3quarksdaily

India, China and the polemics of the East

by Manisha Verma

The oft-cited ascent of India and China and their dominance in the emerging markets as global key players seems dramatic, almost cataclysmic, or to put it mildly - rhetorical, given that not long ago the former appeared in the Western imagination as poor and backward, and the latter, a crestfallen victim to the dogmas of an unyielding Communist regime. Still, rarely has the economic ascent of two still relatively poor nations been watched with such a mixture of awe, opportunism, and uncertain apprehension. To be sure, the story of their awakening from their long Asiatic slumber has been retold a countless times with avid journalistic enthusiasm and funk.

Notwithstanding, a quick re-cap of their historical progression in vignettes is suitable.

India's slow and steady approach contrasts China's meteoric rise, and in many ways the two are as opposite as Gandhi and Mao. India is democratic, China is authoritarian. China's strengths are more visible to the world - in its impressive infrastructure or roads, modern buildings and skyscrapers and network of highways, whereas India's less so. China closed its colleges during the Cultural Revolution, and persecuted capitalists, whereas India with its vast army of engineers, doctors, scientists nurtured by its universities had better run businesses by managers who gained experience by battling it out in the local markets. India's invisible human infrastructure is what has today reconnected it to the global economy.

By 1978, China's countryside was impoverished and starving for decades as a result of the communist reforms. On the night of November 24, 1978, farmers of 18 households from Xiaogang, a village in east Anhui Province, signed a secret agreement using their thumb prints. They agreed to divide the land of the local commune into household plots in return for delivering fixed output quotas to the government with the condition of never asking for money or grain from the state. If the cadres went to jail for this proposition, it was agreed that the other villagers would take care of their kids. This household contract responsibility system was strictly forbidden at that time.  Today, the Chinese celebrate Xiaogang as the birthplace of China's rural reforms and the beginning of the nation's historic move from a government planned economy towards a modern market economy.

Mao's eventual successor Deng Xiaoping sought to advance China through modest deliberate steps, which were initially mainly experimental, and ranged from forming special economic zones and enticing foreign companies to build factories, to paving farmland into vast industrial parks and not in the least ,to laying down phone lines and IT infrastructure. Gradually, the government itself became the "capitalist roaders" they had sought to persecute a generation ago, and gradually China tiptoed away from communism into a silent economic revolution. Although Deng blew the whistle on Mao's originative ideals, he did so in fact to preserve the Communist party that Mao had brought to power when the leaders recognized the need to modernize the nation after decades of stagnation, even if it meant reversing the very essence of party doctrine and accepting capitalism to achieve it. Democracy and political freedom still remained out of question, as was the case when the government violently repressed the peaceful protest at Tienanmen Square, but China's economic freedom surged as it soared towards a Dragon economy[1].

To deliberately draw a parallel, in 1991, India was flat broke.  One hundred and ten million people had been thrown into poverty in just the preceding two years. Inflation had soared to an astounding 17 percent and two in every five Indians lived below the poverty line. The government's finances collapsed and India faced a crisis. Banks had cut off India's borrowings just as they might a defaulter's credit card. India's foreign exchange reserves had fallen to levels of that would pay for only a few weeks worth of oil imports. Following Rajiv Gandhi's assassination that year, Narasimha Rao who was sworn in as prime minister chose Manmohan Singh to be the finance minister. Immediately, upon the recommendations of Mr. Singh, the government rolled out the blueprints containing the basics of political and economic reform containing many of the changes required by outsiders like the IMF, which stood ready to bail out the bankrupt state. The economic crisis finally prompted India to unleash its economy and India's historic reforms began. On Monday, July 1 1991 , Mr. Singh devalued India's currency by more than 9 percent in an effort to boost exports, paid for in much-needed foreign currency. On July 2, Commerce Minister P. Chidambaram announced he would lift long- standing restrictions on imports and make a number of structural reforms designed to further encourage exports. On July 3, the Reserve Bank of India raised interest rates to 11 percent to try to attract deposits. Meanwhile, the rupee was further devalued by 11 percent, a massive 20 percent drop against the US dollar in a span of just 3 days. On July 4, Chidambaram abolished export subsidiaries as part of an effort to trim India's budget deficit.  The same day, India received a $2 billion loan from the IMF to avert the immediate crisis[1]. Over the next two years, the government introduced a big structural reform nearly every week. State-owned banking, airline and oil industries were all opened to private investors. Mr. Singh did away with the Licence Raj (investment, industrial and import licensing) and ended many public monopolies, allowing automatic approval of foreign direct investment in many sectors - a move that cut red tape overnight. He lowered income taxes from 56 to 40 percent by 1993. He allowed mutual funds and other institutional investors to buy shares in Indian companies on the BSE. The effect was dramatic. Debt was paid down, foreign exchange reserves built back up, and inflation dropped to manageable levels. The impact of liberalization may be gauged from the fact that total foreign investment in India grew from a minuscule US $132 million in 1991-92 to $5.3 billion in 1995-96.

These reforms dizzyingly tie in to the neatly folded manufacturing and service-oriented niche sectors that China and India have respectively managed to carve out almost monopolistically for themselves, if we were to talk of a simplified world view for a moment.

Consider manufacturing. Contrary to Henry Ford's evolution of the assembly line in the early 20th century in a single factory, manufacturing today is marked by a rush by companies to break up their products into specialized sub-assemblies which they move to anywhere they can find cheap labor close to decent shipping lines. This new "disassembly line", which is the backbone of the globalization drive, lowers overall costs, improves quality and makes it easier for companies to customize products[1]. Today, many different factories are involved in the making of a single product while sophisticated technology tracks the supply-chain logistics of each part that needs to be added. With the prominence of the manufacturing might of China, many American companies have by now concluded that their role is to invent new products or market finished products instead of even attempting to compete in their manufacturing. Apple created created the iPod and markets it, but the chip that powers it was invented by PortalPlayer, a small Indian company in Hyderabad, and the devices are made in China and shipped around the world. Services have also followed the fate of the manufacturing disassembly line, particularly in India, where outsourcing has been expansively enabled by leveraging digital technologies. Alan S. Blinder, a professor of economics at Princeton University, calls this the third Industrial Revolution. The first was the shift of labor from farms to factories. The second was the shift from manufacturing to services. The third is a shift made possible by the information age[5].

No doubt, India's poor still wait for opportunity and justice in an existence fraught with ignorance, penury and disease. But India's goals remain as inspiring as they have hitherto been elusive. Ratan Tata's rear-engined city car "the Nano" and his urban flats for low income groups encapsulates the dreams of millions of Indians groping for a shot at urban prosperity. Ambani wants to build the Wal-Mart of India, creating a chain of stores across the nation to sell food produce and goods, replacing traditional mom-and-pop shops. At the same time, a modern distribution system which would get produce from ports and airports will create additional billion dollar markets for agricultural exports, by his estimates. Pushing this agenda would of course require commitment towards the long neglected transportation infrastructure in India. The Indian government must convince voters that the changes it uses to spur economic development will bring them gains, for instance that building new roads will create hundreds of thousands of construction jobs for the poor, or that allowing new retail stores to compete with traditional mom-and-pop shops will result in both lower prices and more jobs created than lost. And if the government fails to carry those arguments, it must leave it to companies like Ambani's Reliance Industries, Murthy's Infosys and Tata'a Tata group to take the lead on making those changes. To move forward in economic development, India needs to continue aggressively to put in place policies that encourage Indian and foreign companies to hire in India. According to many thought leaders, if it fails to fully unleash its economy today while it has the attention of investors from around the world, it will have a heavy price to pay both now and when its mostly nascent young population comes of age in need of jobs which need to be there to propel hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.

"Much of the elite in India still attach great importance to the village, even though none of them actually lives in one" says Nandan Nilekani, co-chairman of Infosys and chairman of the UID project in India. "In my view they are dangerously wrong. India must urbanize much more rapidly and much better than we have done so far. This is what is happening in China and what has happened in every developed country on the planet. There are fundamental problems with the Indian village. The village is unable to give its people's jobs and it never will, because reform of agriculture will mean mechanization of farming and fewer jobs. The village is a trap for the lower castes. It is a kind of prison",he says.[2]

The Indian government, beset by twenty-four party coalitions, is fragmented and often incoherent; fewer than forty million of India’s citizens have any formal employment and pay any income tax; and three hundred million people live in abject poverty. Edward Luce writes a commendable and far-reaching narrative in his study on modern India in his novel In spite of the gods, where he tackles the contradictions of the country with a mixture of bemusement, respect and exasperation. He offers an Imax view of a nation so enormous that it is seen embracing every possible contradiction and is always teetering on the edge of either greatness or the abyss. He traverses vast amounts of territory, and supplements personal encounters where he meets corrupt officials, aggrieved diplomats, and Hindu-nationalist adherents of “biofuturology”. The resulting book is stunning in its breadth, and refreshingly free of the usual exoticism. India remains a country where one's admiration of the intellectual and entrepreneurial elite can be as genuine as one's dismay over the acute poverty and backwardness of the villages. In the end, Mr. Luce takes a cautiously optimistic view. “India is not on an autopilot to greatness,” he writes. “But it would take an incompetent pilot to crash the plane.”

According to Robyn Meredith - author of The Elephant and the Dragon, as India and China rejoin the global economy, three big issues, besides jobs are at the forefront. First, their appetites for natural resources are skyrocketing as they get more and more industrialized. The volume of this new demand is leading to higher world prices. Their growing thirst for petroleum along with newfound economic strength is causing shifts in political alliances across the world.  Secondly, now that they are richer and have new technology, both are quickly modernizing their militaries, causing shifts in geopolitics not seen since the end of the Cold War. Finally, as they industrialize, their already dire pollution is worsening, along with causing a danger to the world's environment.

To expand on the first point, even though United States remains the biggest consumer of oil by far, Asians are buying more cars and thus consuming more gas, which is helping drive oil prices up all over the world. As both countries are engaged in a desperate race for the resources they need to continue to grow, they have been cutting deals around the world to buy oil, natural gas, and even nuclear reactors. India, whose petroleum needs were met by the Soviet Union before the end of the Cold War and the financial crisis of 1991, has been in petroleum talks with Iran and Venezuela, and has even proposed a natural gas pipeline across arch-rival Pakistan. China's state owned oil companies have spent billions to buy stakes in hundreds of foreign oil companies and exploration rights in foreign oil fields, devotedly courting South American, African and Middle Eastern governments[1]. And both have talked with the US about buying civilian nuclear power plant technology, something that was inconceivable when China was America's Cold War enemy, and unthinkable in India after its 1998 test of nuclear devices in defiance of international proliferation controls.  More troublesome for the rest of the world, both India and China have been making deals with pariah states - from Sudan to Iran to Myanmar - to secure supplies of oil and other resources they desperately need to ensure growth. As a result, foreign policies of India and China are increasingly dictated by their energy needs. This drive has caused them to make up with historical enemies and to cozy up to nations led by despots or in otherwise unstable state of affairs. Sixty percent of Sudan's oil is exported to China with the proceeds helping pay for Sudanese terror. Not only has China, with Russia, blocked any UN action to stop the genocide in Sudan, it has built arms factories in Sudan and sold the war-torn nation guns, rocket-propelled grenades, tanks, helicopters and ammunition.

Purportedly, a quiet arms race between the United States and China has already begun , although it is much less overt that that of the US with Russia during the Cold War. The US is racing to maintain its sizable lead, and is determined to contain China as it views it as a potential future military threat. The two are not enemies, but it is hard to imagine they will be allies when both nations see their strategic interests in conflict. Advisers to China today argue that China needs the United States economically more than the US needs China. Beijing needs American exports of technology and needs American consumers to keep buying Chinese made goods. But it is predicted that the two nations should reach parity in a decade or two, and then the US will need China economically as much, at which point China will have much more economic and military clout than it does today. This will mark a decisive shift in the global balance of power. Japan, wary of China's growing power, is rethinking its defense strategy and cozying up to the United States as a powerful military ally.

Because Americans buy more from China than China buys from the US, the Chinese government has the world's largest dollar reserves. It buys dollars, largely in the form of U.S. Treasury bonds, to keep its exchange rate steady against the dollar. China's total dollar reserves have more than quadrupled since 2002. In 2006, it held $1.1 trillion in foreign-currency reserves, more than any other nation. Because bond prices move in the opposite direction as interest rates, when Chinese bond purchases drive up demand - and this, prices for the bonds, they also put pressure on interest rates to stay low. Lower interest rates had helped to sustain this decade's housing boom, and kept credit card bills, car payments and mortgage payments low until the recent recession. American politicians argue that China has set the value of its currency about 40 percent below where it would be if it traded freely. Economists argue that the Chinese currency is undervalued by between 20 and 40 percent, with some insisting it is fairly valued[1]. Undervaluation gives a huge tailwind to Chinese exports, at a price that Wal-Mart simply cannot refuse. Some argue that the US is far too overdependent on China not just for goods but also for finance, with the massive Chinese purchases of US debt. A political spat triggered by say - a political revolt in China, changes in Chinese attitude about the US or an Asian financial crisis, could cause China to dump those huge holdings of US bonds creating a financial tidal wave the economic equivalent of firing a long-range missile at the US. Incidentally, Japan too has enormous holdings of US dollars but has been a longtime American ally with decades of political and economic stability under its belt, and more experience maneuvering a powerful economy in global financial markets, so such an attack from Japan is far less likely.[1]

It is in fact in this that serves the real motivation for Washington's recent decisions to sponsor India's great power ambitions. Because of its sheer size and the nature of its political system, India is seen as the only country that could counterbalance China's rise as a global power. The United States has looked at re-ordering their relationship with India - which today is not only a key ally in the war against terror but a counterbalance in Asia against China's dominance. In 2005, U.S diplomat Robert Blackwill said "Why should the United States want to check India's missile capability in ways that could lead to China's permanent nuclear dominance over democratic India?[6]" In July 2005, Manmohan Singh visited Washington and was offered a nuclear deal that went way beyond New Delhi's expectations. The US offered to accept India's nuclear weapons status, reinstate the export of nuclear fuel for India's civil nuclear program, and lift all remaining restrictions on the export of sensitive technologies to India. In March 2006, George Bush paid a return visit to India, agreeing to pretty much everything Indians wanted.  Many in Washington and skeptics such as Australia and Japan wondered why the US had agreed to a deal that would enable India to benefit from all the advantages of belonging to a non-proliferation treaty without paying the full cost. If one ignores Bush's stated reasons for agreeing to the deal( i.e to reward India's nonproliferation record) and looks instead at the administrations underlying motive - that the deal would give India the fuel and cover to accelerate its nuclear weapons program and counterbalance that of China's, things begin to make clearer sense.

As China and India propel themselves towards their historically mammoth roles in the world economy, the global re-balancing of political power also means that they are taking their solid  positions at the table of international diplomacy, which marks a new post-Cold War era, one that has decidedly moved past the ideological battle of communism versus capitalism. The tectonic shifts , while imperceptible to most of us, have taken place already. Naturally, countries such as Japan, Russia, Brazil, Germany, France and Britain will also be important players in coming decades. But in a lot of respects the world appears to be a place where relations between the three big players - US, India and China outweighs a lot of the other ties as the century unfolds. The nodal point in the triangle is, of course the United States. India, meanwhile will want to benefit from America's help without jeopardizing is relations with China. There are many possible moves in this triangular dance. And many opportunities to hem and haw.

References and readings
1. The Elephant and the Dragon - Robyn Meredith
2. In Spite of the Gods - Edward Luce
3. India after Gandhi - Ramachandra Guha
4. The argumentative Indian - Amartya Sen
5. Planet India - Mira Kamdar

Desire Paths: Reading, Memory and Inscription

by Daniel Rourke

The urban landscape is overrun with paths. Road-paths pulling transport, pavement-paths and architectural-paths guiding feet towards throbbing hubs of commerce, leisure and abode. Beyond the limits of urban paths, planned and set in tarmac or concrete, are perhaps the most timeless paths of all. Gaston Bachelard called them Desire Paths, physical etchings in our surroundings drawn by the thoughtless movement of human feet. In planning the layout of a city designers aim to limit the emergence of worn strips of earth that cut through the green grass. People skipping corners or connecting distinct spaces vote with their feet the paths they desire. Many of the pictures on the right (from this Flickr group) show typical design solutions to the desire path. A delimiting fence, wall or thoroughfare, a row of trees, carefully planted to ease the human flow back in line with the rigid, urban aesthetic. These control mechanisms have little effect – people merely walk around them – and the desire path continues to intend itself exactly where designers had feared it would.

The technical term for the surface of a planetary body, whether urbanised, earth covered or extra-terrestrial, is regolith. As well as the wear of feet, the regolith may be eroded by wind, rain, the path of running water or the tiny movement of a glacier down the coarse plane of a mountain. If one extends the meaning of the term regolith it becomes a valuable metaphor for the outer layer upon or through which any manner of paths may be inscribed.

The self-titled first Emperor of China, Qín Shǐhuáng, attempted, in his own extravagant way, to re-landscape the regolith of time. By building the Great Wall around his Kingdom and ordering the burning of all the books written before his birth Qín Shǐhuáng intended to isolate his Kingdom in its own mythic garden of innocence. Far from protecting his people from the marauding barbarians to the West or the corrupting knowledge of the past Qín Shǐhuáng's decision to enclose his Kingdom probably expanded his subject's capacity for desire beyond it. There is no better way to cause someone to read something than to tell them they cannot; no better way to cause someone to dream beyond some kingdom, or attempt to destroy it, than to erect a wall around it. As we demarcate paths we cause desire to erupt beyond them. The regolith, whether physical or ethereal, will never cease to degrade against our wishes.

 

Paths that signify freedom and power to some may, to those under their jurisdiction, signify just the opposite. The corridors of schools and prisons are good examples of this. Paths built as a leverage of control can, in the hands of a rebellious student or prisoner, become desirable avenues of opportunity. The line of desire in these cases is laid directly over the enclosed path. Desire becomes subversion and the means of flight - a way to reverse the roles of power.

 

In a central scene from the 1991 film, Terminator II, Sarah Conner attempts escape from the high-security asylum in which she has been incarcerated. For a patient, deemed to be dangerously unstable, an asylum is a rigid tangle of limits, barriers, locked-doors and screeching alarms. Sarah Conner's escape is notable because of its affirmation of the paths of the asylum. Far from moving beyond it, Conner uses the rigidity of the system to aid her movement through the building. From the very beginning of the scene Conner's dancing feet, her balletic violence, inscribe into the sterile, linear regolith of the asylum a pattern of the purest desire. A paper-clip, a broom and a container of bleach – all systematic of order and closure – become in turn a lock-pick, a weapon and a kidnapping ploy. A key, usually a symbol of access and movement between limits, is snapped in its lock and instantly becomes a barrier. Only upon the arrival of The Terminator and her son, John, does Sarah's freedom over the asylum finally ebb back towards the traditional limits of fear and isolation.

These dualistic notions of the path, where control and desire can overlap and even change places with one another, are beginning to become integral to the online text. As a blog reader you are no doubt aware of the article as a network of possibilities, as a loose guide to your writerly desire, rather than a strict parent. In time the definition of the path as a memory through web spaces and digital texts will lead us to see all movement as inscription and play. Where reading an article leaves on the surface of its regolith another faint trail of breadcrumbs. A single inscription, criss-crossing with a million more, each exactly similar but also entirely unique.

 

Paths engineered by a writer do not destine the realities of readership. Rather, a text can be seen as a surface reality, a regolith formed from substrates of reading, memory and cultural inscription. Reading carves furrows into a text through which the writer's world can be glimpsed, all be it momentarily, in the lattice of possibilities beneath. The writer themself is a mythos, a patchwork of the possible, spiralling away from the reading eye. Whether a reader follows an intended path, or begins to draw desire paths of their own, all depends on the limits they believe the writer set for them.

Upon a close reading of Genesis 11:1-9, Athanasius Kircher calculated that the Tower of Babel could not have existed as described, for it would have torn the very Earth from its axis. Kircher's examination of the myth seems comical, but by taking his reading as purely literal we burden our interpretation with the same limiting logic we attribute to him. Like Adam's grasping of the forbidden fruit the attempt by humanity to build a path to heaven was thwarted by their growing proximity to God. The apple embodies the limits of our God-given knowledge; the Tower of Babel our aspiration to walk beyond paths of the natural order. There is something infinitely creative involved in the act of demarcation, something forever open about the figure of closure. Athanasius Kircher's demonstration should perhaps be seen as a parable of the highest mythic truth: that however hard we try to walk beyond a given path, we will always tend to inscribe another in our wake.

 

by Daniel Rourke

Perceptions

Sughra Raza.On the Charles. 

Painting: Acrylic on canvas 2003.

Digital photograph (minimally embellished), July 2009.

Thanks to the rower who held the painting, and the curious canada goose.

Money Talks Back: The Linguistic Infrastructure of Corporatese (i.e., business jargon)

David Schneider

I applied for a copywriting job the other day. The employer was a maker of some intriguing educational  technologies, and needed someone to fully update the website's text, and determine a new voice for the firm that would be more appealing to buyers. It was a good job; and a not inconsiderable one. The firm, at the nexus of the technology and educational industries, had necessarily constructed a language that blended tech and ed terms into a rich and potent polysyllaby, really tasty for the search engines and industry insiders but a bit tough going for most other people.

I proposed that the ease of a product's language, deep within the soundings of each phrase, helps to sell the ease of using the product – take it a step further, introduce a little fun to the reading experience (beauty, wit, humor, attitude, individuality) and you've just connected a positive emotion to the logical and psychological idea of ease of use. That's marketing and advertising in a nutshell (or, at least, it should be). And teachers, the end users of this product, are probably overburdened enough with the challenges of technology; wouldn't they like a product that's easy to understand, easy to learn and use, and allow them to concentrate on the true arts of teaching? (Well, I 'm not sure about these things; they might really prefer the optimization of educational subjects' skill sets for successful threshold achievement of national graduated assessment agendas. It sounds more professional, at any rate. And it's up to the company whether I'm right or wrong.)

But then it came time to submit my application. As with any large or fully technologized company, these days, the firm had a proprietary online "human resources manager." I could tell, from the way the app worked, that a human was likely to read my work only at a very late stage of the game; instead, a little Pac-Man was going to munch its way through my word-maze, gobbling up jargon keywords like Power Pellets. I panicked, and like a digital sariman on level 40, with the Four Ghosts of the Depression bearing down on me at bankruptcy speed, I raced through the tunnels of the Web looking for a conversion tool. Hey, fight fire with fire, right?

In the midst of this panic, I just had to laugh. Here I was, proposing to update a company's lexical machinery with a more efficient and user-friendly model, yet being thwarted from communicating that by the very systems associated with the industries' language machineries!

That got me thinking. Ever been frustrated with your company's computer network? The New York Times recently devoted an entire Sunday Magazine to the issue of infrastructure – the gist of it being that from roads and bridges to computing systems, there are small, local, idiosyncratic systems that are difficult to link together; and extremely large systems that must perforce be developed as inexpensively as possible. The problem is that as larger, better systems are grafted onto the older, smaller ones, like palimpsests, they become more and more complex; whereas the vast systems can protect themselves against superior competitors through equally vast reserves of marketing capital, and sheer ubiquity, which encourages inertia.

I just read another article, well publicized around the web, that tackles the question of whether language shapes the way we think. It's been a guiding principle of literary theory for decades, but Leah Boroditsky has apparently been able to disseminate the idea among general interest readers – at least insofar as I can see links to it popping up on a lot of different sites – and give it greater credibility, both through natural, non-jargonistic prose and a linguistics approach.

The nature and characteristics of a language system do indeed affect how we perceive our realities, but of course this effect isn't limited to the thought processes of a Portuguese versus a Bantu speaker. With the growth of the technocracy, with advanced industry and professionalization, and with the spread of the career into the private life, the toxic elements of industry jargon have infiltrated our mental environments just as mercury has leached into fish. 

Let's take just one example: "leverage." We all know what a lever is: horizontal, fulcrum, weight, counterweight. Press down hard, and Mr. Acrobat flies up to swing on the trapeze. Leverage, in its strict financial definition, is to borrow capital to finance an investment. But about a decade ago, I began hearing a new buzzword: leveraging human capital. Back then, I just cynically disregarded it as corporate fluffery; I simply didn't anticipate how swiftly and thoroughly it would infiltrate the lexicon. We might not sense the pervasiveness of its Orwellian tendrils, but it's there, influencing things, like background radiation.

Human capital – why do I hear "human cattle" in that phrase? Is it just me? Leveraging human capital – I'm always suspicious whenever anyone tries to rename me, and thereby transform me into something else: I fear lexical conjurers from outside the literary space. I used to be an employee, with a job title; now I'm human capital? I'm not making any accusations here, but I do wonder what the Nazis might have done with such a phrase.

Leveraging human capital – the most positive way to work this would be to carve it out, and extract it from the marbled mouth of corporatese, like Michelangelo did with the David: "hey, guys, we're going to go into debt, pay you much more money to retain you, and bet that you're more than worth it." That, of course, is the mechanism and culture of finance, which is why Wall Street is addicted to outlandish corporate bonuses.

But it's not the entirety of finance's mechanism and culture. Leveraging human capital – I wonder: who's  the weight, what's providing the force, and how heavy is that debt load that needs to be lifted? Is the debt load really being lifted? A lever is a tool: does the tool experience any net gain from the transaction of force? There's a lot of pressure placed on the human capital, by which we mean "workers." In a healthy Newtonian world, you get a healthy steam engine fueled by a coal-fire of debt. It's classic physics: with a heavy debt load, all the available force is lifting a deadweight three inches off the ground. You can't have the give-and-take fun of a session on the seesaw: the workers stay down, under pressure to keep that deadweight in the air, while a debt-financed lifestyle (million-dollar corporate retreats in Vegas, etc.) lets off some steam. 

We've written our way, unwittingly, into a world that almost entirely exists within the dictionaries of business and technology. I ran across an article, in a 2002 edition of Mumbai's Financial Express, headlined, "Leveraging Human Capital Critical for Competitive Advantage." The lede paragraph reads –

Should corporates look at ‘Human Capital’ as an investment which can deliver financial returns? How relevant is it for human resource (HR) professionals to arithmetically measure Human Capital? Are there any sureshot ways by which HR professionals can gauge the effectiveness of their people management systems?

The article discusses ways of quantifying the investment in "human capital." It's actually, in its own way, trying very hard to bridge the languages of business and technology in an objective piece with a hint of bias – and it exemplifies the wide range of definitions a business-engendered neologism can acquire. In fact, the entire article (detailing a conference on "The Return to Human Capital") can be seen as striving toward a common definition, neatly summed up as: "use your staff's intellectual talent, and don't rate them solely on the basis of their job perameters." (Use – yoose; euze – has its own difficulties however. Leverage has more caché.)

But no matter how hard they tried, neither the reporter nor the conference members were able to escape the language of business, as much as they sought to: no matter how enlightened the thought, in corporatese the distinction between a human and a commodity is not altogether that great. Except on the far end, wherein New Age Californian language makes an appearance in the words of Ms. Lalita Gupte, of ICICI Ltd, whose company's job is to think about its customers: " Our endeavour has always been to leverage the criticality of our professionals for holistic customer service."

More and more, these days, I have people asking me to help them make their corporate language easier, more accessible – usually younger firms, start-ups. Our language infrastructure is just as degraded as the rest, a hollow language of arbitrary signs, designated by those who make tools to make money: and all too often, they're invented to facilitate a hollow business model. (Here we go 'round the prickly pear.) Too long have businesses regarded their customers as consumers, their workers as human capital to be leveraged. We're people who make things, sell things, and buy things too.

I am genuinely concerned about the health of the language in the age of "search engine optimization" (writing down abstract words that are most frequently used to define your business, to jump you to the top of Google searches). The uniqueness of an individual firm or product faces an unending battle with Search terms that are desperate to abstract it. If we're not careful, our language could devolve into Communist storefronts: "cheap liquor store northside."

But then, just as every action has an equal and opposite reaction, we're seeing social media (MySpace, Facebook, every site your old high school friends try to look you up) prove itself as a genuine competitor: this system forces you to talk like a human being, to other human beings, rather than as Corporate Entity to Consumer, and to take an interest in one another's interests. From the abstract nature of Search to the highly personal elements of digital networking, we have a weight and a counterweight acting as each other's leverage. It's a steam engine: one in which the quantifiable and the unquantifiable aspects of advertising are moving in syncopated beats. Maybe we'll get somewhere with this bipartisan approach. For the first time in a while, people are leveraging poverty to bring corporations down to size, so that we can talk eye-to-eye: like people who have interests, make things, sell things and buy things to and from one another. You know, an economy.

Perceptions

Yee I-Lann. Sulu Stories: Sarung. 2005.

Digital print.

More here, here, and here.

Stonewall at the White House: A Celebration with the Great Temporizer

by Michael Blim

There is something unforgivably lawyerly about Barack Obama.

I don’t begrudge his question parsing or the clarity it brings when he answers the a-bomb lobs of press and public. I really enjoy how he exposes the contradictions in the logic and arguments of others. Most recently, he simply nailed the insurance industry for arguing on the one hand that federal insurance by its nature would be inefficient and costly, while upholding on the other hand how a federal insurance option would drive them out of business. A nice piece of work that exposed the insurance industry position and also laid down a marker of what the industry can expect in the next round in the battle for national health care.

Obama was in grand form Monday afternoon, June 29, as he welcomed 250-odd gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people to the White House to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots and the birth of a movement. His wife, Michelle, played the straight woman for a couple of ice-breaker jokes and asides. As with other presidents, Obama used his wife’s presence to make the gathering informal and familial, a gesture that might have been touching had lgbt people had families with the same legal footing as Michelle and Barack have

Instead, to judge by the transcript, the event seemed forced. The guests were not invited to witness the signing of a bill or an executive order. No, this was a personal moment, the Obama family welcoming their lgbt friends and families. Though I do not want to demean the occasion, I would have preferred an event with another executive order signing, perhaps reversing “don’t ask, don’t tell,” without Michelle and the family circle chitchat. Because the President had nothing new to say, except to recite his campaign promises, you might think it unfair to think back to Harry Truman’s signing of the military desegregation order. Can you imagine Harry Truman beginning the ceremony with “well, Bess, Margaret and I ….?”

But the contrast clarifies many things. First, this was a feel-good event that substituted for an occasion devoted to law or policy. Second, it was condescending. Obama shifted the focus of the gathering from passing laws to “opening the hearts” of the “good and decent people in this country who don’t fully embrace their gay brothers and sisters…” The theme of moral suasion was swapped for law and policy. The implication too was the we had better get out there and help straight people get over their hatreds and ask them to give us access to the resources and protections they have acquired or have guaranteed to them. He singled out PTA participation as a salutary action undertaken by many lgbt parents to allay straight suspicions. Like the President and Michelle Obama, I come from Chicago, and that experience never taught me the value of the PTA over political power or Constitutional protection. I doubt it did them either.

But because the President speaks of these issues “in front of unlikely audiences – in front of African American church members, in front of other audiences that have traditionally resisted these changes,” he feels entitled to urge his audience to “go thou and do likewise” and convert the nonbelievers while being patient with him, the lawmaker whose mind and heart are already changed. Because he too hails from an impatient minority, and though he admits in a calculated candor that “it’s not for me to tell you to be patient, any more than it was for others to counsel patience to African Americans who were petitioning for equal rights a half-century ago,” he still feels entitled to patience from the lgbt community. After all, out in the gay-hostile world, he’s speaking for us.

Something else of the event I find more disturbing. Beneath the feel-good structure of the event, and the rhetorical bonhomie, the teleprompters were running. Barack Obama is terrific on his feet. He quickly establishes rapport with his audience, responds with care and insight to questions, and knows how to pin an opponent without looking like the bad guy.

But Barack Obama is also a maximal user of the teleprompter, as has been noticed by many journalists. His desire for precision demands it. His desire to “stay on message” and avoid errors requires it, given his multiple briefs. And his lawyerly skill in trimming commitments in this case compel it.

Despite the folksy setting, Obama’s lgbt rights brief Monday showed signs that it had been cleverly crafted. He spoke of rights three times, but not Constitutional rights. Instead he spoke of “basic equality” which has no legal meaning that he as a lawyer well knows. He argued that change should be achieved through laws, in addition to the “hearts and minds” campaigning he recommended repeatedly. He referred to laws ten times. In fact, it would seem surprising that so much must be accomplished by legislation, until one realizes that nowhere has Obama, the lawyer, the constitutional law professor, or the politician asserted that lgbt status deserves the protections of the Bill of Rights. So laws and executive orders have become the tools of choice.

Obama ran carefully chosen rhetoric through the teleprompter that gave the appearance that he believes that the Bill of Rights applies to lgbt people, but offered only specific bills and executive orders to fulfill what others, including me, have come to see as inalienable rights flowing from this country’s founding charters. He achieved his objective with lawyerly adroitness because he doubtless believes that lgbt protections are not guaranteed in the Constitution and that no Supreme Court in his lifetime is likely to grant them.

So Obama, the lawyerly pragmatist, offers inspiration and a series of bills ranging from a domestic partners act to a hate crimes act and the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). He remonstrates with the audience that “we have a duty to uphold existing law,” a reference to the Justice Department’s defense of DOMA brief. Again he deploys “officer of the court” reasoning that obscures the fact that his Justice Department could have declined to defend DOMA, or prepared a brief against the same-sex married plaintiffs that didn’t throw the legal kitchen sink into the law’s defense.

Rights won via legislation need to find their roots in the Constitution if they are to withstand the reversal of fortunes that visit protected groups over time, and Obama the constitutional lawyer must know this. Surely too the infamous Dred Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson decisions must act as a powerful memory prompt. Lawmaking in both the legislative and judicial senses is necessary to secure Constitutional protections for lgbt people, and the President can propose and advocate laws based on this belief. He has the largest law firm in the country, the Justice Department, at his disposal. And he appoints a judiciary with jurisdiction over the Constitution, its amendments, and congressional efforts to expand the protections of the Constitution to those still unprotected.

Social mores may be moving, as the hearts and minds campaign as well as the American libertarian desire to live and let live, have effect. But mores are finally nothing more than majority opinions gifted with a bit of inertia. They are reversible.

And President Obama must know this in his bones. Yet one finds him on Monday in the role of the great temporizer, a posture that if it becomes characteristic of the Obama presidency, could throw away the chance for progressive change in three generations.

Let someone, be it Obama if he will, or others if he won’t, begin to develop a theory that justifies Constitutional rights for lgbt people and put it before the nation, its legislatures, and courts. This Administration should develop a strategy of how to get it done, or get out of the way of those who want to do it.

As in the postwar civil rights struggles, science may be proving once again an important ally and authority for change. Justice Thurgood Marshall and the other advocates for the plaintiffs in Brown v. Board of Education used social science data to show that segregated education was unequal and deleterious education. Now it is important to analyze what impact the increasing scientific acceptance of a genetic basis for sexual orientation might have on lgbt attempts to find a Constitutional taproot for our rights.

Surely it’s time for the Obama Administration to forsake temporizing, especially as it did in the odious Defense of Marriage Act brief three weeks ago, and develop instead a strategy and program for securing Constitutional protections for lgbt people.

Speaking for rights requires no teleprompters, no feel-good lawn receptions, and no lawyerly softening or obfuscation of the fundamental duties of the law in respect of all of its citizens in a democratic society.

Last Monday, President Obama said: “I want you to know in this task I will not only be your friend, I will continue to be an ally and a champion and a president who fights with you and for you.”

Ok, Barack, so much for the good vibes. Get busy.

Readers: This is the second column on Stonewall. The other posted June 22 can be accessed here. You may find a transcript of the Monday June 29, 2009 White House reception for LGBT Pride Month at http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2009/06/obama-gay-pride-remarks-lgbt.html

perceptions

Stamp Your Feet. Hard.

Amelia Vega dancing at Bar Cardamomo, Madrid. All photos courtesy of Randolyn Zinn.

Randolyn Zinn

                                    The way she moves

                                    her slender waist

                                    pleases the eyes

                                    and the soul.

                                                            -- Abu l-Hajjaj ibn ‘Utba, 13th c., Sevilla
                                                                

                                You go scattering,

                                as you walk,

                                roses and lilies.

                                                            -- traditional flamenco Alegrias lyric

In Spain earlier this year, researching a collection of poems I am writing, it occurred to me that my quest to find flamenco puro might be as romantically ill conceived as clambering through the back woods of the Southern United States in search of the blues. A fool’s errand, because both flamenco and the blues share at least one common fate -- professional integration into their respective cultures.

Before my trip, I had visions of coming upon a late night impromptu scene of music and dance in some smoky room in an Andalucían town, aficionados yelling their appreciative ¡olés! (the first syllable is pronounced ah for reasons I’ll get into later).  In fact, I did stay up late watching all manner of flamenco performances in very smoky rooms to learn that the art has become somewhat of a career path, enjoying renewed interest today from artists and audiences not necessarily born in the Andalucían province of its ancestral beginnings. And the pure flamenco I had fantasized about finding proved elusive.

In the Beginning, Complexity Not Simplicity

Even though the word "flamenco" elicits a variety of images and sounds, perhaps cliché -- dark-eyed women in long ruffled dresses clicking castanets and drilling the floor with rapid heelwork, a man hunched over his guitar plying its strings in the plaintive voicings of the ancient Phrygian scale -- the art bears closer scrutiny. Born of strife between Christian, Jew, Gypsy and Muslim, whose ancient shared anguish is mirrored by the challenges of our own era, flamenco is one of the world’s first multi-cultural art forms.

While definitive answers about flamenco’s origins are impossible to pin down, conflicting theories abound. Andalucía, the southernmost area of Spain, is one of the world’s original melting pots. Its mountainous regions fall down the west coast to the town of Cádiz, the oldest city in Europe, settled by the Phoenicians. From Tarifa or Gibraltar, Africa is a quick boat ride away.

 

Map of Andalucia from the Lonely Planet Guide

Throughout history, Muslim, Jewish, Indo-Pakistani, Byzantine, Greek and Roman peoples have congregated in al-Andaluz, the name colonizing Moors gave Andalucía.  When Tamerlane expelled the Gypsies from India around 1400 CE, they wandered west, settling on both sides of the Mediterranean, while other tribes walked north through Russia, Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Germany and France, arriving in Spain around 1447. 
 

Here’s a clip of music (alegrias) with images of Cádiz from the film "Rito y Geografía del Cante."

