Halloween undone

I just came upon a refreshing refresher on the (historical) origins of the "Zombie."

In an antidote to the spectacularization of the Zombie by Hollywood, Amy Wilentz says that the Zombie was born in the midst of slavery, especially as a response to the excruciating cruelty inflicted by the French in the slave plantations of Haiti.

There is a compelling reason why American parents should prevent their kids from donning "fun" Zombie costumes:

There are many reasons the zombie, sprung from the colonial slave economy, is returning now to haunt us. Of course, the zombie is scary in a primordial way, but in a modern way, too. He’s the living dead, but he’s also the inanimate animated, the robot of industrial dystopias. He’s great for fascism: one recent zombie movie (and there have been many) was called “The Fourth Reich.” The zombie is devoid of consciousness and therefore unable to critique the system that has entrapped him. He’s labor without grievance. He works free and never goes on strike. You don’t have to feed him much. He’s a Foxconn worker in China; a maquiladora seamstress in Guatemala; a citizen of North Korea; he’s the man, surely in the throes of psychosis and under the thrall of extreme poverty, who, years ago, during an interview, told me he believed he had once been a zombie himself.

The World's Mine Oyster

This was the rascally Piston's quip to Falstaff in Shakespeare's early comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor:

Falstaff:I will not lend thee a penny.
Pistol:
Why then the world's mine oyster,
Which I with sword will open.
Falstaff:
Not a penny.

Pistol's comic threat--that he's going to steal if falstaff doesn't loan him money--has over time become a merely conceited proclamation of opportunity.

But Oysters are not to be trifled with anymore. They can't simply be seen as passive repositories of the mythical pearl.

Oysters, as Paul Greenberg, who writes about environmental issues reminds us, play a vital role in protecting the Tri-State shorelines from the violent incursions like the one we saw from Hurricane Sandy.

Yet the "oyster kingdom" has been depleted over years.

Sans the depletion, the Hudson and the East river would not have made such deep and devastating inroads into the low-lying areas of Manhattan and New Jersey:

Until European colonists arrived, oysters took advantage of the spectacular estuarine algae blooms that resulted from all these nutrients and built themselves a kingdom. Generation after generation of oyster larvae rooted themselves on layers of mature oyster shells for more than 7,000 years until enormous underwater reefs were built up around nearly every shore of greater New York.

 Just as corals protect tropical islands, these oyster beds created undulation and contour on the harbor bottom that broke up wave action before it could pound the shore with its full force. Beds closer to shore clarified the water through their assiduous filtration (a single oyster can filter as much as 50 gallons of water a day); this allowed marsh grasses to grow, which in turn held the shores together with their extensive root structure.

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, there is much talk about re-designing the infrastructure in New York City to handle the city's identity as an emergent "Gulf Coast".

But humans have already dismantled the natural infrastructure. Isn't it time for the environment  to become a part of the conversation?

The seer

From the latest "Things I Saw"; drawings by artist Jason Polan:

I'm impressed by the presence of turtles and bats in public places. Americans would shriek at that! The Spaniards obviously have a different, more "European" view of such promiscuous interminglings.