The Meaning of Qat

An anecdote. One day in the summer of 2011, I was in a mostly-stationary taxicab with Michael Totten, marooned on the permanently congested 6th of October Bridge, busy enduring one of those unavoidable stretches of tedium endemic to the reporting profession. I'm not sure why, but I started sketching out a theoretical journalistic trip to Yemen--anywhere but Cairo traffic, amiright--and the otherwise-silent taxi driver, a lanky and unusually clean-shaven and unusually young man by Cairene taxi-driver standards, began speaking in jarringly clear English. Because when he wasn't driving a taxi in Cairo, he was a professional soccer player in Yemen, and he had some strong opinions about the place.

"They are the laziest people in the world," he said. He repeated this phrase three or four times, punctuating each word as if he understood he was delivering a stern moral pronouncement over an entire society of several tens of millions of people. The laziest people in the world--let him leave no doubt. "They sit on a rock, and go like this," he said, propping his chin on a closed fist, "and chew qat. This is all they do. They are the laziest people in the world."

The cabbie did more than reinforce my own, possibly but probably not mistaken notion of Egyptians' condescending attitude towards their Peninsula brethren (America is not without its own regional chauvinisms, either. Obviously.). The real reason I'm beginning a long blog post about qat chewing with this guy is that through defining his entire perception of Yemenis and Yemen in general through qat, he was getting at the idea that certain kinds of widespread and socially-acceptable drug abuse can serve as windows into the societies that tolerate and condone said abuse. I'm about to commit some pretty heinous acts of cultural essentialism here--nothing so crude as "Yemeinis chew lots of qat and are therefore the laziest people on earth," God willing--so my old college English professors are encouraged to stop reading here, right now. As for the rest of you--can drug abuse be read as text (welcome back, English professors!)? Let's try it out.

In Egypt, everyone smokes shisha. It's their national drug. To me, shisa represents anxiety without an outlet. It is the dissonance of having to relax and sit still for long periods of time--which are spent engaging in an activity that inspires little more than discomfort and unease. After a couple hours of shisha-smoking--and coffee drinking, shisha's trusty sidekick--it feels as if the chest cavity is struggling under an immovable leaden weight; breaths are more stilted and labored, the palette is ashen and choked, and the head swims and reels if it isn't calmed with gulps of cold water. Seriously, fuck shisha. It is a pleasure that gradually morphs into agitation, and, for the health conscious, mild regret (of course, I smoked a lot of it over the summer).

I don't know what this says about Egypt--I'm really not qualified to speculate, although I think I'm on to something with that "anxiety without an outlet" thing from earlier--but I have some theories about what America's national drug might suggest about Us. Our national drug is weed, which rubs out anxiety and ambition alike for short periods of time. Put differently, it is anxiety's outlet, a closet it can be stuffed into for an hour or two. There's a dark side to weed--it dulls pleasure along with pain, and I could never understand the appeal of watching a sporting event or a movie or even a concert while on the stuff, which slows the mind and in so doing distances the user from sensory and psychic stimuli regardless of their positive or negative nature. It's great stuff for ESPNews; less appropriate if you're about to watch "Scenes From A Marriage" for the first time. From this, I can conclude that we Americans are stressed the fuck out, that we believe that the elimination of anxiety is worth the elimination of pleasure as well; that modern life and our own desires and expectations are only manageable with an escape hatch at the ready, even if the escape, though temporary and very easy to accomplish, is still more total than many would like to admit. (Israel's national drug is hashish. I don't know what to make of this, but if the urban legends about Hezbollahis flinging hash-laden porcupines over the Israeli-Lebanese border fence using special hash-porcupine slingshots is even a little true, then there's a certain  Jewish historical resonance to the idea of buying stupefying drugs from people who want to kill the majority of us).

Qat is the national drug of Ethiopia, Somalia and Yemen, which are more different from each other than I think most people appreciate (Somalia and Ethiopia are about as similar to each other as Ethiopia and the United States are. Other than differences in religion, language, food, music, material culture, historical development and modes of economic and social organization, they're exactly alike!). It is grown in Ethiopia, in the country's polyglot and historically restive east, where the Amhara, Afar, Oromo and Somali regions bleed into one another, and along the approximate frontier between pastoralism and settled agriculture, as well as between orthodox Christianity and Islam. Ethiopia has always lived and died on its periphery--in his excellent popular overview of the country, Harold Marcus posits that Ethiopian history can be understood as a veritable sine-wave of centralization and decay, with the country going through always-temporary periods of deterioration and reconstitution based mostly on developments along its fringes. The east is home to the Oromo, now the country's largest ethnic group and holder of a nearly millenia-old swing vote wrt: whether the Ethiopian national project was or even is all that practicable, and to the Somali, who have been fighting the Ethiopians in some form another for nearly 600 years; not continuously of course, but this is still over twice as long as the United States of America has existed. Ahmed the Left-Handed, one of the more reviled figures in Ethiopian history and the man who burned down the original, gold-clad Church of St. Mary in Axum, invaded from the east--from qat country.

But today, you are not likely to find a more harmonious boundary between Christendom and the Umma than the Medieval walled city of Harar, a multiconfessional warren of mud-brick mosques and polyp-dome tombs, and a profoundly qat-addled town, where plastic bags of the stuff begin to materialize by mid-morning, and where seemingly every square-inch of downtown curbside is cluttered with chewers by mid-afternoon. Harar is particularlistic as opposed to generically Orthodox or Muslim; it has its own forceful and intoxicating character that the ubiquity of qat undoubtedly contributes to. If qat is indeed a National Drug--if it says something about the place that grows and abuses the fuck out of it--then we've already reached a point of complication. A historically violent and tumultuous liminal space--Ethiopia's powder keg, sort of--is the origin of a drug that makes its users docile and zoned out, in turn contributing, however obliquely, to the modern-day sense of equanimity and moderation (I counted zero hijabs in Harar) and tolerance that helps make that place unique. It is as if chewing it brings you to a zone beyond or outside of history--as if the drug is pure immediacy, a psychic extension of those tombs and mosques and box canyon alleyways, of the women wearing jangling metal necklaces and crouching over fulcrum-shaped wicker tables in the marketplaces, of hidden craft shops and muraled horseshoe-shaped mud houses that don't seem to belong to the Middle East or to the Horn or to anywhere you're familiar with really, of marketplaces acraded with pointed Arab archways and streets stalked after dark by yapping hyenas and the feeling of a heady and indescribably vast distance from anything familiar--including anything familiar, even after three weeks of travel, within Ethiopia itself--of everything seeming new and wonderful and giddy and strange.

This feeling is a tourist's luxury and a lie. The realities are less benign and certainly shouldn't be exoticized (should anything, really?). Qat is everywhere in Harar. Men in clean clothes carry mutliple bags of the stuff; men in tatters scour the streets for discarded leaves, competing with the goats and sheep. The alleys are encrusted in dried and decaying stems; in traffic circles and median strips and curbs, men stuff one leaf after another into their mouths for hours at a time, virtually unmoving, with no other apparent demands on their time or ambition. It is epidemic.

