//
Blue under Blue
Jim Culleny

We were sitting on a bench under blue
under the bush of a willow admiring her garden when
I saw an Indigo Bunting but didn’t know it when I did.

Look, I said,
a bluebird on the wall!

No, the fabulous near-turquoise of it,
its deep and tiny beyond-blueness makes it
an Indigo Bunting, she said, if it’s
anything at all.

It hopped, mysterious as one of the angels some say exist
and took off fluttering more beautifully than
the idea of fluttering

fluttering for real

took off into wisteria
like the idea of flying
(cubed at least).

Who thought that up, the flying?
-not to mention the wisteria,
I said. Truth is

that’s what we were both feeling
just then, seeing an Indigo Bunting
so blue under blue under willow
from our bench.

//

There is nothing new under the sun.  —Ecclesiastes

Deus creavit, Linnaeus disposuit. (God created, Linnaeus organized.)  —Linnaeus

It is ninety-nine degrees in New York today—welcome back to yet another summer. This means, dear reader, that unless you are reading this in the southern hemisphere’s fine winter, or from the lofty alpine altitude of a mountaintop, or from some summery yet climatically kinder seaside, your sweat glands are working as hard as mine. The ninety-nine is, of course, Fahrenheit; although the city’s balmy streets feel as though they’re boiling, we have about 113 degrees to go for that to actually happen. In any case, this tropical weather has me operating on tropical time—that is, a bit more s l  o   w    l     y. Yet time and the measure of its passage, much like the Fahrenheit scale, often seem to follow some arbitrary measure—sure, sexagesimal for minutes and anything larger, decimal for anything under a second, now that’s consistent—so we go on as we always do, perhaps in slightly skimpier clothing.

It is in weather like this that I become aware of Mother Nature asserting herself. We can hide in the cool breeze of air conditioners, but they only spew more hot air onto the streets. Also, it’s never very cool to see the electric bill jump a decimal point or so in the sunny season, unless our excesses lead to a blackout—an unbelievably cool reminder of what luxury we normally live in, and how divorced we are from the world around us. But getting back to heat and the arbitrary nature of its measurement, there is a more ordered system (found, naturally, outside U.S. borders): ninety-nine Fahrenheit is equivalent to thirty-seven centigrade or Celsius. These two systems are generally considered interchangeable, but in their difference lies my interest: both have a tidy base unit of ten, but whereas the former name hinges upon its two fixed points (0 and 100, hence centigrade), the latter is named for an individual. Eighteenth-century Swedish scientist Anders Celsius left his name to the system he’d created for use in his own laboratory and observations, with boiling at 0 and freezing at 100. Yet another eighteenth-century Swedish scientist, Celsius’s colleague Carl Linnaeus, switched that system on its head, creating the system we now use. It may be sheer coincidence that one man helped give us both the world’s most widely used thermometer and the highly elegant system of binomial nomenclature; coincidence or not, it’s certainly convenient for me, because the heat that so upsets my own physiology proves a boon to that of my plants, bringing us back to these cyclical seasons, degrees of coolness and warmth, states of decay and growth.

Last summer I was surprised to learn that Linnaeus himself had laid the groundwork for the botanic gardens in Palermo, which were quite dusty on the dry July day I visited. Today, I just returned from my third visit to a much greener earthly paradise, a rural garden created by some delightfully eccentric family members of mine. Begun just over a year ago, this work-in-progress is now well underway, and the tree-room they’ve built is not only visually striking, but is also much cooler than any of my rooms at the moment. Right before leaving I made sure to water my own little urban garden, spread across several sills in my apartment, and crossed my fingers that it would survive my short absence (so as not to disturb friends or neighbors with the hassles of tending to my precious potted pets, a ritual that includes the arts of song and conversation). As I walked in this morning, everyone seemed to have flourished despite, or perhaps because of the neglect—parsley, sage, rosemary, two types of thyme, a mixture of various mints, an azalea, and a veteran jasmine who’s seen tough times yet still sends out flowering shoots of delightfully white, perfumed blossoms. My humble apartment garden is almost the antithesis of the one I enjoyed this weekend, and the backyard gardens my grandparents and parents cultivated falls somewhere in between, though decidedly on the more utilitarian end of the spectrum. Seeing both the growth spurt in my city garden and the remarkable transformations in the country garden since my last visit, the hot spell became instantly more tolerable. Picking up the sweet jasmine blossoms that had cascaded to the floor while I was out, and seeing how their snowy white had turned to a less lively yet more stable brown, I realized that color was one of the many characteristic browns I’d seen between the pages of botanist Ulisse Aldovrandi’s herbarium a couple of years ago when doing some research at the University of Bologna. Perhaps it was the humid heat having its way with me, but I began to think—what if one were to gather all the world’s herbaria; could its countless browns be categorized by area or period, or would there be a family of browns common to them all? Would the resplendent greens of a boxwood in Michigan collected in 2008 dry to the same browns of a boxwood in Milan collected at the height of its verdant life in 1608? Scientifically speaking, these are frivolous questions, as I’m sure that each naturalist collecting plants along her travels, looking back over the accumulations after time has sapped each specimen’s color, naturally sees them in their original splendor. Aesthetically speaking, however, the answers could be quite curious. And we’re back to Linnaeus, whose herbarium, much more recent than Aldovrandi’s, gives us a glimpse into the mind and eye of one of botany’s greats.

I’ll save my musings on the history of ecology for a later column, and will briefly focus instead on these potentially tenuous aesthetic connections. In their early twenties, Simon and Garfunkel were already wise enough to note that all “leaves that are green turn to brown.” Indeed. Earlier this spring, in mid-April and just before the major art auctions, I caught a striking, deep brown image of a single leaf in a New York Times article; it was a “photogenic drawing,” a proto-photogram about to go to auction. The image was believed to have been produced around 1839 by William Henry Fox Talbot, and had been brought to an expert in the history of photography for confirmation and a potential poetic blurb in the auction catalogue. The expert’s reply that it was certainly no Talbot, but may date back to the 1790s, making it one of the oldest photographic images in existence, caused quite a stir and may eventually lead to research that remaps the history of photography. All that, from someone’s simple impulse to make a sunprint with what was probably the closest and most obvious object close at hand: a leaf.
    So the outline of a leaf that lived over two centuries ago was captured in a brownish light-sensitive emulsion quite close to the tone of its predecessors, actual leaves pressed between the paper leaves of volumes upon volumes of botanical matter now housed in archives throughout the new- and old world. Both have survived the heat of hundreds of summers, and float into our air-conditioned, digital-driven, image-laden times like deciduous gems falling to a cool forest floor to nurture the next wave of life.

///
Backyard Haiku
Jim Culleny

Damn!
under a flat rock
the chipmunk, scooting, is gone
the cat’s tail twitches.

Politics
before time runs out
it’s important to breathe free
at least once, no less.

Suddeness
A cat waits under
the wisteria, so cool.
A bird flies too low.

Chiminea
here’s the fire, red in
the chiminea, flaming
in fall before snow.

Emissions
it’s snowblower time
yellow overalls appear
exhaust and white plumes

Sleepwalking
Sleep is hard to find
when, looking back, you see you’ve
never been awake.

///

Michael Blim

America can’t be all one thing. Or rather it is a contradictory thing, swerving almost every two generations – and sometimes within generations – between expanding equal opportunity and equal protections under the law to punishing people who are failing a course in the American Dream. The rights of those who are failing become fungible: they are transmuted into cudgels with which we punish them for precisely their inability to exercise their rights to self-determination, personhood and the pathways to their own destinies.

We still live in the punishment age. Since how the poor, a social description that connotes failure from the start, live is the cause of their downfall, they must be re-directed. So, for instance, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Act, the new welfare system that took effect in 1997, eliminated subsistence support for the poor by virtue of their poverty and replaced it with a law that limited benefits by time and effort. No adults are eligible for welfare payments for more than 5 years during the course of their lifetime, nor will they receive further benefits if they did not seek a job and/or were not job ready within two years of assistance. After the two years, they must be employed for at least 30 hours a week or lose benefits.

Some would say that since rights imply duties It is also true that the failure to fulfill duties annuls or diminishes people’s rights. If the poor don’t live up to their duties as American citizens, then they forfeit some measure of their rights. Or at least those rights can be held in abeyance until they successfully exercise their duties.

There is an apparent paradox here. If people lack resources, then they can neither fulfill their duties nor exercise their rights. Thus, the first problem we have discovered is that both rights and duties depend upon resources. You need them to achieve both rights and duties. Though I will not prove it here today, the resources provided to the poor, for instance, seldom reach the level that average Americans use to procure a modest living, and to fulfill the contract of rights for duties fulfilled. This is intentional, as promoters of orthodox economics tell us that the rest of society’s workers will not work, or their efforts will slack off because they have no monetary incentive to work harder.

I am going to set aside what I think is another telling criticism of our welfare policy that absent full funding of what persons in America normally need to succeed, poor people will never fulfill their duties, and thus their rights will likely remained highly conditional, and in significant ways diminished.

Another approach is on the rise. Providing the poor with incentives to change, it is proposed, could work better than punishment. Financial incentives are being proposed as the carrots whereby we can get the poor to fulfill their duties and help them earn back their rights. It works like this, for example: if we provide a poor mother with money for keeping her child in school, then the child is likely to stay in school. This way we can achieve two things: first, more schooling should improve a child’s life chances; and two, the mother receives additional monies to improve the life circumstances of her family.

Christopher Grimes in a recent Financial Times article (May 24-25, 2008) reports on an experimental program begun in New York City by the Michael Bloomberg administration to try out this approach with 2500 poor families in six poor neighborhoods of the city. The city will provide money incentives for 60 behaviors that it believes might bring positive changes in behavioral patterns of the poor families. The behaviors to be rewarded, according to the website of agency administering the project Opportunity NYC include:

·         $25 when parents attend teacher conferences

·         $600 for students who perform well on important exams, and smaller amounts for improving grades

·         $200 for getting a medical check-up

·         A financial reward for enrolling in health insurance

·         $100 for preventive medicinal and dental check-ups

·         A financial reward for improving credit scores

·         $150 a month for full-time employment

The short-term goals are to alleviate poverty, improve the health and education status of children, as well as improve “workforce outcomes” for adults. The long-term goal is to reduce intergenerational poverty.

These are indisputably noble goals. Through incentives, social planners hope to achieve what compulsion apparently is not. According to Christopher Grimes’ report, Mayor Bloomberg uses the analogy that Wall Street bankers work harder because they get a year-end bonus for success, rather than simply an their ample salaries. “That’s capitalism, and it shouldn’t be a foreign concept to government.” Grimes also notes that American policy planners learned from the social welfare policies of countries such as Mexico, which I have noted in other columns include micro-lending to support business development by the poor.

This approach is an important step toward eliminating in part through incentives the compulsory punishments now installed in our national welfare system. The rewards may be varied and complex but the principle is simple. It is behaviorist: behavioral patterns are achieved and maintained by the consequences that befall actors performing the desired behaviors.

But the incentive approach raises an important moral question. Whose rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness are being rewarded? Are they those of the poor, the actors in this social experiment? It may not be theirs. What moral choices can they exercise? They are those of America’s apparent majority, assuming that the political apparatus fairly represents majority opinion.

Another moral choice returns us again to the dilemma between rights and punishments for economic and social failure. In exchange for some social attention to their needs – in no way satisfied by programs of this sort as people do not achieve with inadequate incomes that support the standard of living of the average American that seem to go some way to satisfying their needs – have incentives become another means to compulsion?

If so, we are still failing to help people exercise their rights and punishing them when the lack of resources prevents them from their enjoyment. Policies imply moral decisions no less than pragmatic policy concerns. Above all, this American failing is what continues to stand in the way of our pursuit of happiness.

The U.S. government, in collaboration with the governments of Poland and the Czech Republic, is very close to sealing a deal for a “defensive missile shield.” According to the plan initiated by the U.S., ten GMD-variant interceptor missiles will be located in Poland, and an X-band radar will be located in the Czech Republic, 55 miles southwest of the capital of Prague. But there is a catch.

In April, an opinion poll showed that two-thirds of Czechs were against the U.S. missile shield plans. Two Czech protesters, Jan Tamas and Jan Bednar, have gone on a hunger strike that has now entered the fourth week. Bednar has been hospitalized once and diagnosed with liver failure. Still, both activists continue the nonviolent protest demanding that the voices of Czech citizens be heard. (June 2 they are expected to announce a chain hunger strike following negotiations with a supporting politician, Head of the Social Democrat senators Alena Gajduskova, who has volunteered to participate.)

Tamas and Bednar occupy a storefront operation in the center of Prague where e-mails and visitations continue on a daily basis. An online petition has garnered over 107,554 signatures from around the globe.1 They will stop the hunger strike when four simple requests have been met: 1) radar base negotiations with the U.S. should be interrupted for one year; 2) the E.U. should issue an official stance on the proposed missile shield; 3) a Czech parliament session should convene around this issue; and 4) a televized discussion of the radar base with four opponents and four supporters of the plan should be organized.

On May 21, the government approved the plans though the basic document has yet to be ratified by parliament and signed by President Vaclav Klaus; the Czech-U.S. treaties are to be signed by July. At this crucial junction, Tamas and Bednar hold out for democracy. They are not alone.

On May 5, an estimated gathering of 1,500 protesters assembled in Prague, marching to the Government Office. Some participants carried banners that read “No to American radar colonization,” and “Say No to radar.”

In April, Greenpeace protesters set up a tent city, referred to as “Spot Height 718,” at the exact location of the proposed radar site in the Brdy forest. They have erected an overhead banner with an image of a large target.

Tamas and his group, the No to Bases initiative, proceeds simplistically and with straight forward demands. Yet what this protest represents is very complex. It is a situation has been upon the human race since the the dropping of the first atomic bomb. We have returned to the scene in history in 1983 where President Ronald Reagan first uttered the words, “Star Wars,” in the world arena.
According to a recent report in Ethics & International Affairs written by Philip Coyle and Victoria Samson, there is one glaring problem, among many, with the proposed missile defense systems: “tests have failed roughly half the time.” 2

Coyle and Samson’s report, “Missile Defense Malfunction: Why the Proposed U.S. Missile Defenses in Europe Will Not Work,” is both a explanation of technical and diplomatic failures. One can extrapolate from its contents that the urgency on the part of the U.S. to establish a missile defense in Europe before the current administration is out of office is predicated on political posturing–with a big emphasis on Iran. The report is clear in enumerating what has been lost so far in the arms race and the militarization of space and why the world has been placed on a precipice of untold consequences by virtue of this unilateral push to locate missiles in Poland and a radar base in the Czech Republic.

