The Naked Country

Coverdanner Spencer Ackerman reviews Mark Danner's Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War, in bookforum:

The book's reportage is divided into three sections: post-Duvalier Haiti, the atrocities of the Balkan wars, and the permanent emergency, in Iraq and beyond, that Danner memorably termed the “forever war” in a 2005 New York Times Magazine piece. Each period shows Danner's maturation: In Haiti, he gave a reporter's tour, but by the time he reached Baghdad, he was primarily a polemicist and a social critic. What has captivated him, and what he has used as a lens to view an ever-bleaker world, is justice, and the all too permeable divide that separates it from vengeance.

Haiti in the late 1980s set the template. The departure of a strongman acted like a pin pulled from a grenade, as official corruption merged with demagoguery and shattered a veneer of social unity; the nearby Americans did little and understood less. Caught between a weak civilian government and a fractured army, Haitians looked to “agriculture, working the earth,” for salvation, a priest told Danner. But the Americans, who offered meager aid, “saw it as inevitable that impoverished, peasant Haiti would become an 'urban country.'” The result was protracted dysfunction and exploitation, leading to the crisis that ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991 and prompted US military intervention.

Bosnia forged Danner's perspective. He expressed outrage in his dispatches over the unwillingness of the world to stop the Serb elimination of Bosnian Muslims. Most writers who documented the Balkan wars romanticized a lost cosmopolitan Bosnia. To Danner, Bosnia was concentration camps, forest death marches, alleged safe areas, Christmas reprisal raids, and racial epithets. He provided lengthy descriptions of Omarska, the camp where grinning Serbs butchered men's genitals as a cautionary display. Glory-hound French generals were outwitted by Bosnian Serb commanders. All this occurred because no one had the courage to recognize evil, least of all the Clinton administration. There was no lost cosmopolitanism in Danner's Bosnia, only predators and prey.



A View of Wall Street, Opening Day 2010

Wallst Beau Willimon on the first trading day of the new year, following the decimations of the previous 28 months, in The Daily Beast:

2:39 p.m. (DJ 10590 +160 +1.55%)

By mid-afternoon, Wall Street was teaming with tourists. I decided to join their ranks and visit some of the local landmarks. Directly across Wall Street from the Exchange stands the Federal Hall National Memorial building. George Washington’s first inauguration took place on this site in 1789. Inside were a number of exhibits chronicling the history of the Wall Street area. Here you are reminded that Wall Street wasn’t always about finance. In fact, it used to be the northern extremity of the New Amsterdam, acquiring its name because of an actual wall used to stretch along its length, built by the Dutch to keep out the Native Americans in northern Manhattan.

I chatted up National Park Ranger E.L. Hooper, who showed me several floor-to-ceiling cracks in the masonry supporting the enormous rotunda—fissures caused by the collapse of the Twin Towers in 2001. Federal Hall was closed for two years to repair the damage.

Since the business of Federal Hall is not business, but history, I asked Ranger Hooper if he felt insulated from all the financial activity across the street. “Pretty much,” he said, “but we get a couple hundred folks come in here every day asking where the Stock Exchange is, or thinking this building is the Exchange itself, or wondering why they can’t get inside the Exchange.” (The public viewing gallery at the NYSE has been closed since the 9/11 attacks.) “And it was pretty crazy around here during the financial crisis,” he added. “There were TV cameras everywhere, and we had all sorts of weird protests going on outside.” Among some of the protests he witnessed were a troop of bikini-clad women parading down the street on a chilly November day, a man who skulked around in a bear costume, and a duo of street performers—one of whom juggled hatchets while the other played saxophone on a pogo-stick, both wearing signs that read “This is what we’re forced to do for work now.”

After leaving Federal Hall, I treated myself to a hot dog from a street vendor. While I was waiting in line, I got to talking with a Jamaican security guard from Deutsche Bank named George. George had been working on Wall Street for seven years and grown familiar with many of the employees who passed through the Deutsche Bank doors every day. “When things were good, it was so busy in the morning you almost got knocked over from all the people rushing down the street,” he said.

