Andreas Economakis

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

Fish

by Andreas Economakis

When he was thirteen years old he used to wander down to the little creek that slipped through the woods in front his mom’s house to fly fish. He never caught anything but he liked the whole experience, being down there with his dog, the velvety brown water reflecting the light and the clouds and the gnats and the trees amidst the clean forest smells of fermenting leaves and damp dirt and worms. He would cast tiny handmade flies into the moveable water and jerk them back up with the fishing rod, imagining a big spotted trout leaping out of the sweet water in pursuit of his bait. But no big spotted trout ever leapt out or even nibbled on his line and he got to thinking that maybe the creek had no fish in it, that maybe it was a dead creek. It didn’t bother him too much actually, it was kind of a relief, until that one afternoon when the dog started barking like mad.

The boy looked upstream and saw something big and silvery floating his way, barely moving but still alive. He waded out into the creek, he doesn’t know why, some things are hard to explain, and a big pale trout with bleached eyes flowed softly right up to his legs, on its side and gasping for air. The boy bent down and cradled the fish softly. It looked like it had been poisoned, all discolored and sickly, its cataract eyes glazed over and milky white. The fish shook for a brief second and went still in his hands. The dog stopped barking almost like he knew the fish had died a strange death. The boy waded back to shore holding the fish and the dog backed away, whimpering like his master had a stick and was gearing up to hit him. “What’s wrong dog?” he asked out loud and the dog turned and ran away.

The boy looked toward the stream for a moment and then walked to his pole. He picked up the fly end of the line, held the fish by the gills -they were brown like winter leaves not healthy pink- and holding his breath to keep the stink of decay and poison from his lungs he passed the hook through the trout’s fat cartilage lips. The fly stuck to the fish’s mouth like a girlish ribbon or a fancy pacifier. It looked so strange. It was so very dead.

The boy started back up to the house with his catch, his dog spying him from behind the trees, frightened like he’d never seen him before. The boy entered the quiet house and dropped the fish into the kitchen sink. Maybe because he didn’t want the trout’s death to mean nothing or maybe because he was on auto-pilot, he’s not sure, he pulled out a sharp little knife and stabbed the fish in its belly. Green-brown guts spilled out onto his fingers and clogged the drain. The stench made him gag and he almost vomited, but he continued until all the innards sat curdling in a frothy pool in the metal sink. When he was finished he pulled the tap and sent the slimy guts spinning down into the grinder.

The boy placed the dead fish in a rusty tin tray and doused it with olive oil and lemon slices and oregano. He turned the oven on and placed the fish inside before turning to the cupboards to pull out all that was necessary for a big family meal, a happy family meal with his mom, just him and his mom. A half hour later the fish was ready and looking quite good though the smell was one of decay and ruin. Right then his mom entered the kitchen. She had just woken up and looked the worse for wear and tear after a lonely 2-gallon night in front of the TV. She burst into tears when she saw the beautiful meal her son had prepared for her. She was so elated and overwhelmed that she turned hastily to go get dressed and accidentally smashed her face on the door, crumbling to the ground with a black eye and a sore jaw and a teardrop on the dirty cream-colored linoleum floor. She picked herself up like a work-horse and staggered off with a bitter smile and stubborn wet eyes to her room to change, not wanting to spoil this for her little baby.

The boy stood frozen for a moment. He then walked up to the fish and smelled it again. He turned and looked at the teardrop on the linoleum floor. He picked up the dead trout in its tray and walked out to the creek, the dog close behind all a wonder, all nervous energy. He slid the fish into the gurgling water. The trout slowly swam away with the lemon slices, all cooked now and ready to go.

–Andreas Economakis

Excerpt from the author’s current novel in progress: “Requiem For A Cat”.

Copyright © 2010, Andreas Economakis. All rights reserved.

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

I Was a Male Chat-bot: The Turing Test, Artificial Intelligence, and Gender Online

Posted on by Chase Dimock


Three summers ago, I made ten dollars an hour plus commission portraying “Jessica”, an online shopping assistant program designed by InQ serving the WhiteFence.com website. On WhiteFence.com, a customer can purchase phone, cable, internet service, and other products specific to their address. If any questions about the products or ordering procedure were to arise, the customer could initiate an online chat with Jessica simply by clicking on her picture in the upper right hand of the page. Jessica looked the part of an intelligent and congenial assistant with blond hair pulled back, a collared white shirt, and a pair of stylish librarian glasses. However, this image of Jessica rarely resembled the individual who answers questions as Jessica. In fact, in the first two months of the WhiteFence.com account, all of the agents working as Jessica were males of ages 20-40. The InQ office was filled with Jessicas working on different websites such as bellsouth.com, sprint.com and vonage.com, all corresponding to roughly similar pictures of the blond, attractive woman ready to answer all your questions. As agents, we were encouraged to maintain our “Jessica” identity at all times. Jessica provided a human face for the website, a form of branding which personalizes an online experience usually marked by anonymity. The overwhelming majority of customers fully bought into the Jessica masquerade, often typing personal testimonies of their trials and tribulations in trying to get their phone connected and appealing to Jessica’s implied sense of personal concern and warmth. Jessica was always sympathetic, but she was also a saleswoman, trained to guide customers to the latest long distance plans and rebates so she could make a fifty cent commission on each sale.

The way that the customers personally related to and trusted Jessica’s authenticity consistently astounded me as I sometimes lost sight of the avatar I impersonated only to be reminded by the femininity they projected upon me. Some customers so thoroughly believed this domestication of the internet, that they contributed their only gestures of intimacy, sometimes  referring to me as “Jessie” in their conversations or even as “Miss Jessica”. Other individuals continued to chat with me long after their purchase was completed, including one notable individual who asked me on a date after a long story about needing to purchase internet service for his new apartment now that his girlfriend kicked him out. Other lonely hearts have been more forward as Jessica has seen her share of lewd comments, come-ons, and outright sexual harassment. Although not a woman in real life, I nonetheless felt than just a sense of disgust in principle, but felt an affect of violation at these comments as if she has become an extension of myself. While my mind fell in and out of the mode of gender impersonation, any customers who seized upon gendered power assymmetries in the conversation immediately interpolated me as a subject into Jessica’s body and I felt the sense of degradation that a real Jessica should have felt, and no doubt, what millions of real women experience regularly in their jobs.

Conscious of the fact that not only am I not truly “Jessica”, but I am also not even a female, this experience raised questions about how age-old conventions of gender performance have been infused into online communication . While most customers fully trusted the fact that that blond-haired woman named Jessica was on the other end of the conversation, a small percentage doubted not only my identity, but my reality as well. Jessica is given a set “script” of answers to frequently asked questions and detailed product descriptions to send that one could obviously not be able to improvise on the spot. In this sense, Jessica is a collaborative artificial intelligence where the intelligence of the individual and the programmed information of the computer merge. This shift from the discourse markers of corporate language and my own personal construction of phrases raises suspicion in the eyes of the customer, who frequently demanded to know if I am real before they allowed me to help them. While most customers were content to just have the answers to their questions, a good-sized portion insisted upon verifying my identity (and sometimes proving I was an American and not in an Indian call center) before they would allow me to help them. Performing as Jessica, I was burdened with having to prove my reality as a human or an American while still masquerading as a female. For these customers, interactions with Jessica took on the properties of a 21st century Turing test in which they felt compelled determine both my gender and humanity through only my responses online so as to determine whether or not the entity on the other end possessed a legitimate and trustworthy store of knowledge on cable TV and internet service.

