Who Owns This Land? In Greece, Who Knows?

Not long ago Leonidas Hamodrakas, a lawyer in Athens, decided to pay closer attention to his family’s land holdings — some fields, a scattering of buildings and a massive stone tower — in Mani, a rural region in southern Greece.

But property ownership in Greece is often less than clear cut. So Mr. Hamodrakas put a padlock on his gate and waited to see what would happen. Soon enough, he heard from neighbors. Three of them claimed that they, too, had title to parts of the property.

In this age of satellite imagery, digital records and the instantaneous exchange of information, most of Greece’s land transaction records are still handwritten in ledgers, logged in by last names. No lot numbers. No clarity on boundaries or zoning. No obvious way to tell whether two people, or 10, have registered ownership of the same property.

As Greece tries to claw its way out of an economic crisis of historic proportions, one that has left 60 percent of young people without jobs, many experts cite the lack of a proper land registry as one of the biggest impediments to progress. It scares off foreign investors; makes it hard for the state to privatize its assets, as it has promised to do in exchange for bailout money; and makes it virtually impossible to collect property taxes.

Greece has resorted to tagging tax dues on to electricity bills as a way to flush out owners. Of course, that means that empty property and farmland has yet to be taxed.

Mr. Hamodrakas is far from resolving the dispute with his neighbors. The courts in Greece are flooded with such cases. “These things take years,” he said, “maybe a decade to settle.”

This state of affairs is particularly galling because Greece has thrown hundreds of millions of dollars at the problem over the past two decades, but has little to show for it. At one point, in the early 1990s, Greece took more than $100 million from the European Union to build a registry. But after seeing what was accomplished, the European Union demanded its money back.

Since then, Greece has tried, and tried again. But still, less than 7 percent of the country has been properly mapped, officials say. Experts say that even the Balkan states, recovering from years of Communism and civil war, are far ahead of Greece when it comes to land registries attached to zoning maps — an approach developed by the Romans and in wide use in much of the developed world since the 1800s.

But not in Greece. Here the extent of disputed land is enormous, experts say.

“If you calculated the total deeds that are registered,” said Dimitris Kaloudiotis, an engineer who took over as president of the national land registry authority last month, “the country would be twice as big as it is.” (...)

Land disputes are less acute in urban centers, where sidewalks, streets and building walls help clarify boundaries. But in the countryside, deeds reflect another era. Boundaries can be the “three olive trees near the well” or the spot “where you can hear a donkey on the path.”

“You had guys who had never been to school — who had 100 sheep — and they would throw a rock a certain distance and say: O.K., that’s mine,” said Mr. Hamodrakas, who in addition to his own problems has handled many landownership cases for clients. “The documents might say ‘from the tree to the stream.’ It is very hard to know what they are talking about.”

by Suzanne Daley, NY Times |  Read more:

Photo: Angelos Tzortzinis for The New York Times

Rio Ancho

Murillo Da Rós - guitar, Convidado Gilson Peranzzetta - piano, Glauco Solter - bass, Luciano Madalozzo - percussion, performing Rio Ancho by Paco de Lucia.

Power Plant (by FMJ Shooter)
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Tsundoku

[ed. There's a word for it...]
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Ralph Steadman, Portrait of Sigmund Freud
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Book Cover Art

[ed. From the Book Cover Archive.]

Albert Camus and the Ventriloquists

“Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.” Those lines are perhaps the most-quoted of Albert Camus’ online. They’ve most likely reached more people than his books have. The problem, aside from the diabolical triteness of the sentiment, is that Camus doesn’t seem to have written these words. They appear in none of his major works nor in any interview that I can find. To anyone who has read Camus’ work, this comes as little surprise. It just doesn’t seem his style to write something so simpering, a message with all the profundity of an episode of The Littlest Hobo, a kind of self-help post-Oprah unspeak drivel, the proliferation of which has made Facebook a place which the sound of mind should avoid as they would a leper colony.

