Past Tense, Forever Present: Remembering 9/11 – C@L Books

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00AA46LS6

The ramifications of 9/11 are still being felt today. And those ramifications will continue to be felt for generations to come. Everyone's world changed irrevocably on that morning. Eleven years later wars are still being fought as a result and nut cases who think it was an inside job continue to spout their poison. Twenty-five, fifty, one hundred years from now, someone will still be looking at the historical and political meaning of this tragedy.

Critics at Large (under the imprint C@L Books) is thrilled to announce the publication is our very first e-book single: Past Tense, Forever Present: Remembering 9/11. Edited by David Churchill, and with original water colours by Andrew Dupuis illustrating the collection's evocative themes, the book includes seven newly revised versions of essays first published on the tenth anniversary of the September 11th attacks, and four entirely new pieces written specifically for this publication.

These eleven essays look at 9/11 from a cultural perspective, examining its impact on the arts, social media, and on our lives as arts journalists caught up in the horrible calamity of that day.

Authors include: David Churchill, Mark Clamen, John Corcelli, Kevin Courrier, Susan Green, Deirdre Kelly, Mari-Beth Slade, Andrew Dupuis, David Kidney, Shlomo Schwartzberg, and Steve Vineberg.

The e-book is now available on Kobo and on Amazon for immediate download to Kindle. Both are priced at only 99 cents.

Remembering 9/11

To commemorate the 10^th Anniversary of 9/11, tomorrow, starting at 8:46 a.m. EDT (the exact moment the first plane hit the first tower), we at Critics At Large will be running a series of posts throughout the day written by members of the site. Seven of us have each written an essay that looks at the cultural (including personal and public) ramifications that have come about as a result of this tragedy. So to our registered followers, whether directly to the site or via Facebook, please note you will be receiving seven notifications throughout the day that a new piece has gone up. We will be posting once an hour, with the last piece – Deirdre Kelly's devastating on-the-ground-in-New York-on-9/11 piece – going up at 2:46 p.m. EDT. Each essay is as unique and individualistic as the writers who crafted them. Please let us know what you think by adding your thoughts to our comment section.

-- The writers of criticsatlarge.ca

Overcoming the Irrational: Flying in the Post 9/11 World

Today, at 11:06am local time, I will board flight UA906 from San Francisco to Chicago. The planes hijacked on September 11, 2001, were also transcontinental flights, chosen by terrorists because they were loaded with jet fuel. I’m not generally a superstitious being, but as I get ready to board this flight I am a little anxious. Traumatic events tend to augment our irrational tendencies, on both a personal and societal level. After 9/11, many people were afraid to fly, although statisticians tried to convince us that we were safer than ever. Airport security was upped to inane levels, although would-be terrorists had likely developed more sophisticated techniques than hiding metal in their flip flops. Crises often catalyze change, and in many ways 9/11 has changed our world for the good, making us more compassionate, considerate, and careful. Still, it was too high a price to pay for the compassion, consideration, and care we should have been showing each other anyway. 9/11 has worked its way into our literature, film, television, and collective conscious. Throughout today, as we reflect on the impact of the events of a decade ago, let’s turn our temptation for paranoia into a catalyst for change. That’s what I’ll be reflecting on during my 4-hour flight this morning.

– Mari-Beth Slade is a marketer for an accounting firm in Halifax. She enjoys hearing new ideas and challenging assumptions. When not hard at work, she appreciates sharing food, wine and conversations with her family and friends.

2001: A Terrorized Odyssey

“The mystic chords of memory,” President Abraham Lincoln suggested during his first inaugural address in 1861, should be tempered by “the better angels of our nature.”

On an early autumn morning 150 years later, the mystic chords of memory became rooted in infamy that would change almost every political, social and cultural sphere on the planet. There’s no going back to the widespread innocence and ignorance that existed before the momentous events of 9/11, which many of us often replay in our minds.

I’d like to think my better angels will eventually diminish the feelings of fury about who wreaked so much misery and about an American government’s failure to be vigilant despite dire forewarnings. After a decade, the immediate fear has subsided but the rage continues and the wound never quite heals.

Here is an account of memories, reconstructed as faithfully as possible, from my sojourn at the Toronto International Film Festival when the worst demons of our nature came calling:

Trying to Comprehend the Incomprehensible: Artists and Musicians Coming to Terms with 9/11

9/11 Tribute - Photo by David Kidney

September 11, 2001, started out as a very ordinary day. Woke up to the radio, had my shower, cereal for breakfast, took the bus to work. It didn’t start to get weird until just before 9am. I received a phone call from one of the technicians in my office.

“A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center!”

I laughed. “Joe, New York City is a ‘no fly zone,’ planes don’t fly over the city!”

“Well it was on the radio.”

“You must’ve misunderstood … what was it, a Piper Cub?”

Twenty minutes later he called back. “Dave, another plane crashed into the World Trade Center!”

