Wednesday, October 17, 2012
The List
[ed. A story with a few angles, some quite humorous.]
For more than a year, the police have been investigating reports that the local Zumba instructor was using her exercise studio on a quaint downtown street for more than fitness training. In fact, the police say, she was running a one-woman brothel with up to 150 clients and secretly videotaping them as they engaged in intimate acts.
Now, the police have started releasing the names of her clients who have been charged with patronizing a prostitute. This has set the town buzzing because the list is rumored to be replete with the names of prominent people. (The Portland Press Herald identified one suspect as a former mayor of South Portland.) The first 21 people, whose names were released Monday, are to appear in court on Dec. 5.
The release of the names has stirred chatter everywhere here — in coffee shops, parking lots and the small shops along York Street, the main drag — about who was on the list. It has also prompted debate over whether the names should be released. And it no doubt has led to less academic discussions behind the closed doors of many homes across this region.
One local entrepreneur tapped into the zeitgeist and printed up T-shirts that read: “I’m not on the list. Are you?” They sold out instantly.
The case is somewhat complicated. The police say that by videotaping her clients, Alexis Wright, 29, the Zumba instructor, invaded their privacy and that the clients, in addition to being suspected perpetrators, are also thus victims.
That led to a convoluted court ruling that the names of the clients would be released but without further identifying information, like their addresses or dates of birth.
“People throughout New England are up in arms that their names might match,” Lt. Anthony Bean Burpee said in an interview.
When a list of the first 21 names was made public Monday night, it contained many common names. “Paul Main” was one, and the news whipped around town because Paul Main once worked for the sheriff’s department and even ran for sheriff himself a few years ago.
That Paul Main said in an interview Tuesday that when he saw his name on television, he started to laugh. But when he heard that a Boston radio station was identifying him as a client, he stopped laughing.
Mr. Main, 65, said that despite the mix-up, he has not suffered any real harm — but that other people could. He believes the names should be published, but only with identifying information. “There should be no ambiguity,” he said.
Late Tuesday, Justice Thomas Warren of Superior Court reversed himself and ruled that the addresses could be released; they were published Tuesday night.
Generally, women who were interviewed here seemed to applaud making the list public with as much information as possible. Men, on the other hand, generally thought that the crime was minor and that releasing the names would only harm the families.
by Katherine Q. Seelye, NY Times | Read more:
Photo:Robert F. Bukaty/Associated Press
Tuesday, October 16, 2012
Going Gently Into That Good Night
These were three things my mother, Ann Krieger, was pondering when she reached the final leg of her terminal illness last year, a month before Mother’s Day. After several years of fighting colon cancer, her doctor broke the news that the cancer had spread and the treatment was no longer working. There was no more they could do.
“You’ve got months, not weeks,” he said.
“What should I do?” she asked. “Should I end it now?”
“No,” he said. “You don’t want to do that.”
Actually, my mother kind of did, but the doctor referred her to hospice and gave her information about palliative care, a mode of treatment that relieves the pain of patients with serious illnesses. But in my mother’s case, the physical distress was less acute than the existential. Coming to terms with the fact that you’re going to die is elusive. For some people, like her, an attempt to manage the logistics could make it seem more doable. She and my father had given this some thought and had very specific ideas about how they wanted their end-of-life matters handled. (...)
I believe that the power to make choices about how and when we die, when terminally ill, should be a basic human right. But there are various arguments against it. My favorite one says that it’s not for mortals to make such decisions because we are in God’s hands, however fumbling they may be. If God wants you to die in a certain manner, the logic seems to go, then that’s because it’s part of His plan. But what if God really doesn’t care one way or the other? It would be quite an administrative headache, after all. Consider that across the globe, roughly 150,000 people die every day, at a rate of about 107 people per minute. A little human intervention could go a long way during that last bumpy stretch.
Many doctors, however, tend to think differently. Knowing this all too well, my mother had filed away the name of an organization she thought might offer some guidance when the time came.
