by Matt McKenna

Christopher Nolan's Interstellar may have been advertised as a science fiction blockbuster set in the vast nothingness of outer space, but the message of the film is clearly directed at more terrestrial concerns. While Interstellar attempts to distract its audience with riddles about space, time, and the nature of reality, the movie simultaneously drives home a critique of American politics and in particular the 2014-midterm elections. In fact, it's been rumored that the film's release was pushed back to November 5th–the day after the midterm elections–just so the movie wouldn't be viewed as a brazen attempt to influence voters.

How can a movie about saving the world via space travel be so political? Well, consider that the primary conflict in Interstellar involves the principal characters considering how long humanity can struggle on a dying Earth before being forced to colonize a new planet and ensure the survival of the human species. As you can imagine, most members of the audience will find the parallels to the recent midterm elections a bit obvious in that these characters are clearly meant to represent American voters who were asked to consider how long their government can struggle in a dying political environment before being forced to break up the toxic two-party system and ensure the survival of democracy in the United States. Well, the good news is the film is pretty optimistic, but the bad news is that maybe it shouldn't be.

Cooper, played by Matthew McConaughey, is Interstellar's quiet-talking protagonist and renaissance man: he is a fabulous engineer, an incredible spaceship pilot, and by the time the film's plot begins, also an excellent agriculturist. This battery of skills comes in handy for Cooper as he is respected by both farmers and scientists for his breadth of knowledge which includes the intricate details of growing corn during the ongoing global blight and the incredibly specific skill of how to reprogram a wayward Indian military drone. It is therefore by fortunate happenstance (or is it?!) that Cooper ends up following a spookily transmitted message to a secret NORAD facility where he learns that Earth will soon become uninhabitable. Cooper is told he must fly a spaceship through a wormhole and locate a new planet to either 1) send the people of Earth or 2) grow a bunch of test-tube babies and reboot the human species.

At this point, you're probably rolling your eyes over the overt political parallels. And yes, even from the very beginning of the film, Nolan drops hints of the politicized nature of the story.

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by Misha Lepetic

“All this – all the meanness and agony without end
I sitting look out upon
See, hear and am silent.”

~ Walt Whitman

On a recent Facebook thread – about what, heaven help me remember – someone posted a comment along the lines of “This is what happens when we live in a post-truth society.” I honestly cannot recall what the original topic was about – politics? GamerGate? Climate change? Who knows – you can take your pick, and in the end it's not really that important. The comment struck me as misguided, though, and led me to contemplate not so much the state of ‘truth' as a category, which has always been precarious (see: 2,500 years of philosophy), but of the conditions that may or may not lead to the delineation and bounding of what we may consider to be sufficiently, acceptably truthful, and how technology has both helped and hindered this understanding today.

I responded to the commenter by suggesting that we live not so much in a ‘post-truth' society as a ‘post-accountability' society. It is not so much that truth is disrespected, distorted or ignored more than ever before, but rather that the consequences for doing so have (seemingly) dwindled to nearly zero. One could argue that this is vastly more damaging, because the degree of our accountability to one another profoundly influences how and if we can arrive at any sort of truth, period. Prior to the onset of information technology, there were well-established (and of course, deeply flawed) mechanisms for generating and enforcing accountability. Now, this mechanism of information technology that has relieved us of accountability is already so deeply enwoven into our society that not only will we never put the genie back in the bottle, we are at a loss to imagine how to ever get this genie to play nice. Except the problem is that this kind of righteous outrage is, in fact, entirely an illusion.

Instead of arguing about truth as an objective, abstract and hopefully attainable category, let's assume that truth (or whatever you want to call it) is a sort of consensus, and that consensus is reached through processes of trust (we respect each other's right to have a say) and accountability (we take some responsibility for what we say to each other). These are all fundamentally social processes, and as such haven't really changed very much over time. What interests me is how the insertion of technology into this discourse has changed our perceptions of the burdens that these concepts –truth, consensus, trust and accountability – are expected to bear.

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by Brooks Riley

The first time I passed through the Berlin Wall into the German Democratic Republic, it was two days after Hitler’s master builder Albert Speer was released from Spandau prison.