India’s sacred extremes

Wendy Doniger in The Times:

Nine-Lives-final-front Manisha Ma Bhairava worships the Goddess and engages in Tantric ceremonies in the cremation grounds at Tarapith, in Bengal. Lal Peri is a devotee of the Sufi saint Lal Shahbaz Qalander. Tashi Passang lives as a Tibetan monk in Dharamsala, in India. Hari Das is possessed nightly by a god during a cycle of theyyam ritual performances every December to February in Kerala. Rani Bai is a sacred prostitute (a devadasi) in a town in northern Karnataka. Kanai is a blind minstrel who sings with the Bauls (“crazies”), an antinomian sect, at Kenduli, in West Bengal. Mataji wanders as a member of a sect of Digambara (“sky-clad”, that is, naked) Jains at Sravanabelgola. Mohan was a low-caste singer of the epics of the cavalier hero and deity Pabuji in Rajasthan. Srikanda Stpathy is a Brahmin idol-maker in the temple town of Swamimalai in South India.

What do these nine people, the subjects of William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives, have in common? All are in some ways purveyors of the sacred, but beyond that the patterns blur. They are Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, Muslim. Four women, five men. Only one (the idol-maker Srikanda, who serves as a kind of baseline point of contrast for all the others) is a Brahmin. Six of them inherited their jobs, while three of the four women, and one man, chose to renounce conventional life for various extreme forms of religion. What binds them together is the unusual suffering that they have undergone – all but Srikanda, whose chief sorrow is that his son wants to become a computer engineer instead of carrying on the family tradition.

More here.

TOWARD A THEORY OF SURPRISE

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I’m thinking here of Daisy crying stormily over the shirts that Gatsby tosses onto a table in a soft rich heap. These are shirts, Nick tells us, with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, with monograms of Indian blue. “They’re such beautiful shirts,” Daisy says, sobbing into their thick folds. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such—such beautiful shirts before.” The scene connects a rich guy’s wardrobe and turbulent emotion—beauty and sadness—in a surprising (but not inexplicable or mysterious) causal relationship. Like most literary surprises, Daisy’s reaction to what Nick calls the many-colored disarray seems correct, even inevitable. If Gatsby’s shirts made Daisy speak in tongues or punch Carraway in the gut, we would be surprised, all right, but not convinced or moved. Or consider Isaac Babel’s “First Love,” a story that conjoins delirious desire and genocide, and that contains this sentence: “For five of my ten years I had dreamed with all the fervor of my soul about having doves, and then, when I finally managed to buy them, Makarenko the cripple smashed the doves against the side of my face.” Bird and face, peace and violence, passion and pogrom—juxtaposed, smashed, improbably but credibly. Surprises are, in their effect and regardless of content, instruments of wonder and spirit. A surprise lifts aliveness toward consciousness, where it does not (and cannot) permanently reside. There are many reasons to read literature, of course. One very good reason to read literature is to be surprised. In reading, we perform the nearly oxymoronic feat of seeking surprise.

more from Chris Bachelder at The Believer here.

split brain

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Back in junior high school health class, we were told that the brain has two different hemispheres — the left and the right. The left brain, the textbook stated, is responsible for language, math, and science, logic and rationality. The right brain was the artistic one, the creative half of the brain. But that’s not quite true. Neuroimaging and experiments on patients with split brains and brain damage to only one hemisphere have allowed a much more detailed, and fascinating, accounting of how the two parts interact with the world, and how they combine to become a unified consciousness (and, in some cases of mental disorders, how they occasionally don’t). Iain McGilchrist has combined scientific research with cultural history in his new book The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World to examine how the evolution of the brain influenced our society, and how the current make up of the brain shapes art, politics, and science, as well as the rise of mental illness in our time — in particular schizophrenia, anorexia, and autism.

more from Jessa Crispin at The Smart Set here.

