Content, More Content!

Content, more content! he said. Streams of it, mountains of it! Content everywhere!

Stop, said the woman on the rue. Oh, please make it stop.

Up to the moon! he replied. Piles up to the moon! The bizerk ego, he implored. Spinning in self-creation! He was hysterical.

Please, she said to him, looking away. You’ve gone mad.

The ego has got to burst, he replied. Oh, piles, of it. Glimmering, schmaltzy and bad! Yes! You need too much, too many of everything!

He looked at the dainty woman. He said in a low voice: then I’ll burn it all down.

What? she asked, looking up.

Then I’ll burn the pile down. And leave.

Power Play

How economic inequality threatens the nature of an equal democracy

Larry Bartels Unequal Democracy. Princeton University Press. 2008.

“Let me tell you about the very rich,” F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote. “They are very different from you and me.” To this, Ernest Hemingway famously replied: “Yes, they have more money.”

This exchange occurred in 1926, a time in America that was very good for the very rich – rivaled only by today. Hemingway’s rebuke is comforting. If it’s true that being rich simply means having more money, having a bigger house and a fancier car, than that might be the just rewards for market success.

But it’s also wrong. Larry Bartels’ book Unequal Democracy is a sophisticated, data-driven study of the myriad ways that the very rich have more than just more money. His book, a collection of previously published papers, traces the socially mediated processes that transform economic disparities into political inequality. He creates a model for understanding democracy that (given recent political and economic events) is utterly relevant, even urgent so.

The Political Economy

From the mid-1970s until today, economic inequality has risen precipitously in America – the average income of the richest Americans has grown six times faster than that of the poorest and the share of the income pie going to the rich has more than doubled.

The key, provocative insight of Bartels’ book is that this is not inevitable. The conventional notion that inequality is due only to “market forces,” to the impersonal economic trends that hum along absent of any governmental policies, is vigorously refuted by Bartels. His central claim is that rising inequality is an artifact of partisan political choice. “The most important single influence on the changing U.S. income distribution,” he writes, “[is] the contrasting policy choices of Democratic and Republican presidents.” To state this more provocatively: Republicans cause rising inequality. And his data here are very compelling. Controlling for macroeconomic factors, Bartels demonstrates that on average, since WWII, Republicans have grown income much faster for the rich than for the middle- and lower-classes, while Democrats have grown income equally between percentiles and faster than Republicans for everyone (including the top 95th percentile).

Unresponsive Democracy

His findings strike me as remarkable, but incomplete. The reader is never told exactly how such a substantial change in income distribution can occur. While he briefly suggests Republican principles of inflationary control over expansion and their vocal support for regressive taxation and spending, he admits that it would take a “small army of economists” to fully account for the connection. However, even without a causal mechanism, the implication is clear. The tides of inequality can be turned back, but only if we so choose.

The obvious question that follows is: if these data are true (and income growth is indeed faster and more equal under Democrats) then why do Republicans keep getting voted into office? Bartels dismisses the notion that low-income voters have been “seduced” into voting for cultural issues against their economic interests. Instead, he suggests that voter “myopia” – such as the peculiar sensitivities of the poor to the income growth of the rich and the tendency of the electorate to judge an incumbent on election-year economic growth – has greatly advantaged Republicans. He also points to widespread misinformation and a general unresponsiveness of political representatives to their poor constituents. Taken together, these effects lead to the break down of a democratic feedback loop that keeps politicians accountable for their inegalitarian policies.

Breaking the Cycle

Some of this might seem commonsensical – of course Democrats are better for the poor! and of course politicians rarely listen to the marginalized! But Bartels’ book, taken as a whole, puts forward a provocative and compelling model of democratic change. Income inequality in the economic sphere challenges the basic premise of democratic equality in the political sphere. One wonders at times whether Bartels is too cautious to state forcefully the nature of this relationship: the very rich are “very different from you and me.” They, whose political representation is greatest, have the power to affect the very policy changes necessary to perpetuate their own advantages.

But there’s a way out. Simply: politics matters. If it is elites that run our country, there is still a difference in the nature of those elites. And these differences matter; the choice at the ballot box is utterly consequential for the landscape of social justice. For those who doubt Bartels’ conclusions, the 2008 election provides a case study. We ought to pay close attention to its aftermath.

Connecting Liberty and Equality

A flurry of debate erupted on the HPR Blog, when Daniel Barbero said this about Sam Barr's the "purpose of marriage" post:

There are a couple things I'd like to point out in response to the post below, first being the grotesque confusion of liberty and equality that occurs in calling the lack of a State imprimatur on your relationship "antithetical to liberty."

Sam responds:

Daniel thinks it is ridiculous to claim that "the lack of a State imprimatur on your relationship" is "antithetical to liberty." Now, if everyone's relationship lacked the state's seal of approval, I would certainly agree that nobody's liberty was being violated. But to grant some people a civil right and then deny it to others is antithetical to equality, yes, but also to liberty. By granting it to some people, the state creates a relative need; it opens a door to some, and closes it to others, and does so (we assume for the sake of argument) for no good reason.

Daniel's libertarian assumption must be (correct me if I'm wrong) that the state cannot create liberty. There is some pre-existing set of natural liberties, and all the state can do is put limits on those. To me, that is a perverse understanding of what it means to be free.

Then Dan responds:

I think the disagreement here does stem from that idea that various state provisions are a liberty/civil right/thing of justice/commandment, and thus we must be brook no opposition! I blame the really religious language this takes on Rawls, but that's neither here nor there.

Then Sam responds:

And yes, liberty does come out of planning committees. Liberty can, in fact, be increased by state action.

Then I respond, saying that "Sam Barr's equation of liberty and equally is pretty well-founded empirically." The rest here:

Think about the history of America. Think about the struggle to integrate non-land-owners, Catholics, Jews, women, blacks and now gays. Surely, as Sam notes, all this expanded both liberty and equality at once.

One way to understand the relationship between liberty and equality is to acknowledge that while the state doesn't have to sanction anything (to, in Daniel's words, grant "imprimatur on your relationship"), it does have to protect people's free pursuit of social goods, marriage included among these. And if the state denies that protection to some but not others than that's both an issue of liberty and an issue equality.

That's the basic point of this post: my contention that even if we accept a minimalist state and the libertarian premise that nothing that comes out of a committee is, in itself, a "liberty/civil right/thing of justice/commandment" we can still understand the connection between liberty and equality to be something other than grotesquely confused, and we can still understand why the state should protect access to marriage for all.

First, note that I said "protect access" to marriage, not just "provide for marriage." It only happens to be the case that marriage is actually provided by the state; it could also, conceivably, be simply protected by the state. So for our purposes, it's easier to think of marriage of as just another social good -- like money or happiness or health.

We can probably all agree that people are entitled to pursue these social goods as they see fit -- that people are, in other words, free to "pursue their own ends." That is natural rights theory; it's a belief that our own freedom is embedded, somehow, in our humanness, in our having Selves. And if we agree on this, we can probably also agree that the state, at the very least, must protect this right; according to libertarians, in fact, that's its raison d'etre: the state keeps us safe, protects our property, protects our transactions, and, otherwise, leaves us free to do what we please (so long as we don't impinge on others' ability to do the same).

If we're all born with Selves that have rights, we are also born (we can probably agree) with certain identities on top of those fundamental Selves -- we have a race, a gender, a nationality, a socioeconomic status, a sexual orientation and so on -- and that our membership in these groups is both arbitrary and non-transferable: I, Max Novendstern, alas, am not free to be a female or a WASP; I am a member of two groups that are decidedly neither!

So the question is: what if those latter identities threaten the freedoms of my prior Self? That's a big problem! What if my inherited membership into one group translates, because of the tendencies of my society, into the systematic deprivation of my access to social goods? Well, now the innocuous unfreedom of my identity (its arbitrariness) becomes a much graver, fundamental unfreedom of restricted access (my inability to freely pursue my own ends).

None of this is idle speculation. In America, at least, this is often the nature of unfreedom: the coupling of identity with access.

The result, of course, is inequality. Some have identities that are tagged as "deserving" social domination and radical deprivation, and others don't. And if I inherited an identity and that identity causes my persecution (ie my restricted access to pursue social goods which is my definitional freedom as an individual) then not only is that just too bad for me, but it has little to do with the freedom of other's who don't have my identity. Persecution is distributed unevenly.

That's how libety and equality are logically connected. Discrimination, which is persecution based on unevenly distributed identities, is ispso facto an affront to both liberty and equality at once.

Please note too that in the course of this entire argument I've said nothing about the distinction between "rights" and "privileges". The privilege/rights debate is something of canard. Whether voting or drinking at a water fountain or marriage is a "right" or a "privilege" is not the issue here. What is the issue is my established human right to pursue social goods freely. This is, after all, what classical liberal "market freedom" is all about: not the "state's imprimatur" on my "right" to a nicer car, but the state's protection of my right to freely attempt to make my preferences for said car effective. The case of marriage is no different. I'm surprised that libertarians regularly miss this point. When the state intervenes, it is not to "establish a freedom" to but to correct, as it were, an imperfectly distributed zone of free action.

We don't, in other words, have to ask the state to grant approval of any ends; we only need to affirm a prior right to pursue them; and this right should be distributed evenly, regardless of identity.

(But Max, can this occur in practice? Can the state protect our prior freedoms to pursue ends without "establishing" those ends as public morality? Perhaps not, but this is the libertarian's problem not my own: if they can't create a state that can protect their own conception of freedom without undermining it...well, maybe they should rethink things.)

To conclude, I'll just point out that I also the think the state's role in this is not the operative question. Of course the state needs to protect access, but, in reality, much of the struggle against discrimination (the struggle for liberty and equality) is negotiated outside the sphere of direct state power. The Civil Rights Movements did not begin in Washington, DC -- it began in the basements of Baptist Churches -- and it did not end their either. Marriage, likewise, is only one aspect of a larger fight, the longer war against the pathologies of identity politics (racism, sexism, homophobia); a war that has little to do with the state, and one that has much to do with the strength of our own civil association.

And that is something, if you think about it, that libertarians should applaud.

{Crossposted from the HPR Blog ; Photocredit http://www.flickr.com/photos/shifzr/413869636/}

Negotiating With Iran (What It's Not)

I agree with the Zoey's points about Iran's incentives to accept American diplomatic outreach. But I would take her conclusion further. It wasn't just Bush's failure to be "attuned to geopolitical realities" that prevented this sort of progress; it was his failure, on a deeper level, to respect or conceptualize properly the purpose of diplomacy generally.

It's a fitting occasion to remember Bush's remarks to the Israeli parliament last spring:

Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along.

We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: “Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.” We have an obligation to call this what it is – the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.

That would be foolish! But of course that's not the purpose of diplomacy. I'm sure that others have articulated this better than I can, but it bears repeating. Negotiation is not about contriving an "ingenious argument" that will "persuade" our foes to put down their weapons. Negotiation is about advancing national goals by aligning them with the incentive structures of the other negotiating partner.

Here's a thought experiment. Say Iran's desire for nuclear capabilities is a product of (1) wanting to deterring an American attack and (2) wanting to assert greater regional leadership. On the other hand, America's fear is a product of our strong interests in (1) halting Iran's nuclear program and (2) ending its hostility towards Israel.

In this scenario, both nations' interests are aligned. One bargain would be that Iran ceases its enrichment program and commits to a policy of neutrality towards Israel; and in exchange, the United States provides security guarantees and recognizes Iran's regional leadership, including working to get it admitted into the WTO. Both nations' interests, initially aligned, are now relatively satisfied.

Negotiation, in this sense, is a form of commerce. Two parties exchange goods (money, security, land, guarantees or other things) and both perceive that the transaction is to its benefit, the result being positive sum. That's the proper purpose of negotiaton: not to use words like bludgeons or to invent persuasive arguments; it's about finding overlapping interests, and pursuing them agressively.

Of course this is all rather simplified and abstract; whether an agreement with Iran can be nailed down will depend on finding an intersection between the perceived interests of multiple regional players, each with varying leverage, stakes, political limitations and so on.

But it's not a "foolish delusion" to think that such an agreement can be reached. And if can be -- let this be said clearly -- the benefits would be greater and more permanent than those gained by military action, and the costs would be infinitely lower. Commerce benefits both parties. Diplomats, like other merchants exchanging goods, desire peace.

{Crossposted from the HPR Blog; photocredit younggrobv}

Integrate Cuba, Don't Hate

America's policies towards Cuba have been total, unmitigated failures, so it's really good to see Obama making some important changes. The entire premise of our embargo -- that isolation will weaken the regime, which in turn will trigger an overthrow -- is based on a major fallacy. In reality, isolation strengthens authoritarian regimes. It shields them from international forces of democratization, while weakening the position of their opposition. Our policies towards Cuba have been successful only at making the Cuban people poorer, less exposed to international development and less connected to NGOs, businesses and governments around the world that have interests in free, open societies.

My Gov. 20 professor Steven Levitsky wrote a paper (pdf) on this subject, in which he argued that the strenght of authoritarian regimes after the Cold War was negatively correlated with how "linked" their countries were socially, economically and politically to the United States or Europe. Integrated countries in Latin America and Central Europe, for example, have democratized, while isolated countries in the former Soviet Union, the Middle East and East Asian have remained more authoritain.

And extremely isolated countries like Cuba and North Korea haven't budged an inch.

The fact that Obama has emphasized easing travel restrictions and allowing telecommunication contracts into Cuba is important. These are the stuff of integration. And that -- I think -- should be the general thrust of America's foreign policy, not just with Cuba but generally.


{Crossposted from the HPR blog ; photo attribution Rudi Heim}

What if Sergey Brin Were Denied a Visa?

[Crossposted from the HPR blog]

The NYT came out with Part IV of its "Remade in America" series. It's a great series, full of the cool graphics that the NYT does so well. But the thesis of the piece, I suggest, is rather obvious (at least to anyone who's walked around Harvard's campus lately). Simply: immigration really, really helps America.

“Every American I’ve talked to says: ‘Dude, it’s ridiculous that we’re not doing everything we can to keep you in the country. We need people like you!’ ” he said.

“The people of America get it,” he added. “And in a matter of time, I think current lawmakers are going to realize how dumb they’re being.”

Immigrants like Mr. Mavinkurve are the lifeblood of Google and Silicon Valley, where half the engineers were born overseas, up from 10 percent in 1970. Google and other big companies say the Chinese, Indian, Russian and other immigrant technologists have transformed the industry, creating wealth and jobs.

To be fair, we're talking about the easiest cases -- immigrants who have enter our skilled labor forces vis a vis Ivy League schools. But in some ways that's the point: these are easy cases.