The Cold War was in full swing in the fall of 1966. I was travelling with a friend whose father was US ambassador to West Germany. An embassy driver took us two naïve young things on a tour of various landmarks in West Berlin, including the Wall and Spandau, where only a few hours earlier, Rudolf Hess had become the one remaining prisoner incarcerated there. Guarding Spandau, which now amounted to guarding Hess, was a joint venture of the Allies on a monthly rotational basis. Speer’s release had occurred in the dark of the previous night and U.S. embassy staff had been forbidden to attend the event. By the time our driver parked in front of the fearsome edifice, the French were in charge and no visitors were allowed–not that we were avid to peer inside those walls. Meeting the mentally unstable Hess might have been a kick, but only my friend’s father was given that dubious privilege.

Because of the GDR’s fluctuating policy toward diplomatic passports, my friend had to be issued a temporary non-diplomatic passport in order for us to visit East Berlin on a tourist bus. It was cold and rainy that day, gloomy on both sides of the wall. The bus would be taking a special route to the Pergamon Museum, one that insured that the shabbier vistas of East Berlin would be shielded from prying eyes–or so we were told. I remember glancing down side streets, looking for signs of decay or worse. What I saw were the ordinary streets of any big city in bad weather. So much for propaganda.

At the end of the day, we were taken to a café near the wall and told to be back at the bus by 6 p.m. for our return to West Berlin. At 6:15, the bus was nearly full, but one passenger was missing. As the minutes ticked by, the East German tour guide became increasingly nervous. A hint of ‘international incident’ hung in the air. The idea that someone would defect to East Germany was preposterous, but where was the guy? Was he a spy from the West infiltrating as a tourist? And if he didn’t show up, what would happen when the East Germans found out the American ambassador’s daughter was in their midst? ‘Terribly exciting,‘ we would later agree. At 6:20, the missing passenger boarded the bus with a lame excuse. So much for our le Carré moment out in the cold.

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by Jon Kujawa

On October twenty-first was Martin Gardner's 100th birthday. In celebration nearly one hundred Celebration of Mind (CoM) events are being held around the world. There are a few still yet to come: check their events listing to find one near you [1]. The CoM is an annual affair in which people celebrate all the things Martin loved: magic, art, music, mathematics, science, and the sheer joy of curiosity and discovery.

You're the sort of person who should go to a CoM if you think a computer constructed from 10,000 dominoes is really, really cool. Or a paper cutout dragon which appears to turn its head as you move. Or if you can't help but be intrigued by a question like “If you heat up a metal washer, does the hole in the center get larger or smaller?”

Martin Gardner (from Wikipedia)

Who was this Martin Gardner fellow who inspired so many people? Born and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, he is right up there with Will Rogers and Woody Guthrie in the pantheon of influential Okies. Gardner earned a degree in Philosophy from the University of Chicago and thereafter became a writer.

In 1956 he wrote an article for Scientific American about hexaflexagons: flat shapes you can construct from single sheet of paper which can flexed to reveal more than the two sides you expect. There's a nice video by James Grime in honor of Martin Gardner which shows how to construct the six sided version.

The article was so popular that Martin Gardner was invited to write a monthly column for Scientific American on “recreational mathematics”. He did so for twenty-five years and forever set the bar on writing mathematics for a general audience. His columns introduced the world to Conway's Game of Life and cellular automata, Penrose's infinite tiling of the plane with a pattern which never repeats despite using only two different tiles, the now-widely-used RSA encryption scheme, and the Mandelbrot set we ran into last month.

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by Kathleen Goodwin

Currently, Ebola hysteria in the United States is at a low simmer compared to the fever pitch of a few weeks prior. In the lull following the peak of the hysteria as Americans in Dallas and New York City tested positive for the virus, a number of activists, physicians, and journalists have reflected on the similarities between the Ebola epidemic and the emergence of AIDS in the 1980s. There are important differences, as a trending internet meme explains, more Americans have been married to Kim Kardashian than have died of Ebola. Yet, Ebola has captured thousands of headlines and is a constant source of discussion, speculation and fear. In stark comparison, it took until May 1983, when 558 AIDS deaths had been reported to the Center for Disease Control, for the New York Times to make AIDS front page news. In today's internet/ social media age, a fascination with the dramatically contagious, fast-acting, and horrific virus ensured that Ebola immediately became a significant news item in a sensationalist media culture where “if it bleeds it leads”. Americans were able to keep their fears of Ebola purely theoretical over the spring and summer even as the death toll rose in West Africa, but on September 29 when Thomas Eric Duncan was diagnosed in Dallas, panic erupted across the U.S. and the accompanying flawed reporting, political overreaction, and public health nightmare made Ebola a reality rather than a curiosity from a distant continent.