In 1950, British Mathematician and cryptologist Alan Turing published the paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” which has since become the cornerstone in the modern scholarly discourse on Artificial Intelligence. Turing begins his paper around the hotly debated question “can machines think?”. He is notably reluctant to define what it is to “think”, wishing to avoid providing a definition that could either be used as an inflexible referent that gains credibility on the strength of his reputation alone or initiating a semantics battle over the definition which would obscure the point of the paper. Turing instead proposes a hypothetical model for determining the intelligence of the machine without debate over the essentials of thought and consciousness, which has subsequently come to be termed the “Turing Test”. In this model, which has been proposed in many variations, usually consists of an individual who is placed in a room where he is to give questions and commands to an entity placed in another room. The entity in the other room, which could be a human or machine, sends back answers to the questions that are first interpreted by a human test conductor and given back to the one who wrote the questions. After several rounds of questions and conversation, the interrogator is then asked to determine whether or not he has been communicating to a machine or a person. In some versions, both a machine and an individual can answer the questions at the same time and thus a comparison can be made. If the individual who asks the questions cannot determine if he is talking to a machine or not, then Turing concludes that the machine could be termed intelligent. For Turing, intelligence in this context is not evaluated in of itself, but instead as far as it relates to the subjective judgment of the individual. A machine possesses intelligence as far as the individual cannot tell it apart from the intelligence of a human being.

I will not make the error that many scholars in the humanities make by attempting to enter into a debate in the sciences for which they are ill-equipped. Instead, my primary interest in Turing’s model is in how questions of gender identity informed his test of Artificial Intelligence and how his theory understood how intelligence and knowledge becomes an embodied phenomenon Turing’s inspiration for his theory was based on a parlor game called “The Imitation Game” in which individuals guess the gender of a hidden individual based on responses to questions. Turing defines it by the following:

“It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator(C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart from the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end of the game he says either ‘X is A and Y is B’ or ‘X is B and Y is A. The interrogator is allowed to put questions to A and B thus:

C: Will X please tell me the length of his or her hair?

Now suppose X is actually A, then A must answer. It is A’s object in the game to try and cause C to make the wrong identification. His answer might therefore be:

“My hair is shingled, and the longest strands are about nine inches long.”

In order that tones of voice may not help the interrogator the answers should be written, or better still, typewritten. The ideal arrangement is to have a teleprinter communicating between the two rooms. Alternatively the question and answers can be repeated by an intermediary. The object of the game for the third player (B) is to help the interrogator. The best strategy for her is probably to give truthful answers. She can add such things as “I am the woman, don’t listen to him!” to her answers, but it will avail nothing as the man can make  similar remarks”.

Turing’s model relies upon the subject of speculation being closeted. This closet, which can be seen by the interrogator, presupposes the content of either a female body, a male body, or in the case of the AI test, a machine or computer of some sort. The ability to detect the contents of the closet depends on the player’s ability to visualize a presence, knowing that something must be there to send the notes. Even when the machine is nothing but a box that can produce a tickertape, we project our sense of agency upon it. Because the mind works with sound images and visual signifiers, we cannot possibly imagine pure information without a visualization of authorship or some origin of the words. Therefore, we must attribute some sense of our selves via personification onto the product that produces the information in order to understand it

With the goal of the game as to fool as many people as possible, gender performativity becomes the ultimate modus operandi for victory. Without the context of voice or handwriting due to a neutral individual or teleprinter reading the responses, the only way to prove gender results from the content and phrasing of the information given. Per Turing’s example, if a woman were to have short hair, it would be in her best interest to lie and talk of long hair if she believes that the audience would expect a woman to have long hair. Therefore, the actual woman may not be bodily woman enough to correspond the signifier of woman formulated in the mind of the interrogator and must perform to what the interrogator pictures as a woman so as to prove her own authenticity

Just as Artificial Intelligence uses repeated programmed responses contoured around the expectations of the user to appear natural, so too does a woman’s gender appear natural as it countlessly repeats the same gestures and affects that we have come to associate with authentic femininity. The more a gesture is repeated, the more natural it feels until that gesture becomes ingrained in the unconscious as instinctual when it is in fact learned behavior. Thus, gender performance is both an unconscious involuntary process and a tactical employment of signifying acts of masquerade as advanced by the early psychoanalyst Joan Riviere in her essay “Womanliness as Masquerade”:

“Womanliness therefore could be assumed and worn as a mask, both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if she was found to possess it — much as a thief will turn out his pockets and ask to be searched to prove that he has not the stolen goods” (36).

Under this definition, the woman performs the gender of femininity in order not to call attention to how her actions may disrupt or threaten the masculine agency of the man she addresses. In this dynamic, the woman is defined as “the Other”, a collection of undefined qualities that are merely the opposite of what the male associates with his sense of agency. There is thus no definition for woman as a genuine, independently define identity, only the false masquerade of typical feminine acts that covers this otherness with familiar gestures. In a similar dynamic, technology and computers occupy a roughly concept of otherness. Just as woman in a simple binary is situated as the opposite of “man” as we think of mankind as masculine, so too do we pose the machine as the other of man. Although we like to believe we have referential qualities for what “man” signifies in opposition to “machine”, the definition of machine lacks its own signifiers that would signify it in its own right other than the lack of humanity. Therefore, there is no “machine” outside of “man” just as there is no “woman” outside of her relationship with “man”. The technology of intelligence employed by the woman and the machine both becomes technologies of masquerade under which there is no authentic face but the expected face projected by the masculine subject onto the veneer of the mask itself. In this relationship, woman and machine are united in the category of “Other” and must perform themselves to the expectations of the assumed male spectator. Thus, the imitation game provides a model for which we can see that the process of signifying intelligence implies a masquerade and that the test for machine intelligence and gender intelligence is the same exact test. There is no difference in the Turing Test between the two imitation games; they are the same test of successfully covering one’s otherness to appeal to the spectator’s expectations of what entails intelligence.

The performance of Jessica online represents not only a contemporary reconceptualizing of Turing’s Test, but that it also constitutes the reality of signifying artificial intelligence and gender intelligence online as the same process in the same body. In other words, Jessica can be viewed as half a gender performance and half a performance of humanity. Because these are not separate performances, but that instead the performance of gender is always already a performance of humanity, I was constantly reminded of the works of Donna Harraway and her Cyborg Manifesto. For Harraway, the cyborg represents a deconstruction of the binaries present in gender relations, specifically the binary of control and lack of control over one’s body. Harraway argues that “Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines” (34). The cyborg represents the way in which modern technology has not only influenced the evolution of the individual and society, but also how it has now become inseparable from the human, a melding of DNA and binary code in which we cannot conceptualize our selves without the intervention of technology. The cyborg is formulated when an individual has incorporated technology into their body and the day to day functioning of the body so depends on this technology that it feels as though it is a natural appendage of the body complete with its own circulation and nerves. The body starts to feel through technology This can take the form of physical prostheses like contact lenses or surgical implants, technologies we use supplement the capacity of our bodies, or even technologies of bodily depiction like the use of Photoshop to retouch pictures where our standards for the bodily strength and beauty become distorted by our ability to create biologically impossible but natural-appearing images of the body.

