Author: asitoughttobemagazine

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: MAC OLIVER

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A pen-and-ink drawing of Wallace Stevens by Mac Oliver.


ANOTHER DEATH TO BRAVE

by Mac Oliver


And soon enough, foreseeably, you’ve lost
Another one you love, another death
To brave, more ashes thrust into your face,
More thoughts about the walks, forgotten nights,
More dust to walk upon, to think of ghosts
Of the departed, real as a dream
From which you had no wish to wake, in which
They breathe & blink again. I’m vexed at his
Brown study now, as Ransom wrote, a poem
Present in a half a dozen books,
Anthologies, he gave as Christmas gifts.
He left a stack of ancient magazines,
A trunk he tagged for me before he died,
A simple note attached to it, unseen
At first, left hidden in the flat, that said
“These items are for Ham, to be preserved.”
He made his living room, entire place,
Hospitable to poetry, to keep
A kind of purity at heart, in mind.
The rest, as Hazlitt quotes from As You Like It,
Is mere oblivion, a dead letter.


Mac Oliver is a bit of a mystery. As I can piece together, he earned his degree from Tulane in 1994 and went on to study poetry in the Doctoral program at the University of Minnesota. His first book of poems, Ham & Mercury, was printed privately, and another book of poetry, Savior of the Netherlands, is available in full online for free. Oliver is also a pen-and-ink artist, and, at least in 2008, a resident of Santa Barbara, California.

Editor’s Note: This poet was by request. If you have a request of your own please feel free to post it as a comment.

This happens to be my favorite request thus far on the Saturday Poetry Series, which is why I jumped at the opportunity to post it straight away. It was requested that I post any poem by this poet “because he is beautiful and I love him but I’ll never be able to tell him.” Now, the hopeless romantic in me was instantly won over. Unrequited love, a mystery love story, and a poet who is himself a mystery. How could I possibly resist?

What I can glean from the limited information about Mac Oliver on the web is that Oliver is a poet influenced by the poets of yore. He seems to like to explore poetry in form and uses antiquated language to create poems that are vignettes and that function like flash fiction. He also was strongly influenced by his uncle, to whom his book Savior of the Netherlands is dedicated, and who makes a number of appearances throughout Oliver’s work. I believe, from the context of the book, that “Another Death to Brave” may be about his uncle as well. Oliver was also strongly influenced by T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Wallace Stevens, and Ezra Pound, which I think is evident in his use of form and choice of language.

Want to read more by and about Mac Oliver?
Savior of the Netherlands
Pen Drawings by Mac Oliver at Elsie’s
Maverick Magazine

BRYAN DE ROO & GINA BORG

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Bryan de Roo, Thought Bubble – Crystal Mesh, Oil on canvas, 24×30″


A CONVERSATION WITH

BRYAN DE ROO

ABOUT PAINTING

by Gina Borg


Bryan de Roo sits on the floor making drawings for the windows of Gallery Extraña on the occasion of our dual exhibit, Temples of Transition. Brushed bone black chinese ink on scavenged ledger paper. A columnar pad. He makes with quick brushy strokes drawings which are like UFOs, architecture, crabs, robots, insects. I ask him questions while he draws.

G: Do you think that our work has in common a decision making process interested in weight vs. buoyancy, or a spacial, sensory presence? All of your UFOs seem to have landed.

Bryan de Roo, Thought Bubble – Crystal Mesh, Oil on canvas, 22×28″

B: I kind of want to blame Morandi. Well, in Chinese calligraphy, characters are anchored to the wall or floating on the wall, and you can tell if you’ve done it wrong if it wants to fall off of the wall. In drawing, you work until it has a weight that is suspended. In painting, if the colors are dingy the painting is just trying to slide onto the floor.  The color has to shine, it is part of that floating.

G: Why do you want that?

B: There’s something going on, it can’t be just marks. Why does this thing need to exist? There’s so much that’s just throwaway in this world. I don’t want to be involved in that kind of product creation. Inert matter comes to life somehow. Paint is just dirt, colored dirt. How do you throw dirt up in the air and make it stay there? Or how do you make dirt into light?

Gina Borg, Big Pink, Oil on canvas, 40×40″

G: Are you trying to make something indelible?

B: Yes. I’m trying to make something happen. Something perceptible that’s not just paint on canvas. A pregnancy, a fecundity, like this could be so many things.

G: Possibility?

B: Yeah. If it’s indefinable, it’s previously unknown. If you can’t say for sure what it is, there’s something apparently new about it.

G: Do you want the feeling to be indelible? Or the buoyancy of the color to be indelible, or the image?

Gina Borg, White Mountain, Oil on canvas, 28×28″

B: The feeling. The artifact itself. The reason it’s indelible is the feeling caught in it.

G: Are you talking about emotions, or sensations?

B: Sensations. I don’t know about emotions, I’m not interested in the art of evoking emotions. I don’t expect an emotional response from these drawings I’m making. I don’t even know what is or is not an emotion. Is fear an emotion? I feel emotions while painting but I don’t know if they get trapped in the painting.

Bryan de Roo, Thought Bubble – Crystal Mesh, Oil on canvas, 22×28″

G: Emotion is sidetracking us perhaps, but it’s interesting to me because you were so much more influenced by the Ab-Exers than I was. Lots of emotional stuff there. I mean, people always talk about standing in front of Rothko weeping. The talk of those guys was as if spirit, or soul, was trapped in the painting.


B: I’m not sure it’s an emotion, but maybe an action, movement, a little twitch, something that is not inert. That’s what I want, that’s what creates that dizzying quality, that sense that there is something of value contained within the work that is not easily quantified.  Also, a modulation between warm and cool, light and dark, which comes from observing natural light. The best paintings feel like the light of the sun is in them.  Painting seems to need this because we expect paintings to be little windows still.

…When I was teaching, I showed the students Gwen John to talk about that.

G: You showed your students Gwen John? That’s awesome. She’s great.


Gina Borg, Green on Pink, Oil on canvas, 24×24″

B: Yeah, maybe it would not be hip to mention her.

G:  I think we should.

B.  OK, but not her brother.

G: Or her lover.

_______

Temples of Transition: Bryan de Roo & Gina Borg
runs through June 19th at Gallery Extraña.

FRIDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: John Surowiecki

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What I Know About Epistemology

by John Surowiecki


As the light goes, go.
Be the rustling in the grass, the fall from
convention’s good graces: learn, or someone
will have you filing files or writing writs,
demonstrating cutlery or selling knowledge

door to door; someone might even drop
your lovely life into a factory and have you
derusting rings on the coolant-spouting
turntable of a vertical lathe.
It’s best for everyone that what you know

is generally thought of as general knowledge.
You can find it in pool rooms and roadside bars,
in meadows as inviting as beds, in bedrooms
where it whispers like a ribbon untying;
you can even find it in schools. But be careful:

it’s dangerous, inescapable and exact
down to every atom of everything there is,
to every name each thing goes by and every
law each thing obeys. And the best part is,
you always know more than you know.


John Surowiecki works as a freelance writer from his home in Connecticut. His work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. Author of six chapbooks and three books of poetry, his most recent work is Barney and Gienka (CustomWords, 2010).


[Image: White Noise/White Light, Athens, by Höweler + Yoon/MY Studio].

COMMENTARY

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Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. Flickr photograph by Dylan Charles.