When Lit Blew Into Bits

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It seems significant, somehow, that Infinite Jest—the big buzzy signature meganovel of the nineties—was set at the end of the aughts. Most of the book’s action appears to take place in 2009, which means that we’ve all just survived the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment. It also means that David Foster Wallace’s prophetic window has now (at least in the most literal sense) closed forever, in the same way Orwell’s did when we reached the actual 1984. And in fact Infinite Jest’s vision of the future does, these days, look slightly dated. One of the book’s nightmare scenarios is the existence of an entertainment so addictive that people watch it until they die—a film they access via a machine Wallace calls a “teleputer,” which turns out to be some kind of ungodly hybrid of HDTV, computer, telephone, and VCR; it crunches data on “3.6-MB diskettes” and plays films off actual physical cartridges. All of which carbon-dates the novel’s creation precisely back to the early-to-mid-nineties (it was published in 1996)—before the rise of iPhones or even DVDs, when the Internet was just beginning to percolate on our dial-up modems. (In mid-1993, there were only 130 websites, and most people didn’t even have a browser to visit them.) The DFW generation’s primary technological bugaboo was TV, a rival narrative engine that both attracted and repelled. (See Wallace’s classic essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” in which he calls TV “both medicine and poison.”) Novelists in the aughts, however, had to contend with a very different bugaboo. The technology that infinitely distracted us this decade, sometimes even to the point of death—the entertainment that tore us away from work and family and prevented us from immersing ourselves in complex meganovels from the noble old-timey decades of yore—was not a passive, cartridge-based viewing experience but largely a new form of reading: the massive archive of linked documents known as the World Wide Web. TV, in comparison, looks like a fairly simple adversary: Its flickering images lure readers away from books altogether. The Internet, on the other hand, invades literature on its home turf. It has created, in the last ten years, all kinds of new and potent rival genres of reading—the blog, the chat, the tweet, the comment thread—genres that seem not only to siphon our attention but to change the way our brains process text.

more from Sam Anderson at New York Magazine here.

Wednesday Poem

Lies

Lying to the young is wrong.
Proving to them that lies are true is wrong.
Telling them that God’s in his heaven
and all’s well with the world is wrong.
They know what you mean.
They are people.
Tell them difficulties can’t be counted,
and let them see not only what will be
but see with clarity these present times.
Say obstacles exist they must encounter,
sorrow comes, hardship happens.
The hell with it. Who never knew
the price of happiness will not be happy.
Forgive no error you recognize,
it will repeat itself, increase,
and afterward our pupils
will not forgive in us
what we forgave.

by Yevgeny Yevtushenko

from Yevtushenko; Collected Poems,
Penguin Books, 1952
translation Robin Milner-Gulland and Peter Levi

More Than Just a Bad Dream–A Nightmare’s Impact on the Waking Brain

From Scientific American:

Nightmares You awake with a pounding heart and clammy hands. Relax, you think to yourself—it was just a bad dream. But are nightmares truly benign? Psychologists aren’t so sure. Although some continue to believe nightmares reduce psychological tensions by letting the brain act out its fears, recent research suggests that nocturnal torments are more likely to increase anxiety in waking life.

In one study Australian researchers asked 624 high school students about their lives and nightmares during the past year and assessed their stress levels. It is well known that stressful experiences cause nightmares, but if night­mares serve to diffuse that tension, troubled sleepers should have an easier time coping with emotional ordeals. The study, published in the journal Dreaming, did not bear out that hypothesis: not only did nightmares not stave off anxiety, but people who reported being distressed about their dreams were even more likely to suffer from general anxiety than those who experienced an upsetting event such as the divorce of their parents.

More here.

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

In Search of the World’s Hardest Language

HardestLang In the Economist:

A CERTAIN genre of books about English extols the language’s supposed difficulty and idiosyncrasy. “Crazy English”, by an American folk-linguist, Richard Lederer, asks “how is it that your nose can run and your feet can smell?”. Bill Bryson’s “Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way” says that “English is full of booby traps for the unwary foreigner…Imagine being a foreigner and having to learn that in English one tells a lie but the truth.”

Such books are usually harmless, if slightly fact-challenged. You tell “a” lie but “the” truth in many languages, partly because many lies exist but truth is rather more definite. It may be natural to think that your own tongue is complex and mysterious. But English is pretty simple: verbs hardly conjugate; nouns pluralise easily (just add “s”, mostly) and there are no genders to remember.

English-speakers appreciate this when they try to learn other languages. A Spanish verb has six present-tense forms, and six each in the preterite, imperfect, future, conditional, subjunctive and two different past subjunctives, for a total of 48 forms. German has three genders, seemingly so random that Mark Twain wondered why “a young lady has no sex, but a turnip has”. (Mädchen is neuter, whereas Steckrübe is feminine.)

English spelling may be the most idiosyncratic, although French gives it a run for the money with 13 ways to spell the sound “o”: o, ot, ots, os, ocs, au, aux, aud, auds, eau, eaux, ho and ö. “Ghoti,” as wordsmiths have noted, could be pronounced “fish”: gh as in “cough”, o as in “women” and ti as in “motion”. But spelling is ancillary to a language’s real complexity; English is a relatively simple language, absurdly spelled.

