An Ode to the Squat

There is simply no other exercise, and certainly no machine, that produces the level of central nervous system activity, improved balance and coordination, skeletal loading and bone density enhancement, muscular stimulation and growth, connective tissue stress and strength, psychological demand and toughness, and overall systemic conditioning than the correctly performed full squat.

So what else might there be to say? To offer just another note of agreement would be pompous; more to the point, I’m not sure I’m qualified to offer straightforward affirmation of Mark Rippetoe‘s quote above. Still, perhaps a few words about my personal experience with the King of Lifts won’t be remiss.

The squat, like the deadlift and the press, is an elementary lift. In the deadlift, you pick a weight off the floor; in the press you raise a weight above your head; in the squat you put a weight on your back, squat down with it, and stand back up. Simple. (Note: a correctly executed squat requires proper training and much attention to form.) The loading of the lifter’s body frame with the weight and the nature of the movement–squat down, stand up–contribute to the lift’s systemic impact (as eloquently noted in the note above). Moreover, in a squat you can ‘move’ more weight, more frequently than any other lift; deadlift payloads invariably tend to be higher, but in a week of lifting, almost nobody can deadlift as many times as they can squat.

But the real appeal of the squat arguably lies in the experience it provides for the lifter. While the deadlift and the press are elementary movements and as such are deeply satisfying to execute because of their intrinsic simplicity, the squat fascinates because it adds the element of intimidation to the movement of the weight. In the squat, the barbell threatens to crush, to drive down, to oppress. In standing back up with the weight, the lifter resists and triumphs.

Thus is the archetype at the heart of the squat established: you place a load on your back that could make your knees buckle and your back crumple if the body’s frame were not stiffened and prepared, and you move that load back up to where it can no longer threaten you so. And then you walk it back into the rack.

The lifter experiences apprehension as he steps out from the rack and sets up, well aware that he is about to make a ‘descent’ from which he might not ‘come back up;’ the nomenclature of the ‘hole’, the bottom position of the squat, acts as a vivid reminder of this possibility; they are often the things that we cannot climb back out of. As the lifter emerges from the ‘hole’ with a heavy load he hits the midpoint of the ascent, where the barbell’s formerly-seemingly-quick upward ascent slows. The moment of truth is at hand; can this barrier be transcended? The lifter soon finds out for himself. A few seconds later, the barbell is on the rack, and the lifter steps away, breathing just a little harder, amazed yet again, at how the simple act of moving iron through space can be physically and mentally inspirational.

Newt Gingrich Extends The Republican Primaries: Hallelujah!

Like wildfire, news of Newt ‘The Philandering Professor’ Gingrich’s victory in the South Carolina primary has spread through the arid grasslands of the American political landscape, bringing relief to those of us who are still grumpily and bitterly kvetching about being denied Sarah Palin’s candidacy in this election year (Mixed metaphors are called for when it comes to this election; all is befuddled.) I had declined to cancel our home cable subscription in the hope that the Patron Saint of Hockey Mothers–or was it Pitbulls?–would deign to leave her Russia-observation post and descend beneath the Arctic Circle to entertain us with her bon mots on energy policy, financial reform, and educating the next generation. Alas, there was–and is–no sign of her gracious acceptance of the many beseechments her followers have sent her way to drop whatever she is doing–perhaps skinning a grizzly pelt or two–and jump into the electoral fray. But now there is hope for those of us who, rather grimly, had been anticipating an election season that would be dominated by the dreary, coiffed, and relentlessly chameleon-like Mitt Romney, who had pulled off the rather amazing trick of presenting us with a candidate that is equal parts management-consultancy-mumbo-jumbo-spouter and the-modern-equivalent-of-a-flat-earther.

