About 98.000 people die every year in the hospitals in the USA due to medical errors. The experts calculated this in 1997, after they studied reported adverse occurrences in hospitals in New York, Utah and Colorado in previous years. The data for the rest of the world is not available. If we assume similar incidence in the world and extrapolate, it turns out, every year over 2.1 million people would die in the world, or over 42 million people may have died in the past 20 years because of medical errors. (This shocking number is not based on any hard statistical evidence. The purist may ignore this extrapolation and the cynic can argue that in many countries people die due to lack of medical care and not because of it.)

Most errors occur due to fault in the “process” of care: switching two similar sounding medications (Hydralazine/ Hydoxyzine), wrong dosage units (mcg/mg), confusing two patients with identical names. Extensive use of information technology (IT) can minimize this tragedy and also provide many other tools to improve the processes of health care in the hospitals, local community and the country. Some such benefits are: avoiding repetitive tests on patients, cost containment, early warning of epidemics, post market drug surveillance, disaster management, health care planning and long distance tele-medicine.

The driving component of the health IT – you could call it the ‘operating system’ of the health care universe — is the electronic health record. (EHR), which is a digitized equivalent of a patient’s chart in the hospital or a doctor’s office. An ideal EHR would record each health care encounter and transaction in the life of an individual, from birth to death. This EHR could reside in doctor’s office, a hospital or a central repository, which can allow secure access to pre authorized persons through the Internet.

Why hasn’t it happened? The use of computers in health care is primitive compared to other industries like banking and airlines. IT entered the hospitals through the back door: financial software, including billing and collections settled in the hospital first without any significant linkage to the clinical work, and within clinical disciplines each department procured software to run only its own functions without any electronic data exchange with other departments. The use of IT in healthcare grew by installation of independently functioning modules in enclosed silos and the unintended result was that the departments could not communicate. Medical fraternity learned the hard way that computers are not amenable to behavior modification and software is like a stern nurse: it may do what you ask but not what you want.

What is true of hospital departments is true of institutions; even neighboring hospitals serving the same population cannot communicate with each other. Since health IT has grown in bits and pieces over the past few years, one will have to first dismantle the current system to install the new interoperable information applications.

Five components are essential for the successful operation of a health information network:

• Common interoperable health IT standards.
• Uniform medical nomenclature.
• Policy and regulations to promote the use of e-health platforms.
• User-friendly interface for clinical workers.
• Early involvement of the end users in development and implementation.

The problem of IT standards and clinical nomenclature is nearing resolution. Over the past few years many voluntary and professional institutions have done remarkable work to delineate IT and clinical standards. For instance, we have Health Level-7 (HL-7) protocols for messaging; Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine (DICOM) for digital images (x-rays) and many other standards have been accepted and vetted. In clinical semantics, Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine (SNOMED) is gaining popularity as the standard nomenclature, which complements the preexisting nomenclature: International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) and Current Procedure Terminology (CPT codes). These common standards will go a long way to solve the problem of interoperability.

In the past, clinical user interfaces were friendly only to the friends of the programmer. In recent times, the EHR has considerably improved, but the medical world is still waiting for the ideal interface — one which would save time compared to a paper chart, make data entry and retrieval faster, connect with ancillary services, provide alerts and prompts, enhance the business processes and provide frequent updates about advances in the medical sciences. In short, it should be convincingly more efficient than the paper chart to ensure easier acceptance by the clinical workers. We are getting there, but slowly and adequate regulations should accelerate the pace.

The regulations have to address three issues about the data of patients:

• Ownership of data and its authenticated flow to users.
• Secure and need based access to slices of data.
• Security, privacy and confidentiality of data.

These policies have to be in place for transaction of data. At present, the patient owns her health information and it resides in the hospital or insurance company’s servers. These institutions have no incentive to share this data with other competing organizations and would rather keep the information to themselves for business advantage.

The US government envisioned in1994 that the communication between the health care entities and the federal government would be streamlined by electronic communication by 2014. A recent survey of the ambulatory medical care revealed that 25 % of doctors’ offices have either a simple or an advanced IT system. Another survey of the hospitals revealed that implementation of an upgraded EHR was a high priority to improve clinical outcomes and cut costs. A study done by the Health Care Information and Management Society (HIMSS) has found “About 62% of the healthcare organizations based in the U.S. have already made a decision about their (EHR) vendors and are starting an implementation or already have a part of an EHR in place, at least the foundation of it.” Recently adopted regulations in the US will ensure that health IT systems become more prevalent in next ten years.

Many developed countries, with mature health care systems, are in some stage of implementing interoperable health information grids. Some counties like Sweden and Finland are ahead and others like UK and Australia are in the process. European Union is planning to connect all the members on a health grid.

Installation of health IT system has proven to be expensive and slow in almost all countries. Starting in 1998, the National Health Service (NHS) in UK began to implement an electronic patient record in all NHS institutions. The target date was 2005 but by early 2007 the venture was still incomplete and had cost £12.4 billions. Now, the revised completion date is 2008.

In Canada, a not-for profit organization, “Canada Health Infoways”, is leading the implementation of an interoperable health information system, with the participation of federal and provincial health departments. The federal government has invested 1.2 billion Canadian dollars and they aim to have EHR systems operational for 50% of the population by 2009.

For the developing nations, lack of any legacy IT systems may be a blessing; they can leap frog to the latest standards and technology without the burden of dismantling the old. Connectivity and costs will, however, remain big challenges.

India has recently started with a vision of connecting the entire country in one interoperable health IT grid to manage health care and medical knowledge. The vision is to capture most health care transactions, when the system is operational in a few years. The proposed grid will be a hub-and-spoke network with interconnected data repositories stationed through out the country. The project is still in the preliminary stages and probably will gather steam in coming years. Other Asian countries, including China, are also in various stages of developing health IT networks.

On the technology side, many new applications will enhance the capabilities of an EHR system. Mobile platforms like the PDAs and cell phones will access clinical data; personal devices like pacemakers and heart monitors will communicate with the EHR; administrative paper work will be streamlined. If and when individual genomic structure becomes part of the EHR, one would be able to predict disease trends and possible preventive measures for individuals and families. Genetic data would guide the choice of therapy; predict the outcome and even help in new drug development research.

Future of health IT systems is exciting. Once we have strong regulations, interoperability of data and efficient user interface, the EHR becomes scalable. Health care institutions, communities, and even whole country can transact health care information and related business on a web based health grid. It is feasible that in next 30 years we could have a worldwide interoperable health IT network.

Imagine this future scenario: Ms Sally, a 49 years old executive from London has traveled to New York for an urgent meeting. She experiences chest discomfort and is rushed to the emergency room. The doctor suspects a heart attack and advises emergency cardiac catheterization. She declares that a coronary angiogram had been done recently in London for similar symptoms and she believed “it was not that bad.” She had received no treatment as she was in a rush to travel.

It is nighttime in London and her personal doctor is not available. She gives the New York doctor access to her EHR on the Internet, who downloads the angiogram. It is perfectly normal.

The ER doctor looks for another reason for her chest pain and orders a CT scan of the chest, which reveals a large life threatening blood clot in the lung. She receives urgent treatment to dissolve the clot.

Immediate access to the EHR helps avoid an error. It prevents an unnecessary procedure, and saves time and probably her life.

Edward B. Rackley

By today’s measures of geopolitical relevance, Uganda would seem an insignificant country. Its name may trigger a few neuron firings among those who’ve read Giles Foden’s The Last King of Scotland, or seen its recent film adaptation starring Forest Whitaker as Idi Amin.

Ugandans who’ve seen the film are less than delighted. Amin’s son allegedly complained to reporters, “He [Whitaker] doesn’t even look like my father.” More clueful viewers writing in local newspapers claim the film relies on the tired reference of African dysfunction to tell and sell a story to an international audience. Much agreed—although I appreciated the film’s portrayal of complicity with evil as a creeping, dimly conscious evolution, capable of crippling the purest intentions.

At the crossroads of ‘species being’

In fact Uganda is at the center of three, if not more, grand experiments of genuine significance to species well-being. The first of these concerns the success of regional peacekeeping: “African solutions to African problems,” as South African President Thabo Mbeki once envisioned. If successful, Uganda’s recent troop deployment (1500 men) to protect the beleaguered national government in Somalia could rewrite how regional insecurity is locally managed, thereby diminishing the current dependency on international institutions (UN, aid agencies) for solutions.

The war on HIV/Aids is a second theatre of action with global import, currently playing out in Uganda. Here the weapons of choice are western science, massive publicity aimed at transmission prevention, and major international funding to provide low-cost anti-retroviral drugs to those in need. Numerous internationally-funded research efforts have joined up with Ugandan universities to collaborate on preventive and curative studies. The result is a boon for Ugandan academic institutions, and sets a precedent for curative research in many of the so-called neglected diseases plaguing the continent (malaria, kala azar, drug-resistant tuberculosis, sleeping sickness, etc.).

Doomsday predictions in the late 1980s of national decimation if HIV transmission were not arrested immediately have not transpired, thanks largely to Ugandan cooperation with international strategies and recommendations. Uganda’s success in controlling the AIDS epidemic strikes a powerful counterpoint to the South African experience, led by President Mbeki and his cabinet, a cabal of AIDS denialists (their approach is described in Michael Specter’s recent New Yorker article, “The Denialists”).

In South Africa today, a country of 34 million, a thousand persons are reportedly infected daily while 2000 die of preventable and treatable causes. ‘Preventable and treatable’, yes, provided you ignore the government diktat that HIV is a concoction of western pharmaceutical companies to continue the economic enslavement of poor nations to wealthy ones. (I’ve always applauded Mbeki’s reasoned Afrocentrism, but this particular delusion qualifies as criminal.)

The third trial with global repercussions—in which Uganda is more than a random test case but a veritable laboratory under 24-hour observation—concerns the success of recently developed instruments of international justice: the International Criminal Court and a separate set of UN Security Council resolutions protecting children in armed conflict. Whether or not these distinct legal initiatives can deliver their promise of justice and improved protection for victims is slowly unfolding.

Their outcome will have major implications for how the gulf of impunity is addressed in armed conflicts elsewhere—or whether it is addressed at all. Inconclusiveness or outright backfire may encourage conservative fulminations against the ICC, the United Nations, and the human rights regime in general. So-called ‘rogue states’ like Sudan or the US will continue to operate above international law, and rightfully so, because those instruments will have proven themselves pallid in tooth and claw.

I wrote about the ICC and its impact on the gruesome practices of the Lord’s Resistance Army and its leader, Joseph Kony, in an earlier 3QD piece. I wrote there that ICC indictments have triggered a return to all-out war, when in fact a curious stalemate is currently holding sway. LRA forces have for the most part respected a de facto ceasefire with Uganda by retreating to Sudanese and Congolese territory. Khartoum has supported the LRA in the past, and it has not signed the Rome Statute, the founding document of the ICC, meaning the LRA are safe in Sudan. From their camps in southern Sudan and northeastern DRC they attack local villages and health centers for food and medical supplies while negotiations with the Ugandan government drag on.

Could it be that the threat of ICC prosecution prompted LRA withdrawal to territory outside ICC jurisdiction (Sudan), thus disabling it from terrorizing its target population in Uganda? Is the ICC ultimately responsible for the current cessation of hostilities? Kony will not say, nor is the evidence conclusive. Will the Ugandan government forego ICC indictments and the experiment with international justice, and instead promise amnesty to Kony and his men to bring them back to the negotiating table? Ugandans themselves want peace and security; their primary concern is that ICC prosecution will bring revenge upon them from Kony’s residual support base. The ICC may turn out to be just another flashy gadget in the general diplomatic toolbox, occasionally useful when dealing with screwball sadists like Kony. It is a carrot or stick, or both, depending on the context. I doubt this is what its conceivers envisioned, particularly if amnesty ends up trumping justice.

The ‘era of application’

As I happen to be in Uganda to help implement the Security Council resolutions mentioned above, I’ll comment on their impact so far.

Armed conflicts have a devastating effect on children. From direct observation we know that thousands of children are killed, others take part in combat, schools and health facilities are targeted for attack and essential humanitarian aid is denied to children. The increasingly documented phenomenon of child soldiers is but one facet of the many ways that children are manipulated and exploited by adults as cannon fodder, munitions mules, spies and scouts, camp minders, cooks and porters, and sex slaves.

Peter Singer’s book, Children at War, is one of the best accounts I have seen of how accepted conventions on wartime conduct have deteriorated to the point where children are abducted and re-programmed to kill and be killed, while their adult overlords watch from a safe distance. Absence of economic opportunities in many of today’s conflicts means militias and armed groups need no active recruitment or abduction, as youth are attracted by the only apparent exit from destitution and vulnerability wrought by the war raging around them. Yet the true extent of violations against children remains elusive without a mechanism to monitor and record violations in situ. Evidence-based advocacy is the primary aim of data collection on such violations—but what authority can make violating parties accountable for their crimes?

The United Nations system, to cite another observer of philanthropic foundations, is basically “a large body of money surrounded by people who want some.” Absorbing and allocating resources constitutes the bulk of its activities and is responsible for the overwhelming red tape that constrains it. For all its faults, and there are many, it is the sole such body to have embarked on the uncharted path of setting and enforcing standards of treatment towards children in situations of armed conflict around the world. No single state has proposed a solution—many including the US have rejected proposals, conventions and treaties drafted by the UN.

Over the last ten years, with much prodding and cajoling from NGO coalitions specializing in children’s rights, the Security Council has issued a series of resolutions to enhance the protection of children in situations of conflict. As part of this process, in 2005, the Secretary General issued a list of 54 armed groups in 11 different countries responsible for the systematic violation of the rights of children in conflict. The Ugandan national army was included on this list as were the LRA, whose sadism is legion, as well as government-sponsored paramilitary groups called ‘Local Defence Units’.

Much ‘setting of standards’ has gone on; the point now is to enforce them. The most recent UNSC resolution (#1612), now almost two years old, aims to apply the prohibitions and injunctions of the previous resolutions. While these have not halted the practices they decry, they have influenced and improved much of the relief programming aimed at these target groups. Including children in the disarmament, demobilization and reintegration programs for former combatants is one such shift in policy (before they were simply abandoned with no psycho-social, educational or material assistance).

Here in Uganda we are setting up a system to document and monitor the following violations:

• Killing or maiming of children;
• Recruiting or using child soldiers;
• Attacks against schools or hospitals;
• Rape or other grave sexual violence against children;
• Abduction of children;
• Denial of humanitarian access for children.

A multilateral structure involving UN agencies, NGOs and government human rights bodies has developed a monitoring and reporting process, and has trained over 100 field monitors to document these violations. We cannot report on LRA activities because they are not active here, for the time being, although the war may resume at any time. For now most of the violations are perpetrated by the government army, whose use of child soldiers continues. Soldiers deployed to protect the hundreds of remote camps for displaced persons commit rape and trade sex for food with destitute girls in the camps.

Use the rod and spare the child

Unlike any other African conflict where I have worked, the Ugandan government actually cares about its international reputation, and wants to get off the Security Council’s list of offending countries. This attitude opens doors where, in places like Sudan or Myanmar, there are but walls and denial. For instance, teams here are close to receiving authorization to conduct unannounced visits to army barracks, to observe recruitment processes, and to enter their ‘Child Protection Units’ where they interrogate and sometimes torture children they’ve captured from the LRA. Abducted and forced to serve as child soldiers for the LRA, these former prisoner-soldiers are now ordered to march for days deep into southern Sudan to help the Ugandan army locate LRA rear bases.

Ultimately, however, the fact that Uganda deploys peacekeepers to Somalia but allows the LRA insurgency to fester leaves many here convinced that their government cares more about international opinion than the fate of its own citizens.

The 1612 monitoring system and the accountability of offending armies it envisions is in many ways an act of faith. No Security Council sanctions have issued from previous UN resolutions against child soldiering or sexual violence against children—why should they now? Given the twenty-year marathon of this conflict, these UNSC resolutions come in some ways as an offensive joke. How could anyone possibly have taken so long to notice, to act?

Uganda is a place with over 26 rebel groups in various states of insurgency; some are dormant, some are surely propagandistic fictions of the government, others are quite active. The country also has an enormous law and order problem across its northern borders, irrespective of LRA activity over the years. In one northern province, Karamoja, the national army has been using helicopter gunships to decimate rural settlements suspected of cattle rustling and arms trading. ‘Suspicious activity’ is the army’s excuse; there is no political insurgency afoot. Armed banditry for economic gain (mostly cattle rustling) is what motivates the bandits, yet women and children are often gunned down in the army’s efforts to impose order.

As a result, Karamoja sees a far greater number of egregious violations against women and children than LRA-affected areas, which are now relatively quiet. Yet no 1612 monitoring and reporting is authorized in Karamoja because widespread violent crime is not accorded the same priority as ‘armed conflict’. We are looking at solutions but for the time being the credibility of UN efforts to bring to book the world’s “worst offenders” is in question.

by Ram Manikkalingam

Borat was disappointing – long, tedious, and repetitive. Maybe I had already seen too many clips on TV. So there was nothing new, except a faux plot to link together a series of previous episodes. There were some scenes that made me laugh, some scenes that made me gag, and some scenes that made me cringe. What is remarkable is not how bad the movie is, but how popular it became. Other bad movies have also become box office hits. But they have not been as badly filmed, as repetitive, or as crass as this. There is no doubt that Borat was a “phenomenon”.

This has nothing to do with the quality of the film, and everything to do with its politics. Borat manages to parody Muslims and “expose” Americans at the same time. He caters to both those who are anti-Islamic and anti-American. He allows them the guilty pleasure of indulging in that which is forbidden – portraying Muslims as ignorant, sexist, and anti-semitic – by portraying middle-class White Americans as ignorant, sexist, and anti-semitic. This is a potent combination, capable of drawing together a large audience in the US and Western Europe, resentful of Muslims in their midst and the global pre-ponderance of American power.

Borat takes on ordinary Americans, some who are bigoted, but most of who are not. Unlike Ali G, who takes on the powerful ones – from Newt Gingrich to Noam Chomsky – irrespective of their politics. Borat allows those who are anti-Muslim and anti-American to interpret him in ways that enable them to entertain, and thus indulge, themselves. He even permits, those who are simply anti-American to excuse his anti-Islamic parodies, as just that, and enjoy themselves. And sometimes he even permits those who are simply anti-Muslim to enjoy themselves – by hinting that this is where a multiculturalism gone awry will take the world.

About 15 years ago, I traveled through parts of China for a few weeks with my white middle-class midwestern friend from Ohio, Mark. Neither Mark, nor I spoke a word of Chinese. But we managed to get around China, from Guangzhou (on the border with Hongkong, to Xinjiang, on the border with, yes, Kazakhstan, through Xian and Chengdu. I am still astounded at the extent to which we were able to make ourselves intelligible – so as to buy food, and train tickets, find hotels and restaurants, visit museums and historic sites, and generally get around – without knowing a single word in a common language with our interlocutors. What made this possible?