Some scholars contend that Gypsies were in al-Andaluz as early as the 8th century, as camp followers of the conquering Muslims, who ruled from 750 to 1492, gracing Spain with brilliant innovations in irrigation, art, architecture and the introduction of important new crops they nurtured in the dusty heat.  The Arabs made Andalucía a peaceful simulacrum of their homeland, tolerant of cultural and religious differences until Ferdinand and Isabella mounted the Reconquest.  When the Spanish monarchy prevailed and, in 1492, Boabdil had no choice but to hand over the keys of the Alhambra to Ferdinand and Isabella, tolerance fell to tyranny. The devastating Catholic Inquisition persecuted and/or expelled ‘infidels’ -- Jews, Muslims and Gypsies who refused conversion to Christianity. 

Those ‘infidels’ who stayed Spain despite the dangers discovered common ground with others similarly oppressed. Frightened, desperate outcasts hiding in Sierra Nevada hill towns and caves aided and learned from one another, their survival promoted by intermarriage and the intermingling of cultural and artistic traditions. The very word for flamenco may have roots in two Arab words:  ‘felag’ and ‘mengu’ put together as felagmengu, fugitive peasant.  It is not a huge stretch to link the cries of protest and grief that so dominate flamenco to the outrageous predicaments of those fugitive peasants hiding in caves.  As D. E. Pohren asserts in his seminal book The Art of Flamenco, “they must have all expressed their sentiments through song, dance, and musical instruments.” Gypsy artists borrowed from Arab and Jewish artists and vice versa, tinkering with style and content as influences blended to create new forms. 

Clap Your Hands

Flamenco as we know it today surfaced in the 19th century.  You can hear the original strands of its multi-cultural blending in, for instance, the rhythms of the tabla that show up in the palos (styles) of bulería, siguiryia and soleá. 

Flamenco is counted in 12-count phrases, which is very different from the predominant 4/4 time signature used in most Western musical compositions (or the waltz, set in ¾ time).  Varying accent patterns within the 12-count phrase determine the particular form.  The bulería compás (meter or time signature) is counted with stresses marked below as / or in bolded numbers.  Try tapping your desk with emphasis on counts 3, 6, 8, 10 and 12. 

                ../.././././    123 456 78  910  1112

The variations are endless when accompanied by palmas (clapping), if every count is given equal emphasis or if the unaccented counts are syncopated by pitos (finger snapping) or the dancer’s zapateados (footwork.)  Trying to keep tabs of the counts is like counting Stravinsky when every measure might change its time signature. 

Here’s a useful aid for counting via Ravenna Flamenco by Andy Fitzgerald:

The soleá or soleáres is an intensely sad song usually danced by a woman with the last two counts kept quiet: ../.././././  or 123 456  78  910  1112, while the guitarist hits beats 1, 4,7,9 and 10.  For the emotional tone of this form, I will quote a few lines from one of my poems posted recently on 3 Quarks Daily.

No singing.  No dancing.
Let the spores multiply on the dishes.  My feet won’t move.
Outside the window celadon leaves tremble against the glass
but they don’t comfort me.  It will take stillness to recover
from yesterday’s news.

Likewise, the form known as siguiryia, perhaps the oldest cante jondo (deep song), is concerned with grief and death, and is funereal in both tone and tempo. The counts are tricky -- you have to feel it.

             /././../../..  or  12 34 5 678 910 1112

Torn Throat, Not Singing Pretty

The flamenco musical scale uses the plaintive Phrygian or Dorian mode and not surprisingly, its vocal style eschews a smooth or pretty aesthetic. In fact, the rougher the better.  As it winds around simple, skeletal melodies, force of feeling marries the voice to the stylistic link back to Arab, Persian, Sephardic and Indian vocal traditions. A singer can extend one word of text for several minutes as he or she spirals down into the emotional cave.  Lyrics tend to be compressed, but their subjects of love, jealousy, social protest and outrage reach back to the poetry of Ibn Arabi, Ibn Hasn, and others. A malagueña by La Trini.

If only out of pity

write to me sometime

for my heart

is so withered with suffering

that it can no longer even feel the pain

Some of the 20th century’s greatest exponents of the torn throat singing style include Nina de los Peines, Enrique Morente, and Camarón de la Isla, whose legacies are preserved on widely available CDs.  Paco de Lucia is the contemporary guitarist who has moved flamenco forward the most without sacrificing tradition.  Remember that the guitar was developed in Andalucía by Arab musicians. Flamenco has brought it to artistic heights (or depths, depending on your point of view), and not by taking the pretty route.

So why is the first syllable of that one-word Spanish pep talk, ¡olé! pronounced ah?  The answer holds another secret of cultural amalgamation.  Muslims cry Allah, Allah! when they have witnessed a spiritual moment in music. For flamenco performers, the worst audience is a quiet one.  While Westerners have been taught to keep appreciation quiet until the end of a song or dance, in flamenco, a moment of depth or risk must be appreciated right away.  The present is elusive and meant to be enjoyed to the fullest.  Anda jaleo!  Let’s have some commotion!

Maybe our polite society has subsumed its cri de coeur for too long.  If we use the film Network as an example -- the moment when the newscaster Howard Beale raves "I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!" -- and transpose his rant to a flamenco moment, instead of throwing our televisions out the window, we might stamp our feet.  Hard.  And shout ¡olé! to a lyric like this:

Tirando piedras por las calles      

y a quien le dé que lo perdone   

de puras cavilaciones.            

(I’m throwing stones out of the window

and if they hit anyone, I’m sorry. 

It’s just that I’m going crazy from all this thinking.)

If you’ve not had much exposure to flamenco, you might start by watching the films of Carlos Saura -- Blood Wedding, Carmen, El Amor Brujo and Flamenco.  Saura grafts ballet, Bizet, Lorca and de Falla onto flamenco, meddling, as some aficionados complain, with its purity.  In any case, you’ll never forget the scene in Carmen, Saura’s play within-a-play, when the choreographer (legendary dancer Antonio Gades) scouts Madrid’s dance school, Amor de Dios, for his leading lady and finds the alluring Laura del Sol, who will change his life forever.

Flamenco Everywhere, Where Is Flamenco?

I didn’t come upon a Gypsy wedding in Andalucía, but I did find the sleekly attractive Museo de Baile (dance) Flamenco in Sevilla, where the education-minded can wander through galleries made up as dressing rooms, and watch floor to ceiling screens showing scratchy old film clips of bygone flamenco artists and glossy collages of beautiful contemporary dancers.  This tourist was non-plussed by the museum’s attempt at codification of an art that by its very nature resists definition.  Sevilla, however, lives and breathes flamenco with its scores of professional schools and fiestas.  More than once I lingered under a window to listen to someone giving himself to the guitar.  One’s ears become so attuned to the wily counting patterns that it is easy to mistake the clatter of a suitcase rolling along the cobbled street for a flamenco compás.

By chance I wandered into Bar Peregil, the outpost of once-legendary singer Pepe Peregil, who is still a very busy man holding court, arguing with the bartender, slicing jamon (ham), yelling with customers he doesn’t fancy and beating out compás on the bar for those he does.  At one point he started a song -- his voice ragged as he’s no longer in his prime – and the entire bar joined in spontaneously with palmas accompaniment.  One fellow pulled out a guitar and the evening spilled out onto the street where the neighborhood had gathered for a fiesta of food and music.  I was astonished to see that even children knew palmas, including one excited baby tucked into his stroller.

Up in Granada’s Sacramonte hills in a whitewashed cave roughly the length and width of a NYC subway car, I sat on a wooden rushed chair with other turistas to watch a band of desultory performers sing and dance.  To their credit, as their concentration deepened, their initial disdain for us fell away.  I empathized with their plight.  It must be hard to crank out fiery songs and dances for foreign yokels night after night.  But I wondered if such compromise stokes the fire of outrage, flamenco’s inexhaustible fuel.

La Canastera in Granada

The espactáculos in Sevilla, Cordoba, Granada and Madrid that concierges will urge you to attend (hotels must get a commission) are rather cut-and-dried affairs, presenting well-rehearsed numbers by either novice or waning professionals who sport the ubiquitous over-accentuated furrowed brow to denote seriousness.  They click castanets (palillos), twirl fans and shawls and negotiate the tricky ruffled dresses with long trains called bata de cola. All these are folkloric accessories introduced in the 19th century by ballerinas performing flamenco for foreigners. They are meant to enhance the pretty factor but are not considered signs of jurando (deep) flamenco. 

Quality varies on the espactáculo circuit.  Some are downright dreadful.  I’m remembering one chorus of chubby girls chewing gum and wisecracking with the guitarists as they marked through a raggedy number like schoolgirls in ill-fitting recital costumes.  In another, a barely competent woman (wife of the proprietor?) wore black stretch pants and a saucy sombrero but could barely manage the footwork.  My companion leaned over and whispered, “Desperate housewives of flamenco…?” 

A dancer in Madrid referred to these shows as museums of “Jurassic” flamenco, but other venues were quite good, like Sevilla’s Los Gallos or Madrid’s Bar Cardamomo, the latter a small peña where artists gather to improvise, much like how jazz clubs operate in New York or Chicago.  Improvisation is the keyword in flamenco, and improvisation is what you want to see: when musicians and dancers tending the traditional fires get close enough to burn.  When the pre-ordained gives way to a deeper concentration and the elusive, indescribable force of duende takes over, the force Lorca writes about so well.

But there are neither maps nor exercises to help us find the duende.  We only know that he burns the blood like a poultice of broken glass, that he exhausts, that he rejects all the sweet geometry we have learned, that he smashes styles, that he leans on human pain with no consolation…The duende works on the body of the dancer as the wind works on sand…But he can never repeat himself… The duende does not repeat himself, any more than do the forms of the sea during a squall.

Not only flamenco artists communicate duende.  I would include the work of Francisco Goya, Francis Bacon, John Coltrane, Jimi Hendrix, Arthur Rimbaud, and Sylvia Plath, among others.

Finalmente, Jerez

With only two days left of my month in Spain, I was finally granted a glimpse of flamenco puro.  "Oh sure," aficionados will shrug.  Jerez is the spiritual home of flamenco.  Well, I was late to the party, but happily, I got there.

First, following the sound of voices raised in song, I was led to an outdoor café in the square where a group of grandmothers had gathered to play castanets and sing traditional variations of the Sevillanas, a popular folk dance every Spaniard knows.  Were they members of a club?  Did they meet regularly?  One thing was certain.  Their table crowded with empty bottles revealed that these ladies had been singing for quite awhile.  The sun was setting.  They put down their castanets occasionally to answer cell phones, but otherwise took turns dancing while their compatriots sang reiterations of Sevillanas.  It is a sure sign that a country’s culture is alive and well when matriarchs don’t sit sequestered and alone, sadly turning pages of a scrapbook, but instead belt their favorite songs in a public square and don’t mind when an audience of strangers draws near to connect with traditions.  The exuberant joy these women expressed with their voices and bodies stands as a correction to the clichés we harbor about how elders should behave.  Their culture keeps them fit and engaged.

Later that evening, I walked over to La Taberna Flamenco, a joint in the Gypsy quarter that resembles so many others I had visited in Spain.  Its walls were covered with drawings and photos of great singers, dancers and toreadors and a small stage barely large enough to turn around on with a bare set of simple wooden chairs.  The bailora (female dancer) wore a skirt printed with traditional polka dots, but the cantaor (male singer) wore sneakers more suited to a skateboarder.  Their company also included a cantaora, only the second female singer I had heard in four weeks.

Despite their youth (or maybe because of it), these performers were the most attuned I had seen in Spain.  The lead guitarist ran his fingers over the strings like a spider as he improvised beyond the expected rendition of a bulería.  I was startled by how quietly they started the set, moving gradually into deeper concentration and force.  Nobody pushed emotionally. 

At one point in her solo, the cantaora stared suddenly into the distance, arrested by an unbidden thought or memory and she turned away.  When she faced us again, with eyes closed, she let loose with a howl that electrified the house.  Something inessential had given way in her and she began to sing from necessity, giving away her privacy in the kind of performance moment every artist longs for.

 

La Taberna Flamenco, Jerez

No matter that I am a trained dancer and somewhat proficient in flamenco, I had long ago come to terms with the fact that I would never achieve that certain angle between shoulder and chin that is the birthright of Andalucían Gypsies.  However, while writing this essay a possible explanation for my interest in flamenco emerged.  Like so many Americans I cannot claim a singular homeland.  My genetic makeup is a blending of Italian, French and German with a dot of Pocahontas’ blood.  Maybe flamenco’s amalgamation of bloodlines compels my interest because its home is mutable like mine, having changed through centuries of wandering and suffering, bridging differences between cultures, embracing the Other.  Flamenco has spread its message not by waving flags or drawing national borders, but by singing and dancing -- these days, not as far-fetched a homeland as a desirable one.  

¡Olé! 

Randolyn Zinn is a writer and choreographer based in New York City and grateful to the Jerome Foundation for her stint in Spain to research her first collection of poems.

Works Cited

Franzen, Cola.  Poems of Arab Andalusia.  San Francisco, City Lights Press, 1989.

Garcia Lorca, Federico.  In Search of Duende.  New York, New Directions, Bibelot, 1955, 1998.

Menocal, Rosa.  Ornament of the World:  How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain.  New York: Back Bay Books, Little, Brown and Company, 2002.

Pohren, D. E.  The Art of Flamenco.  Madrid, Society of Spanish Studies, 1962, 1990.

Totton, Robin.  Song of the Outcasts. Portland, Amadeus Press, 2003.

YouTube Links

Don’t miss the superb clips from Dawn in Granada, a film made for television about fathers -- dancer Manuel Santiago Maya or "Manolete" (one of the greats), and singer Jaime Heredia "El Parrón" --  “…passing their art and their passion for flamenco along to their daughters Judea and Marina.” 

In this one it doesn’t matter too much that the sound and movement don’t match perfectly, but the mise en scene and bulerías are fantastic.  Featuring Camaron Turronero, Paco Cepero, Camaron de La Isla and Paco de Lucia. 

Grape harvest fiesta in Jerez.  Bulerías, Gypsy style.

Stonewall’s 40th Eye on the Prize, and the Prez Blinks

by Michael Blim

The bus Thursday night was late. I slumped back onto the bench as the four-hour trip to New York had just gotten longer. As I settled in, I noticed a young kid waiting too. He had a Sesame Street character sticking out of his pink backpack, and he wore pink tennis and a rainbow-colored belt. On the back pocket of his jeans was written “God loves gays.” He might have been eighteen.

Flaunt it, baby, flaunt it, I thought. There’s still a very good chance you’ll get to New York in one piece. We’re almost normal now.

Four and a half hours later, the bus came bounding off the Williamsburg Bridge into Chinatown. It was one o’clock by the time I transferred at West 4^th Street. The C train was no longer running, the A train was stopping at Jay Street, and lovely shuttle buses were offered from thereon. As I boarded the train to Brooklyn, a bunch of drunken young revelers hopped on. They were a mess of plastered and tinted hair, and a few were prettily painted. Kids of several hues once more with rainbows, and these too were all right with the world.

Finally the shock of recognition hit: the Stonewall 40^th Anniversary was coming up Monday, and New York’s big Pride parade was on Sunday.

I had been oblivious. On the long bus ride, I had been reading the U.S. Justice Department’s June 11 brief supporting dismissal of a suit challenging the constitutionality of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). The motion to dismiss will be held this upcoming August 3.

I had been steaming. By the time the A train reached Brooklyn, it was as if I had the taste of Mexican mole negro, the bitter chocolate sauce, in my mouth. Yes, we were free, to which the rainbow kids could testify. But we had not secured our rights. And American society and we had fallen far short of liberation.

The Justice Department brief says it all. The Obama Justice Department brief says it all. I add the adjective “Obama” because even though Andrew Sullivan has noted that the brief’s author W. Scott Simpson is a Bush appointee and part of a trial team that defended the Partial Birth Abortion Act of 2003, Tony West, the Obama-appointed Assistant Attorney General, signed off on the brief. No one has yet called it a mistake.

The brief seeks dismissal of a suit by Andrew Smelt and Christopher Hammer alleging that their constitutional rights are violated by the provisions of DOMA that established for the first time in American history that marriage in the federal system of laws consists of a union between a man and a woman.

The brief is an exercise in deceit and disingenuousness. DOMA merely “codifies” tradition, Justice argues, even if the republic had survived without a federal definition of marriage for over 200 years, and even though marriage is a state and not a federal matter. DOMA, Justice avers, doesn’t prohibit same-sex couples from marrying: it just prevents same sex couples from any claim to benefits based on marriage, and it protects other states from having to provide benefits to same sex marriage partners who leave same sex marriage states and move to states without same-sex marriage.

Perhaps knowing that congressional reports supporting DOMA might be read by someone once more, the Justice brief takes but a short paragraph to describe the bill’s real purposes. Congress declared that the United States --- here the Justice Department is quoting from the 1996 House Judiciary committee statement reporting the bill for passage -- has an interest “’defending and nurturing the institution of traditional, heterosexual marriage’ because of the role it plays in ‘procreation and child-rearing.’” The Congress wanted to support “’traditional notions of morality.’” The Congress wanted to protect “’state sovereignty and democratic self-governance.’” Finally, Congress wanted to preserve “’scarce government resources.’” (Case 8:09-cv-00286-DOC-MLG, Document 25, Filed 06/11/2009, pages 16-17)

The Congress, Justice argued, has a right to legislate as it pleases on same-sex marriage, and to assert as a rational basis for its actions any reasons, however, prejudiced it might care to give, because persons as homosexuals, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people have no rights to due process or equal protection under the Constitution.

Bald, ugly, and true. We don’t have Constitutional rights as gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender persons.

But did the Obama Administration Justice Department need to re-affirm this? No, it could have refused to defend DOMA, and the Court would have assigned counsel to defend the law. Instead, the President has said that his Administration will seek DOMA’s repeal. As an opponent of same-sex marriage, the President can borrow a page from his Justice Department’s brief and seek repeal of the law while not supporting any instrument or political effort to legalize same-sex marriage in the 50 states. Can’t you read the headline crawling across CNN now: “Obama seeks repeal of DOMA: Prez Says No Federal Question Involved.”

(By the way, how will the Administration seek DOMA repeal when it has just defended the Act in federal district court? That will sure provide a “profile in courage” to encourage the 218st member of the House and the 51^st member of the Senate to vote for repeal.)

Moreover, nowhere has the President mentioned that he views discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation of whatever sort a Constitutional question. He taught constitutional law for some years. Has he no opinion on the matter? Let him speak it. He is no Supreme Court nominee.

Let me close on a personal note. I am no advocate of same-sex marriage. I could be married to my boy friend of 16 years legally as a Massachusetts resident, but having discovered from a lawyer that it confers no inheritance advantage on him if I leave a will that protects his rights, I have refused.

I was born under a different gay sign. Having come out shortly after Stonewall, liberation was my path, coffee houses and community centers my context. My tribe avoided bars, seeing them rather sagely for the time as commodifying gay sex and gay identities -- never mind their success rate in converting social drinkers into alcoholics. I didn’t give a damn about respectability or what straight people might think. I worried more about the perverse power the commodity culture was unleashing in our community.

I was “brought up” as a gay man to believe that marriage was the linchpin of a system that locked up women, glbt people, and even straight men into deadly heterosexist relations. I wasn’t too keen on the gays in the military campaign either, reasoning that American military power was a threat to world peace, and best diminished rather than rationalized.

If the goal is liberation, as mine remains, both marriage and the gays in the military seem odd struggles.

But scratch any American, and scratch me for that matter, and beneath whatever we profess, you’ll find a raging libertarian. Justice Douglas said that “the right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedoms,” and for a people obsessed with whatever passes for freedom, however fuzzy it may sound, that is saying a lot. For Justice Brandeis once put it, a civilized person craves above all “the right to be alone,” and even though Americans historically have been at least a quart shy of honest-to-God civility, each of us is full to the brim with libertarian reason.

Many glbt people find marriage and the military congenial with their version of the life worth living. DOMA and “don’t ask, don’t tell” are a profound insult to our human dignity. The Obama Administration’s pro-DOMA brief was an oddly timed insult, considering that gay communities, including mine in Boston, had begun celebrating PRIDE within a week of the court filing.

I stand with all who want same sex marriage and those who wish to serve our country in the military, even though these are choices I would never make myself.

But I ask all who care to ask President Obama if he stands with us in our demand for the Constitutional rights to equal protection and due process under the laws of these United States. I appeal to the 250 glbt people who will be gathered in the White House this Monday to ask the President to support our Constitutional right to equal protection and due process under the laws of these United States.

To them and all who care: Keep your eyes on the prize!

 

Thanks to JC Salyer for his help understanding DOMA and the law.

The Dearth of Artificial Intelligence

As a graduate student of computer engineering in the early 90s, I recall impassioned late night debates on whether machines can ever be intelligent—intelligent, as in mimicking the cognition, common sense, and problem-solving skills of ordinary humans. Neural network research was hot and one of my professors was a star in the field. Scientists and bearded philosophers spoke of ‘humanoid robots.’ A breakthrough seemed inevitable and imminent. Still, I felt certain that Artificial Intelligence (AI) was a doomed enterprise.

I argued out of intuition, from a sense of the immersive nature of our life in the world—how much we subconsciously acquire and summon to get through life, how we arrive at meaning and significance not in isolation but through embodied living, and how contextual, fluid, and intertwined this was with our moods, desires, experiences, selective memory, physical body, and so on. How can we program all this into a machine and have it pass the unrestricted Turing test? How could a machine that did not care about its existence as humans do, ever behave as humans do? In hindsight, it seems fitting that I was then also drawn to Dostoevsky, Camus, and Kierkegaard.

My interlocutors countered that while extremely complex, the human brain is clearly an instance of matter, amenable to the laws of physics. Our intelligence, and everything else that informed our being in the world, had to be somehow ‘coded’ in our brain’s circuitry, including the great many symbols, rules, and associations we relied on to get through a typical day. Was there any reason why we couldn’t ‘decode’ and reproduce it in a machine some day? Couldn’t a future supercomputer mimic our entire neural circuitry and be as smart as us? They posited a reductionist and computational approach to the brain that many, including Steven Pinker and Daniel Dennett, continue to champion today. Just three months ago, Dennett declared in his sonorous voice, “We are robots made of robots made of robots made of robots.”

But despite the big advances in computing—for example, today’s supercomputers are ten million times faster than those of the early 90s—AI has fallen woefully short of its ambition and hype. Instead, we have “expert systems” that process predetermined inputs in specific domains, perform pattern matching and database lookups, and learn to adapt their outputs algorithmically. Examples include chess software, search engines, speech recognition, industrial and service robots, and traffic and weather forecasting systems. Machines have done well with tasks that we ourselves pursue, or can pursue, algorithmically, as in searching for the word “ersatz” in an essay, making cappuccino, or restacking books on a library shelf. But so much else that defines our intelligence remains well beyond machines, such as projecting our creativity and imagination to understand new contexts and their significance, or figuring out how and why new sensory stimuli are relevant or not. Why is AI in such a braindead state? Is there any hope for it? Let’s take a closer look.

***

Descartes, who held that science and math would one day explain everything in nature, understood the world as a set of meaningless facts to which the mind assigned values (or functions, according to John Searle). Early AI researchers accepted Descartes’ mental representations, embraced Hobbes’ view that reasoning was calculating, Leibniz’s idea that all knowledge could be expressed as a set of primitives, and Kant’s belief that all concepts were rules.[1] At the heart of Western rationalist metaphysics—which shares a remarkable continuity with ancient Greek and Christian metaphysics—lay the Cartesian mind-body dualism that became the dominant inspiration for early AI research.

Early researchers pursued what is now known as ‘symbolic AI.’ They assumed that our brain stored discrete thoughts, ideas, and memories at discrete points, that information is “found” rather than “evoked” by humans. In other words, the brain was a repository of symbols and rules that mapped the external world into neural pulses. And so the problem boiled down to creating a gigantic knowledge base with efficient indexing, i.e., a search engine extraordinaire. They thought that a machine could be made as smart as a human by storing context-free facts and meta-rules able to reduce the search space effectively. Marvin Minsky of MIT AI lab went as far as claiming that our common sense could be produced in machines by representing ten million facts about objects and their functions.

It is one thing to feed in millions of facts and rules into a computer, another to get it to recognize their significance and relevance. The ‘frame problem,’ as this is called, eventually became insurmountable for the ‘symbolic AI’ research paradigm:

If the computer is running a representation of the current state of the world and something in the world changes, how does the program determine which of its represented facts can be assumed to have stayed the same, and which might have to be updated? [1]

GOFAI — Good Old Fashioned Artificial Intelligence — as symbolic AI came to be called, soon turned into a degenerative research program. It is unsettling to think how many prominent scientists and philosophers held, and continue to hold, such naïve assumptions about how humans operate in the world. A few tried to understand what went wrong and looked for a new paradigm for AI. No longer could they ignore the withering critiques of their work by Professor Hubert Dreyfus, who drew inspiration from the radical ideas of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). It began dawning on them that humans were far more complex, with their subconscious familiarity and skillful coping with the world, nonlinear decision-making, ability to assess and adapt to new situations, and the role of things like purpose, intention, and creativity that shaped, and were in turn shaped by, their meaningful organization of the world.

***

In many ways, Heidegger stood opposed to the entire edifice of Western philosophy. A hammer, he pointed out, cannot be represented by just its physical features and function, detached from its relationship to nails and the anvil, the physical experience and skill of hammering, its role in building fine furniture and comfortable houses, etc. Merely associating facts, values or function with objects cannot capture the human idea of a hammer, with its role in the meaningful organization of the world as we experience it.

Or consider music speakers. One way to represent them, in the manner of rationalists, is as objects with physical properties (shape, dimensions, color, material, attached wires, etc.), to which is then assigned a value, use, or function. But this is not how we actually experience them. We experience them as speakers, inseparable from the act of listening to music, the ambience they add to our living room, their impact on our mood, and so on. We do not understand them as context-free, object-value pairs; we understand them through our context-laden use of them. When someone asks us to describe our speakers, we have to pause and think about their physical attributes. According to Heidegger, writes Professor William Blattner:    

The philosophical tradition has misunderstood human experience by imposing a subject-object schema upon it. The individual human being has traditionally been understood as a rational animal, that is, an animal with cognitive powers, in particular the power to represent the world around it … the notion that human beings are persons and that persons are centers of subjective experience has been broadly accepted … Where the tradition has gone wrong is that it has interpreted subjectivity in a specific way, by means of concepts of ‘inner’ and ‘outer,’ ‘representation’ and ‘object’ … [which] dominates modern philosophy, from Descartes through Kant through Husserl. [2]

The Western philosophical tradition, according to Heidegger, “has been focused on self-consciousness and moral accountability, in which we experience ourselves as distinct from the world and others.” Such dualism dominates modern science, but fails to describe how humans relate to the world, which is quite holistic. Heidegger contends that “we are disclosed to ourselves more fundamentally than in cognitive self-awareness or moral accountability. We are disclosed to us in so far as it matters to us who we are. Our being is an issue for us, an issue we are constantly addressing by living forward into a life that matters to us.”

In Being and Time, “Heidegger argues that meaningful human activity, language, and the artifacts and paraphernalia of our world not only make sense in terms of their concrete social and cultural contexts, but also are what they are in terms of that context.”[3]. He claimed that the subject-object model of experience, in which we see ourselves as distinct from the world and others, “does not do justice to our experience, that it forces us to describe our experience in awkward ways, and places the emphasis in our philosophical inquiries on abstract concerns and considerations remote from our everyday lives.”[4] Our being in the world is “more basic than thinking and solving problems; it is not representational at all.” When we are absorbed in work, say, using familiar pieces of equipment, “we are drawn in by affordances and respond directly to them, so that the distinction between us and our equipment—between inner and outer— vanishes.”[6]

[Heidegger] argues that our fundamental experience of the world is one of familiarity. We do not normally experience ourselves as subjects standing over against an object, but rather as at home in a world we already understand. We act in a world in which we are immersed. We are not just absorbed in the world, but our sense of identity, of who we are, cannot be disentangled from the world around us. We are what matters to us in our living; we are implicated in the world. [5]

In other words, it makes no sense to believe that our minds are built on atomic, context-free sets of facts and rules, objects and predicates, storage and processing units. No wonder the methods of natural science, which look for structural primitives such as particles and forces, fail to describe our experience of the world. Contrary to the implicit belief of western philosophy and AI research, a computational theory of the mind may be simply impossible. Isn’t our common sense “a combination of skills, practices, discriminations, etc., which are not intentional states, and so, a fortiori, do not have any representational content to be explicated in terms of elements and rules?” [7] The older Wittgenstein agreed, adding in 1948: “[N]othing seems more possible to me than that people some day will come to the definite opinion that there is no copy in the ... nervous system which corresponds to a particular thought, or a particular idea, or [a particular] memory.”

***

A conceptual advance for AI came when some researchers noted that a problem lay in the fact that a computer’s model of the world was not real. The human ‘model’ of the world was the world itself, not a static description of it. What if a robot too used the world as its model, “continually referring to its sensors rather than to an internal world model”? [6] But this approach worked only in micro-environments with a limited set of features recognized by its sensors. The robots did nothing more sophisticated than ants. As in the past, no one knew how to make the robots learn, or respond to a change in context or significance. This was the backdrop against which AI researchers began turning away from symbolic AI to simulated neural networks, with their promise of self-learning and establishing relevance. Slowly but surely, the AI community began embracing Heideggerean insights.

Machine neural networks, starting with a blank slate (unlike humans), attempt to simulate biological neurons using a connectionist approach capable of continually adapting its structure based on what it processes and learns. In symbolic AI, a feature “is either present or not. In the net, however, although certain nodes are more active when a certain feature is present in the domain, the amount of activity varies not just with the presence or absence of this feature, but is affected by the presence or absence of other features as well.” [7] Learning is guided using one of three paradigms: supervised learning in controlled domains, unsupervised learning using cost-benefit heuristics, or reinforcement learning based on optimizing certain outcomes.

But the results are not promising. Supervised learning, for instance, remains mired in very basic problems, such as the net’s inability to generalize predictably based on the categories intended by the trainer (except for toy problems that leave little room for ambiguity). For example, a net trained to recognize palm trees in photos taken on a sunny afternoon may generalize on their shadows instead, and fail to detect any trees in photos from an overcast day. The sample size can be enlarged but the point is that the trainer doesn’t know what the net is training on, and such category errors continue until an exception shows up. Another net trained to recognize speech may keel over when it encounters a metaphor, say, “Sally is a block of ice.” [6] Outside its training domain, the net is also unable to recognize other contexts, or to know when it is not appropriate to apply what it has learned—problems that humans dynamically solve using their social skills, biological imperatives, imagination, etc.

Reinforcement learning has its own pitfalls. For instance, what is an objective measure of immediate reinforcement? Even if we take a simplistic view that humans act to maximize “satisfaction” and assign a “satisfaction score” to all outcomes in all possible situations, we need some way to model how “satisfaction” may be impacted by our moods, desires, body aches, etc., as well as their correlation with inputs in a diversity of situations (weather, familiar faces, noise, motion, etc.). But does anyone know what, if any, ‘model rules’ humans obey in their daily behavior? Dreyfus sums it up:

“Perhaps a [simulated neural] net … If it is to learn from its own "experiences" to make associations that are human-like rather than be taught to make associations which have been specified by its trainer, it must also share our sense of appropriateness of outputs, and this means it must share our needs, desires, and emotions and have a human-like body with the same physical movements, abilities and possible injuries.” [7]

In other words, the success of neural nets depends not only on our understanding of how we breathe significance and meaning into our world and finding a way to capture it in the language of machines—these nets also need to come into a social world similar to that of humans and project themselves in time the way humans do with their physical bodies, in order to have a shot at behaving like humans. None of this is even remotely clear to anyone, nor is it clear that it is even amenable to modeling on digital computers. To insist otherwise is not only an article of faith, it also seems to me increasingly obtuse and wild. [8]

Notes & Bibliography:

[1] Hubert L. Dreyfus, "Why Heideggerian AI Failed and how Fixing it would Require making it more Heideggerian," 2006.
[2] William Blattner, "Heidegger’s Being and Time," Continuum, 2006, p.9.
[3] ibid., p.4-5.
[4] ibid., p.48.
[5] ibid., p.12.
[6] Hubert L. Dreyfus, "What Computers Still Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason," MIT Press, 1992.
[7] Hubert L. Dreyfus and Stuart E. Dreyfus, "Making a Mind vs. Modeling the Brain: AI Back at a Branchpoint," UC Berkeley.
[8] Think Ray Kurzweil, Nick Bostrom, and Bill Joy, with their fantasies of the technological singularity, mind uploading, etc.
[9] Jonathan Ree, "Heidegger," Routledge, 1999.
[10] Ari N. Schulman, "Why Minds Are Not Like Computers," The New Atlantis, Number 23, Winter 2009, pp. 46-68.

The Empire Estate

By Aditya Dev Sood

Akbar Shah had come to meet us. I can still see him, his untucked shirt fluttering in the wind, long arms strung at his sides, careful words, he needed this job. My main work is the rough-cut stone, he said, like you have all over the facade. But I can also do tiling. I'll manage the labor but the blade will be yours. Gurinder and I couldn't see that we had any other go anyways. The last contractor had been a disaster, requiring minute instruction but then sulking on being told what to do. He'd taken his men and tools off the job finally, and sent one of his other malik-s over to us to try and get his account settled. We told Akbar he was on the job and that yes, the blades were ours. Was he squinting in the sun, or did his eyes betray Chengez Khan and Timurlane as  ancestors? He said he was from Poonch, one of the most northern districts in Kashmir, fatefully falling on this side of the Line of Control. His bearing and manner seemed sincere, but his eyes danced and he seemed always to be restraining his mustache from breaking out into a sly grin. What a name he has, said Gurinder to me later, and we'd had to laugh.

We'd already been at this, what, three months? There were times it seemed like the biggest sculpture studio imaginable, but also days when wood would be fighting masonry, the electricity would fail, and then it would rain on the pieces of wood just polished and left to glint in the sun. Every other morning, it seemed, a whole side of my brain would cave in at these mundane, minute, coordinations that made up my business at Empire Estate, where I was renovating -- gut-rehabbing -- two adjacent row houses. This is why I'd hired Gurinder at the outset, a civil engineer who'd know how to manage all this stuff, and he gamely played the man of action, while I turned back to my Heidegger. I remember him once pulling live wires and closing them with his own hands in light rain, which requires the foolish courage of youth as well as insistent engineering will: this circuit will close, the damn lights will come on.

Akbar Shah was here to teach himself stone-tiling on our dime, but even he didn't pretend to know anything about grinding or polishing the stone he laid. For that we hired Kabir Shah and his brothers and nephews from Bihar. Channa Ram, the head-carpenter was from Punjab, but the rest of his team was also from Bihar. Banwari Lal, the painter-polisher was from Eastern Uttar Pradesh. Every time stone abutted wood, wall met floor, and Bihar met Kashmir, Gurinder and I would be called upon to mediate and dispense Solomonic wisdom, to get the teams back to work and this project back on track.

Our site office was our only office, and it was set up in one of the garages of this pair of row houses we were renovating. From across the driveway, through the glazed windows we'd installed earlier, the staccato pounding and intermittent whining of the site filled up our days. I had two straight edges strung from two drawing boards at one end, and in the center there was a low light-table, a charpai and some mudha-s for future clients to sit at. In the back was my approximation of an American workshop, including tools slung off the wall, a Dremel, and a Sears and Roebuck fret-saw that necessitated the large gray voltage converter on the floor. The scene was a set for dramatic acts of facture, but the heat, the context, and perhaps the weight of real artisans across the way, creating real value with skilled hands even when there was no electricity to power their tools, undermined my own will to faber.

At lunch and for hours in the middle day, when work was more or less proceeding apace, my conversations with Gurinder would take me far from Empire Estate. Beginning from the everyday sparks that routinely flew among our assorted teams of semi-skilled laborers, we would end up talking about religion and caste, post-colonial India, his relatives in Canada, his aspirations for the future. Gurinder wanted to be a sociologist, but saw no way to achieve this, given the engineering degree he had started out with.

Mrs. Kapur was here to inspect the site, and it was a test for all of us. Akbar Shah stood, coiled, next to his tradesman with the handheld diamond saw. A 200-watt bulb hung naked from the ceiling of the small bathroom. Freshly laid, these were 'Indo-Italian' marble tiles, that I'd procured myself from East Delhi. Something about their wan aspiration to Italian marble had appealed to me. Their white surface was sallow, not quite shiny, and their 'Italian' streak was something more like a rusty line of earth waving hesitantly across and through them. One could love them, one would have to know how.

Akbar had been here since the early hours of the morning, supervising the work. Their edges aligned well, up and down. Gurinder and I have no complaints, I told Mrs. Kapur.

We came back downstairs to the garage and had a Coke in its shaded, air-conditioned space. We flipped through some magazines of Italian interiors that Mrs. Kapur had brought. What do you think of this for the kitchen, she asked me, turning the glossy my way to show voluptuous white curves accented with chrome edging and detailing.

Gurinder and I both smiled at the thought of our motley crew reproducing this magazine fantasy. This was made in an Italian or maybe Indonesian factory, I said, with skilled labor working with precision tools. Since we're working with artisans maybe we should try to choose a design language in which they can excel?

Mrs. Kapur nodded and smiled, that's why I hope you'll come up with something really brilliant, Aditya, that no one else could have. She seemed distracted for a minute, but then stood up. We'll have to change that marble in the bathroom. I think it's really not up to the mark. Let's go with makrana white as in the lower bathroom. Can we do that?

I looked to Gurinder. Sure, he said, sure, we can do that. The plaster wouldn't have set. I'll tell Akbar right now. He ran out to stop the construction and Mrs. Kapur gave me another two lakhs in cash before leaving.

By now, I'd figured out that construction management didn't have to be a full-time job. If I organized my meetings right, I could spend a couple of hours on site in the morning, do a cross-check in the evening and have pretty much the whole middle of the day free. Free to do what? I made notes of events and cultural programming in the city, and showed up for plays at Kamani, openings at Triveni, films at IIC, and pretty much any other public exposition and disquisition that could distract and divert me from site.

This morning Akbar Shah and Gurinder were making kuccha markings for the marble tiling on the living floor of the adjacent unit, belonging to Mr. Raja, our other client. The square makrana marble tiles were turned on their corner to allow an abstracted Persianate medallion to be developed in the center of the room in ochre Jaisalmer and black Cudappa stone. The tiles have come, said Gurinder. Akbar's two masons are here. We've got them blades. I want you to check the initial tile alignments. I looked down at the tips of the tiles against the living room windows, which created a series of triangles, trapezoids, and dovetail patterns that were picked up in black Cuduppa. I nodded back, looks like you're ready to go.