In summary:

Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty. Signed by Presidents Bush and Putin on May 2002. The present proposal is in direct violation of the treaty which calls for joint research and development between the U.S. and Russia on missile defense for Europe.

Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. U.S. unilaterally withdrew from treaty in 2002. The treaty had been signed in 1972 by U.S. President Richard Nixon and Soviet Communist Party Secretary Leonid Brezhnev.

Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty. Russia is no longer abiding by the treaty as of December 2007, citing as partial reasons, the U.S. missile defense plans for Europe.3

Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. Russia’s threat to pull out of the 1997 INF Treaty is exacerbated by the proposed U.S. missile defense. (The treaty bans a wide range of ballistic missiles and ground-launched cruise missiles.)

The tenuous relationship between the U.S. and Russia over the proposed European missile shield, located in Poland and the Czech Republic, stands to jeopardize a whole host of established treaties as well as block much needed future treaties in regard to the militarization/weaponization of space.
If this plan is a U.S.-centric geopolitical strategy aimed at threatening Iran (with a system that does not work consistently against intercontinental ballistic missiles that Iran doesn’t have), what is possibly gained? At this point in time, it is perhaps more worthwhile contemplating what could be lost.

The foremost treaty among all, the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), is put in considerable risk by tensions between the U.S. and Russia. It is possible that Russia would be the strongest negotiator in regard to Iranian nuclear weapons capabilities. 4

Tamas and Bednar are making simple requests that may seem unachievable but there is recent precedent. In 2004, the Canadian government declared it would not join the Pentagon’s missile defense program though it continues in its capacity as a partner in the the U.S.-Canada North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD).

According to Coyle and Samson: “Canada understood correctly that U.S. missile defenses represent the first wave in which the United States could introduce attack weapons into space—that is, weapons with strike capability. While the militarization of space is already a fact of life—the U.S. military relies on space satellites for military communications, for reconnaissance and sensing, for weather, and for targeting—the weaponization of space has not happened: there are no strike weapons deployed in space.”

While it would be irrational to think that the geopolitical strategizing of superpowers will diminish in favor of the greater good any time soon, citizens compelled to take nonviolent action wherever they may be and in whatever ways they can, offers hope on incalculable levels.

Notes:

1. No Star Wars online petition
2. Philip Coyle and Victoria Samson, “Missile Defense Malfunction: Why the Proposed U.S. Missile Defenses in Europe Will Not Work,” Ethics & International Affairs, Vol. 22.1, 23 April 2008, http://www.cceia.org/resources/journal/22_1/special_report/001.html
3. see international appeal to “Bring the CFE Treaty into Force,” under “Appeals on Preserving the CFE Treaty,” Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, http://www.pugwash.org/
4. “Russia ships nuclear fuel to Iran,” BBC, 17 December 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7147463.stm
; see also George Monbiot, “The Treaty Wreckers,” The Guardian, 2 August 2005, http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2005/aug/02/foreignpolicy.politicalcolumnists

Laray Polk lives in Dallas, Texas. She can be contacted at [email protected]

///
Everybody Loves Their Tool
Jim Culleny

Word has it that
in the beginning was the word
and that may be true but
(just as a matter of shameless self-promotion),
it’s clear that opener was written by a bard

If the same thought had sprung from a painter
it would have read:
In the beginning was the line or stroke,
or the brush tool of Photoshop

A mechanic would have said
the first efflorescence was a wrench.
And no doubt, a politician would have sworn
the universe had flowered from a lie

Everybody loves their tool

In any case that phrase was not written by God
for whom beginnings are practical figments of our imaginations
along with their anticipated ends

So, Death, be not smug

///

Justin E. H. Smith

*

Works consulted for this essay:

Robert Bernasconi (Ed.), Race (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 2001).

Emmanuel Eze, Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1997).

Eldridge Huddleston, Origins of the American Indians: European Concepts, 1492-1729 (Austin, Texas, 1967).

Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: the American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

William Poole, “Seventeenth-century Preadamism, and an Anonymous English Preadamist,” The Seventeenth Century 19 (2004), pp. 1-35.

Richard H. Popkin, Isaac La Peyrère (1596-1676): His Life, Work, and Influence (Leiden: Brill, 1987).

*

We tend to imagine that our racial classifications map onto natural kinds in the world, that in carving humanity up into ‘Caucasoid’, ‘Negroid’, etc., we are, so to speak, carving nature at its joints. In fact, these categories are recent inventions.

In an important sense it is the 17th-century French writer François Bernier who may be considered the founder of the modern science of race.  He is the first to use the term ‘race’ to designate different groups of humans with shared, distinguishing traits.  He describes his innovation in the Journal des Sçavans of 1684 as follows: “So far, Geographers did not use any other criterion when mapping out the earth but that of the different countries or regions to be found on it.  What I noticed in men in the course of my long and frequent travels gave me the idea to divide the Earth otherwise.” 

Bernier identifies “four or five Species or Races of men.”  The first, he says, “includes France and generally all of Europe, except a part of Russia.  A small part of Africa, from the Kingdoms of Fez and Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, to the Nile; as well as an important part of Asia, namely the Empire of the ‘Grand Turk’ with the three Arabias, all of Persia, the States of the Great Mogul… may be included in the first Species.”  In contrast, Bernier identifies sub-Saharan Africa as inhabited by a different race or species: “I regard the whole African continent except the North African coast as previously described as the second Species.”  Significantly, he does not see Native Americans, in contrast with Africans, as sufficiently different to warrant placing them in a distinct race: “As for Americans, in fact most of them have an olive complexion and their features differ from ours, but not enough to justify their belonging in a different species.”

The third ‘species’ for Bernier are ‘Asians’, which includes for him the inhabitants of “part of the kingdoms of Aracan and Siam, Sumatra and Borneo, the Philippines, Japan, China, Georgia and Muscovy, the Usbek, Turkistan, Zaquetay, a small part of Muscovy”; and finally the fourth species are the Saami or Lapps, about whom he writes they are “very ugly and partaking much of the bear.”  He acknowledges: “I have only seen two of them at Dantzic; but, judging from the pictures I have seen, and the account which I have received of them from many persons who have been in the country, they are wretched animals.”  The ranking of Lapps at the bottom of the scale of humanity would remain a commonplace throughout the 18th century, in Buffon, Maupertuis, Kant, and others. 

What, though, did Bernier mean by ‘species’?  Surely he could not have intended the meaning commonly attached to this term today, namely, that each race is an isolated reproductive group, for he was as aware of the possibility of ‘miscegenation’ as his contemporaries.  Though Bernier himself was not a defender of the doctrine, some of his contemporaries would come to hold the view that different races constitute different ‘species’ in the sense that, while capable of yielding offspring, they nonetheless had separate creations and, therefore, arose from separate lines of descent. 

While it was, for theological reasons, imperative to deny that there could be shared lineage between humans and apes, it was equally imperative for the same reasons to insist upon the shared lineage of all humans.  But just as new evidence, resulting from increased exposure to the world beyond Europe forced European science to contend with the possibility that humans are in fact but another species of primate, it also inspired many thinkers to reconsider the biblical account of all humanity as traceable back to the same shared ancestors.  Both the global extremities at which human beings were found, as well, likely, as the immense cultural and physical difference between the various groups, stimulated a reconsideration of the old Augustinian commitment to a monogenetic account of human ancestry.

If one is an evolutionist, and accepts that there have been hundreds of thousands of years for different ethnic groups to emerge and to spread about the globe, the monogenetic hypothesis is not hard to maintain.  The same is true if, conversely, one believes that the world is only a few thousand years old, but is operating with a geographical scope that does not extend much beyond one’s own region.  But for creationists in the 17th century, monogenesis effectively required that the new anthropological data from around the globe be somehow rendered compatible with the view that all human beings are descended from two ancestors, presumed to have lived somewhere in the Near East roughly six thousand years before the era of the scientific revolution.

Fortunately, there were rich conceptual resources that far predated the modern period available to those who sought to argue that all humans descend from the ancestors identified in the Hebrew bible.  Some in the 17th century continued to be influenced by the tradition of prisca theologia, a vestige of Renaissance humanism according to which all wisdom must flow from the same source, namely, the prophets of the Old Testament, who eventually passed it on to the Greek philosophers.  Because the events of the Gospels were prefigured or intimated by way of typologies in the Old Testament, moreover, it was often thought that the Hebrew prophets were able to share in the good news of the New Testament, and in this way Judaism was effectively elided with Christianity.  As an apologetic project, this tradition effectively baptized any would-be pagan or infidel one might wish to admire or emulate by positing a hidden connection to revealed truth. Many in the 17th century who did not subscribe explicitly to this doctrine nonetheless believed that in some way or other different intellectual traditions are all, in the end, informed by the same truth.

Separate origins for different human groups, in contrast, would threaten both the moral and the intellectual status of the group that is presumed to have a separate creation.  Because it is the man of the bible who is created in the image of God, if men on the other side of the world had a separate creation, then they could not but be seen as unequal, in terms of relative likeness to God, to those in the Christian world.  And thus monogenesis ensures both the appropriateness of missionary work at all corners of the globe, as well, at least from the point of view of the missionaries, as the full equality –again, in terms of relative proximity to God– of all ethnic groups.  In the 17th century, to deny the shared origins of all ethnic groups was to deny the universality of scripture, and was thus heretical.  Thus, for example, in 1616 Lucilio Vanini denounces the “atheists” who believe that Ethiopians, unlike other ethnic groups, are descended from monkeys.

*

If there were some suggestions of separate origins for human beings, this is not necessarily because Native Americans or Africans were perceived to be sub-human (which, for the most part, in the 17th century they were not, in so far as they were all seen as equally worthy of salvation), but also because accumulating evidence made it increasingly difficult to account for (i) the dispersion of people so far from the Near Eastern region presumed to have hosted the original Garden of Eden; (ii) the evident fact that a number of pagan civilizations –notably, the Egyptians, the Chaldaeans, and now the Aztecs– had records extending back well before the 6000 years presumed to have elapsed since the creation; and (iii) finally, the tremendous differences in physical traits of human beings from different parts of the world.  If one did not believe—as many did not—that environments could transform organisms, then it was difficult to see why people in all parts of the world did not look like those in the Near East.  And if one did believe that environments could transform organisms, then it still seemed implausible that the tremendous diversity of human types could have emerged so quickly following the dispersion of people to different parts of the globe– a dispersion that would have come some time after the original creation. 

The evident difficulty of accounting for the emergence of such tremendous differences between various human groups in the very short amount of time thought to have elapsed since Adam and Eve caused some to argue that human beings had in fact existed before the first parents, and that some current humans are descended from these ‘pre-Adamites’.  Isaac La Peyrère argued for this position in his Prae-Adamitae of 1655, though within a year of publication he was forced to recant.  In this work, La Peyrère cites Romans (5:12-14) as support for the Pre-Adamite hypothesis, which holds that until “the time of Law sin was in the world,” i.e., that there were sinful people until, with Adam, law came into the world.  The author was pressured into retracting the views exposited in this work, but not soon enough to prevent his argument from making a profound impact.  William Poole notes that there were at least a dozen important treatises in the latter half of the 17th century seeking to refute La Peyrère’s thesis.   Matthew Hale, in his 1677 work The Primitive Origination of Mankind, Considered and Examined According to the Light of Nature, treats La Peyrère’s hypothesis critically, yet far from dismissively.  Still another important refutation is Edward Stillingfleet’s Origines sacrae of 1661.

Richard Popkin writes that “[p]ractically nobody in the seventeenth century was willing, publicly, to accept the pre-Adamite theory or any form of polygenesis.  The irreligious implications were too great for the theory to be given much credence prior to the Enlightenment… The explanatory value of a polygenetic theory was great, but the danger of holding to it was, perhaps, greater.”   The circles in which the theory came up in the 17th century indicate just how marginal it remained: either it was picked up by a very radical religious sect, such as the Levellers, the Ranters, and the Diggers; or it was propagated in anonymous, semi-anonymous, or pseudonymous literature. Poole, in contrast with Popkin, identifies a number of different sources of 17th-century pre-Adamism, not all of which were anonymous.  Paracelsus is sometimes cited as the first to propose that Native Americans could not have descended from Adam.  He observes that “we are all descended from Adam.  And I cannot refrain from making a brief mention of those who have been found in hidden Islands and are still little known.  To believe they have descended from Adam is difficult to conceive– that Adam’s children have gone to the hidden islands.  But one should well consider, that these people are from a different Adam.  It will be difficult to maintain, that they are related on the basis of flesh and blood.”   It is thus credible that they “were born there after the Deluge,” and also that “they have no souls.”  Giordano Bruno too suggests that denying that Native Americans have souls would be one way of accommodating new evidence (e.g., from the Aztec calendar, from Chaldaean and Egyptian astrology) for the great length of time people had been in the New World, while at the same time adhering to the biblical chronology of descent from Adam. 

Thomas Herbert writes in 1638 of the problematic antiquity of Chinese history: “They say the World is aboue a hundred thousand yeares old after their Chronologies, and accordingly deriue a Pedigree and tell of wonders done ninetie thousand yeares before Adams creation.”  As Poole notes, it was the Jesuit Martino Martini’s Sinicae Historiae Decas Prima of 1658 that called attention to Chinese chronology’s incompatibility with that of the Old Testament,  and on this basis explicitly to question Biblical universality.  Martini asserts: “I hold it as certain that the extremity of Asia was populated before the flood.”  Francis Lodwick, to cite just one more example, in his essay on the “Originall of Mankind,” also provides reasons for the pre-Adamite thesis based in anthropological and linguistic, as opposed to historical and scriptural evidence: namely, what he takes to be the fundamental difference between Africans and Europeans, and the improbability of migration of one ethnic group into a habitat to which it is not suited.  He also speculates that if all groups were descended from the same two parents, their languages would have some common features, which he does not take to be the case.

