Nothing kills the enjoyment of music for some people faster than trying to analyze it. But I’m obsessed with solving the mystery of Arthur Alexander. His body of work is small. His songs are musically and lyrically simple, even simplistic. Almost nobody but the most dedicated music lovers remember his name today. Yet he was the only songwriter to win pop music’s Triple Crown: His songs have been covered by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan, arguably the three most respected songwriting acts in rock and roll history. Dusty Springfield, Ry Cooder, Roger McGuinn, and dozens of others¹sang them too.

I’ve been wondering about these tunes for 45 years now, since I was ten years old. Maybe I’m getting closer to understanding them, But I’m not there yet. After all, his chord progressions were basic. His lyrics seem banal on paper: “Every day I have to cry some/wipe the water from my eyes some.” “Oh my name is Johnny Heartbreak …” “Me and Frank were the best of friends …” But by at least one objective measure – the artists who covered him – he was the greatest rock songwriter who ever lived. Subjectively, his best songs are impossible for me to resist as a listener and indescribably rewarding to sing.

So who the hell was this guy, and what made him so good?

He had a brush with R&B stardom as a singer, but really made his name as a songwriter in the 60’s. Yet even after the Beatles and Stones covered him he had trouble collecting royalties. He lived out the next 25 years as a bus driver, interrupted only by one small hit in the 70’s. Then he then enjoyed a brief comeback in 1993² before dying suddenly.

I was first introduced to Alexander, like many of my generation, by the Beatles’ cover of “Anna.” That track is a great reminder that, before he went on his odyssey from musician to activist to martyr to Apple icon, John Lennon was one of the great rock and roll singers. Alexander’s songs lean to melodrama, and Lennon milks this one for all it’s got. Alexander’s simple vocal patterns leave singers a lot of room to fill the space, and Lennon's able to pull out tricks Alexander hinted at in his original recording, like the Buddy Holly-ish pseudo-yodels that punctuate the bridge (“oh-oh-oh-oh …”)

That’s one of Arthur Alexander’s secrets: His lean song structures make them a pleasure to sing. And his recordings provide suggestions rather than instructions. Where other writers fill every measure with musical and lyrical acrobatics, Alexander’s are spare frames singers can hang their hearts on.

Emotionally, each song has a story arc. If you wrote songs using the Syd Field screenwriting method they’d turn out a lot like Alexander’s. They’re three-minute mini-operas full of conflict and resolution. Take “You Better Move On,” which the Rolling Stones covered in 1964: A poor boy’s talking to his wealthier rival, and he humbly admits he can never give his love the good things he wants her to have. But then he turns on his competitor … “I’ll never let her go,” he says, “I love so.” Then the air fills with tension. “I think you better go now,” he says quietly, “I’m getting mighty mad.” Soft-spokenness can be more menacing than a raised voice, and Arthur Alexander knew that.

Sound corny? Lame? Yeah, maybe. But listen to this cover by Mr. Ironic Distance himself, Randy Newman (before Newman launches into his own “It’s Money That Matters” ):

There’s no distancing in Newman’s performance or Mark Knopfler's accompaniment, no sense of anything but the drama in each moment. That’s the best thing about Arthur Alexander’s songs: They’re irony-proof.

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By Namit Arora

Returning home from China in 1292 CE, Marco Polo arrives on the Coromandel Coast of India in a typical merchant ship with over sixty cabins and up to 300 crewmen. He enters the kingdom of the Tamil Pandyas near modern day Tanjore, where, according to custom, ‘the king and his barons and everyone else all sit on the earth.’ He asks the king why they ‘do not seat themselves more honorably.’ The king replies, ‘To sit on the earth is honorable enough, because we were made from the earth and to the earth we must return.’ Marco Polo documented this episode in his famous book, The Travels, along with a rich social portrait of India that still resonates with us today:

The climate is so hot that all men and women wear nothing but a loincloth, including the king—except his is studded with rubies, sapphires, emeralds and other gems. Merchants and traders abound, the king takes pride in not holding himself above the law of the land, and people travel the highways safely with their valuables in the cool of the night. Marco Polo calls this ‘the richest and most splendid province in the world,’ one that, together with Ceylon, produces ‘most of the pearls and gems that are to be found in the world.’

The sole local grain produced here is rice. People use only their right hand for eating, saving the left for sundry ‘unclean’ tasks. Most do not consume any alcohol, and drink fluids ‘out of flasks, each from his own; for no one would drink out of another’s flask.’ Nor do they set the flask to their lips, preferring to ‘hold it above and pour the fluid into their mouths.’ They are addicted to chewing a leaf called tambur, sometimes mixing it with ‘camphor and other spices and lime’ and go about spitting freely, using it also to express serious offense by targeting the spittle at another’s face, which can sometimes provoke violent clan fights.

They ‘pay more attention to augury than any other people in the world and are skilled in distinguishing good omens from bad.’ They rely on the counsel of astrologers and have enchanters called Brahmans, who are ‘expert in incantations against all sorts of beasts and birds.’ For instance, they protect the oyster divers ‘against predatory fish by means of incantations’ and for this service they receive one in twenty pearls. The people ‘worship the ox,’ do not eat beef (except for a group with low social status), and daub their houses with cow-dung. In battle they use lance and shield and, according to Marco, are ‘not men of any valor.’ They say that ‘a man who goes to sea must be a man in despair.’ Marco draws attention to the fact that they ‘do not regard any form of sexual indulgence as a sin.’

Their temple monasteries have both male and female deities, prone to being cross with each other. And since estranged deities spell nothing but trouble in the human realm, bevies of spinsters gather there several times each month with ‘tasty dishes of meat and other food’ and ‘sing and dance and afford the merriest sport in the world,’ leaping and tumbling and raising their legs to their necks and pirouetting to delight the deities. After the ‘spirit of the idols has eaten the substance of the food,’ they ‘eat together with great mirth and jollity.’ Pleasantly disposed by the evening entertainment, the gods and goddesses descend from the temple walls at night and ‘consort’ with each other—or so the priest announces the next morning—bringing great joy and relief to all. ‘The flesh of these maidens,’ adds Messer Marco, ‘is so hard that no one could grasp or pinch them in any place. … their breasts do not hang down, but remain upstanding and erect.’ For a penny, however, ‘they will allow a man to pinch [their bodies] as hard as he can.’

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For his birthday, my father asks me to hypnotize him.

“Just tell my body to tell itself to heal me,” he says.