Here, some of the similarities to AIDS began to emerge. In mid-October, a Haitian woman vomited at the Massachusetts Avenue MBTA station in the middle of Boston. The MBTA immediately suspended service from the station after a 911 call reported “a Liberian woman” may have Ebola. Based solely on the color of her skin, the woman was covered in a white sheath from head to toe by emergency responders and transported to Boston Medical Center where medical professionals deemed her unlikely to be suffering from Ebola. Of course, many will remember how less than thirty years ago the woman's Haitian lineage, rather than mistaken West African origin, would have been cause for discrimination. In the '80s Haitians, homosexuals, heroin users, and hemophiliacs were the 4 “Hs” Americans feared because of their presumed proclivity for contracting HIV. The episode in Boston betrays the precise issues with maintaining order in the midst of a public health scare— it is always deemed prudent by public officials to be safe rather than sorry when it comes to containing a lethal and contagious disease, even at the risk of violating the rights and dignity of citizens.

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The Impossible Glamour of Istanbul

the narrow streets on the hill
leading from the mooring of our ship
were stepped and cobbled, or bricked.
from overhead they must have looked like laces
knitting together masonry walls
which lined those ancient spaces

greenhorn that I was (and am,
in cosmic time at least) under the luck
of many graces I walked, naive
unafraid/unbrave and innocently unstuck,
full of ignorance and contradiction
as any boy who'd not yet had to grieve

with young others like myself I went learning,
laughing up our hill with no prescriptions
caroming off the inner walls of skulls but
singed instead by bonfire embers
scattered in fresh imagination's thrilling burning

we turned and faced the Bosphorus
caught in an opening between close parapets
the air was clear and undefiled for us
the sun as bright as white phosphorus
for us the place was indecipherable and new
impossible and glamorous

a muezzin called his faith from roofs
but no one really knew if god was there
a woman paused to stare at three
unconscious boys in sailor suits

the muezzin's song echoing in the canyons
of those streets was not consonant
but to our fifties four-part
doo-wop ears was clamorous—
like half an argument too resolute,
too apt to drown out other ways of love,
the opposite of amorous avalanching
down the slope of years
to bury new counter-thoughts
that children of the present world
hiking up their hills will
always be advancing
.

by Jim Culleny
11/01/14

—Thanks to Azra Raza for the poem's title and the article
that provoked this recollection

by Yohan J. John

I.

Before the scientific age, boundaries between disciplines were not that sharply defined. Many cultures around the world saw art, music, mathematics and theology as reflections of each other. Perhaps the most poetic expression of this idea was the Pythagorean notion of the musica universalis: the harmony of the spheres. According to this conception, there was a deep link between music and celestial motion: the sun, the moon and the planets danced around the Earth to the tune of an inaudible symphony. The heavenly bodies that could be seen with the naked eye were divided into two categories. There were the fixed stars, which were attached to a spherical cosmic canopy that whirled around the Earth, and the wanderers, the sun, the moon and the visible planets, which changed their position with respect to the fixed stars. Each of these wanderers was assigned its own sphere, so the cosmos was a kind of spherical onion, each layer inhabited by a celestial body that contributed its own note to the universal symphony. The tenor for life on Earth was guided by these cosmic vibrations.

Nowadays it seems this conception of the cosmos is only of interest to hippies, mystics and other fringe folk. Compared to the dizzying scale of modern cosmology, the spherical cosmos seems insular, childish, and unacceptably human-centric. The solar system is now viewed with the sun at the center, and the cosmos is recognized as having no center at all. Or rather, the center of the cosmos is everywhere.