While the comedy quotient of the Republican primary race declined rather precipitously after Herman ‘The Original Niner‘ Cain dropped out, it has now been significantly elevated by Gingrich’s Revival, and by Santorum’s Surge. (I used the word ‘revival’ advisedly: apparently, 44% of born-again or evangelical Christians in South Carolina voted for Newt.) As Gingrich showed in the South Carolina debate–and indeed, through his political career–no one does hysterical hypocrisy better than him; the boosting of his electoral fortunes prolongs his presence in the race, and watching him go up against Rick ‘Dan Savage Loves Me, He Really Does‘ Santorum, Ron Paul and Mitt Romney can only be awaited with the sort of delicious anticipation that was formerly reserved for the Seinfeld Finale.

So my glee at this primary result is not just because Gingrich survives and endures. Rather, it is supplemented by the awareness of the identity of his opponents in the Republican primaries. A primary season that has already delivered trainloads of fodder to the Stewart-Colbert combine deserves to run long; premature termination would be cruel and unusual punishment for all of us. Legislative logjams have been our staple diet for too long; we want, and deserve political comedy now. Yes, much hilarity is promised when the eventual Republican candidate goes up against Obama; but really, why should we be made to wait that long?

So, please, if the slightest part of you feels any compassion for the American political spectator–not participant, for our exclusion from the political process is well-nigh complete–then join me in applauding Gingrich’s persistence in the Republican primaries. To (mis)quote the Great Russian Political Theorist Aleksandr I. Lebed, if we are to be screwed in this particular prison cell, they might as well change the channel to the Comedy Network.

(I am well aware that the joke will be on me were Gingrich to be elected President this November. But being the butt-end of a joke comes easily to one confronted by a cartel of political monopolies.)

Occupy Wall Street And The Police: Why So Estranged?

Last year, as OWS kicked off, and as New York’s Finest (and later California’s) began their usual heavy-handed crackdown on any dissent that might threaten the ruling classes, I was struck by the absurdity of it all. Once again, the plutocratic class had found a sub-class of workers–underpaid and overworked–who ostensibly should have been in sympathy with protesters of those economic and political realities that conspired to keep them in a state of perpetual economic and political subjugation, and had them do the dirty work of repressing them. Once again, a comfortable protective barrier had been built around the privileged enclaves of the rich and fatuous, manned and patrolled by those whose best interests lay in dismantling it. The best and most enduring political parlor trick was on display again, and it didn’t seem to have lost its effectiveness over the years.

No matter how long one theorizes about it, to see the game in action, to see its visceral absurdity on display is something else. There they are, the working class sons and daughters of working class men and women, clubbing, gassing, and shooting (rubber bullets at UC-Riverside, anyone?) those that have taken up cudgels on their behalf, those whose struggles, if successful, would ensure the clubbers, shooters, and gassers would be politically and economically empowered, and perhaps be able to ensure a better life for their future generations. Five months after OWS kicked off, five months after discourse about economic inequality has bubbled up in possibly more prominent spaces and forums than ever before, there is no sign America’s currently serving police have shown any inclination to hear, pay attention, and possibly join, a political struggle in their best interests.

Tragedy, farce, or some combination thereof, I think.

Last October, when I joined several thousand others in marching through Wall Street and its surrounding confines, I would often yell out to the wary and skeptical New York City policemen that stood close by, “What was your last contract like?” or “You should be marching with us” or “Wall Street won’t stand up for you” and so on. I’m not sure if any policemen heard me or cared. But that’s no way to be heard, of course. The need for communication with the police, for outreach directed at them, for the discourse surrounding OWS to be funneled directly at the police, written somehow, in a form that makes it relevant to their lived realities is greater than ever.

In a recent interview with 3AM, Brian Leiter said,

An important strategic question for the Occupy movement concerns the police. The police are, themselves, members of the 99%, indeed the 99.9%. Police labor unions remain strong, despite a three-decade long campaign against labor unions in the United States. As unionized workers, the interests of police lie with the Occupy Movement, not the plutocrats. On the day the police refuse to clear “Occupy” protesters from their sites, that will be the day the game is up for the plutocracy in America. It would behoove the Occupy activists, indeed any opponents of the plutocracy, to remember this.

This is close to being as absolutely and totally correct as any contemporary political statement could be.

