Poetry As a Contact Sport

by Christopher Borelli

Poetry makes nothing happen.

So said W.H. Auden.

Who never lived in Chicago.

Or knew Don Share. Share is the senior editor of Poetry magazine, the venerable Chicago-based literary institution. It turns 100 next year and has seen far more than nothing happen, particularly in the past decade. Share arrived at the magazine four years ago, hired away from Harvard University, where he was poetry editor of Harvard Review. Soon after arriving, he received what he calls a "threatening phone call."

It came from a famous novelist whose name he won't say, but the message to Share was this: You really don't want to find yourself alone in the same room with me. "He couldn't believe we rejected his poems," Share said of the man. "When you work in poetry all day, it's internal. People get shaken. I was shaken."

Poetry magazine started in Chicago in 1912, and during the ensuing century, the magazine's history and the history of American poetry often were joined at the hip. It published an unknown T.S. Eliot, gave early support to Langston Hughes, discovered Wallace Stevens, James Merrill, Gwendolyn Brooks. What Poetry rarely had was a history of picking fights, rising blood pressures or heated controversies.

Until the money arrived.

In 2002, Ruth Lilly, an heir to a fortune built by Indianapolis pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, donated $200 million to Poetry magazine, which then had a modest circulation of 10,000 and annual budget of $700,000. "I was one of those people in an arts organization who thought, 'Wow,'" said Tree Swenson, executive director of the New York-based Academy of American Poets. "That's a lot of cash for one group. So out of proportion to the scale of the magazine. In one swoop, it basically made them the largest poetry organization in the country."

To administer the gift, the magazine set up the nonprofit Poetry Foundation and created a raft of initiatives to promote poetry. Today, the foundation has a budget of more than $6 million. The magazine gets $1.5 million a year, and $2.2 million goes to educational programs. Poetry's website alone receives a hefty $1.2 million, a point of contention in literary circles. Then there's $1.3 million for administrative costs, including salaries for the 20-person staff. "We have a guideline that forces us to never spend more than 5 percent (annually) of the total market value of the endowment," said John Barr, president of the Poetry Foundation.

"But poetry is not a moneymaker," he added. "And so the grand experiment here was to throw money into this art form that had no history of making money and see if poetry would be OK at the end of the day."

The answer is complicated.

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The $100K Razor

Got a cool $100,000 kicking around and tired of buying yet another Porsche Cayenne Turbo S SUV for your summer retreat on the Caribbean island (that you own)? It’s time you invest in your shave with the limited edition Zafirro Iridum razor.

For just $100K, you can have the luxury of brushing solid white sapphire blades against your face every morning. According to Zafirro, each blade is “less than 100 atoms across, or 5000 times thinner than a human hair,” so when you nick your face (as you inevitably will) those cuts will be ultra-fine. Sapphire blades are hypoallergenic, not prone to oxidation or corrosion, will stay sharp for about a year, and are without a doubt more durable than the stainless steel blades mere mortals use. The price tag also includes a decade worth of servicing, cleaning and sharpening of the razor, though the cost of insuring the postal package for said service may be astronomical. I hope the blades don’t get dull that quickly.

The handle of this ultra lux razor is literally from out of this world. It is made of iridium “derived almost exclusively from meteorites,” according to the press release, which is of the same material as rocket engines because it can withstand extreme heat and is extremely corrosion-resistant. There are also a few pure platinum screws in the handle for good measure. So the message seems to be this razor is so rugged it could even outlive you, but is that really necessary?

Zafirro may have good intentions in creating a luxury consumer product so well made it can be the only razor you will ever need. It could very well become a family heirloom for some of the 99 uber rich who manage to score one of these razors. But even a life-time of disposable razors will not set you back anywhere close to this price, and wouldn’t it make more sense for someone this wealthy to hire his own personal barber?

