Habitus

by Joshua Ellison · 01/21/10

In February, the city is filthy with almost-black snow. It drifts from the streets and overwhelms the sidewalks. Drainpipes pour water on the pavement that instantly turns to ice. No one lays down salt. In a few days, a half-dozen guys with shovels will show up, scraping away for hours without making any real progress. The passersby each have to find their own elusive footing; they try to keep themselves upright without making direct contact with the concrete. From the flat roofs, other men with shovels send the excess snow and ice hurtling downward without warning. The traffic moves incautiously through the intersections, spinning off more filth. Cars race forward, just to idle again in mid-block traffic.

But then, a black—always black—sedan or jeep will ride through, gleaming. There isn’t a speck of dirt or soot; even the tires are clean. This seems impossible when you look at the sputtering, gray Russian cars, or even the plentiful German and Japanese imports, none of which could make it a few feet without succumbing to grime. Somehow, though, these cars manage to stay pristine, unspoiled, unimpeded. They travel along their own privileged plane: above the pollution, the crowds, even the weather. Moscow is a place that won’t surrender or accommodate easily to fate, history, or nature. With a little luck and the right connections, anything can be made or unmade.

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by Olga Zondberg · 01/21/10

[This is the shortest day of the year in our neck of the woods.]

The divergence of animals, said Khlebnikov
is the result of their ability
to see God in many different ways.

If the Universe, said Hawking
was different, we still
would not notice.

From Chanel to Escape (remembered
one pretty fashion magazine)
in every year death has a different scent.

There are these people, writers
who have everything written down
the tics and the tacs
in place of numerical facsimiles

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by Yuri Slezkine · 01/21/10

I became Soviet in 1963 when the USSR beat Czechoslovakia in the World Hockey Championship on an empty-net goal by Leonid Volkov. I became Russian around the same time and for the same reason. I became exuberantly Soviet in 1964 when I joined the Octobrist (Lenin’s Grandchildren’s) League, and then again briefly in 1966 when I was admitted to the All-Union Pioneer Organization.

I became half-Jewish in 1967 when I told my father that Mishka Ryzhevskii from apartment thirteen was a Jew, and my father said, “Let me tell you something.”

I became mostly Jewish around 1968, when I became anti-Soviet. My father, who was already anti-Soviet, did not have the option of becoming Jewish.

I was officially classified as Russian in 1972 when I received my internal passport (on the occasion of my sixteenth birthday). I was temporarily reclassified as Soviet in 1978 when I received my external passport (on the day I was hired by the Ministry of the Merchant Marine).

I became Swedish for a day and a half in 1978 when I borrowed the identification papers of one Gunnar Gunnarsson (place of birth Göteborg, permanent residence Boda) for the purpose of surviving a visit to the rebel-held part of Sofala Province in the People’s Republic of Mozambique.

I became a published author in 1981 when Progress Publishers printed my Portuguese translation of L.M. Maksudov’s Ideological Struggle at the Present Stage. My attempt to translate a manual on mechanical engineering for Peace Publishers was aborted due to my unfamiliarity with the subject matter.

I became Iouri Slezkine in 1981 when the Department of Visas and Permission of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR received special permission to transliterate my name into French. I was dismissed from the All-Union Union of Communist-Leninist Youth and from the Soviet Army reserve.

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by Joshua Ellison · 11/16/09

New Orleans is a floating city. There isn’t much earth beneath the street before you reach water. Suspended in its basin, between the crooked embrace of the river and Lake Pontchartrain, leading out to the Gulf of Mexico, New Orleans is always moving and adjusting, sinking and shifting. The sidewalks and streets have been stretched mercilessly; they tilt and crack and bulge from all the changes underneath.

So many different people have laid hands on this place—empires, immigrants, slaves, and their descendants. Their imprints are still everywhere, on an unforgiving terrain that pushes back against human intervention. It’s impossible to even know what direction the city is moving in, when you try to account for all the complicated equations of past and future, culture and environment.