Camus did have a talent for writing one-liners and epigrams though rarely as light-weight as the aforementioned one (which seems more akin to Footprints in the Sand god-bothering doggerel than any literary text). There was more than just his looks linking him to Philip Marlowe-era Bogart. His economy of setting and language, the continual question of complicity, the omnipresent threat of violence, the deadly inexorable clockwork of his plots, the unreliable narrator of The Fall and the narrative tension in The Stranger, The Plague and ‘The Guest’ (from Exile and the Kingdom) mark him out almost as much a noir writer as an Existentialist, the latter a title he always denied. Camus was manifestly hard-boiled; hair slicked, collar up against the wind, cigarette hanging from his mouth. Perhaps he did write those words but they were mistranslated. Perhaps his instructions not to walk ahead or behind was not some happy-clappy sentiment but an untrusting and untrustworthy narrator, afraid his follower might suddenly brandish a revolver or afraid he might do the same. Walk alongside me so I can look you in the eye and get the measure of you, friend. Robbed of Camus’ characteristic style or perhaps the context of a private letter (in which case it would have a touching personal resonance), the quote is just another platitude masquerading as wisdom (hence the vaguely religious connotations). Why it attached itself to Camus or who actually wrote it is unclear.

Let’s take what Camus really did write as an example of the depth of his writing. The words of the infernal barfly Clamence in The Fall, “I shall tell you a great secret, my friend. Do not wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day.” The startling admission that opens The Stranger, “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure.” His evocation of Manhattan from his American Journal, “Sometimes from beyond the skyscrapers, across thousands of high walls, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia in the middle of the night, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island.” In Return to Tipasa, he wrote exquisitely that “In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” In Summer in Algiers he is equally life-affirming, “If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.”

All very inspiring but only truly so when placed in context. To fully appreciate Camus’ humanism you must set it in the sense of godless post-Nietzsche post-Holocaust futility which he, and the Existentialists, wrestled with and following the very real and often grim experiences of his poverty-stricken childhood in Algeria and his time risking his life in the French Resistance during the Occupation. This is why he deliberately sets his observations within tales of murder, epidemics, betrayals, dictatorships and torture.It might be reassuring to think that at least quotes serve as a signpost towards a writer’s work. (...)

It takes a discerning eye to know who to signpost to and how (the early albums of the Manic Street Preachers with their attendant literary slogans being a successful example of this). Such an eye is rare and brings us to the question of ulterior motives. I’m highly sceptical of those who claim that society is dumbing down, with its implication that some golden age of knowledge existed in the past, often unsurprisingly a draconian age where knowledge was the preserve of a cosseted and craven elite. Though I’m sceptical too of a view of human progress as ever-upward, we do know, in every field of inquiry, immeasurably more now than we ever have before. It may sound unromantic but the famed Library of Alexandria, regardless of its undoubted lost treasures, would pale in comparison to Wikipedia let alone the Library of Congress or the British Library. We have more ways to access this information and share it despite the considerable efforts of those who would happily shut these routes down for most people. The real issue of concern is not whether technology and social networking are rendering us ‘stupider’ (the contrary may well be true or equally the effect may be negligible as technology tends to only bring out and accentuate what is already in us) but the motives behind those who employ them.

Take the prevalence of websites where for your convenience you’re served culture as you might be served chicken nuggets in a drive-thru. You know who they are. In the absence of imagination or depth and using the modern model, you could easily fire together a Top Ten Books/Films/TV Shows About Vampires/Zombies/Fashion/Love, preferably with each book on a separate page or their beloved “after the jump” to greatly boost the hits and thus advertising revenue of your site. You could make sure each book is dealt with in a cursory paragraph, perhaps lifted wholesale from its blurb or press release with a droll rejoinder tacked to the end. Or better still, just stick a quote or ten on there with images taken from other list-based culture sites who’ve in turn taken their image from other sites and so on forever and ever. Include endless ‘how to write’ articles written by writers so it has that familiar creative writing workshop feel. Don’t bother looking too closely or at too much length at anything. Feel free to share all of this via the widgets provided. Reiterate positivity, motivation, self-belief like Dr Phil if his moustache happened to be an acceptably ironic one. Remember above all, your priority is clicks not culture. There’s little harm in any of this of course but there’s little substance to it either. It’s resulted in the elevation of the curator above the creator, taste above talent, pointing above doing.