What desires does it suppress? What subtle control does it exert? What urges does it domesticate? What pains does it cancel? What joys and ambitions does it kill? A dip into a bag of qat is essential in Harar. Because if you answer these questions for yourself, you might be able to answer them for a significant number of people in town.

+++

I first tried qat near the tomb of Hamid Nur, a tall and narrow mud-brick dome layered in pickle-colored greenwash. People in Ethiopia tend to overestimate the age of things by a century or five, but the attendant will square with you: the tomb is a little over 400 years old, and within it lies the emir responsible for building the walls of Harar, to defend against newly-arrived Oromo migrants from modern-day Kenya. Hamid Nur presided over a kind of Harari golden age, a period during which the city--or rather, the independent city-state, a status the place maintains under Ethiopia's ethnicity-based federal system--turned into east Africa's Timbuktu, a cosmopolitan trading hub ideally positioned between geographical zones and empires, as well as a center of Islamic scholarship. Harar was the point where trading routes from the Arabian Penninsula, Solomonic-period Ethiopia, sub-Saharan Africa and even and especially India converged, and Hamid Nur helped guide the city to prominence. But he's buried in a modest structure, now hemmed in by muddy alleyways strewn with rotting qat leaves--although there's a wooden roof over the corner of the romantically out-of-control garden surrounding the tomb, and the entire halfcourt-sized compound is green and shady and remarkably quiet. The Taj Mahal,  the greatest of Islamic tombs, captures humanity's impotent frustration at the permanenance and enormity of death, and the beauty made possible by our inevitably futile attempts to gain an upper hand over the thing. The tomb of Hamid Nur, made out of wood beams and painted mud, is just a nice place to sit down for awhile, and you can stare at it, while lounging under the aforementioned wooden roof in the corner of the compound, without being burdened by any deep metaphysical concerns, or even any deep non-metaphysical concerns for that matter. Make yourself at home--this place was practically designed for chewing qat, which, as it turns out, is best enjoyed over long periods of time and in a shady, quiet and above all comfortable place.

My entry into the stuff was a young man named Abdulaziz, who looked about my age and had a freshly-trimmed beard and a smartphone even fancier than mine. He was studying to be a irrigation engineer and had cousins in Washington, DC. He lived in the walled city with his wife and six month old daughter, and chewed qat at around this time, and in roughly this place, every single day.

This stuff is what the goats chew, he said after 30 minutes of munching on plastic-green leaves, incense wafting through the compound, Qaranic chanting playing on someone's cellphone, the latest call to prayer ignored, sweet coffee brought by a young girl and then slowly gulped out of handmade clay mugs, the sun held pleasantly in abeyance, wind brushing the weeds. Give me 30 birr, he said, and I will get you the good stuff. The real stuff. And I will show you how to chew it.

As noon approached, as I looked around at the small handful of strung-out young men lounging in the tomb's garden, a strong and largely although not entirely anthropological desire emerged to see what it was like to be seriously wasted on the stuff. When Abdulaziz returned with a fresh bag, he explained that you only chew the small leaves, the brownish-green ones ones at the top of the stem, preferably the ones so small that they've curled into themselves, although the medium and larger-sized leaves surrounding them are potent as well. The apple-green ones, large and thick and lower down on the stem, are a waste of energy and taste especially terrible. Don't bother.

And now, an abrupt transition from freeform social, historical and experiential-type observations to a more clinical sorta question and answer thing clearly ripped off from the Ithaca episode of Ulysses.

WHAT DOES QAT TASTE LIKE?: Qat is vegetative and bitter. It has a sickly sour quality, although if you've been eating backcountry injira for three weeks straight then sickly-sourness has been a constant and unshakable companion for you. It is hard to masticate to a complete pulp; it is less tough or resistant than, for instance, an overcooked piece of meat, but it is so simultaneously plastic and granular--even the softer, smaller, rolled-up leaves--that chewing it eventually requires a heavy, sustained motion that makes the jaw ache for days afterwards. When fully broken down, the qat leaf becomes a heavy, viscous paste that gently swells the inside of the mouth, and the paste always seems to migrate to the inside fold of the upper lip, requiring a chewer to periodically circulate his tongue around the borders of his cheeks and mouth. This is actually hard; qat doesn't just swell the inner mouth, but numbs and mildly paralyzes it. Qat isn't eaten exactly--you don't swallow until the last possible moment, when the paste become so thick and unpleasant that you're left with no other choice. But this takes awhile, and gets at one of the most appealing aspects of qat chewing--it's time consuming. It's real work. It's not something to eat--it's something to do, as the old tagline goes. It's like eating sunflower seeds, if sunflower seeds had a stimulant effect somewhere between caffeine and cocaine. Ooops! Getting ahead of myself here.

IS IT ADDICTIVE?: Hell yes! When you're chewing qat, you feel an urge to continue chewing the shit that's so powerful it isn't even consciously noticed or recognized as an urge. You just kind of mechanically keep feeding yourself leaves; whether you want to continue chewing or not is inconsequential. You just keep plucking leaves and shoving them into your mouth and it could be hours before it occurs to you to do anything other than this or to stop.

IS QAT A SOCIAL LUBRICANT?: I can't say the conversation I had with the 3 or 4 chewers at the Tomb was all that stimulating, but there were certain language and cultural barriers that kept things on a rudimentary level, aside from the occasional inquiries about my religion or place of birth or the spelling of my name. I don't think qat makes you talkative, exactly--I had fun imagining a living room full of American high school kids silently munching qat with their eyes pasted over (how about a qat lounge in the center field loft at Nats Park? Probably wouldn't fly, because of the appetite suppressant thing. Maybe we could replace the East Village's shisha bars with qat houses? I know which I'd rather go to.)--but the fact that it takes an incredibly long time to chew the stuff, combined with its near-ubiquity, makes it a social drug almost by default.

A snippet of conversation: in Islam, we believe in one God. Not four, not two, one. I agree, I said.

WHAT ARE THE PHYSICAL EFFECTS OF QAT?: Qat has a stimulant effect somewhere between caffeine and cocaine. Your heart rate increases slightly, your skin seems to radiate and crawl. The mouth dries out--have a large bottle of water at the ready is my advice--although you don't feel any agitation because any excess energy is channeled into the labor-intensive chewing process itself. So you feel simultaneously stimulated and listless (qat isn't the only drug that has this effect I've heard), as if the drug has focused you on this one task to the exclusion of all others. Everything else becomes laborious: shifting position, reaching for your camera, raising a clay coffee mug to your lips, retrieving a water bottle from your backpack, swallowing the coffee and/or water, maintaining conversation with people whose language you don't speak, etc. The body is lulled into a deep inertia, but not to the point where you want to nod off--which is impossible anyway, what with the uptick in the heart rate and the clean but slightly tingling body high. The most powerful effect is related to the appetite: hunger physically dissipates; eating just sort of vanishes as a physical need altogether. Which brings me to

WHAT ARE THE PSYCHOLOGICAL EFFECTS OF QAT?: the dark side of the drug, and with it the core observation of this blog post. Qat destroys all appetites--like, all of them. Trust me on this. Qat destroys all appetites and I think this has a lot to do with why it is both widely abused and socially tolerated. It is not unlike marijuana in this respect, although pot leaves one particular appetite (the Double-Stuff Oreo appetite) disastrously intact. Qat doesn't discriminate. Hungry? Chew some qat, because you soon won't be. Qat is a powerful appetite suppressant, disturbingly handy in places where food is scarce, or where the source and nature of any given meal is uncertain. Qat inflicts a kind of synthetic appetitive discipline, and it banishes all thought of food, or really any other need.