HOW I DIED IN VIET NAM

by George Evans

April 30, 2010, marked the 35th anniversary of the day the U.S. war in Viet Nam officially ended. It was not a clean break. It’s a day famous for, among other things, a photograph of the last U.S. helicopter ready to lift from the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon, dozens of people crowding a ladder-like stairway up to the landing pad. We can tell they won’t make it up the stairs, let alone fit in that tiny aircraft. It’s a poignant, lasting symbol for U.S. meddling in the affairs of other countries.

By then, North Vietnamese troops had already invaded the city and were storming the presidential palace. Gerald Ford’s administration went to work conjuring lingo to convert defeat to victory for public consumption. A habit of deceit had applied to everything related to Viet Nam since John F. Kennedy and is a major reason politicians have been forced to trick Americans into agreeing with U.S. military interventions ever since. The U.S. Viet Nam War was the mother of all deceptions. George Orwell would have had a field day with its euphemisms. Current warspeak phrases like “collateral damage” and “asymmetric warfare,” describing war crimes in Iraq or Afghanistan, are right out of the U.S. Viet Nam War playbook.

The war ended five years earlier than that day for me, but “ended” is yet another nuanced word where that war is concerned, just like the name of the war itself. “Vietnam” Americans call it, a synecdoche for everything related to the war, but which doesn’t distinguish between the war and the country, the name of which is two words, “Viet” and “Nam.” We invented the word Vietnam, and it has always bugged me, compelling me to mention and correct it at every turn.

Actually, I died in Viet Nam. I’ve lived a rich and varied life the past 40 years, but back in early 1970, I never made it home like I was supposed to. At least the me that was did not; that is, the one who died in Vietnam, Viet Nam.

He was a young man, just this side of still being a kid, with life details similar to his military peers: lower working-class Pittsburgh high school drop out runaway wise guy gangbanging doo wop singer who also wanted to be a boxer and a painter (of canvases, not houses).

If he made it back from the war, he would have few prospects beyond, maybe (if lucky), a minor steel mill job. Or he might even get on as a driver somewhere if his Teamster father forgave him whatever transgressions he committed during a wild, lunatic youth (not the least of which was running away and not coming back). If his father used his connections, he might even land a long haul rig, or delivery route (beer or UPS, the steadiest).

Things like that took connections, but his father knew, however casually, somebody truly powerful, the not-yet-disappeared Jimmy Riddle Hoffa of Brazil, Indiana–mystery of mysteries–because he, my father, drove trucks from the time he was a kid, and was a button-wielding, card-carrying Teamster who stood out on the skull-cracking strike lines with a fish bat or blackjack right alongside Jimmy R. and other fellow Teamsters–long before his own long war, where he also died, in the islands, before coming back to die over and over in Pittsburgh behind the wheel of his ice and coal truck.

Don’t get me wrong. Confessing I died in Vietnam is not meant to demean the memory of thousands of Americans (some of them dear friends) who never actually came back from Viet Nam except in coffins or on lists of the disappeared and missing, or millions of Vietnamese (some of them dear friends) who did not survive our 20-years-plus presence in their country (though if we count the first American soldier who died there, in 1945, we lasted 30 miserable years).

When my walking, talking living corpse returned from Vietnam (the war), Pittsburgh was hardly the city I left four years earlier. Plenty of flags were flying back then, but a lot of native sons had died in the interim, and the war’s dark face was exposed. To the city’s credit, I discovered an army of hippies and antiwar activists, though I was dead and not much interested until my corpse reanimated almost automatically by plugging into the hippie subculture. It was suddenly (the world) all about weed, women, and rock & roll, and I didn’t care if I never heard the word (or words) Viet Nam again, not ever. Period.

Unfortunately, that was impossible.

Every April 30 I think about the beauty of spring and the end of that war. It was a painful day. The boy who died nearly came back to life, something I did not want. It was a day I never thought would come, and when it did I tried to ignore it because I could not believe it. I’d been tricked by so much deception (the whole country had) that it simply could not be true.

I was in Baltimore at Johns Hopkins University attending graduate school, having managed to somehow turn a GED test into an education. It wasn’t supposed to happen that way. I was supposed to stay dead, but there I was. It was Wednesday, a glorious spring day. I walked from one end of the city to the other, to Lexington Market. As if there was not enough plenitude inside, the streets outside were lined with arabbers–colorful horse drawn fruit and vegetable wagons that used to roam the streets. The drivers, each with a unique song to hawk their goods, were all singing, competing for business, and the sun was shining. I was certain it would shine forever, and though that is all I remember of that day, it is still as real to me as the boy who died in Viet Nam, not to save his country but his life.

–George Evans

This piece was first published in New America Media, April 30, 2010. It is an excerpt from Evans’ memoir, “How I Died in Viet Nam.”


More writings by George Evans:

A Standing Ovation: My Lai Redux

Woodstock Nation, Viet Nam

Desert Winds

JIM DORENKOTT

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Photograph by John Filo that united our rage and fueled our resolve.

KENT STATE — 40 YEARS LATER

by Jim Dorenkott

May 4th 1970 I am sitting in my classroom  at college after getting out of the Navy. Students come running in up to my desk and almost whisper: “They just shot 4 students at Kent State.” Our voices become louder and the teacher interrupts us. We start telling the class and he lets us go on for a few minutes. Then he says we can either get back to the lessons or take it out in the hall. Of course we couldn’t think of anything else. They had just shot 4 American kids, our generation at Kent State, gunned them down in broad daylight and they were unarmed. No way were we going to go back to “lessons.”

A group of us went into the hall and started interacting with the growing number of students who had heard. We agreed to go back into our classes and lead discussions about it. If the teachers stopped us we would lead a walkout and meet outside and continue the discussion. So it continued till the school was at a standstill about 2 periods later. Many teachers not much older than us had just dismissed their classes or changed it to focus on the war and the shootings.

The next move was to tie into the rapidly growing network of colleges and schools reacting. Our college radio stations were keeping us informed of growing walkouts and resistance across the country. Within a couple of days this was organized into a network of several hundred radio stations which broadcast updates and status reports on various walkouts, shutdowns and protests against the shootings, the war and the escalation into Cambodia and Laos.

We organized demonstrations to the local town, but most of our activity was setting up a parallel university with our own campus. Some were taught by teachers and others by students. They were relevant to the struggles of the war and of the better world we constantly talked about wanting to build. Instead of sticking to the textbooks we used more current and more radical pamphlets and books. Those who participated were getting a rare opportunity to develop critical thinking which was strongly encouraged, and which was rarely allowed in the usual courses. Many of these parallel institutions continued on as free universities some of which continued in the major cities for several decades. It was also the beginning of students grading teachers at many schools.

Our school shut down till our graduation ceremony which I as a senior and many others participated in wearing  black armbands. Once the school year ended and we left the campus it was much more difficult to continue the movement; it  had to reorganize itself by hometowns and not having the mutual support took its toll. When students returned in the Fall some of the sting was gone but many of the reforms were continued. It was 5 years later that Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces took over Saigon and the Americans left.

Who could forget the picture which flashed around the world and united a generation.