I was off for a lecture on the poetry of Rumi at the Iranian Cultural Center, after which I was going to pick up some lights for both houses from Khan Market. As I pulled back into Empire Estate that evening, I saw Mr. Raja's car. Akbar Shah and Gurinder were standing together outside as if in solidarity, but ashen. Gurinder put out his cigarette and told me one of the walls was crooked. See, we took the gunia from the front of the living room, and it was fine for the three walls, but not for the fourth, which was the long one stretching down the entire living and dining. Mr. Raja's just seen it and he's not happy.

I took a deep breath and went over to greet Mr. Raja. He nodded toward me but continued talking directly to my woodworking and electrical contractors. When he was finally done, he pointed back down to the edge of the floor and shook his head. You've ruined the whole room. Then he looked at Akbar Shah and asked him again to account for how the pattern for the entire room had gone awry. These two are over-educated idiots, but you're an artisan. You should have known better, he told him. Akbar Shah was standing tall and straight, relaxed but intent, his eyes carefully averted from Mr. Raja's. This seemed a good pose to adopt, and Gurinder and I quietly followed suit.

I convinced Mr. Raja to come back to the garage and gave him, basically, false assurances that we'd find a way to deal with the problem. I sought also to lead the conversation away from the day's debacle on to other designs and other rooms. We settled down in the garage, I ordered tea, and laid out some drawings for his family room, which had abundant cabinetry and woodwork. I explained how my drawings showed interlacing champ, sal and teak woods on the floor and then repeated that logic in the cabinetry in the corner of the room.

That's a great drawing, he said, but what do you need champ and sal for? There is the money for teak, use teak. The idea, I explained, was for the differing woods to have their own color and grain, and not to stain the wood artificially. We really should use three different kinds of wood.

Mr. Raja's upper lip was glistening with a light film of sweat and it was trembling very slightly. No house of mine will have champ and sal in the family room, he said. He got up and stepped out of the garage, and I worried for a minute that he was going to leave suddenly. But he came back with a briefcase, from which he removed an A4 envelope. Two-and-a-half, he said, as he handed the money to me. Please remember, you must show quality, otherwise what is the idea? I nodded with feeling, and shook his hand.

Never before or since have I ever felt so comfortable with so much money. It was not something I wanted or needed very much of, and it seemed to flow easily, from client briefcase through my salwar-kameez pockets through to contractors, or else to wholesale vendors in Chawri Bazar, who supplied pipes, locks, handles, sanitary wares, and every other item of hardware for building construction. Every two weeks, I might spend a whole day up in Old Delhi, roaming around in the sun, imagining sculptures and installations based on hardware and building materials only slightly more inventive than the stacks of goods and wares already on retail display all around me.

It was now after Diwali. Mr. Raja had wanted his house ready by then, but despite stepping up the pace of construction, only the living room floors had been polished and walls painted. Mr. Raja had held a havan there on Diwali morning, and all of us still working on the place were invited to attend. He gifted Gurinder and me a shirt length each, gave shawls to the head contractors, and boxes of sweets to their labor. Around that time, Gurinder told me Akbar Shah had asked for a meeting.

He came bearing sweets, which may have been jalebee-s, or else those sickly-sweet local laddoo-s. Gurinder and I sat on the charpai and Akbar Shah took a mudha. We called for tea. Gurinder seemed to be enjoying himself. He asked Akbar, what's the occasion, sir?

I'm going to German, said Akbar. Wow, I said. How come?

He told us he'd been approached by a recruiter many months ago, but that he'd spent his time getting his documents in order, and checking on the bonafides of the recruiting firm -- all to make sure the sisterfuckers weren't going to take his money and dupe him. But he would be part of a team of twelve skilled laborers going to Germany together, of whom he knew and trusted more than a few. Once you went out there was no easy way to come back for a year, so he had to make sure he was going to be comfortable doing the work, that his earnings would be safe and that he would make it back safely.

What about your family, Gurinder asked. Akbar said that they would remain here in Delhi, with his main, at this he patted the air with both his hands, his main. His older brother, who seemed his main refuge and support here in Delhi, and who had come to the city before him. My daughter is nine, my son is four, he said, my home-woman will stay here with them. I'll bring my older brother to meet you. He'll take care of any of the remaining work on the second house. After Akbar had left, Gurinder and I continued sitting, as I took in the news. He'll be a gastarbeiter, I said, a guest-worker. But maybe he'll figure a way to stay, I wouldn't put it past him, and bring his family over as well.

There is one another news, said Gurinder. I'll be leaving in December. I'm going to Toronto to study Urban Planning. Now this was a shocker. Wow, that's really a lot of news... Congratulations. It'll be a combination of teaching and coursework, for at least four years, he said.

And what will you work on, I asked? Well, all this -- he waved generally towards the row houses -- people coming into the city to work, the people that employ them, where they go next. Migration, class, social tensions, the stuff that's been happening on site, basically.

So in ten or fifteen years you'll be a professor in Toronto... and Akbar Shah's daughter will end up registered for one of your classes! Gurinder guffawed, but he liked this idea. It could happen, he said, why not?

As I locked up for the day, I had a sudden and heavy impression of all the living rooms, family rooms and bathrooms that still lay ahead of me, which I'd now be working on alone.

Image: A sketch by the architect dating from the same period.

Perceptions: of exquisite detail

Gabriel Orozco. Extension of Reflection. 1992.
C-print.

More here, here and here.

Thanks to Asad Raza for turning me on to this fabulous Mexican artist.

May our Gods be angry: Celestial politics in Bas Congo

Edward B. Rackley

Unlike in Latin America, where liberation theology was once an influential force, Christians in Africa rarely confront political oppression. On the surface, African Christian institutions claim not to meddle in affairs of the State. These days, ‘conversion of the heathens’ is passé, as Christianity is now a widespread and entrenched belief system. Churches of all denominations offer manifold development initiatives in education, health and agriculture. In many countries where the State has limited reach into rural areas, churches represent the sole link to the outside world for isolated communities.

But it’s only half the story to say that African Christian institutions are above political interests and the establishment of a modern State. Throughout colonial occupation, the Church completed the political and economic triangle that comprised the massive social engineering project of colonialism. Here was a hearts and minds program that worked—colonial control encapsulated Maslow’s entire hierarchy of needs. From material conditions, social space and into the spiritual realm, colonialism repackaged the indigenous African experience and replaced each dimension with a foreign substitute. Little has changed since independence: neither the school curricula nor the political dispensations (despite elections, ‘Big Men’ reign in a colonial style). Formerly vibrant traditional belief systems are now subaltern and syncretistic, fusing in curious ways with imported Christian ideas.

Where legitimate grievance has erupted in armed conflict, as in Congo, Rwanda and Sudan, the Church has been neither neutral nor salutary. In Rwanda and Congo, the Church actively fomented ethnic divisions (Hutu/Tutsi, Hema/Lendu), ultimately facilitating ethnic cleansing campaigns in both countries. During Southern Sudan’s famines in the 1990s, the Church leveraged its food distributions to starving animist populations against Bible study and conversion. 

The failure of Congo’s recently elected officials to improve the suffering and destitution across the country aggravates an already desperate, vulnerable mindset. No surprise then that Congo is a breeding ground for rival evangelical Christian sects, many with massive US support, whose pastors implore their congregations to submit to divine providence. God, not human agency, will resolve Congo’s political morass. The sleep of reason is a powerful drug, and a convenient soporific to distract attention from Congo’s kleptocratic institutions. Political elites welcome the evangelical fervor—as long as pastors keep the population’s gaze focused on  the heavens above. Liberation theology would never last a day here, because its proponents would find themselves muzzled in no time. Such is the story of Bundu Dia Kongo, an Afrocentric religiou s movement that dared to challenge State corruption and ineptitude.

Négritude sacrée 

Alongside its myriad Christian sects, the province of Bas Congo has a long tradition of grassroots, Afrocentric spiritual movements that have little appeal to Congolese east of Kinshasa. Besides their call to traditional Kongo beliefs, these movements advocate authenticity by recovering ancestral ways of self-governance as a means of salvation in the present. Disengagement from Congo’s political failures was off-set by reconstituting the pre-colonial Kongo kingdom, which originally covered northern Angola, much of Congo Brazzaville and Bas Congo province in the DRC.

In 2006 Bundu Dia Kongo (BDK) gained national attention when unarmed supporters began to clash regularly with police. The exchanges were exceptional for their extraordinary bravery and persistence on the BDK side, and the unwarranted brutality and unprecedented use of lethal force by state security forces. Independent reports by the UN and Human Rights Watch suggest several hundreds of unarmed BDK supporters were massacred; Congolese authorities continue to label BDK a ‘terrorist group’ and maintain a death toll of around 30.

While BDK is the latest in a long series of independent religious movements in Bas Congo, it is not the most well known or the oldest. This would be the Kimbanguist movement of Kongo prophet and folk hero Simon Kimbangu, who claimed to have been sent by God to heal and lead the black race. His ministry lasted only a few months in 1921 before he was arrested by Belgian authorities and imprisoned in Katanga where he died in his cell in 1951. His surviving sons later founded the Kimbanguist church, today recognized as one of three Christian churches. As many as fifteen prophets and messianic movements appeared in Bas Congo from 1920 onwards. Many of these, like BDK, claimed to promote African authenticity. Another notable movement, still powerful today, is the Eglise des Noirs. Founded by Simon Mpadi in 1939, he was also arrested by Belgian authorities and deported to Katanga on the other side of the country.

The BDK story shares the elements of persecution and authenticity with Kimbanguistes and the Eglise des Noirs, but with one major difference. Recent BDK experience marks a clear break with how religious groups of all stripes have historically responded to Congo’s long succession of repressive and brutal regimes. The trajectory of BDK spiritual leader and founder, Ne Muanda Nsemi, from academic lecturer and part-time minister in the late 1960s to gubernatorial candidate in the lead opposition party in 2006, to jailed and excoriated head of a ‘terrorist organization’ in 2008, reveals much about the spectacular failures of Congo’s body politic. Despite the massive loss of life, BDK is also a sign of enormous hope. The BDK challenge to a corrupt and predatory government—to the point of mortal sacrifice—is a long overdue sign of ‘politicization’ among Congo’s destitute and illiterate masses.  

In 1969 Muanda Nsemi fasted for a month in order to ask the higher spirits to ‘save the black race’ and to ‘enlighten the world’. His prayer was answered in the form of a visitation by the Great Spirit Muanda Kongo, who listed a series of crimes against Africans and attributed responsibility for the plight of the black race to Western civilization. He relates the terms of his illumination:

“The West massacred millions of Africans through slavery. The Gods know this, so does the West. The West is responsible for Africa’s current economic misery. The Gods know this, so does the West. The West colonized Africa on inhumane grounds. The Gods know this, so does the West. The West established the borders of African countries arbitrarily, and for this Africans continue to bleed. Western crimes in Africa are well known to all, both in the West and in the higher realms.”

Fast forward to 2006. Muanda Nsemi continues to lead BDK; its supporters now number in the tens of thousands. He has written extensively, publishing over 500 books and brochures in French and Kikongo on the religion, history, culture and politics of the Kongo people. In the buildup to national elections as Congo struggles to recover from years of war and dictatorship, Muanda Nsemi allies BDK with the main opposition party and its candidate Jean-Pierre Bemba. Bemba lost the presidential elections to Kabila in late 2006 and was soon run out of the country. He is now in The Hague, indicted for crimes against humanity committed by his troops in neighboring Central African Republic. BDK, meanwhile, asserts territorial control in Kongo homeland areas, underscoring Kinshasa’s manifest inability to extend the reach of the State beyond the capital.

Pyramids of payback

DRC has a long history of political elitism, predation by civil servants and abusive behavior by armed forces. King Leopold’s Ghost, by Adam Hochschild, chronicles the atrocities of the Congo Free State in the late 1800s, a period made famous by Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Hochschild also documents the heroic attempts by a few to halt the economic tyranny, slavery and mass murder that characterized Leopold’s gruesome reign. Congolese workers were threatened with amputation if they did not produce their daily quota of rubber. Their Congolese overlords, loyal to Leopold, had to present the severed hands of workers whose quotas were not met.

In Kongo folklore the hunting dog provides a dual analogy. First, as a traitor to one’s own kind; second, for blind loyalty to foreign interests. For Muanda Nsemi, Congo’s political leaders are the mbua ntantu – dogs who aid man in his hunt for their fellow animals. Historically and today, Congolese political elite have pursued power as a means to wealth rather than as an end in itself (eg., governing in the public interest). Despite a merely symbolic presence outside the provincial capitals, the Kinshasa government deploys predatory elements (police, army, intelligence agents accountable only to the Executive branch) to pursue its extractive interests throughout the country. Echoes of Congo Free State are not arbitrary or imagined. The same extractive objectives for which the DRC was originally designed by colonial powers remain virtually unchanged.

Patronage systems turned kleptocratic during the Mobutu era, leading to a shadow economy that is wholly extractive. Those at the top of government departments expect to receive substantial cash payments from their subordinate, who in turn ‘tax’ those below or divert funds from public budgets. At the lowest level, bribes are extracted from the public in order to pay those above. In effect the public is taxed for the provision of state services, including health, education and security—a reversal of the normal expectation that the State should subsidize services. The situation is aggravated by the non-payment of government staff, including police and military. Teachers require ‘motivation fees’ from students in order to give classes and grade exams. Policemen have to submit a weekly ‘report’, effectively a fixed payment to their superior officers who in turn must make payments further up the chain. A policeman who fails to meet his quota will still have to pay up—an example of how it is practically impossible to remain in public service and not be corrupt.

A cadaverous State

Combined with years of dictatorship and the travesty of personality cults, the saturation of Western Christian values has led to a general disinterest in holding the State accountable for Congo’s misery. That there are voices like that of Muanda Nsemi and BDK demanding reform today is cause for hope. The Congolese political opposition, once led by Bemba, is now weak and fractured, its appointed leader now awaiting trial at the ICC. Apart from BDK the opposition lacks credible allies outside the political class who can channel the vox populi.

The novelty of Muanda Nsemi in this context lies in shifting blame for Congo’s freefall away from Western manipulation and colonial legacy and onto the Congolese state. In a country renowned for its obsession with conspiracy theories and a recurring victim complex, BDK delivers straightforward and empowering invective where it is rightfully due. In one of my favorite moments of Muanda Nsemi oratory, a 2007 speech to Parliament following a series of BDK massacres (video here), he tells his fellow deputies: « The State is a cadaver that is still breathing » (L’Etat est un cadavre qui respire encore). Parliamentarians then bellow and hiss, and the Speaker forces him to retract the statement.

Whether the courage and sacrifice of BDK will set an example to be followed by other Africanist movements remains to be seen. The average Congolese, it must be said, finds Muanda Nsemi and the BDK worldview to be quite insane (check the ridicule by fellow deputies in the above speech to Parliament). On the other hand, given the strong traditions and proud history of the Kongo people, Bas Congo province will likely generate further spiritual movements. That one or some of these will press for political reform is always possible. 

Impunity for atrocities committed against BDK supporters by state security forces from 2006 to 2008 aggravated already open wounds; these will not heal quickly. Popular grievances against Kinshasa and its appointed leaders (mbua ntantu) in Bas Congo will deepen and fester. Kongo memory of injustice is long, and Muanda Nsemi will continue to preach this history, reminding his people of the unbroken continuum between colonial occupation and the string of corrupt tyrannies since independence. 

The BDK experience shows that where the stateless void of rural Congo persists, traditional forms of authority will arise to fill the power vacuum. For Kinshasa, BDK and its vision remain a threat, not a partner or an intermediary solution. It is also an object lesson in Kinshasa’s tendency to counter dissent not with dialogue or mediation, but with crushing, lethal force. For now, Muanda Nsemi is in many ways the only credible dissident voice in the country. The opposition is fractured and skeptical of BDK as a viable political asset. Despite the blood on his hands, Bemba could have led an effective opposition to the Kabila regime. But before returning he must first learn his fate at the hands of a remote legal body on distant continent.

Thomas Friedman Clogged My Toilet

Justin E. H. Smith

A few nights ago I hosted a reception for an old friend, a respected scholar and most recently the author of Citation Techniques in Duns Scotus. We were celebrating the sale of the 100th copy of his book.

Now ordinarily this sort of event is attended by only the dustiest of academics, so you can easily imagine my surprise when a former colleague of mine --a newly minted global-justice theorist who left academic philosophy in order, as she put it, to 'work the Davos circuit'--  showed up accompanied by the prize-winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.

The two of them had just come from the opening session of the ‘Mini Davos’ forum, which this year my adoptive city had the honor of hosting. My former colleague (let us call her ‘Juliette’) had just led a session on ‘The Universal Right to Clean Water’, in which her performance was judged by Stephen Harper, Desmond Tutu, and Bono alike to be of ‘Oscar calibre’.
“Water,” exclaimed Bill Gates, “now there's something people can get excited about.”
“She's gonna take this act all the way to Switzerland,” Bill Clinton himself was heard to say.

I had already known Friedman to be a small and twitchy man, and was now able to confirm that this is at best a mild understatement. Yet almost immediately I sensed that there was something unusual, that this man, however awkward he may ordinarily be, was at this very moment in a tremendous amount of discomfort.
“It's a pleasure to meet you Mr. Friedman,” I said smoothly and, I hoped, with just the right amount of ambiguous sarcasm. “I'm a big fan of The Lexus and the Olive Tree. It really captured the moment. When I read it I was like: forget about On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (and Always Have) in the Future Tense, it's Friedman who's really got his finger on the pulse.”
“Thanks,” Friedman groaned. “Call me Tom.”

This was all he managed to say, after which he just kept standing there, sweating and wincing. I imagined Juliette might be able to bring him back to life if I were to disappear, so I excused myself and went to mingle among the other guests. Things were proceeding as usual. Reginald, it seems, had read Gunther’s new book, Kenelm Digby’s Qualitative Corpuscularianism. The babysitter-deprived and therefore absent Gunther, Reginald reported to the crowd’s amusement and surprise, had based his study almost entirely upon The Nature of Bodies of 1644 while completely ignoring the Discourse concerning the Vegetation of Plants of 1661.

Thirty minutes in or so, when I simply could not stand to see my most distinguished guest suffering anymore, and when conversation with the others had weakened from Digby to dental insurance to daycare, I leaned in and, in a whispered tone, asked Juliette what was wrong. She knew the man better than I did, after all, and I had long known her to be what Nietzsche would call a penetrating 'psychologist'. Was she ever! Thomas Friedman, Juliette whispered to me discreetly in the elegant Ciceronian Latin she still retained from her years as a scholar of Imperial Stoicism, was in the throes of a fluxus ventris.

It is not for nothing that some years ago I sought out a home with a semi-secret 1/2-bath in the basement, for who has not at some point been at a social gathering, and preferred to reabsorb rank toxins through the intestinal walls, rather than to risk, by the emanation of one's own stench even through a closed bathroom door, being found out as a defecator? This, I've long believed, has been the key to my reputation as a host.

I gracefully led Friedman to the basement door and pointed him down the dark stairs, giving him, for some reason, a little thumbs-up as he began his descent. He was looking much worse by now, and I was worried that he might collapse on the bathroom floor, so I lingered on the stairs and pretended to be busy putting the boxes I'd piled there in order, all the while listening for a thud.

I heard nothing that sounded like that, exactly, but anyway after a good 15 minutes what I did begin to hear was an unusual amount of flushing, repeated in two-minute intervals or so, each time accompanied by a mild curse. After five or six tries I heard one much rougher profanity, the sound of the sink, and of the light being switched off. I quickly pulled a newspaper clipping out of one of the boxes --an old Mike Royko column, of all things, on the disagreeableness of health food-- and pretended to read it.

“Your toilet’s backed up,” Friedman announced as he came out, visibly relieved and almost giddy, still wiping his hands on his Dockers. “But you know, I just flew back from Shanghai, and let me tell you, the lavatories in the airport there are world-class. You don’t see anything, you don’t touch anything, and away it goes, right down the modern, rust-free pipes.”
“So you clogged my toilet?” I asked. I was, I confess, a bit annoyed, but also fascinated by the way Friedman's trip to the restroom had brought back what I imagined to be his usual élan.
“Now hold on, let’s back up a bit here. Instead of asking who clogged the toilet, maybe we should be asking why America’s scores on standardized math and science tests are so low. Maybe we should be asking how we lost that competitive edge to a bunch of scrappy upstarts in a call-center in Hyderabad.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Maybe we should be asking why America’s pipes are so rusty.”
“My toilet’s in Canada.”
“Well that’s just the kind of potential I’m talking about,” Friedman replied without missing a beat. “There I was just now, sitting on the commode in Quebec, while simultaneously chatting on my Blackberry with the Prince of Dubai, who was at that very instant sending out tweets about the construction project he’s partnering with Texas A & M to build on a landfill site in the Gulf. And guess who’s doing the building? Filipinos and Bangladeshis, that’s who!”

I confess I was quickly being overcome by the sheer intensity of the Friedmanist line. I knew it was a ruse, I knew there was a toxic pile of shit waiting to be plunged, but I couldn't help myself. “You're right Tom,” I said, prompting him for what was sure to be his most spellbinding performance yet, “but how are we going to have any stability in the region if we don't make any progress on the Middle East peace plan?”

“I’ll tell you one thing,” Friedman shot back, “the Middle East doesn’t need a road map. What it needs is a flight plan. You know why? Because when the Israelis and the Palestinians realize it’s in their own interest to get along, they’re going to take off. I’m talking about high-tech companies based in Ramallah texting orders to their supplier in Tel Aviv. I’m talking about firms outsourcing their IT to a couple of upstarts in Bethlehem. How’d you like to get your IT solutions from a Muslim working in the birthplace of Christianity? Because I tell you what: it’s going to happen.”

That did it. I was ready to join up. Just to think of those gleaming towers in the Gulf! Just to think of those IT solutions I could be getting! I wanted to text my excitement to everyone I knew, especially my mom (she won't be around forever). Having lived for years without a car, I had a sudden urge to buy a Hybrid and show those Saudis I'm not addicted to their oil. Ten years out of grad school, I wanted to retake the GREs, just to show Thomas Friedman we could do better. I'd even take the SATs again if that could bring about a little statistical bump for America. Most of all, I wanted to return to America, to reverse the tide of the Bush-era brain drain, and help make my country great again.

And at that moment, just as I was ready to volunteer for some new Service Corps, or to reinvent myself as a scrappy upstart with a can-do attitude, Juliette came looking for her party companion. “Tom,” she said urgently, “text from Soros. Big Malaria afterparty at the Hard Rock. I'm talking about World Bank execs. I'm talking about potential for some serious Clinton exposure. I'm talking about you remember the Dysentery happy hour last year at Señor Frog’s? Well forget about it.”

Juliette had changed, that much was certain. She and Tom said their perfunctory good-byes and departed just as suddenly and inexplicably as they had arrived. I went back up the stairs and looked around the living room. Reginald was on the phone to his sitter, while his wife had made herself comfortable on the couch and was busy grading blue books. My friend the Scotus scholar, bless his heart, had fallen asleep right next to her, holding a copy of the Treatise on the First Principle. One could still hear a few mutterings here about the proper use of semicolons, and there about so-and-so's impending divorce, but this party was definitely winding down.

My work however was not done for the night. I grabbed the plunger from under the upstairs-bathroom's sink and headed towards the basement. And what did I see when I came to the staircase but the ghost of Mike Royko, sitting forlornly on a step, reading his own column. “Oh the celery bit,” I heard him mutter. “I crack myself up.” But Royko wasn't cracking up; in fact he looked miserable, even for a ghost.

I slipped past him on the stairs and continued toward the bathroom, hoping he would simply evaporate. “I wouldn't go in there if I was you, kid,” he called out behind me.
“Did you see what Friedman did?” I asked, exasperated.
“Of course I saw. I'm a ghost. I was hiding in the Glade can, but I got sprayed out when he tried to cover up the smell. That Friedman. He can raise a stink that would floor Slats Grobnik, and Slats was no lightweight, I tell you. But you want to know why Friedman's so full of horse puckee? Well let me tell you a little something about the news biz.” Royko's form seemed now to be bulging in certain parts and contracting in others, like a fun-house mirror. “Come in a little closer, kid. This is a secret we don't want just anyone to get in on.”

And so I began to walk back up the stairs towards the ghost of Mike Royko, who had by now contorted into a sort of spiral, hoping to learn the mystery of what had happened that evening, and also to understand, finally, what it is that keeps me, year after year, so ready to make room in my schedule and in my thoughts for the ordures deposited daily, with no thought of accountability nor any solid proof of any real expertise in anything, by the tenured squatters of the New York Times opinion page...

To be continued. Next episode: 'You Can't Wrap a Fish with Nanotechnology', plus Nick Kristof's Name-That-Fistula Contest.

--

For an extensive archive of Justin Smith's writing, please visit www.jehsmith.com.

The Ponzi Avenger

by Bryant Urstadt

This is a story about what happened when an artist met a Ponzi scheme. The name of the artist is Billie Mintz, and he is a filmmaker in Toronto. His money disappeared on a January Monday in 2008. Mintz had just sat down to check his email. Monday was normally the day he got his statements from RazorFX, a foreign currency management firm operating out of Northport, New York, on Long Island. On the recommendation of a friend, Mintz had invested his life savings, which was about $20,000.

He loved getting his Monday statements. They detailed the trades his manager, Bradley Eisner, had made, and they were usually up, not by a lot, but maybe by one percent. It was a number not so outlandish as to be unbelievable, but exciting enough to tell your friends about, and it made Mintz feel that he had done something smart and sensible. At that rate, Mintz’s $20,000 would turn into $33,000 in a year.

No statement, however, arrived, and Mintz immediately knew something was wrong. Not long after, a Google search confirmed the worst. Eisner and his partner Michael MacCaull had been arrested in Long Island that morning. They had been running a Ponzi scheme, and had stolen more than $100 million. Mintz was stunned, not only by the loss of the money, but by the questions it suddenly raised about himself, chief among them the realization that he might have just become that guy who loses his life’s savings in a Ponzi scheme.

And, no, it had nothing to do with that Ponzi scheme. Bernie Madoff wouldn’t have tipped Mintz at the golf club, much less let him into his select circle of gullible millionaires. Mintz had fallen victim to one of the hundreds of other Ponzi schemes that swept the country in the easy credit years.

Mintz didn’t stay seated in shock for long. Where many might have seen pure loss, a shame to be covered up, and a mistake to forget, Mintz saw an opportunity to learn about issues of the human condition, from trust to kindness to greed. “I saw this as a chance to learn something about being human,” he says. “About who we are.”

Mintz is an upbeat guy, 35, who describes his life’s work as making movies that help foster positive change. He is tall, attractive in a slightly comic way, with bushy hair and a goatee, and able to see the humor in just about anything. So, yes, he had lost his life savings, but he had found his next subject for a film. It would be called, “The Ponzi Scheme” and it would be part tragedy and part comedy.

In the next months, he would undertake an odyssey into the heart of the scheme that took his life savings. He would criss-cross the continent, meet victims in Phoenix, stake out accomplices in Vancouver, and, finally, disguised as a pizza delivery man, confront the man who had stolen his money.

“I started out a filmmaker,” says Mintz, “and I ended up a vigilante.”

      The first thing he learned was that victims of a Ponzi scheme mostly haven’t a clue what to do, or how to do it. “Nobody else was ready to actually do anything,” says Mintz. “Everybody was just reeling at having lost so much money. They were crippled by it.”

       He felt he could help. As he saw it, making the film served a lot of purposes: He would educate the public about these schemes, tell a good story, and maybe even get some justice, or revenge. A few days after he found out about the arrest of Eisner, Mintz found a Yahoo group where victims were commiserating about their losses, their anger, and their own stupidity. He found that dozens of the victims lived in Vancouver, and so he went there, organizing a meeting of town hall style meeting of victims.

       Like many of the Vancouver victims, Mintz had come to RazorFX through a friend, in his case a talent manager in Hollywood, who in turn had come to the fund through his trainer, who had heard about it through a friend who was a teacher. Razor FX would find investors across the country in this way, and in the U.K., New Zealand, Mexico, and Hong Kong, blossoming in the pockets of trust where “affinity fraud” often blooms. The “affinity” is usually a religious denomination or a neighborhood, but it can be any group, up to and including the members of a golf club, a la Madoff. Razor FX took off particularly in Hollywood, capturing investments from B-list stars and A-list managers, and in the Vancouver area, having likely migrated through a film world connection.

       In Vancouver, most of the victims had come into RazorFX through a feeder fund called Horizon FX. Vancouver investors, many of them with small deposits like Mintz’s, poured as much as $30 million into RazorFX through the firm. HorizonFX is suing RazorFX for fraud, but more than one investor, including Mintz, believes that the suit is just cover, and voice suspicion about HorizonFX’s founder, Cem Ali, who has basically disappeared. Mintz hired a private investigator, found out where Ali lived, or at least where he had been living, and staked out his Vancouver apartment, hoping for an interview. Though Mintz learned a few tricks of the private investigator’s trade – always bring your own waste bucket to a stakeout, for one, because PIs don’t share – he never found Ali.

       After Vancouver, Mintz traveled to speak with victims in Arizona and Los Angeles. Some of the stories were heartbreaking. One widow had lost $600,000, her life savings, and was thinking of killing herself. Other stories proved how stupid smart and informed people could be. Mintz met someone he describes as “big in the financial world,” who had lost millions. He had gone so far as to call Eisner’s supposed “clearing house” in London, where trades were claimed to have been made. The brokers there couldn’t talk about specific trades or volume, but they warned the investor off anyway. The big wig ignored their advice.

      

       Next, Mintz got some cameraman friends, hopped in his little econocar, and headed through a blizzard to Long Island. Long Island, it turns out, is a good place to find a con man, or to learn the trade. RazorFX, Mintz found, appears to have roots in a family tree of con men, being descended from some of some of the best known securities frauds of the 80s and 90s. When MacCaull helped start RazorFX, the Department of Justice affidavit alleges, he was already under arrest for his involvement as a broker working for Sterling Foster, a “boiler room” operation where con men cold-called prospects with hot tips on fake companies, the stock of which the firm later sold for a profit. The operation, which closed in 1997, took more than $200 million from investors. MacCaull pleaded guilty in 2002, and was sentenced to prison for 15 months. Sterling Foster, it later turned out, had been “secretly controlled,” in the words of a 1998 New York Times article, by Randolph Pace, who had run another crooked brokerage, Rooney Pace, which was closed in 1987 by the SEC. Forbes in 1997 called Pace a “notorious bucket shop owner.” He went to jail for eight years in 2002 on 13 counts.

       To locate Eisner, Mintz found a private investigator and former cop who was not only willing to help, but volunteered his time. They found a rap sheet with assault on the record, and seven registered addresses for Eisner and RazorFX. They went to the offices of RazorFX, which were supposed to have been in Great Neck, NY, and Upper Saddle River, NJ, but they turned out to be mere forwarding addresses.

       Along the way, Mintz made a visit to the North Fork Bank, where $68 million had been stored in one account under Eisner’s name, and where Mintz made a Michael Moore-like show of asking for his money back. They also learned that Eisner and MacCaull seem to have spent the money in the usual con man way. MacCaull in the affidavit is described as living in a “luxurious apartment,” and driving an Aston Martin paid for by Eisner out of the investors’ funds.

       Mintz also pieced together what had happened in the days leading up to the missing email that Monday morning. He learned that the fraud went south sometime in December of 2008 or January of 2009, though the Department of Justice and the United States Postal Inspection Service, who worked together on the case, have yet to disclose exactly how the case broke. The indictment describes a first meeting between a “Confidential Source” and United States Postal Inspector Vincent Minecci on January 9, 2008. The source, identified as one of the “principals” in RazorFX, is likely to be Bradley Eisner, and he probably agreed to call MacCaull while the Inspection Service taped the conversation.

       In the taped call, Eisner told MacCaull that an investor wanted to take out $10 million, but the funds weren’t there. MacCaull suggested they “squash” the account, which is the typical exit strategy for a con. David Maurer’s classic book on fraud, The Big Con, is full of squashed race track cons and fake stock plays, though Maurer calls this stage “the blow off.” MacCaull stated that they had already squashed the accounts five times before.

      

       Finally, Mintz, with the help of his Long Island PI, began to close in on Eisner. They visited an address that turned out to be an older, smaller home, and then spent the night in a motel before heading out for the last on the list. 

       His girlfriend, whom he called that night, was not crazy about the plan.

       “You guys are either going to turn up dead, or you’re going to get fucked,” she said.

       The next day, Mintz and his crew headed to Four Merrivale Terrace, in Great Neck, New York, on Long Island. It was a mansion, and Mintz, in his econobox, parked across the street.

       This one looked certainly looked right: It was a huge red brick home, with multiple towering chimneys, a two-story entry with a portico, and grand double doors. In short, the new money special. (Mintz would later find that it had been bought for some $1.65 million, in cash.)

       Mintz’ plan was to pose as a pizza deliveryman, and then ask Eisner what had happened to his money, and how Eisner could have stolen from so many people.

       Mintz and his cameramen were all scared.

       “I’m fucking shitting bricks,” said Mintz, before getting out. “I’m so goddamned nervous.”

       Mintz got out. It was raining. He was wearing a dark winter coat and a blue baseball cap. He hadn’t shaved in a couple of days. One of his friends handed him a hot box of pizza. He went up to the big door. He knocked once, twice. A big guy with thinning hair came to the door in an maroon Abercrombie & Fitch sweatshirt.

       “Hey,” said Mintz. “Pizza?”

       “I didn’t order any,” mumbled the guy.

       “Are you Bradley Eisner?”

       “Yeah,” said Eisner, trying to close the door, but Mintz had his foot in already.

        “He thought I was going to shoot him,” says Mintz. “I could see it in his eyes.”

       Mintz instead told Eisner that he came on a mission of peace and understanding, that he wanted to know if Eisner understood how many people he had hurt. Eisner muttered that he couldn’t talk about the case. Mintz asked him how he could do it and got the same answer. Mintz tried to connect with him in any way he could, even prefacing the whole talk as being between one Jew and another.

       There was no shooting, or violence. Instead, Mintz found himself overwhelmed with sympathy, and, oddly, admiration.

       “I probably spoke with him for seven or ten minutes,” says Mintz. “It was more just me telling him how I felt. But the weird thing, at the end of it all, was that I kind of liked him. He wasn’t the monster I thought he would be. He was just a normal guy, a likable guy. I saw myself in him, and I thought, ‘We’re all capable of this.’”

      

       Eisner’s lawyer, Benjamin Brafman, will certainly stoke any sympathy he can. “In Bradley’s defense is the fact that he came forward and brought the fraud to the attention of the government when he was not under investigation,” says Brafman. “He came in to my office and told me, ‘I’ve been involved in fraudulent activity for years and I want it stopped.’ He was fundamentally honest, and did not want to live like that the rest of his life.”

       Brafman goes on to describe Eisner as a “soft-spoken, gentle young man,” a husband and a father, with no substantial post high school education, and no real background in finance.

       Eisner, according to Brafman, went with Brafman to confess to the DA. If this is so, it’s likely the government asked Eisner to make the call to MacCaull as part of any bargain. Because of Eisner’s actions, Brafman says, “the investors are going to participate in a restitution pool of $30 million. It could have gone on for years. Investors may be angry but they should be to some degree grateful.”

       Even Brafman seems impressed by the lure of the business. After Eisner “stopped participating,” says Brafman, “investors continued to send in money. The clients were so happy with their returns that they were tripping over themselves to put more money in…. It’s remarkable how easy it was for Bradley to begin the business.”

       The U.S. Attorney’s office did not respond to an e-mail and a telephone call trying to determine whether or not Brafman’s version is correct.

       Mintz doesn’t find Brafman’s version too crazy, and imagines the scheme snowballing out way beyond the original dreams of Eisner and MacCaull.

       In July, Bradley Eisner and Michael MacCaull pled guilty, and both await sentencing. They each face up to 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. In all, the scheme took in over $100 million, says the Department of Justice, with just $28 million recovered. The DOJ adds that “tens” of millions were returned to investors on top of that, to “perpetuate the scheme.” That leaves well more than “tens” of millions unaccounted for.

       As Maurer notes in his book, “If the fix curdles and the insideman should find himself inextricably involved with the law, the safety of the whole mob is menaced; hence the insideman retains excellent legal service to be used in such an emergency.”

       Brafman’s service qualifies as excellent, to be sure. He is a premier lawyer specializing in white collar crime, having represented Sean Combs, Jay-Z, Michael Jackson, nightclub owner Peter Gatien, and many others, including a number of New York-area organized crime figures.

       Even Mintz’ stellar empathy has limits, and to Mintz the appearance of Brafman is not a historical nicety but another in a series of grim jokes at the expense of the victims. After all, Eisner is spending Mintz’ money to avoid having to spend time in jail for having taken Mintz’ money. As humor, it doesn’t get much darker than that.

       “Still,” says Mintz. “I feel for the guy. I almost felt like we could have been buddies. You get caught up in something and you think you can outrun your conscience. It must be a nightmare once it starts to haunt you.”

       In the end, as Mintz sees it, he and Eisner made a kind of spiritual trade.

       “He took my money,” he says, “but I gave him my greed. For me just to point my finger at him would be taking away from a recognition of what was inside myself, too.”

       

      

5

Perceptions: truly!

Roni Horn. Untitled #2. 1999.

Iris printed photographs.

More here, here, and here.

I discovered the ants

by Daniel Rourke

I discovered the ants trailing like gunpowder across my kitchen floor. Before I had time to think I had vacuumed up a thousand. Yet they kept coming, tending to resurge where last I had punished them; coursing like a rainless cloud on the exact same trajectory each time.

Somewhere unseen to me a billowing sack of protoplasm with the head of a Queen was giving birth to its hundredth clone of the day. But unlike its brethren this clone would never grow towards the daylight. A dark shroud of worker ants would drag poison into its womb: a deadly meal upon which the nest would feast.

In my local supermarket was an aisle devoted to domestic murder. Sticky traps infused with cockroach friendly aromas; circular baiting baths filled with a saccharine mosquito-drowning dew. Tablets for prevention, sprays for elimination and piles upon piles of bug-nets, bug-bats, bug-bombs and bug-poisons.

I bought a box of Raid ant bait. The compound eyes and hideous mandibles of a cartoon ant stared back at me from the package. This caricature, designed to demonise the ants, instead expressed their human-like determination. A determination that I would use against them. A determination bound up and offered to them like a spoonful of Trojan horses.

---

The French tourist attraction Lascaux II is like the 1980 family movie Superman II because:

1. It’s a translation of archetypes, a kind of ode to idealism.
2. Some people claim that it is better than the original.
3. The special effects are dated, but they still pack a punch.
4. It cost millions to re-produce.
5. All it is is editing.