The week she started hospice care, at the beginning of April 2011, my father, Melvin, contacted them. A few days later, they got a call from Judith Schwarz, the clinical coordinator of Compassion & Choices, who lived nearby on the Upper West Side. She came over and spent a few hours talking with my parents, explaining her organization’s mission and discussing my mother’s illness and the options available. “She was warm and it was personal,” my father said. “She was a professional who is very skilled at dealing with situations like this.”
by Daniel Krieger, Narratively |Read more:
My Life as a Girl
Maybe I just want to be pretty.
Maybe I just want to feel pretty, or to look pretty. Some of those goals seem impossible, or incompatible, or prohibitively difficult; not worth what I would have to sacrifice. I’m a man, but I like dressing up as a woman, in women’s clothes, wearing lipstick and bracelets and bright rings and women’s shoes. Given my tastes, at the moment, it might be better to say that I like dressing up as a girl. I like to wear costume jewelry, and pastel nail polish, and I do that all the time. I like to wear skirts and tights, or dresses, too, in private sometimes, in public fewer times, and in company when I can find an appropriate occasion, which I rarely can.
That’s been the case for a while. In my twenties I found the perfect social circle, and the perfect set of dance parties and rock clubs, where I could dress up like a girl and my friends didn’t mind—or found it charming. Then my favorite club closed. Then Jessie and I got married and moved to Minnesota, and my space for cross-dressing dried up. I minded, but not very much, because I liked the rest of my life. I even stopped wearing nail polish and sparkly rings for a while, though the poetry I published made its commitment to girlish identities, feminine alternate selves, all but unmistakable.
And now I have started dressing up again, every so often—I think all I want is every so often—and I’m ready to write about it in disjunctive and maybe all too self-conscious prose.
What follows are tentative answers to persistent questions about how I look, how I want to look, why I often think that I would rather have been a woman, and why I’m sure I won’t try to become one. It has to do with sexual feeling, but it says almost nothing about sexual acts. It’s no substitute for queer theory, nor for a cultural history of cross-dressing and other trans life-ways, nor for the book-length memoirs by trans people and their loved ones (one of my topics here is resistance to memoir, to narrative, to identifying your true self with one story that can be told), though all those forms of writing have helped me, and I refer to them. I also refer to poetry, since I care far more about poems—and think more often about them—than about how I look. I am a literary critic and a writer of verse, a parent and husband and friend, before and after I am a guy in a skirt, or a guy in blue jeans, or a fictional girl. I have tried to have as little concern for my own privacy as I can—I’m tired of keeping secrets and don’t want more. I have, on the other hand, tried to have as much concern as I can for Jessie’s privacy. I’ve chosen to share these parts of my life with you, if you stay with me; Jessie has chosen to share the whole of our life, not necessarily with readers, but with me.
People who know my name but haven’t met me usually know I’m a poetry critic and a book reviewer. In one important model of poetry-in-general, the poet constructs apersona (Greek poiein = to make; Latin persona = actors’ mask), a stylized mask made of words that replaces the poet’s physical, literal body, and provides a better fit for the soul. My own first published poems spoke of wanting to be a girl, or a woman, dramatically and tautologically: “If I were a girl, I would be a girl,” one said. Later I published poems in girl personae, such as “Self-Portrait as Kitty Pryde,” about the teenage genius from the X-Men who has the power to walk through walls.
This essay is a substitute, not so much for a memoir, but for an unwritten, overlong, awkward, over-literal poem.
Recently I went shopping for a denim skirt that I could wear to an open house for trans people and cross-dressers, the venerable Tiffany Club in suburban Boston. I’ve now gone to two open houses, and I’ll go to more, though I don’t know how often, since we have a two-year-old and a six-year-old, and the open house events conflict with both of their bedtimes. It’s astonishingly helpful to find a space where trans people can meet one another without being expected to date, or to dance on stage, or to seek medical attention. Also, it turns out, I like being addressed as Stephanie. Some of the folks I met there are learning to live full-time in their preferred gender (with or sans surgeries). Others are more like me; they enjoy dressing up.
by Stephen Burt, VQR | Read more:
Maybe I just want to feel pretty, or to look pretty. Some of those goals seem impossible, or incompatible, or prohibitively difficult; not worth what I would have to sacrifice. I’m a man, but I like dressing up as a woman, in women’s clothes, wearing lipstick and bracelets and bright rings and women’s shoes. Given my tastes, at the moment, it might be better to say that I like dressing up as a girl. I like to wear costume jewelry, and pastel nail polish, and I do that all the time. I like to wear skirts and tights, or dresses, too, in private sometimes, in public fewer times, and in company when I can find an appropriate occasion, which I rarely can.