–Jim Dorenkott


ANDREAS ECONOMAKIS

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KARMIC CAT PISS

by Andreas Economakis

You wake up to the Doppler–effect roar of a Japanese motorcycle and the neighbor’s muffled TV, the host rattling on like a jackass on steroids.  You try, you try hard to put your first bare foot down on the right side of the bed, not the wrong side.  Call it your little karmic effort every morning, you truly believe that what goes around comes around and if we all tried to be a little more positive the world would be a better place, the sun shining, people always smiling, kids giggling, wars and strife and broken hearts relegated to the dustbin of history.  A new era is dawning and you played your part!

That said and done, you end up kicking your cat in the ribs, it was a mistake, the damn fool always gets tangled up in your feet at the door, he never once calls out that he’s there before you accidentally kick him.  No, he never warns you.  The crying and pestering and hurt attitude begins only once you’ve already committed the violent act of feline football.  And every morning you’re forced to watch his pinkish-brown sphincter hurry down the crumble-strewn hallway toward the kitchen, him throwing you little guilt-inducing looks, trailing a trembling tail behind a trail of trembling pleas, hoping and just knowing you will follow him and get on with this business of canned cat food and fresh water that repeats itself every day, ad nauseam, like groundhog day only worse.

You step over the semi-dried puke by the fridge, congealed kibbles and bits adorned with a lemony blade of grass, smothered in some sort of gluey horse-hoof sauce that obviously isn’t as tasty as the canned expensive stuff you have to purchase from the expensive neighborhood vet.  You glance toward the sink, hoping there’s a roll of kitchen paper for the cat vomit, it sure is easier than toilet paper for kitchen work, maybe that’s why they named it as such, though both papers come from the same dead trees.

As the cat grunts and slobbers over his dish you load your mug with black coffee, pouring the oily black liquid into your vessel over the sink because the damn pot always leaks, stupid made-in-Germany overpriced piece of shit.  What is the point of German engineering if you have to use it over yesterday’s air-dried pasta and basil-spattered tomato-sauce dishes?

Your pour a shot of cold milk into your coffee (after all, you’re not a Turk) and make your way back into your dark bedroom, careful not to wake the baby up because then you won’t be able to lie in the dark sipping your dark coffee, ruminating on the day’s tasks at hand, wondering what clothes you should wear for today’s big meeting.  You sure as hell want to impress them and get the job.  If you get the job you get the cash.  If you get the cash you get the life.  If you get the life, well then…  Hmmm…. Where does it go from there?

Best jump in the shower now, the stupid TV from below is disrupting your thoughts anyway.  How can people watch TV in the morning?  Are they insane?  Who cares what traffic is like and how many degrees it is and whether Paris Hilton is screwing a dim-witted Greek playboy or a short Palm Springs disc jockey or some three-legged porn star with A.D.D., none of this information will change the outcome of your day, it just clogs up your brain and makes you want to scream at people in traffic and give them the obscene finger because you’d rather be on some sunny beach, yes, even if it means next to Paris Hilton.  Yeah, you’d rather be on a beach with Paris Hilton than in your crappy dusty vehicle on your way to your crappy demeaning job, red raindrops from Sahara making a mockery of your recent overpriced trip to car wash.  Why do people wash their cars?  They always end up looking like shit in a couple of days anyway!  (Happiest man you ever saw was this longhaired dude on Sunset Boulevard in a caked car, a cake car, a car so dirty it was like a little mountain of dirt on wheels.  This little rolling mountain had a cave in it with a happy California Neanderthal inside smiling his ass off at all the neurotically shiny cars buzzing down the road.  Not a care in the world, this dirt man. Huh….  What were you saying?)

Oh yeah, best get dressed now because you’ve got to wake up the tot and take her to pre-school before you rush off to your big meeting.  You’re going to get that job, you’re going to impress the shit out of them, they’ll be dazzled by the mere clothes you’ll be wearing, by your snappy duds which will compliment your snappy resume which will compliment your snappy canned confidence.  You will unleash a can of professional woop-ass on them, an American can of woop-ass, and they’ll hire you.  They’ll hire you on the spot.  You probably don’t even need to show up for that stupid interview, you’re so damn right for the job!  It’s all about confidence.  That’s all you need.  Confidence.  Just look at anyone on TV.

“Shoo, shoo, shoo!” you gasp at the cat as you enter your bedroom all naked and dripping, chasing him and his one wet paw off the bed.  Why does he put his right paw in the water bowl when he drinks, what’s that all about?  Is it some sort of primordial getting in touch with his inner fish or something?  We’re all descended from fish, right?  Or is it lizards?  Or is it Adam and Eve?  Didn’t those two have sex after getting kicked out of paradise for partying under an apple tree and pissing God off?  If they did, then that would make us all a bunch of inbred descendents of theirs, still inbreeding and pissing God off.  This inbreeding thing explains a lot of things.  It explains folks like President Kim Jong-il and Imelda Marcos and Idi Amin Dada and the W and everyone at or on the TMZ channel (Paris Hilton included), a good percentage of motorists out there, that rattling idiot on the boob tube down below, one overrated bald-headed British film director from LA with three fax machines in his car (his inbred dysfunctionality cleverly disguised as art), all those clean-cut religious missionaries who wear starched white shirts and ties and nametags (these guys are particularly inbred) and, well, your wet-footed cat who likes to leave a moist monopod path all over your unpronounceable Ikea goose comforter cover.  Linderfootenpath, you think it’s called, with all kinds of umlauts.  You bought it one burpy morning after washing down several homogenized 60-cent hot dogs with a can of tangy red Swedish beer.

You stall at your closet, shocked at the lack of clothes in there that actually fit you right or that you fit in right.  Everything is one size off, the wrong color or made of a fabric that makes your skin crawl like a caterpillar in retreat.  Why don’t clothes hang on you the way they hang on James Dean or Tom Ford or Brad Pitt or even your local grocery-store dude?  Dude’s got a basketball belly, Sponge-Bob legs and horn-rimmed Coke-bottle glasses that make his eyes look like British flying saucers and yet he looks cool.  He looks cool in his duds.  He doesn’t even need to try.  Why is that?

You yank several clothing items off of cheap clinking dry-cleaner hangers, hoping for the best.  It’s no use though.  You always end up looking like some sort of plain tree (brown down below, green up above) or an upside-down blueberry muffin or a skinny effeminate terrorist with a bubble-butt.  Why were you born with no color coordination?  And as for your shoes….  Suffice it to say that only sneakers fit right.  Everything else is simply savage, tearing your poor feet to shreds and making you limp like a gimp, just like at your brother’s wedding in Italy when you had to dress up like a monkey in a suit, a gimpy monkey in a shiny blue Italian suit with too-tight Italian shoes.  Somebody needs to have a serious word with Italian shoe designers.  What they’re doing is criminal.

After several attempts you end up looking like you always do.  You fall back on the one and only outfit that sort of fits: your old 501’s, white t-shirt, Doc Martin shoes (without the stupid yellow thread—what in God’s name were they thinking?).  Hip yet casual.  The necessary touch of seriousness is obvious from the fact that you’ve opted for shoes instead of sneakers.  You twist and turn in front of the full-length mirror, squinting for effect, the way you would squint if George Clooney showed up suddenly at your door with a case of gin.  Come on in pal ‘cause I’m not worried.  It’s an even toss between you and me for the ladies and besides… we could always use the extra booze.  Just leave it on the kitchen counter and make yourself at home, George!

