islamic studies library

this is oppressive, self restraining silence. the guilt is almost overwhelming, i want to remind people that ordinary human movements make noise and that i am not a gorilla, but i know that would only make it worse. opening my bag and turning on my computer make me want to shrink inside my sweater with shame. velcro; what was i thinking getting a bag with velcro on it?

this is a really attractive building. i'm sitting at a large round table that sits about 14 people, and it makes me feel close to them. a boy just snapped his glasses case shut and i feel wronged by it. the clock is ticking so ominously. it's strange to listen to it closely because it's actually an otherworldly tempo; just now i was trying to think of a metaphor for it, how it sounds and makes me feel, to call it a murderer creeping or heart beating or sticks crunching underfoot, but nothing happens at the speed of seconds. it seems, all of a sudden, like such an arbitrary unit. if it doesn't describe blood flow or icicles dripping or the speed at which i naturally count then why are we stricken with this alien cadence?

i looked up 60 bpm, which is things at the speed of seconds, and heart beat actually does come up. apparently some peoples' hearts are around that speed. mine doesn't seem to be. other than that there was nothing, except obscure ancient threads of people searching for leisurely baroque music. the heart beat would make seconds pretty valid, however, so that was a disappointing discovery.

the ceiling above my head is upwardly vertiginous, it yanks your eyes up as fast as you can tilt your head, which is thirlling and beautiful. and there is a chandelier that hangs down from that faraway ceiling, in a sheer drop like a free-falling spider with an instinctual grasp of where it should stop.

the one jarringly ugly thing are the lights. they are florescent lights which, for some very obscure reason, have been packaged in black, plastic, sausage-like tubes. They look modern in the most cartoonish way possible, like monsieur hulot's techy relatives. it's a bit choked with carrels in here, but the bones are exquisite and grand.

litter

I had an epiphany earlier today about litter, about the significance of putting trash in a garbage can. Sesame Street taught me the evils of littering at a very young age, about the evil of being a litter bug. What i realized earlier today is that we are disgustingly self congratulatory about putting trash in garbage cans, that that, in fact, is just displaced litter. In a word, EVERYTHING WE THROW AWAY IS LITTER. IF IT ISN'T RECYCLED THEN IT WILL GO SIT SOMEPLACE FAR AWAY AND BE LITTER THERE. WE HAVE TO STOP THROWING THINGS AWAY.

it would actually be great if there weren't any trash cans, if we had to confront the disgustingness of all the stuff we throw out right on our sidewalks. we can tolerate it because all that trash is spirited away, but what would really be right would be for us to confront that, to face the fact that IT'S ALL LITTER in the flesh.

I'm sure we could continue doing this for decades, centuries to come, the world is awfully big. But it's a terrifying thing to realize that you are contributing to that dumping with everything you throw out, and that throwing something out is part of that happy magic, like the flushing of toilets, that makes us believe we are not constantly piling up shit that isn't being dealt with elsewhere anymore than we are "dealing" with it here.

We need to take the righteousness out of putting something in a garbage can and replace it with the terrifying fact that that garbage can is just going to be dumped out someplace else.

barbara kruger

it's very late at the library and the florescent lights are piercing. i am sitting across from kira who is as out of place as a leopard. it is comical for someone so beautiful to be sitting in a place like this. i've been looking at a book of barbara kruger's art when i don't want to look at the screen anymore, and i think it's a lot of bullshit. it's the most simple, shallow and fun nonsense i've ever seen. i think it's got to say something when you rely so heavily on your font; this art would collapse in comic sans, it's only as appealing as it is aesthetically pleasing, which isn't necessarily damming but in her case, blaring platitudes about consumerism, it makes it all rather dumb. one just doesn't get the impression she's thinking very hard. in particular, her pasting "blind idealism is reactionary" on the side of a bus really made me think of her work with its self satisfied one liners. where exactly does "don't be a jerk" take us? is this at all memorable or do we just want to buy a poster in sleek red and white?

also, the introduction with its requisite references to barthes, derrida and other name brand philosophers tossed out uncited (apparently kruger's thinking about 'power' "calls to mind" foucault) is the most irritating kind of pretentiousness.

i mean, i guess you could argue that she's taking up space to convey vaguely (so vaguely) subversive ideas and therefore encroach on capitalist advertising's monopoly on our subconscious. but i really don't buy that, because the messages she's planting (silly word) in peoples' minds are just tidy, feel good ones consigned to oblivion amidst so many other feel good messages (like "oprah says 'you're beautiful!'" (i don't think oprah has an ad campaign like that, but doesn't it fit?))

