Sources for this article, Part 1 and Part 2, can be found at the end of this article.

Questions, Questions, Questions!

In Part 1 of this article, I posed three questions:

1. How did Freud, with his collaborator and mentor, Joseph Breuer, and independent rival, Pierre Janet, discover the traumatic basis of hysteria, as well as its treatment?

2. Why did Freud repudiate his findings on the traumatic basis for hysteria?

3. In the face of his prior scientific investigations, how did Freud come to develop psychoanalysis? And to develop a psycho-sexual theory of development based upon the inferiority, mendacity, and erotic fantasies and desires of women?

I provided answers to the first two questions in Part 1. Here, in Part 2, I deal with the third. Freud repudiated his theory of the traumatic aetiology of hysteria, but as a scientist he still had to account for his data. The problem one confronts in finding an answer to the third question is this: How does one go from Freud's observations and recorded data to the theory of the Oedipal Complex – the cornerstone of his psycho-sexual stages of personality development, and psychoanalysis?

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By Aditya Dev Sood

You know, we all have our favorite seasons, our special days in the year. For me that has to be Holi. Today is all color and madness, the world is turned upside down, nothing is wrong, all is forgiven, everything is laughter.

These tents in pink and white are looking taut, expectant. What is it, ten, ten-thirty? Gaurang is over there setting up the DJ, Abhinav the bar, along with Kishan Chand, who is nailing down the table-cloths to the tent-house tables. I have to set up the chat-wallah-s, all along this back wall of the garden, far enough from the Holi playing action, but also away from the bar — we don't want to have to monitor the liquor too hard today.

Hari kulfi khaenge, sahib? The kulfi guy's brought the regular kesari kulfi, but also the one spiked with the green stuff. You should try one. Down the row we've got aloo-tikki-s on that enormous frying pan, and then the gol-gappa guy and then the fruit-chat guy, all from my Dad's contact in Chandni Chowk.

I always find thandai either too sweet or too milky and strange to the palatte, maybe like semen. But in the frozen cream of kulfi, the sweetness is blanched. Try it. It's quite refined and subtle, a bit like green-tea ice cream. The kick will come slow, but the layered joy that green kulfi opens out on the morning of Holi always makes me smile…

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by Shiban Ganju

Early in the morning, my cell phone rang. I looked at the screen. It was a call from India; Anoop was on the other end. “This training will not do well. The women don’t seem enthusiastic.” He was in Uttar Pradesh, in a small village – Mijwan, the birth place of progressive poet, Kaifi Azmi. I did not believe Anoop, his assessment must be wrong. The women of Mijwan must have changed in the past eighty years since Kaifi, the son of this soil had exhorted women to walk in stride with men:

Get up my love; you have to walk with me.

Emerge out of ancient bondage, break the idol of tradition

The weakness of pleasure, this mirage of fragility

These self drawn boundaries of imagined greatness

The bondage of love, for this too is bondage

Nor merely the thorns on the path, you have to trample on flowers too

Get up my love; you have to walk with me

[http://www.youtube.com/user/raajayshchetwal#p/u/1/w61ELibfQiY]

[http://crazymindseye.wordpress.com/2009/03/08/aurat-kaifi-azmi/]

But over many centuries, history has traveled by Mijwan without affecting it. Four capitals of ancient India, Kannauj, Kausambi, Magadha, and Ujjaini prospered within three hundred miles. Culture flourished only two hundred miles away in the city of Lucknow, just over a century back. Buddha walked on this land. Mughal emperors galloped across it. Mijwan has been a neighbor to riches, decadence, knowledge and enlightenment but has stayed frozen in poverty and ignorance.

When Kaifi Azmi was born, Mijwan was off the map. His tireless work christened it with a zip code and it got a post office; it acquired a tarmac road and a train station nearby. By the time he passed away and shortly after that, a girls’ primary school, an associate degree college, a computer training center and an embroidery school came up. Mijwan now attracts students from nearby towns.

Five hundred and fifty people live here. The local NGO, Mijwan Welfare Society, picks up their shredded ambitions and stitches them with a thread of zeal and hard work. India has 600, 000 such villages, home to over sixty percent of its population. Thousands of voluntary organizations – probably the largest number in the world – toil in these villages to usher development. They dangle the yarn of future possibility as their flag. ‘Save a Mother’ is one such small organization.

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As some of my previous blogs attest I have a big interest in food. This extends beyond the buying, cooking and eating of food to social and political issues concerning food. So it was with some interest that I noticed the latest Atlantic contained a piece by Caitlin Flanagan entitled “Cultivating Failure.”

The little headline above the article indicated that the title was a sly double entendre—`How school gardens are cheating our most vulnerable students.’