Culture filtered through social networking (or more accurately the opposite) reaches its nadir with the tendency towards ventriloquism, the point at which it becomes damaging rather than just mildly irritating. Readers inevitably project their own views onto the writers they love (and loathe), it takes a curator or a critic to truly misrepresent a writer. In the past few months, I’ve seen writers whose work I adore be resurrected in horrifying forms. Gone are the edges, complexities and ambiguities that made them so interesting and unique. Instead we get a partially-pristine partially-malformed ventriloquist dummy replica. Worse still they all speak with the same voice. The words are theirs but the voices are not. Those have been changed in the editing process.

by Darran Anderson, Literary Flotsam and Jetsam |  Read more:
Image: uncredited

photo: markk

Cabbage Butterflies (Fiction)

The guy looked disappointed when he saw me. My one sales point is that I’m young, but my eyelids are so puffy they look like caterpillars, and my lips are pale and kind of caterpillary too, and so are my fingers and toes, so I’m pretty much caterpillars all over, and the problem was that the guy was fairly young himself. Not as young as me – I’m only 20 – but late twenties at most, which is about the same or a little older than my friend’s brother, who drives a Soarer and got arrested for possession of crank and who I had sex with a couple of times, but it was on bare tatami mats and the mats made a creepy-looking imprint on my ass.

'Good evening, I’m from the Snake Pit,’ I said, and the guy laughed and said, ‘“Snake Pit” – sounds like a gym for pro wrestlers.’ He had a very gentlemanly-sounding sort of laugh, which put me at ease in a way, but then again it’s always the ‘sophisticated’ ones who want you to stick your tongue in their ass or smooth out the wrinkles in their ball sack and lick it, stuff like that, which I hate, so I acted very shy when I walked in, like it was my first time to do this, but I couldn’t tell if the guy bought it or not. It seemed like he was experienced at this kind of thing, though, and it was one of the best hotels in the city, and the room had this giant bed, and I was thinking, Where does a young fucker like you get off, staying in such an expensive place?

While I was calling my office to tell them I’d arrived at the appointment, the guy took a bottle of wine from this ice bucket that looked like a robot’s head and popped the cork and poured himself a glass, and he seemed right at home, like he did this sort of stuff all the time. I had some wine too, and I was thinking it wasn’t as good as the gin and tonic LUI and me always drink together, but I stopped thinking about LUI when the guy said, ‘Show me your ass.’ I asked if I could take a shower first, and he said, ‘No need. I’ll hardly even touch your body. Just lift up your skirt and stick out your ass.’ I kind of stalled and kept fidgeting, and finally he said, ‘Never mind,’ and pulled a ten thousand yen bill from his wallet and held it out to me and said, ‘Take this and leave.’ I realise now that I should have just taken it and left, but at the time I thought he must be incredibly rich and maybe I could get a lot more money out of him, so I went ahead and showed him my ass. He poked at a cyst on my ass cheek with the tip of a ballpoint pen and said, ‘What the hell is this? It’s disgusting!’ I said it was a cyst, and he said, ‘You must be undernourished. That’s what happens when you eat nothing but noodles, like the Filipinas do – they’re all covered with cysts and boils.’ I knew some Filipinas from the last place I’d worked, and it made me so mad that he’d say that, it brought tears to my eyes.

‘You crying?’ He slapped my ass. ‘What are you, a moron?’ he said, and grabbed hold of my ass cheek and started touching my pussy with his other hand. He was so good with his fingers that even as I stood there crying, I started to get wet, and all I could think was, Shit, I really am a moron. Then he let go of me and said, ‘Cover your ass back up, it looks like hell,’ and took twenty thousand yen from his wallet and told me to leave again.

‘Please,’ I said, ‘I’ll do anything you ask.’

I don’t know why I said that. I think it must have been because my grandfather used to bawl me out about giving up on things. He used to tell me it’s important never to quit, that you need to finish things you’ve started, and I’ve always remembered that. But why would I think of my grandfather, who I loved so much, at a time like this? It made me sad, and I started crying again.

As I cried I knelt on the floor and tried to undo the zipper on the guy’s velveteen pants so I could blow him, but he grabbed my hand and told me to stop. LUI always forgives me if I give him a good long blow job, but I guess this guy was a different type. ‘Look, I’m offering to pay you,’ he said, ‘so just go,’ but I said, ‘They’ll yell at me at the office if I go back early.’ He stared at me for a minute, and then he said, ‘Ah, what the hell,’ and asked me if I was hungry. I nodded, and he took me down to a bar on the basement floor.

