My Emptied Valise

On E-books and their Readers

2009-05-25T10:58:00.006-04:00

From an email in which I try to explain my reservations about e-book devices like the Amazon Kindle.

If these devices propagate information more thoroughly, that would be terrific. But the way they are being packaged is as a business plan for keeping newspapers and publishing houses solvent against the onslaught of digital media - i.e. an e-savior for businesses whose primary product has not been electronic. And I think the message that this will increase ready access to the written word for people who may not have it now is part of a marketing strategy to alleviate guilt in a group of people who both have strong convictions in the necessity of language & literature and a strong social conscience, and who also just so happen to be the target market for this device. Unless Amazon can alleviate the guilt, they won't be able to sell these people a Kindle.

A seduction, in other words. Like the Product Red program that "allows" people to buy highly discretionary items under the cover of making a (minuscule) donation to Africa. Absolution has become a major marketing tool in this era. In many ways, it is almost like the selling of indulgences by the church during the time of Erasmus.

Long way around, but what I think is this: don't by a red sweat shirt - send the entire purchase price to Africa and do without the sweat shirt entirely. Or set yourself an hourly rate where if you spend $100 on discretionary items, you then need to work in community service for 5 hours at an imagined $20/hour.

The language associated with e-books is the same language associated with computers 20 years ago, and yet there still isn't the democratic device in terms of computers. The OLPC is trying, but it faces many obstacles, the most complicated to solve being that the many people who would be its beneficiaries would benefit more highly from things like food, clean water and medicine.

As members of the first world, we, like Donald Rumsfeld, have a strong belief that technology is the answer to many of our issues. But as the AK-47 proves over and over again, sometimes technology pales in comparison to good old analog steel. Sometimes a book is just better. Longevity, durability, transportability, universality, etc. To read an e-book, you need electricity and an e-book reader compatible with that e-book's file system. To read a book, all you need is a little light.

If some sort of pay-to-play were worked out - Amazon and its brethren must provide unlimited access for public schools to every e-book produced in order to use the public airwaves to transmit its content to all the Kindles running through the NYC subway - I might feel more comfortable about it. Of course, they'd have to promise to keep all the e-book reader interfaces up and running. I know from many friends in academics that while school systems have little problem getting computers, maintenance is a whole other ball of wax. Lots of broken computers sitting in back closets waiting repair due to lack of funds or languishing unused due to obsolescence.

The reality is that the people who benefit most highly from e-books are the book manufacturers and Amazon. Warehousing and shipping books (along with the employees required to manage this process) must be a tremendous expense that not even just-in-time warehousing/publishing can offset sufficiently. E-books would create the possibility for greater control over profits for those entities, whether or not they would actually benefit the consumer. So all the rhetoric around e-books is suspect until the benefits to consumers can be shown to at least equal the desire of the producers to cut their overhead by eliminating warehousing, reducing employees, and cutting brick & mortar retailers out of the income stream.

Finally, because I like words and deal in their nuances, I can't ignore that while the word "kindle" can connote germination of an idea, it also means starting a small fire for the purposes of burning something larger and more resistant to flames. And that sense of the word is a bit too close to my flammable library.

I like technology and gadgets as much (or perhaps more) than the next guy. I am much more of a fan of the book publishing robot that the NY Public Library recently obtained. In 20 minutes, it can publish a book from an electronic file, allowing the library to dispense far more books in physical form that it could ever stack on its shelves. A physical book that can be read by anyone without the necessity of batteries or a device.

Light Meters

2009-02-27T12:46:00.014-05:00

I was sitting in a gallery yesterday while listening to a docent explain to a kaleidoscope of high school students that a photo of a white person and a black person that hung on the wall before them required the photographer to compensate for exposure based on the meter's reading of the light so that the black person's skin would not be too dark and that this made the photograph more complicated. And it occurred to me that even light meters were calibrated to one thing in order to measure another and that right now somewhere in Washington DC there is a room full of photographers fidgeting with their cameras as one of them steps forward to the empty podium with a meter in their hand. They call out the reading, and each photographer does their silent calculations for exposure, turning a knob, twisting a dial and compensating.

My Quandary of Traveling Responsibly

2009-02-19T15:11:00.002-05:00

This issue has been rattling around in my head a bit lately. I think it has always been there. People have told me that I tend to over-complicate situations through an excess of empathy. And I worry that sometimes I border on unfairly paternalistic in my concern about the impact of my presence on other people. I try to recognize that everyone has their own lives that they live as best they can and from that they generate a sense of pride and accomplishment that is wholly and 100% their own. And that this self-possession is something that I can not diminish with something as insignificant as my appearance on a street corner in their neighborhood.

But I have been struck over the last several years while traveling by the relative materialism of tourists from the developed world, especially while they are visiting third world or less developed destinations. They arrive in sparkling new clothes, with lovely new backpacks carrying one or two new cameras, maybe a laptop, cell phones, pdas, chargers, batteries, and so forth, in countries where the average salary per year is less than the contents of said backpack. Perhaps even less than the cost of the backpack itself.

The places these tourists (and I include myself in this category of tourist) visit are more than happy to see us. We bring money to areas that desperately need money, provide jobs, development, infrastructure, that would otherwise not be there.

But you do not have to dig too deeply to feel that along with this welcome is a thin layer of resentment (is that the right word? discomfort at least) created by the ostentatiousness of these accessories carried by tourists from developed countries, who, in turn, barely recognize these items as anything other than the standard equipment of travel.

So there is the welcome extended and your visit graciously received for its benefit, but along with that comes a sour bite from the economic chasm between you and the people you meet as you travel.

I am not sure if I am making sense. Friends have said that I am just feeling guilty for where and into what circumstances I was born. And that potentially I am transposing that sense of guilt onto people who are independent and proud of who they are, their country and their lives. That I am being paternalistic, perhaps even colonial.

But I have had opportunities to talk to people in the countries I have visited, and I have heard them suggest that the feelings are just as complex on their end of things. Like I said, they see the benefit to having tourists come and visit, economically and politically. But they also see the incredible materialism exhibited by these tourists, and they wonder why just a fraction of that wealth expressed by giant digital cameras, laptops, cell phones, jewelry, could not instead be invested in their countries where it might make the difference for some people, not just between happiness and sadness, but between life and death.

You cannot imagine how much you stick out like a sore thumb in a third world market place. There isn't one thing about you that isn't entirely foreign in appearance. If you were dressed in dayglo orange you wouldn't be any more apparent to the people who live there.

When I worked in outdoor equipment retailing, we had some t-shirts that said something like "Leave only footprints, take only photographs." A friend of mine said he thought that in some places even footprints were too destructive. I think he used the White Mountains as an example of a place that gets so many footprints, everything is getting a bit worn away. The landscape is being changed just by the footprints left behind.

At any rate, footprints are inevitable if you go places. What I have been thinking about lately is the kind of footprints you leave. Or the depth of them. And I think this expression of materialism that is made by all the things we carry with us when we travel is a sort of footprint, a deep one that could perhaps be made a bit shallower without diminishing the experience of travel or our ability to remember what experience was had.

I don't know. I definitely have come to think less is more when it comes to travel. I have tried to reduce what I bring to what I need and not what I might need. I resolved to stop looking for the perfect camera bag and just use what I have until it falls apart. My experience on a trip is not going to be adversely affected by whether or not I can get email. Or make a phone call from a mountain top. Fill a frame with a lion's head and post on Flickr that very night. Reduce reduce reduce.

Above all, my goal is respect. If you have clothes made of gold, you don't wear them to visit your friend who has clothes made of rags. At the same time, you don't wear clothes made of rags when that is not what you wear regularly. What begins as respect can become an insult if taken too far.

And I don't expect everyone to share my concerns. Travel as you will. Just that this is something that I have been thinking about - before during and after travels - and I guess in a way I haven't really come up with a suitable answer for myself.

The Sartorialist

2008-10-03T14:58:00.002-04:00

You wouldn't know it by looking at me, but I have always had at least a passing interest in fashion. Friends kept mentioning this site, and I finally spent some time looking at it. I must admit I have a certain amount of envy when I look at these photos (if I had only, to borrow Nike's slogan, just done it,) but I am not sure whether I would take these photos necessarily myself. Or whether I like the work of Bill Cunningham, the venerable street fashion photographer from the NYTimes to whom these photographs owe a sizeable debt, better. They feel, to me, to lack a certain vitality, if that makes any sense. Or rather, they feel shot with a bit too much sang-froid. I do like very much that the subjects often feel like collaborators or at least, co-celebrators, in their appearance. Happy in their skins, emphasis on the plural. That must be a response to the care with which they are approached by the photographer. And no matter how or in what you dress yourself, happiness should be the measure of (fashion) success I think. A pair of Converse All-Stars and a favorite pair of jeans is often enough to make a bad day better. But then, sometimes there is that little nuance that makes those All-Stars and jeans even better than that.

The Sartorialist

Factories, Nostalgia and the Intellectual Elite

2008-10-03T12:38:00.002-04:00

I have never understood this antagonism towards intelligence. One, I think there is a disconnect when people vote for people "like them" and then complain about the poor quality of elected officials and two, I think Americans have a giant intellectual inferiority complex, complicated by a diminished set of expectations for themselves that developed during their experiences with education.

I have met many people who do not think of themselves as intelligent who are in fact, intelligent, but simply because they do not have the confidence to believe in their own abilities, they tend to defer to those who seek power. And that deferral sets them up for a cycle of belief and betrayal that further diminishes their expectations.

On the other hand, when I taught a class on the Renaissance, I took my college students to the Phoenix Art Museum. After walking through the exhibits and showing them the PUBLIC research library in the museum, one of my students turned to me and said, "That was really cool. I didn't know that we were allowed to come here." I thought at first she meant the research library, but then I realized she meant the entire museum itself. This was a smart kid, a good kid, and she didn't know that she was allowed to go to a PUBLIC art museum.

I think the careful erosion of quality education by conservative (I won't say Republican, because that's not correct) entities in this United States has led a lot of people to feel like there are a lot of places they are not allowed to go. They are not smart or cultured enough. Because education funding has been continually gutted, people without extra financial support or academic traditions already part of their family's resources had mediocre instruction in school: it wasn't interesting, it didn't serve their needs, etc. And as a result, their only experience with the place where many of us gained a solid sense of our intelligence and developed a reasonably healthy and reliable relationship with it (as opposed to Homer Simpson's relationship with his intellect - "Brain, I don't like you and you don't like me...") was unsatisfactory and unfulfilling. At the same time, the educationally under-served are smart enough to see that having that solid relationship with intelligence is the membership card for doing a lot of really desirable things in this world.