What has not been emphasized in most discussions of pre-Adamism is evidence of the sort that Lodwick adduces– from the observation of different human groups, rather than the much more common evidence from biblical hermeneutics and from the encounter with non-European chronologies.   But the more evidence that was adduced that would seem to militate in favor of it, the more environmental adaptation, and rapid adaptation at that, needed to be adduced in order to account for the emergence of human variety within the short period of time that had elapsed since Adam.  In order for the case for separate creations to be effectively laid to rest, the possibility of rapid mutation as a result of migration into new environments had to be defended.

*

Of course, environmental influence on moral and physical character is not entirely new in the modern period.  As early as Hippocrates ideas about the environment’s role in human variation. He gives, for example, a lengthy account of differences in skin pigmentation and moral temperament in different parts of the world, describing the differences between Asians and Europeans in a manner favorable to the former.  Asians are gentle, Europeans bellicose (the exact opposite of the early modern stereotype), and this because of the way each group is influenced by climate and wind. 

Nicolas Malebranche, writing in the 1670s, thinks that the different qualities of air in different places bring about differences in natural character.  He notes that “it is certain that the most refined air particles we breathe enter our hearts,” and believes that this process is corroborated empirically from our daily observation of the “various humors and mental characteristics of persons of different countries.  The Gascons, for example, have a much more lively imagination than the Normans.  The people of Rouen, Dieppe, and Picardy, are all different from each other: and they all differ even more from the Low Normans, although they are all quite similar to one another.  But if we consider the people of more remote lands, we shall encounter even stranger differences, as between an Italian and a Fleming or a Dutchman.” 

But what happens when human beings begin, in massive numbers, to abandon the places to which they are ‘assigned’ for other climes?  In ancient accounts of racial difference, when this difference is conceived as having a history it is generally one of mythological character, involving a curse or a cataclysm that brought about the difference. Thus the scorching of Africans –a one-time event, generally associated with a curse or misfortune, as in the Old Testament myth of the curse of Ham,  or the Greek myth of Phaeton, who rode his burning chariot too close to the surface of the earth– is communicated to future generations, perhaps by some physically comprehensible channel, but what is emphasized is the miasmic and dynastic character of the differentiating traits.  If similitude for the ancients is accounted for in terms of intelligent design, difference within a species is generally written off to cataclysm or curse. This view, we should note, is very different from full-fledged modern scientific racism, which takes it that differences between ethnic groups are, somehow, rooted in essential differences that are not susceptible to environmental influence. Joseph Chamberlain gives a very pure statement of the view in the 19th century: “I believe in this race, the greatest governing race the world has ever seen; in this Anglo-Saxon race, so proud, so tenacious, self-confident and determined, this race which neither climate nor change can degenerate, which will infallibly be the predominant force of future history and universal civilisation.”

*

While this short outline of some of the developments in early modern ethnography is too preliminary to draw any general conclusions about intellectual trends in thinking about human difference in the period, we may nonetheless draw some tentative conclusions.  The reflections of thinkers as diverse as Edward Tyson, John Wallis, John Locke, and Malebranche suggest that a view of the relationship of the influence of the environment on human variation is beginning to emerge in the late 17th century that emphasizes: (i) The demise of cataclysmic accounts of diversification.  Environmental influence would begin to be seen as ongoing; it would be widely believed that human beings –and, most relevantly, Europeans– could be transformed through transplantation into new environments.  In the 17th century, the cataclysmic account begins to give way to a more naturalized picture of similitude and variation within a species. With the shift from a conception of cataclysmic change to one of ongoing change, we also observe a shift, broadly speaking, from a mythical conception of origins to a truly historical one.  (ii) A conception of the different traits of different ethnic groups as truly adaptive rather than degenerative, that is, as serving some genuine purpose under particular environmental circumstances, rather than resulting from the harmful effects of a ‘savage’ lifestyle, e.g., exposing one’s flesh to the elements rather than wearing clothes.   

At the same time, of course, there was the trend in thinking about human variation that may be seen as extending from Bernier through Chamberlain that emphasizes the fundamental or essential difference between different human groups and that, while certainly not denying the possibility of cross-group reproduction (and thus not denying that Europeans and Africans belong to the same ‘species’ in today’s sense), nonetheless would see this as somehow against nature’s grain, since nature has humanity carved up into real and neatly bounded races.  One of the great ironies of early modern ethnography is that it was the religious and creationist world-view that spoke in favor of common origins for all humanity, while the abandonment of the need to interpret human diversity in scriptural terms easily led to polygenesis. 

Polygenesis, and the corollary belief in the essential difference between different groups, would enjoy its most widespread success in the context of 19th century slavery and the hardening of a global institution that relied on racism for its legitimacy, and would present itself as the account of human origins most in keeping with the best scientific evidence.  The fact that this account of human diversity remains controversial in the 17th century may be traced in part to the enduring imperative in the period to stay faithful in speaking of origins to the inherited scriptural account.

There has likely always been some conception of the way in which organisms fit their environment, whether this fit is seen as one fixed from time immemorial by God for each organism in the place ‘appropriate’ to it, or whether this is conceived as a gradual change in the organism to better accommodate the vicissitudes of its habitat.  For the most part, the latter view prevails prior to the early modern period.  Nowhere does Hippocrates say that the people who are now Europeans arrived in Europe and became bellicose as a result of environmental conditions; he only says that Europeans are bellicose.  It would not be unreasonable to suppose that the new concern with change over time as a result of change of habitat, whether this is conceived as adaptation or as generation, was a response to the increasing dispersion of Europeans throughout the globe in the early modern period, and to the increasing concern about the long term effects on European populations of this dispersion.  Racial essentialism may, in turn, be seen as a way of securing the stability of the population through change in habitat by positing traits that are, somehow, resistant to any environmental influence.   

The claim that there are separate lines of descent for different human groups was perceived as heretical and atheistic in the 17th century, while a shared line of descent for different but related species was likewise perceived as heretical and atheistic.  In both cases, moreover, the denunciation of these views serves as a clear indication of their growing importance in the 17th century.  As with atheism itself, there are vastly more denouncers than defenders, and we have to wait until the following century to find the ideas being defended for the first time as serious hypotheses.  One might almost conclude that denunciations of ideas function in history as anticipations of these ideas’ ascendancy.

The view the denouncers were looking to secure was precisely that all and only human beings are related to other human beings.  Corollaries of this view are that all and only human beings are the earthly likeness of God, are capable of salvation and damnation, and are capable of higher cognition and moral agency.  But scientific evidence appeared to be mounting against this exclusive position of human beings in nature.  By the 18th century, ironically, at the same time as species boundaries were becoming more fluid with the rise of pre-Darwinian evolutionary thought, ‘racial’ boundaries were becoming more rigid.  Mainstream 17th-century thought, while largely failing or refusing to acknowledge the kinship of humans and apes, was certainly more clear-sighted about the kinship of humans to one another than much purportedly scientific thought of the following two and a half centuries would be. 

—

Los Angeles, May 23, 2008

For an extensive archive of Justin Smith’s writing, please visit www.jehsmith.com.

Elatia Harris

Ever since she married and divorced four times within six months and entered into a state-sanctioned civil union with a woman in Hungary – all of it for art’s sake, but all of it legal and binding – Alix Lambert has had my attention. In the photo below by Dan Monick, we see her in finest film noir fettle — as she should be, apropos her newest book, Crime (FUEL Publishing, 2008) — but in her weddings photos, she can look awfully sweet and unsuspecting. And, recently on David Milch’s Deadwood, for which she also wrote a filmed script, she appeared as a prostitute both imperious and wistful.

While Alix Lambert may not be the most often-married artist one can name, she is the one who got me thinking what a work of art a marriage was anyway, and what kind of marriage might best be understood as a work of art. That was back in the early 90’s — her ex-wife has had two babies meanwhile — and a number of artists have since staged weddings as culturally freighted yet instant artifacts. When they do this it does tend to make a point — but it’s not the same, is it?  Susan Sontag remarked that, of the things wrong with marriage, only one was that, without necessarily knowing or questioning it, we tended to think of a marriage as existing quite apart from ourselves, the people who were in it. Alix may have entered her marriages knowing that very well, and not questioning the idea as much as sounding it. When I learned that Crime had just been published by FUEL — the London-based design group that last year brought out the BibliOdyssey book, whose author I interviewed in this space — I thought it was time for a look at both the genre-crossing artist and her publishers, themselves no strangers to managing parallel careers that, convention suggests, do not particularly reconcile.

If you don’t already know all about Alix Lambert, then you might know her best from her 73-minute Russian language, English-subtitled film of 2000, The Mark of Cain, about prisoners in Russia, prisoners whose elaborate, full body tattoos tell of their rank and history in the prison system in a pictorial code not understood by their guards. Research for Eastern Promises, his 2007 film, brought Viggo Mortensen to The Mark of Cain, and showed him how he should look in the scene where he strips to reveal tattoos just about everywhere. (Stars tattooed on the knee-caps mean, incidentally, that you will never kneel down before authority.)

It was Russia — Russian prison tattoos in particular, about which Damon Murray and Stephen Sorrell, the principals of FUEL, have published two acclaimed books — that brought Alix Lambert and FUEL together for Crime. “Russia is the new Wild West,” Damon Murray told me. Even so, Crime brings something new to exploring that Wild West within — the criminal imagination, and how it is accessed by writers, actors, directors, the police, private investigators, victims of crime and criminals. There’s crime, there’s representation of crime, and then there’s Crime — the book that sets up a conversation about it all, amply illustrated by Alix’s own photos ranging from luscious to perfectly horrifying. In preparing for the book, Alix was cautioned by David Mamet, “You won’t get answers.” And that was okay — she wasn’t looking for them. What she got was questions — many questions — and a sense of possibilities. The cumulative effect of Crime is best experienced by reading it through. But only if you want to think thoughts you shall not have had before.

For Damon Murray and Stephen Sorrell, to the left as painted by Gordon Murray, the route to Crime and to Russian tattoos may have started with a four-letter word: USSR. In 1992, they were design students at the Royal College of Art in London, and already partners in publishing. FUEL magazine was then themed around four-letter words, and they thought in light of recent events that “USSR” would do nicely. And, that a trip was in order.  “Boris Yeltsin had just declared, ‘Everything, everywhere is for sale,’ ” Damon told me, “and it was fascinating to experience at first hand Russia’s initial interpretation of capitalism. There was an aesthetic of deep melancholy and integrity that we sensed then, and found an affinity for. It’s resonated with us ever since.”

In focusing on prison tattoos — far afield from the avant-garde graphics influencing designers since the Russian Revolution — was FUEL doing a form of visual anthropology?  Damon said there was indeed urgency to document social traditions that were rapidly falling by the wayside, post-Soviet tendencies throughout the 90’s having been to forget the past and mimic Western culture. “The tattoo has been devalued to mere fashion in the West, and our aim with the tattoo books was to show that this wasn’t always so, that they once had so much value that they were a matter of life or death.”

Is there a type of book that can be called a FUEL book?  Damon almost hopes not, but supposes there is. He and Stephen Sorrell are not only the publishers but also the designers of every book.  Six FUEL covers are below, and a full list of titles at the end of this post.  “The interesting thing for us,” Damon says, “is applying our aesthetic to subjects that people might not consider ‘right’ – such as Crime. It’s actually difficult to say what would make us reject an idea.”

The bibliography on Alix Lambert is already extensive. Like Damon and Stephen, she first went to Russia in the early 90’s — to exhibit her photography. “I was hooked,” she told me. To film The Mark of Cain some years later, she reports starting off for Russia a bit underfunded — with $1.67 — an instance of the “do it anyway” spirit that she has long relied on to get her where she needs to go. She and I have been in recent contact mainly about Crime, but there was time also to revisit the marriages. I’ve obtained permission to use four photos from Crime, throughout the interview below.  I thought, however that I’d start with the marriages. Mastering the Melon, a book about her various art projects, shows one of the weddings photos.

Elatia Harris: You’re the only one I know who has gone through with multiple, legally real marriages as art. I’d love to hear how you framed the project — and how you survived it.

Alix Lambert: I felt like it was important to actually legally get married. In part because I was interested in showing the paper work. These pieces of paper mark places in our lives and shape how we think of ourselves and how others relate to us. Also I feel that the process I chose shows in the photographs — there are inevitably details that you might not think of when staging something. The drive-thru wedding chapel in Vegas — especially Charlotte the Wedding Queen of The West — is something that I might not have made up, like the same guy at City Hall who married me twice in the span of a couple of months and of course didn’t recognize me…

EH:  Did you — kind of — know what would happen?

AL: I don’t think I have ever done a project that was particularly mapped out from the start. With the wedding project I was in Vegas and I noticed that the place to start divorce proceedings was right next to a wedding chapel.  I wondered how many times you could run back and forth in one day getting married and divorced.  As I learned more, I wanted to address the historical, social, political, and formal aspects of the institution of marriage. As far as surviving it – my work is very much intertwined with my life. Eventually I will not survive it.

EH: What was the most surprising thing about working with FUEL?

AL: That they care so much about the book as visual artifact was why I was interested in working with them — that, and that their interests were so aligned with mine. The process of making this book was extremely collaborative. Damon and Stephen were involved from the very beginning. They are incredible talents.

Undercover Police Detective, and Family, below. Photo by  Alix Lambert

EH: If one of the jobs of the artist is to transgress, then art can’t be just lovely, can it? It must take the viewer aback a bit — do you agree?  There are artists who are not shy about entering the dark, not knowing what will happen. Who’s one who has come back with something we need to see?

AL: I think art can just be lovely – but not all art, all the time. I do try to “enter the dark” as you put it and tend to be attracted to the work of people who do as well. I was introduced to the work of Chris Burden when I was 14 and it opened up my entire understanding of what art could be.
 
EH: To a conservative reading, Crime might seem to posit a two-way street between crimes that are performed by criminals and how criminals are portrayed in art, especially film. Is this portrayal merely commentary, or do you think that, in a society where everything is mediated, portrayal ever feeds into crime?  As it may into vigilantism, for instance — assuming that’s not also crime.

AL: I definitely think that portrayal feeds into real life crime, and many of the real life criminals I talked with supported that.  Bank robbers acknowledged posturing coming from films. I think the “overlap” that we refer to in the press for the book was of more interest to me than the “gap.”