FOSS Licenses: Hackers As Legal Maestros

Over at Concurring Opinions, Biella Coleman writes a very good post on her anthropological work on hackers. In it Biella states what many of us who have looked at the world of free and open source software think:

[M]any developers are nimble legal thinkers, which helps explain how they have built, in a relatively short time period, a robust alternative body of legal theory and laws

I don’t fully agree with the reasons that Biella gives for why this might be so (i.e., similarities between programming and the writing of laws), but I don’t doubt for a second that this is true. Anyone that comes into contact with free and open source software (FOSS) licensing, and with the rich, vibrant discourse that permeates the FOSS community about about copyright and patent law will know that many hackers know the law really well, and they know how to hack the law to make it work for them.

So I found Orin Kerr’s response curiously skeptical:

Can you give a few examples of how the group you have studied are “nimble legal thinkers”? And what are the “robust alternative body of legal theory and laws” that you mention? I think I can say I’ve been somewhat near this space for a few years and I wouldn’t reach that conclusion: I’ve encountered a lot of naive and self-serving legal claims over the years, but not a lot that I would call nimble or robust.

I think the replies in the comments space address Kerr adequately but I’d like to throw in my tuppence in any case. And I’ll do so by talking about what I know best: FOSS licensing.

First, I think FOSS licenses present an alternative body of legal constructs that show how within a political economy that was increasingly becoming proprietary and using copyright, patent and trade secret law to lock down its content (copyright executables; patent algorithms; treat code as trade secrets), an alternative zone of creation can be created, which can flourish, be viable, and be richly productive of more and better code. (Look for instance, at how FOSS licenses solve the problem of protecting their projects from patent infringement lawsuits, and how they solve the problems inherent in multiple-authorship of a body of code).

Second, as for being “nimble” thinkers, I think copyleft licensing is a work of genius–hats off, Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen–and represents, in my mind, one of the cleverest backs to the legal system that I’ve seen. The GPL–in all its incarnations–reveals a deep understanding of the law, and how best to utilize it to bring about desired ends–solving the problem of non-reciprocity that could create a tragedy of the commons–within an existent legal framework (the GPL’s  protection of the commons gives it a practical and ethical advantage over other FOSS licenses). Read GPL V3 and look at how cleverly it addresses the challenges that made it’s release necessary; it’s “nimble” all right. Any lawyer that reads the GPL, understands it, and gets what it is trying to do, should be struck by the sheer cleverness of how copyright law can be made to serve ends that might not look like its original intended ones, but actually turn out to be in great resonance with them.

Third, I don’t think it is any exaggeration to say that a great deal of thinking about how artistic content in the new political economy of the digital world could be distributed and regulated in a way that is respectful of artists and consumers’ interests alike, has been inspired by FOSS licensing. (Creative Commons licensing is a very good example of this; that body of licenses presents an alternative way to deal with artistic content today; it isn’t perfect, but it’s a start, and it got started by FOSS licenses). Sometimes I wonder indeed, if anyone talking about the new digital economy and how to legally configure hasn’t been inspired by FOSS licensing and practices somehow.

When it comes to being “self-serving,” I’d suggest that there is a general tendency in the legal academy to simply not admit that law can be “done” by non-lawyers, that a body of rules built up over a period of time can be “hacked” by others than them.

Jaron Lanier and the Web’s “False Ideals”

Jaron Lanier’s Op-Ed in the New York Times today is a classic piece of muddled Lanier writing that allows him to train his sights, yet again, on his favorite bugaboo and strawman: ‘free content.’ And in persisting with this notion of the demand for ‘free content’ being the true threat to the ‘Net, Lanier shows that despite having successfully hoodwinked some mainstream ‘Net pundits into appointing him the Voice of the Digital Masses, he remains as clueless as ever.