I think the conservative degradation of education funding has its source in an antiquated idea of labor, and what is a suitable expenditure on education for the labor force, based on labor price and expectations. This antiquated idea still clings to a split educational path where workers work and the intellectuals lead. In short, no one believes more in an intellectual elite than the conservatives who use it as a rhetorical pry-bar on those who might otherwise vote against their designs.

In the old USofA, the people who now feel denied this membership card by a lackluster educational experience would have then gone into industry and worked in an auto plant or other factory work where their skills and intelligence that were not perhaps measured well by books & grades could be developed, giving them a sense of honor, identity and self-worth. But conveniently for the captains of industry, they were still undereducated, and therefore their wages would never be more than a certain level, assuring industry a ready supply of labor at a good price to profit ratio.

But those jobs are gone. We don't make anything anymore. We are now a country where the two industries are retail and Wall Street. And there are very few opportunities to develop a sense of honor and identity if you are working in retail or service. The wages required to make a profit for the retail industry are so low, they are insulting even to the worst educated. We have people discussing minimum wages as living wages when the minimum wage was originally meant to be like the minor leagues in baseball. It isn't supposed to be comfortable, because you are supposed to go to the major leagues. You weren't supposed to stay in the minors for your entire life. Now we have way too many people stuck in the minor leagues.

Where the frig am I going with this - just that I can see where a candidate like Palin is the backlash to the death of the industrial revolution in this country, just like the defeat of the bail-out package is a denial of the new central role of the investment industry to our national economy. We are going through a major transition in national identity, very similar to some of the adjustments that people in Eastern Europe had to go (and are still going) through when the "new" international economy arrived after the Wall went down.

Those people in Eastern Europe who have language skills, who are resourceful and resilient are doing really well. They are the burgeoning middle class. Those people who have no language skills, who are conservative in their ability to shift with the times, who are middle-aged or from families whose identity is linked with industry & mining, are having a tremendous difficulty. As a result, there is backlash of conservatism and ultra-nationalism, along with a tremendous amount of nostalgia for a system that was proven to be economically bankrupt in the 1980's. In Eastern Europe, this means communist parties get perhaps 20-30% of the vote in elections on nostalgia & backlash alone. Here, it means that candidates that espouse conservative recidivist ideas like "family values," traditional simplistic responses to new multiplex issues, and maintain a belief in fundamentalist power structures, probably get about 20-30% of the vote in elections from a group of people who are totally under-served by an economy in which factories no longer have a place.

I think that's Palin's role here. To make solid a 30% of voters that McCain can add 21% to by convincing a few slow-moving moderates & paranoid senior citizens and thus eek out a win. And I am going to bet, that it will be McCain, not Palin, who will fail to hold up his end of the bargain.

1st Bail-Out Vote Fails

2008-09-29T19:47:00.004-04:00

The vote on the bail-out in Congress today (09/29/08) was an interesting piece of politics. I think the Republicans wanted to push the Democrats into carrying the bill, so they could return to their constituents with the words "Tax & Spend Democrats" on their lips. With voter phone calls evidently averaging something like 99:1 against the bill, the Republicans teetering on the edge of losing their fights for re-election wanted to make voting for the bill an election issue. The hard political reality of this economic meltdown is that as each day goes by, the Republicans have less and less to run on. They want support for this bill, which is wildly unpopular, to be the responsibility of the Democratic party, not the result of Republican infatuation with Reaganomics & unilateral "diplomacy".

However, Pelosi reminded everyone in a speech made before the vote, that this was a bill to begin to repair the complete failure of Republican-backed economic policy over the last eight years. By doing so, Pelosi signaled to the Republicans that the Democrats made their votes under protest. Then when it became obvious that Republicans were not keeping up their side of the effort, she refused to push the bill through without at least 1/3 of the support coming from Republicans. Now they are saying that the speech she made is the reason the bill didn't go through, when the reality is that the Republicans are no longer a house in order. The bill was drafted by their man in the Whitehouse! How could they not vote as a party in support of this bill?

Frugality? Worries about spending tax-payer money irresponsibly? Eight years and a $10trillion budget deficit later and the Republicans are suddenly getting frugal with tax-payer cash?

140 Democrats to 65 Republicans voted for the bill. That's a sad statement on the power of the current President AND the optimism within the party that Republicans are going to do well in the upcoming election. Check out this detailed breakdown of the vote, and you will see that the Republicans voting "no" were the ones locked in the closest contests.

Mets are gone. Shea is gone. Long live Citi Field - or whatever its name will be after all this is over.

Presidential Debate #1, September 26, 2008

2008-09-26T22:45:00.003-04:00

I am 100% all about being politically involved, but in the current epoch, when candidates do so little in public that isn't scripted, the extemporaneous speaking skills in a Presidential debate are a painful display. A Congressional debate on CSPAN is an opera compared to a Presidential debate. And I mean in no way to diminish the importance of a Presidential debate, or the chance for everyone with a television set or a computer screen to see and hear the candidates. But politicians these days, with very few exceptions, are really sorely tested to sound like they are in control of their ideas, even if their ideas are good ones and even if their ideas are indeed of their own making.

The debate ends up being a bit like NASCAR where everyone is sitting around waiting for someone to hit the wall and burst into flames. Like as not, if you are a Jeff Gordon fan at the beginning of the race, you are a Jeff Gordon fan at the end of it.

But civic duty is not easy, I suppose, nor perhaps should it be. So we watch, listen, scratch our heads, and add up the pluses & the minuses along the way. And the politicians, good soldiers that they are, go unsteadily forward while trying to avoid the walls and the flames.

Mets lose 6-1 to the Florida Marlins. You could hear Jerry Manuel's teeth grinding on the radio.

Robert F. Kennedy, 11/20/25 - 06/06/68

2008-06-05T08:32:00.005-04:00

Bobby Kennedy

The train was a black centipede
moving through the blue-dust
a television cast across my mother’s pleated red skirt
spread like a fan over her knees.
She sat on the floor, her legs
kicked out to one side,
her white-socked foot
tapping rhythmically
until the newsman’s voice,

And now the car bearing the body,
draped in the flag

stopped it,

her heart breaking all the way
across the back of America.

- from my second book, The Circle Line, forthcoming from The Backwaters Press in 2009

Shiho Fukada's Photos of Chinese Parents After the Earthquake

2008-06-03T14:47:00.008-04:00

Sometimes a story finds the photographer. I think this is the case with the photographer Shiho Fukada, who was one of the early photographers into the earthquake zone in China. The story that found Fukada, however, is not just the general devastation of the earthquake, but the specific devastation of families as the result of "tofu construction" of schools. These schools were built poorly as the result of corruption, with money either embezzled, squandered or diverted to the schools of wealthier people in the towns. And now the parents are becoming a political force in their local areas, demanding that local officials be held accountable for the deaths of their children. The central government may give them their wish, in order to keep the controversy local and not allow it to expand nationally.

Of course, the local officials are scared to death, primarily because if the central government decides that they should be punished, they could very simply be put to death. At the very least, they will lose their positions and their primary source of income. You can see exactly how desperate local officials are to diffuse the anger of the parents in Fukada's photo above of Jiang Guohua, the Communist Party boss of Mianzhu (New York Times, May 28, 2008,) as well as the intensity of the anger in the parents who are marching to protest the collapse of the schools in their village. Quite a photograph.

Slide Show #1: Grief Turns to Fury in China

Sunday, June 1, was International Children's Day, a particularly poignant day for the parents who lost their child in the earthquake. Since China has a "one-child" rule, many of these parents only had one child, which made losing their child even more disastrous. The central government has rescinded the "one-child" law for those parents who lost their children in the earthquake, but what are parents whose children were 12, 13, 14, or older to do? Aside from the emotional price paid, they have already invested hard-earned resources in the rearing of their now deceased child - can they afford to do it all over again? What if they have already chosen sterilization as a method to prevent future children? And to further anger parents, there is the sting of class in this issue. There are ways around the "one-child" rule if you have money, and it is not unlikely that the people who have money in these communities are the government officials and perhaps the building contractors who made the decisions and did the work on the schools that collapsed.

Slide Show #2: China's Grieving Parents

I think Fukada has really taken some terrific photos of the parents whose stories, for obvious reasons, are not being reported with much detail in China. While the first slideshow is made of more purely journalistic photos of events as they occur, the second slideshow contains posed photos of parents holding the photos of their children in the ruins of the schools they attended. Perhaps, while these photos may not change the way China takes care of its working class, the photos Fukada took may offer some solace to the parents in their taking. I wonder if these parents will find themselves in government positions as reformers some time in the near future. I hope that she spends some time also documenting the children who survived. I wonder what will be their role in China's future once they are older, having at least lost their home at a young age and perhaps, lost their mother or their father or even their entire family.

Here more of Fukada's work on her website and others.

Shiho Fukada's Website

An Essay by Shiho Fukada on PhotoBetty

"24 Hours in the Financial District" by Shiho Fukada on Portfolio.com

Kenya, December 21, 2007 to January 8, 2008

2008-01-17T10:31:00.000-05:00

My wife and I are just back from a trip to Kenya. The trip was amazing. We arranged the whole thing through a company called Let’s Go Travel, a Nairobi based travel agency (which is different than a lot of the European or American based agencies as presumably the money stays in Kenya – important consideration I think.) George Ogola set everything up through email, and we transferred (gulp) payment to him with a bit of an “oh well” feeling, wondering if somehow it all might end up in the ether. But on the appointed day, a safari matatu (sort of a combi-van with a full-length pop-top roof) showed up at the gate of our friends’ house, honked, and we were away.

Landa was our guide, and he had pretty amazing driving skills. Most of the roads we took, except for one stretch around the base of Mt. Kenya, were rough and that’s an understatement. After the brutal drive from Amboseli to Lake Nakuru, Landa had to take the matatu in to the shop overnight to have every nut and bolt on the suspension checked and tighten. Good thing too, as many of them were loose, which explains why on the last leg of that stretch he could drive at about 50 kph.

Our itinerary was Amboseli, Lake Nakuru, Aberdares, Samburu, and then after a short flight, Masai Mara – basically the same places just about everyone goes when they do the whole safari tamale.