Without in any way questioning the importance, power or beauty of the modern scientific worldview, I think it is possible to dust off the discarded image and learn something from it. Not necessarily something about the true nature of the cosmos, but about how we impose notions of beauty and perfection upon reality, and how reality often overturns these notions, leading us to wider and deeper understanding.

Before we get to the idea of perfection, we can pause in order to just look at the geocentric model. Let's just focus on the example of Venus. How many educated people know what the orbit of Venus looks like from an Earth-centric perspective? There is a popular narrative in science that claims that the geocentric model is just plain wrong, and that it is the Earth that moves, not the sun. But if, as Galileo and Einstein established, all motion must be relative to some frame of reference, then you can pick any position as a stable center and see what the motion looks like from there. Now that the heliocentric model has pride of place, we can look back at the geocentric model purely out of curiosity, and see if there is anything of interest to be found.

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by Paul Braterman

I have recently visited two very different sites where time is turned to stone, where just looking at the rocks shows the passage of enormous lengths of time, dwarfing all of recorded human history. At the first site, the rocks I was looking at were ancient sediments, with the clearest possible evidence of prolonged interruption. In the second, they were comparatively (!) recent volcanic outpourings showing the traces of slow continuous change. In the first case I was looking at an

80,000,000 year gap in the record, in the second, at the signs of a hundred thousand years of continuous weathering. The first site is indicated by nothing more than a small information board behind a farm
gate off a minor track, although it occupies a special position in the history of geology as a science. The second is visited by over 750,000 tourists annually, has its own well-appointed visitors centre, and was the occasion of a recent shameful episode of science denial. The first records events connected with the closing of an ancient ocean; the second with its reopening.

The first of these sites was Siccar Point, on the Scottish coast between Edinburgh and Berwick-upon-Tweed. Despite its significance, it has remarkably few visitors; in fact my family and I had it all to ourselves on a lovely summer's afternoon. It is hidden away of a minor road, and access is on foot, culminating in a steep descent across grassland. When the pioneering geologist James Hutton visited it in 1788, he came by boat, and was delighted (but not surprised) by what he saw – a spectacular example of an unconformity, a mismatch between one set of rocks, and those above them. The lower rocks are a sediment (greywacke) rather like a very coarse sandstone with lots of embedded small pebbles, of the type formed on continental shelves. As is common with sediments, different strata are clearly visible, but what is much less usual is that the strata are standing almost on edge. Immediately above these are another accumulation of rock, a reddish sandstone, with the strata lying almost horizontally. The boundary between the two sediments is also roughly horizontal, but with minor ups and downs, all filled in by the upper sandstone. Down on the beach to the immediate Southeast, the upper layer has been stripped away, and one can see dark lines corresponding to the upended strata, gently curving parallel to the coastline.

As Hutton realised, we are looking at a complex sequence of events, which we would now describe as follows:

• The initial coarse sediments were laid down in moderately turbulent offshore conditions. Turbulent enough to mix up debris of different sizes, but not so turbulent as to erase the boundary between different sedimentary layers.
• Enough time passed for them to form solid rock.
• Then came at least one, and possibly two (remember the curve in the strata exposed on the beach) episodes of mountain building, folding the sediments so dramatically that here they are standing on end.
• Next a lengthy interval, how lengthy Hutton had no way of knowing, in which these mountains were worn flat, apart from irregularities caused by local streams,
• The deposition, and eventual consolidation, of the upper sandstones
• And finally, the erosion of later deposits, exposing the sandstone and, down on the beach, the ner-vertical strata of greywacke.

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GOOD FORM

for Keith Bayard, a demigod

Winsome nymphs
in thongs
over gym tights,
nebbishes
nerds
nudnicks
aging stud-muffins,
twitterbots,
bloggers,
gal jocks
with polished fingers
racing down the steps
without touching
the chrome banisters,
I love it here.

First day of work out
I all but faint
on the green broadloom
as you cradle my head,
fluorescents flicker,
the eagle tattooed
on your flexed biceps
unfurls from its talons
Semper Fi.

“Don’t be afraid
of pain.” You push me
to heavier free weights,
move me to the front row—
left leg forward
swinging my arms
driving the right knee
into my skinny chest
for 48 nonstop bursts.