In the first three paragraphs, Lanier dutifully establishes his good-guy credentials: he is against the SOPA. Phew. Now what? Well, he needs to point out that opposition to the SOPA has gone over-the-top. That’s always a good one: preaching moderation in political action to those confronted by opponents not bothered by moderation. This switch is achieved quite deftly with the classic Yes-But manoeuver:

The legislation has indeed included draconian remedies in various drafts, so I join my colleagues in criticizing the bills. But our opposition has become so extreme that we are doing more harm than good to our own cause. Those rare tech companies that have come out in support of SOPA are not merely criticized but barred from industry events and subject to boycotts. We, the keepers of the flame of free speech, are banishing people for their speech. The result is a chilling atmosphere, with people afraid to speak their minds.

I have to be honest. My reaction to this paragraph is: Are You F***ing Kidding Me? Who exactly, in this atmosphere of “Pirates are ruining America and driving artists out of work” is afraid to speak their mind? Reaction to the SOPA threatens free speech because one sub-community has decided to unfavorably norm behavior that could be threatening to its existence?

Lanier then moves on to a worthy target: proprietary social networking and its creation of walled-off spaces within the ‘Net. Bully for him. But Lanier’s analysis of why this has come about (and why it is not Facebook’s fault. Really!) segues from

We, the idealists, insisted that information be able to flow freely online, which meant that services relating to information, instead of the information itself, would be the main profit centers

to

The adulation of “free content” inevitably meant that “advertising” would become the biggest business in the open part of the information economy

Pardon me if I’m confused. What does ‘information [being] able to flow freely online’ have to do with ‘free content’? The former is about open standards, free–as in free speech, not free beer–and open source software, non-proprietary protocols, network neutrality and so forth. What does that have to do with ‘free content’?

Lanier insists on enhancing a confusion that proponents, not the opponents, of the SOPA would like to perpetuate: that the battle for the ‘Net is between those who want content to be paid for, and those who want to mooch. It has never been that; it has always been between those who want to export wholesale the economic and legal machinery of the offline world to a domain that requires that the foundations of that machinery be inspected and reconfigured before application.

Lanier, after critiquing the notion of a walled-off ‘Net, then returns to displaying his conceptual confusions:

This belief in “free” information is blocking future potential paths for the Internet. What if ordinary users routinely earned micropayments for their contributions?….under the current terms of debate that idea can barely be whispered.

I hate to break the news to Lanier, but precisely those that want to keep information ‘free’–free as in free speech, not free beer– are the ones that talk about how alternative models of payment could serve as the foundations of a new economy.

Lanier concludes with a dramatic sigh:

To my friends in the “open” Internet movement, I have to ask: what did you think would happen? We in Silicon Valley undermined copyright to make commerce become more about services instead of content — more about our code instead of their files. The inevitable endgame was always that we would lose control of our own personal content, our own files. We haven’t just weakened Hollywood and old-fashioned publishers. We’ve weakened ourselves.

And there we have it again. Now Lanier is back to talking about the ‘open’ ‘Net. Well, I had no idea that insisting on open standards, free–as in free speech–and open source software, and networking non-proprietary protocols and open standards would undermine copyright. This will certainly be news to people in the free and open source software world who, by their innovative licensing, have actually artfully employed copyright law to ensure their community’s flourishing.

Frankly, I find it amazing that someone like Lanier, who is so completely befuddled by the basic issues concerning the ‘Net, has access to forums like the NYT.

Fiction, Non-Fiction, Essays, Posterity

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post disagreeing with Katha Pollitt’s claim that (roughly), Even the best non-fiction writers only get read by future generations if they are lucky enough to have written some quality best-selling fiction. Pollitt had referred to “columnists and essayists and book reviewers” in her original post, but in my response, I broadened the category to “non-fiction.”

That post triggered some interesting responses. Corey Robin wrote in to say that he disagreed with the small list of “essayists” I had generated (while agreeing with my disagreement with Pollitt):

Arnold, Barzun, Burke, and Bacon are not known and remembered primarily for their essays; they have other bodies of work that we mainly remember them for. You’re right about Montaigne, Johnson, and Sontag, and I’d also throw in Hazlitt, Chesterton, maybe Benjamin, and James Baldwin.

