Winter 2011: Blueprint (Selections)

Full Issue Available at theharvardadvocate.com

Selections  from  the

ART Molly Dektar, Julian Gewirtz, Dana Kase, Rebecca Levitan, Anna Raginskaya, Scott Roben, Madeleine Schwartz, Zoe Weinberg.

BUSINESS Ankur Agraval, Ben Berman, Sanders Bernstein*, Sophie Brooks, Skyler Hicks, Benat Idoyaga, Andrew Karn, Temi Lawoyin, Iya Megre, Jaron Mercer, Sasha Mironov, Anna Raginskaya, David Tao, Natalie Wong, Emily Xie.

The Harvard Advocate www.theharvardadvocate.com

Editorial Board President Publisher Art Editor Business Manager Design Editors

DANA KASE CHARLETON LAMB MADELEINE SCHWARTZ BENJAMIN BERMAN WENDY CHANG LAUREN PACKARD Features Editor JESSICA SEQUEIRA Fiction Editor RYAN MEEHAN Poetry Editor ADAM PALAY Technology Editor JEREMY FENG Pegasi MATT AUCOIN MARK CHIUSANO SOPHIE DUVERNOY Disonysi EMILY CHERTOFF SOFIA GROOPMAN Circulation & DAVID TAO Publicity Managers ANNA RAGINSKAYA Alumni Relations Manager IYA MEGRE Community Outreach Director ANDREW KLEIN Librarian TED GIOIA

Board of Trustees Chairman Chairman Emeritus Vice-Chairman President Vice-President and Treasurer Secretary

JAMES ATLAS LOUIS BEGLEY DOUGLAS MCINTYRE SUSAN MORRISON AUSTIN WILKIE CHARLIE ATKINSON PETER BROOKS JOHN DESTEFANO LESLIE DUNTON-DOWNER A. WHITNEY ELLSWORTH JONATHON GALASSI LEV GROSSMAN ANGELA MARIANI DANIEL MAX CELIA MCGEE THOMAS A. STEWART

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DESIGN Charlotte Alter, Lucy Andersen, Isidore Bethel, Wendy Chang, Hanna Choi, Jessica Henderson, Dana Kase, Charleton Lamb, Joseph Morcos, Lauren Packard, Sally Scopa, Michael Segel.

FEATURES Sanders Bernstein*, Eric Brewster, Spencer Burke, Emily Chertoff, Mark Chiusano, Rebecca Cooper*, Eva DeLappe, Sophie Duvernoy, Molly Fitzpatrick, Madeleine Schwartz, Jessica Sequeira, Georgia Stasinopoulos, My-Ngoc To. FICTION Sanders Bernstein*, Emily Chertoff, Molly Dektar, Eva DeLappe, Ricky Fegelman, Erik Fredericksen, Carolyn Gaebler, Sofia Groopman, Seph Kramer, Michal Labik, Charleton Lamb, Max Larkin, Patrick Lauppe, Charlotte Lieberman, Georgia Stasinopoulos, David Wallace, Scott Zuccarino.

POETRY Matthew Aucoin, Hana Bajramovic, Ricky Fegelman, Erik Fredericksen, Ted Gioia, Julian Gewirtz, Andrew Klein, Jennifer Nicole Kurdyla, Stephanie Newman, Adam Palay, David Wallace, Joshua Wilson, Justin Wymer.

TECHNOLOGY Ben Berman, Dan Cole, Jeremy Feng, Lakshmi Parthasarathy, Anna Roth, Sam ten Cate, Michael Segel, Qichen Zhang. *The Harvard Advocate congratulates its graduating seniors.

The Harvard Advocate will anonymously consider all submissions of art, features, fiction, and poetry. Submissions may be emailed to art@theharvardadvocate.com, features@theharvardadvocate.com, fiction@theharvardadvocate.com, or poetry@ theharvardadvocate.com. Submissions may also be mailed to 21 South St., Cambridge MA 02138. All submissions should be original work that has not been previously published. If you wish to have your submission returned to you, please include a self-addressed stamped envelope. Questions about submissions may be directed to the individual emails above or to contact@theharvardadvocate.com.

Founded in 1866, The Harvard Advocate is the nation’s oldest continually published college literary magazine. It publishes quarterly from 21 South St, Cambridge MA 02138. Published pieces and advertisements represent the opinions of the authors and advertisers, not The Harvard Advocate. Domestic subscription rates are $35 for one year (4 issues), $60 for two years (8 issues), $90 for three years (12 issues). For institutions and international addresses, the rates are $45 for one year (4 issues), $75 for two years (8 issues), $110 for three years (12 issues). Payable by cash or check made out to The Harvard Advocate and mailed to the above address, Attn: Circulation Manager. Back issues are available for purchase at www.theharvardadvocate.com. No part of this magazine may be reprinted without the permission of The Harvard Advocate. Copyright 2010 by the Editors and Trustees of The Harvard Advocate.

instructions for use

There are a great many ways of understanding the Blueprint and each experienced reader probably has his own selection which he prefers to all others.

It is a sound rule to stick to a method which you have found satisfactory in practice, and a reading which has never failed you is probably the best for your purpose.

To many, however, a comprehensive grasp of the Blueprint is a difficult thing to learn and a very easy one to forget, while to others the following descriptions and illustrations may suggest improvements or simplifications in present methods.1

1

Text adapted from Fisherman’s Knots & Wrinkles, W. A. Hunter, 1927.

Winter 2010

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CONTENTS

art 9

Protect Protect deep purple Jenny Holzer

20

Caorle 2 Julia Rooney

22

Dressing Poultry Jeff Wall

23

Search of premises Jeff Wall

FEATURES Notes from 21 South Street:

6 Starchitects: Designing for Outer Space Madeleine Schwartz

17 Haus of Gaga Eva Delappe

38 Dressing Up

Emily Chertoff

52 Is Utopianism Dead?

Simon Critchley

36

Sketch for “A Two Way Mirror Labyrinth” Dan Graham

61 A Man Dispatched Jessica Sequeira

44 Sparse Matrices

71 After The Law

56 Arthur 3’ x 10’

77 A Moment of Mishearing

Yifan Hu and Timothy Davis Dana Kase

Monty in “A Dead Skinned Cat in a

59 Bag” Comix

Kayla Escobedo

67 Untitled

Holger Niehaus

70 Sargassum bacciferum Anna Atkins

81 Take Care of Yourself Sophie Calle

Illustrations: p.3 Isidore Bethel; p.15, p. 68 Sally Scopa; p.35, 50 Lucy Andersen

Sophie Duvernoy Amit Chaudhuri Envoy:

85 To Build a Deck Mark Chiusano

POETRY

FICTION

[If my skull were a circle of light]

10 Gypsies

[Open ocean falls ]

24 The Starlight on Idaho

14 David Wallace 34 Matt Aucoin

Mark Chiusano Denis Johnson

Poem

37 Mathew Zapruder (Or Manhattan)

46 Kiwao Nomura

Translated by Kyoko Yoshida and Forrest Gander

48

The Sea Beyond This World Kiwao Nomura Translated by Kyoko Yoshida and Forrest Gander

50 Ambitions

Laura Kasischke Of The Dead White Men

51 Laura Kasischke Inscription

57 Dan Chiasson The Poem of the Mind

58 John Koethe

Rain and Mountains

69 Henri Cole

x

11

x

13

x

2

x

Your Horoscope

74 Laura Kasischke Plans

75 Laura Kasischke 84 Xixtaberri

Nasir Husain

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Notes from 21 South STREET

Starchitects: Designing for Outer Space Madeleine Schwartz

This October, NASA unveiled a proposal to carry people to Mars and leave them there. The project, called the Hundred-Year Starship, would fly four astronauts to the planet, resupply them with food and basic needs, and then let them adapt without the chance to go home. A NASA representative explained that the one-way trip would be more economical than going back and forth to Earth. Plus, by staying on the planet completely alone, the astronauts could thoroughly get to know its make-up. Mars is a rational first choice. It has water, it is near the sun, and it’s our closest neighbor—just a three-month trip away. If we’re going to settle the universe, it’s a good place to start.

The move constitutes one of the agency’s most pointed attempts at inhabiting new planets, and its boldest. Participants in the “Hundred Year Starship” would be denied most of the psychological amenities that mark usual NASA trips—return dates, accolades, the hope of seeing loved ones again. But Pete Worden, the Director of NASA’s Ames Center, defended the plan as a step forward for American space exploration. “The human space program is now really aimed at settling other worlds. Twenty years ago you had to whisper that in dark bars.” Now, he suggested, the agency pursues the idea headlong.

It isn’t far off to think of such a trip as a new form of colonial expedition.

The proposal’s supporters speak of it with a sort of conquistador rashness, as if preparing to revive the Age of Exploration. In a paper about one way trips to Mars in the Journal of Cosmology, Dirk Schulze-Makuch and Paul Davies—from the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Washington State University and Arizona State University, respectively— describe the project thusly: “Explorers such as Columbus, Frobisher, Scott and Amundsen, while not embarking on their voyages with the intention of staying at their destination, nevertheless took huge personal risks to explore new lands, in the knowledge that there was a significant likelihood that they would perish in the attempt.” Only a bold project, they explain, could push space exploration forward in a time of scientific close-mindedness. Never mind the risks extreme weather poses on a planet where the temperature is often 100° Celsius below zero, or the possibility of radiation sickness, which an astronaut might acquire from the atmosphere without proper shielding: “The main impediment is the narrow vision and the culture of political caution that now pervades the space programs of most nations.”

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The agency has begun to work on the project. According to the Daily Mail, Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, is one of its main sponsors.

Gumption and a spirit of adventure are all well and good, but the fact is, if you send a human into space, you’ll have to account for his wellbeing. Enter the space architect. Space architects oversee the design of the cramped living quarters of the International Space Station or the loud cabins of a space rover; they make sure that whatever is carrying humans through the dark void is equipped to do so. It is their job to make the complex systems of wings and motors built by engineers function as a whole. Dr. Larry Bell, a professor at the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture at the University of Houston, the country’s only space architecture degree program, explained it this way to me: “We are kind of like the general practitioners. We are not just looking at the toes or at boob jobs. We’re trying to understand what things are and how they connect together.”

Such supervision is necessary to ensure that all the engineering science is tailored toward human safety. “Being a licensed architect means that you are qualified to protect the health and safety of the public in the built environment,” says Marc Cohen, an architect who has worked for NASA. “Space is a much more unforgiving environment than Earth. If you’re not qualified to protect the health and safety of the public on Earth, how can you do it out there?” Or, as Bell puts it: If you’re going to explore extreme environments, you’ve got to take care of “the human factor.”

Most architects work with models and blueprints, but how do you design a structure when terrestrial experience is no guide? Space architects have to figure out how designs will function when moving in different gravity, or when attacked by incredibly fine dust, or when faced with radiation. A good deal of time is spent looking for the appropriate analogue on Earth. Guy Trotti, who works at MIT and helped found the Sasakawa Institute, rides on the “vomit comet”—a plane whose movements simulate zero gravity—and tries to use his designs under the shaky conditions. If he can’t open a bottle or turn a handle, he builds it again. “I also spend a lot of time underwater with mock-ups,” he says. Some lunar rovers he designed got tested in the desert. He also once participated in an effort to set up a NASA base in Antarctica—the cold weather and uneven surfaces are a

good approximation of other planetary surfaces. Today, much of his work is done in labs at MIT, where harnesses and simulators can make you feel like you’re walking on the moon.

External environment isn’t the only challenge. Much of the trouble in building something like the International Space Station lies in making it fit for human life, especially in the case of long-term projects. When Constance Adams, a space architect who once worked for NASA and is now the president of a technical consulting firm, designed a habitation for Mars, she created a closed-loop system that would both provide nutrients and process human waste for the 425 day-long mission. The key involved miniaturized, adult versions of edible plants—culled from the George Washington Carver Institute—that would fit in the small space. Another design, “TransHab,” would expand into an inflatable shell as it was released from a space shuttle. In the crew galleys, there would be room for a small gym and a bit of socializing space—enough, according to an article about the project, to foster the necessary “interpersonal relationships” and keep the crew healthy during a confinement of over a year. The International Space Station, where six to eight astronauts live at all times, has crew quarters fitted with binding straps so that occupants can comfortably nap, check email, or read without floating away.

three hundred years ago.” This may be an overly optimistic view. Adams says that she has worked on three separate programs to replace the space shuttle with a newer spacecraft, and none of the resulting designs have been built. With every announcement like the one about the HundredYear Starship, there are new budget cuts, indefinite holds due to lack of funding, attempts at downsizing. “We’re going to retire the space shuttle with nothing to replace it,” Adams says. “We are hoping that Congress will put some serious funding into this program sooner rather than later, so that the U.S. gap in space access and the loss of essential intellectual capital may be kept to a minimum.”

While the development of the field is well underway, the question of who began the practice is still in dispute. One architect told me that the field grew out of industrial design. Raymond Loewy, best known for his Studebaker designs and his new take on industrial sleek, helped NASA build the first American space station, Skylab, in the mid-70s. He drew the trays and tables, chose the color palette and fought for the inclusion of a window allowing astronauts to look out at the space they were flying through. NASA conceded a 24-inch hole. But who was the first practicing “space architect”?

Marc Cohen says it was Maynard Dalton, another SkyLab contributor.

When I asked Trotti, he responded, “You’re looking at it.”

As the potential for human space exploration and colonization has grown, so has the field of space architecture. In 2002, to celebrate the advance of the discipline, a group of space architects led by Adams wrote their own “Millennium Charter Manifesto” outlining the methods and goals of the space architect’s job for the public. The manifesto recorded their motivation—“we are responding to the deep human drive to explore and inhabit new places”—and important ideas that each space architect should keep in mind, such as “Human Condition” and “Humility.” In so doing, these architects were placing themselves in a long line of visionary endeavors; architectural movements, like Futurism, have often marked their own importance with a manifesto.

This expansion is not just theoretical though. The Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture, which started in 1987, now trains a dozen polymaths each year to work for space agencies and private design companies. Space architecture has moved into the public eye as well. A few weeks ago, I attended the Moon Ball, a forum on whether humans would ever be living in space. Unfortunately, the event was also a big party, closed to those under twenty-one. I spent much of the panel on “How we will live on the moon” and the difficulties of low-gravity design arguing with a very real and very weighty bouncer. Nearby, a man dressed in an old astronaut costume was trying to drink water, but couldn’t fit the liter bottle over his round metal collar.

The announcement of large-scale programs and private investments in the space industry has helped kindle the hope that space exploration will expand in the next few decades, and space architecture with it. Many architects describe the field as poised on the edge of an explosive growth.

The moment space is privatized, Guy Trotti tells me, space exploration “will be the largest business on earth. Like maritime exploration was

On a recent Wednesday night, the astronauts in the International Space Station were trying to watch a football game. I was listening in via NASA TV, a channel set up by the agency to connect the station with humans down below. The team that the astronauts really wanted to watch (Missouri, I think) wasn’t coming through the communications antenna, so they watched Texas Christian University instead. As they settled down to enjoy the game, their talk was interrupted by a loud voice: “There’s no wagering in sports.” After that, the astronauts seemed to have stopped conversing, and all I could hear was a high-pitched sighing sound as the station’s camera tracked its flight over an icy pole.

“It is unknown on year-long interplanetary missions, where there is no Earth to look at and no planet to walk on, what activities can mitigate the negative effects of boredom, confinement, and limited social interaction,” say the authors of Out of this World: The New Field of Space Architecture, a book on the discipline. Even when the engineering science is solid and the budgetary concerns are resolved, there’s one problem that remains to be ironed out: Human beings are not meant to live in space.

Many of the space architects I’ve talked to over the past few weeks have made references to the “craziness” of their work. For some, it is the continuation of a childhood fantasy. “I’ve always wanted to build spacecrafts, since I was very young, and now I get to do it for a living,” says Marc Cohen. “In the end isn’t space tourism the dream of the child inside each one of us?” asks Out of this World. The sentiment even shows up in some of the designs for future space tourism infrastructure. A blueprint for a space hotel based on the TransHab has candy-colored walls and furniture that could have come from a Fisher Price catalogue. The pieces of the hotel are made out of the most advanced material NASA knows to create, but, in the mock-up, they look like they are made of plastic.

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In conversation, there’s the inevitable comparison of the work to science fiction. Cohen likes Ursula LeGuin and Ray Bradbury despite being “somewhat disillusioned” by the unrealistic portrayals of the civil servants who work in space agencies. “A thorough encyclopedic understanding of science fiction help one to judge ideas,” Constance Adams tells me about her designs. “An idea that has some game has been dealt with in science fiction.”

One of the most recent science fiction movies about lunar living is called “Moon,” and it was directed by Duncan Jones, David Bowie’s son.

The premise is that in the near future, humans harvest energy from the moon’s surface; one man supervises the process for a three-year shift. The main character has a strict regimen to stay sane—morning exercise, talks with his wife and child, a countdown calendar. He cannot wait to get home, but he has trained himself not to fret. Just as you become engrossed in the psychology of the man you’ve gotten to know—he’s even friends with a robot!—it turns out that he’s actually a clone. The movie turns into more of a thriller after that, and the strict regimen is left behind. By that point, the film has already answered its own question. What real human would want to cut himself off from Earth?

When the Hundred-Year Starship was announced, I asked Adams if she thought anyone would sign up were the project actually put in place. The “Starship” is unlikely to happen, she said—while the engineering behind it is sound, NASA would never commit to such a controversial plan.

“But if we announced tomorrow that we were looking for volunteers for a one-way trip to Mars, eight hours later, we would have tens of thousands of exceedingly qualified names,” she added.

“The hard part’s getting them home. The people who would adapt to that kind of situation might not handle going home. Imagine: you’ve left whatever you care about on Earth, and you have few ties there anyway.

You’ve done this big adventure. You’ll never see Mars again.

“If you’ve got a crew of six it only takes one wild card to cause a problem. Who knows what someone might pull.”

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Protect Protect deep purple, 2007 Jenny Holzer Oil on linen 79 x 102.25” (200.7 x 259.7 cm.)

Text: U.S. government document © 2007 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Winter 2010

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Gypsies

Mark Chiusano

People used to call my Pops a geep when he got old, which was, in a way, accurate. He used to wear the black socks all around the house. I don’t know where the term comes from: something with guinea, maybe the G-P of grandpa. I used to tell him when he just had the ripped white tee on, Pops, get the hell back in the house before someone respectable sees you. Anyway, it’s something I’ve been thinking about now that I’m around that age. My wife Lola tells me karma’s bitchy. My back isn’t too good. Sometimes I dribble in my pants after I pee. But I’ll tell you one thing, I’m always wearing white socks when people are watching.

My Pops was Italian, but Ma was a Jew, so that makes me a little different background than him. I’ve got a finely sculpted figure, like I used to, just someone recently put a little too much of the extra marble on my belly. I’ve still got the moustache, and the goatee, black, that Pops used to make me shave off, back when he told me I had a little of the Hasid in me, that I looked like a little dwarf when my hair balded at sixteen.

Pops was a showman, circus fella, when he got back to New York from the army. I’ve still got the first carousel he used to truck around to all the events. Back then there was big money in it, and he was a respectable man. The borough presidents used to call him up every spring to figure out when he’d bring the show to their big parks for the summer. That’s how I grew up: in a big house on Gerritsen Avenue. We were like the first settlers there, practically, like pioneering days, and we got a house that was as big as half a block. In the backyard was where we’d keep the carousels, the inflatable mazes, the bouncey-bounce, and the little baby roller coaster that took five hours to put together.