The Chinese we interacted with gave us the benefit of the doubt. When we used Chinese words and got the pronunciation invariably wrong – they did not take the wrong word we had used at face value and proceed on the basis of what would have been clearly irrational statements. Rather they tried to organise their thoughts in ways that made what we said intelligible to them. Then they proceeded to help us with what we wanted. Mistakes were made, but they were always explicable in the context. And our vulnerability to locals in a foreign land was never exploited – except the one tout who took us for a ride and cost us a fortune in a restaurant. But even that was explicable in the end, and of course quite rational.

The way we get along in strange places is by depending on the interpretive charity of strangers. We expect that they will make amends for our mistakes – linguistic and/or cultural – and assist us in interpreting a different world. What is remarkable is how well this works, seldom leading to complete failure to comprehend each other in the midst of linguistic and cultural difference. It works because when we come across people with whom we struggle to communicate, they also struggle back. And the mutual struggle involves simultaneously holding two contradictory ideas about the person we are communicating with. She is just like us and she is not like us.

She is just like us, because the way she understands a person or a situation or an event or an act, is similar to the way we would. And her thoughts cohere together much like mine would, making it possible for her to make her world intelligible to me. And she is not like me, because she may have a belief or a view or a thought, that I would find weird, awkward, queer, or simply wrong. But this can be explained in ways that I understand, precisely because she is just like me, bringing her closer to me, even if neither (she nor I) revise our views leading us to agree about this (weird, awkward, queer or wrong) belief. And so we go around the world taking for granted this human facility to engage with strangers and depend on their communicative charity to successfully navigate very complex terrains of culture and society without a second thought.

Success in communicating depends on the willingness to suspend judgment during those crucial initial moments when you are not certain that you understand exactly what the other person is saying. And this is exactly what Borat exploits to pull his stunt – the human propensity to communicate in ways that make us seek to understand each other better, even if we may not ultimately agree. He does this by exaggerating exactly the kind of cultural difference – accent, gesture, walk and attitude – that would make any interlocutor assume a high likelihood of miscommunication, thus ensuring that they would give him even more latitude in making the most outrageous comments about women, Jews, Muslims and others, who may come to mind.

To me what was remarkable about the movie, were the large number of instances where people either watched in bemused or stony silence (a large fraction of the audience at the Rodeo and even at the country and western bar), or clear, if polite, discomfiture – like the guests in the wealthy Southern home. The instances where people actually went along uncritically – the homophobe in the Rodeo, the frat boys in the trailer, or the audience in the western bar – were relatively few in retrospect. After hundreds of hours of footage, the instances where Americans were sufficiently abusive towards others were reduced to such a short time – and even these cases were not unambiguous.

Borat’s conceit is that it is only ignorant, islamophobic, not to mention sexist and racist, Americans who would behave in this way upon meeting a stranger. But, this way of behaving is not just American, it is human. And it is humanly necessary, particularly if we have to ensure that we are not failing to communicate with someone who appears at first blush to be so very different from us. And it usually works because fortunately there are so few Borats in this world we inhabit together.

Before reading another line, watch the video, especially if you think you’d rather not.

One is hungry for a few facts now.

That was the French street theatre company Royal de Luxe in London last May.  The show was The Sultan’s Elephant, created in honor of the Jules Verne centenary in 2005, and performed that year in Nantes.  Founded in 1979 by Jean-Luc Courcoult, Royal de Luxe has since then made theatre in public spaces in Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America.  The London engagement, years in the planning by the British production company Artichoke, was the debut of the Little Girl Giant, as she has come to be called, in the English-speaking world.  You could probably just make out the Elephant – at least its trunk — hosing her down.  At around 20 and 40 feet high, respectively, both were designed by a longtime Royal de Luxe collaborator, Francois Delaroziere .  The video, shot by Mike Connolly of Electric Pig, is by far the best document of the event on the Web, and the place to start if you cannot in person see Royal de Luxe.  Les Balayeurs du Desert, a French rock band that has worked with the company since the 1980’s, provided the music.  The song is “Decollage” — their riff on “It Amazes Me” by Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh, the vocal sample by a digitally remixed Blossom Dearie.

Those are the bits I would have found it calming to latch onto when I first saw the video last summer.  I needed to be sure it wasn’t Photoshopped, as you do when you see a thing on the monitor that can’t be real.  Attaching a name to the consciousness in control of the event became paramount, no less than had it been a towering crime I’d witnessed.  But none of this helped, ultimately, for I still can’t take it in.  And that, I came to understand, is precisely the point.

Royal de Luxe is both renowned and secretive.  Based in Nantes, it has no Web site, doesn’t go in for ordinary PR, and if for artistic reasons the whole company needs to move to Cameroon or to China for many months at a time, then it does so, appearing there as in the West with permission but without fanfare. Gathering outdoors to make the small marionettes that have been their acting partners since long before the Giants, the actors casually attract local interest, which can at first be skeptical.  By the time of leave-taking, however, the village is ensorcelled, the months-long interlude most often likened by everyone to dream.   

Except in the United States, the fame of Royal de Luxe now outpaces its stealth.  So precautions are taken that, despite high anticipation of an appearance, an audience remains in a condition to be startled by it. Jean-Luc Courcoult is far too much the man of the theatre ever to lose the advantage of surprise.

When Royal de Luxe next appears, at the Reykjavik Arts Festival later this spring, no one there but the functionaries who must know them shall have all the details in advance.  The venue is simply the streets and open spaces of the city — by the lake, by the harbor and in the city center.  Admission is not only free, but accidental, since the show may begin anywhere, even in two places at once, and will overtake its audience bit by bit, for they shall not have known where to assemble and wait for it.  Once it begins, it will keep moving, and people will follow it or even try to run a little ahead of it en route to the next corner it seems bound for, where others shall have started to hear things and look up.  No member of that audience, not even the most avid, will see the show in its entirety – like the London event, it will be structured to make that impossible.  Courcoult has said only that a special story for Icelanders will be enacted, by Little Girl Giant and other familiar figures, that, on the morning of May 10, “something unexpected will happen in Rekjavik.” 

Thus will begin the latest chapter in a Royal de Luxe narrative that spans three continents and fifteen years, The Saga of The Giants.

The Giant Who Fell From the Sky

The inaugural show, The Giant Who Fell From The Sky, was conceived for the people of Le Havre in 1993.  Lying supine, his ribcage rising and falling as he exhaled white dust for his own cloudy atmosphere, the 38-foot carved wood sleeping Giant was laced Gulliver-style to the street.  Baffled onlookers hesitantly prodded him, and he opened basketball-sized eyes in which blood vessels showed, taking on the look of terrible suffering nobly borne that would never leave him. To walk the city, he was hauled up into a scaffolding six stories high; red-liveried actors hanging onto ropes leapt from it to the ground, landing slowly, counter-weighting and lifting his sandaled feet.  He swung his arms, he turned his head this way and that, he parted his lips and gazed down, sweeping the crowd with his eyes as he marched, looking as if he did not quite believe what he saw or the fix he was in, a haggard incredulity being one of his signature expressions. And the faces of the townspeople, from toddlers to the very old, lining the streets six or eight deep and leaning out of windows, were solemn and rapt.

Trucks figured in this — big ones — for here was serious tonnage.  Apart from drivers, more than thirty liveried actors, in choreographed motion all over the scaffolding, were needed to keep the Giant groomed and on the move.  One man turned a wheel the size of a helm to open and close his mouth, another hovered near his shoulder to brush dusty traces of respiration from his lips with a broom. It is one of the paradoxes of the Giants that, seeing an unbelievable thing, and seeing plainly the levers and ropes and pulleys and humans required to make it work – for none of this is ever concealed in a Royal de Luxe performance — you believe in it utterly.

The stories of the Giant, written by Courcoult, are always very simple – just a few lines long, with deep cultural resonances.  To cite a feature that counts heavily with him, you could tell them to a child.  Each is enacted over several days, nights included, it being of the utmost importance that the Giant abide with the town.  During that entire time, the Giant is out in the open, his hair and face getting wet in the rain, sleeping by night in a chair the size of a cantilever bridge, breathing always — and dreaming.

On that first visit to Le Havre, the story goes, the Giant was frightening to the people of the town only when he dreamt; the morning after, cars were found impaled on trees, or pinned to the asphalt with a 10-foot fork, the work of his dreams. And so, on the second night a wall of light – motley thousands of battery-operated headlights mounted on a twenty by thirty foot frame — was erected to prevent his losing consciousness.  Head dropping to his chest again and again in the painterly golden light, the Giant spent a wakeful night.  A blonde singer, Peggy, wearing a long blue opera cape with a stiff collar, climbed out of a white limo and was lifted thirty feet onto the scaffolding to sing to him, the better to divert him from dreaming.  Un bel di vedremo, sang Peggy, a few yards from his face, the anguished and sleepy longing she saw there finally making her turn away.  On the morning of the third day, a hole had been torn in the wall of light, the immense scaffolding was torqued and knocked aside, flattening still more cars, and the Giant was gone.

He returned to Le Havre on two occasions between 1993 and 1998. In that time, he would lose a leg – causing middle-aged Frenchmen ordinarily nothing if not buttoned down to weep openly – acquire a son, a 20-foot black giant, on a trip to Africa, regain the leg, and, in 2000, send a crate of giraffes to Le Havre.  The giraffes, a tender, tree branch-tearing mother towering delicately over the city, and her calf, all legs, were the crane-operated forerunners of the 46-ton elephant seen by more than one million people in London in 2006.

The Giant’s last appearance anywhere was in August, 2006, in the South of France.  Looking as relaxed as his watchful countenance allows, he sat barefoot on a lounge chair anchored to the river bed by the Pont du Gard. Just as it is understood that the Little Black Giant is his son, Little Girl Giant, last seen in Chile in January, when she chased down and caged a rhinoceros, is his daughter.  It is rumored she will face her father in Reykjavik in the spring, and that the meeting might not be friendly.

Telling a Story to an Entire Town
                               
In a conversation with Odile Quirot, Courcoult tells how the idea of the Giants occurred to him.

“For years, I wondered how one could tell a story to an entire town.  On a Plane to Rio, the idea of using out-size marionettes came to me… People have believed in giants since the year dot.  Every culture on earth has stories about them.  I find the giant more powerful than God or religion – because it is more make-believe yet more human.”

Interviewed for Les Cahiers du Channel, Courcoult discusses with Jean-Christophe Planche how The Saga of The Giants works its effects on the grown men who weep, the women of a certain age who lose their composure like maenads.

“Over three or four days I try to tell a whole town something intense which will be talked about everywhere, be it in the bakery or the bar, on the pavement or in the office… I have seen adults crying as the giant leaves.  They have obviously lived other things, sometimes difficult, and yet this makes them cry.  I don’t believe they are crying because [the Giant] is leaving but because of the loss of their imagination.  Over several days, they have dreamt as adults and now it’s finished.  Most adults have difficulty dreaming.”

Courcoult has not gone on record – that I could discover – with more theory-bound observations about his method than these.  While he is almost always described as a visionary, even by people who mean no very good thing by that term, he is entirely direct in conversation. As an artist, he just wants to knock you down, and to see the look on your face when that happens. “How the public reacts is as important as the form of the show,” he says of the highly participatory experiences he creates for audiences.  Music plays a big role in it.  “I am constantly on the lookout for sounds from my era.  Music…directly assails the emotions and feelings.  I take great care with it.  It must not crush feelings by crudely emphasizing the action taking place.”

The closest Royal de Luxe has ever come to an indoor performance is the Roman arena at Nimes.  One reason for this is that Courcoult is a self-described claustrophobe. But he likes to blow things up and smash them to pieces, too.  Open air allows for “poetic risk,” he says, and the light is right: “you can create explosions, hellfire.” A performance in an outdoor public space is by definition a free event open to all comers, and this is key. “By putting on the show in the public arena and free of charge I can reach people as they are, whereas in traditional theatres you only meet those who have dared to cross the threshold…I try to move people, and this ambition will not be restricted by [the audience’s] financial means or their culture.”

Genius Envy
          
It was not wasted on the British that The Sultan’s Elephant came from France, and was many times more prodigious than any homegrown thing.

Julian Crouch, a maker of large site-specific images and co-artistic director of the company Improbable, writes of seeing the Elephant move for the first time. “The thing was real.  It was alive and it was enormous and it was really there.  And in the midst of my pure admiration I could feel something crumble inside me.”  What crumbled, it turned out, was his notion of how unfeasible it was trying to get a large image to do many things at once instead of just one thing – a idea foundational to his twenty years of experience designing and making such. 

With frankness, Crouch tells how it felt to be a maker of theatre watching Little Girl Giant hoisted from the time capsule that had smashed down onto the tarmac in Central London. “When they lifted [her] out of the rocket, the crowd just gasped.  Of course I work in ‘the business’ so I tried to stifle my own gasp, but by the time her flying-hat was off and she blinked and shook out her hair, I was absolutely and completely lost.  She was beautiful.  But really beautiful.  In a deep way… And [there was] a little voice in my head that said, ‘you could never, ever have made this.’ ”

Immediately following the event, LIFT (London International Festival of Theatre) sponsored a day of discussion among British theatre makers, educators and arts administrators. Reading the papers given on this occasion, one appreciates both the tone of raddled admiration and the newly hatched catch-up strategies.  A top administrator spoke passionately about “the next Elephant” – presumably an indigenous one – being inevitable.  Some opined that the show had been “about money” or “about power,” as if the lack of those timeless benisons was all that prevented work of similar quality occurring routinely. Julian Crouch attended the conference, as did Helen Marriage of Artichoke, the company that produced The Sultan’s Elephant. That night, Crouch sent an email to Marriage, voicing these sentiments: ”I have no desire to see Britain grow a Royal de Luxe, and will be very irritated if we try.  It was such an honour to see that work, and it is insulting to the company and their long history to suggest that it is in any way replicable.”

This is not to say a hard look at the conditions friendly to Royal de Luxe could never be instructive to the British or to any other people pondering the direction of public art in their lands. 

Conceding that the success of Royal de Luxe is “due to the power of their work, its popularity with the public and their uncompromising attitude in presenting it,” Edward Taylor, a joint artistic director of the Whalley Range Allstars, a British outdoor theatre troop founded in 1982, writes about other factors that provided a crucial nudge. “The development of street theatre in France was helped no end by the levels of financial support in a system which demonstrates what is possible in the arts if you put serious thought into how to sustain the people who make it happen.”

Taylor argues that not only national, regional and local funding are necessary – and did, in the case of Royal de Luxe, unstintingly kick in – but also the setting up of various “regional creation centres (large workshops where companies can live and create work without unnecessary interruption).” And more: that the French national benefit scheme paying performing artists a wage when they’re not working is what enables large-scale groups to stay together during a non-performing period, taking the rehearsal time they need.  It’s all to do, Taylor says, with whether performing artists are regarded as an important asset in a nation’s economic life. In any case, this is exactly the level of support that has led to “larger and more expensive French shows being created over the years.”  Note, Taylor does not insist, superior ones. “Of course, big is not necessarily better,” he concludes, “but when a work of this scale [The Sultan’s Elephant] can convey such strong emotions to large audiences, it has an irresistible power.”

For A Few Good Pieces

Artists beset with frequent interruptions of their work, who live without medical care in poor housing and exhaust themselves with two or three dead-end jobs at a time to keep going until they are next paid to perform, may look on the French system as a Utopia greatly to be desired.  Yet the same model is repugnant to anyone suspecting that money would only be wasted on cheap red wine, exorbitant rehearsals, and plain old hanging out.  Everyone can agree, however, that The Saga of The Giants is no accident, and is anything but the product of social Darwinism in the arts.

The big question, then, is how, in making a policy decision for such as Royal de Luxe potentially to develop and flourish, can anyone be sure the result will not come artistically closer to synchronized swimming than to Royal de Luxe? To the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade than to The Sultan’s Elephant?  One answer is found in mulling over yet another question – why we would expect public funds spent incubating the arts to produce more precise results than like amounts spent on other necessarily speculative programs in the public interest.

Read more »

One thing is clear: Los Angeles is much more interesting than New York, visually.  This is because it conceals more.  In New York the streets are the city, each facade only hiding an array of more-or-less identical, apartmental shoeboxes of space; the triangular Flatiron building on Twenty-Third Street counts as a major departure from the typical.  In L.A., there is a much greater variety of places: not only rectangular blocks, but plazas, gardens, diagonal intersections, parking lots, beachfront estates, strip malls, green lawns, absurdist signage, hills, winding drives, and houses of every conceivable style and shape.  As well, so many private domains can only be glimpsed from the street: not only the movie studios, with their shopping-mall opulence behind abode walls, but even the average U-shaped apartment complexes, which always  include an interior, vine-shaded courtyard only accessible to residents. 

Isn’t it fatuous, you’re asking, to compare the two cities as though generalizations about each can be made from a few limited observations?  Of course.  Let’s get started.  In Los Angeles, the infinity of kinds of spaces constantly makes for sudden, unexpected vistas.  David Lynch has expressed this aspect of the city much more eloquently than I can, with the dark, enigmatic corner in Bill Pullman’s house in Lost Highway that seems to open into a void, or the frightening space around the back of the diner in Mulholland Drive.  The irregularity of L.A. causes this exhilarating anxiety: you literally don’t know what’s around the corner, or what’s inside that gate.  In New York, there’s no imaginative mystery at all to the physical world: everyone lives in an apartment, only cohabiting couples have a spare room, and ten million guidebooks chronicle every square mile of ground-level space.  Hence, in New York, “secret” bars and restaurants (from Lansky Lounge to Milk and Honey to Freeman’s) proliferate, while in L.A. figuring out what is where is difficult enough without intentional concealment. 

Much of the unknowability of Los Angeles starts with its being so spread out.  As a friend philosophically observed, the entire difference between the two cities stems from one being horizontal and the other vertical.  This kind of irrefutable contrast is what makes comparing the U.S.’s two largest cities irresistible.  Horizontal and vertical, slow and fast, early and late, wide and deep–we might as well go whole hog and make a structuralist comparison a la Saussure and Jakobson: Los Angeles is a metonym, where meanings are arranged next to each other, New York is a metaphor, where meanings are stacked and substituted for each other.  Los Angeles is synchronic, about the arrangement of objects in space in the present, New York is diachronic, about the way the same small space changes over time.  Etc.

Maybe a simpler (and simple is better, and very L.A.) way to express this is to compare the cities’  typography.  In L.A., uninhibited by the past, the vogue is for a bold, beautiful, sans serif typeface.  Check out this restaurant‘s menus (which is excellent, by the way) or the aforementioned director’s coffee-selling website for examples.  These typefaces bespeak a commitment to modernism, a desire to invent anew, a lack of anxiety about leaving behind what’s outmoded and traditional.  What could be more opposite than the Jurassic, faux-medieval typeface of the New York Times?  New York scenesters often cultivate an anachronistic aesthetic, compleat (sic) with beard and suspenders – their blogs always use serif fonts.  In L.A., with its lack of comparable history, new vocabularies displace the old, new forms of yoga and therapy console its citizens, new big-box retailers brashly replace yesterday’s disposable strip malls, the casual is preferred to the formal.  New is good, new works.