America's ability to attracted the brightest students from around the world remains one of its greatest advantages -- one that distinguishes it, finally, from other great powers at their senescence. Britain never had the same universalist appeal that America has. It couldn't. For Britain, an old and rich cultural-racial heritage made the assimilation of immigrants fraught with difficulties; it's complicated, but the bottom line was that the darker your skin, the less British you could ever be.

That's not the case in America. America was founded on virgin soil; there was no antecedently established culture (well, almost none...). So we were constituted on a set of ideas -- ones that, conceivably, anyone from any part of the world could aspire to. I think this aspirational quality is key. It means that our ability to attract diverse and talented students isn't just an artifact of our wealth; it's built into our source code, into the way that we were founded. It's because our national identity isn't predicated on a cultural heritage but on ideals. America is a framework not a race.

This is something that's often neglected both by the "United States is in decline" crowd and the "I'm a real American" crowd. Both groups misunderstand how the founding of our country makes us unique; and they both undervalue the material advantages this confers, Google Inc. as a great example.

Of course, you could ask, Should we be skimming off the most talented students from developing countries? Maybe not. But if they want to come, surely we should take them.

A Few Thoughts on SLAM from a Liberal Committed to Social Justice

The following is a response to the Student Labor Action Movement and all the rallying we've recently seen (here, here). As far as I'm aware, the Crimson won't run my response. I don't know why, exactly -- either scheduling issues (?) or substantive ones -- but I am publishing it here.

If you're reading this and are interested, I'd love to discuss this issue further: mnovends@fas.harvard.edu.

- - -

A Few Thoughts on SLAM from a Liberal Committed to Social Justice

“We come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics.”
- Barack Obama, Inaugural Address

Let’s assume that you are a liberal (I am) whose support for the American working class is deep – what are you to make of the Student Labor Action Movement?

The group, known by its onomatopoetic acronym SLAM, helped to organize Thursday’s labor rally, in which hundreds of students, workers and union representatives chanted outside of the Holyoke Center, and then marched to President Drew Faust’s office in the yard.

Picket line protesting of this sort is part of an important progressive tradition in America. It is based on a explicit, essential premise: the normal avenues of reform are too clogged or too bigoted for my lone voice to be heard. I must take to the streets.

To this effect, the Crimson quoted one of the leaders of the rally (to be fair, not directly affiliated with SLAM) as saying: “We are fighting for justice. We are making history. We can only rise together."

Protests demand enemies; yet, I am left to wonder, Whom, exactly, is SLAM fighting? The information is sketchy here. Is SLAM really suggesting that President Drew Faust is acting in bad faith or insidious intent to undermine Harvard’s most vulnerable?

If this is their point – insulting as it is to President Faust’s long career of service to the public good – then SLAM ought to say it outright. And then they need to give evidence.

Second, What exactly is SLAM fighting about? In a Crimson editorial, SLAM member Alyssa Aguilera says that there is “nothing responsible about the richest university in the world conducting massive layoffs that will only add to the already hurting economy.” But she only points to Harvard’s announcement to scale back an outsourcing contract to the effect of terminating “13 of 27 jobs contracted through American Cleaning Company at Harvard Medical School.”

The fact is: zero workers directly employed by Harvard have been laid off. And there is no evidence that they will be. President Drew Faust did indeed write that she would be “taking a hard look at hiring, staffing levels and compensation,” but the result seems to already have come to pass: a freeze on wages for most faculty and staff, and a voluntary early retirement option for 1600 workers.


I question the way SLAM has framed the debate – and I do so with all due respect for the organization and the principles that it is pursuing that SLAM has denied Drew Faust and Harvard University. Rhetoric like “massive layoffs” (not to mention the epithets and sloganeering) is more than just misleading – it is openly mendacious. SLAM, like any movement, ought to be wielding truth, not suppressing it. And to the extent that they need to fabricate enemies and conjure up phantoms, I cannot support their work.


I humbly suggest, instead, that SLAM is not a protest group, but a lobbyist. Their case, at its best, is one of costs against benefits: in this time of economic hailstorm – one that threatens hard decisions about practically every aspect of the University, from research to admissions to expansion – workers should be protected as primary.

They might be right. (In fact, I hope they are). But they should not pretend that it's an easy case to make, or that it’s morally unambiguous. Compensation accounts for fifty percent of University expenses, and with limited and drastically reduced resources there are a number of programs liberals might prioritize: What about the University’s mission to research for the public good? What about financial aid, so that no one is discriminated against because of economic standing?

Reasonable people – reasonable liberals – can disagree. And reasonable debate, I posit, should be conducted as such. They ought to get off the street and start typing briefs.


The tactics of SLAM, in the end, seem suited for a place and a time very much different from our own. While my peers are reenacting the civil strife of an older generation, the Obama Administration (a product in many ways of Harvard’s better sensibilities) is proceeding from pragmatism and consensus to win real victories for American liberalism.

Pragmatism. Consensus. Real victories. Such, I believe, are the demands of our age – and ones that we Harvard liberals are uniquely equipped to seize upon.

Protest, a tool of voice, is often wielded by those who do not have one. It seems as if the passionate students in SLAM, a group that exists at the very center of societal influence, want to wish their own considerable talents and access away. Apparently, they would prefer to leave the halls of power – where rational discussion can lead to rational solutions – so that they might bang loudly at their doors.

End of the Semester Essays

I've finally gotten to it: here are some of the essays I put together in the waning days of first semester. Two of them are fairly large in scale, the Warhol essay perhaps my best non-fiction piece, the homelessness essay perhaps my most bizarre.


The Persistence of Difference in Warhol's Marilyn Diptych

The message is clear: accepting the reality of time opens up both a host of possibilities and a host of problems, accounting at once for Marilyn Monroe’s fame and her death. Accepting the right panel, that of change, is accepting the trappings of freedom. The very existence of the right side questions the power of the left: the persistence of time despite our attempts to evade it. Warhol forces us to grapple with the two universes, side-by-side.

In the Wake of Genocide: Designing A Constitution for Rwanda

The Hutu-Tutsi ethnic divide at the center of the Rwandan Genocide is old but not ancient. The two ethnic groups, ascriptively and culturally similar – sharing physical semblance, language, heritage and religion – provide a textbook example of how ethnic division can be made salient by institutional design, and then made violent by political opportunism. From the 1930s to 1961, Belgian colonizers created institutions that specifically allocated political power along ethnic lines: using a card-based identification system, they stripped Hutus of their land, created a shadow extraction government headed by the Tutsi aristocracy, and gave them exclusive rights to tax collection power and state-funded education. Then in 1960, at the eve of Independence, the Belgians held an election in which they endorsed the Hutu politician Dominique Mbonyumutwa, affecting a precipitous change in political power that uprooted the monarchy headed by Tutsi aristocracy (Lec. 8.1 Levitsky). It is the major intention of this report to consider ways to reverse the very institutional incentive for ethnic identification that helped to create and perpetuate the myth of ethnicity in the first place.

Warning Out: Then and Now

The most exhausting piece of writing I've ever attempted, begins in this way:

You might know what dispossession feels like if you’ve ever jumped into the Charles River at night. I felt something like that, I think, throughout the year of 2008, when I was living alone. And then again, having come back to my town but seeing nothing there. And then when I left again. September 8th, 2008 the first night I slept at Harvard University, I could have told you that dispossession feels something like black water, like drowning beneath the lights of a city in September, and like feeling totally alone.

I had met a girl named Joyce who was real shy. She said her father was a diplomat so she never stayed in one place for more than a few years and never had many friends. We walked together from the Yard to the River, the lights of Dunster Street glowing as if very wet and totally yellow, like they do. We stripped off our clothes on the dock – I remember feeling very cold – and danced a little – I spun her – and then we jumped into the water. Whooo ahhh I shouted. Someone else, a boy’s voice from the road beyond the grass, said Yeeeehaaaa. When we got out of the river, we folded on the grass and sat there, in total silence, with the air, light and brilliant – the air was very light that night – mixing with the lights of Boston beyond the river, and me, I remember thinking something like This, this is the day your slumber breaks…She asked me: Are you just going to forget about this? I smiled and she smiled too and I said: Nothing counts, you know – it’s Freshman Week.

That night, I guess, rounded something off for me. It was the first time that I wondered, real hard, whether I hadn’t just walked out the front door, when I could have walked out the back. It was that night, my looking at the city from that place on the banks, thinking about place, to be one thing and not another thing, thinking that I am a small part of something much bigger, more complex and totally indifferent, that I first began to think about homelessness. I can’t say that I know what dispossession feels like today, but I could tell you that night. Tramping back to the Yard in the soaking clothes, I thought Whooo ahhh Yeeehaaaa, what a thing it is to be here.

I go on to explore a set of laws about inhabitancy rights that early settlers brought from England:

With this came the first class of American untouchables. From the middle of the 18th century to its completion, more than nine thousand people were warned out of Boston, with more than two thousand people in the year 1791-1792 alone. These numbers not only reflect a propensity for warning out, but a need to do so in the first place, a reflection of a class of migrants that had emerged in America, traveling largely from the countryside to the cities in search of labor. When they entered a city and were warned to leave, many of them did. Forty percent of those warned out in Boston in 1780 were not there in 1790. Entire families were legally expelled from towns, left to wander in search of a fixed abode. Such a class has never left us.

The piece ends reflexively:

I feel like shit about it, but that alone does not mean I have failed. In fact, that’s the only success I’ve had in four months since I jumped into the Charles. I feel ashamed – good, piercing, shame.

Primal Scream

Domna: You, you run yesterday. I saw you that you run yesterday.

Boy: *Smile, nod*

Domna: Yes, yes you run, you run.

Max: Wait, Domna's seen your penis?

Boy: *Silence*

Happy New Year after A Year of Travel

2008 was a year of traveling. The images that are salient to me are of mountains, and of sitting on buses with my cheek against a window; I see myself third-person, looking at the dusty yellow road outside; I think of going home every day, walking up Giraldez in the dark, hearing dogs bark, a few internet cafes and yellow ice cream vats on the street; I think about all the nights I sat with Nilda, that beautiful girl who seemed very sad, just the two of us at the table, sipping soup; I think about waking up at dawn.

For me, thinking about 2008 is a lot like thinking about traveling. It is only a coincidence that this was also a year of travel for America. An odd coincidence: I've heard some people say that their lives are products of artistic design – I don’t think that is true. But is odd, as a point about narrative arc of some sort, that the two, my traveling and our country’s, come together that way – it is odd that I leave America at exactly the moment when so many people are rediscovering its meaning.

The history of our country is punctuated by moments when we have chosen to be better, to create a more perfect union, and it is my conviction that we are passing through one of those moments right now. And 2008, a year for me that has featured a long march in Peru and then the inundation of Harvard, a year of abyss in all the best ways, also constitutes a personal moment when I choose to be better than I have been.

Travel, though, only means something so long you stop. Why travel? I used to say: to understand your home. Well, we’ve traveled an awful lot. Let’s get to work.

Here’s to 2009. I think it’s going to be a good one.

Freshman Year Writing, Part 1

Here are two essays that I've written. In the first, about a Emerson, I argue that the doctrine of "self-reliance" is a doctrine of obedience, rather than freedom. In the second essay, I look at the different ways that black protest writers used religion before and after Emancipation.

Obedience and Destiny in Emerson's Self-Reliance:

Emerson is calling for a total merger of a man with his Self, and thus a proximate a merger of man with God. All told, Emerson’s supposed doctrine of “defiance” quickly reveals itself to become a doctrine of obedience. Self-reliance might as well be God-reliance.

The Uses of Religion in Du Bois and Douglass:

To conclude: Du Bois, in his discussion of sorrow songs in the final essay and his juxtaposing of them with European hymns throughout, suggests an answer: integration through the self-assertion. He wants both Black and White elements of society to be at once productive and self-containing, to interact as “co-worker in the kingdom of culture” (Du Bois 5). These Sorrow Songs represent all that is important to Du Bois’ conception of religion; in them, there are all the gifts that Blacks brought to America, “the soft, stirring melody,” the “gift of sweat” and the “gift of Spirit” (Du Bois 214). Thus, religion encapsulates the divisions that not only threaten to paralyze blacks, but also the very divisions that make their identity so important. He asks: “Would America have been America without her Negro people?” (Du Bois 215).

Bad Conversation Starters for Freshman Orientation Week

#1 “Wow, the food really sucks here. It reminds me of that time I murdered a child.”

#2 “Hey, a lot of people say I look like John Harvard.”

#3 “Aw, the math placement exam was terrible. I thought they said to use a #2 Dildo. Boy was I wrong.”

#4 “Yeah, it’s fucking ridiculous. They have me living with like one roommate. Once he played music softly from his computer and then I told him that it was difficult for me to study while music is playing. Then he stopped. He insists on using a blue backpack. What a douche bag.”

#5 “Hey I’m Zach. I could not properly identify circles until I was eleven years old.”

#6 “Wow, you’re from Thayer Hall? I’m a homosexual too.”

#7 “Same. I thought the Lamont Library Open House provided a great deal of pertinent information too.”

#8 “You’re from Maryland? Wow. Absolutely fascinating.”

#9 “Truth be told, I have no respect for the janitorial staff. They are mostly uneducated.”

#10 “Hi, I’m Drew Faust.”

#11 “Once I held a young child’s mouth closed to keep him from making noise. After a while he suffocated to death. Hey, I’m from Canaday too!”

#12 “Cool. Same here. I was thinking of concentrating in either Premed or Expos.”

#13 “What’s interesting to me is that this conversation is compounding most of my racial prejudices.”

#14 “Do you happen to have directions to Anneberg?”

#15 “In retrospect, Community Conversations probably would have been more fun than masturbating alone in my dorm room.”

#16 “Hi, I’m Michael Sandal.”

#17 “Did you happen to notice that a large number of kids are using cellphones and other electronic devices to contact their friends and family?”

#18 “Jeeze, this blueberry pie tastes like human blood.”

#19 “Hey I’m Max. I think abortion is murder. What’s your name?”

Respond to Political Attacks by Staying on Message

I'm writing this while watching Mark Warner's keynote. This line struck me as true: "This race is all about the future. That's why we must elect Barack Obama as our next president. Because the race for the future will be won when old partisanship gives way to new ideas. When we put solutions over stalemates, and when hope replaces fear."