This sounds too complex a method to be undertaken by someone like me. I imagine that when I tell his body to heal itself, Dad’s insides will play a game of telephone, his brain passing instruction to his bones, bones to blood, blood to cells, and so on, and so anatomically forth, until the original message garbles and wends its way stomach-ward, where it beds down beside the remains of my father’s most recent meal. I’m bad with telephones. This isn’t a call I want to make.

But for nearly a year now, my father’s been dealing with a condition that doctors will classify one day as morbidly urgent, and as a simple but mysterious allergy the next. All we know, all we see, is that his skin is overwhelmed by sores of parable proportions, and if he’s allergic, then he’s allergic to the world, because touching just about anything sets his skin to shudder and flash with heat. In response, he restricts his diet, handles dyed objects with gloves, and institutes a uniform of billowy white clothing. I can never decide if he looks like he’s about to go on safari, or be baptized, but this indecision hardly matters, as I’m not certain either would be of any use.

—-

I’m not a good candidate for a hypnotist, as inopportune laughter is a specialty of my personality, and while the practice no longer ranks as a pseudoscience, I’m still uncomfortable with being placed in a position of authority over Dad’s brain, and given the opportunity to do so, would prefer to take him for a dip in the Dead Sea, or a skeptic’s tour of Lourdes.

We wouldn’t go to the faith healer I once saw on a painful whim of an experiment, with a woman willing to be paid for her services in exchange for the tutoring session of her son. Beyond the cold I came down with soon after my visit, this experience was notable only for two items:

1. Outside the home, there was a garden with a statue, and a dog affectionately licking its stone hand, obviously convinced of realities unobservable to myself.

2. In tutoring the healer's son, I assisted in the writing of a paper that demanded the use of many synonyms for fakery. False. Forgery. Ersatz.

—-

I'm still not sure how to feel about that particular waste of time. I never expected to benefit, and some would say that this was precisely the problem. But that lack of expectation, truthfully, is something of an effort, as I’m vulnerable to the guilty pleasures of superstition and the colorful terrain of the paranormal, and have to occasionally remind myself of the dangers that come with believing too much. So while reading reports about financial experts flocking to psychics in record numbers, and avoiding the magical thinking that often slips in with the New Year, I also have to note just a few elements that usually accompany such preoccupations: hysteria, distraction, a willingness to exploit the exploitable. Better than to note might be to watch the British documentary, Dispatches: Saving Africa's Witch Children.

Tell-tale signs of a dark servant under the age of two, according to a popular book in Nigeria written by supposed prophetess Helen Ukapbio of Liberty Gospel Church, are high fevers, declining health, and disrupted sleep. She herself is a mother of three, and her own offspring have unsurprisingly avoided this diagnosis.

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by Aditya Dev Sood

As long as I have lived and thought about it, Delhi has been metastasizing, growing like a cancer outwards, drawing more and more people inwards, cutting its trees, widening its avenues, adding more and more floors per plot and cars per family. It may boast an imperial legacy stretching back a thousand years, it may once have been home to Khusro and Ghalib, and to styles of thumri singing and kathak dance, but for much of the later half of the 20^th century, Delhi has been preoccupied with building itself into the massive and global city that it is now still becoming.

The walled city of Old Delhi, the one with the Red Fort from which generations of Mughals ruled, and which was eventually sacked by British troops in 1857, is but a kernel of the whole today. By 1911 its walls were being dismantled by the imperial architects Lutyens and Baker, the better to be integrated into the New Delhi they were creating. At partition about a million people were freighted into the city from all parts of what had become Pakistan, and they were allotted plots in new neighborhoods to the west and south of Lutyens’ Delhi. By the 1950s, different kinds of urban elites were pooling their resources to invest in housing societies, which bought up agricultural land along a southern ring, stretching from the Army Cantonment in the west through to the Yamuna River to the east. They swallowed whole farming settlements into the south Delhi that they built, creating newly urbanized villages that sometimes suddenly irrupt its urban fabric today. Seventeen million people now live in the National Capital Region, which encompasses the informational suburb of Gurgaon to the far south, as well as the unhappily named New Okhla Industrial Development Area, NOIDA, the city’s more intellectual Left Bank, which is accessed via multiple utilitarian bridges across dispiriting stretches of the shriveled and fetid sludge that is the Yamuna.

What kind of art should be associated with this great and emerging city today? This difficult, pressing, and largely unasked question has found a bold new answer in the form of its first public arts festival, named 48°C.

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by Katherine McNamara

the tragic vision

“No ideas but in things,” wrote William Carlos Williams; and about Lincoln: “the walking up and down in Springfield on the narrow walk between the two houses, day after day, with a neighbor's baby, borrowed for the occasion, sleeping inside his cape upon his shoulder to give him stability while thinking and composing his coming speeches….”

Here is Obama, for three years a community organizer in Chicago, during the mayoralty of the great Harold Washington, the hope of black people. Suddenly, Washington dies. The young man goes to the wake and sees the skull beneath the skin.

“There was no political organization in place, no clearly defined principles to follow. The entire of black politics had centered on one man who radiated like a sun. Now that he was gone, no one could agree on what that presence had meant.

“The loyalists squabbled. Factions emerged. Rumors flew. By Monday, the day the city council was to select a new mayor to serve until the special election, the coalition that had first put Harold in office was all but extinguished. I went down to City Hall that evening to watch this second death. . . .

“But power was patient and knew what it wanted; power could out-wait slogans and prayers and candlelight vigils. Around midnight, just before the council got around to taking a vote, the door to the chambers opened briefly and I saw two of the aldermen off in a huddle. One, black, had been Harold's man; the other, white, Vrdolyak's. They were whispering now, smiling briefly, then looking out at the still-chanting crowd and quickly suppressing their smiles, large, fleshy men in double-breasted suits with the same look of hunger to their eyes — men who knew the score.

“I left after that. I pushed through the crowds that overflowed into the streets and began walking across Daley Plaza toward my car. The wind whipped up cold and sharp as a blade, and I watched a hand-made sign tumble past me. HIS SPIRIT LIVES ON, the sign read in heavy block letters. And beneath the words of that picture I had seen so many times while waiting for a chair in Smitty's barbershop: the handsome, grizzled face; the indulgent smile; the twinkling eyes; now blowing across the empty space, as easily as an autumn leaf.”

Amid desolation, beyond irony, the writer has assented to the tragic sense of life. He does not give way to hopelessness; he observes what exists and must be engaged with, not wished away. He will bend his will like the arc of a bow to a higher purpose, which is, he recognizes, as real as, but of a different nature than, worldly power. Shedding only some of his skepticism (he notes wryly), he embraces — is embraced by — a Christian faith carried in traditions of the black church: its embodiment of the Word as agency, and so, its spur to social change.