In keeping with this attitude, a widespread addiction to youth seems is evident everywhere in the culture.  Living with your parents is no mark of shame; it’s a sensible, workable arrangement until you hit it big.  (Can you imagine telling someone you lived with your parents in New York?)  Adulthood is to be resisted, the self-absorbed dream of youth (or at least its cosmetic facsimile) pursued.  When you’re there, it’s somehow hard to remember that there are other people, even other social classes.  As my sister puts it, you’re stoned by the weather.  And yet, at the same time, there is a much greater diversity of people to be seen on the streets of Los Angeles.  Perhaps because the necessities of life (housing, food) are more cheaply obtained, the range of wealth and ethnicity and age of people you see in L.A. puts New York to shame.  Its visual economy may value the cultivation of the body over that of the mind, but in its way it is a much less pretentious, more frank, and yes, more gritty city than the fauxhemian paradise that modern New York has become.  It’s not that it disavows its traditional culture, however; it’s that it has no settled culture, at least of any longevity.

Beautiful, casual, young, stoned by the sun: am I just reciting a litany of cliches about Los Angeles?  What next, an assertion of how bad the traffic is?  Well, sometimes a city performs as advertised.  The impossibly tall, slender palm trees of Santa Monica; the bookstores devoted to auras and chakras; the tennis-playing lotharios drinking mineral water at bars with skateboarders and stylists; bronzed limbs and smoggy sunsets; maitre’d’s who greet you with “What’s up?”; the presence of Richard Gere; and, yup, infuriating traffic jams that break out at random; these all really exist, to the wonder of a New York-based correspondent.  At the Getty Center, above their surreal and gorgeous landscape garden, there is a certain outdoor walkway overlooking the city.  As you approach its end, there is a low stone wall beyond which you can see nothing but a nebulous, blue haze.  It goes on forever, it’s impossibly beautiful, and it gives you vertigo.

The rest of Dispatches.

I’ve not been reading much about art lately, as I often find reading/analyzing and doing fairly incompatible acts when attempted simultaneously, but I have just read an old essay that turned out to be unexpectedly timely. Published in German in 1766, and first translated into English in 1853, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laokoon: oder über die Grenzen der Malerie und Poesie (Laocoön: an Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry) is a delightful rumination on the limits of two sister arts. He ultimately ends up praising these limits, which is why I find the work so timely, now that we’re in an age that seems to let any medium try to become any other. A few months ago I’d first tried to get through a remarkably inelegant, almost incomprehensible English translation of it that appeared in 1898, and gave up—it was atrociously faithful to the German, to the point of becoming an absurdist text in English, curious but insufferable. The McCormick translation published in 1962, on the other hand, is a gem. In the spirit of Herr Lessing I’ll digress for a brief moment only to note that, no, Gotthold isn’t any direct relation of our contemporary writer Doris; for several years—after reading her Golden Notebook and long before reading anything of his—I’d thought (or wanted to think) that was true. In terms of lucidity and sharp critical thought I’d claim that they are related, but that’s the extent of it. Those who feel deceived by my title are welcome to quit here.

But back to the essay: his exploration of the respective limits of painting and poetry is, to a certain degree, a response to the Horatian simile ut pictura poesis (as painting, so poetry) and a potential misinterpretation of it. While Lessing’s work as a translator is clear in his analysis of language, his later point that a work’s poetry may well lie in concision is exposed by this first reaction to the (likely unintended) assertion that poetry should be as painting is.
    Opening with a comparison of how poetry and painting affect amateur, philosopher, and critic, he seeks to establish a balance between the two types of art. The amateur equates the two—both proffer absent things as present and appearance as reality, and both create a pleasant illusion. The philosopher looks instead at the nature of the produced pleasure, and names the source as beauty, with its subsequent rules applicable not only to artistic form, but also to thought and action. Finally, the critic takes these general rules and examines their application in various art forms with differing and often complimentary roles.
    Mentioning in passing Winckelmann’s “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur,” it becomes clear that Lessing will continue his predecessor’s preference for classical antiquity. Noting that a still, deep soul can be expressed even in its moments of stirred passion, he claims that, contrary to modern German (or European) traits, the ancient Greeks held up the paradigm of artist and philosopher as one, and condoned the depiction of beautiful bodies to the exclusion of any other sort. The end purpose is the highest goal: of knowledge, it’s truth; of art, it’s pleasure. The reciprocal nature of what we might term “artistic culture” is outlined here: good (beautiful) men produce good (beautiful) work, and vice versa. Beauty is the supreme law of both visual and poetic arts. The expression of passions, and degrees thereof, is circumscribed by certain limitations; the depiction of unpleasant or upsetting passions should be limited, or at least portrayed with some beauty. In the Laocoön, the pain was too great to be shown with beauty, so it was tempered, hence the discomfort inspired by the pain is transformed, through beauty, into pity. Beauty is transformative.

Lessing’s observation that his times have expanded (or even abolished) the classical limits placed on art, and beauty is but a small part of art’s newer priority of depicting nature in all its sorts, carries echoes of Caravaggio et al. and the scandalous idea of working directly from nature, which was so highly criticized at the time. Art’s aim at truth and expression places beauty below these primary goals, and they in turn transform even the ugliest bits of nature into what Lessing Romantically terms “artistic beauty.” Despite this, artists must nevertheless restrain their depictions, and never show an action at climax. Here he addresses the key difference between painting and poetry, or visual versus verbal arts. Painting carries with it material limitations and the ability to show only a single moment of time from a single vantage point (cubism, anyone? Might Braque have been egged on by this essay?). Additionally, the most “fruitful” or effective point of view is the one that is well thought out for long-term contemplation and leaves the imagination free. Needing to choose one moment of an ongoing action, that action’s culmination is generally the least suitable, weakest moment from which to imply the whole in painting or sculpture, as it limits the imagination by showing the most extreme point, forcing the mind and eye to focus on the lesser aspects. Permanence comes into play here—the chosen single moment depicted, although it should hint at the rest of the action, mustn’t have anything fleeting about it. Returning to impassioned art, Lessing cites the late Byzantine painter Timomachus, whose work is known through the writings of Pliny the Elder, as an artist paramount for his ability to combine two major things in his work: the precise moment that most fires the viewer’s imagination, as opposed to exposing all to the viewer’s eye, and a visual approach to the passing moment that keeps its pleasantness even when captured forever, perpetuated as a frozen object in art. Lessing discusses Timomachus’s superiority over another, unknown painter; the former depicted the murderous Medea before she commits infanticide, whereas the latter shows her in the act; what might he have had to say about Caravaggio’s Judith and Holofernes?

Lessing goes on to consider whether or not both painters and poets enjoyed real freedom in their work, or if it was constrained by external dictates like religion (that word freedom does warrant a digression about autonomy and heteronomy, which I don’t dare go into here). Whereas pleasure is the ultimate goal of the work of art, religious demands and superstitions often confined the artist. Lessing opts for unfettered art as the true art above those done for religious aims, which focus more on meaning than on the pure depiction of beauty. And conceptual art? Though perhaps a loss for us, yet luckily for him, he wasn’t around to have witnessed the past sixty-odd years. His mention of artists who “create for art’s sake” is dubiously credited in a note from the translator as “possibly the first use of the expression ‘art for art’s sake.’” I’m not so sure about that, but it would be radical.
    Citing a statement by the British writer Joseph Spence marveling at poets’ brevity in describing the muses—goddesses to which, after all, poets owe their very art—Lessing in turn critiques Spence’s seeming obtuseness in not recognizing that the name and function of a character, expressed in poetry with words, serve the same purpose as the visual attributes, in lieu of words, with which a painter is forced to depict a character. Here Lessing is simply pointing out that it would be redundant, not to mention a betrayal of each art’s respective strengths, for poetry to describe a character as she would be visually depicted in painting. While I don’t quite follow his differentiation between the “allegorical beings” of painting and the “personified abstractions” of poetry, as it seems to me that these are the same things merely expressed in different media, his point is quite clear: poets can concisely use words, painters must rely on visual clues. Neither should worry about mimicking the other art, and both should focus on the strengths of their own means of communication. He returns to this later when discussing his surprise at seeing a painter use the poet’s device of cloaking something in a cloud when it is meant to be invisible to the other characters in a scene. Just as it would be silly for poets to adopt verbal descriptions of things as seen in painting, it’s equally absurd that a painter would adopt so literally the poet’s device of rendering things invisible with a shroud of fog or darkness, something quite effective when described in words, yet odd when converted into paint.
    These limitations—painting’s need to visually depict, poetry’s need to signify in words—determine the very nature of each art. Continuing to take examples from classical antiquity, he imagines how a painter could go about showing Minerva as stronger than several men combined. In Homer’s Iliad she is described as such, and the listener’s or reader’s mind conjures this up in the imagination, whereas a painter, forced to depict her visually, inevitably loses that advantage. In choosing to show her several times larger than a man and hence convey her strength through size, the “marvelous” disappears and is replaced by an improbable and ineffective rendition that seeks to engage the eye rather than the imagination. Here Lessing returns to the cloud comments I noted earlier, pointing to such a device as “not what the poet intended. It exceeds the limits of painting…” by becoming a hieroglyphic symbol, a visible key to make us read something as invisible, and therefore one step removed from the poet’s direct statement of something’s invisibility.
    He then returns once again to an earlier passage and reiterates that where poetry can describe an event unfolding in time, painting can only suggest an event’s course by choosing a specific moment and portraying actions through bodies and their implied movement. Painting is limited to the “single moment of an action,” and poetry is limited to “one single property of a body.” Each much choose the most effective moment and property, respectively, to communicate its story. The essential rule, clarified in Homer’s epics, is that “harmony in descriptive adjectives and economy in description of physical objects” are necessities. Lessing elaborates this idea of harmony in adjectives later on, and for the moment moves on to the potential objections that could be raised against this rule. Poetry’s symbols may be successive, but they are also arbitrary, and as such should be able to depict bodies in space—like the shield of Achilles, for example. This is dismissed by agreeing that the “symbols of speech” are indeed arbitrary, but that this applies to speech in general, not poetry specifically. Essentially, it’s a question of style; yes, language doesn’t prevent a poet from describing everything, including space as a succession of bodies and actions, but the artistic demands of poetry (i.e., to make things strongly felt, as opposed to just understood or dryly conveyed) make it impossible. We need to be rapt at the “moment of illusion,” rather than distracted by how the poet created the illusion through words.

Lessing digresses for a moment to indulge the idea that even Homer succumbed to a dry laundry-list approach in his descriptions from time to time, casting doubt on his clear-cut line dividing painting and poetry, but he follows it with the clearest summary of his thesis—namely, that the poet reigns over the succession of time just as the painter reigns over the succession of space. Poetry is a verbal, temporal art, pain ting a visual, spatial art. For the two to encroach on one another’s realms is sheer bad taste. He uses the analogy of two friendly neighbors who have a mutual respect for each other’s terrain and maintain a tolerance for any eventual transgressions. Here Lessing is quite indulgent, pardoning artists like Raphael who combine two moments into one as evidenced in a curious fold of drapery, and sees this error as minor, committed in the name of capturing more prefect expression. I wonder what he’d have to say about Masaccio’s Brancacci Chapel scenes, wherein Saint Peter is shown in quaint continuous narrative, foreshadowing Muybridge’s startlingly non-static stills….

Forebearance is Lessing’s main mood here: forgive the painter who occasionally shows more than one moment at once, pardon the poet who occasionally uses more words then the strict minimum. His earlier mention of harmony in the use of adjectives returns here, as he dispenses pardons specifically for those extra words that a poet can use according to the lucky structure of his language. Comparing Greek, German, and French, he points out that what Homer could get away with in describing the shield of Achilles, its forging and figurative details, cannot be excused in its less scintillating translations into German and French, which “give the meaning but destroy the picture.” This is made slightly more complex with the addition of the temporal aspect: Homer chooses to describe the shield not as it exists when complete, but rather as it’s being made. The details that are statically coexistent on the final armor, described as they’re being formed, become consecutive in time. Hence Homer perfectly adapts this description to the strength—time, not space—of poetry; a painter would have to approach it quite differently, emphasizing space rather than time.
    Lessing concludes with a reaffirmation of limits’ benefits for each art. By not allowing poetry to use infinite descriptions, poets are forced to focus on the effect their words have on listeners and readers. While Homer doesn’t go into vivid description of Helen’s beauty, he makes her beauty clear through the circumstances and surrounding events, with a jury of elders deeming it worthy of the wretched war they’d endured. By verbally conveying the results of beauty, poets “paint” the beauty itself. The confining lines Lessing has worked to establish between painting and poetry are blurred by his choice of words here, bringing us back to the present. How he pulled this off 241 years ago I can’t begin to imagine.

So, admit it: if you’ve read this far, or if you even read past the first paragraph, you’ve also read Lessing’s essay, along with Greenberg’s and everyone else’s additions, and likely know a lot more about all this than I do, which confirms my suspicion that I’m probably one of the last people to get round to this piece. My interest in current visual works blending theater and more static visual arts aside, anyone working in poetry, painting, sculpture, video, or anything else would likely enjoy having a look at Lessing’s little essay. I won’t pretend to have any new insights about it—what is most striking is that such a potentially old, musty musing about such old, musty arts and ideas can remain so pertinent today.

Previous Lunar Refractions can be found here.

Although I swiped my title from the media coverage of this story:

SCIENTISTS have created “miracle mice” that can regenerate amputated limbs or damaged vital organs, making them able to recover from injuries that would kill or permanently disable normal animals.

The experimental animals are unique among mammals in their ability to regrow their heart, toes, joints and tail.

And when [fetal liver] cells from the test mouse are injected into ordinary mice, they too acquire the ability to regenerate […]

there are a number of important caveats missing from the “miracle mouse!” version.  (Whenever you hear “miracle”, especially in science, think of David Hume).  Nonetheless, I do think this research marks the point at which regenerative human medicine becomes not just possible but entirely probable.  The article to read is The scarless heart and the MRL mouse by Ellen Heber-Katz (who runs the lab responsible for most of these discoveries) et al., and a good primer on regeneration, including non-mammalian models, is Andrea Rinaldi’s The Newt in Us.

The mouse strain in question is an inbred strain called MRL, and has been around since 1979. It was originally selected for large size and has a lymphocyte (white blood cell) proliferative disorder which gives rise to a variety of immune problems, including autoimmune symptoms. For instance, the MRL mouse is a common model for systemic lupus erythematosus.  The regenerative abilities of this mouse were discovered by researchers marking mice by punching small holes in their ears; within 30 days, the MRL mice healed the ear holes closed whereas other mice retain the holes for their lifetimes (mice live about two years).  The figure above is taken from the linked paper and shows healer and non-healer mice at the time of marking (the authors don’t say when, but typically you do this at about 3 weeks of age) and 30 days later.

Further investigation revealed that the MRL mice can regenerate almost all tissues except brain. This regenerative healing is fundamentally different from normal mammalian wound healing, and takes place without scar formation (which is of particular interest to cardiologists, since scars formed in response to heart injuries, including infarcts, are probably the primary cause of subsequent chronic heart disease and failure). Such healing is known in mammals, but only very early in development — interestingly, prior to the development of certain immune, especially inflammatory, responses.  Heber-Katz et al. report that T-cells from nonhealer mice do inhibit the ear wound closure response. It doesn’t seem, however, that their immune dysfunction is the only mediator of the regenerative response in MRL mice. For instance, matrix metalloproteases 2 and 9 and their specific inhibitors have been shown to be differentially activated in healer vs. non-healer mice (MMPs and MMP inhibitors are primary players in tissue remodelling, including wound healing). In fact, at least 20 genetic loci (chromosome regions) have been shown to be involved in the MRL regenerative phenotype. Importantly, many of these show no overlap with the loci mapped to the autoimmune disorder. (In very plain English: it is not likely that the primary cause of the regenerative capacity is also the cause of the immune disorder, although there may be some overlap; this means that we may be able to replicate the regenerative ability without causing immune dysfunction.)

It is also not clear exactly which cells are doing the healing. In bone marrow transplant/transfer experiments, healing in both heart and ear tissue followed the recipient not the donor phenotype, meaning that bone marrow derived stem cells are not likely to be driving the healing response (although some involvement of donor cells was observed). Moreover, in these model systems recipient hematopoiesis is destroyed by X-ray exposure, so the cells responsible for the healing must be resistant to such treatment. It’s also possible to reconstitute irradiated hematopoiesis using fetal liver cells, which contain a population of hematopoietic stem cells. Heber-Katz’ group has tried that too. The results were somewhat surprising: in the heart, healing followed the donor phenotype (i.e. the fetal liver cells transferred the regenerative capacity or lack thereof), whereas in ear injuries healing followed the recipient phenotype (as seen with bone marrow transplant/transfer). Once again, donor cells are seen in the healed heart but the mechanism of their involvment is not clear, nor is it clear why cardiac but not ear tissue could regenerate in this model.

Here’s the thing that jumped out at me: because non-healer liver cells transferred that phenotype, it appears that scarring inhibits regeneration in mammals. In the MRL animals, something is holding back the formation of scar tissue, and (therefore??) regeneration is taking place. In non-healer mice which received healer fetal liver cells, high degrees of chimerism (~60-80%) were seen, whereas non-healer into healer transfers showed an average of only 12% chimerism. Why was 12% non-healer enough to cause normal healing and scarring in that transfer, but 20-40% non-healer was not enough to stop MRL-type healing without scarring in the reciprocal model? The authors offer one clue: “We do not know which cell population is responsible for [scarring with only 12% chimerism] and it may be different than the population that allows for a regenerative response in the reciprocal chimeras.”

This much at least is already clear: the MRL mouse model will provide profound insights into mechanisms of wound healing (including opportunities for regenerative medicine) and the functions of hematopoietic stem cells.  Let me finish with a direct quote from Dr Heber-Katz, forecasting the future from late last year in New Scientist magazine:

I believe that the day is not far off when we will be able to prescribe drugs that cause severed spinal cords to heal, hearts to regenerate and lost limbs to regrow. People will come to expect that injured or diseased organs are meant to be repaired from within, in much the same way that we fix an appliance or automobile: by replacing the damaged part with a manufacturer-certified new part. Advances in heart regeneration are around the corner, digits will be regrown within five to ten years, and limb regeneration will occur a few years later. Central nervous system repair will occur first with the retina and optic nerve and later with the spinal cord. Within 50 years whole-body replacement will be routine.

….

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Tony Blair says he is leaving before the summer is out, and the race for the Labour party leadership, and the assessment of the likely contenders in the next general election is already generating column inches. There’s every expectation of a bit of (all in good fun) back stabbing in the race for the Labour party leadership, but nobody seriously expects Gordon Brown to lose. What is much more fun is considering  how he will stand up to the Tories now that their new leader, David Cameron, is infusing the Tories with a fresh faced kind of posh boy sexiness (he took cocaine! he wears converse trainers! he listens to the Killers!). What is even more fun is considering how the female swing voters will choose between them.