That’s been the case for a while. In my twenties I found the perfect social circle, and the perfect set of dance parties and rock clubs, where I could dress up like a girl and my friends didn’t mind—or found it charming. Then my favorite club closed. Then Jessie and I got married and moved to Minnesota, and my space for cross-dressing dried up. I minded, but not very much, because I liked the rest of my life. I even stopped wearing nail polish and sparkly rings for a while, though the poetry I published made its commitment to girlish identities, feminine alternate selves, all but unmistakable.
And now I have started dressing up again, every so often—I think all I want is every so often—and I’m ready to write about it in disjunctive and maybe all too self-conscious prose.
***
What follows are tentative answers to persistent questions about how I look, how I want to look, why I often think that I would rather have been a woman, and why I’m sure I won’t try to become one. It has to do with sexual feeling, but it says almost nothing about sexual acts. It’s no substitute for queer theory, nor for a cultural history of cross-dressing and other trans life-ways, nor for the book-length memoirs by trans people and their loved ones (one of my topics here is resistance to memoir, to narrative, to identifying your true self with one story that can be told), though all those forms of writing have helped me, and I refer to them. I also refer to poetry, since I care far more about poems—and think more often about them—than about how I look. I am a literary critic and a writer of verse, a parent and husband and friend, before and after I am a guy in a skirt, or a guy in blue jeans, or a fictional girl. I have tried to have as little concern for my own privacy as I can—I’m tired of keeping secrets and don’t want more. I have, on the other hand, tried to have as much concern as I can for Jessie’s privacy. I’ve chosen to share these parts of my life with you, if you stay with me; Jessie has chosen to share the whole of our life, not necessarily with readers, but with me.
***
People who know my name but haven’t met me usually know I’m a poetry critic and a book reviewer. In one important model of poetry-in-general, the poet constructs apersona (Greek poiein = to make; Latin persona = actors’ mask), a stylized mask made of words that replaces the poet’s physical, literal body, and provides a better fit for the soul. My own first published poems spoke of wanting to be a girl, or a woman, dramatically and tautologically: “If I were a girl, I would be a girl,” one said. Later I published poems in girl personae, such as “Self-Portrait as Kitty Pryde,” about the teenage genius from the X-Men who has the power to walk through walls.
This essay is a substitute, not so much for a memoir, but for an unwritten, overlong, awkward, over-literal poem.
Recently I went shopping for a denim skirt that I could wear to an open house for trans people and cross-dressers, the venerable Tiffany Club in suburban Boston. I’ve now gone to two open houses, and I’ll go to more, though I don’t know how often, since we have a two-year-old and a six-year-old, and the open house events conflict with both of their bedtimes. It’s astonishingly helpful to find a space where trans people can meet one another without being expected to date, or to dance on stage, or to seek medical attention. Also, it turns out, I like being addressed as Stephanie. Some of the folks I met there are learning to live full-time in their preferred gender (with or sans surgeries). Others are more like me; they enjoy dressing up.
by Stephen Burt, VQR | Read more:
Monday, October 15, 2012
GM Mouse Created to Detect Landmines
[ed. I wonder what other "modifications" are being explored to achieve specific objectives.]
More than 70 countries are contaminated by landmines, a constant reminder of previous conflicts. "Long after wars have ended, communities are still impeded from going back to their normal, daily activities because of all these mines still affecting their land," said Charlotte D'Hulst of Hunter College, New York, who led the team that developed the MouSensor.
One approach to clearing landmines is to use HeroRats, giant pouched rats that are trained to sniff out landmines by the Belgian NGO, Apopo.
Two of these, with a human handler, can clear an area of 300 sq metres in less than two hours. It would take two people about two days to do the same. One disadvantage of the HeroRats system, however, is that the rats need nine months' training before they are ready for landmine detection.