In 1963 Lascaux cave, a network of subterranean tunnels scrawled with some of the earliest known Upper Palaeolithic human art, was closed to public scrutiny. Since its discovery in 1940 around a thousand visitors had trampled through the site per day, bringing with them a toxic mix of exhaled CO² and greasy, groping fingers. In 1983 the Lascaux II replica was opened to the public. The tourist attraction contains a faithful recreation of the textured surface of the original cave upon which 75% of the precious art has been meticulously copied.

In the late 1970s Richard Donner, a talented director best known for his earlier film The Omen, was fired by the producers of the Superman franchise. Donner’s attempt to craft and create two Superman movies back to back had become hampered by production disagreements. A new director, Richard Lester, was drafted in to piece together the unfinished second film from remnants that Richard Donner had left scattered on the cutting-room floor. Lester’s Superman II was released in 1980. Richard Donner’s name was absent from the credits.

The original Lascaux cave rests in darkness again now, killing the time its simulation has reclaimed from toxic breath and greasy, groping fingers. The addition of a ‘state-of-the-art’ air conditioning system to the Lascaux complex is thought to be responsible for a virulent, black fungus now invading the site. Experts are looking for a solution to the new problem they helped introduce.

Richard Donner finally released a ‘faithful’ version of Superman II in late 2006, a version for which Richard Lester received no credit. The two films contain around 75% of the same material, in vaguely different orders.

---

Most fire ant bait is an insecticide and an attractive ant food (generally processed corn grits coated with soybean oil) combination. Baits are taken into the colony by ants searching for food. The bait is distributed to other members of the colony through the exchange of food known as trophallaxis.

Although several fire ant baits are available, there are two main types: insect growth regulators and actual toxins. Hydramethylnon bait (Amdro®, Siege® and Maxforce®) is a toxin (slow acting stomach poison) that disrupts the ant’s ability to convert food to energy. Spinosad bait (Eliminator® Justice™) is a slow acting biorational toxin derived through the fermentation of a soil dwelling bacteria. Abamectin, the toxin in Raid® Fire Ant Bait is also the result of the fermentation of soil dwelling bacteria. Fipronil bait (Chipco® Firestar™) is a slow acting toxin that disrupts the insect’s nervous system through contact and stomach action. Fenoxycarb (Award™ and Logic®), or methoprene, (Extinguish™) and pyriproxyfen (Distance® and Spectracide®) are all insect growth regulators that prevent queens from producing new workers. Abamectin (Clinch™, Varsity™, Ascend™ and Raid®) bait acts both as an insect growth regulator and a toxin.

One key to the efficiency of baits is that the insecticide gets to the queen. [i]

---

(The stage is very dark. The sound of breathing can be heard, and then the scrape of a foot against something solid. The darkness holds in this state for a few more moments. The breathing dwindles to a spoken whisper, low and indistinct. These noises echo from within a narrow space. They grow closer as they repeat. The audience waits.

A flicker of light erupts from below stage right. It swells and diminishes like a heart-beat. The stage is modelled on the inside of a cavern. Its edges fill all angles of the stage except the obligatory missing section. It is through this absence that the audience watches.

Two men clamber up from a tiny recess in the simulated stone. An older man carries a flame set upon a gnarled tree root. The dank odour of tar drifts out from the flame as the men catch their breath. There is only an iota of light. The audience waits.)

Older man: Though the radiation from kryptonite is detrimental to all life, it is especially harmful to Kryptonians such as Superman.

Man: Kryptonite is the ore of kryptonium, and usually has a green hue.

Older man: Although in its red form, kryptonite is perhaps at its most unpredictable.

Man: Red kryptonite is especially volatile. (pauses, looking at his companion) No two chunks of red kryptonite have the same effect on Superman.

(The two men drift. The older man's lantern casts the only light in the theatre. A series of hand outlines, shaped in ochre powder, are met by the men's gaze. In turn they each press an outstretched hand to one of these, muttering under their breath. After this ceremony they find seating spaces and buckle into crossed legs. As well as his flame the older man carries a small, leather pouch over one shoulder which he now sets down. The men are dishevelled and dirty with tar smoke.)

Older man: Red kryptonite turned Superman into a powerless giant and a dwarf.

Man: (thinking at first) Turned him into a terrifying Kryptonian dragon.

Older man: Red kryptonite drove Superman insane for a period of forty-eight hours.

Man: Made Superman unable to see anything green; grow incredibly long hair, nails, and beard.

Older man: Grow fat; gain the ability to read thoughts; grow a third eye in the back of his head.

Man: Lose his invulnerability along the left side of his body.

Older man: Split into an evil Superman and a good Clark Kent.

Man: Become apathetic.

Older man: Be rendered unable to speak or write anything but Kryptonese.

(The older man opens his pouch, passing his companion the lantern. He pulls out handfuls of twigs, moss and dried fungal remnants and begins to build a fire.)

Man: Grow an extra set of arms.

Older man: Become clumsy.

Man: Swap bodies with the person nearest him.

Older man: Transfer his powers.

Man: Rapidly age.

Older man: Go through multiple personality changes.

Man: And have his skin rendered transparent...

Older man: ...overloading him with solar power.

(By now the fire has been built. The younger man lights the fire. As it begins to burn the light of the stage naturally increases. The cave walls are covered with ancient depictions of horses, reindeer, mammoth and bears, as well as the outlined hand-prints.)

Man: (thinking again) Red kryptonite made flames shoot out of Superman’s mouth and endowed him with the power to make his wishes come true.

Older man: (weary) Transformed Superman into an infant with the mind of an adult.

Man: Robbed Superman of his super powers and afflicted him with total amnesia.

(From the fire the older man now draws a length of charred wood. He stubs the stick into the ground, and pinches at its end, blowing away the cinders until only a charcoal tip remains. The older man attempts to stand, eventually requiring his companion’s assistance. He walks the length of the cave, touching his fingers against the animal depictions. Coming upon the naive likeness of a human amongst the animals he taps it in recognition, and begins to mark the figure with his charcoal tool. His marks are simple strokes, but they highlight the human form until it is transformed into something quite different. His companion speaks as he continues to draw.)

Man: Is that everything?

(The older man continues transforming the painting. From its head he draws a set of antennae. Its torso he elongates into a tear-shaped thorax, adding new limbs onto the extended body. He finishes, stepping back. The human now resembles a giant ant, defined in charcoal against the surface of rock.)

Older man: Red kryptonite once endowed Superman with the head and antennae of a giant ant.[ii]

---

Ants! Giant fucking ants! Millions of them, with spiny knees and quivering mandibles trickling with deathly secretions. They advanced upon Earth, taking Tokyo at first, seeming to rise up as one black monolith and wash across the terrified metropolis below. They came from the moon - or perhaps from outer space - although tales of cracks in the Earth opening to an ant-shaped hell beneath could not be founded on rumour alone. From Asia they advanced West, pulling behind them the glistening entrails of human civilisation in one terrific globule. To cross the Himalayas they congregated along its flank in layers, cemented one upon the other with human gunk, until a sheer wall of arthropod crept like a heavenly bridge, up and over the mountain peaks. By the time they reached Iraq they had crushed five hundred armies beneath their scurrying limbs. The viscous mass of human dead they trailed behind them now teemed with the remains of fighter jets, gun turrets and ten thousand war tanks - all minced together in the goo. On a dusty plain, not far from the city of Baghdad, the horde began to gather. Within hours a vast swathe of earth and human cement had been erected into a cone-shaped tower of Babel. The human armies kept their distance defending what little remained of the terrified populous; cursing their inevitable slip from the top of the food-chain; peering back into the evolutionary quagmire from whence they had risen. From the entrance of their Biblical tower the insects extended, like a waiting procession, along the walls of Babylon. With their antennae pushed up high and their thoraxes lowered onto the hot desert ground it was then that their Queen appeared in the sky. In her tree-trunk sized jaws she carried a great, green meteorite, which she set down at the gates of her new ant city. The rock emanated from within a pulse of fire which seemed to re-energise the ant millions; causing their many limbs to chatter against one another; causing the whole of Earth to tremble in anticipation. There are many contradictory tales of what happened next. Some say that the green rock cracked, tearing apart the Earth with its power. Others claim that the Queen ant shed an outer skin, revealing beneath a pair of golden wings. The most accepted story though, and the one to which I subscribe, is that slowly the Queen rolled the green rock in through the gates of the tower, her army following behind her, until the entire swarm had disappeared into the awesome nest. Today the new Babel tower glints in the sun, its upper-most pinnacle piercing through the thin desert clouds. It is said that one day, when the ants have waited out their restful sleep, our waking nightmare will drive them from the tower once again. But I don't believe that, knowing that in time all monuments must crumble to the earth which bore them. Instead I listen carefully for the pulse of the Queen's cargo. Turning my ear to the trembling sky. Waiting for it to speak of the journeys on which it has travelled. Hoping that somewhere, out in the depths of outer space, the ant Queen is revered as the saviour of her alien race.

---

By morning the upturned plastic mushroom was empty of its poison, as piece by piece the ant bait had been dragged, carried and manoeuvred into the nest. In places a fine yellow dust now stained the kitchen's cracked linoleum. A dust composed of corn grits soaked with delicious, deadly poison.

END

---

[i] Extracted from University of Arkansas web archive.
[ii] Dialogue text compiled from online sources: Superman wiki, Wikipedia& SupermanHomePage.

by Daniel Rourke

An Essay on an Essay on the Polish Soul

Krzysztof Kotarski

First, a note about me.

I am an outsider in the country of my birth.

I am too happy, too trusting, too Canadian. I walk into a shop and expect the shopkeeper to smile. I expect bureaucrats to help me when I seek official documents, and when presented with an idea, I think “why not?” instead of “why?”

For a long time, I chalked this up to personality. I tend to be excessively optimistic at times, and although I always laugh that “I am educated enough to be cynical,” I am cynical when confronting the realm of ideas, but naïve to a fault when confronting the realm of man.

My Polish family and acquaintances have always told me that my behaviour and worldview were deeply rooted in Canada, that although I could speak the language and read the books, I was too foreign in my temperament to fit in in my native Warsaw. After a while, I came to believe this. After all, in some matters, Canada and Poland sit on the opposite ends of the same axis, with Canada’s broad open spaces, easy smiles and obsessive deference to the law contrasting starkly with Poland’s confining apartments, sulking functionaries and a citizenry that dislikes and distrusts the state.

Yet, sometime over the past five years, I came to discover that things are not always so black and white. I began to notice a dark and cynical current that runs through Canada’s continuing struggles with collective identity, and I began to rethink my view of Poland as a place where cynicism triumphs en masse.

The 1980s, the decade of Solidarność, was my first in this world.

I was born in 1981, a few months before martial law was declared, so for as long as I can remember, everything around me was always on an upward trajectory.

While my parents and grandparents struggled with curfews, communist-era lineups and food-ration cards, I started attending kindergarten with the distinct idea that elementary school would prove to be a lot more fun (after all, it couldn’t be worse than kindergarten).

Beginning in 1986, my grandmother was able to buy sugar without using our ration cards. I remember thinking that this was great, but even better was the fact that the year I started attending elementary school, the Communist regime began selling chocolate (actually, the official designation was “wyroby czekoladopodobne,” which literally translates to “chocolate-like goods”) in the same manner.

Before 1988, I needed a ration card to get my fix.

After 1988, I could gorge on chocolate-like goods to my heart’s delight.

I mention the ration cards because they were a big deal to me as a child. There were greater events and greater concerns in the political world of the adults around me, but for me, everything existed on the same plane. Chocolate, the Pope, a new football, Gorbachev… everything was moving forward, and when we listened to Radio Free Europe, we began to feel more and more optimism as the Cold War began to lurch to a close.

It wasn’t all beautiful, especially for the adults who had real responsibilities at that time. I vaguely recall a violent demonstration in downtown Warsaw with my mother and aunt (students at the time), and vividly recall another occasion when my panicked father shielded my eyes with a handkerchief from the teargas, as we ducked on to a bus to get away from a demonstration.

When we were clear of the tear gas, the policemen and the snarling dogs, my father glanced down at me, looking absolutely terrified.

“Do not tell your grandmother that we were here,” he begged.

To this day, I have not.

In 1989, exactly 20 years and four days ago, there were free(ish) elections in Poland. We all celebrated trouncing the Communists, and everyone said that this was the beginning of the end.

A few months later, my grandpa called out as my friends and I kicked a football at an improvised net.

“Come inside, all of you,” he bellowed from the second floor window overlooking the courtyard in front of our apartment building. “Look at what the Germans are doing!”

Not long after, my history text gained an “amendment” courtesy of an enthusiastic teacher, and western products began appearing in the stores.

I recall all these vague memories and impressions to make a broader point: For those young enough not to dwell on the risks and the sacrifices, the world was a wonderful teacher for a while. Although we were young, poor, and had to get our chocolate-like goods with the help of a state-distributed ration cards, we grew up believing that everything was possible.

When looked upon a certain way, Poland in the 1980s was an incubator of incredible optimism, and by 1991, my optimism was well entrenched. And it was not just me—I recall the schoolyard conversations with my friends, as we all looked hopefully at the new world around us. The ninja turtles were on TV, we could buy bananas at the store, and our allowances kept growing during a time of massive inflation. Since we were too young to understand that the bills in our hands were depreciating with each passing day, it seemed as if nothing could possibly go wrong.

I was 11 when I moved to Canada, and this is where my Polish narrative ends.

I used to think that this is why I would always be an outsider in the country of my birth, that I became too Canadian to be Polish anymore, that the two were mutually exclusive.

Yet, the older I get, the less I believe this to be true.

Although Canada certainly had an immense influence on my values, my system of beliefs and my opportunities in life, my Polish optimism never waned. I mention this because earlier this year I picked up Ryszard Legutko’s Esej o duszy polskiej (Essay on the Polish Soul).

Legutko is a professor of philosophy and a leading Polish intellectual. He is close to Poland’s president, Lech Kaczyński, having served as education minister in his twin-brother’s conservative government. He has published a number of essays and books, he is very active in Polish newspapers and magazines, and barring a major surprise, he is celebrating his new post as one of 50 Polish members of the European Parliament this very morning.

And although our political (and cultural) views could not be further apart, I greatly respect professor Legutko scholarship and I was riveted by his Essay on the Polish Soul.

“Polska, jaką znam i w jakiej żyłem od urodzenia, to Polska zerwanej ciągłości,” he begins.

“The Poland that I know and in which I have lived since the day of my birth, is a Poland without continuity.”

Legutko's essay is a devastating cultural and social indictment of present-day Poland, aggressively setting out a thesis that World War II and the 40+ year period of communist social engineering harmed the Polish soul irreparably.

Modern Poles have problems with the degradation of language, with identity, and with finding a proper place in the world for their country and their narrative. Legutko argues that this is coupled with a chronic inability to make proper moral judgments because of a complete detachment from history and traditions, and he lays out the case that everything from architecture, to workplace habits, to education was willfully tainted and corrupted between 1939 and 1989. Lacking its traditional spine, modern (post-1989) Poland is unable to recover properly, without mindlessly accepting and distorting foreign models, and drifting aimlessly in larger European and global currents which Poles, as a collective, are neither willing nor able to comprehend.

This may sound familiar to those who follow certain trends in conservative cultural criticism, but what makes Legutko unique is that he outlines the cultural, social and historical degradation of the past 70 years without offering a remedy. Unlike other conservative thinkers who often advocate a return to deeply-rooted values usually constructed in an idealized past, Legutko argues that for Poland, no such past exists, at least not one that is applicable.

He demolishes the present state of Polish discourse and culture, but consciously offers no remedies or solutions to ease the suffering of the Polish soul. Another conservative Polish academic, Rafal Matyja, describes it like this: “Jest katastrofa. Kataklizm, na który nie ma odpowiedzi.”

“There is a catastrophe, a cataclysm, for which there are no answers.”

Legutko’s essay was widely read in academic and political circles, and it is my hope that his arguments were heard and dissected by Polish elites. The case he makes is not the only compelling diagnosis, but it is quite damning, and even if he offers no remedy to the current state of affairs, he correctly identifies a number of problem areas where some creative reforms (especially to Poland’s education system) could provide at least a partial remedy.

Of course, Legutko’s essay is as much a monumental piece of thought as it is a deeply personal lament over something as subjective as a nation’s historical and cultural trajectory.

And here, I offer a brief counterpoint. (With a caveat—it may be a Canadian counterpoint.)

One thing that is culturally obvious to North Americans is that individuals and their narratives matter. Nowhere is this more pronounced than in the realm of entrepreneurship and commerce, where individual names and stories can tower over entire industries through a combination of luck, will, and genuine ingenuity.

Presently, this tendency is especially pronounced in the online world, where products and services are invented almost daily, and where a number of individuals (Gates, Page, Brin, Zuckerberg, Jobs, Dell, Hurley, Chen and Karim) have shaped our collective path in a way that remains incomprehensible to previous generations.

Of course, it is impossible for the Internet to save Legutko’s wasteland. After all, the Internet is a tool, and although Google, YouTube, iPhones and Facebook constitute a new mode of communication, Legutko’s primary point is that the nature of the conversation itself is irreparably damaged, and that solutions imported from the outside world can at best offer momentary distraction or temporary relief, without ever touching on the essence of the problem.

This is where I depart sharply from the good professor, for one main reason. Page, Zuckerberg, et al. are not only important because of what they brought, but because of what they are. The Essay on the Polish Soul leaves absolutely no room for the potential of individuals to construct (or, far less likely, reconstruct) something homegrown and something positive in Poland’s cultural and political space. There is no room for something new to grow out of the circumstances of the day, no way to escape the heavy historical burden.

This lack of acknowledgment for the potential of individuals is a major omission, although it is completely understandable. Legutko was born in 1949, and I cannot help but see his unwillingness to consider the role of individual actors as a symptom of the very disease that he attempts to diagnose.

Legutko grew up in the ashes of World War II, and survived a world of mass movements, mass mobilizations, and the conscious and unconscious erasing of individuality. Although I only know him through the words that he has put down on paper, Legutko’s lament is the lament of a certain generation: powerful, intelligent and insightful, but also deeply cynical about the present state of affairs.

While some of those who he writes to may indeed be tainted by the degradation of the country’s traditional culture, the existence of a vacuum suggests an opportunity, one that awaits members of another generation born in a different time. 

They will not rebuild what was lost, nor will they keep what is there. But if they take on the challenge, and if they somehow move past the historical burdens, I doubt that whatever they build will take on a form that professor Legutko could appreciate, or even easily recognize. This is not to denigrate his open-mindedness or his considerable powers of perception—it is simply that if his diagnosis is correct, and if Poland truly is detached from its cultural and moral traditions and its past, then it will be difficult for him and those raised with his political and cultural sensibilities to recognize what is taking their place. 

Of course, if one buys into the pessimism and despair at the core of the Essay on the Polish Soul, Poland’s potential cultural innovators carry too much historical baggage, and Poland’s future looks rather grim. I suspect that this may be Legutko’s take, and his life story more than entitles him to take such a position.

Yet to this I offer a counterpoint—something that I see quite clearly 20 years and four days after the first 1989 dominoes began to fall.

Here, sitting in the global cybernetic ether, is proof that something very positive can be derived from the Polish cultural experience. The Polish optimist. Me.

Perceptions: Still Outside Art

Sughra Raza. Highway Fog. 2003.

Acrylic on canvas.

Digital photograph outside the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA, 2008.

Talkin' Gibbon in the Hypercloud

by David Schneider

If you're asked, "So, what are you reading these days?" do not under any circumstances reply The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Unless, of course, you intend to frighten off acquaintances, old friends, petrified Republicans, pie-eyed Democrats, overstaying guests, job interviewers, potential lovers–  heck, just about anyone. Trust me. In this age of Life, Inc., in that mumbled admission you instantly brand yourself: prolix, patrician, and pessimistic. (Yeah, names don't hurt me, but ouch.)

Look, blame Battlestar Galactica for my parade of pedantry. You might remember–– a while back I was thinking about that sci-fi epic as "Romans: Remixed," so – as part of my new venture, Reading Books So You Don't Have To, Unlimited – I decided to check out the original track recorded by Gibbon. (Decline and Fall must have sounded pretty interesting when it premiered, in London, in 1776.)

I regret to report that, as a literary work of art, it has a few significant defects.

We'll note, dismiss and forgive its impossible length. If Bolaño could get away with it in 2666, I suppose you can too. No, no, Mr. Gibbon: what I object to is your narrative strategy: more switchbacks than a sherpa track! History moves in a straight line, Mr. Gibbon, just like a Roman road. Reading your history is like playing 'Chutes & Ladders. Like living in a hamster wheel. The pomposity and idiocy of your protagonists – and how many there are! – beggar belief. Sir, your Rome is always declining; I'm waiting for the Big Finish, okay, here's Odoacer on Italy's throne, "Goths Win!" in duodecimal overtime, and now you tell me we're playing a double-header in the Eastern Conference.

Mr. Gibbon, I am greatly crestfallen by your lack of attention to the effective construction of a cliffhanger and its resolution. You really set up a corker at the close of Chapter XXVI (the last page of Volume I in my Modern Library edition):

Such were the scenes of barbaric rage which disgraced the palace and table of the Roman emperor; and, as the impatient Goths could only be restrained by the firm and temperate character of Theodosius, the public safety seemed to depend on the life and abilities of a single man.

Bang! A worthy parting shot. Imagine my disappointment, bewilderment, and general annoyance when I began Volume II with Theodosius nowhere to be found, and your wheedling encomium to Gratian – who's he, anyway? – commandeering the page. Does "Who shot J.R.?" mean anything to you?

Furthermore, Mr. Gibbon, your paragraphs seldom feature conspicuous, easily identifiable topic sentences. They undoubtedly consternate both English teachers and test-makers of the College Board. It is impossible to cut-and-paste your work into the standard five-paragraph essay; how does this study intend to have any longevity when, as you must know by now, plagiarism is the one guaranteed form of cultural transmission left to us?        

Still, I suppose we must give you credit for ingenious hilarity when it comes to the names of your characters. A tyrant named Maximin? I know of at least one consultancy and three Mike Myers movies that ought to be paying you royalties. In general, I'll admit, a sterling job. Far better than the abridged edition, published by Penguin Classics, which I tried (and failed) to read a few years ago. Now that was just a blizzard of dates and names. Ugh. Kind of like an AP exam. Like pornography without the dirty bits.

I confess, Mr. Gibbon (in the tone of an English schoolboy scolding his tutor), I'm slightly cross with you. You have so many trees in your forest that these days, there are few who have time to walk with you. Are you related to Virgil, by any chance?

•••

Mr. Gibbon, in light of America's recent history (as epic as any you've lived through, or have written about) I'm inclined to ask different questions about your book than it seems a lot of people have been asking.

From what I can gather, we spend an awful lot of time arguing about how Rome fell, why Rome fell, the true date for the Fall of Rome; arguing whether the barbarians should have been better integrated or kept out completely, or whether Christianity or taxes or environmental pollution (lead poisoning) did them in. but as you make clear through 800 pages chronicling 500 years – your doubling-back upon a particular period six times over, framing each moment with regard to the military, the imperial family, the intrigues of advisers, the domestic economy and the "international situation" – there are no answers to be arranged in neat ScanTron bubbles.

The question to me, at least, is: "Why didn't Rome fall?" –I mean, it didn't fall for a while, at any rate. The amount of carnage, chaos and panic you describe each year, every year, 500 times over, makes our past decade look like a sunny afternoon at Coney Island. Bread and circuses in the bad times, I suppose; and between you and me, America is plenty good at baking both.

I'll admit, the Roman culture of bling looks very much like our own (but perhaps it can be said of all high societies in all of history); Abramoff and Cunningham and the K Street Project bear an uncomfortably close resemblance to your descriptions of the corrupt Roman Senate. And you puncture my hopes repeatedly, as when you sing all the virtues of Gratian's royal education, only to conclude:

Gratian neglected the duties and even the dignity of his rank to consume whole days in the vain display of his dexterity and boldness in the chase.

You do this time and time again, setting pride up for a fall like a bowling pin. I can see my cocktail conversants' point: you are a bit of a pill. But I think that in this, by this constant accrual of negative example, you have a close companion in Plutarch (even as that writer tends to celebrate his subjects): you're seeking to sculpt an idea of the character of leadership that commits such actions, whether for good or ill.

The Roman emperors were too large, their decisions too capricious and absolute: like the Olympian gods they emulated, I suppose. So distant in the past (unlike the monsters of the 20th century), so baroque in their depravity, they're almost comedic – like comic-book SuperHero/Villains – or miniaturized like the clay figurines posed by Zeus in that "Clash of the Titans" amphitheatre. It seems to me as though, as types, they comprise a vast range of leadership styles from which one might mix and match – were one an emperor. Or, shall we say, from the one-armed bandit of heredity and ambition, every couple dozen years, Time puts in a quarter and cranks out two BARs and a Cherry; every century or so, a JACKPOT. One that restores or re-creates the identity of Roman-ness to, shall we (hedgingly) say, fight another day.

It's funny: over the last decade, through volleys of the term hyperpuissance hailing from "Old Europe," America spent some time debating whether or not it is, in fact, an empire. (And then: what kind of empire is it?) As I recall, those most vociferously denying that allegation of imperialism, were actually performing that imperial role most energetically by invading Iraq.

Now, I wasn't intending to put Joni Mitchell and Colin Powell in a blender to make an Obama smoothie, but the catchphrases "You don't know what you got 'til it's gone" and "You break it, you bought it" are earworming my brain. I think that we're only now fully comprehending the ramifications and scope of the American commercial and cultural empire, now, in its fading colors: its endangerment raises its visibility, like the California Condor.

Mr. Gibbon, I don't know how you managed to accomplish this work in the space of a single lifetime. I can't even catch up on C-SPAN Congressional hearings, not even with a TiVo. I heard about that failed romance of yours; maybe… overcompensatory sexual sublimation? After all, when you finished Decline and Fall, and there was no more history for your pen to ink, your testicles swelled up. But I think I understand why you wrote it, why it consumed your life: you were trying to help your country. You had a Mad King George, tossing away his empire. By your last volume, we'd written a Constitution over here across the pond. (Can I just say, thanks for taking the time? No, seriously.)

Mr. Gibbon, noting the slowness of your voluble pen, and your considerable antiquarian nature, I think you'll find a couple of recent events most interesting. First, there was, rather is, this rather monumental financial crisis. Think of it this way: the barbarians we'd let in to protect the empire (you know, under that whole "competing self-interest" thing) – yeah, well, they've just sacked Rome. It's an inexact comparison, open to a lot of debate I'm sure, but it's a serviceable model for now.

That's sort of snowballed together with the Decline and…Whoknows of the media establishment, which delivers the raw material you and I try to make sense of. But, as you'd say, something funny happened on the way to the Forum.

President Obama made that White House Correspondents' Dinner address. Shortly afterward – coincidence, surely? – I discovered some writers you'd find really fascinating. Mainly a gentleman named John Lanchester. It's as if he's tailed the Vandals all the way to the Breadbasket, by which I mean the Financial District. Two articles, one right after the next: in the London Review of Books, Lanchester shows us how you make 3+5 = 64 with a 10% down payment. Meanwhile, over in The New Yorker, Lanchester teaches us how Wall Street bakes an upside-down cake with zero calories! It's a miracle! – no, not this financial chicanery, which would dip Attila the Hun's knee to admiring genuflection – but the speed, the rapidity, with which we are learning the detailed history of our Dark Ages.   

On June 4, two other remarkable events occurred. First, Obama gave a landmark speech at the University of Cairo – an initial attempt at reconciliation and progress with the Muslim world which, in its admissions of colonialism and proxy wars, reminded me slightly of Gorbachev's Glasnöst. Second, June 4 marked the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Crackdown in Beijing: an event that, we learned in the days preceding the anniversary, has been totally excised from the Chinese historical record. Totally? Not quite. In the last few days, the New York Times has reported on a handful of Chinese activists and artists who are struggling to fill in that titanic national aporia.

Learning about this, I can't help but think back to my own American history education. Twenty years after 1968, what could I know about the '60s? To a lot of American parents, the decade was an embarrassment – "if you remember it, you weren't there" and Joe Cocker slurring Beatles' lyrics at Woodstock – and, as I recall, "The Wonder Years" was primary source material, right? At any rate, it was a handful of pages in an outdated textbook, covered at the very end of the year, and you could probably wing the one question they'd place on the AP Exam.

See, Mr. Gibbon, I'm getting the impression that history works like the human psyche: trauma results in amnesia. It took more than 11 centuries for you to collect the fragments of Western memory into a coherent pattern. We don't have that much time. But we're working fast.

Wish you were here, Mr. Gibbon. I'm sure you'd have something interesting to say. You Twitter, right?

perceptions

Gabriel and Gilberto Colaco. CLP #1. 2006.

Acrylic on canvas.

More here.

Extreme Cases: An Interview with Affinity Konar

              


Elatia Harris

Earlier this year, Affinity Konar, a former 3 Quarks Daily blogger, published her first novel, The Illustrated Version of Things (Fiction Collective Two, April 2009.) One of the very few 3QD columnists to post short fiction, her pieces were received in a way that suggests the form has a future here. Her novel, too, has been greeted with excitement – and read hungrily by me, among others.

In a bookstore, one might find The Illustrated Version of Things shelved under coming-of-age fiction. From time to time while reading it, I spared a thought for some classics of the genre – one in which growing up usually does a young protagonist a bittersweet bit of good. Less usually, a bleak childhood will be seen as a lost paradise by a narrator who has crossed over -- if only he’d known. Whatever happens, poignant is the watchword. If to have that note sounded is why you would read about kids, then this is probably not the book for you. Sam Lipsyte has a word for the experience of reading it: “singular.” Ben Marcus, a phrase: “the far limits of sorrow and isolation.” I don’t disagree, but it’s worth adding that it’s also a very funny book.

Affinity and I exchanged emails over 10 days as she and her family prepared to move from Virginia to California, where she grew up. They’re all on the road as I write, headed west.

                                   

Elatia Harris: Though the brother and sister in the novel are extreme cases, I got an uncanny sense as I read of how provisional every childhood is. That it's kind of amazing that any of us makes it through -- assuming adulthood is the point. A children's advocate I know says that adulthood is not really the point, only the result of childhood.

Affinity Konar: I see it as provisional as well, and have always been tempted to view individuals who surface from horrific childhoods—not only intact, but functional beyond all understanding–as unusually talented people. It’s as if they have an extra muscle in their bodies, or a passport that allows travel between worlds with disparate laws of maturity and justice.  

EH: Do those laws bind fictional characters? The brother and sister in your novel?

AK: I’d hoped that the brother character would dilute the notion that their childhood experiences were solely responsible for the narrator’s failures.  Her language and perspective were the more pressing issues to me, and I’m still unsettled as to whether or not she’s actually interested in making her life livable.

EH: Readers will notice we don't talk about your narrator by name -- they should know we're not being vague. She gives almost every sign of not having a name. Tritely, I'm wondering about your first name. To me, it sounds straight out of a novel by Goethe. Or certainly like something to do with chemistry. And it's refreshing to be asking someone else about her unusual name rather than defending my own.

AK: It's an odd relief to speak to someone else who is eccentrically named, too--I know I should plead Goethe or chemistry, but I just turned around and asked my mother about it, and she says it was a purely aesthetic choice, that she wanted something very feminine, so... It was a good move in any case though, because it sort of encouraged an affection for words that are somewhat off the beaten path. And provides for a lot of funny interactions.  

EH: Mm, tell me about it. But this isn't just gossip. Your having a highly unusual name, and your protagonist being positively handle-challenged, might be unrelated facts but they are not going unremarked on. Names like ours have their good points, but -- would you name a daughter Affinity?

AK: No, I wouldn't, even thought it's been entertaining for me -- and a lot of other people.  I suspect sometimes that my name led to my shyness.  Every time a stranger meets me I want to interject and tell them that it's okay to laugh, I know that it's funny too, and I still, after all these years, can't believe that that's what I'm known as.

It's definitely led to trouble in naming characters, and I can't say that the protagonist's handle-difficulties aren't related...

EH: I am wondering how being unnamed helps the protagonist more fluidly toggle from identity to identity Whether this may underline her shape-shifting, putting it on a nearly mythological level, where, in the end, it seems unabashedly -- rather, necessarily -- to be. Never to be called by name is to remain unclaimed in some essential sense -- not by the writer of the fiction, but by the other characters. 

AK: I was hesitant to leave her unnamed, but it was also impossible to name her.  I couldn't imagine her answering to any one name--and thought that yes, she'd prefer to have the gift of flitting from identity to identity, given that some of her circumstances offer little wriggling room. While it's never spelled out, there's one moment of extreme duress where she calls attention to its written form--there's always been a great difference to me, in the spoken word and the written one.  I can handle my name somewhat on a page, but it's a whole different beast if I have to hear someone else say it, let alone myself.  There's something so final and limiting about it that's oddly physical to me. 

EH: Well, I'm not telling what it is! Words have such different presences in different forms for writers, but you're talking about something bigger than that...

AK: My parents taught me to read by placing signs with the names of objects all over the house and I'm not sure if it assisted my progress whatsoever, but words have always been strangely tactile to me, and names especially so.  Making her anonymous made her untouchable in a sense, and I wanted to offer her at least that illusion of comfort. 

EH: Well, she needs it. I've read a lot of fiction about late adolescence and its hideous pains, but never before one in which a kid turns bars of soap filthy with her touch -- twice! That really is awful -- you should be congratulated. I was convinced she only saw herself as that unclean, and her soap probably looked as good or bad as anyone else's. But the world of the novel is one in which there's a lot of blood and filth and injury. With the narrator -- not quite literally -- clawing her way through a cloacal passage, laboring under a curse. Why shouldn't it show on her soap? 

People haven't accused you of being a particularly naturalistic writer, have they?

AK: I love that you think that her soap was as clean or as unclean as anyone else's!

I can't say that I'm often accused of being naturalistic. I actually began the novel when a mentor challenged me to write a story as realistically as I possibly could, and in the least opaque language that I could manage. I thought it was a pretty useless task at the time, and was offended as only a young person whose adolescent survival was highly dependent on surrealist word games could be, but that attempt to skew as closely to what other people perceived as natural clued me in to how I might be able to articulate a certain outsider's point of view, one that is constantly in a process of translating itself into acceptability, while having very little idea of what acceptability is. So that assignment became the opening chapter, and while I was in the thick of writing the rest of it I wasn't preoccupied so much with where it fell along the naturalism spectrum. 

EH: Your protagonist is probably the least acceptable kid I've ever met reading. Totally unacceptable, although endearing in how wrong she is for everything, and in how low her sights are set. I kept wanting to put the book down and talk her out of it, and then would realize there was no way to reach her but to keep reading -- which I had other reasons for wanting to do.

People should be careful talking about the mother. But the mother, even off-stage, is a bad mother of the epiphanial class.

It was the father I kept needing to hit, however. There's one scene in which he appears wearing only a beach towel. I thought how much fun to reach in and pull it off. To make him to face himself naked as a nurse who made vitamins for a hobby and spliced up at the sight of the suffering he caused.

AK: Your very physical impulses towards the father are so welcome to me, because I often hear people bemoan the mother exclusively. The fact that she tends to be singled out as the only party responsible for the protagonist's stunted nature has made me more sympathetic to her than I believed myself capable of being while writing the book, and it's given her another life in my mind that I wish I had been able to incorporate. It seems unfair that the narrator's disproportionately extreme longing for the mother serves to indict her as the more ghastly half of the parental unit, but there's also something of a tribute in it, I think--it's difficult to envision her having such extreme swings in affection for the father, whose inertia and passivity are often perceived as more forgivable.

EH: The father's impulse to give aid and comfort to everyone but his children is devastating. And funny. I knew a mom like that -- no, I am not her daughter. I kept thinking of that Bunuel classic, The Phantom of Liberty, wherein the "missing" little girl in the powder blue coat is seen to be found by everyone except her deeply concerned parents, on whom her reappearance does not register. She tugs at their sleeves in the police station, but they can't be distracted from their absorption in the loss of her. The father is blind like that.

I felt the mother needed to be missing, artistically, so I was not necessarily expecting her. (Anyway, certainly not the way she -- never mind!) I felt she needed to be immanent. But positioning your baby under a leak in the roof, the better to obtain nourishment for it, nourishment that was otherwise withheld, deserves a niche in the Bad Mother Pantheon.

I guess you can't write about kids whose parents carry on so without writing a coming-of-age fiction. Are you artistically comfortable locating The Illustrated Version of Things there?

AK: So many of my favorite books rest along the coming-of-age spectrum, and I'm always too happy to hear it classified along those lines; I suspect that a portrayal of the narrator at any age though, would fall into the same category. 

I made a living writing educational scripts for a children's cartoon brand during the whole process, and it's funny to think how much of that informed the novel--I had to make pitches concerned with teaching kids about coping mechanisms and behavioral skills through these super-saturated, pop-culture characters with catchphrases and anagrams, and I can't say that my personal diagrams of maturity weren't frequently corrected by the editors.

EH: So that was one inspiration! What were some others?

AK: Twain’s Huck never really left me. He kicked off my obsession with the supposedly unlovable figures, derelicts, outsiders, underachievers—it’s a love that won’t resolve itself, though I thought it was close to closure after reading "Red the Fiend" by Gilbert Sorrentino, which pulls you through scenes whose horror is matched only by playful, often gymnastic language. I also thought a lot about Gary Lutz and Ben Marcus stories, the sad and comic ways that they bend words, the lines you only have to read once to remember always.  And I ended up returning Grace Paley for conversation, Rimbaud for the synesthesia, Witold Gombrowicz  for nearly everything, and Beckett for just as much, sometimes more.  Lydia Millet’s "My Happy Life" put aside my doubts about creating characters that are at a great disadvantage in the world, but it’s so much more than that, and I wind up wordless just thinking about it.

EH: It's hard to talk about the end of the novel without uncorking it. And, while I think people should read it to be reading it, they should also read it for the way it ends. I will say that while reading -- and after -- one feels caught up in something tremendous, not in a story about quirky kids. There's a filmic aspect to the book, too. Are there films that have made a difference to you as a writer?

AK: Sam Lipsyte referenced My Best Fiend in a workshop once, and spoke about how Klaus Kinski habitually entered a scene with his body at a lean, half-hidden, evasive angle, just lurching into the frame. And he talked about how a writer could enter a story in the same way, at a slant, with an evasive sentence leading to a more revealing sentence. Thinking that way--in terms of physical gestures as applied to language—was really striking to me, and it became a sort of game to play with the narrator and my favorite actors.  As in—here she’s in Buster Keaton mode, completely deadpan, or here she is, doing a teenage Jodie Foster, all narrowed eyes and swagger. I have difficulty thinking visually sometimes, and it was strangely helpful to think of writing as a sort of performance.