Amboseli is this incredible wetlands formed by the snow melt from Mt. Kilimanjaro. When the snows melt at the top of the mountain, the water flows underground until it hits a bed of less absorptive rock and pools in the middle of an otherwise arid plain just across the Tanzanian border in Kenya. On a clear day, you can see Kilimanjaro very well, and like most huge mountains that I have seen, the size is several orders of magnitude larger than I expected. What seems merely to be a cloud hanging over a mountain is actually the mountain surrounded by clouds, and the peak is just slightly lower than the highest cloud. Amboseli’s waters attract elephants and hippos, and each morning we saw quite a few elephants sunk up to their chins in the vegetables that nearly choke the water in each of the pools. Because the aquatic vegetation is so dense, the birds depend on the large animals to push aside the plants and reveal the fish and other goodies otherwise hidden beneath. As a result, each elephant or hippo has its own attendant flock of ibis’, egrets, jacanas, and other birds. Very lush. However, just beyond the banks of each verdant pool is arid grasslands, making for an immediate contrast between the lush watery elephant playground and the drier dominion of the giraffes, bustards, lions and cheetahs. We saw one large groups of lions, but unfortunately no cheetahs. Easy to imagine one zipping after a gazelle though. Plenty of runway.

Lake Nakuru is an alkali lake, famous for its large flocks of flamingos. We stayed in an excellent but small tent lodge – tent being an insufficient word for what is essentially a canvas house with full bathroom and four-poster bed. Not roughing it. In the morning, the black rhino showed up at our doorstep, making the thin wire fence seem entirely insufficient, especially when one of the other people at the lodge took a photo of the rhino at close range with a flash and the rhino charged the fence. These are the people you read about in the paper – “Man Trampled By Charging Rhino: Experts Puzzled Over Cause”. The flamingos are pretty amazing. The noise is what I thought was most impressive. All the squawking and carrying on blends into a single tenor-pitched sound that only elevates in volume when a hyena splashes into the flock to see if anyone is napping or a tawny eagle cruises through for a quick snack. The most impressive birds we saw were a pair of Verreaux’s eagles perched just above the matatu as we drove through the outer edges of the park. They looked like a pair of burghers in their black feathers and white “necklace” that extends down over their shoulders and across their backs.

To get to the Aberdares Mountains, you have to climb up out of the Rift Valley where Lake Nakuru sits. The vegetation moves from arid acacia scrub to more deciduous tangle. We stopped first at the Aberdares Country Club, the launching point for a bus ride to the strangely built Ark Hotel – strange because the roof of the hotel looks like that of an ark from the “classic comic” version of the Bible. The Country Club sits above a wide valley that holds a free ranging flock of Rothschild’s giraffes. After lunch and a few hours counting the many different kinds of sunbirds that flock to the flowers in the excellent gardens, my wife and I took a game ride down to the valley to see the giraffes. When we got there, the guide said we could get out if we liked. As most of the national parks prohibit anyone from exiting their cars for any length of time, an opportunity to walk among the animals is not to be missed. The giraffes were terrific – totally silent and perhaps a bit curious, moving across the ground so steadily and smoothly it was almost as if they were not moving at all. Once we got out, they started poking their heads above the bus-sized hedges that were spaced randomly around the edges of the clearing where the guide parked the truck (a big safari Land Cruiser from 1970 something – like riding in a washing machine.) I was not sure my wife would ever want to leave.

When we got up to the Ark, we were shown the system of bells that alert the guests to the arrival of certain animals who frequent the water hole the Ark was built to showcase. Each animal – leopard, rhino, elephant, hyena pack, and a few others – got a separate number of rings on the bell. As bells were placed at the head of each bed in the guest rooms, a ring was certain to alert most sleepers to an opportunity to stumble outside and look down on the floodlit water hole while wrapped in a large, thick blanket against the cold of the higher altitudes. And it was cold – we wore nearly every scrap of clothing we had and were still glad to find a hot water bottle placed between the sheets when we went to bed. Alas, no exotic creatures, though we did have a bit of excitement involving elephants and hyenas.

Just before dinner, four female elephants showed up with a very small baby elephant. They were not particularly interested in the water – the area was actually quite wet which is probably why we did not see many other animals. Instead, they wanted the deposits of salt in the dirt around the shore of the water hole and quietly went about digging up the dirt by bending down onto their front knees and gouging the dirt with their tusks. While they were so occupied, however, first one, then another, and another hyena showed up. Soon there were 15 hyenas, and the first hyena became to make experimental sorties into the outer limits of the elephants’ comfort zone. Finally, one got a bit too close, and the largest of the female elephants gave the smallest a not-so-gentle poke in the butt, sending her out to walk the perimeter as it were, against the encroaching hyenas. The small elephant was about 3-4 years old, and she did a pretty good job chasing the hyenas. They were none too keen on getting stepped on or tusked, but they still did not leave and more arrived each minute or so, increasing the odds in their favor of getting at the baby elephant sometime later in the evening. Then the largest female stopped, stood a few feet apart from the rest, and made a rumbling sound that seemed to be something you heard in your head rather than with your ears. A few minutes later, a very large male elephant walked out of the forest into the clearing. There was a pause, some throaty notes from each animal, then the male elephant stepped into the ring of female elephants for a session of trunk “handshakes”, body rubbing and bumping – quite a scene. Afterwards, the male elephant turned to face the hyenas with a sort of huff! and that was that. The hyenas gave up, leaving the elephants to finish their meal of salty dirt in peace.

The road to Samburu from Aberdares goes through some of the richest farm land in Kenya, much of it owned either by corporations or rich white Kenyans. The transition is most obvious when one looks at the telephone & electricity lines. Before one gets to the wealthy farming area, most of the lines are merely forlorn poles with balding strands of wire waving awkwardly in the wind. By the time Mt. Kenya becomes a roadside vista, the poles are straight and sturdy, and the wires connecting them are 1.) connected and 2.) continuous. In no other place we went in Kenya, including Nairobi, was the infrastructure for electricity and communications so shiny and new.

Once we reach Isiola, however, the road took on a decidedly more tense feeling. Perhaps part of this was the elections, which had taken place while we were in Nakuru a few days earlier and were still without conclusion. But I also think that Isiola is a pretty desperate place. In other parts of Kenya, even poor people would look you in your eye and see you – at least it felt that way. In Isiola, I kept wondering if most the town were glue sniffers. There was something hazy about the way they looked about two inches in front of you, rather than at the surface of your face. Then Landa said, “They are all chewing khat,” a leaf that when chewed produces a buzz stronger than tobacco but perhaps a bit weaker than marijuana. They were stoned. The kids came up to the windows of the matatu and asked for ink pens & paper, making me immediately regret not having followed our friends’ advice to bring a box of pens for the kids we would meet along the way. My wife and I had dedicated ourselves to traveling light, but now this compulsion for lightness felt a bit rude. Before we left Isiola, Landa registered with the police – the road from Isiola to Samburu had in the past been the realm of bandits who waylaid cars and then robbed the occupants. While the police had clamped down on this stretch a while ago, killing or chasing off most of the bandits, I think Landa felt that the unsteady elections might embolden some to go back into business. Even though the road was horrible, we didn’t stop or slow down until we reached Samburu.

Samburu is my kind of place. Hot, dry and plenty of arid vegetation. Even though it was far more lush, it reminded me of my favorite place in the states, the foothills of the Chiricahua mountains in Arizona. Samburu is better though. The birds are tremendous – we even found a pearl-spotted owlet perched on the edge of a bush late one morning. And the animals seem very much in their element, moseying through the brush as they looked for things to graze. The gerenuk is here, a long necked antelope whose name means “giraffe-necked” in the local Samburu dialect. And there are actual giraffes, this time the reticulated giraffes instead of the Masai giraffes in Amboseli and Masai Mara, or the Rothschild’s in Aberdares. Hornbills are ubiquitous here, and we found several different kinds, each separated out by the different patterns on the wings, the face and the color of the bill even though their over-all scheme is black & white with a bit of lipstick red on the bill. And that is most of bird watching in Kenya – 4 or 5 species of whatever, each looking nearly the same as the next, except for slight, perhaps even nearly imperceptible, differences in markings, or range, or song. The family of Cisticolas, small fussy birds that seem to be a cross between a warbler and a wren, proved the limit of my birding skills. With few exceptions, they are all a very limited variation on brown, rust and white.

During the day, we fended off the monkeys who came to raid each tent in our lodge. Bad monkeys. For that reason, we cheered when a Bateleur eagle showed up and tried to bash a monkey out of the trees over our heads. Bateleurs are big strong birds with very powerful wings, but the monkey held on, ducking and weaving out along the end of his branch, until finally he was able to leap to another tree and skitter down to safety.

Finally, we finished up in Samburu, and Landa took us to the small tarmac where we were to catch an airplane to Masai Mara. I think in the worst situation, traveling with a guide becomes a laborious process of tug-of-war. You want to go here or see this, and your guide has a seemingly invisible agenda that keeps him from ever giving in. However, in the best situation, you and your guide become collaborators on the adventure, and he is as receptive to your suggestions as you are deferential to his direction. That was the situation with Landa. He was instrumental in educating us in flora and fauna, as well as keeping us up-to-date with the shenanigans associated with the elections. That last day in Samburu was the first day of election violence in Kenya. After we got on the plane, Landa had to drive all the way home to Nairobi alone in that matatu. We hope he arrived safely, and that he continues to do well in the futre. He is a terrific gentleman, and someone I would recommend asking for if you travel with Let’s Go in Kenya sometime in the near future.

For us, I think, Masai Mara was a bit anti-climatic – though that might be the wrong word actually. The lodge was spectacular, run by Nick the half-crazy, half-sane, totally eccentric Tanzanian-Englishman-American owner. He made it his goal to employ the smartest of the local guys to work for him, and they repaid him with loyalty that meant that several had worked with him at the lodge since the early 1980’s. He is also making the lodge greener and greener by the day, sending the sink and bath water to a small wetlands set up to clean out the suds and installing solar/instantaneous water heater combos to take advantage of the sun without running out in the evening or on shady cool days. The food was uncomplicated but perfectly delicious and fresh. When the chef found out we were vegetarians, he made us a special dish each dinner. And the landscape & the animals are truly amazing. To look out across a plain and see gazelles, antelopes, buffalo, zebras, a few lions, a couple elephants, several giraffes, as far as the eye or binoculars can see, is mind-boggling, especially when one considers that we were there in the quiet season. When the wildebeest show up, things are really crazy. We even got to get out of the car again and go for a hike up the ridge above the lodge with a couple Masai (one of which received a prestigious offer of a spot in seconday school, which it seems the lodge owner is preparing to sponsor) to watch out for leopards (there are several in the lodge’s valley) and a guide to help with the birds. One of the highlights of the whole trip.