Including another fundamental human need, and this might be why qat use in Ethiopia, Somalia and Yemen is more public and socially acceptable than say, marijuana use in the US. Qat is a magic drug that keeps people umm, away from one another. Useful for the women--hormonal young men are off chewing and gazing into the near-distance instead of chasing them or harassing them or worse. Useful for the men--in Ethiopia, in the US, hell, anywhere, chewing and staring into the near distance is sometimes--usually?--more individually/socially responsible than obeying one's sexual appetites. I don't want to read any deeper neuroses into societies in which seemingly the majority of the male population publicly abuses libido suppressants for hours at a time, every single day. But there's a grim kind of social utility at work here, especially in more conservative societies--albeit a utility functioning on the premise that a stupefied and disinterested population is preferable to one that's constantly making decisions for itself. You can't fornicate on qat--and I imagine that criminal conspiracies, political manifestos and revolutions are equally tough to pull off on the stuff. Maybe tougher. Dictatorships should subsidize the stuff (although interestingly, qat is banned in Eritrea).

There's a certain blunt quality to the highly transparent and shameless nature of qat abuse. In Harar, you're surrounded by desiccated-looking young men, chewing their ambitions or desires, the sense of a present or future, the possibility of anything better or even anything different, the potential for meaningful individual choice, even the aknowledgement of fundamental physical and psychological needs, into a sweet and mind-numbing vegetable paste. They do this every day, for hours, in public.

WHAT IS THE COMEDOWN LIKE?: You feel empty and sort of tired, but not tired exactly--this is where the agitation sets in, even if the source of one's botheration and unease is impossible to pin down. Eating is a chore, walking is a chore, but again, you aren't really tired. You just want to sit down, and stare, and do nothing else more complicated or interesting or meaningful than that.

+++

Qat controls and pacifies through an activity that people seem to enjoy, and that is, actually, sort of objectively enjoyable under the right circumstances. So let's close on the positives: see it's the definitional nature of experiments that their results must be reproducible, and drug experimentation is, in my view, no exception to this rule. The next day I had a long bus ride or rather series of minibus rides from Harar to really as close to Addis Ababa as I could make it between 1 PM and darkness. The 500 kilometer road to the capital through the highlands of Oromia is paved and well-maintained, rising into cloud forests and straddling high ridges, climbing into and out of rain storms, around deep vallies and waterfalls and rivers and into a kind of north-Pacific dampness and fog. Ethiopia is a land of dizzying topo- and geographic change; one night you could be in an ancient desert trading post where wild hyenas, whose jaws are powerful enough to bust a human skull in a single bite, are an accepted and even beloved neighbor; the next, you could be sleeping in a mountain town you'd never heard of, waiting for the roof to begin leaking under deafening torrents of rain.

It is the in-between that can be challenging in Ethiopia. Buses don't leave until they are full--completely full. Ethiopian "full" means people on the floor and in the space between rows of seats; 17 in a 12-seat van is barely acceptable and 20 is the norm; superstar minibus conductors don't quit until their vehicle is a 23-25 person cattlecar, with the contrast between the vast openness of the mountain wilderness and the claustrophobia of the vehicle made more obvious and excruciating with every stop-off, and every new arrival. There is never a shortage of customers; empty space is wasted birr. The minibus will get you where you're going, though, so long as patience is in rude supply. And even if it isn't, what choice do you really have? And if you did have another choice--qat is basically patience you can eat! Qat, as I wrote a few paragraphs ago, "inflicts a kind of synthetic appetitive discipline;" in Ethiopia, the appetite to just like, ditch the bus and walk for a while is one that often needs to be kept in line.

After an hour of chewing, you don't really care where you're going, or how long it will take you to get there. You don't care that you can barely move, that darkness is falling, that the clouds are thick, that it's becoming gradually colder, that you're about to be dumped in a town that doesn't appear in your guidebook, that you don't have a raincoat or even a sweater, that you're totally alone. The mind is clean and unbothered, and the body is contented to be at rest, even in the crawlspace of the backseat of a crowded minibus; the swirl of people entering and leaving, the churn of clouds bursting over the mountains, the darting of a neon bird or the scimitar horns of a passing cattle train--it emerges out of a dream-haze that seems as physically tangible as the clouds scattering over the minibus's windshield. Everything is pleasantly unreal. Perhaps the trip will just keep continuing, and this is all there is.

Qat is very bad, a man two seats over from me said at one point in the trip. You must never chew it. We must stop chewing it. He placed another leaf in his mouth.

Nine Airports

BEN GURION INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, LOD, ISRAEL

The cabbie responded to a phone call in Arabic—a woman, his wife maybe, perhaps digging into him for working yet another Saturday, even if the business benefits or even the necessity of driving a taxi on the one day of the week when public transit is banned by law should be fairly obvious by now—then insisted on speaking to me in Hebrew the entirety of the ride to the airport. This is odd, because I can barely, and I mean barely, sustain a conversation in Hebrew (ani tus l'Yarden achshav! Horrible). I still can’t figure this one out. A shabbos-breaking Iraqi who speaks Arabic at home? A Hebrophilic non-Jewish Arab hard up for language practice? Unlikelier people exist here.

Even setting foot in this airport feels wrong. The night before, a friend was telling me about how Menachem Begin defended El Al’s ban on Saturday travel when the issue was brought before his cabinet, even though he himself was not a shabbos observer. What message did it send to the world, he asked his mostly shabbos-violating ministers, if airplanes with the Magen David on their tailwing were seen violating one of Judaism’s fundamental precepts? What message did it send to them, and to ourselves for that matter, about our own faith in the national spirit and mission? Jews can fly on shabbos, but the official airline of the Jewish republic cannot. One was an individual choice; the other a national imperative.

The logic seemed millstone-like as I scanned a departure terminal eerily absent of its usual broods of black-hatters, Chabadnik tifilin-pushers and synagogue groups and daveners and birthright kids. I noticed that the airport’s two kosher McDonalds were now Kosher Burgerranches, one of which was open, oddly enough—a step down in quality, though the plastic fried onions on my Ranch Burger seemed a pean to Israeli autochthony and the sort of thing that Bagen and his ilk might have really appreciated on some level.  Fuck your help, we can make our own terrible hamburgers and top them as well, these onions seemed to say.