“Babaaaaa!” you hear through the walls and you thank your lucky stars that you actually managed to get dressed before the little one woke up.  Well, sort of.  You rush into your kid’s room holding one Doc Martin in your hands and find your daughter ruffle-headed and standing in her crib, tugging at her explosively large diaper.  “Buongiorno Principessa!” you burst out all bubbly and chirpy and right away she replies “Kaka!”  Didn’t need to say it though, because the scent of poop hits your nostrils like a blasting dive into a steaming river of sewage.  Oh heavens!  You swoop your little girl up and rush into the bathroom, already worried that you’re running late for your big meeting.  “Me!” she says as soon as you pull the offending diaper off her butt, and you watch her struggle to sit on the toilet seat to go pee-pee and wipe herself all by herself, knowing full well that if you try to expedite matters by placing her in the bathtub shower you’ll have a little hysterical she-bomb on your hands.  She’s got to go through the process, you think, it’s just that she’s takes her sweet time about it.  One little smile and you temporarily forget all your angst.  “Done!” she announces and you snatch her up to plop her in the shower, accidentally stepping on some liquid by the toilet with your socked foot.  “What’s this?” you ask, dropping to all fours to sniff and examine the mysterious puddle, quickly realizing that you’ve just stepped in your daughter’s pee-pee.  She missed.  Shit!

“Off we go!” you say with a smile once the baby-butt shower is done, trying to inject a little positive urgency or is it a little urgent positiveness (?) into the situation, into the fact that now you’ve really got to rush.  You hate being late.  Call it the American in you.  It certainly isn’t a Greek trait.  You quickly dress your daughter and send her scurrying to the living room and the TV to amuse herself (drastic times call for drastic measures…), as you must hurry back to your room to change socks and finalize this tiresome business of getting dressed.  You take a step in that direction and instantly realize that you are leaving a monopod trail on the carpet just like your cat, only this time it’s a baby urine trail, not a cat water trail.  Double shit!

New socks on, you’re almost ready to go, if only you could find your other Doc Martin.  Where did it go?  You follow the monopod urine trail (follow the yellow brick road…) hoping it will lead to the errand shoe.  Nothing!  Would it matter if you went to the big meeting with a Doc Martin on one foot and a New Balance sneaker on the other?  Would that be a deal breaker?  I bet that English director could pull it off, the limey fucker!  He’d probably get the job even if he showed up wearing just a sock on his penis, like a Red Hot Chili Pepper.  It all goes back to that thing called confidence.  No, you’d be a hell of a lot more confident if you were wearing two Doc Martin shoes instead of just one.  And that’s definitely better than showing up with just a sock on your penis.   As for the sock, what kind of sock would you choose anyway?  Adidas?  Is that too athletic?

The bedrooms and smelly bathroom exhausted, you hurry into the living room, convinced that the curly-haired culprit on the couch must have your shoe.  Who else would?  You find her staring all zombie-eyed at four bubbly bottle blondes going round and round a stupid-looking spike-haired muscular fellow in a cut-off t-shirt on some kind of morning talk show.  It’s circle jerk time on the morning tele and they are all chattering and laughing non-stop, all the while trying to tear the male model’s shirt off.  “Dear God!” you breathe and quickly turn off the TV, instantly igniting a hysterical wail from the couch, something that scares your dozy wet-footed cat right out the room and onto the balcony.  The good news is that you spot your missing shoe, which your distraught daughter is clutching against her salty wet cheek like a prized Gund bear.  “Give daddy the shoe!” you say all exasperated, sparking a new batch of wailing, one that makes the windows and assorted crystal in the room tinkle ominously.  This time the cat bolts past you with panic written all over his body language, hightailing his way clear out of the house through the back door.

Out of patience and time, you pry the shoe out of your daughter’s surprisingly strong grip.  Oh no… fatal error!  You’ve just committed the fatal error!  Lesson No. 1:  never ever take anything from a child if you don’t have something to replace it with.  Instantly.  Eardrums ready to burst, you hobble-skip your way quickly into her bedroom, somehow managing to get your shoe on your foot.  A Cirque de Soleil performer couldn’t do that as well, you think, as you pluck a small stuffed donkey out of the crib and race back into the screeching living room.  You hand your child the donkey only to receive it back in your face like a Hideo Nomo fastball.  Ouch!  Before you can react, your daughter yells “Pipila!” sending you scurrying into the kitchen looking for her Greek pacifier.  Man, you’re really wasting time now.  You’ve got to get going soon or it’s curtains for you.  No Doc Martins or athletic penis sock or snappy can of American woop-ass is going to help you if you actually miss your big meeting.

You practically jam the pacifier in your tot’s mouth, one hand whisking her up like a pendulum, the other grabbing her school bag (filled with extra clothes, snacks,  diapers, a water bottle and an abused Chinese plastic frog with a perturbed ribbity expression on his face).  You hustle out the door.   All the commotion quiets the baby down, who settles in for the ride down to the street like a little cherubic poker-faced Buddha, knowing full well that she’ll have you back in the palm of her hand the moment you plop her 15 kilos down onto the asphalt and turn in the direction of her school.  Indeed, the moment her little sneakers hit the road she runs to the nearest plant, pointing at it all Google-eyed, jumping impatiently up and down.  “Gimme, gimme, gimme!” she says, meaning the neighbor’s luscious white rose, the one dangling all dewy and heavy and fragrant over the fence like the ultimate forbidden fruit.  You know full well that convincing her otherwise will take at least a couple of minutes (you’ve been dealing with this all week long) and so, with cardinal guilt written all over your hunched and deceptive frame, you quickly snap the forbidden flower off its stalk and hand it to your elated child.   An almost instantaneous booming and angry knocking sound on a window pane alerts you to the fact that your neighbor has caught you red-handed assaulting her priceless flowers and so you bow your head in quick sinful apology and hustle your daughter off before the verbal assault comes.  You know it’s about to come because you can hear the old lady trying to open her window to let you have it.  This must be how Adam and Eve felt when they beat their hasty retreat from the apple tree that fateful day years ago.

Well, not 20 meters down the road your jubilant daughter has completely shredded the immaculate rose (women!), tearing all the pedals off with brisk movements and scattering them in the wind, stepping on the bud for effect like she’s extinguishing a cigarette.  She slap-cleans her hands in a fait-accompli motion, pleased with herself.  “Why did you do that?” you ask, quickly regretting the way you phrased your question.  You should never have used the word “why” in a question.  It’s like opening a kid’s Pandora’s Box and it’s bound to slow you down in this, your hurried journey to depose your little pocket-sized flower-terminator at her pink-colored pre-school, the one with the large and awkwardly drawn Mickey Mouse by the front door.

As expected, you begin a long and arduous “why” conversation as you plod toward school.  And as per usual, your crafty little daughter turns the tables on you almost instantly, forcing you to reply to the whys.  You can never win these arguments.  “Why did I do what?”  “Kill the flower.”  “You gave it to me!”  “You asked me for it.”  “Why?”  “I don’t know, you tell me.”  “Why should I tell you?”  “Because you’re my daughter.”   “Why?”  “Because your mom and I made you.”  “Why?”  “Huh!  Because we wanted a child.”  “Why?”  “Because we did.”  “Why?”  “I don’t know why, it seemed like the thing to do.”  “Why?”  “Because that’s what people do.” “Why?”  “Because if we didn’t do it, none of us would exist.”   “Why?”  “Because you need to exist in order to exist.”  “Why?”  You stall, knitting your brow.  Check mate!  Luckily, you’re saved from the utter humiliation of admitting philosophical defeat to a 2.5 year old by Mickey’s curiously sad smile and scary elephantine legs.  Hallelujah!