EH: As well as criminals and survivors of crime, to prepare for writing, you talked with writers and filmmakers – David Mamet, Samantha Morton, Mark Salzman, Nick Flynn, David Cronenberg, to cite a few. Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, told you of contemplating crime as a very young child. “I knew I shouldn’t do it until I was ready,” he said to you.  Well, that’s forthcoming.  Lots of people really spoke from the heart for Crime, didn’t they?

AL: I think they did. I am pleased if they did. Many of these people are people I had some sort of connection to, so perhaps they felt more open.

EH: But it was almost as if they couldn’t wait to talk about it.  Even with some of the people you didn’t know, it was as if you’d found them in a confiding mood and asked them to talk to you about high school… 

Samantha Morton, below. Photo by Alix Lambert

AL: I think the people I didn’t know did open up just as much – sometimes more. For the most part people want to be heard and listened to. I only wanted to include in the book, and in my documentary — and in any subsequent projects — people who truly wanted to talk with me. Some were extremely enthusiastic and said it was something they thought about all the time in their life or in their work.  Others were less so, but still interested enough to engage in a conversation. I like what you say about high school – with some of the interviews it was quite like that.

EH: Your own childhood brought you very close to victims of crime. Maybe everyone’s did.  In the late 1950’s, my mother’s oldest friend hired the mother of Lee Harvey Oswald to look after his children for about a year — who knew?  But your experiences came closer than that. How did this help to make it your material?

AL: As I talked to people I found that everyone has a tangential relationship to crime. If not a direct one. And that was part of my interest in making the book. Those experiences shape us and how we think and who we become, and I was interested in exploring that.  Of course, many non-crime related things in our lives shape us as well – but you start with one thread that you notice and keep going.

EH: You open Crime with an interview with Joe Loya, a man who writes in a very undefended, regular guy tone who’s done time for bank robbery and is now an author and playwright. You close with a letter from Jimmy Wu, who will in a few years be released from lock-up after doing 15 years for home invasion. He was in Mark Salzman’s workshop for juvenile criminals, and one has to hope he keeps writing.

AL: I wanted to open with Joe because aside from being a good friend of mine he is also someone who is able to speak to many points of view of this subject – as a criminal, as an artist. He has an amazing story to tell and is articulate in telling it. I closed the book with Jimmy — and I want to credit Damon and Stephen for being very involved in the order we ended up placing the interviews in — because Jimmy’s story has hope in it.  For me, this book is very emotional if read straight through, and I wanted to end on a story that one felt empathy toward. 

EH: Joe and Jimmy both recall scenes of brutal humiliation as a child, and, actually, so do many artists and writers.  Throughout reading Crime, I kept thinking of Graham Greene’s famous remark that you needed a sliver of ice in your heart to be a writer. I always thought that meant, among other things, that a writer was by nature someone who stood a little apart. Can that same sliver of ice get you — first — to crime?

Tom Kalin, screenwriter, director, producer and gay rights activist. Photo by Alix Lambert

AL:I don’t know about that sliver of ice – but I do think that artists in general are in the curious position of being set apart from society and also being able to communicate universal ideas to society.

EH: The actor Matthew Maher, who has often been cast as a criminal, told you a woman he was seeing had been looking at an old passport photo, and said to him, “You look like someone who does bad things to children.” He all but likened acting and crime as resulting from a need to be someone you can’t be and do things that aren’t done. Is he onto something?

AL: I talked to a number of people who felt acting allowed them to be someone they otherwise weren’t or to act in a way that they otherwise wouldn’t.  Role playing is at the root of much of my work, too – and I have always been fascinated by the experiments where they make one group of people “prisoners” and the others “guards” and within days the guards are committing horrible abuses and the prisoners are having nervous breakdowns. Joe Loya and other prisoners I have talked to who have spent extended periods of time in solitary talk about hallucinating.  In Joe’s case a boy would come and talk to him.

EH: Apropos Do With Me What You Will, her sixth fiction that was part legal novel, part romantic triangle, Joyce Carol Oates said she’d like to write about love and the Law as it affected every single citizen. Could she take a look at your weddings, coming more than twenty years later, and find in you a kindred spirit — of fascination with the Law?  Maybe there was a spirit of nolo contendere in the marriage project…  Or were you more in control than that?

AL: Oh dear, I am never in control. I certainly would be happy to believe that I was a kindred spirit with Joyce Carol Oates – I think she is wonderful and am looking at a copy of On Boxing, another shared interest between us, that I have been reading for a completely separate project.

EH: What’s next for you, Alix? Can you talk about it?

Steve Hodel, below, author of The Black Dahlia Avenger (2003). Photo by Alix Lambert

AL: I always have about 18 balls in the air with the hope that I might catch just one of them. Yesterday I spent the day talking with a wonderful artist named Harrison Haynes about a project we want to collaborate on that deals with surveillance. And tomorrow I will work on details for a round-table in Moscow around my book, The Silencing, that will be held in September. There is always something going on, but I never know what will rise to the surface.

EH: An artist! Do you have a strong favorite from the film noir era?

AL: No. I have lots of favorites – I was thinking about Scarlet Street the other day, with Edward G. Robinson, that’s a great one. I LOVE depictions of artists in films.

EH: I’ll be trite now and ask you about the crow tattoo…

AL: That I have on my back? As far as what it means to me – I have to keep some things private, no?

On the 13th of June, Alix Lambert will sign 25 copies of Crime at The Mysterious Bookshop. 58 Warren Street, New York, NY 10007

SELECTED LINKS for ALIX LAMBERT

Her film, The Mark of Cain: http//www.markofcainfilm.com/

Her site: http://www.pinkghettoproductions.com/

The site of Perceval Press, owned by Viggo Mortensen:  http://www.percevalpress.com/

SELECTED LINKS for FUEL DESIGN

http://www.fuel-design.com/

http://www.designmuseum.org/design/fuel

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FUEL_Design

http://www.designobserver.com/archives/030690.html

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1933181,00.html

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1933598,00.html

BOOKS published by FUEL PUBLISHING include:

Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia, Danzig Baldaev and Sergei Vasiliev (London: Steidl/FUEL, 2004)

Fleur. Plant Portraits by Fleur Olby (London: FUEL, 2005)

The Music Library, Jonny Trunk (London: FUEL, 2005)

Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia Volume II, Danzig Baldaev and Sergei Vasiliev (London: FUEL, 2006)

Home-Made. Contemporary Russian Folk Artifacts, Vladimir Arkhipov (London: FUEL, 2006)

Ideas Have Legs, Ian McMillan and Andy Martin (London: FUEL, 2006)

Match Day, Bob Stanley and Paul Kelly (London: FUEL, 2006)

BibliOdyssey, P.K. (London: FUEL, 2007)

Notes from Russia, Alexei Plutser-Sarno (London: FUEL, 2007)

Crime, Alix Lambert (London: FUEL, 2008)

///
A Weekend in the Garden of My Sixties
Jim Culleny

Two days behind a roto-tiller panting like a spent mutt
you get to meditating on poor Yorick’s skull.

Barely holding back the stallions of a Briggs and Stratton
you smell the nearness of becoming void and null.

You wonder how’s my ticker doing
and will I soon me caving in a final bow?

You consider, I could suddenly be toodle-looing
I could be tumbling headlong into dirt right now.

You wonder then if the world will matter
You wonder, how deep’s this mine?

You wonder how far your dust might scatter.
You wonder how much longer the juice will crackle
up and down your spine.

///

Edward B. Rackley

The final scene of the 1968 Planet of the Apes (Rod Serling script, starring Charlton Heston and Roddy McDowall) is worth enduring the tortuous acting. It’s a very different ending from the 2001 remake with Mark Wahlberg, and distinguishes the original Apes as true science fiction. Marky Mark’s version is a generic action film.

Briefly: After his escape as a prisoner in an ape society on a distant planet, Heston discovers a damaged Statue of Liberty half-buried on a remote beach. He realizes that his inter-planetary voyage had in fact kept him on Earth all along. Humanity had destroyed its own civilization, paving the way for a Planet of the Apes.

I had a more mundane version of this vision recently: a post-petrol world where combustion engines were a memory and pedal-power had reclaimed the Earth. I like apes, but they didn’t play a role in this particular fantasy.

Embrace your inner redneck

Sound advice, perhaps. Not for me though, at least in this lifetime. My inner redneck will have to wait—I’m still recovering from my past life as Pavlov’s dog. But last weekend I had the opportunity to embrace that inner redneck in my first close encounter with the apotheosis of modern redneckdom–NASCAR. This was the Southside Speedway in Richmond Virginia, one of the sport’s earliest professional tracks, in use since 1959. NASCAR fans hail Southside as ‘the toughest short track in the south’, and I quickly learned why.

Thing is, I wasn’t there for the roaring engines or burning rubber. I came for a day of bicycle racing. These were track bikes primarily but a couple of road bike races were also scheduled. I arrived late and over-caffeinated to find the speedway grounds completely empty except for a hundred or so cyclists in the circle inside the track. Most were either preparing to race or recovering. I had not missed my start time, and ran over to get registered.

Under a gray sky and spots of rain, the place had the mournful feel of a fair ground or circus site after the festivities had ended, the cheers and laughter now gone, the animals and rides long departed. Here too, on the ground were crushed candy wrappers, gluey traces of melted sno-cones, tufts of cotton candy stuck to matted patches of grass where crowds had stood and cheered.

But absent any NASCAR fans and the roar of the spectacle itself, the quiet speedway also had the distinct feel of anachronism, of future-past. I gazed out at the empty bleachers and imagined the speedway as a relic of an extinct civilization, a NASCAR ruin in a post-petrol world.

‘I can’t control my fingers, I can’t control my brain’

Founded by a band of track bike racers without a local velodrome, the Sprint Club (think ‘Fight Club’) created its own race series called Go Fast Turn Left, in deference to Richmond’s long history of stock car racing at Southside, where many GFTL races are  organized.

The Sprint Club ethos is a direct descendant of old school punk rock’s DIY spirit. That means, in no particular order: (1) Appropriating a found environment, making it one’s own, at the expense of appropriate norms and behavior that belong to that environment; (2) In spectacle or performance, participation trumps consumption. Passive, polite observation is replaced by direct participation, eliminating the distance between spirit and seer, artist and viewer; 3) The ‘do it yourself’ mentality is self-explanatory–there are no experts, only students and practitioners, and all are welcome.

After getting my race number and quickly inhaling assorted carbs and sugars, I steered out onto the ragged tarmac to warm up with the other racers. A banked, tight oval track, Southside is only a third of a mile long. My group would race for 25 laps. From the previous night’s NASCAR event, there were fist-sized chunks of black rubber from exploded car tires, random nuts, bolts and metal fragments scattered everywhere. The racing surface itself was gritty, pock-marked and scarred from crashes and the elements.

Ass on fire

I didn’t win the race or even come close, but I learned a few things. First, cycling is a cruel muse. Glorious bouts of smoking and drinking never got in the way of my marathon running, years back. Marathons permitted me the dubious luxury of being a hedonist and a masochist at the same time–usually such joys cannot coexist. But competitive cycling is different than long distance running. Marathons require stamina and effort sustained over hours, as does cycling. Unlike marathons, however, cycling involves regular spikes of acceleration, troughs of radical energy depletion and periods of recovery within the course of a single race.

My fantasy of riding on a post-petrol, futuristic ruin of a NASCAR track was shared, I learned, with other riders, some of whom complemented me on my ‘sweet ride‘ before the race (have a look, it really is an amazing bike). These were the same guys who slammed into me as the peloton whistled forward at a bruising 31 mph. ‘Keeping the rubber side down’ was more challenging than I thought. At one point, I heard a crash behind me, but rubbernecking was not an option. 

Competitive cycling is a contact sport, I also discovered, with lots of intimidating banter between riders. Kind of like a mosh pit, I thought and smiled, as I managed to keep pace with the breakaway pack for much of the race. Surely I would finish in the top five, I thought. But with two laps to go, my legs turned to lead and a handful of leading riders pulled away from me. I hadn’t the strength to stay with them, or even maintain a spot in their slipstream. I crossed the finish line and thought, ‘Time to kill my inner Marlboro Man’. Alas, it appears my inseparable companions hedonism and masochism will finally be parting ways.

by Beth-Ann Bovino

A walk through the lower east side in New York can feel like Spring-cleaning at mom’s house. Back then mom would have a “Tag Sale, and everything, including my favorite childhood dreams, was priced to sell. Each item would have a tag on it. A stuffed animal from my crib priced at 25 cents. Barbie dolls, 50 cents, not to mention all the items I collected over time to make my plans to become a famous (fill in blank) come true. The U.S. is also cleaning house, again with everything priced to sell. .

Before, with the dollar a strong reserve currency and an interest rate differential that supported U.S. assets, the U.S. could easily cover its trade deficit with a capital surplus. The capital account surplus was attracted by the high returns and low risk in the U.S. financial markets. Even signs of the housing weakness in the U.S. didn’t slow inflows until the last few months. The financial tides have shifted. Now with oil prices at record levels, housing weak and home prices continuing down, the U.S. is in a recession.

This recession will likely be shallower but longer than previously anticipated. Like 2001, there might not be the usual two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. But it will still be a recession. It probably will be officially pronounced one by the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research some time later, and certainly feel like one in the minds of most Americans.

Other things we used to take as given are no longer true. The relative bias in favor of U.S. assets has been reduced sharply, because of shrinking relative returns and increased credit risk. The financial shock that erupted in August 2007, when the U.S. subprime mortgage market was derailed by the reversal of the housing boom, has spread quickly and unpredictably, inflicting damage on world financial markets. Despite Fed action to calm markets, lending dried up. The resulting slowdown in capital inflows has pushed borrowing costs higher for both households and businesses, and brought the dollar down.

The U.S. has the largest and most liquid financial market, with about one-third of the global capitalization, and is not expected to give up this status anytime soon. However, as financial globalization continues to develop, other regions will gain prominence in world markets. Higher European interest bond yields, lower U.S. yields, and the weaker dollar have improved returns for European bonds relative to U.S. bonds, with less money coming in. Inflows into the U.S. over the last few years were dominated by fixed income private bonds. It has slowed. Flows are now shifting towards treasury bonds and equities. Real assets are cheaper because of the weak dollar. Foreign money will continue to buy up U.S. investments once investors believe the decline is nearing an end, but they will be buying more real assets and fewer fixed-income securities.