[Source: PRNewswire press release, Wired Gadget Lab blog]

Gutted

Steven Shapin

Alexis St Martin was one of the 19th century’s most important scientific guinea pigs. In 1822, the illiterate young French-Canadian was working as a ‘voyageur’ for John Jacob Astor’s fur-trading company in northern Michigan. He was hanging out with a bunch of rowdies in the company store when a shotgun accidentally went off and he was hit below his left nipple. The injury was serious and likely to be fatal – his half-digested breakfast was pouring out of the wound from his perforated stomach, along with bits of the stomach itself – but a US army surgeon called William Beaumont was nevertheless sent for. Beaumont was pessimistic, but he cleaned the wound as best he could and was amazed the next day to find his patient still alive. It was touch and go for almost a year: St Martin survived, though with a gastric fistula about two and a half inches in circumference. It was now possible for Beaumont to peer into St Martin’s stomach, to insert his forefinger into it, to introduce muslin bags containing bits of food and to retrieve them whenever he wanted. Human digestion had become visible.

Beaumont took over St Martin’s care when charity support ran out, and over the next ten years the patient lived intermittently with the doctor, as both his domestic servant and a contractually paid experimental object. St Martin’s fistula was soon to become one of the modern world’s most celebrated peepshows. The experiments were conducted at intervals over the eight years from 1825 and a remarkable contract survives which established a legal basis for scientific access to St Martin’s stomach:

Alexis will at all times … submit to assist and promote by all means in his power such philosophical or medical experiments as the said William shall direct or cause to be made on or in the stomach of him, the said Alexis, either through and by means of the aperture or opening thereto in the side of him, the said Alexis, or otherwise, and will obey, suffer and comply with all reasonable and proper orders of or experiments of the said William in relation thereto, and in relation to the exhibiting and showing of his said stomach and the powers and properties thereof and of the appurtenances, and powers, properties, situation and state of the contents thereof.

In return for letting Beaumont in and out of his stomach, St Martin was to get board, lodging and about $150 a year. But by 1833 he’d had enough: he went back to his old life as a voyageur, and, amazingly, lived well into his seventies. At his death he was survived by a wife and six children, who had him buried two feet deeper than usual so that the scientists could not retrieve the corpse and dissect his stomach.

St Martin’s fistula offered a unique form of scientific access to the living stomach, but throughout the 19th century ever more powerful technologies were being devised to get at its contents and to render it visible, audible and, finally, manipulable. Physicians became more skilled in such non-invasive techniques as auscultation, learning to distinguish and to mark the physiological significance of stomach sounds called, variously, ‘splashing’, ‘gurgling’, ‘ringing’ and ‘sizzling’. In 1868, the Freiburg physician Adolf Kussmaul invented a rigid tube, developed through experimentation with a sword-swallower, that enabled him to retrieve samples from the oesophagus and stomach and even to see a little of what was going on in there. In the 1890s, a New York doctor called Max Einhorn devised a small silver ‘stomach bucket’, secured to a string. Patients, suitably encouraged, swallowed the thing, and Einhorn would then pull up the bucket and have its gastric contents chemically analysed. From about the 1930s, endoscopy became a key diagnostic tool, and now upper-gastrointestinal endoscopy extends medical vision as far as the duodenum, the bit of the small intestine just downstream of the stomach. By the 1910s, X-ray technology was making a vital contribution to visualising the stomach and its lesions. Surgical access to the organs of the abdomen in the 19th century was slow in developing, partly because of problems with anaesthesia and infection, and partly because surgeons initially had little basis for understanding the significance of what they were seeing, but after the ‘Listerian revolution’ in antisepsis surgeons became increasingly comfortable with a range of abdominal operations, especially in connection with peptic ulcers.

Beaumont’s work with his experimental subject was aimed at understanding digestion in general, not St Martin’s digestion in particular. He wanted to know how digestion normally went on, and was not much interested in how it occasionally went wrong. He tabulated how long various types of food took to be digested; he recorded the temperature of the stomach under different dietary and climatic conditions; he compared digestion in St Martin’s stomach with the action of extracted gastric juice and food in vitro; he measured the dynamics of secretion of the juice; he analysed the juice and shipped samples to university chemistry laboratories at Virginia, Yale and Stockholm, which confirmed his judgment that its main active constituent was hydrochloric acid and that digestion was just a process of chemical decomposition, replicable in a test tube. St Martin’s guts were becoming universalised.