D'Hulst wanted to improve on the HeroRats concept by creating a genetically modified "supersniffer" mouse, sensitive to the specific odour of the explosives in landmines, TNT.
by Alok Jah, The Guardian | Read more:
Photograph: Feinstein Lab, Hunter College
Suddenly Everyone Wants New Yorker Style Content
[ed. And this should be a surprise to anyone?]
This is great news….mostly.
For a long time, I’ve said that I thought the reason journalism was reeling was its own fault. Daily papers had a de facto monopoly — on news, classifieds, movie listing, stock quotes, sports scores, and all types of content. And yes, the Internet destroyed it. But if daily newspapers in aggregate, had been good stewards of that role in the community, people would still have read them. Most daily papers, instead, were like the one from my hometown: more daily than a newspaper. Like paying with the cable company, no one particularly loved reading it, but there wasn’t another option for getting all those things I describe above delivered to you daily.
Simply put: It was easy and cheap for a lot of other players on the Web to outdo daily newspaper journalism for cheap or free. And that lead to a wave of massive commodification of news. But those glimmers of really great storytelling and investigative work that weren’t in the paper every day were ravaged as part of the shift. And there was no clear way to replace it. Good content isn’t free — as anyone who struggles to write it or hire good talent knows.
I’ve always been confident that it would become valued again one day, and the market would figure out a way to pay for it — either by non-page view based ads or subscriptions. But I felt that as an industry we had a period of penance for that abuse of a monopoly position, maybe our own 40 years of wandering in the desert.
Well, that was a short 40 years. It seems good quality work has come raging back into vogue. There are a handful of upstarts the raison d’être of which is reporting, writing, and long form work — we’re part of that, as is NSFWCORP, and even The Verge produces some long spectacularly written stuff. Meanwhile you have companies you’d least expect investing in it. Buzzfeed, which already enjoys a schizophrenic life as a purveyor of cat photos and political scoops, announced it’s going to focus on long-form journalism, and now Tumblr, which isn’t even a content company, is getting in on the act.
So much of this boils down to one big change in the Internet: A lot of companies are being built out of New York. New York loves, will pay for, values, and excels at producing quality content in a way that Silicon Valley never will. And, at least in our experience, audiences are gulping it down like water in a desert.
In our recent reader survey almost every respondent answered why they read PandoDaily with a variation of the following: Long form content that isn’t afraid to call out powerful people. When we asked what could make the site better, I was surprised that several people actually said longer content. And these aren’t just those six hundred people who have time to fill out a survey. Our 2,000-3,000 word stories consistently drive the most traffic, and have for our eight-month existence.
So people want to pay for long form journalism, and readers want to read it. Wow, suddenly journalism isn’t so dead, right? Not so fast. There’s still one big problem here: Who the hell is going to write all this brilliant New Yorker style prose? (...)
Simply put: Without a system that trains people how to do a New Yorker style piece, there are none for Tumblr and Buzzfeed to commission, nothing for those readers who so badly want it to soak up. We’ve got the money and the demand, but a disastrous paucity of supply.
Within 10 years, the industry’s biggest challenge has been totally inverted. Before, we had all this talent and no one to pay for or read it. Now, it’s just the opposite.
by Sarah Lacy, Pando Daily | Read more:
Image via: Wikimedia
Mortify Our Wolves
We hear, and look up as one at the two attendants hurriedly wheeling something so shrunken it seems merely another rumple in the blanket, tubes traveling in and out of its impalpability, its only life this lifeless cry.
The doors open soundlessly, and the pall of sorrow goes flowing off into the annihilating brightness beyond. Then the doors close, and we as one look down, not meeting each other’s eyes, and wait.
The terrible thing—it could perhaps be a glorious thing; always the ill are meant to see it as such, are reproached if they don’t (carpe fucking diem)—the terrible thing about feeling the inevitability of your own early death is the way it colors every single scene: at some friends’ house I am moved by the beauty and antics of their two-year-old daughter—moved, and then saddened to think of the daughter D. and I might have, for whom my death will be some deep, lightless hole, which for the rest of her life she will walk around, grief the very ground of her being. What is this world that we are so at odds with, this beauty by which we are so wounded, and into which God has so utterly gone?