It wasn’t all great. People used to call us gypsies behind our backs and ask where the donkeys were. Of course in Kennedy’s America the smalltime carnivals didn’t have animals anymore. If we were a gypsy show we were gasoline-fueled and blow-up, going around in the back of a Chevy: rides, food, music that was strange to the American ear. But probably gypsy is what we would’ve been if we’d still been in one of my parents’ old countries. Then again, if we were in Poland, we’d probably be dead: cause I’ve got a long nose, and nobody likes gypsies even if that’s not really what we are.

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Pops liked to tell us stories about his tour. He’d never been to Italy before it, though grandpops was born there. The army gave him a way to see the world, and he appreciated them for that. His war experience had been as good as you could possibly get, I’d bet: he was a truck mechanic in the sunflower fields outside San Gimignano. Pops used to tell us that everywhere, the air smelled like raisins. And when one of the military vans went by, the new ones with diesel engines, the sunflowers turned their faces to follow, and no one could tell if it was the wind from them passing or some weird magnetic force.

Pops had a favorite story, his defining experience, which went something like this: one day, he had leave, just for the second half of the afternoon. He and a buddy took bicycles that they’d stolen from the houses of civilians, and biked up the path towards town. It was a bustling and busy place then, because it was walled, and everybody who was anybody, civilians, in that area of Italy, was inside. They said that the place had withstood every battle since the Venetians dug a hole underneath during the Papal Wars.

Anyway, they weren’t supposed to be there, it was military policy to stay out of town, too many locals were getting screwed. So they go through the gates with local clothes on, no uniforms, and up this crooked alley. They make it to Via Berignano which goes through the whole village and they take that, left, looking for the restaurant that’s supposed to serve wine and hashish even if they know you’re a soldier.

But they keep walking and don’t see the place until they get all the way to the city walls. They were crumbling like cookies between a pair of legs, Pops used to say.

There was a grove of peach trees and Pops stopped, peered behind them. There was a big wagon with a cow licking the green moss off the walls. The wagon was all wood and covered and painted in big garish colors. Show of the Universe, it said in purple script. There was smoke coming from a little canvas chimney towards the back—and the last thing Pops saw before the carabinieri came out of nowhere and hustled him and his buddy away with their arms on their asses was the woman lying on her back. She was underneath the wagon, next to the ruts that

the wheels made, and she was completely naked, with her hands behind her head and humming something mountainous into the air that was stinking of peaches.

I’m not an anything person. I’m not that cheap and I don’t spend too much, sometimes I like to be outside while at the same time I’d rather just sit on the couch. I used to like country but I listen to rock and roll too.

There’s things that I like half of when I should like the whole: women, babies, Oreo cookies. This is how I feel about my marriage sometimes.

I married a black woman, ok? Sure, Pops didn’t love it. But he didn’t love a lot of things, and in a way he was a filthy racist, which is a whole thing, not half. Her name’s Lola, and I met her at a job in Prospect Park. Once she told me that where she came from, wasn’t no one who didn’t like a little carnival.

Lola I like. We’ve got the house now, on Gerritsen. It’s the only big one left, everything else is rented. We’re this big decrepit place now with leaves stuck in the drainage and everything around us, one floor, is a condominium. I hear their babies squalling through the little walls, and their mothers getting fucked in the bedrooms. Lola likes to leave the music on and pretend the whole thing’s an opera.

I guess we had a kid late. There had been a while when we didn’t think it would work, though it wasn’t for not trying. Really it was like twenty years, which could have been time enough for a whole nother four kids. But we ended up with just the one, Tony. I love him to death.

Right now he’s at school, second grade, which really is a great age but I can’t help wishing that he were a year out of high school, because then he could’ve taken the family business from me and I wouldn’t have to sell the show. I’m getting tired of doing it, I’m a little too old, and it’s just not the same: carnival rides aren’t too popular anymore. We’ll do a summer-opening fair or something, but that’s about it for the major bookers. There’s always a couple of calls for July 4th. But the rest of the summer is pretty empty and you can forget about the winter, I just sit around and oil the machinery while the TV blares from the bedroom and Lola yells out the window, let the goddamn things rust.

It’s something I can’t really do. I remember Ma was really helpful with Pops when we were in season, and even outside it. She used to run the concession stands, sometimes hiring local kids to walk around with white hats and boxes of peanuts. Once, I remember, she had to fill in for Madame Starbright, the fortunetelling lady—and this was the most beautiful moment, her wrapped in blue robes with the sprinkles falling from the ceiling of the wood shack we did the readings in—and I think even Pops was surprised, that maybe Ma was something else entirely that he never gave her credit for.

I’m not saying Pops was perfect. That’s clear: he was a jerk sometimes and especially to Ma. You got the feeling that he thought he could’ve done better in life, coming back from Italy with the G.I. Bill, but somehow things didn’t work out, just a roll of the dice. Somehow he became Brooklyn’s Preeminent Showman. But because he did, he lorded it over Ma and me like he was coming from some other sort of place where things looked much better.

When he died a couple months ago I thought he was going to say something like, Sonny, make sure the show goes on, but instead he said, “Come here.” I dropped my ear real close. He said hoarsely, “I think, Sonny, that I left some broccoli in the refrigerator.” Ma had been gone for a while then and I guess he was looking out for my vitamin health.

But that was the first time that I thought maybe I could actually sell the thing, get out of the business, retire. I saw a couple of ads the other day in the Skyline for delivery drivers, trucking stuff around to where people bring it into places on those metal pushcarts. I thought I’d look really good in one of those company polos that those guys always wear and maybe, because of my advanced age, they’d let me work part-time and have the rest off to ice my bones. That’d be nice, especially this being the end. Once I saw a stoner on the street with a cap and a sign on cardboard, The End, and I said to him, what, is this the movies?

Here’s something. I never went to college. Lola was done with high school by the time I got my GED, and at that point I thought, forget it, I make 10 large a go oiling the roller-coaster for Pops. Lola said I should’ve, that it’d come back to bite me in the end, but then there’s another thing I should’ve listened to Lola for, and I was wrong, I’ll admit it.

One thing I always liked about working the carnival when I was little was that Pops used to let me hand out popcorn, and when I was really little I’d give it to all the pretty ladies in high heels. Then when I got a little older my friends used to come and hang out and eat snacks by the generator. We were big into the blow-up obstacle course in those days, that Pops made us take our shoes off for. It was all made of canvas and air, and there was a climbing section and a sliding part and one place where you had to push punching bag things away. There was the year when someone tripped in the middle and punched a hole through the floor. I still remember the hiss while the whole thing sank down and collapsed. There were times we did it as races, two at a time until we’d all gone twice, and then the two fastest raced with everyone else screaming at them from the sides, hanging off the hand-holds and throwing popcorn at each other. Last year during a block party in Rockaway, when we were about to wrap up, I saw two kids sitting in the middle where it’s painted blue like a water trap, just talking. They were playing video games on their hand-helds. I told them they could have one more go through but then we had to close up and they said it was ok. They just left. I don’t know what to think about that.

Once a little girl asked me on the subway what I did for a living, because I was carrying a plastic bag full of balloons over my shoulder that kept trying to float above my head. I told her about the travelling carnival thing or whatever and she said, is that sort of like Santa Claus? I said first of all we work in the summer. And it’s not like we do presents and it’s not like it’s for free. She nodded really intelligent and said she hoped I’d come visit her neighborhood sometime, she lived in Bay Ridge. This was the R train which always takes forever and she must have been on a school trip, or something. She got off with lots of other little kids and a lady who kept holding the door. She kept looking at the bag and then back at me and then at the bag until finally I gave her a balloon and she got real excited.

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Yesterday I was on the train because I dropped the pickup off at Flatbush, to change the breaks, and I’m standing with one hand on the rail when this guy goes, here you go grandfather, it’s your seat. First I was like who talks like that on Newkirk Avenue? Then I got a look at myself in the window and I said, God, I really am a geep. My goatee’s getting real fuzzy and there’s hair coming out my ears. And here I am sitting with a t-shirt tucked into my shorts.

The way it happened was the guy wrote me a check. He had a truck and his cousins had two more and yesterday they just took it all in that. It was 200 grand, which was more than the show would make in the next 15 years, Lola said. She’s right. We all sat down at the kitchen counter and I gave them coffee and introduced them to Tony, before he ran upstairs or something. They didn’t have any of the cake Lola made, which I thought was rude, until she said Jesus, not everyone’s half Italian.

When they left I went into the backyard to straighten the rest of it up. Lola’s in the kitchen making jerk chicken, or something. I almost knock over the plants in front of the screen door where we’ve been trying to grow pot, Lola’s little side business. A story about Lola: once she told me that when she was fourteen, before she came here, she was driving a jeep in Jamaica, up and down the mountain roads. These things were all dirt, she said, and one lane, so that if there were two cars coming at each other, one had to back up and find a little place in the rock to turn into. Lola was never a great driver but this happened to her once, and she was at a point on the hill where there weren’t any niches to turn into for a while, and so she drove down the whole thing backwards, yelling. When she got to the bottom, where the beach was, she got out of the car and grabbed a seashell and threw it at the windshield. It didn’t even make a crack. I’m never driving again, she said. And she didn’t. But she took the shards of the shell and took them with her, and put them back together with crazy glue, and now it’s up above the sink in the kitchen where she washes the fruit.

Our last gig was a week or so before, between Avenue M and N, on one of those streets that curves. Hasid neighborhood, who don’t party much, but some liberal Jews too who eat up this sort of thing. They rented the whole street and closed it down, so we had room for the rollercoaster and even the extra large maze that we hadn’t taken out in a couple years. I ran the barbecue for most of it while Tony ran to and from the truck getting hot-dog packets. He didn’t mind doing it and other little things as long as he got an allowance every Monday.

Because it was our last one, Lola decided to make it something special. She took out the Madame Starbright costume and did that for a few hours. She was really good too. I listened in a bit from behind the tent. “The Wheel,” she said, “Sagittarius. You resemble the Jilted Man appearing in the pocket of Jupiter.”

The night before, she’d been practicing. Tony was asleep after eating half a chocolate cake. I was just licking the rest off the spatula when she came in from the dining room, where she’d been looking at tarot cards. The way she did it was she came up from behind and spread

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her hand in the center of my chest.

“Want to hear your fortune?” Lola said. I told her not to be stupid, that she better get back to studying.

“I think I’ve really got it, Sonny,” she said. I kept doing the dishes but she tapped twice on my chest with her hand. “Please,” she said.

I know I turned the faucet off but it was drip-dripping while we went outside. The patio sliding door used to hum when you opened it, but it’s a little broken now so it just squeaks and starts. It was around that time in the summer when it felt like Halloween at nighttime. Next door the baby was crying and the TV going on. We sat down at the little table, next to the vines that went from the ground to over our heads.

She was across from me and she picked up my hand in both of hers and said, “Remind me to get charcoal for tomorrow.”

“We doing this or what,” I said.

She shook my hand up and down and kissed it on the knuckles.

Then she closed her eyes and hummed. I thought she was going to say something any second but she didn’t, so I looked around a little bit, got distracted. I’d promised to paint a free throw line for Tony fifteen feet from the hoop.

When I looked back she’d stopped humming, but I hadn’t even known. Her eyes were wide open and her hands were tight around mine.

“Litigus, Dionysiac, Mesopatam,” she said. “I see that the Chariot is aligned with the Prince of Satyrs.” I grinned. She started to laugh too.

She put my fingers over her eyes and looked through them. I mussed up her eyebrows and looked over her shoulder to where some of the equipment was covered by a tarp. There was a little bit of standing water in the middle from the thunderstorm last night.

“When I was sixteen,” I told her, “I used to come out here and make sure the stuff wasn’t getting wet, if it was raining, the night before a job.”

She put her fingers back on the table.

“You’re going to be ok,” she said.

When I get to the first delivery place from the ad they tell me they’ve diversified their interests. Actually their owner had gotten himself into real estate. I go to the second but they’re closed for the day. The third is the Herr’s outlet on Quentin Avenue and I find a spot and go inside.

It really is a warehouse: no front door but just an open garage. It’s like a hangar inside, but just filled with rows and rows of bags of chips.

There’s a cashier’s desk at the front where it looks like they sell single bags and things like that, and the guy sitting there gets up when I come in and says, “Can we help you?”

I say you can, because it’s obvious that he’s the only one here. He’s got on dress clothes and black socks that are wrapped up around his dress pants, so that it’s like he’s wearing tights below the knees.

“I’m looking for work,” I say.

“Are you a veteran?”

“Do I look like one?”

“Merchandising?”

“No, delivery.”

He looks at me for a second as if to tell me that I’m too old, but then he says one moment please and goes in the back. The guy’s as old as I am. I can hear him making a call. The row of chip bags behind the desk is called Worcestershire Steak Sauce, Special Edition.

He comes back and tells me they’ll try me out for a run, do I have a commercial driver’s license? I do. Can you sign this paperwork? I do the pen. He tells me that the truck is parked out on 34th, it’s already loaded and I just have to make the stops on the sheet. Crown Heights, Flushing Park, a hub outlet on 248th in the Bronx. He brings out a map but I tell him I know how to get there. I figure I’ll do the Bronx first, then circle back. Then, while he’s checking over the paperwork and filing it in a folder, he asks me, “So what type of work have you been in?”

“Entertainment,” I say.

“Are you an actor?”

“Used to have a little travelling carnival, we did kids’ birthdays and block parties and things.”

“Maybe I’ve heard of it? What was the name?”

“Show of the Universe,” I said.

He straightened the papers. “Well this must be a let-down then,” then he looks at me and grins to let me know he’s kidding.

“We’ll see,” I say. He raps the desk with his knuckles. He asks me did I want anything else besides the keys? I give him an A-OK but don’t even answer, just grab the key-ring and walk my way out.

It was one of those days when it’s like the middle of the night on the street, no cars or traffic or anything. Then Ocean Avenue, down from Coney Island. I take Ocean Parkway to the Prospect Expressway, and I’m just flying, me and this truck. This must be what it’s like to drive a Hummer, I think. As if you could roll over the Toyotas in front of you, trunks crushing and bags of chips flying everywhere.

Pops used to say, there are five easy steps to living: The Mariner’s Inn has dollar beers on Thursdays, and I forget the other four. I’m passing Prospect Park, where there’s kids playing baseball and things. I don’t know what Tony’s gonna tell his friends that I do for a living anymore, because he used to say I was a magician, because I’d shown him some tricks with pulling a coin out from behind an ear. All I’m saying is, with the way driving this big baby feels, I want to go in for show-and-tell day, or career day, if they still have those.

I’m on the highway next to the East River, watching Manhattan get more wild as we go North. It’s true: there’s more trees up here by the water, and that big tower that’s supposed to be part of Columbia way up in the 100’s, that looks like a lighthouse, but made of stone. I’m passing Yankee Stadium and I’m changing lanes, going around the 18-wheelers and the little cars too. It’s like the first time I drove on the highway by myself, how it was just like dancing: sort of like when I was little and we’d be cleaning up after a job and everything would be packed, and it’d just be Pops and Ma, but the music still going. They’d put it on to something corny like Frank Sinatra, and sometimes Pops would hug her and go side to side. I had this little move, a sort of jump-in-the-air-split kind of thing

that they asked me to do over and over and over. I showed it to Lola once as a joke and she patted my cheek and said, white people.

I double park outside the hub on 248th and some guys come scrambling out to unload. They nod, say, hey, you made good time. One of them claps me on the shoulder before he starts loading the handcart.

They won’t let me do anything so I take a bag of Worcestershire and sit on the curb. They tell me it’ll be about half an hour, take a walk, go check out the Stella Dora factory a few blocks away.

I start walking and eating my bag of chips and it’s like when you don’t even realize how far you went because you’re licking your fingers for the crumbs and the salt on the bottom. I’m on Broadway where the 1 train ends and Van Cortlandt Park spreads out in front of me. It’s the badlands up here, no one coming except for track races and the immigrant soccer games. Places where just the crack addicts go at night to use the bathroom.

I walk across the soccer field and into the trees where it’s just a forest part. There’s a pond here where I always wanted to do a gig, set the roller coaster coming down the hill, let kids throw water balloons into the water.

Only problem is the shit trees that have these blossoms that smell terrible.

There’s a cave here, a waterfall too—it’s so far out in the Bronx that tourists never heard of it, and the locals have other things going on. I sit there for a while until I realize I have to go get the truck back. I take a piss on a tree because I’d been holding it in. When I get back to the outlet some respectable guy in a company polo opens the driver’s door for me, and then he closes the back with a bang and I start driving again.

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[If my skull were a circle of light] David wallace If my skull were a circle of light I would use it unfairly.

After you were mesmerized I would place my tattoo, and setting you down, I’d read you what I am reading until you spoke it with me.

Next, I’d take a long walk as the tides bring in the next waves of damaged fish woven in glowing polyps.

To erase the record of any potential transaction I would make myself into a cherub and install myself back into the painting from which I think I arrived most recently.

My book, which is the only one with much in it worth reading for your sake, doesn’t germinate in your abdomen. Don’t get excited.

I’m the last cycle of a perpetual murmur, and my reasons are byzantine.

These dealings in high wind, they break on the high rocks, and I couldn’t replace them if I tried.

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Haus of Gaga Eva delappe

It is 1923 and we are in Weimar, birthplace of the Republic.

This is a time and place of hands. Define hand: a circle with five appendages. A thing that sometimes holds pens and sometimes pulls triggers. A thing which can turn levers, move gears and belts, hold bars on trams or anchor a line of fingers. In the metropolis, hands become tools; a person becomes what he can create.

Enter the Bauhaus—tracing to “Bauhaütt,” a pre-modern guild of cathedral builders. The school planned to construct a utopia which was either spiritual or socialist, depending on whom you asked. Before its students could work toward a new reality, however, they had to learn the basic building blocks. In the Preliminary Workshop, pupils experimented with paint, textiles, glass, metal, and wood. Unlike other art schools of the era, the Bauhaus emphasized teaching theory through touch. For the first six months of tactile learning, students created nothing. No ideas, no concepts—just breaking, molding, and watching materials until their textures felt like a second skin.

Geometric structures were stripped to their essences. A painting, lines and yellow/red/blue; a chair, a leather strip and a curved metal rectangle; a house, a white cube with windows in which each verb (dine, bathe, lounge, cook, sleep) got its own room. Art was craft and craft was art. Architecture had to become as efficient and simple as a gear if it hoped to create a movement.

For the essence of an era is not contained lazily within fading relics or daydreams. Modernity does not lie with what people miss or idealize, but sprints with concrete objects, those things without a history or theory to dull their vitality. Grit, deviance, speed: modernity is what moves. To reach the masses and create something new, the artist must embrace whatever new forms people see and touch.

The Icon Lady Gaga is not a star. A star is soaring, timeless, transcendent— the celestial body inhabits the sky and we gaze at it from below; there is great distance and great beauty. Lady Gaga wears meat and drives the Pussy Wagon and tweets, “It is a promising day when your eyelash falls in your Folgers.”

An icon has more earth to it. It is constructed by its time and place, and solidifies the intersection between the two; it condenses a movement (toward God, toward equality, toward revolution) into a form. An icon is not nebulous; we can grasp figures like Jesus or Che. And because we can grasp them, we can deconstruct them, analyzing their parts to understand the essence of an era.

Lady Gaga is an artist who knows her materials. On The Fame and The Fame Monster and through the videos, photos, tweets, websites, facebook posts, and online articles her albums have spawned, she selfconsciously models herself after icons to comment on modern celebrity.

Yet her work is more than a strange spectacle or a Warhol-esque imitation. Lady Gaga seizes the mundane materials of digital culture to reach the masses and, ultimately, to build toward social and political equality.