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Notes for a Young Gentleman

by Toby Litt

A gentleman should arrive at his destination, after however arduous a journey, quite as if he had just taken a turn around the rose garden.

A gentleman should never acknowledge a mere fact.

A gentleman should behave no differently in a prison than in a palace – to be affected by place shows lack of character.

A gentleman should never confuse superiority with nobility.

A gentleman – English – should reassure foreigners of his bona fides by appearing to be nothing more than a parody of an English gentleman; this is particularly important with the French.

A gentleman should never be heard to say anything other gentlemen have not said before.

A gentleman should greet physical agony much as if he were greeting his old Latin master.

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For Derek Jeter, on His 37th Birthday

by Michael Sokolove

Derek Jeter, the Yankee captain, as we are often reminded, emerged from the visitors’ dugout about two hours before a game last month at Baltimore’s Camden Yards and into late-afternoon sunshine. “Derek!” a middle-aged man in a Yankees cap called out from the first row of seats.

“Hey, buddy, how you doin’?” Jeter said, giving a glance over his shoulder but not breaking stride. He continued on toward home plate, where several Orioles players stepped away from their pregame batting practice to shake his hand.

Jeter is his era’s DiMaggio. Admired. Diffident. By all outward appearances, charmed. He became the Yankees’ full-time shortstop in 1996, at age 21, and only once since then has his team failed to qualify for the playoffs. (His 599 postseason at-bats amount to just about an extra season’s worth of swings.) The Yankees have reached the World Series seven times during Jeter’s tenure and prevailed in five of them. Jeter is just 6 hits from becoming the 28th player in baseball history to reach 3,000 hits (a quest that was delayed when he was placed on the disabled list with a calf strain on June 14). His baseball earnings have surpassed $200 million — not counting the three-year, $51-million contract that he signed before this season. The tabloids track his romances with one glamorous woman after another — the latest being the actress Minka Kelly, Esquire’s “Sexiest Woman Alive” in 2010. He is building a house in Tampa, Fla., a waterfront paradise so massive, at 30,875 square feet, that locals have dubbed it St. Jetersburg.

Just one thing has reduced Jeter to human scale, and it is not surprising what it is: age. On June 26 he turns 37, which makes Jeter a decade older than Einstein was when he published the general theory of relativity, a decade older than Lindbergh when he set the Spirit of St. Louis down in Paris and 15 years older than Ted Williams when he batted .406 in 1941. Even more to the point, Jeter is a dozen years past the best baseball version of himself — the 25-year-old who in 1999 played a sprightly shortstop and also functioned as a slugger, hitting 24 home runs, to go with 102 runs batted in and a batting average of .349.

The night I watched him in Baltimore was like most games for Jeter these days, only more so, because it went on for 15 innings. He came to bat seven times, and in six of those he hit ground balls — two of which squirted through the infield for base hits. He struck out in his other plate appearance. He leads all of baseball, by a wide margin, in his ratio of ground balls to balls lifted in the air, an arcane but telling statistic. Jeter can no longer consistently bring the bat through the hitting zone at the proper moment, and with enough authority, to hit line drives into the outfield gaps or fly balls that clear the fences. (Think of that classic advice to Little League hitters: Swing the bat as if you’re mad at the ball! Jeter swings as if he’s mad at the ground, with an abbreviated, downward stroke that pounds ball after ball into the turf.) In his best season, he had 70 extra-base hits. He is on pace for just 30 extra-base hits this season, meaning that about once a week he gets something more than a single.