EH: Although people in an excellent position to judge have written about your use of language -- and it is striking and beautiful and original -- I considered that asking you to talk about that was like collaring a weaver of the Unicorn Tapestries to make her talk about stitches. Instead, tell me a little about publishing with Fiction Collective Two. I am not so sure most mainstream publishing houses are excited when they hear a writer's use of language is extraordinary.

AK: The prospect of publishing—even though that was supposedly what I’d set out to do—made me feel more uncomfortable and disembodied than I’d thought possible, and abandoning it was a genuine, ever-lurking temptation.  Much of the content of the book had been inspired by my mother’s childhood, and what was written as a personal tribute to her suddenly felt too limited, too final. Brenda Mills, my editor at Fiction Collective Two, pulled a magic trick and drained a lot of the fear out of the experience, but my knees still knock with awe at the fact that my book was accepted by FC2, since it has a history of publishing great work on the fringe of what’s commonly perceived of as publishable. 

EH: I'm a friend of Jonathan Baumbach, who was a friend of my late teacher, Art Edelstein, and a founder of the Fiction Collective. Maybe FC2 is doing for our era what the Fiction Collective did for the late mid-century. 

When you get to California, will you live close to your family?

AK: Oh, yes. We're all joking that we're like the Joads -- but with a happy ending.

The Illustrated Version of Things , by Affinity Konar, Fiction Collective Two, March 2009.

(amazon.com link)

A Factual History of Fictional Natures, Affinity Konar, 3 Quarks Daily, December 8, 2008.

All We Know, All We See, Affinity Konar, 3 Quarks Daily, January 5, 2009.

In Nutshell Code, Affinity Konar, 3 Quarks Daily, February 2, 2009

Web site of Fiction Collective Two -- http://fc2.org/

Roland Garros 2009 Dialogue

A conversation about the upcoming French Open between three tennis fans: Sydneysider Lucy Perkins, New Yorker Asad Raza, and Ecuadorian-North Carolinian Juan José Vallejo.

Asad Raza: Hey guys, thanks for coming aboard the 3quarksdaily raft.  So here we are at Roland Garros time, again, where for the last several years Rafa Nadal has been the bear that eats Roger Federer.  J.J., you have the best account of the state of their rivalry I've heard.  Care to run through it?

Juan José: I'm currently toasted, but I promise I'll send my run-through tomorrow. Hope you're all doing well!

Lucy:  JJ! If I had thought one of us was gonna delay writing on account of being under the influence, you would have been my THIRD choice.  I'll check back in after Fed's straight-set drubbing of Rafa in his HOME MASTERS FINAL. Oh yes. (Ed. Note: this message written eight hours before Roger Federer's May 17th straight-sets defeat of Rafael Nadal in the Madrid final.)

Juan José: Eh...oops. Wrong choice of words there!

What happened was that yesterday ended up being way more exhausting than I expected. It all started at 7:40 in the morning, when I woke up to fish for an internet stream so I could watch my Manchester United clinch the English Premier League title. Which they did, and I was very happy. Shortly after the celebrations ended, Nadal and Djokovic were on.

Now, I had already written off the match as a straight sets defeat for Djokovic, since he was playing on his third straight week, and Nadal even had a walkover in his "home" tournament. But then the match started, Nadal looked terrible and Djokovic looked good. When Djokovic served out the first set, I thought he had a great chance to win this, if Nadal didn't improve dramatically. Djokovic was playing his game, not even going for anything spectacular, and it seemed that staying the course would be enough to win the match. Then, at 1-2 in the second, Nadal calls for the trainer, and he gets his knee taped. I thought, hey, now there's an enormous chance. Djokovic adjusted on the fly, making Nadal hit loads of backhands, since the taped knee was his right one, which he pushes off when he hits off his backhand side. That was a nice adjustment to see. So I thought, man, this is really going to happen! Even if it was similar to last year's Nadal-Ferrero match in Rome, who cares, it was a clay win over Nadal. And Nadal didn't look good. He wasn't moving well. He looked like he was about to retire.

But of course, that didn't happen. What happened instead was that he stopped missing. Welcome to Nadal hell. However, Djokovic was still playing well, so even when he lost that second set tiebreaker, I thought he had a big chance in the third. So it was no surprise to see him go up a break. But then cramps hit, he gets broken, and the real match started.

I'll echo Djokovic in saying that there is very little to say about what followed. All the evidence you need to see was there in those last games of the third set. It was unbelievable, it was ridiculous, it was crushing, and it was heartbreaking, in a strange way. The worst way to endure a defeat is if your sporting entity choked, and that was not the case. But it also hurts when your sporting entity plays as well as he can possibly play, and still lose. As an Agassi fan, I've been through that before. It's a special kind of heartbreak.

So the only influence I was under all day was from a pint of Guiness I had stored in our refrigerator here for extreme emergencies. It had been sitting there for about 9 months. So that and videos of Manchester United celebrating made me happy again.

Anyway, we're missing the Madrid final here because of Amy's birthday brunch. I'll talk about the Federer-Nadal thing when I get back.

Asad: Actually, I think it's quite appropriate that we ended up talking about Djokovic, who has been pushing Rafa on clay more than anyone else--Federer may have won the Madrid final, he might owe Novak part of that check--it was the match with Novak that took the starch out of Rafa.  Or did Federer make a true breakthrough just when none of us expected him to beat Nadal on clay again, Luce?

Lucy: I very much doubt it, although I reserve the right to boast about my prescience. Rafa was exhausted. It wasn't just the Djokovic match - although that little foray into claycourt dramatics probably didn't help Rafa any. It's also the fact that he's reached seven finals already this season. Even Rafael Nadal gets tired sometimes. This is a blip, along the lines of Hamburg 2007, in which an exhausted Rafa lost to Federer in a Masters final (Federer even bageled him, as I recall!) and proceeded to win the French Open in grand, sweaty, fist-pumping Rafa style.

So I don't think this final matters much to Nadal. (Check out his grin during the trophy ceremony, then tell me he's secretly dying inside.) It does matter to Federer, however. He's only just coming to terms with the fact that his days of majestic dominance are over. You can hear that in what he said after this final: "In other years it didn't matter whether I won or lost, I was always one of the top two or favourites". That was, you get the impression, a fun time in Federer's life, and it lasted longer than he had any right to expect, but it's over.

The thing about Federer, too, is that he subscribes firmly to a reality-based world view, as I believe it is now called. In his salad days, this helped him out greatly. After the 2007 Federer-Nadal Wimbledon final, which Federer won in five dramatic sets, he was asked if he had been worried during the match. No, he said. He had won the first set. He was always ahead in the match. He was number one in the world. He was the defending champion. Why would he have worried? This is the attitude many people mistook for arrogance when Federer was king, but it was really something more like empiricism. Now that he is no longer number one, now that Nadal owns him and Djokovic and Murray are both closing in, he doesn't have that to turn to. So what now, when he gets down a break? He's not a born pugilist like Rafa, he's not the type to find solace in Buddhist mantras, like Agassi (can you imagine it?). So it's been tough for him to adapt to the new world order, even tougher than is generally the case.

Asad: He does seem to be adapting, though--at least to my eye, Federer seemed more comfortable in the hungry number two role than ever before.  He also served and volleyed enough to keep Rafa guessing in that match.  Good sign for him.  Speaking of adapting, the most consistently hot player of the last nine months, Andy Murray, has been trying to adapt to clay, but hasn't had great success yet.  You'd think the surface would suit his tactically multiform, dropshot-centric game.  But so far, no dice.

Juan José: Murray does seem like an interesting case study. You'd think that a guy with a gift for creating points, changing spins and throwing junk around would thrive on clay. However, I don't think it's realistic to expect Murray to challenge any of the other members of the Big Four on this surface, especially Nadal or Djokovic. I think Andy has two main problems:

- Nadal has revived the old paradigm about clay being more about muscle. However, with him, it's way more than just muscle. Nadal asks of you to take your game, amp everything up, and brace yourself to trade haymakers with him for a couple of hours. There is no shot you won't hit, and every little muscle in your body will ache with every shot. It reminds me of that Honda commercial where the two gigantic men are playing chess with even bigger chess pieces. The slogan is "strength meets intelligence". You could see this being portrayed to the extreme in that third set tiebreaker between Djokovic and Nadal on Saturday: those two lunatics had been trading blows for almost four hours, and instead of slowing down, or just copping out and going for broke, they kept trading their meticulously brutal groundstrokes right until the end. The point of all of this is that Nadal and Djokovic's game is essentially muscular. Murray's really isn't, and neither is Federer's, really. Both Murray and Federer share that innate ability to change pace seamlessly on a hardcourt (in Federer's case, also on grass), but both struggle to do it on clay, and both aren't used to hitting with loads of top-spin every single time. They also like to slice, but that's a risky proposition on clay, since you have hit it at a consistently high level in order to avoid getting punished.

- Still, it's unfair to put Federer alongside Murray in terms of clay prowess. And the basic difference is the ability to move on the surface, something that I think doesn't come naturally to Murray. If you don't feel at home on the dirt, there's a higher likelihood that you'll make footwork mistakes, and if you're feet are not in the right position, you're more prone to missing.

And there's another issue: the other day, I watched  Murray go down in flames against Del Potro, basically because he was missing a boatload of drive backhands. Drive backhands! That's supposed to be his best shot! I had already noticed in several Murray matches that every once in a while, he misses some drive backhands that make you think "Really, is that his best shot?". And the thing is, Murray's strength lies in the variety his backhand gives him, by allowing him to hit drive backhands both cross-court and down-the line with great consistency, using the slice backhand to change pace and defend, and the backhand drop-shot to take control of the point. On clay, since he can't slice as much as he wants to, his shot selection isn't as clear, and he ends up missing drive backhands. Which he can't really afford on this surface.

If you look at Nadal, it's all about having a rock solid backhand, and that killer forehand. Djokovic goes a step further on the backhand side, by being consistently aggressive down the line, but can't replicate the power of Nadal's forehand. Federer dominates with his forehand, and tries to hide his backhand. Where is Murray in this? He doesn't dominate you with his forehand, which is way less dependable than Djokovic's. And his backhand is not yet solid enough to anchor the rest of his game.

I also think that clay will probably remain a little foreign to Murray, since he only expects to play on the stuff for about two months. Great Britain will never host a Davis Cup tie on clay, and yes, he'll have to play some clay ties away from home. But it's quite different to play a Davis Cup tie where you can't write off a result as "oh well, they put it on clay, nobody will kill us if we lose". Spain will always play on clay, and Switzerland and Serbia have, and could very well choose the surface if it means getting an advantage on someone. It's that kind of experience, as well as a familiarity of growing up on the stuff, that lets you play clay tennis at a high level. And yes, Murray trained in Barcelona. But he didn't even stay that long to learn the language.

In the end, it's not like Murray's a total hack on the surface. He's good enough to win a couple of rounds every single tournament, but not good enough to beat anyone in the top 4.

About Federer, I think that recent S.L. Price piece on S.I drew a clear picture of the guy. I really don't think he understands the state of tennis nowadays, I don't think he'll ever understand Nadal, and he probably still thinks Djokovic and Murray are a couple of juniors. In his mind, he's a couple of wins away from getting back to his dominating days, when he was perfect, everyone bowed to him, and Mirka texted happily in the stands.

He's ignoring one number: 798. That's his total number of ATP matches. Sampras retired at 984. Agassi at 1144. Edberg at 1076. Becker at 927. Courier at 743. Todd Martin at 645. Safin is at 663, and he won't be adding many more to that total. Hewitt is at 672.   The point is, the days of domination and awe are over, and he's entering that dreaded time in a tennis player's (not named Agassi, Connors or McEnroe) life: the past-your-prime stage. He doesn't realize that the only way he got his hands on a Master's trophy was because he got the easiest of draws (Soderling, Blake and Recently Married Roddick), and Djokovic and Nadal battled to the death for four hours while he did some target practice with Del Potro. It was a perfect storm in his favor, and he took advantage of it. You'd think he'd notice the obvious, but, his discourse after the final made me think that he's still in denial. He failed to acknowledge the titanic struggle that took place the day before, when in reality he should have written Djokovic a check for around 450 000 dollars of his title prize money. He says that Nadal wasn't slow, and that if you're fit to play, you play. The last part is true (although he is the same guy who brought us "mono"), but the first one, come on. Like he wouldn't know how it feels when you're trying to move less than 24 hours after pushing your body to limits it probably didn't know. He praised his own aggressive game instead of questioning why he was having an easy time hitting sitters inside the court.

My dad didn't watch the match. However, I asked him: "Dad, you've watched enough tennis. If I told you that someone beat Nadal on clay in straight sets, in about an hour and a half, would you believe me?". He said "no". The thing is, it actually happened, but it happened because an obvious reason that only one person failed to notice.

Now here's where ignorance could be bliss for him: this perfect storm could very well happen again. Say Federer gets a draw filled with hardcourt specialists (who at this point are more of a reality than the famed claydogs), and Nadal and Djokovic clash in the opposite semi, while he deals with Davydenko, Wawrinka, Del Potro or even Murray. Let's say he plays the first semi on Friday, gets it done in straights and in under two hours, and then it rains. And it rains some more. So much that the other semi between Nadal and Djokovic have to play on Saturday. And they do, for about 6 hours, in a match that forces Djokovic into professional skiing. Nadal is half-dead on Sunday, and Federer is fresh and rested. The way I see it (and barring a serious Nadal injury), that's the only way he wins the French Open this year.

This could happen again, but the tennis gods are not that generous. Especially to those who fail to acknowledge their gifts in the first place.

Lucy: The thing is, JJ, Federer has been burnt before under similar circumstances, and recently: the Australian Open final, in which everyone agreed that Nadal SHOULD be tired (having played an intensely physical, five-hour semi in the middle of the night against Verdasco) but which Nadal nevertheless managed to win. I think after that match, it seemed to Federer that Nadal just simply doesn't tire, which, while objectively untrue, is certainly how the great majority of players would experience matches against Rafa.

I agree with you that, barring a Nadal injury or some sort of force majeure event, Federer doesn't stand much of a chance of winning this year's French Open. Nor, I would add, do any of the men ranked beneath him. The mythology surrounding Federer's quest for a Roland Garros title obscures, to an extent, the prosaic fact that nobody else has won Roland Garros since Nadal set up camp there in 2005, either. Djokovic might be your best bet - he combines technical solidity with an intensely competitive will, but I can imagine every disadvantage he suffered against Nadal in Madrid (including, yes, the choking) being multiplied over five sets, particularly given that Nadal is greatly his superior, conditioning-wise. Murray is no also-ran, even on clay, but as you both point out, he doesn't seem nearly as comfortable on the surface as Nadal or Djokovic. Besides, when it comes to Grand Slams, experience and fortitude both count; that was made abundantly obvious in Australia, when betting favourite Murray flamed out to an admittedly zoning Verdasco in the round of 16.

As for the non-Big Four, I can see potential spoilers, people you would rather not see in your draw, but no title contenders. What about you guys, who are we watching? Juan Martin Del Potro, Gilles Simon, Nikolay Davydenko, David Ferrer? Or someone more dashing and unlikely? Maybe a retro pick? I am feeling nostalgic for the era of David Nalbandian's eternal semifinal greatness.

Asad: You guys are showing me up with your long, amazingly thoughtful answers.  Lemme try to pull the rug out this way: what do you have to say about the women's tourney?  To me, women's tennis is in a big lull after a thirty-year run run of great champions: King, Evert, Navratilova, Graf, Seles, Hingis, Serena, Venus, Henin.  These days it seems so postmodern: a player who never won a tournament (Kournikova) still has a bigger mainstream U.S. profile than any of the new inconsistent generation of current stars--Ivanovic, Jankovic, uh, Dinara Safina?

Lucy: Oh man, I hate it when you make me talk about the women's game! You're right, it has been much harder to follow women's tennis in the last few years; the dynamic era of Hingis/Venus/Serena/Capriati/(Kournikova?) is over, and none of the current crop has the dominance or the star power of former eras. So, um, yeah. I watch very little women's tennis, and I have even less feel for the state of the game.

With that caveat out of the way, it seems like Dinara Safina is the player to beat going into this year's French Open. She's ranked #1 in the world, she's coming off a hot streak, having won both Madrid and Rome, and she is in exceptional physical condition. Safina's main disability is that she seems to flake out in Grand Slam finals - both in last year's French Open final against Ivanovic and against Serena Williams in the horrible Australian Open final earlier this year. Neither of those performances give me great confidence that Safina is capable of competing well in a high-stakes final.

On the other hand, nobody else seems to have a clear case for favouritism. Serena Williams, having posted unremarkable results this clay season, just retired in Madrid with a leg injury. Lack of matchplay never seems to be a problem for Serena, but she hasn't done great in the last few years at Roland Garros, and at the moment she hasn't confirmed that she will play Roland Garros, so Safina (and the rest of us) might escape a repeat of Australia.

The defending champion, Ana Ivanovic, hasn't had the ideal preparation, either, having withdrawn from Madrid just last week with a knee injury. Her compatriot Jelena Jankovic, whom she defeated in a choky semifinal last year, is an accomplished claycourter, and she seems to be healthy. Her results lately haven't been fantastic, but she would be right to look at this year's French Open as a genuine opportunity for a breakthrough.

Then you have your usual pack of Russian contenders - Kuznetsova, Zvonereva, Dementieva, Petrova, who had their halcyon days in the middle of the decade, but are still competitive.  Then there are youngsters like Radwanska and Azarenka and Wozniaki. Some of them were born in the 1990s. This is both shocking and appalling and I have nothing more to say about them.

Juan José: Err....sorry about the delay, but this household has been quite busy recently. Two thoughts that lingered from the men's discussion:

- I saw that Federer made the case that Madrid was the same as the Australian Open for Nadal, in terms of recovering from a tough semi (tough being the understatement of the year). Does he not remember that in Melbourne Nadal finished his semi around midnight on Friday, and the final was at night on Sunday? That's plenty of time for a sore body to loosen. In Madrid he finishes at around 8:30 pm, and he has to play the next day at 4 pm. That's not enough time for anyone, even Nadal.

- I think I've seen all 18 Nadal-Djokovics. Djokovic definitely gagged in a couple (the Olympics, Queens), but on Saturday, he really didn't. The reason he broke down at his press conference is because it was clear to him that his best only brings out the best of Nadal. His absolute best, which was higher than he actually thought it was, wasn't enough. That's a hard pill to swallow.

Now, onto the women.

I guess it's the polar opposite from the men's side. You could make a case for an entire group of players. I think I'll just go with scattered thoughts here:

- I will be rooting hard for the "Actual" world no.1. I love Dinara Safina, the person, but her tennis is only interesting to me when she is fully aggressive. That cross-court backhand of hers is a sweet shot, and I still feel she doesn't use it as often as she should to take control of a point. I've been pleasantly surprised of how she's handled the no.1 ranking, despite the predictable outrage that a Slamless player has to fend off. She's made three finals, and won two of them. I think clay is where she's at her best, and she has good memories of last year's run. She should be the favorite, and if form holds, she should win it. I really hope she ends up with more Slams than her brother.

- It would be a complete surprise if Ivanovic defends her title. I cannot say this saddens me. The less of her "fistpumps" I see, the better.

- I really like Jankovic, but it seems like she can't get her old swagger back. By now it's clear that all that work she put on during the off-season actually hurt her, which is a shame. There seems to be this growing trend among the women that if you're not firing missiles, you're worthless, so you have to bulk up. Which is ridiculous for a player as gifted as Jankovic is at creating angles and mixing things up. If anything, she should be more aggressive with her variety, and not try to become someone she's not. It's all about playing your natural game in the best way you can.

- I like Wozniacki, but I fear that she might go through something like Jankovic's recent trajectory.

- I really like Venus, but clay isn't really where she's going to make some noise. I bet she's counting the days until Wimbledon.

- As for the "real" no.1, she's become one of my least favorite sports entities. She'll probably snap out of her recent 4 game losing streak, but I do hope Safina gets to play her and sends her on a new losing streak. Maybe then she'll start on that script she's been talking about.

- I'm completely certain that Svetlana Kuznetsova is the most talented female tennis player alive. You'd be hard pressed to believe she's not the best player in the world. But then again, she is Svetlana Kuznetsova, capable of anything and everything. The Mickelson of women's tennis.

- Carla Suarez Navarro is probably my favorite female tennis player. She's absolutely great: pretty backhand, decent forehand, doesn't grunt or fistpump or anything. She just plays ball. However, she's struggling to cope with the expectations and the exposure. It's clear that she'd gladly transfer the spotlight to someone else.

- Azarenka, or Viko, as C-Note calls her (by the way, Forty Deuce is how I keep up with the WTA. I think anyone who makes me read about the women's game should get kudos) has an amazing game, but I'm not sure how it translates to clay. That girl will dominate the tour one day, though.

- I wonder how Mauresmo does this time. Usually she crumbles early, but it seems that something has really changed in her attitude towards the game. So this might be the one time that she actually delivers at home.

- Zvonareva is flying under the radar, like her tennis twin, Nikolay Davydenko. And like Nicky D, she actually has a pretty nice game. I hope she does well.

- All I'll limit myself to ask Petrova is to avoid wearing those horrendous Ellese outfits she's had the audacity to play tennis in. I don't want to go blind.

Asad: Ha, JJ.  Wow, this has been hardcore!  One other thing I wanted to say is that the main difference going into this year's French is that Nadal is now number one.  It's been a remarkably smooth conceptual transition--the guy wears the aura very well.  Anyway, now I'm just gonna make my picks--Nadal, Safina--and get out of the way.  Final thoughts?  And dudes: thanks!

Lucy: No fair, Nadal and Safina were my highly radical picks! Fine, I'll take Jankovic. But backing anyone except Nadal is a fool's game, even if it looks cool while you do it.

Juan José: I really hope Safina wins it. Will she actually do it? Who knows. For some reason I have this feeling that Kuznetsova might actually do it. No evidence to back it up, no logical process behind it other than this: she's the most talented player out there, and clay seems to be her favorite surface. I'd also be immensely happy if Jankovic won it, but that one seems like a stretch even in a wide open year like this one. I do think whoever wins it should thank Henin in her victory speech for staying retired.

If I had a house, I'd bet it on Nadal. It's that simple, really. I only see a freak injury and/or the freakish-yet-feasible scenario I wrote about earlier as the only possible scenarios where the guy doesn't break Borg's record. The most interesting question on the men's side is, once again, where will Novak Djokovic land in the draw. I thought this same question had some merit last year, but there was evidence that undermined its importance (err...the Montecarlo sore throat fiasco). This year, it could have significant consequences, mostly in the rankings (if Djokovic draws Federer in the semis and beats him, there's a huge point swing, 980 points to be exact).

My last thought will predictably go to Djokovic. Once again, he became the master of the unexpected. There was no way to predict that he'd reach the level of play he has shown throughout the clay season, especially after that surreal 2 and 3 drubbing he suffered against Roddick at Indian Wells. If you had told me after that loss that Djokovic would hold three match points at the end of a four-hour match on clay against Nadal, I wouldn't have believed it. Never a dull moment with that dude.

perceptions

Laure Albin-guillot.Fortress les baux de Provence.

Phoptograph.

More here.

On Criticizing Israel

Justin E. H. Smith

I would like to lead my life, with Spinoza, sub specie aeternitatis. I truly would. But every now and then my fellow men show themselves to be so brutish that I have no choice but to come back down to earthly reality and cry shame. Such a moment was the Israeli siege on Gaza that began at the end of last year, which prompted me to try to do what I could, with the low-grade weaponry of rhetoric, to convince the unconvinced that this was a thing to be harshly denounced. What did I do? Well, I wrote up my case, and I made it known through various low-voltage electronic media. Why did I not do more, like Jeff Halper? As I've said, I am hardly a philosophe engagé. I confess to doing as little as possible.

In any case, my minor foray into activism was also a learning experience. What did I learn? Among other things, I learned that, as one might fear, criticism of Israel really does draw the creeps out of the woodwork: there are indeed many out there who are far too eager to see in Israel's aggression the confirmation of their own fantastical, alternative accounts of the secret forces guiding world history. I also learned that there are many out there who take the opinions of these alienated, ill-informed bigots far too seriously, and who mistakenly suppose that any and all criticism of Israel must come from, or lead to, that same dark place.

Should one then refrain from criticizing Israel altogether? This is a privilege no one would dream of granting to any other state in the world, and one I certainly don't grant to my native country or to my adoptive one. Or should one instead insist that such delicacy around the question, such special treatment, is itself a manifestation of the same sort of unhistorical, unscientific Sonderweg-thinking that, under other circumstances, has been used not to hold Israel above all criticism, but rather to blame Jews for whatever goes wrong with the world? I know which of these two approaches I choose, and I insist that to say this is also a choice to stoke antisemitism is not only a fallacy, but also a smear.

Some who have written in response to my intervention have expressed concern that critics of Israel's aggression do not take sufficient pains to distance themselves from those who use this aggression opportunistically to advance their troglodytic world-view and their --how shall I put it?-- unscholarly conspiracy theories. Well, let us consider a parallel example. I for one would not think to preface the (patently true) observation that Robert Mugabe is a brute with the assurance, "I have nothing against black people, but..."

Now it is certain that there are some out there who believe that Mugabe's mess stems from an inherent incapacity among Africans for self-government, and who might mistake any criticism of an African dictator for agreement with their own view. But these are not my conversation partners, and I don't care what they think. The way to deal with these people is not to try to convince them of anything, but only to ensure that they remain estranged from any serious decision-making process. Let them have their AM talk radio and their barber-shop mutterings; we on the other hand have serious work to do. Similarly, antisemites who shroud their bigotry in criticism of Israeli policy are not of particular concern to me, and I don't see why I should be compelled to account for their presence among the critics of Israeli policy simply because I myself am a critic. Again, racists, for their own reasons, don't like Mugabe either, but that's not my business. 

Unwavering defenders of Israel often observe that the critics seem disproportionately interested in this particular conflict, when there are numerous other conflicts in the world that appear to be of relatively little interest to them. This the defenders take as evidence of antisemitism. As one comparatively thoughtful antagonist demanded to know from me:

"[W]hy is there so much emotion among the anti-Zionist protest movement? What's at stake? Why do these protesters have such a visceral, angry feeling about a country 5000 miles away, and no comparable anger about far worse events/discrimination/bloodshed in equally distant Turkey/Kurdistan or Myanmar or Sudan or Tibet or you name it? When none of them affect the protesters' lives in any meaningful way? (we can exclude actual Jews or Palestinians from this question.)"

Where to begin? As an aside, I should say that I can't speak for the "anti-Zionist protest movement." Anti-Zionism seems to me as pointless as anti-Bonapartism, or opposition to the Agricultural Revolution. These are things that have already happened, and the only relevant question is how to deal with their legacies. We may, in a scholarly mood, question whether the best solution to Christian Europe's inability to realize the virtues of tolerance and cosmopolitanism espoused by Toland, Spinoza, Moses Mendelssohn, and others was to grant to the people that Christian Europe rejected a portion of a European colony in the Near East. But that is what happened, and no one who now lives there is going anywhere. So when we move from the amusing game of counterfactual history to serious proposals for solutions to current problems, rational minds must agree that good-faith commitment to a two-state solution is what is needed, not death to Israel, nor yet illegal settlements in Palestinian territory, collective punishment through home demolitions, and targeting of civilians in the name of security.    

That small correction out of the way, I should perhaps start responding to my questioner by noting that he has made an empirically false observation. Many of Israel's critics are veteran human-rights defenders, and are either serially or simultaneously engaged in campaigns for peace and justice elsewhere.  An observation such as his could only, I imagine, be made by a youngster with no living memory of the passion, and even the 'viscerality', of North American and European opposition to apartheid in South Africa or to dictatorship throughout Latin America. 

Second, and relatedly: in supposing that 'connection' to a place is what confers license to have an opinion about what goes on there, the lad unwittingly puts his finger right on the answer to the question as to why so many of us care about what happens on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean: that region is of tremendous importance for US foreign policy in a way that, for better or worse, Myanmar and Congo are not (at present). Even if it's "5000 miles away" (as if that made any difference in an age of jet travel and instantaneous long-distance communication, and as if non-Jewish, non-Palestinian critics were for that reason incapable of forging bonds of friendship and even love on both sides!), this conflict is in no small part America's conflict. This is to say, among other things, that it is my conflict, and I won't sit silently by just because I lack the correct ancestry. In many of the international campaigns against unjust political regimes in the past 50 years or so, about which the questioner appears to know nothing, those Americans (and often Western Europeans and Canadians) who were involved were so because their own country was directly implicated in supporting, or even creating, the far-away injustice. What myopia it would have taken to have shrugged and declared, as President Reagan arranged for the munition of death squads: Oh well, I'm not Nicaraguan!   

My questioner is at least right to notice that there is something arbitrary in the way in which causes become causes célèbres. I have been insisting for a long time that the Uighurs of the Xinjiang province of China deserve at least as much of our concern as the Tibetans do, even though Richard Gere has not yet noticed what a 'spiritual' people they are, and even though they do not have a P.R. man as smooth as the Dalai Lama speaking for them. But while the case of Tibet belies my questioner's claim that Israel has some special purchase on the Western activist's attention, the case of what would be Eastern Turkestan shows just how difficult it is for an activist to influence the course of events in a part of the world in which his or her own government plays no significant role in the creation of internal policy. China does whatever the hell it wants, and it is difficult to imagine any Western grass-roots campaign that might sway the Central Committee anytime in the near future. The case of Israel is very different in this regard. An American really does have reason to hope that grass-roots democracy might change US foreign policy. And a change in US foreign policy could, in turn, lead directly to a softening of Israel's brutish behavior.

Still another obvious reason why one might pick Israel out for particular criticism without, for that, being an antisemite, is that Israel, unlike, say, Sudan, purports to be a member of that abstract community of civilized nations that we call 'the West'. Israel is a product of the Enlightenment: it is a multiparty democracy; it has its own Rousseau Society; it produces books about multiculturalism; it sends contestants to the Eurovision song contest; etc. None of these things is true of Sudan. For better or for worse, this means that Israel is held up to different standards. My questioner wants to know why critics of Israel do not turn their attention to Myanmar or Sudan. I want to say: what a fine comparison class! One may indeed ask how much remains of the decent, liberal, humanist legacy of Israeli society when these are the countries that suggest themselves for comparison.

I don't doubt that in raw numbers the Sudanese government, or the warlords who have replaced it, are responsible for more deaths than Israel's government is. But you can be sure that if, say, England were to use phosphorus bombs in Belfast, or if Canada began demolishing homes and practicing targeted assassinations on unruly Mohawk reservations (and Gaza, whatever euphemisms might be proposed to describe its status, is a reservation), the outcry would be at least as great as it is against Israel, and this would not be because of some paranoid suspicion that 'the Jews' are behind the scenes pulling the strings, but only because --again, for better or worse-- we expect more of England and Canada. Some of us continue to expect more of Israel, in contrast to those who appear to believe that criticism of Israel is by definition enmity towards Israel, and from there, towards Jews.

My questioner was repeating talking points without substance, all of which I have heard with minor variations from dozens of people since I spoke out against the siege of Gaza. To repeat these talking points requires, at the very least, a good mix of logical fallacy and bad faith, and I prefer to believe that most of the people who repeat them are only unwitting participants in a smear campaign that has as its objective the complete silencing of critics of Israel through elision of all such criticism with antisemitism. The only fitting response is to call the smear campaign by its real name, and to kindly let them know that they are talking to the wrong person.

--

For an extensive archive of Justin Smith's writing, please visit www.jehsmith.com.

Atheistic Materialism in Ancient India

Various societies at different times have dazzled with their bursts of creative and intellectual energy. Historians have a penchant for dubbing them Golden Ages. Examples include the Athens of Herodotus, the Baghdad of Haroun al-Rashid, and the India of the Buddha. But though India has long been famous for its "ancient wisdom", the few historical sources that survive shed woefully inadequate light on the Buddha's society. By contrast, far better portraits of classical Greece and Abbasid Baghdad are available to us.

Still, evidence at hand suggests that around 600-500 BCE, in parts of the Indo-Gangetic plain of north India, people were asking some very bold and original questions: What is the nature of thought and perception? What is the source of consciousness? Are virtue and vice absolute or mere social conventions? Old traditions were under attack, new trades and lifestyles were emerging, and urban life was in a churn, reducing the power of uptight Brahmins.

Philosophical schools flourished in a marketplace of ideas, and included chronic fatalists, radical materialists, self-mortifying ascetics, die-hard skeptics, cautious pragmatists, saintly mystics, and the ubiquitous miracle mongers. "Rivalries and debates were rife. Audiences gathered around the new philosophers in the kutuhala-shalas—literally, the place for creating curiosity—the parks and groves on the outskirts of the towns.... The presence of multiple, competing ideologies was a feature of urban living."[1] It was also an age of nascent democratic republics, which, like Athens later, did not ultimately survive the march of monarchy and empire.[2]

Ever since the colonial encounter, the West has associated India strongly with its spiritual tradition—often out of sympathy, respect, and the best of intentions, but sometimes dismissively as "the land of religions, the country of uncritical faiths and unquestioned practices."[3] But such assessments are problematic. As Amartya Sen has argued, the history of India is incomplete without its tradition of scepticism. To see India "as overwhelmingly religious, or deeply anti-scientific, or exclusively hierarchical, or fundamentally unsceptical involves significant oversimplification of India's past and present." The West, Sen claims, focused unduly on India's spiritual heritage, on "the differences—real or imagined—between India and the West," partly because it was naturally drawn to what was unique and different in India.[3]

The nature of these slanted emphases has tended to undermine an adequately pluralist understanding of Indian intellectual traditions. While India has ... a vast religious literature [with] grand speculation on transcendental issues ... there is also a huge—and often pioneering—literature, stretching over two and a half millennia, on mathematics, logic, epistemology, astronomy, physiology, linguistics, phonetics, economics, political science and psychology, among other subjects concerned with the here and now.

Sen marshals a good deal of evidence in support of his view of India's long tradition of heterodoxy, openness, and reasoned discourse. While India might offer "examples of every conceivable type of attempt at the solution to the religious problem," Sen submits that they "coexist with deeply sceptical arguments ... (sometimes within the religious texts themselves)." Among his examples is the 'song of creation' of the Rig Veda, "the first extensive composition in any Indo-European language" (Wendy Doniger) and the radical doubts expressed therein.

Who really knows? Who will here proclaim it? Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation? The gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe. Who then knows whence it has arisen? Whence this creation has arisen—perhaps it has formed itself, or perhaps it did not—the one who looks down on it, in the highest heaven, only he knows—or perhaps he does not know.

§

The historian Romila Thapar has observed that "until recently, it was generally thought that Indian philosophy had more or less bypassed materialism." But scholars now widely recognize that in ancient "spiritual India", atheistic materialism was a major force to reckon with. Predating even the Buddhists, the Carvaka is one of the earliest materialistic schools of Indian philosophy (named after one Carvaka, a great teacher of the school, with Brhaspati as its likely founder). Its other name, Lokayata, variously meant "the system which has its base in the common, profane world," "the art of sophistry," and also "the philosophy that denies that there is any world other than this one."

The Carvakas offered an epistemological justification for their materialism that echoes British empiricist and skeptic David Hume, as well as logical positivists. The Carvakas admitted sense perception alone as a means of valid knowledge, and challenged inferential knowledge on the ground that all inference requires a universal major premise (e.g., "All that possesses smoke possesses fire") but there is no way to reach certainty about such a premise. The premise may be vitiated by some unknown "condition," and we can't know that such a vitiating condition does not exist. Since inference is not a means of valid knowledge, all supersensible things like "destiny," "soul," or "afterlife," do not exist. To say that such entities exist is regarded as absurd, for no unverifiable assertion of existence is meaningful.[5]

The Carvaka denied the authority of all scriptures. First, knowledge based on verbal testimony is inferential and so vitiated by the flaws of inference. The scriptures, they claimed, are characterized by three faults: falsity, self-contradiction, and tautology. Based on such a theory of knowledge, the Carvaka defended a complete reductive materialism according to which the four elements of earth, water, fire, and air are the only original components of being; all other forms are products of their composition. Consciousness arises from the material structure of the body and characterizes the body itself—rather than a soul—and perishes with the body.[5] Ajita Keshakambalin, a prominent Carvaka and contemporary of the Buddha, proclaimed that humans literally go from earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust:

Man is formed of the four elements. When he dies, earth returns to the aggregate of earth, water to water, fire to fire, and air to air, while his senses vanish into space. Four men with the bier take up the corpse: they gossip as far as the burning-ground, where his bones turn the color of a dove's wing and his sacrifices end in ashes. They are fools who preach almsgiving, and those who maintain the existence [of immaterial categories] speak vain and lying nonsense. When the body dies both fool and wise alike are cut off and perish. They do not survive after death.[4]

According to the Carvaka, the soul is only the body qualified by intelligence. It has no existence apart from the body, only this world exists, there is no beyond—the Vedas are a cheat; they serve to make men submissive through fear and rituals. Nature is indifferent to good and evil, and history does not bear witness to Divine Providence. Pleasure and pain are the central facts of life. Virtue and vice are not absolute but mere social conventions. The Carvaka advised:

While life is yours, live joyously;
None can escape Death's searching eye:
When once this frame of ours they burn,
How shall it e'er again return?

The Carvakas mocked religious ceremonies, calling them inventions of the Brahmins to ensure their own livelihood. The authors of the Vedas were "buffoons, knaves, and demons." Those who make ritual offerings of food to the dead, why do they not feed the hungry around them? Like the other two heterodox schools, Jainism and Buddhism, they criticized the caste system and stood opposed to the ritual sacrifice of animals. When the Brahmins defended the latter by claiming that the sacrificed beast goes straight to Swarga Loka (an interim heaven before rebirth), the Carvakas asked why the Brahmans did not kill their aged parents to hasten their arrival in Swarga Loka. "If he who departs from the body goes to another world," they asked, "how is it that he comes not back again, restless for love of his kindred?"

Carvaka thought also appears in the Ramayana. In the epic, Rama is not the god that he later became, but an epic-hero, who, as Sen notes, has "many good qualities and some weaknesses, including a tendency to harbor suspicions about his wife Sita's faithfulness." In the epic, a pundit named Javali "not only does not treat Rama as God, he calls his actions 'foolish' ('especially for', as Javali puts it, 'an intelligent and wise man')". Echoing Carvaka doctrine, Javali even asserts that "there is no after-world, nor any religious practice for attaining that ... the injunctions about the worship of gods, sacrifice, gifts and penance have been laid down in the [scriptures] by clever people, just to rule over [other] people."