A hurried kiss and guilty smile and you turn to avoid the tears welling up in your kid’s eyes as she’s pried out of your hands and led into her obscenely pink school by her cute young teacher, the one with the long jet black hair, braces and sinfully large boobs.  One last pink glance and you hustle your Levis-shacked frame down the cement road, past the olive trees with the dripping black fruit, past the old abandoned cream-colored Zastava with all the bird droppings, past the crazy old lady’s house, where everything she owns is stacked in insane little piles in her 1 by 7 meter yard.  A quick look to the right to check for kamikaze bikers, a skillful dodge to the left around the huffing and panting local bus and you breeze past the pastry shop with the ornate multi-colored cakes in the display, your Doc Martins really sticking to the pavement now as you wheeze your way up the San Francisco-angled street toward your house, sweat beads beading up on your forehead.  Better watch out, you don’t have time for another shower.

Two, four, six, seven, eight, nine, ten bounds up the cracked mosaic marble stairs to grab your computer bag and keys and breath.  Better take the motorcycle today, you huff and pant to yourself.  You’re already horrifically behind schedule.  The door slams, shit do I have my keys (?)… yes (!), and you snatch your helmet off the baby stroller by the vestibule door as your tear your way back down the stairs toward your 1952 BMW motorcycle, the one that looks cool but is as slow as a turtle on Quaaludes (you never were a fan of speed…).  No choice though, the Fiesta will take three times longer in traffic.  It’s always rush hour in Athens.  It doesn’t matter what time it is.  Why don’t they just call it traffic?  I mean, why add the rush?  Why do they need to stress us out like this?

“Shoo, shoo, shoo!” you gasp yet again at the large and annoyed-looking mangy cat that’s decided to turn your motorcycle seat into his very own personal Red Vic armchair.  He doesn’t budge.  “Get your own seat, you wanker,” you yell, swiping your black fabric computer bag in his direction, hoping he’ll have the common sense to heed your advice and bolt.  You sure as hell are not ready to go mano-a-mano with a large male stray cat from the ‘hood.   Last time you decided to tango with a street cat was in NYC, in your back yard on 116th and First in East Harlem, when you had the brilliant idea of tearing a large grunting male cat off of the back of your horny yet sweet little kitty cat Kaya.  This hasty little bit of coitus interruptus cost you four large fang holes in the right index finger, an exhausting trip to St. Luke’s and a dehydrating tendonitis-causing antibiotic therapy for a month.   No, better not lay a hand on Red Vic.  He’ll tear you to shreds before you can say Rapunzel.

Luckily, the lazy beast gets the message and slowly descends off the bike.  He sure takes his sweet time about it, all the while staring at you with a spine-tingling mixture of mockery and murder.  You make a mental note to avoid this particular male cat in the future.  He’s not well.  He’s not stable at all.  He must be seriously inbred.

You spend the next three and a half minutes cranking away at your motorcycle’s ignition pedal like a deranged River Dancer, working up a serious sweat and bad attitude, cursing the fact that you didn’t take the damn geriatric motorcycle in for service when you had all that free time last week.  Shit.  You end up pushing the bike down the street toward the downhill, almost dropping it on your legs because once again you’re trying to multi-task (who was it that said that men cannot multi-task?), simultaneously swinging your computer bag back on your back while trying to open your jacket to let some air in.  If you don’t let some air in quick you will drown in your own sweat or have a massive heart attack right on the spot, dropping to the pavement in a quivering sweaty pile very near your daughter’s shredded rose pedals.  It would be a strangely poetic finale to a stressful morning.  Damn these big meetings!

The bike chuga-chuga-chugs to life with a bang and burp, leaving behind a small grey puff of petrol smoke like an Indian sending up a smoke signal.  Make way!  We’re on the road now!  Can of Woop-Ass is on his way to the big meeting!  You’re going to knock them off their blocks, stupid amateur Athenian advertisers.  You’ll show them how it’s done, how real directors are supposed to direct.  You’re going to provide all the necessary brilliance needed to lift Greek television out of the hopeless middle ages, where everything is on display as if the public is as dumb as doornail.  You will show them what subtlety means, how you don’t really need to show the product in order to sell it.  Huh, isn’t that what the W did to sell his invasion policy?  He never once showed the weapons of mass destruction.  No one ever found them!  They probably don’t even exist.  And yet, the W managed to convince practically the whole world that they were there.  Yeah, you don’t need product to sell something.  All you need is confidence.  Just look at the W.  If he could sell a war so easily to the world, you sure as hell can sell your splendid can of American woop-ass to these dimwitted advertising folks.  Yeah, nothing can stop you now!

“Hey, watch it you old nut!” you yell at the crazy old-timer with the plastic bags in his hands who jumps out in front of you on the street, causing you to swerve dangerously and almost drop your bike.  The old timer points to the green walking man signal and gives you the Greek finger (well, actually it’s a hand), sending you straight to Hades’ hell, don’t pass go, don’t collect 200 drachmas.  The nerve of the old coot, running across the street like he owns the place!  Can’t he tell you’re in a serious rush?  Can’t he see that you are Greece’s last great hope for television, the guy who will save him and millions of others from sheer pixilated idiocy and ennui?  You seriously think about getting off your bike and setting grandpa straight, but your light turns green, forcing you take off.

You screech into the parking lot (a sidewalk that the advertising company has blatantly and illegally taken possession of, forcing all pedestrians onto the road) and you hustle in through the glass doors, a whirl of determination and attitude.  You check your cell phone watch.   Right on time!  You are seriously bad ass!

The cute receptionist points you to the meeting room and asks if you want a coffee or something because you are the first one here.  “Everyone is running a little late,” she says, smiling.  Of course they are, the Cro-Magnons!  How do these people actually manage to get anything done?  This is why Greece is forever stuck in the mud, you think to yourself.  Nothing works right, or if it does, it’s a day late and a euro short (or several billion euros short).  No organization, no one in charge.  Probably better for you, you realize.  They’ll take one good look at you and be dazzled by your structured methodology and methodical structure and hierarchical thought process.  You’ll have them doing back flips in your hand, you smile all cherubically, like a little poker-faced Buddha in cool 501’s and pair of slick Doc Martin shoes.  Yeah!   You’re hot stuff today!  Sizzling!

“Phew!  What’s that smell?” you think to yourself, scanning the glistening, almost kitschy black vinyl and chrome meeting room.  “Don’t they mop in here?  Place smells like a god damn cat orgy or something,” you cringe, trying to regain your winning mind frame.  Your double cappuccino shows up on a tray held by a Slavic-looking woman who could be anywhere between 18 and 55 years old.  Hard to tell how old she is.  Trying to figure it out it is like trying to figure out if Mona Lisa is smiling or smirking at you.  You’re losing your train of thought.  All this money and chrome and kitsch and they can’t afford someone to mop the place up with some bleach?  How can they stand the smell?   You get up to investigate.  You don’t want anything disrupting your winning flow, your kick ass attitude.  No, you don’t want some hideous odor from below scattering people’s brains as you pitch your stellar ideas and personality, as you unleash your can of woop-ass on them.  Can of woop-ass needs a clean environment to prosper.  Can of woop-ass needs order and structure.