We’re fascinated by sports partly because in physical matters, elite athletes set the outer limits. They do what we wish we could: hit a baseball 400 feet, dunk a basketball, sprint 100 meters in less than 10 seconds. Their feats look so pleasurable in the doing that some of us, long past our best playing days, dream at night we are in their realm — say, for example, patrolling the expanse of a big-league center field, or digging our cleats into the batter’s box as a pitcher goes into his windup. (Or firing a slapshot at a goalie, as one of my dreams went not too long ago, even though I have never played ice hockey in my life and don’t even follow the sport.)

But the careers of elite athletes, enviable as they may be, are foreshortened versions of a human lifespan. Physical decline — in specific ways that affect what they do and who they are — begins for them before it does for normal people. The athletes themselves rarely see the beginnings of this process, or if they do, either do not acknowledge it or try to fight it off like just another inside fastball. They alter their training routines. Eat more chicken and fish, less red meat. They try to get “smarter” at their sport.

A great many of us, their fans, live in our own version of denial — even in this age of super-slow-motion replay and ever more granular statistical data. We want to think our favorite players have good years left, great accomplishments ahead of them, just as we would hope the same for ourselves. The writer Susan Jacoby, who happens to be a devoted baseball fan, is the author of “Never Say Die: The Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age.” “Fans don’t like to watch aging in these relatively young guys,” she told me. “It makes us uncomfortable. We think, If it happens to them, what the hell is going to happen to us?” Jacoby, a self-described insomniac who listens to sports-talk radio in the middle of the night, said she has been appalled at the “venom” she sometimes hears directed at Jeter. “It’s like they’re saying, ‘The hero is not performing.’ Well, he’s gotten older.”

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Don Cherry & Latif Khan - Air Mail

Michele Bachmann's Holy War

By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and, as you consider the career and future presidential prospects of an incredible American phenomenon named Michele Bachmann, do one more thing. Don't laugh.

It may be the hardest thing you ever do, for Michele Bachmann is almost certainly the funniest thing that has ever happened to American presidential politics. Fans of obscure 1970s television may remember a short-lived children's show called Far Out Space Nuts, in which a pair of dimwitted NASA repairmen, one of whom is played by Bob (Gilligan) Denver, accidentally send themselves into space by pressing "launch" instead of "lunch" inside a capsule they were fixing at Cape Canaveral. This plot device roughly approximates the political and cultural mechanism that is sending Michele Bachmann hurtling in the direction of the Oval Office.

Bachmann is a religious zealot whose brain is a raging electrical storm of divine visions and paranoid delusions. She believes that the Chinese are plotting to replace the dollar bill, that light bulbs are killing our dogs and cats, and that God personally chose her to become both an IRS attorney who would spend years hounding taxpayers and a raging anti-tax Tea Party crusader against big government. She kicked off her unofficial presidential campaign in New Hampshire, by mistakenly declaring it the birthplace of the American Revolution. "It's your state that fired the shot that was heard around the world!" she gushed. "You are the state of Lexington and Concord, you started the battle for liberty right here in your backyard."

I said lunch, not launch! But don't laugh. Don't do it. And don't look her in the eyes; don't let her smile at you. Michele Bachmann, when she turns her head toward the cameras and brandishes her pearls and her ageless, unblemished neckline and her perfect suburban orthodontics in an attempt to reassure the unbeliever of her non-threateningness, is one of the scariest sights in the entire American cultural tableau. She's trying to look like June Cleaver, but she actually looks like the T2 skeleton posing for a passport photo. You will want to laugh, but don't, because the secret of Bachmann's success is that every time you laugh at her, she gets stronger.

In modern American politics, being the right kind of ignorant and entertainingly crazy is like having a big right hand in boxing; you've always got a puncher's chance. And Bachmann is exactly the right kind of completely batshit crazy. Not medically crazy, not talking-to-herself-on-the-subway crazy, but grandiose crazy, late-stage Kim Jong-Il crazy — crazy in the sense that she's living completely inside her own mind, frenetically pacing the hallways of a vast sand castle she's built in there, unable to meaningfully communicate with the human beings on the other side of the moat, who are all presumed to be enemies.