To understand how a meat-wearing Pussy-Wagon-driving twentyfour year-old woman might just change the world, however, we must first analyze those materials. She and the Haus of Gaga, her Factory, have built an addictive interactive image, and the space she inhabits— the touch screen—shapes her form.

Material 1. Screen name Self-invention is nearly impossible without a good name. Though Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta had belted out countless songs at the Convent of the Sacred Heart as Adelaide in a production of Guys and Dolls, then at NYU, then at seedy Lower East Side bars, she still couldn’t get a record deal. She wasn’t classically beautiful, and she wanted to sing rock ballads on the piano. From a record company’s perspective, she just wasn’t the greatest catch. She wanted to do something new, and her Italian-American birthname wasn’t punchy enough for the image she wanted to create. So she started searching for the right combination, the one that would attract followers and ultimately define her image.

In the end it required an element of (technologically manufactured) chance. Each time she walked into the studio, Ray Fusari—her manager and boyfriend at the time—sang Queen’s “Radio Ga Ga” as if the music

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cued her entrance: “Radio, what’s new? Radio, someone still loves you.”

He sang it often enough that it became something to text about. One such conversation produced one of the more generative autocorrects in the history of T9: as Fusari tells it, “somehow ‘Radio’ got changed to ‘Lady.’

She texted me back, ‘That’s it.’ After that day, she was Lady Gaga. She’s like, ‘Don’t ever call me Stefani again.’”

And she meant it. Outside the studio, in any reality digital, visual, physical, or otherwise, she performs her invented image. When a magazine reporter called her Stefani, she sincerely replied, “But Lady Gaga is my name. If you know me, and you call me Stefani, you don’t really know me at all.”

Material 2. Screen Lady Gaga has over one billion YouTube views. If fame can be quantified (and if this is how we quantify fame), she has more of it that any other current musician except Justin Bieber.

But Bieber’s music videos are three to four minutes long. They show a cute boy courting a cute girl in a bowling alley. Lady Gaga creates six to nine minute mini-movies, complete with opening and closing credits, that rarely relate to her lyrics and never so much as pretend to relate to reality.

Take her latest saga “Alejandro,” a dark mixture of Madonna and Cabaret filmed under a sickly green tinted lens. Gothic Queen Gaga watches her army of militant gay monks (they wear black tonsure wigs) stomp, wrestle, dance, and carry symbols. When Pageboy Gaga tries to play S&M with her soldiers, they consent and fool around a bit with straps on stark barrack beds, but they are far more interested in playing with one other. Later the video breaks from the homoerotic cabaret so that Lady Gaga can mimic two gay icons. These segments are appropriately shot in black and white: she struts about like Liza Minelli in a bell-bottom romper; wearing a leather jacket and nothing else, she stands before a cross and sings into an old mike like Madonna.

At the end of the video, Nun Gaga confirms her celibate devotion to iconography by swallowing a rosary. Then, like burning celluloid, her eyes and mouth disintegrate.

Lady Gaga has said that the song is about loving gay friends and not being loved back, except as an icon. It clearly also takes pride in being different. Cute boys, cute girls, and bowling alleys are sweet to look at, but deviance fascinates. Porn, musicals, sci-fi, fantasy, horror, animated, and B-movies distill entertainment to its essence—the guilty pleasure exists a few standard deviations beyond reality. When we watch these genres, we escape our bodies and fulfill our inner, imagined selves. Though guilty pleasures always entice, they also shame us for what society considers low-brow. But we can’t stop consuming— especially when a video costs nothing to watch and is screened within the privacy of our own MacBooks.

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Material 3. Constant Updates Sometimes we need her to change her outfit twelve times in one video. Sometimes we need her to change her outfit five times at the Grammys. Sometimes, we need her to post two new tweets in one day.

No matter the form, Lady Gaga continuously adds to and refreshes her unique online image.

Material 4. Access Anytime, Any Place, Anywhere Lady Gaga always performs. Whether in a video or in a yoga studio, at her sister’s graduation or on the red carpet, she is constantly a thing to be looked at—because, as we all know, Lady Gaga wears crazy shit.

Material 5. Persona(e) Her crazy shit is mostly sexy: she lacks containers (no pants, no shirt, no bra) and flaunts exhibitors (high heels, red lipstick, and platinum blonde or banana-yellow hair). Yet her sexiness transgresses labels like masculine, androgynous, transvestite, or feminine. She’s just Gaga, which is a hyper-sexualized bit of everything.

At times she looks burlesque (fishnets), futuristic (rotating metal circle dress), fantastical (plastic bubbles), monstrous (black latex from head to toe), cartoonish (Kermit the Frog heads) and/or bizarre (sparkly lobster headpiece). But Lady Gaga is always her image and always a pastiche (“I am what I wear”).

Material 5. Links If you wanted to, you could describe every Lady Gaga video through its pop-culture allusions. In “Paparazzi” Lady Gaga falls into a Vertigo vortex, then returns from the hospital in a gold robot torso and forehead reminiscent of Metropolis’s Maria. In “Bad Romance,” she emerges from a white coffin labeled “Monster” in Where the Wild Things Are white latex; in order to say “I want the deepest, darkest, sickest parts of you that you are afraid to share with anyone because I love you that much,” she sings, “I want your Psycho, your Vertigo schtick/Want you in my Rear Window, baby you’re sick.” Unlike other celebrities, Lady Gaga’s name is never mentioned in the press for going to rehab/jail or leaking a sex video.

These celebrity scandals are performed in her videos; her art, videos, and costumes become her spectacle.

“Telephone” is her most masterful pastiche. She links Kill Bill (Pussy Wagon, women on revenge) with Thelma & Louise (two women on the run for murder) to create a plot, then sprinkles in too many proper nouns to count: Beyonce, Pulp Fiction (“Honey Bee” riffs on “Honey Bunny”), Old Glory (stars-and-stripes placemats, acrylic nails, bikini and onesie), reality television (Poison TV mimics a Food Network segment,

Jai Rodriguez from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy), consumer culture (diner, Miracle Whip, Wonder Bread, Diet-Coke can hair rollers), and product placement (Virgin Telephone and Polaroid).

Images that consist only of pop-culture references lack anchorage.

Some might say Lady Gaga reaches Baudrillard’s fourth level of simulacra—an image that relates to nothing but other images. However, she not only links to other images (hypertextuality), she links those links to herself (intertextuality). “Telephone” picks up where “Paparazzi” left off. In “Telephone,” her opening band appears in the booth behind Bo, and her sister appears as her jailbird friend, and a fellow prisoner wears the diamond-shaped earbuds she sported in her “Bad Romance” bathtub and now sells on ladygaga.com. But like hypertextuality, intertextuality must avoid obnoxious narcissism or a tangled post-modern network—for the audience to truly engage, the text needs to have heart, a weight to it.

Material 6. Keyboard Lady Gaga doesn’t just tweet about eyelashes. Her feed overflows with love for her “Little Monsters.” She tweets, “celebrate yourselves!” and, “I heart lilmonsters”; and whenever her deviant self-invented image breaks the system that favors cute boys courting cute girls in bowling alleys, it is a shared success: “Monsters have 6 Grammy nominations!”

She knows how to reach her fans. Usually the mass ignores, marginalizes, or persecutes artists who make strange things that we’re not comfortable calling art. But as of December 3, 2010, Lady Gaga has accumulated 24,164,851 Facebook page “Likes” and 7,252,432 Twitter followers. For Lady Gaga knows how to make what we see and touch— images—into a site of meaning, and deviance into a form of empowerment.

Some would say that watching is an inherently selfish act. It gives us pleasure to wonder how we would act in a fantastic scenario, to desire a flat image that can’t respond or reject and to add fences around our identity as one who belongs (to the fan-club, to the club of viewers who will now “get” a reference to that video, to the elite club who claims superior cultural clout or the authority to judge, dismiss, and/or satirize another’s work). In its crudest interpretation, solipsism is what compels people to watch. Look at the YouTube comments: thread after thread of projected pride.

But Gaga recognizes that this is a mean interpretation of her work and our culture. When someone makes a YouTube video, posts on a blog, or updates their Facebook status, she wants her inner thoughts, desires, and image to be affirmed. Even better than watching alone is finding someone else, a fellow fan or satirist, to watch with you—this takes the shame out of it. When someone else sees what we see, and makes it known through a comment or a “like,” it’s a form of contact.

If legislation, society, your school, or your parents call you deviant and tell you to be ashamed of your identity, the screen might provide the only sense of belonging that you can find. Lady Gaga does not judge, retreat from, or ignore what older generations deem the sinful, frivolous or dangerous signs of modernity. She embraces our instant

digital age and non-normative identities. She pours her soul into her image until her manifest form becomes the essence of herself and ourselves and our era—Lady Gaga sees the materials, what we see and touch, and acts accordingly.

The Movement In recent months Lady Gaga has dedicated her digital, physical, and artistic self to fight for gay rights. Born this Way, to be released in February 2011, is already lauded on BGLTSA blogs as a new gay anthem. At a recent concert, Lady Gaga sang the chorus; one fan recorded it and posted it online so all the Little Monsters could enjoy Lady Gaga belting, “I’m beautiful in my way, ’cause God makes no mistakes. I’m on the right track, baby I was born this way.”

But Lady Gaga doesn’t just affirm self-invention, instant digital age, or non-normative identities. Because she knows how we interact, and supports and participates in our forms of interaction, she can use that interaction to effect change. On October 17 she tweeted, “We reached 1 Billion views on youtube little monsters! If we stick together we can do anything. I dub u kings and queens of youtube! Unite!” On November 30 she and other celebrities staged their online deaths (no tweets, no Facebook updates) until their fans collectively raised $1,000,000 to fight HIV/AIDS at buylife.org. By December 3 they were all “alive” again.

She fervently worked to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” she spoke in Maine, she spoke in DC, she posted a video speech, she tweeted about it with Harry Reid. But she wants more than to build a new political structure. Her tweets build an image of her concerts as events that reach something close to an egalitarian utopia: “Never could I have imagined the connection we share. Hrvatska, 2nite there was no politic, no economy, no society. Just us. Monster ball.”

When millions of eyes gravitate toward a distinct image like this, it must mean that the new form is one that is necessary, a relief rather than a threat. An icon is one who is particularly adept at sensing in advance the way the tectonics are shifting, and has the courage and vision to bring the movement to the surface.

Once students knew the materials, they could begin to build. The Bauhaus believed the essence of objects—geometric forms—would free modern man from spiritual or economic oppression. And by building together, they could restructure society. As the Bauhaus Manifesto ends: Let us therefore create a new guild of craftsmen without the class-distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between craftsmen and artists! Let us desire, conceive, and create the new building of the future together. It will combine architecture, sculpture, and painting in a single form, and will one day rise toward the heavens from the hands of a million workers as the crystalline symbol of a new and coming faith.

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Caorle 2 Julia Rooney Oil on unprimed canvas 48 x 36�

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Dressing Poultry, 2007 (opposite) Jeff Wall Transparency in light box 87 x 107 x 10” (Inv.#11478) Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York / Paris

Search of premises, 2009 (above) Jeff Wall Color photograph 78-7/8 x 106-3/4 x 2” (Inv.#12406) Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York / Paris Winter 2010

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The Starlight on Idaho Denis Johnson

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[open ocean falls] Matt Aucoin For S.P.— Open ocean falls closing into the white past dark blue where bound, in sand, in sun, blood, we lie unopened: five years of love – still it runs caught: every cell is a blue diver falling the volume under papyrus stretched, its inner face bathed as in tea – to look old? You look lived in, like home till the diver surfaces, volume unbinds – till the page cracks, read – the ocean has never opened – the tea leaves its leaves (the waves turn over) the sea leaves and leaves (almost in sleep) we leave love

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Sketch for “A Two-Way Mirror Labyrinth�

Dan Graham Sketch: 8 inches by 8 inches for a project that would be 30 feet on all of the 3 triangular sides 36

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Poem

Mathew  Zapruder

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Dressing up

emily chertoff

The Harvard Film Archive began this month with a three-day screening of the movies of Kenneth Anger. Anger, who grew up twenty minutes outside Hollywood in Santa Monica, California, is considered one of the fathers of American avant-garde film: David Lynch and Martin Scorsese count him as an antecedent. The first two days of screenings were devoted to Anger’s Magick Lantern Cycle, a nine-film series of thematically linked works that film critics tend to group together. All of them in some way concern the production of myth and mystery in Hollywood and elsewhere—the “magic lantern,” of course, being both the film projector and an object of the sort that might be used in a cultic ritual, with more than a whiff of the esoteric about it. (To call it a “magick lantern” both reinforces a connection to the occult and adds a touch of Anger’s characteristic camp.)

In Anger’s films, this production of myth and mystery is intimately linked with the idea of glamour. In his early films, this means the glamour of Hollywood. Scorpio Rising plays off the glamour of 1950s counterculture; in one of the film’s longest scenes, a biker (in sunglasses) lounges in bed and reads comics while Marlon Brando in The Wild One plays on the television. Photographs of James Dean stare down at him from the walls, and a “James Dean Memorial Foundation” button lies among the rings scattered on the dresser.

The film’s audience understands that the elements of glamour here point to a single, definite cultural source—the glamour of the rebel biker figure which both Dean and Brando played (and who Dean in particular seemed to embody, in a glamorous conflation of actor and role). Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, filmed ten years earlier in 1954, has a more esoteric set of cultural referents. It is based on Anger’s experience at the Hollywood party “Come as Your Madness” and his fascination with the magician and self-proclaimed prophet Aleister Crowley’s religion, Thelema. Still, the actors in the film are all faces on the Hollywood social scene—these include Anaïs Nin, the famously erotic French novelist, and Sampson De Brier, a former actor who held salons and occult gatherings in his home—in its totality the glamour of

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the film is recognizably the glamour of the Hollywood occult scene and the circuit of pleasures trod by Anger and his actors.

Over the course of the Cycle, however, Anger begins to drain the glamour of his films of recognizable cultural referents, leaving bare glamour—now legible only as a form or style—where any content has been emptied out. In Lucifer Rising this decontextualized, effectively a-referential glamour is most evident. While the film once again displays an identifiable interest in the occult—a framed picture of Crowley hovers in the background in one scene—the visual elements of the film cannot be interpreted in relation to a single coherent referent. A scene of a priest or acolyte at his toilette clearly points to the occult motif again, as well as to the idea that glamour is prepared and artificial; but whereas Thelema was an obvious occult referent in earlier films, nothing in Lucifer Rising but the picture of Crowley points to any specific religion or cult. The sight of the singer Marianne Faithfull—if you can recognize her in her gray face-paint or hooded cloak—momentarily evokes the British rock scene of the 1960s and 70s, but after three minutes of watching her walk up a stone staircase, the cultural context of her celebrity becomes almost meaningless. The film’s Egyptian imagery is recognizable, but its camp use is bewildering. All of these images have an element of glamour, but this is not a culture-specific glamour that the viewer can decode— though these images originally had cultural referents, now they are almost completely hermetic.

In their book The Glamour System, Stephen Gundle and Clino Castelli cite the New Fowler’s Modern English Usage in designating glamour as an alteration of the old Scottish gramarye: this meant “occult learning, magic, necromancy.” When the word glamour entered English usage in the 1830s, Gundle and Castelli continue, “it did so with the meaning of ‘a delusive or alluring charm.’”

Their definition of the word’s contemporary meaning retains this etymological connection: glamour is “an enticing image, a staged and constructed version of reality that invites consumption[...] it is primarily visual, it consists of a retouched or perfected version of a real person or

situation, and it is predicated upon the gaze of a desiring audience.”

Buried in this idea of glamour is the old notion of casting a spell, of seduction—of seducing with the visual. But what does it mean to seduce with pure glamour, glamour as form and aura alone, rather than with the fantasy of life as a kept woman or movie star? * Anger’s films and the way they treat glamour are of particular interest today in light of what seems to be a change in the media that surround fashion and fashion culture. His recognition of the selfsustaining interaction between glamour and visual media is canny and prescient. The current wave of interest in fashion has developed a telling degree of sophistication, focused on the fashion industry itself as a source of glamour rather than merely what “looks” are in next season. The New York Times now aggressively covers fashion weeks in New York, London, Milan, and Paris both online and in print—positioning itself, perhaps, as the newspaper of record in this area. (Women’s Wear Daily is the newspaper of record for the fashion industry; the Times’s coverage is aimed at a more general readership.)

Five years ago, almost no one outside of the fashion industry could have told you who Giovanna Battaglia (fashion editor of L’Uomo Vogue) or Carine Roitfeld (editor-in-chief of Vogue Paris) was; today if you ask a well-dressed young person in a major metropolitan center, you have a decent chance of getting an answer.

Perhaps the most impressive cultural shift accompanying the increasing visibility of the fashion industry itself has been the rise of the fashion photo blog. Five years ago, it didn’t exist. Today, bloggerphotographer-writers like Scott Schuman of The Sartorialist, Tommy Ton of Jak and Jil, and fourteen-year old Tavi Gevison of Style Rookie receive tens of thousands of hits to their websites each day, merit front row seats at fashion shows, and attract major advertising and editorial commissions from top designers and magazines like Vogue. Fashion blogs generally fall into one of two categories. Street-style blogs like The Sartorialist and Jak and Jil feature snapshot (or snapshot-style) photos of attractive and interestingly dressed individuals caught “on the street.” (In fact, many of the most successful bloggers regularly photograph the same cadre of fashion editors and other industry insiders.) Personal style bloggers like Tavi, on the other hand, photograph their own outfits each day. Both types of blog can contain additional material like analysis of recent fashion shows, commentaries on favorite designers, and colorful outfit-inspiring collages called “mood boards.” Most importantly, all of these new fashion blogs are image-based. Even when a particular post does not feature images, some visual—a runway presentation, a trendy print or cut—is always referred to, because fashion is primarily a visual phenomenon.

Glamour in Europe had its roots in a bourgeois response to the splendor of a decaying aristocracy; in the United States, which never really had a hereditary aristocracy, it was associated from the beginning with images and products that an ordinary person could consume. But today, when collections are filled with contextless historical references and fashion coverage has become at least overtly democratic, glamour has become, even more than before, an a-referential aura, a form with no immediate content. Fashion once had a social logic; even the widely-commodified aura of glamour, which functioned primarily to market certain celebrities and products to the public, was pegged to certain celebrities and diffused among middle-class consumer-aspirants. The girl in the 1930s who bought a fur coat captured for herself a hazy emanation of Garbo’s glamour, not the aura at full strength. Today, the relation between media and glamour has become even more intimate than before. Capture in the right kind of media is the condition of glamour. The very environment of the fashion media has become a center of glamour.

This deepening of the connection between media and glamour created a new set of fantasies distinct from the old fantasies of glamour— the fantasy of becoming a Hollywood starlet, for instance, or of finding a wealthy man to support one’s tastes. First, of course, there is the fantasy of a job in fashion. Fashion world jobs seem glamorous not only because they have an aura of creativity, but because they are associated with a jet-setting lifestyle (attending fashion weeks or shooting ads in far-off locations), with physical allure, and with celebrities, socialites, and others whose wealth attends on high status.

Second, there is the fantasy of being “discovered.” But here the body or face is not (primarily) the thing being discovered, but rather one’s eye— the knack for analyzing high fashion or advertising or trends-in-the-making; the personal style and allure so compelling that it inspires others to fantasize. In an economy that lacks stability, where even college graduates are unlikely to find a stable and rewarding job, young people who have spent their lives looking at images in print, on television, online, and in the world around them want to be rewarded for their superlative visual skills.

The internet is an open forum where anyone can work to get noticed, and where a handful—but only a handful—in fact have been.