Everyone has theories about why Obama hasn't pulled ahead in the polls. The question that I raised earlier, which still seems relevant, is whether Obama's "new politics" can survive in the world of "old politics," where we decidedly reside. Machiavelli said that you can't achieve a world "as it might be" until you succeed in the world "as it is" and one is reminded of this watching McCain's sleazy campaign, and noting that it's working. Obama once again seems stuck hoping for a future politics that hasn't come yet, deciding either to weather the personal attacks or undercut his own message of transcendence by responding. Democratic are calling for him to take the gloves off.

How does a call for a more civil politics fit in the world as it is? This is not just a question of political image; it goes to the heart of competing philosophies on the nature of politics. Hillary, on the one hand, ran her campaign on the premise that we will always be divided. She said that we needed a knife fighter.

Obama said that he didn't look at things that way. He said that the terms we have used to discuss our politics, the cultural divisions that we have been relying on since the 1960s -- the divisions that Nixon used to create a southern Republican coalition -- have outlasted their usefulness. He said that our old categories have lead us to the point of impasse and that we need a new politics to deal with a new and dangerous world.

Writing with the only authority I have, which is as a representative of a class of eighteen year old Americans who came to age intellectually during the eight years George Bush's president, it is clear to me that the nature of our politics is a direct symptom of the nature of a worldview that developed in the 1960s and came to a head with the racial gambits of Karl Rove and the neoconservatism of Dick Cheney. The governance and the politics are the same; when Obama says "change" he means not just from an the economics and foreign policies that have failed us, but also change from the destructive reductionism of our political demarcations. The fact that the two are bundled together and must be overcome at once is because the historical moment that we are at is real. We have a forty-seven year-old Obama and a seventy-two year-old McCain to illustrate that.

Every time Obama is smeared his campaign must make it clear that McCain's attacks are part of the great choice of this election. I'm not a "message person" but today even my prose is ringing with a patriotic zeal, and as I see it, here's what they might say.

The choice our country has is simple. We can continue what we are doing, continue to have a politics smaller than our problems, continue on the path that we are on at the risk of running headlong into disaster, or we can change.

The history of America shows that we have never been afraid or unwilling to stand up and fight for change. We have never been afraid or unwilling to measure ourselves against our own ideals. American history is a process. It is a process of creating a "more perfect union." It is a series of moments of standing up and looking at our future deciding that yes, we as a country can do better.

Now is one of those moments.

What we are doing is simply unsustainable. We are depleting our economic and political resources too rapidly. We are too insouciant towards the violations of our constitution and rule of law, the torturing of soldiers and the consolidation of executive power. We are failing too many Americans. Abroad, the world is shifting rapidly, China and Russia are re-emerging, and extra-national terrorist pose an undeminished (exacerbated?) threat. We continue to do nothing about an oil dependence which promises to siphen our wealth, fund our enemies and destroy the world.

One thing that what we have learned in the past eight years is that the old solutions are insufficient. The old free market economics, the old cold war dogmatism, the old political tricks -- these cannot solve the new problems presented to us at the turn of the century. America can do better. Obama, by virtue of his age, his temperament, his multiculturalism, his intelligence, is a product of this new era and the one fit to lead us there. McCain -- who is volatile, mawkish and reductionist, dangerously aggressive; who would be the oldest president in history; who, in an electronic information economy doesn't know how to use the internet -- typifies the limitations of old principles and outworn notions. His worldview -- his belief in a great existential struggle between Evil and Good -- is befitting of World War II, rather than a globalized twenty-first century when the Iranian economy might soon look more like ours than the German.

Every time McCain attacks Obama it is an opportunity to respond at the heart of the matter. This is the choice we face: more of the same, or a change -- change not just from the Republicans and the Bush Administration, but change from the culture that gave birth to a politics this small, the cultural divisions that no longer fit us and that we were always to limber for, the bifurcating of the world into good and evil when it was always more complex, the cowboy unilateralism so unfit for a globalized world, the total, blustering incompetence propped up and legitimized by this one's ideology or that one's morality -- a change not just from old policies, but from the entire cultural and intellectual milieu that has lead us to the catastrophe of the Bush Administration in the first place.

Homecoming

What’s past is just that, thought Max. He was lying in a truck filled with cows, moving down the road beside the coast, contemplating the sky. What air! he thought. The smell of cow and of beach; this whipping and mixing around him, beach air – thick, mild, medicinal, odorous, always sweeter at the night.

Three hours before, he was sitting at a fish stand watching a small child play, as if it were his duty to watch quietly. He had the sense that he might go all week without speaking a word to anyone, and, what is more, that words could only confuse the purity of watching.

This was wrong, Max decided as he lay there on the netting affixed to the sides of the truck, above the cows. Beaches were not meant to be enjoyed alone; Max missed his companion already. Revile the past, and in that way, you worship it too. Sweet, encompassing memories, they leave an acid aftertaste.

Bands of dark chemical pinks and greens lined the upper sky. From where he was lying, the mountains of white sand and the stars were like spiritual bodies. Max shut his eyes, thinking about his trip and what to say about stars.

Chivay

He began to dream at once. The room was suffused with the golden light of a single electric bulb; through the windows truck headlamps occasionally shone. In this room, the candles looked like thin and anxious blinks, against the cement. Max was squinting to read the pages of his book, Herzog, while Conor danced with nobody in the far corner, occasionally grasping for the hands of a girl, who sat beneath rows of candy and bags of chewing cocoa. Truck drivers came to buy, and the girl shut the radio off.

Later that night they managed to hitch a ride to Chivay, on a vegetable truck, pushing, pushing in the dark.

- - -

October 20, 2007. The conversation is light because there is nothing much to say. In fact, it’s all been said before, and in my mind I have this overwhelming feeling I have heard it all before. There is light and the colors of twilight shift on the planes outside. I see a fat bird sitting on the wing of the plane. Why? I wonder. He’s not crying out, not even looking at anything in particular. The bird just sits on the wing, doing nothing, expecting maybe, but not knowing anything – anything except that he’s not supposed to be there. I feel just like that bird. I am very far from home.

- - -

He stepped into the plane and walked down the aisle to his seat. He noted the faces. He assumed that he would never see faces like that again (which of course was wrong). He felt dizzy, and he dozed even as the plane had not taken off. Those hours on the plane were spent dreaming; the dreams were whirling, sweet, skittish; they smelled of dust and of brine and he heard the sound of taxis and saw mountains. He was tired, dead tired, and he suspected during the occasional moment of consciousness, that there was a certain nobility to this fatigue, and a sadness too, as if while he dreamed he were watching the very passage of time.

What of these dreams that he had on the plane to Newark Airport? You can understand what a boy like this randomly constructs with his sleeper's mind. At first everything became very, very large. And then everything became very small. Then things slowed down, real slow, and then they sped up fast, fast, like a cinematic effect. Then they became quiet, and then very loud.

Then Max woke and realized he was home.

Watching Iron Man in Bogota

He wasn't doing it right, this traveling. Too much aloneness; too much solitude. Despite his theories, whatever they were -- "that the better journey must be taken inward, to the self"; that "there is no endless solitude"; that it was "a culture of life and a culture of life cannot be enjoyed alone." He couldn't keep them straight. He made it all up anyways.

Aloneness becomes loneliness. It is that simple.

Max walked through the town with his bag on his shoulders. The sun was hot in the sky and mud was drying on his face. Max glanced at his fingers which were brown with mud. He look at the light which was glinting off the hard dust in the street.

Max had paid a boy on a motorbike to drive him through the valley. They had rode together over green fields that extended far, with god-like intensity. Then the motorbike slipped and they fell in a pool of mud and they laughed. Mud was on everything. The mud dried as they rode and then cracked on their skin so that it itched and they needed to stop to wash their hands in the stream beside the road.

"Anything extra?" the boy asked. "It was a real hard trip," he said. He did not look at Max's face as he spoke.

"How much will the Laundromat cost?" Max said, smiling.

Little bugs were hopping on the table as he sat. He leaned on the plastic. He looked at the town. It was a small town; a woman sat on her stoop in a rocking chair; the colonial houses stood in rows. The colors! he said out loud. Yes, it was always the colors that we wished he could keep. Max could only smile, though no body could see it. They would care, he knew. He knew they would care that he was smiling.

How would he change any of this? Well that at least he did not know.

Most of his days began with him lying awake in a hotel room. It was always dimly lit, real cheap. It was the worst place he knew: a hotel at midday. The walls glow blandly gray; people moving on the street. Then he would leave the room. The first light of the day is one of his greatest pleasures.

Really, Max thought to himself, sitting at the plastic table, looking at the town: things will work out. He hoped they would and he knew that they must. For if the world was not sorted for him ahead of time, the deck stacked in such a way that he might win, while barely trying, he felt that he could not do it for himself.

Thing will work out. He had great faith that they would. In fact he considered this a part of his personal faith in the power of an Almighty God. Yes, it was still vaguely considered, but he felt it deeply. Max believed that the universe was so delicately and precisely constituted that he needed only to throw himself within it for an experience to materialize. Things will work out. This was his Belief -- he believed that if he left his house, life would fall on him like raindrops. And he must only bring the buckets.

Max sat back in his chair. He was smiling dumbly at the town, sipping his grape soda. The question, of course, is that if the rain stops falling, where do you find the water? He hadn't figured that part out yet.

Would he need to? Alone, bored and lonely and covered in mud, Max felt that he was a creature of great luck. I walk through a forest and I stumble over something. When I look down, I find that it is exactly what I needed.

Yes, a creature of great luck, he said to himself. As if I made a deal with Fate to give me exactly what I need, and spare me the worst.

- -

A plump, dark-skinned girl sprawled herself on Max's mattress. She was smoking a joint. Her legs were spread out from her jean skirt, the dark skin of her legs shining with the lightbulb in the corner, like the wet scales of a fish. A topless boy sat in the frame of the door. He was saying, "New Yawk. New Yaawk." He looked at Max. "Tha Big App-lee. New Yaaawk, The Big App-lee."

"The Big Apple," Max corrected. "The Big Apple"

It was four a.m.. Outside the room, big men were yelling in a Caribbean slang. It was dark and the halls smelled like marijuana. Through the plywood walls of the room, Max could hear the Beatles. "Love, love me do," they sang. "You know I love you. You know I ll be true."

"Want some?" the plump girl asked, leaning her head on Max's leg. Max looked at her. He looked at the boy in the door frame. The boy's eyes were fierce, but his face looked sweet. On the door above him, tiny cockroaches climbed through the busted holes.

The Beatles sang: "So please, please, please...love me doooo"

"No, thanks." said Max. He looked back at his book in his lap, From Dawn to Decadence. He flipped through the pages, trying to focus his eyes. Somewhere, he knew, beyond this hall, beyond the beach, over the Atlantic, the sun was rising in the sky.

- -

Sometimes he found the differences charming. They were, he fancied, a part of his personal escape from the wholly parochial. Today was not one of those days. He looked at the street, hot with sweat, hot with stink. He spooned the soup broth. I never want to live like this, he said to himself.

- -

A thin lady wailing on the side of a main street.

The question of why some have more and why some have so very little is important.

But must the existence of such a question (of such a woman), prevent my enjoyment of a simple walk, on this busy street?

That was what he wrote in his journal. It was getting dark. The street was narrow and yellow; boys and girls were climbing the cobble stones; two were kissing in the shadows. Pastry shops lighted each corner. Beside them, policemen stood with machine-guns, chatting with the girls.

What was worse were the streets without the guns.

Men walk with black jackets and they pick through the trash. They look at me as I pass. I think they look like wolves. "Give me money. Any money," a man says and he touches me on the shoulder. I say nothing. I shake my head "no" and I walk. There is no light on the street. It is all blackness except for the occasional red of the florescent lights of a closed-down shop, small as a particle of dust, glowing red like a fat drop congealed in the distant upper sky. "You and me," the man says. His hair is long and his face is sooty. His eyes are wild. "In all of us there is only one spirit." "Yes," I say. I walk quickly. Streets like these are an image of Judgment Day. The weak face the strong and God says, "Well, boy, what have you done?"

What was worse were the streets without the guns. Beneath an order of guns is that more odious one: the order of human survival.

- -

Unless you are old or already in love, nights like these are spent feverishly. From the beginning they are unsettled, breathless, like running in a machine designed for the manufacture of illusions, like a whirling top. Nights like these are spent moving from place to place wondering whether around the very next corner is the Answer, the permanent fix to your endless hunger.

They were the same in Bogota as they were in Lewisboro, which is evidence that human anxiety is universal. For Max, who had no guts and anyways liked sleep too much, such nights still held their mysterious charm.

"How old are you?"

"Fifty-nine," said Max, making the numbers with his hands.

"No. Really, how old are you?"

"Age is illusion," he whispered in her ear.

"Is that so?

"Yes, illusion. And you? How old are you?"

"Thirty one."

"Thirty one? Really? Thirty-one? Don't worry, that is illusory."

She put his hand on her waist, and they both moved together. She was teaching him Salsa.

"Slowly, slowly," she said. Max smiled big and she smiled too. Wilfred, Max's friend, was dancing with a heavy woman in the back. His head rested on her shoulder; her eyes were closed. A man was kissing a girl in the corner, behind them and the girl was touching the back of his head. The whole room was moving. It was all real slow.

"Slowly," she whispered in Max's ear. She laughed and Max laughed too.

"White skin," he said, like a revelation. "Pizza, war -- that's all I've got. American."

"Now hold my hand," she said, taking his fingers, touching his ring. Max spun her. The lights hung from the wooden rafters on the ceiling, glowing soupy and big.

Max never caught her name. It was something long, and Latin-sounding. Wilfred and the heavy woman and Max and she sat down. They don't have girls like that back home, Max thought to himself. Nope, not in America. They all drank shots.

"In my opinion," Max said promptly, pointing at a man across the room. "In my opinion, that man, not really. Not really so impressive."

"Oh?" she smiled. "Is that your opinion?"

"Sure, sure," Max continued, not looking at anything now. "Sure he's more handsome that I am, and he can speak fluent Spanish, and he can dance better, but..."

He trailed off, unable to finish the comparison. In fact, it wasn't there for him to find. To put the question another way: what does it mean that he, this boy who hoped for pandemonium, with all these notions, far from innocent, is sitting here tonight? Perhaps (as he would later argue) he had been searching eight months for the answer. His mind now was eggy, reeling: all lightness.

The whole thing, he thought, was teetering on an invisible line drawn somewhere in the space between the musty shine of the wooden rafters and the infinite softness of this sly girl's breasts (and all the girls he's ever thought about) and to Max's own beating heart, thumping gaily to the rhythm that was filling this room. It was fast now, lots of trumpet. Perhaps everything rested on that line.

There's no time, Max thought, grinning, triumphant.