QUEEN ALIA INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, MADABA (MORE OR LESS), JORDAN

There is that moment during the approach when the earth returns to you, and buildings and cars and maybe even people regain their individual character as the ground loses the eerie fake stillness of a theatrical backdrop and bursts into reality and life. At exactly that moment, when the clustered domes of the arrival terminal seemed almost at safe leaping distance, close enough to imagine yourself inside of, the plane abruptly jerked skyward again, pitching into a straight climb and what felt for one almost bowel-unplugging moment like a stall—apparently an aborted landing dispatches the mind to the darkest place it can possibly reach. But there was nothing wrong with the aircraft. We had hit a wind shear, though I have no way of knowing whether the order to abort was out of residual fear or actual mortal danger—I could see little funnels of dust scurrying across the flat surface of the tan and unvegetated wastes, and ours was a tiny plane with as many passengers as crew, easily tussled and tossed on the harsh breath of the Western Desert, wind blasts roaring from the barren center of Arabia. The plane swung around the airport a second time, and I occupied my nerves with a repeat view of a rock quarry, the snaking King’s Highway, precarious and often vain attempts at desert agriculture. I would take any spot on the ground--anything over this. I developed an uneasy familiarity with one particular grid of empty tree trunks marooned stubbornly in an ocean-like expanse of gray dust, and in my mind I placed myself inside that vast aborted orchard where nothing seemed likely to ever grow again, and where the few trees that survived stood as the mocking residue of a general failure. I was the only person (out of like, 8 passengers) who clapped then the nose angled towards absolute safety, and the forward wheels kissed tarmac.

We were rewarded for our ordeal, because wow, Queen Alia airport. Now this is the airport a nation builds when it is going places. Right? The ruins of the old terminal cower beneath palm-frond vaulting and tasteful gray sandstone, glass curtain-walls and gaping, uncluttered atria. It is as if the king himself ordered the squat, windowless old terminal to remain there forever, as a reminder of what the nation used to be before it was capable of constructing glorious Queen Alia, with its coffee lounges and Lebanese falafel bar (highly fucking recommended) and oriental sweet shops (also very much recommended) and Popeye’s Fried Chicken. I paid for an espresso in dollars and received Saudi rials as change--Queen Alia is generic in a way that reflects some noble national aspiration. It is cosmopolitan and logical and clean. And for the transit passenger, there is no way to test Queen Alia’s ethos against the angry and crowded nation that it serves. Because your next view of Jordan will be the gray, dust-devil wastes, which the hastening distance between earth and sky will render unreal once again.

CAIRO INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, CAIRO, EGYPT

I have touched continents with the balls of my toes, grazed the skin of nations without ever entering them, known them only as lines and polygons on the earth, or as marbled hallways and stale hamburgers and glowering ticket agents and then lines and polygons once more. A five-airport itinerary sends a traveler pinballing through some parallel spatial plane where they never actually are anywhere, officially—or they are somewhere in the sense that we’re all somewhere, and even an airport isn’t some impermeable magical realm, like there is no anti-reality forcefield yet in operation, no spatial plane parallel to the only one we know to exist. The airport is a separate place, an island as well as a gateway. But only to a point.

Had the confusion of the previous weeks seeped through the walls of terminal 3? People clogged its endless  corridors and escalators and moving sidwalks, and there was no relief from them, even at 1 or 2 in the morning. My flight went through an hour-long security check, was moved to a gate on the opposite side of the airport—miles away, and that’s only barely an exaggeration—at which point we were subject to a second hour-long security check, followed by a roughly hour-long delay, followed by some lame and obviously fake excuse about having to wait on a few straggling transit passengers, as opposed to the delay resulting from the general and quite obvious disorder in whose grip the airport/country lay prone—all of it made worse by the Cairo airport’s near total lack of seating. People have to just sort of lean or sit against empty patches of wall, which creates the illusion of clutter and chaos even when things are perfectly under control, which means that when, for instance, 300 Nairobi-bound passengers must hike from gate A3 to C5 (and it's a hike, let me tell you--terminal 3 is designed like a series of quarter-mile long (or longer) piers, but there are no underground tunnels connecting them; you have to walk the length of each pier if you want to get from one side of this monster to the other) they must overcome a British Bulldog-like gamut of stony Japanese tourists and portly Ugandan priests and mindless little kids and beer-swilling backpackers, and men in military dress who have no obvious occupation or purpose, or knowledge of exactly why anything is happening. I might have killed an Italian child; I honestly don’t know. My only instinct was to leave this messy and horrible place; for hours, that instinct was frustrated and offended, until all instinct wore away for good, and I was tired and empty and passive and drifting.

JOMO KENYATTA INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, NAIROBI, KENYA

But then: another one of those airports, like Newark, where you can’t let your guard down or trust anything that anyone tells you. A place where you have to snap out of it. Nothing will be easy here. East African Safari? Right over there in the waiting tent, sir; a representative will come and collect you and the other passengers. A representative? No, you have to go through immigration. Transit? Twenty dollars please. East African Safari is in the Cargo Terminal, reachable via shuttle bus—that shuttle bus. No, it’s in the domestic terminal, which is now the international terminal because the airport burned down on Wednesday. Or possibly it’s the cargo terminal that’s now the domestic terminal, which means the international terminal would be—

It isn’t an exaggeration to say that it took several hours to disentangle all of this, although this is to be expected, since the airport—the third busiest in Africa by passenger volume. Like, imagine JFK burning down and you'll get an idea of how major this is—had in fact been reduced to a charred hunk of ‘60s brutalist concrete the previous Wednesday.  And what a field day the conspiracy theorists are having! "I DIDN'T BURN AIRPORT, SAYS PARETTI," trumpeted possibly the greatest newspaper headline I've ever seen; "BLAZE CATASTROPHE," read another, elegantly. The airport was obviously burned down in order to hasten or facilitate the building of a long-rumored new terminal, or to clear the way for international loans that would allow said terminal to be built, or to secure construction contracts for the terminal. Valid or not, a conspiracy is probably less embarrassing to the national image than something more mundane—there are perfidious and self-interested and arson-inclined personalities everywhere, but what kind of country loses its premiere piece of infrastructure by accident?

I won't judge, because the airport soldiered on bravely, in cramped spare terminals and tents so numerous that it was hard to believe they had only had four days to construct them all. The tents had been contracted to a party supply and/or rapid tent deployment company called Wandergood, based in Nairobi. Wandergood: The entire world seemed stuffed into their closed quarters; every accent and passport and language and style of national dress, people flying to London and N'Djamena and Moroni and Dubai; no specific sense of where you are, except at the heaving and anxious center of everything, the naval of the whole of the earth.

ADEN ADDE INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, MOGADISHU, SOMALIA

Arriving in Mogadishu is not like arriving in Cleveland. The plane (a Fokker Fellowship, the last of which rolled off the assembly line in 1989 as it turns out) lands, the hatches open, you approach a single-level building with an arched portico ornamented with powder-blue Somali stars, and you suddenly aren’t in an airport that’s generic and calm and partitioned from its surroundings—it is its surroundings, only more so. There is no liminal or intermediate space here; you're immediately in what's probably the most dangerous place in the entire city. Every step of the process is laden with mortal urgency, or at least seems to be. Your visas are issued without discussion, and with the strictest alacrity. Your vehicle is already waiting for you, although it probably hasn’t been waiting for long. The key to the Mogadishu airport is just to keep fucking moving. You want to scan your fellow passengers—which are the  kingpin returnees, the newly-minted bankers and hoteliers? Which are the Turkish development experts, and which are the South African mercenaries? Do they even have those anymore? Both here and in general, I mean? But the passengers scatter before you can give them even quick study. Experienced Mogadishu travelers have more sense than the wait around for trouble, however improbable “trouble” might be on a second-to-second basis.