I think by the time we got to Masai Mara, we were fully into the whole safari routine, so instead of a mild sense of panic about what comes next and whether we were going to get to see this or that, we could just relax and let it all go by. And we had the perfect vehicle for it too – a huge, fully padded, Toyota Landcruiser that plowed along through the grasslands at about 20kph while we stood up through the roof and watched for cheetahs. No luck on the cheetahs though. The relatively wet conditions – not muddy but bright green grass everywhere as far as the eye could see – meant that there was no natural feature focusing the activities of the succulent gazelles that are cheetahs’ favorite snacks. Everyone was spread out all over the place, and thus, so were the cheetahs, which made finding them in the huge expanse of the Mara fairly imprecise. Each group of cheetahs have fairly distinct territories, but the guide said that some of these territories are as large as ten square miles. That’s a lot of space to cover at 20kph. But we did see plenty of lions, various eagles, hippos, elephants, hundreds of antelopes of all sorts, giraffes, and a nice Serval cat on the way to the airport to return to Nairobi. I can imagine that the spectacle of the Wildebeest migration would change my impression markedly, but ignorant of that experience, I prefer Samburu to Masai Mara.

The last day we were at the lodge in Masai Mara, we heard the story of the Eldoret church fire. A mob made up of opposition supporters (though who instigated their actions may never be known – in these situations, the instigation for events can as easily come from one side as the other, even when the results seem to indicate the culpability of particular group) chased a group of Kikujus from their homes. The Kikujus took refuge in a church, which was then surrounded by the mob and burned, killing 30 people, some of them women and children. When our plane from Masai Mara to Nairobi reached Nairobi airspace, we were told that we would not be going to Wilson Airport, the regional airport serving destinations in Kenya, but instead would be landing at Kenyatta Airport, the international airport in Nairobi. The reason given was that Wilson Airport did not have fuel available for refueling the plane; however, Wilson Airport is very close to one of the largest slums in Nairobi, called Kibera. One wonders if the fuel or lack thereof was not truly the problem, but that security and the threat of potential riots made landing at Wilson a bit more sketchy than would be smart or safe. Whatever the matter, our driver met us at Kenyatta, the streets of Nairobi were empty, and we fairly well flew back along the streets to the Karen district and our friends’ house with its lovely garden.

We had meant to go to Mt. Kenya, the second tallest peak (17,058’) in Africa to Mt. Kilimanjaro (19,340’,) but the potential for random violence strongly suggested that staying put in Nairobi was a better plan. In the west, even when things are tense politically, you have some assurance of the continued support of police or security. In the third world, this assurance barely exists when things are calm. A police officer at a checkpoint in the middle of the night might just as easily throw you in the dark hole of a jail someplace as wave you along to continue your journey home or to the market or wherever you might be going. In other words, if you find yourself in questionable conditions in a third world country some time, unless you are a journalist, a military advisor, a government official, a priest, an aid worker, or someone else who has a completely solid reason for being where you think you need to go, don’t go. First, you might get killed, but second, if you just get in trouble, then you are going to create all sorts of problems for the people who are going to have to figure out a way to get your ass out of trouble – people who probably have much better and more important things to do at that moment than deal with some idiot who drove into an unknown situation in search of excitement and a few photographs. Plus, you might just find that the embassy really couldn’t be bothered, which means you might sit wherever you are sitting for quite a while. Stay home. Watch the news on television and send email to your friends.

Which is what we did. Conveniently, our friend is a correspondent for a big news magazine, so we got hourly reports on the political situation from him while he was in the field or from his contacts. The basic issue seemed to be this: Kenya’s leaders (and perhaps Kenyans themselves) have deluded themselves that democracy was the universalizing influence that would bind all Kenyans together irrespective of tribal allegiances. And I think that perhaps this delusion was not a delusion really, if our conversations with the young men and women at Nakuru was any indication. They were all very excited about the potential for change that voting represented. Here was, they said, a perfect opportunity for political progress, to help improve the future of the country, through the democratic selection of a progressive alternative to the status quo – a vote for Odinga, instead of merely reelecting Kibaki. The night watchman at Nakuru spoke with us at length, and then he took his flashlight and shined it on his pinkie finger to show us the purple dye used to confirm that he had indeed voted earlier in the day. They were optimistic, bright-eyed, idealistic and in the end, naïve.

But they were naïve, not because of their own frailties, but because of the frailties of their own leaders. They believed that their leaders had as strong a faith in the process of democracy as they did. However, in the last hour of the vote count, with Odinga leading Kibaki by a slim but solid number, a sudden burst of votes for Kibaki put him over the edge, and he was declared the winner by an embattled elections commissioner (we heard the commissioner get shouted down several times on the radio while we were in Samburu, until finally he cleared the audience and made the announcement to an empty room.) Within a few minutes, Kibaki was sworn in and all the optimism we heard in the voices of the people we met in Nakuru drained out of the country. And when that happened, the reality that democracy could bind Kenyans of diverse ethnicity together, one to the other, neighbor to neighbor, tribe to tribe, became merely the delusion of political leaders disconnected from the will of their people.

Once the election was seemingly busted into pieces, democracy no longer had the ability to offer people something higher than tribal allegiances. For democracy to work, even the lowest of the low must believe that their vote will offer them a chance to select someone who will be their representative, who will speak for them fairly and seek changes that will improve their lives in some small degree. There must at least be some hope for the future affirmed by the process of registering the votes cast. Remove that hope and democracy no longer sits as the voice of the people, and the tribal allegiances – family, village, ethnic group – become the strongest voices speaking to people seeking protective assurance. Add a few politicians who see these multiplex arrangements as a path to power, and suddenly two life-long neighbors look at each other not as fellow Kenyans struggling to get by but as one Kikuju and one Kalenjin or one Luo struggling against all 40 other tribal groups that otherwise live side by next in Kenya every day. And then every one of each person’s troubles become the final result of who they are and who they are not, rather than part of a country’s worth of troubles that require a country’s worth of people working together to solve.

Since the Kikuju tribe has largely controlled the political landscape since the end of British control, Kikujus sit in all the important ministerial and regulatory positions in government, they own the best businesses, the most arable land, the freshest water supplies, and benefit most directly from infrastructure development in the parts of the country where they are the majority tribe. The other tribes have not had the same access to the government, and so they have been progressively excluded from more and more of the day to day necessities required to not just make a living, but to advance and improve one’s station in life. What I read in the man-on-the-street interviews in the papers and heard on the news is that Kikujus seem to feel the other tribes are merely whiners. After all, what any Kikuju has is the result of hard work and the building of interpersonal networks to ensure that their businesses and farms are successful and well supported by infrastructure and resources. Anyone could do this. Of course, what they don’t see (or choose not to factor into the equation) is that their access to infrastructure and resources, their network of business associates and customers, are largely a result of their position as a member of the Kikuju tribe. There is no pejorative definition of nepotism in tribal politics. Nepotism is just another word for family, and in a resource-poor environment, you look out for your family first and others second (if at all.) The idea that hard work gets you anywhere when the reality is that in order to get the chance to do the hard work depends on which tribe you are from is a fantasy built to support the institutionalization of unfairness. Not an uncommon form of denial. And now, with the hope of democracy as a correcting influence on this institutionalized unfairness stripped from the electorate by the base need for power by the political elite, all the other tribes in Kenya are counting out loud each time a Kikuju got an opportunity and others did not. Legitimate or not, the perception of years of unfairness without recourse to a fair electoral process has created the perfect opportunity for violence to spring up like a fast growing weed of frustration.

The situation of sitting in Nairobi, in a lovely garden with brightly colored birds flitting across brightly colored flowers, while a short car ride away police were shooting tear gas canisters at protestors was unavoidably surreal. And as the images of strife in the towns of Eldoret, Kisumu, Mombasa, and other towns across the country flowed across the television screen, I felt as if I was still separated from Kenya by an Atlantic Ocean of space. Somewhere people were staying up all night to make sure that marauding gangs did not light their houses on fire. Somewhere people were wrapping all their belongings in blankets and heading for areas were their tribe was not the minority and they would hopefully be safe. And somewhere people were lighting stores on fire and picking out one tribe’s members from another tribe’s members, beating one while allowing the other to pass. Meanwhile, we were sipping coffee (excellent coffee) in the shade of a garden, watching the kids jump in and out of the freezing blue water pool, and eating mango each morning for breakfast. The reality remains if you have money and the mobility that comes from having money, your experience with violence will be very different from someone locked down in the slums by their lack of money, their lack of mobility, and their complete lack of anywhere else to go.

When we were in Masai Mara, there were big dark clouds scooting across the plains. Some were producing rain. However, we didn’t get rained on at all, partly because the rain never reached us, but if it had, we could have merely driven around the rain in our truck. We had enough open space, we had a truck and we had fuel enough to move wherever we wanted to go. The Masai across the short valley who were leading an errant cow home from its stray adventure in the national park would have been stuck. They were on foot, they were far from home, and they were not supposed to be where they were. If caught by park rangers, they would have been fined and their cow taken from them until they paid up in full. And usually the fine would be equal to the value of the cow they were trying to save.

Damn You, Mr. Guggenheim!

2007-09-12T22:42:00.000-04:00

I am struggling to finish a Guggenheim application. There is something about congratulating oneself and asking for money simultaneously that feels well, like a Presidential candidate. No, not like a Presidential candidate. Maybe like a really sorry-assed rap star. Who is running for President. That's it. But these are the things poets do. The grant would be a tremendous honor, and the money would allow me to travel to the Philippines and visit the places my grandfather and his family, including my mother, were during their internment in a Japanese prison camp during World War II. My next project will use my grandfather's notebook kept while there, so seeing places personally would be a terrific asset. You see, I can't stop writing my grant proposal even now.

Tonight I listened to the Mets beat Atlanta again, and while I was worrying about Mota's inability to keep opposing batters from hitting RBI singles at will, I picked up Gerhard Richter's Atlas. I saw the show in London at the Whitechapel Gallery, and I was totally floored by it. One of those things that makes the Rilke poem, Archaic Torso of Apollo spring to mind.