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The Last American Man

By Elizabeth Gilbert

I met Eustace Conway through his little brother Judson, who is a young cowboy and a very good friend of mine. I used to work with Judson Conway on a ranch out in Wyoming. This was some years ago. Judson and I had a million laughs together and then went our separate ways, but we've always stayed in touch. Like a good Civil War soldier, he corresponds faithfully and eloquently by post, but it happened one day—so unexpectedly!—that he actually placed a telephone call. Judson Conway phoned to announce that he would be coming to visit me in New York City the very next afternoon. Just a whim, Judson said. Just wanted to see what a big town is like, Judson said. And then Judson added that his older brother Eustace would be coming along, too. Sure enough, the Conway boys arrived the following day. They stepped out of a yellow cab, right in front of my apartment building. They made the most incongruous sight. There was handsome Judson, looking like a young swain from Bonanza. And there—right beside him—was his brother, Davy Fuckin' Crockett.

I knew it was Davy Fuckin' Crockett because that's what everyone on the streets of New York City started calling the guy right away:

"Yo, man! It's Davy Fuckin' Crockett!"

"Check out Davy Fuckin' Crockett!"

"King of the wild muthafuckin' frontier!"

Of course, some New Yorkers took him for Daniel Fuckin' Boone, but everyone had something to say about this curious visitor, who moved stealthily through Manhattan wearing handmade buckskin clothing and carrying a mighty knife on his belt.

Davy Fuckin' Crockett.

So that's how I met Eustace Conway.

Briefly, the history of America goes like this: There was a frontier, and then there was no longer a frontier. It all happened rather quickly. There were Indians, then explorers, then settlers, then towns, then cities. Nobody was really paying attention until the moment the wilderness was officially tamed, at which point everybody suddenly wanted it back.

Within the general spasm of nostalgia that ensued (Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, Frederic Remington's cowboy paintings), there came a very specific cultural panic, a panic rooted in the question, What will become of our boys?

Problem was, while the classic European coming-of-age story generally featured a provincial boy who moved to the city and transformed into a refined gentleman, the American tradition had evolved into the utter opposite. The American boy came of age by leaving civilization and striking out toward the hills. There he shed his cosmopolitan manners and transformed into a robust man. Not a gentleman, mind you, but a man. Without the wilderness as proving ground, what would become of our boys?

Why, they might become effete, pampered, decadent. Christ save us, they might become Europeans.

For obvious reasons, this is a terror that has never entirely left us. A century later, some of us are still concerned about the state of American manhood, which is why some of us are so grateful when we get to meet Eustace Conway.

Eustace Conway moved into the woods for good when he was 17 years old. This was in 1978, which was around the same time Star Wars was released. He lived in a tepee, made fire by rubbing two sticks together, and bathed in icy streams. At this point in his biography, you might deduce that Eustace is a survivalist or a hippie or a hermit, but he's not any of these things. He's not storing guns for the imminent race war; he's not cultivating excellent weed; he's not hiding from us. Eustace Conway is in the woods because he belongs in the woods.

Eustace started off on a small parcel of land, but over the past twenty years he's accumulated 1,000 acres of pristine wilderness in the southern Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. He calls his home Turtle Island, after the Native American legend of the turtle who carries the very earth on its back.

Eustace travels through life with perfect equanimity. He has never experienced an awkward moment. During his visit to New York City, I lost him one day in Tompkins Square Park. When I found him again, he was in pleasant conversation with the scariest posse of drug dealers you'd ever want to meet. They'd offered Eustace crack, which he'd politely declined, but he was chatting with them about other issues.

"Yo, man," the drug dealers were asking as I arrived, "where'd you buy that dope shirt?"