The images that show up on fashion photo blogs feed a similar desire. Anyone can be captured by a street photographer if he has the “right look.” And anyone who posts photos of herself to her blog knows her eye too can be discovered if her blog becomes popular enough that the relevant people hear about it. Jane Aldrich, of the website Sea of Shoes, started posting photos of her daily outfit to her blog in April 2007. Two years later, at age seventeen, she had designed a collection of shoes for Urban Outfitters. In November 2009, she debuted at the Bal de Crillon in Paris alongside Princess Diana’s niece and the great-

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granddaughter of a maharajah despite being from a by-all-accountsnormal family in a planned community near Fort Worth. * An interesting facet of the fashion industry’s latest media moment is that among young people, a taste for fashion does not seem notably gender normative. It is more acceptable for heterosexual males to be interested in fashion now than seems to have been the case at almost any time since what Gundle and Castelli in The Glamour System call “the masculine renunciation of fashion and display” during the nineteenth century. The metrosexual, the male hipster, and various permutations thereof can be of any sexual orientation. Interest in appearance, or more specifically, in maintaining a particular aesthetic or personal style, is presumed by the mere fact of membership in one of these groups, prior to the fact of the individual’s sexuality.

Despite the reinscription of fashion as an acceptable interest for all sexes rather than a mere caprice, fashion and the spells it can cast still pose a particular danger for women. While men are featured on some style blogs—among them the all-men’s Urban Gentleman and the gender-balanced Sartorialist—the majority of the photos major bloggers take are of women. The women in these photos often (but not always) treat their dress in a different way from the men; while the men on these blogs are often held up as exemplifying the importance of fine tailoring, clever details, and investment in quality garments, the women are often more spectacular in their dress. For every woman whose sleeves hit at just the right place on the wrist, there are five in towering stilettos, leather pants, or blinding prints.

Producing these enchantments requires a considerable investment of energy and time: many of the women who are photographed clearly spend hours a day on “personal appearance” once exercise, hair, makeup, skin, clothing, and decisions about diet are factored in. (Not to mention the extra time it takes to walk places in heels over three inches.)

One editor who is frequently photographed for fashion blogs is said to exercise for two hours and change outfits up to three times a day. While the efforts of these women can buy them a great deal of notice—and in the editor’s case, a form of internet celebrity—you have the feeling that they think there is an expressive dividend as well.

But is this tremendous investment of time in fashion as it relates to one’s own dress in fact a creative activity? The claim is often made in an off-hand way by fashion bloggers and other young people with an interest in the industry. However, change in a culture’s preexisting system of dress, which constitutes the only environment in which a woman’s clothing is legible as a set of choices with content, is determined by the need producers have to sell garments. The choices fashion-conscious women make about dress are almost never autonomous of the market, and are therefore creative in a sense so stunted as to be meaningless.

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Here I am following Barthes, who (to radically simplify his argument) conceived of fashion in a culture as a complicated signsystem that evolves both synchronically and over time. Critically, the article of clothing or some detail of it only signifies in the context of this sign-system. Even when an instance of a gesture is initially unique to one woman or to a small group of them—say, the wearing of a jacket over the shoulders rather than with the arms through the sleeves—for outsiders, this gesture only signifies if it has had some identifiable historical association (the jacket over the shoulders signifying, perhaps, either casualness or fragility, depending on the execution). If this gesture is repeated by more women, it becomes legible to a broader audience, but it may also attract the attention of marketers and trend-spotters and in turn become a codified, marketed element of dress by the next season—with a fully fixed signification. (Street style blogs chronicle the eccentricities of dress that might become bottom-up cultural phenomena, thus accelerating the ability of corporate designers and marketers to invert them to top-down phenomena that will sell clothes.)

But if women have taken on the role of the ornamental sex, and if the signification of their dress is highly prescribed by cultural context—which, in turn, is highly if not primarily determined by the exigencies of market capitalism, which must drive periodic shifts in codes of dress in order to motivate consumption—then I at least would argue that dress for many fashionable women is not creative, despite being precisely the domain in which for the last 150 years the right to create has at least theoretically been ceded to women.

Women—the reasoning goes—retain the ability to choose their dress, to style themselves, and the ultimate right to refuse a mode of dress for reasons of taste. But the dress of many fashionable women not only operates completely within a broader cultural code, but is also driven by the necessary cycling of the market to a far higher degree than even modern visual art. It is perhaps even worse for a woman who considers her elaborate everyday act of dressing creative to follow the styles in the magazines, than for an artist to painstakingly copy a certain style of painting the market has approved—at least the artist retains a degree of self-awareness. Glamour today is indeed a form without immediate cultural referent; the market can fill glamour with whatever content immediately suits its own needs. The style of Hollywood starlets was in some ways fixed, but in a world in which designers show five or six collections per year, style is completely mutable; to remain useful, the cultural content of glamour must be mutable as well. * Whether dressing up can actually become a creative act will not be resolved here, because I don’t know whether there is a way for dressing to totally leave market-driven networks of signification behind—or whether it is even worth it to attempt to do so. At the least, it doesn’t seem to me

that the historical place of women, pre-liberation, as keepers of personal objects—as homemakers, producers of household goods, and visual clues to their husbands’ social status—should necessarily lead them to treat a “feminine preoccupation” like adornment as a frivolity. Take the ground that is ceded to you, despite the stigma that attaches to it as an unserious (feminine) activity, and use the space a lack of male interest gives you to develop a practice that is interesting and worthy of analysis.

Since many young women do seem to feel that dressing is a creative act, I would like to point them to Anger’s later films for some indication of how the reality of dressing might match their fantasy. Glamour here is a form, still easily recognizable as a particular type of visual enchantment, but without the legible visual references to any market-driven cultural significance of the sort that dogs most “creative” dressers’ attempts to “say something” with what they wear. While these films appropriate certain cultural references only to blend them, they are not pastiche; the result does not have the quality of a montage, but rather of a closed system, one in which visual elements are in fact full of significance but in which their signification is only fully understood by the initiated—a category, in this case, that the viewer does not belong to. The priestess in Lucifer Rising understands the rules, rites, and icons of her religion, and their origin.

Because we cannot read this visual code, we do not.

If women want to turn dress itself into a form of art, they need to create not just the outfits or even the garments that they wear but the very codes within which their dress can be interpreted. This requires the creation not just of things to wear or even of ideas for their design, but of a little world that these garments fit into and by which they are legible. In other words, it requires an act of fantasy that is both hermetic and theatrical: hermetic because the broader culture cannot be allowed to fully learn this code (otherwise, it can become popular and can be appropriated by fashion), theatrical because it requires the creation and constant maintenance of a fantasy world around the dresser so that the possibility of finding significance in the dress always exists (otherwise, it falls apart as a language.) There is no way to know what form this little world built up around the person who dresses would take, but I imagine an elaborate mythology and a set of personal rituals as in Anger’s Lucifer Rising. In other obvious ways, “parafashion” would take after performance art. But could it ever stand alone as a separate category of creative endeavor?

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Sparse Matrices Yifan Hu and Timothy Davis Graphic drawings “Each of these images represents a system of mathematical equations from a real problem in science or engineering. Each endpoint of a line is an equation, and a line is drawn between related equations.

The image is then shaped using laws of physics. We make each line a spring, and give each dot an electrical charge. Then we let the entire system shift until it settles down into a low-energy state. We then draw the graph over this system. Once the positions of the endpoints are known, the colors are chosen by how long the lines are: long lines are drawn in cool colors (blue) and short ones in hot colors (red).�

How do you invest stocks and bonds, so they produce the best return and least volatility? (this page)

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(or Manhattan)

Kiwao Nomura translated by Kyoko yoshida and forrest gander

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The Sea beyond this world kiwao nomura translated by kyoko yoshida and forrest gander

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Ambitions

laura  kasischke

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Of the dead white men

laura kasischke

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Is Utopianism Dead?

Simon Critchley

We are living through a long anti-1960s. The various anti-capitalist experiments in communal living and collective existence that defined that period seem to us either quaintly passé, laughably unrealistic or dangerously misguided. Having grown up and thrown off such seemingly childish ways, we now think we know better than to try and bring heaven crashing down to earth and construct concrete utopias. To that extent, despite our occasional and transient enthusiasms and Obamaisms, we are all political realists; indeed most of us are passive nihilists and cynics.

This is why we still require a belief in something like original sin, namely that there is something ontologically defective about what it means to be human. The Judaeo-Christian conception of original sin finds its modern analogues in Freud’s variation on the Schopenhauerian disjunction between desire and civilization, Heidegger’s ideas of facticity and fallenness, and the Hobbesian anthropology that drives Carl Schmitt’s defense of authoritarianism and dictatorship, which has seduced significant sectors of the Left hungry for Realpolitik. Without the conviction that the human condition is essentially flawed and dangerously rapacious, we would have no way of justifying our disappointment; nothing gives us a greater thrill than satiating our sense of exhaustion and ennui by polishing the bars of our prison cell by reading a little John Gray. Gray represents a very persuasive Darwinian variant on the idea of original sin: it is the theory of evolution that explains the fact that we are homo rapiens.

Nothing can be done about it. Humanity is a plague.

It is indeed true that those utopian political movements of the 1960s, like the Situationist International, where an echo of utopian Millenarian movements like the Heresy of the Free Spirit could be heard, led to various forms of disillusionment, disintegration, and in extreme cases, disaster. Experiments in the collective ownership of property or in communal living based on sexual freedom without the repressive institution of the family, or indeed R.D. Laing’s experimental communal asylums with no distinction between the so-called mad and the sane, seem like distant whimsical cultural memories captured in dog-eared, yellowed paperbacks and grainy, poor quality film. As a child of punk, economic collapse and the widespread social violence in the United Kingdom in

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the late 1970s, it is a world that I have always struggled to understand. Perhaps such communal experiments were too pure and overfull of righteous conviction. Perhaps they were, in a word, too moralistic to ever endure. Perhaps such experiments were doomed because of what we might call a politics of abstraction, in the sense of being overly attached to an idea at the expense of a frontal denial of reality. Perhaps, indeed.

At their most extreme, say in the activities of the Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and the Red Brigades in the 1970s, the moral certitude of the closed and pure community becomes fatally linked to redemptive, cleansing violence. Terror becomes the means to bring about the end of virtue. Such is the logic of Jacobinism. The death of individuals is but a speck on the vast heroic canvas of the class struggle. This culminated in a heroic politics of violence where acts of abduction, kidnapping, hijacking, and assassination were justified through an attachment to a set of ideas. As a character in Jean-Luc Godard’s Notre Musique remarks, “To kill a human being in order to defend an idea is not to defend an idea, it is to kill a human being.”1 Perhaps such groups were too attached to the idea of immediacy, the propaganda of the violent deed as an impatient attempt to storm the heavens. Perhaps such experiments lacked an understanding of politics as a constant and concrete process of mediation. That is, the mediation between a subjective ethical commitment based on a general principle—for example the equality of all, friendship, or an infinite ethical demand—and the experience of local organization that builds fronts and alliances between disparate groups with often conflicting sets of interests, what Gramsci called the activity of “hegemony.” By definition, such a process of mediation is never pure and never complete. * Are these utopian experiments in community dead or do they live on in some form? I’d like to make two suggestions for areas where Notre Musique 2004, J.- L. Godard (dir.) (France/Switzerland: Avventura Films, Péripheria Suisse, France 3 Cinéma et al).

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this utopian impulse might live on: two experiments, if you will. One is from contemporary art, one is from contemporary radical politics: but the two areas can be interestingly linked. Indeed, if a tendency marks our time, it is the increasingly difficulty in separating forms of collaborative art from experimental politics.

Perhaps such utopian experiments in community live on in the institutionally sanctioned spaces of the contemporary art world. One thinks of projects like L’Association des Temps Libérés (1995), Utopia Station (2003), and many other examples gathered together in a retrospective show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in Fall 2008, Theanyspacewhatever.1 In the work of artists like Philippe Parreno and Liam Gillick or curators like Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Maria Lind, there is a deeply felt Situationist nostalgia for ideas of collectivity, action, self-management, collaboration, and indeed the idea of the group as such. In such art practice, which Nicolas Bourriaud has successfully branded as “relational,” art is the acting out of a situation in order to see if, in Obrist’s words, ‘something like a collective intelligence might exist,”2 As Gillick notes, “Maybe it would be better if we worked in groups of three.”3 A great deal of contemporary art and politics is obsessed with the figure of the group and of work as collaboration, perhaps all the way to the refusal of work and the cultivation of anonymity.

Of course, the problem with such contemporary utopian art experiments is twofold: on the one hand, they are only enabled and legitimated through the cultural institutions of the art world and thus utterly enmeshed in the circuits of commodification and spectacle that they seek to subvert; and, on the other hand, the dominant mode for approaching an experience of the communal is through the strategy of reenactment. One doesn’t engage in a bank heist, one reenacts Patty Hearst’s adventures with the Symbionese Liberation Army in a warehouse in Brooklyn. Situationist détournement is replayed as obsessively planned reenactment. The category of reenactment has become hegemonic in contemporary art, specifically as a way of thinking the relation between art and politics (perhaps radical politics has also become reenactment). Fascinating as I find such experiments and the work of the artists involved, one suspects what we might call a “mannerist Situationism,” where the old problem of recuperation does not even apply because such art is completely co-opted by the socio-economic system which provides its life-blood.

To turn to politics, perhaps we witnessed another communal experiment with the events in France surrounding the arrest and detention See the documentation collected in Theanyspacewhatever (Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2008).

2 H.-U. Obrist, ‘In Conversation with Raoul Vaneigem’, E-Flux Journal, http://www.e-flux. com/journal/view/62. See Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Les Presses du Réel, Paris, 2002).

3 Liam Gillick, “Maybe it Would be Better if We Worked in Groups of Three?”, E-flux Journal 3 (February 2009), www.e-flux.com/journal/view/35.

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of the so-called ‘Tarnac Nine’ on 11 November 2008 and the work of groups that go under different names: Tiqqun, The Invisible Committee, The Imaginary Party.1 As part of Nicolas Sarkozy’s reactionary politics of fear—itself based on an overwhelming fear of disorder and desire to erase definitively the memory of 1968—a number of activists who had been formerly associated with Tiqqun were arrested in rural France by a force of 150 anti-terrorist police, helicopters and attendant media. They were living communally in the small village of Tarnac in the Corrèze district of the Massif Central. Apparently a number of the group’s members had bought a small farmhouse and were engaged in such dangerous activities as running a cooperative grocery store and local film club, planting carrots, and delivering food to the elderly. With surprising juridical imagination, they were charged with “pre-terrorism,” an accusation linked to acts of sabotage on France’s TGV rail system.

The basis for this thought-crime was a passage from a book from 2007 called L’insurrection qui vient.2 It is a wonderfully dystopian diagnosis of contemporary society—seven circles of hell in seven chapters—and a compelling strategy to resist it. The final pages of L’insurrection advocate acts of sabotage against the transport networks of “the social machine” and ask the question, “How could a TGV line or an electrical network be rendered useless?”3 Two of the alleged pre-terrorists, Julien Coupat and Yldune Lévy, were detained in jail and charged with ‘a terrorist undertaking’ that carried a prison sentence of 20 years. The last of the group to be held in custody, Coupat, was released without being prosecuted on 28 May 2009, although bail of 16,000 Euros was levied and Coupat was forbidden to travel outside the greater Parisian area.4 Fresh arrests were made in connection with the Tarnac affair late in 2009.5 Such is the repressive and reactionary force of the state, just in case anyone had forgotten. As the authors of L’insurrection remind us, “Governing has never been anything but pushing back by a thousand subterfuges the moment when the crowd will hang you.”6 L’insurrection qui vient has powerful echoes of the Situationist International. Yet—revealingly—the Hegelian-Marxism of Debord’s analysis of the spectacle and commodification is replaced with very strong echoes of Agamben, in particular the question of community in Agamben as what would survive the separation of law and life.7 Everything turns here on For more information on the “Tarnac 9” see http://tarnac9.wordpress.com/. See also the commentary by Alberto Toscano, “The War Against Pre-Terrorism: The Tarnac 9 and The Coming Insurrection”, Radical Philosophy (March/April 2009), http://www.radicalphilosophy. com/default.asp?channel_id=2187&editorial_id=27700.

2 L’insurrection qui vient (La Fabrique, Paris, 2007); translated anonymously as The Coming Insurrection (Semiotexte[e], Los Angeles, 2009).

3 L’insurrection qui vient, p.101.

4 http://tarnac9.wordpress.com/2009/05/29/julien-coupat-released/ 5 http://tarnac9.wordpress.com/2009/12/05/statement-from-the-tarnac-ten/ 6 L’insurrection qui vient, p.83.

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A strategy of sabotage, blockade and what is called ‘the human strike’ is proposed in order to weaken still further our doomed civilization. As the Tiqqun group write in a 1999 text called, “Oh Good, the War!,” “Abandon ship. Not because it’s sinking, but to make it sink.”

Or again, “When a civilization is ruined, one declares it bankrupt. One does not tidy up in a home falling off a cliff.”2 An opposition between the city and the country is constantly reiterated, and it is clear that the construction of zones of opacity is better suited to rural life than the policed space of surveillance of the modern metropolis. The city is much better suited to what we might call “designer resistance,” where people wear Ramones T-shirts and sit in coffee shops saying, “capitalism sucks,” before going back to their jobs as graphic designers.

L’insurrection is a compelling, exhilarating, funny and deeply lyrical text that sets off all sorts of historical echoes with movements like the Free Spirit and the Franciscan Spirituals in the Middle Ages, through to the proto-anarchist Diggers in the English Revolution

and different strands of nineteenth-century utopian communism. We should note the emphasis on secrecy, invisibility and itinerancy, on smallscale communal experiments in living, on the politicization of poverty which recalls medieval practices of mendicancy and the refusal of work. What is at stake is the affirmation of a life no longer exhausted by work and cowed by law and the police.

But this double program of sabotage on the one hand, and secession from civilization on the other, risks, I think, remaining trapped within the politics of abstraction identified above. In this fascinatingly creative reenactment of the Situationist gesture—which is why I stressed the connection with contemporary art practice—what is missing is a thinking of political mediation where groups like the Invisible Committee would be able to link up and become concretized in relation to multiple and conflicting sites of struggle; workers, the unemployed, designer resisters, and perhaps most importantly, with more or less disenfranchised ethnic groups. We need a richer political cartography than the opposition between the city and the country. Tempting as it is, sabotage combined with secession from civilization smells of the moralism we detected above, an ultimately anti-political purism.

That said, I understand the desire for secession: it is the desire to escape a seemingly doomed civilization that is headed for the abyss. The proper theological name for such secessionism is Marcionism, which turns on the separation of law from life, the order of creation from that of redemption, the Old and New Testaments. In the face of a globalizing, atomizing, bio-political and legal regime of violence and domination which threatens to drain dry the reservoir of life, secession offers the possibility of withdrawal, the establishment of a space where another form of life and collective intelligence are possible. Secession offers the possibility of an antinomian separation of law from life, a retreat from the old order through experiments with free human sociability: in other words, communism, understood as the “Sharing of a sensibility and elaboration of sharing. The uncovering of what is common and the building of a force.”1 It is also the case that something has changed and is changing in the nature of tactics of political resistance. With the fading away of the so-called anti-globalization movement, groups like the Invisible Committee offer a consistency of thought and action that possesses great diagnostic power and tactical awareness. They provide a new and compelling vocabulary of insurrectionary politics that has both described and unleashed a series of political actions in numerous locations, some closer to home, some further away. The latter is performed by what the Invisible Committee call—in an interesting choice of word—“resonance.”2 A

1 See Call, http://bloom0101.org/call.pdf, p.57. Call was an earlier text by The Invisible Committee circulated anonymously in 2004.