I dimly recalled that Flanagan had gained a certain amount of notoriety for being a harsh critic of the feminist movement and for having boasted that she had never changed a sheet or sewn on a button. It was not obvious why she should now be engaged in attacking school gardens; the only possible connection to feminism being that the movement promoting such gardens was if not founded, at least given a public face, by Alice Waters of Chez Panisse fame. All this by way of saying that I had no reason to pre-judge one way or the other the contents of the article.

It begins with a fictional anecdote. I quote in full because paraphrase would lose the full force of the rhetorical strategy. It is intended to establish the author as a friend of the oppressed and to set the stage (poison the well) for an attack on school gardens.

“Imagine that as a young and desperately poor Mexican man, you had made the dangerous and illegal journey to California to work in the fields with other migrants. There, you performed stoop labor, picking lettuce and bell peppers and table grapes; what made such an existence bearable was the dream of a better life. You met a woman and had a child with her, and because the child was born in the U.S., he was made a citizen of this great country. He will lead a life entirely different from yours; he will be educated. Now that child is about to begin middle school in the American city whose name is synonymous with higher learning, as it is the home of one of the greatest universities in the world: Berkeley. On the first day of sixth grade, the boy walks though the imposing double doors of his new school, stows his backpack, and then heads out to the field, where he stoops under a hot sun and begins to pick lettuce.”

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By Maniza Naqvi

This is about fat and no-fat Generals.

But before I get to them here’s a little gem about a way to catch wild monkeys: The trapper takes a glass bottle with a long neck and a wide body. You know, like a good old vodka bottle. Then he finds a nut that monkeys consider a treat and drops it into the bottle. Then the trapper cements the bottom of the bottle to the jungle ground. Monkey arrives and sees the nut. Immediately with no second thought, sticks his elongated paw and pinched fingers through the neck of the bottle—and wraps his fist around the nut. Then the trapper comes along. The monkey can see the trapper coming but the monkey doesn’t run away. The monkey won’t run away though he is trying to pull away. The monkey is pulling and tugging and wriggling but he can’t get away—he’s stuck to the bottle. He can’t get his paw out. Why? After all he got it in, he should be able to get it out, right? He can’t get his paw out because he’s got it around a nut and now his fist is too large to come back out through the narrow neck of the bottle. But he won’t let go! He won’t let go of the nut—- and so there he is, fist clenched in the bottle staring at the advancing, trapper. The monkey can see the trapper coming at him wielding a club—yet the monkey won’t let go of the nut. The monkey just isn’t programmed to let go. The trapper clubs the monkey’s brains out, he clubs the monkey to death but the monkey has his fist still wrapped stubbornly around the nut. It just won’t unclench that fist. It isn’t programmed to unclench. Doesn’t know how to. Stupid monkey! Greedy monkey!

Is the US not able to let go? Is the US programmed to be trapped in Afghanistan? Is the US trapped in Afghanistan while many players in the region state and non-state look on patiently and contentedly all the while providing supplies and supply lines for its war? In its war in Afghanistan this non regional and chief warrior, the US military’s, cost per gallon of fuel is US$400 and cost per US military soldier is US$1,000,000. Somebody is bleeding and being clubbed and someone is getting rich.

I think about this story of a monkey in a bottle when I read the news and I think of platitudes such as, “Government in a Box”, a concept that the United Nations rejects of using development and humanitarian aid as a military strategy and therefore as a weapon. If anything the US military is involved in opening one Pandora’s box after another which is evidence of an unrestrained military out of the box. The nut can be a metaphor for an idea and a concept driven by power, greed, hubris and overreach.

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by Daniel Rourke

According to the film industry, to director James ‘billions at the box-office’ Cameron, Avatar is the first ‘true’ 3D movie. It takes the experience of cinema to the next (natural?) level, and it does it in a way that makes the movie industry gasp. According to the industry, Avatar is the 3D film that other film makers will be watching for years to come; Avatar is the Citizen Kane of 3D cinema.

It is at this point that I could repudiate this position, arguing plainly, perhaps with examples from cinematic history, why Avatar is not a revolution, why beneath its faux-3D visuals it is the same old same old, re-wrapped and re-branded for the computer game generation. But, the truth is that I think Avatar is a triumph of film-making. Not because of its technical bravado or simple, effective characters, but because of something that Hollywood seems to have forgotten about itself: the mythic potential of cinema.

Although Avatar is definitely not the Citizen Kane of 3D cinema, it might just be its Wizard of Oz.

At its best Hollywood can be transformative. It can speak through its audience, mirroring the concerns of the generations. At its worst Hollywood is little more than a series of plucked-off-the-shelf set-scenes stitched end-to-end. Recent Hollywood vehicles that made a mockery of the art of film-making include Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, Spider Man 3, Transformers, Indiana Jones IV and – dare I suggest it – both recent renditions of James Cameron’s estranged Hollywood franchise, Terminator III and IV.