The bar was all gold and black, and the shelves were lined with bottles of liquor I’d never even seen before, and the waiters were tall, and it made you feel special to be in there. The guy ordered a steak sandwich and put it in front of me and said to the bartender, ‘This one’s got a cyst on her ass,’ and the bartender, who was mixing up a drink in a shaker, got a big laugh out of that. I was kind of shocked, but I figured maybe that sort of talk was normal in fancy bars like this, and I just quietly ate the steak sandwich. It was really delicious. I told the guy this, but he didn’t even look at me but kept talking to the bartender, saying stuff like, ‘Remember that Vietnamese girl? Half Chinese, half French. If she wasn’t strung out on smack I’d consider making her my main squeeze,’ and the bartender kept working the shaker and said a girl named Natsuki, from a bar in Ginza called Madonna or La Donna or something, had shown up and asked a waiter for the guy’s room number, but the waiter wouldn’t tell her, so she sat drinking whiskey and went through half a bottle before she got up and left. When the guy asked if she’d been wearing a kimono, the bartender nodded, and the guy said, ‘Phew, I really dodged a bullet there,’ and took a slice of pickle from my plate and stuck it in his mouth but didn’t chew it, only let it hang out over his lower lip, and said, ‘But that woman’s a genius at giving head. Let her have her way, she’ll suck on it all night long. You’ll wake up in the morning and find her slurping away,’ and this time both he and the bartender laughed.

It wasn’t until I was finishing my steak sandwich that I realised that I’d missed the last train, and then I remembered my grandfather again. My grandfather always said you should never let down your guard, not when you’re taking a dump, not when you’re sick – never – and here I was mooning over the brown juice oozing out from between the slices of bread and forgetting all about the time. To be honest, though, maybe the sandwich wasn’t the only reason. I’ve missed the last train before, and when I asked the customer I was with if I could spend the night, they were always happy to let me. I didn’t think this guy would let me but went ahead and asked him, and he said he was going to have a woman over. I asked if I could sleep in his room anyway, and he thought for a minute and said, ‘Well, that might be interesting. All right, stay and watch.’

by Ryu Murakami, Cabbage Butterflies | Read more:

Image: uncredited

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Hummers

I have hummingbirds at my feeder (an hour after setup). They're so cool. Food recipe: 4 parts water to one part sugar.

by markk

Tim Phillips, coconut palms australia
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Jerry Brown's Political Reboot

One Friday morning this spring, I drove to Washington’s Dulles airport at dawn, to catch the first nonstop flight to San Francisco. When I got off the plane six hours later, the morning sun still slanting through the terminal windows, my cellphone began ringing practically as soon as I turned it on.

“Okay, you’re here!” the man on the other end of the call said, cheerily. I’d been trying to arrange a visit to his office for quite a while, and just the previous evening he’d let me know that if I got there in a hurry, he’d have time to talk the next day, as well as over the weekend. As I walked through the airport, he began reeling off turn-by-turn instructions for reaching his office in Oakland in my rental car. “You’ll take the Bay Bridge to the exit for the 580 East and the 24. But don’t go all the way to the 24! That would send you out to Concord. Take the 980 West until the exit for 27th Street, and then …”

It was like a moment from a Saturday Night Live sketch of  "The Californians”—­which seemed appropriate, since the man I was talking with was the Californian, Jerry Brown. Brown began his first two terms as governor in 1974, at age 36, following one Republican former actor, Ronald Reagan. He returned to the office at age 72, following another, Arnold Schwarzenegger. In between he ran for president three times and the U.S. Senate once, all of course unsuccessfully; served eight years as Oakland’s mayor and four as California’s attorney general; and lived in both Japan (studying Zen meditation) and India (volunteering for Mother Teresa). He celebrated his 75th birthday the weekend I was in Oakland, which means that if he runs for reelection next year and if he wins, both of which are considered likely—his approval rating this year has been the envy of other politicians in the state—he could still be governor at age 80. “This is certainly a new identity for Brown, so flighty in his first ‘Governor Moonbeam’ period as governor,” Bruce Cain, a political scientist and an expert on California politics at Stanford’s Bill Lane Center for the American West, told me. “Now he is the most trusted, stable, and reliable leader around.” I asked Kevin Starr, of the University of Southern California and the author of the acclaimed Americans and the California Dream series of books, how Brown was seen in his return to office. “He is now liked,” Starr said. “Eccentric, but liked.”

Life and health are provisional, and within the past two years, Brown has undergone radiation treatment for early-stage prostate cancer (while maintaining his normal work schedule) and had a cancerous growth removed from his nose. But he moves, talks, reacts, and laughs like someone who is in no mood, and feels no need, to slow down. He is nearly a decade older than Bill Clinton but comes across as younger and bouncier.