Into which, rather than from which: in a grain of grammar, a world of hope.
That conversions often happen after or during intense life experiences, especially traumatic experiences, is sometimes used as evidence against them. The sufferer isn’t in his right mind. The mind, tottering at the abyss of despair or death, shudders back toward any simplicity, any coherency it can grasp, and the man calls out to God. Never mind that the God who comes at such moments may not be simple at all, but arises out of and includes the very abyss the man would flee. Never mind that in traumatic experience many people lose their faith—or what looked like faith?—rather than find it. It is the flinch from life—which, the healthy are always quick to remind us, includes death—and the flight to God that cannot be trusted.
But how could it be otherwise? It takes a real jolt to get us to change our jobs, our relationships, our daily coffee consumption, for goodness sake—or, if we are wired that way, to change our addiction to change. How much more urgency is needed, how much more primal fear, to startle the heart out of its ruts and ruins. It’s true that God comes to the prophet Elijah not in the whirlwind, and not in the earthquake, and not in the fire that follows, but in the “still, small voice” that these ravages make plain. But the very wording of that passage makes it clear that the voice, though finally more powerful than the ravages it follows, is not altogether apart from them. That voice is always there, and for everyone. For some of us, unfortunately, it takes terror and pain to make us capable of hearing it. (...)
Part of the mystery of grace is the way it operates not only as present joy and future hope, but also retroactively, in a way: the past is suffused with a presence that, at the time, you could only feel as the most implacable absence. This is why being saved (I dislike the language, too, not because it’s inaccurate but because it’s corrupted by contemporary usage, a hands-in-the-air, holy-seizure sort of rapture, a definitive sense of rift) involves embracing rather than renouncing one’s past. It is true that Christ makes a man anew, that there is some ultimate change in him. But part of that change is the ability to see life as a whole, to feel the form and unity of it, to become a creature made for and assimilated to existence, rather than a desperate, fragmented thing striving against existence or caught forever just outside it. (...)
When my grandmother—whose reading was limited to the Bible and Guideposts, and whose life was circumscribed by the tiny yard around her tiny house in tiny Colorado City, Texas—died 20 years ago, I was pierced, not simply by grief and the loss of her presence, but by a sense that some very particular and hard-won kind of consciousness had gone out of the world. Hers was the kind of consciousness that is not consciousness as intellectuals define it, but is passive rather than active. It allows the world to stream through you rather than you always reaching out to take hold of it. It is the consciousness of the work of art and not necessarily of the artist who made it. People, occasionally, can be such works, creation streaming through them like the inspiration that, in truth, all of creation is.
Into which, rather than from which: in a grain of grammar, a world of hope.
That conversions often happen after or during intense life experiences, especially traumatic experiences, is sometimes used as evidence against them. The sufferer isn’t in his right mind. The mind, tottering at the abyss of despair or death, shudders back toward any simplicity, any coherency it can grasp, and the man calls out to God. Never mind that the God who comes at such moments may not be simple at all, but arises out of and includes the very abyss the man would flee. Never mind that in traumatic experience many people lose their faith—or what looked like faith?—rather than find it. It is the flinch from life—which, the healthy are always quick to remind us, includes death—and the flight to God that cannot be trusted.
But how could it be otherwise? It takes a real jolt to get us to change our jobs, our relationships, our daily coffee consumption, for goodness sake—or, if we are wired that way, to change our addiction to change. How much more urgency is needed, how much more primal fear, to startle the heart out of its ruts and ruins. It’s true that God comes to the prophet Elijah not in the whirlwind, and not in the earthquake, and not in the fire that follows, but in the “still, small voice” that these ravages make plain. But the very wording of that passage makes it clear that the voice, though finally more powerful than the ravages it follows, is not altogether apart from them. That voice is always there, and for everyone. For some of us, unfortunately, it takes terror and pain to make us capable of hearing it. (...)