was looking through "the architectural review" from may 1967 and one of the ads blared "REVOLUTION!" and then, in smaller font just below, "(IN TILE FIXING!)," and it made me think of barbara kruger again. i don't know why, exactly, or if it's a good or a bad thing, but i guess it's just another example of how readily the phrases she loves, the irony she loves, like "our prices are insane!" http://tiny.cc/clvll are coopted by plain old reactionaries looking to sell stuff. i can totally imagine some ad for a low priced soap with a man in a padded cell who's lost his shit over how cheap it is. actually, you know, that would totally be a great ad.

this all reminds me of the conversation i had with people after the talk by that guy W J T Mitchell about how effective or ineffective different efforts to keep the hooded man, abu grahib man, in conversation after people lost interest. mitchell really liked this poster a group had interspersed (that word is spelled so strangely!) with multicolored ipod advertisements, those with a colorful background and a black figure, with abu grahib man's silhouette with the wires with which they threatened to electrocute him in white like the ipod headphones. he thought this was really excellent stuff. from what i remember of us talking about it afterward, and i might just be remembering this the way i want to, we didn't really agree because, well, it fit in all too well, alarmingly, uselessly well.

i think the way to make people remember abu grahib man, or any of the other big issues barbara kruger wants to address, like domestic violence, are best addressed not with witticisms but by reminding us of the humanness of the victims. i think the only hope we have to care about people is in the specifics of who they are, if we are reminded that they have a name, perhaps, and an age and a mother. if we can, in essence, try to make people care about them in the way we care about people that we actually care about: by knowing who they are. if publicity can foist the intimate facts of someone's life into public knowledge we can forget them less readily, there is such a teeming sea of anonymous unhappy faces that for the tidal waves we see not a drop. sympathy and awareness are the inevitable result if we aggressively underline the common ground, the food anyone anywhere has to eat every day, the insecurity they feel about their nose and their hatred of their little brother TOGETHER WITH the torture they have suffered and their friends who have died. because if not, it's just as neat and forgettable as a snapple fun fact, a bit of trivia, a photo

sleepy day

i'm reading a really fascinating article about athenian humanism, how athens' imperial, crusading, impious and somewhat immoral doings after the persian war came as a result of their abandonment of their territory to persian destruction in order to face them at sea. it's really persuasive and fascinating, it's a really seductive creation myth for the character of a people.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/1958267 is the article

the snow has stopped, which stinks, because in spite of the wailing about how it's spring and that it shouldn't be snowing anymore, this is really the finest snow there is. because it's a shower rather than a blizzard, a fleeting pillow fight that makes the air come alive. snow is the most beautiful thing in the world.

i would love to have some leisure time, a really gluttonously oblivious day when you only realize at sunset that a day has passed, when clocks are not symbols of doom.

st patrick's day

well, i suppose st patrick's day in the form it takes at mcgill is quite obviously a bad thing. it smells steamy and rank and people act indecently and loads of people have the hungry lecherous look of feeling that sexual pleasure is their right on this most indecent day. I guess the problem with being drunk and knowing that many other people are drunk is that it magnifies the ordinary evils of drunkenness, since everyone's doing it there's no shame in indulging your most primitive instincts to yell and hoot and be indecent and hit on people crudely and uncomfortably and, worst of all, feel normal through it all.

It sucks for people who don't want to be involved at all because they get roped into it, it's just an expanded bar scene, a bit more raucous than usual, but it's ugly when it lassoes the unwilling. though for those who do embrace it, or don't mind it overmuch and don't get too close to the sticky beer and the armpits flailing in t shirts cut into strips, indecent and tribal and DIY and fabulously tacky all at once, the green everywhere is great. because it can, if it isn't made too crude, just be that lots of people are dressed in green and can share a phrase with each other about nothing, and many people need that camaraderie, i think. it's great when we can feel like we're other people, see a thread running through all the different varieties of person. it doesn't really work here on mcgill's campus because the armpit hordes dominate the scene and have scared off most everyone who might do it tastefully. but if those tasteful people were also doing it well, had their own elegant spin on things that perhaps didn't have the simmering scent of sexual assault underneath that spirit of celebration, this day might really look like a slightly better world. inequality and sexism and everything else, but with everyone in the same color? that's gotta be some kind of step towards something. the world wouldn't look quite so immense and anonymous.

miami

It’s kind of stupid to start with the plane’s descent into Miami because it gives everything away. On seeing its worryingly neat, geometric lay out you can’t help anticipating the horror to come. Those right angles, that gray, gray ground, those buildings that fit so alarmingly well into the squares squared by those uninterruptible roads, that sense that making those roads so straight was the defining reason things are as they are; the view from the Miami sky is a fearful premonition.