It doesn’t surprise anyone that David Cameron is exciting more interest at this stage than the normally, intensely serious, and generally dour Mr Brown. None of the previous leaders of the Tories –  Michael Howard, Iain Duncan Smith, William Hague – has excited this much hope of finally facing down New Labour. What is annoying, however, is the way the public, and specifically, women, are viewed as reacting to the new Tory leader. Recent polls show that David Cameron owes his lead in the polls mostly to women’s votes. But is this because we women like his policies? Because they are sick of the present administration’s conduct in Iraq? Because they would like a change after ten years of New Labour? Hell, no, it’s because we all have the hots for him!

The press in the Tory camp base their campaign on the premise that the female vote is always susceptible to a strong chin, and a full head of hair (read Bill Clinton). There are constant references to Mr Cameron’s looks, charm, and sexiness. We are told how he cooks, he cleans, and that even some of his best friends are women. All in all we are persuaded that David Cameron is new age, young, and passably handsome ergo we must fancy him. As long as he gives us a cheeky grin, and a bit of laddish humour, we’ll be gagging to stuff our votes into his ballot box. Enough of a twinkle in his politician’s eye, and a photo of him on the school run, and he can have us over a soapbox anyday.

It’s a bit worrying that female voting attitudes are still viewed as this simplistic. If it isn’t the “he’s so handsome” gag, it’s the old “he changes nappies!” routine. David Cameron is supposed to be winning hearts with his caring dad demeanour, and his tie less suit and white shirt combos. He woos us with his talk of the “family”, “work/life balance”, and “saving the planet for our kids”. We see photos of his youthful figure riding a bike to work, while in reality, his Lexus trails behind him carrying his shoes, papers, and a statelier change of clothes. He affixes solar panels to his roof, and talks of sharing childcare responsibilities. And with every pronouncement he affects a posh, but loveable Hugh Grant inspired charm calculated to win over the ladies. Does everyone really think we are that easily swayed?

Granted, men aren’t so likely to be patronised on this front due to the disproportionate number of successful female politicians on the scene. And perhaps the fact that – in the main – older women aren’t considered half as desirable as shiny young political interns. Nobody would have wanted to jump into bed with Maggie Thatcher unless they had fantasies of the whip and leather variety, and most men would have had to close their eyes and think of Mother India before Indira Gandhi would have got a look in. But although every Frenchman worth his salt maybe panting over pictures of Segolene Royal in that blue swimsuit, you are unlikely to hear of the male vote swinging Royal’s way because she is sexy. You’re much more likely to hear that she puts off less capable, more wrinkled, female voters due to sheer female jealousy. As a sex, we’re still considered capricious voters – but the spin doctors approach us on the basis that our emotions are predictable, and our interests defined by childcare, family life, and, at a push, the climate. All grassroots, smaller scale, and domestic (with a small “d”) interests.

I won’t pretend that politicians can’t be sexy. I’ll expose my deviant taste in men by admitting that I think Gordon Brown oddly sexy, with that dishevelled lock of hair hanging over his face. And I even quite like the way he quotes treasury statistics with a sort of smug post-coital smile. But, unlike Cameron, his behaviour is not premeditated to set female hearts aflutter, in fact it is hard to see anything approaching (at least talented) spin in his normally serious demeanour. If anything, women voters have labelled Gordon Brown as “trustworthy” – high praise from members of a normally distrustful electorate, and at least recognition of a proven track record.

But despite the fact that David Cameron’s policies are so far variable, and given his lack of experience, largely untested, the statistics appear to show that Cameron’s play for the female vote may be working. An unproven Tony Blair came into power in 1997 on a tide of women’s votes. That tide seems to be changing. A Guardian/ICM poll last summer reflected women’s discontent with Labour, and swing towards the Conservatives. The Tories were 1% behind men, but scored an 8% lead among women. In a November, a Times/Populus poll showed that while men would vote for Labour and the Conservatives in equal numbers, women gave Cameron 37% of their vote to 31% for Labour.

Viewed through the prism of gender politics, it is fairly clear that Labour comes out miles ahead. It has 95 women MPs, to the Tory’s 17. It has a female foreign secretary, and several female ministers. It has made unprecedented strides in anti discrimination laws, contributed record levels of spending on education, and health, provided all children of nursery school age with guaranteed and quality childcare, and raised the minimum wage – mainly affecting a badly paid part-time female workforce. There is little, apart from the spectre of Margaret Thatcher, the Tories can point to in terms of increasing women’s participation in the political process, or at least easing the burdens of a modern working woman’s life.

If anything surely this would force commentators to a different conclusion on the figures, rather than the effete observation that women must be attracted to Mr Cameron’s kindness to children and puppy dogs. Perhaps that women are not only concerned with “women’s issues”. That perhaps their concerns are much wider, and not just rooted in domestic homebound concerns. Also that, for example, women may have a greater aversion to war, a greater propensity to take risks, or the intelligence not to stick to lifelong party commitments, but to change with the times. Or maybe it’s just because they think David Cameron is a cutie. Go figure.

The progressive left has always been based on a coalition of the oppressed or marginalized; in the West, this is now taken to include the poor, women, racial minorities, and sometimes gays and lesbians. But the actual constituents of the coalition evidently change over time, as after all, originally the coalition only included the working poor and, specifically to the US, racial minorities. More importantly, the groups that are considered working poor or oppressed racial minorities change over time. A good case study for this is the experience of Jews, who the left considered a racial minority on a par with black Americans throughout the West until about the 1960s. Although at least in the US Jews still tend left, the association between them and movement progressivism is weaker for reasons that are indicative of how the left operates as a whole.

The reflexive reason is that Israeli actions became increasingly consistent with right-wing politics. In 1967, Israel turned from a perpetually threatened country to a country so strong that it could destroy its neighbors’ air forces while their planes were still on the ground. Later it also became an explicitly occupying force that funded settlements in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which from a left-wing perspective changed Zionism from an anti-colonialist or anti-racist ideology to an imperialist one. That is certainly the underlying concern of modern left-wing opposition to Israel.

But in fact, something else had to be at stake. When two countries billed as post- or anti-colonialist fight, the left tends to blame historical imperialism. When the Second Congo War tore Congo-Kinshasa apart, the left-wing response was not to blame the Rwandan Tutsis, who invaded the Congo and plundered its natural resources, or the Hutus, who were responsible to the greatest atrocities. Rather, it was to blame Western colonialism for Africa’s problems and to cast the war as a scramble for resources demanded by the capitalist system. Although it was possible to narrate the Arab-Israeli conflict from a pro-Israel, anti-colonialist view, emphasizing Britain’s divide and rule tactics, the left chose not to. Such a narrative would later become impossible to make because of the settlements and the brutality of the occupation, but the Western left broke with Jewish groups in the 1960s and early 1970s, before the first settlements were built.

Therefore, a better explanation for the expulsion of Jewish groups from the coalition of the oppressed has to lie in domestic trends in the United States, which held a plurality of the world’s Jews. The most obvious explanation given that constraint—namely, that discrimination against Jews abated after World War Two to the point that in the US Jews were more like Italians and Poles and less like blacks and Hispanics—is helpful, but it still seems like only part of the reason.

A different part likely comes, ultimately, from different experiences with oppression. In the last six or seven hundred years, anti-Semitism has taken predominantly legal and cultural forms, reinforced by the occasional pogrom. Earlier than that it had an economic dimension—Jews were forbidden to own land—but once Europe recovered from the Dark Ages, the professions that Jews dominated, such as banking, turned them into a prosperous minority. This trend has existed since then almost continuously, with a brief break among Jewish immigrants to the United States around the turn of the 19^th century. But even then, many of the poverty-based experiences that shaped black civil rights activism just didn’t exist among Jews.

Equipped with an intellectual culture closer in its emphasis on book learning to this of China than to this of the West and a skin color that made it possible for Jews to pass as gentiles in certain cases, Jews came to dominate such skilled professions as the law, medicine, and the academia. Discrimination against Jews was therefore more about explicit restrictions than about the economic impoverishment that typified anti-black racism. For example, in the 1920s Harvard moved from a purely meritocratic admission system to its current system in order to reduce the percentage of Jewish students from 25 to 15; at the time, Jews consisted of 2% of the American population. In contrast, only recently have blacks stopped to be underrepresented in American universities in general, to say nothing of elite universities.

As such, Jewish civil rights activism was predominantly legal, consisting of fights against discriminatory laws. Since most Jews at the time also came from a socialist or sometimes liberal political tradition, they naturally lent their groups—the ACLU and the Anti-Defamation League—to supporting similar equal rights struggles, primarily those of black people but sometimes also those of labor. As long as that was how left-wing activism worked, the ACLU and the ADL were natural allies of the black civil rights movement. More importantly, once black civil rights activism changed its focus to economic issues, the natural link was severed.

Although in the 1920s and 30s there was a strong socialist element to Jewish thought, by the 1950s and 60s it was replaced with straight liberalism. The most committed socialists were Zionist enough to immigrate to Israel and merge into city or kibbutz life. Anti-communist witchhunts exercised pressure to repudiate socialism. Several decades of life in the United States exercised pressure to adopt one of the two acceptable ideologies in the country, liberalism and conservatism, abetted by the fact that upward mobility plunged most Jews into the middle class. Those trends most visibly affected the ACLU, separating it from the unions.

And perhaps most importantly, after the early 60s, the most pressing legal battles were no longer racial. There was a growing realization in parts of the left, especially but not only the liberal ones, that there were marginalized groups not defined by class or race. Second wave feminism drained many Jewish liberals away from racial civil rights struggles; while within anti-racist activist groups Jews could define themselves as another racial minority, once Jewish liberals diverted their energies to other civil rights struggles the blacks who dominated the civil rights movement could now define Jews as whites. The animosity between feminists and anti-racists over who was more oppressed and therefore had a greater priority certainly didn’t help.

Those blacks were certainly within reason. Jews could change their names and pass for white gentiles while blacks and the new minority in search of civil rights, Hispanics, couldn’t. The Holocaust made racism generally unfashionable, but especially affected anti-Semitism. Especially after Martin Luther King’s assassination, the black civil rights movement had shifted its focus to poverty-related issues, while the ACLU’s civil liberties battles were increasingly class-neutral. Lacking any domestic discrimination to focus on, Jews who wanted to focus on specifically Jewish issues gravitated to support for Israel, which would’ve separated them from the mainstream American left, whose only involvement in foreign policy was anti-war activism, even if it hadn’t entailed support for Republican hawks.

Thence by 1970s the relationship between Jews and blacks had strained to the point that the American left stopped considering Zionism an ally. American Jews have still leaned left since then, but Zionism, which historically was a left-wing movement, was tagged as right-wing.

It’s important to note that it was only after domestic trends within the United States had separated Jews from the anti-racist left that the left started to view Zionism as right-wing. The Six-Day War could provide a suitable pretext for viewing Israel as an oppressor state rather than as an oppressed state, but the right-wing characteristics of Zionism, namely a singular emphasis on military service and discrimination against Arabs, date back to Israel’s independence. Today’s anti-Israeli leftists even trace right-wing Zionism further back than that—for example, Noam Chomsky blames Zionists for the initial friction between Jews and Arabs in the 1920s—but those interpretations only arose after the fact. As long as Zionism was considered left-wing, the left would forgive its transgressions just like it did those of other socialist or post-colonial states.

The significance of this to the left in general is that the answer to the perennial question of which groups are considered oppressed and therefore get the associated fringe benefits is determined by many things that have little to do with oppression. A group that is no longer oppressed may still receive these benefits if politically it’s still aligned with other left-wing movements; conversely, a group that is still oppressed but fails to side politically with the mainstream left, or a group that is oppressed but cannot convince anyone that it is, will be perceived as not deserving any special recognition.

CSI, Law and Order, 24, Cold Case Files, Without a Trace, Criminal Minds, The Shield, Crossing Jordan, The Wire. I learn a lot about life. For instance, there is evil, sometimes petty, sometimes monstrous, but always deadly. There is good: the police, the prosecutors, and their beleaguered, but heroic witnesses. Of course, there are the squealers, the snitches, the sleazeballs, or simply the entrapped that help get some portion of evil greater than their own off the street. Defense attorneys have pride of place in the evil paragon. They are sort of the Beelzebubs of the evil operations, scheming, unscrupulous, tricksters that made it so difficult for the do-gooders to defeat evil.

Sebastian Shark of CBS’ Shark, for example, is the most dangerous trickster of all, for he now applies his incomparable skills with the tools of evil to serve the good. He now puts evildoers, sometimes even his ex-clients, in jail. Once evil, he has morphed into someone good. The moral of his story is that the good must learn, or stronger still, must be a little evil to get evil off the streets. Justice is a result, not a process, for Shark. His young and beautiful lawyer posse is often revolted by his tactics, but the lesson they are taught by Shark is that evil must be used to ensure that good will triumph.

I prefer Orson Wells in Touch of Evil. Now there was evil incarnate, three hundred ugly pounds of it. Chomping a wet cigar, unshaven, clearly getting the better of his opponent, the goody-goody cop Charlton Heston whom he transforms into someone evil. Only Marlene Dietrich, the borderlands madam, took pity on Welles’ Hank Quinlan. Dietrich as Tanya was not exactly the hooker with a heart of gold. Instead she was the weary, cynical stable keeper for men like Wells whose peccadillos were her bread and butter. As Wells framed hundreds of suspects throughout his career, he had also hooked up with a sneaky, violent, dark-faced, Spanglish-speaking criminal Mexican gang, that he uses to break the mestizo and obviously uppity Heston, the proud husband of the blond-haired Janet Leigh whom the Mexicans kidnap and torture for good measure. Except for Leigh’s Susie, the damsel in distress, everyone else gets more evil, and some of the worst of them kill, die, or in Heston’s case sober up to the need to do evil in order to do good.

Well, that is the big lie – to do evil in order to do good – that TV tells us is the moral of our version of Crime and Punishment. The good must do evil so that the bad are caught, murdered, jailed, and/or sometimes executed.

What do we learn about our civil rights, good or evil as we are? What does TV tell us about the practice of criminal justice in the United States? More accurately, what does TV portray as everyday practice in our daily battle against crime?

The first lesson is that everyone is a suspect and their rights an impediment to uncovering evil. Your are supposed guilty until you prove yourself innocent, and every attempt you make to clear yourself or help the police out will be turned against you. You can be “liked” for a crime, not a compliment on your character or good looks, and become a suspect without knowing it. If and until you are arrested, they do not need to tell you that their “liking” you makes you a suspect in their book, until they find someone better.

So the second lesson is that it is better to remain silent. Cooperation is a mistake. Request a lawyer. If you have no lawyer (woe betide you if you are poor or like most people in America consider lawyers potential road kill), then ask to go home. Whatever you do, seek to avoid staying at the station house because that is where the tricks often occur.

At home, answer the door cautiously, as guns may be drawn, and never, never invite police into your house. If you do, you have invited them to grab up whatever they need for their case against you.

Suppose you are transformed from witness, to person of interest, to suspect. You are arrested. Take the warning seriously and say nothing once more. Ask immediately for a lawyer. Don’t cop an attitude, or they will clock you. A whack on the head or anywhere else on your body, so long as it leaves no bruises, is practically the duty of a morally outraged cop. It seems that the good cop is never quick enough to restrain the bad cop. Ask for aspirin as soon as you can, as you will bruise more easily, and perhaps shorten the beat down.

The good cop, bad cop routine is still the order of the day, and amazing grace at least on TV, seems to work. The good cop is constantly asking you to help them out, or suggesting you help yourself by getting the evil off your chest. It will go easier if you confess now or if you give up your partner in crime. Beware the prisoner’s dilemma: it works too.

I personally can’t understand how cooperating and confessing makes things easier. The image of the prison with which they threaten the accused is an inferno. Sweet young things, male or female, are threatened with gang rape or being sold as sex slaves for a pack of cigarettes. HIV infection lurks in every sex act. The middle-aged are told they will die miserably in jail.

Most criminal indictments end in plea bargains – 85% of them. You may be surrendering your right to self-defense, but your odds don’t improve through jury trials, which for murder suspects ends 85% of the time in conviction.(If you are African-American, please note that you are three and a half times more likely to be convicted of murder through trial by jury than your white counterparts.) But Law and Order’s “Maximum Sam” Waterson’s .750 batting average does represent reality: crime usually leads to punishment. Much of the success, for better or worse, owes to being incriminated before you are arrested, and according to TV, way before you even know you’re “liked” for the crime.

But who knows about innocence? Northwestern University’s Center for Wrongful Convictions found in 2001 that of 86 persons wrongfully convicted and exonerated, 53% were convicted on the basis of mistaken or perjured eyewitness testimony; 20% were convicted regardless of police and prosecutorial misconduct; another 12% were convicted with jailhouse informant testimony; another 9% on the basis of coerced or false confessions; and finally (take that CSI!), another 11% were convicted with what the center calls false or misleading “junk” science. Illinois in 2003 found so many wrongful murder convictions in their midst that the 17 defendants on death row were exonerated, and then Governor Ryan commuted the death sentences of 160 others. The wrongful conviction movement has spread throughout the country and the convicted in many cases exonerated, but this is seldom seen on TV. Instead, alla Cold Case Files, the past offers up its old murderers for the convicting.

This brings us back to what we learn on TV. It is not the truth of the matter, but a rather well-set and coherent collection of ideas about crime and punishment in America. It is rather like the old westerns with good and evil starkly portrayed, and the Indians vested with few, if any rights. This is no Dirty Harry syndrome any more, as in cops hampered by court decisions, and the guilty escaping because of our fecklessness in the face of evil. No, the cops usually catch the culprit under circumstances of their choosing, rather than those once prescribed by the Constitution. If they get it wrong, there is little recourse. Old Gil Grissom, in the recollection of this CSI-addicted writer, has only once worked to exonerate someone whom his office has wrongly convicted.

Outside of the tube and bumping around the everyday world, people are wrongly convicted through abuse, sloppiness, or the rush to judgment. If you are a person of color, watch out especially. All of you whose income falls beneath that of the well-heeled won’t get a snide, slick, and successful defense lawyer. There is no Shark in your future. Instead, you may get an over-worked and under-paid public defender, or a lawyer whom you cannot pay enough to do a really thorough job, given the endless complications of justice in America. Public advocates can only save the few and the really endangered.

An occasional jury will jump the rails and find for a defendant believed to have been treated badly or wrongly, or who they believe to be innocent. In Boston last year, several juries in a row refused to believe police testimony and found defendants not guilty.

But if the TV is about our beliefs, then it seems that we believe that evil is back big time, and evil criminals are caught and punished, even if by hook or crook, and this is really okay. And most of us, me included when I leave my rational world and head into the realms of American authoritarian fantasies, really enjoy it.

… Did I forget your favorite crime show? I confess. Sometimes during a Thursday night seminar, my mind wanders to the question: Will I get home in time for CSI, the real one in Nevada with Gil Grissom and the rest of the gang? Sometimes, I have to content myself with a killing in Miami or New York.