“Out of necessity,” he would write, “the black church had to minister to the whole person. Out of necessity, the black church rarely had the luxury of separating individual salvation from collective salvation.” His hard-won knowledge, as radiant as his smile, is that “the sins of those who came to church were not so different from the sins of those who didn't, and so were as likely to be talked about with humor as with condemnation.” (He knows they see that he “knew their Book and shared their values and sang their songs,” but that part of him would always remain “removed, detached, an observer among them.”)

What he loved was the thisness of the community. “You needed to come to church precisely because you were of this world, not apart from it; rich, poor, sinner, saved, you needed to embrace Christ precisely because you had sins to wash away — because you were human and needed an ally in your difficult journey, to make the peaks and valleys smooth and render all those crooked paths straight.”

Obama's beloved community was the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's Church of Christ, which, for years, he attended every Sunday at 11 a.m. You can imagine his grief at the sacrifice which a media-amplified politics demanded of him, his forced parting from Wright, the man who had given him his beautiful shield against desolation, the audacity of hope.

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by Beth Ann Bovino

This was a record-breaking year, though there was almost no good news. As it came to a close, most welcomed its departure. Unfortunately, we expect more tough times ahead in 2009, with no turn around likely until later next year. The current financial crisis has deeply frightened consumers and businesses, and in response they have sharply pulled back spending, making the recession even more severe. Moreover, the usual recovery tools used by governments, monetary and fiscal stimuli, are relatively ineffective given the circumstances. The economy won’t likely reach bottom till spring of next year, with risk of an even bigger recession more pronounced.

The National Bureau of Economic Research officially declared that the U.S. has been in recession since last December, only surprising those living at the North Pole. The downturn is expected to approach the slump of 1981-82 and be even longer, bottoming out in the spring of next year, which would make this the longest postwar recession. After a strong rebate-check related second quarter, four consecutive quarters of negative growth is expected through the second quarter of 2009, with risk that the fourth quarter will be down 6% based on current data. Employment dropped for the eleventh consecutive month in November, with 2.1 million jobs lost over last year, the biggest 12-month job loss since the 1982 recession. Financial markets remain in distress. Housing is still in recession, with November housing starts falling to the lowest pace since World War II. Not surprisingly, both business and consumer confidence remain weak.

The spendthrift habits of American consumers are a likely casualty of the crisis. Consumers and banks are becoming more cautious, and we expect household debt to decline from record levels, relative to income and to assets. The household saving rate is likely to increase, how much will help determine how quickly the economy revives.

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by Norman Costa

[Part 1 of “My Father: A Veteran's Story” can be found here.]

The Meaning of War

There is nothing about war that is to be celebrated. As an art, a force, or an institution, war is the killing of people and the destruction of property in the name of, and in the service of, a people or a nation state. I recommend Christopher Hedges' “War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning.” It is a searing account, of not only the devastation of the acts and scenes of war but, of the disability, suffering, and destruction that follows war. The best book on war is still “The Iliad”, by Homer. Beginning with the first part of “My Father: A Veteran's Story” I wanted to tell a story about one soldier's war that had many facets: heroics, cowardice, sacrifice, selfishness, futility, redemption, atrocity, generosity, suffering, loss, randomness, meaning, and enigma. For my father, it was all of the above in terms of what he experienced and what he observed. For reasons that I can't explain, his first combat experience in the Battle of Graignes (Part 1) was THE defining event of his life. No other vet with whom I spoke had the same transforming experience in Graignes as my father. I am very proud of his military service, and so is he; but it was not without the blurring of the distinction between the light and dark elements of his own human nature. He confided to me an act that I have never disclosed before to anyone. We were talking about the reprisal executions by the Germans following the Battle of Graignes. In particular, he was talking about the execution by bayonet of the wounded paratroopers who were being tended by the local priest and his priest friend. He told me that he and others shot their own German prisoners. I don't know how many, or when in the battle it happened. The GIs had no resources to guard, feed, or give medical assistance to any prisoners. In his mind they had to kill the German prisoners or else they would put their own situation in further jeopardy. However, he allowed no excuse to the Germans for killing the wounded American soldiers. He said, “They had the resources to take and keep prisoners. We didn't.”

His story was the same as for many Americans who went to war: pride, opportunism, adventure, being 'young and dumb', patriotism, obligation, duty, 'having more balls than brains', breaking the boredom of life, anger, rage, and fight. Let's not forget the absence of a real sense of their own mortality before they experienced combat. After the war, his story was still the same for many veterans, except the American culture after World War II had no tolerance, nor understanding, for the severe costs to the returning GIs that would last them a lifetime. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) for the WWII veteran was a sentence to a lifetime of grief, sadness, dissociation, repression, anxiety, self destructive behavior, depression, and a sense of isolation from loved ones and family. For some it ended in suicide. One GI who took his own life was a Medal of Honor winner for extreme heroism as a medic and saving many lives at the risk of his own during the worst of a three hour battle. He was a friend of my father for many years.

There is another reason I am telling his story. I want to be able to understand my own. There's an old Irish saying, “You can't tell your own story until you've told the story of your father and grandfather.” So this telling is also a part of a very personal journey.

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by Shiban Ganju

Jack arrived in the hospital a few minutes after midnight. Next morning he was dead.

Death visits a hospital in sobs, shrieks or stoic silence. It stumbles with stroke, burns with feverish sepsis, crashes in with a fractured torso, stuns a teenager with drug overdose, rams the chest with a heart attack, relieves agonizing cancer, or just sneaks in sleep with stealth. In all its forms, death is a process.

“The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed” (T S Eliot)

But Jack’s death was different.

He was healthy just two weeks back – he did no drugs, he exercised, he worked, he voted and he was in love. And now he was on life support. Plastic tubes and wires connected his body to bottles, monitors and an armory of medical gadgets. With his chiseled nose, calm countenance, eyes shut, long dark black hair sprayed on the white pillow, he looked pristine – even on the ventilator. His face reflected the golden hue of bile seeped into his skin. The feeble pulse, high fever, low blood pressure and delirious thrashing of limbs foretold gloom. The air of death hung heavy over his bed. And he was only thirty-three.

The process of death unravels in the molecules deep inside the cells and shatters emotions on surface. Irrespective of the first cause, the processes have a broad similarity. But all death is not dangerous. Some part of us is dying all the time without any harm to our physique or emotions.