Another commenter, Lauren Hahn, wrote,

The examples you give of essayists who did not write fiction are problematic. Ben Jonson, of course, wrote brilliant plays (Volpone!) and poetry as well as essays. Matthew Arnold wrote brilliant poems. Hitchens did not write plays or poems.

Later, Corey and I also got into an interesting Twitter dialogue with Jeff Sharlet; Katha Pollitt herself showed up to clarify her initial claim (with some interesting examples; do read the comment); and later, Mukul Kesavan suggested, using Borges and the standard New York Review of Books piece as examples, that Pollitt’s claim was correct:

[W]e can be certain that the generic ‘literary’ essay that is the stock-in-trade of the NYRB and its imitators, has the shelf-life of fresh produce. Or fish.

These discussions threw up some interesting points of contention:

  1. The distinction between “essayists” and other “non-fiction writers”; I started too broadly but this was inevitable, given that many writers who wrote essays also wrote other material: philosophical and political tracts most notably. Consider Barzun, who has written many “general” essays but is a historian of ideas and culture and a philosopher of education. Or Burke, who I had down as an essayist, is perhaps most straightforwardly considered a political theorist and philosopher. (Incidentally, in response to Hahn above, I would say that my examples were intended to be not of writers who confined themselves to essays but rather those that we remember primarily for their essays; Sontag, as I noted, wrote fiction too, but I’d be surprised if anyone remembers her writing for that reasons).

    This disagreement in general suggests the category “essayists” is too narrow, and “non-fiction” is too broad when it comes to picking the appropriate target for comparison with “fiction” in reckoning how well one’s writing will endure. I think if a comparison between “non-fiction” and “fiction” is made, the case is hopelessly muddled. But even restricting the comparison to “essays” and “fiction” is hard. Because I don’t think we have great agreement on who an “essayist” is or what an “essay” is. Is this defined by subject matter, writing style, length of piece, forum of publication, or something else? “Essay” is a vague predicate when applied to works of prose, and our categorization of writers as “essayists” is an exercise in classification that will always reveal boundary cases that don’t quite fit in. 

    I suspect “essay” is often reserved now for a piece of prose that is intensely personal (i.e., there is an element of autobiography in it); even the quasi-philosophical piece can become an “essay” then if the writer makes explicit that his view is not from “nowhere” but from his personal standpoint. I’d be interested to hear from folks on what they would include in the category and what they would leave out, and how a line would be drawn between different kinds of writing so that we could more accurately classify writers as “essayists” or something else.

    I think if nothing else, this discussion made me realize the original comparison between different kinds of writers’ ability to earn posterity’s recognition is not a very interesting one if “essayists” is restricted too narrowly.

  2. The “popular” and “serious” distinction. In the discussion that Robin, Sharlet and I had on Twitter, the central disagreement was about my rather loosely-worded claim that “Well, fiction is always more likely to reach a broader market than the non-fiction a writer puts out.” Sharlet contested this point, and he was right. The implicit suggestion in this claim of mine was that “fiction” is somehow “popular”, while “non-fiction” is “serious” and the greater accessibility to markets comes about because of the “pop” nature of fiction. This conflation of “fiction” with “popular fiction” was careless on my part. Sharlet later suggested that by my examples, I was attempting to point out “exceptions to the rule” but he’d suggest rather, that “nonfiction is the new rule.” When I asked if this meant that in the modern context, “nonfiction writers and fiction writers stand equal chance of access to markets of readers”, Sharlet replied, “my understanding is except for a few stars, nonfiction far outsells fiction now.”

    The question then remains: What kind of non-fiction? Essays? Reportage? Political tracts? Literary criticism? Another interesting question this prompts is why this might be the case now. Have fiction markets become saturated? Is there an expressed preference for the consumption of “non-fiction” now? Have bloggers had something to do with this?