Australian poet and author Peter Nicholson writes 3QD‘s Poetry and Culture column (see other columns here). There is an introduction to his work at peternicholson.com.au and at the NLA.

Poetry is a foreign country: they do things differently there. (Apologies to L. P. Hartley.) And for that very reason I sometimes want to get right away from words, the awful girders and trusses of words, to the freedom of an art form where I don’t have to do any oxyacetylene welding or other territorial revisionism. The world of dance and ballet is one place I can escape to where all of that mental sledging falls away, movement and rhythm in poetry being entirely different things. I’ve always been star-struck by dancers whose abilities I envy and whose ease of movement sometimes seems like the most real poetry.

Dancers would have a good laugh over this, knowing that the apparent ease of movement is down to countless hours of practise at the barre, slipped discs, wretched touring, aching feet, stroppy corps de ballet, partners who were once amenable and now aren’t, and so forth. Yes, I know that, but still—here is an art form where the invitation comes with the possibility of joyfulness that other art forms don’t offer so readily or abundantly.

I can’t think this preference of mine is anything special because I note that one of the most viewed videos on YouTube is Judson Laipply’s Evolution of Dance which has been seen over forty million times! We would all like to move like Fred Astaire or Beriosova, but we can’t, and so we settle for dance performances where music, light, decor and flesh transform themselves into intoxicating rhythms, visions of transport, gravity temporarily defeated. Film sometimes captures these rhythms—Black Orpheus, the end of Les Enfant du Paradis—but usually it happens after choreography, the slow accretion of movements that work from inspiration to the moment when the curtain goes up and there are no safety nets left to hold off error. How touching it can be at curtain call when dancers, thrilled with their own efforts, and knowing they have touched the stars that particular evening, have to come back down to earth. You feel their shared pleasure, and perhaps also a little of the sadness that must ensue after an attempt at the ideal has to be replaced with the usual ordinariness. The makeup is removed, day clothes are put back on and the street looks penny plain.

In my youth the Australian Ballet seemed—was—terribly glamorous, and there was always a special theatrical intensity in its performances. Australians have always had an interest in dance and we now have contemporary companies providing every kind of dance style imaginable. Robert Helpmann and Peggy van Praagh were in charge of the Australian Ballet in earlier times and regularly starred great dancers from yonder, Margot and Rudolf for starters. I remember Margot Fonteyn slaying everyone in the aisles in an act from Raymonda. There were unexpected delights too such as Lucette Aldous and Alan Alda dancing a spectacular Spring Waters or the pleasure of seeing an all-Australian The Lyrebird, music Malcolm Williamson, choreography Robert Helpmann, sets Sidney Nolan. The first director of the Australian National Gallery purchased a basketful of one hundred Ballets Russes costumes which, now cleaned and restored, still convey something of the excitement of the Diaghilev era. The same kind of excitement can be seen practically leaking from the screen in the balletomania of Michael Powell’s The Red Shoes. Anton Walbrook drives Marius Goring’s composer and Moira Shearer’s dancer to the point of self-destruction. Obviously there is a warning in the film, taken as it is from the Hans Christian Andersen story, of the dangers in dwelling too much in pure aesthetic realms, and of seeking perfection en pointe.

For some, it’s breakdancing, or ballroom dancing, the tango, salsa, Indian or African tribal dancing, that is the spellbinder. The body can be made to move in so many remarkable ways. How awkward and unsatisfactory one feels in the face of the choreographed visions of Cranko, MacMillan and Graham or loose-limbed winging it on the dance floor.

If going from the ballet world to the other one we must usually occupy is a little like going to bed as Margot Fonteyn and waking to find yourself Peggy Hookham, that doesn’t invalidate those ephemeral moments when the visionary gleam catches fire. Sluggish limbs recall great transformative dance experiences, whether Jiri Kylian’s Nederlands Dans Theater or a distantly-recalled Ballet Folklorico from Mexico, incense engulfing Her Majesty’s Theatre amongst the leaping and the noise.

I’m not qualified to comment on dance technique, but I know technique is needed to contain and convey emotion. I’ve read that some big names in the past didn’t have have the technique of today’s dancers. Perhaps, but how hard it must have been, for example, for Madam, Dame Ninette de Valois, to build a British company of dancers equal to de Bournonville and Fokine, almost from scratch. And dancers then had personality in spades. Our age seems rather anodyne in comparison. The ballet world can be split by factionalism, as any of the arts, and stories abound of carryings-on and put-downs of various leading lights. That is the negativity you always get when anyone aspires to something beyond the status quo.

Think about the sheer variety of dance styles—Sammy Davis, Jr., Yuri Soloviev, Merle Park, Chita Rivera, Maria Tallchief, Michael Jackson, Leonide Massine, Bob Fosse. These heterogeneous dance styles suggest some mysterious energy, a parallel universe, where movement attains a condition of transcendence, however impermanent. Balanchine especially seems to make his dancers move with a gracefulness and fluidity that can raise whole evenings to a level of exaltation. Stravinsky said Nijinsky didn’t understand music and thus made his choreography too complex for the dancers, but Nijinsky must have had some charisma and ability to have captured his historical moment so acutely. Nijinsky’s sister, Bronislava, was also a fascinating choreographer. However, Balanchine seems to have worked out the way forward from the classical style of Petipa to the contemporary with a wit and elegance that can encompass Sousa marches and Ravel, the sinew of Agon and the brilliance of Ballet Imperial.

Well, back to poetry country. Silence, exile and indolent strumming may be needed to get along in that place, but there’s always the flight to freedom available over the border in dance land, where words turn into rhythms unavailable to letters, and you can temporarily escape their manacles. 

                                                               *

               Top Hat

   Fred Astaire d. June 23, 1987

Gingering the boredom
Of awkward tribulation,
That near lean on a stick
Spins firecracker variations
With legs in a suave equation.

This is style
Mapping the screen,
Planetary movement
Reducing to top hat, white tie and tails
Stardust of the Milky Way.

It ends with the usual stillness,
Those toe-tapping terrors
Trapped, perfection cracked,
Yet up in the evening sky
A ghostly footprint whizzes figures of eight.

Written 1987 Published 1994 Such Sweet Thunder 69

Maria Bylova and Leonid Nikonov of the Bolshoi Ballet dance Spring Waters here. 2′ 27”

The great, big, fat, extravagant Indian wedding is back, straight from Sudeley Castle, Gloucestershire to the Umaid Bhawan Palace and Mehrangarh Fort in Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India. The royalty in nuptial question is none other than an obscure Indian by the name of Arun Nayar (no relative of mine!) and a has-been British actor by the name of Liz Hurley. The seven million pound week long extravaganza has kept the media in India and Britain hooked, even though none but Hello! ,the magazine which paid two million pounds for exclusive rights to cover the wedding, were allowed anywhere near the gates of the Mehrangarh Fort. In fact, in the hurly-burly of it all, some journalists even managed to get beaten up by security (who says that glamour journalists have it easy) as they tried to catch a glimpse of the tamasha, rather foolishly, through the lens of their cameras. Anyhow, it’s all over now as I write, and I have no intention of buying a copy of Hello! to see what it was all about. Suffice to say that it wouldn’t have quite matched up to that other (and earlier) great, big, fat, extravagant, Indian wedding in the Palace of Versailles where the world’s fifth richest man, India’s own Stalin (meant only literally, as in Russian) Laxmi Mittal, married his daughter by spending a mere fifty five million pounds of his vast fortune. After all India’s biggest film stars danced there. And Michelin starred chefs cooked the supper. The only thing in common to the two weddings was that they continued the old Indian tradition of the girl (and her family) funding the festivities. Liz Hurley apparently made up the difference between the actual costs and what Hello! paid. Arun Nayar’s claim to fame is not his riches (he isn’t even in the Forbes list of the richest Indians), but this marriage-Indian Ishtyle! (and my apologies for the Hinglish style, but we Indians are like that only!)    

But that’s just the glitzy side of Indian weddings. There is a side which is darker, but ironically as extravagant. Take the case of Mr. Ram X. (name changed for reasons of privacy). He is a clerk, earning a lowly wage. He married his daughter recently. He spent a lot of money, nowhere near what the Hurley’s and the Mittal’s spent, but in fact much more, disproportionate to his own income. He went to the extent of borrowing money, some from friends, some from exploitative moneylenders. He had to pay for his daughter’s dowry ( a scooter, fridge, microwave amongst other items). And then he spent on the festivities. He would have been happy with the debt had his daughter been happy after marriage. Sadly, her new family harass her, beat her sometimes for more dowry, and constantly demand more money from her father. He can’t afford it. He can’t bear to see his daughter suffer. He will bring her back. Ram X. is just one of millions of fathers-of-the-bride who are arguably more extravagant than the richie-riches (given that they go into debt, compared with the pocket change celebs spend) when it comes to their weddings, but unfortunately don’t get any pleasure out of it. This too is a facet (admittedly negative) of getting married-Indian ishtyle. Incidentally, some believe that dowry is actually an English custom. The British famously received the island of Bombay in dowry from the Portuguese, when an English prince married a Portuguese princess.

And before this gets too teary eyed, let us move to the scenario of Indian marriage where age old tradition marries the new age and all its technology and facility. Yes, I am referring to the ‘Arranged’ marriage now facilitated by the world wide web! It’s now easier than ever for parents (and often young people) to find brides and grooms of their choice on the internet. Shaadi, jeevansathi, bharat matrimony, go4marriage, anmolrishte etc DOT.COM are amongst the innumerable sites where one can find profiles of young people looking to get hitched. There’s big money in it for the web portal owners (as is evident by the number of advertisements they release on prime time television). Everyone who signs up pays a fee. Some of these sites claim up to 700,000 successful matches. Others, in competition, claim 710,000! Whichever way, and whomever you believe, this is a big time activity. These portals are actually quite sophisticated. You can search for a partner by sifting through various categories based on religion, community, caste, region, language etc. The downside of this, of course, is the realization about how parochial we Indians can still be, when it comes to choosing a partner. Marriage across different categories is rare. The other interesting observation is about what is valued as an occupation: H1B US visa, working for a MNC (multinational corporation) in India, and a good job in the elite government services probably top the list.  In a rather ironical twist, it is amazing to see the number of people who want their partner to be ‘fair’ skinned. I thought we were ALL outraged by the racism meted out to poor Shilpa Shetty on Big Brother! Oh, and lest I forget, it’s always better to be a homely girl! Like it or not, all a part of getting married-Indian Ishtyle. Did I hear someone say arranged marriage is outdated?!

So there you are, a very brief journey through the great Indian wedding: that almost impossible blend of tradition, modernity, extravagance, happiness and sometimes sadness. I have to say, that by observation, most Indian weddings these days tend to be great, big, fat and extravagant. This in part due to the influence of Hindi films which depict weddings in the lavish Punjabi style, with all the song, dance and fun. Other parts of India, often have weddings which my Bengali friend in Chicago says resemble funerals more than a celebration. He, and a lot of others, believe in adopting the Punjabi way. Weddings should be fun after all.

Long live the Indian wedding (free of dowry and other such outdated and abominable practices). Lets only hope (and here is where it gets a little mushy!), that like in the Hindi films, there is always a happily-ever-after sort of ending.

Now that nearly every American has access to VHS and DVD and Netflix and Blockbuster, a certain feature of the cinephilia of times past has disappeared: scarcity.  Almost every film one wants to see, one can see – albeit on television.  This has had a major negative effect on the cultural importance of retrospectives, revival houses, film series, etc.  But there is now a retrospective going on that includes truly rare films that are also, in my opinion, unmissable.  The Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, who is having his first major U.S. retrospective right now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, became famous worldwide for a series of meditative, often metafictional films–Through the Olive Trees, The Wind Will Carry Us, Close Up, Taste of Cherry (for which he won the Palme d’Or)–that are indisputably part of the canon of cinema.  But prior to that, Kiarostami made a series of films about children that went unscreened and unavailable in the U.S., until now.

In the seventies, Kiarostami was employed by Iran’s Institute of Cultural Development of Children to make explanatory shorts on subjects like the concept of different colors, why one should choose forgiveness over fighting with classmates, how to repaint household objects, etc.  From the first, these films are leavened with poetic insight into their subject matter, an enthusiasm for finding beauty in simplicity, and a playfulness and joyful energy that seeks to inspire the same in their young audiences.  Many of these short works are being screened by MoMA before the longer, sixty-to-ninety minute narrative films Kiarostami made in the same period, also concerning children.  These works are examples of perfect cinema. 

The enforced viewing of these films in MoMA’s excellent projection is a good thing, because with Kiarostami, as with all film artists, it’s imperative to see the movies at the movies.  He relies on big compositions and often gives the crucial details or resolution of a plot in distant long shots, the most famous example being the last shot of Through the Olive Trees.  These early films show that that capacity was an evident talent from the beginning of Kiarostami’s career.  They often detail the most subtle moments of joy, relief, triumph, and despair through beautiful compositions that leave one to infer the rush of internal emotions.  For instance, the climax of one of these films is simply a boy in long shot, watering plants, but with a relief so palpable that the normality of the action turns into an inner celebration.  (Girls, sadly, play a much smaller role in Kiarostami’s children’s films). 

A boy stands in line to buy tickets at Tehran’s soccer stadium.  Around him are grown men, pushing and jostling him and each other.  Still, he moves faster than most, pressing any opportunity to advance.  He is small and vulnerable against this crowd.  Determined, he finally reaches the counter, where the ticket-seller is counting bills.  “No more tickets.”  The boy droops, but, again showing great resolve, presses on, checking other entrances, braving the menace of the police that everywhere surround the stadium, overhearing scalpers.  Finally, he buys a ticket of a man for too much money.  Later he will have to find a way to get back to his village, an overnight bus ride away, with no money or acquaintances in Tehran.  Excitedly entering the stadium, he finds a place in the upper stands.  Nothing much appears to happening on the field of play; the match won’t begin for three hours.  The boy, who is tired, unpacks a small bundle.  It’s a cloth wrapped around some bread, all the food the boy has seen for twelve hours.  Still, with a simple impulse to manners, he taps the man to his right’s shoulder.  “Mister, please, have some!” 

The scene is from Abbas Kiarostami’s 1974 film The Traveler, one of his first feature-length projects.  It  evokes in an almost unbearably moving way the consciousness and travails of Qassem, an indefatigable schoolboy trying to see his first soccer match.  Skipping school, where he is an indifferent student, he tries various schemes to make the needed money, undeterred by beatings from his school principal, the carping of his mother and the utter disregard of his father.  Yet this is no mildly uplifting story of the triumph of childhood optimism and wonder over cynical and brutal adulthood.  It’s much more honest filmmaking than that – Kiarostami observes the boy’s world in a manner that belongs to the neorealist tradition, with sympathy but without overt judgments.  He has a magical ability to summon the emotional world of children, in both its poignance and its selfishness.  And this honesty, in turn, buys him our true emotional engagement with his stories. 

Describing the occurrences of Kiarostami’s plots does not, somehow, communicate the sense of surprise or freshness that pervades almost every frame of the children’s films.  Always, Kiarostami’s plots seem truly simple in a general sense (two boys want to borrow a wedding suit, a man is stranded, etc.) but turn out to be full of revelations, unexpected moments, reversals, setbacks, unforeseen victories and defeats.  They have the vivacity of life, or perhaps more.  The films are kinetic explorations of forward motion.  Never do the characters stop to consider actions for long – they take them, and then react as swiftly to the results.  Because of this, perhaps, the settings are often roads, lanes, alleys, atria.   These boys live in the interstices of home and work, school (if they can afford to go) and recreation.  Comfortable in none of them, they seek relief, fun–basically an escape from the harsh treatment of their bosses, teachers, parents, and older siblings.  Determination is their signature quality. 

Kiarostami’s interest lies very deliberately with working children, hustling to make their way and maybe getting a bit of schooling, which they typically ignore, on the side.  They scheme because they desire, but the desire to escape often traps them further.  The young bully in The Wedding Suit takes the money his older brother saves to send him to school and uses it on karate classes.  Qassem’s trip to the soccer match will no doubt only increase his immiseration when he gets home.  That determination is so often stymied, so often self-defeating, does not entail a retreat into complacency, though – if anything, the failure of a plan only makes the effort nobler.  No false salves or sentimental compensations are provided – only a picture of life that is stunningly convincing. 

It’s a measure of how pure the cinematic quality of Kiarostami’s work is that prose can’t seem to capture what makes his images and journeys so unboring, so endlessly stimulating.  In a short from 1978, we see a man standing by the side of the road.  The din of passing trucks drowns out any other noise.  The man tries, and fails, to hitch a ride.  Truck after truck doesn’t stop.  Rather than compress this sequence, however, Kiarostami keeps the pace even.  Each new truck, we imagine, must be the one to stop.  This is the one!  But they don’t.  The man has a tire with him, and he sits on it idly.  He is high in the mountains; his breath is visible.  A driver stops at the solitary tire shop we see across the road.  Our hero helps him load his new tire, but the driver is going the wrong direction.  Back to waiting.

The road is momentarily empty.  Birds animate the still mountains.  A moment is reached; the man decides he must go himself.  He begins to run, slapping and nudging the tire with him, which rolls along like a animal companion.  The tire and the man make their way – he has determined to get down himself.  The road turns this way and that, a small tunnel is reached, large switchbacks are traversed.  A car stops comically to wonder at the spectacle of a man and his pet tire.  At times the tire speeds up too much, at times it slows, sometimes it looks as if it will go over the edge.  They are descending.  The man is sweating now, he removes his jacket, recombs his hair.  Again the film’s pace does not speed up, we experience time with him, not knowing what will come.  And then, the tire rolls up to and hits a yellow car, missing a tire, on a jack.  The man stops.  He ran down a mountain with his fixed tire.  At best, a momentary victory.  But he made it.

The short’s name?  “Solution No. 1.”  I can’t recommend these films more highly.  The full schedule is here; The Traveler is playing Sunday, March 11th, at 4pm.  “Solution No. 1” and The Wedding Suit are Monday, March 12th at 6pm.  Here’s A.O. Scott’s take on the major films; here, is a properly Kiarostamian anecdote about introducing Close Up from Jeff Strabone. 

The rest of Dispatches.

A couple of months ago, as my debut on 3 Quarks Daily, I wrote about my frustrating experience of being the intended victim of an apartment rental scam on Craig’s List. You can read that piece, entitled Web of Lies, here. Of course, the crooks haven’t been stopped yet. Last I heard the other Beth Ann Bovino has moved to Arizona and cut the rent price, since the apartment had been sitting “empty on the market’” for some time. That’s not surprising. What is surprising, and amazing, is how the story spread so rapidly across the country, enough to catch the attention of regulators.

The morning after it was posted, the Daily News called and asked to interview me about my problem. I agreed and spoke with a journalist on the phone that day. She even sent a photographer by to take my picture. I happened to be dressed up that day, and got ready for my close-up with a big smile. I was asked to stop, given the seriousness of my situation. OK, I can do that, and I frowned. The next morning my frown appeared on the cover of the Daily News.