From above, Miami is also a strangely flat place. Even from the rakish angle of the plane window, nothing sticks out from the ground; its buildings don’t scrape the sky so much as squat. Which is not to say there aren’t tall buildings in Miami, just that they don’t seem to point or reach or aspire to the great beyond. This might be because they have nothing to fear from the sky; because nothing ever falls out of it there’s no reason for the complications of pointiness, of angles not ni nety degrees, of not being flat. Rather than soar, these buildings are built to bask. They just don’t have that narrowing, accelerating upward movement of a building like the Empire State Building, that striving oneupsmanship of trying to be a bit taller and closer to the clouds, the moon, the great beyond. Rather, the third floor in Miami often looks like the thirtieth; height is just stacking floors until you’re satisfied that the building is tall enough to appear worldly and urban. Miami is submissively content under its sky, it knows it’s high and wide up there but doesn’t care to climb up. And you couldn’t climb up anyway: the clouds here, those handholds of sky climbing, are pathetically frayed and malnourished little things. There’s just that coddling, infinite blue. And so it squats.

Squatting is natural when the weather is so pleasant, in fact, pleasant isn’t a strong enough word. There is nothing in Miami that hasn’t been sun stroked, warmed and brightened, everything under the sun has been painted with pacifying pleasantness, with soft heat. The byproduct of this climatic coddling is that you cannot help being a slob, that you sink naturally to the lowest level of comportment as surely as water to the lowest point. One day Shiyi and I had to meet our host, Jorge, an extremely generous and sincere and handsome man, at work near Douglas Road so as to exchange keys with him. He works on a faceless street across from a parking complex with no pedestrians; the street really isn’t more than a dark gray road in between two light gray sidewalks, and there is no place to sit. What was strange was that Shiyi and I naturally sank to the ground, sitting at first, but we were soon unceremoniously sprawled on the concrete. This was odd because Shiyi and I are reasonably dignified people who, I think, would normally feel self conscious about lying on ground where dogs pee and gum is discarded. But in Miami you don’t even have to reassure yourself that you aren’t a hobo. You debase yourself in the same way that someone about to freeze to death feels warm, your fall is as comfortable, as irresistible, as the cozy seduction of death. As long as it's warmer than it is undignified, anything is possible.

Going to the Miami zoo gives these ideas about climate a pretty rigorous scientific foundation. I had never seen such indifferent and flaccid animals. Lions and hyenas and most everything with fur looked like the "before" pictures on advertisements for hair thickening products. The crocodile was sleeping with its mouth open, which might be what crocodiles always do, but it looked too slovenly to not have been the result of living under that soporific, coddling blue.

There must be something good about a sky you fear in the same way that it might be helpful to fear god. Or else, as in this Korean gangster movie (friend) in which a gangster wishes he had been punished as a child so that he would not have grown up to be a gangster, to have a less permissive sky. In Miami the heavens are just a bland nanny, an immense pacifier on which to suck for all time, a sky that doesn't make you into a gangster as much as it makes you slouch with impunity. The sky here teaches you to pass your days dozing, like that stupid crocodile, yawning even as you sleep.

A white tiger, one of the few animals awake in that zoo, ambled back and forth across his weedy grass moaning extremely loudly. We forget that the large animals on TV that we always see roaring in triumph are equally noisy when they're piteous. It not productive for people to see things that wretched; zoos should remind us that animals are worth caring about but spectacles like that tiger are too disconcerting to help that cause. It should be mentioned that the monkeys at the zoo swung obligingly on their ropes and climbed trees and appeared not unhappy to be alive. But the general impression made us walk through very quickly.