2 In Politics is not a Banana (The Institute for Experimental Freedom, 2009), p.156 & 162.

1 See “A Point of Clarification,” a statement from January 2009 that appears at the beginning of the American edition of The Coming Insurrection, op.cit. pp.5-19, see esp. p.16.

2 Ibid, p.12.

an understanding of the relation between law and life and the possibility of a nonrelation between those two terms. If law is essentially violence, which in the age of bio-politics taps deeper and deeper into the reservoir of life, then the separation of law and life is the space of what Agamben calls politics. It is what leads to his anomic misreading of Paul.

The authorship of L’insurrection is attributed to La Comité Invisible and the insurrectional strategy of the group turns around the question of invisibility. It is a question of “learning how to become imperceptible,” of regaining “the taste for anonymity” and not exposing and losing oneself in the order of visibility, which is always controlled by the police and the state. The authors of L’insurrection argue for the proliferation of zones of opacity, anonymous spaces where communes might be formed. The book ends with the slogan, “All power to the communes” (“Tout le pouvoir aux communes”). In a nod to Maurice Blanchot, these communes are described as “inoperative” or “désœuvrée,” as refusing the capitalist tyranny of work. In a related text simply entitled Call, they seek to establish, A series of foci of desertion, of secession poles, of rallying points. For the runaways. For those who leave.

A set of places to take shelter from the control of a civilization that is headed for the abyss.1

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resonating body in one location—like glasses on a table—begins to make another body shake, and suddenly the whole floor is covered with glass. Politics is perhaps no longer, as it was in the so-called anti-globalization movement, a struggle for and with visibility. Resistance is about the cultivation of invisibility, opacity, anonymity, and resonance.

I have my doubts about the politics of abstraction that haunts groups like the Invisible Committee. But if we reject such political experiments, then what follows from this? Are we to conclude that the utopian impulse in political thinking is simply the residue of a dangerous political theology that we are much better off without? Is the upshot of the critique of utopianism that we should be resigned in the face of the world’s violent inequality and update a belief in original sin with a reassuringly miserabilistic Darwinism? Should we reconcile ourselves to the options of political realism, authoritarianism, or liberalism (John Gray, Carl Schmitt, or Barack Obama)? Should we simply renounce the utopian impulse in our personal and political thinking?

If so, then the consequence is clear: we are stuck with the way things are, or possibly with something even worse than the way things are. To abandon the utopian impulse in thinking and acting is to imprison ourselves within the world as it is and to give up once and for all the prospect that another world is possible, however small, fleeting and compromised such a world might be. In the political circumstances that presently surround us in the West, to abandon the utopian impulse in political thinking is to resign ourselves to liberal democracy. Liberal democracy is the rule of the rule, the reign of law that renders impotent anything that would break with law: the miraculous, the moment of the event, the break with the situation in the name of the common. It is a political deism governed by the hidden and divine hand of the market.

Other political forms of life are possible.

ideology—has become a form of passive nihilist, quasi-Buddhist self-help amnesia, a new jargon of authenticity and well-being. All we have to oppose it is an understanding of history, a clear-sightedness about the structural injustices present and a willingness to take action, a need to confront commitment-free bovine contentment with the urgency of anguished commitment, the anguish of a demand as that which prepares the possibility of action. Such action should not just dream of a non-relation of law and life, and a secession from an allegedly doomed civilization, but require that the relation between them be decisively rethought.

The world is shit, I agree; the problem is that it’s our excrement.

* Allow me a final word on the future. I’m against it. I think we have to resist the future, I mean resist the idea of the future, which is the ultimate ideological trump card of capitalist narratives of progress. I think we have to resist the future and the ideology of the future. But in the name of what? In the name of sheer potentiality of the radical past and the way that past can shape the creativity and imagination of the present. The future of radical, creative thought is its past, and radicalism has always driven a car whose driver is constantly looking in the rear view mirror.

Some objects may appear bigger, some smaller.

Capitalism is an evil that presents itself as inevitability, as a destiny to whom the future by necessity belongs. Capitalism—at the level of

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Arthur, 3’ x 10’ (2010) Dana Kase Hand-knotted Oriental Rug Watercolor on 16mm film leader, 3’ by 10’ rug (disintegrated by hand) Knots were individually pulled from a hand-knotted Oriental rug, recorded with watercolor on clear 16mm film leader in the order in which they appeared in the original rug, and collected into a pile.

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Inscription

Dan  Chiasson

The poem of the mind john Koethe

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Monty in “A Stinky Dead Skinned Cat in a Bag” Comix Kayla Escobedo Ink on paper 11 x 17” Winter 2010

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a Man Dispatched Jessica sequeira

Even the contemplative life is only an effort, Nora my dear, to hide the body so the feet won’t stick out.

— Djuna Barnes, “Nightwood” “The wax imprinted with the seal,” said I, “can never change the figure; so my brain Now bears its stamp from you.”

— Dante, “Purgatorio,” Canto 33, Lines 79-81

The Start of What Might be Called a Crime Scene.

At the entrance to the promenade on Carter Road a man sat beside a pile of coconuts, holding a waist-high blade. It was, he’d recently discovered, quite useful for picking at a troublesome right toenail; this is the way he was employing it now, waiting until for Rs10 someone gave him the chance to display his executioner’s skills: guillotine the fruit, push in a bright straw, hand over the bowl brimming with its own milk. The umbrella sheltering his stand was the same dirty yellow and red as the sidewalk; the air bristled with heat. Waves lashed the shore. The rains would come soon.

Though Fr. Correa was usually an observant man, noting the coconutwallah and the umbrella and much more besides, today such perceptions had been pushed away: like water about a ship’s prow.

It was late, but he continued swiftly along the path running alongside the beach, skirting the black mud and rocks, the sea shaded like a snail’s belly and leaving the same oily traces. Swimmers, dozens, maybe hundreds, were ignoring the multiple posted warnings and playing in the waves. Wrappers with Hindi brand names littered the walk; couples, with a liberty their homes would not admit, sat kissing on benches with plaques: “In memory of the late—,” “God is great,” “Raja is great,” “Allah is great.” Water—ship—prow—perceptions gently splashing up and fading away: in a confused muddle all passed him by, the combo bhel puri and Friendly’s ice cream stand, the skin care advertisements every few yards, the old stone crosses built to ward off

bhoots, the men scrubbing laundry out on the rocks. In red painted capitals, the government sign on the wall: “Don’t throw poojas in the sea, even God wouldn’t approve.”

All because somewhere in the city, a man he did not know had been killed.

The fact was, he could not dispel the image of scissors from his mind. He knew they were common, a household item easy to obtain, as was rope; nor did death itself shock him—always a mundane, and sobering, deliverance into a form more pure. And yet: scissors. It was just because they were so concrete and everyday that their use on the flesh so disturbed him. After the policeman’s tale of Fr. Almeida— strangled with rope, his lips slit open, scissors sticking up from the open mouth—they were all he could think of: their holes for the hand, their one blade opening into two.

“Why should it bother me?” he asked himself. Then, with a bravado that he knew was false: “After all, I’ve seen death before.”

As a young priest he’d been sent to Madhya Pradesh for his missionary requirement. It had been ferociously cold, the children’s eyes peering out from unwashed faces, teenagers picking up with ease the western disdain for farm work but unwilling to toil at English (an ugly language; they slinked around instead doing good-for-nothing such-and-such, their mothers looking at him with accusing eyes). Pieces of cloth spread on the ground of the little hut were the only layer between him and the hard frozen earth. Many had passed away that winter, usually already in an

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advanced, greenish state of bloat by the time he arrived. There had not been medicine, nor would they have taken it had there been. But he was not thinking of humans. No: for some reason it had taken a cat falling into the village well to shake him—one of the mangy things that prowled about, feeding on the no doubt disease-ridden rats. The villagers, making their daily trek to the well, walking barefoot through the forest, had not reported it to him at once. For days the animal had lain rotting away, preventing access to the only water supply for miles, before thirst had won out and a reluctant cook knocked at his door.

No moonlight had lit the ground as Fr. Correa picked his way over the broken branches and muddy leaves of the jungle lying between him and the well. The cook accompanied with a lantern, neither electric light nor batteries being available. But because the darkness lacked the thinness any lamp could penetrate, the little yellow spot did little to illumine it. In the blackness even the voices of the jackals in the brush seemed to assume a sharper tone (as if cut from scissors, murmured a jagged corner of his mind). How did the villagers navigate these paths?

Eventually he came to the little clearing, where at the bottom of the black ring the cat’s body formed a fly-ridden island in the murk. “Take it away,” he’d ordered the cook, whose job every day was to break the necks of the chickens. The man refused, shrank back as if faced with a madman. He had not understood this reluctance to touch the corpse.

Eventually, another villager had whispered to him the reason; a lowclass dalit was dispatched to remove it.

“At the same time, why shouldn’t it bother me?” he asked himself suddenly, and immediately this seemed the more sensible question.

With relief he remembered that he’d promised to see only one person that day, and that was Risha. Risha lived on the western side of Bandra’s two sections; the board at ground level listed the surnames of the building residents. Nearly all Portuguese, but overlaid by a curiously overemphasized English, the Marathi tongue twisting together something strange of its own. Ferreira lost the soft swish of its abdominal “ay,” assumed a hard “air”; “Gracias” metamorphosed into “gracious” (the diocese archbishop’s surname, thrilling punning church bulletin contributors), “Rodrigues” became “Rodrigs,” spelt “Rodricks” for convenience.

Ascending four flights he reached at last the gleaming marble tiles and sparkling window panes of Risha’s flat, viewed from without as she thrust the door open and ushered him in. Too clean, he thought immediately; the floor sparkled and the corner even boasted a new potted plant.

Catholics but the Hindu mentality: turn inwards, the outside can go to hell, what’s a little dirt so long as the inner domain remains pure. Even the humblest shack will be spick-span when the country goes to pieces.

Standing over the stove ten paces away Risha was peeling and chopping a stem of ginger. She dropped it into the boiling water, stirred

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in milk and a dash of sugar, poured the chai into a porcelain cup on a tray beside two biscuits. “What’s new with you?”

He told her, then, about that morning. The church had been empty when he’d entered; light had been filtering through the small glass louvers wedged between squares of precast concrete and fitted with imported polychromatic glass. In the shimmering air, winged insects flashed past. Sensible people were home, or sipping Pepsis at an indoor café, or whiling away the hours somewhere else with a fan. But there he was, dipping his hand into the cool water of the entrance font, slow hand moving: forehead, chest, left shoulder, right. Within him that familiar contentment was growing, objects impressing themselves through his half-closed eyes: the altar, the cross outlined in diamond lights, the rows of seats, the red hymnals specially bound and embossed. Comfort and silence drew him close to the state in which he’d left seminary years before.

To think even then that the light flooding in through the low windows on both sides was taking on a certain softness, molding itself into its opposite.

He shielded his eyes and squinted: a man, yes, a policeman to gauge from the uniform. Passing the first pew, the third, the seventh. Stopping.

“He came to me, asking for help understanding the mind of the killer. He’d left a note, you see, claiming to understand the mind of God. So they think I can help understand the mind of the murderer. They asked me for help, Risha. Of course I said yes.”

One must watch one’s feet when walking in public places: no knowing what one might step on. Yet only when he felt developing a slight limp in one leg, followed soon by a flapping in the other, did he pinpoint the problem: his sandals were disintegrating. With three fingers he peeled off the bottom layers completely, tossing them into a Bandra Residents Association bin. With only a thin layer of plastic separating his feet from the pavement, each step he took made a complete impression: and this sensation provoked in him a delicious sense of total freedom.

Making the Rounds.

In Bandra, Mumbai—“Queen of the Suburbs”—residents pride themselves on their constant spirit. “Take a look at us!” they say. “Never quiet, even at four am. Between Chitrapatee Shivaji and the Railway, weddings drum down the streets, gangsters move foreign liquor and lakhs, crores of gold. See the high schoolers congregating in hashish bars, the shiny black clips of the girls in gymkhana. Browse western wear, floor five Shoppers Stop; visit Hill Road, the stalls in the street. Wade through puddles to bargain down handbags, lumpy bras massed on tables, salwars tailored by hand. Because you have to keep upbeat here, it’s all in the temperament. In the west you might cultivate melancholy but here

aloneness and silence are unknown. If you’re born into it rickshaws, motorbikes, the constant buzz of people become what silence really means: we’re tucked into our community like silver foil desserts in a sweet box, Yes, we admit it, just wander a little and they’re squatting over chapattis, even on the main street there’s stink and the odd cow. But there isn’t true loneliness, there isn’t Western despair. We have faith. We have community. And it’s that which gives us hope.”

the rosary itself had become an extension of his mind, so that even touching a bead evoked thousands of Hail Mary’s, and each Hail Mary took on physical weight. Midway through, without his noticing, the rosary fell into a heap between his thin legs, but in a way suggesting somehow not impotence but strength. Fr. Correa felt a sudden and inexplicable exhaustion. He declined a second cup of tea and promised to stop by were he ever in the neighborhood again.

At the station Inspector Anand’s hand grasped his shoulder, guided him toward his office—“Coffee?”—spun creamer to him across the slightly sticky table. Spooning Nescafé into a mug during the trivialities that followed—it’s always best when it’s piping hot, isn’t it, take some biscuit, bengal gram is there—he’d begun to think this was someone he could trust. Together they’d considered the investigation. For now, to make progress, his attention would center on the priest. Since it was impossible to think of a person in isolation—or in any case foolish, given a murder requires two parties—the best course would be to speak with those the priest had known. Only after would he visit the site of the death. From Navrijan Bookstore he purchased a tape recorder and notebook from the counter assistant with the mullah’s cap; on Tuesday, Inspector Anand drove up in an old green Fiat and waved from across the street. Opening the car door, Fr. Correa got in.

The first visit was to the house of an elderly couple. The entrance hall was under an inch of water when he knocked; Laetitia Domingues was cleaning when he found her (she must have opened the door but no one was there when he entered) flying from room to room, covering the beds, the cabinet, the table with pink plastic sheeting before the next rains. Cracks spidered the walls; half the ceiling lay on the floor in flakes.

“Come in, come in,” she cried. “I’ll be just a moment,” and the same invisible presence slid a chair beneath him, a cup of tea in his hand. Her husband Ivan sat quietly before the television in a pair of boxers.

For an hour they remained on the cushions in the sitting room, discussing Fr. Almeida. A good man, insisted Ivan fiercely. Fr. Almeida’s treatments had offered him relief from pain; a cyst plaguing him for years had been cured when Almeida had placed one cool finger upon it. Ivan had written a letter to the Examiner decrying the “total lack of action and self-serving complacency” of the local police force, which had been published; he stood now to remove it from a dresser drawer and show Fr. Correa, who was struck by its simple, vigorous style. Despite their anti-police sentiments neither of the Domingueses were surprised he had been sent their way. They were known for being devout.

His questions finished, Laetitia rose. “Every day,” she said, pulling open a drawer and passing her husband a set of wooden beads: a plastic version was already in her hand. “This is our strength.” Ivan began, mumbling at rapid-pace, but with complete conviction—over the years

Along the road to the Kerala campus children wove between cars, selling all kinds of things: toy boats, clear plastic umbrellas, collections of stories by Kushwant Singh. On the way they passed a line of hutments, crammed within a tiny interval. The government had cleverly paid gardeners to cultivate a nursery along the road and bored attendants to care for them at all hours, so that there would be no space for shacks; instead there stretched sweeping lines of yellow, emerald, incarnadine flowers blossoming from lines of pots. The stalks of some were tilted in the direction of the hutments. Come, they seemed to say: be small, make yourselves invisible, burrow down into our warm and welcoming soil. It is warm, we get lots of clean water, there are friendly spiders and mites for company, no one will disturb you here. The campus was built in the middle of a marsh and so unlike in the rest of the city, big leafy green plants were everywhere, with puddles of water overflowing into the cement sidewalk.

Professor Peranha had an office in Rangade Bhavan, where a cluster of students was standing outside. Fr. Correa seated himself on a bench in the corridor and prepared to settle in. He had to wait less than ten minutes; the knot of people unraveled surprisingly quickly into the queue hidden within it. Soon enough the authors of the penultimate (on Abused Women) and final (on Domestic Help) theses had been sent away with instructions for further fieldwork, or statistical analysis, so their work could stand along the wall alongside the hundreds of other projects the professor had supervised. If one was familiar enough with the field the patterns of intellectual currents could be discerned, encoded within the colons and capitalizations, the preoccupations of the past mixing headily with current research.

Fr. Correa had known the professor for years; their relationship was marked above all by mutual respect, grounded in mutual silence. If the professor considered religion a relatively harmless tool required to placate the population, he said nothing. And if Fr. Correa saw God in the professor’s work—one always left his office with a letter or book, the slim kind you accept out of mere politeness but later find contains the key to your entire work—this reverence was saved for other ears. The two shared a deep love of bridge, forming a team on the occasion they found a pair: that was enough.

Which was why Professor Paranha’s involvement with Almeida, the

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visits that according to Inspector Anand he made twice weekly, were so surprising. He had never mentioned them; it gave this meeting the nature of a confrontation, for which Fr. Correa had no desire. At the same time, his friend’s behavior was curious: subtle, to a degree an outsider might call dissembling, if he had never seen Professor Paranha’s open honest face before. It was a face Fr. Correa knew well, having had ample opportunity to watch it as the professor slid across a five of diamonds with perfect equanimity, bidding an artificial 3NT; it could mask certain complexities, even the lack of a minor suite contract.

What transpired in that office? Though Professor Paranha preferred his privacy, one sentence hinted at what he’d been looking for with Almeida: “The idea began to obsess me: to construct a single, beautiful book that gave a glimpse of divine radiance. At rare moments I could even feel myself approaching the tender phrase, the geometric structure, which would recreate the world in its beauty. A sentence can be stroked to make it purr, sucked like a boiled sweet, scoured until the rust is removed and it sits there burnished as a new kettle…”

Driving back, half the hutments standing on the way in were gone, demolished by governmental order in a flash raid by police with night sticks. Only the oldest ones, there since 1984 and therefore with legal permits though indistinguishable from the rest, were spared. Tapping batons against their legs showily, a few police still kept watch. Two women were already stacking up the wood planks and sheets of scrap metal into neat piles, so that as soon as the police departed with a siren squall they could set up once more.

Onward they went to the Bombay High Court second appeals room, papers soft and crumpled, bound in twine, stacked to the ceilings, softening away through the waterlogged air into nothing… hands clicked over typewriters perched atop the stacks. In that meaningless, breathing building, every door opened like an entrance to a self-contained absurdity. A judge expounding far longer than was needed, lawyers sounding off like television announcers, a bailiff taking notes in a baseball cap—an affront, no two ways about it!—five levels of verandas overlooking the massive central courtyard. You could wander up and down the floors; no one seemed to care. People in tight red caps and costumes in white with embroidered beads on the chest, Sikhs wearing their best turbans, judges smelling of sweat as they whirled by in black robes, individuals and families waiting on benches and rows of chairs or quietly, quietly sobbing…

The clerk on their list was out. No, no one knew when he would return.

They exited and continued on their way…

Inspector Anand, in the car beside him: “Do you want to know why I became a police officer?”

The inside of a Fiat is not very large; the two had been spending

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nearly every day with one another for a week; the car was stalled in traffic. Everything demanded an exchange of confidences.