Body cells have a life span: red blood cells live one hundred eighty days, platelets live for a week, intestinal lining rejuvenates in one to seven days. Approximately fifty to seventy billion cells die every day. Even in children under fourteen, twenty to thirty billon cells vanish daily. With this continual destruction and proliferation, in one year, we probably replace cell mass equal to our body weight.

Our cells also disintegrate with a programmed protocol that paradoxically keeps the body in state of health. Scientists call it apoptosis. When something goes wrong inside the cell, cell generates an appropriate biochemical signal, which triggers a sequence of biochemical processes: scaffold collapses, cell shrivels, nucleus condenses, DNA fragments and its membrane blisters. Enzymes dissolve the contents of a cell and break it into small sacks. Roaming scavenger white blood cells mop up the debris.

This process is protective and apoptosis gone wrong can unleash havoc like cancer. Apoptosis does not damage the body, which differentiates it from another form of cell death – the harmful necrosis. Infection, physical injury, poisons and lack of oxygen can provoke a cascade of reactions producing toxins that irreversibly damage the cell and also its surrounding tissue. Examples are: heart attack or paralytic stroke due to lack of oxygen and staphylococcus bacteria grinding normal tissue into an abscess. The sequence of chemical events in necrosis differs from apoptosis.

Necrosis can damage a single organ, which may not cause death unless the organ is life sustaining like heart or brain. Both these organs are extremely vulnerable to oxygen deprivation; a few minutes of anoxia or absence of oxygen damages the heart muscle, which looses it strength to pump oxygenated blood into the brain cells. Neurons deprived of oxygen collapse fast – within four to eleven minutes – causing irreversible brain death. The sequence of anoxia can also initiate from the respiratory center in the brain stem – the part of brain at its junction with the spinal cord, where the neck meets the skull. The center controls the depth and speed of respiration. Any damage to this center- as in head injury or stroke- will depress breathing and cause anoxia, which then damages other parts of the brain, heart and the rest of the body. Irrespective of the initiating event, anoxia seems to be one of the prominent determining events of cell death.

What happened?

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My father died four years ago today. At the time, my sister Azra published a shorter version of this obituary in Karachi's leading English newspaper, Dawn:

–S. Abbas Raza

MEMBER OF PAKISTAN CIVIL SERVICE, RESPECTED AUTHOR AND INTELLECTUAL, SYED ALI RAZA DIES AT 91

by Azra Raza

Syed Ali Raza, Retired Director, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Pakistan, died peacefully in his sleep at Musa House, Karachi, on Wednesday, January 5^th, 2005 at 2:25 a.m. The youngest of four children of Syed Zamarrud Hussain (1876-1932) and Hashmi Begum (1885-1956), he was born in Bijnor, India, on November 29^th, 1913. His paternal lineage is Rizvi Syed, tracing back to the Prophet Muhammad through Imam Ali Raza whose descendent Shah Syed Hassan Rasoolnuma arrived in Bengal from Sabzwar, Iran, in 1355 AD. Apparently he so impressed the ruling monarch Badshah Ghiassuddin with his charm and intellect that the King gave him the hand of the Royal Princess in marriage. The ruler of Delhi, Mubarak Shah, then invited Shah Syed Hassan to his Court where he served faithfully by overpowering the rebellion mounted by a smaller Principality. He was rewarded by being given the properties of Jarcha and Chols in Bulandsheher, UP. Shah Syed Hassan’s grandson, Syed Shah Jalal distinguished himself even further through his exceptional scholarship, courage, intellect, and leadership such that both Hindus and Muslims viewed him with the respect and awe accorded a spiritual leader or Pir in his lifetime. His mausoleum in Bijnor became a site for worship and elaborate annual rites commemorate his many and varied accomplishments to this day. The maternal side of Syed Ali Raza’s lineage is Zaidi Syed, his maternal great-grandfather Syed Muzaffar Ali was attached to the Oudh court with extensive landholdings in Muzaffar Nagar. Stories of his extraordinary wealth circulated including the reputation of his wife for leaving behind enough gold and silver threads which fell from her exotic dresses, for the servants to fight over each time she left a party. Ali Raza’s parents lost 6 children (ranging in age from 1-16 years, named Zainul Ibad, Ali Murad, Ali Imjad, Ali Ibad, Sadiqa Khatoon and Muhammad Raza) to the epidemics of plague, influenza and typhoid over a decade. The extreme grief affected both parents, but especially disheartened Ali Raza’s father Syed Zamarrud Hussain, who simultaneously lost his 28 year old brother, 26 year old sister-in-law and their only child. Inconsolable and anguished by the deep sorrow of losing practically his entire close family, he left the ancestral home accompanied by his wife, for a more or less nomadic existence, wandering for several years through Dehradoon and smaller villages (Kandhra, Kirana, Shamli) of Muzaffar Nagar. Three more children were born during this period, and the family finally returned to Bijnor where Ali Raza was born in 1913.

Cataclysmic changes in the ancestral home including the untimely loss of family members in the prime of their lives to epidemics with consequential disenchantment and world-weariness, as well as Natural disasters such as repeated droughts resulted in demoralization and neglect of material properties to the extent that living there became unbearable for the Raza clan. Because of the family’s economic independence due to the extensive land-holdings until that time, pursuit of knowledge was mainly confined to a rigorous religious education for male members. A culture of knowledge for the sake of knowledge prevailed. Now, things changed so that education became a necessity for economic reasons as well. With the disastrous turn-around in the family’s financial and personal fortune, and the ascendancy of British control in India, Ali Raza’s parents were pragmatic enough to recognize the need for securing the best available secular education for their four surviving children. This was not possible in the village, so they took the bold step of saying goodbye for the final time to their ancestral home and migrated to the nearest larger city. By the time Ali Raza was 4 years old, his father had relocated the family to Lucknow, a city famous across the subcontinent for its high culture.

Ali Raza recounts in his autobiography, an incidence imprinted on his memory from this traumatic farewell. He had a number of pet geese that could not be moved to Lucknow. A decision was made by the family to leave these behind with his maternal Uncle. Ali Raza cried his heart out upon being forced to give up his beloved geese and for many years thereafter, carried a negative feeling in his heart about this poor Uncle.

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by Shiko Behar

On December 30, 2008 the New York Times published its first editorial on the recent bombings of Gaza. The editors open their text with the following claim: “Hamas must bear responsibility for ending a six-month cease-fire this month with a barrage of rocket attacks into Israeli territory.”