In their ethics, the Carvakas upheld a kind of hedonism: the only goal people ought to pursue is maximizing sensual pleasure in life while avoiding pain—the kind that proceeds from over-indulgence and instant gratification. As is common with confrontational schools of thought, they were accused of "immoral practices" and depicted as "hedonists advocating a policy of total opportunism; they are often described as addressing princes, whom they urged to act exclusively in their own self-interest, thus providing the intellectual climate in which a text such as Kautilya's Arthashastra ("Handbook of Profit") could be written."[5]

Carvaka doctrine had disappeared by the 15th century, but its erstwhile importance is confirmed by the lengthy attempts to refute it found in both Buddhist and orthodox Hindu philosophical texts (some written as late as the 14th century), which also constitute the main sources for our knowledge of the doctrine.[6] Perhaps the Buddhists felt threatened by the Carvaka emphasis on pleasure, rather than suffering.

Just as the Stoics of ancient Greece and Rome resemble the Buddhists in their emphasis on mental tranquility through self-awareness and reining in of the ego and selfish desire, the Epicureans are reminiscent of the Carvakas, who too disavowed irresponsible sensualism and upheld ethical ideals similar to the Epicureans. Epicurus' words below could well have been spoken by a Carvaka:

When we say that pleasure is the goal, we mean ... being neither pained in the body nor troubled in the soul ... it is not possible to live pleasurably without living sensibly and nobly and justly. A just man is least troubled but an unjust man is loaded with troubles ... the pleasant life is produced not by a string of drinking-bouts and revelries, nor by the enjoyment of boys and women, nor by fish and other items on an expensive menu, but by sober reasoning.

____________________________________________

Notes:
[1] The Penguin History of Early India, 2002, by Romila Thapar, p. 164.
[2] Democracy in Ancient India by Steve Muhlberger, 1988.
[3] The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian Culture, History and Identity, by Amartya Sen, Penguin, 2005.
[4] Digha Nikaya, 1.55, tr. AL Basham, The Wonder That Was India, p. 296.
[5] Carvaka, Encyclopedia Britannica, 2008.
[6] Such as Mādhava's Sarva-darśana-samgraha (“Compendium of All Philosophies,” 14th century CE). Haribhadra in his Sadharśanasamuccaya (“Compendium of the Six Philosophies,” 5th century CE) attributes to the Carvakas the view that this world extends only to the limits of possible sense experience. Source: Encyclopedia Britannica 2004.

Photos (in order of appearance; © shunya.net):
—Vasantasena, Bacchanalian relief with intoxicated courtesan, Kushan, 2nd century CE, Mathura, UP; National Museum, Delhi.
—Turbaned Male Head Maurya, 3rd century BCE, Sarnath, UP; National Museum, Delhi.
—Musician, 5th-6th century CE, Nalanda University, Nalanda, Bihar.
—Sunset in Kausani, 2005, Uttaranchal, India.
—Funeral pyres on the banks of the Ganga, 2006, Varanasi, India.
—A statue of Rama on a traffic island in Rishikesh, 2005, UP, India.

My Experiments with Cooling

by Aditya Dev Sood

This is Delhi in its glory. Hotter, even, than when I knew it as a child, the temperatures these days scratching past the 45 degrees Celsius that were their absolute threshold then. Every day the earth baking, every night the atmosphere billowing in response, plumes of invisible heat unsettling the skies, a sudden imbalance and extreme of the natural order, corrected by crazy dust storms in the late afternoon, whose special, threatening light, one knows, will never break to rain. The dust is everywhere. On window sills and on the floors of my home, on doorknobs and banisters, and even hidden atop curtain rods and high shelves. The body is always tormented by the heat, always seeking respite, coolness, moisture, a wet towel, ginger-lemonade, the direct draft of an air-conditioner.

Last summer, when I was remodeling this house, I had six air-conditioners installed, one for each room, most of them split units, their umbilical tubing buried within the masonry. When we moved in, at the end of September, they seemed excessive, perhaps even a bit of a waste. This month, they seem barely adequate, and my family's warnings prescient -- don't skimp on the aircon or you'll regret it in the summer, when you most need it. The units loom over each room, promising Singaporean efficacy, but delivering Patna levels of cooling.

In the center of the two-storied house is a kind of small atrium, or large shaft, which stretches from plinth to roof. My neighbor has one just like it -- it is mandated by local zoning. The idea was, in those pre-aircon-days of the Raj and early Indian post-coloniality, that air would circulate through the house, gathering heat from the groins and armpits of its wilting inhabitants, before entering the atrium and rising up as hot air must, but also following Bernoulli's principle, that fluids will accelerate as they pass through a narrower channel. The logic of air-conditioning, sadly, runs so directly counter to this ecological understanding of architecture, as a coordination of air flows from outside the building, in through its interiors, all the way out its top.

In my grandfather's house, the air-conditioners were enormous wet monsters, set into courtyard windows at just about child height and, it now seems, equally familiar to me from both ends of their operation. On the front they dripped and dribbled condensation off white and gold grills, sometimes even creating sheets of ice in the night, which might slide off and splatter the floor in the morning. In the back, their grey-black fins bore dents and scratches like war wounds, as water ran round to cool the entire roaring assembly before running off into planterboxes of cacti and bonsai, artfully placed below. The window's chhajja, a horizontal projection of concrete that protects it from rain, might have had a chick protecting the back of the unit from sun and there might have been other plants crowding all round the courtyard windows. These were old techniques of courtyard living, the cultivation of layers of vegetation and other kinds of screening around all fenestration, now re-adapted to helping those groaning air-conditioner units along. 

Soon after my parents moved into their West End home, they built a large and dark cabinet, which stretched floor to ceiling along one of their living room walls. It was a multimedia marvel, housing books, records, recessed lamps, as well as a record changer and cassette deck connected to an amplifier and then to speakers perched up at the top. But equally wondrous, in one of its bays, a roll-top screen slid up and over to reveal a hidden 'cooler.' After school, my kid brother and I would have trudged back home under a glaring afternoon sun, our bookbags making large stains of sweat on our backs. We'd shrug off our shirts and steady ourselves before the cabinet's 24-inch fan to enjoy the continuous blast of moist-wet coolness that hummed steadily out. Only once we were sated of this air shower, would we agree to turn to lunch and the other diversions of doing nothing at home. 

I think I only came to realize that coolers were an esoteric technology while visiting relatives in the States, who had no reference for whatever it was that I was talking about. In Phoenix they were then called Desert Coolers, and I now believe them to be one of the few manifestations of the alternative technology movement that actually found a market -- and a worldwide following -- in the 1970s. In India their evaporative cooling fins were traded in for chicken-wire mesh screens that held in place a padding of khus-khus shavings, dry-wooly masses that have the most indescribably positive fragrance -- clean, cool, fresh, inviting. A modified aquarium pump might push water up to the top the cage, from where it would be allowed to drip on to the khus-khus, while the fan pulled air through the entire screen sandwich. Voila, fragrant evaporative cooling from a cooler. 

At the homes of friends and relatives a subtle hierarchy of cooling could be observed: service areas, like stairwells and interior hallways might be air-cooled, while spaces for public reception and polite sociality were air-conditioned. This subtle gradation as to the status of the two technologies seems based on their relative complexity, cost, and energy consumption. The more wasteful and difficult to manage the technology, therefore, the more it is prized, and the more likely that its use will be reserved for elites who really deserve it. The caste of air-cooler duct-installers, consequently, has lower status than air-conditioning duct-installers, and one must be wary of conflating the two. All this seems a great shame, for if there is an opportunity for a credibly green approach to cooling Delhi's homes, if not offices, it must begin with the bastardized, improvised, jugaadbaaz air-cooler.
 
These days, my free time at home is taken up with imagining ways of converting the double-storied atrium at the center of my home into a kind of building-wide cooler. I am imagining a thirty foot tower of khus-khus, through which I would allow water to drip over two-and-a-half stories. An enormous fan -- or maybe centrifuge -- at the roof would push air down and through the khus tower. We would all be living in, essentially, a habitable cooler. 

To understand the joy of cooling, one must first reconcile oneself to the heat of this difficult city. Despite air-conditioned cars, air-conditioned malls, and air-conditioned metros, one's exposed forearms, forehead, cheeks will glow red for the sun. The body will sweat and streak and stain your shirts, and turn the hair on the nape of your neck into a micro evaporative cooler. Without thinking, you will run your hands through your hair, wipe the sweat from your brow, and shake the collars of your shirt to allow air in, for that brief whoosh of cool that your entire torso will exult in. There can be no joy in cooling without surrender to the heat, without a knowing intimacy with its inevitable, permeating embrace. 

Cultural, architectural responses to Delhi's heat have traditionally achieved their nobility by creating artificial oases of vegetation, waterworks, wind tunnels and screens. Human ingenuity has been applied to create spaces hospitable for human habitation and enjoyment or vilas. The madarsa of Hauz-e-Khas, now just Hauz Khas, for instance, is a double-storied colonnaded structure on edge of a huge, now urban, water-tank. For centuries, westerly winds have picked up moisture and lost heat to that pond, before striking the screen jali-s of the madarsa, the better to ensure that its students remain occupied with their theological and juridical studies. My cousin Ayesha lives in a courtyard house not a block away from the madarsa, and oriented in precisely the same way to this special tank of water. But like me, she now air-conditions each room separately, although I'm sure she would also prefer another, better approach. 

In Old Delhi's Red Fort, one can make out the vestiges of waterworks that ran through its bilaterally symmetrical gardens and into the colonnaded marble floors of the Diwan-e-Khas, or special reception area. The marble floors of the pavilion dip down into shallow pools with edges that seem perfectly designed not only for seating but also for cavorting with those already dunked into the pool. And from what we can tell of courtesans hanging out at the palace, as depicted in Mughal miniature paintings, such technologies to beat-the-heat were well integrated into the social functions of the Mughal pleasure palace. Why wouldn't one want to socialize at private pool parties in the summer? And in this city, in this part of the world, how could one possibly feel at ease without taking off one's shoes, washing one's feet, and wiping one face and head with a towel, effectively conducting a full vajoo, ritual cleansing, every time one stepped into a courtyard? 

The Thar Desert, on whose Eastern, extending, desertifying edge Delhi is perched, is far from those moist riverine deltas of Africa, where humankind acquired its distinctive characteristics, including our aqualine nose, our relatively hairless body, and the curious fact that it is slightly more difficult to drown a human baby, because its windpipe reflexively closes when immersed in water. Well before the Great Mughals, we evidently knew the pleasure of bounding in and around moist wet architectures on the edge of flowing water, cavorting upon and around a variety of wooden furnitures and vegetal furnishings. This mostly hairless ape can imagine no better vision of an Edenic garden than those Mangroves-e-Bahisht.

From that originary apiary home, we have wandered far, into natural deserts as well as those devised of our own self-incarceration. Yet, we long to recreate those densities of flora and moist-cool habitation, though in our contemporary image. Architecture serves as both boundary and link back to our pre-cultural past, and we need it to be moist and cool when it is hot and dry outside, and warm and dry within when it is cold and wet outside. 

What I am missing, in these split-unit-invisible-ducting-cost-centers of my home, I think, is the synesthetic experience of the respite that a home is supposed to bring. The room is cool now, but how? I am not feeling the wonder, appreciating the ingenuity, respecting the total-architecture that is the inventive cooling solution. What is required, it seems to me, is the social-architectural analog to a fireplace, which burns its logs in full view of the room, heating all of it through convection, but radiating heat to your warming hands, buttocks and thighs as you sidle up to its mantle, ostensibly to look at the photographs and cards on display. The fireplace is intrinsic not only to the room, but also to the architecture of the building, its chimney iconic of the home from outside.

Along the same lines, we need a cooling solution that allows a party guest, in the middle of May, to walk over to a cabinet or shelving unit to admire the book collection, while exposing his chest and armpits to the full blast of cool moist air for a few minutes, before he heads off to the bar. The solution must be as integral to the architecture of the building as it is to the room, and it should involve the strategic location of moisture, greenery and forced ventilation through it. This, at any rate, is what a contemporary cultural-architectural response to Delhi's heat would have to look like -- a marriage of ingenuity with responsibility, informed of a thousand years of eloquent space-making within the city. 

A Bomb Won't Go Off Here

by Daniel Rourke

 
A bomb won't go off here... (Click to enlarge)

Y: I like the use of the past tense. Saying “weeks before” sets up the seen* as a narrative.

X: Oh yeah.

Y: It’s almost like the story’s not ended, like we now are still part of the story.

X: And that there’s people there all the time.

Y: That they are always on this street.

X: Yeah, in that little square. And they’ve always all got long, blondish hair. Shopping.

Y: Does it mean that a bomb might go off somewhere else?

X: That’s exactly what it means. It means that a bomb’s not going to go off here, but it is going to go off somewhere else.

Y: Somewhere where people aren’t more suspicious?

X: Not people: shoppers.

Y: Somewhere where shoppers aren’t more suspicious.

X: There’s no such thing as people – there’s just shoppers.

Y: By reporting someone studying the CCTV cameras to the police the shopper didn’t become anything of greater value than a shopper. They managed to stay as a shopper and yet still act in a way which protected the rights of all shoppers everywhere.

X: That is the best thing you can be for society. A citizen is secondary to a shopper. For the good of the country there is nothing better than a shopper who reports suspicious looking un-shoppers. If you’re an un-shopper, and you are in a shopping precinct, then you’re not there for the good of the country.

* A play on the words ‘seen’ and ‘scene’ is alluded to here and for the remainder of the conversation.

------------------

Y: There’s a couple of things I’m a bit worried about in this seen. One is the location of the photographer who took this picture - and I’m not talking location in space, but actually location as a member of society. Nobody there is watching them. Nobody is aware of their identity as a photographer, giving them the perfect identity of the perfect terrorist. They are un-seen. They are in fact making the seen. There wouldn’t be a ‘seen’ without them.

The other thing that I am worried about is the woman in pink on the left there. She looks a bit suspicious to me. She isn’t shopping.

X: She is shopping! She’s a shopper. You don’t have to worry about her.

Y: She doesn’t look like a shopper, she looks like a looker. She looks like a studier. She is studying the seen.

X: Yeah, but she is looking at the seen with a sense of: “Yes, this is ours and we have to protect it.”

Y: But do you not think that the location of the pink lady on the left is very similar to some of the shadowy figures that Salvador Dali placed within his works? Where the viewer – the shadow of the viewer – is located within the frame.

X: [gasp] The pink lady is us!

Y: The pink lady on the left is meant to be us, looking on the happy seen.

X: The undisrupted – the un-bombed seen.

Y: She’s thinking: “A bomb won’t go off here, because weeks before I reported a viewer – similar to myself – studying this seen.”

X: Yeah. And it’s not just that that one ‘shopping in’ of one suspicious non-shopper protected the seen from that one occasion of being bombed – it has prevented that seen from ever being bombed.

Y: A bomb will never go off here, because sometime before this photo was taken a shopper – perhaps the woman in pink on the left – reported someone studying the CCTV cameras, who wasn’t this photographer.

X: No. Not this one.

Y: This photographer is more interested in studying the shoppers than they are in studying the CCTV cameras. Although the CCTV cameras are in the seen.

X: I am guessing that this suspicious person who was studying the CCTV cameras – and not shopping – was suspicious because they were just in the middle of town, in the middle of the day, on a week day. Why weren’t they at work?

Y: Well they were. They were doing their job. Terror.

X: This place, it’s a very pedestrianised, a very...

Y: ...bland.

X: A very bland town. A town where shoppers live. If this was a really beautiful city centre, like Bath Spa, if this was a beautiful Spa town, there would be people taking pictures all over the place of a nice Georgian building here, a nice Georgian building there. I am worried because how am I supposed to tell, when I next go shopping, who is taking pictures in a bad way and whose taking pictures in a good way?

Y: It’s obvious that this seen suggests to us - the lady in pink on the left - that from now on one should shop in as bland locations as possible, in places which visually, aesthetically, have nothing going for them whatsoever. Because it’s only in a place like that that one can be absolutely sure that anybody taking photographs of or near CCTV cameras are doing so for terroristic purposes.

X: Yeah.

------------------

Y: I’m a bit concerned about the notion of not relying on others.

X: You can’t rely on other shoppers. They are only concerned about the next bargain, in the next shop. You - as the good shopper, who is so expert at shopping that you can get your shopping done and have time to notice what suspicious things are going on around you - you can only rely on yourself to do that. It’s up to you to protect everybody, but mainly yourself and your own shopping.

Y: There is something about the notion of shopping that completely revolves around the individual. It’s that freedom that we get in a capitalistic society to choose what we want from a selection of identical goods in a series of identical shops, it’s being able to wander through the streets making the choices that define you. But there is something very much related to that in the action of the terrorist. Yeah, ok, every shopping centre, every CCTV camera is the same, but the terrorist has the right to choose which shopping centre or CCTV camera to bomb. They reduce the individual even further to a state of nothingness.

There is the freedom to shop, but there is no freedom in being bombed.

X: But there’s no freedom in not being bombed. We are not being bombed, and they are not being bombed, but the last thing they are is free.

Y: They are not free from not being bombed.

X: No.

Y: They are trapped by the fact that...

X: ...by the fact that they are not being bombed. But if they were bombed...

Y: That would be true freedom.

The London Metropolitan Police's new campaign is available online for all concerned citizens to study at their leisure: Counter Terrorism Posters.

by Daniel Rourke

Udaipur Chronicles

by Manisha Verma

Cuisine is only about making foods taste the way they are supposed to taste --- Charlie Trotte

During my recent trip to Udaipur this winter, I became avidly keen on trying out the local Daal Baati Churma, a much savored and popular dish of Rajasthan,and fairly uncommon in most other parts of India. Upon interrogating the locals of the whereabouts of the most authentic version of the aforementioned dish, my husband and I landed in Natraj Restaurant, unbenowst to the world at large, but a rage amongst the locals, and a name that makes even the most nondescript autorickshaw driver glint in seeming recognition of the sublime treatment meted to a salivating palate. We alighted on the auto and it putterred and sputtered off on a bumpy ride towards our destination, meanwhile our driver giving us the low-down on the details of what to expect, amidst other casual converstaion.

"Aapko Udaipur kaisa lag raha hai?" (How are you liking Udaipur?)

"Accha hai, kaafi sundar aur aithihaasik hai" (We like it, its beautiful and historically intriguing).

"Ji, Isko hum Venice of the East kehte hain. Door door se log aate hain. Bahut pyaara shehar hai." (We call it the Venice of the East. People come from all over here.)

I couldn't help but smirk at the inherent allegience of the auto driver to his town, something that I recall having missed from most of the autowalahs in Delhi. If only he was poster boy for the tourism department of Udaipur. This was the fifth auto driver who had sung La De Daas about Udaipur to us. I enjoyed every minute of my conversation with them, but only wished I had a penny for their words of praise, for there was no real need to sell the city to us - we were already there.

"Aap kahan thehre hain?" (Where are you staying right now?), he interrogated curiously.

"Hotel Pichola Haveli pe - Bagor ki Haveli ke bagal mein." (At hotel Pichola Haveli, near Bagore Haveli), we reported.

"Wahan toh roz Dharohar jaise dance groups ka music ya dance show hota hai. Wahan tourist log bhi art aur craft khareedne bahut aate hain." (There's a lot of famous dance groups like Dharohar who perform there regularly. Its also a good place for tourists to explore the arts and crafts).

"Ji, kafi raunak rehti hai wahan par; galiyon mein bhi bahut chehal pehal hai"  ( Yes, the place is rather busy and bustling with life), we concurred.

"Aapne aaj kahan kahan ghooma?" (So what places did you visit today? )

Fine conversationalist he was, our man.

"Ji, aaj hum Fateh Sagar Lake gaye, City Palace dekha, Lake Pichola aur sunset point." (Fateh Sagar Lake, City Palace, Lake Pichola and the sunset point.)

"Aapko Pichola lake mein boating karni chahiye. Jag mandir tak. Jag mandir bahut famous temple hai. Wahan Raveena Tandon ka shaadi hua tha." (You ought to go boating in Pichola lake, till you reach Jag Mandir - the famous temple where Raveena Tandon got married).

Was it deja vu again or was this yet again the nth auto driver who didn't abstain from blurting the fact that Raveena Tandon got married at the Jag Mandir at the mere mention of the monument? I had enough evidence to believe now that Jag Mandir was not what it was because of any of its rich historical or architectural importance, but simply the trademark symbol of a top Indian filmstar's choice destination for holy matrimony. However, given that filmstars in India who play leading heroic roles are icons of national infatuation and bestowed an almost demi-god status, common rhetoric built around their movements in a manner of reverence more pious than that revealed by - say, daily tabloid gossip - didn't quite come as a new revelation to me.

"Natraj restaurant yahan ka sabse famous restaurant hai. Aapko Baawarchi bhi try karna chaahiye." (Natraj is one of the most famous restaurants here, and you should try out this other one called Baawarchi).

"Hmm", I nodded.

We reached there, promptly got off the auto, thanking the driver for his incessant commentary and set afoot into Natraj.

Not far from a typical dhabha-style restaurant, Natraj could have passed off to the innocent bystander as yet another regular eatery hidden in the narrow alleys of Bapu Bazar near Lal Ghat. It had faded paint peeling off walls, an army of square looking wooden table and chairs awkwardly arranged in the most isotropic fashion to accommodate the maximum number of people per square footage, and was rampant with unkempt worn-out, barefoot yet brisk walking waiters carrying thalis and other heavy culinary artillery in both hands, and finger-licking medium-bellied patrons sizing up their generously apportioned utensils filled to the brim with copious amounts of fresh and mouth-watering grub, hot chapattis and buckets of fodder. The white tube lighting, though dim and poor in incandescence was rather gnawing to the eyes and a bit of a sensory overload. We took our seat to wherever we were ushered and promptly ordered the item on the menu that was the sole objective of the undertaking that evening.

Dal Bati Churma is the most popular item in Rajasthani cuisine. It is made of three items of bati, dal and churma. Dal is lentils - black and bengal grams sauteed with green chillies, crushed ginger, garlic, turmeric and chilli powder, bati is baked round wheat flour dumplings baked over firewood or over kandas, or cow dung cakes, as traditionally done in villages, and churma is powdered sweetened cereal. Churma is a popular delicacy usually served with baatis and dal.  It is coarsely ground wheat crushed and cooked with ghee and sugar. Traditionally it is made by mashing up wheat flour baatis or left over rotis in ghee and jaggery , optionally mixed with cardamom powder, dry fruits like cashew,almonds and pistachio and flavours. It seems to have a close resemblance with Litti Chokha which is a prevalent dish in Bihar. The major difference lies in that Dal Bati Churma is stuffed with Dal and soaked with Ghee, Litti is stuffed with Sattu and almost always baked with a tinge of Ghee. Chokha served along with the Litti, is a type of spicy mashed potato mixed with roasted brinjal.

The waiter came with our dish and placed the dal and bati and ghee-bathed churma on the table, and started soaking the bati with huge bucketspoons of more ghee right before our very eyes. All those years of zero-oil recipes and dietary-regimen cooking mantras flashed in unison at their violation before my eyes, but I managed to politely convert my squeal into a mere bemused rolling of the eyes in disbelief. As even two bites of the batis and churma were depleted, they were uniformly replenished by a ladling of a couple more untill we firmly and with wild gesticulation muttered 'bas bas' through our chewy ghee ball stuffed mouths. As we had quickly discovered with each successive helping, the more ghee that was poured on our bati, the more delectable it became. This was a determined assault on the normal, and perhaps an insidious design on mankind's part to stave off violent midnight hunger pangs for the travelers, the nomads, the ancient voyagers of the region. The only cinematic image that seemed now to invoke any sort of restraint for the addition of even more ghee to the infinitely absorbent dish was that of tiny flour dumplings swimming in a bowl of hyperviscous ghee, interfering with the perception of distance - where was the bottom of this sea of oil anyway? I could almost think of myself as being on a little boat floating on this quiet sea, looking downward to peak at the crust of an inevitable volcano thrusting up the ocean floor. I blinked loudly, overwhelmed at the idea, stared at the innocuous table and its contents for a moment, and continued masticating.

Rajasthani cooking in this princely state was influenced by the war-like lifestyle of its Rajput inhabitants and the availability of ingredients in this dry region. Scarcity of water and fresh green vegetables have clearly had their effect on the choice of staple constituents. In the desert belt of Jaisalmer, Barmer and Bikaner, cooks prefer to use more milk, buttermilk and clarified butter than water itself to make dishes. Food that could last for several days and could be eaten without heating was preferred in the old days, but more out of necessity than choice - a tradition which has carried on till date. Marwari cooking includes the distinct use of mango powder, a suitable substitute for tomatoes, scarce in the desert, and asafoetida, to enhance the taste in the absence of garlic and onions. Additionally, dried lentils - beans from indigenous plants like sangri and ker  are used liberally. Gram flour is a major ingredient here and is used to make some of the delicacies like gatta ki sabzi, pakodi; powdered lentils are used for mangodi, papad. Bajra and corn are used all over the state for preparations of rabdi, khichdi and rotis. Various chutneys are made from locally available spices like turmeric, coriander, mint and garlic.

Finally we were asked whether we would like dessert, although sweet dishes in Rajasthan are had not just after a meal, but before, during and following it. Each of the dishes are popular dessert for specific regions - Rasgullas from Bikaner, the Mawa Kachori from Jodhpur, Malpuas from Pushkar,  Ghevar from Jaipur, and Diljani from Udaipur. We went with mishri mawa and Ghevar, as per the chef's recommendation. Ghewar is generally prepared in January for Makar Sankranti, in March-April for Gangaur and in July-August for the Teej festival. It is disc-shaped, and made from flour, sugar syrup and our favorite usual suspect - Ghee! There are many varieties of Ghevar, such as plain, desi ghee, mawa and malai ghevar.

As I walked out of Natraj that evening, the slow cool breeze of night time Udaipur brushed past like a silhouette of contentment. Food sure was the most primitive form of comfort. Whoever knew that the volumes of ghee downed that night could taste so much like something entirely magically different - a thinly veiled art's tongue disguised as an opulent transformation to the regulars of a ghee-eating spartan nation. In retrospect, I can now only associate the moment with an amusing anecdote from Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle:
"It’s like when you put instant rice pudding mix in a bowl in the microwave and push the button, and you take the cover off when it rings, and there you’ve got rice pudding. I mean, what happens in between the time when you push the switch and when the microwave rings? You can’t tell what’s going on under the cover. Maybe the instant rice pudding first turns into macaroni gratin in the darkness when nobody’s looking and only then turns back into rice pudding. We think it’s only natural to get rice pudding after we put rice pudding mix in the microwave and the bell rings, but to me, that is just a presumption. I would be kind of relieved if, every once in a while, after you put rice pudding mix in the microwave and it rang and you opened the top, you got macaroni gratin. I suppose I’d be shocked, of course, but I don’t know, I think I’d be kind of relieved too. Or at least I think I wouldn’t be so upset, because that would feel, in some ways, a whole lot more real."

Perceptions

 

Judith Larsen. Attractor. 2007

Iris print on somerset paper.

More on this Boston artist here and here.

Pressed: Obama at the White House Correspondents' Dinner

by David Schneider

Last Saturday night, over dinner and drinks, the President of the United States was overheard saying:

Michael Steele is in the house tonight. Or as he would say, 'In the heezy.'

Wazzup!

For the last time, Michael, the Republican Party does not qualify for a bailout. Rush Limbaugh does not count as a 'troubled asset.

That's right. At the White House Correspondents' Dinner, Obama killed. American humor in the commercial media, over the last decade, has largely trended toward the coarse and snarky, so Obama's delivery – mature, intelligent, and martini-dry with a hip-hop twist – was thoroughly (in a word laden with meaning) disarming. (Even as he reaffirmed Michelle's right to bear arms.) 

Disarming, because journalists and Big Media – in a crisis for survival – are now reckoning with their role in the great failures of the Bush Administration, in the failures of the economy, and the failures of their own profession. All are connected. And as Obama was happy to take the heat, as well as dish it ("Sasha and Malia are not here tonight. They're grounded. You can't just take a joyride to Manhattan.") – because he took responsibility – he opened the possibility for the press corps to say to one another, like Hardy berating Laurel (though with a sheepish grin), "Well, that's another fine mess you've gotten us into."

The American press might have been on "suicide watch," as Frank Rich wrote yesterday, since Stephen Colbert's monologue three years ago (surely a critical event in media history). But the news industry had been in a severe depression long before Wall Street laid its latest egg.

Print newswriting methods are like the internal-combustion engine: their basic mechanics and operating principles have been little altered for a hundred years. For pistons, gears, sparkplugs and the carburetor, journalists have the lede, the quote, the counter-quote, vocabulary set and wordcount. They're all housed in an engine-block called the inverted pyramid, a structure whose wide use in American journalism dates back to the mid-19th century. This structure has its essential uses, but I think it also has, over the long-term, determined the way we receive, process, and use information, with negative aspects.

The lede, as they call it in the biz, is the one-sentence lead paragraph that provides the who, what, when, where and how of the immediate event under discussion. That's the broad top of the inverted pyramid. Descending into the story, we encounter context and detail and background, so that, theoretically, the least important details are at the bottom and even the most casual or harried news-reader can grab the most important news of the day.

Trouble is, in the modern world, events are wildly complicated. And the news, that is, the tip of the iceberg by which we call the newest new development – driven by the economics of the "scoop" – is often confused with the most important overall story, by the very nature of this information structure.

In other words, the news and what's really happening are not necessarily the same thing – although in our reading of the news, as quickly as we do, we may subcognitively conflate the two. The inverted pyramid, while intending to convey information efficiently for the headline reader, only has real utility for those who follow stories.

In investigating Watergate, Woodward and Bernstein ran up against the limitations of this structure: small articles over here, small articles over there, the latest indictment, the most recent subpoena. They owed their ultimate success to the Washington Post's editor at the time, Ben Bradlee, and publisher Katharine Graham (surely two of the great Americans of the 20th century), who risked not only the paper's reputation, but also its profitability, by publishing articles that attacked Nixon at the zenith of his popularity. They insisted that readers follow the story – and surmount the very obstacles that the journalistic profession itself had placed in the way of successful narration.   

Bradlee and Graham had the foresight and tenacity to read beyond the lede.

To interpret the news, we were once told, "Read between the lines." Decades of fill-in-the-blanks and multiple-choice tests in our nation's schools, however, have proven to be inadequate means of teaching reading comprehension and critical thinking. The speed and volume of information assaulting us, and the continual triage we must execute in order to function in our lives, means that we have become a nation of headline-readers. You can't read between the lines if you haven't reached the second.

It's apparent now, the truth of the old adage, "A democracy gets the government it deserves." The hallmarks of American society during the '90s and '00s had been intellectual disengagement, physical fitness, superannuated adolescence, and empty talk – and we managed to acquire (elect seems too strong a word to use here) a president who acted like us. And for all its incompetence and nefariousness, the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party was, for a time, highly successful in controlling the media. Derrida said, "There is nothing outside the text," and critical theory asserts that language is a study of power relations. As often happens, the weaker the grasp on power, the more aggressive are the attempts to consolidate it – and the Bush Administration, using this headline-deep approximation of poststructuralism, openly claimed the ability, and undertook a strategy, to construct its own "reality." America had its intellectual incuriosity used against itself, and in the main was too intellectually incurious even to interrogate that mortifying assertion.

Step one in this strategy of media control had already been taken care of, on its own, by market forces – the consolidation of news and entertainment under the large conglomerate corporation. As early as 2002, Frank Blethen, the publisher and CEO of the Seattle Times Co., said, "Our democracy is far more fragile than we'd like to admit. And the concentration of our media in large, public companies is posing one of the greatest threats ever to its survival."

Now, one thing business – and thus a business-oriented government –learned from Hollywood is that no matter how shoddy your product, you still have a good chance of turning a profit with a strategically planned, widely disseminated marketing campaign. The eight-year long Bush presidential campaign ("administration" seems too strong a word) was able to combine a deft understanding of market forces, American intellectual incuriosity, and Clintonian spin in an attempt to monopolize the market of ideological marketing. 

Condemn journalists for "left-wing bias," hold the 4th Estate in contempt, and exploit television news's profit-based valuation of entertainment over journalism. Neuter critical press by denying access, plant government-paid "journalists" and "commentators" in the pool, counter-attack your critics with slanders of un-Americanism (a page out of McCarthy's book), combine business with pleasure in the Beltway cocktail circuit (a page out of the business handbook) and adopt a stance of seclusion and secrecy (a page out of Nixon's book), rendering the only uncontrovertible facts capable of being printed into direct quotations of spin: "The Bush Administration said X today..." If language constructs reality, and our educational system made critical thought into a rare – yet bizarrely devalued – commodity, to the uncritical headline- and lede-reading American, "Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction, the Bush Administration said today" becomes "Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction."

Thinking critically now, I'm not sure Frank Rich is entirely correct when he posits Stephen Colbert's sack of the News Establishment as the crucial date for the Decline and Fall of the Media Empires. I believe it was only the second of three acts. I think the first unmistakable sign of the Fall was the failure of the entirety of the American press to adequately examine Colin Powell's address to the United Nations, in which he "made the case" for the Iraq War. He did no such thing, and even a mediocre attorney could punch holes in it the size of a Mack Truck on cross-examination. But the press relied on Powell's reputation, just as credit agencies relied on the reputation of financial institutions without investigating and interrogating the constituent parts of mortgage bundles. And we relied on the reputation of our media, without interrogating it. Even people strongly opposed to the war checked the totality of their opposition for a moment, thinking, "Well, if the New York Times bought it, they must know something we don't…maybe…"

This colossal failure of the mainstream media directly led to the explosion of blogs and online media that now threatens the totality of the established 4th Estate. Someone had to watch the watchdog because as starving mutt knows all too well, you can't bite the hand that feeds you.

When history becomes farce, and all the political media become courtiers at Versailles, only the court jester has transgressive license to oppose power with truth. In hindsight, however, Colbert's evisceration of the media lapdogs appears to me merely the equivalent of the Soothsayer whispering in Caesar's ear, "Beware the Ides of March." I mark the coup de grace as the broadcast and commentary of the Vice-Presidential debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, it became clear that electoral drama was throwing Big Media a ratings lifeline. The media establishment had a vested interest in keeping the horserace a carnival ride. I watched, flabbergasted, as Palin ran on – and on – in arabesques of incomprehensibility wreathed around substanceless, talking-point zingers. I continued to watch, dumbfounded, as the cadres of cable bloviators lauded the image of her performance – because they, too, had created entire careers around image and substance-challenged zingers.

"Surely," I thought, waking up the next morning, "this madness will end." No such luck. The early newsfeeds and initial reports merely cut-and-pasted the cable commentators, lauding Palin's chirpy loopy logorrhea as a creditable performance in the gladiators' arena.

But then a strange thing happened on the way to the Forum. As the clock turned to noon, reader comments began to accumulate across the Web. "You've got to be kidding me," they said. What had been arcane numbers on a balance sheet now had the force of the vox populi. "We're no longer buying what you're selling us," America said to the media, and by the day's end the public achieved the courage to challenge and overwrite the opinion-makers.

As of Sunday, the members of the press who managed to write through their hangovers described the genius of Obama's Saturday Night Live act and noted the sheer audaciousness of some of the jokes. Very few, however (the Huffington Post, an online publication, being one of them) reported Obama's candid words to the press corps. Suddenly, the comedy routine was a Constitutional law lecture, and after eight years of the Executive Branch regarding journalists with contempt – in part, because of their own spinelessness – it was nothing short of astonishing to hear these words from Obama, which I'll quote in full:

"It's a time of real hardship for the field of journalism. And like so many businesses in this global age, you've seen sweeping changes in technology and communications that lead to a sense of uncertainty, and anxiety, about what the future will hold. Across the country there are extraordinary hardworking journalists who have lost their jobs in recent days, in recent weeks, in recent months. And I know that each newspaper and media outlet is wrestling with how to respond to these changes, and some are struggling simply to stay open. And it won't be easy. Not every ending will be a happy one.

But it's also true that your ultimate success as an industry is essential to the success of our democracy. It's what makes this thing work. Thomas Jefferson once said that if he had the choice between a government without newspapers, or newspapers without government, he would not hesitate to choose the latter. And clearly Jefferson never had cable news to contend with [laughter], but: the central point remains:  a government without newspapers, a government without a tough and vibrant media of all sorts, is not an option for the United States of America. [applause] I may not agree with everything you write, or report, I may even complain – or more likely Gibbs will complain – from time to time about how you do your jobs. But I do so with the knowledge that when you are at your best, then you help me be at my best. You help all of us who serve at the pleasure of the American people to do our jobs better, by holding us accountable, by demanding honesty, by preventing us from taking shortcuts and falling into easy political games that people are so desperately weary of. And that kind of reporting is worth preserving. Not just for your sake, but for the public's. We count on you to help us make sense of the complex world and tell the stories of our lives the way they happen. We look to you for truth, even if it's always an approximation [laughter].

This is a season of renewal and re-invention. That is what government must learn to do, what businesses must learn to do, and what journalism is in the process of doing. And when I look out at this room, and think about the dedicated men and women whose questions I've answered over the last few years, I know for all the challenges this industry faces it's not short on talent, or creativity, or passion, or commitment; it's not short of young people who break news or the not-so-young who still manage to ask the tough ones time and time again. These qualities alone will not solve all your problem, but they certainly prove that the problems are worth solving. And that is a good place to begin."

Obama's voice fell as he spoke those final words, and in that falling voice he spoke a hard but necessary truth: the government may well be unable to help the field of journalism, as necessary to the nation as the auto industry, or the financial industry, and perhaps more deserving of relief than either of the two. Because the failure of the media, and its role in the larger failures of American business and government, was due to its overly close relationship to both.

Frank Rich, yesterday in The Times, was exercised about the terrifying attrition of journalists – of the professionals who actually go out and hunt the news – a far more expensive endeavor than opinionating. "Such news gathering is not to be confused with opinion writing or bloviating – including that practiced here," Rich demurs. But reporters alone, as we've seen, often neither have the time nor the structural ability (concerned as they are with basic facts) to make sense of the news, to police themselves, to locate the story within the story, to connect the dots. Frank Rich has been among the best of the best in doing so. There are many online outlets, including this one, that assist this task, a task made essential by the very limitations of journalism itself, and the speed with which information is consumed, without being digested thoroughly, by a public used to a diet of fast food.