The airport’s single runway streaks along the seashore, and represents one of the outer limits of a thin, rectangular green zone stretching south of the city, a ridiculously fortified enclave that includes the seaport, the airport, the headquarters of the national UN assistance mission, the headquarters of the African Union peacekeeping mission, several foreign embassies, and the site of proposed resort and conference center currently being developed by an American private security contractor. The road from the terminal to the city is a 200-meter canyon of cube-shaped sandbags with occasional turrets rising out of the walls; it’s a very narrow two-way road, and Ugandan peacekeepers ensure that traffic moves at a nervous crawl, as fast as it can possibly go, which, under such cramped circumstances, isn’t very fast at all, or at least not as fast as you and probably the Ugandans wish it could be. And then the airport roundabout, actually the most dangerous intersection in town, entrance to both the road to downtown Mogadishu as well as a parallel span of roadway connecting the airport’s gate to the so-called “Medina Gate,” which controls traffic in and out of the Green Zone—this road is guarded with just as much care and paranoia as the one leading to the main airport terminal, with Burundian soldiers standing in sandbag bunkers in the middle of the street, in constant battle position. Armored troop carriers trace an anxious circuit around the airport and the airport/Medina Gate/Mogadishu road roundabout, and although this isn’t 2008, when jihadists controlled most of the Somali capital and the airport was Civilization and Order's final remaining foothold in the city, the Shabaab are still everywhere. I’m sure I saw some, even if I have no idea who they were. The airport is your introduction to this warped environment, this dissonance between potential and reality and the attendant questioning of your own creeping complacency. Nothing will happen to you at the airport--in all likelihood, since one can never be too sure, and after having destroyed the UN compound, the Supreme Court, the Turkish Embassy and many of the town's nicer restaurants the airport would be an obvious next target for Shabaab, right? So everyone acts is if something might happen, or will. You start to act as if something might happen, or will. From then on, every stop in traffic, ever barreling minibus and jaywalker, seems imbued with deadly potential, even if that potential is only what you project upon the city out of ignorance or fear.

Considering there is no fiber optic cable network in Mogadishu, the departure terminal has amazingly fast wifi.


BERBERA INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, BERBERA, SOMALILAND

Before my flight out, a young Somalilander studying finance in Kuala Lumpur complained to me with a certain ironic detachment and scorn that this airport was was "fully manual." And while it is true that there's no electronic ticketing or digital scales at the check-in counter, there are in fact metal detectors and x-ray machines and flat-screen TVs and even a few functioning air conditioning units--although none of them are stamped with "COURTESY OF IOM" or "A GIFT OF THE JAPANESE PEOPLE," like the ones in Mogadishu. The Berbera airport is a bare-bones operation that receives little or no help from the outside--the Somaliland recognition thing, you know--but it works. The police drive around in beat up 30 year old compacts spray-painted a vaguely martial shade of blue; the civil air authorities and even the immigration officers dress in flimsy white uniforms bearing cheap clip art-insignia, and I'm not sure there's even an air traffic control tower (speaking of the immigration officers, a message to the two-dozen nations that the holder of an Israeli visa may not enter: no nation on earth recognizes Somaliland, yet its passport stamp bans me from none of them). No matter--it still works, and the environment bears out the small miracle of it all: abutting the runway are a series of military-style berms, berths where fighter planes could be hidden from an outside ground attack. The airport is also far, far away from the center of town, and curiously far from the port--in short, this airport probably wasn't built for civilians, and is likely a holdover from the old and incredibly brutal military regime, the same one that bombed the Somaliland capital of Hargiesa to its foundations in 1988. Today, the berms are all that remain, and they shelter rotting propeller planes, fuselages barely supported by rusting landing gear, and it is difficult to tell whether they are still airworthy, or whether they're waiting for the salt air to reduce them to brittle amber.

There is a mosque near the airport's single terminal, and it is designed in the unique and I think quite remarkable style of a Somaliland village mosque, domeless and with a unadorned and purely ceremonial minaret, with the eastern (the minbar/mihrab) side projecting outward such that the building is rhombus-shaped, and resembles depictions of the Kaaba sometimes found on antique prayer rugs.


DJIBOUTI-AMBOULI INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, DJIBOUTI, DJIBOUTI

From the air, I wonder if this is what Berbera would look like if Somaliland had the resources and the political recognition needed to develop it. Perhaps it too would have dozens of jetties and cranes, and a four-lane paved highway running along the coast; maybe it would gobble up every available acre of shorefront, and have its share of expensive hotels and foreign restaurants. But maybe not, because the most prominent feature of the Djibouti Airport is actually the American airport, that reminder that the former French Somaliland possesses a natural resource that no other country can boast of: coastline at the exact spot where the Red Sea begins, which is itself a 45 minute commercial flight (less by drone, maybe?) from the exact spot where Yemen begins. Location, location, etc. Camp Lemmonier has its own runway, and a visible fleet of Ospreys with their wings at rest, as well as hulking transport jets and humvees guarding any entryways from the main airport. A single American flags flies overhead. And at the main airport, there's the largest plane I've ever seen, an Antonov, a five-storey beast so massive that it has its own name, battleship-style: it's called the Volga-Dniepr, and it has 20 aft wheels (from what I could count) and enough clearance to stack two battle tanks on top of each other. There's also an EU base at the airport, on the opposite side of the runways from Camp Lemmonier--something having to do with piracy, I'm guessing--and I saw German soldiers milling about the arrival hall, and a gang of American grunts debarking from a charter flight.

Aurally, the airport is a novelty, an interpolation of melodic French into what has been a very guttural previous week (really a very guttural previous month, counting Israel), music made all the more remarkable by its passing quality, moments of glorious difference before the it was time to return to the air.

SANA'A INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, SANA'A, YEMEN

Sit on the right side of the plane, take a window seat, and stay awake for the approach: a few moments before landing, you'll see just an epic vehicle dump, with fighter jets and helicopters and humvees wasting away. And not just a couple of them--like, dozens, beaten by the rain and wind into the same rich, wooden shade as the earth.

There is nothing to do at this airport, a single terminal surrounded by a high wall. Restaurants, departure/arrival displays, functioning WiFi and toilet paper are but four of the things it lacks. Do not be stuck there for five hours, if you can help it.