Eustace was explaining to the drug dealers that he did not, in fact, buy the shirt at all but had made it out of a deer. He described exactly how he had skinned the deer and softened the hide with the deer's own brains and then sewed the shirt together using strands of sinew taken from alongside the deer's spine. He told the drug dealers that it's not a difficult process and that they could do it, too, and that—if they came to visit him in the mountains—he would show them all sorts of wonderful ways to live off nature.

I said, "Eustace, we gotta go."

The drug dealers shook his hand and said, "Damn, Hustice. You something else."

Eustace Conway has perfect eyesight, perfect hearing, perfect teeth, perfect balance and reflexes. He has a long, lean body. He talks real slow. He is modest but truthful, which means when I once asked Eustace, Is there anything you can't do?" he had to reply, "Well, I've never found anything to be particularly difficult."

I should say not.

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Open Source Warfare

Stuxnet: Anatomy of a Computer Virus from Patrick Clair on Vimeo.

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Climate of Fear

By Glenn Greenwald

The Obama DOJ's effort to force New York Times investigative journalist Jim Risen to testify in a whistleblower prosecution and reveal his source is really remarkable and revealing in several ways; it should be receiving much more attention than it is.  On its own, the whistleblower prosecution and accompanying targeting of Risen are pernicious, but more importantly, it underscores the menacing attempt by the Obama administration -- as Risen yesterday pointed out -- to threaten and intimidate whistleblowers, journalists and activists who meaningfully challenge what the government does in secret.

The subpoena to Risen was originally issued but then abandoned by the Bush administration, and then revitalized by Obama lawyers.  It is part of the prosecution of Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA agent whom the DOJ accuses of leaking to Risen the story of a severely botched agency plot -- from 11 years ago -- to infiltrate Iran's nuclear program, a story Risen wrote about six years after the fact in his 2006 best-selling book, State of War.  The DOJ wants to force Risen to testify under oath about whether Sterling was his source.

Like any good reporter would, Risen is categorically refusing to testify and, if it comes to that (meaning if the court orders him to testify), he appears prepared to go to prison in defense of press freedoms and to protect his source (just as some young WikiLeaks supporters are courageously prepared to do rather than cooperate with the Obama DOJ's repellent persecution of the whistleblowing site).  Yesterday, Risen filed a Motion asking the Court to quash the government's subpoena on the ground that it violates the First Amendment's free press guarantee, and as part of the Motion, filed a lengthy Affidavit (pdf) that is amazing in several respects.

During the Bush years, Risen was one of the few investigative journalists exposing the excesses and lawbreaking that was the War on Terror -- causing him to be literally hated by officials of the National Security State.  Along with Eric Lichtblau, Risen most famously revealed, in 2005, that the NSA was secretly spying on Americans without warrants which -- as he put it in his Affidavit -- "in all likelihood, violated the law and the United States Constitution."  In 2006, he revealed that the Bush administration had been obtaining huge amounts of financial and banking information about American citizens from the SWIFT system, all without oversight or Congressional authorization.  And here's how he summarized the multiple revelations in State of War, the book for which the Obama DOJ is now seeking to force him to reveal his source upon pain of imprisonment:

State of War included explosive revelations about a series of illegal or potentially illegal actions taken by President Bush, including the domestic wiretapping program. It also disclosed how President Bush secretly pressured the CIA to use torture on detainees in secret prisons around the world; how the White House and CIA leadership ignored information before the 2003 invasion of Iraq that showed that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction; documented how, in the aftermath of the invasion, the Bush Administration punished CIA professionals who warned that the war in Iraq was going badly; showed how the Bush Administration turned a blind eye to Saudi involvement in terrorism; and revealed that the CIA's intelligence operations on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Iran and other countries were completely dysfunctional, and even reckless.

(To understand the function of the American media and American political culture: please re-read that paragraph -- describing revelations of pervasive lawbreaking and corruption at the highest levels of government from one reporter in one book -- and compare the media's indifferent and/or supportive treatment of that revealed conduct to the orgy of intense, obsessive condemnation directed at Anthony Weiner; or compare how the perpetrators of that conduct revealed by Risen are treated with great respect to the universal scorn heaped on Weiner).