The mainstream media spent most of 2007-8 dismissing online upstarts, "citizen journalists," and "bloggers" – with the identical contempt once shown to it by the Bush Administration – right up until they were the ones receiving the pink slips. But in the current multifaceted crisis, which is in many ways a crisis of information, connectors of dots ought to be equally valued for their ability to, in Walter Benjamin's words, create a constellation of facts, for us to sail our ships by. The role that the online media plays should be integrated into a new idea of the journalistic profession. That has already begun happening, although opinionators, rather than dot-connectors, often seem to be the ones most often embraced by the ancien regime.

Following Obama, comedian Wanda Sykes took the podium, and began a harangue so pointed she might be painted, in the right-wing press, as Obama's featured attack dog. But it was then that I understood why the White House Correspondents' Dinner has its tradition of comedy. More than a few times, she crossed the line – even satirizing Rush Limbaugh, who went on record saying that he wanted Obama to fail, by calling him the 20th hijacker who missed the flight because he was so whacked-out on Oxycontin. I heard boos. She'd gone beyond the pale. "Oh, you'll be telling that one tomorrow," she promised, and she was right. Comedians, by nature of their job description, have to risk going beyond the pale: it's their job to connect the dots, to reveal the hard truths, to expand the envelope of the sayable, to speak the comedy of language and unclothe the constructed reality of it, to protect, defend, and champion the First Amendment, to go where even journalists fear to tread.

Prick Up Your Ears, Times Readers: Do You Know What Your New York Times Is Doing?

Michael Blim

The minutes of the night tick down as I write this column. Soon I will have my morning reward. My column will come out on 3QD, and I will hear the thud of the Boston Globe against the front door. 

My column will come out, but with the Boston Globe? 

Ask The New York Times Company, its owner. For the past month, they have been threatening to close the Globe unless its workers give back $20 million in wages and benefits by May 1. For the past two days, the Times company has extended the deadline by one day. As I write, the Times company has put several hours back on the clock at the same time it is waving its official plant closing notice as required by the state in the faces of its employees. 

The Globe, once the Sulzberger flagship for its New England media armada, and a cash cow to boot, is now losing a million dollars a week. It is the last paper of record in Boston, and has garnered dozens of national awards, including seven Pulitzer prizes since 1995. The 2007 prize was won by reporter Charlie Savage’s exposure of President Bush’s abuse of so-called signing statements, pithy bits of prose attached to his approval of laws that skewed or set aside whole provisions of legislation he could not summon the courage to veto. The 2003 prize was won the Globe’s spotlight team for their uncovering of the sex abuse scandal in the local and national Catholic churches. 

These were hardly prizes awarded for art criticism, however valuable those forms of recognition may be. They were what newspapers do that no other institution or platform in America can yet do, which is to generate facts about and attention to serious, yet undiscovered problems in everyday life.

In Massachusetts, run so long via a Democratic Party daisy chain, the Globe is in effect the opposition party, even though it is a liberal institution –far more liberal institution than its owner’s paper, the New York Times. 

Like so many major dailies across the country, it is hemorrhaging circulation and ad revenues. Its website, www.Boston.com, is the sixth busiest newspaper-related site in the United States, even though it is the 14^th in circulation size nationally. 

Despite its eminence and importance as the most authoritative journalistic voice in New England, the Globe’s editorial staff and workers are being frog-marched forward to concessions or oblivion by the Times. The Gray Lady herself has sunk to concession bargaining a great newspaper like some percale sheet producer would whoop a benighted southern-town labor force. This is not collective bargaining, but simply the blackmail that low-down employers in America use every day to discipline and dispossess their labor forces. 

Prick up your ears, Times readers. For those of you for whom the Gray Lady is a messenger of enlightenment and truth, register its hypocrisy. As Globe copy editor Julie Dalton on April 4 put it: “People feel like the Times is willing to throw us overboard." 

Not willing, I would say, after a month of squeezing its employers for concessions on top of concessions made just 2 years ago in collective bargaining contracts. Quite ready. 

Beginning soon, perhaps as early as later this week, if you read the Times, you will likely find you’re paying fifty cents a copy more. 

In Boston, people fear that they will not be able to purchase the Globe at any price. 

Consider not buying the Times for a couple of days. If you start getting the bends, read it on line if you must. Try reading another paper -- you may enjoy the change. But let the Times Company know that you know what they are doing in Boston, and that concession bargaining Globe workers, especially given its pretensions to being something other than a union-busting percale sheet producer, doesn’t sit well with you. 

Meanwhile, I’m going down to make coffee with the hope that my Globe delivery agent hits the door this time rather than the flowerbed.

Perceptions

Nirmala Shanmughalingam. Beirut.

Acrylic on canvas.

More here and here.

Dispatches: Rome Food Report

Fettuccine alla gricia, a common pasta dish in Rome, has four ingredients: the noodles, olive oil, bits of cured pig's cheek, and grated cheese.  Most trattorias offer it.  It's not innovative, nor is it usually presented with much elegance.  It's simply an oily plate of flat, yellow noodles with some reddish brown bits of guanciale and a shower of pecorino.  The pleasure it gives is hard to describe.  The word delicious somehow seems too refined and cerebral, tasty insufficiently hyperbolic.  Scrumptious is close, but kind of pretentious.  Anyway, a good alla gricia is lipsmackingly, profoundly pleasurable to eat. 

There's a difference between eating and dining.  In Rome, you eat.  By eating, I mean the straightforward, carnal pleasure of gnawing things that taste good.  A perfect example would be another common speciality: abbacchio scottadito, which is grilled very young lamb sauced with a lemon wedge.  There's usually a rib, a bit of shoulder or leg, and a chop.  (Incidentally, Urdu speakers call a chop a "champ," which has always struck me as charming, and oonomatopoetic of lipsmackingness.)  Abbacchio scottadito is variously salty, gamy, fatty, and cartilagenous.  It tastes extremely, intensely lambish.  Impossible not to chew the bones. 

Not that you can't dine in Rome: at La Rosetta, Rome's most celebrated fish restaurant, you can wear your Lanvin suit, sit with the multinational haute-bourgeoisie, and have a spaghetti with seafood that costs forty-two euros.  But I had a superb (superb!) spaghetti alla vongole for eight euros at a random neighborhood restaurant.  By the way, you can make this at home very easily: fry a tiny bit of minced garlic, add some white wine and the smallest clams you can find, cover till they open, and mix with some high-quality pasta (I recommend Martelli, if you can find it; I can't anymore) and a bit of chopped flat-leaf parsley.  End of story.  But try getting dime-sized little vongole outside of Italy that are as fresh and sweetly saline.

You can find various cheap but amazing trattorias throughout Rome, even in the center.  I had the aforementioned alla gricia at Da Francesco, a great, great place off the Piazza Navona, one of the most touristic places on earth.  They won't make you an espresso, though--they maintain a pre-capitalist refusal to do things they don't want to do.  This attitude, actually, marks most of these places, which often treat Italians better than foreigners, may not have written menus, and generally stick to the same dozen dishes.  Fior de zucca (deep-fried zucchini flowers), baccala (salt cod), spaghetti cacio e pepe (with cheese and black pepper), bucatini all'amatriciana etc., etc.  It's interesting how many restaurants are locally famous for their version of a dish with less than five ingredients.

Great renditions of dishes like this are like sketches by an old artist: slapdash and assured at the same time, with no mistakes.  I think it's easier to be more attuned to the subtleties of how good fettuccine can be if you try to cook these dishes at home.  Cooks know first-hand that making a perfect omelet is a lot harder than a perfect fifteen-ingredient stew.  The tolerances are lower when the ingredients are so few: a restaurant can't save itself by selling you on its chef's virtuosity, the fact that he or she was the first to combine vanilla beans with sea bass. 

Eating in Rome is a nice curative to the U.S. addiction to deism.  Chef deism, I mean.  When compared to the average three-course Roman meal with a jug of decent Falanghina, which often runs you less than twenty euros, a lot of New York's Italian food and wine appears bloated, garish, and drastically overpriced.  Worship of culinary innovation and virtuosity bores me, anyway.  Food is less serious, and more serious, than that.  The deliciousness of great Roman meals doesn't have to do with a particular chef's combinatory talent, but with a chain of proud people.  Arugula that tastes so good, anchovies that taste so good, puntarella that tastes so good: these are the collaborative achievements of a gastronomico-agriculture. 

The good places don't court you; actually they're willing to deny you a dish if it's not in season.  I once went in search of carciofi alla guidia (artichokes Jewish-style, with are deep-fried and taste as good as potato chips).  A self-respecting Trastevere (the neighborhood across the Tiber: tras-Tevere) ristorante refused, saying those artichokes weren't in season as of last week, and that the ones that were available now were only for carciofi alla romana (artichokes stewed with mint) instead.  So I had those.

Not that there aren't bad meals in Rome: there definitely are.  And there are establishments where popularity has led to impatience.  Nice-looking spots near popular sites are usually mediocre.  Waiters behaved with exasperation at the Terence Conran-ian Gusto, although their fior di zucca pizza was very fine.  The crazy lines at tourist spots like the Café Sant Eustacchio make their sugary, Neapolitan espresso less enjoyable.  But the level of execution at dozens of unheralded cafés around the city make up for it.  My pick, simply because I had an impeccable cornetto and cappuccino there every morning, is La Cornotteria.

My last night in Rome, which was last night, I said I wanted to go somewhere typical, which began a somewhat rollicking hour-long argument amongst the assembled company, with recommendations flying around, places being called only to find they were shut (Sunday), etc.  Finally it was realized that we were only down the street from a very typical neighborhood restaurant, apparently the last place Pier Paolo Pasolini was seen, eating his dinner, before being murdered.   This was Al Bionde Tevere, a few hundred yards from Cestius' first-century Pyramide, which sits there randomly at a traffic circle. We walked over.  It's a crappy-looking place with plastic chairs, on whose terrace stray cats torture lizards.  You should try it.

Al Bionde Tevere
Via Ostiense 178
tel. 06 574 1172

Da Francesco
Piazza del Fico 29, near Piazza Navona
tel. 06 686 4009

Da Enzo
Via dei Vascellari 29
tel. 06 581 8355

La Cornetteria
Via Ostiense near Montemartini Musuem

La Rosetta
Via della Rosetta 9, near the Pantheon
tel. 06 686 1002

perceptions

 

Huang Li,

More here and here.

A Sales Conference

(An excerpt from Resident Alien, my currently unpublished first novel)

On Sunday evening, Ved flies to Palm Springs, California, to represent his product at Omnicon’s annual sales conference. More than a thousand of his coworkers from scores of countries will attend the three-day event. A chirpy event coordinator greets him at the airport and drives him and six others to a sprawling resort hotel at the edge of the city. It has its own golf course, horse ranch, hot air balloon rides, an artificial lake with boating, and gigantic auditoriums.

The conference opens at 7:30 A.M. next morning with a video recording of a high-energy rock band on four large screens. The lead guitarist screams, ‘Omnicon is blazing ahead, blazing ahead with all the winning elements!’ The intent is to get the adrenalin flowing early in the morning. The band’s screechy cacophony annoys Ved, but the sight of his Japanese colleagues in dark suits clapping earnestly amuses him.

On the walls of their auditorium are multicultural posters of happy people in business attire: shaking hands, gazing at computer screens with animated smiles, or peering lovingly at Omnicon’s box-like equipment. So much joy their products bring into this world! A gleaming red Ferrari stands outside the auditorium, soon to be awarded to the Salesman of the Year.

Ved is one of over fifty thousand employees of Omnicon in 130 countries. More than half of the world’s Internet traffic passes through Omnicon’s equipment. It never ceases to astound him that his company spends more on R&D alone than what the government of India spends on all its schools and hospitals.

He is paid to think about market dynamics, competition, and product positioning for a line of products. He crafts easy-to-digest messages, and describes features and benefits for less technical audiences. In a nutshell, he helps Omnicon’s salespeople sell. In doing so, he must sell himself too: his ideas, personality, skills.

Omnicon’s CEO, Greg Dyer, opens the proceedings by pointing out the importance of ‘the passion within’ that keeps his ‘intense focus on the customer.’ He claims to wake up everyday to this thought: ‘What can I do for my customers today?’ With his body language and deep voice, he projects authority and confidence. Following a loud drum roll, he introduces a new corporate tagline for Omnicon: Your potential, our passion. It is to replace the current tagline: Business is the game, play to win. Greg’s hour-long presentation is laced with frequent references to excitement, power, speed, and killing the competition.

To usher in a new growth phase, says Greg, Omnicon needs proactive competence renewal, relentless focus on systemic process quality, end-to-end mission-critical service creation, leveraged opportunities in emerging value domains, tapping latent creativities, and last but not least, the shaping of end-user behavior in a converged world.

Greg ends with a misplaced quote by Martin Luther King Jr. and by reiterating Omnicon’s four corporate values: Customer satisfaction, Achievement, Relentless learning, Empowering people (CARE)—all neatly embossed on a genuine twelfth-century knight’s shield (bought from a private European collection) in Omnicon’s main lobby.

A few months ago, Greg sanctioned new artwork at Omnicon. What was once anti-establishment art is now the art of the establishment, defanged, made chic: a wall-sized woodcarving of Ché Guevara’s shaggy face in one conference room; a reproduction of a Diego Rivera mural in another. High-resolution posters adorn major hallways: a lone bald eagle in flight, muscular rowers in a longboat, lean white people scaling mountain peaks. Inspirational messages appear beneath: only those who see the invisible can do the impossible. True leaders don’t strive to be first but are the first to strive. Dream more than others think is practical, expect more than others think is possible.

During a break in the morning sessions, Greg stands in the hallway surrounded by other senior managers. Ved sips tea and watches them from a distance. He notices their deference to rank and power as they compete with each other to impress the boss. It is good to be the king.

Though Ved has long seen Greg as a dreary man, isn’t this precisely what one needs in a CEO—this dedication, hunger for success and growth, the cold and focused execution of a navy seal? Wall Street appears unanimous: a visionary par excellence, among the best of the new breed of entrepreneurs. Omnicon is lucky to have him at the helm. For this, Omnicon’s board of directors has granted him a private jet and millions of stock options.

The session resumes. Greg introduces the next speaker, ‘Every great company has a few individuals who boldly go where no one has gone before. These latter day gladiators don’t seek easy journeys but new adventures and the rewards of leadership. At Omnicon, we celebrate such people. I introduce the next speaker with great pride and humbleness.’

An animated young man, a project leader from the Internet Games Online Division (iGOD), walks onto the stage to give a sneak preview of the games due for release—Pocket Empire and Ballistic Adventure. ‘One thing that keeps me motivated,’ he says proudly, ‘is the opportunity to do something that nobody has done before. I want to be able to look back in ten years and say, "look what I’ve achieved!" That’s the cool thing about working for a company that gives you the chance to pursue your dreams.’ Next to Ved, an older British colleague softly intones, ‘Oh, puhleeze!’ just as the audience bursts into a hearty applause. Ved turns to him and smiles; there is hope yet.

Presentations continue all afternoon. An industry guru offers an “independent” take on Omnicon’s market. He unveils his big idea: The true killer application is killing time. He explains that the leisure that technology creates, and other remaining “idle time” in the life of the techno-savvy consumer, needs to be filled with new technology—this is the race and this is our ultimate challenge! Using homey anecdotes to foster intimacy and trust, he paints an upbeat picture of the potential ahead and endorses Greg’s daring strategy of growth via strategic acquisitions—twelve in the last year alone.

New hardware, software, multimedia gadgets, and gaming consoles are launched. The air reverberates with jargon: synergy, paradigm, leverage, proactive, deployment, value-proposition, mission-critical, solution ecosystem.

§

In the evening, a bus conveys everyone on his hotel floor to a noisy Brazilian Churrascaria. Cocktails start flowing, alongside self-congratulatory speeches from senior salesmen (‘what a great, hard-working bunch we are’). Only seven of the eighty employees in the dining hall are women. None are seated near Ved.

He finds himself seated across a sales director from the US western region, a “Top 5%” salesman last year. Conversation soon reveals that the salesman is fond of Harleys and once traversed the entire US west coast on one. Each year he also hunts elk and moose in the Great Northwest on a friend’s ranch. Last year, he and his two friends nearly broke their backs dragging the corpse of an adult moose back to their cabin, a task normally done by Mexican farmhands with pickup trucks. Thankfully, the perfect roast that night made up for it. His words are laced with common expletives (‘that fuckin' moose’, ‘friggin' awesome roast’).

Next to Ved is the marketing director for Asia-Pacific, a young Singaporean educated in a US business school. They often collaborate on regional marketing programs. The director is an ideal corporate employee: clever, hardworking, analytical, and devoid of distracting interest in anything beyond his profession. How do clever people let themselves be content with such tunnel-vision: knowing more and more about less and less? Is that being clever or obtuse?

Shortly, a dozen servers go around the hall with massive slabs of rare meat on skewers. They stop on request and use a china dish to gather the red-brown fluid that drips as they carve the flesh. Fortunately for Ved, there is also a salad bar.

‘How far are you on the Asian Telecom testimonial you promised me?’ Ved asks the marketing director from Singapore.

‘I’m working on it,’ he responds. ‘It’s real close.’

‘You are not getting the Shanghai Bank case study until you get me the testimonial.’ There is a friendly threat in Ved’s tone.

‘No worries, I have everything worked out.’ He leans towards Ved, lowers his voice and says, ‘Keep this to yourself. We’re sending the customer and his wife to Hawaii. For this favor, he has agreed to let us write our own testimonial in his name. In fact, I’ve already drafted it. I’ll show it to you tomorrow.’

‘Bravo. Is this the secret of your rapid climb on the Asia-Pacific management ladder?’

‘I always get the job done,’ he says with a straight face. ‘That is the secret.’

Two drinks later, the moose-hunting sales director’s eyes have turned bloodshot. His expletives have multiplied, as have his lustful stares at a young waitress. Chomping on rare cuts, his chin is slick with grease. His plate is heaped with bones and streaked with red. Ved, suddenly nauseated, excuses himself, rushes to the men’s room and throws up. Bits of rice, beans, salsa and chips he ate for lunch come gushing out.

After the meal, the sales director inquires about post-dinner entertainment: how about a gentlemen’s club? ‘I doubt there is one,’ someone opines. ‘Palm Springs is a retirement community, people come here to die.’

‘I bet there still are lots of horny bastards like me.’ There are subdued chuckles. The sales director accosts a waiter who, minutes later, reappears with several names scribbled on a piece of paper. For this he receives a $10 tip. Word spreads and before too long a small contingent is settled on their post-dinner entertainment.

‘Are you going to join us Ved?’ The sales director pronounces his name wade. He is used to it by now, this clobbering of his name in America.

‘No thanks, I am tired. I didn’t get enough sleep last night.’ Not his idea of fun, to wade through strip joints with tipsy salesmen away from their wives. This form of entertainment, he feels certain, is behind him. It is not even of anthropological interest. On the bus ride back to the hotel, Ved is seated next to Fardad, a field engineer from Los Angeles, who inquires where Ved is from before revealing his own place of origin: Persia.

‘Why not say Iran?’

‘Yes,’ Fardad pauses, then resumes in a softer voice. ‘I think you’ll understand. I say Persia because Iran has such bad PR in America: Axis of Evil, fatwa-rattling mullahs, and so on. Persia sounds neutral, even exotic, with its cats, rugs, and ancient culture. As it turns out,’ he smiles, ‘most Americans don’t know that Persia is also Iran! They think it’s another country.’

§

A team-building event is scheduled for the second evening in Palm Springs. Omnicon’s Human Resources team has worked for weeks to make it happen. Participation is mandatory. They say that such events help break down barriers, foster trust, communication, and teamwork, hone leadership skills, and identify strengths and weaknesses. The end result is improved employee motivation and productivity.

But such events remind Ved of his place in the corporate machine: a puny gear that needs to be lubed and conditioned periodically. He knows that in this system, their collective output and efficiency matters above all else, but who needs juvenile games to rub this in? He dreads the small talk, the pretense of interest.

He considers calling in sick (diarrhea? vomiting? diarrhea plus vomiting?). But the evening is pleasant and the option of room service is not too appealing. Besides, cocktails and dinner would be served right after the event in the nicest part of the resort, the velvety green garden by the man-made lake he saw in the morning. How striking its contrast with the barren desert behind! He will surely meet a few like-minded Europeans who find this American team-building stuff ridiculous too, not to mention the human comedy of such events. So he goes.

Omnicon’s contingent is soon divided into tribes of American Indians: Hopi, Navajo, Sioux, etc. Each is to compete in quintessential “Indian activities,” such as making a campfire, a treasure hunt, pitching a nylon tent, and climbing rope ladders. His tribe is Navajo, and he is part of a group that is to build a campfire. Meanwhile alcohol starts flowing from four portable kiosks. It is late evening shortly before sunset. The desert air is starting to cool.

The project gets a boost when his Navajos stumble upon prime firewood neatly piled for them to discover and use. Many Navajos, among them Mexicans, Chinese, and Japanese, display childlike enthusiasm in transferring the logs to a brick-lined pit. Good thing there aren’t any real Navajos watching this, he thinks. Without sharing their elation, he does his bit for the cause by tending a fire that burns evenly. His Navajos finish ahead of other tribes, congregate with beers and margaritas, and start bantering. He fails to see what team-building purpose was served.

But the dancing flames warm him up. Staring into them he wonders: if he were marooned on a deserted tropical island, what three things would he need the most? Potable water would surely be first. The next, he reckons, ought to be the art of making fire. What a difference fire must have made to early humans! Isn’t it is way up there with stone tools, agriculture, and writing? Did humans get civilized before or after learning to use fire, if civilization is defined as humans learning to see in others their own human essence?

People mingle, the din of conversation rises, dinner is served, announcements made, and awards given. For post-dinner entertainment, an ex-Olympian archer in a cowboy outfit displays his skill by shooting apples off his wife’s head. Is there anything people won’t do for a living? By now his colleagues have grown loud with alcohol and lustily applaud the performance. The evening ends with a resplendent fireworks display befitting Omnicon’s size and financial muscle. The twenty-minute show lights up the night sky.

And indeed what a vast enterprise Omnicon is! Even core government portfolios in most countries—the health ministry of Greece, for instance—lack the budget of an executive vice president at Omnicon. Money is power, and with it, corporations are changing the world in their image. In a way, he too is on this leading edge of change.

But what kind of change, he wonders? On one hand, he is part of a system that creates new vocations, convenience, and leisure through advances in technology, a quest as old as humankind. On the other, he now also belongs to a global culture of competitive self-interest that sanctifies yielding to desire without consulting the soul’s scruples. Rights are now chic, not obligations. The citizen has been replaced by the customer, who apparently knows best. Instant gratification is king, not personal responsibility. This is called progress. Yet if there is a sustained linear relationship between material and moral progress, he fails to see it. What good is the former without the latter?

Some argue that technology has given far more power to man than he can handle with grace. But were men graceful with power in any age? Except that the stakes are so much higher today. And one thing is clear to him: Technology skews power relationships, and unbalanced power corrupts the soul. By working for Omnicon, is he not helping the US and its cronies expand their power and dominance over other countries? Is he not helping the culture of narrow self-interest to swell out of bounds? Oh, how he longs to know: is the net impact of his daily labors good or bad for the world? Is he, or is he not, acting like a little Eichmann?

Imaginary Tribes #6

The Middle Managers

Justin E. H. Smith

[Please click to read Imaginary Tribes #'s 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.]

It's the 105th annual meeting of the American Society for Anthropology. Dr. Ken Vonderwelt is late to his own talk. He is rushing from door to door in the massive foyer of the Minneapolis Sheraton, looking for the appointed venue, from the Lake Superior Banquet Hall to the Madison Ballroom to the 10,000 Lakes Business Solutions Headquarters. He can't find a soul he knows, not even in the Twins Sports Bar. 

Vonderwelt spots an employee and asks him where the anthropologists are. The employee's nametag says 'Jimmy'. Jimmy asks him if he means the convention. He says there was a convention on the mezzanine level, but that the mezzanine conventioneers were all carrying tote bags advertising some new hip-replacement device.
"I think they're like doctors," Jimmy says. "Are you a doctor?"
"Not really," Vonderwelt replies.
"Maybe your group is meeting in the basement rooms. They're along the hall next to the fitness center. They're named after cities from around here. You know like Brainerd and Duluth."

Vonderwelt takes the elevator down two flights below the ground floor. In the Bemidji Room there's a man wearing a turquoise bolo tie. He has a long grey goatee and is talking to an audience of a dozen people or so about a recent summer spent arrowhead collecting with his wife. "We took the camper out near Flagstaff," he recounts. "Great arrowhead country out there. Mitzi and I were in heaven." Alas, Vonderwelt says to himself, I'm with my people.

But this is not quite the group he's looking for so he moves on, further down the hall. In the St. Cloud Room there are two men, one of them Native American, sitting in front of microphones and unopened bottles of water. He's wearing a flanel shirt and a cap that says 'Buffalo Bills' on it. The man next to him is talking about resource conservation in the Finger Lakes area. "Otherwise," he says, concluding some line of reasoning Vonderwelt had missed, "pretty soon the bass fishing won't be so good for the region's original inhabitants." He turns to his neighbor and says: "You wouldn't like that, would you Jerry?" Jerry grunts 'no', and the dozen or so people in the audience emit a borderline-laugh of condescending agreement.

Vonderwelt goes out and opens the next door along the hallway, entering the Mankato Room. It's a younger crowd, and a larger one. A young woman, her face cluttered with eyebrow rings and horn-rimmed glasses, is talking about the teenaged 'cosplayers' of Harajuku. She maintains that Lolita goths need to be seen as a separate species from, rather than a variety of, the vampire goths. Vonderwelt hears the word 'intermediality' and quickly makes his exit. What the hell kind of profession is this? he wonders. What do any of these people have to do with one another? 

Next to the fitness-room door he spots a flyer with one of those copyright-free bits of clip-art, those silhouettes with the protruding noses and question marks over their heads, those inane little icons that announce: here an instance of bottom-of-the-barrel scholarship is about to take place; here an event has been scheduled for people associated with universities, but which bears only the most distant ancestral relation to science natural or human: a brown-bag lunch for faculty and/or staff on smoking cessation or stress management ("Blood pressure soaring? Try walking to work!"), a workshop on learning styles and multiple intelligences sponsored by the Office of Teaching Support, a lecture by Dr. Ken Vonderwelt. Or the clip-art homunculus might be found frozen in a stomping motion, surrounded by exclamation points and asterisks, and for this bad behavior will have been crossed through with a red slash. "No hitting, swearing, threatening, or other violent gestures of any kind will be tolerated in this office," the sign will warn, perhaps concluding with that golden oldie of public-institutional morality: "It's About Respect!" Nay indeed, wherever that clip-art man is found, you will know that the university has lost its way.  

Wait a minute! says Vonderwelt. That's me! That's my name on a flyer with that fucking clip-art. I have striven to be a paragon of seriousness throughout my career.  Why are they doing this to me?

"Looking for Dr. Ken Vonderwelt's talk on 'The Sociocosmic Context of the Nak Concept among Ural-Altaic Reindeer Herders'?" the flyer reads, as the homunculus scratches his head.  "It's been moved to the Minnetonka Annex!" The little man appears again, now featured in a running motion, running, we may presume, towards the Minnetonka Annex, his question mark transformed into an exclamation point, bending backwards from the sheer speed of his dash. 

Dammit! Vonderwelt thinks. Why do they always write 'Ural-Altaic' when it's supposed to be 'Aral-Ultaic'?! And where is that damned circumflex accent over nâk? Nak doesn't even mean anything! Come to think of it, nâk doesn't mean anything either. I thought it did when I did my thesis. I made up this whole big structuralist structure that made it mean something. That went out of fashion, the profession crumbled into a thousand little camps --dear old arrowhead collector here, indigenous advocate there, grating culture-studies clones all around-- and I was left with my meaningless nâk: just a sound, really, just a meaningless sound the fates had conspired to make the center of my career. Nâk means employee benefits is what nâk means. Nâk means braces for the girls. Nâk meant braces for the girls anyway. Now it's just this last meaningless talk of an undistinguished career, advertised with clip-art, to be given in the Minnetonka Annex of the Minneapolis Sheraton.

"Miss," Vonderwelt says, showing his unconcealable age, to a girl pushing a cart bearing multiple 24-packs of bottled water. "Where's the Minnetonka Annex?"
"Oh that's like out on the lake," the girl says. "That's where we host company retreats. You know like the kind where people who work together go out to the woods and they have to fall backwards so their co-workers can catch them? To build trust and stuff?"
Vonderwelt nods his head.
"Well they do that there."

Nâk means last talk before I move to half-time teaching and the faculty takes away my conference-travel stipend. Last talk of my career and they've moved it out to a business retreat out of town without telling me. Nâk means lichen and nâk means life-force-- Vonderwelt was by now mumbling in a mocking tone. Nâk means whatever you want it to mean. Louise, the older girl, used to make up new meanings for words she shouldn't even have known yet. She took the names of illnesses and extended them far beyond the human body.  A potato with too many eyes or too much mold was said to have 'tuberculosis'; upon entering an odd-smelling room she would deem it to be suffering from 'roomatism'.

How many Sanskrit scholars have milked a steady paycheck and employee benefits out of om?  What does om mean, anyway? Vonderwelt wonders.  Something like the onomatopoeia of the cosmos; the sound the human voice makes to sound like nothing in particular, just life itself. But they have texts and tradition. I had reindeer herders.

Self-pitying Vonderwelt makes his way to the annex shuttle in the front parking lot. There he finds Jimmy, buck-toothed and acne-ridden, yet, it now seems, a disarmingly eager employee of this great hotel franchise. "Hi doctor," he says, "you going to the annex?"
"I told you I'm not a doctor. And yes, to the Minnetonka Annex."
"This way sir, watch your fingers. It's a slide door."

In the van, Vonderwelt pulls from his bag his decades-old copy of the translation of A. P. Okladnikov's Yakutia Before Its Incorporation into the Russian State. It describes the archeological work carried under the author's leadership along the Lena River in 1939-40, under the auspices of the Yakut Institute of Language, Literature, and History and the N. Ya. Marr Institute for the History of Material Culture, which was then attached to the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. To think that any science got done at all, in those years! More than today, that's for sure.

Tanya's father had been on that expedition. She says the archaeologists had been ordered by the Yakut Institute, transmitting a direct command from Moscow, to be on the look-out for signs of living woolly mammoths in the region of the mouth of the Khatanga and in the vicinity of Cape Chelyushkin. She says that in 1938 General N. V. Vatutin, inspired by his recent taste of dethawed mammoth meat from Karelia, had developed a plan, codenamed 'Hannibal', to create a sort of cavalry of woolly mammoths that would drive the German army out of Finland. Vatutin regaled Stalin with images of the Arctic elephants' mighty tusks, and assured him of the 'near-certainty' that they were still out there roaming, somewhere, in the great North. Stalin became fixated. The archaeologists were given tranquilizer guns, and strict orders to 'harness' and 'tame' at least a half-dozen of the beasts by the end of their year-long expedition.

"Who knows if Tanya was telling the truth?," Vonderwelt thinks. "Maybe I should tell the story when I get to the annex, just to keep the legend alive."

"Last stop, Minnetonka Annex," bellows Jimmy, awakening Vonderwelt from his private Sibériade, as he slams on the brakes in the nearly empty parking lot of a bleak, futurist little complex of glass cubes tucked among the pines on the edge of the lake.

In the entryway to the large, central cube, Vonderwelt finds a letterboard announcing an event hosted by a certain Dr. Glenn Bacca, Ph.D.: "Building Trust, Building Sales: It's Your Move!" On a fold out table to the side there is a cardboard box filled with glossy pamphlets describing Dr. Bacca's many accomplishments. "Dr. Glenn Bacca, Ph.D., is one of the most sought-after motivational speakers in the country," the pamphlet announced. "Known to earn up to $20,000 for a single engagement, Dr. Bacca has made a name for himself wowing crowds and boosting sales from Palm Beach to Palm Springs."

There is no sign of Vonderwelt's talk, not on the letterboard, not in any pamphlets in a cardboard box on the fold-out table. Vonderwelt turns toward Jimmy, who had followed him in from the shuttle. "Are you sure this is the Minnetonka Annex?"
"Positive," Jimmy says.
"So you're sure this is where I'm supposed to be?"
"This is definitely where you're supposed to be," smiles Jimmy.
Vonderwelt seems to understand. He nods to Jimmy, thanking him for his help, letting him know he could bring the shuttle back to the hotel. This was the final engagement.

Vonderwelt hears the din of audience participation from a meeting room down the hall, and makes his way towards it. He can already hear Bacca's voice, the voice of a man-child, a honey voice honed through an adolescence spent in community-theater productions of Cats and Grease. When Vonderwelt enters the meeting room the motivational speaking came to a halt, and twenty or so middle-aged, Midwestern middle managers, a thoroughly middling tribe, stand gaping towards the door, waiting for Bacca to give them some kind of sign.

"I'm Ken Vonderwelt," the interloper volunteers. "I'm, uh, here for the seminar on boosting sales."
"Well I don't know if you can call it a seminar," Bacca replies, feigning an English accent for that unfamiliar word, "but we're definitely about boosting sales."

The middle managers all laugh heartily, gesturing for Vonderwelt to come join the fray. Bacca instructs them to go around the room and say a little bit about themselves. There is Doug from Cedar Rapids who is just trying to stay focused on his vision, and Harlan from Peoria who won't let any negativity kill his deals. There is Steve whose dreams didn't burst when the housing bubble did, and Barb who, to the great delight of her peers, is on her way to outselling her ex for the third year in a row.

Once everyone in the room has been introduced, Bacca announces a new plan: "You know what I think we're going to do? I'm going to have you partner with Tammy here, and what you and Tammy are going to do is what we call a trust-building exercise. Because why?"
"Because there's no sales without trust," three or four of the participants mutter.
"You think that's something you want to do?"
Vonderwelt nods his head.
"Good," Bacca says. "Now you know what? I think we're going to do one of the oldies-but-goodies here. Now I know you're all going to be like, 'that's so cliché, that's so cliché'. You're going to say you remember seeing it on Eight is Enough way back in the Stone Age. But you know what? It's been around for so long because it works. Techniques that work in the motivational business are techniques that last. So Ken what I'm going to have you do is to get ready to put your trust into Tammy here. And I mean your complete trust. You're going to have trust Tammy to catch you when you fall back into her arms. If Tammy doesn't come through for you, then you know what? Your skull's going straight for the tiles. Sound good?"

Vonderwelt nods his skull, and he begins to prepare himself to fall. He tries to imagine what might come next. Would he be stripped naked and painted black with soot, taking on the form of some god of the underworld? The god of no-sales, who would then be ritualistically cast out and plunged into Lake Minnetonka? Would they scarify him with motivational hortations, or adorn him with a bluetooth headset and a penile sheath bearing slogans that promise 'solutions'?  And is this fate, Vonderwelt thinks as he waits to fall, not the fate of anthropology itself? Could anyone else offer a more incisive farewell performance than I, here, building trust, falling backwards into the arms of some homely sales team leader from some branch office in Grand Rapids?

The team forms a circle around them, and begins to chant 'trust, trust, trust' in the same tone and rhythm that Vonderwelt imagines college kids in that same region must, at that same moment, be encouraging their peers to 'chug'. Bacca enters the circle and lurks over Vonderwelt and his partner. The motivational speaker had become the high priest of trust, and trust had become --by some hidden chain of cosmic associations that would have been entirely obscure just minutes earlier-- that force that sustained sales, just as blood once brought the rain that made the corn grow. The high priest leans in closer and commands:
"Now Ken, on the count of three, I want you to trust, and I want you to fall. Tammy here's got your back, you remember that."
Vonderwelt nods.
"No you know what? I'm going to do something different this time. Instead of just one-two-three, like that, I'm going to count 'one, two, three... trust!' And when I say trust!, just like that, that's when you fall."
Vonderwelt nods his head again.

This new variation on the countdown is carried out to great enthusiasm, and Vonderwelt begins his descent. And as he falls the din of the encircling mob faded into the distance, and Bacca's theatrics occupy just the narrowest corner of his eye, and Tammy's saving hands seem still hours away (if they are to materialize at all, and all this talk of trust is to succeed in summoning its deity after all). And the sensation of the wind, and the blur of the bodies, and the sound of their chant all blend together in Vonderwelt's falling brain, in his now semi-retired, entirely spent little brain, into a single word.

Is that word trust? God no, Vonderwelt is no heathen. Is it om? It isn't that either. Om echoes with pure harmonious being, but Vonderwelt's word comes riddled with provisos, stipulations, conditionality, and backtracking. Is it, then, that notoriously plurivocal nâk? How desperately he would have wanted it to be just that! It is almost that, but --oh, what a career!-- the circumflex is missing. He hears it with a long a as in marsh, not the a is in land that Aral-Ultaicists associate so strongly with that two-sloped diacritical mark.

"Damn where's the circumflex!?" Vonderwelt thinks, plummeting, just as Tammy's cell, programmed to ring to the tune of the Eagles' 1976 hit, "Life in the Fast Lane," begins to peel out for attention. And the heart of the sales team leader from Grand Rapids, who never really gave a damn about sales, but only turned her attention to them in proportion as her nubility waned, races with hope as she recalls the personal ad she has placed in the Grand Rapids free weekly (which, too, referenced life in the fast lane), and causes her, cursed be the gods, to reach for her classic-rock phone. 

--

For an extensive archive of Justin Smith's writing, please visit www.jehsmith.com.

The End of Something

By Aditya Dev Sood

 

I am sitting inside a white cube, watching things familiar but different. I know this music, but there are no lyrics, nothing to anchor the sound flowing round and through me. These soldiers, their rhythms, they seem to be preparing for an event I was once at. Perhaps India's Republic Day, which I remember attending with my kid brother when he was about six, both of us sitting in grass in front of the VIP enclosure with passes that Captain Kumar had arranged for us while he was serving as ADC to the President. Perhaps the Beating of the Retreat, which is held in front of the old Viceroy's Palace, now the Rashtrapati Bhavan, and which ends with a spectacular drum detail, no two drummers in the same uniform or from the same regiment, North and South Block reverberating together, silhouetted by the camel brigade, whose mounted guards point submachine guns into the air as the flares come sailing down to close the ceremony. It is, of course, another country, another time, and these memories have been triggered by a haunting new video work by Shahzia Sikandar entitled Bending the Barrel (no still available).

There is something uncanny about the angle and depth of Sikandar's camera. The marching band is moving past without making much progress, as if depth had been flattened for framing the scene into a Mughal miniature painting. The music emanates from their instruments but the moment is intercut with other scenes -- we are there but no longer there. Before there can be boredom there is a new anomie, introduced by Krugeresque text fragments that overlay the image plane, not with slogans, but with the impersonal and passively-voiced militarese that cannot but be recognized as the public pronouncements of the Army's leadership. This is an acute, biting piece, crafted without polemic, so much more powerful for being all quotation, all documentation, all juxtaposition.