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

Part of the power of that poem is of course the turn that the end where the lyric description is end-stopped by a Zen-like crack of the bamboo on the back of "You must change your life." But for me, the best line is just preceding that: "for here there is no place/that does not see you." That's totally spooky, but I like it. I want that. I want to be able to see like that. Not only to see everything, but to not be able to not see everything.

In an earlier poem of my own, Death of a Tractor's Son, I was writing about the death of a farmworker who was carried out of the house into the fields by another person. It came from a moment spent talking to a farmer on the edge of his land in Charles City County, Virginia near the James River. He was one of those naturally poetic figures who spoke about the depression of being a farmer with a full-hearted love. When I sat down to write the poem, I found I couldn't remember what he had said exactly, but I could see it. So I tried to decribe what I saw with a made up epigraph:

If I ever see that white light
that comes up the back of the head
and lays out all sides of everything,
I'll lay down my tools.
I'll walk away.

What I like about Gerhard Richter is his sight. His ability to see everything. Sure, there is a Germanic organizational fetish that is a little scary (I once had a professor who told us about an epiphany he had when he realized the pristine level of organization that was whisking him speedily through Frankfurt airport to his waiting plane was the same organization that whisked people to the gas chambers during the Holocaust.) But beyond that is a vision that sees everything as important enough to organize it. To see it and keep it. To put it somewhere it can be found and used. Each photo in his Atlas is part of the lyric chain that leads to the denouement of his final expressions - his paintings. By looking at the photos in Atlas, you come to understand how he arrived upon the blurry black & white paintings, the smeared paintings, the portraits, the military paints, the gray paintings, etc. - all of these in their infancies were a moment in which a shutter clicked right after an eye saw something. Or just before.

And that's the real excitement for me in the conceptual expression that is the Atlas as exhibited. How many images? A lot - many rooms. It took me 2 or 3 hours just to feel like I had seen everything, and yet I could have stayed longer and seen more. But what I did see was perhaps the shadow of an eye - what gets projected upon it or through it - and a willingness to allow things to project and be seen without evident filters.

Of course, Richter is filtering things throughout Atlas. We don't see totally bad shots or every waking moment of his day. Still there is an openness to seeing everything - in the construction and in the presentation - that means a lot to someone who is trying to write poetry.

So what to write? Everything. What to photograph? Everything. As Wolfgang Tillmans' exhibition title said, "If one thing matters, everything matters." Quite a romantic notion, which is exactly why applying for things like the Guggenheim makes me feel like someone dropped sand in my shorts. It feels so much like the person who hasn't yet seen the archaic torse of Apollo or been elevated by Gerhard Richter. What good are these visions?

I operate from a position of resistance in nearly everything I do. Politics, art, academics. Poetry. I am frequently furious. Quite often rebellious. And yet, here I sit worrying that my Guggenheim grant application sucks. I am not sure I see well enough, and yet I see everything. I must change my life.

David Grossman's "Writing in the Dark" essay, NYTimes 05.13.07

2007-05-13T15:04:00.000-04:00

David Grossman has a nice essay in the New York Times today. I remember reading something about him at the time of his son's death during the recent fighting in Lebanon. And I remember him being quite well-spoken even then when he was obviously distraught at the loss of his son. I guess he is one of the literary voices for peace in Israel, and a number of people felt that perhaps now that he had lost his son in battle, his views would shift. But he didn't, and if I remember correctly, that was what the original article was about.

I think the current article is very well written in that it explains writing from the position of self-preservation against the onslaught of mind-numbing conflict. He suggests that “the ongoing state of war” creates a “shrinking of the 'surface area' of the soul that comes in contact with the bloody and menacing world out there.” Susan Sontag presented a similar model in regard to the viewing of photographs of tragedy in her book, Regarding the Pain of Others, in which the viewer feels first the shock at the horror depicted, then the call to action to cease the current or prevent any future horror, followed quickly by impotence in the face of the immense inevitability of the institutional perpetrators of horror, and then lapsing finally into the malaise of an apathy ironically inoculated against feeling anything like the original shock ever again. Both Grossman and Sontag understand that the danger here is that conflict and its continuous spectacle of tragedy, rather than preventing future tragedy (i.e. a war to end all wars) make it easier for future tragedy to be perpetrated by “those who might 'know better'” as it serves their interests against our own. As our exposure to conflict increases, our apathy grows, our compliance increases, and those who might lead us find their jobs easier and truth more malleable. We contract. They expand.

The Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, suggests that the model for modern governance is that of a “state of exception” in which the ruling body convinces the polity that the current epoch is unique in its relationship to imminent threat, and as such, special powers should be accorded the ruling body that might not otherwise be accorded in a free and open society. All language is focused on supporting this idea, and the energy of the state is expended, through military action, through legislation, and through the daily rhetoric of those in power, to convince the polity that this state of conflict is continuous and imminent. The cloak in this case is that democracy is held out as the model, while the hidden dagger of fascism slices off individual freedoms one by one. The power of polity is decreased. The power of the ruling body is consolidated and increased.

Grossman offers that writing is the act that reverses this “narrowing” of the world, a phrase he borrows from Kafka's mouse in the short story, “A Little Fable”. Through writing, Grossman says, he can “relieve myself of one of the dubious and distinctive capacities created by the state of war in which I live - the capacity to be an enemy and an enemy only.” I think this is right on. Following from J.M. Coetzee's book, Waiting for the Barbarians, having an enemy and being an enemy are the same form of subjugation, especially if the definition of “enemy” is one handed down to you by “those who might 'know better'” and occupy a position of power over you. Or as President Bush said, “You are either for us or against us,” as statement, when made from a position of power (and therefore as a deadly threat,) is so anaerobic that objectors are reduced to meaningless defenses of their positions like, “I support the troops.”

Grossman, on the other hand, points out that writing allows the writer to escape the subjugation of this false oppositional duality: “All of a sudden I am not condemned to this absolute, fallacious and suffocating dichotomy - this inhumane choice to 'be victim or aggressor,' without having any third, more humane alternative. When I write, I can be a human being whose parts have natural and vital passages between them; a human who is able to feel close to his enemies' sufferings and to acknowledge his just claims without relinquishing a grain of his own identity.” Right on.

Part of Jean Amery's argument in his book, At the Mind's Limits, is that the purpose of resistance is resistance, not winning or change. Thus when all else seems lost, resistance is still important - in fact, it is paramount. If one accepts that writing one's conscience is a form of resistance that allows one to “cease to be the helpless victims of whatever it was that enslaved and diminished us,“ then Grossman's ideas about why one must write dovetails nicely with the philosophy that came out of the Holocaust and the determination that it never be allowed to happen again, that we are active, vigilant & aware, “not the slaves of our predicament nor of our private anxieties; not of the 'official narrative' of our country, nor of fate itself.“ In a word, resistant.

“Our private anxieties” and the dislocated behaviors they produce - anti-immigration polemics in a nation of immigrants, intolerant rhetoric in a nation stitched together by tolerance, persecution of difference globally by a country made of diversity - are what make the United States such a polarized and polarizing country right now. If writing can free us, let's get to work.

Finally, I like Grossman's perception that the rhetoric of “predicament“ comes down through society from the military in a way that “ultimately seeps into the private, intimate language of the conflict's citizens, even if they deny it.” In the United States, one need look no farther for a physical manifestation of that phenomenon than the products developed by the military that now appear in everyday society - Humvees, nylon, SPAM, GPS systems, etc. We are more Sparta than Athens I think.

Popular Ink—because everyone needs a shirt and everyone needs a story!

2007-04-23T13:32:00.000-04:00

My new chapbook, All About the Blindspot & Other Poems, just came out the other week. There should be a link to the publisher's site to the right. Popular Ink is a cool company, and I hope they do very well. Below find their press release to find out more about their company.

"The high-concept publishing and accessories company, Popular Ink, is reinventing the traditional literary publishing model for the 21st century with its debut line of five limited-edition books and matching t-shirts. The founders of Popular Ink, a collective of writers and artists who wish to keep their identities anonymous, have created a new publishing approach and online community to share writing and spark interest in reading. What better way to get people talking than with stylish t-shirts printed with enigmatic phrases from portable new works?

Inspired by the affordability and accessibility of the wildly popular Penny Press, Popular Ink tees sport attention-getting lines from the work of new writers. And each tee comes with the matching book—a pocket-sized, perfect-bound cache of poems or a fresh, new story. The writers for the debut line are: Jorn Ake, M. C. Boyes, Paula Champa, Nathan Alling Long and Jessamyn Joy Ross. (Collect the whole set and you'll never go naked or lack for a good read again.)

Popular Ink's first in a series of tees can go from yoga to brunch to Memorial Day barbeques. Choose the washable, giftable tees and mini-books in five limited-edition colors, like lazy-ass yellow, disturbing fin gray and think-tank pink. Popular Ink tees and books are available only at PopularInk.com. To link directly to the shop: http://store.PopularInk.com/. (Shipping is free.)

Cool tees and provocative reads not enough? In Popular Ink's Indelible Kitchen, everyone is invited to join the riff of conversation. Each week, the blogazine Indelible Kitchen will feature writing, art and more. This lightly juried blogazine is a unique place to post new writing and art — with the opportunity to become a permanent contributor. Simply click on the email function to submit posts.

The editors at Popular Ink routinely read the Indelible Kitchen looking for the authors and illustrators for their next set of books. The Popular Ink website also offers a direct submissions link for authors who hope to see their names in bright lights (or at least in print).

Popular Ink features a stand-alone t-shirt, the Popular Monkey, by artist Chris Shrader. In June, Popular Ink will launch the first Remake the Monkey contest. Artists can submit their illustrations in the Indelible Kitchen.

The company plans to debut new shirts, other unusual items and giftbooks in limited editions of collectible colors and a full range of sizes four times a year. Watch PopularInk.com for new items and contest announcements."

If you get one of my books, send me a photo of you wearing the t-shirt. I'll start collecting them for later posting here!

Virginia Tech and Baghdad

2007-04-23T13:15:00.001-04:00

The irony struck me when close on the heels of the tragedy at Virginia Tech (i.e. the next day) there was a huge series of bombings in Baghdad in which over 170 people died immediately. And this was one day. Earlier in January, 70 students and staff were killed in a bombing at a Baghdad university.