Part of the mystery of grace is the way it operates not only as present joy and future hope, but also retroactively, in a way: the past is suffused with a presence that, at the time, you could only feel as the most implacable absence. This is why being saved (I dislike the language, too, not because it’s inaccurate but because it’s corrupted by contemporary usage, a hands-in-the-air, holy-seizure sort of rapture, a definitive sense of rift) involves embracing rather than renouncing one’s past. It is true that Christ makes a man anew, that there is some ultimate change in him. But part of that change is the ability to see life as a whole, to feel the form and unity of it, to become a creature made for and assimilated to existence, rather than a desperate, fragmented thing striving against existence or caught forever just outside it. (...)
When my grandmother—whose reading was limited to the Bible and Guideposts, and whose life was circumscribed by the tiny yard around her tiny house in tiny Colorado City, Texas—died 20 years ago, I was pierced, not simply by grief and the loss of her presence, but by a sense that some very particular and hard-won kind of consciousness had gone out of the world. Hers was the kind of consciousness that is not consciousness as intellectuals define it, but is passive rather than active. It allows the world to stream through you rather than you always reaching out to take hold of it. It is the consciousness of the work of art and not necessarily of the artist who made it. People, occasionally, can be such works, creation streaming through them like the inspiration that, in truth, all of creation is.
by Christian Wiman, The American Scholar | Read more:
Michael Winslow
To those of you too young to remember the famed Police Academy series of movies, you missed out on a true gem of the '80s, Michael Winslow. The man was the king of sound effects. If you don't believe me, check out the above video where Winslow does a mean Robert Plant impersonation for "Whole Lotta Love" and then creates a ripping guitar solo ENTIRELY WITH HIS MOUTH. How do you do it Michael?
h/t GS
What Psychopaths Teach Us About How to Succeed
If you are born under the right star, for example, and have power over the human mind as the moon over the sea, you might order the genocide of 100,000 Kurds and shuffle to the gallows with such arcane recalcitrance as to elicit, from even your harshest detractors, perverse, unspoken deference.
“Do not be afraid, doctor,” said Saddam Hussein on the scaffold, moments before his execution. “This is for men.”
If you are violent and cunning, like the real-life “Hannibal Lecter” Robert Maudsley, you might take a fellow inmate hostage, smash his skull in and sample his brains with a spoon as nonchalantly as if you were downing a soft-boiled egg. (Maudsley, by the way, has been cooped up in solitary confinement for the past 30 years, in a bulletproof cage in the basement of Wakefield Prison in England.)
Or if you are a brilliant neurosurgeon, ruthlessly cool and focused under pressure, you might, like the man I'll call Dr. Geraghty, try your luck on a completely different playing field: at the remote outposts of 21st-century medicine, where risk blows in on 100-mile-per-hour winds and the oxygen of deliberation is thin. “I have no compassion for those whom I operate on,” he told me. “That is a luxury I simply cannot afford. In the theater I am reborn: as a cold, heartless machine, totally at one with scalpel, drill and saw. When you're cutting loose and cheating death high above the snowline of the brain, feelings aren't fit for purpose. Emotion is entropy—and seriously bad for business. I've hunted it down to extinction over the years.”
Geraghty is one of the U.K.'s top neurosurgeons—and although, on one level, his words send a chill down the spine, on another they make perfect sense. Deep in the ghettoes of some of the brain's most dangerous neighborhoods, the psychopath is glimpsed as a lone and merciless predator, a solitary species of transient, deadly allure. No sooner is the word out than images of serial killers, rapists and mad, reclusive bombers come stalking down the sidewalks of our minds.
But what if I were to paint you a different picture? What if I were to tell you that the arsonist who burns your house down might also, in a parallel universe, be the hero most likely to brave the flaming timbers of a crumbling, blazing building to seek out, and drag out, your loved ones? Or that the kid with a knife in the shadows at the back of the movie theater might well, in years to come, be wielding a rather different kind of knife at the back of a rather different kind of theater?