While the editors assign the blame conveniently and squarely on Hamas, this nevertheless remains a factually erroneous statement contradicting reporting by Israeli newspapers (in both Hebrew and English), the British press, Amnesty International and – perhaps curiously enough – November 2008 reporting by the NYT itself.

On November 12, the paper’s Jerusalem reporter, Isabel Kershner, wrote: “At least six Palestinian militants were killed in a clash and an Israeli airstrike on Nov. 4 after an Israeli force entered Gaza for the first time in five months.”

Therefore, the rockets into Israeli territory after nearly six months of cease-fire followed – rather than preceded – the Israeli invasion into, and the killings of Palestinians inside, the occupied Gaza Strip. On November 14, the paper’s Jerusalem Bureau Chief, Ethan Bronner, re-stated the same facts reported by Kershner; he additionally voiced them in his accompanying interview on NYT radio – both can be read/heard here.

More crucially, Israeli and international sources from the first week of November 2008 – sources that are scholarly and (otherwise) more reliable than the NYT – shed further light on the misleading claim by the NYT editors. They include, but are by no means limited to:

The Israeli Haaretz, November 5, 2008: “Israel Defense Forces troops yesterday killed a Hamas gunman and wounded two others in the first armed clash in the Gaza Strip since a cease-fire was declared there in June. […] An Israeli army spokeswoman said troops had entered the territory.”

The Israeli Yediot Ahronot, November 5, 2008: “For the first time since the ceasefire took effect in June, IDF forces operated deep in the Gaza Strip Tuesday night.”

(Note: had the NYT editors bothered to consult Hebrew sources they would have easily found that the Hebrew version of the news item cited above is even clearer.)

The Times (UK), November 5, 2008: “A five-month truce between Israel and the Islamist rulers of the Gaza Strip was foundering yesterday after Israeli special forces entered the besieged territory and fought.”

Amnesty International, November 10, 2008: “A spate of Israeli and Palestinian attacks and counter-attacks in the past 24 hours could spell the end of a five-and-a-half-month ceasefire. […] The killing of six Palestinian militants in Gaza by Israeli forces in a ground incursion and air strikes on 4 November was followed by a barrage of dozens of Palestinian rockets.”

The Guardian, November 5, 2008: “Hamas militants fired more than 35 rockets into Israel today, hours after the Israeli army killed six people inside the Gaza Strip in the first major exchange of fire since a truce took effect in June.”

The Independent, November 5, 2008: “Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip fired more than 35 rockets towards Israel today, the army and the Islamist group said, hours after the Israeli army killed six militants in the coastal territory.”

***

Curiously, the NYT opinion page chose to host two Israeli Jews two days in a row (Benni Morris and David Grossman) to voice their thoughts (representing left and right Zionism). The paper apparently did not find it necessary – if only to maintain the façade of journalistic objectivity – to invite an Arab from Gaza (or elsewhere) to opine. This is particularly intriguing given that the death toll at the time stood at 360 Palestinians to 3 Israelis. The history of the NYT’s sloppy reporting on the Israeli-Arab conflict makes it unlikely that the editors will bother to correct their erroneous – and needlessly inflammatory – editorial.

Lastly, it is worth emphasizing that inaccuracies such as that of the NYT must be considered as much anti-Israeli/anti-Jewish – as they are certainly anti-Palestinian/anti-Arab: factual fallacies (let alone lies), whether willful or unintentional, benefit neither Israeli Jews, nor Palestinian Arabs, nor – most critically – the mere possibility for their more hopeful joint future. Illuminating such errors is therefore a simultaneously pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian act. Perhaps it is also pro-human.

ADDENDUM:

In fact, a 16 November commentary by Dr. Zvi Bar'el, Israel's most senior analyst on Arab affairs, further confirms the NYT's (yet-to-be-retracted) grave factual error:

“[…] It is impossible to claim that those who decided to blow up the tunnel were simply being thoughtless. The military establishment was aware of the immediate implications of the measure, as well as of the fact that the policy of “controlled entry” into a narrow area of the Strip leads to the same place: an end to the lull. That is policy – not a tactical decision by a commander on the ground.”

UPDATE 1/8/08: Part two of this article can be seen here.

Shiko Behar is a friend of 3QD and presently a melancholic Israeli citizen.

by Anjuli Raza Kolb

For me, moving into adulthood was and continues to be a series of amplifying revulsions as I find out more and more about what goes on in grown-ups’ secret lives. If this sounds peevish and stufepyingly lacking in empathy, it is. But I think it’s the reason that I am especially moved by stories that shuttle us to the outermost limits of what is morally and viscerally incorporable—can I love this person who likes Radiohead (no)? Can I love this person who is deceiving his affianced (yes)? Can I love this person who eats in this fashion, tongue preceding lips and teeth? Whose eyes change color? Who scales ice-cold hospital walls in an unseasonably light nightie with bare feet? Who, in sleepless hungry nights, kills middle-aged men to guzzle their blood and in the ensuing froth might be incapable of not also drinking me dry? Yes please.

Horror stories, and vampire tales in particular, are almost always read according to a series of circulating paranoias that range from the intensely personal to the anxious social. Disquiet about chastity, virginity, invasion of the domestic space, and contagion occupy the more intimate chambers of such paranoias. Xenophobia is one of the most obvious of the latter, more social agitations. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is the paradigm for such interpretations, obsessively detailing cultural and psychological difference through letters, physicians’ diaries, shipping bills, and journals. In what is perhaps the imprisoned solicitor Jonathan Harker’s most uncanny discovery in Castle Dracula, he learns that the Count is applying himself rigorously to the study of English culture and idiom, revealing not only the monster’s focus and drive, but also the promise of an unidentifiable and dangerous assimilation about to take place—an intimate and secret invasion that activates all the more personal, antigenic panics on the other end of the spectrum.

What’s interesting to me about vampire stories is how they cut two paths around a particularly feminine adolescent narcissism with which I am uncomfortably familiar. On the front side, they model a generosity of spirit and a maternal instinct that allows especially sensitive, brainy, outsidery beauties to fantasize about what amounts to gestating and/or breast-feeding (neck-feeding? blood-nursing? lactation station at the blood bank?) anemic boys at the expense of their own strength. Like Bram Stoker’s Mina Harker and Lucy Westenra, and more recently Stephanie Meyer’s Isabella Swan from the Twilight series, these often-female subjects, defined by their independence and smarts, find themselves moved by the idea of becoming providers, life-lines. The failers-to-thrive they thusly nurse or dream of nursing—and herein lies the seduction for at least a century’s worth of voracious female readers—are paradoxically capable of puncturing the taut skin of their defenses, at throat and hotly thither.