“They’ll be here in a couple of minutes,” the receptionist announces from the door, a strange expression plastered all over her face.  You look at her with your mouth agape.  Yeah, your mouth is dangling open like a village idiot because you’ve just made a horrific discovery, a catastrophic revelation.  You’ve just realized that the smell of cat urine that is permeating the room, that is singing your nostrils, that is making you nauseous, is coming from your very own butt.  It’s coming straight from your not so snappy anymore 501’s.   You must have sat in Red Vic’s urine.  That stray cat pissed on your motorcycle seat and you sat right in it like a hasty fool.  You now smell like tangy, nose-curdling, run-for-the-hills cat piss.  Horny, street-fighting, territory-marking, in-your-face cat piss!  Oh, this is going to be one long and painful meeting…

You wither into your stinky 501’s, a mere shadow of your former self.  And to make matters worse, there’s a new sound at the door.  No, it isn’t the sound of your personal can of woop-ass rolling out the door (well, maybe it is…).  It’s the sound of people arriving for your big meeting.  A moment of heavy panting on your part and you realize that you had it coming.  You had it coming all right.  If all it takes to fall from grace is snapping one little apple off of a tree, then what should your fate be if in the course of just one morning you kick your cat in the ribs, stress your daughter out for no good reason, steal a flower, have several obscene thoughts, assault a stray cat, nearly kill an old man as you try and run a red light and develop an attitude about yourself that would make Nietzsche blush?  What should your fate be then?  Good for the cats!  At least they realized that what goes around comes around.  Serves you right to be covered in karmic cat piss.

–Andreas Economakis

This piece is part of a collection of stories on blindness entitled: The Blindness of Life.

Copyright © 2010, Andreas Economakis. All rights reserved.

For more stories by Andreas Economakis click on the author’s name below.

The Cognitive Turn in Theory and Cultural Studies: A Review of Patrick Colm Hogan’s Understanding Nationalism

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

[The following review-essay was originally published in Inside Higher Education.]

The Cognitive Turn in Theory and Cultural Studies: A Review of Patrick Colm Hogan’s Understanding Nationalism

by Okla Elliott


1. Academic Triangulation: An Analysis of the Paratextual Aspects of Understanding Nationalism

In critical theory—or, perhaps, Theory with a capital “T” as some would have it—many scholars’ use of such thinkers as Marx, Freud, Lacan, etc (all thinkers whose fields have been heavily updated with empirical research since their contributions) can seem like an attempt to explain the movement of celestial bodies via Copernican mechanics. This of course is not to suggest that these thinkers are entirely non-productive or that they got everything wrong. After all, Copernicus’s model for equinoctial measurements is still used today (roughly putting March 21 as the marker of spring’s coming and September 23 as that of autumn’s), and his calculations of the Earth’s precessional period (a sort of wobbling on its axis) was within 99.9% of current astronomers’ calculations. Also, the so-called Copernican Revolution informs our current ideology much more than any contribution Niels Bohr made to the field of science. That said, Copernicus would not be able to get Verizon’s satellites into orbit, allowing me to email this review to my editor, so it is worth thinking of the advances that have been made.

In order to locate Patrick Colm Hogan’s book in the overall academic discourse, I propose we continue to borrow from the field of astronomy, this time the term “parallax shift”—which Slovenian cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek has also made use of, though in a much more radical way than I propose we do here. A parallax shift is the apparent displacement of an object caused by actual change in the position of the point of observation; most importantly, the angular amount of such change in position. Using some basic geometry, these angular shifts can be used to triangulate the distances between various objects, thus locating them in space.

But what objects ought we to use to triangulate location within the academic cosmology? For a rudimentary location, we can use the paratextual aspects of a book to measure the parallax shift and thus triangulate its location. I offer here such a triangulation of Hogan’s Understanding Nationalism.

First off, we see that the book is part of Ohio State University’s Narrative Series, edited by James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz. This lets us know certain things about the book. It will be concerned with the structures of narrative and with cognitive psychology. It also lets us know it will be first-rate overall (even if one happens to disagree with all or part of the book), given that series’ excellent reputation.

Secondly, the Index to the book tells us volumes alone. Number of references to Derrida: 0. Number of references to Foucault: 0. Spivak: 0. Lacan: 0. Hegel: 1 (but only in passing). Antonio Negri: 1. Chomsky (both as linguist and political thinker): 5 (though my count has it at 7, if you include the Introduction, which the Index doesn’t). Judith Butler: 0. Freud: 3 (though the Index doesn’t list any of them, despite their being in the book’s main text). Benedict Anderson: 26 (and 1 more in the Intro). There are over a hundred references to various cognitive psychology experiments, papers, books, and theorists. And while Marx gets no direct mention, “Marxists” are mentioned 6 times.

And the last paratextual aspect we’ll consult is simply the author’s bio: Patrick Colm Hogan is a professor in the English Department, the Program in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, and the Program in Cognitive Science at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. From this, I think we can safely assume that we’ll get a comparative approach that incorporates several languages, literatures, and disciplines. And, indeed, we do.

As the final word I’ll offer on the book’s and its author’s location in the academic cosmology, I’ll say that the clarity of his writing style, his consistent use of cognitive psychology and analytic philosophical techniques, and the authorities he cites generally (though not dogmatically) locate Hogan on certain sides of current academic debates. He seems more sympathetic to the analytic philosophical tradition than to the so-called continental tradition—though he doesn’t have any axe to grind on this matter, since he happily makes use of the likes of Marx(ists), Freud, and Negri; but his methodology is clearly analytic. He also clearly falls on the Chomsky side of the Chomsky-Foucault debate about linguistics and human nature—that is, he believes that there are similarities between human languages and that these are due to neurobiological and cognitive psychological factors found across the species. I wish I could offer an unbiased assessment here, but Chomksy’s Universal Grammar model has been proven time and again to be as accurate as any scientific theory could hope to be. Foucault’s work on power and biopolitics is groundbreaking, and it is likely a (minor) flaw of Hogan’s book that Foucault’s talk of power and the mechanisms of biopolitics are not mentioned, but this reviewer at least is happy to see a more careful and scientific discussion of linguistics among literary theorists. Foucault was right about a lot of things, and his thinking has proven productive in several fields, but there is zero evidence that he was right about human language acquisition and composition, while there is and continues to be more and more overwhelming evidence that Chomsky is right, but perhaps more importantly, Foucault’s linguistic approach is all but totally nonproductive, especially if the task before us is understanding nationalism, which here it is. Also, given the total domination of the Foucauldian view in literature departments, it is heartening to see another approach taken. This is what I will refer to as the cognitive turn in theory and cultural studies (echoing the similar turn in the social sciences), and it’s a movement I would like to see carried further.

But again, I want to stress that Hogan does not have any axe to grind and never brings up these academic turf wars and even ought to be excluded from them, since he makes use of various competing traditions, using whatever tools will yield the most productive results and provide the strongest explanatory accounts of nationalism and its mechanics. I only mention these turf wars here for the purpose of locating him within these intellectual traditions.