Under this reading, Jessica can be partially interpreted as a cyborg. While my co-workers and I all joked about being Jessica and pretending to be a woman, it was clear that nobody actually thought of themselves as Jessica nor did they change their behavior to perform consciously what they would consider gendered speech. Instead, Jessica is best seen as a collaboration between the computer program of Jessica and the individual agent logs into her identity when they receive chats. As part Artificial Intelligence, Jessica the computer program is designed to pop up on the screen of a customer who has stayed on a single page beyond five minutes as well as remain a seductive icon of help that one can click on, on the upper right of the web page. The agent portraying Jessica had no ability to initiate chat at all; it is only Jessica as AI that could initiate chat with a prerecorded offer of help under the guise of having been initiated by a live person. Once the customer responds, the agent is then notified of the request and can begin to click Jessica’s pre-typed script and FAQs to send to the customer as well as free type responses on their own. Through the combination of pre-programmed script and improvised answers, the agent and the program mutually collaborate to create the intelligence of Jessica. On a rudimentary level, Jessica may be considered a cyborg so far as she as presented to the consumer as neither wholly a person nor wholly a computer program but instead a technology of artificial and human intelligence stamped with an attractive blond face as to pose as purely a product of human intelligence. Neither Jessica the computer program nor the operator logged on as Jessica can do their job without one another; they inhabit one virtual body composed of human flesh and binary code. The cyborg body of Jessica is composed a technology of gender which projects the picture of Jessica on the screen into the mind of the customer to constitute an image of whoever chats with them on the other end of the conversation. The pixels of the computer image of Jessica takes over the DNA of the real chat operator who becomes infused with the elements of Jessica in the mind of the consumer.

However, Jessica proves somewhat unsatisfactory as a cyborg in that her identity as a cyborg is only comprehended by the agents who portray her. For the customer, Jessica is designed specifically to erase the potentially threatening notion of artificial intelligence of technology and to allay consumers’ fears of shopping online in a world obsessed about identity fraud and scams.  Posing specifically as a gendered human, Jessica represents how individuals online ignore the how technology has pervaded our existence and rendered us all cyborgs. The consumer clings to and insists upon knowledge of “real” existence of Jessica so as to verify the veracity of the information they are given, somehow suggesting that if it had come from the program and not Jessica herself, that somehow the computer had developed the ability to formulate it without someone first having given the computer that information. Thus, there is a fear of technology having too much agency that the image of Jessica assures them has been tamed and domesticated.

The privileging of “real” biological identity offline transports the Turing Test to the 21st century in which individuals determine intelligence based on the information broadcast over the internet by an individual performing identity. This Turing Test of determination of true identity through the use of language is further complicated in Jessica’s interactions with customers. In the dynamic established in chat exchanges between Jessica and the customer, a slightly modified version of the Turing Test is realized. The main adaptation comes with the ever-increasing role played cyberspace in the model (thus the machine) as both the means of conversation and thus the moderator. In the original Turing test, the interpreter of the information submitted from the closet is a human being, yet in this model, the machine is the moderator. The machine is both the moderator and possibly the object submitting information from the closet at the exact same time. While the customer must still necessarily visualize the source of the information that he is fed, he is already conscious of the presence of machines as he is communicating through a computer. Therefore, the customer himself must rely upon a certain level of artificial intelligence in the form of his computer so as to be able to access the information in the first place. Despite the lack of consciousness in the part of the customer, the interaction between Jessica and himself cannot be defined a man talking to man, or machine talking to man, but instead cyborg communicating to cyborg. As I have spoken of earlier, internet communication inherently changes the way in which we communicate because we cannot express certain ideas in words or merely lack written proficiency. Just as gender is affected through online communication as performance, so too is the humanity of the individual typing.  Customers often find typing to be cumbersome or they feel unable to express their questions and thus they frequently ask to speak to Jessica on the phone. There is some element of their own humanity that they feel becomes depersonalized or incommunicable through the computer-mediated communication.

The presence of Jessica’s picture helps to alleviate this anxiety as she is employed to make it appear as though the customer is talking directly to a human being instead of sending their words out into the anonymity and incomprehensibility of cyberspace. The Turing Test’s set-up is realized in the interaction as the customer is presented with the possibility of a jovial woman being in the closet sending him the information instead of some anonymous machine. However, despite the fact that all of the WhiteFence.com Jessicas were men, there was no premium placed by the supervisors on the agents to perform a feminine language. Instead, the standardization of the language came from the scripts on products and ordering procedure formulated by the supervisors. Instead of being consciously gendered, the scripts were imbued with salesman-type phrasing, attempting to make the products appeal to as broad of an audience as possible. The use of language centered on an ultimate tone of neutrality and diction at the level of the average consumer that one could easily read and understand through text alone.  Yet, at the same time, very few customers ever doubted Jessica’s femininity despite the relative neutrality of scripted answers and the males supplying the free-scripted answers. The only context of femininity provided for the chat is the little aforementioned picture of Jessica on the screen and the prefacing of every piece of information with “Jessica says”. This consistency of iteration results first from the use of scripts. Because the tone of the scripts are carefully processed and edited, there is a consistent tone of salesmanship that overrides any feminine or masculine tone. Secondly, the consistency is also derived from the mere repetition of the name Jessica before every piece of information submitted. Every time Jessica speaks, the program gendered the statement by reminding the customer that it came from Jessica. Thus, the language use becomes gendered not by any inherent quality, but merely by the customer expecting to read inflections of gender in it and in the process producing them himself.

This acceptance of the gender of Jessica raises the question of why the female gender is preferable to the male for representing the company and why individual customers trust her information. As I have alluded to beforehand, Jessica functions as a sort of brand name for the website on which she is featured. Jessica provides and image that humanizes a product such as a website which is composed of complex computer science of which the average consumer lacks knowledge. The employment of a female face to personify a section of cyberspace refers back to the act of masquerade. The female who has been labeled as an “other” shares a relationship with cyberspace as “other”. Otherness in this context can be especially threatening for the customer as the computer functions in ways it cannot comprehend. While Jessica functions to answer questions that the consumer could very well look up in the FAQ page, Jessica’s feminine gender represents the masquerade of difference that masks the feared otherness of technology and woman. The feminine gender is already imbued with the process of masking otherness through performances of sensitivity and empathy rooted subconsciously in the mind of the customer. Here, the otherness of machine is hidden under the same mask of gender in order to familiarize what cannot be fully understood. As a brand, Jessica as woman inherits a lineage of female icons adorning products and familiarizing them to the consumer. Just like an Aunt Jemima, Betty Crocker, or Mrs. Butterworth, Jessica infuses a touch of femininity into the website that she adorns. These corporate icons suggest personification of a product that consists of little more than a bag of flour and sugar. The image of the completed pancake on the box is not enough to simplify the abstraction of the product before it is cooked. The end product must have an author, a genial, motherly cook whose know-how produces delicious pancakes that you too can make. In this same way, Jessica’s simulacra of bodily presence of the website seizes upon the need for the customer to see embodiment online.