At the back, there’s the promise that whatever ontological distance exists between two people can, if necessity or passion should force our hand, be eliminated by the quick and dirty trick of sharing a blood supply. In other words, a more thanatophilic version of my favorite flea from John Donne’s Songs and Sonnets who unites the speaker’s blood with his reluctant lover’s in its promiscuous gut to render them “more than married.” This sanguine exchange is, I think, equally heady to both vampire and victim because for each it can expeditiously turn the other into a version of the self, or at least a separate being infected with the self. Victims become vampires, and vampires make the blood of their prey circulate through their own veins becoming fully inhabited, at least until the next meal—a solution to solitude not entirely different from the tried and true umbilical connection between mother and foetus.

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by Bryant Urstadt

Here’s Harold L. Humes again, back from the dead this time, rising from the boiling mists of time like The Swamp Thing, dripping muddy secrets and forgotten brilliance and true madness. Nothing new about that, in a way. He was always showing up with his own invite, overstaying a welcome he had extended to himself. His appearance in a PBS documentary making the rounds of local public stations this winter is among the least strange of his drop-ins.

He appeared at James Jones’ funeral in 1978, with a boulder in the back of his station wagon, which required three men to unload. Jones was the author of From Here to Eternity, just the kind of bright literary lamp Humes would introduce himself to when he was alive. The boulder is still on the lawn in Bridgehampton. Fine, but… Humes had never met Jones.

He showed up at Random House in the mid-Fifties with a stellar novel, just moved in with his manuscript and his toothbrush and his motorcycle, which he wheeled into the lobby of the office of founder Bennett Cerf, when Random was located in the more motorcycle-friendly Villard Mansion, just behind St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Madison Avenue.

“You didn’t just meet Humes,” remembers Random House editor Bob Loomis, who edited Humes’ second novel, Men Die.

*

Loomis, now 80, is the embodiment of the legend of Random, having worked with everyone from William Styron to Toni Morrison, and he lobbied hard within Random to allow for last springs’ reissue of Men Die and Humes’ longer, better novel The Underground City. “He kind of entered your life. He used to sleep in our offices. He helped me move. He just became part of your day.”

Humes swept into the cafes of Paris in the late forties and early fifties, inserting himself into a crowd that included Irwin Shaw, James Baldwin, and everyone else, it sometimes seemed, who would otherwise have been living in Greenwich Village. Humes was at Le Dome in Paris one night in 1951, probably wearing the black velvet cape and carrying the silver-handled cane for which he became known in those days, tapping a 24-year-old Peter Matthiessen on the shoulder and introducing himself, and soon after teaming up with him to start Paris Review.

And now Humes, dead for 16 years, crashes 2008, his books up for reevaluation after forty years in the cooler of history; the subject of Doc, the documentary by daughter Immy Humes; and shedding awkward news about Matthiessen, who used Humes and their Paris Review as a front for his work with the CIA. (It was deeper than that, of course; in a way, it can be argued that Matthiessen was using the CIA as a front for living as a novelist in Paris.) Humes now is a weird Banquo pounding the literary table, asking us to listen, listen, to the story of his life, his work, and the birth of one of the country’s most important literary magazines.

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“The natives are restless” — I used to get indignant when I heard that paternalistic, sometimes cynical phrase. Now I try to smile. For one, I hear it a lot in my line of work, and it gets tiresome to always think ill of someone whose diction deceives her intentions. But mostly I smile because I want the cliché to mean something else, a portent for positive change, the end of calamitous rule, a new era for the meek. So when the meek turn restless, it should mean that justice is around the corner.

With last week's passing of Guinea's senile dictator, Lansana Conté, and the military coup that followed, the country is marking no deviation from a well-rehearsed choreography, enacted repeatedly since independence from the French in 1958. The dance moves are economical, simple for new generations of political elites to learn.

A leader emerges, accedes power bolstered by populist rhetoric, buys off the military, installs single-party rule. Cronyism flourishes, rule of law evaporates, the military shores up the trappings of statehood. Decades pass; the population languishes. Leader then dies, military resumes control until a new leader-puppet is found. For nine million Guineans, the spectacle and squalor continue.

Conté down for the count

Conté belonged to a dwindling species of wizened and paranoid leaders-for-life, whose ranks include Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and Omar Bongo of Gabon. Once hailed as liberators and visionaries, they became pathetic parables of 'absolute power corrupting absolutely'. The psychological path from flamboyant liberator to murderous despot is dramatic stuff, and was ably fictionalized in The Last King of Scotland. An excellent non-fiction account of Mobutu Sese Seko’s rise and fall is Mobutu, Roi du Zaire, by Thierry Michel.

Not so for Conté. A diabetic chain-smoker who rarely appeared in public, Conté was a garden-variety despot whose life and career will be quickly forgotten, even by Guineans. In the murky hours after Conté’s death, a military junta declared power. Western powers demanded an immediate return to civilian rule; a rote bit of finger wagging that has surely never produced a single result.

Alluding to the high propensity for carnage in this West African neighborhood, Senegalese President Wade recently appealed for acceptance of Guinea’s new military junta. Although highly predatory and wholly opportunistic, the Guinean national military arguably prevented the country from sliding into the chaos of its neighbors, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast, for whom Guinea served for years as a place of refuge.

The intent of Wade’s appeal is ambiguous. Another leader-for-life in the making and no friend of opposition parties or the free press, Wade's point may be that civilian rule and democracy are over-rated, and that in such places security is primordial. He may also be a proponent of 'negative solidarity', as my Burundian friends call it, between African leaders who defend one another till the bitter end. Witness the deafening silence from African leaders regarding Mugabe.

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by Jeff Strabone

It would be easy to laugh off Jennifer Aniston's problems. She's rich, famous, and able to have her pick of nearly all the men of the world and all the scripts of Hollywood. And what she's famous for is being funny. Her television sitcom ran for ten years, her movie comedies are big money-makers, and, for what it's worth, there was even a hairstyle named after one of her characters. But something about her disturbs me deeply. To put it simply, Jennifer Aniston represents one of the worst traits of the human race: the inability to forget.