2. Five Hierarchies and Four Metaphors

Hogan’s primary interest in this book is how in-group and out-group identities are formed and reinforced. He writes: “…each of us has countless identities. But these do not have equal importance to our self-concepts and they do not have equal motivational force. I have isolated five parameters governing the hierarchization of identity categories—salience, durability, functionality, opposability, and affectivity” (65). Let’s look briefly at his definitions of each of these five hierarchies.

His explanation of salience is thus:

…some conceptual categories and some objective properties are more salient than others. Suppose I look into a room. The room has some furniture, a few gum wrappers on the floor, a movie poster, and a corpse. If someone asks me what is in the room, I am likely to ignore the furniture, gum wrappers, and movie poster, mentioning only the dead body. This is because the corpse has a high degree of salience. Salience has two aspects. First, it involves the intrinsic properties of the object…For example, things that are smelly or loud tend to be highly salient. Second, salience involves relational characteristics. These are a matter of subjective propensities that link one to the object in attention-eliciting ways. (58)

Notice here that he claims objects have intrinsic aspects. This is the kind of thing scientists assume regularly, whereas most Theorists do not. But let’s set our triangulation aside for the moment and carry on with the terminology Hogan introduces.

Of durability Hogan writes:

Other things being equal, we prefer categories that refer to more durable properties. In connection with categorical identity, we need to distinguish two levels of durability. On the one hand, there is the degree to which an individual’s category status may change. On the other hand, there is the degree to which the social group isolated by the category is itself enduring…In the case of identity categories, then, high durability means that I am unlikely to leave the group and the group itself is unlikely to dissolve. With respect to both levels, nonelective identity categories, such as race, tend to have an advantage over elective categories, such as religion, nation, or class. (60)

And so, durability is key to the hierarchization of in-group/out-group considerations. There are racial tensions between, say, African-Americans and Irish-Americans, despite the their sharing the second half of that hyphenate; and the differences, even if they don’t lead to tensions, are more durable in regard to race. One can convert to Catholicism; converting to another race is, to say the least, slightly more difficult (though cosmetic surgical techniques are and will likely continue to change this fact). But durability alone is not enough to explain in-group/out-group divisions that are the undergirdings of nationalism.

Which brings us to functionality. Hogan writes:

But durability too is insufficient. Consider a very simple case. I am presented with a $100 bill in a plastic bag. Paper is not very durable. Plastic bags (I gather) are. However, I am very unlikely to categorize this gift as “plastic.” I am likely to say, “Wow! One hundred dollars!” The reason for this is straightforward: We also choose characterizations based on importance, usefulness, value. Not that this is not confined to positive value. A large credit card bill in a plastic bag would have the same consequences. In the case of identity categories, it not quite accurate to speak of value. Rather, we would say that categories have greater or lesser functionality. (60)

So, while there are many categories of varying durability, it is essential to look at the social functions of the categories as well.

That said, however, Hogan goes on to explain that “a very common property may be highly functional, durable, and salient. But it is unlikely to trigger categorization. When we are treating identity, one of our main concerns is distinctiveness” (61). But how do we get at distinctiveness? Hogan offers the following:

If a particular feature varies in slight increments from one person to another, then it is a less likely choice categorization than if a feature varies in large steps. The limiting case of this is bipolar division Thus, a sharp, bipolar division is more likely to be high in our hierarchy of categories than is a more smoothly graduated set of differences. I refer to this as opposability. (62)

This makes an immediate sort of sense, though I am immediately reminded of the Hutus and Tutsis of Rwanda who shared nearly every physical and cultural trait, except for the slightest of distinctions, and those largely made up and not even discernable to most. That said, Hogan’s theory is not without merit. One type of identity category scores very high in opposability—sex. And here we see distinctions of the broadest sort made across all cultures.

But Hogan adds one more category to his list—affectivity. He writes:

It is not, then, simply a matter of ideas. It is also a matter of motives. These motives derive their force from our emotional engagements or the category’s affectivity, our final parameter.

In order for nationalism to have concrete, practical effects, citizens must feel something about that national category. Our emotional response is in part a simple result of labeling, as we have already seen. It is a matter of categorical identification triggering responses in the amygdale or insula in the case of out-groups, and perhaps regions such as the basal ganglia (which are connected with trust; see King-Casas et al.), in the case of in-groups. (63)

Here is another strength of the book, one that my other quoted passages have not sufficiently illustrated. Hogan makes regular use of striking cognitive psychological and neurobiological experiments as evidence to back up his claims, and while he admits these experiments are not 100% accurate yet, they do at least offer excellent scientific guidelines for how the brain processes events and data of the sort pertinent to a discussion of nationalism. (Here I am again reminded of our friend, Copernicus, who did not get everything right, but who brought our thought and scientific accuracy centuries forward with his book Revolutions.)

Hogan also offers an interesting account of metaphors in order to set the groundwork for how metaphors work in the discussion of nationalism. What is admirable and most useful here is that he takes into account so many languages and finds the commonality among them. This is another place where Hogan strikes me as Chomskyian. One might even be tempted to say he is looking for a Universal Grammar of Metaphors.

It is via this work of metaphors that literature becomes particularly interesting in terms of nationalism—and I think we should define the term “literature” as broadly as possible.

Here are, in brief, his four categories of metaphors: “inferential (metaphors that guide our thought about a target), articulatory (metaphors that facilitate our communication of ideas about a target), emotional (metaphors that facilitate our communicative transferal of feelings regarding a target), and unmotivated (metaphors that express a spontaneous recognition of parallels, initially without further functions)” (130).

Hogan goes on to make a quite convincing schema of how these metaphors are used in both organized propaganda and organically arising nationalist sentiments. There isn’t space here to elaborate on his analysis, so you’ll simply have to read the book for this and other reasons.

3. Conclusion, In Which I Argue That This Book Matters and You Should Buy and/or Teach It

Nationalism is a force that has driven much of history—ranging from recent debates on the Iraq War or immigration here in the US to the India-Pakistan conflict to more distant phenomena such as Nazism and earlier ones going back as far as ancient Persia and Rome, and so on. It is, however, worth noting that while the word has taken on a generally negative connotation among activists and intellectuals, there are also anti-colonial nationalism(s) and pro-democracy nationalism(s), to name but two of the types of nationalisms many activists and intellectuals would likely feel at least some sympathy for, if not support outright. Nationalism might therefore be the single-most important point of cultural and historical study—that is, if we judge importance in terms of human lives (or deaths) and historical forces. It is for this reason that Patrick Colm Hogan’s Understanding Nationalism is such a necessary investigation.

It is not, however, merely the topic that makes the book valuable. Many books are published on the subject every year, and many smart and useful ones even. But what makes Understanding Nationalism unique is its methodology. Hogan attempts to explicate nationalism via an admirably interdisciplinary approach. He makes use of cognitive science as fluently as political science; quotes as freely from the Persian national epic, The Shanahmeh, as he does from Walt Whitman; imports the insights of Noam Chomsky the linguist as or more readily than Noam Chomsky the political thinker.