"Professor!" he shouted. The music in the room was loud. "Come heerree!"

"You." she said. "You come here."

She was moving her hips. Max got up slowly. It was dark and hot and it was hard not to realize at that moment, as he walked slovenly to the floor, that they were different -- she a Colombian woman and Max a Jewish boy from New York. There was no charm that he could summon, Max knew, to fill in that gap. That gap will persist; presumably it must.

They danced all night, whispering and smiling. Max, beside these beautiful women, looked as if he were only joking. In a lot of ways he was.

- -

Somewhere, he mused, drifting on the tops of the Andean mountains, is my style -- that slippery bitch. Is it buried in the snow? Maybe it's beneath a stone?

Max looked at the window, as the bus moved from the terminal. If only for the blows that I'm going to take, he smiled. I need a style, if only to survive. He looked back at his journal and then up at the mountains. I hope it's there, there for me to find.

Well, in any case, he thought, my stuff is getting better. That's all I want: to unite my thoughts with the realities of the world with the words I can write down in my journal. That is what he aimed for. He wished to express himself fully, and then die.

Crossing Borders

A girl stood beside the glass doors of a supermarket called La Vivanda. She held a cellphone to her ear, she seemed angry and moved her hands a lot, she seemed like she wanted the other person on the line to see what she was seeing, pointing down the street at the green park with the art exhibit which was hosted by theMiraflores municipality. The sun was high. When she moved her arms, the silver mesh on her belt glittered, like snowflakes.

"Rich bitches" thought Max, entering the market. You can do better than that, Max. You know her only too well. Educated, but too stupid for it. Fatuous. He walked through the isles lined with expensive food that he had never seen in Peru. He looked at the girl through the glass door, talking on her cellphone like that, moving her arms, the sun spotting the silver on her waist. He wasn't sure what to make of a girl like that, here in Peru. He knew her only too well. He wondered why he felt this way. She wasn't so bad. Was it that he didn't like girls like that, or that they generally did not like him? He contemplated this point, sifting through cheeses. A man across the counter looked weary. After all, he was of her class, he knew: these girls and him -- man, they were just the same.

Spoiled bitches? Yes, he thought, spoiled bitches. Things need proper names.

At the checkout counter the woman in front of Max placed on the conveyor belt a jar of olives and a couple of peppered sausages and a loaf of French bread. She was a quiet-looking girl, and you knew that she didn't belong here. She checked the list as the food rolled by. One imagines this kind of woman setting tables and taking out the garbage from a big manner home somewhere. Maybe she sends money to her mother. Five hundred years of blood and fire held in those brown hands.

The woman paid for the groceries and walked out of the store. The girl was still beside the door, apparently waiting. She did not speak anymore. As the maid passed, she did not even look.

"Spoiled rich bitches" thought Max, putting his brie on the conveyor.

- - -

The rain stopped as Max turned from the main road towards the beach. The sun was setting over the Pacific Ocean and the fishing boats were returning to the shore. The wind was blowing while the shadows darkened on the sand. Beaches are perfect in the dusk, after rain. Better than in the sun. Yes, much better.

Max bought a beer and sat on the beach, against a stone wall which bordered a raised platform with benches made of cement and cement tables painted in bright colors. Sand blew against the wall and stuck to the wet bottom of the beer bottle. Beaches are perfect in the dusk.

Above, on the stone wall, sat a man. He knew he was there, when Max sat, though he couldn't see his face. When he heard him shift, Max knew that he was going to say something.

"Where do you come from young friend?" said the man.

"The United States. New York." said Max. "And you, sir?"

"I am from here, Mancora"

"What do you think (how is it)?"

"Oh, Mancora is very beautiful" said the man. "Are you traveling alone?"

"Yes. Alone"

"How long are you staying here?"

"I lived in Huancayo for five months. Working with artisans. I am going to stay in Mancora for two more days."

"Oh Huancayo. The south."

"I am going to Colombia next."

"Oh Colombia is very beautiful" said the man. Max looked up at him. He was big and his face was sweaty, though the night was cool.

"You know (about) Colombia?"

"I lived in Cartajena. Beautiful, like Mancora."

Max poured his glass full of beer and handed it to the man. He didn't say anything when he did this.

"Where are you staying (in a hotel)?"

"La posada."

"Over there" the man said, pointing.

"Yes"

"How much does it cost?"

"15 soles a night"

"Do you know Miami?" he asked.

"No. I do not know Miami."

"How much is it to stay in a hotel in the United States?"

"Forty dollars a night. I don't know. But the economy is different. You make more money, too."

"Are there jobs in the United States?"

"Yes" said Max.

He considered saying that there are poor people in the United States, too. He considered saying that life in Mancora is calm and beautiful, and that though he was young and didn't know a lot, he knew that beautiful things are worth too much to run from. But he did not say these things. He was watching the boats get larger as they returned to the coast. When he thought about all the things he wanted to say his heart tightened. These past months he had changed, he knew that. He first to ditched ideas about futility. People can change the world, he really believed that now. Then he began to talk about duty. The poor girl on the street, crying like that. I could be her, he knew. I've got to use what I have. But this wasn't enough, he began to understand, recently. He saw that he was sad, sadder than ever before. This wasn't enough, to think about helping. He had replaced one sadness, the personal sadness of futility, with another one, more universal: the sadness of the human condition. He felt things were very serious. Max knew he was hardening.

One must be very serious, he thought to himself looking at the ocean, to ride a fishing boat like that, moving goods through the dark water, all alone. One has got to be serious to steer a boat like that. The sky was pink now and the clouds were moving quickly. Max was not sure whether he wanted company or to be alone.

- - -

Funny thing happened at the Ecuadorian border. Just really funny.

Max had overstayed his three-month Visa in Peru, once again, and he noticed this two days before he was to cross into Ecuador. He wanted to travel to Colombia, because the woman are beautiful there, he was told, and it is a warm, wonderful place. They told him that. It was his second Visa which he had overstayed, which he purchased at the Bolivian border, when he traveled there with Conor. He did not want more problems. Crossing borders is almost always difficult, at least for Max. He hated borders.

He decided to altered the visa with a black pen that he had in his bag, as he sat on the bed. He did not want to pay that shitty tax and deal with all those shitty problems, he decided to himself. Gringos were tanning by the pool, and Max sat in the dark room of his dorm. He meticulously wrote a 1 before the 90 on his passport. But it didn't look right. He went over the 190 with his pen. He did this a number of times, until all the numbers looked the same. But that did not look right, not at all. He wrote "6 Meses" beneath the 190. One hundred and ninety days is, after all, about seis meses. The American passport is a fine, stately thing. But this looked all wrong. Jarring and messy and large. He couldn't think of anything else to do.

Max rode on the bus the next morning and began to worry about the preposterous mess on his passport. It was the size of a playing card. He was traveling with two other people (a boy from New Zealand and a girl from Israel). He was sure this was going to be a problem.

The border official brought the foolish American to his office. "You wrote that" he said.

"No, sir," Max said, "I paid for 190 days. Perhaps the policeman at the border lied to me. Perhaps I was tricked."

"You wrote that 190. No immigration official would write 190 like that. You can only receive 30 or 60 or 90 days"

"I paid him, sir. Perhaps he fool me. I am just a student, sir."

"This is a crime. You know that? This is a crime. You're going to stay in Peru for a while."

"Well, sir, for me, Peru is a very beautiful country."

"Ever slept in jail before?"

"No."

"You like Jail?"

"No."

"You want to be deported?"

"No."

The man left the room. He said he was checking a system. He came back and asked Max to stand up and he took out handcuffs and put them on Max's wrists. Max could hear the others walking though the station, looking for him. When he left the room, the two travelers were standing, crazy-looking. Max winked at the Israeli girl. He was led him to another room by his elbow, because his hands were cuffed in front. It was an empty room with a chair and a desk and the walls were cracked with white concrete, like walls of poor buildings at beach towns. This joker is going to bluff all night, thought Max.

They continued, Max explaining calmly that he hadn't written anything on his passport, that he was only a student, that he was helping artisans in Peru, duped at the Bolivian border, and wasn't there something he could do. Isn't there sir anything I can do? The midday sun by now was tawny and gold, through the window. He offered him the 90 soles he had in his pocket. He didn't have any more money. That was all he had. The man took the bills and consulted a few more officers that had entered the room. It was all very impressive: they were not going to let him commit a federal crime. Their sense of justice was very great.

Another hour passed and Max just sat there grinning widely. The sun was glinting off his handcuffs.

"Do you have kids, sir?" asked Max. He was boring rappidly with the spectacle. A man like this, a mountain of man, I am sure he has kids. He did not answer. "Your kids, are they studying English?" He did not answer this either. "Well, look sir, I have a present for your kids. Here's an English book. Do you want a book in English for you kids? It is by Ernest Hemingway. He is very famous. Yes, he is very good."

He put his feet around his bag, so that he might open it with his hand cuffed together as they were. He showed him the book. On its cover was a picture of a boy on a train. It was a very American book. The man looked at Max and then he looked at the book. He looked at the bills sitting on the desk and then at the passport and then at the book again. He went out of the room. He came back with the passport stamped and he removed Max's handcuffs.

Neither of them said anything else. Max left the room, and walked quickly to the door. He did not want to look back to see, but he imagined the officer was smiling. It was a good time they had. And now the policeman had an English book.

Outside the two travelers were sitting in the street waiting. The girl was drawing pictures with her finger in the dust. On the bus Max watched the Peruvian streets recede into the distance. There are always problems crossing borders, he said quietly to himself. He look out the window, the dusty town of one country being replaced by the dusty town of another. It looked the same. He wondered whether any of it would be different after all. At least for me, he thought, there are always problems crossing borders.

He watched through the window for a long time, as he did not have his book to read anymore. He thought that Hemingway would not have liked it any other way.

- - -

Holding the map, she showed me where she lived. Max was lying on her hotel bed, looking at the map, trying to imagine a country. What are these mountains? And this city, what does it sound like? She was an artist, she had told him. She lived in Medellin and was 29 years old and her camera was in the corner on the green desk. He was thinking all sorts of things. They were saying almost everything. They talked about New York, she wanted to go to the Guggenheim, she said. And about the bible and art and vegetarianism, as she was a vegetarian, and love and about Simón Bolívar. You know, said Max, he was a brutal, brutal man. He shot all the Europeos, all of them, even the innocent. The secret, Max said, was not be a Europeo. Then you wouldn't get shot. Yes, she said nodding, the secret was not to be the one they wanted to shoot. That's still the secret, she said smiling. Claudia loved to smile, she smiled while she talked. It was all very jolly, lying on the bed that night.

Eventually they just looked at each other. She asked him what he was thinking. He said he was thinking about flowers and clouds and then he leaned in towards her lips. She turned her head. She looked at the wall for a moment. Max tried again, leaning against her body. He tried again to kiss her lips, and then she turned once more, this time, moving close to his ear. She was all seriousness now. She said, too loudly for a whisper: Not all Colombian girls are what you think.

He smiled and kissed her on the cheek and got up from the bed. It was late. Yes, he said, and not all American boys are what you think.

At the door he turned and she was smiling, leaning on her arms on that hotel bed, her black hair falling on her shoulders, blacker than the night through the window. Tomorrow we hike the volcano, Max said. Yes, tomorrow we hike the volcano, she agreed. She thought about blowing him a kiss, but Max wouldn't have seen it. He was already out the door. He was happy. Tomorrow they were going to climb the volcano. He loved Colombia already.

Watching Ayacucho

This is a short story about traveling. There's a voyeurism to traveling, a tendency to watch rather than do, which I tried to write about. 

What is this feeling? He shuddered. A mix, a mix of grief and joy and loneliness – and the realization that he could do anything he wanted.

Max walked down a small street in Ayacucho, watching the yellow in the streetlamps shine against the sky. It had rained during the night and the day; and though the sky was clear now, thin drops of water still fell from the gutters of the buildings above; the cobblestone, smooth and wet, reflected the yellow beams of the streetlamps, in a glowing yellow.

His scarf was wrapped around his neck, French-style and in his hand he held a book by Jack Kerouac. As if, thought Max, I have pretensions to be free and without fear. Though he knew at times that he did.

Yes, yes, he thought, who am I kidding? I am free. He smiled. I, a poor man's Kerouac. Nobody knows me here and nobody knows where I am. Free to glow on the margins and make love to that nothingness and do nothing. I can do everything. Freedom as weakness. Freedom as invisibility. Free because I am small. That's Kerouac's freedom. Max saw himself beneath the yellow streetlights. He felt vicious and even trembled. How simple it is to be a mouse.

The Plaza de Armas was filled with people. A crowd of fifty-thousand or more, Max guessed, circling the street. He had come to Ayacucho to see the final days of Holy Week. Ayacucho was famous for Holy Week. Tonight was Good Friday and late tomorrow night was Easter Mass. It wasn't as a pilgrimage or anything, that Max came. He traveled simply because he could, and because he wanted to. Sometimes things where he lived were sad; the girls felt trapped and alone and the whole hotel that they lived in was like net for hatching butterflies, and then lettering them go. Max could leave too, and he had. That was part of his feeling. He hoped that by leaving, just leaving he would find something real and big. For that is what his heart persistently sought.

In the Plaza, people moved about. Max, having nothing to do, sat on a bench. He listened to the clacking of shoes. He watched couples dance in the street. A drunk man danced alone, looking sad. A little girl jumped in a shallow puddle. Above these things – the hundreds of families and vendors and murals that lined the ground – sitting at the center of the square was a large bronze horseman statute. Max admired its noctilucent beauty. Beneath it a tiny old woman sat selling candy applies. She was murmuring something soft. Surely, thought Max, Christ would bless that woman and those apples. He had no doubt about that.

Continue here.

Obama's Dilemma

It should not be surprising that we are seeing aggression from the Hillary campaign. Now, her winning by reasonable democratic measures is besides the point: she cannot overcome a lead in pledged delegates or a lead in states won or by popular votes. Instead, she has two options: drop out and rally behind Obama; or stay in the race and hope that she can deligitimize him to the point that he is so unfit, weak and damaged, that superdelegates vote in her favor because she is simply the last person standing.

This is a remarkable and insidious hope. She is banking her success against her own party; it is the hope that Barack will lose to McCain in the general election. This explains Clinton's ad campaigns, her remarks about whether Obama is a Muslim (he's not, “as far as I know”), and – most incredibly – her repeated suggestions that McCain is a more worthy commander-in-chief than Obama.