And another thing: It's not like some percentage of the Yemeni women are in full hijab--they all are, including the one with a child swaddled in a Spongebob Squarepants blanket, and the one with a red Angry Birds rolling duffel bag. The hijabs are identical bolts of black--some of the women wear black socks and shoes as well; any hemwork is black as well, and the edges of the hijabs shine like glittering black prisms if the light hits them just so. One woman comforted a crying infant who was unable to see his mother's face. There was an African woman in the waiting room in normal western dress, and I almost felt sorry for her, given the judgement that she likely read into every male in the room. She was the only woman whose hair I saw for the entirety of my layover, during which I read a book and humored the local merchants: You might not be able to go on the internet at this airport, but you can buy a Jambiya, the ceremonial daggers that most Yemeni men wear. An amazing thing, the jambiya: a trained eye can apparently tell clan and social class and occupation and even religious or political affiliation just from the ornamentation of the hilt, or the bend of the blade, or by observing whether the leather jambiya belt is worn tightly or loosely. Jews were renowned Jambiya makers; even today, a fine Jambiya blade is complimented as "Jewish work," even though Yemen's Jewish silversmiths fled the country decades ago. More things I learned about Yemen during this layover: holy shit, does it look like an amazing country. I picked up a coffee table book for tourists, and found myself rushing through it even with hours left in my layover--had I lingered on every page, on every mosque and castle and village, on every azure-blue port reflecting rows of ancient skyscrapers, the sense of disappointment at likely never being able to see these things in person would have become too burdensome to fully process. The airport is probably all I would ever see of this place; over the span of my brief and perhaps futile moment on the earth this terminal would be the only Yemen that would ever exist for me, and whatever lay beyond it would only mock my shortage of money or energy or courage or time.

Yemenis believe that a week in a remote mountaintop village--one of hundreds of lonely desert settlements where ancient ten-storey towers jut straight out of the rock--can cure any psychological ill. Go to one, and balance is restored; life is practically made new.


CAIRO INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, AGAIN

The Yemenia flight landed at terminal 1. Back in 2007, my father and I spent a week in Egypt together, and our El Al flight landed at this terminal--the Phaoronic-style arrival hall, with a collosal Egyptian freeze adorning the back wall, was the first place I ever went in Egypt, the first stop on a wonderful and intense trip where my dad and I slept in an unimaginably skuzzy hostel on Sharif Street, climbed every minaret at the Al Azhar mosque and ate potato chips as we waited for worshippers to leave the Ibn Qaitbay mosque, in the heart of the City of the Dead. We shared our sense of unreality at the Pyramids and at Saqqara and Karnak--how could we convey the scale of it all? My dad had lived out a lifelong dream, and any sense of wonder or enchantment I had towards Egypt had been fully spent. When I returned in 2011, I regret that my strongest emotional response to the place was resentment at the traffic--although tonight, it was difficult to spot even a single vehicle on the airport road, or along the tree-lined boulevards of Heliopolis. The curfew was being scrupulously obeyed.

There had been a massacre in Cairo just a few days before. But the massacre didn't like, happen at the airport, and Terminal 3 was creepily indistinguishable from the past half-dozen times I had been there. I went to the Burger King. I had a full Whopper, as they had run out of the smaller, Juinor variety. My flight left on time.


OPHIRA INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, SHARM EL SHEIKH, EGYPT

This was the terminal point--a row of jagged mountains poking through the hot red earth. It was 35 degrees Celsius at 5:20 in the morning. The cab driver wanted me to pay him 25 pounds more than the official, legal price--"for waiting," he said, operating off of the paradoxical and rather mindblowing (and also mistaken) assumption I had entered into a transaction with him before we had even met. I don't care that you want to rip me off, I told him. Take me to my hotel. Take me a place where I won't have to look at another airplane, or eat another cheeseburger, or panic in front of another customs official. Set me down on earth again.

Meditiation on Formal Perfection

*kramer walks through a wall without flinching* jerry i,m home *jerry's knife-wound filled corpse sits on the couch* jerry tell me a joke;

If this stopped at the first line or independent clause or whatever it would still be a kind of hilarious that I could never hope to duplicate. It cracks me up still; it is cracking me up right now. Do we enter mid-PCP binge? What sport if this is the case! Kramer stalks the streets, bugs out, refuses to put on an AIDS ribbon, has business ideas such as beach-scented cologne or maybe a sort of coffee table book about coffee table books, slides, disappears, subsists in New York City without a job or any apparent purpose in life and then CRASH, without flinching even, drywall and paint chips littering Jerry's once-orderly apartment, he has walked through a wall, the greatest of his vaunted entrances. Through a wall, jittering though unfazed, oblivious as always (indeed, none of this makes sense--never mind comedic sense--if one is unappreciative of Kramer's just sort of like, Zen-like, mystical obliviousness), bleeding but unflinching even though there's something very obviously wrong. What is it? He isn't greeted with a stinging bon mot or a friendly groan. It is dark, the apartment is a deep shadow tempered only by the suggestion of a soft and distant streetlight, casting its stale glow from another world. A gaseous, fetid quality pinches the air, but Kramer is on PCP so he smells and notices nothing. God, he is on so much PCP. He sees nothing but the back of a hanging head and hunched neck and everything appears as normal, except that Jerry's corpse is positively filled with knife-wounds (although if Kramer knows that, of course, the humor of the situation is sort of totally lost, unless you find humor in someone expecting to hear a joke from a wound-riddled corpse. Which I sort of do, now that I think about it!). Jerry tell me a joke;--this isn't even the punchline of this situation. That I believe is off somewhere else, perhaps far off, occupying some indeterminant point deep in a vast unwritten Beyond. And this is funny only insomuch as tragedy at its cheapest and cruelest and most flippant or most reducible is funny. Take the Twitter handle Weed Hitler, for instance. See that's exactly what I'm talking about.

This might be the greatest tweet of all time.

Occupy Gaddis, pp 175-205: Coitus Splint

Thank the Great Cosmic Owl that tomorrow is my last day as a New Yorker. We've been through a lot together, this city and I. I've eaten veal heart in Queens and been inside the original CBGB's back when it was still actually CBGB's. I've stood on the southern tip of the Rockaways; I've been run out of a beach co-op on the southern tip of the Rockaways. I've been harassed by bored, off-duty cops. I've been in the attic of St. John the Divine. I've seen the Pupin Cyclotron, which is now scrap metal. I have wistful, nostalgic memories of about a half-dozen music venues that no longer exist--I can drift into "back-in-my-day"-like reminiscences without a shred of irony or pretentiousness, and with a real, unimpeachable longing for the old Market Hotel, the old Knitting Factory, the old McCarren Pool. Not to mention the restaurants that have closed since I got here--P&W Sandwich Shop on 110th, the kosher felafel stand in front of Borough Hall, El Toro Partido on 138th. Dreams have a very short lifecycle in this town, because this is a mean, status-obsessed, law-and-order oriented sort of town. It's a town of rules and obstacles, a town where the police are creepily ubiquitous in the rich parts of  the city and a fucking occupation army in the poor parts. It's a city where you can't drink or ride a bicycle or smoke without exposing yourself to nattering yet potentially serious legal consequences. It's a city where it's impossible to have fun at a rock show, because for most people rock shows are actually a kind of work, more about the joyless slog of status-driven self-making than cultural or individual enrichment. It's a city where you're expected to overpay for everything, just for the supposed privilege of physically inhabiting said city. It's a city that pretends to care about art and creativity, when what it's really obsessed with are patterns of consumption. It's a city where designer-attired men in Babybjorns flag down taxis at 3 in the afternoon on a Tuesday. Six years of this shit is enough. I'm happy to leave this city and its myriad annoyances and anxieties to people with stronger nerves and thicker bankbooks than myself. I'm over it, which is part of the reason why I'll be starting a new job in Washington, DC on Monday.