The privileging of the situatedness of intelligence through gender in the eyes of the consumer is evidenced by the one account in the company that does not use the Jessica moniker. InQ’s account with Gamefly.com, a website like Netflix for video games uses the name “Mike” for its employees. While most of the Gamefly.com agents were in fact men, the customers reacted negatively to and doubted Jessica’s advice because they assumed that a female would not know enough about video games. Jessica was subsequently fired and replaced by Mike who proved much more effective with the customers despite the fact that the scripts remained the same and the account used the same exact chat agents. The only change in the dissemination of information was changing Jessica’s name to Mike and removing her picture. The Turing Test set up of customer and agent is reflected here as the customer situates intelligence through “masculine know-how”. The customer determines the intelligence of the information he is given based on his own criteria for intelligence. He necessarily presupposes a man in the closet on the other end of cyberspace as the signifier of intelligence. Once he is presented with the suspicion of femininity, the information no longer qualifies as “intelligence” and is thus branded artificial, or in this case, female. For the customer, intelligence is an embodied phenomenon where the presence of the body indicates an understanding beyond mere instruction. As a male is presupposed to “know how” to play video games, (the complicated sequencing of pushing buttons) his bodily presence signifies this know-how that corresponds to the signifier of video-game intelligence in the consumer’s mind. Despite the fact that this process of video game playing cannot be communicated online, its know-how is symbolized by the name Mike and thus anything he recommends on the website carries an authenticity that a woman who delivers the same advice cannot signify.

Jessica extends the common yet unfortunate practice of using attractive women in customer service positions so as to seduce the wandering eye of the male consumer and lure him into a power dynamic where he thinks he is in control due to his perception of superiority over women. This practice is merged with cyberspace that is imbued with connotations of the frontier, a wild yet virginal area prime for the conquering male to insert himself. The presence of Jessica as an attractive female further raises the sexualization of the cyberspace frontier, putting a human face on unconscious sexual drive. The presence of Jessica allows the customer to trust the information he is given in that her intelligence is validated through this masquerade of self and machine as woman. Such a process is evident with the sheer amount of sexual harassment that the average Jessica must fend off. Yet, this sexual power dynamic is a mere mask on the actual power dynamic at place which feminizes the consumer through the monopolistic economic control of the cable and phone companies over the individual which are sold on the site. Jessica thus softens and sexualizes the monstrous nature of technology’s power over the consumer.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: MAYA ELASHI

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

IN A BIBLICAL GARDEN
by Maya Elashi

i saw the messiah this morning.
He was wearing a white kaffiya and riding a donkey
southeast, towards Jerusalem.

He didn’t look at me
though he knew i was there with two cameras: moving and still
He didn’t want any pictures taken
and i, in dissappointment, respected that it’s

not an everyday experience i said to myself as he faded into the multitude

now, my heart alone holds the image developing
still
i’ll keep walking the path they followed up and over the hill.


Maya Elashi is an Irish Jew. A Kabbalistic Hebrew Pagan Priestess to The Goddess. She is a gardener/herbalist, as well as a teacher of English and Hebrew. Maya plays and prays for peace in the Middle East (and worldwide).

Editor’s Note: Just in time for the Hanukkah holiday, and the holidays in general, comes this piece from Maya Elashi. A piece that, in both its brilliance and simplicity, captures both a moment in time and a spiritual experience. I recall seeing Maya read in a barn in Santa Cruz many years ago. She shared an exceptional long poem that was very well received by the audience and that ended with her singing a line from Tom Petty, “Oh my my, oh hell yes, honey, put on that party dress!” Maya has been one of the most influential people in my writing life, and was the first person to be completely thrilled that I was leaving the law to pursue a career as a poet and teacher. It is a true honor to share her work with you here today.

Frozen on a Street Corner While the Unbludgeoned World Moves Forward

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

Michel Franco’s Daniel y Ana

In the last decade or so, Mexican film has been among the most consistently interesting in the world. It has a certain moral and social grittiness not seen in most American movies, but a tightly-edited watchability missing in European films. Some big-name, Hollywood-endorsed movies spring to mind – Amores Perros, Pan’s Labyrinth, Y Tu Mamá También – but there are also some worthy, less-heralded candidates. One of these is 2009’s Daniel y Ana.

Directed by Michel Franco and starring Gael García Bernal’s younger brother, Dario Yazbek Bernal, the film garnered critical attention at Cannes and other film festivals, but is still without its own wiki, and its IMDB page is incomplete and littered with negative reviews. I don’t want to psychoanalyze audience reaction too much, but part of this reception could be because the movie straddles an uncomfortable middle ground between shocking and subtle. It will turn off the easily offended, but with its nearly geologically paced shifts in character, it will also alienate thrill seekers. It is genuinely disturbing – a very different effect than simply being shocking.

Most synopses of the film have shied away from the trauma at its heart, perhaps reluctant to ruin the suddenness with which the trauma occurs. I, for one, had guessed at it simply by looking at the movie’s cover, but the movie remained vital and unruined for me. In fact, this knowledge, coupled with the slowness of the movie’s first act, created a nice simmering dread which I found just as effective as the hammer-to-the-head suddenness of real trauma.

Therefore: spoiler alert for that which there is no way, really, to spoil.

Daniel and Ana are brother and sister, young privileged Mexicans at pivotal points in their lives. Ana is on the verge of getting married. Daniel is a typical teenager, taciturn and self-involved, on the verge of losing his virginity to his girlfriend and resentful of not having been given a new car yet. One day the siblings go shopping and Daniel fails to make the appropriate turn on the way home. Two men jump into their car and hold a gun to Daniel’s head. They blindfold Daniel and Ana, throw them in the trunk, and take them to a big, starkly furnished house. And yes, if you haven’t guessed, they force them to have sex. On camera. Brother and sister.

The true horror of this scene is not just in its unflinchingness, but in the way it indicts the viewer. Daniel and Ana are beautiful, slim, and pale, like Greek statues. You cannot look away as Daniel fucks her from behind. Her face is buried in the mattress, and though we know she is weeping, it might be mistaken for orgasmic bliss. Daniel comes quickly and shamefully, as any teenager having sex for the first time might.

What follows is a study in post-traumatic stress. Both victims retreat from the world in their separate ways. Ana breaks things off with her fiance and retreats into her room.  Daniel stops going to school, spends time in movie theaters watching any old film. He also breaks things off with his girlfriend. Quite understandably, both do not talk to their parents about what happened.

In the end Ana proves to be the stronger about it, more equipped to deal with it because of her relative adulthood perhaps. She sees a therapist, weeps, and delicately broaches the subject with Daniel. Daniel meanwhile lies about going to the therapist and continues his self-destructive behavior. He googles their video, but gets no matches. There is another big twist at the heart of the film and perhaps you can figure it out. It didn’t surprise me, but I still don’t want to give everything away. Suffice to say it had the quality of being both unexpected and entirely appropriate that all the best storytelling should have.

As It Ought to Be cofounder, Okla Elliott, compares Franco’s subject matter to Neil Labute – that great American playwright, director, and darkly comic moralist responsible for Your Friends and Neighbors and In the Company of Men – and that’s as useful a touchstone as any. But he admits that the comparison is of limited use, and indeed, Labute has a venomous edge that Franco does not. Labute seems to see everyone as disgusting – either weak and sniveling or sociopathic – while Franco’s aim is to show us how fundamentally good people react to horrible events. Though Daniel, and to a lesser extent Ana, behave badly throughout the movie, we understand why. There is no comic distortion or exaggeration. This goes back to the difference I outlined earlier between shocking and disturbing: the shocking cries “Look at me!” while the disturbing goes about its quietly gruesome business, twisting the psychological knife deeper and deeper. It doesn’t need to beg for attention because it’s impossible for us to look away.

Further, Labute is a playwright and his characters vocalize their trauma in a way that seems psychologically untrue to me. One reason I think this movie was, relatively speaking, not well received by audiences is that there is so much silence at its heart – that the shifts in attitude of its two main characters are so gradual and happen over scenes that only seem repetitive. In pace, Daniel y Ana resembles a Euro-film (or the American idea of one), and yet there is no fashionable ennui here, or Bergman-like scenes of Freudian camerawork, just two characters coming to grips with their shattered relationship with each other, their family and lovers, and the world.