Will she be successful? Probably not. However, the negative attacks reveal an interesting point: that Obama, the idea of Obama, is uniquely vulnerable to this type of aggression, not because he is weak or inexperience, but, importantly, because aggression is diametrically at odds with the narrative structure on which has has based his entire campaign. That is to say, he is muzzled by his own conceptions of a new politics.

We all know this conception. This election – so his narrative goes, one that I have been known to prop up – is not about two people or two plans but about two divergent sets of values. It is choice about the aesthetics of political power: the new versus the old, the united versus the divided, and finally, the beautiful and eloquent versus the tough. Obama based his campaign on this idea, that people were hungry for a different type of politics, and with great success.

The question is, however, Can a person who has decided to play by different rules, win the game? Does agreeing to abide by a future, more perfect politics, pose limitation on one's success within the confounds of old politics, where we currently reside, where people make accusations and throw mud.

What makes Clinton's attacks important is not just that they hit Obama on a tactical level (that is the theory of negative-sum campaigning, that everyone gets hurt, but the attacker falls less than the attack). What is important is that the negativityhits Obama on a structural level. Clinton's story becomes "Hillary the fighter" and Obama's, inverted, becomes "weakness." His new politics, one is meant to see, is not equipped for the world of old politics, he is too weak to survive, effete and thin.

This contrast will be difficult to escape, because it is built within the narrative of his campaign. If he fights like Clinton, he undercuts his message of transcendence; if he doesn't fight, then he is weak, and one wonders, can any presidential candidate survive perceived as weak? At best, his assertiveness is defensive, and at worst, it is whole-sale hypocrisy.

The point may be this: if Obama or anyone wishes to change things, he's first got to get into power. For even very good people must first succeed within the limitations of very bad systems.

This is Machiavelli's paradox. Good, he said, must necessarily be founded on the evil – who, after all, would Lincoln be without slavery or Churchill without Hitler. What Machiavelli gave us was the Prince, who knew that if he wanted utopia, he had fight for it within a reality-based world. The future, in other words, can be only be achieved from within the constraints of the present; and perhaps so too must Obama's new politics be achieved with the tactics of old politics, with strong people, armed prophets, a willingness to first get your hands dirty first, before anything can be clean.

Natural Dyes

Just a preview.

Their own version of existence under the crushing weight of mass.

I have been working on this essay, for a while. It´s about the novel Herzog, by Saul Bellow.

Many have been lifted from the idiocy of village life, that is true; and we thank our forces of accumulation. But many, like this Herzog, are lost. Suffocated. Frightened and confused. Even Newsweek tells us that there is too many, too much and nothing new can come about. How might I keep up the burden of self-hood despite the excess of everything. Who I am among this mass? Where does a feeble voices fit, among this group, these thinkers, possessors of every wisdom, alive and dead, among this great authority, indiscriminate, teeming, swollen, vast. I am completely lost.

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Barack Obama and the Importance of Change

A year after his high moment in 2004, Karl Rove, “Boy Genius,” fell into utter disgrace. His privatization scheme fell flat; the Iraq war proved to be unwinnable; Hurricane Katrina; Harriet Miers; and Bush´s poll numbers dropped lower than any president in history.

It turned out, Rove was appallingly inept at turning his visions into reality. And this illustrates a simple piece of political wisdom: getting into office and governing once you're there, are two different skills indeed. Dividing the country proved effective campaign strategy, but terrible governance principle. Karl Rove´s fall reminds us that a great politician is not always – and not often – a great leader.

- -

Hillary Clinton, by all consensus, is a great politician. She and her husband control the machinery of the Democratic party, and insiders from the outset believed her nomination to be inevitable. If the measure of a president were, as Clinton wishes us to believe, a matter of experience as a politician, then she deserves to win. And Barack Obama, by that standard, could have waited to run for presidency.

However, the case for Obama rests on the assumption that he could not wait to run. That his skills are not as a politician but as a leader and that this specific moment in American history, when the world and our role within it is shifting – “the urgency of now” as he likes to say – uniquely calls for a world leader, rather than world politician.

- -

For fifty years, the politics of the Baby Boom generation has defined our political discourse. From the creation of a capitalist, democratic world-order after World War II, to the advances of Civil liberties and the triumph of West in the Cold War, the post-WWII generation´s particular brand of optimism – that the evil can be and must be combated – has wielded force with great success...... continue reading here

The Elusive Search for Papá Noel

Merry Christmas, Happy New Years and stop necessarily fooling. This set of sketches is very long, but that doesn´t mean it´s very good.

· · · · ·

It was a Wednesday more difficult than most. Rain was falling, and drops dripped from the sides of the concrete walls onto everything, onto Max too, as he walked down the sidewalk towards the doors of the restaurant. It was a difficult, sad Wednesday. It is true that there was sickness (Max had been throwing up for days) and then there was the letter. Yet, he felt that tonight there was something more – more subtle, more deep; that tonight his melancholy was not general, but precise – truth, like.

But Max knew enough about life to distrust these feelings. Big emotions in the young come without reason and recede as quickly, like erections at random.

Max had an occasional, cranky intensity and he wore this tonight. And when a boy walks like this, as if he is caught by some imperial weariness, he has an advantage: no one suspects much, especially that he might be alone. He of course had another advantage: he was gringo, and therefore impossible to understand.

He was walking towards a pizza place. He had never been, but the the memory of what it might be mingled with the sweet nostalgia of Christmas. There were other places – better places – but Max, after all, was an American far from America: pizza is his home, and that's where you go when you are sad.

The place was small, nothing more than two tables and an oven. A man stood in the open kitchen (only ten feet from the door) peeling processed meat. A woman with tight blue jeans – the man´s wife, probably – leaned against the counter. They did not speak. They both just knew too much, and the great weight of the unspoken left only silence. Being old is no better than being young, he thought. He sat quietly, pensively at a table against the wall, conscious not to disturb anything. Everything was silence. It was one of those place that smelled like cooked food and where it´s possible to see everything. The woman leaned over and the crease of her jeans pressed against the soft skin on her belly. The man seemed to know without looking. His face was steady and his eyes were deep-set, as if they knew and knew and knew.

Max looked through the window, dreamily. The haste and heat of the city outside shouted: move! – the city lights; dirty roads; hurried people slipped past slow-walkers down the sidewalk; small motorcycles pushed the street; young girls leaned beneath thresholds dripping rain. Move! But here he sat in silence, watching like a clinician or a voyeur. An old woman kneeled on a dry stoop roasting meat and shewing alley dogs. The dogs would shiver tonight in the rain, no doubt. But she did not seem to care. Max knew that it was wrong to withdraw from the pulse life – he knew it was wrong just to watch, if only because it was too easy. Lucho said that you shouldn´t use bridges; you´ve got to jump into the river. Max smiled at this. Leave those judgments for easier days, he thought. The heart is ruthless in its manufacture of illusion, and so it must be, sometimes.

I was my idea – to start the co-op. Lucho was Max's business partner -- but the word partner was wrong. Lucho is a big man; his face is angled, as if instead of bones in his face he had twisted rocks that pushed beneath his skin. Lucho´s eyes are puffy. Every moment it looks as if he is at the point just before tears (rage or glee, Max could never tell). He didn't belong to the city: he was an animal. But he lived in the city, alone, like a wolf, howling at the moon. We are all howling at the moon.

One of Lucho's workers had stolen Max´s email password and sent him some of Max's mail. Lucho yelled, “I do not need an educated American to tell me what to do.”

He continued to stare outside. Exhaust blew bits of skittering litter around the old woman's ankles. Sometimes on these street corners one can smell nothing but machinery. Thousands of people poured through the street. It was there, Max recalled, in this great crowd, possessor of every genius and every secret, that he first felt disfigured -- that everyone was moving together, like a larger body. At that moment he felt within it, the great mass of the current, the past, he was a part of the impulse everything and he could think to say within the throbing heat was, “my brothers, my brothers.”

But now in the pizza shop, he didn't much feel much like a brother to anyone. And if there were a larger body of Collective Man – well tonight, he felt all alone within it. No, if there were something larger, he felt like he was struggle against the extinction of himself, to that dear, dirty mass.

What am I doing? he thought. How can I work for a man who does not trust me. I trust him. Well, I have to trust him, because there´s money. What am I doing? The question – the question of whether you are squandering yourself – is remarkable because there is no answer, only perpetually prolonged guesses, secondguesses and guilts. Guilt! guilty about being guilty, guilty about not feeling guilty. Above all we want to confess.

The nausea returned. He put his head on the table. No one came to give him a menu; no one disturbed him. Silence and the scents of cooked food lingered like soporific lullabies. In time, he fell asleep. He dreamed. He was at a phonebooth. I am sick, yes, but I am surrounded by sadness, he said somewhere to someone. I live with a woman, he continued. She is beautiful, but she is all alone in the hotel. Shouts from around him began. It was a great mass of people, like the one he saw on the street. Tell me that I am decent for doing this – for trying to help somebody, for trying to disturb what is, he said loudly into the phone. The shouting around him was great, and he could barely hear his own voice. He said: I just need to know that I am not all alone.

He repeated, “I just need to feel like I am not all alone” a number of times, at first softly, then with greater force. “All I need is to know that I am not alone” he said, almost shouting. He felt in this dream that it was quite true.

His shoulder was pushed, pushed, a dream, he was awake, it was the woman. He looked up and she did not even smile and no one seemed to care that he was mumbling as he slept.

When the pizza arrived he was happy, because it was better than he had remembered.

· · · · ·

Max is now awake, vividly, fumbling with his shoes, his flashlight, the steps; every step is one more closer to the hole – his stomach, a cannonball, spiteful. Everything is lucid, the night – perfect photographs. He sees a bird on a branch. It looks like it is floating with the clouds in the sky. Fuck that bird.

He is there – the hole – release: for twenty minutes his colon purges into the ground. Then he tips over and throws up. It is treacherous.

Silence. At this hour, between the final rustle of men and the first call of the rooster, all is silent, except for the occasional movement of dogs and birds. Max is spread Christ-like, half-naked from the bottom down, on the shitting hole, in this personal mix of disgust, vomit and chemicals. The wounds from earlier in the day (he had slipped down the hill and to stop himself grabbed onto a thick, thorn-covered bamboo); these wounds are his stigmata. But for what sin? He could only think the words "No me importa ser una piedra mas." The silence, as he lay awake in the dark, unable to move, was only broken by the ticking of Max´s wristwatch; frantically ticking, harder, harder; and all the while, this young boy wondering why he is here, why it hurts so much, why consciousness, which was spinning like a top, is born.

· · · · ·

Papa Noel lives in the Andes mountain Huayatapallano, Max had been told. And that was where he happened to be this Christmas, in the mountains, with a family of gourd carvers visiting their uncle, searching for Santa Claus.

- -

A beautiful girl entered the open courtyard of the house. She was wearing a colored skirt and holding a dead calf. Its face was defined, like hers, and its eyes were open, like all of theirs, but they were alive and the calf was dead. Dead as stones. She placed him down besides a tin bucket of fresh cheese. The man whose hut this is was in the yard, digging a hole and heating stones with an open fire. As he worked, gravel leapt into the air, leaped up and then landed lightly, rolling back down the mound beside the hole. I thought, Who is this girl? She picked up an axe from against the wall and raised it above her body. She swung down and cut the head from the calf. Tiny blood drops flicked into the air, onto her skirt, onto her cheek. Decapitated, only one swing, only one clean stroke. Her brother ground corn as she worked the skin with a knife. The blood specks stayed like a badge on her. And the head of the calf, lay alone, eyes open.

That first afternoon they all ate well. Together they were warm, though the thatched roof leaked water. And as they ate, Max was quite sure that killing an animal was not like killing a man.

- -

They set out early next morning to find Santa Claus. Surely he lives in the peaks. So they climbed high, where ice covers the ground and there is a lake filled with trout. The girl took long strides, and her skirt and apron brushed against the stones. “Tired?” she asked, whenever Max fell behind. "You okay?" she´d ask, and each time, he hated it more. He did not want to be a child, especially today, this important day, as he searched for Santa Claus.

He wanted to explain to her that sometimes an intensity finds him – of mind, of senses – when everything in the world becomes just one place. He wants to dig that place. He got that feeling sometimes lying with a girl or sitting outside. Small boys kicked a soccer ball through the stones; an eagle dipped into the blue. And now he had it, that feeling of great intensity, as he hiked in the cold air through these mountains. He hated the question because if he answered it – if he talked at all, then the wings are plucked from the butterfly, the moment is lost.

And, in any case, if he couldn´t focus, how could he ever find Santa Claus? (After all, what is Christmas, but an intensity of feelings?)

He reached the summit and could see the lake with the birds skipping on the water. Everyone had already arrived. He fell to the ground, breathing fast and heavy. “Tired” the girl asked, with no hesitation. She didn´t even smile. If her cheekbones weren´t so high and her face so nice, one might say that she stood like a man. She held her shoulders high and watched as her brothers shot stones at the birds. He wanted to punch her. Max got up from the ground and walked up to her. She didn´t even notice him. From behind, he touched her cheek, and then held her face firm as he bent forward and gave her big kiss on the chin. A big, facetious kiss.

She did not move or do anything at all. She stood in surrender.

“Thats a warning,” he said, smiling. “If you ask me again whether I´m tired, it will be on the lips.”

She looked at him with an open face and blinked. Never before – and not once for him again – would she look like such like a woman to Max.

- -

The next morning was the type when everything is still and you think – Yes, this is what a mountain feels like.

The air was cold and the great white clouds that would later blind the whole valley were now only whispers. Thatching from the roof drifted in the dirt of the courtyard. Max sat on the ground eating panetone and sipping a slippery drink that was white and tasted of oatmeal. He tried not to watch as the girls took off their clothes to bath in the river. Instead, he stared at the soup bowl in front of him: cold water, corn kernels and chopped bull testicle.

So this is Christmas, he thought. The mountain range was big and gentle as if it were its own reflection in a still body of water.

- -

Later, they -- all twelve -- piled into a taxi to leave these mountains. The white clouds of the evening began to float through the valleys, and at everything was thin and white and you see nothing. That was how it was as they drove through the mountains Christmas day. The sun was setting and everyone was going home.

But as happens in moments when you lose the present and have instead that heavy, fierce anticipation of what is next – their taxi lost a tire. They had no spare and the closest town was four hours away on foot and it was now dark and the the girls had nothing but skirts and mantas for the cold. They set a bonfire and the youngest girl said "I´m tired" Beside the road, together on in the middle of the Andes mountains, they came to solemn and unspoke understanding.