  3. Why might it be the case that fiction ensures greater enduring fame? Now, I think the original discussion, and the examples of Montaigne, Johnson and Sontag, show that even with “essayists” there are some counterexamples to Pollitt’s claim. But why might Pollitt and Kesavan think that fiction ensures greater fame? The facile answer to this is that fiction is not a creature of its time in the way that essays might be. Some fiction can speak to universal themes that span space, time and cultures. But other pieces of fiction are, of course, hopelessly parochial in those same dimensions. And when one considers the category “essays” to include political tracts or philosophical speculation, those can often cease to be confined by temporal boundaries as well. It isn’t a conceptual feature of fiction that it will always be less parochial.

    But where fiction does come off best is in comparison with those pieces that are necessarily creatures of their time: journalistic pieces (see my post on “Essays and Expiry Dates”); book reviews; some kinds of travel writing (not all; see for instance travel writing that has now become an important historical sources in its own right); topical political commentary (like the tedious modern pieces of election analysis).

    In general, I’m not sure that a general sort of claim can be made about how well some kinds of writing endure based on their fictionality as a parameter. Rather, when it comes to assessing enduring fame or a place in posterity, there is only one way to do it: keep checking over time. In Law and Literature, Richard Posner suggested that coming up with necessary and sufficient conditions for a work to be judged a “classic” was a doomed exercise and that the best way to exercise that judgment was to see how long it continued to be read. I agree.

John Wycliffe And Academic Freedom

I’m an academic; quite understandably, one of my concerns is often academic freedom. Mine, and that of my colleagues. My employer, the City University of New York, has had a mixed relationship with academic freedom over the years (this ambivalent attitude was perhaps best on display during the Tony Kushner flap last year). But my intention in writing this post is not to dig through CUNY’s record on academic freedom. It is, rather, to note a historical instance of a university standing by an academic’s right to pursue inquiry into whichever direction it took him.

The university: Oxford. The academic: John Wycliffe. In 1372, he had become a doctor of theology at Oxford (he had been Master at Balliol in 1361). He was aged fifty then, and still orthodox. His move to heresy was prompted, wisely, by his disgust at Churchmen who grew richer and more prosperous while the poor continued to sink into abject poverty. His attacks on the papal structure of power was thus, primarily political and moral. But his doctrinal objections soon took center stage. By 1376, he had started preaching/teaching (amongst other things) that the clergy ought not to have property as a) property was the result of sin and b) Christ and the Apostles had no property. He was soon in hot water with Gregory XI, who condemned eighteen theses in his lectures. Wycliffe was duly ordered to appear to be tried by a tribunal of bishops, but Oxford refused to admit the Pope had any jurisdiction over its teachers.

Oxford’s defense of Wycliffe continued as he advanced even more controversial theses in the following years: the King is God’s vicar; bishops are subject to him; (after the Papal Schism) the Pope is Antichrist and acceptance of the Donation of Constantine made all subsequent popes apostates; and lastly, that transubstantiation was a deceit. He also refused to condemn the Wat Tyler-led Peasants Revolt of 1381. Most famously, Wycliffe translated the Vulgate into English.

Given this record, it is almost beyond belief that Wycliffe did not suffer a messier end to his life, which came in 1384. (His remains did suffer though: the Council of Constance ordered them dug up and burnt in 1415; the orders were carried out in 1428.) Part of the reason is that the University of Oxford defended him for as long and as vigorously as was possible; Wycliffe also enjoyed some popular support from the masses and from the King’s mother. This support was mixed of course: Oxford’s vice-chancellor followed some papal direction in subjecting Wycliffe to a form of house arrest (a modern version might involve a denial of internet access, I suppose) but he himself was soon subjected to the same treatment for doing so. And in 1381, Oxford’s Chancellor declared some of Wycliffe’s pronouncements heretical. But the University’s provision of a forum for him to lecture and promulgate his doctrines through the storm that engulfed him was always a significant factor in his visibility and his ability to reach those that most needed him.

It is worth keeping that in mind every time we see a pusillanimous university administrator back down from defending its faculty’s right to research and teach as freely as possible.

Source: Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, Unwin: London, 1988 Reprint.