Understanding Nationalism is an excellent book, one that could (and should) be used in a variety of classrooms—e.g., political science, cultural studies/critical theory, literature, sociology, cognitive psychology, and even advanced rhetoric courses (depending on the class’s focus of course). It has been often said that all critical theory (or Theory) must be interdisciplinary, and that it must be productive and applicable in many fields. Despite going rather strongly against the stream of post- and anti-structuralist trends in critical theory and cultural studies today, Hogan’s Understanding Nationalism certainly qualifies as critical theory of the highest order.

In airing his frustrations with the task before him, Copernicus wrote in Revolutions that “the courses of the planets and the revolution of the stars cannot be determined by exact calculations and reduced to perfect knowledge.” This is the difficulty of doing careful evidence-based scientific analyses—the constant frustrations of failure—but the rewards of such inquiry are, if you’ll excuse the pun, astronomical. I applaud Hogan for his contribution and wish his book great success. I can only hope it receives the attention it deserves.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: LEONARD COHEN

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DANCE ME TO THE END OF LOVE

by Leonard Cohen


Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic ’til I’m gathered safely in
Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love
Oh let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone
Let me feel you moving like they do in Babylon
Show me slowly what I only know the limits of
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the wedding now, dance me on and on
Dance me very tenderly and dance me very long
We’re both of us beneath our love, we’re both of us above
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the children who are asking to be born
Dance me through the curtains that our kisses have outworn
Raise a tent of shelter now, though every thread is torn
Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic till I’m gathered safely in
Touch me with your naked hand or touch me with your glove
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love


Leonard Cohen Is a world-renowned Canadian singer-songwriter, poet, and novelist.

Editor’s Note: This poem was by request. If you have a request of your own please feel free to post it as a comment. For me, the Leonard Cohen song that is pure poetry is Hallelujah, which is even more interesting for the many different versions of the lyrics in existence. I jumped at the opportunity to post this song today because it brings to light one of my favorite subject matters: Is music poetry? To me, the answer is yes, though it depends on the artist and on the piece. I do believe that poetry is an artful manipulation of language, so for a song to be poetry or an artist to be a poet I need lyrics that read, for me, like poetry. Bob Dylan tends to fall within this camp, as does Ani DiFranco. Of course there are countless others, and there are also pop songs that I am loathe to consider poetry, such as Britney Spears or Miley Cyrus songs. But poetry is subjective, and people view what is and isn’t poetry differently. What do you think? Are songs poems? Are lyricists poets?

Want to read more by and about Leonard Cohen?
LeonardCohen.com
Wikipedia
The Leonard Cohen Files

ANKH

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Ankh

by Eve Toliman

Anna Akhmatova. Just the sound of your name softly hammering against the roof of my mouth calls me, gently, into order.  Anna Akhmatova. If one such as you once lived then I want to live here too.  From another world in a smoldering time that formed diamond hearts in the crucible of relentless suffering, you spoke me into being.  You left your words dead still on the page that I might find them again, just where you put them.  I return to them shyly.  How do I dare resurrect them, dare even touch them, when I have not known what you suffered?  Yet somehow through the darkness of your time into the bright darkness of mine, your words give me breath, full of the scent of spring and bitter cold iron, like blood on my tongue.  Because of you, I will breathe deeper, and I will risk a little more, your heart in mine, until I take my place beside you under the unknown stones.

ANDREAS ECONOMAKIS

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

Cockroach. Flickr photograph by Kidicarus222.

COCKROACH

by Andreas Economakis

It’s late summer afternoon, one of those calm afternoons that warms the skin, coating the entire body in a heavy yet soft cocoon.  I’m in a little seaside village in Southern Greece.  Shirts unbuttoned, hairy black forests concealing little golden crosses, the smell of sun-oil and cheap soap permeating the salty air, fresh fish on ice, sizzling under yellow lamps.  Mosquitoes are buzzing around, invisible.

The waiter wafts by, trailing a cloud of stale sweat and fried calamari.  It’s hard work being a waiter in Greece, in the summer, with all the tourists.  Greek tourists are the most demanding of all, never happy and with a chip on their shoulders the size of Mykonos.

I sit alone at a small round blue table on the sidewalk. A small pedestrian road and another sidewalk are the only things separating me from the tranquil sea.  The salt water of the port laps up against the weathered harbor stone, against the sides of small white wooden fishing boats.  The night is dark, the moon barely up.  The water is black.  My back is turned to the black water.

I’m watching soccer on the large TV that the coffee-shop owner has set up at the open window.  Mundial, the World Cup finals.  Every table at the coffee shop is taken, the predominantly male crowd, with their cigarettes and worry beads and ouzo and bottles of Amstel and Heineken and Kaiser beer all staring at the brilliant Philips green of the soccer field.  Disoriented flies hover nearby, confused by the coupling of light and dark, food and exhaustion.  They’re so lethargic you can pick them up with your fingers.

Next to me is a table with three old men, all turned and facing the TV.  They speak with one another, eyes glued to the radiant green grass.  They speak of their lives, of trips on boats, strange harbors, exotic women, greasy sheets, spicy foods.  They must be retired sailors.  Their conversation is pickled with ouzo and beer and olives and cigarettes.  Lots of cigarettes.  One of the men has an American accent.  Not exactly American, just an accent of a Greek who has spent a long time abroad.  Like me.  Too long.  Now he is here, getting drunk with his friends.  Home at last.

The calamari waiter wafts by again and my eyes drift to the sidewalk floor.  A huge cockroach stands (crouches?) motionless a meter or so away from my table, closer to the three old men.  The waiter drifts by again but the cockroach doesn’t budge.  He’s as big as pit bull.  Brave too.  Motionless.  Steely resolve.  I observe, transfixed.  This is an insect god.  Perfect.  Frightening.  The three men are laughing.  Their voices echo in the distance.  The cockroach has absorbed my attention.

Suddenly, the cockroach moves.  Rather… he bolts.  He runs, trickling, fast, determined, to the three old men.  For a moment he pauses by the leg of the American-sounding one.  I can hear my soul cry “WATCH OUT!” but my voice can’t catch up.  Before I can find my speech the roach rushes up the man’s pant leg.  The nimble old man jumps up with lighting speed, overturning the small table.  Ouzo glasses and beer bottles and ashtrays come crashing down, shards everywhere, cigarette butts and black glistening olives floating in dirty frothy pools of beer.  The old man swats his leg, screaming.  Both his friends are doubled over, laughing up a storm.  Heads from everywhere momentarily turn away from the Philips green, enjoying this old man’s frenetic dance.  “Crazy old timer!” “Booze must have gone to his head.” “Too many years on a boat.”  “America!  That’s what happens to you if you stay there too long!”  “Too much ouzo.”  “Can’t mix ouzo and beer, old fella!”

The nimble old man keeps swatting.  Frantic.  The man can dance.  And sing!  The roach drops to the sidewalk and scurries off to a crack in the cement.  Only the old timer and I see this.  Did you see that?” he gasps out loud, pointing toward the crack.  His friends, still doubled over in glee, ask him what happened.  “There was a cockroach in my pants!”  The men double over again.  The calamari waiter crouches nearby and sweeps up the shards.  “Crazy old coot!” he says to himself, his eyes snap-turning to the electric green Philips.  One team has just placed the ball in the opponent’s nets.  The score is 1-0.

–Andreas Economakis

From a collection of stories on Greece entitled: The Greek Paradox.

Copyright © 2010, Andreas Economakis. All rights reserved.

For more stories by Andreas Economakis click on the author’s name below.