9/11: Popular Culture's Partial Truths

After 9/11, pundits weighed in on how the popular culture was going to treat this unique, horrific event and how it would change because of what happened in America on that fateful day. I remember comments about the immediate death of irony, pace Roger Rosenblatt in Time magazine, and musings about a supposed new seriousness in American culture. Well, neither has happened, as in many ways the U.S. has gone further along a superficial route with its TV reality shows still thriving and becoming even more idiotic and fatuous. Much of Hollywood’s output is increasingly given over to tedious remakes, unimaginative sequels and empty-headed comedies. You can also see that disintegration of thought in the political arena where complex issues are routinely debased with cheap sloganeering and carelessly used language such as Rick Perry’s recent labelling the act of U.S. Reserve Chair’s Ben Bernanke’s printing of U.S. money as ‘almost treasonous.’ In the case of depictions of 9/11, however, popular culture has taken a different route, not making light of the tragedy, but for various, sometimes complex reasons, refusing to look at it in a clear light and thus veering away from examining the reality of the terror attacks and what they actually meant.

Mirrors: 9/11 and the New Media

One night, about four years ago, I was sitting in front of my computer at work, just killing time and finishing some e-mails. As I was about to head home, a Chinese employee in her mid-thirties just happened by my office to chat. In no particular hurry to leave, I asked her to sit and soon we began talking about her short time in Canada as well as the journey that brought her here from Beijing. Our conversation quickly got around to world affairs and some of the historical events that touched, perhaps even changed our lives. After I rhymed off some of the key ones for me – from JFK's assassination to 9/11 – I suggested that for her the massacre of the students at Tiananmen Square in 1989 had to be a seminal event. Instead of nodding in full recognition of the terrible slaughter of that June, she looked at me with the puzzled expression of someone left out of the loop of a conversation.

Certainly I must be confusing this horror with some other place, some other country, some other time, her face told me. While I insisted on what I knew to be historical fact, she was adamant that Tiananmen Square never saw such a calamity. For her, not only had Tiananmen Square never happened, student leader Chai Ling never existed, nor did the iconic sight of the sole protester standing in front of the tank; an image that, for many, stood for both the resiliency of human defiance as well as its futility when it's up against enormous odds. In her mind, there never were such odds at stake. Her expression of denial proved wrong the hopeful young female student speaking to the BBC who, in the middle of the protests, told the reporter, "What can they do to us? We have our whole future ahead of us, and we've seen it." The student obviously didn't see a future where one of her own citizens had no knowledge, or even a recognition of the events that prompted her to see a better future, a time she saw ahead as a period of democratic freedom that China has yet to attain.

Paralysis: The Day the Words Ended

“What's that Bin guy's name?” I asked Ron Bowering, who'd just told me that two airplanes had deliberately crashed into New York's World Trade Center towers. And so it began. As I outlined last year in my analysis of the U2 song, “Beautiful Day,” everything began to change for me on that day. In the case of U2, the song's meaning was transformed, but in so many other ways my attitude and outlook also began to morph into something different.

Throughout the rest of that horrifying day, windows opened onto a whole other reality. For about an hour after I watched the first tower fall on a TV in a boardroom, I tried to work. In my day job, I write feature and sales copy about fine wines and spirits, so I tried, vainly, to go back to it. Finally, I knew I needed to get out, so I grabbed a work colleague and we walked down to the water's edge at the Toronto harbour. Everything was quiet as we talked and tried to make sense of things. A handful of images from our moment by the harbour persist today: hundreds of seagulls knew something had happened because they surrounded us, just walking rather than flying, as if they had received the no-fly order too; a bus circled aimlessly around in the background (we were in an unused parking lot where bus drivers were obviously given lessons); just before we returned to work, a single-engine plane approached the island airport. We both found that odd since we had heard that all North American airplanes had been grounded (clearly this pilot didn't get the memo). We went back to work and I sat at my keyboard to start again on our latest 'magalogue' about the wonderful world of wine. I opened the program, rested my fingers on keyboard and, nothing. I thought, “What the fuck does it matter that I'm telling people about wine when the world was ending?” I couldn't type, I couldn't think about anything else except what was happening in New York, and, later, Washington and Pennsylvania. And then it seemed to be getting worse. A friend called and said there was gunfire in the streets of New York. Another friend told me the Sears Tower in Chicago was down. It was like the end of days.

Seven Days in September

This wasn’t my war. It wasn’t even my city. And it wasn’t supposed to have been my assignment that day, or for the nearly 10 days that followed. But I was in New York on 9/11 -- definitely the wrong place at the wrong time -- and found I was swept up in the chaos and other forces beyond my control.

I had been there already for days, covering the fashion shows that had been unfolding inside the tents at Bryant Park as part of New York Fashion Week. That morning, as terrorists flew jet planes into the World Trade Center, I was just about to take my seat alongside a catwalk teeming with pregnant models showcasing a new line of maternity wear by American designer Liz Lange, a fashion runway first.

But I didn’t end up reporting on that.