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Debt Ceiling Choices

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The End.

by Ben Ehrenreich

You've made some bargains. We all have. Maybe you allow yourself a single Tommy’s burger every six months. Maybe you’ve given up meat altogether, or red meat anyway, most of the time. Maybe you’re serious about this and you’ve given up all refined grains and any processed anything; the extra buck a pound to buy organic seems a reasonable sacrifice. You’ve given up booze, cigarettes, pills, cocaine, sex with strangers. You tell yourself you don’t miss them. You wear sunscreen and eat flaxseeds. You go to the gym on breezy Sundays when you’d rather lie around. You go to yoga classes even though the chanting makes you want the world to end. You sold your motorcycle years ago. You cross at the light and look both ways.

No matter how many sacrifices you make to Lady Death, no matter how rich the offerings you lay before her altar, she will know where to find you. When she comes, she will hold you tight, and she will never let you go. Don’t be frightened. She takes us all.

Even here in Los Angeles, in the glow of so much newness, she takes 60,000 of us each year. That’s 164 each day. Imagine them all lying side by side, napping forever without a snore. The sun goes down and rises again, and 164 more are sleeping beside them, resting cheeks on shoulders, ears on arms. One day you will join their still parade. Chances are good—about one in four in L.A. County—that death will grab you by the heart. Coronary disease is by far our leading cause of mortality, as it is in the rest of the country. L.A.’s specific inequities, though, travel as deeply through death as they do through life. In this and other ways, death maps life. If you’re an African American or a Latino male and you die before 75, you’re more likely to die of homicide than any other cause. The same goes if you’re of any race or either gender and you live in South L.A. If you’re white or live west of La Cienega and it’s not your ticker that gets you, it will most likely be an overdose, or a car crash, or lung cancer, or your own hand—murder is not even in the running.

Whoever you are and wherever you live, you will go. You will not be you anymore. Not exactly. You will be a corpse, a cadaver, a decedent, a “loved one.” You will be remains. The death industry employs more euphemisms than politicians do. Someone will find what’s left of you. A child, spouse, or parent. A nurse or passerby. Whoever it is will call for help. At home, at work, or in the street, he or she will dial 911. In a hospital, hospice, or nursing home, someone will call your doctor, who will check one last time for vital signs, declare you dead, and fill out the proper forms. A nurse will remove your clothes and close your eyes. (Not just for modesty’s sake: Rigor mortis hits the eyelids fast.) He or she will tie a tag bearing your name, which you can no longer speak, onto one of your toes, cover you with a plastic shroud, and wheel you to an elevator and thence to the morgue. In most hospitals it is in the basement. You will be rolled from the gurney into a refrigerated drawer. The door will close behind you. It will be dark and cold, but you won’t care.

Power Words
So here you are, dead and alone. Chances are you didn’t want this, but your wishes were ignored. Whatever happens to the part of you that you recognize as somehow quintessentially you (call it soul, self, spirit, spark), the other part isn’t finished yet—the fleshly part, the limbs and guts that ached and pleased you in so many ways, the meaty bits that you vainly or grudgingly dragged around for all those years. That piece is still of interest to the bureaucrats. It is still a potential source of profit. In your absence its journey is just beginning.

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Henry Matisse, Bathers by a River, 1909

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War

LOL

by Joe Berkowitz

“The intention is usually to signal an informal, gossipy mode of expression, and perhaps parody the level of unreflective enthusiasm or overstatement that can sometimes appear in online discourse.”

My face is set in a neutral expression as I type this, probably too dull to merit an emoticon. Let’s say I was smiling, though, or even laughing. Let’s say I was laughing so hard that part of my ass literally came off, on account of all the calories expended. You wouldn’t know it unless I mentioned it. Right now I’m conveying meaning through words only — complete, unadorned sentences. In other words, I’m conducting myself in the manner apparently most befitting a man.