When Umberto Eco visited New Orleans, he saw “one of the few places that American civilization had not remade, flattened, replaced.” Where most cities are functional and orderly, New Orleans is lyrical. Just read the street signs: there’s the counterflow of Piety and Desire, parallel streets in opposite directions. Humanity intersects with both Arts and Music. Race meets Religious not far from the river. It’s a place where the imagination can float, too.

Making sense of New Orleans is a constant negotiation between time and space, expansion and limitation. History moves in its ways, the landscape shifts too, and New Orleans is their fluid sum.

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by Andrei Codrescu · 09/23/08

The Mold Song

it was one of a kind
the earliest map of the united states
it was hanging right here on the wall
the mold ate it all
in one gulp the mold ate it all
and these books the only copies
of newton franklin galileo
and this shakespeare folio
the mold ate them like they were candy
look at the satisfied grinning mold
stretching from floor to floor
like a fifties horror movie mold
not to speak of this stack of cash
I shoulda never kept around
not a zero left in the whole stack
look at me I’m growing old
I’m giving myself to the mold
it’s some kind of lesson
it’s some kind of horror story
keep collecting paper things
I knew that one day I’d be sorry
I’m not wearing a mask
I’m not wearing any gloves
I feel stupid I feel cold
I’m giving myself to the mold
halloween and suicide rolled in one
I shoulda sold I shoulda sold
only in new orleans only in new orleans
halloween and suicide all in one
a man of means

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by Rodger Kamenetz · 09/21/08

From the roof that I had before Katrina, I have only one slate left.

It’s a jagged grey oblong, about the size of my head, thin and sharp at the edges. It flakes easily; after a hundred years, this old slate has lost most of its integrity. It’s a slate that’s been written upon: a history of wind and sun and rain. It protected me and my family, and the families before us who lived here. It was a roof over our heads.

There was a time when I had piles and piles of these slates. I was a mad collector in the months after Katrina and stacked them around my porch and in the crawlspace underneath my house. Every time I heard the shovels scraping a roof in the neighborhood, I ran over to see if I could get the Mexican guys to save some slates for me. It was always Mexican guys working on roofs in New Orleans after Katrina, which is a sad fact that people make into politics: the old Creole craftsmen who built this city by hand and pride hardly exist any more, the men who passed on specific knowledge of the wood and stone and plaster. The Mexicans came in to do the roofs, and they worked quickly and just slid the slates off the roof with shovels. As the slates cascaded to the dumpster below in a cloud of gray dust and fracture, you could feel your heart breaking with it, and the sound when they hit was like disaster all over again. But when I explained I would pay fifty cents a slate, and once they got the idea from my rusty Spanish, they seemed to like it a lot. In Mexico people understand materials and recycling and the old ways.

I became a militant slate preservationist. I didn’t really understand why, since our obsessions only look like obsessions in retrospect. It just seemed like the only thing to do. We hadn’t had much water damage at my house, but the wind had torn through the neighborhood pretty badly—130 miles an hour, some said. An amputated branch of the sycamore in front of the house shot over the driveway like a white rocket and somehow landed high up in the ginger fronds. And the wind ripped off a bunch of the hundred-year-old slates on my roof, leaving the attic exposed to wind, rain, and ferocious winged termites. I lost a lot of sleep over those slates—for me there was something fundamentally wrong about a house with an open roof. Every minute that went by, I felt more damaged.

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by Habitus · 09/16/08

For musician and historian Ned Sublette, New Orleans is a city of global significance that is also “an alternative American history in itself.” His book The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square, is a painstaking and imaginative recreation of the city’s first hundred years. By carefully decoding the influences that shaped it, he has created a vivid portrait of the city we know today.

Sublette approaches the history of New Orleans largely though its music, and he hears in the city an expansive dialogue that reaches back to Europe and Africa and across the Americas. “The whole history of New Orleans is Diasporas,” he tells us—a place where myriad cultural inputs were preserved, integrated, and exported to the world.

Some people call New Orleans the least American city. Your book illustrates that the city is deeply singular, but also profoundly connected to the history and culture of the nation, the region, and the world.