Don't misunderstand me - the presence of violence and tragedy in other parts of the world doesn't make an event NOT a tragedy in this part of the world. The VA Tech shooting, where I have friends and acquaintances who are faculty in the English department, was definitively a tragedy in many different ways. There is no mitigating that fact, nor would it be my intention to do so.

But I couldn't help wondering - must not just about every Iraqi who sees coverage of this event on CNN be wondering if any of the students on VA Tech's campus will connect their experience of violence & its psychological aftermath with the experience of violence that has become a daily presence for people living in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq? I am not of course saying that VA Tech was caused by Iraq. That would be a simplistic misreading of my point. I am wondering merely whether the moment of violence at VA Tech might give the people who experienced it directly & those of us who followed it on television, pause to consider what living in Iraq might truthfully mean to the people we insist we are helping. Can anyone of us imagine what it must be like to live in a country where VA Tech happens every day, if not VA Tech x3 or 4 or 5? Even in this dismal moment of meaningless violence, how many of us are considering how insanely lucky we are that we live in this country?

And given the resultant understanding that might come from careful consideration, what are we going to do now?

Helene Cooper in the New York Times, 01-14-07

2007-01-14T08:43:00.000-05:00

Sometimes an article appears in the New York Times that is so bad, I wonder really whether the editors read it. Such is the case with Helene Cooper's article, "The Best We Can Hope For" in the Week in Review section of the Sunday edition on 01/14/07. Cooper attempts to suggest that the Spanish Civil War provides a hopeful model for the end of the Iraq War - in short, that the war would remain an Iraq War and not become a regional or global conflict. I was so astonished at the simple-mindedness of this article, that I could barely write a letter to the New York Times. The worst articles are always the most difficult to object to concisely, because they usually are bad in a mind-bendingly three-dimensional manner and their rebuttal seems always to include repeating verbatim the entire history of the twentieth century. Just so, this article by Helene Cooper. I include my attempt to respond to its weaknesses below.

~

Dear Editor:

Helene Cooper's article is astonishingly bad, even for the New York Times. Apart from the flippant cocktail-party tone taken about subjects as serious as the Spanish Civil War and the Iraq War, she insists on missing her own points. To quote:

"But, in the end, the Spanish Civil War stayed Spanish. The Europeans sent money and arms and even volunteers, but they didn’t let the war engulf the continent. (Probably because the continent was busy getting engulfed in World War II, but let’s not be too technical.)"

Huh? So in history, what actually happened is merely a technicality?

Regardless, she continues by warning that somehow we risk turning the Middle East into a nuclear conflagration or merely a world war by not increasing the numbers of troops in the area. Somehow by devoting more troops to the conflict we will keep the Iraq War in Iraq, just as the Spanish War kept the conflict Spanish, thereby averting another world war of some sort. But back to the mere technicalities of history - wasn't the Spanish Civil War followed by World War II? So really, to follow Cooper's logic (which she herself seems reluctant to do, probably because it doesn't make any sense) what we need to keep the conflict in Iraq IN Irag is another world war, just like the one that followed the Spanish Civil War.

Nice.

The Spanish Civil War involved players from all sides of the future conflict that became World War II. Many of these players are also actively involved in the Iraq War - anti-fascists, industrialists, weapons manufacturers, world powers, etc. Even the rhetoric in the speeches is similar - compare those of Franco with those of President Bush and you will find some (shocking) similarities in the use of The Enemy as a pry-bar on their respective countries' sense of democracy and civil justice. The true horror of the Spanish Civil War was the lack of enough tactical and material superiority on either side to end the war quickly. Instead it dragged on for a couple extra years while the fractious combatants bludgeoned each other, killing hundreds of thousands of people in the process. The half-interested intervention of world powers did much to prolong the conflict and prevent a negotiated peace earlier than it occurred. As a civil war, the situation in the Spanish Civil War is closer to that in the Yugoslavian Wars than it is to that of the Iraq War, which is basically a war of imperialist intervention and why it is dangerous regionally.

The Iraq War is dangerous not because it might spread to other countries, but because the Bush administration is trying to prevent the spread of the Iraq War into other countries (and thus ensure its own petro-economic agenda) by keeping other countries from being involved in the solution to the problems in Iraq. Because Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia are not involved in the process of creating a peaceful Iraq, they can only distrust any goal that the United States, a (non-Muslim, pro-Israel) foreigner in the region, may have for that peace. Iran fought a long and costly war against Iraq it does not want repeated. Syria sees an American-backed government in Baghdad as a direct threat to its dictatorship, especially since Bush keeps trumpeting the exportation of democracy. Saudi Arabia watched Iraq overrun Kuwait and sees the fate of minority Sunnis as its responsibility in the region. The House of Saud cannot maintain face in the Arab world and allow Sunnis to be killed simultaneously. Keeping all of these countries out of the deal guarantees that each country will seek influence individually in order to ensure their strategic interests are maintained through whatever means possible. The Bush administration needs to involve these countries in order to make certain that what peace can be achieved in the region has the blessings of all parties. Otherwise, nothing but instability will be the result. The Iraq War cannot remain Iraqi. It involves all the other countries in the region already.

And then there are the Kurds and the Turks.

In the end, Helene Cooper's article just seems incredibly shallow and naive, perhaps even slightly malformed. I would suggest the more active participation of an editor in the future.

Sincerely,
J Ake

~

I know, I shouldn't snipe at the editors. But really, the editors at the New York Times are just not paying attention. If Cooper's piece is an Op-Ed, then the article should be in a different section. If the piece is an analysis, it should take that tone and honor the presence of historical information, not denegrate it to mere technicality.

If you would like a good book on the Spanish Civil War (and one that gives good examples of the rhetorical approach of Franco that you can compare to the speeches of Bush and his pals) check out Anthony Beevor's The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939.

Happy New Year!

2006-12-30T10:45:00.000-05:00

Our best wishes to our family and all our friends for a Happy New Year!

Women and the Two Body Conundrum

2006-12-19T14:48:00.000-05:00

Women in Science: The Battle Moves to the Trenches (NYTimes, 12/19/06)

The New York Times has an interesting article about the "two body" conundrum facing women working in the sciences - a conflict I would argue is present for women in nearly every professional career. There are other aspects of this article surveying the inequities in the sciences that result in more women entering and then leaving the field compared to those numbers among men. However, the two body conundrum is one that is a frequent topic of conversation between my wife, a corporate lawyer, and me, a poet and photographer. Briefly, the two body conundrum is the unresolved conflict between having a career and having a family. In order for women to resolve this conflict successfully, they either have to be gifted individuals with exceptional skills that cannot be readily acquired by others or have two bodies, the punch-line being that no one can be two people. Thus the conundrum.

I think, however, it is also the answer. The focus of the article is upon emancipating women and equalizing the playing field, but it doesn't really address the underlying problem of WORK in the current era, though the article hints at the issue when it questions (through a quote from Evelyn Hammonds, professor at Harvard) whether a 70 hour work week is truly required for anyone to succeed in science. I feel the underlying problem is that contemporary models for employment & career building do not create space for the building of families or even the maintenance of a well individual. The article presents accurately that one of the most tenacious inequities women face emanates from the perception of their relationship to child-rearing as being disruptive to the dedication required for women to be serious scientists. What the article does not discuss is that this perception is based on an equivalent & opposite assumption that child-rearing will not be disruptive to a man's career, because it is institutionally assumed that men will disappear from the family during the period of time required for them to establish themselves in their field.

My father is a scientist and was an academic for 40 years. Until I was ten years old, he was barely home during the week. He left for work at 7 in the morning, returned at 6 in the evening for dinner, and then returned to the lab at 7:30 until after I was asleep. When my mother died, much of the friction in our family was the result of his realization that his absence made my mother the sole historian of those years, followed by his struggle to accept that he could not repair that absence, no matter how well intentioned his efforts might be. My father, if offered the opportunity in retrospect to be two bodies and build his career and his family simultaneously, would have signed whatever Faustian contract was required in order to do so.

The reason that the two body conundrum is difficult for women to overcome is that it is an untenable proposition for anyone - man, woman, mother, father, or parents of any configuration - commited to creating a healthy family. Individuals cannot solve the two body conundrum, because individuals by definition cannot be two bodies. In a family, the second body is the second parent, and current models of employment and career building demand that one parent MUST be absent in order for the family to generate the resources required to raise a family successfully. The current model is not healthy. People should not be doing it. Employers - universities, corporations, factories - are getting away with an unjust stipulation when they force either parent to acquiesce to those terms in order to build a career. And governments are subverting their responsibility to families in situations where a single parent is forced to manage a family without access to the resources having two bodies would otherwise present - child care, health care, and time off from work.

Thurgood Marshall was asked at the end of his career as Supreme Court justice, whether black people were better off now than they were when he first started practicing law. His answer was that the question itself was moot. People are better off now. No one is served by inequity. Humanity is lowered by what costs prejudice exacts upon the spirit of the community. So too I think in terms of women's access to an equitable workplace. I think the goal is not merely make the workplace more equitable to women. The goal is to make the work place more equitable and thus, more humane. We will all benefit from that increase - as individuals, as men, as women, and as parents.

2006-12-11T09:53:00.000-05:00

Barack Obama

So Mr. Obama goes to New Hampshire. I would just like to say that I am worried about an Obama candidacy. A number of people have told me he is a tremendous orator, and that he leaves his audiences with a sense of optimism that the most difficult problems of the country are indeed difficult, but they are not impossible. I have read his speeches in written form and even without the accompanying timbre of his voice, I find them to be charismatic in the way friends have described. I wonder how conservatives hear his speeches. Do they make the most ardent supporters of the Bush administration, those individuals who still feel that Bush is doing important work in the world and is being misrepresented by people who just do not understand the imperatives of the current epoch, cringe at what they may feel to be the soft-brained, socialist pandering of a Barack Obama to the muddled masses? And considering this, I remember wondering at the heart-clutching of conservatives when they heard the words of George Bush during the 2000 and 2004 elections. The eloquence of Bush's plain-spoken (mis-spoken to liberal ears) speeches made his supporters believe that Bush was the chosen one, the candidate who would once and for all lead the country on a permanent restructuring of this United States into a land governed by conservative ideals from sea to shining sea.

