Thank you, tooth ache

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the current president of Iran, came to my school a week ago. Hitherto tonight's insomnolence, I didn't care what the man had to say, but I am glad I read the transcript, for the introduction given by Lee Bollinger, Columbia University's president, has benefited me a great pride. So, I list my favourite excerpts:

It should never be thought that merely to listen to ideas we deplore in any way implies our endorsement of those ideas, or the weakness of our resolve to resist those ideas or our naiveté about the very real dangers inherent in such ideas. It is a critical premise of freedom of speech that we do not honor the dishonorable when we open the public forum to their voices. To hold otherwise would make vigorous debate impossible.

To be clear on another matter - this event has nothing whatsoever to do with any “rights” of the speaker but only with our rights to listen and speak. We do it for ourselves. We do it in the great tradition of openness that has defined this nation for many decades now. We need to understand the world we live in, neither neglecting its glories nor shrinking from its threats and dangers. It is consistent with the idea that one should know thine enemies, to have the intellectual and emotional courage to confront the mind of evil and to prepare ourselves to act with the right temperament. In the moment, the arguments for free speech will never seem to match the power of the arguments against, but what we must remember is that this is precisely because free speech asks us to exercise extraordinary self- restraint against the very natural but often counter-productive impulses that lead us to retreat from engagement with ideas we dislike and fear. In this lies the genius of the American idea of free speech.

Lastly, in universities, we have a deep and almost single-minded commitment to pursue the truth. We do not have access to the levers of power. We cannot make war or peace. We can only make minds. And to do this we must have the most full freedom of inquiry.

Over the last two weeks, your government has released Dr. Haleh Esfandiari and Parnaz Axima; and just two days ago Kian Tajbakhsh, a graduate of Columbia with a PhD in urban planning. While our community is relieved to learn of his release on bail, Dr. Tajbakhsh remains in Teheran, under house arrest, and he still does not know whether he will be charged with a crime or allowed to leave the country. Let me say this for the record, I call on the President today to ensure that Kian Tajbaksh will be free to travel out of Iran as he wishes. Let me also report today that we are extending an offer to Dr. Tajbaksh to join our faculty as a visiting professor in urban planning here at his Alma Mater, in our Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. And we hope he will be able to join us next semester.

The arrest and imprisonment of these Iranian Americans for no good reason is not only unjustified, it runs completely counter to the very values that allow today’s speaker to even appear on this campus.

But at least they are alive.

According to Amnesty International, 210 people have been executed in Iran so far this year – 21 of them on the morning of September 5th alone. This annual total includes at least two children – further proof, as Human Rights Watch puts it, that Iran leads the world in executing minors.

There is more.

Iran hanged up to 30 people this past July and August during a widely reported suppression of efforts to establish a more open, democratic society in Iran. Many of these executions were carried out in public view, a violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Iran is a party.

In a December 2005 state television broadcast, you described the Holocaust as a “fabricated” “legend.” One year later, you held a two-day conference of Holocaust deniers.

For the illiterate and ignorant, this is dangerous propaganda. When you come to a place like this, this makes you, quite simply, ridiculous. You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated.

You should know that Columbia is a world center of Jewish studies and now, in partnership with the YIVO Institute, of Holocaust studies. Since the 1930s, we’ve provided an intellectual home for countless Holocaust refugees and survivors and their children and grandchildren. The truth is that the Holocaust is the most documented event in human history. Because of this, and for many other reasons, your absurd comments about the “debate” over the Holocaust both defy historical truth and make all of us who continue to fear humanity’s capacity for evil shudder at this closure of memory, which is always virtue’s first line of defense.

Let me close with this comment. Frankly, and in all candor, Mr. President, I doubt that you will have the intellectual courage to answer these questions. But your avoiding them will in itself be meaningful to us. I do expect you to exhibit the fanatical mindset that characterizes so much of what you say and do. Fortunately, I am told by experts on your country, that this only further undermines your position in Iran with all the many good-hearted, intelligent citizens there. A year ago, I am reliably told, your preposterous and belligerent statements in this country (as in your meeting at the Council on Foreign Relations) so embarrassed sensible Iranian citizens that this led to your party’s defeat in the December mayoral elections. May this do that and more.

I am only a professor, who is also a university president, and today I feel all the weight of the modern civilized world yearning to express the revulsion at what you stand for. I only wish I could do better.

Lyubov Bistreff stood alone outside the gates, holding a sign that read “Second Generation Holocaust Survivor.” She was 11 years old, she said, when she fled the Holocaust with her mother, two siblings, and one suitcase. “How can he deny it?” she asked. “I’m a witness. I remember everything.”


In the squares of the city - In the shadow of the steeple
Near the relief office - I see my people
And some are grumblin' and some are wonderin'
If this land's still made for you and me.

The devil speed him! no man's pie is freed
From his ambitious finger.