A Safe Bet?

In 2006, U.S. long-term interest rates were a percentage point above equivalent European bond yields. Money looking for the highest possible return on a safe investment thus flowed into the U.S. The surge was not pushed more by low interest rates abroad than by high U.S. interest rates. The U.S. interest rates were low by historical standards, but still higher than what foreign investors could get at home. In 2006, over 85% of the net inflow into the United States came from private sources, and increasingly went into the buying of private rather than government debt. (Only 13% of the inflow went into equities.)

The inflow of funds to the United States had made markets very complacent about risk. Investors’ struggle for yields meant that yield spreads above treasuries hit record lows. The spread of corporate speculative-grade bond yields over U.S. treasuries hit a record low in May 2007 as investors chased higher returns and ignored risk. Markets now aren’t as complacent about risk; they’ve been reminded by the subprime problems that risk is still a four-letter word. Yield spreads have widened well above normal levels corporate bonds (both investment-grade and speculative-grade), well above the historical average and over twice what we saw just over a year ago. The sharp swing from risk also hit household borrowing costs. They have climbed higher, if households can get a loan at all.

Climbing from 45-year lows, U.S. interest rates has now dropped back as problems increased. After raising rates 17 times, the Federal Reserve’s main concern has now abruptly turned to recession risk and the turmoil in financial markets. The liquidity squeeze that began last August, brought about by the U.S. subprime mortgage problems, forced the Fed and other central banks to change direction quickly. The financial shock spread far beyond the subprime mortgage market to a general crisis of confidence. Since then, the Fed has cut rates by 3.25 percentage points to 2%. The Fed cuts helped some borrowers with adjustable rate loans coming up for a reset on their loan. The Fed has also helped reduce corporate costs, but creating various term lending facilities, coordinated with other major central banks. Corporate yield spreads are, however, still wide by historical standards.

The decline in Fed-controlled short-term interest rates has not, however, been echoed in long-term bond yields. That’s because interest rates are determined by global markets. The globalization of bond markets means that a central bank has less influence on long-term interest rates than in the past. The U.S. financial markets have illustrated that in the last few years, as a Fed tightening by 4.25% was met by indifference in the bond market. The Fed has now cut rate by 3.25%, which was also met with similar indifference. European rates are now above U.S. rates, making U.S. securities less attractive and reducing foreign inflows. This has prevented U.S. bond yields from dropping in line with short-term rates.

Foreign net buying of long-term U.S. assets slipped in 2007, to $1.00 trillion from its $1.14 trillion peak in 2006. While stocks saw a record annual inflow in 2007, inflows into fixed income dropped sharply. Risk aversion was the dominant theme in the first quarter of 2008. The March report continues to show weaker foreign inflows, suggesting the decline in the dollar isn’t over. Long-term inflows that did come in, came from official sources (central banks, trying to stabilize markets) and less from private money—not a healthy sign. Foreign buying was dominated by money going into safe-haven government bonds, while private accounts sold off sharply. Foreign purchases of U.S. financial assets will likely remain weak through yearend. But, if investors outside the U.S. continue to worry about the risk of a dollar decline, the result could be both a sharp drop in the dollar and a sharp rise in U.S. interest rates, extending the recession at home.

At Bargain Prices

Recent financial market stress has had an impact on foreign exchange markets. The real effective exchange rate for the U.S. dollar has declined sharply since mid-2007, with the dollar down 8% over last year. Foreign investment in U.S. bonds and equities has been dampened by reduced confidence in both the liquidity of and the returns on such assets, as well as by the weakening of U.S. growth prospects and the Fed’s interest rate cuts. Weaker foreign inflows pushed the dollar lower. Now foreign investors have lost confidence in U.S. securities and the U.S. dollar, and money is not so easy to come by, and only at higher interest rates.

The silver lining is improving U.S. sales to foreign bargain hunters. The decline in the value of the U.S. dollar has helped boost net exports, bringing the U.S. current account deficit down to 4.9% of GDP by the fourth quarter of 2007. This is well below its 6.6% peak in the third quarter 2006. But, while improving, the current gap is still-high, and financing from abroad will now require higher bond yields.

The weak dollar will continue to attract money into some U.S. assets; at least once investors believe the dollar decline is nearing an end. Although yield spreads make U.S. bonds less attractive, the weak dollar makes real assets cheaper. U.S. firms are becoming targets for foreign buyers, who see current pricing, especially in euros, yen, pounds, or Canadian dollars, as a bargain.

According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, foreign direct investment into the U.S. was $199.3 billion in 2007, after $175.4 billion in 2006.and $101.0 billion in 2005. Outlays in 2007 were the fourth largest recorded and the highest since 2000. Foreign money bought a substantial amount of our real estate (this was already indicated, anecdotally). Outlays also increased sharply in manufacturing and wholesale trade.

Not Going Out Of Business

The massive inflow of funds to the U.S. once helped the U.S. easily cover its trade deficit. But things have changed. Now the relative bias in favor of U.S. assets has been cut, because of shrinking relative returns and increased credit risk. Fed action has helped reduce interest rate spreads somewhat, though they are still high. The resulting slowdown in capital inflows has brought the dollar down.

Foreign purchases of U.S. assets will likely remain weak through 2008. Higher European interest bond yields, relative to U.S. yields, and the weaker dollar have made investing in European bonds more attractive than investing here. As a result, the inflows into U.S. financial assets, once dominated by fixed income private bonds, are now smaller. What money that comes in has shifted towards safe-haven treasury bonds and real assets. Real assets are cheaper because of the weak dollar. We expect foreign money to continue to buy up U.S. investments once investors believe the decline is nearing an end, but they will be buying more real assets and fewer private fixed-income securities.

While we expect inflows to slow, but not stop, things could go wrong. We’re worried that with the increased credit risk and the falling dollar the U.S. investments will become even less attractive to foreign investors. That could push bond yields up higher and the dollar down even more than we had already anticipated. The ‘Tag Sale’ would feel more like a ‘Going Out Of Business’ Sale. This scenario is not likely, but neither were $130 oil prices a few years ago.

The following is an introduction to Péter Esterházy I delivered at the New York Public Library two weeks ago for the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature.

If you want to talk about Péter Esterházy you have to dredge up the past a little. That isn’t always a fun thing to do, especially if you hail from anywhere in the between lands, Mitteleuropa. Still… somebody, as they say, has to do it and for whatever reason Esterházy is up to the task. Why does he do it? I think it is a simple as a line from his novel Helping Verbs of the Heart. “I’m terrified,” writes Esterházy, “yet I feel better now.”

The current situation in Mitteleuropa has to be traced back to the Hapsburgs, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the stupidest of several empires that kicked Mitteleuropa around for most of the last century. Still, if you’re going to have an empire, make it a ramshackle one, make sure it barely functions. It’s better that way. The dysfunctional aspects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were its most endearing. We know this from no less a doomed genius than Joseph Roth. True, most Joseph Roth characters drink themselves to death while gazing wistfully at portraits of Franz Josef, but on the positive side of the ledger there are lots of nooks and crannies to inhabit. There are lots of places the empire forgot to look and it is in those places where you could find the actual business of living and dying. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was lousy but it was human being lousy. For all the other evils, absolute evils, of the Empire of the Third Reich or the Empire of the Soviets, their chief crime against the varieties of everyday existence was in the obliteration of nooks and crannies. These were empires that didn’t want to leave a place where life could exist on its own terms anywhere, if they could help it. Steamroller empires. Empires of death for death’s sake.

You could say, then, that Esterházy has been producing a literature of the nooks and crannies. This is not a small thing. It is a giant thing. It means, simply, (and I hope you take this in its full ethical implication) producing a literature that is on the side of life.

There have, of course, always been nook and cranny writers. Catullus was one, lingering around the back alleys of Rome with a hard on and a smile. There is Cervantes and Rabelais. There is Lawrence Sterne. You catch the drift. Esterházy, I think, has a more specific lineage and that has to do, once again, with that sad and loveable place, Mitteleuropa (but do we call it a place really? More like a feeling, a way). Anyway, there it is. No place is as screwed up as Mitteleuropa and no people are more screwed up than Mitteleuropeans. (I say that with a fondness, by the way.) You either make that situation work for you or you’ve got nothing at all.

Esterházy is trying to make it work. It is a literary approach that comes down directly from that incorrigible drunk, Jaroslav Hasek, the author of The Good Soldier Svejk. Svejk is a rube all the way through and sometimes a scoundrel, but he always chooses life over death. It is there even in his way of talking, a style that Hasek gives his favorite literary creation which is both straightforward and evasive at the same time. It’s a kind of irony, middle European irony, that is neither Socratic nor the blasé irony of Western intellectual boredom. Actually I think it is much better than both of those things. Always it is a language, a style or a manner of comporting oneself that finds a way to skirt through the cracks. Again, life. Here’s Svejk on being locked up in an insane asylum, “I really don’t know why those loonies get so angry when they’re kept there. You can crawl naked on the floor, howl like a jackal, rage and bite… There’s a freedom there which not even Socialists have dreamed of.”

As the Austro-Hungarian Empire trailed off and more terrible events came to pass, the mantle of the literature of life was passed from Hasek to another great Czech writer, Bohumil Hrabal. In Hrabal the language of Svejk becomes more contorted, more obviously damaged. It takes on a childlike flavor that allows it to hide even further, to seek what’s left of the rapidly disappearing nooks and crannies. It is a run-on language, driven by fear, driven by the knowledge that to stop for a moment is possibly to stop forever. It’s incredible, really, that Hrabal manages to be so damn funny.

Finally, tragically, the language begins to dry up altogether. If life plus the Hapsburg Empire equals tragicomedy and the disastrous if hilarious adventures of Svejk, life plus the Soviet Empire equals silence. You simply had to shut up or you’d be forced to say something despicable, to betray yourself, to betray somebody, anybody. Czeslaw Milosz mentions somewhere that a whole generation of writers took to writing for their desk drawer. That was the only safe audience. And then they waited. It must have been a terrible waiting for Hrabal, the man who was born to spew. But he couldn’t find a nook or a cranny to spew in. Finally he penned a terrible document praising the regime so that he might get to spewing again. That’s what it had come to, trapped between untenable choices the little human figure gives way. One’s strength gives out.

Esterházy is still strong, though a little cracked up from the whole affair. But all of Mitteleuropa is cracked up, like one of Neo Rauch’s displaced canvasses bubbling up with memory and trauma and a few jokes. The greatness of Esterházy is in taking up that thread of life, thin is hell much of the time, that got passed from Hasek to Hrabal and now resides in Budapest. He is trying to turn on the spigots of language again, to open up the linguistic floodgates of which Hrabal was once the keeper and Hasek before him. There’s a passage in Esterházy’s novel, The Glance of Countess Hahn-Hahn where the traveler compares himself to the Danube. “But seeing,” Esterházy writes, “or at least supposing, that there was something which connected Ulm with Vienna, and Vienna with Belgrade, and not wanting to call this something the Danube, that metaphysical, imaginary, hotch-potch of a river, he would arrive at the conclusion that it was he himself who connected Ulm with Belgrade, he the traveler. …But the boat was carried by the Danube, and the Danube by the weight of lived-out lives, that unbearable weight we carry with us, we travelers. That is why the Danube comes before he does. And that is why he sits on the bottom step of the quayside, watching the melon rind float away downstream—if that means anything to anyone.”

Well, it sure as hell means something to me, and I’m not even a cracked up Mitteleuropan staggering around under all kinds of unbearable weights. But that’s it right there, the joy and the incredible burden, to be a Danube man trying to put history and logic and language and memory back together again. Talking your way through it as best you’re able so that something painful becomes something funny, and also the reverse. That’s also why, I think, Wittgenstein keeps creeping into Esterházy’s work when you least expect it. Wittgenstein’s journey is merely the philosophical version of Esterházy’s narrative fable. The point is to get to life without losing the thing that makes it lived. In many ways, Wittgenstein’s journey from the Tractatus to the Investigations is a trip to find where language really is. In the beginning he thinks it might be below us or above us, locked away in the secret relationships between words and things. Then he gets older and he realizes it is just right there. And that is what Esterházy is looking for most of the time, a language that is constantly running away from him but that he finds in scraps and fragments like sediment at the bottom of the Danube. Finally, Esterházy and Wittgenstein come to a similar insight: Language is just us being us. It was all so stupid and so great. The trick is in simply remembering how to be. Mitteleuropa took a long scary detour away from the land of us just being us, it is heartening to know that there were a few crazy bastards in their skiffs on the Danube paddling wildly away in the other direction.

Then again, we shouldn’t let ourselves get too drunk and puffed up on all this weighty stuff. Here’s Esterházy again… “From so much Danube and so much talk of Central Europe I didn’t so much get sick—which is the wrong word—as get angry. All that stuff about Danubian thought, Danubian ethos, Danubian past, Danubian history, Danubian suffering, Danubian tragedy, Danubian dignity, Danubian present. Danubian future! What does it all mean? All that flowing became suspicious. Danubian nothingness, Danubian hatred, Danubian stench, Danubian anarchy, Danubian provincialism, Danubian Danube. Poor Gertude Stein, were she alive to hear this! The Danube is the Danube is the Danube…
According to a rather weak joke, the answer to the question of what holds a football team together is partly alcohol and partly a shared hatred of the coach. And that’s all. That’s all Central Europe ever was.”

Point taken. Eventually you have to move on or you sink into it like a bottomless pit. Esterházy is writing himself out of that pit daily. And that, in short, is writing in the service of life. It is something that Péter Esterházy has done for himself and also for all of us. And I hope that you’ll all take a moment later on in your homes or in your favorite pubs of worship to say, as I will, L’Chaim, To Péter Esterházy, to life!

///
Hazy Moon
Jim Culleny

Last night I almost hugged the hazy moon,
that crazy bubble in the sky
who is ever entering new phases.

She rose red, round, and huge
as a melon of imagination.

She loomed listening to the pine pitch
and birch bark, an ear for the night choir.
She tugged,
I leaned as she rolled higher.