I thought I ran through my 15 minutes of fame and then some. But the story reached its boiling point. It cascaded into huge headlines nationwide. National Fox News asked to have me on their 8 AM show that day. Associated Press interviewed me over the phone. Another TV network came in for an interview. After over four interviews that morning, I declined local Fox News. They showed up at my office anyway, interrupted a meeting and pleaded that I comply. They said I have been on the news all day and that they had to have an interview. Choosing between sitting in an interoffice meeting or staring in the news, I did the interview. They sent TV crew to the apartment in question, which was my old home as I recently moved. Some asked that I leave work so that they could get a picture of me in front of my (old) home. My name even made it to the 1010 WINS (radio) news loop, in between traffic updates. I was told that my name and issue was raised during a Press Conference with Craig’s List, which was now under investigation because of the event. Inside Edition both called and wrote asking for an interview to use in their investigation into Craig’s List.

Ms. Jordan Lite, the Daily News reporter who first covered the story, said that it’s “a classic New York story (real estate, aggressive renters) with a modern-day (cyber) twist”, and that she wouldn’t be surprised if it got more attention. It did. It was linked to many other web sites, blogs and received countless local and national TV and radio attention, possibly some international press. People called my office or emailed my office to give advice. Sitting at a restaurant in the Miami airport, someone asked me if I caught the crooks. In upstate New York for the weekend I heard “Oh! You’re the girl that…”

How did it spread so quickly?

The surprising impact of Web of Lies was likely an example of a social epidemic proposed in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. The word “tipping point” comes from the study of epidemiology, and refers to that moment in an epidemic when a virus reaches critical mass. It’s the moment where the line on the graph starts to shoot straight upwards.

Web of Lies hit Gladwell’s tipping point and quickly spread. It received over 12,000 hits in the first hour posted, and soon after, received about several hundred hits per MINUTE. It received over 70,000 hits in 3 days. To give some perspective, a recent PEW/Internet report said that about one in five bloggers (22%) have fewer than ten hits a day in blog traffic, and 17% say they have 10 to 99 hits on a typical day. Just 13% have more than 100 hits a day. In contrast, Web of Lies spread so quickly, that within 36 hours it reached national headlines. In other words, the line on the graph shot through the roof, much like a virus turned epidemic.

Gladwell explains that ideas and behavior and messages sometimes behave just like outbreaks of infectious disease. He compares it to an epidemic of measles in a kindergarten class, saying how “one child brings in the virus. It spreads to every other child in the class in a matter of days. Within a week or so, it completely dies out and none of the children will ever get measles again.” In this sense, they are seen as social epidemics. The virtue of an epidemic, after all, is that just a little input is enough to get it started, and it can spread very, very quickly.

Even more fascinating was how Gladwell explains the three criteria that diseases must meet in order to become an epidemic. This lends itself, by analogy, to practically every change initiative, such as social ones. The three criteria are:
The Law of the Few: A few people doing something different start and incubate the epidemic. These people, who Gladwell calls “mavens” are the ones who rub two sticks together in such a way that they improbably catch fire. Incubation also requires “connectors”. These are people with contact to a lot of people, enough to get the idea out into other communities and networks. They are the ones who move in different circles, so that the epidemic reaches escape velocity and spreads, much like HIV or SARS.
The Stickiness Factor: This allows the epidemic to endure long enough to “catch”, or to become contagious or “memorable”. Ways to make something sticky include repetition, hooks and triggers and an understanding of the message, some kind of story, and suspense. In other words, ways of “packaging to make it irresistable”.
The Power of Context: This requires that the physical, social and group environment must be right to allow the epidemic to then suffuse through the population. A concentration camp environment, for example, will change human behavior at epidemic speed. In a less austere environment, harsh rules and codes will not be as effective.

The success Web of Lies had in reaching such a large audience was likely because it met these three criteria. To begin with, the story had an inherently sticky message that resonated with many. People who had received numerous emails from scammers with the SUBJECT: URGENT!!! in the header would undoubtedly identify with the story. Moreover, given the popularity of “whodunit” TV show; someone trying to crack his or her own case would certainly be very appealing to many. The audience would essentially be “hooked”. The story caught the eye of a few early enthusiastic readers, likely within the blogospere, who incubated the story. It spread by connectors, such as digg.com and other web sites, which spread the message to other communities. Each new group then adapted the message to the group’s own unique social environment and own social context. Postings from renters searching for a home in Canada, relay operators handling phone calls for the deaf, or those fighting consumer fraud online indicate that the story reached across social circles. Together they may explain why the story spread far enough that I could be recognized in a small town a few hours north of New York City. The original internet real estate scam likely meets the same criteria as well.

What is amazing, and what he makes clear, is how frequently this pattern can be seen. Gladwell notes a number of positive epidemics, such as Sesame Street that started a learning epidemic in preschoolers, turning them onto reading and “infected” them with literacy. To a much smaller degree, the impact from readers of the Web of Lies would be considered a “positive” social epidemic in that readers then pushed for change. Of course, there are also social epidemics that have destroyed, he mentions the spread of teen suicides in Micronesia, for example, or the rash of mass shootings at schools and elsewhere. The wave of internet crimes, costing hundreds of millions of dollars yearly, would lie here. In the end, his book attempts to show people how to start positive epidemics of their own, and, hopefully, help wipe out those that could destroy.

Justin E. H. Smith    

Among Aral-Ultaic linguists, it is widely presumed that no single English word, or any word of any other known language, can adequately translate the Yuktun word nâk.  It may denote, depending on context, reindeer lichen (Cladina rangiferina), an Arctic hare (Lepus arcticus), an adult Yuktun woman, a Russian, something resembling poetic justice, and, of most interest to many, the life force that runs through every tundra-dwelling creature, through the sky, through the great sea to the North, and, during the short Summer, through the top ten centimeters or so of the ground.

In contrast with Chinese, Yuktun is not a tonal language, and so differences of meaning cannot be extracted from differences in the semimusical ways in which the various forms of nâk are pronounced, for it’s always pronounced in exactly the same way.  Nor is Yuktun a highly inflected language like Russian.  There are no noun cases, no genders, not even any endings to distinguish singular from plural, nothing at all that might give one occurrence of nâk away as involving the sort of nâk it does.  Nothing except context.  So, for example, in the sentence

Ba nâk kuntân-te nûq pœrtyttun
With a nâk trade you always both-eyes-open
(When trading with a nâk, always keep both eyes open)

we can be sure that nâk refers to Russians, since no trade is conducted with lichen or with hares or poetic justice or life forces, let alone with women.  On the other hand, in the sentence

Nâkkantaq nar tôgyœn bir nâk grâgttyan
The reindeer in the valley on nâk graze
(The reindeer in the valley graze on nâk)

there can be no doubt but that the nâk in question is lichen, since no other sort of nâk may be grazed upon.

A semi-legendary position has been carved out in Yuktun society for Narda, an elder Yuktun, said by some (evidently conscious of their exaggeration), to have been alive even in mythological time.  She is, to be sure, old, 105 by the best estimates.  But nobody knows how old exactly, for nobody else was alive when she was born.  The Yuktun simply take her word for it when she says that she was seven when the Russian soldiers came through in 1905, en route, so they said, to fight the Japanese.  Must have been lost, she laughed, exposing the blackened stubs she still used as teeth when the BBC came through filming a documentary in the early glasnost years on “Russia’s Wild Frontier.”

The mid-1930s were difficult years, following the 1933 report to the Central Committee of the Communist Party on “Shamanistic Practices and Historical Progress among the Siberian Tribes.”  There, it is reported that “the shaman is usually picked from the most unproductive, most nearly criminal element within Yuktun society, from among those who, in a more advanced stage of history would find themselves members of the Lumpenproletariat.  They are positively hostile to labor, often grand mal epileptics, and prone to the sort of deceitfulness and evasiveness that in a socialist society can only be described as counterrevolutionary.  They practice their art by convincing other tribe members that they are in contact with spirits from the ‘underworld’.  They speak in tongues and beat on drums to invoke these spirits, and their fellow tribesmen watch, spellbound.  It is a magic show and a stunt, all craftily organized by the shaman to gain the maximum respect possible, and, we dare mention, the maximum remuneration in the form of gifts.”   

The report tells of a crafty woman, evidently in her thirties but already hunched over, wrinkled and grey like a tribal elder, who had perfected the black art of shamanistic fraud.  According to the report, she had conned the delegates from Moscow into participating in a ceremony where, by skillful use of smoke, intoxicating herbs, and disorienting glossolalia, she managed, as the report maintained by way of an uncharacteristic colloquialism, to make asses out of all of them. 

Narda had been told that she was to stop her shamanistic performances and to confess, before the delegation of party members, to her own charlatanism.  But she insisted to the members of her tribe that she was no charlatan, but a real shaman, and that she would demonstrate as much to the party delegates.  When they arrived, she invited them all into her yurt.  She began by dancing, beating on a drum and calling to her spirit helpers.  Gradually, she worked herself into a trance.  She called forth a flood, and at once her yurt was filled with water, up to the ankles of all of the spectators.  Next, she called forth a serpent from the underworld, and caught it in her hands, holding it close to the faces of the stunned delegates.  Finally she commanded the men in her yurt to drop their pants and to hold their penises with both hands.  She returned from her trance and commanded them to return as well.  And there they were, standing to their ankles in water, pants down, holding their members like onanistic fools.  They begged her forgiveness, rushed out of the yurt, back to Moscow, and made a concerted effort, in writing up the report, not to look each other in the eyes. 

Narda also appears in Butenko and Vainshtain’s groundbreaking 1938 study, Naknost’ i tavtologiia v predstavlenii prirody u iuktunskogo naroda [Nâk-hood and Tautology in the Conception of Nature among the Yuktun],  There, Narda relates the beginning of the Yuktun creation myth: “In the beginning there was only nâk, but one day the nâk got it into its head to take all the nâk for itself, which naturally made the nâk upset and brought down a harsh nâk to teach the nâk a lesson.”  She broke off, Butenko and Vainshtain report, upon seeing the displeasure the ethnologists exhibited as she told the tale.  The authors report that, when asked to specify which sort of nâk she had in mind in each instance, Narda protested combatively that there is only one sort of nâk .  “Nâk is nâk,” she is reported to have said. “Nâk is always just nâk.”

The authors proceed to observe: “However hard it may be for us to imagine a world-view [mirovozzrenie] in which this could be the case, it may be that in the primitive communism of the Yuktun all the sundry things denoted by the term nâk are seen as bearing certain strong affinities with one another, so strong indeed that, from their point of view, no terminological differentiation between them is needed.  Just as for us noga denotes both the actual foot of an animal, as well as anything that serves an analogous function for an inanimate entity such as a table (though, to be sure, by a much more complicated path of conceptual associations), so too in the case of nâk.” 

The authors conclude that, like the medieval philosophers who appealed to the formal virtues of things, explaining, to use Molière’s famous example, the power of opium to put people to sleep by the fact that it possesses a virtus dormitiva, the appeal to the naknost’ (‘nâk-hood’) of something in nature in the effort to make sense of it is equally vacuous, yet, for the Yuktun, equally satisfying.  In the case of the Yuktun, however, the explanatory power of naknost’, is all the more difficult to comprehend, in view of the fact that it is seen as a virtus of a wide range of entities, characters, and phenomena that would seem to have no obvious connection to one another, unlike the soporific quality that opium clearly shares with anything else said to posses the virtus dormitiva.”

In an unpublished footnote, Butenko and Vainshtain speculate: “It is worth reflecting on our own concept of partiinost’ [‘party-ness,’ i.e., suitability or appropriateness from the point of view of the Communist Party].  Imagine, if you will, a Yuktun struggling to determine what it is that a symphony, the wheat yield at a collective farm, and the knot in a Young Pioneer’s neckerchief have in common.  We tell him that what all these things share is partiinost’, and he looks back at us perplexed.  We are likewise perplexed when confronted with the idea of naknost’.  But we mustn’t assume it does not make sense to him, unless we are equally ready to abandon partiinost’ as meaningless.” 

Sergei Vasil’evich Butenko disappeared in 1938.  The last that was heard of him, he was sent to a camp not far from Noril’sk, in the Taimyr okrug, relatively close, but still a few time zones away from the Yuktun to whom he had devoted his life.  His longtime research partner, Lev’ Abramovich Vainshtain, a physician who practiced ethnology not as a vocation but as an avocation, made it all the way to 1951 before embarking on his first involuntary trip to Siberia. 

On a recent trip to Moscow, I found Vainshtain’s daughter, Tatyana L’vovna, now in her early sixties, a physician herself, a chain-smoker of cigarettes whose packages evoke the American West, and a self-described ‘true communist’, in a dreary grey concrete-block apartment somewhere at the far end of Prospekt Vernadskogo.  She is an avowedly obsessive documenter of her father’s life, and she graciously allowed me to peruse the notebooks pertaining to his work among the Yuktun.  It was there that I found the unpublished draft of the famous article, complete with the speculative footnote about partiinost’ and naknost’. I also found there a curious scrap of paper, on which Dr. Vainshtain had, evidently, sketched out a version of Narda’s abortive creation myth, but in full, and with the appropriate denotandum of nâk substituted in the appropriate place.  If it stands up to expert scrutiny, I believe this scrap may make an invaluable contribution in the field of Aral-Ultaic ethnography, and perhaps even to the study, if I may speak so grandly, of the human mind.  For it shows, as no other study has, that apparently arbitrary ways of carving up the world can, from an internal point of view, make perfect sense. 

Here is what I read on the scrap of paper (translated with the kind assistance of T. L. Vainshtain):

“In the beginning there was only Lichen, soft greyish-green Lichen, extending across the tundra in all directions.  A seven-day journey would not bring you to the end of the Lichen-covered tundra. 

“But the Hare became greedy and got it into his mind that he should steal the Lichen. He placed the Lichen in his ear and darted off.  And he ran for eight days, until he came to the edge of the world, where the land meets the frozen sea in the North.  On the long journey, the Lichen had penetrated into the very depths of his body, and wrapped itself around his leg-bones.  And at the shore of the Northern sea the mother of the Yuktun was born from the Hare’s right shoulder.  She became the Hare’s wife, and from them the generations of Yuktun were born, right down to our own day.      

“One day long ago, in the time before the time we know, a Yuktun Woman came upon a Hare in a trap.  The Hare pleaded with her, saying: ‘Do not kill me, for you are my daughter and my wife.’ But the Woman only laughed and replied: ‘I am the daughter of Nâgvak, and the wife of Sik.  Sik is hunting with the others, and Nâgvak is long dead.’  She slit the Hare’s throat, skinned it, and threw it in the pot.   

“Just then, a Man came along, toward the village.  He was pale as the snow, with a yellow beard as thick and rough as the hair on a Yuktun’s head.  ‘What’s that you’ve got in the pot there?’ the Man called out, but the Woman was afraid, and did not speak.  ‘I said, What’s that you’ve got in the pot there?’  ‘A Hare,’ the Woman muttered.  ‘I say,’ the Man bellowed.  ‘There’s nothing I like better than a stewed Hare.’ 

“‘Where is your husband?’ the Man asked as he devoured his big bowl of stew, but the Woman was afraid, and again did not answer.  ‘I said, Where is your husband?’  ‘My husband is Sik, the Woman replied softly, ‘and he will be back soon with many more hares, and many ermine, from which I will make him a warm and handsome sark.’  But the Man simply laughed, for he had ambushed the husband and his men as they slept by the frozen banks of the Yob, and sliced off their heads, and taken their tools and necklaces of the smoothest antler.  He took her as his own wife, and that is how the time we know began.

“But Justice makes all things right, and neither the Hare, nor the Woman, nor the pale Russian can escape it.   For the generations that issued from this union would suffer mightily, streaming in from the West and the South, weary and beaten down, some the prisoners of others.  They would build up their heavy grey homes on ground that in its depths never thaws, laying tracks from the great City in the West to the great Sea in the East, frozen limbs amputated unceremoniously by their comrades, up high enough to get rid of the dead mass, which can only mean high enough to cut away living flesh as well; half-starved boys lying down in the snow for a little rest and never rising again, broken men without number, fighting, always fighting against one another and against the permafrost, itself so great, so massive and indifferent, that it never even noticed it had an opponent. 

“But still there is the the Life Force, which sees to it that Justice does not go on unchecked, and for a few months every year softens up the very top level of the ground.  And at least a few varieties of flowers bloom, and it is always day, for these few months, and the tundra is covered, at least in patches, with soft, grey-green Lichen.” 

*

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

Edward B. Rackley

A gripping and maddening slow-motion spectacle, last week’s Senate Armed Services Committee Hearing on the Situation in Afghanistan (available on C-Span), drifted predictably to Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan as senators and experts grappled over why Afghans, like Iraqis, could not ‘get it together after all we’ve done for them’. Another exasperated senator demanded, uncomprehending of why the hunt for Osama Bin Laden was still inconclusive: ‘Why not raise the price on Osama’s head by a million USD a week?’ It is currently valued at $25 million. Surely more millions would do the trick.

Among an endless sampling of senatorial hubris and stunning provincialism, the most memorable moment was the testimony of Afghanistan specialist Barnett Rubin from the Center on International Cooperation at NYU. Asked by Senators why the Afghan state and people could not capitalize on what the US had ‘given them’ in the way of democratic elections and the ‘freedom’ in the wake of Taliban rule, Rubin patiently explained that ‘in some parts of the world, freedom and democracy are not perceived as essential’ to a country’s recovery, stability or even prosperity. ‘Security and order’ are the desired ingredients, which neither the US nor the ISAF forces are providing.

‘And whose policies are to blame for the current state of affairs, then?’ demanded another Senator. ‘The United States, sir,’ came the cautious reply. Water wears out a stone, I thought, when the Committee closed the Hearing by noting the excellence of Rubin’s testimony.

Alongside democratic processes, ‘good governance’ (i.e., anti-corruption measures, accountability, transparency, etc.) and the ever nebulous ‘freedom’, justice is another superpower ideal frequently exported to troubled countries hoping that foreign intervention and aid programs will remedy their ills. As with freedom and democracy, local perceptions of the value and utility of justice are not what its defenders in the West would wish or suspect.

The biggest experiment in the pursuit of justice in countries where probable war crimes abound is currently led by the International Criminal Court, in operation since 2002. Its ratification followed four years of heated diplomacy among the 148 states involved, and intense lobbying by humanitarian agencies and human rights activists. The founding treaty affirms that ‘the most serious crimes of concern to the international community must not go unpunished’ and promises ‘an end to impunity for the perpetrators of those crimes’.

Unsurprisingly, the ICC is being tested in central African countries with the least economic and political significance to the major powers. Nor are any ICC suspects combatants in wars supported by the world’s major powers: otherwise their indictment would surely be blocked. The Hague-based body has undertaken investigations in Uganda, the DR Congo, the Central African Republic and, most recently, the Sudan. But as the ICC lacks its own police force, its investigation can only proceed as far as the state concerned allows. Despite its potential as a global legal instrument, its local actions and impact are complex, evolving and far from conclusive. Its four initial investigations have thrown up a slew of surprises; some welcome, others not.