There is a beautiful and telling image some two-thirds of the way into the movie: Daniel is deep in his daily wanderings on a crowded street; the light changes and all the pedestrians move forward in a wave, crossing to the other side of the street, but Daniel just stands there. This strikes me as the perfect symbol for the way trauma affects us: it leaves us frozen on a street corner while the rest of the world moves—steadily, ignorantly, heartlessly—forward.


Waking Up

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Lon Chaney in The Phantom of the Opera, 1925. Photo source: g4tv.com.

Waking Up
By John Unger Zussman

In line for the tram at the Universal Studios tour, we filed past a statue of Lon Chaney in the old silent classic, Phantom of the Opera. It was lifelike in its detail—sunken eyes, jagged teeth, black cape. We admired it and passed it by.

A small crowd gradually arrived, waiting and chattering. A father and his small child stopped in front of the statue. The father began to explain who Lon Chaney was when, suddenly, the statue came alive, snarled, and swooped menacingly at the child. Everyone jumped back, startled, our hearts skipping a beat; so you can imagine the child’s terror, her scream piercing the waiting area.

The actor set down a tip jar, then turned to the girl and gave her a sweet. He cajoled her until, safe in her father’s arms, tears drying, she asked him how he could stand so still for so long. At that moment, the tram arrived. As we rode away, the actor reassumed his pose for his next victims.

Many years later, I have forgotten what else we saw at Universal Studios. But after witnessing stone turn to flesh, I understand what the physicists have been telling us. Matter is not as we perceive it. The world is a field of probabilities waiting to happen. And any object, no matter how inanimate or inert, might merely be awaiting its moment to awaken into life.

Copyright © 2010, John Unger Zussman. All rights reserved.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: NATHAN WISMAN

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Photo by Joshua Band.

BURRS
by Nathan Wisman

Your one, your only,
that grinning face.

For you, the cold dew
smears his arms.
The thickets of shivering weeds
part around his determined body.

Strips of cloudy sky traversed again and again
by the sun.
It is never warm enough.
Strips of pinpricked black tread upon again and again
by some moon.
The wait for an echo becoming impossibly long.

Burrs do not stick to wetness.
Turn your shivering back.
Because to burrs, wetness
means death.
Grasping for you, along the hedgerows.

Echelons of rings surrounded again and again
by echelons of rings.
All so artificial.
Squads of leaves piling upward again and again
by shoving winds.
The tree’s rocking impossibly slow.

Tendrils of steam rise from beneath steel lids.
Feel lumps beneath your skin.
Because to steam, rising
is all there is.
Reaching upwards to you, from limestone basins.

A soulmate, a lover,
your ultimate, your final,
those hands tangling endlessly.


Nathan Wisman lives in San Francisco, California where he writes in a number of mediums and imagines he has a cat named Fitzgerald. His favorite authors include Cormac McCarthy and Bret Easton Ellis, and he strongly encourages you to read Catch-22 and Eating Animals.

Editor’s Note: Sometimes there is an “it” factor in poetry. That inexplicable dust that shimmers over a poem. Natural raw talent apparent from the words and equally from between them. The work of today’s poet strikes me in such a way, and my personal poetic landscape has been forever altered by the words “to steam, rising is all there is.”

Andreas Economakis

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The author and his p-spot in second grade

The P-Spot

by Andreas Economakis

When I was a young boy I was fascinated by the Dictator of Greece and his cadre of austere military men. What I think impressed me the most was the Dictator’s black bulletproof limousine and the fact that the cops would stop all the traffic so that his convoy could roll through the lights without stopping. In a city that was already starting to show the signs of traffic gridlock like most cities today, I reckoned that the ability to cruise through red lights uninterrupted was the equivalent of absolute power. One time I even managed to see the Dictator’s shiny balding head as he sat in the back seat of the limousine. He seemed to be both smiling and angry at the same time. Maybe he was smirking at all us hapless motorists who had to wait for him to go by. I didn’t know enough back then to question the politics of the whole situation. I was blinded by all the guns and uniforms and cops and pomp and circumstance.

During the time of the US-backed military dictatorship or junta (1967-1974), my family occasionally used to eat at a restaurant called Anna’s on the corner of Kifissias and Katehaki avenues, across from the old Luna Park. I loved that restaurant for a myriad of reasons. First of all, they served steamed snails in a red sauce. Second, it was across from the Luna Park. After dinner, while my mother and father argued or drank or sat silently avoiding each other’s eyes, my brothers and I would go over to the Luna Park and play bumper cars and shoot balloons and race go carts. You could even win bottles of booze from the games, something which later became a fun way to score cheap liquor with my stepbrother Lee. But what was most cool about Anna’s was that the Dictator’s second-in-command would occasionally eat there, plain-clothes police escort always occupying the nearby tables. This man also had a shiny bald head, though his was clean shaven like Mussolini’s infamous pate. He always looked angry in his double-breasted suits. I tried to imagine what kind of cool guns he and his police escort carried under their jackets.

Though my dad and my friends all quietly intimated that the dictatorship was bad and doomed, I liked looking at those severe men in their snappy uniforms and at the symmetrical military parades they staged several times a year. And, of course, I loved being stopped at the traffic lights, hopefully first in line, where I could see the black cars and their police escorts whiz by unobstructed. What could possibly be wrong with these cool-looking people in their uniforms? I mean, everything was fine at home, right? We had food and shelter and pets and whatnot. Why was everyone complaining? Life seemed to roll on normally every day and, barring a few small hassles, I was happy. Okay, it was annoying that we had to go to church every morning before school (by Dictator’s decree), to stand for an exhausting hour while mysterious bearded men in black robes and tall hats droned on and on in an indecipherable language. But that was made up for by the cool censorship stamps on the back of every school book. Each stamp displayed an armed soldier standing in front of a flaming eagle, the Dictator’s sacred flaming phoenix. Rumor had it that if you removed the stamp you would be sent to jail instantly. My friends and I toyed with the stamp constantly, sometimes removing it and glueing it back on with spit. We imagined armed men bursting into our classroom and hauling us off kicking and screaming to the torture chambers. We were such rebels. No armed men ever came to haul us off of course, not for the stamps nor for us substituting dirty words in for the real ones when we sang the national anthem in the school yard every morning. So what was wrong with the Dictatorship? My young eyes simply could not see what the fuss was all about. Then one day it all became clear to me.

It was Apokries (Greek Halloween) and I was a bit upset because I didn’t have a costume to wear to school. I knew my friends would all dress up as Zorros and pirates and crusaders and cowboys and fairytale princes. Somehow or other my parents had forgotten to get me a costume. At the last minute at home, before my brothers and I had to go meet the school bus, my middle brother came up with the idea of having me wear some shorts and sneakers and a red and white Arsenal soccer T-shirt. I was going to go to school dressed as a footballer. I guess it was a pretty dumb idea, considering I dressed this way every day, but what other options did I have? I remember being completely embarrassed on the bus as I sat between Captain Hook and one of the Seven Dwarves. Taking pity on me, my brother inked a mustache on my upper lip. I guess he figured that I would look less stupid as an older footballer. Well, my classmates all made tremendous fun of me, but pretty soon they moved on as they were too busy showing off their own cool costumes. I dreaded the fact that the school photographer, who was making his rounds from classroom to classroom, would immortalize me in my silly duds. I decided that I would stand in the 2nd row during the photo in order to conceal my shame.