Two hands from the horizon
she pulled in humble as a quarter,
levitated, and kissed
the high limb tips of a twisted
locust tree.

For a moment, free
in the circle of her gravity,
I understood what that chalkball moon
held over me.

She hovered like a lover on a balcony
waiting for a star to shoot.
She disappeared once each month
leaving the shadow undilute,
but she was never faithless.

Always she returned
sweet as an arc of canteloupe,
billowing like a parachute,
calling to the oceans in their cells,
reaching down to the tips
of the deepest roots,
coaxing up through the tender stems
of slender shoots,
dragging, even through the leather hearts
of old galoots
the purest waters of the poorest wells.
………………………………………
………………………………………
………………………………………
………………………………………………………………………………
………………………………………………………………………………
………………………………………………………………………………

///

Frida Kahlo’s Brows
Jim Culleny

Who would not be blown away
by Frida Kahlo’s brows?

They soar over her eyes like a crow
broad      black      wings      spread

two hooded planets in its grip
scanning for a place to light and dine

the back-to-back parentheses of her nose
poised beneath, but above the pursed lips
of a rose

From portrait to portrait they fly
within the riveted space
of Kahlo’s face, changeless
as a signature

“This is me, Frida,”
they say. “This black crow
is my revelation to you

This raven mark is the sign of a Mexican girl
who realized her peculiar beauty with
bristles of brushes in odors of oil

“Once you see these brows,” says Frida,
“I will be indelible. My brows
will be stamped in your mind’s eye
until the day their pigments die
or till the descent of a crow
cradling two eyes in its claws
becomes impossible because
all the thoughtful will have
vanished.”

///

Elatia Harris

The year I was 9, I made every effort to turn Japanese.  I padded around the house in tabi and a kimono, elongated my eyes with my mother’s make-up – she wasn’t using it  – and did up my long dark hair in what I regarded as geisha poufs anchored with chopsticks. I even packed a small bag with tissue-wrapped favorite possessions, in case the opportunity to leave permanently for Japan came all of a sudden – as I had faith it would. Beneath the dress-up, however, and the very strong signal that I was not best pleased by life as a child in the West, was the real ardor I felt for the art of Japan. It looked so right to me, it just was right. Why was that? What was the secret? 

My mother knew what there was to know about how to look at Western painting, and together we looked at hundreds of paintings on the walls of museums and galleries and inside books. Though I might wait weeks for her to find an hour to page through a certain art book with me, I never pushed ahead without her until I began turning Japanese. She experienced the japonesque as chic, a deft touch in any environment, but the true family aesthetic was one in which Jules Verne duked it out with Henri Matisse. I will not forget what it was to be profoundly attracted to something my brilliant mother didn’t particularly get — it was a real rite of passage. From this distance, I see how kind she was to encourage me on my way away from her.  In the photo to the left, however, I appear a bit resentful. She had asked me to look up from what I was doing — assuredly not my homework — and I didn’t like my concentration to be broken. If at this age I was found drawing, then I was drawing something that looked — to me at least — Japanese. But I needed a guide to that universe of art and taste that drew me in, and it could not be my mother.

Enter Elise Grilli – a woman whom I suppose I never knew, although it does not feel that way.  I first encountered her name on the cover of one of my most beloved childhood books, Golden Screen Paintings of Japan. You can see the scan of my personal copy below left – it’s dog-eared the way a book gets if you sleep with it for many years. On the upper right corner, there is ink I spilled from copying something inside it. Akiyama Teruzawa’s big book from Skira, Japanese Painting, was similarly pored over by me, and is now obviously distressed, like the Modern Library edition of The Tale of Genji, written by the world’s first novelist, Lady Murasaki, and translated by Arthur Waley. Nobody in this bunch wrote for children, but in fact they all wrote for me. Especially Elise Grilli.

From the post-war years through the 1960’s, curiosity about the art and culture of Japan was likely to lead a reader of any age to a kind of book that would today be hard to find — one that unabashedly played up the otherness, not to say quaintness, of things Japanese. Asia was called the Orient then, and the modifier for anything east of Vienna was “Oriental” not “Asian.” (Well, I exaggerate — but not by much.) The Allied Occupation of Japan did not end until late in 1951, and even by the time I began studying the subject that would fill so much of my childhood, Japan was still Other. It was certainly the antithesis of the maroon sides of beef slathered in barbecue sauce, the morgue-temperature air-conditioning, and the fevered visual excess I considered to surround me, and that alone would have gotten it my childish attention — but perhaps not for long. And we are talking about long years of being absorbed in a subject, so that when in school I could pick my topics and write to please myself, I would write about Japanese gardens, Japanese creation myths, Japanese tea ceremonies, or some aspect of Japanese art. A teacher in the 6th grade made fun of me for this — gently. And even after years of child-time, it was not that I had learned so much, but that I had looked so much. For this was all about extreme optical seduction, the ideas and feelings it can give rise to.

It happened through books — tiny books, at that. In the late 50’s, Elise Grilli wrote two 7″ x 7″ soft cover companion books for Crown, Golden Screen Paintings of Japan and Japanese Picture Scrolls. Each is one-quarter of an inch thick, with about 30 pages of text and 36 plates, mostly color. They belonged to the “Art of the East Library” series, and they cost $1.25 each. My mother must have bought them for me at the local museum book store — I don’t remember wheedling her, but I wouldn’t have been above it. There was also the Kodansha “Library of Japanese Art,” brought to Western readers by an arrangement between Kodansha, an old Japanese publishing house, and the Charles E. Tuttle Company. These were amply illustrated soft cover monographs on leading Japanese artists, from Sesshu to Taikan. I see that the 7 volumes — about the height and width of paperback mysteries, but perhaps 30% of the thickness — I have owned since the age of 8 were marked down from $1.25 each to 75 cents. Of the Kodansha books I owned, Elise Grilli wrote or co-wrote the texts on Sesshu, Sotatsu and Hokusai. I’ve read them all many, many times. Her name became very familiar to me, as did her words, her beautifully chosen words.

The image under the title is a four-panel screen from the Room of Maples and Flowers, painted in the late 16th century by Hasegawa Tohaku and now in the Chishaku-in, a temple complex in Kyoto. Each gold foil panel is a bit under 6 feet in height. I first became aware of this work of art reading Golden Screen Paintings of Japan, my $1.25 book by Elise Grilli, and it was the most gorgeous thing I had ever seen, period. Paging through the book late at night, I would have to sneak up to it, because it was almost too much, and because the ravishing pleasures of anticipation were not to be disdained. The same artist, Tohaku, painted the monkey panels, above. These are ink paintings on paper, incorporating a gold wash, now in the Kyoto National Museum. Oh, their fur, their presence.

Unfathomably, it was the same Tohaku who painted the pair of six-paneled screens below, Trees in Fog, now in the National Museum, Tokyo. These are slightly over 5 feet high, just sumi on paper. No gold. If you imagined them side by side you would set the right edge of the topmost at a slight distance from the left edge of the bottom screen.  So that, considering the twelve panels as a whole, there would be two — almost three — largely empty panels in the middle.  Before I got a look at Trees in Fog, I didn’t know there were compositions of this kind. I knew it was bad composition to put something smack in the center of your drawing, but I did not know you could put so much nothing there.

Might you not be better off doing as Tohaku did in the Room of Maples and Flowers, and drawing a tree that reached diagonally across the center of your composition, while truly inhabiting areas just to either side of it? Trying to find the right way to draw things, I was instinctively attracted to an individualistic painter of vast and wide-ranging genius. My first sensations of wonder and bewilderment have stayed with me. They remain the correct response to the daring and naturalism I saw, that I was too young to know I could not as an artist aspire to.

Thanks to Elise Grilli, I was beginning to understand there were two long traditions in Japanese painting that occasionally inter-penetrated but were also separate. Very roughly, there was a tradition that overwhelmingly reflected the civilization-changing influence of China and Buddhism, and one that was Japan’s unique contribution to world art, with each flaring into greater vitality at different times over almost 1500 years. Another distinction to look out for was that between art of a private, contemplative nature — a scroll that is unfolded slowly in the hands, a poem card — and art best understood as a large element in an entire surround, like the screens above. In the West, the same distinction might attach to the difference between drawing and painting, the former usually done by artists for themselves, the latter having a necessarily public intention. In the West, too, the same artist might excel — that is, live equally — in both drawing and painting, but in Japan, with staggering though very few exceptions, art that was contemplative would not issue from the mind or hands of a great decorator-painter.

That was a matter of different trainings, temperaments and positions in society, I learned from Elise Grilli. Reading about Sesshu, the priest-painter who in 1467 had gone to China to study, returning to Japan to found an academy, I saw that for some kinds of painting, you needed to be a philosopher.  Oh, perhaps even an aristocrat. Not like Tohaku, whose birth as a dyer’s son conferred outsider status on him, making it anything but a sure thing he would gain a toe-hold as a screen painter in an elite studio — as indeed he did not. As a Buddhist priest born to a samurai clan, Sesshu occupied a troubling position too, however — he was both a master of ink painting, a suibokuga, and one in a long tradition of adepts whose first allegiance could not be to to anything in the samsaric world, not even to brushes and paper. And yet, this detachment was essential to his art — something that made no sense at all to me, until I was able to see that that was the point.

The painting above, left, Sesshu’s Winter Landscape, in the National Museum, Tokyo, to me sums up kara-e — Chinese-style painting as it is done in Japan. Because of a book that cost 75 of my mother’s cents when I was 8, I have had decades to think about Sesshu — not a task you can fully accomplish in a lifetime. A child of the mid-century, I could not look at the central area of the background of this landscape and fail to wonder how a priest in Japan the 1400’s had found his way to abstraction — which of course belonged to my own era. To painting an idea of winter and ice on rock, and not its appearance. I showed my mother, who knew everything about modern art. Her mind boggled, too, that the crowning achievement of the painting of our time — radically to simplify, to search for essences, to suggest — could have been thus anticipated. Much later as a college girl, I would learn from another wonderful teacher, Katherine Caldwell, how through the centuries Chinese painting veered towards an appearance of abstraction. For the time being, however, my mind was on a handful of long-dead Japanese painters. Among the very great benefits of turning childish attention upon the long ago and far away is a world view that, even if it is inaccurate, is thrillingly grand, that will impart the habit of looking for connections.  Sometimes, after all, they’re there.

That which was uniquely or at least especially Japanese in painting — yamato-e — stirred me beyond anything. Not always — occasionally yamato-e could look phoned in or precious, and, developing an eye for this stuff, I could see that something was amiss. Too much has been written on the differences between yamato-e and kara-e; whenever you think you’ve pinned it down, you can, yourself, produce an exception. Greatly to simplify, kara-e is line to which color or modeling is added, yamato-e the juxtaposition of flat areas of color. Looking again at Tohaku’s screen from the Room of Maples and Flowers (under the title), you see a blue curving shape in the panel second from left that you know to be a body of water receding into the distance — a winding stream. The gold ground stands equally for riverbed and sky — you sense this without needing more. That’s yamato-e, which could not and did not happen in China. Looking at Sesshu’s Winter Landscape, the primacy of line is apparent — it is specific, suggestive and expressive, and it is through the weight of the line, from dark and bold to faint and attenuated, that you apprehend the recession of objects in space. I am not so sure that, in the 502 years since he died, any painter has taken kara-e further than Sesshu. Or shall ever do.

But where do these distinctions leave us when we look at Tohaku’s Trees in Fog?  This shattering masterpiece, almost 24 feet long, and according to a 2001 poll, Japan’s best loved painting, is neither juxtaposed areas of color nor line in the sense of contour-line.  Using enormous brushes, Tohaku made a brush stroke the very shape of a trunk, a bough, a clump of pine needles. So that line is never exactly descriptive, in that you can’t separate it from form. The radiant fog here is what establishes distance, some trees standing before us, roots to crown, others veiled.  You know the forest is dense, for you can see trees that are pushed aslant by the upright growth of others, yet a shimmering bright fog is everywhere moving in and out. The painting itself has almost an aural quality — of deep hush. You can tell that if it were not for Chinese civilization, which changes everything it impinges on, and has always done, this work would not have come into being, but it’s transcendantly yamato-e.

Has yamato-e reached such an apotheosis with color? Oh, I have long thought so so. On the cover of Elise Grilli’s 1959 book, Masterworks of Japanese Painting, 15th — 19th Centuries, there is a close-up photo of an iris from Ogata Korin’s pair of six-paneled screens, Kakitsubata, below, painted in about 1705, now in the Nezu Art Museum, Tokyo. The screens refer to a wistful verse in a 10th century romance, the Ise Monogatori — everyone who looked at them would have known it. Unusually for an art historian, Elise Grilli writes about the in-and-out aspect of a folding screen — a byobu — which, standing on its own before you, would give an experience that cannot really be simulated in 2-D space. The irises would take on a different presence, with your seeing them as if from both above and below — a manipulation of your “felt axis” that would gently and pleasurably disembody you, putting you in iris-space the way Monet would place you among waterlilies, looking impossibly up at the high horizon of the pond. This is a perspective that Western painting discourages, and that you can enter through tiny portals — books only twice the size of a deck of cards.

I still have and read Elise Grilli’s books, although I no longer sleep with them.  In writing about their place in my childhood, I haven’t wanted to quote from them.  I’m turfy about her — she’s mine.  And anyway, what if readers found her less entrancing than I did, and do?  Hers is the voice of a charming, educated mid-century writer who gently impels you to see and to love what you see, who has the gift of creating interest before she imparts information. I don’t know if she was thought of as a formidable scholar — so many formidable scholars of the era are no longer consulted, yet, in preparing to write this post, I learned that her book on Sharaku, written in the 50’s, was just last year re-issued. For the most part, her books can be found on the secondary market, where they cost a lot more than $1.25.

Who was Elise Grilli, really?  I never knew in any detail until a few weeks ago. She lived in Japan from the late 40’s through the mid-60’s, and raised her children there. She spoke, read and wrote Japanese, and wrote articles on art for The Japan Times, for which her husband was a music critic. That figures — she was fond of using musical and also literary analogies to illuminate art that was still very foreign, comparing and contrasting what readers might know with what they probably did not, the better to facilitate optical seduction. It’s a habit I see I’ve caught — although my mother did it too. Her biggest book, The Art of the Japanese Screen, Weatherhill, 1970 — and you will never know a better treatment of the subject — I did not as a child get my hands on.  It was published posthumously. She died in 1969, at work at that time on a book about calligraphy in China and Japan. She was not much older than my mother — something I’d always sensed.