It should be said, before I write about Miami's humans, that we saw them in an uncommon way. We came to Miami under the misapprehension that you could walk or take public transportation to get wherever you wanted to go, under the misapprehension, in a word, that Miami was a city. Miami is not a city, and only its saddest inhabitants don't drive. This is partly because you probably aren't very well off if you don't have a car, but also because you will have to spend time on the metro, the bus and the sidewalks, all of which encourage you to think about infinity and solitude and whether there is any good in the world. You often have to wait soul crushing lengths of time for public transportation. You can look up when the next train will arrive on Miami's skeletal and inadequate metro system, which is nice, because it gives structure to an often flabbergasting wait. For the bus routes, which would in theory do a fair job of getting you where you want to go, you can't. I like taking the bus in Montreal because besides being able to see when the next one will come, the stops are close enough together to race the bus. your head start is the time until the next one, and because the stops are close together (except on sherbrooke where the bus racing game sucks and is exhausting) you can run looking anxiously over your shoulder and always catch them just as they're pulling in behind you. the race is terrific because you have agency in getting where you're going. you're a wheel/leg centaur that never has to submit to the infuriating paradox of waiting so as to be able to go later. the bus race is also idiotic in that you arrive at the same time, only sweaty. but it's hateful psychologically to amputate yourself in sacrifice to the god of public transportation, to bind your feet so that it might better carry you. In Miami that god is a truant (and there are vast deserts between the stops), but people bind their feet just the same.

We had the same bus driver both going to and returning from a couple of places, we saw the literal loop on which those people worked, the tragic, absurd familiarity of understaffing and under-bussing. The undisguised hamsterwheeling of the drivers seemed indecent. The passengers on these buses are sad, surreal people, and not least because some of them drink out of miniature bottles of liquor and wear clothes they have found rather than picked. There are so many people with nametags.



And the passengers are sad, surreal people, an astonishing number wear name tags.










Miami is a lot of parallel lines that do not cross. Its mathematical perfection is positively nightmarish, there is something deeply inhumane about the unwavering straightness of its streets. It kind of has to do with there not being any refuge, with getting confronted by the infinite horizon in every direction, unsheltered from the great beyond. I think people like scurrying as much as any rat; "having a roof over your head" is really just a romantic spin on the verminous compulsion to find a hole. But the point i want to make is that scurrying is natural and i think it makes us happy. The mayor of Paris in the 19th century, a guy named Haussmann who I'd like to learn more about, razed a great deal of the city under the pretense of modernizing what had become a dirty, shadowy, crowded, alley-filled, nooky and sneaky city, but some people have recast his doings as an effort to reshape a city ideal for scrappy insurrection. While Paris, by the standard of other cities, is still rotten through with crannies and things, Haussmann was instrumental to giving it a few boulevards -- with names like Avenue de la Grande Armee -- on which little people would look littler and soldiers could march more breezily. I mention this because Miami is the hideous consummation of a Haussmannian project. It is a good place for wind to blow or tanks to roll, and there isn't very much wind.

earlier, when i mentioned how comfortable shiyi and i were sitting on the sidewalk it was in part because of how bare they are. I say bare rather than clean, because the sidewalks still have cigarette butts and the like, only very little of it. The bits of litter are like the artifacts left after a nuclear apocalypse, wistful, dusty tumbleweeds for archaeologists to study how we used to live. The trash, in a word, is dead here; it doesn't have the fresh freshness, the offensiveness of something new. If you let your dead cat's vomit sit for a decade it might eventually make you remember and miss your cat and its retching. Miami's litter gives you the same feeling about pedestrians.




The trash on the sidewalks makes me think of how archaeologists study litter and poop and other discarded things to understand the way people used to live

but only those of the extremely occasional passerby. The wind spreads trash very thinly, giving it an air of cleanliness the world might have after a nuclear apocalypse, with modern pollution made into a sort of wistful tumbleweed wishing there was some foot traffic.

Utter neglect and lackadaisical streetsweeping leave approximately the same gray.


a place as nakedly perfect for a tank, cruising unobstructed, as suggestible as a palm tree in the wind. I don't like trees like well fed snakes, naked trees, trees that look shaved.







ideal for an infinite parade of


Miami's geometry puts horizons at the end of every street, you have to stare down eternity to make it to the end of the block



Walking is a gimmick for tourists. No reasonable person would ever walk in Miami, the geometry, with the horizons on every street, stretching forever, makes things look pretty hopeless. You have to stare down eternity to make it to the end of the block. Shiyi and I had to walk over almost the whole causeway from the mainland to Miami Beach because of my stupidity. It was a very long walk, but we had the shoulder to walk on and the weather was mild. We decided to try and hitch hike, but there is no way anyone would ever pick up a hitch hiker in Miami; the only pedestrians in Miami mumble loudly and angrily to themselves and peck at cigarette butts.



do as we did. They are doubtless sad because they don't have cars, but doubly so on account of the metros and buses into which they're shunted. The public is wretched, no self respecting person leaves the kingdom of their car.
