“I love what I am doing,” he told me once I got to his Oakland office. “I love it much more than the first time. Back then I got bored because we didn’t have big problems. Now I am very enthusiastic. Everything’s interesting, and it’s complicated. There is a zest!” He likes to pound the desk or table as he talks, and this passage was punctuated: love (bang) … love (bang) … zest! (bang bang bang!). Anne Gust Brown, a former Gap executive in her mid‑50s, who became his wife eight years ago and is widely regarded as his most influential and practical-minded adviser, arched an eyebrow from the other side of the room, where she was half-listening while working at a computer. “Ed-mund!” she said smilingly, but being sure to get his attention. (His official name is Edmund Gerald Brown Jr., after his father, Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, who was governor for eight years before he lost to Ronald Reagan in 1966.) “Don’t get yourself too worked up!” As a note on nomenclature: apart from his wife’s occasional joking use of Edmund and my own antiquated sense that I should address him as Governor, every other person I heard speak about—or with—him called him Jerry.

by James Fallows, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Photo: Chris McPherson

Patricia Robert
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The Gift of Siblings

Given what a mouthy thing I grew up to be, it’s shocking to me that I began talking later than most children do. But I didn’t need words. I had my older brother, Mark.

The way my mother always recounted it, I’d squirm, pout, mewl, bawl or indicate my displeasure in some comparably articulate way, and before she could press me on what I wanted and perhaps coax actual language from me, Mark would rush in to solve the riddle.

“His blanket,” he’d say, and he’d be right.

“Another cookie,” he’d say, and he’d be even righter.

From the tenor of my sob or the twitch of one of my fat little fingers, Mark knew which chair I had designs on, which toy I was ogling. He decoded the signs and procured the goods. Only 17 months older, he was my psychic and my spokesman, my shaman and my Sherpa. With Mark around, I was safe.

This weekend he’s turning 50 — it’s horrifying, trust me — and we’ll all be together, as we were at his 40th and my 40th and seemingly every big milestone: he and I and our younger brother, Harry, and our sister, Adelle, the last one to come along. We marched (or, rather, crawled and toddled) into this crazy world together, and though we had no say in that, it’s by our own volition and determination that we march together still. Among my many blessings, this is the one I’d put at the top.

Two weeks ago, the calendar decreed that we Americans pause to celebrate mothers, as it does every year. Three weeks hence, fathers get their due. But as I await the arrival of my brothers, my sister and their spouses in Manhattan, which is where we’ll sing an off-key “Happy Birthday” to Mark and drink too much, my thoughts turn to siblings, who don’t have a special day but arguably have an even more special meaning to, and influence on, those of us privileged to have them.

“Siblings are the only relatives, and perhaps the only people you’ll ever know, who are with you through the entire arc of your life,” the writer Jeffrey Kluger observed to Salon in 2011, the year his book “The Sibling Effect” was published. “Your parents leave you too soon and your kids and spouse come along late, but your siblings know you when you are in your most inchoate form.”

Of course the “entire arc” part of Kluger’s comments assumes that untimely death doesn’t enter the picture, and that acrimony, geography or mundane laziness doesn’t pull brothers and sisters apart, to a point where they’re no longer primary witnesses to one another’s lives, no longer fellow passengers, just onetime housemates with common heritages.

That happens all too easily, and whenever I ponder why it didn’t happen with Mark, Harry, Adelle and me — each of us so different from the others — I’m convinced that family closeness isn’t a happy accident, a fortuitously smooth blend of personalities.

by Frank Bruni, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Futurity

Edwyn Collins

Hawaii Before Statehood: Photos, 1959 | LIFE.com
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The Suicide Epidemic

When Thomas Joiner was 25 years old, his father—whose name was also Thomas Joiner and who could do anything—disappeared from the family’s home. At the time, Joiner was a graduate student at the University of Texas, studying clinical psychology. His focus was depression, and it was obvious to him that his father was depressed. Six weeks earlier, on a family trip to the Georgia coast, the gregarious 56-year-old—the kind of guy who was forever talking and laughing and bending people his way—was sullen and withdrawn, spending days in bed, not sick or hungover, not really sleeping.

Joiner knew enough not to worry. He knew that the desire for death—the easy way out, the only relief—was a symptom of depression, and although at least 2 percent of those diagnosed make suicide their final chart line, his father didn’t match the suicidal types he had learned about in school. He wasn’t weak or impulsive. He wasn’t a brittle person with bad genes and big problems. Suicide was understood to be for losers, basically, the exact opposite of men like Thomas Joiner Sr.—a successful businessman, a former Marine, tough even by Southern standards.