I think it’s the most American city. It’s as fundamental to the history of the nation as Philadelphia or Boston or New York. New Orleans is the logical outcome of competing international forces, meeting in a peculiar geography.

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by Habitus · 02/14/08

This interview—which has never appeared before in English—was conducted in 1984 by Professor of Philosophy Tomás Abraham, associate professors Alejandro Rússovich and Enrique Marí, and their students in the Psychology Department of the University of Buenos Aires.

RÚSSOVICH: We begin. What can we say about…?

BORGES: In the beginning, b’reshit bara elohim, no?

RÚSSOVICH: B’reshit bara elohim et hashamayin ve et ha’aretz, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

No, the Gods created.

RÚSSOVICH: Ah, “Gods”; elohim is plural. Borges knows more. [laughter]

ABRAHAM: Today, philosophy invites poetry to a discussion. We have a poet…

Supposedly.

ABRAHAM: A supposed poet, then, of whom we can ask what relationships exist between philosophy and poetry.

Sometime ago I said that philosophy is a fantastic branch of study. But I didn’t mean anything against philosophy, on the contrary; it could be said, for example, that it was exactly the same [as poetry] maintaining that the syntax is from two distinct places, [and] that philosophy deserves a place in the order of aesthetics. If you look at theology or philosophy as fantastic literature, you’ll see that they are much more ambitious than the poets. For example, what works of poetry are comparable with something as astonishing as Spinoza’s god: an infinite substance endowed with infinite attributes?

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by Habitus · 02/05/08

Osvaldo Golijov, an Argentine Jew with a global imagination, is one of the most celebrated composers in the world today. The New York Times suggests that Golijov is “profoundly shifting the geography of the classical music world, dumping the old Eurocentric map.” He has crafted his own vernacular from his experiences in Argentina, Israel, and the United States—along with his learned grasp of the Western tradition and an expansive ear for pop and folk sounds from around the world.

In 2000, he was commissioned to create a Latin American interpretation of the Passion of Jesus Christ. Golijov’s La Pasión según San Marcos, based on the Gospel of Mark, boldly recasts the story of Christ’s death with Cuban drums, flamenco guitars, Brazilian dance and percussion, cantorial melodies, a choir and soloists singing Spanish and Aramaic texts. The piece ends with a melancholy setting of the Kaddish. It’s both an inward turn and an empathetic leap from a composer who has taken what he calls a “step towards the Other.”

You said in an interview once that you saw music as a way to “map the human soul in sound.” Is Argentina at the center of your personal map?

Argentina is pretty much at the center, but I don’t know if it’s the center-center. [laughter] It’s interesting, because I don’t know if the map even has a center or not.

That’s true. It might not.

For every artist there is a center, which is childhood. And Argentina was my childhood. But it’s not necessarily the Argentina of a Christian kid, who is part of the majority there. My Argentina also has the memory of my great-grandfather, who dressed as if he had never left Romania. A lot of my experiences were specific to the Jewish immigrant community. It might be the Argentina of Borges, but it’s not necessarily the Argentina of the majority.

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by Joshua Ellison · 02/05/08

It’s winter in Buenos Aires, one of the coldest ever. This is a port city in the southern hemisphere—low and humid—and the winds here have a raw, sudden sting. People look restless. If they are outdoors, their heads are down. Most activity has been driven inside. All the life that usually takes place on the street has been corralled into narrow spaces. Noise floods out through the openings in every border or barrier.

The city is always moving, almost compulsively, but it’s also breathlessly studying its own reflection, taking its own pulse. The very existence of the city seems to depend on the psychic exertion—urgent, anxious, and loving—of the people who live here. As if the whole metropolis might vanish if their attention flagged, even briefly. The city has to be conjured anew every day through sheer resolve.

Trying to understand Buenos Aires feels like trying to master the human heart. This is not a place that can be learned in the usual ways: it’s too fragile, too volatile, cobbled together from too many unlike parts. The journalist Jacobo Timerman writes, “Argentina…does not yet exist. It must be created.” Over the generations, Argentines have shaped the city out of desire and discomfort, and these heavy emotions seem as real as all the towers and avenues and parks.

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