“The building where I grew up was down the street from this fence,” the inspector said, keeping one light hand on the wheel. “An unmarked gate, just across from a giant billboard advertisement for Gold Flake honeydew tobacco. As kids we had all sorts of tales about it, though mostly we accepted what our parents told us: that it was where the gods lived and devoured the sweets we gave them as offerings. One day I discovered a small hole in the fence, behind a red electrical box reading ‘Stick No Bills.’ I was small for my age; immediately I grew curious. By inserting one leg, ducking my head under, twisting my head sideways and wriggling the second leg over I was able to pass through this hole, something impossible only one year later. To my great disappointment I came up against only a much larger, thicker second fence. Pressed into the almost nonexistent space between the first wall and the second— turning anything, even my head, sideways was impossible—for a minute I descended into a cold panic. My body shook in its entirety. Then, an immense calm overcame me. The external situation would remain the same whether I was nervous or not; this thought gave me the courage to sidle right a few steps. And that’s when I saw it, a tiny chink precisely at eye level. A sign. Mehboob Studios. I saw it all, the stars going in and out, not in saris and thick makeup like in the magazines but in T-shirts and jeans. When I saw Raj Kapoor, my heart almost gave out. This was the hero of my youth: when I was younger I’d pasted up magazine pictures of him in my room at home… This was where I crouched, day after day, not longer than twenty minutes at a stretch because my mother expected me, but long enough. When I passed the building on the way back from school I would run my hands over the gate. It was something special, something only I knew about.”

He paused. Fr. Correa tilted his head and waited.

“You are expecting this to be a story of how my boyhood illusions were destroyed,” the inspector said, looking at him uncannily.

“You will be disappointed,” he continued, maintaining his stare.

Fr. Correa exhaled; Anand’s mouth continued to move. “Strange things went on there. They had costumes, would try on British imperial clothes, Portuguese… Later I discovered young stars were entertained, females, given the chance to prove themselves. But none of it matters now.” His eyes were far away. Fr. Correa clutched the door handle as they narrowly escaped colliding with a motorbike careening in the opposite direction. “In the merciless and unsubtle heat of this city, the idea that there are hundreds or thousands of such nooks enthralled me. And if you’re not a criminal, the only chance to see them is if you go into my line.”

The oldest man in Pali Hill lived in one of the Portuguese colonial bungalows, the ones open at both ends so the summer breeze could

travel the length of the house and ripple the curtains. He had lived there his whole life. On the table before the delicately fret-worked verandah, pink roses stemmed upwards from a narrow-necked gold vase; light flowed in through the honey-combed windows. A framed photo showed a handsome young man smiling before the station tracks: later, at the pinnacle of his 36-year career as an Indian railways officer, he would become senior store officer of purchase.

He spoke slowly and very softly. Fr. Correa, afraid his tape recorder would not pick up the voice, took down the words in his Navrijan store notebook, above the clean blue lines:

Years ago, when Fr. Almeida was posted at Dahisar, he approached me at Andheri platform No.3. He wanted to know the time. I told him, half-three. He casually mentioned he was awaiting a Virar bound fast train for Dahisar. You’re not in the right place then, I said.

Platform 3 is a dedicated platform for UP Churchgate bound trains only. Virar trains arrive on Platform 4. I am not aware of the railway system, he replied. I know only that the train I am awaiting will come on this platform. Five minutes later the scheduled Virar bound train arrived on Platform 3. I thought my eyes were deceiving me. I could not comprehend the absence of a crash. The next Sunday I visited him for the first time.

Brief Forays into Other Modes of Being.

Risha took lunch on the upper level of the Coffee & Tea Leaf overlooking Linking Road. The music of ancient classical instruments entranced her with its swirling tenderness: out past the scarlet and ivorystriped awning her eye swept over the cars and rickshaws below. The motorbikes with women in full hijab clutching stern-looking husbands, the roofs made of overlapping sheets of corrugated metal, the gas station and advertisement for Whyte & Mackay scotch: “Scotland’s Favorite.” Palm trees framed the scene; raindrops made little crowns where they splashed on the awning. A layer of glass separated her from it all. The minute the doorman showed her out in a blast of air-conditioning India would be there once again, its muddy gravel and fruit stalls with rows of chemically ripened fruit thrusting themselves into her field of consciousness.

Once her brother had taken her to visit the Sisters of Mother Theresa ashram. The first floor ladies were merely poor, or “psychological”; the third floor were unwed mothers, long hair hanging over round bellies. Wandering down the stairs a level to the second floor, though, she saw them: the women lying on beds with limbs splayed, eyeballs grotesquely turned and hugely larger than warranted, heads looming

massive atop desiccated bodies. “We turn them over every hour so they don’t get bed sores,” the nun on duty had said.

So that’s how life was, then—like a giant omelet! Weren’t we all getting bed sores? Well? Who was turning things over for us?

Incidentally, the worst had been yet to come. The nun told her in excruciating detail how the ladies entered the ashram with maggots swarming beneath their skin, which had, obviously, to be removed.

This was done first by “smoking them out”: dousing the skin with a combination of turpentine and naphthalene. After a few seconds the waving black heads would emerge; that was the moment when you’d dive in with a pair of forceps and pull them out as quickly as possible, smashing them into a ready-to-hand tissue. Of course the ladies cried— not with pain, but with relief.

The waiter brought out her pasta; it swam in a cream sauce, topped with a light sprinkling of parmesan, pepper, and basil. This, she thought, was the kind of food you couldn’t get on the street. Yet now, it nauseated her.

Why were these thoughts going through her mind now, of all times? For she wasn’t alone. There was an incidental boy sitting across from her, worrying over his napkin and the impending gloom of the check. She did not count it among her more successful dates.

But where was her brother now?

Crows had been crowding in improbable bunches on the balcony of the apartment complex opposite his bedroom window in S.V.D. Provincial when he’d woken that day, feeling reasonably fresh. If he’d been a bit closer he would have been able to see the rich glossy black of their foreheads, crowns, throats, and upper breasts, or the beautiful lighter gray-brown ringing their necks like a collar. But he did not like crows: their enormous curved beaks frightened him, as did their habit of eating anything at all to stay alive (on the neighbor’s balcony was a large, reeking bag of trash).

In any case, he was too preoccupied now to think of the creatures.

Walking to the kitchen, he flipped the switch: tiny wings and legs scurried away in frantic spiral motions as they always did when light came on so suddenly after the dark. How different are our minds? he wondered— diverting himself by looking at the vegetable leftovers, the last slice of cake in the fridge. Removing a plate from the stack, he thrust a blade under a thin stream of running water—it flashed when he turned the handle, nestling it into the heart of a pear.

His research had taken him through the whole of the city; over the course of the past few months he had collected hundreds of testimonies. People who had seen Fr. Bombacha, people who had attended his masses, people who had only heard of him but wished to speak of him regardless. The number of these people was outweighed, of course, by the number who looked at him in sheer confusion—or sheer contempt—

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when he revealed to them the purpose of his visit. In fact, part of the reason he worked so tirelessly was that in some part of himself he realized his approach was wrong; the feeling had begun to creep over him of a man who darkly senses he has missed a crucial turn but keeps walking, hoping in vain it will be the one just ahead.

The investigation was not coming along. It was no longer even, strictly speaking, a search for Almeida’s killer. Fr. Correa could not pinpoint the exact date the form had begun to diverge: he could look it up in his notes, he supposed, but this would not change the substance of the matter. If he found it increasingly difficult to add notes to the paper, it was because the investigation itself was offering up resistance, gradually transforming into a form unable to accept the addition of dry fact. Even Fr. Correa himself had not fully realized the extent to which this was occurring—though at times, like a luminous halo behind his consciousness, he sensed a corona of truth his mind would not acknowledge.

Increasingly he was convinced the murderer’s identity was not something he could know directly. One could only edge round it, draw out a chalk circle and walk on it, then at specific tender moments, nodes of sensitivity, pick up and carefully set down one’s load. If he tried to name a suspect before the time was formed his choice would escape, become ludicrous; he would be left with nothing. If he waited, perhaps the parts would fall into place: perhaps he would at last comprehend everything.

Attempts with other strategies had met with mixed success. The day before he had taken out from the library The Secret Doctrine, with its commentary on the ancient Tibetan Book of Dyzan. He read of the body as a fluid and unbroken consciousness, of paramnesia as the state of consumption by a single soft flame. With careful practice, by the fifth day he was able to experience a hint of something: a love invisible, colorless, beyond substance or proof: quinine, or asphodels in water.

He carefully managed his feelings of disgust throughout; this was not his religion, that much he knew.

Once it may even have worked. They’d been passing one of the dozens of government retail creameries, where the percentage of “milk” never exceeded half, and was diluted still further by shop owners with powder. Women sat on the road with vegetables spread out on blankets.

The gleam of a shiny, pale pink oblong caught his eye as a man at one of the fruit stands stacked tomatoes with hands cleansed by spit. Did the rains that continually washed over them—water from sewage-filled puddles condensing in clouds—purify or simply soil the land further? At that moment he could feel his body becoming an expanse of connected parts flowing out into the vast expanse of sky, moving simultaneously inward toward a source behind his thoughts and gestures. In the rainsoaked light, the nose of the Fiat parted the waters as a rickshaw’s wild star careened by in a haze of exhaust.

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The Approach to X. The morning train departed at eight; he was at the station ten minutes in advance, wearing his usual striped long-sleeve shirt, brown pants rolled at the bottoms, pair of old chappels.

A hand passed across the counter to give the man beside him a samosa wrapped in a torn bit of newspaper: a cryptic. Fr. Correa watched two tiny birds hopping about on the platform; beside him, a pair of slim girls purchased loaves of sliced white bread for the journey. Three-rupee tea and pista milk were being hawked from the stalls.

At last the train, thirty minutes behind schedule, fitted with a single pipe graduated release airbrake, hissed into the station. He stepped across the square tiles, which grew larger as they spanned the platform; unlike the local trains where one had to kick and claw onboard and pickpockets cut the straps of handbags in the ladies’ compartment, a relative quiet reigned. He pushed his way up the stairs and found his berth. The train was moving now, gathering speed, though not enough to work up a wind or dispel the stink of the other passengers. He wished now he’d sprung for an A/C car; well it’s always easy to hope in retrospect things could be different, that’s the way the game of history works. Something jolted, the track took a curve, and now the Bandra station was disappearing from sight, sucked into an already distant past. Fr. Correa did not watch it recede; instead he faced forward, standing: the only way to look if you’re searching for answers.

Twelve hours. The top of the seat to which he was clinging cut into his hand. But he no longer felt sick or afraid, for everything was clear. To truly understand, he would need to go not to Almeida’s church but further away, to Goa. His investigation had been flawed from the start. He’d been asked to get inside the head of the murderer claiming to understand the mind of God; instead, he had only been learning about the priest. At the most fundamental level, this did not make sense: it was impossible to have a God without using him—molding him in order to fit one’s own personality and circumstances. One could not understand the killer’s motives by asking others about him; whatever the killer thought was his own thought, in all its imperfection.

But after all—now he really was feeling feverish—wasn’t even the killer just another middle term? Why couldn’t you get rid of him too?

God, and the imprint of the crime, with nothing in between. Perfect imprints were sent through imperfect mediums, and imperfect imprints through perfect ones—the thing to do wasn’t to study the mediums, but to collect the imprints themselves, to find the perfect traces left behind and reassemble them upward into something like understanding. In searching for the priest’s murderer, in following the imprints he’d left, he’d only begun seeing larger imprints: of Portugal in India, of God on earth, of things he could not himself verbalize.

As night fell the cries of the food vendors and chaiwallahs moving up and down the narrow carriages—“Chai-chai,” “Panipuri-panipuri’— grew less and less frequent, at last ceasing altogether. The light murmur of another family reached Fr. Correa from behind a curtain across the aisle. It didn’t bother him; he slept peacefully, waking only once when another train passed. A scorched orange light burned on the right behind the curtain; on the left the wall sloped gently away. Looking briefly at the window he could see only his reflection: nothing showed when he relaxed his eyes into the blackness beyond. Again, he fell asleep.

The ashram was located in Raia, in Salsette, the southern part of the state. Fifteen hours later he was there, his driver maneuvering the car down dirt roads, a stretch of rubber trees rising up on the right: the ashram owned the plantation.

Soon they entered a kind of courtyard, bounded by buildings on three sides. To the left was a dairy farm, where cows lowed in their stalls; straight before him was the distillery used to make cashew fenny, the ashram’s primary source of income. It gave onto a room in which two young men were beating rubber into sheets, hanging it in a smaller chamber to dry before they sold it. On the rightmost building upon entering the courtyard, a giant portrait of Peter Verhaelen, the first missionary to settle there, was mounted on the wall.

Fr. Matthew was inside the main building overseeing repavement of the tiles. A saw ground at the air, making an enormous noise.

“Careful!” he scolded a boy who whipped round the corner too quickly with a load of beams in hand. “Ah, you’re here,” he said, ushering Fr. Correa into a room off the main foyer: less dusty, if not less loud.

A television hanging from the ceiling flashed out news of corruption scandals. In the kitchen Fr. Matthew ghosted his hand over the bottles of rum and whisky in the cabinet, let it settle on two bottles of Kingfisher lager; cracking the tops he waited for the foam to settle before bringing them out on a plastic tray. Fr. Correa was glancing in the direction of their Konkani quarterly Sobdacho Ulo (Call of the Word), lying splayed like a tired dog on the table, when he came in.

“You see the troubles we have,” sighed Fr. Matthew.

“Yes?” “Birthrate in the regions has declined further. Fewer children, fewer sent to become priests. Already only nine enrolled this year.”

“It’s getting so expensive to raise children…”

“We know that some of the families send them only so they can learn English, and will withdraw them before they take the vows. It’s so hard to tell with the boys though. They’re all so polite and usually have no idea of the situation themselves.”

“Difficult, yes.”

“And then there are the materialist values of the west.”

Fr. Matthew sipped his beer and looked intently. He had become aware of an essential fog in the responses of the man before him, who was absorbing only the tone of his words, impressions good or bad, rather than the concrete facts demanding action.

Fr. Correa picked up a lime from the bowl of fruit on the table, absently spun it in one hand. “I apologize for being so distracted,” he said. “It’s been a tiring journey.”

“Of course.” Fr. Matthew stood. “Here, I’ll open a room for you; take some rest and in the morning go see the countryside. It’s raining but it will be cool out; the asan trees are beautiful this time of year. In the evening we’ll talk.”

Gently he led Fr. Correa to the building adjacent and showed him the second door. He was the only visitor at the moment: he had the building to himself, it would be quiet.

Everything was just like the house back home, comfortingly so.

The two small hard beds lying side-by-side separated slightly like quarreling lovers, the curtains with a pale floral print stirring faintly, the small plastic bucket with its handle hung over the larger one in the bathroom for washing, the mosquito lamp resting in its plug in the wall outlet. On the wall above him ants moved in jagged lines through the dust.

As promised, it was quiet. He was woken only once, by two loud knocks at the door. The power had gone out. It was only Fr. Matthew, alone in the dark hallway, with the stub of a candle and a full box of matches.

In Old Goa it had been raining, so it was cool outside; when the sun came out the whole place looked bright and clean. How much quieter this is than the city, he thought. He inspected the ornate gilt decorations in the churches, went inside the Basilica of Bom Jesus, but St. Xavier’s corpse was not out for viewing: would not be for another four years.

On the upper level of the Archaeological Museum was a gallery filled with portraits and biographies of Portuguese viceroys and generals.

What he liked best of all was the huge statue of Luis Vaz de Camoes rising up in the middle of the hall; everything else seemed small beside the author of the epic Lusiads. At the Museum of Christian Art he bought some stationery in light beige, bordered with dark blue leaf and animal designs; Risha would like it. Driving on at random he pulled into the lot of a small church in the area, where the sacristan let him look at old postcards written in neat cursive, and colorful Indo-Portuguese stamps printed on thick avergaodo paper with stripes all round the border.

On the way home he visited two beaches. It was pouring rain, so hard his umbrella inverted as he stood on the sidewalk to watch the waves. Even so, he could smell the sand, and tried to imagine what it would be like in the sun.

Though it was growing late he could not resist the novelty of a model tourist village on the way back, where an albino with a drinker’s

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nose tried to guide him through. He shook off the assistance. Two ladies materialized, selling tamarind toffees; they disappeared when he refused.

Walking by the various plants, he read the tiny labels with their strange names: coffee plum, custard apples; and facts: a decoction of cinnamon bark twice a day will reduce menstrual bleeding.

Removing his shoes and walking into a cave, a placard informed him that this was where one of the old gods presided. The plaster was peeling; the god’s face had a dyspeptic tinge. At the end of the far end was a set of stairs, which he descended with a hand on the rail; two brown dogs sat beside one another on a mound of trash. The vegetation was marshy, dissolving into jungle. The tips of the trees touched their heads to form a clearing.

He thought about what he’d seen that day. The site the locals called Orlem Gor, where the Palace of the Inquisition once had stood.

On the day of the ceremony, the prisoners filed out, dressed in all black, but for a yellow cloth scarf with red cross if condemned. The sound of the “Bell of the Inquisition” heralded the start; the prisoners proceeded to a bench in the gallery; the sermon was preached and proceedings against the prisoners read. A confession of the faith and absolution from excommunication was granted to those whose lives would be spared. Those sentenced to death were handed over to the secular authority; the next day they were burnt on the stake on the Campo de Sao Lazaro before the Viceroy.

Beyond where he stood a little dirt path snaked through to crest a small hill. He could not make out whether the path was manmade or natural. The light, which had before flowed around the trees, had now flattened and become gray—the sky for all the world like a giant roti.

On a tree a few yards off where the sunlight happened to hit it, a yellow leaf dangled and spun on its axis. It was like a tiny revolving door, or a gateway to infinity. Fr. Correa hesitated; then he went to it.

In 1542, when Francisco de Jaso y Azpilicueta was first sent from Lisbon, a dream came to him. Crossing a river, there was a native on his back, so heavy he could hardly carry him to the other side. Yet he did so, and continued to do so, night after night. It was a sign of the work waiting: the endless task of planting the cross in those far-off lands.

The journeys had been difficult. He’d crossed the banks of the Ravenna to reach a stand of pine cones, which he’d consumed to stave off hunger; no alms had been given him in two days. He’d slept in beds with wet or stained sheets offered as hospitality, climbing into them with gladness in his heart; he’d crawled naked into a cot full of hungry lice to compensate for his sins. Once he’d sucked the rotting finger of a leper in atonement for his revulsion. In Mozambique he’d gone about with a lantern in one hand and a bell in the other, proclaiming in the public squares.

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The sun is rising above the shore now. The prospect of the next few years makes him ill: flashes come to him of a great violence. It is always difficult to uproot the old superstitions, though one cannot condemn what is necessary. O Lord, give me hope, he prays, as the anchor goes down.

But the crack is contained, hidden, within the glass. As Fr. Correa makes his visits, he is preparing the way for his further passage. As Azpilicueta touches land to extend Portugal’s command, he is leading the way for his country’s effacement.

Untitled, 2000 Holger Niehaus Digital c-print 63 x 88 cm.

Edition of 10 (Courtesy Van Zoetendaal Gallery, Amsterdam / Tinderbox, Hamburg)

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Rain and mountains Henri Cole

Sargassum bacciferum, 1843-1853 Anna Atkins Cyanotype 70

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After the law

sophie duvernoy

Joseph P. wanders through the Salle des Pas Perdus—the room of lost steps. People pace back and forth; it is a place to wait. Train stations, government buildings, edifices of the law: all force those who enter to surrender themselves to their own irrelevance. You must abide, they command.

