A typical fighting season in southern Afghanistan begins in spring and continues through fall. This photo essay by photojournalist Louie Palu in the summer issue of Geist documents last year’s fighting season. It finds the region’s Pashtun people, who know little of life without seasonal warfare, living day to day on the fringes of battle.

As the 2009 fighting season began this past May, Palu returned to Afghanistan to capture what could be the worst season the Pashtun have seen. He writes:

The longer I stay in Afghanistan and the more I see, the fewer answers I have about what is going on there and what the future holds. Back in Toronto I can’t even talk to anyone in a bar, because conversations with people who think they understand Afghanistan just end as heated arguments on the sidewalk.

Source: Geist 

 Image by Louie Palu.

So you’re stuck in the hospital, preparing for or recovering from this or that procedure—what books do you bring along to keep yourself busy? Canadian author Alberto Manguel tackles the question in the new issue of Geist, describing his careful process for selecting hospital reading during a couple of recent stays.

During his first trip to the hospital, Manguel decides against a number of genres, including recent fiction ("too risky because unproven") and biographies ("too crowded: hooked to a tangle of drips, I found other people's presence annoying"). Ultimately, he opts for “the equivalent of comfort food, something I’d once enjoyed and could endlessly and effortlessly revisit,” he writes. “I asked my friend to bring me my two volumes of Don Quixote.”

Because I’ve kept going back to it ever since my adolescence, I knew I wasn’t going to be tripped by the surprises of its plot; and since it’s a book that I could read just for the pleasure of its invention, without having to delve into its erudite conundrums, I could allow myself to drift peacefully away in the story’s flow, in the wake of the noble knight and his faithful sidekick. To my first high school reading of Don Quixote, guided by Professor Isaias Lerner, I have added many other readings over the years, undertaken in all sorts of places and moods. To those I can now add a medicinal Don Quixote, both a balm and a consolation.

Approaching his second hospital stay, Manguel works out a formula of sorts to assure a “companionable variety” of books, drawing from each of four categories: “a miscellany,” “a meditative work,” “a book to make me smile,” and “a collection of poetry.” It's a lovely way to approach a down-time reading list, though I might have to add a fifth category: "trashy mystery novel."

Source: Geist 

I had a dream that I was back in the house I used to share with 11 other college students in Washington, D.C., and apparently I was also Barack Obama's girlfriend. He was one of my roommates and also the President of the United States. There was a huge, Dr. Seuss-like pile of dirty dishes in the sink. It was my turn to wash them, and I hadn't done my duty. President Obama was on television in the living room, giving a speech. All my roommates were eyeing me with anger and contempt, crossing their arms and saying things like, "You think you're so special? Just 'cause you're the President’s girlfriend doesn't mean you don't have to pitch in and do your chores." In spite of their judgment, I felt comforted and safe, like no matter what happened, Obama would be home soon and make everything okay.

I had this dream before I heard about Sheila Heti’s Obama dream-collecting project through Utne’s Shelf Life and Great Writing blog. Now I feel like I’m part of some larger collective consciousness.  

Image by springhill 2008, licensed under Creative Commons

Sources: Utne Daily, Geist, I Dream of Barack

Sheila Heti began collecting dreams about Barack Obama during the 2008 primaries. Even after Obama’s victory and his first 100 days Heti’s peculiar dream journal is an irresistibly peculiar read: 

Then he is in my bed wearing blue striped boxers. I have a perfect apartment in Harvard Square … The room has a bohemian look, all earth tones and Indian prints. The afternoon sun is coming through the window above the bed. I remember the intense conversation we shared … We’re talking less intensely now. I’m reclining on the side of the bed, not touching him … We fall silent and our eyes meet. Then we kiss very softly. I can feel his desire to relax, to be himself, to lose himself here. I realize this could never be kept a secret. I know how disastrous it would be for the man about to be our country’s first black president to have an affair with a white woman twenty years his junior. I cannot risk any chance of ­being the woman who will cost our country his presidency. I put my hand on his chest and say, This is getting ­really dangerous really fast.

The venerable Geist magazine has collected the best of these dreams and produced a video of dream readings over a montage of paintings they inspired.

Of course, if you’re more the Obama nightmare type, there is something for you too. Jamal, take it away.

Sources:  I Dream of Barack ,  Geist  

Image by EricaJoy. Licensed under Creative Commons. 

Featured in this week’s episode:

- Meatpaper’s Pig Issue on how to share a pig, factory-farmed pigs vs. sustainable pigs, and much more (not available online)

- Hunting (and cooking) octopus, from Art Lies

- A collection of dreams about Barack Obama, from the eco-redesigned Geist

- Sustainable architecture in Cape Town, from Azure

Like the McDonalds of tourism, the proliferation of Lonely Planet has branded and shaped our interaction with the world.  In the winter issue of Geist, Stephen Henighan compares international travel before and after the popular guide book series took root.  He considers early travel narratives by Harry Franck and A.F. Tschiffely, Americans whose journeys favored rough improvisation over guided plans, relying instead on advice from locals and their own observational knowledge.  In contrast, Lonely Planet has effectively homogenized how people think about travel, reducing the experience to a predictable set of outcomes.        

“The company’s formula, laying its easy-to-consult categories over each destination like a grid, has not only charted the world: it has changed it,” writes Henighan.  “By assuring almost everyone that they can travel to faraway places and find familiar comforts and attitudes, Lonely Planet, along with its competitors, has acted as a catalyst in installing cheap hotels, transportation links and English-speaking personnel in locations where otherwise they might not exist.”       

Henighan acknowledges that Lonely Planet has also helped democratize travel through both its mass appeal and its nod to specific groups, such as women, people of color, and the LGBT community.  No small feat, considering that experiences like Franck and Tschiffely’s were once limited to a privileged few.

Source: Geist

Image by The Wandering Angel, licensed under Creative Commons

J.R. Carpenter has assembled a charming canine lexicon for the Winter issue of Geist. Carpenter’s “Words Dogs Know” are on the sophisticated side: phenomenology, conquest, corruption; they’re probably pretty representative of the average Geist-reading dog’s vocabulary. My favorite:

trust:  When they say: "We’ll be right back," they may not come right back, but they always do come back eventually. When they say: "It’s all right," it may not be all right yet, but it will be soon. When they say: "Stay," for no apparent reason, it’s best to just do it. Who knows, maybe there’s a car coming.

Source: Geist

Image by rgdaniel, licensed under Creative Commons. 

So many pieces by and about ageing people are depressing meditations on mortality and the meaning of life. Edith Iglauer's essay “What?” for Geist, a Canadian magazine of ideas and culture, stands out with its light, comic tone. Iglauer and her husband Frank both use hearing aids, and she writes about the trials of wearing—and more often searching for—them. The challenges are sometimes tragicomic (fumbling with tiny batteries) and sometimes just comic (dropping aids in a glass of water). Whatever the situation, Iglauer comes at it with vitality and a sense of humor that’s a welcome change from darker fare.

Image by  Photos by Mavis , licensed under  Creative Commons .