The conductor's back is to me, his musicians stare at their sheets of music. They are seated on an elevated bandstand whose steps were coated last night in chuna, lime, to shine back in the sun a brilliant, almost blinding white, outshining the musician's spats and their neelam-washed white tunics. Framed by Sikandar, the musicians at first appear anonymous, ordered, regimented. But now and again she swoops in. At first this causes me to worry that some amateurism had caused a camera shudder. But she is neither zooming nor panning, but shifting frame, capturing in perfect detail a particular Army bandsman staring directly back at the recording lens, a new composition, a new picture within the picture. This is the delirious pleasure of experiencing cinema through the eyes of a miniaturist, who like others of her craft, can see, and can desire to see the whole as well the individual parts of creation with the same detail, the same interest. Sikandar's way of seeing is elucidated by her film-making, and newly educated, I want more of this vertigo.

I have few and fading memories of my father in uniform. He was already resigning his commission by the time I was four, and the period of his gallantry in combat and the near-thing escapes from border skirmishes thankfully happened before I was born and before he even knew my mother. How much of his joke-telling-scotch-drinking-jazz-loving social personality, though, was shaped by his training as a cadet in Khadakvasla? Would it have been much different on the other side of that border? Sikandar's quiet study of the musical culture of the Pakistani Armed Forces is immediate evidence of the common Anglo-Indian idiom that all legatees of the British Indian Army share.

I feel I should know these tunes by name, but they are blending into one another in my mind. Was there a Reveille? A Taps? One of them must surely be The Last Post, with which soldiers from the United States through Britain through Pakistan and India are laid to final rest. I smile wanly at Pakistani troops marching jauntily to Colonel Bogey March, which I remember from Hollywood's Bridge over the River Kwai. Now a soldier sitting impassively in what appears to be a professional recording studio is belting out a folk or tribal tune that I can't completely catch either, now dissolving into soulful and jazzy improv and fadeout: jadon ho gae gori nal pyar, ho gae kisi de nal pyar... 

The alternately seated and then marching Army bands, and their fluid medley of Western and Indian musicalities puts me in mind of my own wedding day, now a lifetime ago. The invitation card was based on a painting I'd commissioned from the contemporary Indian miniature painter Mohammed Firozuddin, who traces his families legacy back to the house of Mansur, Jehangir's court painter. Its cover was based on The Marriage Procession of Dara Shikoh, a famous Avadhi painting by Haji Madni, and showed an enormous imperial procession behind the mounted prince, including a troupe of musicians and foot-soldiers carrying their shields above their heads.

In her choice of Pakistani Army Bands as a subject for visual capture and representation, Sikandar triggers deep resonances from within the tradition of Indo-Islamic miniature painting. The corporeal language, rhythm, space-making and compositional effects that she discovers and creates in film appear rooted in courtly spectacles as well as in their painterly representation, in various Mughal and later Company and British Imperial styles. The pagentry of Army bands on both sides of the border, moreover, have their foundation in mansabdari and related feudatary traditions of spectacle, which involved the parade and presentation of armed battalions and material resources potentially available for the command of the Emperor. Though visually beguiling, they are a pre-democratic form of public spectacle, which have been variously accomodated within the modern republics of South Asia.

In a patch of green in front of a public building a marching band has been invited to play for the camera. Perfectly framed and perfectly composed, they are united in music. Although they have finished the music somehow is still sounding, while they shuffle off and sort into the individuals they are actually comprised of, walking away in twos and threes, or standing alone, struggling with a carry-belt or a piece of regalia. In the distance, a motorcade is being prepared, for General Staff, ready, also to depart.

The common threads of our Anglo-American and Indo-Pakistani martial cultures are easy to trace through all of these songs, national, martial and regional, as well as in the patterns of drill that the marching bands will follow and the diverse postures of relaxation and ease that the bodies of these men will fall back into when they break formation. While it is easy and commonplace to fault the Pakistani army for usurping civilian authority, Sikandar's video essay would suggest that this has occurred not on account of their own character, but because of the structure of institutions and society around them. It has been on my mind, since I saw Sikandar's piece and viewed her other exhibits, that Britain and India enjoy civil service bureaucracies with a strong cadre structure, traditions, and values of social and welfare service delivery, while by comparison, at least, Pakistan and America do not. 

The emerging embrace of the American and Pakistani militaries and national security apparatuses is the subtext of numerous sketches and studies that are also on exhibit. Reading clockwise around the gallery, they are illuminations from an unwritten manuscript, whose themes and meanings build successively upon one another as the creative afterglow of her cinematic project, while also being informed by the Americana she has recently curated from the collections of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. As esquisses they give an intimate account of the Artist's process of thought, association, meaning-making, and so will be prized by contemporary collectors, though they might once have served as mere preparatory work for real paintings. Sikandar has, in fact, completed several major new paintings of this kind, folio spreads too large to be lost, larger than the measure of man, at the scale of architecture itself, wherein all the meanings and intentionalities worked out in these drawings are reassembled in grand compositional style.

Where her documentation of the Pakistani military was perspectival and immediate, Sikandar's depiction of the CIA and the Pentagon is visually and conceptually abstract. The Langley Series is a set of four drawings that serve as a kind of book within the book, which borrows from eighteenth century Architectural copper-plate print-publishing in the tradition of Palladio, documenting real and imagined labyrinthine gardens as templates for new potential projects. In case you missed it, the CIA is a labyrinth. Sikandar's four-part Empire Follows Art is executed in a similar idiom, but to greater rhetorical effect: Her drawings begin with the classical hexagonal grids of Islamic Art and Architecture, which replicate and extend in all directions clear off and beyond the drawing surface. They are an index as well as an icon of infinitude, as well as a vehicle and means for entering into a meditative state. An observer may simply fall away from everyday reality and begin to see the world as a mere reflection of the divine. An open doorway to the boundaries of the nation, however, allows alterity to enter. Within the hexagonal grid complexifications and secret patterns are discovered, which reveal first one and then another larger pentagon, now co-originous, squared-off but mutually generating, the radiating star-triangles of one becoming the corners of the other. The resulting pattern is a stalemate, from which no release now appears possible. It is damningly good work, for I will never be able to look at the Pakistani flag again, without seeing the Pentagon inscribed within and superscribed around its star. Yet there is also no space for optimism left in Sikandar's geometry, and this is deeply disquieting.

In the titles of these paintings and series of drawings, Sikandar is more clearly polemic and critical of the Army and of militaristic thinking than she has allowed herself to be in the video installation: Here Fido, Here Boy, Arteries and Artillery, The Little Boys Club, for example. 

Tone-Deaf Top-Brass is a tart set of obvious double-entendres, that Sikandar also couldn't resist perhaps, though the painting's visual content allows even more deeply critical readings of the relationship between Pakistan and America: amidst a figural garden stands the dynamically arching body of a warrior-monk, his loin-cloth fluttering in the wind of his motion. His arms outstretch such that they might hold an M-16, or is it an AK-47, or is it just a deformed trombone, whose double-sided double-barrelled horns billow into parachutes. This is blowback, for virtual inversions and bilateral near-asymmetries must always describe the joint drills being conducted under a waving American flag.

In any number of these drawings the figure of the  monk reappears, now dancing or playing music,  now  fighting, now transforming himself into an  eagle-man, leaping into the skies, grotesque and mighty. The monk is an icon of the artist and also perhaps of the observer, but the donning of the eagle-gear is a complex image that can be read in so many different ways. Pakistan is something else, but hiding in an eagle's clothing. The Pakistani leadership is flying high, but American eagle-gear is no reliable means or mechanism of flight. The eagle-man is also a mythological figuration of America's drones, preying in the skies above Afghanistan and Pakistan, making mere mortals of the tribesmen and women below, for they can no longer seek sanctuary within the security or damnation of their own national boundaries. A possible follow up project to Bending the Barrel suggests itself in the form of a docudrama of the pilots of Predators that fly over Afghanistan and Pakistan, but who work at military bases in Texas, Arizona and New Mexico, as they return home each day, catch a swim or play tennis to unwind before helping their kids with homework and sitting down to supper.

In a series of calligraphic remixes and medleys, Sikandar explores the imposition of freedom upon Pakistan and the transposition of American values and national narratives upon the region at large. She copies existing copies of that famed original parchment, the American Declaration of Independence, her version being interrupted by further Krugeresque text fragments, now esconced within arabesques and calligraphic flourishes that bleed into the declarative signatures of John Hancock and other Founding Fathers. Beyond the limits of foundational charters, beyond time and the reactionary logic of the state, there is a warning here, and also a terrifying invitation, to the blurring of cultures and national narratives, which will create monstrosities and beauties, the likes of which populate our dreams. The calligraphic line, the flow of ink, funding, influence and power which now interconnect the destinies of Pakistan and America, Sikandar seems to suggest, form an umbilical chord, stomach to stomach, America to West Asia, but who is feeding whom?

Unlike Steve Gaghan's film Syriana (2005), which appears to counsel Americans to stay home and stay out of West Asia lest they endanger their children, their marriages and their personal safety, Sikandar's ambivalent exploration of the engagement of Pakistan and America seems to acknowledge that there is no turning back. Yet these intersections of culture and national interests will not involve any simple relations of power and quiescence, but will continue to create terrible beauty and violence before something else, something new, however bastardized or unholy, is born.

Sikandar's painting The Last Post is a sly, subtle and poignant remixing of media and cultures. The surface of the painting is contiguous with a sheet of music, but as the notes of the tune dance along the page they are interrupted by Urdu calligraphic characters, the visual and formal similarity between these two forms of notation descending more and more fluidly into an enclosed garden, perhaps even Arlington Cemetery. Also dancing around and along the painting are the contoured peaks and lines of the Himalayas, between Afghanistan and Pakistan where death, these days, seems to come easy, no matter what culture or world region one originally came from.

As Sikandar's sketches turn to watercolor and gouache studies, they become increasingly lurid and phantasmagoric, tracing for example the intestines of the general as they curl into a fleshy great horn, the sound emanating therefrom becoming a grotesque fart. Finally, in the apocalyptic Faith, Unity, Discipline, named for Pakistan's national motto, the Artist's warrior-monk is dancing a tandava amidst the flames of a ruined state, whose mountains and clouds are equally inflammed, whipped up by whirring battleship helicopters, as Jinnah's likeness, with Pakistan's flag for backdrop, looks on impassively. If the flavors of these paintings includes fury, horror and disgust, the overarching mood of the series is of pathos -- but without compassion, and leading the observer not to shanti, cessation, but rather the indeterminacy of a stalemate. All known ways of living and being and managing Pakistan from within and without have been exhausted, no new ones have emerged, and still we must persist.

Miniaturists throughout the Islamic world have always known that the art of the book is a tragedy waiting to happen. Their work will remain hidden for years, consulted only by those with access to power and its handmaiden, beauty, until the book is lost, the pages scattered, and its illuminations sold in the marketplace to foreigners who will only incompletely understand the fragments they are bidding on. Unlike Hindu temple sculpture or Tibetan thangka paintings, miniaturists have worked in courtly guilds, fragile superstructural apparatuses funded by the State, whose fantasies and purposes they must then subserve, or in fact subvert. Sikandar's focus on the apparatuses, ideologies and emblems of the State, therefore, are well within the repertoire and thematics that have defined Indian and Persian miniature painting. But the world-remaking power of Sikandar's work is so great that it forces us to reconsider the extended artistic and cultural legacies of the Mughal empire, which must now include Avadh, Hyderabad, contemporary Pakistan and -- who knew? -- the United States of America.


All images courtesy Scott Briscoe of Sikkema Jenkins & Co:

1. Empire Follows Art, 4th of 4 works, detail
2. Empire Follows Art, 3rd of 4 works
3. Tone Deaf Top Brass
4. Alter Ego, After Goya #2
5. Last Post

Shahzia Sikandar's exhibition Stalemate is on at the Sikkema Jenkins Gallery through May 2, 2009.

Perceptions

Hirsch Perlman. An Animus Cat Antagonist. 2008.

Choromogenic print.

Current Hammer Museum, LA show: "... For this exhibition Perlman made a new body of photographs—portraits of a cat shot with a 4 x 5 camera – which are studies of movement and stillness, both beautiful and haunting at the same time."

More here, here, and here.

Post dedicated to Abbas Raza.

Werner Herzog: Beyond the syphilitic machine

Edward B. Rackley

Even the most subtle and complex artists can’t escape the crudity of synopsis. Grazing the critical literature surrounding Herzog’s films and career, two stock phrases repeat incessantly: ‘man vs. nature’ and ‘Heart of Darkness parable’. These signposts may guide the uninitiated, but as always the map is never the terrain.

Generically speaking, Herzog explores the complexity of man/nature relations in dozens of films and documentaries; his antipathy towards romanticism and Cinema Verité is well known. To reject both fantasy and empiricism as story telling vehicles, where does that leave a director? Because it blurs fact and fiction, Herzog’s method of documentary cinema is rogue. To contrast his approach with Cinema Verité, in interviews he cites the Heideggerian concept of ‘ecstatic truth’ (remember ‘unconcealment’, fellow philosophers?).  The work of the author lies in finding friction between the facts, enough to create light or 'illumination' according to Herzog.

‘The truth of accountants’

In 1999 Herzog released a twelve-point manifesto called ‘Lessons of Darkness’, borrowing the title of his silent recording of devastated oil fields in Kuwait following the first Iraq war. Much of the manifesto is tongue in cheek, Point Three captures Herzog’s balancing act between fact and insight, where fact is a “rock beneath which greater truths hide.” Facts are superficial truths, the “truth of accountants,” the snapshots of tourists. To film facts and reject fabrication is to confuse fact for truth; such orthodoxies “plow only stones.” Illumination, the goal of successful cinema, happens because “facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.” 

Man the measure of madness

It is easy to caricature Herzog as a misanthrope: dwarfs taking over the asylum in 'Even Dwarfs Started Small'; the swaggering, leering colonial adventurer in 'Aguirre: Wrath of God', the voyeuristic cruelty of 'Kaspar Hauser'. Yet misanthropy followed Herzog closely, less in his choice of themes than in the form of his frequent lead actor and artistic collaborator, Klaus Kinski. Kinski starred in Nosferatu, Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo, Woyzeck, Cobra Verde and, the classic record of supreme artistic hubris as madness, My Best Fiend. YouTube holds a trove of Kinski's spiteful outbursts; I like this one the best (from MBF).

Aguirre and the more recent Grizzly Man constitute the spectrum of Herzog's misanthropic subjects, each with their own antagonistic relationship to nature and the world of men. Aguirre, the story of a mutinous Spanish conquistador seeking gold and domination in the Peruvian rainforest, sets the stage for nature's harsh rebuke. It is this film more than all others that feeds the popular perception of Herzog films as 'Heart of Darkness parables'. I see it instead as one among many shades of misanthropy and anthropocentrism, the full spectrum of which is contained in Herzog's career. Aguirre is arguably Kinski's finest performance, with Fitzcarraldo a close second.

Grizzly Man presents an altogether different, more nuanced and contemporary mode of misanthropy and anthropocentrism, that of the environmental defender/activist. Nature is under siege by a calamitous and greedy humanity; its flora and fauna at risk of extinction as human civilization encroaches and metastizes. Alaskan Grizzly Bears provide Timothy Treadwell with an object of communion, a purpose for his existence, thus far elusive in human society. Nature and its beasts are not 'red in tooth and claw'; they are there for our solace and succor. Inter-species communion is obtainable with Treadwell's enlightened approach. But Treadwell is eaten alive on camera--not Herzog's but his own, an attempted record of his efforts to befriend a remote Grizzly. 'Let us be grateful the universe does not know our smile', Herzog writes in his manifesto. No hippy romantic, he.

Soundtrack as dramatic element

Herzog has an uncanny ability to match the climaxes and nadirs of his soundtracks with the film's visual footage and narrative. Popol Vuh, named after the Mayan genesis myth, created soundtracks for many Herzog films of the 70s and 80s. In a previous post for 3QD, I confessed my first love among Herzog films. 'The Great Ecstasy of the Woodcarver Steiner' follows a record-setting ski jumper who makes his living carving wood figurines. Popol Vuh provides its powerful soundtrack, full of building crescendos and periods of faint, throbbing notes. 

Watching 'Kaspar Hauser' the other night, I was surprised to see a cameo of Florian Fricke from Popol Vuh. He plays a blind pianist living where Kaspar the adult foundling is taken in by a good Samaritan. Fricke sits slumped at an old piano, banging out these chords from the Steiner soundtrack. Herzog lets the camera linger on Fricke's face as the last note fades -- a gesture of kinship and respect between two visionaries. [The song itself appears on the Aguirre soundtrack album.]

A Heideggerian in Hollywood

In a recent interview with an awestruck Henry Rollins in annoying gee-whiz mode, Herzog was not expansive but did confirm that he’s living in Los Angeles and liking it. “LA is the city with the most substance in the US, period.” Henry tried to wrap his head around that one and couldn't. He leaned forward: "And all the plastic surgery? What about that?" 

Herzog smiled, unfazed: "Hollywood is where the dreams of the world are organized and manufactured … including stupidity."

 

 

The Next Great Discontinuity

Part Two: The Data Deluge
(Link to Part One)

By Daniel Rourke

Speed is the elegance of thought, which mocks stupidity, heavy and slow. Intelligence thinks and says the unexpected; it moves with the fly, with its flight. A fool is defined by predictability...

But if life is brief, luckily, thought travels as fast as the speed of light. In earlier times philosophers used the metaphor of light to express the clarity of thought; I would like to use it to express not only brilliance and purity but also speed. In this sense we are inventing right now a new Age of Enlightenment...

A lot of... incomprehension... comes simply from this speed. I am fairly glad to be living in the information age, since in it speed becomes once again a fundamental category of intelligence.

Michel Serres, Conversations on Science, Culture and Time

Human beings are often described as the great imitators:

We perceive the ant and the termite as part of nature. Their nests and mounds grow out of the Earth. Their actions are indicative of a hidden pattern being woven by natural forces from which we are separated. The termite mound is natural, and we, the eternal outsiders, sitting in our cottages, our apartments and our skyscrapers, are somehow not. Through religion, poetry, or the swift skill of the craftsman smearing pigment onto canvas, humans aim to encapsulate that quality of existence that defies simple description. The best art, or so it is said, brings us closer to attaining a higher truth about the world that remains elusive from language, that perhaps the termite itself embodies as part of its nature. Termite mounds are beautiful, but were built without a concept of beauty. Termite mounds are mathematically precise, yet crawling through their intricate catacombs cannot be found one termite in comprehension of even the simplest mathematical constituent. In short, humans imitate and termites merely are.

This extraordinary idea is partly responsible for what I referred to in Part One of this article as The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness. It leads us to consider not only the human organism as distinct from its surroundings, but it also forces us to separate human nature from its material artefacts. We understand the termite mound as integral to termite nature, but are quick to distinguish the axe, the wheel, the book, the skyscraper and the computer network from the human nature that bore them.

When we act, through art, religion or with the rational structures of science, to interface with the world our imitative (mimetic) capacity has both subjective and objective consequence. Our revelations, our ideas, stories and models have life only insofar as they have a material to become invested through. The religion of the dance, the stone circle and the summer solstice is mimetically different to the religion of the sermon and the scripture because the way it interfaces with the world is different.

Likewise, it is only with the consistency of written and printed language that the technical arts could become science, and through which our ‘modern’ era could be built. Dances and stone circles relayed mythic thinking structures, singular, imminent and ethereal in their explanatory capacities. The truth revealed by the stone circle was present at the interface between participant, ceremony and summer solstice: a synchronic truth of absolute presence in the moment. Anyone reading this will find truth and meaning through grapholectic interface. Our thinking is linear, reductive and bound to the page. It is reliant on a diachronic temporality that the pen, the page and the book hold in stasis for us. Imitation alters the material world, which in turn affects the texture of further imitation. If we remove the process from its material interface we lose our objectivity. In doing so we isolate the single termite from its mound and, after much careful study, announce that we have reduced termite nature to its simplest constituent.

The reason for the tantalizing involutions here is obviously that intelligence is relentlessly reflexive, so that even the external tools that it uses to implement its workings become ‘internalized’, that is, part of its own reflexive process...

To say writing is artificial is not to condemn it but to praise it. Like other artificial creations and indeed more than any other, it is utterly invaluable and indeed essential for the realisation of fuller, interior, human potentials. Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word.

Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy

Anyone reading this article cannot fail but be aware of the changing interface between eye and text that has taken place over the past two decades or so. New Media – everything from the internet database to the Blackberry – has fundamentally changed the way we connect with each other, but it has also altered the way we connect with information itself. The linear, diachronic substance of the page and the book have given way to a dynamic textuality blurring the divide between authorship and readership, expert testament and the simple accumulation of experience.

The main difference between traditional text-based systems and newer, data-driven ones is quite simple: it is the interface. Eyes and fingers manipulate the book, turning over pages in a linear sequence in order to access the information stored in its printed figures. For New Media, for the digital archive and the computer storage network, the same information is stored sequentially in databases which are themselves hidden to the eye. To access them one must commit a search or otherwise run an algorithm that mediates the stored data for us. The most important distinction should be made at the level of the interface, because, although the database as a form has changed little over the past 50 years of computing, the Human Control Interfaces (HCI) we access and manipulate that data through are always passing from one iteration to another. Stone circles interfacing the seasons stayed the same, perhaps being used in similar rituals over the course of a thousand years of human cultural accumulation. Books, interfacing text, language and thought, stay the same in themselves from one print edition to the next, but as a format, books have changed very little in the few hundred years since the printing press. The computer HCI is most different from the book in that change is integral to it structure. To touch a database through a computer terminal, through a Blackberry or iPhone, is to play with data at incredible speed:

Sixty years ago, digital computers made information readable. Twenty years ago, the Internet made it reachable. Ten years ago, the first search engine crawlers made it a single database. Now Google and like-minded companies are sifting through the most measured age in history, treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition...

Kilobytes were stored on floppy disks. Megabytes were stored on hard disks. Terabytes were stored in disk arrays. Petabytes are stored in the cloud. As we moved along that progression, we went from the folder analogy to the file cabinet analogy to the library analogy to — well, at petabytes we ran out of organizational analogies.

At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics...

This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.

Wired Magazine, The End of Theory, June 2008

And as the amount of data has expanded exponentially, so have the interfaces we use to access that data and the models we build to understand that data. On the day that Senator John McCain announced his Vice Presidential Candidate the best place to go for an accurate profile of Sarah Palin was not the traditional media: it was Wikipedia. In an age of instant, global news, no newspaper could keep up with the knowledge of the cloud. The Wikipedia interface allowed knowledge about Sarah Palin from all levels of society to be filtered quickly and efficiently in real-time. Wikipedia acted as if it was encyclopaedia, as newspaper as discussion group and expert all at the same time and it did so completely democratically and at the absence of a traditional management pyramid. The interface itself became the thinking mechanism of the day, as if the notes every reader scribbled in the margins had been instantly cross-checked and added to the content.

In only a handful of years the human has gone from merely dipping into the database to becoming an active component in a human-cloud of data. The interface has begun to reflect back upon us, turning each of us into a node in a vast database bigger than any previous material object. Gone are the days when clusters of galaxies had to a catalogued by an expert and entered into a linear taxonomy. Now, the same job is done by the crowd and the interface, allowing a million galaxies to be catalogued by amateurs in the same time it would have taken a team of experts to classify a tiny percentage of the same amount.

This method of data mining is called ‘crowdsourcing’ and it represents one of the dominant ways in which raw data will be turned into information (and then knowledge) over the coming decades. Here the cloud serves as more than a metaphor for the group-driven interface, becoming a telling analogy for the trans-grapholectic culture we now find ourselves in. To grasp the topological shift in our thought patterns it pays to move beyond the interface and look at a few of the linear, grapholectic models that have undergone change as a consequence of the information age. One of these models is evolution, a biological theory the significance of which we are still in the process of discerning:

If anyone now thinks that biology is sorted, they are going to be proved wrong too. The more that genomics, bioinformatics and many other newer disciplines reveal about life, the more obvious it becomes that our present understanding is not up to the job. We now gaze on a biological world of mind-boggling complexity that exposes the shortcomings of familiar, tidy concepts such as species, gene and organism.

A particularly pertinent example [was recently provided in New Scientist] - the uprooting of the tree of life which Darwin used as an organising principle and which has been a central tenet of biology ever since. Most biologists now accept that the tree is not a fact of nature - it is something we impose on nature in an attempt to make the task of understanding it more tractable. Other important bits of biology - notably development, ageing and sex - are similarly turning out to be much more involved than we ever imagined. As evolutionary biologist Michael Rose at the University of California, Irvine, told us: "The complexity of biology is comparable to quantum mechanics."

New Scientist, Editorial, January 2009

As our technologies became capable of gathering more data than we were capable of comprehending, a new topology of thought, reminiscent of the computer network, began to emerge. For the mindset of the page and the book science could afford to be linear and diachronic. In the era of The Data Deluge science has become more cloud-like, as theories for everything from genetics to neuroscience, particle physics to cosmology have shed their linear constraints. Instead of seeing life as a branching tree, biologists are now speaking of webs of life, where lineages can intersect and interact, where entire species are ecological systems in themselves. As well as seeing the mind as an emergent property of the material brain, neuroscience and philosophy have started to consider the mind as manifest in our extended, material environment. Science has exploded, and picking up the pieces will do no good.

Through the topology of the network we have begun to perceive what Michel Serres calls ‘The World Object’, an ecology of interconnections and interactions that transcends and subsumes the causal links propounded by grapholectic culture. At the limits of science a new methodology is emerging at the level of the interface, where masses of data are mined and modelled by systems and/or crowds which themselves require no individual understanding to function efficiently. Where once we studied events and ideas in isolation we now devise ever more complex, multi-dimensional ways for those events and ideas to interconnect; for data sources to swap inputs and output; for outsiders to become insiders. Our interfaces are in constant motion, on trajectories that curve around to meet themselves, diverge and cross-pollinate. Thought has finally been freed from temporal constraint, allowing us to see the physical world, life, language and culture as multi-dimensional, fractal patterns, winding the great yarn of (human) reality:

The advantage that results from it is a new organisation of knowledge; the whole landscape is changed. In philosophy, in which elements are even more distanced from one another, this method at first appears strange, for it brings together the most disparate things.

People quickly crit[cize] me for this... But these critics and I no longer have the same landscape in view, the same overview of proximities and distances. With each profound transformation of knowledge come these upheavals in perception.

Michel Serres, Conversations on Science, Culture and Time

The Literature of the Piano

       “I’d like piano lessons,” said my daughter, and, yes, of course, I said, that would be terrific. She was only six. How could she know that she was giving me permission to relapse into yet another time-wasting obsession, with the possibility of acquiring yet another library on a subject? Now, under cover of being a good parent, I could once again dive into a literature, slip off to internet chat rooms late at night, wander into stores that had been around forever but that I had never had an excuse to explore, and contemplate an expensive purchase. But mainly I like to read about that kind of thing.

       “Of course,” I said, benevolently, the noble father. But I was thrilled; such interests had been largely off limits since donning the responsible hoodie of the parent. In earlier years, I had been there with photography, wooden boats, ice hockey, tube amplifiers, all pursuits offering a deep literature, and the chance to spend money. Right away, I knew full well where I was headed: Worst of all are the Internet forums, where I will undoubtedly cruise late at night, recklessly picking up useful-seeming advice from strangers hiding behind screen names. (Why does Dennis care quite so much about the grey market, one must wonder?)

       Not all interests spawn literature of equal quality. The literature of the tube amplifier and the literature of hockey are as one in their paucity. Tube amplifiers are lacking an oeuvre, certainly, because, well, they just kind of sit there. The dearth of good hockey writing is a little more mysterious, but it may be a sport that knocks the lyricism out of people.

       The piano, like wooden boats, seems to spin off more books than actual piano players, judging by the number of books that I have read on the two subjects and the number of wooden boat owners and accomplished piano players that I have met. For the amount of soaring prose generated, too, these two objects share the Empyrean. When I was obsessively reading about wooden boats, writers were always going on about how they were alive, had molded with the water, what have you. And so with the piano and its ethereal mellifluousness, et cetera.

       As far as the number of literate admirers, I can think of no other musical instrument that compares to the piano. Stabs have been made at a few, of course. There is a small genre of violin books. Annie Proulx did write a novel called The Accordion, but no one got very excited about it, as far as I could tell.

       There are piano movies, of course, too. Think how alluring was the madness of Geoffrey Rush in Shine. Yeah, he was crazy, but wouldn’t it maybe be worth it to play a piece like the “Rack 3?” There is The Piano; The Piano Teacher; and the tragic love affair in Once, unconsummated but made real over the keys; the joyful songs in The History Boys, played by English schoolboys experiencing their special kind of love for one another, whatever it is.

       As for the books, I am doing my best to read all of them, but only six months in I am a long way from that. I read NPR’s Noah Adams’ book about a year spent trying to learn the piano, in which he goes to every length, from buying a Steinway, to ordering some kind of computer software to teach him. Tricia Tunstall, in Note by Note, writes of twenty years teaching boys and girls to play. Charles Rosen’s Piano Notes was an odd addition, for it seems aimed at people seriously considering making a living as a concert pianist. There are many to go. The microscopy of the obsession is relentless. There is a whole subgenre of books on the making of a Steinway, down to the least mystical details. And there is yet too a book about Glenn Gould’s personal Steinway; he spent a decade trying to get it perfectly tuned.

       Probably best and most obsessively disordered of all was Perry Knize’s perfectly titled Grand Obsession, a book, as far as I could tell, about essentially going crazy, though it purports to be merely the recounting of her efforts to get her Grotrian grand piano properly tuned. Knize, in her forties, decides she must learn to be a concert pianist, and this leads her to need a piano, which leads her to stores on the east and west coasts and in the Midwest. She finds an obscure brand at Beethoven pianos in New York, and it plays perfectly there, but not so well after it has been shipped through an icestorm to her home in Montana. And so years of strange behavior on her part ensue, from flying a tuner in from New York, to visiting the piano maker’s factory in Germany, all in search of a vanished sound. (As an author, I am frankly curious to know how she managed to sell a proposal for a book about getting a piano properly tuned.)

       Combining two oft-pornified subjects, the piano and Paris, there is The Piano Shop on the Left Bank, romancing the strangeness of the French, who, apparently, uber-quaintly, will not sell you a piano unless you have a reference. As with seemingly every author of every book on the piano, Thad Carharrt walks into a piano store hoping to buy a cheap little upright to plink away on, and ends up with something much more esoteric and expensive, after the piano salesman, all of whom seem to be Svengalis, somehow upgrades him to an antique baby grand way out of his budget. Same thing happened to Knize and Adams.

       It’s quite an upsell, when you realize how, like good dogs, very nice pianos are always trying just to walk into your life. For such a lovable and charming instrument, capable of producing book after book on its wiles, there are an awful lot in the thrift shops, and even, here in the city, alone on the sidewalks. I passed a perfectly good Yamaha on 2nd Avenue the other day.

       In this odd combination of ability to entrance, and frequency of discard, the piano must only be matched, again, by the wooden boat. What other objects elicit at once so much passion, and yet spend so much time freezing in barns, or waiting in antique shops for suitors who shall never come?

       I live six blocks from a thrift shop, and it is one of my current pleasures to go there once a week, and to usually find yet another beautiful piano available for not much. There have been a multitude of spinets, and one glamorous baby grand made by the venerable Chickering. This week there is a Janssen, a small piano which must have been made in the thirties; it looks to be made of cherry, if that’s possible, and the intricacy of the woodwork is breathtaking. It was actually built in New York, which, I have learned, was once one of the great piano-building capitals. So many were built that there were worries for a time that wouldn’t be enough trees in the country to keep going. Steinway is still here, of course, but I read on the Internet that it is not the same. Of course not.

       I have a digital keyboard, now, as a kind of placeholder. There are no books about digital pianos, that I know of, though they outsell the real thing by a decent margin. They do not need to be tuned, for one thing, and this must take some of the fun out of the journey, for perfection is clearly not as interesting as the attempt to reach it.

       Once you start playing the piano, though, you do get a chance to feel some of the romance that fills the books; not necessarily at home with your teach-yourself-piano book, but sometimes it happens while traveling.

       I finally played a Steinway, and the right kind, last week, down at the Gallery Inn in San Juan, Puerto Rico. It was in a music room overlooking the water. It must have been nine feet long. It had been built in 1934, and belonged to the father or grandfather of the hotel’s owner.  He had gotten it from music department of Yale, and it had spent fifty years at the family home in Connecticut, before being shipped down. They moved it into the conservatory with a crane, over the hotel and through the courtyard window. There amid books and candles and thick drapes and heavy wood furniture and old scores, I played some of the easy note piano I had been practicing, and for the first time, felt walloped by the full romance of the pursuit, the mellifluous sonorities, the sense of… well, it seemed like the kind of scene I could put in a book, and the strangest part was that I actually kind of wished I was reading about it.

       

How we learned to stop worrying and love the recession

by Manisha Verma

Lets begin with Adam Smith and his masterpiece The Wealth of Nations in which he argued that all human actions are rooted in self-preservation and directed towards self-interest, and that personal ambition is not a vice, but a virtue, leading to hard work and prosperity. He propagated that businesses and workers, left to themselves are  motivated by self-interest to put their capital and labor to uses where they are most productive. Facing keen competition from other companies, a businessperson has to build high-quality products at the lowest possible prices, and to get ahead of the competition, everyone has to work to their best potential. That's how self-preservation works. He did not denounce avarice, which is inborn in most of us; in fact a lot of modern monopolists have invoked his ideologies to rationalize their income levels. The United States was the first country which adopted the practices he had preached, and with open arms embraced the spirit of individualism that was already sizzling among its freedom fighters, who were typically averse to federal intervention in matters of pursuit of profit in a business enterprise. The nascent US industry advanced at a brisk pace, and early enterprises provided keen competition to each other. The power of domestic rivalry became a dynamic force in a free-market economy, and importing capital from abroad and combining it with domestic factories, they sold their products primarily to consumers at home[3]. By the end of the nineteenth century the US had forged ahead of the previously dominant economies of England, Germany and France and emerged as the world's economic leader. The invisible hand of Adam Smith provided a most visible success story to the globe. Free enterprise, thus became a mantra for economists and politicians, and the rest as they say, is history.

Or so it seemed till recently.

Several accounts of the crisis now often seem to place the ultimate blame squarely on the shoulders of free market capitalism embodiments - Wall street bankers, hedge funds, mortgage lenders and rating agencies, or even on the mistakes of former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan. It would not be accurate to say that we as a collective mass of civilization with a rich history of preceding financial disasters had absolutely no foresight. Former Federal Reserve governor Edward M. Gramlich privately warned Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan about abusive lending behavior in subprime mortgage markets in 2000, but the warning was swept aside. Gramlich went public with his worries in 2007 and published a book on the subprime bubble just before the crisis broke. Charles Kindleberger, an expert on bubbles, warned of the housing bubble in 2002. Martin Feldstein, Paul Volcker(former Fed chairman)and Bill Rhodes(a senior Citibank official) all made bearish warnings. Nouriel Roubini predicted that the housing bubble would lead to a recession in 2006. But as the WSJ noted, there were many hedge funds taking a bearish stance on housing but "they suffered such painful losses waiting for a collapse" that they  eventually gave up their positions. To the extent that even in 2007 the then CEO of Citibank Chuck Prince was quoted as saying "When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance. We're still dancing".

It would now seem that the housing bubble that created the crisis was allowed to grow as big as it did because we as a society do not yet completely understand, or know how to deal with speculative bubbles. At its root, there was never an attempt to thwart the epidemic of irrational public exuberance for housing investments, even though the most well-informed people knew what was going on was a bubble, yet carried away by an illusion of a Goldilocks economy, a majority of them continued their nap in paradise. Clearly there was no active segment in society that was critically evaluating the real-estate market for any potential of its speculative excess. The perception that real-estate prices could only go up, year after year, established an atmosphere that encouraged lenders and banking institutions to loosen their standards and risk default. This, if anything serves as a lesson in human behavior and its capriciousness.

Banks sold off their riskiest mortgages by repackaging them into collaterized debt obligations ( CDOs) which channeled the cash flows from thousands of mortgages into a series of tranched bonds with risks and yields tuned to different investor tastes. The top tier tranches, which comprised perhaps 80 percent of the bonds, would have first call on all underlying cash flows, so they could be sold with a AAA rating. The lower tiers absorbed first-dollar risks but carried higher yields. In practice, bankers and rating agencies grossly underestimated the risks inherent in absurdities like no-documentation (ninja) loans.

Securitization in fact was meant to lower risks through tiering and geographic diversification. Instead it ended up increasing the risks by transferring ownership of mortgages from bankers who knew their customers to investors who did not. Loans were were sourced by brokers, temporarily warehoused by thinly capitalized mortgage bankers, then sold en bloc to investment banks, who manufactured CDOs, which were rated by rating agencies and sold off to institutional investors. All income from the original sourcing was fee based - the higher the volumes, the bigger the bonuses. The prospect of earning fees without incurring risks encouraged lax and deceptive business practices. Around 2005, securitization became a mania. "Synthetic" securities that minimized the risk of real securities but did not incur the expense of buying and assembling actual loans were mass produced , well beyond the actual supply in the market. Enterprising investment bankers sliced up CDOs and repacked them into CDOs of CDOs or CDO²s, and CDO³s. The highest slices of lower-rated CDOs obtained AAA ratings, creating more AAA liabilities than there were AAA assets. Synthetic products towards the end accounted for more than half the trading volume[2].

Even though the US has weathered several financial crisis, like the international lending crisis of the 1980s and the savings and loan crisis of the 1990s, the current one, as is unanimously agreed upon by all who know, is entirely different in character. It spread from one segment of the market to others, particularly those which employed newly created structured and synthetic instruments. Distress spread from residential real-estate to credit card debt, auto debt, and commercial real estate and the credit default swaps market. Even the seemingly benign municipal bond market, which had lately  ventured into insuring structured products has been disrupted.

In 2003, the Fed cut its federal funds rate to 1%, roughly the period of most rapid home-price increase. In fact, the inflation-corrected federal funds- rate was actually negative from Oct 2002 to April 2005. (This was driven by economic conditions created by the bursting of the stock market bubble of the 1990s, and the real-estate boom was itself in some ways a repercussion of that same bubble.) The impact of this loose monetary policy was amplified by the large number of adjustable rate mortgages issued after 2000, particularly to subprime borrowers. These mortgages were more responsive than the fixed