But this is the season of miracles. It was nine o´clock at night when the truck came. It was filled with watermellons. At least that moment, this big, dirty fruit truck suggested to Max the divinity of Jesus Christ. I don´t know much about these things, Max thought as all twelve of them were freezing together, laughing too, as they sat on the back of a truck filled with watermelons, diving them home. I don´t know much about these tings, but this must have something to do with the spirit of Chirstmas...

The truck moved forward and family said goodbye to their uncle. (I still do not know where he slept that night.) Max turned back and saw that the uncle, the man who dug the hole, now hundred of yards away, was still watching the truck roll beyond his sight. One understood solitude in that second; but he is not alone. One is never alone if one looks at these mountains. Especially, Max thought knowingly -- especially with Santa Claus roaming and receding in their peaks.

Mirrors

The following are short sketches of three images. They are from separate instances, and the narrative is weak.

· · · · · ·

The bus makes its final roll forward after seven hours ascending the Andean mountains, and as it does, a wild dog barks at the yellow beams cast by the headlights. The passengers pass single file through the bus door, and the dog continues to bark. Though no one seems to notice the dog; somehow his noises only contribute to the quiet and dusty darkness of the night. The bright nearly-full moon makes clear, even in the darkness, the impossible magnitude of the mountains – their dark shadows go on forever – and also in a way the impossible smallness of us.

Max descends from the bus and the dog´s bark is like the crack of a felled tree; everyone now notices the dog. He crouches then he jumps forward and for a moment there is a fight between Max and the dog. For a moment there is a fight, and everyone sees the beast´s wild red pupils. A man beside Max kicks the dog hard in the chest and picks up a stone from the dirt road. He holds it over his head. The dog, pushed back, hesitates.

He looks over the mountains beneath him and then back at the shadowy path towards the man with the stone. Then he puts his tail down and his legs begin to weaken.

· · · · ·

At some point between Chosica and San Pedro, Max noticed the mirror on the dashboard. It was held by the hands of a Jesus figurine and trembled over each pebble on the unpaved road. Off the surface of this small, minutely cracked mirror was another mirror, that of the driver´s face, whose Aviator glasses were shinny and curved. In this remarkable and cruel double reflection the world in front of the bus was revealed and distorted: the cacti were metallic spider webs and the yellow road was indefinite. Max discovered then (with the inevitability of discoveries made in the heat of the sun) that there is something grotesque about mirrors.

· · · · · ·

“¿Qué quieres Joven?” asked a woman, who was quite young, probably the café owner´s daughter. Rather than walk, she seemed to glide to the table. This is because the concrete in the plaza is smooth, as if it were cut from ice, and covered with dust. Max did not notice this until later, however, because he was thinking deeply. Though the night was alive and sexual, it was also dark, and in the dark alone it is easy to sit and sip coca-cola and think deeply, or to watch pretty girls walk about the plaza and think about nothing at all. Perhaps now he was doing both, as he reflected on the wrinkled woman he saw, with an indigenous colored skirt and dark braids, who sat on the corner of the street huaking nock-off deodorant to a hurried public. That is the solitude of this land, he thought, to be at once very old and very young…

“Joven, vas a pedir?” the woman asked, this time more loudly. When he looked up, she smiled a great facetious smile. Everything in her face pulled smooth but the rims of her eyes, as if they were dual keepers of some great wisdom. Her smile was so nice that he thought, if only I knew her language…

Around the plaza, faded pinks and green covered the low walls and smoky reflections drifted in the light of the lamps, like gray clouds gently dripping dust.

In fact, Max was so diligently engaged in the activity of watching the girls in the plaza and thinking grand thoughts, that he hardly noticed – as if in a daze – when a crooked man (Max would later remember seeing him picking through the dump) walked to his table, lips shining, and grabbed at Max´s Coke bottle. His hands were shaking, like the of humming vocal chords passing through his body.

“Hey, don´t, sir” Max said, but he was passive. The crooked man took the Coke bottle and held it with two hands. He went to the center of the plaza and with two hands, he drank the Coca-Cola. He placed the bottle on the ground with tenderness, and then, hurried, went towards the dump, around the corner, out of sight.

The waitress had her hands on her hips.

“Más Coca-Cola Joven?"

“Sí por favor” he said. She walked away, and as she did, Max watched her slightly revealed waist, the smooth, brown skin above her jeans, gently wrinkle and tighten with the movement of her hips.

Immediately, of the crooked, old man, he wondered: How different is this country, engaged in dizzying modernization, from a crazy man with a coke bottle, picking through the remains of others refuge?

As the woman reached for a second coke bottle, she absently shook her head and smiled, “los gringos.”

It was only later that Max wondered: How different am I?

Chupaca Livestock Market

It is still early, so the sun is hot and the road is still dusty and dry. A dog is barking from the roof of a faded, concrete house, and as the group of travelers walks to the market, the bark of the dog and the sound of the sun burning white, gringo skin is all that can be heard.

Beyond the town, the Andes Mountains are crisp and plump against the sky, as if a sleeper built them in his dreams.

They enter the livestock market, a hundred yards of tarp-covered shops and tied pigs, donkeys, sheep and cow. Max tries to commit to memory the sense of its machine-like bustle and its mixture of yellows and reds. I want to write about this, he says to himself. Nothing in the world is easier than not to write; and that is what he has done. Max has written nothing since he arrived in this dusty, yellow, sexual place. So he has to say “I will write about this,” because otherwise he won´t, too afraid that he will fail the richness of his experiences. How can I write, he reasons, about the small brown girl with dirty hands and a dirty pink shirt that holds a piglet like it is a pile of clothes, who has tears running down her cheeks? I cannot.

But I can try – I will – because whoever cares to read the stuff will be able to correct the twists and distortions in the imperfect lens, because he will know the imperfect lens grinder. He will know that the failed sketch is made by a young boy whose image of the world is formed during the terrible lucidity of insomnia or the terrible lucidity of loneliness or those moments when he is so happy that it is as if the world has stopped turning and everything is that single moment.

A pig is dragged squealing by a rope twisted on its back legs; a drum somewhere is beating. The odor of feces and fried meat mixes with the heat, the heat! which rises in waves off the yellow dirt and also the smell of humanity. Everything is dust, dry and yellow. The pig is thrown into a bag, jerking and alive, by a woman with a multi-colored skirt. She has two braids darker than the darkest black in the pupils of a bird´s eye. The drum continues to beat, a little quicker than the beating of the human heart.

A man leaning against a painted wall holds a rope tied to a lamb. Blood is caked in small spots on the top of the lamb´s head; flies dance in the flakes of dirt and blood in its fleece.

"What happened to the lamb?" Max asks to the man.

"A wolf" he says.

"Que lástima."

The man has sad, liquid-blues eyes. Deep marks are in his cheeks beneath his eyes. He holds a beautiful child in his left arm; her skin is the color of the mountains.

"How much to buy the lamb?"

"45 Soles"

"Cute and delicious, right?"

After the market, the group of travelers hikes to a top of a mountain and watches the blue and brown mountain range while sucking on orange slices.

For lunch, they eat on tables under straw huts. The sun glints off the skin of the chicken. “Tranquilo” says one of the travelers. Max hopes that one day it is he who can explain that in English no word is quite like “tranquilo” to communicate total, quiet contentness. While they eat, stray dogs circle the chairs for food and children throw rocks into baskets and laugh.

On the way back to town, Max sees the man with liquid-blue eyes. He is walking down the hill with his child and his lamb. He is moving so slowly that a butterfly flutters past him and loses itself in the sky.

Marcahuasi

For now, this very short video of my trip down from the site of Marcahausi, a stone forest high in the Andes Mountains, must do.

A Very Short Love Letter to America

This small collection of pictures spans a time period from the beginning of the summer -- to me known as the Summer of Love -- to the end of my travels in the West. Though this period is rather short, I will remember it as endlessly long. How long is the moment that a ball tossed in the air stops and sits before it travels down again? There is a moment that the ball does not move. This is the moment of transition, of reflection; the ball is at once traveling up and traveling down; this is the moment that glances at infinity, that is outside of time, has no beginning, no end and is infinitely short. Therefore the moment is forever. For me, that is the feeling of this period in my life.

This was not a specific feeling, but a general one. It gripped all those closest to me. On the hottest days of the heart, it was always three o’clock in the morning, and we are waiting awake for the first light of dawn. This was a period of restlessness.

Perhaps, one might say that America herself is caught on a brink of anticipation, running without moving towards something we do not know. America (to borrow Mailer's phrase) is pregnant.

I am leaving for Latin America on Sunday, and once I leave, I doubt that I will ever be able to sufficiently restore these feelings of infinite anticipation. After I leave I doubt I will ever be able to wholly return, and perhaps I will not want to. Therefore, these photographs and memories are a last glance at my home. These are my images of America: if they die away, then a part of America for me dies too. But they are alive, and indeed it is tough to hate America looking at the Rocky Mountains. My country has certainly committed barbarities – yes, they are outrageous. But can America be truly obscene if she has produced for me these people and spaces?

Treehouse

The dirt is soft against the feet. That is how you know the trail, even in the dark – like tonight, with a full moon. The woods are wild: a cracked tree, long javelins protrude in the moonlight, fallen stones from the old wall, logs decaying to sawdust, wiry branches kiss your face like sad, chapped lips, spider webs wrap on your skin and taste like long hair in your mouth. About two-hundred yards into the trail, the cars and road are no longer visible. If you stare into the glow of the trees against the black sky it makes you think for a second that you’ll die in the woods, somewhere next to the stone wall, but that it wouldn’t be the worst end, to leave your bones among the leaves. After all, the black sky is august.

Just when these thoughts come, they go, for the awkward turn of the trail opens to the noise of the crowd, somewhere faintly away. Then, ike a phoenix, it emerges into sight; the lights strike first. They are fantastical lights. They shine in a circle. The noise, drums against the sky, strikes too. You move towards the lights and the noise. Even moths travel towards their own salvation, even if it ends up killing them, on a fire; Then they burn and dazzle. So you appeal to the animal and search in the woods; and you simultaneously are the civilization that destroys the animal with those fantastical lights. Curious how the transition between the one and another – man and his animal ancestor – is not difficult. For a moment the civilization and the woods are united. They are one for a moment. Then you move from the wild trail into the party, where your friends greet you with smiles.

Prom

Get Yo Jollies III

She glanced at me. Her face was filled with such a mixture of intimacy and vacancy that I felt guilt. Hers was the sideways, awkward glance that one can imagine between a whore and her client, after they both have dressed. “Goodbye” he says, with melancholy, shame, and satisfaction; “goodbye” I said to those eyes.

Maine

That you might think is wrong. Max did not on most occasions believe that recklessness was admirable. In fact he looked down on that dirty, moonlight class of teenagers who profited on their own wildness. Sex, fire, alcohol! Balls! All were like street chases broadcasted live – to make headlines during the evening news or to sell newspaper ads for facial cream. Recklessness, by most accounts, is not synonymous with freedom. The teenager is a servant to his own identity: he must each night bring himself closer to his own destruction if he want to continue to be alive. You cannot build anything by destroying everything. And when the onlookers tire of his antics, they tire of his life itself, caring not whether he jumps from a ledge to his own doom or whether he just stands there, bamboozled, while everyone walks away to watch the next joker play with guns.

But she was different. Wildness for her was neither statement nor identity; it was a property of her soul. She does not have to be reckless. Or have to be anything. Hence, she could take everything. Perhaps the definitive moment when a girl transitions to a woman is when she realizes that to be good is easy; and that the real challenge is to be bad – and enjoy it. Max had known girls before – yes he had know the young and the good – but woman he knew few...

Mt. Katahdin

...too smart to be destroyed by madness, but too stupid to know that there are fates much worse for great minds than ending life too early: among them, beginning life too late -- passing seamlessly from the protective womb to the protective grave, with no intervening period, and with nothing to show for it.

San Francisco

Oakland

Napa Valley

Point Reyes

...what a curious cat! too free to be a queen, but too beautiful to be a serf. A sphinx, she reclines languidly on a Moroccan rug in my mind, purrs until my heart breaks, and then at night vanishes curling like a wisp of smoke.

Jamba Juice

Aspen

Colorado College

New Spirits

The following travel sketch is of a complex event of sorts, one both outlandish and coherent, worthy of mockery and of consideration. Perhaps, if we wish to understand such an event, a weird event, we must temporarily defer our trust to the likewise weird. Yes, to understand the ambiguous, let us trust characters of equal ambiguity – the comedic heroes who are alternately confused either as tragic clowns or foolish heroes. Rely on them, the characters of great disproportions. Let us see the perceptions of such a figure.

. . .

They park the car, which has felt seats, in the lot next to the large tree whose branches are still wet. Everything is wet, because it is only nine in the morning and the sun is not yet hot. The wet is on the hills with brown grass that looks like hay, on the gold Buddha placed on the grass and on the deer that do not move when Max walks by them. It is the wet on the eyeballs of someone who has stayed up until dawn.

A wooden staircase, besides two silver hybrid cars, leads to an open door, above which the sign says “gifts.” The book sold include: “Zen Buddhism: In Search of Self,” “The Path: A Spiritual Journey,” and “The Laws of Spirit: A Tale of Transformation." A carved stick surrounded by purple velvet with a crystal attached is on sale. Everything is expensive, but to make a purchase one need only to drop money into the basket.

They walk up the road and see a man with a flannel shirt and a red beard from his ears to his chin. He is singing solemnly on a stump and his face is rather like a bush with a smile.

“We’re here for the teen sweatlodge?”

“Yes, wonderful,” he says. “Scott on the stage is here for the lodge too.” They are setting up for the day, he tells them, and he points to the woods, to a dome cage not tall enough to stand within but at least twenty feet long. It is made of thin saplings like bones.

Jan leaves in the car. She leaves beyond the wet. Now Max is left with only ambiguous allies: the bush faced man, Scott, who wears tight jeans with small spots of bleach that are cut beneath his kness, Eloise his friend, and – above all – the image of thin saplings bent into a skeletal frame which he saw distant in the woods. It is this picture, like a ribcage from the ground, like a glance at his own innards, which remains fixed in his mind while he waits.

Max explains that he is taking a year off before college and that he is from New York. Soon he will be in Latin America. “I do not know what I am going to do there, but maybe I will learn to trust what happens when I do not know what will happen.” Perhaps this trust that his experiences will precede his understanding is why he is here today, sitting with affluent teenagers, preparing to pray to voodoo gods.

The group is fourteen and these kids seem so tender. They are almost naked as they walk to the woods. By the fire, they sit. Eloise sits cross-legged, her short hair combed back behind her ears. Max, searching for her gaze, makes conversation. “People like the South Californian shores,” she says as she turns. “They are quietly beautiful, but I don’t like them. Point Reyes beaches are wild, wind and fog – their beauty is intense.” Much the same could be said about her eyes, which are wild and foggy blue.