Claims like these are admittedly hard to believe. But they're true. Psychopaths are fearless, confident, charismatic, ruthless and focused. Yet, contrary to popular belief, they are not necessarily violent. Far from its being an open-and-shut case—you're either a psychopath or you're not—there are, instead, inner and outer zones of the disorder: a bit like the fare zones on a subway map. There is a spectrum of psychopathy along which each of us has our place, with only a small minority of A-listers resident in the “inner city.”
by Kevin Dutton, Scientific American | Read more:
Image: Tim Bower
The Temporary City...Maybe
However, there is another, far more compelling and humane way to view these camps, and that is as prototypical urban types. The various ways in which we define the urban, such as population density, non-agricultural economic activity, and reasonably well-defined boundaries, are conditions that are here amply met. And when one considers the ways in which people artificially conjure cities (consider a company town, built for the sole purpose of extracting a natural resource), then why shouldn’t we consider refugee camps to be cities? More importantly, if we do consent to think of them as cities, what is it that we can learn from them?
Consider, for example, the three refugee camps collectively known as Daadab, in northeastern Kenya. Founded in 1991 to take in Somali refugees from the then-new civil war, the camp is now the world’s largest, and is still growing after 22 years; the influx of new arrivals has been guaranteed not only by the still-unresolved civil war, but also by the added stress of two failed monsoons in the Horn of Africa. As a result,
Dadaab is now the third-largest city in Kenya, but there are no Kenyans living there. Instead, it is home to 450,000 Somalis in a camp that was built for 90,000 people. Refugees…are not permitted to leave the camp, because the Kenyan government wants them to remain refugees and not become illegal immigrants. The government also prohibits them from working.This illustrates the paradox of the refugee camp and why, at first blush, it may seem counterintuitive to think of this form as a fundamentally, if prototypically, urban one. For one, the restrictions on the freedom of mobility violates our contemporary conception of the city: as a place to which people migrate in order to seek economic opportunity (I should note that this is debunked below). The additional perception of refugees as victims dependent on the largesse of both host country and humanitarian organizations – which, of course, operate under their own incentives that are not necessarily aligned with the long-term desires of the refugees – further removes them from the perception as independent actors.
And yet, as the case of Dadaab reveals, we really do have a city on our hands. The logistics of housing and feeding nearly half a million people are formidable, and to facilitate an organized approach the camp is laid out in a grid, with every family assigned an address. Even though it may be motivated only by pragmatism, this is de facto urban planning.The grid layout, by seeking out the efficiencies generated by proximity, creates the conditions for a socialization that is specifically urban. This is particularly striking when one realizes that those being so “urbanized” are people who had, up until that point, likely lived in rural settings. And as the camps grow, infrastructure and services have to maintain pace, and schools and hospitals are founded at strategic locations in order to serve the population. There are also “internet cafes, pharmacies, auto repair shops, and bus depots.” On the other end of things, formal cemeteries have been established and the burial of the dead regimented.
by Misha Lepetik, 3 Quarks Daily | Read more:
Sunday, October 14, 2012
Stephen Colbert Steps Out of Character
[ed. ...and has some interesting things to say about satire and the 2012 Presidential race.]
How to Win the Nobel Prize in Literature
I waited by the phone all week for that congratulatory call from overseas myself! Not for the stuff I’ve already written, which, let’s admit, is pretty amazing. But for the stuff I could write. I’m not saying I’m the most deserving writer on Earth for this recognition. I just want the Swedish people to tell the world I am. Just as the Nobel Prize people preemptively gave President Obama a Nobel Peace Prize for what he could or would do in office, they should give a Nobel Prize in Literature to me (and then maybe the year after that to you) for what we will accomplish in our Literary Careers with the million bucks, the free donuts and champagne and the NPR drive-time interviews we’ll receive as a Nobel Prize Winner. No one remembers who wins the other prizes. They are in subjects most people failed. Chemistry, geometry? Who knows. And I’m not exactly a selfless hero leading my people to any kind of freedom. I have no good intentions here. Writers are all about ourselves! And although my half-written novel Yay-o-wolf remains half-written I think we can all agree it’s going to be the greatest thing since The Bridges of Madison County, which I believe won the Nobel Prize twice it was so good. (I just checked that on Ms. Google and The Bridges of Madison County hasn’t won the Nobel Prize—yet.) The Nobel Prize in Literature is given to a writer for the body of their work while they’re still alive, so they can give a speech in cold, cold Sweden. To blond children who do not laugh or clap, such as those featured in the documentary The Children of the Corn.