Watching these movies is like being force-fed visual gruel. A luke-warm dribble of grey matter concocted to approximate the flavour and consistency of much richer, organically grown, cinematic equivalents. These films, each in their own way, do away with characters and conflicts, replacing them with up-and-coming stars and plot devices. Instead of scripts these films have sound bites, instead of cinematography and vision these films are filled with chase scenes and montages designed to pull the viewer from one meagre set-scene to another.

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Spirit Level

I've been a carpenter most of my life
and so have had occasion to use
what used to be called a spirit-level
but which today we call a level
–ditching spirit for the sake of efficiency
baby-with-bathwater-like as we
so often do, way past what's necessary

but the hole heaps up

this level is used to set things straight
to the plane of the horizon as with a beam
or plumb as with a stud to make sure
structure's right by spirit

you breathe deep and easy and hold the level
so the spirit bubble floats in the small arc of a glass flask
dead center which if placed upon a joist would say,
this floor is level

being on the level
good way to be

by Jim Culleny
Feb 7, 2010

This is an essay written by my 16 year old daughter, Sheherzad Raza Preisler. I am posting it today in honor of Black History Month:

Taking its lead from the 1957 Montgomery Bus Boycott, the 1960s in America was a major stride towards civil rights. Initially, the 1960s may appear to be a time of great cohesive progression towards equality. After close analysis, however, one sees the prevalence of different factions and changing strategies in the midst of resistance. The first half of the decade was characterized by legislation and nonviolent protests, however, as tensions grew, approaches that embraced violence became more popular, but the goal remained the same: equality for all. These different strategies, rather than being an impediment to success, were in fact necessary, because they combated different forms of resistance.

Early articulations of major groups and leaders promoted two major, overlapping ideal goals and strategies: to achieve total equality, through nonviolence and legislative action. In 1960, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee declared the necessity of nonviolence, arguing that it agreed with effective Judaic-Christian practices of unconditional love, even in the wake of oppression. In the following years, the Committee held numerous nonviolent sit-ins, many of which resulted in cruelty against the protesters, who never fought back. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led a march in Birmingham, Alabama, one of the most segregated cities, in 1963. Policemen such as Bull Connor met the protesters with vicious dogs and fire hoses. Dr. King was jailed, and in his April 1963 Letter from the Birmingham Jail, he explained that his intention was to bring Christ’s gospel of freedom throughout America through nonviolent gathering. Dr. King also refuted the idea that the protest intruded in Alabama state affairs, because every city in the United States was interconnected, and it was therefore his duty to promote equality everywhere. This vision of interconnectivity was also present in a June 1963 address to the American people made by President John F. Kennedy. In his address, Kennedy stated that compromising one’s freedom, compromises everyone’s lives.

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Better known as Momus, Nick Currie has, since the mid-1980s, led parallel careers in music (with 21 albums out so far), prose, art and journalism, exploring the nexuses between them while traveling the world and examining his favorite cultures. He has most recently turned toward traditional ink-and-paper publishing with two volumes, The Book of Jokes and The Book of Scotlands. Since 2004, he has written the blog Click Opera on his life, work and art adventures, which he closed on February 10, the eve of his 50th birthday. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes link]

I was thinking, reading your final post, about Brian Eno's diary that he published, at the end of which — just a year of daily personal diary entries — he says, “Oh, it's so good not to have to write this damn thing tomorrow.” Is there a similar feeling with the much larger effort you have just put the cap on?

It's not a relief at all, because blogging is the best thing I've done in years. I feel like it's the ending, and maybe the happy ending, or maybe the sad ending, of a very enjoyable thing. It's become an ingrained habit in me, so as soon as I knew I was putting the blog to bed, in came a great story, a conversation I was having with Ezra from Vampire Weekend and I thought, “Wow, this is a great update to that Vampire Weekend story we featured last year.” Then I thought, “Well, I can't do it, because the blog ends tomorrow.” It's frustrating.

And your introduction, calling me a former blogger; in a way, one reason I'm ending the blog is so that I don't get called “Nick Currie, blogger” anymore. But actually, it's even sadder to be the former blogger Nick Currie. I'm hoping that'll be a very brief interim period, and then I'll be known as Nick Currie, something else.