But Dad had left an unmade bed in a spare room, and an empty spot where his van usually went. By nightfall he hadn’t been heard from, and the following morning Joiner’s mother called him at school. The police had found the van. It was parked in an office lot about a mile from the house, the engine cold. Inside, in the back, the police found Joiner’s father dead, covered in blood. He had been stabbed through the heart.

The investigators found slash marks on his father’s wrists and a note on a yellow sticky pad by the driver’s seat. “Is this the answer?” it read, in his father’s shaky scrawl. They ruled it a suicide, death by “puncture wound,” an impossibly grisly way to go, which made it all the more difficult for Joiner to understand. This didn’t seem like the easy way out.

Back home for the funeral, Joiner’s pain and confusion were compounded by ancient taboos. For centuries suicide was considered an act against God, a violation of law, and a stain on the community. He overheard one relative advise another to call it a heart attack. His girlfriend fretted about his tainted DNA. Even some of his peers and professors—highly trained, doctoral-level clinicians—failed to offer a simple “my condolences.” It was as though the Joiner family had failed dear old Dad, killed him somehow, just as surely as if they had stabbed him themselves. To Joiner, however, the only real failing was from his field, which clearly had a shaky understanding of suicide.

Survivors of a suicide are haunted by the same whys and hows, the what-ifs that can never be answered. Joiner was no different. He wanted to know why people die at their own hands: What makes them desire death in the first place? When exactly do they decide to end their lives? How do they build up the nerve to do it? But unlike most other survivors of suicide, for the last two decades he has been developing answers.

Joiner is 47 now, and a chaired professor at Florida State University, in Tallahassee. Physically, he is an imposing figure, 6-foot-3 with a lantern jaw and a head shaved clean with a razor. He wears an off-and-on beard, which grows in as heavy as iron filings. The look fits his work, which is dedicated to interrogating suicide as hard as anyone ever has, to finally understand it as a matter of public good and personal duty. He hopes to honor his father, by combating what killed him and by making his death a stepping stone to better treatment. “Because,” as he says, “no one should have to die alone in a mess in a hotel bathroom, in the back of a van, or on a park bench, thinking incorrectly that the world will be better off.”

He is the author of the first comprehensive theory of suicide, an explanation, as he told me, “for all suicides at all times in all cultures across all conditions.” He also has much more than a theory: he has a moment. This spring, suicide news paraded down America’s front pages and social-media feeds, led by a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which called self-harm “an increasing public health concern.” Although the CDC revealed grabby figures—like the fact that there are more deaths by suicide than by road accident—the effort prompted only a tired spasm of talk about aging baby boomers and life in a recession. The CDC itself, in an editorial note, suggested that the party would rock on once the economy rebounded and our Dennis Hopper–cohort rode its hog into the sunset.

But suicide is not an economic problem or a generational tic. It’s not a secondary concern, a sideline that will solve itself with new jobs, less access to guns, or a more tolerant society, although all would be welcome. It’s a problem with a broad base and terrible momentum, a result of seismic changes in the way we live and a corresponding shift in the way we die—not only in America but around the world.

We know, thanks to a growing body of research on suicide and the conditions that accompany it, that more and more of us are living through a time of seamless black: a period of mounting clinical depression, blossoming thoughts of oblivion and an abiding wish to get there by the nonscenic route. Every year since 1999, more Americans have killed themselves than the year before, making suicide the nation’s greatest untamed cause of death. In much of the world, it’s among the only major threats to get significantly worse in this century than in the last.

The result is an accelerating paradox. Over the last five decades, millions of lives have been remade for the better. Yet within this brighter tomorrow, we suffer unprecedented despair. In a time defined by ever more social progress and astounding innovations, we have never been more burdened by sadness or more consumed by self-harm. And this may be only the beginning. If Joiner and others are right—and a landmark collection of studies suggests they are—we’ve reached the end of one order of human history and are at the beginning of a new order entirely, one beset by a whole lot of self-inflicted bloodshed, and a whole lot more to come.

by Tony Dokoupil, TDB/Newsweek |  Read more:

Images: Vincent van Gogh, Wikipedia; Virginia Woolf, Bettman/Corbis

Zachary Tate Porter, Tomb for Two Brothers (2012)
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20 Great Essays by David Foster Wallace

[ed. The Electric Typewriter has 20 Great Essays by David Foster Wallace. All for free. Here's an excerpt from his masterpiece Infinite Jest, describing why video-phones never really took off.]