The heat is impressive.

We went to Miami because it's hot. And it is hot there, all of the time. It's actually funny because it's not at all idyllic, in the same way winters are painfully cold here, the summer in Miami is intolerably hot. By 8 or 9 in the morning you can stand outside and take off your shirt and feel as though you're making progress and getting and looking healthier by the minute. And I did do that, I took every opportunity to take my shirt off, it seemed like my right going down there, as if absorbing the sun was a physical imperative the way some people take pictures. Miami is one of those places that's astoundingly full of cement, one of those places where you become faintly aware of how negated and denied actual dirt is, you know, what the ground is where people haven't built things. Apparently it's all dead, hard coral underneath. That cement gets obligingly hot during the day and you can lie down on it or lean against it and everything feels great.

The grass in Miami is kind of strange, it isn't soft like the kind i've known in new york, it's hardier, more weed like, it's a survivor plant, conspicuously and gruffly alive amidst so much gray.

What the grass is up against are vast savannahs of parking lots. Parking lots comprise a tremendous amount of Miami's space. They occupy swaths of the areas inside the squares we saw from the plane, they hold, after all, the cars that are the key to those otherwise impassable roads. It's complicated to leave the square without one. Parking lots are the soul of Miami, they give it girth and substance it wouldn't otherwise have. Miami stuffs its brassiere with parking lots. The buildings are only as tall as they are because they sit on top of parking lots. At least the first ten floors of many large buildings are dedicated to them, giving them an extra push towards urban legitimacy. Constructing elaborate buildings for cars adds something like density.

The other thing is, despite the claims that Miami is a rather dense city, its lay out doesn't seem to reflect that. The tall buildings shoot up sporadically and usually solitarily, there is no evident need for their sudden bursts of height. There's emptiness all around them, their push is a kind of dutiful acknowledgement that they are helping Miami claim that it's a city where life doesn't simply seep sideways but surges up. But it doesn't in Miami, those outcroppings of touchingly deliberate verticality are unnatural and few. Miami squats.

Miami is not a city. It's absurd predilection for building buildings for its cars seems like a campaign to humanize them, crown them half citizens. Some of them are quite beautiful, for these citizens require no air conditioning and their houses are wide open, beautiful the way cement hulls of half finished structures are. I annoyed my friends announcing whenever I saw a parking lot building. There's just no shame in it, they have an integral place in the skyline. A prime stretch of real estate along Lincoln Road on South Beach had a beautiful parking lot building on it. Cars are hallowed and utterly essential here.



Even if you aren't on a causeway, bathed in headlights and fear, walking in Miami just isn't fun. The street is the small emptiness enclosed by immense, impassive buildings which take no notice of having reached the ground floor. These buildings sometimes have actual doors that could open onto the sidewalk and out of which people could theoretically walk, but these are absurd gestures. And so, as you walk, that which looms to the right and left does nothing but cast shadows; you can look forwards or behind you towards the horizon; or you can look up at buildings that look liable to launch, so unnaturally and indifferently do they stand on Miami's ground. The streets are funnels for wind and cars.

How people actually get into those buildings is something of a mystery, but it definitely has to do with cars. As I mentioned, the parking lots are integrated, coming to work with your car is like bringing your briefcase, a presumed companion.




If you ask locals what you should do in Miami they will shirk the question. They will make the sort of pronouncements usually reserved for tourism bureaus, gesturing expansively at "the bars" or "the restaurants," or else towards those obligingly bland sports teams. They will recommend entertainment for you and ten thousand friends, but nowhere with any intimacy. Miami has accumulated the trappings of fun and culture, but its attractions are only real when they're aggolmerated

Miami is strange in that there doesn't seem to be anything between being swallowed by its massive spectacles and blobbily "fun" areas of town -- it's notable that no one tells you any particular place to go, people recommend a sprawling area liked let it ooze into you that way -- and the almost mythically private good times that are said to happen. It's hilarious that in a place that claims to be a city the residents tout the obscure and elusive joys of deep sea fishing. When Shiyi and Yona and Alice and I, flabbergasted at the awfulness of Miami, tried to think of what celebrities might do to have fun here, the people for whom happiness was probably inevitable, we assumed it must be happening on unseen yachts or behind doors that you need special glasses to see. Fun, in the sense of going some place and leaving your mark on it, in the sense of the semi-public -- the scrabble in the park, the birthday party in a bar -- is mythical here.

and if you confront them, if you ask them baldly whether they like Miami, they will say no.