My teacher back then was a horribly strict woman who was the living reincarnation of the Devil. She loved the Dictatorship and kept us kids terrorized with threats and actual manifestations of punishment. In step with the Dictatorship’s policy of order, Mrs. M. demanded military-like obedience from her 1st, 2nd and 3rd graders. I was in the 2nd grade then and I feared and loathed this woman with passion, as did all my peers. We would sit in twos at our desks, hands clasped together in front of us (as regulations dictated), trembling with fear, hoping she wouldn’t call on us for something or other and consequently whip the shit out of us with her ruler or with the flesh-stinging mullberry twig she cut every morning from the school yard. Anyway, that Halloween we were sitting there, hands clasped in front of us, for what seemed like a very long time, waiting for the stupid photographer to come by, when I suddenly realized I had to pee real bad. I started shaking my two legs back and forth to ease the pain. The bell finally went off signaling the break. Mrs. M. ordered us to stay put. The photographer was due any minute. The pain in my bladder became intense. Braving the anticipation of Mrs. M.’s anger, I raised my hand meekly and asked her if I could run to the bathroom. “Absolutely not!” she barked. She reiterated that the photographer was due imminently. Fifteen agonizing minutes went by. I was in tears, my knees knocking together, my bladder ready to explode. I wasn’t going to make it. I raised my hand again and was shot down again, this time with a threat. I secretly cursed her and the dictators and all they stood for for the first time in my life.

It was at the very moment that the door swung open and the photographer marched in, the moment that my mind imagined a big wave crashing against the shore, that I was finally overwhelmed. Warm urine flooded my khaki shorts and trickled down my trembling leg. Mrs. M., resembling a military sergeant-at-arms, barked out that we should all line up together in front of the blackboard in two rows, one behind the other. Trying to conceal my mishap, I crept up to Mrs. M. and indicated my problem. She looked at me and my dark pee-stain with disdain and ordered me to the front line. Defeated, I edged my way to the front, choosing the corner. Maybe the photographer would crop me out by mistake. No such luck. The flash flashed and I was immortalized, huge pee-spot in the middle of my shorts, stupid Arsenal outfit and all. It was from that day on that I came to hate all fascists and military people and authoritarians. I hated Mrs. M. and everyone who was like her. I hated the Dictator and his bald-headed, limousine-riding, uniformed thugs. My eyes were finally open. I had to pee on myself to wake up, but I was finally awake.

The following year the military junta started to unravel, plagued by its catastrophic handling of student and civilian unrest and its asinine mismanagement and meddling in international affairs. Within a year of the bloody Athens Polytechnic uprising and the Cyprus fiasco the Dictatorship fell and all those bald-headed fascists and M.-types got sent to jail. I rejoiced. I’ll always remember riding my bicycle down to the center of Athens a couple of days after the Athens Polytechnic students’ revolt that ultimately led to the downfall of the Junta. The Dictator had sent in tanks and over twenty protestors were killed as they chanted anti-government slogans. One of the tanks simply rolled over the university’s gates and squashed many of the protestors. The tanks on the streets opened fire and rolled over everything in their way, leaving flattened cars and dead people lying in pools of blood. I remember walking around the area where the events had taken place, my heart pounding. As I crept amongst the carnage and bullet casings and broken glass and garbage and revolutionary fliers, I saw a tattered pair of pants lying on the street, soiled with tire and tank tracks. Near the crotch was a fist-sized imprint of dried blood. It looked a lot like the photo of my Halloween shorts. My heart sank. I was pretty sure that the pants’ occupant hadn’t met a good end. On my way back home I took an oath to never trust dictators and “men of authority.” I remembered my humiliation with Mrs. M. and I took an oath to never trust “women of authority” too. I vowed to myself to always fight violence and hatred and tyranny. I wanted to kill all the fascists. If they stick it in your face, then stick it right back to them.

The Military Junta eventually collapsed but my anti-fascist resolve and belief that violence was necessary to fight tyranny continued. It took me years to realize that I had missed the point. You cannot fight hatred and violence with hatred and violence. The proof was the military Junta itself. It fell because of mismanagement and bad decisions in the international political arena. It fell because it was unpopular. It fell because of the events at the Athens Polytechnic. But most of all it fell because it was based on a philosophy of violence and tyranny. Democracy cannot not exist where violence prospers.

Looking back now, I realize that the photograph of me with the pee-stain is the first photograph of a conscious me. It was like I was born then. That was when I woke up from my childhood dreams. I would be reborn again years later, when I freed myself from the belief that hatred and violence can solve anything. No photograph this time of a childish me with an embarassing p-spot. Just a quirky smile and one eye half-closed, questioning, wondering if the photographer back then knew what I know today.

–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.

Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech: On Learning Hebrew in Israel

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by Letitia Trent

As our plane arrived in Israel’s airspace, I listened to Pimsleur’s Hebrew lessons on my headphones, which go over the same phrases in half-hours of repetition, the accent-less audio-guide voice followed by the native speakers, who respond to his commands (Tell her you do not speak Hebrew. Ask her how she is doing today. Say “let’s go to my place”). I practiced the way the female voice’s inflection went up at the end of certain phrases, such as beseder (OK or Good).

I had tried to study ahead of our scheduled move to Tel Aviv. In Burlington, Vermont, my husband Zach and I had weekly basic Hebrew lessons from an Israeli man studying in Burlington. He was young, with messy black hair, but had a courtly, polite, and serious demeanor that belied everything I’d read about Israeli youth from the Let’s Go Israel! travel book.  He photocopied Hebrew words and phrases transliterated into English for us and insisted that we had to study. We tried to please him, but usually had lost the worksheets or neglected to study them at each meeting. We met once a week, which wasn’t enough for anything to stick. By the time we boarded the plane, after a month of visiting family in Oklahoma and Arkansas, we’d forgotten everything. Pimsleur didn’t help. By the end of the flight, I knew how to say “I don’t speak Hebrew”, “I don’t understand Hebrew”, and “Do you speak English?” It would have taken another five or six hours of listening to get past the words for hotel, the taxi, and the bills and down to something substantial. By the time we landed at Ben Gurion, we had no Hebrew but assertions about how we cannot speak it.

#

Although I’ve never been particularly quick when it comes to subjects like Math or Science, I’ve excelled in language since Elementary school. My memories of school are punctuated with sudden realizations that what others seemed to struggle with—reading, vocabulary, comprehension—came easy to me. I can remember a whole section of read-and-respond comprehension questions in a standardized test where we had to read a dry, boring history text and then respond to questions about the meanings of sections. I finished the test and set down my test booklet. I noticed, then, that everybody else was still working—most still reading the text. This wasn’t a source of pride, but curiosity: how could something so essential to me, language, be so difficult for everyone else? My inner life from the ages of eight to seventeen came almost exclusively from books. I was shy and physically isolated from other people my age (I lived in the woods, by highways, and didn’t own a car until I got married), and so I learned about people who were not me from books.  I didn’t understand what everyone else had inside of their heads, if it wasn’t books.

Before moving  to Tel Aviv, I’d imagined that my primary discomfort would be in speaking to people, but this is not the case. About 85 % of people in Israel speak English, and even more in Tel Aviv. The problem isn’t speaking to people so much as grasping the general tone of a place based on the signs, the advertisements, what people choose to put on chalkboards outside of bars and restaurants.  Now, the world around me is encoded in chunky Hebrew letters which carry messages that I don’t understand.  A billboard by the sea, featuring a picture of a boy smiling, his hands folded school-picture style on the table before him and with a paragraph of block-text to his right, baffles. Is this billboard an advertisement, a warning, or a public service announcement?