It was, but I was a little bit worried because I was approaching a one-to-one ratio. In other words, the things you would talk about and the things you would do would approach equality. Every single thing I would do in real life would end up getting written about. There is this saying that the unexamined life is not worth living. I forget who said that, but, actually, you know, it is worth living.
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“This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel”

Holden Caulfield would probably have two hemorrhages if he heard someone say this, but it’s true that even for thoughtful and otherwise independent people it simply feels good sometimes to know you’re doing the exact same thing as thousands of others. And judging by the book’s Amazon ranking (I saw it reach as high as #7), I wasn’t the only one rereading The Catcher in the Rye over the past two weeks. Despite my determination to read it, I have to admit that I expected to be put off by the book this time around, and I was. What I didn’t expect was that I wouldn’t be put off by what I’d dreaded going in—the sanctimonious tone—but by what I thought I would enjoy—the novel’s action, watching Holden run around and clash with people. Because I finally realized that, when it comes right down to it, Holden’s a jerk.

It started with one phrase in the book—“It killed me”—and the variations thereof. I say that phrase sometimes, and I never realized where I’d picked the phrase up. Holden says it dozens of times; aside from “phony,” it might be his pet phrase. But I (along with most people) say “It just about killed me” when something just about kills me with laughter, when I find something so absurd or incongruent I almost die in delighted shock. And in fact, far from Catcher being the somber treatise on how to live an authentic life that I remember being assured it was in high school, the book was disarmingly funny. Holden is a master of hyperbole, the comic exaggeration—a style of joke mostly lost on people who take the book a little seriously. But Holden generally doesn’t use “killed me” when he’s speaking of something uproarious. He uses it to point out shams, hypocrisies, or, most often, just plain normal human failings that offend his fragile sensibilities. Jesus Christ never laughed, and neither does Holden Caulfield. If we readers find ourselves laughing, we almost have to hide it from him.

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by Bliss Kern

February 2^nd saw the release of Don Delillo's Point Omega: A Novel. That the book claims to be “A Novel” is not surprising; this has become standard practice for denoting that a fictional work is literary (read: not genre) fiction. The heft of the distinction balanced against the lightness of the tome (a mere 117 pages) provokes the question: isn't it really A Short Novel or perhaps A Novella? Delillo himself declared in an interview with the New York Times that writing Point Omega was different from composing his longer works in that “this novel demanded economy.” That Point Omega carries the subtitle A Novel, despite the declaredly different “demands” of its form, suggests that we may have too few words to describe the wealth of prose fiction that makes up the majority of contemporary English language literature. What we need are more standardized and specific terms to delineate the fine distinctions of prose fiction genres.

Medium length fiction is a term I use to categorize a work based on bulk alone. It describes those works of fiction that contain somewhere between, very roughly, seventy and two hundred pages. While admittedly seventy pages is an arbitrary cut off point, one does begin to feel antsy if a short story much exceeds this length. The descriptions of people and places have often, in these cases, grown out of proportion with the events of the narrative and have therefore hobbled the pace that characterizes the short story. The broad scope of a novel, on the other hand, can rarely be fully fleshed out in fewer than two hundred pages, with all of the elaborated characters, settings, and interdependent causes and consequences that the reader expects when tempted by the word “novel.” It is not, however, the length alone that defines a given narrative. As author and critic George Fetherling has warned, defining one version of prose fiction against another based solely on length is “like insisting that a pony is a baby horse.” Medium length fiction must certainly be further categorized under the terms available to us. So far these are “novella” and “short novel,” each distinct from the other in form and objective, as I will describe below. (I leave novelette out of my list of available sub-genre labels because, despite my long residence in the strongholds of English academia and among lovers of literature, I have yet to hear it used a single time—it, like “fetch,” simply never caught on.)

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The photo to the right is of our family dog, Treetree (we stupidly allowed a 2 year old to name her and Treetree is what we ended up with.) She’s a yellow Labrador Retriever, a breed notoriously easy to train. Dog motivation, and particularly Lab motivation is pretty simple: they want to please their owners and extra food is always welcome, and so a carrot and stick approach works very well. They do a good job, they get a treat, they do a bad job and they are scolded. Despite the fact that Treetree is definitely not the smartest dog in the world, and that we were not the most consistent and industrious dog trainers ever, she’s a well trained dog; the carrot and stick approach of “if-then” turns out to be a good way to train a dog, but is it how we should be educating our children?

To recap briefly my argument put forward so far over the last few months: as traditional “left-brained” jobs get automated and outsourced to China and elsewhere, and as these countries themselves start to move into the innovation space, the US and other western countries need to be educating children in a whole new way. We are not educating our children to be creative, innovative, inventive leaders for the 21st century, we are not even improving our ability to compete in traditional left-brained-based activities with other countries. So, now let’s fantasize for a moment that the Department of Education wakes up and realizes how truly lacking the education system in this country is. They do away with standardized, multiple-choice exams; they do away with the traditional grading system until high school; they devise a curriculum that encourages children to be intellectually vibrant, academic risk-takers for life. Even if this were all to happen, I think that there would still be a part of the puzzle that would be missing: how to motivate children in this brave new world.

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