The gray zone of indeterminacy stretches out in front of P. Though he has done his share of waiting in life, he feels this entrance hall extend infinitely above and around him, a grand zone of lostness beyond his comprehension. The marble does not take heed of his footsteps; it refuses to bear any trace of his passage. Above, gray figures walk hurriedly down a corridor P. cannot reach, barely registering his presence. A constant murmuring reverberates round the hall, yet P. does not see anyone speaking. People keep a strange, wide distance between each other, silently glowering at the forests of Corinthian columns rising impassively to the sky.

P. has entered the Palais de Justice. His fate rises, suspended above him. He is before the law. * The Palais de Justice is a monolithic monstrosity at the center of Brussels. W. G. Sebald called it “the largest accumulation of stone blocks in Europe”; with a surface area of 26,000 square meters, it is larger than Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome. In fact, the Palais was the biggest monument built in the nineteenth century; today it is second in size only to Bucharest’s Palace of the Parliament in Europe. It occupies an overbuilt square that connects two main transportation arteries in the center of Brussels by means of a large, blue-lit traffic island, and hovers above the city in the midst of Brussels’ leaden sky: a sight impossible to escape from almost any perspective. Built on the Galgenberg, where convicted criminals were hanged in the Middle Ages, it looks down from the higher, wealthy area of the city onto the Marolles, the historically poor neighborhood of Brussels, an ominous reminder of Justice and the Upright Life.

Despite its grandeur, the Palais has been under renovation for the better part of twenty years. Its golden dome is permanently surrounded

by bleak gray scaffolding; shrubs shoot up through the roof. Though it has been the seat of the Supreme Court of Belgium for 130 years, its maintenance costs have become simply too much to bear for the government, which has decided to evacuate the building for the time being. Its future is up for debate: the city of Brussels is currently holding a competition to determine its use, with the winning proposal to be unveiled in 2011.

For now, the Palais de Justice confounds those who confront it, standing as an emptied monument, a hollowed symbol that refers to nothing except perhaps its own bizarre existence. One remembers, upon seeing it, that Brussels is a city prone not just to monumental spectacle, but also to eccentric and self-conscious myth-making. René Magritte and surrealist art both called Brussels home. The Palais, a supposedly rational temple to law, is an unlikely combination of the monumental and the mythical: entering it means surrendering yourself to the fact that you have entered a land where justice has ceded to myth, where ritual takes over from rational proceedings, and where bureaucracy has achieved hitherto unknown heights of refinement intended to eternally confound. * Joseph Poelaert, one of Belgium’s most famous fin de siècle architects—harboring a reputation for slight insanity—worked on the plans for the Palais ten years before the city even decided to build one.

When in 1860, an international competition to build Brussels’ new Palais de Justice was ordered by royal decree, Poelaert had already spent the better part of a decade hunched over his drawing board, sketching out a monumental map of his thoughts. It was to be his magnum opus, the eighth wonder of the world; the competition was the chance for his Palais, a symbol for greatness elaborately wrought in his mind, to be turned at last into a reality of massive stone.

The plans Poelaert submitted for his Palais to the municipal council in 1862 were as vague and uncertain as the myth of the building itself. The scale of the building was unclear from his designs, and the cost of its construction was a total mystery. Jules Anspach, the mayor of Brussels at the time, simply declared, “I want the expenditure to be the

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largest possible!” Anspach’s wish was fulfilled. The building, which had a projected budget of 4 million francs, ended up costing 50 million, completely emptying the coffers of Brussels and almost driving the city to ruin. Its construction would take an entire seventeen years to complete.

Poelaert never saw the end result: he died in 1879, four years before its completion. The building was inaugurated in 1883, the largest public governmental building of the century: boasting 24 large courtrooms, 236 smaller rooms for diverse uses—including prison cells to detain criminals waiting to be convicted—and a further realm of mysterious, shadowy rooms whose locations and uses were obscure from the beginning.

Though it was designed to command quiet, dignified respect, the Palais de Justice was overrun by a rioting mob on October 15, 1883, the day of its inauguration. In the government’s blind desire to create a monument that would testify to the power of Belgium, an entire section of the Marolles was razed to make space for the edifice. At that period, urban development in Brussels mainly focused on beautifying the richer areas of the city, while the poorer ones were left to stagnate. However, with this particular assertion of might, the government had gone too far for the people. An angry mass stormed the entrance hall, pushing over furniture, slitting the covers of leather seats with razors, breaking mirrors, tearing down tapestries and paintings, shitting and pissing in the corners to fully desecrate the building. It was pillaged, ravaged, and abandoned in disgrace. For the angry Marolliens, the Palais de Justice was a symbol of might, not justice. They cursed Poelaert as a skieven architek, or crooked architect: thus inventing one of the most creative— and condemnatory—Brusseleer insults in existence today.

Another brutal scene occurred in June 2009, when a man sitting in the audience of a court case pulled out a gun and fatally shot a magistrate and her clerk. Later, the apprehended perpetrator claimed to have acted out of vengeance “toward Justice in general, and the magistrate in particular,” despite the fact that he had nothing to do with the case that had just been deliberated. Violence and madness, part of the dark underbelly of Justice, suddenly revealed themselves in the marble halls that ordinarily served to deny their existence. * The Palais de Justice was built to create, not reflect, myths. It is a symbolist hodgepodge built in the Neoclassical style common to many European public monuments: a mysterious mix of Greek, Egyptian and Byzantine elements decorate each of the four distinctly-designed façades. Winged lions, Greek gods, and Masonic signs cover the halls, seemingly holding the elusive key to the law. The massive marble stairs that lead from the Salle des Pas Perdus to the upper gallery are flanked by statues of Greek and Roman senators, orators, and jurors.

Shadows fall on their faces and ripple over their stone togas—they stand as silent guardians to the symbols hidden in the shadows of porticoes, forgotten but for the odd scholarly text collecting dust in the public archives of the Brussels library.

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When the Palais was built during Leopold II’s reign, Belgium was a world power. The country was rich with the spoils of the Congo, and longed to prove this to the outside world. This edifice, dedicated to justice, was really a symbol of ill-gained wealth, a testament to imperialism and colonialism. More than that, it was intended to stand for the glory of the country: relatively new (it was founded in 1830), Belgium yearned for its own national myths which would create cultural memory and reflect a unified identity. As Belgium declined in importance again, hit hard by the Great Depression of the ’30s and the Second World War, the Palais became a world unto itself, dissociated from a larger social context.

Even taken on its own terms as a symbol of Poelaert’s madness, the Palais exceeds all attempts at comprehension. It is so easy, even inevitable, to become hopelessly lost in its vast system of lugubrious corridors. It is its own country; though it began as a map to Poelart’s own cavernous and convoluted mind, it slowly took on a grotesque life and topography of its own. Edmond Picard, a Belgian jurist and writer, said of his time working in the Palais, “For more than forty years, I have been traveling and living in the country of the law.” It is an enclosed system from which the traveler cannot escape, much in the same way that Kafka’s Joseph K. is trapped in the series of interminable corridors and constantly shifting rooms that populate his court. It comes as no surprise that Orson Welles initially planned on filming his adaptation of The Trial here: one can easily imagine a bird’s eye view of Joseph K., walking interminably around the sixteenpoint star embedded in the center of the marble floor in the Salle des Pas Perdus, helplessly waiting for his trial to begin.

In The Trial, Joseph K. is told a parable titled “Before the Law.” A man from the country journeys to find the Law, and tries to gain access through a doorway which will lead him directly to it. However, this door is guarded by a doorkeeper, who tells the man that he cannot go through at this time. The man waits, at first patiently, then with increasing impatience as his waiting stretches from days into years. He begs the doorkeeper incessantly to let him in; he tries first to reason with him, and then to bribe him, to no avail. The man grows old; his eyesight begins to fail; he waits for so long that he befriends the fleas that live on the collar of the doorkeeper’s uniform. Just before his death, it occurs to him that there is one question he has not asked the doorkeeper. “Everyone strives after the law,” says the man, “So how is that in these many years no one except me has requested entry?” As he dies, the doorkeeper bends over him, and shouts to the deaf old man: “Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you. Now I’m going to close it.”

Like this door to the Law, the Palais de Justice carries the promise of capturing an ever-receding opportunity for transcendence, knowledge, or even salvation. Entering it means accepting the myth of the Law, complete with its slow, Belgian bureaucratic mechanisms, shuffling paperwork, endless waits, interminable deliberations. Yet at the end of this, hidden in the catacombs of the basement, the vaults of the unreachable attic, the obscure carvings hidden in the shadows of

porticoes, lies a glimpse of what is secret, unrepresentable, unspoken: the true meaning of this massive symbol.

But first one must find it. People emerge from the Palais telling stories of endless corridors that make the visitor walk compulsively, passing the same halls over and over again despite never changing direction. Some speak of courtrooms filled with ghost-like figures glimpsed when walking past, who have vanished on the way back.

Disused wooden stairs branch off from main corridors, yet end abruptly in the air, hanging in a void, their ends blocked off by a dusty stockpile of bureaus, chairs, and filing cabinets. Gaping marble halls are scattered throughout the building, hushed like disused ballrooms at night. Other stories tell of people who set up shop in forgotten, crumbling rooms in the basement: a tobacconist’s, bookie’s, a barber shop, and a bar may all have flourished in its subterranean regions for brief periods, inexplicably vanishing overnight. The Palais also carries legends of more mystical architectural properties. In his haunting description of a visit, Sebald writes, “Austerlitz went on to tell me that he himself, looking for a labyrinth used in the initiation ceremonies of the Freemasons, which he had heard was either in the basement or the attic story of the palace, had wandered for hours through this mountain range of stone, through forests of columns, past colossal statues, upstairs and downstairs, and no one ever asked him what he wanted.” People still search for this labyrinth; the promise of secret, subversive knowledge in a palace of justice is almost impossible to resist, even if one must risk eternal lostness. * According to Georg Simmel, all buildings contain the potential of their own ruin. The Palais de Justice may not yet be physically rundown, but with every further hollowing out of its symbolic potential, it has been inwardly collapsing since its construction. Walter Benjamin remarks that with Kafka, “there is no longer any talk of wisdom. Only the products of its decomposition are left.” One could extend the sentiment to the Palais de Justice itself.

Soon the Palais will be completely transformed. Suggestions for its future include turning it into a monumental art museum or luxury shopping-mall. A more outlandish proposal put forward by Franco Dragone, director for the Cirque du Soleil, involves turning the building into a giant souk and transforming it into a microcosm of the entire city of Brussels: a hectic, nonsensical crossroads of culture.

Most people, however, are still attached to the Palais as an edifice of the Law, the symbol of a particularly Belgian, surrealist bureaucracy that continually propagates its own mystique. To rob its halls of their impenetrability, bringing it into light and time again, would be the greatest injustice of all.

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your horoscope Laura Kasischke

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plans

laura  kasischke Â

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A Moment of Mishearing Amit Chaudhuri

The following is the text and approximate blueprint for a programme involving words, sound, and music that was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 13 November 2010.

[Birdcall; the sound of sparrows, extract from “Freewheeling Jog” is introduced then begins to fade out.] Sometime in the nineteenth century, the Tagore family, located in the spacious mansion Nilmoni Tagore had built in Jorasanko in North Calcutta, acquired a piano. The reason for this isn’t clear, except that a certain curiosity and openness, a widening cosmopolitanism and a restless upward mobility marked—as it did many Bengali families of the time—the Tagores. [Opening bars of Dvorak’s Humoresque are played.] The arrival of the piano must have comprised a moment of excitement and possibility. One of Rabindranath’s older brothers—by Rabindranath I mean the poet we generically know as “Tagore”—was the gifted and (no other adjective but this well-worn one comes to mind) flamboyant Jyotirindranath. It was Jyotirindranath who began to compose songs on the piano in the 1870s, and was admired and then emulated by his star-struck younger brother. In what way Jyotirindranath learnt the piano—there would have been no shortage of teachers—or if he ever did is obscure; the songs were mainly a new type of devotional addressed to the nameless, transcendent divinity of the recent reformist church within Hinduism that the pianist’s father had helped found. The sound of the piano must have facilitated this new mood, this shift from the Radha and Krishna of the old devotionals to the high-minded unitarianism that now hung over this world. [The sound of the tanpura, the drone, overlays the last two sentences.]

But clearly Jyotirindranath was also at play on the instrument, using it to explore all kinds of transitions and departures—as his younger brother would famously do later, incorporating in his songs a profusion of borrowed material, from the Indian dhrupad to the outline of ragas, from Bengali devotionals to folk tunes and Irish drinking songs. Well before the poet Tagore accomplished his oeuvre in music, Jyotirindranath was producing strange hybrids. [A section from Keith Jarrett’s Koln Concert, part 1, where he is shouting while playing, is introduced.] None of these are known today, because they seem to have been performed primarily for a private audience—performed and then (probably with the various

unhappinesses accruing to his life, including his young wife’s suicide) over time forgotten. But, given his involvement with theatre (a cause also for domestic trouble), some of this experimentation reached the public ear. His nephew Abanindranath remarks in his memoir that a Bengali production of Othello contained, as part of Desdemona’s “Willow Song,” a musical variation called “Italian Jhinjit.” [Women’s voices in the background, speaking in Bengali.] Italian Jhinjit! Talk about strange bedfellows. “Jhinjit” is colloquial for Jhinjoti, a raga of exceptional sweetness; how did it become Italian?

I first heard of Italian Jhinjit at a dinner party from a professor of theatre and expert on Tagore in Calcutta, who was also, incidentally, a jazz buff. [Sound of a door closing; footsteps; voices. Indian classical music: raga Jhinjhoti] This was late 2004; I told him I’d begun work on a project in music—it was going to bring together disparate and, sometimes, apparently incongruous elements: a raga, a rock riff from a well-known song, a jazz standard. “One of the pieces in the repertoire is called Spanish Bhairav,” I said, “for the way Bhairav echoes certain Spanish melodies. Another moves from raga Todi to Clapton’s ‘Layla.’”

He listened without bemusement. “You’re going back to Jyotirindranath’s experiment. To when he sat at the piano in Jorasanko. ‘Italian Jhinjit.’”

That was first occasion on which I heard that puzzling name. [Door closing; footsteps. Extract from Koln concert.]

I mention these details not only to construct a lineage, or to unearth an unsuspected convergence—because the music I’m interested in is all about convergence—but to invoke the household, and the nature of life at home, integral to my project. I don’t know what growing up in the 1860s was like for Tagore, although, in his memoirs, he suggests he was surrounded by sound and image. [The ticking of a clock; alarm goes off.] By the early twentieth century, when he’s recounting that childhood, “the ghosts,” he remarks, “are gone.”

My story begins not with childhood, but with moving to Calcutta in 1999, after roughly sixteen years in England. Working and writing at home, my wife near me, she not having resumed work herself because our daughter was nine months old, my aging parents—whose only child I am—always nearby, the perennial hired help moving in and out of the apartment, I was constantly encircled and encroached upon

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by movement. [Women’s voices. Short extract from Koln concert, part 1, in which Jarrett is thumping the piano.] My writing flourished in these conditions; I began to see why certain French philosophers would always go to the café to write and think. To be among people you’re completely familiar with, or, on the other hand, those you don’t know at all, as in a café or on a street, is to be perfectly solitary, and in a state of composure; you’re free to pursue your preoccupations, imaginary though these might be, and constantly, even unguardedly, absorb your environment. [Sparrows in the background; extract from Freewheeling Jog playing.] It is, in a sense, the opposite of the sociability of a party, where you might feel down-hearted and alone, suddenly aware of invisible limits, not necessarily wanting to talk to the person you’re talking to, wishing you were somewhere else. [A single high organ note on a synthesiser gets louder, then fades.]

This apartment, like almost everywhere else in Calcutta, has not only light but sound coming into it from every side. It’s nowhere near Jorasanko in the old town in the north; this is the south, in a plush residential neighbourhood full of trees and the houses of the onceprivileged classes that are being torn down swiftly and all the time for the new apartment buildings to come up. Birdcall, human voices, hammering, traffic noises from the main road form my horizon of hearing when I’m in the bedroom, and the large windows are open.

[Jarrett, from part 2, tapping his feet and playing in 4/4.] But there’s also music, because right next door is the Calcutta School of Music, whose second-story terrace I can amply gaze upon from my eighthstorey perspective, and where, particularly when paying no attention, I can hear children practising Indian classical modes, recordings of swing music, emphatic drum solos, tentative jabs at the trumpet, and, of course, piano scales. [Repetitive sound of Chinese pentatonic being practised on acoustic guitar; played by myself at home.] There’s another slightly faraway sound which comes to me at different hours of the day, that could be termed musical—the muezzin’s call to prayer from the two or three mosques in Park Circus. [Dvorak: from Humoresque—violin and piano] This call is clearly audible (though still remote) at half past four in the morning, when I’ve sleepwalked to the bathroom; gradually my ear awakens to the whining tone, translates, then realises it is quite beautiful. In half a minute, the bathroom is pristinely silent, and the ear discerns yet another muezzin, but singing in another key, creating a short-lived, unintended dissonance that no one but the steadfastly devout is listening to. For the rest of the day, it won’t be easy to hear them again, because of the veil created by the traffic, the fizz of cooking, even the hushed transit of the ceiling fan. [A hissing sound overlays the previous sentence.] All sound’s potentially music, said John Cage; but all music is also sound—that is, something with not just a tonal but a physical and social life. I find it increasingly hard to tell, living as and where I do, when sound turns to music and music turns to sound.

Speaking of Cage, I should mention that I hear silence quite differently in this apartment. Listening to 4’33”—the famous piece of silence where Cage is actually asking us to hear carefully what happens in that

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brief span of time—is hardly comparable, I suspect, to experiencing it in Oxford or at the Barbican. Here, 4’33” means the sound of my daughter talking, a tap being opened, a spatula being put down, two women conversing in the background: all this is contained within the performance. [Women speaking to each other in German.] When the same piece is executed in a concert hall in London, it becomes much more predictably about silence; you see clearly, during the unfolding of the work, how much English concert-goers resemble commuters on the Tube, attentive, knees pressed together, eyes focussed strategically not on any one human being but on the near distance. The train vibrates; silence becomes habitable; in the concert hall, you suddenly think of Cage’s mysterious impulse when you hear someone cough. [Again, a single high organ note on a synthesiser gets louder, then fades, in the course of the previous and the next two sentences. A door closes.]

Each time I’ve returned to England in the last twenty-seven years, entered my room or flat or studio apartment and closed the door behind me, I’ve heard one thing in the first few moments: silence. It’s an indescribable but unmistakable sound: high-pitched and narrow, bearing upon the eardrum. It could be, of course, as an engineer once informed Cage in a soundproof room, the sound of one’s nervous system—but I think not. [Sound of thumping.] It is an admonitory sound, protected and even fostered by regulation and the law; it is the mad foundation of order, and I only ever hear it in the West. I’m intimidated by it; then, in a few minutes, I stop hearing it, just as, in India, during whole stretches of time, I no longer hear the intricate and intrusive array of sounds around me. [Sudden loud car horn.] In the room in England, I begin making tea, or making phone calls; and then the reproving signal that was plainly audible upon my arrival has vanished—only to confront me again when I make the journey back from India to the room the following year. These are the indisputable moods and situations in which my sense of a certain music and language has been working itself out ever since I can recall.