While one might argue that Bush has indeed effected just such a restructuring and thusly bankrupted the country - socially, morally, financially, and any other way that remains - my initial concern was that his message had such power over so many people, and yet he had so little political experience to recommend him. Karl Rove might suggest this made him the perfect candidate - all message and potential without negative baggage to slow him down. But a good candidate does not a good leader make. I think that is fairly obvious now. Even the profoundly blind among the conservatives must admit that the man whom they once thought to be the chosen one is so only by them.

But about Obama, my worry is this: When Bush spoke, he made the hearts of conservatives leap with optimism. If there were such a thing as a conservative-to-liberal translating device that could be placed in front of Mr. Bush's mouth and translate his words from those that would make the hearts of conservatives leap to those words that would do likewise for the hearts of liberals, would we hear then the speeches of Barack Obama? Eloquence in oratory is after all the sweetest of sweet talking for most liberals awaiting political seduction. Linguistic bumbling is what made them first hate Bush, and then later, condemn those who supported him as the blind following the blind. But the presence of eloquence in Obama may make liberals equally myopic.

In terms of experience, Obama's resume is similarly thin when compared to that of Mr. Bush. He has some experience (1996-2004) at the state level as a senator representing the 13th district in Illinois. He failed in his effort to unseat Rep. Bobby Rush in the Democratic primary in 2000. He succeeded in winning his election as U.S. Senator when the Republican candidate, Jack Ryan, withdrew and was replaced by Alan Keyes, arguably the least electable person in the world. His record as a state senator was commendable - to liberals. Bush's record as governor was equally commendable - to conservatives. Obama has been lauded for his essential populism and innate understanding of the working class, a sensitivity born into him as the child of an African father and a white mother. Bush's aw-shucks attitude, his jocularity, his malapropisms and mispronunciations, were seen by many voters as signs that he was "just like us." Obama went to Columbia and Harvard. Bush went to Yale. They are as equally not "us" as they are "them" - members of the Ivy League intellectual ruling class that continues to hold sway over the government and politics of this country.

Admittedly, some of these connections are tenuous or even meaningless. The track record of Obama in the state senate does seem to reflect the conscience of someone who is honestly concerned with the health and well-being of people. And one could perhaps just as easily compare the career of Obama with that of former President Bill Clinton, who was governor of Arkansas for approximately 11 years, interrupted for 2 years by defeat. Whether Clinton will be held in posthumous esteem remains to be seen, but he currently stands as one of the best Presidents of the latter half of the Twentieth Century. Bush certainly presents no competition there.

But Bush is exactly why I worry about Obama. The world is in bad shape, and our position in this world is worse than merely bad. We can no longer afford the luxury of an inexperienced or marginally competent President, because we do not have the space available for serious mistakes. Obama cannot be held as inherently righteous, no matter how eloquent the speeches may be. Obama must meet the challenges of candidacy and satisfy the proper scrutiny of the electorate.

A President should be eloquent. Eloquence is not an asset. It is a requirement for the job of President. Concern for the health and well-being of people is a requirement for the job. Honesty is a requirement for the job. Integrity is a requirement for the job. Bush made everyone accept the rarity of positive character traits in public servants, because it served his designs on power, not our need to be powerfully represented in the world. If the men who are to lead us are truly like us, then they should be at least as honest as we are. I would argue that in matters of public concern, they should be more so.

Obama (and Hillary Clinton and Tom Vilsack - this is not an argument to interrogate one in order to protect another) should be asked many difficult questions - about foreign policy, about individual rights and freedoms, about the draconian policies of the outgoing administration, about specifics of plans for the future, budgets, diplomacy, China, Russia, the Middle East, etc. Answers should be required and time to do so should be given. If liberals are to truly become the populist party of this country, they cannot merely embrace the first person who says all the things they want to hear. That sort of embrace by the conservatives brought us Mr. Bush, a bad President who was bad because he was bad, not because he was a conservative. As liberals decide who to nominate for the 2008 presidential race, they should challenge everything and every candidate equally, even the things with which they agree wholeheartedly. Even and especially themselves.

Addendum: After discussing this point, one of my very smart friends from the Czech Republic reminded me that the concern is not so much inexperience per se, but what hangers-on inexperience may allow to access the decision making process at the highest levels of government. A President who so lacks the experience required to make decisions about the relative soundness of disparate packages of advice offered for his consideration, may in the end allow decisions to be made for him by people whose interests are not in representation of interests any larger than those of a corporate board of investors. This has undoubtedly happened during the current administration. We can so ill-afford to lose the rest of this country's relationship to the teachings of Locke, it is as if the essence of our representative government were Amazonian rainforest.

Another of my friends, who is professionally involved in politics at a high level, felt she should caution me against conflating Obama's lack of experience with that of Mr. Bush. It is one thing to be inexperienced, she said, but another thing to be inexperienced, unintelligent and devoid of the intuitive leadership skills needed to guide a country through difficult times. She conveyed to me strongly that without his powers of oratory, Obama is merely inexperienced. Bush on the other hand....

These are both points well taken.

Pinochet is dead.

2006-12-10T18:30:00.000-05:00

From NYTimes.com's AP feed at 6:30pm, December 10th, 2006.

'''Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile represented one of the most difficult periods in that nation's history,' said White House spokesman Tony Fratto. 'Our thoughts today are with the victims of his reign and their families. We commend the people of Chile for building a society based on freedom, the rule of law and respect for human rights.'''

We are such fuckers. A quick review of history here on Wikipedia might be worthwhile to see why the above comment might just as easily be considered an insult to the people who fought to free Chile from Pinochet.

Alec Soth's Very Interesting Blog

2006-12-05T18:36:00.000-05:00

I have been following Alec Soth's very interesting blog about photography, politics, photography, ethics, photography - did I mention that his blog is interesting?

Recently he asked several questions in an area (building off an article in the New York Times on the architectural photographer, Julius Schulman, who lamented the loss of people in architectural photography) that has been in the front of my head this year - that of the role of people in documentary photos and from there, the role of photojournalism in the art world.