Its primary challenge is the pursuit of justice in war zones defined by their absence of political order. Enforcement of legal limits and rights in an ungoverned—or government-sponsored—context of ethnic cleansing, such as Darfur or the Ituri district of Eastern Congo, is one difficulty. The subordination of justice—the arrest and trial of known perpetrators—to the more immediate need for political settlement is another.

Where protection from prosecution is used as a carrot to pacify warlords and thus restore order—as occurred in UN-brokered negotiations in Eastern Congo where the ICC was investigating suspected war crimes—aid workers call the trade-off ‘peace on the cheap’. Arrest warrants have been issued in DR Congo, and one former warlord is now awaiting trial in the Hague (Thomas Lubanga) But the Court’s work is undone when lesser warlords, also war crimes suspects, are offered high positions in the national military in exchange for a ceasefire and troop surrender.

Such is the slow and uncertain course of the ‘giant without arms or legs’. Since 2002, two of the four ICC investigations (Northern Uganda and Darfur, Sudan) have triggered a powerful popular backlash of opposition. Three unintended consequences of its investigations can explain this popular resistance. In the case of Uganda’s ongoing conflict with the Lord’s Resistance Army, fear of ICC indictments has led war crimes perpetrators to abandon political negotiations with government forces in favor of their original position: a ‘no exit’ war of attrition.

Second, in Congo, the prospect of ICC indictments had the opposite effect: it stimulated sagging political negotiations when a ‘golden parachute’ of high administrative office coupled with amnesty was offered to certain intransigent rebel leaders. Yet the prospect of justice is undermined by ‘peace on the cheap’, when the cessation of conflict is bought with amnesty: protection from ICC prosecution. At what point is amnesty indistinguishable from impunity?

Third, in Sudan, where ICC jurisdiction is categorically refuted by Khartoum officials, many Sudanese associate the ICC with a supposed ‘colonization effort’ by the UN and its western backers. Concerns that ICC warrants recently issued for two Sudanese officials will result in increased attacks on aid workers and the objects of their efforts, Darfuri citizens, are well-grounded. Should justice be pursued if it entails the withdrawal of the aid agencies’ vital life-support system where more than 200,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million displaced?

No one at the ICC could have foreseen the causal chain of perceptions and reactions born from a fear of indictment among those leading civilian massacres in each of these four countries. The learning curve is steep, and the ICC remains unwelcome in two of Africa’s most gruesome conflicts.

But from my experience in all four of these wars, I believe that subtracting the ICC from the equation of variables at play in each context would not diminish the cruelty or shorten its duration. Symbolic though it may now be, the fact that warlords and implicated government officials are investigated and held accountable by outside observers is a moral and legal dimension of the geopolitical kaleidoscope that did not exist four years ago. Reparations for victims may not be immediately forthcoming, but that suspected perpetrators in these otherwise forgotten crises understand that their deeds are documented and monitored is an essential first step in limiting the seemingly boundless human cruelty of such places.

I was sitting for maybe half an hour in the main room of the plantation house watching an old green and white painted door swing lazy in the gusts of ocean breeze. The door was too heavy to slam. It was creeping open slowly of its own weight and then another gust of wind would blow it back. I knew the gust was coming because I could see it in the trees through the crack in the door. I was watching those trees and I could see the branches shake and the bits of green would start dancing around. And then, I knew that the door would begin to swing closed again. Every time, for half and hour, I braced myself for the inevitable slamming of the heavy painted door. But it never slammed. The door was too heavy, the rusted hinges offered too much resistance. The gust would catch the door in a moment of promise and then give up, indifferent to the door, indifferent to the stubbornness of the door, indifferent to the wobbly frame of the old plantation house and the scraggly grounds with intermittent explosions of bougainvillea and the softer pink of the orchids; orchid, I’m reminded by my wife, meaning testicle in Greek, no doubt referring to the root of the orchid, which dangles off the stem and terminates in a couple of wrinkly little sacs that are normally hidden under the earth, the secret source and sustenance for the vulvic spread of the furry flower above.

***

At around 10:00 AM every morning a small bird that we have named Shelly flies down to the veranda. He is a hopper. He also likes to perch on things, the rim of a cup of coffee, the edge of a book, the screen of a computer. He has a friend we call Fatty but Fatty keeps his distance. Shelly is the guy who engages the world. On the second day, we discovered that Shelly is particularly fond of small containers of jam and if you open one and leave it on the table he’ll eventually make his way over, stick his sharp little beak into the container, and dart his tongue out ten or fifteen times in rapid succession.

Heidegger once said that animals are poor in world. It is a step up, I suppose, from the viewpoint of someone like Descartes, for whom animals were at an infinite remove from human beings, the latter having souls. Still, Heidegger’s comment is more about finding the distinction between animals and men then seeing the lines of continuity. I say this only because I’ve gotten to know Shelly. It is not difficult to say that he has a personality and it differs from that of his dour pal, Fatty. Fatty, I have come to realize, fears rejection and it has made him bitter. Shelly is open to the world, intoxicated by experience, you can see it in the way he pokes his head into the coffee cup and cranes his bird neck back up to look at you and then takes off in the other direction to inspect new developments around the base of the aloe plant.

I suspect that, like many things, it all has its roots in Christianity and the problem of theodicy. We needed to explain how there could be evil in the world since God is good. We hit on the solution of man’s free will. To be good, man needed also to have the capacity to do evil. But this solution left the animal world in an odd and uncomfortable position. Not capable of free will, they none-the-less were fated to suffer in man’s world. They were condemned with no possibility of redemption. That strange problem has been carried over into contemporary discussions about consciousness and philosophy of mind. More often than not, the basic premise is that the problem of consciousness is a human one, and that there is an infinite gap between the way we experience the world and the way that other creatures do. We’re uncomfortable about the way that our own modes of experience overlap with those of creatures like Shelly, who is currently trying to figure out a way to force his entire body into a green bottle sitting along one of the garden walls.

***

May I reveal to you that there is a secret city hidden inside the city of Willemstad, Curaçao? There is only one picture of Willemstad, reproduced thousands and thousands of times. It is taken from Otrobanda looking across the inlet toward Punda. A row of Dutch colonial buildings make Willemstad look like it is just emerging from the seventeenth century. Otrobanda and Punda are at the Southernmost section of a road that is known simply as The Ring. But what does The Ring, ring? That is the secret of Willemstad. I will tell you that this inner city burns and belches. At night it throws strange flames into the air that can be seen for miles. Its color is the dull grey of tankers and silos. Its infrastructure is pipes, little pipes, massive pipes, intertwined pipes, networks of pipes, whole families of pipes, generations of pipes, a universe of pipes onto itself in which one could find, no doubt, pipes whose sole function is to pipe things from one kind of pipe to another kind of pipe. These pipes have forgotten of the world of man and nature and live in an ontology of pipeness where the only kind of being is to-be-an-enclosure and to-be-flowed-through day and night. Inside this planet of pipes and metal husks? Oil. The secret Willemstad is a city of oil. It is my favorite city.

***

The Dutch Caribbean would not be the Dutch Caribbean without the specific combinations of sounds that make it so. There is color, of course, a certain look, and there is feel, primarily the heaviness in the air of heat and the sea but always also there is sound. Typically it comes in the rushes of the wind that sweep across the islands of their own volition paying little heed to the insignificant patches of raised land that make up the landscape of the Dutch Caribbean. And then there is the twittering of the birds who jump around in the swaying branches of the trees and bushes that catch the wind and make of it a rich and fulsome rushing sound, almost like water and the pounding of the tide such that, at the sea, one constantly hears the rushing of the ebbing and flowing of the tide and further inland, one constantly hears the rushing and flowing of the wind. The point is, there is always some kind of rushing. Then there is the sound of one solitary car. You start to hear it from far away and then the sound grows, passes you and slowly fades away. There will always be that one car and no part of any of the islands is really far enough away from any road not to hear it. The car will come and the car will fade. And then the birds will twitter. Birds twitter everywhere, but in the Dutch Caribbean they twitter in mysterious syncopation with the rushing noises of the sea and the breeze that is itself constantly punctuated by the sound of the one car, approaching and passing. These three sounds weave together into one interrelated thing; the lengthy crescendo of the one passing car layered over by, the shorter burst of rushing sound from sea and breeze layered over by, the staccato punctuation of the twittering of the birds. You could graph it something like this:

Gggrgrgrgrgrggrggrgrrrrgrgggggrgrgrgrgrgrggrggrgrgrgrrgrgrggrgrgrggrgrgrg
Sssshhhhhh ssssshhhhhhh ssssshhhhhhhh ssssshhhh
Pip pip pipipip pip pip pip pipip pip

***

A thesis: The Caribbean is terrible and sad. That’s why it is so beautiful. If the people were happy here it would be unbearable. These happy islands would mock the nations of the earth. Nothing would make sense anymore; our daily toils and strife would be stripped of whatever faint meaning we are foolishly able to attach to them. We would all give up, find a lonely niche somewhere to go die in. Luckily, the people of the Caribbean are not happy. They are a wreck. There is something brutal here that will not go away. Plunder, murder, slavery, the basest things, the slow progress of evil that worked its way across every island. There is nothing abstract about this. To cast your eyes around the Caribbean is to see plunder still in progress, the legacy of slavery right there in the racial divides along axes of wealth and power. Let us be honest friends, the Caribbean is a nightmare and because of that we can enjoy it. Merely a thesis.

***

I haven’t told you of the secret within the secret, the ring inside the ring. In the fifteenth century the Catholic Church in Spain decided that it was a good time to get more serious about Christianity. The Jews, sensing that this new direction boded rather ill for them, cast their eyes about the globe once more, looking for safe haven. The Dutch were a good prospect. A basic premise of toleration seemed to govern their internal affairs. And as time went on the Dutch began to establish their colonies, the Dutch Caribbean being one example, Curaçao in particular. And so they came. The Jews sailed the high seas to Curaçao. They lived and died in Willemstad and in the smaller towns, on the beaches and in the craggy coves. They ended up with names like Chaim Aron Henriquez. Linguists say that the language of the Dutch Caribbean, Papamiento, has its roots in the Ladino of the Sephardim and thereby can be traced directly back to the Jews who fled the Inquisition. As they lived and died they built a cemetery. They put it in a place outside the city of Willemstad. And then the city grew. And it continued to grow until, in 1919, Shell came to town. There was oil beneath the waters of Curaçao, and a deep water port in the center of Willemstad where it could be processed. There was also a Jewish cemetery dating back to the seventeenth century.

Today, you can take a turn onto a little used road off the northern section of The Ring. A drive of a couple hundred yards brings you into the heart of the city of pipes. The smell of oil and burning gases is overwhelming. There is a sound that can only be described as a deep mechanical belching. Giant chimneys and exhaust pipes stretch high into the sky letting out a thick white smoke. Here is the final resting place of the Jews of Curacao. Thousands of wind swept graves on which the names and stories of the deceased can barely be discerned. They are being wiped away here a second time, in what seems almost like the concerted effort of man and nature to obliterate this place of memory.

As a postscript, the early modern philosopher Spinoza lived in Amsterdam and was from a family of Marrano Jews who fled Spain. He could easily have ended up in Curaçao. Indeed, his half sister did, and she is buried in the cemetery at the center of The Ring. We know almost nothing of Spinoza the man, and it seems that he wanted it that way. We have only his writings, some of the most powerful and lucid thoughts of their time, any time. In his Ethics, Spinoza wrote, “a free man thinks of nothing less than death.”

In most countries secularism is positively correlated with support for welfare, but does welfare make people more secular? Anthony Gill of the University of Washington says yes; in 2004, he and grad student Erik Lundsgaarde published a paper arguing that welfare provides a substitute for church attendance, making people less likely to attend church.

The full theory goes as follows: in the 19th century, the power of Christian churches came from their ability to provide social services such as charity, education, and health care. As the state started providing the same services without requiring or expecting church attendance, it became less economic for people to attend church, and less economic for church leaders to focus on welfare activities.

This theory has a lot of holes in it, but the study has some empirical backing. There’s a statistically significant relationship between a Christian country’s welfare spending as a percentage of GDP and the percentage of people in it who report attending church weekly, even when controlling for such variables as education and whether the country is Catholic or not. The weakness of the study comes not from its lack of data, but from flaws in how the variables are defined, failure to look for alternative explanations, and problems with individual case studies.

First, the study doesn’t explicitly say how welfare spending is measured. This is significant because it right off the bat fails to control for key factors. Most importantly, the most expensive part of the welfare state is social security, whose cost increases with the old age dependency ratio. But more religious states have higher population growth rates, leading to younger demographics and lower social security costs.

It’s possible to get around that by looking at states that buck the trend and are both relatively religious and relatively old. The best case study here is Poland, which is simultaneously the most religious nation in Europe and one of the oldest. Additional examples include Spain, Portugal, and to some extent Italy. The only one of the four that appears in the scattergram plotting church attendance and welfare spending is Spain, which is considerably more religious than the regression line predicts.

In addition, even when one controls for old age pensions, not all governments spend welfare the same way. The USA prefers targeted tax breaks, making its welfare system appear stingier than it actually is. In addition, some benefits can be distributed either as welfare or as spending on health care and education, which the study doesn’t account for. A good example in the US would be free lunches in schools, a welfare service that adds to the education budget.

Second, the omission of education spending is crucial. A church often thrives by having its own set of parochial schools. The standard British joke about catechism is that religious education only secularizes people, though the more common sensical effect is the opposite, namely that greater availability of parochial schools will make the population more religious. Education spending is correlated to welfare spending via the mediating variable of economic liberalism or socialism. As such, Gill and Lundsgaarde commit a grave sin of omission by overlooking it.

Likewise, a more direct political mediating variable could account for much of the correlation. In a followup paper, Gill notes that the correlation between welfare and religosity holds within US states, too. But within the US, both welfare and secularism fall under the rubric of liberal politics, contrasted with the welfare-busting and religiosity of conservative politics.

This in fact holds true in Europe and Latin America, which comprise all countries in the study but two, the US and Australia. Throughout Europe and Latin America, even more so than in the US, there is a strong tradition of anti-clerical liberalism. It’s likely that all Gill’s motivating example of Uruguay shows is that Uruguay has a long history of domination by the left-liberal Colorado Party.

Third, the main measure used for religiosity, reported church attendance, is deeply flawed. The USA’s real church attendance rate is half its reported rate. The church attendance variable tracks not how many people attend church, but how many would like pollsters to believe that they attend church. This variable has some value, but is overall less important than data based on actual church attendance.

The other figure used, the percentage of people who declare themselves nonreligious, is flawed as well. There are two dimensions to religious affiliation – one’s choice of religion, which tracks culture, and one’s position along the religious-secular spectrum. More plural areas, especially those with strong connections between religion and culture, will have a lower percentage of people calling themselves nonreligious than less plural areas.

Fourth, many of the assertions in the study admit too many inexplicable case study exceptions. Ireland and the Philippines’ unusually high levels of religiosity are attributable to the role the Catholic Church played in pro-independence and anti-Marcos politics respectively; I presume Poland could be similarly explained away, were it in the study. But other exceptions require seriously modifying the theory.

For example, the study would predict an increase in American church attendance rates after the welfare reforms of the 1990s. The American study only finds a slightly less significant correlation between welfare and religion in 1995; meanwhile, there was a measurable increase in church attendance in the two months following the 9/11 attacks.

For another example, the case study of Britain goes in almost the opposite direction as the one the study predicts. Britain hasn’t had a serious welfare system since Thatcher’s economic reforms. And yet, in the 1990s, religious belief crashed, and while children of secular parents always grew up to be secular, children of religious parents had only a 50% chance of growing up to be religious. Levels of belief crashed even among Muslims, who Britain forces a religious identity on in many respects.

And fifth, there are alternative explanations that the study should look at but doesn’t. First, it’s legitimate to ask why support for welfare correlates so nicely with secularism in Western politics. It could be an ideological accident that modern liberalism is secular and pro-welfare and modern conservatism is religious and anti-welfare; after all, in turn-of-the-18th-century Britain, it was the Tories who were more supportive of extensive Poor Laws and the Whigs who favored a libertarian economic policy.

Or, equally well, it could be the realpolitik version of what the study is trying to say: welfare is a substitute for religion. As such, religious organizations are likely to ally themselves with political groups that oppose welfare. It holds to some extent for modern conservatives, though by no means for all. In 1900, the US populists were both pro-religion and pro-welfare, and would only embrace prosperity theology in the 1960s and 70s.

A good way of gauging such political explanations is seeing if the same trends hold for non-Western countries. Muslim organizations provide the same welfare Christian ones do; in fact, one of the main power sources of Islamist movements is their strong performance in disaster relief. Of course, Islamism has an entirely different dynamic to it – its main promise isn’t charity but change – but it’s useful to examine this dynamic and see how it can apply to the West. How relevant is the promise to change the morally uncertain status quo to the rise of American Dominionism?

I should stress that except perhaps for the problematic definitions of the variables, this study is not shoddy. A data set comparing religiosity and welfare is always useful. The study’s downfall is in using the data to confirm a theory that has no other evidence to it. Although the study seems to satisfy the falsification criterion in that Gill intended for it to highlight the failure of the theory, in fact it does not falsify the statement “welfare does not cause a decline in religiosity.” All it does is superficially confirm the statement that welfare does in fact cause religiosity to fall.

Of the many different angles the study could take, the one about a direct effect of welfare on religiosity is one of the most obvious two, which is probably why Gill went with it. The other, that religious groups lobby against welfare, is more empirically plausible than the converse direction of causation, but does not fit well into Gill’s theory. But more indirect links, for example with education or political liberalism as a mediating variable, look far more fruitful. The study’s ultimate downfall is not so much that it is wrong as that it is woefully incomplete, concentrating on perhaps the least enlightening theory available.

On a winter’s night in Paris long ago, I ducked into the Grand Vefour – then a charmingly approachable temple of gastronomy, free of the rather strained merriment that signals too much money being spent – and, as one of seven guests of a rich man, sat down to a dinner that would leave me not as I was before. 

To my right was Diarmuid C.-J., an elderly esthete of some renown living among dusty art objects a stone’s throw from the restaurant.  He was well used to ordering without regard to the menu, and he did so this night.  While others were calling for appetizers, a fish course and an entrée, Diarmuid commanded a dish of eight lightly sautéed whole fresh truffles.  A little salt and pepper, a splash of cream whisked into the pan juices – that would suffice for his dinner. 

But, what were truffles?  Rare mushrooms, the man on my left quickly whispered to me. Rare, and black and growing underground.  They were the cost equivalent, I later determined, of ordering five or six personal lobsters while others in your party struggled with choices less pricey and less pure.  But cost was only part of the story.

