Invisible wars...

...are wars that are one-sided because they are conducted remotely with the aid of technology; at the receiving end of such wars are the defenseless poor, who are designated "enemy combatants" against their consent or knowledge.

The "enemy combatants" die in this warfare without firing back a single shot, because missiles are launched against them when they were sleeping, or are going about their business of daily living.

While the rules of war in the 21st century hasn't changed--still heavily rigged in favor of winners and those who write the rules--the technology, and consequently, the definitions of who or what constitutes the "combatant" have.

Madira Tahir's 2013 Documentary, The Wounds of Waziristan, is about such wars and such enemy combatants. The films makes me wince, but it also makes me feel I understand; I understand why we would like to flock to imaginary landscapes and histories of a Hogwarts (of Harry Potter fame).

Because Waziristan-like realities are too hard to bear.

The only just war (in my eyes)

Is the war on poverty.

America celebrates the 50th anniversary of what I consider to be its one and only just war--the war on poverty. One of the many points of inception of America's war on poverty was the passing of the food stamp act in 1964.

Food stamps, along with Medicaid and Head Start, among others, were foremost among the anti-poverty programs primarily conceptualized during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson.

The first recipients of the food stamps program were residents of McDowell County, the poorest county in West Virginia. 

LBJ took a poverty tour of West Virginia in 1964 and was appalled to see first hand the desolation of the Appalachian region.

The Times has an interesting look at McDowell County fifty years later.

Return of the erudite vampire

Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive, has something I appreciate--adult vampires instead of the odious teenage ones (a.k.a. The Twilight Saga twits). 

Having familiarized myself with the vampire ecology in Bram Stoker's Dracula, I believe vampires to be intelligent adult creatures who have more than sex and chastity on their mind.

Count Dracula, was above everything else, an artist, an erudite adult male. Jarmusch brings back the adult erudition back to vampirism in his new film on a refreshing class of vampires who are lovers of old-world creativity and art in classic Bohemian style. 

The female lead, Eve, played by the gorgeous Tilda Swinton, packs her suitcases with classics and Adam, her male counterpart decorates his walls with pictures of famous artists. Adam and Eve's muse, quite fascinatingly is Christopher Marlowe, one of Europe's original literary outlaws who was both spymaster and erudite poet and playwright who dismissed Shakespeare as a plagiarist and populist with grave literacy problems.

Marlowe, Adam and Eve look upon the present as a present of zombies, comprised of ordinary humans who have squandered and/or lost their ability to appreciate art. 

Movie critic A.O. Scott describes Only Lovers Left Alive as "a generational protest against the zombie kids and their enablers, digitally distracted creatures who don’t appreciate the tactile, sensual glories of the old things."

Wall Street warriors

Michael Lewis, known for his insightful books on the culture and moral ecology of Wall Street, does something unusual in his new Wall Street chronicle, The Flash Boys: traces the emergence of ethics and fairness in an otherwise corrupt culture of high frequency trading.

The central figure of the book is Brad Katsuyama, who observes that the market does not work fairly for everybody as they are supposed to. Many traders have made this observation but have played along with the discrepancies primarily because their goal is to make money; what is fuzzy and is incidental to the task of making money is mostly left alone by Wall Street folks.

But Katsuyama and his ilk wear separate stripes; as Wall Street insiders they are not simply in it for the immediate financial gratification. They would like to know the big idea on which the trading culture fundamentally rests.

The big idea isn't, however, as Katsuyama finds, not an idea enshrined in the principles of fairness or justice. In his quest for the knowledge of Wall Street's underpinning, Katsuyama is joined by Ronan Ryan, a specialist in studying how electronic signals are transmitted in telecommunications, and John Schwall, who buries himself in the library obsessed with finding out the modalities of a specific kind of stock-rigging called "front running."

The trio, through pooling their interdisciplinary skills and interests, discovered that the market is severely rigged. But unlike those who would keep this knowledge a secret so as to profit from it, the three men decided to set up an alternative stock market that was immune to the kind of rigging the real stock market is vulnerable to.

What sets Katsuyama, Ryan and Schwall apart from the usual trader is their pursuit of knowledge over the acquisition of mere information; the pleasure of satisfying their curiosity triumphed the pleasure of making money. 

The fabulous thing about Capitalism, as argued by David Brooks, is that it rewards in the long run, those who pursue knowledge, or the "skull beneath the skin," as it were, over those who only would be contented to scratch the skin for whatever money they can make in the short run.

There is a moral power in which the kernel of Capitalism and the market is wrapped up, says Brooks, and those who catch on to the moral power are those who are the true champions of Capitalism.

Sleepless in dystopia

Karen Russell of the very original Swamplandia-fame, has written a dystopian novella for Atavistic Books: Sleep Donation.

The story is of a futuristic America from which sleep has been chased away by "our 24-hour news cycle, our polluted skies, crops and waterways, the bald eyeballs of our glowing devices."  

An epidemic of insomnia is not far off the horizon of possibility, particularly in the United States, where pharmaceutical corps are reaping bonanzas off classifying insomnia as a "disorder", and downplaying the fact that sleeplessness is a byproduct of a culture of hyperproductivity and deep economic insecurity.

What's innovative in Russells novella however is the concept of donating sleep. We've run a vast gamut of donations, of organs, of blood, of food, of clothes and other commodities, of money, of time even (in speculative fiction). But sleep?

The single most sought after donors of sleep in Russell's universe are babies, who become "deep, rich wells" of this most precious of things that we take for granted. Adult sleep comes with liabilities like nightmares and other kinds of dilutions, but babies "serenely churn forth a pure, bracing sleep, with zero adult terror corrupting it."

Atavistic Books has created an unique interactive video trailer of the book.  

Hold your breath

And watch this.

Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1960)

Of gherkins and potato chips

Lydia Davis the translator par excellence of Gustav Flaubert's Madame Bovary (French to English), has published her second short story collection, Can't and Won't.

Here's what Don Chiasson has to say about the collection in The New York Review of Books:

Lydia Davis’s shortest stories, only a sentence or two long, float like little dinghies on the white of the page. They can’t be followed the way stories ordinarily are followed, nor are they “told” in the usual sense of that word. They belong to the class “fiction” but also to the larger class made up of all things isolated in time or space: specimen creatures in jars, radar blips that promise interstellar life, Beckett’s characters on a desolated stage, or John Cage’s notes dispersed across silence.

One of the shortest stories that Davis has composed thus far in her writing career is "Samuel Johnson Is Indignant." The story is a sentence-long:

That Scotland has so few trees.

Davis' collection surprises, says a reviewer; the best analogy is that of reaching inside a bag of potato chips and pulling out gherkins.