Desperately Seeking Sam

Boylan_34.6_beckett Roger Boylan in Boston Review:

I could not have gone through the awful wretched mess of life without having left a stain upon the silence. –Samuel Beckett

The first and last time I saw Samuel Beckett, he was walking down a Paris street, the Rue Rémy Dumoncel. At least, I think it was Beckett. The height was right; the near-skeletal thinness was right; the location was right—near the nursing home where he died not long after. I think he was wearing a hat and coat, but I can’t be sure. It was twenty years ago.

Seen always from behind whithersoever he went. Same hat and coat as of old when he walked the roads. –Beckett, Stirrings Still

But I never got close enough to be certain. I was across the street, behind a row of parked cars, admiring, if memory serves, a silver Porsche. Unusually for July in Paris, it was a gray, drizzly day, what Parisians call “la grisaille,” and it was a bit misty, as if in November. Despite all that, I could easily have crossed over and asked my suspect if he was, in fact, the One True Sam. But I didn’t. I funked it. He disappeared. Six months later he was dead. And I had wanted to meet him for years.

I first learned of his work from Mr. Achkar, my French teacher in high school in Geneva, who was most enthusiastic about Oh les Beaux Jours (Happy Days), of which he’d seen the Paris premiere in 1961.

“What a play!” he enthused.

A woman sinks slowly into the earth while reciting the inanities of her everyday life … c’est magnifique! Does anyone understand as well as Beckett does the banality of tragedy and the tragedy of banality? This woman, she could be my wife: the eternal optimist despite all the evidence. Non, mais non, c’est magnifique.

There were the other plays, notably Waiting for Godot, that incomparable hymn to the vital nothingness of life (the play in which, in the words of the Irish critic Vivian Mercier, “nothing happens, twice”); Krapp’s Last Tape, Beckett’s melancholy homage to memory and failure; Rockaby, the tender death-lullaby; and the great Fin de Partie (Endgame), Mr. Achkar’s favorite—and mine.

If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans

Aquinas

PLANNING IS SOMETHING that people learned from God. The lesson might be said to have begun with the prescriptions God laid out for His earthly habitation among the Israelites: the Tabernacle that housed Him in the desert, and then the Temple that was His residence in Jerusalem. The dimensions of these structures were dictated by a divine blueprint. The Temple gave birth to a city, and from it emerged a civilization. We are descendants of this tradition, irrespective of such trivialities as whether one identifies as a “believer.” Its most obvious inheritors are those who shout of “God’s plan for you” from street corners and write “purpose-driven” books, people for whom the blueprint—and our basic need to follow it—is a raft in the ocean of time. But this tradition also finds resonance in something as ordinary as the practical virtue of prudence: the present’s responsible response to the uncertainties of the future, which Thomas Aquinas considered the highest of the cardinal virtues.

more from Nathan Schneider at Triple Canopy here.

Buy yourself a sequencer and let the games begin!

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There is a recurring aversion on the part of American labels to foreign singers, and it sometimes amounts to a mutual distrust. Kylie Minogue, the tiny Australian who has annexed most of Europe, has had only three hits here. Girls Aloud, the devilishly clever flagship act of the producer Brian Higgins and his Xenomania production team, generally doesn’t release records outside Britain. For many such acts, the American mountain can sometimes appear like too much bother, since even superstars can’t gain purchase. But given the retro-eighties feel and Euro-friendly nature of the year’s biggest female star, Lady Gaga, why not admit an actual European, who is even more fond of the eighties, into the game? Anne Lilia Berge Strand, a Berlin-based Norwegian singer-songwriter known as Annie, has no American label behind her. Her second album, “Don’t Stop,” a brash, bright, and easily absorbed pop effort, was completed in 2008 but is only now being released, jointly, by Annie’s Totally Records and an independent label in Norway called Smalltown Supersound. (After working on an earlier version, Annie was dropped by Island in Europe.)

more from Sasha Frere-Jones at The New Yorker here.

A Scientist’s Infectious Enthusiasm

From Science:

Benjamin_tenOever_200x250 In late 2007, during the early months of his faculty position at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, Benjamin tenOever faced a wrinkle in his research plans. Experienced in looking at how cells respond to viruses, he'd set his sights on microRNA and how these small molecular segments that tweak protein expression might help cells fight off infection. After months of work, the project looked like it might be a dead end: They had found that microRNAs are produced as a virus infects a cell, but those sequences didn't make a difference in how a cell responded to its invader.