An unglamorous and socio-economically striated New York is the setting of J R, and my God do I recognize the place. It's an unglamorous New York, but it isn't cinematically unglamorous in the tradition "Taxi Driver" or Don DiLillo's Underworld. The obsession with status is coded into the city's DNA, threaded through the novel with almost overpowering subtlety. The city's darkness operates on a microbial level--the novel has very few impressionistic touches when it comes to evoking the city-as-postmodern-hellscape, and it's possible to blink past Gaddis's almost-cubistic illustrations of the city's soullessness. New York is a city of tweed-jacketed men plotting scams and takeovers and foreign invasions from penthouse offices lined with stuffed zebra heads. But more than that, it's a city whose tiniest, most throwaway details are consistent with a tweed-jacketed, top-down world of normalized unfairness and criminality.

The long paragraph on pages 193-4 is a case in point. The paragraph brings together two of Gaddis's recurring motifs--time (as expressed in the upward progress of the elevator) and sound (the Light Cavalry Overture, the Spanish rhythm). I have read no other book that goes so out of it way to evoke the artificiality and oppressiveness of the contemporary soundscape. The inane conversations of the novel's characters, disconnected bits of radio chatter, the music playing at the bank on Burgoyne Street 30 pages into the novel--it's as if Gaddis is narrativizing the constant junk noise that most of us just tune out or accept. In a weird way, this is a novel of ambience. So the long paragraph in the elevator is like a tidal wave of inane detail. There's little punctuation to guide you; the aural and visual and sensory noise just sort of sweeps you along, until you reach the literal Hell (and Hell it indeed is--check out the references to Virgil, Dante etc.) of the Diamond Cable offices.

Before then, you're given an almost chillingly casual snippet of untoward sexual pursuit, a scene made normal by the headrush of ambient details the reader is bombarded with:

"...an idly scratching hand thrust down the front of the denims burnished where it moved hidden as the other, empty, rose behind her gasped against the waist high rail there for -- You like to give head? posed in a tone as vacant as a face..."

I'm willing to bet that no adjective appears in this book as often as "vacant." This is actually kind of a funny scene, from one angle: Mrs Joubert(?) is propositioned for oral sex on an elevator; this being the sleepwalking, static-choked world of J R, vacancy ensues. And it's also a very disturbing scene: Mrs. Joubert is subjected to perversion and creepiness that is are normal, so coded into the chemistry of everyday life, that it warrants nothing other than vacancy--which is another way of say that everything warrants vacancy. The world of J R is one of darkly comic passivity. Everyone and everything is completely paralyzed, reified, for you Marxists out there--a condition that enables and even justifies the systems of control that the novel satirizes.

I made a similar point a few posts back, that it remains to be seen if the titular J R will be the avenging angel in all of this. Of course, he might also be a horrible demon child, a monster built by these systems of control, rather than the one figure who can challenge or even dismantle them. The two adult protagonists who could inhabit this role have been hilariously inadequate to it thus far--Gibbs and Bast's complete impotence is played for laughs in these 30 pages, and the "Zebra music" scene and Gibbs's train adventure are two of the funnier episodes in the novel thus far. Perhaps significantly, J R hasn't been held up as an object of ridicule in the book's first 200 pages.

Occupy Gaddis, pp 150-175: Nobody Has to See Anybody

Whilst procrastinating en route to today's J R reading, I finally willed myself through the pilot of "The Newsroom" and holy fuck is this show fucking awful. And it's awful in a way that actually ties in nicely with today's reading! See what really grated me about "The Newsroom" wasn't its haughty, even paternalistic construction of the relationship between the Fourth Estate and the viewing public (OK, that grated me), or the fart-sniffing self-righteousness of nearly every single character (that also really grated me) or "The Newsroom's" seemingly-magical and totally unctuous ability to piece together one of the most complex stories in recent years--a story that the New Yorker's Raffi Katchedourain only wrote about like, a year after the fact--in like what, 15 minutes (THIS REALLY GRATED ME!). What outraged me the most about The Newsroom was the fact that it depicts people who are good at and who actually really like their jobs.

Is this how life typically works? Do things actually function so smoothly, so seamlessly? Is morale always this high? Are most people constantly possessed with an unquenchable sense of purpose, which sense is expressed in eight hour or ten hour increments five days a week? There is something uncanny, even something disturbing, about such a sleek depiction of such motivated and unwrinkled professional existences. I prefer "The Office," or "Larry Sanders," or even "Louie"--I prefer struggle. The elusiveness of fulfillment, the inner battles with one's limited competencies, and, by extension, one's limited capabilities (i.e. one's inadequacies) as both a professional and a human being--these conflicts are seemingly absent from "The Newsroom." There's struggle, but its stupid, politically-located struggle--struggle against the vacuousness of the newsmedia and the idiocy of the American public, mostly. These conflicts are bullshit, and the characters are more bullshit still. They love their jobs too much, and they love themselves too much.

Which brings me to the the first ten pages of today's reading, where days--perhaps weeks--pass within the confines of an office in Queens. In a novel of changing leaves and ticking clocks, the scenes in the General Roll offices are notably disconnected from any temporal signifiers. And yet time is constantly being mentioned: take a late lunch, because it will make the afternoon seem shorter. Get a plant to liven up the office, because that's where you spend half your life (not half your time--half your life). A weekend goes by. Angel leaves for a business trip; Angel comes back from a business trip. People come and go. A female employee is on her period.

Both the reader and the office hacks are acutely aware of how time is passing, but they're unaware of just how much time is passing. And it's passing quite quickly, by the novel's standards: the book's first day takes what, 80 pages? Here, we go through a week in the space of a few thousand words. And it's a week in which very little happens. Much of this novel is dedicated to scenes in which nothing really seems to happen: it's dedicated to obscure, bureaucratic discussions, to technical jargon or legalese, to deep conversations on complex matters that have been foregrounded with little and in many cases no previous exposition. The office scene is a poignantly low-stakes version of that. Time is hastened by virtue of the banality of the conversation filling it. There's frustration and sadness as the bottom of this--Time passes, nothing happens. It's a common and all too human frustration, and Gaddis evokes it brilliantly.