That’s a bad loss, that she did not complete and publish the work-in-progress. I only just found out, and I am passionately sorry, and sorry for her children too, who would have then been young adults.

At around the same time, I was beginning to learn about calligraphy, about the syllabary that Lady Murasaki used to write the Genji Monogatori, in the Heian Period, when men at Court wrote bad poetry in Chinese and, in Japanese, women wrote good novels. Chinese calligraphy looked to me then like ideas, Japanese like a language to record utterances. I went further back than the Heian Period, to the 9th century, to the time the Japanese, who did not write at all before contact with China and the extreme alterations that it wrought, began to develop a written language that diverged from the grafted-on Chinese, that was more suitable to their own spoken language. A calligrapher-monk, Kukai, may have been instrumental in this process. He had been to China, returning to found the Shingon Buddhist sect, headquartered at Koyasan. There, beyond the darkly forested Okuno-in, for centuries the cemetery of choice for Japanese Buddhists, beyond the Lantern Hall where two lanterns have burned for 900 years, in an underground chamber of Mt. Koya, Kukai had not died, but had entered eternal samadhi — deeply concentrated meditation — to await Maitreya, the Buddha of the Future.

I was a big girl now, and I was off.

Justin E. H. Smith

Romania has its share of track-and-field athletes, and even some marathon runners, but don’t ask me where they train. In all of my dozens of visits there, I am the only person I have ever known to run in public parks and along public streets. I do it expecting harassment. What choice do I have? I confess I experience groups of street kids the same way I do street dogs: as a threat. I also confess that in general I am repulsed by the swarming crowds, so familiar throughout the Balkans, of scowling young men in shiny track-suits with gold-capped teeth and gold chains. Of course I am. I want to be surrounded by people who look like they’ve been to college, who look ready to discuss Aki Kaurismäki, or the prospects for a post-Mugabe Zimbabwe, or the plausibility of the punctuated-equilibrium hypothesis. Shouldn’t there be a way of just admitting as much and moving on? Is this gut-based aversion really what needs to be overcome in order that a more just society might come into being?

Romanians will often tell me that the people triggering my aversion, the people to watch out for, are the Gypsies. I am finally beginning to be able to distinguish members of this legend-laden ethnos from their non-Gypsy neighbors, but I hasten to add that by no means is everyone a Gypsy who matches that particular thuggish description just given, and by no means is the ethnic boundary nearly so clear as the non-Gypsies insist. The Balkans are not so much an ethnic patchwork as a seamless ethnic continuum, and sharp boundaries are emphasized the most where they are in fact least secure. As one Romanian revealed to me, showing me photos of a recent trip to a Greek Island: “Greece is very very beautiful… Very clean… No Gypsies there… No Romanians.” It was clear from the context that the last two sentence fragments constituted one proposition, not two.

I have heard repeatedly that ‘Roma’, as a name for the Gypsies, is entirely unconnected etymologically with the capital city of Italy and the center of the Roman Empire, which lent its name centuries ago to Romania (i.e., the land of the Eastern Romans, in contradistinction to the Greeks and Turks and Slavs surrounding them), that it is a name that came with the Gypsies from India, but I have immense difficulty believing this. It is true that rom means ‘husband’ or ‘man’ in the Romany language, but this word itself has shadowy origins, and my guess is that it comes from the Southeastern European region in which the Roma people settled, not from the India they left behind. Rom- and rum- are too ubiquitous in the names of places and peoples in the region they would come to settle for the current preference for ‘Roma’ in denoting the Gypsies to be explained by chance convergence.

In France one often hears of the ‘Romanian problem’. French people will tell my Romanian wife that France is being overrun with ‘Romanians’, that you cannot go 10 metres without bumping into one begging in the street. When the Romanian director Cristian Mungiu won the Palme d’or at Cannes for his excellent film 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, a cartoon in a French newspaper showed him holding out his hand as if begging, and attempted a fairly uninspired jeu de mots involving ‘palme’ (i.e., the frond of the palm tree as well as the part of the hand a beggar extends). It is not clear whether the French believe they are being politically correct in avoiding the term ‘tsigane’, or whether they mistakenly believe that ‘Romanian’ is the proper ethnonym for the Roma people, but one thing is clear: the newly politically correct ‘Roma’ is not making things any simpler. 

I’m sticking with ‘Gypsy’. The newer term is simply confusing, and, I believe, responsible for the decidedly politically incorrect conflation in France and elsewhere of Romanians and Roma. (Again, this conflation is not just a product of French xenophobia. It is also a part of the Romanian identity itself: fear of Gypsies grounded in the fear of being a Gypsy.)

My wife and I speak only French in the streets of Bucharest, permitting us to prance around like 19th-century nobles (or at least me; for Romanians speaking French is de rigueur, like knowing your multiplication tables). We always choose to say ‘gitane’ rather than ‘tsigane’, since the latter has its cognate in Romanian, whereas the former enables us to talk about the Gypsies without, we suppose, being understood. Just like Brooklyn Jews used to talk of the ‘schwarze’. I do enjoy this opportunity to say ‘gitane‘. The word calls to mind not the Gypsies of Slovakia or Romania but those of Spain and southern France, as also the cigarettes, Picasso, Hemingway, and other stupid clichés. Les gitanes will seduce you; les tsiganes will send their toddlers to poke your kneecaps with needles until you turn over the contents of your pockets.

We probably shouldn’t be talking about them, using our secret code so that they won’t understand. I feel like an asshole but I keep doing it. I can’t not talk about the people around me. I just can’t.

*

For reasons I need not explain here, I found myself recently with temporary custody of a seven-year-old Romanian girl, whom I will call ‘Maria’. Our task was to kill a few hours in the provincial Moldavian town of Bârlad, where fortunately the warm spring weather had brought a sort of temporary amusement park to the central municipal gardens. I paid for Maria to go on a sort of blow-up rubber slide shaped like a castle, three lei for five minutes, and while she was climbing up and sliding down I stood and held her jacket, her umbrella, and a Romanian translation of the latest issue of the “Totally Spies!” comic book, about three high school girls in Beverly Hills –Clover, Sam, and Alex– who are, as luck would have it, not just high school girls but also spies. 

A Gypsy girl saw the comic book and exclaimed ‘Wow, Spioanele’! I smiled and held it out to show her.  She called over her two little friends, perhaps her sisters or cousins, and they all smiled and said many things, of which I understood mostly just the word ‘Spioanele’ repeated many times.  Maria saw me holding out the photo and yelled to me: ‘Hey! It’s mine!’ The girls continued to hover around me, their leader (the one to the left in the photo) smiling beautifully, the funny looking dirty girl (in the photo to the right) looking at me confusedly and seeming at instants to apprehensively extend her little palm.

When she was done on the slide I went with Maria to the ‘Wheel of Fortune’, a giant vertical roulette wheel that the kids are permitted to spin for three lei, after which they receive a Chinese toy worth far less than three lei corresponding to the number on which the wheel stops. The Gypsy girls followed us. Maria spun the wheel and won a particularly cheap little bird with a chip inside that played an annoying, greeting-card tune.  The leader of the Gypsies continued to smile at us. I asked her if she wanted to spin the wheel, and of course she said yes.  I paid the obese carny –visible from behind in the photo– and he grudgingly allowed the Gypsy girl to spin it. She won a cheap shiny plastic crown. She unwrapped it and touched the tiara and it lit up. A red light spun around in a circle at the center like a warning flash worn by a nocturnal cyclist. ‘It lights up!’ she said with joy, as if the cheap plastic Chinese toy were a real crown. 

Maria wanted to go back to the slide and she asked the girls to come with her. ‘Nu au bani’, they said. No money. I gave the newly crowned queen nine lei, enough for each of the three to join Maria on the slide.  They all ran over. Maria and the beautiful girl and the funny-looking girl tore off their shoes and scrambled up the slide. The third Gypsy girl, the one at the center of the photo, stayed at the bottom of the slide, holding the beautiful girl’s crown, staring up and frowning. Photographs lie, for looking at the three of them now it seems to me that the third girl, the one who stayed behind, is the beautiful one, and the girl to the left seems positively plain. In reality, the one who looks plain was radiant, and the one who looks beautiful was a distant shadow of the other two.

I bent down and asked the shadow if she wanted to go up. ‘Ce?’ she asked. I pointed up the slide to her friends.  She shook her head no. The parents gathered at the bottom seemed alarmed that I was talking to her.

The carny yelled ‘Gata! Terminat!’ after five minutes had passed and the three girls –two Gypsies and Maria– came down laughing and out of breath. ‘A fost super!’ they all exclaimed.  The little shadow girl who did not go up, but stayed at the bottom and frowned, held out the flashing crown to the beautiful girl.  The beautiful girl thanked me profusely and continued to smile. 

I wanted to cry. I had taken Maria out to treat her to something special, because I had felt bad for her, in view of her parents’ divorce, her little sister’s departure for Italy (along with so many millions of other Romanians) to be raised by relatives, the difficulty of growing up a girl in the harsh banlieues of Bucharest.  I had taken her out to treat her, to buy her Spioanele merchandise (there are puzzles and ‘detective kits’ and make-up cases and fake cellphones), to play Curious George games on the PBS website at the local internet café. When I met the Gypsy girls, my pity shifted, so it seemed, downward, and Maria seemed suddenly spoiled. And then the beautiful girl won the crown, and it lit up, and she and the funny-looking girl went up and down the slide, and now they looked like spoiled little queens next to their pathetic friend, who stood at the bottom of the slide, holding the crown, afraid for some unknown reason. Is there some little creature out there somewhere, I wondered, even more beaten down and meek than this one, who would in turn make her look like a queen?  Lord, how far down does the scale go? 

I left with Maria. ‘Those were nice little girls, weren’t they?’ I asked. ‘They were Gypsies,’ Maria shrugged. 

*

Gypsies were legally enslaveable in Romania until 1864, one year after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Abolition in Romania was not followed by Reformation, nor a civil rights movement, nor demands for reparations, nor separatism. The Ceausescu regime naturally had a lot to say, if not do, about the equality of all peoples, and this equality is something that Romania must continue to officially promote as a condition of its long sought-after accession to the European Union. But this is all strictly formal. There is no Gypsy Martin Luther King on the horizon, not to mention a plausible Gypsy candidate for the Romanian presidency. The current Romanian president, Traian Băsescu, has openly used “stinking gypsy” [ţigancă împuţită] as a slur, with only very minimal political repercussions.

*

The TV is always on in Romania. It’s what holds the nation together.  That’s the accent from Oltenia, the viewers can say. That’s how they talk in Maramureş. The format is Italian strada: glitzy never-ending review shows, always in dismally bad taste. There are peppy teen pop groups in coordinated neon sweatsuits doing dance routines, backed up by synthesizers, wearing headsets with mics in the fashion of Madonna circa 1990 (during the ‘Sex’ period, which I for one have not forgotten). They do jazz hands, they look at each other and nod their heads ‘yes!’ to the rhythm of the music. There are knock-offs of knock-offs of pop songs that were bad to begin with. There are drippingly sentimental give-aways of washing machines, deep freezes, and truckloads of goats to needy families, who are required to stand on the studio stage, under the spotlights, in the presence of the magnanimous host, and cry. There are four-year-old kids with gel in their hair, trained to sing little songs and to give the host a high-five. 

I’ve found only two channels that I can stomach. One is ‘Etno TV’, with non-Gypsy men and women on rolling green hillsides, dressed in traditional costumes, singing and dancing folk songs, sometimes minimally acting out the story the lyrics tell. That’s a dance from Bucovina. That’s a typical theme from Moldavia. The other is a lower-budget channel for Gypsy music videos, made with home-movie cameras in living rooms and public parks.  Some of the videos show young Gypsies performing manele, the cultural if not the musical equivalent of rap. They hold up handfuls of euros and show their gold-toothed smiles, sitting on plushly upholstered furniture, wearing track-suits. They boast about all the enemies they’ve brought down. Aesthetically and morally, the unacknowledged Urtext is 2 Live Crew’s unforgettable ‘Me So Horny‘. (Romanian rap, in stark contrast, has much more in common with the tediously indignant political stuff that has kept French hip-hop consistently mediocre since the early 1990s.)

Other videos are of older men, all wearing matching tuxedos, in what look like banquet halls. These men still seem connected to some ancestral past. They sing with their hearts and they pound their xylophones with heavy mallets faster than my eyes can take in. Those are Gypsies, the nation says. 

*

In Romania the ‘hippie’ look is described as the ‘Gypsy’ look. Maria wore a pink sweatshirt made in China, with an image of a girl named ‘Windy’ on it.  Windy was making a V-shaped peace sign with her fingers, wearing John Lennon glasses, a belt made out of bird-foot-shaped peace signs around her waist, and a bandanna around her head.  She looked, in a word, ‘groovy’. Maria’s family noted that Windy was a Gypsy, and wondered whether the little girl should be wearing such a thing, in much the same way that American parents might worry about vaguely gangster-like insignias on mall-bought clothing. 

The Gypsy/hippie conflation is not entirely incorrect, and indeed is one that would have made sense in America not so long ago.  One of the nodes on the ancestral chart of the hippies are the ‘Bohemians’, by which was meant urban people associated with the theater, music halls, and a free and rambling life style.  Now a Bohemian minus the scare quotes is not an ancestor to the hippies but a Czech. Most of the Gypsies of what used to be called Czechoslovakia were concentrated in the Slovak part, but from the perspective of a Central European from somewhere slightly to the north or west of Prague –Berlin, say– Czechia easily stood in for that place from which all the dark and uncouth musicians and actors hail.  Soon enough, a Jew from Minnesota could settle in Greenwich Village and electively take on the identity of a ‘Bohemian’.