Baritone, you soar
above the amplified ABBA—
“On your toes,
punch to the left
open up the stride.
Ladies
down on hands & knees.
Gentlemen
grab your body bar—
Nothing, nothing
but good form.”

by Rafiq Kathwari, winner of the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award. Links to more work here.

by Lisa Lieberman

I recently attended a retrospective on the work of East German filmmaker Siegfried Kühn sponsored by the DEFA Film Library at UMass Amherst. DEFA (Deutsche Film Aktiengesellschaft), a production company founded by the Soviets immediately following World War II in their zone of occupation, was responsible for most of the films produced in the former GDR. The DEFA film library is committed to making East German films better known and the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall provided an opportunity to reflect on the East/West divide by showcasing the career of one director over an eighteen-year span. Beginning with Kühn's popular love story, Time of the Storks, his gentle satire, The Second Life of Friedrich Wilhelm George Platow, and the period drama Elective Affinities, the series culminated with Childhood an intimate exploration of his wartime experiences growing up in a small town in Silesia, which would be absorbed into Poland by the terms of the Potsdam Agreement in 1945 and The Actress (1988), his award-winning film about an Aryan actress in love with a Jewish actor in Berlin during the Nazi era.

DEFA's ideological mission left little room for directors to assert their own vision. Over the course of his career, Kühn had some problems with the censors, but I didn't see much for the authorities to complain about. By and large, the basic tenets of the socialist state were upheld. Rather than subverting the establishment, these five films open a window onto the dominant preoccupations of the regime right up to the eve of its dissolution.

Love in the Workers State

The two main characters in Time of the Storks (1970) are young people in rebellion against bourgeois society. Susanne, an elementary school teacher, finds herself attracted to a man who is the polar opposite of Wolfgang, her staid fiancé. Christian is an angry guy who reminded me of the character Jack Nicholson played in Five Easy Pieces (1970), chafing against the genteel tastes of his parents, who gave him music lessons and harbored hopes that he would pursue an academic career. Instead, Christian became a foreman on an oil rig and at first glance appears to be a bad boy, which is what attracts Susanne, almost despite herself. But unlike Nicholson's alienated anti-hero, he turns out not to be so much of a bad boy; he's quite conscientious in his job and a field trip to the factory provides a reconciliation between the lovers complete with a vision of a happy future where Susanne's pupils celebrate the accomplishments of the country's workers.

Work in the Workers State

At first glance, the railway crossing guard who is the subject of The Second Life of Friedrich Wilhelm George Platow (1973) is anything but the model worker idealized in the Stakhanovite movement, part of Stalin's great push to industrialize the Soviet Union. Platow is lazy, sloppy and set in his ways. He is also redundant, now that the railroad crossing he has manned for decades is being automated. Kühn ran afoul of the authorities with this film, but compared to The Witness, Péter Bacsó's black comedy released in 1969 but banned in Kadar's Hungary for ten years, this says more about the East German officials' lack of a sense of humor than about the message of the film itself. Indeed, Kühn seemed perplexed, in the Q & A following the screening, by the verdict of the censors that Platow presented “a distorted image of the working class.”

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by Mara Jebsen

After Edward Hopper's Two On the Aisle, 1927

A dark theatre can curve round you like a snake
if you show early and the theatre’s sunk
in that deep-hush velvet, against which
a body feels bony, wrong.

Fold your coat squarely on the back
of your chair; un-crease a programme, don’t fret
about the vague clunk
behind the curtain. Pretend that actors
have no bodies at all. . .

And trust that if the night goes right, a click
will sound high up in the gut, when a story
blows up your life like a long hot noon.
Like a sundial. You stream for miles.

Briefly that star
is you. Enormous and singing
with numb, raw throat. Honed, hurting,
glorious, scared– of the movements
of time that will crack you
back to your body, now that you’re
just so much stretched shadow, glass. Brinked
to the-just-past-the-crest. Poised
to crash.