By day:       Magenta, the sky to aviate. 7 o'clock illuminated on my mobile phone just as I had closed my eyes for the night's initial sleep. I woke, three hours later, aching from filth; my hair was greasy, my fingernails garnered ink and dirt, my skin had the balm of old coconut and sweat, and my muscles pounded from exertion. "I'll get something sweet to eat," I thought. Ergo I bartered the remaining mouthwatering hours of Sunday morning sleep for something with which I can actually satisfy my tongue. Hot shower with an open window. Asquith & Somerset soap. Squinted at the sun upon first step outdoors. My father said with a Bulgarian accent, "Our daughter has become a creature of the night..." This has been an ongoing joke since I first started falling into strange sleeping cycles at 14. Poppyseed bagel with butter and a Sobe Coolatta. I took small bites and chewed slowly, crossed legs, heavy eyes, humming in my head. I watched cars and the waddling walks of many a passerby. I know nothing about car models, but I can generally guess the 2 year vicinity of its creation based on the details. I made photograph prints; one for my father to hand colour, two for my mother, six for James. Lake and I went to lunch, ordered the same soup, different drinks. She's really the only one to find me so funny.

By night:       Two hour nap (dreamt of Metropolitan steps, friendly phantoms who cause the racket on my roof, kissing the fingertips of my precious in the French restaurant, and fighting. No less than four times I woke to glance the moving shadows outside my window. Peter Pan.)
cont'd

If I would be impassive. If I would be less. If I would make up my mind. If I would express my composition. If I would be impassive.

If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. But do not care to convince him. Men will believe what they see. Let them see.

        My mother so often said to Spike, when he was not dead, "We should have named you," whichever sweet or sour name of the hour, that we have adherently extended Watson's name to a length I cannot recite.
        The afternoon was governed by whim. Consequently, we rode over the rivers, past the wood, and through the mountains to our grandparents' foreign home. It was two in the morning when we arrived - roughly seven hours past their bedtime - and we were no less awake. I gave my grandmother a mug from the Bronx Zoo, and my grandfather an old piece of jewelry on which an emblematic H had been engraved. Frazzled and markedly pleased, they left to share their bed during a time that my grandfather goes straight into a sound sleep, and my grandmother reads by flashlight for hours. As they did, Lake and I sat huddled together on a patchwork settee and shared a brownie she first tested for peanut butter. We spent two hours looking through an "I Spy" book and never found the duck. I dressed into my grandmother's nightgown and we tip-toed quietly, past the door with a covered hole induced by the punch of my then teenage uncle, into the deep, dark room redolent of the trees it is so close beside. Watson plopped by the crooked door, his nose aligned with the only exposed sliver of light. My mobile phone never seems to have more than one bar of service when visiting my grandparents, so I fruitlessly leaned toward the window, and whispered my good nights to Tim. In the hardship of being kept awake against your will, there is only one delightful exception, and that is being kept awake because your little sister will not stop laughing.

"Actually, there is no graffiti on our building..."
"There is now..."

I hate television at 4 in the morn. The only enjoyable sitcom they run at this time is X-Files, but, by jove, at this time it is too petrifying! Satanic alien serial killers and massive, dangerous government secrets -- I'd rather watch the painfully tantalizing mattress infomercials.
"What does that have to do with anything? That's like trying to sell a bicycle because McDonald's designed it!"

Loss and Gain

Virtue runs before the muse
And defies her skill,
She is rapt, and doth refuse
To wait a painter's will.

Star-adoring, occupied,
Virtue cannot bend her,
Just to please a poet's pride,
To parade her splendor.

The bard must be with good intent
No more his, but hers,
Throw away his pen and paint,
Kneel with worshippers.

Then, perchance, a sunny ray
From the heaven of fire,
His lost tools may over-pay,
And better his desire.

In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.

Sep 5, 2007 11:05 AM
Subject: stomach
Watson and I are sick. He vomited on my bed, I vomited in the bathroom, then he came in to join me for a long rest against the side of the bath. Sneeze! He jumps

I shouldn't've jumped into a cold pool last evening and swam for fifteen minutes, utterly convinced that my body would adjust...
And I should've listened about showering when I came inside...
And I should simply sleep once in a while, opposed to estivating (which is like hibernating, but rather, lizards, amongst other unspeakables, do it during summer, not winter).

sneeze

Sep 6, 2007 3:32 PM
Last night was the worst sleep, or complete absence of, I've ever had. I had a ferocious ache deep in my legs and was too exhausted to move them. The top half of my skull throbbed and every inch of me was unmistakably sore. I had a menthol and eucalyptus emitter beside my bed but couldn't tell the difference because my nasal passage was hording every newspaper in history, the equivalent. I tried to read but the focus made me dizzy, I tried to sleep but my body was too vexatious, I tried to use my laptop but the heat smothered me, I tried to watch television but was irritated by the thought of anything and the film I would like to watch I have only a VHS copy, too exhausted to take the trip to the living room. I have a playstationII in my room set to watch dvds and the seldom video game. At midnight, I began the hours of lying in my dark room, pretending and desperately trying to sleep. I embraced 6am as the time to celebrate not trying to sleep by sitting on the side of my bed. I heard mum walking about in her bedroom and called out for her. Watson came in first. Mum readied a bath for me, I stayed in for five minutes, and sat on my bed to watch the news, then Arthur. Watson seemed happier since I had unplugged my sinus clearing device and decided to stay in the room with me. I drank crystal light and willed my legs to feel better, then after I cried about Luciano Pavarotti's death and watched an episode of Charmed, I passed out for 2.5 hours, tissue box, Watson, and Mutsy by my side.
Now, to complete my cycle of being utterly pathetic, my mucous is no longer watery, but yellow.

When I got my drivers' license, the first drive with Lake was to the grocery store for sugar at midnight.