Here is the post, along with comments, including my own which I have inserted below. The parts of the conversation preceding my comments that interested me most were those responding to a Luc Delahaye photo of a dead Taliban soldier in a ditch which was recently priced for sale at $15,000 and the Robert Polidori photographs of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina. I am not so interested in the ethics of photographing these images, but rather, I am interested in the ethics of their presentation and reception.

~~~~~>

I keep thinking of the scene in Woody Allen’s film where he walks into his kitchen and there is a wall-sized reproduction of Eddie Adams’ photo of the Vietnamese police sargeant executing a VC prisoner in the streets of Saigon. That photo had immediate, terrific impact when it appeared in the press, but Allen I think recognized that very quickly it became wall decoration and that the decoration included the emotional charge of the image as well as the charge from the lack thereof. Or as Susan Sontag said, “There is the satisfaction at being able to look at the image without flinching. There is the pleasure of flinching.”

I don’t begrudge photographers like Nachtwey, Delahaye, Haviv, Kratochvil, and others the right to make a living through their work. But I wonder if the presentation of these works in galleries and museums where only a small percentage of the public goes does not merely assuage the angst of inactivity in the face of tragedy among a group of people by offering them a view of the tragedy as a surrogate for solving or rectifying the contributing factors of that tragedy. What, for example, are people to say or do upon seeing Polidori’s photographs? Buy one? Make a donation? Vote for officials who will never allow this to happen again? Or as I overheard more than a few people say in the Met where several of his New Orleans series are/were hanging, comment upon the opulently rotten beauty of the photographs and head for the Picassos.

I think we can all understand the motivation of these photographers for selling their work - most have worked for relatively low pay in exceptionally dangerous, life threatening conditions. Haviv even had a contract on his life taken out by the infamous Arkan of the Serbian paramilitary group, Arkan’s Tigers. His photo of one of Arkan’s men kicking a dead or dying woman lying on the ground is a tremendously “impactful” image. Sontag has already commented on the graceful pose of the soldier as he delivers the blow. But this image is also for sale at the Museum of War Photography in Dubrovnik. If not to hang this over their couch, what then would be the motivation of the collector who would buy this? An investment?

I don’t know. Why would you buy Luc Delahaye’s photo for $15,000 and not send $15,000 to help build a school in Afghanistan? I can only guess that the surrogacy of these images is profound - that it represents a tremendous need to do something that grows out of the activating energy of the image itself. But even then - even if it comes from the need to do something, what is being done by buying an image such as this seems profoundly impotent. Perhaps that is our current condition - that we are condemned to an explicit awareness of tragedy around us and yet continually lack what is actually required to effect change through accurately directed action.

No answers here then. Just an open and ongoing struggle to understand…

Milton Friedman is Dead

2006-11-18T14:39:00.000-05:00

I walked past a national electronics retailer and saw this gianormous line running around and around and around the block complete with barricades and cops and sleeping bags and some pot smoking and some girls who looked like they really really loved their boyfriends at least enough to hold their place in line while the boyfriend was at work at the local CD store or bookstore or guitar store or in class studying Neetchee and all that dark philosophy stuff you know man like it’s fucked up and I thought hey! must be something really important so I asked hey! what's so important and the guy in the front of the line said for the one millionth time today man its like the new playstation you know like from sony and all like we're waiting for it you know so I said word and he said yeah it's cool though dude cause I am going to like sell it for like ten times what's worth to some dude from japan or something like on ebay or something you know and the guy behind him looked homeless which he was and so were a couple other guys and they had either been paid by someone to stand in line for someone or had seen an opportunity and had gotten up and gotten into line at some point earlier in the day and were waiting for 11:55PM 5 minutes before the doors opened and the whole deal happened like lightning hitting a speeding boat whereupon they were going to sell their place in line to the highest bidder and then go get ripped and sleep it off and then go get ripped again and then when I got home I read that today Milton Friedman died at 94 years old and I thought no he's not he's living on the streets of NYC standing in line getting ready to take advantage of someone who wants something just a little bit more than he does and will pay for it.

Daniel Ellsberg Helpfully Predicts the Past

2006-10-23T10:28:00.000-04:00

Daniel Ellsberg article from 10/22/06 in Harpers

The irritating part is that Ellsberg's article relates past events. That the build up to Iraq WAS exactly like the build up to Vietnam. He did not write this article during the build up to Iraq. If my friends and I, sitting at a table in Prague with three newspapers spread out in front of us in early 2002, could predict the outcome of the Bush Adventure in Iraq and forecast all the things that would go badly - and we did, nearly to the letter (this is not bragging - this is depression) - as well as show how weak the President's case was for going to war, how far down river Colin Powell had sold himself and the country along with it, and how little Iraq had to do with OBL & how much it had to do with oil, ANYONE could have done it. It was not hard. But America was psychotic, and the press & most of the left were either asleep or suffering from a national Stockholm syndrome, captured and mollified as they were by the threat of appearing unpatriotic (if you are fighting for what you believe to be the democratic ideal, how can you be unpatriotic in a country which holds democracy as its ideal?) at the gunpoint pointed at them from the right through the cross-hairs of the Patriot Act.

In a backa$$ward way, I think what will actually save America is its failure to win in Iraq. If, on the heels of the success of the Patriot Act I, the military, at the behest of this administration, had won a decisive victory in Iraq (though impossible for any western government to do ever) then the power that the administration would have felt its right to take and keep would have been immense. And I think our democracy would then become one where life and the pursuit of happiness would be guaranteed, but not necessarily liberty. That would become a conditional given at the pleasure of the government.

I think I like the whacko conservatives in the west more than the whacko liberals of the east. The western conservatives never forget that the greatest threat to this country will always be our own government. The liberals think that government can be made into your buddy.

Ellsberg said once that the thing in government that most truly corrupts is not money and power, it is the secret information, like the dossiers on the Johnson administration's goals for their involvement in Vietnam, that a select group of people in government get to see. Once you have read that information, he said, the arguments of people who do not have access appear stupid and irrational, not based on facts and merely jousting at windmills. And that breeds contempt among those people who have access to top secret documents for all the people who don't have access - which, as Ellsberg notes, is nearly everyone else in the country.

Which of course makes the final part of Ellsberg's essay (excerpted as it is from his book) scarier. The efforts of the Bush administration to develop plans for a war against Iran must be seen through the lens of Ellsberg's caution about the corrupting influence of top secret information. What may be farthest from the consciences of those with security clearance in Washington is that possession of top secret information merely makes them informed, but it does not - especially in a democracy - make them right. They may be arrogant enough to feel their information charges them to pursue their mission outside the will of the people, as Reagan did in Iran-Contra (note the irony of Iran's position in both operations - this is naught but a war of princes!) We hope that our system checks the arrogance of the few who might seek to work in opposition to the will of the many. Should the left win control of one or both houses in Congress, we will see whether our hope will be met satisfactorily.

First post - Tbilisi Georgia and the Caucasus

2006-05-29T11:31:00.000-04:00

So I am in Tbilisi, Georgia right now, typing away on a wifi connection in our hotel room with a view of Tbilisi's city hall just outside my window. A few days ago, the first hundred or so of several thousand soldiers were practicing their marching skills for the celebration of Georgian Independence Day, May 26th. Like the Czechs, the Georgians have a couple days that could be considered independence days. This one represents the day in 1918 when the Georgians declared their independence from Russia who had governed them for 117 years previously, an independence that only lasted two years. The most recent moment of Georgian history that most people outside of Georgia remember is the Rose Revolution when Eduard Shevardnadze was excused from power and the democratic government of 36 year old Mikheil Saakashvili took over after storming the Parliament armed only with roses in 2003. Before that, tanks rolled down Rustaveli street, the street where my hotel sits, and fired directly into many of the buildings, lighting them on fire and either gutting or destroying quite a few. And that is only the twentieth century - the history of Georgia is immense.

Most of you know that currently Georgia is strategically important to the United States as it has allowed US warplanes to operate in Georgian airspace during the various campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan (not too far away - Georgia is due north of eastern Turkey.) And Georgia, through Shevardnadze's wily marketing of Georgia as a thoroughfare, is the bed upon which several very important oil pipelines run, carrying energy supplies from Baku, Azerbaijan to the Black Sea directly and to the Mediterranean Sea through Turkey. This is why my wife is here. Her firm is helping Georgia settle a dispute that grew out of the building of the pipeline.

Still, even with the oil transport money coming into the country, there just is not enough money here. As a result of the devastating earthquake of 2002, which registered a 6 on the Richter scale and caused approximately $45million in damage while displacing 15,000 people, the historic old town in Tbilisi is on the verge of falling to the ground, a architectural loss akin I think to what is happening in Havana or Tirana, Albania or other places that continue to suffer after the fall of the Iron Curtain (unlike Prague, for which there seems to be no end to foreign investment.) Unemployment is high, worse in the countryside, and the optimism of the Rose Revolution is constantly bruised by the day to day realities of being torn between Georgia's love-hate relationship with Russia and a growing trade relationship with Western Europe and the United States, symbolized by the country's geographic location in neither Europe nor Asia.

The army is an achievement of sorts. Georgia must maintain an army, partly because several of the Georgian states have declared themselves independent from Georgian control and threaten retaliation if Georgia tries to reestablish sovereignty, and partly because Russia is the 3000 pound giant waiting at the door who would think nothing of (and has in the past) sending in troops as it sees fit. As it has historically for centuries, Georgia has to defend itself from the constant threat of invasion. In the end though, a fit Georgian army is simultaneously reassuring and depressing. Reassuring because small armies have frequently shown their ability to hold off even the largest and strongest countries in the world. Depressing because this effort has often resulted in the near annihilation of that country, as it has in Chechnya.

Over the weekend, we headed out into the area surrounding Tbilisi to see some of the buildings and sites associated with early Christianity in Georgia, as well as Stalin's hometown of Gori and a cave town whose habitation began in the first century B.C. Quite astounding. Georgia is just ancient. I suppose one gets the same impression from visiting Greece or Italy, but frequently here, we were the only tourists at the site. Everyone else was going to church or farming or shepherding a flock of sheep somewhere. So the impression feels much less packaged and contained. And the sites are incredible, located as they are in strategic positions to defend against a seemingly endless wave after wave of attackers who repeatedly wrecked things over the centuries. When we found ourselves among tourists, they were Georgian, mostly school children who are delightfully brave and quickly say "hello" and "isn't it beautiful" in English. If the energy of the youngsters is any indication, this country has a bright future.

We did see some Japanese tourists while visiting Stalin's birthplace, however. Gori is a very strange place. The only indication that we got of any of Stalin's faults was that perhaps collectivization of farming was not such a good idea. Obviously Gori is an important part of Georgian history, but it would be a shame if it gets tourist dollars to the exclusion of other places in Georgia, i.e. tour buses zoom past something from the 4th century to look at a statue made in the 1950's of someone who was responsible for the deaths of millions, including Georgians.

Most of the churches we saw had at one time been entirely white-washed by the Soviets - that is to say, all the frescos and decorated surfaces were coated with white paint or white plaster and either left derelict, converted to historic monuments or used as theatres or other secular functions. Renovations are recent and ongoing, but the amazing thing is that Georgia has been trashed by the Persians, Tamerlane, the Russians, earthquakes, etc. and still these older sites are standing. The masonry skill is tremendous, and the supposition is that the chemical properties of the mortar, which included eggs in the mix, made the buildings flexible but stable.

On Sunday we headed north out of Tbilisi on the Georgian Military Highway that leads to the Russian - Georgian border. The road runs along the Aragvi river until the river's valley gets too steep, whereupon the roads begins to climb to the Dzhrvi pass, elevation 7858 feet, then down the other side to Kobi, a flat spot at 6339 feet where four mountain valleys meet, and on to Kazbegi at the foot of the huge Mt. Kazbek (16,500 feet) where a small church sits perched on a cliff above the town. A little bit further down the road beyond Kazbegi is the Darial gorge, the end of the known world for the Romans and the site of the Russian - Georgian border. Just shy of a hundred kilometers north of the border (if that) is the town of Beslan, unfortunately famous for the school massacre that took place a while ago. The whole area is contentious, with the Russian at the border, the Chechens to the northwest, and the South Ossetians, one of the rebel regions in Georgia that claims autonomy, just over the mountains on the east bank of the Aragvi river. The Russians accuse the Georgians of aiding the Chechens, and the Georgians accuse the Russians of arbitrarily shutting off the natural gas pipeline that keeps everyone warm in the winter & of meddling in South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

The scenery is primeval. Most of the rock formations are the result of volcano, earthquake or both. Huge uplifts of rock jut out with angular striations, striated volcanic plugs flake into geometric tailings, and large expanses show evidence of lava flow from the once active volcanoes in the region. Much of the rock color is gray, but there are also areas that are colored an intense red, or in the case of sulfurous outflow, bright yellow, white and green. The mountains are sharp edged and pointed. Rocks are everywhere. Landslides seem to happen frequently, and at several locations, we could see buildings up to their second floors in scree, though it was difficult to tell whether the slide had occurred yesterday or several years ago.

People live throughout the area and have for centuries. The mountains, if you are tough enough to withstand the horrendous winters (6 meter snowfall at times) and the vertical territory, allow you to stay one step ahead of your enemies who may not be so hardy or prepared. Towers are sprinkled liberally throughout the valley and functioned as an early warning system when invaders approached. If you have seen the movie, The Lord of the Rings and watched the scene when the towers are lit to signal far off kingdoms of the coming invasion, you will have a sense of how some of the Georgian towers functioned and what it felt like standing beneath them.

Shepherding is a common vocation, and the shepherds spend their springs driving the herds up out of their pens in the valleys towards the alpine meadows in the heights. When you see a flock of sheep up on a highland meadow, the first question is how did they get up there? Then the second question is how will they get back down. The routes are often not easily seen from a distance, and I am sure that too is purposeful. A sheep meadow with only a few ways to enter or exit makes the work of the shepherds and their sheep dogs (large white dogs with brown and black splotches and bobbed tails) easier when it comes to watching for wolves.

Pretty spectacular but hard life. If you want a really good read for some Georgian history & culture, as well as a ripping yarn, try to find Tony Anderson's excellent book, Bread & Ashes. I don't think it is distributed in the U.S., but you can follow the link and get it through Amazon in the U.K. Highly recommended.

You can see my photos from the trip at the links below or by just going to my site on Flickr. Before you start wondering, I have gotten a small Canon Digital Elph camera to carry along and shoot snaps so I can post on the road, so to speak. This is an experiment. So far the quality seems pretty good, but I haven't given up on film by any stretch, as evidenced by the last link below. Rather I have been shooting film and digital both, which makes for a heavier bag but not by too much.

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

Day 4

Day 5

Film Shots

Thanks for looking. Hope everyone is well.