With the dilemma percolating in the back of his mind, tenOever had a eureka moment while shopping with his wife along Lexington Avenue in Manhattan: “Every cell has a pool of microRNAs, even if they didn't target the viruses,” he explains. So, he wondered, what if he flipped the idea around and engineered viruses that bound to the existing cellular microRNAs? Instead of trying to harness a cell's microRNAs to fight infection, he would be creating tools to tweak the immune response of an altered vaccine. The strategy could provide a stealth way to build attenuated viruses for producing vaccines. Since then, he and his colleagues have modified the sequences of influenza viruses to bind to a natural microRNA expressed in humans and mice, in essence developing a virus that's knocked down by the body's natural microRNA. What's more, the microRNA they chose is not expressed in chickens; therefore, the modified virus reproduces well in chicken eggs, potentially solving a common flu vaccine-production problem. They reported the work in the June issue of Nature Biotechnology.

More here.

Where Did the Time Go? Do Not Ask the Brain

Benedict Carey in The New York Times:

Time That most alarming New Year’s morning question — “Uh-oh, what did I do last night?” — can seem benign compared with those that may come later, like “Uh, what exactly did I do with the last year?” Or, “Hold on — did a decade just go by?” It did. Somewhere between trigonometry and colonoscopy, someone must have hit the fast-forward button. Time may march, or ebb, or sift, or creep, but in early January it feels as if it has bolted like an angry dinner guest, leaving conversations unfinished, relationships still stuck, bad habits unbroken, goals unachieved. “I think for many people, we think about our goals, and if nothing much has happened with those then suddenly it seems like it was just yesterday that we set them,” said Gal Zauberman, an associate professor of marketing at the Wharton School of Business.

Yet the sensation of passing time can be very different, Dr. Zauberman said, “depending on what you think about, and how.” In fact, scientists are not sure how the brain tracks time. One theory holds that it has a cluster of cells specialized to count off intervals of time; another that a wide array of neural processes act as an internal clock. Either way, studies find, this biological pacemaker has a poor grasp of longer intervals. Time does seem to slow to a trickle during an empty afternoon and race when the brain is engrossed in challenging work. Stimulants, including caffeine, tend to make people feel as if time is passing faster; complex jobs, like doing taxes, can seem to drag on longer than they actually do. And emotional events — a breakup, a promotion, a transformative trip abroad — tend to be perceived as more recent than they actually are, by months or even years. In short, some psychologists say, the findings support the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s observation that time “persists merely as a consequence of the events taking place in it.”

More here.

Drone attacks in Pakistan: Challenging some fabrications

Farhat Taj in the Daily Times:

ScreenHunter_01 Jan. 05 09.53 There is a deep abyss between the perceptions of the people of Waziristan, the most drone-hit area and the wider Pakistani society on the other side of the River Indus. For the latter, the US drone attacks on Waziristan are a violation of Pakistani’s sovereignty. Politicians, religious leaders, media analysts and anchorpersons express sensational clamour over the supposed ‘civilian casualties’ in the drone attacks. I have been discussing the issue of drone attacks with hundreds of people of Waziristan. They see the US drone attacks as their liberators from the clutches of the terrorists into which, they say, their state has wilfully thrown them. The purpose of today’s column is, one, to challenge the Pakistani and US media reports about the civilian casualties in the drone attacks and, two, to express the view of the people of Waziristan, who are equally terrified by the Taliban and the intelligence agencies of Pakistan. I personally met these people in the Pakhtunkhwa province, where they live as internally displaced persons (IDPs), and in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).

More here. [Thanks to David Schneider.]

James Cameron’s Avatar

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Morgan Vampire In retrospect, it was fitting that I saw James Cameron's new film Avatar at an IMAX 3-D theater in Las Vegas. Las Vegas is not a place for those with any nostalgia for simpler times. In Vegas, reality is something to be fabricated, played with, and reproduced in as many ridiculous ways as someone is willing to pay for. Robert Venturi, the architect who penned the famous postmodern manifesto Learning from Las Vegas, was never a fan of Minimalism or austerity. In response to Mies van der Rohe's architectural dictum “less is more,” Venturi quipped that “less is a bore.”

Likewise, Cameron has never been a prophet of restraint. From Terminator to Titanic, he likes things big, expensive, messy, and new. It was, thus, fully expected when Cameron told Dana Goodyear of The New Yorker that Avatar is, “the most complicated stuff anyone’s ever done.” Cameron's goal, in short, is to completely revolutionize cinema. He also thinks of cinema as largely a visceral and visual thing. Emotional complexity is not his strong suit. He wants people to see something new, like when they first discovered the moving image.