If you’re lucky you’ll find
you’ve been crying. Your spine
aches briefly in you chair; your cheeks
are wet. Try with a sweet pain to think
what you got. But it’s nothing
and gone. It’s the ruin you came for.

by Charlie Huenemann

“It is therefore worth noting,” Schopenhauer writes, “and indeed wonderful to see, how man, besides his life in the concrete, always lives a second life in the abstract.” I suppose you might say that some of us (especially college professors) tend to live more in the abstract than not. But in fact we all have dual citizenship in the concrete and abstract worlds. One world is at our fingertips, at the tips of our tongues, and folded into our fields of vision. The concrete world is just the world; and the more we try to describe it, the more we fail, as the here and now is immeasurably more vivid than the words “here” and “now” could ever suggest – even in italics.

The second world is the one we encounter just as soon as we begin thinking and talking about the here and now. It is such stuff as dreams are made on; its substance is concept, theory, relation. We make models of the concrete world, and think about those models and imagine what the consequences would be if we tried this or that. Sometimes our models are wrong and we make mistakes. Other times our models work pretty well and we manage to figure out some portion of the concrete world and manipulate it to our advantage. But in any case, we all shuttle between the two worlds as we live and think.

Right now, of course, you and I are deep into an abstract world, forming a model of how we move back and forth between our two worlds. We are modeling our own modeling. But I'll drop that line of thought now, since it leaves me dizzy and confused. My fundamental point is that the abstract world isn't reserved only for college professors. We all engage with it all the time, except perhaps when we sleep or are lost blessedly in the vivacity of sensual experience, and it is in some ways just as close to us as whatever is here and now. To be a human, as Schopenhauer suggests, is to live in two worlds.

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by Brooks Riley

I’m standing at the window looking north over a small garden with several different kinds of trees and bushes. If I refine my intake of visual information, I am, in fact, gazing at many different shades of green at once, perhaps even all of them (at least 57, like Heinz). There’s the middle green of leaves on a thorny bush in the sunlight, and on the same bush, a darker green tweaked by shade. Add to these variations of light the variety of flora in my view, and I come away with a whole alphabet of green—the common green of a lawn, the brown green of dying leaves, the gray-green highlights of a fir tree, the black green of certain waxy leaves, the lime green of new leaves on a late bloomer, the Schweinfurt green of certain succulents. Green in nature is a chlorophyll-induced industry all its own—a Pantene paradise. . .

. . . for those who love green.

I do not love green. Separated from nature, green is a travesty. I was born with green eyes, and I do love them, but I wouldn’t want their hue on my sofa or my walls or my bedspread or my person. Removed from nature, decorative green is a shabby attempt to remember nature or worse, to try to recreate its effect on us. As a child I was attracted to green olives, acquiring a taste for them that had as much to do with their color as with their shape. But olive green is not that far from baby-couldn’t-help-it green, or drab Polizei green (slowly being phased out in favor of blue), and removed from its smooth round humble origins in an olive, loathsome. So too the so-called institutional green, once thought to soothe the troubled souls of those coerced to spend time in schools, hospitals, or insane asylums.

I’m not here to condemn another’s love of the color green. And from a Pantene point of view, I confess to appreciating certain shades of green (artichoke green, celadon green), as long as I don’t have to apply them to anything.

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by Randolyn Zinn

Flipping through photos of a recent trip to Spain, I was struck by this one.

A typical tobacco drying barn a few miles from Granada, Spain, in the fields of Fuento Vaqueros — Federico Garcia Lorca’s birthplace. In town we toured the Lorca family house and museum (no photos allowed) to ogle his cradle, his mother's kitchen and the piano where he practiced cancionnes. Out back an old pomegranate tree in the courtyard was old enough to have shaded Federico as a child as he played beneath its boughs. Upstairs, glass cases displayed selected drawings, notebooks and first editions of his poetry and plays. We sat down to watch a quick film with no sound of the young poet in overalls unloading scenery from the back of a truck with his theatrical troupe, La Barraca, on tour performing Calderon’s La Vida Es Sueno or Life Is A Dream in the white towns of Andulucia. He wrote his own plays at this time: Blood Wedding, Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba. We gasped at the end of the clip when Lorca smiled and waved at the camera…he was waving to us ninety years later in his own house. Life is a dream.