'VIDEOPHONY' SUDDENLY COLLAPSED LIKE A KICKED TENT, SO THAT, BY THE YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT, FEWER THAN 10% OF ALL PRIVATE TELEPHONE COMMUNICATIONS UTILIZED ANY VIDEO-IMAGE-FIBER DATA-TRANSFERS OR COINCIDENT PRODUCTS AND SERVICES, THE AVERAGE U.S. PHONE-USER DECIDING THAT S/HE ACTUALLY PREFERRED THE RETROGRADE OLD LOW-TECH BELL-ERA VOICE-ONLY TELEPHONIC INTERFACE AFTER ALL, A PREFERENTIAL ABOUT-FACE THAT COST A GOOD MANY PRECIPITANT VIDEO-TELEPHONY-RELATED ENTREPRENEURS THEIR SHIRTS, PLUS DESTABILIZING TWO HIGHLY RESPECTED MUTUAL FUNDS THAT HAD GROUND-FLOORED HEAVILY IN VIDEO-PHONE TECHNOLOGY, AND VERY NEARLY WIPING OUT THE MARYLAND STATE EMPLOYEES' RETIREMENT SYSTEM'S FREDDIE-MAC FUND, A FUND WHOSE ADMINISTRATOR'S MISTRESS'S BROTHER HAD BEEN AN ALMOST MANICALLY PRECIPITANT VIDEO-PHONE-TECHNOLOGY ENTREPRENEUR . . . AND BUT SO WHY THE ABRUPT CONSUMER RETREAT BACK TO GOOD OLD VOICE-ONLY TELEPHONING?

The answer, in a kind of trivalent nutshell, is: (1) emotional stress, (2) physi­cal vanity, (3) a certain queer kind of self-obliterating logic in the micro­economics of consumer high-tech.

It turned out that there was something terribly stressful about visual telephone interfaces that hadn't been stressful at all about voice-only inter­faces. Videophone consumers seemed suddenly to realize that they'd been subject to an insidious but wholly marvelous delusion about conventional voice-only telephony. They'd never noticed it before, the delusion — it's like it was so emotionally complex that it could be countenanced only in the context of its loss. Good old traditional audio-only phone conversations allowed you to presume that the person on the other end was paying com­plete attention to you while also permitting you not to have to pay anything even close to complete attention to her. A traditional aural-only conversation — utilizing a hand-held phone whose earpiece contained only 6 little pinholes but whose mouthpiece (rather significantly, it later seemed) contained (62) or 36 little pinholes — let you enter a kind of highway-hypnotic semi-attentive fugue: while conversing, you could look around the room, doodle, fine-groom, peel tiny bits of dead skin away from your cuticles, compose phone-pad haiku, stir things on the stove; you could even carry on a whole separate additional sign-language-and-exaggerated-facial-expression type of conversation with people right there in the room with you, all while seeming to be right there attending closely to the voice on the phone. And yet — and this was the retrospectively marvelous part — even as you were dividing your attention between the phone call and all sorts of other idle little fuguelike activities, you were somehow never haunted by the suspicion that the person on the other end's attention might be similarly divided. During a traditional call, e.g., as you let's say performed a close tactile blemish-scan of your chin, you were in no way oppressed by the thought that your phonemate was perhaps also devoting a good percentage of her attention to a close tactile blemish-scan. It was an illusion and the illusion was aural and aurally supported: the phone-line's other end's voice was dense, tightly compressed, and vectored right into your ear, enabling you to imagine that the voice's owner's attention was similarly compressed and focused . . . even though your own attention was not, was the thing. This bilateral illusion of unilateral attention was almost infantilely gratify­ing from an emotional standpoint: you got to believe you were receiving somebody's complete attention without having to return it. Regarded with the objectivity of hindsight, the illusion appears arational, almost literally fantastic: it would be like being able both to lie and to trust other people at the same time.

Video telephony rendered the fantasy insupportable. Callers now found they had to compose the same sort of earnest, slightly overintense listener's expression they had to compose for in-person exchanges. Those callers who out of unconscious habit succumbed to fuguelike doodling or pants-crease-adjustment now came off looking rude, absentminded, or childishly self-absorbed. Callers who even more unconsciously blemish-scanned or nostril-explored looked up to find horrified expressions on the video-faces at the other end. All of which resulted in videophonic stress.