Essays And Expiry Dates

My post yesterday on reportage and war porn, in which I quoted from a 1999 essay by Sebastian Junger, prompted a thought related to my December post on fiction and non-fiction and writing for posterity: How well do reportage-style essays hold up to the demands of time? (I ask this question as someone who, having made the claim that non-fiction will endure just as well as fiction in ensuring fame, is now a) dealing with the broadness of the category “non-fiction” and all the confusion it created in discussions surrounding that post and b) trying to get clearer on what kind of non-fiction will endure best over time and be granted posterity’s acknowledgement)

In the post linked to above, I had, in responding to Katha Pollitt, said,

“columnists” and “book reviewers” are more inclined to be creatures of their age who risk rapid obscurity unless they write more substantive and possibly popular work.

Junger’s essays, of course, are not columns or book reviews. But neither are they extended meditations on philosophical, literary or cultural subjects; rather, they are long-form journalistic pieces written for venues like Vanity Fair, Harpers, Men’s Journal, Outside, and National Geographic Adventure; other than the essays on wildfires and fire-fighting, they were written to cover topical hot-spots of human and political conflict: Kosovo, Kashmir, Sierra Leone, Cyprus. The wildfires and whale-hunting essays belong to the kind made popular by forums like Outside magazine; the standard theme in this kind of writing is “man-against-nature revealing the human spirit in all its wonderfully varied cussedness.” (Man-Against-Nature as a theme is, I think, more likely to endure and age better than Man-Against-Man-In-A-Particular-Time-And-Place.)

In reportage essays, the expectation is that the traveling reporter will send back news but also background; the reporter will inform, update, ruminate, and crucially, prognosticate. The last part carries the most potential to date the essay; if fate deals the writer a cruel hand, readers in the future are likely to be struck–and turned off–by the silliness of the prognostication. In any case, such essays by virtue of being extended reports or news, are very much captive to that particular time. They are meant to be read soon; they are meant to make contemporary understandings of a ‘trending’ subject more extensive and thoughtful; but they are extremely unlikely to make for useful or illuminating reading down the line. The backgrounders in the essays, by virtue of space limitations, tend to be superficial; indeed, they have to be, if the essays are to maintain their readability in the intended forum. If you want a detailed history that underwrites Kosovo, Kashmir or Cyprus, you’d be an idiot to look for it in the pages of a Vanity Fair or Harpers essay. (In Junger’s essays, I enjoyed the material on Cyprus the most, and I suspect part of that was because of the collaboration that that required Junger and Scott Anderson to be placed in, and reporting from, the Greek and Turkish portions of Cyprus so that a contrast between their respective narratives could be brought out).

When it comes to reportage style history, the longer form will work better; the extended, improved, and more likely-to-endure version of this style of writing is perhaps the book-length reportage project like David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest (which, interestingly enough, started as an essay for Harpers).

Much more to be said on this. But later.

Sebastian Junger, AK-47 Bullets, and War Porn

Reporters on war’s frontlines often produce great investigative journalism (this was truer in the days before embedded reporters.) They also, sometimes inadvertently, sometimes not, produce “war porn,” writing that vividly, graphically, sometimes almost joyfully, details the carnage of war and weaponry, of organized violence, and the men who live and die by its rules. The newspaper correspondent, his prose awestruck by the power and glory of the mechanized apparatus of war, and sometimes by the uniformed men who operate it, is almost a cliche now. But even the presumably more sober long-form journalist, committed to writing more ruminative essays for longer-term consumption, can produce descriptions of war that succumb to the temptation to produce war porn.

The appeal of such writing, we are told, is that the writer takes us into places we are reluctant to visit; through his eyes we bear witness to that which we might find unbearable. And our praise for the writer is as much an acknowledgement of his epistolary skills as it is his of his courage in exposing himself to the gore and guts that he enables us to vicariously experience. But part of the writing’s appeal is precisely in catering to a particular kind of fantasy, entertained by a sensibility that finds in war moments of exultation and fierce joy. And nothing better stokes such passions than descriptions of the machinery of war. Such writing must revel in technical detail, all the while making clear the relevance of that detail to the damage inflicted on human beings.