After they walk the perimeter of the wood frame, deferential to the mystical energy that connects the fire to the altar to the entrance, they crouch inside. Hot stones are shoveled from the outside light into the darkness. The dark is hot and malicious; steam rises from the stones that are still vaguely red. The chanting begins: “Higha, lowhowa, higha, heelow.” Strange echoes fill the lungs, lingers on the skin, skin huddled in that small cavern, burns. People shout confession: “You know, creator, if you want Lou to die, let her die with beauty,” Ho! they shout when truth is said or they cry. “You know, creator, if she should live, creator let her live with beauty.” The steam hisses like whispers and at some moment, imperceptibly, the red from the stones disappears and the darkness is total. Everything is hot with breath, hot with skin, hot with wet.

It is at this moment of total blindness that Max feels the great wet cover his body. This awkward lodge is the womb.

Outside, they sit on rocks and drink lemonade and Eloise asks him how he feels. The breeze stings against his body, which is still wet. He says he is cold, but feels very alive. She looks at him. He thinks for a moment that the milky white has receded from her eyes, and that these wild eyes are no longer foggy, but blue like the sky...

But surely that is impossible! Max after all is still an impostor – though perhaps a little less than before.

Graveyard

At the top of the hill, Max sits against a gray obelisk. The sign below the hill says Home of Eternity, “Oakland Jewish Cemetary.” The roots of these trees, twisted and drooping – strangled, but strong; they feed in dirt packed to the brim with the grief of dead Jews. “Home of Eternity” he repeats to himself. Moving on the ground is an infestation: thousands of ants pour from seams and crevasses along the concentric walls, each grubbing at the earth, steeling its fruits. Together these stupid ants move with a common mad soul. It is eerie to find such wild life the dirt of a graveyard.

Max has spent the past days alone, and he is content. But here he senses that he is not alone. Yes, the presence of the dead floats in the September air. The tombstones, old teeth, sweep crooked across the green fields. One is never alone in a graveyard. Cold shudders shoot through his frame. Max is never alone. The presence of the dead, odorless and colorless, floats in is air: friends not there, mistakes committed, dreams lost – the sad memories of what is dead are strewn amongst the living like tombstones. Do not give too much too their ghosts, he knows. Dwell too long with the past, and the duties of living become too difficult. Every late-night trip to Facebook is like stumbling over tombstones of his past.

These thoughts fill his veins with sap. His mass is hot and paralyzed on the ground, as clouds begin to cover the sky and the first black drops hit the stone. Threads of rain shine obliquely against the trees and the sun. His cellphone rings beside him. It is a girl from back home. The rain falls everywhere now. From the flowers in the fields, to the spikes of the iron gate, to the crooked crosses and tombstones, it falls upon the living and the dead.

Memories at a Potluck

The guests sit against the walls. The room is not square when thirty people sit. It is a circle of faces cast in dim lights and one cannot help but watch: a dark-skinned man from Uganda talks about empire; a boyish Asian man with a beard sharpened to a point beneath his chin; faces beyond the walls fill plates from bowls; a white girl with a dreadlocked braid extending like a snake to the small of her back clasps tea; two brown-skinned children play in the candlelight. The faces are warm like freshly baked cake.

It is his second night at the co-opt house and the fourth night of his life that he does not have to account to anyone at all. Though it all blends together: hours bleed into days, faces into their surroundings and nothing is countable or separate. It is all one experience. It is supposed to be like this, he thought. When one leaves home for a while, one’s systems of order and chaos are left behind too; the brain yawns open like a wale and it sucks in all the floating specks of life. Everything is equal; dig everything. Memories drift and mix in his mind like plankton at sea.

Valencia Street. He has Mexican food in a small place with yellow ceilings. A young couple sits on stools in front of him. The boy wears a t-shirt striped with velvet purples. He has a terrible slouch but is nice-looking. The girl is blond. “I want to go and see a band or a night, but it’s tough, you know.” The boy nods. “I think sometimes that I’ve outgrown this city,” she says.

Max walks from the locker with his suitcase on his back. The boy from London with whom he had shared a room is leaving the hostel too.

“I didn’t recognize you with your sunglasses” he says in a British voice appropriate somehow.

“It’s my disguise.”

“Did you speak to the other two boys in the beds above ours?”

“Yes, they were assholes.”

“I tried to talk with them, but they didn’t want a chat. I came in late night late. I couldn’t sleep at all. At three in the morning I hear a zipping sound from the bunk above yours, and then the bed starts to shake like this,” he says moving his arms. Both boys have no doubts in their smiles. “Then at seven in the morning he does it again. I hear the zipping and I cleared my throat and it stopped right instantly.”

“Wanking – that’s the word for it in London, right?”

At the end of the city block there is a statue of a man pointing to the sky. Beneath the statue a poor man in grey clothes sleeps in the sunlight.

The girl he is staying with invites him to the City. She is beautiful and the conversation is easy. She has brought her friend. They three meet on Velencia at a bar where they are asked at the door for identification. The Boy might not pass for seventeen.

“I forgot my I.D.”

“That’s too bad. You look pretty young.”

“Yeah, bad genes or something”

Max smiles and the three of them leave. At the next bar, the girls are carded again but Max slips in. “Look at this!” he grins and pulls his shirtsleeve up. His arm is thin like a used role of paper towels, “You would be a fool or a suicidal to mess with someone with these!”

Next to the garden is the concrete patio. The sun is high and the concrete is yellow; the garden is filled with weeds. Max is worried about the party – they are too hip, too young (though they are ten years older than he), they wear tight black jeans, tight and vivid t-shirts, large black sunglasses; wholly they are good-looking, assured, their movements are fierce. Heat rises from the yellow concrete courtyard and kabobs hiss on the barbecue. “My sister is much cooler than I can ever hope to be,” she says.

The kids have airy gazes in their eyes. You know that Middle Class America frowns on them and anything that does not quickly turn a profit. But if our civilization falls, what remains? The group sits in plastic chairs in the shade or against the concrete wall. Is it our bank accounts or does it all come down to personal style? They have style. Which is not to say they are artist (who here could write a poem worth reading?), but that their values are stronger than most. Values born from that place in which these hipsters hide, from that crease between past and future, not knowing where you’ll be tomorrow and not caring: to live outside the law, you must be honest.

On the first floor of the bar, brown is salient – the walls, the tables, leather jackets. The people are packed in as if they are in a subway car. This is Max’s subway car through time: he is twenty-one. He wants a drink, but is too embarrassed because he does not know how to order. On the second floor they play a game of bad pool. Men watch around the table. There are games too important to be treated as games. So they dance. The music – Soul Music – is from a place too far away for anyone to know the songs well. The floor is almost empty, but the songs are good and at times they are very good. One notices that there are single moments when one’s heart begins to beat in time with the pound of the speakers. Everyone’s ears curl to the high notes from the jazzy voice out of the dj box: " I said my baby's coming home tomorrow." For a single moment the whole earth becomes the room, this dark, malicious room that moves to the voice that wails: "Ain't that good news. Yeah, ain't that news."

At the potluck a woman from Chile speak in a steady accent. She is a practitioner of holistic medicine. In time, her husband, Peruvian, picks up his guitar. He is a professional musician, a child of four hundred years of blood and fire, the story he plays with his fingers. The room is still warm and the candle continues to flicker off the wall.

Max mingles, but he is exhausted and looks to leave this world to which he does not belong and doesn't fit in. He enters the girl's room; he falls to the ground and looks at the ceiling. It is tiring being around people you do not know. She is in the room and so are the two neighborhood children. He looks into the eyes of the doll besides him and wonders to whom it belongs, though he knows the answer already: it belongs to him; he is so young. Outside of the door, the sounds and faces steam the windows, spin like wheals, sound like the street, like laughter, like silverware falling to the ground. Inside the door little children toss around the doll with black beady eyes.

Vehr are you travel?

“Vehr are you travel?”

“What – a hostel. Can you take me?”

“Vehr are you goh-ing?” Not now. It is four in the morning Eastern Standard Time at the baggage claim in the San Francisco airport. Has Self-Consciousness really chosen now, in an Eastern European accent no less, on a cellphone! to reveal to Heart that on behalf of Max’s Many Selves – the Intellect, esteemed, the Groin, darkly comedic, the Creature, soulful and weak, the Beast, the Crusader – that we (Max) are lost and need direction. I wished to respond: I do not know really...

In fact Max was not drunk. But wafting around him was a cruel mixture: the conditioned air inside the airport, calculated and sterile like medicated Vaseline, mixed with the intimations growing in his arteries that everything in his life would somehow be different. This mixture worked as a hallucinogen on his nervous system.

“Vehr are you goh-ing?”

“A hostel downtown…on 312 Mason Street. Can you take me there?”

The Boy made his way to the parking lot. In his bag: a new sleeping bag, a tremendous weight of books, including the Selected Works of W.H. Auden, On the Road, Latin America: Modern Times Vol. XI , a pocket knife, three pairs of khaki pants, and an electronic toothbrush. The contents of his bag reveal to some extent the content of his expectations.

On the way out of the airport, he began to hear a muffled buzzing from inside his bag, rather like a honeybee trapped in the mouth of an alley cat. What might it be? At best a cellphone, in which case Max was rather rude not to stop – but at worst? The object continued its fast oscillations. Was Max, unwittingly, trasporting across America woman’s good vibrations? A pimp with a Learner’s Permit. Or weapons? Yes, a bag filled with weapons, all vibrating to some ungodly aim. “Get to the floor" the Officer would say. Ah, Max got the joke. “Death to America” he might even shout back, if only to confirm for the Officer his worst fear: yes, Evil is now in the business of recruiting for Their dark plots the duffle bags of Jews. Seventeen-year-olds from Westchester, NY. An islomofascists with a Learner’s Permit! The Officer might then remove from the bag, rather triumphantly, the weapon of innumerable tears: a Braun C32 Electronic Toothbrush turned on by an accidental bump of the dufflebag. “Death to Plaque you goons” Max smiled in his preposterous head. “Get the fuck off me.”

Yes these were his thoughts. There is no reason to continue to explore them, the bright rainbow colors of his delusions, other than to make once again the point that Max was tripping wildly on his sense of contradiction – so drab was this building but so vivid was his own freedom to destroy or elevate himself, for which this airport served as the most immediate symbol.

Outside gasoline lingered on pavement; the air was dangerous but full of amusement: unsettled. The van to the youth hostel was blue and fat, and it sat on the curb like a caravan set to travel somewhere beyond a Tunisian horizon, where the sun sinks to innumerable moments of mystery. An old woman from Nova Scotia said “take me home,” in part to the driver, but mostly to herself. “I am very tired.” A Minnesotan woman with hair like peels of ripe bananas was in San Francisco to celebrate her son’s wedding. “I’ve been praying for him and his wife,” she said in Midwestern tones. Through the windshield, Max watched the highway push into the night; it was cast in grays too white for this hour, as if trapped in the concrete was a last blush of sunlight long past.

The van dipped into a tunnel filled with racing orange. “He listened to my prayers. God can guide you if you pray” she finished. As the van emerged from underground, the city lights of midnight towers sent vague, bright shapes reflecting off the windshield, like a hundred cats’ eyes piercing the dark. Max wondered about his own guidance.

Hiking Mt. Katahdin

To believe that life is meaningless is a priviledge of the modern world. On the mountain, actions have purpose: food, water, shelter. When "survival" is not just an old-fashion word for comfort but a question, it's hard to believe that all actions are vanity.

More photographs here.

Concerning the Comments Section

Here's what entered my inbox:

I was planning to send you this email, when I noticed the return of the comment links.
-----
I was browsing one of my favorite blogs that think, and I noticed a disturbing, anti-democratic change. It seems that the comment links have disappeared from The Conviction, despite the veneer of "Say Something" text that remains. I don't want to jump to conclusions, but might this constitute reasonable doubt?

Cheers,
The Somewhat Convicted Max "the cooler one" Siegel
-----
Sincerely,
The Duly Convicted Max "the cooler one" Siegel

Add that to the list "Reasons I'll Miss Home."

Ticket to Anywhere

The quick, bright shapes of the sun retreat below the horizon. We watch the retreat on a hill, while vague pinks and purples spread out into the long New York night. It smells like grass and twilight. We see the last yellow blush of the sun vanishing, imperceptibly.

On one hand, the sunset, idyllic, is of nature, spontaneous, tangible, it is everything; on the other, it is just a drabber version of what has flashed in front of my eyes many times before, either in miniature on hotel postcards or in technicolor on the screens at the cineplex.

At a greater rate than ever before, the experiences we have day-to-day are synthetic. They are the digital images and interpretative commentaries that multiply forward in geometric procession. By way of these images and commentaries , we were there to meet the suicide militant in Pakistan or to check the Nuclear reactors in North Korea. We were there, but not like sitting on the grass to watch a sunset: The event was in two dimension on our television, computer, newspaper, it was manufactured and deliberate, related but ultimately divorced from reality. Our experience was a product of human hands, designed to satisfy our appetite for the illusory and fantastic.

At least one effect of these synthetic experiences on our consciousness is that living in this world becomes more and more each day like flipping through the pages of a magazine. Everything we might see beyond our stoop self-references something that we have already “lived” through. Even our emotions: are we really angry that Sally kissed Joey after she kissed Tom? Or are we acting as we think we ought to, in line with our favorite soap opera or tabloid story. Few things are left unseen; few emotions are left unexplored. Life becomes more like a continuous rerun of forms and color, like a sunset that we’ve all seen not once, but a thousand times before, embalmed in some electronic medium, airbrushed and perfect.

For better or worse, in a world where natural novelty and surprise have all but expired, the burden to enliven our lives shifts from God and His spontaneous will to mankind itself – to the cinematographers and studio executives who we expect nightly to channel into our humdrum living rooms the extraordinary. We are the merchants of our own illusions, who must sieze for ourselves what is worthy. In a world of reruns, no price is too high for a new sensation.

19^th Century industrial workers knew that the quickest route out of Manchester was at the bottom of the bottle. The escape is now is to be found in our televisions sets and internet portals, in our drugs, parties, pornography, George Lucas' studio. Or, for privileged, who might tire of two dimensional images and seedy opium dens, go build a house in Nicaragua – don’t forget your sunglasses! – where, for a few grand, and a few days, one can feel the pangs of human sadness and the elation of missionary salvation. Yes, it's the greatest show in town. Next stop? Under the ocean to the ruin of the titanic? The moon? There is only one simple rule! The rule of perpetual motion: where you are not is probably better than where you are, because new is better than old, and nothing is worth more than a new sensation.