More here.

Monday, January 4, 2010

Notes from a journey with Barack Obama

By Tolu Ogunlesi

On January 20, 2009, Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th President of the Unites States of America

*

I stayed up all night to watch Barack Obama become the President-elect of the United States of America. At that time I lived in a hotel room in Uppsala, a Swedish University town, far away from home (Lagos). It was hard to feel that the Swedes were in any way excited at the prospects of the sort of momentous change that was about to be unleashed on the world.

Obama Inauguration by Tolu Ogunlesi 1

I recall comparing the apparently unconcerned Uppsala with the Lagos I left behind, a city throbbing with the nervous anticipation of History bearing down on it at top speed (even though nothing like that was happening). Even before I left two months earlier Nigeria had already been overrun by Obamastickers and Obamatalk. There was even an Obama fundraiser that brought in millions of naira; money we later learnt US campaign guidelines prohibited the Obama campaign from accepting. A friend told me that he would be attending a party hosted by the American Embassy in Lagos, where they would keep vigil as the election results came in.

*

Read more »

Knifers

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Elatia Harris

The child on the left rests her hand atop the head of the other, working her fingers gently through smooth hair like her own into the scalp. Her expression is inspectorial, proprietary – and openly so. The other gazes out at us – nonplussed, plotting. You know without being told that these two could have but one relation to each other: they are sisters. It is your sister, and only your sister, whom you may handle like this in the expectation she will take you back.

These are the Gainsborough girls, Mary and Margaret, as painted by their father, Thomas, in 1758. The double portraits Thomas Gainsborough left of Mary and Margaret, from early childhood through their late twenties – at which point he died, or surely he would have gone on painting his daughters – are the most penetrating exploration of the theme of two sisters that art has to show us. As well they might be, for it was just once that a great genius of English painting begat two nervous girls close in age, and trained his eye upon them for over a quarter of a century, recording their dominance play, their tremendous naturalness with each other – even when sisters pose, there is no posing – and, their striking individuation in late girlhood.

As they hurtled towards thirty, their father the painter did the only thing he could do – he sat them into single portraits, into superb examinations, like all great portraits, of the separateness, and the fatedness, of one being who exists apart from all others. Apart even from her sister. This is the job of portraiture, to fashion personality and character into that mute and singular appeal across centuries: Behold me — for I am yet present.

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The Poetry of Jason Boone (1971-2008)

Justin E. H. Smith

We are so presumptuous as to wish to be known by all the world and even by those who will arrive when we are no more. And we are so vain that the esteem of five or six people who surround us amuses us and renders us content.” –Blaise Pascal (tr. Jason Boone, the epigram to his 2002 poem, “Ho There, Raise Up the Tommy Lift!”)

*

I should no doubt begin with what these days is known as a 'full disclosure': I was a friend of Jason Boone's for a short time, towards the end of the 1980s, when he would drive up through the valley from Fresno to Sacramento on weekends to go to rock shows at a night-spot called the Cattle Club, out near Highway 50, where I wasted a lot of time back then. The most peculiar thing about him, as I recall from that period, is that he always maintained that he absolutely loathed the music he heard at the Cattle Club, every bit of it, and yet he solidly refused to give any reason why he kept coming nonetheless.

“I hate guitars,” he would often announce. “I hate these flanel shirts and this whole beer and 'fuck yeah' thing.” The music was mostly what would come, within a few more years, to be called 'grunge', and featured many of the bands, then in an embryonic state, that were taking shape at that time in Seattle and touring up and down the West Coast. “The worst of all of them is this opening act called Nirvana,” Boone once said to me. “They open for Tad, who are almost as insufferably awful, but Tad's probably going somewhere. This is the end of the line for Nirvana. In ten years they'll be working shit jobs, installing cable TV, repairing copying machines, wishing they'd gone to college, and waxing nostalgic about their glory days. You can just sense it when you're watching these bands, you know, you can read their fates.” Is that why you watch them, even though you hate them? I asked. “Yes I suppose.”

It was more than anything else that halting, self-conscious “yes, I suppose,” instead of a thoughtless “yeah, I guess,” the elocution so much more natural in our shared milieu, that gave me a sense of Boone's own fate. He was dead wrong about Kurt Cobain, yet I was broadly right about him.

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