Here is a classic example, taken from Sebastian Junger’s 1999 essay, The Forensics of War, (originally published in Vanity Fair, and reprinted in the collection, Fire, published by WW Norton in 2011), which discusses the war crimes investigations and trials that followed the Serbian massacres in Kosovo. Writing of mass killings by shooting, Junger informs us of the damage caused by an AK-47 bullet:

[A] round from an AK-47 assault rifle leaves the muzzle of the gun at twenty-three hundred feet per second, twice the speed of sound. When it hits a person, the density of the tissue forces the round to yaw to one side until it is traveling sideways or even backward. Shock waves ripple through the tissue and create a cavity that can be as much as eleven times the size of the bullet. The cavity lasts only a few thousandths of a second, but the shock waves that created it can shred organs that the bullet never even touches. In head wounds the temporary cavity is particularly devastating because the skull–being rigid–can respond to the sudden deformation only by bursting. If the gun barrel is actually touching the victim, rapidly expanding gases inside the barrel get trapped in the wound and blow blood and tissue back out. It is safe to assume that some of the killers in Studenica walked away covered in the people they killed.

I do not mean, by providing this excerpt from Junger’s writing, to suggest that he was consciously trying to titillate. Rather, I’m suggesting that the temptation to do so is always present when writing about war and weaponry, because, I think, the writer knows a thing or two about his readers, about his subject, and about the perennial fascination it exerts on our imagination.

Walking and Reading

We all know the ability to walk and chew gum at the same time is a rare talent. But what about walking and reading? This seems a rather more mundane ability, if the number of New Yorkers that indulge in the act of simultaneous perambulation and literary consumption is any indicator. This city’s sidewalks are broad and pedestrian-friendly, and thus, indulgent of the mindfully-distracted stroller, one that covers blocks by the dozen, all the while consuming pages by the mile. If the tourist in New York is easily detected by the upward craned neck, the resident is easily spotted by the insouciant burying of face in tome. While I am normally extremely intolerant of the pedestrian that is distracted by the smartphone–texting while walking seems to inspire a particularly over-the-top reaction from me–I am far more indulgent of the mobile reader; I think most New Yorkers are too.

There are variants, of course. Book-reading while walking is far more common than newspaper- or magazine reading, for instance. I’ve never seen schoolkids stroll down a sidewalk while cramming for exams. I have though, seen graduate students walk back to their apartments from the subway station while finishing off journal articles. And I have, many a time, caught in the middle of a page, a paragraph, or a sentence, as the subway pulls up at the station, simply stood up, book in hand, walked out, and resumed reading. Till an appropriate point for interruption suggests itself; I have never quite managed to muster up the courage required to walk all the way home from my current station; that journey involves six crossings, and I simply wouldn’t dare.

For my money, the best public and collective display of walking while reading I’ve witnessed took place in my boarding school years. Then, just before year-end exam time, the school’s main athletic field would feature dozens of blazer-and-tie-clad schoolboys, each carrying a textbook, diligently marking time and laps as they walked, face immersed in a soon-to-be-turned page, each desperately seeking to imbibe as much of its wisdom before the moment of recapitulation and examination presented itself. From a distance it looked like some ancient Benedictine ritual: monks navigating a monastery compound, each absorbed, perhaps, by some recent exegesis of the Scriptures. I took part in this little ritual too; I read histories of medieval India, Midsummer Night’s Dream, collections of short stories (Never a science or math texbook, of course; it was understood that those could not be consumed in this fashion, but rather, had to be “worked through” with paper and pen handy.)

What has remained common to my New-York-City-sidewalk- and schoolday acts of literary peripateticism is the giddiness caused by the appreciation of the recklessness of the act: here I am, head down, charging into the unknown, not deigning to see what lies ahead, consumed by the printed word. In a world where distraction is so commonplace, where we do not have time to stand and stare, but plenty to check email again and again, it almost feels subversive to pay so much attention to the printed word in the midst of all that is hectic and impatient.