It has increasingly come to my attention that a lot of women consider the male usage of emoticons and LOL to be at best a ‘pet peeve,’ and at worst a ‘total dealbreaker.’ As someone who takes a spirited interest in the evolution of language, and conducts feverish, Talmudic research into what women find objectionable, I thought the matter could use some further scrutiny. What exactly is the problem here, and how bad is it?

First off, allow me to briefly distance myself from the behavior in question: I’m not much of a LOL-er, and I do 80% of my emoting with my actual face. While it’s polite to acknowledge when the person you’re texting with has made a humor-joke, I prefer to use the simple “haha,” rather than the stage-directiony LOL. As far as the declarative-sentence LOL goes, well, telegraphing the fact that you find what you’re saying to be funny seems at least as pointless as explaining to James Bond that you’re going to kill him, rather than just offing the bastard straightaway.

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From Monterey Pop to Bonnaroo, the Hippie Endures

by Hampton Stevens

Forty-four years ago this past weekend, a group of musicians, impresarios, and true believers in the nascent, acid-soaked counterculture of San Francisco staged the Monterey International Pop Music Festival. Billed as three days of “Music, Love, and Flowers,” Monterey mixed 32 musical acts and an arts exposition with elements of a political rally and a church service, sparking a revolution. It was the first true rock festival—progenitor of and template for every one that followed, from Woodstock two years later to this month’s Bonnaroo.

Musically, Monterey was a jailbreak—a creative explosion. There had never been a festival line-up so varied, with room for Johnny Rivers' rockabilly, Hugh Masekela's trumpet, and Ravi Shankar's sitar. By embracing such a stunning range of musicians, and by giving instant legends like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Otis Redding and The Who national exposure for the first time, Monterey announced that rock had come of age as a serious art form. Monterey declared that it was in rock music, not jazz, where the most innovative musicians were to be found; that it was in rock, not folk, where the growing youth protest movements would find a voice; and it was rock stars, not poets, painters, authors, filmmakers or any other sort of artist who would be most effective at communicating new, counter-cultural values to mainstream American society.

That communication could be explicit, like when Country Joe McDonald sang his antiwar protest, the “I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die Rag.” Or it could be implied, like with the long hair, love beads, and phosphorescent wardrobe of MC Brian Jones, all of which seemed a calculated assault on middle-class values. Or Janis Joplin, who took the stage and embodied the liberated woman in all her passionate contradictions, living feminism in way that academics like Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan could only describe.

But the festival also marked the debut of a new national archetype—an entirely new stock character in the American repertoire soon to be as iconic, and arguably as influential, as the cowboy, quarterback, or frontiersman in a coonskin cap. At Monterey, the world met the hippie, who lived by the newborn creed of Flower Power in the experimental communities rising in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, perhaps best exemplified by the colorful, placid, and often communally-minded fans of the Grateful Dead. Before the festival, hippies were a few thousand denizens of one neighborhood in a medium-sized city. After Monterey, hippies and their sensibility would become a global phenomenon.

For most of the United States, the middle of 1967 would be known as “The Long, Hot Summer,” with race riots breaking out in seemingly incongruous cities like Buffalo and Tampa. Not so in San Francisco, where the success of Monterey and subsequent media attention set off the famed “Summer of Love," a mass migration of nearly 100,000 young people who converged on Haight-Ashbury, many sporting flowers as instructed by Scott McKenzie's saccharine rendition of “San Francisco.”

When America's youth flocked west, the media glare went supernova. In July of 1967, Time Magazine ran a cover story, "The Hippies: Philosophy of a Subculture." In August, CBS News broadcast a special report, “The Temptation of the Hippie.” The world discovered that Flower Power was often fueled by marijuana and LSD, bringing more crowds, and lots of unwanted attention from the law. By October, the Haight seemed played out, and a bunch of locals staged a mock “funeral for the Hippie” in Golden Gate Park. They declared the hippie dead, killed by greed, commercialism and media exposure.

They couldn't have been more wrong.

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