He evokes it for sound, thematic reasons as well. On page 172, Our Hero explains what I'll simplistically describe as the disembodiment of capital. Money flies around without debtors or creditors understanding who's sending it or who's receiving it or where it's going or why. The paths that it travels are not random, but there's no way of conclusively pinpointing its behavior. Shakespeare makes a similar argument in Act 4 of Timon of Athens, when the title character reflects upon the seemingly mystical quality of gold, a substance that can cancel the predicted course of nature, and that even the gods are enslaved to:

[To the gold] 2085
O thou sweet king-killer, and dear divorce
'Twixt natural son and sire! thou bright defiler
Of Hymen's purest bed! thou valiant Mars!
Thou ever young, fresh, loved and delicate wooer,
Whose blush doth thaw the consecrated snow
That lies on Dian's lap! thou visible god,
That solder'st close impossibilities,
And makest them kiss! that speak'st with
every tongue,
To every purpose! O thou touch of hearts!
Think, thy slave man rebels, and by thy virtue
Set them into confounding odds, that beasts
May have the world in empire! 

Of course, the mysticism of capital is different from the mysticism of specie--capital implies an intricate system of debits and credits; gold is simply money, a more straightforward signifier and enabler of wealth. Gold is a noble and valuable thing; capital, in contrast, can be the absence of value, or the promise of future value. Which is why the office scene is so vital: the office is where value is created; it's where things are made and produced, the tangible side of the crypto-black box economy that J R unwittingly describes. In these 25 pages, we get something of a full look at Gaddis's notion of contemporary capitalism, in all its quiet frustrations and absurdities, in all its mystical banality. It is something less noble, less worthy of high poetry than the notion of capitalism that Timon rails against. This is no bright defiler of Hymen's purest blood, and maybe in the next 500 pages, we'll find that it's something altogether darker--and altogether more familiar to us.

Occupy Gaddis: A Mongolian Detour

Didn't read any of J R today. A terror-inducing line outside the Shedd aquarium doomed us to an afternoon at the Field Museum, which has a temporary exhibit about Gengis Khan, the most fascinating  historical figure of all time. The exhibit had plenty of interesting shit about the "how" of the rapid and violent expansion of the Mongolian empire (short answer: technological advantages, which included superior longbows, stirrups and badass siege machinery, including a version of the giant crossbow on wheels from Warcraft II, which the exhibit had a delightful scale model of; a carefully-oragized military, a total lack of moral scruples and, you know, just wanting it more). But what about the "why?" Why does a band of illiterate nomads decide that forcibly incorporating the entire known world into a well-organized crypto-cosmopolitan, semi-bureacratic state is like, worth the effort? How does the idea occur to them? Like where does this kind of ambition even come from? I mean this in the literal (as well as philosophical) sense--with modern colonial powers the expansionist impulse is fairly straightforward to understand: there's a drive for resources, political clout and foreign markets, not to mention ideologies of racial and cultural supremacism. But the Mongols didn't care about resources--hell, they even introduced an early version of fiat money. They had no civilizing drive; the reason the empire got so enormous so quickly is that they didn't fuck around with imposing their values on the conquered. In a weird way, the Mongols were open-minded and semi-tolerant because they were motivated purely by tribalism, which is emotional and inward-facing, rather than ideology or religion, which is systematic, expansionist and inherently arrogant. The Mongols weren't involved in any generational political struggles when they kicked this thing off either. They weren't locked into a mutually-destructive long game with the Russians or the Arabs or the Chinese (all of whom they would eventually conquer). They were just kinda roaming the steppes, tending their horses, minding their own business. Then something changed. But what? Why go through the headache? Thoughts?

So I didn't read today, but these people probably did: Infinite Zombies writes about the money-art nexus, with a nifty take on the bust-drowning on page 1. Chazz Formichella on humor in the novel.

Occupy Gaddis pp 51-60: Brooklyn Telephone Directory

Stray thoughts regarding a journey from Chicago to the Schaumberg Ikea and back:

-We board the Metra. It is 10:30. The train passes a baroque church, domes like the lid of an antique candy jar. We get to Des Plaines, which we mistakenly believe is pronounced D-ee Play-ne. It is not. The place name, though Francophonic, reverts to more familiar, phonetic pronunciation. Forty-five minutes from Ogilvie, Chicago is a theory, a previous point on an unfamiliar railway line that leads to...

-Des Plaines. When I heard the words "train to a bus to an Ikea," I immediately pictured some weed-eaten parking lot adjacent to a whooshing highway underpass. This is not the case. Des Plaines has a theater. It has a library newer and nicer than that of  my former college. It has a Thai restaurant. Inexplicably--for our own individual benefit almost--it has excellent public transportation. It has Civilization. It has...

-The bus. It swoops around worrying and unexpected curves, it stops to change drivers for some fucking reason, it huffs its way down Golf Road, which, perhaps coincidentally, abuts a golf course of sorts, or at least it abuts a driving range. It is a straight road, an arrow of a road, fucking a flat frontier of green and corn and two-level houses and cyclists and inflatable swimming pools. Speaking of cyclists, I spot a woman hauling one of those child carriages--and a child--behind her bike on a perilous four-lane road, a road without a bike lane, I should add. Is this person a fucking moron, or is this mode of transportation imposed by economic necessity, rather than idiocy, per se? The bus approaches an office park. This is our stop. For...

-The flag of St. Gustavus flutters proudly in the breeze. Ikea is a foreign outpost of another nation's nationalism. This nation is Sweden, so who gives a fuck. At lunch, I am served a platter of 15 meatballs, with a Swedish flag impaling the central ball. Said impalement was committed by a wasted-looking female employee in her late 20s, a woman whose ancestry might not have been particularly Swedish. Is this an example of Swedish Soft Power, or is it a more sinister indicator of the postmodern erosion of the Nation State as a morally and practically viable idea, even within our emblematically-American heartland? Or maybe this doesn't demean us Americans so much as it demeans the Swedish nation, which was once something of a regional and even imperial power, a conqueror of men, rather than furniture stores and meatball platters. My brother (whose apartment we are furnishing) and father go tie up some loose ends, which mostly involve paying for our furniture--our Bjorns and Halaks and Anders Behring Breviks--and arranging its safe delivery to downtown Chicago. I read ten pages of J R, a novel I will not be writing about in this blog post. Although earlier...

-Our helpful Co-Worker was Jeffery. No, not Jeffrey--Jeffery. Much joking will later be made on his account. Were his parents drunk in the delivery room? Or, more tantalizingly, more romantically--were his great great grandparents drunk on corn liquor in the delivery room/wagon/tent; was their clerical error lovingly reproduced throughout the generations, was it enshrined even a century later, carried forward by their Ikea-employed progeny? Jeffery was an English major at some earlier and perhaps more hopeful station in life. He knows every fold-out couch by name. He says that he hasn't sold any of his college books. For a moment, I imagine that J R is one of them.

-We finally leave. We encounter a Greek, or maybe an Armenian. For money he drives on a highway, in a direction that we're unsure of, towards the city, maybe away from it. We stand at a prairie railway station, staring at the backside of the Arlington Park grandstand. I mention how flat everything is here, how straight. There are no hills, no distinguishing buildings even, it's one sprawling expanse of flat, checkerboarded by straight-ahead roads converging at the occasional 90-degree wedge. The wind picks up, and I'm reminded that tornadoes are a common occurrence around here. Don't worry, my brother tells me. Clouds gather before a tornado hits. It it is clear. I have no idea which way the city lies. In matters directional, only God can help you--the sun is already setting in the west.