Kierkegaard and Nietzsche wrote important statements on forgetting, but I prefer the simplicity of Rodgers and Hart's 1935 classic 'It's Easy to Remember'. Imagine it in Frank Sinatra's 1957 recording on his Close to You LP, arranged and conducted by Nelson Riddle:

Your sweet expression,
The smile you gave me,
The way you looked when we met,
It's easy to remember, but so hard to forget.

I hear you whisper,
'I'll always love you.'
I know it's over and yet,
It's easy to remember, but so hard to forget.

It is hard to forget, and all the more so when we fight it. Who wants to forget the way a lover's skin tastes, or the sounds she made, once the relationship ends and those sensations are no longer possible? Perhaps one reason we resist forgetting lovers, the special ones at least, is that we come to believe that we were better people with that person than we could be otherwise. It's not so much about losing them as it is about losing all that we were when we loved them. Without that special object of our affection, we fear lapsing into a heap of selfishness again.

But what if we had stayed together? Wouldn't we change anyway? Wouldn't we eventually forget, to paraphrase another great song from the 30's, why we ever tolerated the way he held his knife or the way she insisted on dancing 'til three? Love, unlike television, should not go out on a high note. When it does, it creates the illusion that one's bliss would have known no vicissitudes and that it can never be matched. Only by forgetting can we make ourselves available to what may come next and what, however inconceivable, may be even better.

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by Daniel Rourke

In Another city another me is writing; Another thought is unwinding.

When we think of minds we think of intentions. Intentions that lie behind acts, acts that unfold at the recourse of agents: agents with minds. In short, when we look out at the world we see objects that are acted upon and entities that do the acting. This clear cut distinction between the 'done upon' and the 'doer' appears stable, but it hides one of the mightiest constraints of our world view. A logical stand-off that threatens to undermine the logical systems upon which it is based.

In Another city all matter pulses like a living organ, where time imposes significance upon the most dilapidated dwelling or murky gutter.

Take this article, for example. It is an unwinding spring of phonic sounds, encoded into a series of arbitrary symbols, stretching from left to right within an imaginary frame projected onto the surface of your computer screen. Here lies the perfect example of an artefact with intention behind it. A series of artefacts in fact, positioned by my mind and placed within a certain context (i.e. 3QD: a fascinating and widely read blog). As a collection, as an article, its intention is easy to distinguish. I wanted to say something, so I wrote an article, which I hoped would be read by a certain audience. But what of the intention of each individual object within the whole? What was the original intention of the letter 'A' for example? Do we decide that the intention is connected to all speakers of the English language, perhaps? Or maybe all literate members of the human race? Or maybe the human race as a whole?

Another city begins at the out-stretched tip of a human finger and ends as artefacts gathered from the dust. It is a spider-web, a precious ball of dung, a bare and crimson backside glinting in the jungle sun.

It would be short-sighted to claim that the letter 'A' is intention-less. At some point the shape of the letter 'A' was attached to the phonic value for the sound 'ay'. At some point the letter 'A' was placed at the front of a 26 letter string of arbitrary symbols. A separate, but connected artefact, later to be called 'The Alphabet'. There was intention behind these acts, and these acts were perpetrated by people or persons who – we hope – believed that their decisive acts mattered. The difference between my artifact – the one you now find yourself reading – and the letter 'A' is one of time, distance and – most importantly – appropriation. The alphabet is omnipresent, it is everyone's. It has become disconnected from the very idea of mind and intention. We have appropriated it into our sense of what being human is; into the scaffolding of our reality. Of course we still have to learn how to read, whether it be with the Western syllabic alphabet or the Chinese pictographic/logographic system. But we treat our writing system as an extension of language, of ourselves, and we do this quite naturally. For not one second do we question the intention behind the alphabet, even less so the letter 'A'.

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An imagined conversation between Tariq Ali and Benazir Bhutto.

By Maniza Naqvi

Act I: The Leftist and the Leader:

Scene/Stage: There is a screen at the back of the stage which plays the clip, of General Zia-ul-Haq, declaring Martial Law, on July 5, 1977.

When the speech ends, two spot lights have searched, found and trained themselves on two people on the stage. Two actors playing Tariq Ali and Benazir Bhutto stand a couple of feet apart from each other. They are a young Tariq Ali, in jeans and a young Benazir Bhutto also in jeans. Tariq Ali, stands, legs apart, and grabs his head in anger and frustration. Benazir crouches—holds her head and then reaches out her arms as though reaching for someone in grief and pain.

TA: Arghhhhhhhhhhh

BB: ———Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh.

Stage darkens.

Lights go up. In the middle of the stage, there are two podiums at a short distance from one another. Tariq Ali stands at one and Benazir at the other. Benazir wears a white dupatta covering her head –and a green colored shalwar-kameez. Tariq Ali is dressed the same way as before, in jeans. They have their backs to the audience and they face two screens at the back of the stage. In the foreground there is a single chair.

The screen in front of Benazir shows one of her typical political rallies. There are massive jubilant crowds of people waving banners and chanting slogans. The screen in front of Tariq Ali shows either a clip of a talk, or Tariq Ali leading the February 2003 anti war demonstrations.

There is the sound of people cheering and shouting her name. Her fists punch the air she makes movements that show that she is delivering an impassioned speech. There are cheers and slogans in both crowds. Benazir and Tariq Ali turn away from the screens and look at the audience and then turn around to face each other. They stand for a moment just looking at each other. Benazir adjusts her dupatta, in her characteristic way with both her hands. She moves forward away from the podium waving. A flash goes off-from a camera—then another and another. With each pop of the flash, the sound gets louder, till it segues into the sounds of explosions and gunshots.

Tariq Ali on his side of the stage instinctively ducks. Sound dies. Silence.

Benazir stands straight and still——She leaves the podium and makes her way to a chair in the foreground of the stage. Tariq Ali, shakes his head as he watches her go. He stays where he is but reaches out one arm in a futile gesture of trying to reach out to catch her. Then he stands his head bowed for a moment (a longish moment) before he looks across at her. He approaches her and stands gazing at her. She looks at him.

TA: Take that damn thing of your head, will you. Why do you wear it?

BB: (She looks at him slides it back from her head and smiles, and says in a forlorn voice): I’m afraid they won’t recognize me without it.

TA: Would you?

BB: You have the white head of hair—I have the white scarf—Moses and the Madonna.

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So here we are, celebrating our 5th Newton's Day at 3QD. Along with Richard Dawkins, we independently and simultaneously came upon the idea of celebrating Newton's Day on December 25th in 2004, and each year since then I have written a little something about Sir Isaac. Here are my posts from 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007. Today, I'll explain a simple but very useful mathematical technique called Newton's Method, discovered by Newton in 1669, though he published it later.