Is it, I’ve often wondered, the proximity of real ‘Bohemians’ –the kind who send their children into the street to beg, who have a life expectancy of 50 and the lowest literacy rate in Europe– that makes the Romanian bourgeoisie place such value on tucking your shirt in, on polishing your shoes, on wearing cologne? In America and Western Europe, the ‘bourgeois Bohemian’ is by now a common figure, and may be the only social trend David Brooks ever correctly identified. The bourgeois Bohemian’s parents and grandparents did all the worrying about procuring durable goods and putting wallpaper on the walls and mothballs in the closets, only to find their children and grandchildren affecting an antimaterialism that communicated positively valenced class distinction precisely by downplaying the importance of appliances, by opting for exposed brick walls over wallpaper, sometimes even by wearing clothing pocked with holes. In Romania this  cultivated Bohemianism is, as far as I can tell, entirely unknown. Nobody has ever entered the bourgeoisie and come out the other side. The nomads’ encampments, the infectious diseases that underlie the hygiene that in turn underlies culture, are all still too close.

*

‘Gitane‘ is a deformation of ‘Egyptian’, and until the birth of Indo-European linguistics in the mid-19th century it was widely presumed that the Gypsies had wandered from Egypt into Europe.  In fact they wandered from India in the 11th century, and only gradually shed their Hindu identity.

The tiny kernel of truth at the heart of Nazi racial mythology –that there is a common background for civilizations spreading from northern India to Scandinavia, that there are recurrent gods and recurrent words for things like ‘horse’ and ‘night’ and ‘yoke’ that unite the Vedas with Homer and with the Icelandic sagas– was conveniently ignored so that the Gypsies could be persecuted along with the ‘Asiatic’ Jews. This is curious, since in fact one could not be any more Indo-European (or, as the Germans continue to say, ‘Indo-Germanic’) than the Gypsies: they are a living reminder of the unity of India and Europe, of the recent and artificial invention of two distinct continents. The Nazis claimed to approve a picture of European history that united Germany and Greece and Persia and India against the successive waves of pollution from the Semitic world, but were not ready to acknowledge the community with the Gypsies that it logically entailed.

*

My wife tells me that everything I attempt to write about Romania is comprehensively, systematically wrong. She’s probably right, but I have to keep trying.   

*

The TV is on. There is a woman in a sequined leotard charming a python. She wraps it over her shoulders and does Oriental things with her hands. She closes her eyes and smiles like she’s faking an orgasm. This is pushing the limits. This is moving into dark and uncharted places. The python hangs there.

Next she carries the python over to a little chest at the side of the stage, puts it in, and pulls out a greenish chameleon. She places her new dance partner in front of her at the center of the stage and again begins to do that thing with her hands. Chameleons have a naturally fixed expression of boredom but this one looks particularly bored. He begins to walk away, towards the stage exit opposite the chest. The woman is forced to interrupt her dance routine to bring him back. She tries to do this without allowing the exotic mood to lapse. She’s smiling ecstatically as she chases after the chameleon. She picks him up and twirls him around Orientally. She holds him out in front of her and attempts a sort of walk-like-an-Egyptian back towards the center of the stage. He’s now a pale grey.

Someone needs to put a stop to this.

—

Bucharest, April 30, 2008

For an extensive archive of Justin Smith’s writing, please visit www.jehsmith.com.

Michael Blim

It’s better to be rich – hardly a surprising claim.

But it is devastating to be poor, and this period of economic crisis it is deadly to be poor.

The effects of the crisis have been charted in many ways. There has been barely concealed panic on Wall Street. Big banks have wobbled, and many wallowed in debt. Many have taken on as much capital as anyone will lend them, as well as selling off big chunks of their equity. A major brokerage house failed, and was saved by the Federal Reserve Board.

On Wall Street, record numbers of people in the finance industry are being let go.

On Main Street, states and municipalities, as well as state authorities that back borrowings for universities, public schools, and public housing corporations, are having trouble selling their bonds.

Then there are the homeowners whose economic troubles triggered in part the crisis –apart from a financial sector whose blood lust for ever higher profits created the mess in the first place.

Who are the homeowners? Hard to know. Though you can learn a lot about the latest cure for something on the news every night, followed or preceded by drug commercials selling you pharmaceuticals, the efficacy of which seems to boil down to a smiley face and chocolate Labrador, you can’t learn much about endangered homeowners. A reporter may find one of the 7.2 million of families at risk of losing their home, but the bigger frame amidst the family’s well-earned tears is lost. Try as they might, or try as they don’t, the news industry presents a fuzzy picture. Who are these folks in trouble?

They are many: the 7.2 million households comprise 28% of all American households with mortgages. They owe $332 billion in loans, and 2.2 million have lost or will lose their houses without a federal remedy, according to the Center for Responsible Lending. A majority is white, but a disproportionate number of blacks and Latinos are vulnerable too. For instance, among whites, 17% have sub-prime mortgages; the figure is 55% for blacks.

I have come to the conclusion that only a specialist can understand what the Congress and the Executive are proposing for remedies. It is transparent, however, that they have done nothing yet to assist these vulnerable families.

(Parenthetically, where were the Federal Reserve, financial regulators and the Congress when the crisis had begun to show itself in October, 2006? Where are the US attorneys and the Attorney Generals of 23 states, all of whom are equipped with statutory authority to stop predatory lending and impose civil, as well as in some cases criminal penalties on perpetrators?)

Banks made greater profits on sub-prime loans because they could charge working class and near-power households more for their mortgages. They sold them in packages at higher prices to customers eager for extra profits. Everybody made out – except those purchasing the mortgages. Disaster was just around the corner.

Not even the poor without homes, I expect, would want these troubles. Yet, the poor along with those caught up directly in the sub-prime emergency face even rougher times ahead. Inflation is back. For the past five months, headline inflation, that is, everything we consume, has been 4% above the comparable period last year. Even the so-called core inflation rate, that is what we consumer minus food and energy, has been running at 2% for the last seven months.

I have written about how economic policymakers are attached to a measure – core inflation – that having dropped food and fuel seriously under-estimates the increased burdens on typical American households. (See my column, September, 2007)

But an interesting analysis by Neil Irwin and Alejandro Lazo of the Washington Post (March 21, 2008) suggests how even headline inflation misses a much higher increase in the cost of living. Their analysis of government data shows consumer prices for basics has risen 9% since 2006, and now costs a family making $45,000 a year an extra $972. The poor and near poor consume the basics too.

Fearful that the economic roof was falling in, Congress and the Executive agreed to a stimulus package. The idea is that American families need to keep the economy going by spending money.

Don’t put a down payment on the Prius yet. Individuals will receive up to $600 and couples $1200 depending upon income. Families with children will receive $300 for each child.

These are the upper limits. Being poor entitles you to no more than this, despite inflation and diminished or nonexistent employment opportunities.

Without employment, you may not get the money, even if you are poor because you are unemployed. You must have filed a tax return several weeks back and have declared at least $3000 in income. To get the check, Social Security and Veterans benefits, and low income wages count. But to qualify you must have income, a curious requirement when the easiest definition of poverty is the absence of it.

Thanks to the Clinton welfare “reform” act of 1996, welfare recipients are eventually cut off from further assistance, job or no job. The result a little over ten years later is that 20% of low-income mothers are without work or welfare benefits, a figure that has doubled since the 1996 law. How do they qualify for the “stimulus?”

It’s movie we have all seen before, I know. But the ending is meaner than usual: when times get tough, we make it tougher on the poor, near-poor, and the working class.

Once more:

7.2 million families holding sub-prime mortgages, disproportionately lower-income, black and Latino are in danger of losing their little bit of the American Dream.

37 million poor people (the definition of poverty for a family of 4 is an income of less than $20,000) can receive $600 a person and $300 per child if they have an income already. If not, then not.

In a society without justice such as ours, poor people, people with one foot out of poverty, and the working class are experiencing a crisis only guessed at on Wall Street where all the mischief began. Those becoming stricken by the crisis — they indeed are the chickens that are coming home to roost. Only for them, it is simply for delivery to Tyson’s.

///
On finding a lifelong friend and lover while reading
Martin Buber in a diner—

Over the Counter
Jim Culleny

I lean from behind Buber while
Thou serveth me caffein and smile.

I know my elbows rest upon the sky.
O! the blue formica shines.

I see your red cheeks blare
in oval frame of hair.

Arthur stares me down.
He’s an angry, sad, old,
ruddyfaced lecher. Alone.

He imagines you his young lover.
He pushes baked haddock past
tired lips.

The chrome coffee pitcher
belches water vapor.

It rises to your eyes
and there they are, cloud bourn,
as the brown liquid drops my buzz.

My soles float over the counter rail.

Never weaned from fantasy
I want to nail down my shoes,
not wanting to trust romance:
fool’s paradise. I say

love cool reason. Do it alone. No.

Oh, I’d love to do it right.
To give it up. Free
the hawks and doves and be slave
only to discovery.

///

My brother in law (BIL) has joined the jobless – the vortex of sub-prime debacle has sunk the hedge fund he managed. But please don’t pity him: he is without a job but not without money. Unlike a side-street plebeian, this Wall Street prince stays rich even when unemployed.

BIL – though ailing from derivatives deprivation – is now blessed with free time to reflect on the genesis of the hedge fund collapse. He thinks he suffers from sleep apnea; he snores at night and feels exhausted when awake. He blames this daytime undue somnolence for his blunders in trading.

Sleep apnea made its debut in medical literature in 1956. Dr C S Burwell and his colleagues told the story of an ever-sleepy 51 years old obese businessman who measured 5 ft 5 inches and weighed 260 Lbs. During a game of poker – with three aces and two kings in his hand – the businessman missed the prime chance to make a killing. The reason: he had fallen asleep! Dr Burwell titled the article, ‘Extreme Obesity Associated with Alveolar Hypoventilation: A Pickwickian Syndrome’.

‘Pickwickian’ refers to ‘The Pickwick Papers’ where in 1837, Charles Dickens introduced a gluttonous, “wonderfully fat boy” Joe, who had a hard time staying awake. He stood at the door after repetitive knocking “ upright his eyes closed as if in sleep” with looks of “calmness and repose.” Questioned thrice, he did not answer, but “nodded once and seemed —– to snore.” Then he “suddenly opened his eyes, winked several times, sneezed once, and raised his hand as if to repeat the knocking.”

Dr Burwell – with retrospective analysis – diagnosed ‘fat Joe’ and the somnolent obese businessman suffering from obesity-hypoventilation, which is now called sleep apnea. Joe still continues to live in the medical literature as the original embodiment of the Pickwickian Syndrome.

BIL thinks, he is the clone-reincarnation of fat boy Joe. Like him, BIL is also portly, short and overweight; his round head sits atop his stout neck; a cigarette often dangles from his wet lips and he finds the poker game goof akin to his hedge fund fiasco.

He wonders, “Do I have Pickwickian Syndrome?”

So, BIL goes for a check up – a sleep apnea study. BIL spends one night in the sleep lab, wired to gadgets, which monitor his blood oxygen, respiratory pattern, blood pressure, pulse and brain electrical activity.

During sleep, the muscles inside his throat relax and collapse into the air passage, which is already narrow due to his stout neck. The air cannot flow through the obstructed airway and his breathing stops for a moment (apnea), which plummets his blood oxygen. The oxygen-deprived brain startles and awakens him for a moment; the muscles at the back of his throat tense up, which opens the breathing passage allowing air to rush through. He breathes again. The gushing air vibrates the floppy throat muscles, broadcasting a sonorous snore. He falls asleep only to stop breathing again. He repeats this cycle of stops-and-starts, about 27 times every hour during the night.

BIL does not remember the sleeping-awakening cycles, but the video monitors, focused on him, capture his snoring, tossing and turning. A sleep-deprived night leaves him exhausted the next day.

The sleep lab verdict follows quickly: BIL does have sleep apnea. He is not alone. One in fifteen or 6.6 percent Americans have sleep apnea. Most are overweight mid age males, though skinny ones and women are not exempt. One in fifty snore through life undiagnosed – at work, while driving or in public places.

Now, the bear news: many years of sleep apnea are likely to give BIL high blood pressure and heart failure. He also has higher chances of suffering from a paralytic stroke.

And the bull news: sleep apnea is treatable and simple interventions yield satisfactory results. BIL can, once more, enjoy a restful sleep at night and profitable derivatives during day.

What should BIL do?

He should stop smoking and avoid alcohol. (Alcohol relaxes the throat muscles, enhancing the obstruction.) He should loose weight. His Body Mass Index or BMI is 33, which classifies him as obese; if it were over 40, he would be morbidly obese. (BMI is weight in kilograms divided by the square of height in meters. A Belgian statistician, Adolph Quetelet, who was friend of Charles Dickens, first described this concept in 1869 and called it Quetelet index.)

He should sleep on his side and may use a mouth appliance to keep his throat open. BIL may have to use a CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure) machine, which forces air under pressure into his obstructed airway. If these methods don’t help, he may have to undergo surgery, where the surgeon will remove the triangular floppy muscle hanging form the roof of his throat (uvula and soft palate) and also some of the surrounding tissue, to widen his airway.

BIL, in his insuppressible bullish manner, is determined to get his trading prowess back. No more daytime slumber! The night in the sleep lab convinced BIL of his infirmity. “See, I told you I am Pickwickian.”

BIL: the answer is yes and no. You do have sleep apnea but you may not have the Pickwickian Syndrome; the two may not be the same disease.

You remember, Dickens describing the nonstop knock at the door at the Pickwick mansion, which prompted the opening of the door leading to discovery of a “wonderfully fat boy” standing “upright” and “in sleep”. Some experts tell us that people suffering from sleep apnea do not fall asleep during vigorous action like incessant knocking. If Joe did fall asleep, he would not be standing but would have dropped to the floor with flaccid muscles. His snore would be loud and not ‘feeble”. Joe probably exhibited a different sleep disorder: narcolepsy.

BIL still insists in washing off his guilt. “ But, you do agree that sleep deprivation was the cause my poor judgment and hedge fund collapse?”

Dear BIL, the cause of your bungled trading was not apnea-when-asleep but avarice-when- awake. You are less like Joe from Dickens and more like Malcolm from Macbeth:

“With this there grows
In my most ill-composed affection such
A stanchless avarice that, were I king,
I should cut off the nobles for their lands,
Desire his jewels and this other’s house:
And my more-having would be as a sauce
To make me hunger more; that I should forge
Quarrels unjust against the good and loyal,
Destroying them for wealth.”