In 1983, in a studio apartment in Warren Street, not far from University College London, silence quickly gave way to “Relax!” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. [Extract, when the word ”relax” isn’t being used; repetition of “when you want come.”] An excellent song; but to my ears, noise, and noise I still wouldn’t have any idea what to do with. I had grown up with Western popular music. My father had gone to a shop called Melody next to Strand Cinema in Bombay and bought our first hi-fi in 1970. [Extract from Freewheeling Jog.] The purchase came with a gift: two complimentary records—a Polydor compilation and The Best of The Who. How I blushed and fidgeted with inner excitement while listening to “I Can See For Miles”! At twelve, I started to learn the guitar, and, in a few months, could play and sing the Bee Gees’ “Words” and other songs. But, at the age of sixteen, I began to undergo an extraordinary conversion. [Sparrows.] Not only did I begin to listen to Indian classical music; I wanted to sing in the North Indian classical tradition. This was, though, easier desired than accomplished; and so my days arranged themselves around a pattern of repetitive and exhausting vocal exercises. [Again, sound of Chinese pentatonic being practised on

acoustic guitar; played by myself.] Not only did my practising exceed what my guru, my music teacher, expected of me—softly, he’d caution me to practise less—but I performed an ideological and cultural volteface as well. I believed, now, that my recent urge to be Neil Young or Ian Anderson was deeply inauthentic; that I’d been embraced by Indian classical music, and that I would be made complete by it, establishing, through it, a continuity between my immemorial “Indianness” and the world I was part of in Bombay. But Bombay itself was changing; the immense apartment we’d moved to on the twenty-fifth storey of a building in Cuffe Parade after my father became chief executive overlooked the construction of an even more immense penthouse, in which the builder’s daughter and son in law would one day live.

[Tabla playing at great speed.] And, at the same time, the American singer-songwriters I’d adored, with their long hair, bent monk- or nunlike over acoustic guitars, partly in denial of the world and partly in subtle ministration, unexpectedly turned antediluvian—they left their footprint and were gone before the universal onrush, in restaurants, festivals, and houses, of disco, synthesised and sequenced music. I arrived in London with a small, custom-made tanpura. During my sixteen years in England, I pretended—and it was easy to do—that there was no Western popular music. Around me, sounds changed and shifted, from “Relax!” to “Karma Chameleon” to the perceived threat of “Here we go! Here we go!” to the clicking of heels at 5 pm as temps marched to Warren Street Tube Station to the deathly calm of Sundays and, later, the inert desolation of Christmas, lightened only by the selfabsorbed agitations of Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday. [Woman’s voice from the film, calling, ‘Henry! Henry!’]

I moved back to India—as I’d always intended to do—in 1999.

I was, again, a different man from the sixteen-year-old ideologue for whom Indian music became a prism through which to view the world, and the lonely young misfit who came to London in 1983. I was now married; I had a six-month-old daughter who announced her needs with what sounded to me like a distinctly musical wail. And I’d lost something of my familiar antagonistic polarities, and begun to listen to my old record collection. An album had come out, very posthumously, of Hendrix playing the blues; I found myself listening to it. [Luxuriant acoustic blues licks from Hendrix album.] I could hear certain Indian ragas in what he was playing—like Dhani, Jog, Malkauns—not because I’d gone looking for them, but in a way that one becomes aware, one day, of another dimension to an outline: like, for instance, the duck-rabbit, Wittgenstein’s famous mutant. [Opening line of Cream’s “I Feel Free.”]

Or it could have been something else—an echo returning from what I’d forgotten, made possible by the fact that the blues is based on the very same five-note or pentatonic scale that these ragas emerge from. But reminding me that listening isn’t only about naming, but about accident.

Now I must return to that previously-mentioned location: the household in Calcutta. [Once more, repetitive sound of Chinese

pentatonic being practised by myself on acoustic guitar at home.] Here, sitting on my bed at 10 a.m. in the white kurta and pyjamas I’d slept in, I thought I heard, midway through practising the morning raga Todi, the riff to “Layla” by Derek and the Dominoes in a handful of notes I’d just sung. [Two low glissandoes of a raga being played on a veena.] After completing the hour-long exercise, I turned to my wife and said, ‘Do you know what I just heard?’ and, after demonstrating what I meant, asked: ‘Do you think one could make a piece of music out of this?’ [Opening riff from the original record.] Another moment of mishearing followed a few days later, in the same unpremeditated fashion, when I was standing in the lobby of a newly-opened hotel on the grim Calcutta EMS Bypass.

The typical hotel Indian classical Muzak was my ambience—the santoor, whose tinny, glossy notes I was trying successfully to ignore, when it seemed to launch, without prior notice, into “Auld Lang Syne.” I listened intently; but, in a few moments, the music had gone back to being the raga it was, Bhupali, a pentatonic identical to the Highlands scale from which the Scottish melody was derived. My project had such non-serious beginnings. [Sound of laughter from the end of ‘We Were Talking’ in Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band; then, during the next sentence, the opening of Sgt Pepper’s, with the ‘one-two-three-four’.] When it was finally ready for performance, I called it “This Is Not Fusion.” People responded by saying, “Of course it’s fusion,” just as—and I’m introducing an analogy here, not making a comparison—they exclaimed, “Of course it’s a pipe!’ upon viewing Magritte’s “This Is Not a Pipe.” [Extract from The ‘Layla’ Riff to Todi, approx 3 mins.]

What’s the difference between listening as an inescapable fact of everyday existence, and the sort of activity I’m trying to get a handle on? The answer isn’t clear. I could hazard a guess—perhaps the latter involves an element of chance discovery that makes irrelevant our usual poles of attentiveness and inattention? [A meditative Tagore song in the background, from a recording by my mother.] I was spending the winter in Berlin at the end of the year in which my project had its first outing, and I was allowed to be at once solitary and constantly in the midst of things in that city by the fact that I knew no German; that is, presence predominated over instruction, proximity over sense. Once, on an U-Bahn train, I studied a tall, gaunt-looking man as he made a short but dense speech while holding aloft a copy of Motz, the newspaper sold everywhere in Berlin by the homeless and the unemployed. His earnest, childlike sing-song led me to presume, for no reason, that he was East European or Russian, and reminded me, as it happens, of the tune of a Vengaboys’ hit I didn’t know I’d even heard in those days when disco still hadn’t lost its grip on our world. Sound has the characteristics of music, true: but the same is true—when I think, say, of disco—the other way round. The concatenation becomes, as in an endless game of “pass the parcel,” infinite. [Cheerful seventies party music.] And what of the spoken word itself? Communication often precedes understanding, T.S. Eliot helpfully declared; and Tagore, reading Herbert Spencer, reflects that

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the speaking voice is full of emotion and is, thus, itself a kind of music.

My mother, a singer of Tagore songs, always says that the treatment of a song needs no added emotion, and should be easy as speaking—although speaking didn’t seem at all easy to that anxious man on the U-Bahn train.

[Play ‘Motz’ from the CD, “This Is Not Fusion.”]

Motz Thank you for listening kindly And sparing me a second.

I know you’re sitting blindly And thinking of the weekend.

I sell a paper called Motz, It really is a treasure.

I live not far from Ostkreuz, I’m not a man of leisure.

My father was from Russia, My mother was from heaven.

They killed him with inertia When I was just eleven.

When she left me alone My faith had started crumbling.

Somebody picked a stone, I saw the wall come tumbling.

Since then I’ve wandered freely From Ahrensfelde to Spandau.

I’ve worked for two years nearly But I don’t have a job now.

Tomorrow I will walk it To the employment bureau.

Meanwhile do check your pocket And please give me a euro.

And if you have no small change I’ll settle for a smile.

I know you think that it’s strange I’ve been singing for a mile.

Thank you for listening kindly And sparing me a second.

I know you’re sitting blindly And thinking of the weekend.

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“Take Care of Yourself” is a body of work created for the French Pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 2007.

At the center of the piece is a break-up email received by the artist, whose last line forms the title of the work. 107 women—opera singers, psychiatrists, philosophers, and even one parrot—take on this letter and perform and transform it according to their own analysis. The complete installation contains interpretations as farranging as a Talmudic exegesis and a clairvoyant’s response, and is presented in photographic portraits, textual analysis and filmed performances.

Take Care of Yourself, Proof-Reader, Valérie Lermite (pictured p. 82-83), 2007 Sophie Calle Portrait: Fine Art print dry mounted on aluminum, wooden frame 44 1/2 x 55 1/8” (113 x 140 cm) Text: silkscreen print dry mounted on aluminum, wooden frame, glass 78 x 55 1/8” (198.1 x 140 cm) ©Sophie Calle / ADAGP. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

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Xixtaberri

Nasir Husain

To protect a vegetable garden from rabbits you must lay the chicken wire twenty-five centimeters into the soil.

They can’t dig that deep.

Eighteen meters of wire fencing, four sides of four and a half, iron stakes cornering the square, entrusted with strawberries, tomatoes, artichoke hearts.

The farm was near Biarritz.

Our hunter green tablecloth unfurled labyrinthine corridors of blueberry bushes winding down into the River Nive sailing blueberry flotsam through piment d’Espelette villages into the Atlantic.

The Carcelles had owned Xixtaberri for seven years.

This summer I was their only guest.

I worked for room and board.

In July, at dinner, they told me how in March, at night, they had lost their child. How in the morning, his crib was just

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empty, its narrow wooden slats painting strips of sunlight on the hardwood floor.

A rabbit can slip through an opening of five centimeters, said Noël, his legs dangling in the corn husks below the porch, drinking one glass of sambuca Ramazzotti on ice, like every other night.

He stared into its milky white snow globe murk before each sip.

He told me he once trapped rabbits and snapped their necks but that he didn’t use live traps anymore. I found one in the bushes, an ancient and empty cage, and he slipped his fingers into his trap’s square lattice, two centimeters by two centimeters, white knuckles clinging to rusted memory.

If there was one, there must have been others, entangled and forgotten in blueberry folds – and he cried to imagine it – clawing paws, pawing hands, unable to know what is happening

Envoy

To build a deck Mark Chiusano

When I was eleven there was a real push in my family to build a deck over our backyard, out from the kitchen on the second floor.

This was a real motion, like the time when my father said that he was considering getting a dog for my brother and me, though that never actually materialized. But the building of the deck looked real, obstacled only by the old-man berry tree in the garden plot and the basketball hoop whose base was filled with sand. Joe, who lived next door, had promised to help us build it. Or else he knew a guy.

Building a deck meant staying on Avenue R for a summer, a real decision because usually my parents, teachers, saved what they could so we could go away for a few weeks while we were all off school. Both of them had travelled extensively in their youth and it was something of a tradition.

This was a priority, more important than new furniture, or painting the kitchen, or going out to dinner. But to build a deck we’d need to stay put for a while, to save the travel money, at least for a year or two.

Joe had been advocating the construction of a deck in our backyard for years, in no small part because he couldn’t wait to be the one who personally cut down the berry tree. It was on the edge of our backyard, right next to the fence, meaning that, to be fair, at least half of it grew over into Joe’s own property. The snow in the winter made the branches crack and fall and in the summer, berries: ones that no amount of scrubbing the carpet or yelling at rulebreakers to take their shoes off could help. Though they smelled wonderful when crushed, purple and everlasting.

Building a deck was serious business on Avenue R, still is. There is an alleyway that runs behind our backyards that was built, so they say, for the garbage trucks to come through and do their business. Which means that we have this illusion of space, enclosed by fences, backyards jutting out to a long asphalt alleyway even in the middle of Brooklyn. We have our berry tree. Most of the houses have basketball hoops and in the alley we play football, tackle, when it snows. The houses touch on either side and Avenue R at our front entrances rumbles citylike by, but out here, where the deck would go, it feels like perpetual country summer. My mother swears that it’s ten degrees more temperate “in the back.”

Which is why everyone wants a deck, to double their living space, to extend their second floors into the outdoors, to have this little quiet area to take the sun and barbecue and listen to Spanish radio. The couple on the end hangs their laundry there. The next one over has lots of plants and vines. Joe on our immediate right has a nice and simple one, just the barbecue and a few lawn chairs, but he likes to stand for hours at the edge of his and watch what’s going on, up and down the alleyway, like at the helm of a ship.

What’s going on Joe? Nothing, nothing.

Same old.

Same old, he says. * When Joe was younger he was a cop. Those were tough days to wear blue, back in the sixties. Some people liked you, sure, but you also had lots of enemies. It didn’t help if your last name was Castellano. He told me that he’d only had to draw his gun once, thank God, but had never shot it, though there were some chases, and guns pulled on him.

There’s a story he sometimes tells that everyone used to know in the city, though most people have forgotten now, about when a city councilman brought a friend into City Hall, and no one patted him down. And then the friend took his place up in the gallery, and stood up and took a shot at the city councilman on the floor. But the real part of the story, what’s crazy, is that there was a cop, a regular police detective, who was plainclothes in the lower level: and he took one look up at the shooter and shot him, surrounded by people, dead, one bullet. It’s a great and gruesome story, but I particularly like the way that Joe tells it: with great sensitivity to the angle of the police detective’s shot, how he was from below, the jutting out of the upper balcony, the levered supports, the force of gravity. These are things he took into consideration when he

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built his own deck, or oversaw the guys doing it, I forget which: for Joe it amounts to the same thing, him maintaining a terrible disdain for people who can’t or won’t do their own work.

Joe has a lot of respect for the United States Army and fond memories of his days serving in part because it allowed him to get to Europe as a young man, the only time he ever traveled. He was stationed in Germany for a while after the war: not so much fighting as policing, or giving tours, wherever they went. But this seems to have done it for him: he’s satisfied with what he’s seen. The extended family comes to Avenue R on holidays, when his wife Angie cooks enormous dinners at the stove in the kitchen overlooking the deck. He doesn’t like to stay overnight in other places, doesn’t even like to drive so much anymore—once he told me a terrifying story about how sometimes red lights look green to him.

Yeah you know, they just look green? he said. It didn’t seem to bother him too much. He likes his time at home. * The thing about a deck on Avenue R is that it stands for stationary. These things aren’t quite legal, by city law, and they cost a lot to do, so it’s not like you’d just move out a couple of years after the last two-by-four’s put down. Decks are for summer afternoons, for people to sit on deck chairs and look up at the smog. From here the cars on the other side of the houses sound like rushing water, or waves, just like you’re on a beach. There aren’t many restaurants in this part of Brooklyn because everyone cooks their own dinners, then eat them out on the decks, staggering dinnertimes so neighbors don’t overlap.

The Q train is a car-ride away, so getting into the city is hard—easier to stay out here and relax.

The older my brother and I got on Avenue R, the more decks there were. When we were little there was just the one that was a homerun if you hit a Whiffle ball on top. Then they started popping up like Bloomberg campaign posters. We kept putting it off. Next year, next year.

That summer when I was eleven or so was the culmination. There were heated discussions about the construction: my father especially didn’t want to be tethered down. He’d always loved the city across the river and wanted to be as close to it as possible. This was a distant second. This was the year my uncle died, and I remember peering from the stairwell and watching my mother say to the mirror: My world is falling apart.

We never built a deck behind our house and in a way it’s good, because then there’d be five decks in a row with no separation, and we’d really be stepping on each others’ toes. But somehow it signifies that we haven’t put our roots down yet, even though my brother and I have lived here all our lives. We’re afraid to. There’s something of the frightened nomad in us. We could leave anytime. We’d leave nothing behind.

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To build a deck, first you have to measure and lay out the site.

You have to install the ledger, and pour the footings, and set the posts.

There is a point in the middle of the process where you lay the decking.

Then the railings, then the sweet-smelling paint that keeps the thing from rotting away. I can imagine Joe building it with me. I can see Joe with a t-shirt tucked into his pants, tossing me a bottle of water, asking me why I went away. Everything’s here. You can even keep the goddamn tree, if you want: it’ll just be a short deck.

I love that tree, the berries, the face of an old man growing out the middle of the trunk. I used to love looking at it when we’d park the car in the backyard after some trip. While Dad got the bags out of the back I’d stand in front of it and let it scare me a little. The face always looks like it’s yelling. I’d stick a twig inside its mouth. Home, I’d say.

SPECIAL THANKS The Harvard Advocate wishes to thank the following generous individuals for their support of our activities during the 2010-2011 academic year. They have made it possible for The Advocate to remain committed to publishing the best literature and art that the Harvard campus has to offer, four times each year. The contributions of the following individuals have not only supported the printing of our magazine, but have also made it possible for The Advocate to further our mission of promoting the arts on campus.

Last year, our building at 21 South Street was home to a host of literary and artistic events, including visits from Jeffrey Eugenides, Denis Johnson, Alex Ross, and several members of Wilco, to name only a few, as well as several concerts featuring local artists. Our new Community Outreach Program has helped expand The Advocate’s presence in the neighborhood; our members offer a creative writing workshop at a local homeless shelter and have helped facilitate the creative writing curriculum of a second and third grade classroom at the William Blackstone Elementary School in the South End in Boston.

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CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES ANNA ATKINS (1799--1871) was an English photographer and botanist. She is thought to be the first female photographer.

MATT AUCOIN is mostly air-conducting.

SOPHIE CALLE lives and works in Paris, France.

AMIT CHAUDHURI is currently Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of several award-winning novels, an internationally acclaimed musician and essayist, and a regular contributor to The London Review of Books, Granta, and The Times Literary Supplement. His latest novel The Immortals is about music in the modern world; his latest CD is Found Music.

EMILY CHERTOFF, he’s DNAF. MARK CHIUSANO’s brother is better than him at basketball.

HENRI COLE’s new collection Touch is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

SIMON CRITCHLEY is an English philosopher currently teaching at the New School. He is series moderator of The Stone, a New York Times philosophy blog, and chief philosopher of the International Necronautical Society.

TIM DAVIS is a professor of computer science at the University of Florida and an aspiring poet (MeetTheProf.com/TimDavis).

EVA DELAPPE grew up in Reno, where she shoots men just to watch them die, then gets arrested by cut-off-wearing cops; she is glad you asked both those questions.

SOPHIE DUVERNOY is human.

KAYLA ESCOBEDO and Monty are currently residing in Texas, but can be found online at www. kaylascomix.weebly.com.

DAN GRAHAM is a conceptual artist living in New York City.

JENNY HOLZER lives and works.

DR. YIFAN HU is a Principal Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Labs - Research.

NASIR HUSAIN ’12 is an English concentrator in Kirkland House.

DANA KASE would like to thank Globie, mostly.

LAURA KASISCHKE’s newest collection is Space, in Chains (Copper Canyon Press). She has also published a number of novels. In 2010 she was a Guggenheim Fellow, and has been the recipient of two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Michigan.

JOHN KOETHE’s last book, Ninety-Fifth Street, received the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets. He is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and was the Bain-Swigget Professor of Poetry at Princeton last year.

HOLGER NIEHAUS lives and works in Berlin.

Famous for his electrifying performances, KIWAO NOMURA is revered in Japan where he has been awarded major literary honors including the Rekitei Prize for Young Poets and the prestigious Takami Jun Prize. His work as a writer, editor, performer, organizer, and critic has altered the landscape of contemporary Japanese literature. Spectacle & Pigsty, a book of his poems translated into English by Kyoko Yoshida and Forrest Gander, is forthcoming from OmniDawn Press in Spring 2011.

JULIA ROONEY thinks whipped cream makes most things better.

JESSICA SEQUEIRA acknowledges structural challenges.

Even MADELEINE SCHWARTZ has good dancing legs!

Photographer JEFF WALL lives and works in Vancouver.

DAVID WALLACE is finally unfamiliar.

MATTHEW ZAPRUDER is the author of Come On All You Ghosts (Copper Canyon), selected as one of the top 5 poetry books of 2010 by Publishers Weekly.

He has received a William Carlos Williams Award, a May Sarton Award from the Academy of American Arts and Sciences, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship.

Currently an editor for Wave Books and a member of the permanent faculty in the low residency MFA program at UC Riverside-Palm Desert, he lives in San Francisco.

DENIS JOHNSON is the author of several novels, plays, and books of verse. He lives in Idaho and Arizona.

Image Credit: www.the-blueprint.com