Gap Year

Dear Mr. Fitzsimmons,

I am Max Novendstern, a recently admitted student to the Class of 2011. I wish to take a year off before entering college, and I am writing this letter to request that my admittance to Harvard College be deferred to the fall of 2008.

During my time, I plan to immerse myself in Latin America – its culture, language, history and scholarship. I have made arrangements to stay with a family friend in Trujillo, Peru, and from there, to travel throughout the continent: the Choquequirao ruins in Peru, the pampas of Argentina, el desierto florido of Chile. After travel, for the remainder of the year, I intend to find a job opportunity, volunteering my time somewhere in the region. Throughout the trip, I hope to read and write, with luck completing a year-long writing project of my own design.

In part, the reasons for the year off are academic. I will achieve greater proficiency in the Spanish language, learn about Latin American history and literature, and gain, before entering college, a greater understanding of a culture very different from my own. By discovering the foreign and uncomfortable, perhaps my understanding of the commonplace and unremarkable will click into greater focus. But the reasons are also spiritual. Sometimes I feel that I’m so busy searching on the road for the next better thing – the fruits of high school will be picked at college, then graduate school, then career – that I do not notice a bit of scenery that is whirling by me. During my year off I hope to spend some well-deserved time off the road that beats forever forward, and to simply enjoy, at least for a short time, the smiles of the people that I meet.

Bill Gates said to Harvard’s graduating class that there is almost no limit to what the world has a right to expect from them. After a year of “exploring, living, studying, traveling,” all suggested as revelatory in your wonderful article Time Out or Burn Out, I hope to gain a greater sensitivity to the pains and hopes of others, but also to the talents and opportunities that I have been gifted. I believe that I will enter college motivated to my mission by an enhanced perspective on the worlds around me and within.

Sincerely,

Max Novendstern

Note: I'm hoping to utilize this web space a lot during my travels, geographic and otherwise, so expect some layout change in the next couple of weeks, and then, eventually, photographs, maps, reading excerpts, journal entries, and essays.

A Graduation Speech That Won't be Read

This speech is a simple reminder to focus, for the final fleeting moments in our grasp, on the connections that we have made, rather than on a future that recedes always further from our grasp. For those who have kept up with this site, it is clear that this speech – its phraseology, its ideas – is not new, but rather it is a reformulation, and I think for this reason its value as a graduation speech is greater not lesser. I was not picked to speak at graduation, so I'm posting the text here. (The speech that was chosen is certainly much funnier than this one, so I guess that's nice.)

□ □ □

We have spent tonight, with good reason and great deservedness all around, contemplating the past that has brought us to this stage, and the future that awaits us when we walk off of it. This stage is a literal barrier between the place we came from and the place where we are going: everything will be different when we leave. So, today, with good reason and great deservedness all around, we should embrace the nostalgia of the past and what it has given us and the excitement of the future and what it has to offer us.

However, I am not going to talk about either, the past or the future: I'm quite certain there are others who can talk about school better than I can, and all I can do as a student is guess about what will come next. Instead, in the no-man’s-land between these two places, the past and the future, yesterday and tomorrow, is the present. And if only for a few minutes of your time, "the present" is the setting of a short, fictional story I would like to tell. Nothing big, just a story.

The story begins very dramatically. The tragic hero of our tale lives in a quaint house off Todd Road. (I live on Toad Road, but this is not about me, it, at least a little bit, perhaps, is about everyone.) One day, maybe on the Today Show or the Journal News, he sees a map of the Katonah-Lewisboro school district. With pride, he quickly locates his house. No sooner can he point to the dot of his house, then a feeling of horror pulses through his veins. For all his life, he had known his address to read Todd Road, Katonah NY -- to his friends, his family and to the U.S. Postal Service, he is a member of Katonah. But, his house, he sees, with anguish burning in his eyes, is geographically at the heart of God's Country: his house is in Lewisboro, NY. You heard correctly: his address is Katonah, but he lives in Lewisboro. Obviously, these are the trappings of an existential crisis. He is suspended between one town and another. He is suspended between one culture and another. He is literally the dash on the Katonah-Lewisboro School District's letterhead. He realizes that he has no identity. He realizes that he has no home to call his own. Caught between Lewisboro and Katonah, welcome in neither, he is the “Man without a Hamlet.”

So the Man without a Hamlet wanders on the roads searching: He travels from the hills of Waccabuc to the waters of Cross River to the dark, frightful depths of Vista; he asks for answers from the academic, from the athlete, from the adolescent; with his head in his textbook, he travels towards the corner of Naviance; he runs towards the endzone, under the lights of the turf; he searches for the next quick thrill, at Cameron’s Deli, in the darkness between dusk and dawn.

The hero of our story travels different roads, the roads that many on this stage have traveled too, searching for that place where he can park his car, along the cobblestone, greeted by the smiles of forever. The Man without a Hamlet searches for a place to call his home; he searches for what we learned in John Jay High School is called the American Dream. The roads that he travels – that we on the stage have travel to get here – are different, of course (in the textbook, on the turf, at Cameron's Deli) but all roads towards anything are, in a sense, very much the same. They wind far onto the horizon, so that Man without a Hamlet can only see what is directly in front of his eyes. The divider lines flash rhythmically in front of him, hypnotizing him. Beating forwards with the wind whipping on his face, the line hypnotizing him, the horizon obscured and winding far into the distance, the Man without a Hamlet does not notice a bit of the scenery he is passing. He cannot enjoy the beautiful stone walls or the quotes during his morning announcements or the people around him, because he is too busy searching for something better on the road that whispers a promise of happily ever after.

One day, though, his car breaks down and he steps off the road. He does not have anywhere to go, without his car, so he decides to lie on the grass. With the sun beating on his back, he notices for the first time the people around him, and their smiles are the best part of his day. No longer traveling down the road, he feels that time is standing still, the earth is no longer rotating and the present, that Now, is everywhere. The Man without a Hamlet finds a home the moment he stops searching for it.

Perhaps at some points, we all are, in this community of vast opportunity and privilege, men and women without Hamlets. Perhaps, at some points, we all are so busy searching on the road late at night for something better, that we do not notice the scenery as it whirls by us.

I believe in ambition and idealism – I believe that this spirit, the wisdom of youth, is no less important than the wisdom of old age, just because it comes first and, sometimes, is lost like a receding hairline. That wisdom is a burning compulsion in a great many of us: we have hopes and dreams and fears; we will change to world, I am quite certain of it. However, this wisdom, I have come to believe, is only so important. Perhaps, in the final moments on this stage, before we walk off and can never really return, in the final moments we have with the school that has given us its firm hand, the town that has given us its woods and streams, and the people who have given us their hearts – perhaps for at least a few moments, we ought to stop looking to a future that beats on, forever receding in front of our eyes, and look to our home, around the stage and in the audience, in the present, and be thankful for the smiles that we see.

Farewell to Campus Congress

This is the first of two farewell speeches that I've written in my final months at John Jay High School. This was delivered, roughly as it appears here, to Campus Congress on June 4, 2007, my final address as Speaker.

□ □ □

This is a student congress. We are in fact students, but that is not an accusation. The students I meet and talk to are exceptional: they’re witty, hopeful about tomorrow and skeptical about today. I believe in the importance of Campus Congress because I believe in the power of the student's voice.

Congress of 2007 became more attuned to this voice... [Details not relevant]

Earlier this year, the school decided to lock its doors to the bad things that lurk outside: the doors around campus are locked so that thieves and terrorists and bears cannot come into the school without visitors passes. But I have to say that these are not the evildoers that I fear. No, I fear less the loudness of the people outside this school, than I do the quietness of those inside of it. When dissent walks onto a stage, it is not always greeted with warm and welcoming applause. And for this reason, the real danger to our safety is not those willing to stir up trouble outside of this school, but those who are too idle or fearful to honestly and openly speak their minds.

There are things as representative we have to consider: are we delegates…or are we trustees… are we watchdogs of the administration, condemning its decisions …or are we liaisons…

I am saying this, quite simply, because representation is not always easy. When we act there are going to be costs. But I believe, and I believe this from my heart, that if there are costs when we take action, then the costs for inaction are far greater. To ask a question our school district asked itself this year: What harm can come of words? Perhaps words can cause harm. Perhaps that is true. But ask yourself: What is the harm of no words at all? How can we understand who we are, the bounds of our own civility and our own ignorance, if we cannot hear aloud what others think? Of all the values a society, or a school system like this, can have, the willingness for open discussion is our most important. If we cannot meet and talk freely about our own stupidity and our own potential, then we might as well be going to class to learn fairytales each day.

So, I would like to say, as I leave, that Congress is the closest thing we have to a forum for open dialogue, and for this reason, in all its boisterousness and its disorder it’s been one of the important homes I have ever had. One man rule has never had much trouble drumming up support, but democracy needs all the help it can get. Tyranny is silent, but democracy is unsettled and loud, so don’t stop talking and don’t stop asking questions. I’m going to be handing this gavel to the next Speaker. Be respectful when she hits it on the table – be respectful and be orderly, but don’t ever be quiet.

Looking Up at the Stars

This is another short story. It's a bit more careful than the last one, and I'm pleased with the results.

Instead, for four months, I was a voyeur to humanity: I would watch during waking hours the people that passed through the street, wondering what they knew and I did not, hoping to see a beating human heart, or waiting for her shadow to emerge into visibility. The light from the sun defined her form as she walked.

The .pdf is here.

Added June 10, 2007: Here's a recording of Neruda reading his poem Inclinado en Las Tardes (translated version). The rest of his Veinte Poemas de Amor is also recorded, so that's good.

Two Proposals for John Jay High School

Managing Noise in the Library

Proposal:

To establish the back of the library – from the doors of the flat lab to the computer of the checkout desk – as a “communal work” area, where students are permitted with greater leniency to carry on quiet conversation with their tablemates.

Rationale:

Homicide, pestilence, insanity and precious stones – and a great many others things that catch human desire and passion – have all at one point or another been viewed through a cloudy lens of irrationally and mythology. Fortunately, the lights of human reason have dispelled these clouds. The first library was opened in Alexandria more than two thousand years ago, and since then, the idea of the library has occupied a place in the wildest dreams and fears of western culture. For this reason, traditions are fought for irrationally. Among these traditions, is the wide-held belief that a library – by nature of the books on its wall – must be entirely silent. This silence, however, often hurts, not helps, the positive role the library facilities play.

The John Jay High School library is regarded by many as one of the best public high school libraries in the region. Many students – the vast majority of students – who use this library want to enjoy its facilities in ways other than just silent study: working together on projects, discuss homework assignments, talk about extracurricular activities while they review their study notes. However, teachers, in varying degrees, believe that silence or near silence must be enforced in the library.

The conflict – and the tension and problems and power struggle that arise – between those who wish to work communally and those who wish for silence could be resolved if the back of the library were open to quiet discussion.

First Time Mistakes

Proposal:

To establish a discretionary “First Time Clause” whereby first-time offenders will not be removed from and/or disqualified for admittance into the National Honor Society and/or the Peer Group Leadership Program. Such first-time offenders will be put on good-behavior probation, as outlined by the administration.

First-time offender is a student without record of past equivalent infractions and without record of infractions that warranted in-school suspension or higher punishment.

Discretionary is the administration’s right to waive the “First Time Clause” if the infraction is deemed weighty enough to pose a specific threat to the wellbeing of the High School campus, such as drug possession on campus or violence on campus. Such discretionary decisions can be appealed by the student to the superintendent.

Good-behavior Probation is a period during which a student can be removed from Peer Group Leadership and/or the National Honor Society for lesser offenses and can be required to check up with social workers, administrators, guidance counselors, as designated by the administration.

Rationale:

One of the primary purposes of school is to aid students along the pathway of intellectual and social maturation. Integral to this process of growth is the prospect of punishment and reward: students must learn that actions have consequences, that grades cannot be earned without diligence and positions of leadership cannot be held without sacrifice. However, in a school, dicipline is only a means to the end, because the purpose of school is to teach, not to punish. Zero tolerance justice, the official policy of Peer Group and National Honor Society, oversteps John Jay High School's goal of aiding students as they develop to become decent members of society; it shifts the education process to the discipline process and damages futures rather than guides them.

Adolescents are not children, but they are not adults either. In opportunity, we have an adult-world expanse; but in experience and perspective, we have a child-world naiveté. And in this no-man's-land between opportunity and insight, mistakes are made. A hallmark of adolescence is error, and school functions to elucidate and correct this error.

Because adolescents are not adults, and because the vocation of the student is experimentation, high school students cannot be held to standard of absolute perfection. National Honor Society and Peer Group Leadership require students to live as role models in the school and community. However, building character is a process, not a singular triumph; likewise, tarnishing character, like tarnishing metal, is not a singular act. Students ought to be judged as leaders on how they grow from past follies, because growth, in the schoolyard, is triumph.

Providing students with second chances, and puting them through a reform probation period, John Jay High School will better realize its goals of educating rather than punishing. By allowing for error and consideration, reform will occur; conversely, by removing students from important organizations, the will to reform is struck dead, and the growth that constitutes primary education stops also.

Caramoor

This is the second draft of a short story that I wrote a while back. I am a bit displeased with the results, but I've invested too much for a total overhaul. How true with life!

The guests told Walter that they felt as if they had traveled to another country when they visited his home. Perhaps what they really felt, is that they had traveled with Pizarro himself to Cajamarca, and that they had witnessed a massacre. Only in Caramoor, it was not the Incans who were slaughtered; it was time and distance and culture and everything that could die did die. So nothing that survived in the halls of the mansion could ever die anymore, for pretty things like paintings and old swords and reliefs could live for a very long time, without context or soul. One man's suffering and another's genius were owned by Walter Rosen and hung up among the ruins in the rooms and corridors, like a fantastic museum of cauterized splendor.

Read "Caramoor" here. (html)

Parting

"If you have to go away," she said, "is it absolutely necessary to kill off everything you leave behind?...Harry, why do you have to turn into a devil now?"
"I don't like to leave anything," the man said. "I don't like to leave things behind."

- Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro

I'm graduating from High School, leaving what I know, and an expanse of opportunity is born. When something is born, must something too die? Must the forest burn, for flowers to grow? Yes in 1532 in Cajamarca, yes in 1917 in St. Petersburg, and maybe here too. If it is not dying, then maybe I'll kill it, with shaking and clumsy hands, because it is just easier during the crisis of change, the ecstasy of change, to leave nothing at all behind.