I can recognize letters and some words, but for the first time in over twenty years, I have to try to read. I sound out Hebrew words painfully, like a child. The feeling brings me back to elementary school, when I hated speaking out loud in class so much that I flatly refused to read aloud, so I was eventually put into remedial reading classes, where we practiced sounding out words slowly, hunched over our desks with our fingers under each letter. The remedial reading room gave me sympathy for those who couldn’t read well. It was embarrassing to be stuck on a hard combination of letters, like the word thought, it’s unmercifully illogical “ou” and “ght” combinations, which sound nothing like the individual sounds of those words.

After almost four months of Israel, as soon as someone comes up to me speaking Hebrew, every bit of Hebrew I’ve learned falls out of my head. I get tongue-tied, afraid that I’m wasting somebody’s time and end up saying the only words that come to me: Anglit (English), I say, apologetically, Slicha, Slicha (sorry/excuse me), Ani rac medeberette anglit (I only speak English).

#

In our neighborhood, the old city of Jaffa, or Yafo, as it’s pronounced in Israel, Arab shops and restaurants outnumber Jewish ones. At first, I tried to speak in Arabic to the Arab shop owners and Hebrew to the Jewish ones. In almost every shop in Yafo (above the cash register, usually) you’ll find some indication of the religion of the shop owner. In Arab shops, you’ll often find fancy Arabic calligraphy or a Tree of the Prophets of Islam. In Jewish shops, you’ll often find a chamsa (hand-shaped good-luck charm).

I heard from Zach that one of his friends, a non-Israeli who speaks Hebrew fluently, found that some Arabs find it offensive for Hebrew speakers to try to speak Arabic. Though Israel officially has two languages—Hebrew and Arabic—Hebrew is the spoken language of the country, and in my experience, few Jews are fluent in Arabic. Many Arab-Israelis, though they know and speak Hebrew, speak Arabic with each other (you hear it in the streets of Yafo, coming from clouds of perfumed smoke at nargilla bars or groups of young men at coffee shops). The language is one way to retain Arab culture in a country dominated by Judaism and Jewish culture.

My Israeli friend D, though, told me that it isn’t so clear cut. The problem isn’t just Hebrew and Arabic: it’s any dominant language confronted with a more marginalized one.  Of course, you can speak any language with a heart of condescension, with a sense of ridiculous pride that you’ve spent ten minutes on the internet looking up the correct words for hello and goodbye. This can happen anywhere.

Anything done with kindness will be understood as kindness, she told me. I am still not sure.

Language is personal, political, and what we use to wound and show superiority. My native language is a bully, and the language I’m learning is tied to the concept of Zionism, which I imagine that most Arab-Israelis resent. I don’t know how my intended kindness translates.

#

Our Ulpan teacher, Chava, holds up her hands as we stumble over the Hebrew letters.

Hebrew is simple, she says. Hebrew is not a problem.

She’s right. Hebrew, unlike most languages I’ve tried to learn, is very regular and is indeed not much of a problem outside of the different alphabet, pronunciation, and maddening lack of vowels. Hebrew is so regular because its spoken form was largely constructed, with modern words added to the lexicon. Hebrew, after the diaspora in 70CE, remained primarily in written form through religious texts. When early Zionist leaders such as Ben Yehuda set about systematizing, modernizing, and creating the new/ancient language of Hebrew, they understand why it was so important: a culture must have its own language. Taking a common European language wouldn’t have worked: Israel had to reach back farther.

It’s astonishing to think about how new spoken Hebrew is. In 1881, when Ben Yehuda moved to Palestine and insisted on speaking only Hebrew with his family, he was probably the only Jew in Palestine speaking Hebrew exclusively in the home. Now, a little over a hundred years later, an entire nation speaks it, and the language has grown from its roots into its own, strange creature.

The difficulty arises in Ulpan class of exactly how to teach Hebrew. Do you teach schoolbook Hebrew or Hebrew the way it is spoken, which is often in an extremely contracted form with frequent intrusions of other languages, such as Yiddish, German, and Arabic? For example, while standing in the line at the bank or grocery store in Israel, if you don’t move quite quickly enough, you might hear yalla, yalla, usually from an elderly man or woman at the back of the line. Yalla is an Arabic word. Once, in a taxi on our way back from a party, we heard the taxi driver explain to a passenger in the front seat—a Transylvanian woman working in Israel—that the word yalla was not actually a Hebrew word.

We took it from the Arabs, he explained. It means move.

#

As an American, I have the benefit and the curse of not having to pay much attention to my culture, my language, my identity. I do not have to fight to hold onto it, to make sure my language doesn’t die or my rituals are preserved—the US is ubiquitous, and knowing English is (unfortunately—but that’s a whole other essay) considered a necessity for success in most countries. My language is the language on T-shirts and products from Shanghai to Paris. Israel, a country just over 60 years old, had to create fluency in a relatively short period of time in order to unify a culturally and linguistically diverse citizenship. The Ulpan system was created as an easy, quick way to teach immigrants Hebrew, and it seems to work: though it doesn’t make people immediately fluent, it does provide an “in” to the culture that isn’t always offered in other countries.

My Ulpan class isn’t traditional. No olim chadashim (new immigrants), and Zach and I are probably the oldest people in the class. The majority of us are non-Jewish. We consist of three Chinese students, four Americans, and half-dozen Polish students who seem to have an uncanny ability to pick up the language but don’t seem to recognize the Jewish religious songs that Chava sings, which makes me think they didn’t get the basics of Hebrew through a synagogue. I’m not sure if they’ve studied before (Zach’s theory) or if their young, elastic brains make it easy for them to learn another language compared to my older, less flexible brain (my theory).

The Polish students speak Polish to each other and English to Chava. They turn to each other sometimes and speak perfectly easy, fluent Polish, and it makes me wonder at fluency at all: how do we all learn to navigate our native language so easily? I wish that I had access to their language, too. Compared to Polish, I have a good start in Hebrew. I know over 25 verbs. I can request to go to the bathroom, ask for food, and tell somebody that I want to shop or speak or walk. I know nothing about Polish. There are so many languages I will never know, books I will never read in their original languages, and people I will never know as deeply as a native speaker of their language could. There simply isn’t enough time to understand more than a few languages in one lifetime.

#

In my opinion, the saddest Bible story is of the Tower of Babel. Once, there was a universal language that everybody spoke, and we all understood each other. Since we all understood each other, we could organize, and soon, people began to build larger towns and higher buildings, which angered God:

And the LORD said, ‘Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.’