Dinner began to arrive, the unexcitingly superb starter items of the era: delicate pike terrines, mussels steamed with shallots and Chablis.  Who isn’t happy with such?  But it all fell away when, in a footed, lidded Limoges dish, Diarmuid’s golf ball-sized truffles were borne to the table by a sly-looking servitor who uncovered them and swanned off.  The others, including our imperturbable host, smiled faintly but intently, like Etruscans at bull games.  They were in the know.  Silently, I sniffed the truffle aroma, nothing if not a decisive fragrance, but I lacked the right referent. The grassiness of the cream — cream had never smelled so grassy — called up woods and moon and dew.  The odor I might later describe as “earthy” and “musky” and many other things to do with cheese was then but deeply portentous.  An agreeable fright overtook me: it was Pan, I understood – it was Pan!  Beneath the cool weight of napery, my knees knocked slightly.  I shot Diarmuid a meaning glance, all but nudged him as he plied his knife and fork, and opened my mouth to receive a truffle. For was I not still a baby bird, the whole world’s pleasure to feed me? The saurian flicker of his cold pale eye should have warned me to desist, but it did not. 

And so, my first truffle. Tuber melanosporum, unearthed not a day earlier by a caveur who knew a secret place in the oak groves of Perigord, who had gone out after nightfall with his muzzled, truffle-ardent sow or his keenest bitch – for the female of the species is by far the better finder – and, kneeling where the unerring animal pressed its snout among the roots and panted and grunted and stamped, had angled his small trowel into the soil and sifted his way down to the prize.  My prize.  Oh, I could wish it had been fed me by an unbegrudging man, but that might only have crowded the sensation.

Not a sensation that I particularly had words for, either, looking back on the almost convent-bred purity of my food vocabulary that year.  Best just to liken it to the entrance into the room, naked, of that person whom you know will make all the difference.  Time passed — I’m not sure how much — and as I licked my lips and refocused on the table I saw that people — all but one — were smiling those faint, intent smiles not at the truffles but at me. 

Having been admitted, in any case, to the 4,000 year-old company of those who know the truffle firsthand, I was hardly astonished when, a few years later, a Parisian banker, discovering that his cook had served his only truffle to two of her friends, made television news by shooting her. The investigating magistrate refused to bring the banker to trial for what was “obviously a crime of passion, completely understandable and completely forgivable.”

Yes, I understood. And if, wedged among his dusty curios, Diarmuid caught the news and untenderly remembered me, then I spared a thought for him too.

It Started with Desert Truffles in the Axial Age

The Pharaoh Khufu, builder of the Great Pyramid, is the one of the first truffle eaters whom history names, although truffles were prized still earlier in the palaces of ancient Mesopotamia, where their remains have been found in special baskets.  The Egyptians inventoried their edibles, making papyrus records of who ate them, but the Sumerians left recipes.  The truffles beloved of Khufu and the Sumerians, well known both to the writers of the Mishna and the Hadiths, and greedily imported by the Greeks and Romans, are not the same as T. melanosporum, however, but desert truffles, of the Terfezia and Tirmania genera, comprising about 30 varieties.  And, although they are in flavor terms if not in pedigree far humbler cousins, any consideration of the truffle must begin with them.

Terfezia taste nutty and delicate, with flesh that is white or creamy or even rosy in color, and they need cooking – either simmering in milk and honey or roasting in the embers of a fire. While T. melanosporum imparts unmistakable flavor to other foods, the mild Terfezia will take on the flavor of whatever it is cooked with. It can also be ground into flour for poultices, its cooking juices saved as a treatment for eye infections. In the Tirmidhi Hadith, No. 1127, Mohammed recommends the latter use. There is even an intriguing etymological case that the self-replenishing manna from heaven sustaining the Israelites in the Book of Genesis was in fact Tirmania nivea, the aristocrat of desert truffles.

Among nomadic peoples, folklore about the truffle abounds — it is a highly nutritious “found food” for which relish, gratitude and even awe are well demonstrated.  Singing to the truffles, Bedouin girls forage at dawn, when the first rays of light create telltale shadows on the still damp sand, and the truffles swell not far below the surface. Bedouins claim that truffles will grow where lightning strikes, appearing without seed or root, loosened from their beds by thunder. These beliefs go back thousands of years, at least as far back as Theophrastus, the favored pupil of Aristotle and father of taxonomy, who described truffles in the 3rd Century B.C.E. as “a natural phenomenon of great complexity, one of the strangest plants, without root, stem, fibre, branch, bud, leaf or flower.” Three hundred years later Pliny the Elder wrote that “among the most wonderful of all things is that anything can spring up and live without a root. These are called truffles.” The Babylonian Talmud, compiled in Iraq in the 5th Century C.E., records the rabbis concluding after discussion that truffles “emerge as they are in one night, wide and round like rounded cakes.”

In the desert as elsewhere, outlandish explanations for tuber growth have stubbornly attached to the truffle. But the necessary reciprocal relationship between truffle and host obtains in the desert as in the forest. Shrubs of the Helianthemum genus – relatives of the North American rock rose – can be a tip-off to desert truffle presence, for Terfezia and Helianthemum are symbionts.  Filaments of the truffle penetrate the roots of the shrub, obtaining nourishment from it, in turn producing a substance that inhibits the growth of competing plants. In the absence of Helianthemum, the desert truffle can make do with other shrubs.  It’s all a bit mysterious, as desert truffles grow in locations that are closely guarded secrets, and they utterly resist cultivation.

Usually no more than a few centimeters across but occasionally the size of a fist, desert truffles are found in the spring and sold in the souk, from North Africa to the Negev to easternmost Iraq.  A good truffle year depends on adequate rainfall in the autumn – about 8 to 10 inches.  In a middling year, desert truffles can cost about $100 a kilo, the price fluctuating wildly with supply. 

In the past few years, European interest in whether desert truffles flourish has increased along with the size of Europe’s Middle Eastern population. Traditional European fanciers of T. melanosporum and its lordly white Italian counterpart, T. magnatum, are also looking to Africa and the Middle East for truffles, the supply of their most highly prized indigenous ones being egregiously threatened, down twentyfold from 100 years ago, rarer and pricier and more sought after with every passing season. A good time, in short, to take after the Romans and import Terfezia from Africa, thereby nabbing — it is surely hoped — some of that same old razzle-dazzle if not the peerless and shocking taste.

Food of the Devil, Fit Only for Saints and Popes

If one of the defining characteristics of Late Antiquity was its excessive devotion to banqueting, with the inclusion in banqueting protocol of emetics and special chambers – vomitoria – where diners would rid themselves of surfeit the better to take on still more surfeit, then with the Fall of Rome the elaborate truffle dishes of the era would go the way of the stewed cygnet’s tongues, leopard’s marrow cooked in goat’s milk, almond-fed geese, and conger eels fattened with live slave-meat fetishized by the later, briefer Roman emperors. The Middle Ages were dark indeed for the abused and maligned truffle, whether because, with the rise of Christian Europe the devil was presumed afoot in the kitchen as he never was in less sober times, or because food preparation to some end beyond sustenance – cuisine, that is — took centuries to regain sway after being made repulsive by decadence and impracticable by the breakdown of trade routes.

In these years, there occurred also a shift in the thinking about exactly what a truffle was, and where it came from.  It was the devil’s own food, and it was black.  Though occasionally it was white, tasting of honey and garlic, a Manichean reading of this difference would never obtain.  Any way you sliced it in the Dark Ages, a truffle was a degenerate thing, and it came not from Africa but from secret pockets of Europe.  T. melanosporum and T. magnatum had been found, and found to be potent aphrodisiacs, conferring unholy sexual prowess on their eaters.  And so they were banned from kitchens – most kitchens, that is.

Ambrose, the famously ascetic 4th Century Bishop of Milan who became after death a saint, received a gift of truffles from the Bishop of Trevi.  No one can say whether he ate them, but he certainly recorded his gratitude for them.  Pope Gregory IV, who reigned in the mid-9th Century, let it be known that he positively needed truffles “to strengthen him in the battle against the Saracens.” Around this time there was philosophical speculation as to whether the truffle was truly a plant.  Folk wisdom still held that it was a fusion of water, heat and lightning, but deeper thinkers asked whether it might not be some kind of animal.  One of the salient mysteries enshrouding all love foods began to pertain to the truffle — in particular, the question of how food that debauches the weak-willed and the sinful serves yet to fortify the strong-willed and the saintly, nourishing them towards victory in their fitting and strenuous tasks.

By the late 14th Century, however, the truffle had made a comeback from the demonic hypothesis.  Petrarch dedicated a sweet sonnet to it, and its ungodly reputation burned off like ground fog in the clear light of more rational times.

Back with Bells On, This Time for Women

During the Renaissance, the absence of truffles from the tables of the mighty would have been an inadmissible embarrassment, and their chefs were under relentless pressure to present them with ingenuity and élan. The custom of the truffle tribute arose.  In 1502, the nobles of the Marchigian region of Aquamagna made a gift of stupendous black truffles to Lucrezia Borgia, the daughter of Pope Alexander VI.  The redoubtable  Lucrezia, for whose golden tresses long curly pastas were named, was very well pleased indeed, and lost no time incorporating the truffles into her beauty routine – history does not say exactly how. 

But it was Catherine de Medici who outdid all other comers in securing the hold of the truffle on the European imagination.  The late-born daughter of Lorenzo the Magnificent, Catherine was the child bride of Henry II of France.  Forsaking Florence for grim cold Paris could not have delighted the 13-year old royal girl, and she brought with her cooks, and forks, and artichokes, and truffles and high heels, thinking to subdue the gaucheries of the French.  That would become the gayest achievement of Catherine, who for lack of love grew into a dour and grasping queen, not averse to poisoning her political rivals. By the time she died in 1589, however, the French court was used to the sight of ladies of high birth openly eating love foods such as artichokes and truffles. This was unexampled in the Florence of her distant youth, so full of gorgeous perks for men only.  It is worth remembering that until Catherine de Medici became Queen of France, aphrodisiacs were the prerogative of men, at least officially. The truffle tribute received by Lucrezia Borgia would not have been intended for her to eat – as perhaps she did not – but to serve to male guests to good effect.

A century and a half later, things had become ever so much more relaxed. Madame de Pompadour chatted freely with her maid about amatory matters.  Hoping to hold onto the affections of the king, Louis XV, she lived for days at a time on an aphrodisiac regime of vanilla and celery and truffles. “My dearest,” she confided to her maid, “the fact is I am very cold by nature.  I thought I might warm myself up, if I went on a diet to heat the blood, and now I’m taking this elixir which does seem to be doing me good.”

Sipping at truffle juice, Pompadour had no call to give the king heirs; when, one evening, she and Louis XV sat down to a dinner of truffled ram’s testicles, they were unbothered by thoughts of the succession.

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I had the perfect weekend planned. Although I rarely manage to visit my hometown, the occasional irresistible event does come along. This past weekend that event was a memorial service for Russell Thorn Blackwood, a philosopher, one of my father’s college professors, and one of my own mentors from about the age of four. As you might guess from this opening, the weekend didn’t quite go as planned, but was nevertheless perfect, in its own way.

When my early-morning flight from JFK was delayed and then cancelled (about five minutes prior to the rescheduled departure), I knew that the cushion of four hours I’d set between my arrival and the memorial service wouldn’t suffice. Resigning myself to spending the day at the airport between various lines, cancellations, and standby lists, I decided to get some work done. As often happens when I’m inclined toward such solid resolve, it rapidly dissolves as soon as I find the choicest reading material at hand. On this sunny Saturday it was the current issue of Bookforum, a magazine that typically lets me enjoy only one or two articles before hitting me with the next issue, equally full of great stuff I’ll never get the time to read. I could’ve easily responded to the delay with anger—so many people clearly did, shouting profanities at no one, verbally abusing the ticket-counter staff—but just didn’t feel it, and besides, it would’ve been inappropriate, don’t you think, to get angry while en route to a philosopher’s memorial service, not to mention at the results of a nice storm brought on by dear Mother Nature, who’s merely trying to keep Old Man Winter alive despite the impact of lifestyles aimed at creating an eternal summer here on earth.

The subtitle for today’s piece might be “Seeing Through Things, or Photographing and Writing Through Them,” so as to play with both the physical and temporal possibilities of that special adverb/preposition/adjective, but I’m a bit ambivalent today, and that’s a bit drawn out. So, sitting down in my funereal garb next to a glamorously-shoed woman reading Glamour in terminal three, I set about a near cover-to-cover reading of this issue, with some delightful reviews and some specious judgments, and soon came across this: Mark Twain, in an 1877 interview in the Boston Globe, when asked “what are you now politically, Mr. Twain?” replied “Politics have completely died out within me. They don’t take to me or I don’t take to them. Since I have come in possession of a conscience I begin to see through such things.” His use of this phrase “to see through such things,” took me back to the night before, when in a talk about his work from 1969 to 1973 for a book launch Vito Acconci mentioned wanting to take pictures that “photograph through things” and actions, just as words allow you to see through themselves to the idea behind them. Earlier this month I had come across Acconci’s more recent architectural work in an interesting book, No. 1: First Works by 362 Artists, where supposed artists write about what they consider their first work. I say supposed artists because many people in the book are rather insistent that they are not artists, or don’t identify as such, and Acconci was one of the most adamant. In this talk he reiterated his realization that he actually wanted nothing at all to do with art, but also did an excellent job of clarifying how his earlier performances (think of his poetry, writings and involvement with words—think perform, reform, transform) developed into the spatial work he’s now doing.

At Friday’s talk Acconci was introduced by Gregory Volk, who I mention here only because he (unintentionally?) said “ephemerable,” which is now my favorite new non-word (okay, okay, my favorite neologism, is that better? Maybe it is a word; Google honors “ephemerable” with approximately 61 strange hits, and it admittedly has a lot of potential…). Skipping over the talk itself—you really just have to be there when a poet-cum-artist-cum-architect credits an involvement with art to the coining of the term “Contemporary Art,” which, being about ideas rather than craft or end product, gave him the license to think, “well, maybe I can have vague ideas”—one of the audience members then predictably asked what he thought of Marina Abramovic’s reinterpretation of his 1972 Seedbed in late 2005. He had understandably little to say, and was fine with her riffing on his idea, which then led me to another tenuous connection, aside from the one by which everyone relates each artist’s work to the other’s.

The book No. 1 had also included a spread of Abramovic’s first work, and I’d seen her a couple weeks earlier at a tribute to Susan Sontag at the 92nd Street Y. She was the most striking of the six presenters that evening, who according to the press were to read passages of Sontag’s posthumously published book At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches. Luckily the author’s six friends did nothing of the sort, and instead talked about memories and things of their own choosing, with mixed results.

Judith Thurman read some of the quotes Sontag had jotted down in various journals, including: “Love is, to me, that you are the knife that I turn within myself” (Kafka); “Relax, there’s no shortcut to tragedy” (a friend, regarding the beginning of a love affair); “Liebe, Mut und Phantasie” (graffiti from the Austrian city of Graz); “Mary McCarthy can do anything with her smile—she can even smile with it” (a note by Sontag herself); and “my library is an archive of my longings” (also Sontag).

The most interesting contribution from Richard Howard was his mention of a three-hour televised interview with Kissinger that Sontag did for PBS, and his plea for it to become available again (hint, PBS or anyone who has access to the recording). Continuing Thurman’s point of her love for epigrams and aphorisms, he read her inscription in a book she once gave to him, “For Richard, whom I want to talk to all my life.” James Fenton focused on the importance of style, and her style, and curiously remarked that the preface is one of the few literary forms where writers still have a fair amount of freedom. Darryl Pinckney was concise, “Yes, it’s a drag not to have her.”

In the initial presentations and following discussion Marina Abramovic had some amusing—dare I say sweet?—recollections. The two had met at a 2002 birthday party, where Abramovic was one of four guests, and bonded by telling jokes about the war and the UN’s botched interventions in her homeland. Sontag then quietly attended one of her multi-day performance pieces and at the end replied by leaving a napkin that read, “this was good, let’s have lunch, Susan Sontag,” with the museum guard. Her lemon meringue pie anecdote particularly hit me, as it’s my favorite dessert as well; when splitting a pie with Sontag she remarked that she’d never liked eating the crust and had always wanted to just eat the filling, but there were rules and etiquette to contend with, and she’d always held back. Watching Sontag agree and proceed to eat all but the crust she learned the valuable lesson that, sometimes, you really can just do whatever you want. A remark the author made to the artist during her illness was particularly striking, “I am not alone, but I feel lonely.”

So, how does any of this relate to my being stuck at JFK all day Saturday and missing a friend’s memorial service? The delay, plus the fact that its location prevented me from otherwise filling my time with studio or other work, afforded me time to reflect on this recent overdose of stimulating things. While sitting in the terminal and taking breaks between articles I overheard a man on the phone who was much worse off than I; booked on four successive flights, each of which had been cancelled, he’d been there for over two days. After he’d hung up the phone we began discussing strategies in such situations, and on a tangent I learned he’d flown in from Jordan, where he’d been working independently to help regional development under the aegis of some US government-related organization. He’d been in Macedonia before that, and the government had always sent a group of interpreters to facilitate the collaborations, but this time they’d not sent any—either forgetting or just assuming that everyone in the Middle East does or should speak English…. When my name came up before his on the standby list I felt terrible, and hoped there would be more space and he would be next, but I also wasn’t ready to give up my spot. As I walked down the ramp and across the tarmac to the puddle jumper awaiting the last lucky standbys I was overcome with guilt, and my mind explored all possible implications this moral dilemma had for my conscience, humanity, and simple impatience. After a few minutes the guy boarded, much to my relief.

On the return flight I was faced with yet another dilemma when I was third in a taxi line that hadn’t moved for over ten minutes, with not a taxi in sight. When one pulled up and whisked away the first person in line, the ground transportation agent stopped the next one to pass, a taxi with the ”off duty” light on. The gentleman ahead of me in line let me take it, and I soon found out why—the cabbie was furious at being stopped like that, had been going home to study for his nursing exam the next day, and told dispatcher he was headed toward the Bronx, not southern Queens. I felt terrible and told him to just circle round and drop me off, I could wait for the next car. After venting for a few minutes and stopping for gas (kindly stopping the meter as well), he soon dropped me off after chatting all the way about his immigration from Africa, studies, love of James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, and his hope never to be forced out of this country.

It seemed quite a coincidence to hear the taxi driver mention Baldwin, because I’d just reread a phrase of his in an old book of mine rediscovered while home. The phrase appeared in my high school English teacher’s inscription in a biography of Marcel Duchamp she gave me: “The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.” It all came together here—Duchamp started a change that later let Acconci’s work become art, his work in turn let Abramovic go somewhere else entirely, her work brought me a new look at Sontag, who’d included Eleonora de Fonseca Pimentel in one of her novels (I’d walked under a commemorative plaque for Pimentel on via di Ripetta just days before), and so on. All of them, in their own way, have heeded Baldwin’s words.

Right below the Twain excerpt I mentioned earlier was one from Dorothy Parker: “INTERVIEWER: How do you name your characters? PARKER: The telephone book and from the obituary columns.” If she were still writing, perhaps a Professor Blackwood might make an appearance in one of her yarns.