So what can you do, oh writer who has not yet died? Here are some helpful hints that you and I can use on our way to the top of the Literature Anthill! (...)
BE DEEP, BUT NOT TOO DEEP
I’m not a deep person. I don’t have deep thoughts. I am not contemplative at all. I have no idea how the universe works or why it does the things it does. And my experiences haven’t given me any insight into the way people live or any ideas of how we could all live better together. Does that mean I won’t win the Nobel Prize? That does not mean that! The Nobel Committee isn’t necessarily looking for the most-daring, most-experimental, nost-smarty-pantsy of writers. They’re kind of middle of the road readers themselves. But like everyone else, they want authors to make them feel smart. Can you make them feel like they’re daring and edgy readers? Then you will soon have a Nobel, my friend. Although they hate any kind of reading that is at all fun, enjoyable, amusing. It’s an eat-your-vegetables kind of vibe they’re looking for. So just fake that kind of tone for like 30-40 years. Dour, solemn, lots of meaningful death shit and lots of adultery. Adultery is like the pinnacle of Literary Themes. If you’re a guy and you sleep around on your wife in books you are deep, existential, Nobel-worthy. If you’re a lady and you sleep around on your husband, the universe will shame you. And that shame will be deep.
But not too deep. It’s not like avant garde writers win the Nobel. Sartre refused his Nobel, which is pretty punk, because he both felt that he wasn’t avant garde enough and therefore winning wasn’t avant garde enough. That’s a lot of money to flush down the toilet. But you can always tell people in bars “The Nobel Prize? Fuck that! I threw mine in the river!” Very punk. But someone probably fished that Nobel out and sold it on ebay. Money’s money, and most writers would gladly tear your heart out and seal their grant-writing envelopes with your still-hot blood if they thought it would get them a few extra bucks. Writers are lazy or they’d go get real jobs like everybody else. Instead they live in the center of a universe in which they are the most interesting character. Yikes!! Double exclamation points!!
The John Cages and Gertrude Steins of the world don’t win prizes. They earn our lip-servicey love. We don’t actually enjoy reading them. We enjoy feeling better than everyone else for reading and listening to people like Cage and Stein. I learned more from every Raymond Chandler novel than I did by reading all the weird Woo Woo Shit I could ever get my hands on. They never gave an award to that French guy who wrote an entire book without using the letter e. Who knows if it was a good book or anything. You should win SOMETHING for writing a whole book without using an e. I can barely write a sentence without using an e. I’m munching on walrus poo. There’s one sentence. It took me an hour to write that. And I’m pretty sure walrus is spelled wrong there, doesn’t it usually have an E in it? I am seeing Es everwhere. So they never give the awards to the people who truly deserve them. That’s why they should give them to you! And me! We’re not up to anything truly complicated or trailblazing. They keep giving the award to people writing in the Magic Realism form. Talking giraffes. Monkeys dressed like angels. That kind of thing. Trees that make you cheeseburgers. Magic cheeseburgers! They love magic realism because it’s safe and it makes people feel smart. And it makes for good movies. Who doesn’t like movies with talking cats? Assholes, that’s who!
So don’t get fancy. Don’t try to do too much. Use E’s, apparently. You just have to learn how to make people feel smarter about themselves without saying much. It’s like how people who don’t talk much seem contemplative, thoughtful. When they’re probably just playing Tetris in their heads. Cheat on your wives in books but not on your husbands! Has a gay writer ever won the Nobel? Maybe just Gide! Although I have my suspicions about Hemingway. So be straight and white and male and old, maybe grow a big bushy beard. And always hold your head or face in your author photos, that helps you sell 10,000 extra copies per book. Blue covers are better. People are always asking for “that book with the blue cover.” Are you writing all this down? This is some serious Nobel-prize-winning gold. Well, get a pen! Go, now!
by Jim Behrle, The Awl | Read more:
Photo by San Francisco Foghorn.
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