Newton's Method is a way of iteratively finding closer and closer solutions to a certain kind of mathematical equation (a real-valued function f(x), to be technical). We do this in the following way (it may help to look at the concrete example from Wikipedia in the graphic following my description of the general method, to better understand what I mean):

1. Take a guess at the solution (a value for x).
2. Plug in this value for x and see what f(x) is.
3. Draw a line tangent to the function at this point.
4. The point where this line intersects the x-axis is your new and improved value for x.
5. Take this new value for x and go back to step 2. (This repeating is called iteration.)

Have a look at the graph (from Wikipedia) on the right. The function f(x) is the curved line shown in blue. In other words, for any point x on the horizontal axis, the blue line shows the value of f(x) on the vertical axis. The root (or solution) of the function is where the function crosses the horizontal axis; in other words, where the value of f(x) is zero. In the graph here, this is the value marked X. So we take a guess, X_n, go up the dotted blue line to the function, and then calculate the tangent line to the function at that point. This is shown in red. We see where that line crosses the x-axis, and take that point, X_n+1, as our value for x in the next iteration. As you can see, X_n+1 is a better approximation of the actual root, X. When we repeat the process over and over, one can very quickly converge on the correct solution.

How exactly do we do this? Let me show you. We know from calculus (as did Newton, since he invented it) that the derivative of a function f(x) at given point, written f'(x_n), is just the slope of the tangent line at that point. But we also know that the slope of a line is just the “rise”, in this case, the value of f(x_n) (on the vertical axis), divided by the “run,” the amount we move from X_n+1 to X_n on the horizontal axis. Setting these two quantities as equal, we get this equation: the derivative of the function at X_n is equal to the value of the function at X_n divided by the distance between X_n and X_n+1. In proper algebraic notation:

f'(x_n) = f(x_n) / (X_n – X_n+1)

Mutiplying both sides by (X_n – X_n+1), we get:

(X_n – X_n+1) * f'(x_n) = f(x_n)

Dividing both sides by f'(x_n), we get:

(X_n – X_n+1) = f(x_n) / f'(x_n)

Subtracting X_n from both sides, we get:

– X_n+1 = f(x_n) / f'(x_n) – X_n

And finally, multiplying both sides by -1, we get:

X_n+1 = X_n – f(x_n) / f'(x_n)

So that's how once we make an initial guess X_n, we get our next value X_n+1. And then repeat the process.

Look at this nice example from Wikipedia, where one wants to find the square root of 612:

In each successive result on the right hand side above, the correct digits are underlined. As you can see, one converges to a very accurate (to nine significant digits) approximation rather quickly. Well, there you go. That's Newton's Method. Interestingly, since computers are very fast at doing this sort of iteration, Newton's Method has become even much more useful now than when he invented it.

Oh, and if you don't understand “derivatives”, just take my word for it: the derivative of the function “x² – 612” is “2x” and don't worry about the details… 🙂

I wish all of you a very happy holiday season, and also best wishes for a wonderful new year!

David Schneider

It's Christmastime, Solstice-time, that annual ritual of family and SADness. But whenever I get depressed, I remember that poets frequently intuit the nature of the world long before psychologists, physicists, biologists, mathematicians or theorists are able to parcel out their pieces into numbers, formulae, and systems. I remember, for example, how the German and British Romantic poets grasped an understanding of complexity, relativity, and organic growth that was largely alien to Enlightenment science and the Industrial Revolution – understandings we now take for granted in the scientific conceptions of Relativity Theory and Chaos Theory, which were devised, respectively, nearly 100 and 200 years later.

And so, as we return home to the faces yet more familiar than the years before, we return to Larkin. He was right. Your mom and dad fuck you up – and we might now understand why.

In a new theory that could revolutionize the practice of psychiatry, neuroscience and genetics, Bernard Crespi, a biologist at Simon Fraser University in Canada, and Christopher Badcock, a sociologist at the London School of Economics, propose – in essence – that men are stupid and women are crazy.

I joke. A bit. It's only that when an idea this elegant, this simple, and this beautiful is proposed, the mainstream press (and blog commenters) will try to publicize it using truisms – that blaspheme its beauty, and jeopardize the great conceptual leap that's been taken – which harm the reputation of Science.

But I digress.

Crespi and Badcock propose that

I think of Keats:

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///
House of an Evil Jin
Jim Culleny

Smoke snakes from house roofs
in lazy loops of loose thought

as idle as the wisps of dreamers
who burn to know why god has wrought

I drive by with windows open
the smell of char comes drifting in

It's more like March than January
so odd the way this year begins

Malingering smoke might mesmerize me
and lazy thought could do me in

as easy hours may hypnotize me
till my skull's the house of an evil jin
.

Bookstores don’t often make people’s heads snap around, but there’s a lot of competition along Venice’s engorged thoroughfare, Salizada del Fontego dei Tedeschi. Amid the temptations of gelato for breakfast and designer Italian clothes, anything less opulent than the window display at La Carta would go ignored.

The window was a triptych set back from the street and hooded from the Venice sun. Only an artificial light from inside, a flattering golden-brown bronze, illuminated it. The centerpiece was a replica yacht with white canvas sails, intricate rope rigging, and a hull as polished as a bowling alley lane. Surrounding the ship were the accoutrements of a belles lettres lifestyle ca. 1875. A box with iron tooling for personalized wax seals. A vase filled with pens you’d have to dip in ink and possibly sharpen with a knife. Ribbons. Letter openers capped with colored Murano glass. Leather-bound journals for gossip about duchesses. Magnifying glasses, and gyroscopes for paperweights in a pinch. It looked like an estate sale from some universe where Proust had become a ship’s captain.

As it did to others, La Carta’s window tugged me almost gravitationally, pulling my neck and torso it while my feet were still walking forward. Before setting out that morning I had pulled from my luggage a sheaf of papers, directions to half the bookstores in the city, and I made this my first stop. My mission was simple (if admittedly daft). I figured I’d absorb political, religious, and architectural Venice by osmosis, without really trying. I was looking for literary Venice. That sounds a bit precious, but even when I’m ignorant of the local language, I visit every bookstore I can on vacations: I simply grasp a foreign culture most easily through its books.

And I wanted to know what Venice would have been like for a bookish person now and in the past, what sorts of stores they visited and how they got their verbal fix. The knowledge seemed far from Doges’ palaces, secreted away on a bookshelf somewhere, and I wanted to pull the volume down and peek inside.

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