Even worse, of course, was the traumatic expulsion-from-Eden feeling of looking up from tracing your thumb's outline on the Reminder Pad or ad­justing the old Unit's angle of repose in your shorts and actually seeing your videophonic interfacee idly strip a shoelace of its gumlet as she talked to you, and suddenly realizing your whole infantile fantasy of commanding your partner's attention while you yourself got to fugue-doodle and make little genital-adjustments was deluded and insupportable and that you were actually commanding not one bit more attention than you were paying, here. The whole attention business was monstrously stressful, video callers found.

(2) And the videophonic stress was even worse if you were at all vain. I.e. if you worried at all about how you looked. As in to other people. Which all kidding aside who doesn't. Good old aural telephone calls could be fielded without makeup, toupee, surgical prostheses, etc. Even without clothes, if that sort of thing rattled your saber. But for the image-conscious, there was of course no such answer-as-you-are informality about visual-video tele­phone calls, which consumers began to see were less like having the good old phone ring than having the doorbell ring and having to throw on clothes and attach prostheses and do hair-checks in the foyer mirror before answer­ing the door.

But the real coffin-nail for videophony involved the way callers' faces looked on their TP screen, during calls. Not their callers' faces, but their own, when they saw them on video. It was a three-button affair:, after all, to use the TP's cartridge-card's Video-Record option to record both pulses in a two-way visual call and play the call back and see how your face had actu­ally looked to the other person during the call. This sort of appearance-check was no more resistible than a mirror. But the experience proved al­most universally horrifying. People were horrified at how their own faces appeared on a TP screen. It wasn't just 'Anchorman's Bloat,' that well-known impression of extra weight that video inflicts on the face. It was worse. Even with high-end TPs' high-def viewer-screens, consumers per­ceived something essentially blurred and moist-looking about their phone-faces, a shiny pallid indefiniteness that struck them as not just unflattering but somehow evasive, furtive, untrustworthy, unlikable. In an early and ominous InterLace/G.T.E. focus-group survey that was all but ignored in a storm of entrepreneurial sci-fi-tech enthusiasm, almost 60% of respondents who received visual access to their own faces during videophonic calls spe­cifically used the terms untrustworthy, unlikable, or hard to like in describ­ing their own visage's appearance, with a phenomenally ominous 71 % of senior-citizen respondents specifically comparing their video-faces to that of Richard Nixon during the Nixon-Kennedy debates of B.S. 1960.

The proposed solution to what the telecommunications industry's psy­chological consultants termed Video-Physiognomic Dysphoria (or VPD) was, of course, the advent of High-Definition Masking; and in fact it was those entrepreneurs who gravitated toward the production of high-definition videophonic imaging and then outright masks who got in and out of the short-lived videophonic era with their shirts plus solid addi­tional nets.

Mask-wise, the initial option of High-Definition Photographic Imaging — i.e. taking the most flattering elements of a variety of flattering multi-angle photos of a given phone-consumer and — thanks to existing image-configuration equipment already pioneered by the cosmetics and law-enforcement industries — combining them into a wildly attractive high-def broadcastable composite of a face wearing an earnest, slightly overintense expression of complete attention — was quickly supplanted by the more inexpensive and byte-economical option of (using the exact same cosmetic-and-FBI software) actually casting the enhanced facial image in a form-fitting polybutylene-resin mask, and consumers soon found that the high up-front cost of a permanent wearable mask was more than worth it, con­sidering the stress- and VFD-reduction benefits, and the convenient Velcro straps for the back of the mask and caller's head cost peanuts; and for a couple fiscal quarters phone/cable companies were able to rally VPD-afflicted consumers' confidence by working out a horizontally integrated deal where free composite-and-masking services came with a videophone hookup. The high-def masks, when not in use, simply hung on a small hook on the side of a TP's phone-console, admittedly looking maybe a bit surreal and discomfiting when detached and hanging there empty and wrinkled, and sometimes there were potentially awkward mistaken-identity snafus in­volving multi-user family or company phones and the hurried selection and attachment of the wrong mask taken from some long row of empty hanging masks — but all in all the masks seemed initially like a viable industry re­sponse to the vanity,-stress,-and-Nixonian-facial-image problem.

by David Foster Wallace, Excerpt from Infinite Jest, The Electric Typewriter |  Read more:

Image: uncredited