Note here what the problem really is: it’s the fact that humans, when they understand each other, can work together, which creates so much promise that even God is jealous

I’ve been studying Hebrew for two months, and I’m amazed at what I still cannot say. I can’t explain in Hebrew why studying languages ultimately depresses me, though I need and love to do it and could never live in a country without at least trying to understand the language(s) spoken there.  I can’t explain in Hebrew why I am a writer, why I don’t miss the United States, or why I don’t know where I’ll live after we’ve left here and why am happy about that fact. I can’t say anything important yet—but compared to Russian, German, Cherokee, Swedish, Icelandic, Japanese, and on and on, I can make due. Making due, at least when it comes to language, never feels like enough.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: ALLYSON KWETT

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Two A.M.
by Allyson Kwett

But there’s no darkness, at least
No Country Darkness
No Fords on Highway One
No tires packing salt into pavement
No dim headlights shining back off yellow signs

But the glow is the same
                          Toxic orange
And the same weeping strings
             Cries of smoke and whiskey
Leech through headphones
Leech into the sky

Yellow streetlights and
Endlessly blinking neon
Bounces off slick wet pavement

             And the bay
Is white and yellow
With Atlantis sunk
Office buildings and sky-rise apartments
Bleeding to the shore

No stars, no moon
Under a ceiling of burnt fog
And the porch light is off
But still I wonder

Wonder if the smoldering ash
Faint red glow and
Release of gray smoke and flesh
Covers the stratus and cosmos of night
Behind sheets of melancholy

Fighting to bleed through the edges
With violent ferocity


Allyson Kwett is a San Francisco Bay Area native currently completing her BA in Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. She enjoys parlour games, trivia, crosswords, and cucumber-flavored soft drinks, and abhors people who say “for all intensive purposes”.

Editor’s Note: Allyson Kwett has a nice handle on the use of sound in poetry. Moments like “No tires packing salt into pavement” hit the ear in the same way the mind’s eye pictures the tires packing salt into the ground. Beginning the poem mid-moment, “But there’s no darkness, at least,” we as readers experience the poem as a scene carved from time. We are dropped in, a world opens up for us, we inhabit it in all its detail, and we exit “with violent ferocity.” It is a quick and intense experience, alive with images and sound along the way.

Participatory Budgeting: Sharing Power Over Public Resources

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By Mira Luna

Photo by Alan Cleaver on Flickr

With city governments now declaring bankruptcy and cutting vital services, local officials may be wise to take the lead from Brazil and get their constituents directly involved in tough budgetary decisions. Politicians can be pressured to fund bank bailouts over health care by their campaign contributors, but their constituents won’t.

Long before the global finance crisis, residents of Porto Alegre, Brazil were having trouble getting essential services from their government. The city was bankrupt and residents were lacking proper sewage, clean water, and other necessary infrastructure due to rampant corruption. In order to more equitably and efficiently distribute scarce public funds, Porto Alegre became the first town to formally adopt a process called participatory budgeting. This process allows its residents to directly decide how public funds will be spent though open deliberation in budget assemblies and voting. Since 1989, when the program started, city-wide participation in budgetary decision-making increased from 1,000 to over 50,000, while doubling the town’s access to many essential services.

Now over 1200 local governments across the world use participatory budgeting, including most municipalities in Brazil, several other Latin American countries, Europe, and a smattering of towns in Canada, Africa, and Asia. Peru, the U.K. and the Dominican Republic have national participatory budgeting laws that apply to all their local governments, and the UN acknowledges participatory budgeting as a core component of good democratic governance.

Yet this process remained largely unheard of in the U.S. until last year when it sprouted up in an unlikely place, Chicago’s 49th Ward, a community which speaks over 80 different languages within two square miles. Last year, residents of the ward, invited by their city representative Joe Moore, made proposals and voted on its $1.3 million discretionary budget for capital infrastructure. At a series of neighborhood assemblies, residents brainstormed project ideas and selected representatives who would transform those ideas into concrete proposals. Representatives split into six thematic issue committees to spend four months meeting with experts, conducting research, and developing budget proposals before the big vote. As Moore wrote in a letter to his constituents, it “exceeded even my wildest dreams. It was more than an election. It was a community celebration and an affirmation that people will participate in the civic affairs of their community if given real power to make real decisions.” Now some candidates in Chicago’s other wards are running on a participatory budgeting platform.

Participatory budgeting as a model usually allows residents to propose, discuss, and vote on public spending projects. It is frequently initiated to address resource inequalities, as well as corruption in the budget allocation process and lack of transparency and accountability. It can also have the potent side effect of creating a more engaged and empowered citizenry through a taste of direct democracy.

Most participatory budgeting processes involve these steps:

-A government and/or nonprofit develops the 1st year participatory budgeting process.

-The government approves the amount of the budget to be turned over to the voters.

-Neighborhood assemblies are organized and meet to determine budget categories (public safety, education, health, environment, sanitation, etc.) and who will be making project proposals to the community, either on a city-wide or district/neighborhood basis.

-Proposals are developed in collaboration with nonprofits, technical experts and government officials.

-Proposals are presented, publicized, discussed and voted on by everyone eligible in the community (usually more inclusive criteria for voting than electoral voting).

-The process is refined to achieve greater budget inclusion, transparency, diversity, participation, and quality of proposals.

There are wide variations on this process, and each community defines its own rules, which may be more or less participatory. Where corruption is high and civic participation is low, participatory budgeting should start with small initiatives and work towards greater transparency and accountability as the process develops. Comparing the most with the least successful participatory budgeting projects, a well developed participatory budgeting organization with adequate structure and rules is imperative to residents’ willingness to participate and trust in the process. Loosely developed participatory budgeting programs that simply provide a rubber stamp to corrupt local government or cheat the process can be even more disempowering.

In most cities, residents are allowed to decide on no more than 20% of the budget, and often it is only the discretionary portion of the budget (non-necessities) that is voted on. This limits the damage of uninformed mistakes, but the public may actually become more informed and make wise decisions about services that their lives depend on. As the community becomes more involved and the process refined, additional portions of the budgets may be included. A larger pot can encourage more participation. One town in Brazil puts 100% of its budget up for public discussion and vote after positive experiences.

While participatory budgeting can cost cash-strapped municipalities extra money to hold assemblies, publicize, vote and add staff to deal with the requests, residents often end up more motivated to fulfill their tax obligations, because they feel their money is better spent with less money going to pork barrel projects. Some participatory budgeting processes have also led to increased local employment through local hiring prioritization as selected projects are implemented, improving the overall local economy.

Another side effect of a good participatory budgeting process is greater social harmony. Government officials can less be blamed for corruption, and unequal allocation, and so community-government relations may be improved. And as residents of all walks of life come together to listen to each others’ needs and be heard in a fair venue, trust, understanding, and collective wisdom may blossom. The process is not about winning, but as a one participant mentioned, “It’s more about being happy for someone else to be able to live a better life.”

Participatory budgeting is not just for city-wide budgets, some nonprofit agencies are adopting it, too. Toronto Community Housing has given its capital budget ($9 million currently) up to its tenants since 2001. Tenants are encouraged to propose ideas for improving their community and democratically decide their priorities. The top ideas are pitched at voting events, where tenants from different buildings come together to listen to each other and view display boards that each buildings creates as part of their proposal. Using “dot-mocracy”, every building selects a delegate who gets sticker dots with which they vote for the best ideas. Listening to active tenants talk about their experience, you get the impression that this is a fun community bonding event and less of a democratic chore. Many of them being marginalized and low income, this is also one of the more empowering things they’ve done.

In New York, City Representative Joe Moore from Chicago is promoting the idea of participatory budgeting to universities such as CUNY (City University of New York), as they experience cuts from decreased public funding. Even in good times, budgets are often a source of conflict between college administrations and students. Students might be less frustrated and dissatisfied with their education if there was more transparency and they had some say over how their tuition is being spent, increasing student retention.

Think about how participatory budgeting could democratize your world. How can you incorporate participatory budgeting into your government, university, business, nonprofit, community, or family? If we put our heads and our hearts together, we just might make better decisions that our collective future depends on.

For more information see the Participatory Budgeting Project website.

This article was first posted on Shareable.net