by Dave Maier

Here’s a joke I remember from my childhood. A man takes a taxi. The fare comes to $9.63, so the passenger gives the driver nine dollars, two quarters, a dime, and three pennies. The driver looks at the money dubiously; whereupon the passenger asks “Isn’t that correct?” The driver’s answer: “It’s correct, but it ain’t right.” Here the driver is distinguishing correctness from moral rightness in particular. That’s not quite the distinction I want to talk about today, so let’s instead use a word which wouldn’t make the joke quite so funny: appropriateness.

Our context is that of the nature of truth. Pragmatists are often accused of reducing truth to appropriateness or utility. (William James invited such attacks with his supposedly pragmatic slogan that “truth is what works.”) Yet it certainly seems possible to say something true which is not appropriate or useful. There are many types of case, but for now as an example of “inappropriateness” try tactlessness: “Why yes, that dress does indeed make your butt look big.” While clearly effective against James’s slogan, this is not the refutation of pragmatism that it appears. We must look more closely at what determines what it is appropriate to say, and why.

* * *

After 9/11, President George W. Bush emphasized that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were not wars against Islam generally by claiming that, as he put it, “Christians and Muslims worship the same God.” He got immediate pushback on this from some Christian leaders (Richard Land is the one who sticks in my mind, but there were others), who disputed this claim. More recently, a professor at a Christian school got into hot water when, as a way to show solidarity with Muslims, she made that same claim. In each case, the objectors quite plausibly pointed out that the Christian deity and the Muslim deity have many conflicting characteristics – for example, that the former is triune and the latter not – so how could they possibly be the same entity?

This presents itself as a disagreement about the correctness of a manner of speaking, or a matter of fact, one which is difficult even to word properly so as not to beg the question: is the entity (are the entities) which Christians call “God” and (Arabic-speaking) Muslims call “Allah” the same entity or different entities? Bush says they are the same and Land disagrees; so it seems that one of them must be wrong, depending on how the world actually is. Let’s examine the arguments and see if we still think this when we’re done.

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by Sarah Firisen

Recently, I dropped my iPhone on the sidewalk. I have a case with a bumper on it, but even so, I guess it hit the sidewalk in just the wrong way and, the next thing I knew, I had a $130 trip to the Apple store in my immediate future. Now clearly, like many thing iPhone, Apple could quite easily make a shatterproof screen. We have shatterproof windshields after all. They could also make water resistant phones (as other companies do), but then think of all that lovely lost income from phones dropped in the toilet or tangled up in bedding and put through the washing machine – yeah, I’ve done that as well. The trip to the Apple store was quick and pretty painless, they’re a well oiled machine with a steady incoming stream of people with pretty similar issues to mine. It would be interesting to stand there for a few hours and try to count how many people come in with either cracked screens or water logged phones, I bet it’s high.

The “things” we can’t live without; for most of us, our phones are pretty high on that list. And so of course Apple, as happens in a capitalist society, exploits this need, some might say addiction. And of course, our phones are not the only screens we’re addicted to: TVs, laptops, tablets, Fitbits, Apple Watches, and more.

Magic Leap, the most incredibly secretive and highly anticipated startup in the VR/AR (virtual reality/augmented reality) space seems, at least from its demo videos, to be working on a product that could, in principle, do away with all these screens. There will certainly be a headset of some sort to begin with, but it’s not hard to imagine a scenario where we’re all wearing contacts lenses instead. Then you can not only have a screen that you can’t smash or drop in the toilet, you could have many of them, at once. Every screen, devices beyond screens, could, at least in theory, be replaced overnight. If I was a company producing laptops, or TV screens, I might be a getting a little nervous. And while I realize that there is a whole social dimension, and probably legal and moral ones, around whether we want a world where people can be looking at virtual screens (unbeknownst to those around them) at any point, we sort of almost live in that world now. 15 years ago our current levels of smartphone usage was unthinkable, but it turns out that these technologies have a way of worming themselves into our daily lives and suddenly the unimaginable becomes the impossible to live without.

I recently ran a workshop on emerging technology and virtual/augmented reality was one (or two) of the technologies we looked at.

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by Claire Chambers

In discussions of postcolonial and diasporic literature, questions of faith and religious identity have until recently tended to be subsumed under such categories as ethnicity, nationality, hybridity, and race. Rae Isles, a character who lectures on Middle Eastern politics in Leila Aboulela's The Translator, accordingly asserts: 'Even Fanon, who I have always admired, had no insight into the religious feelings of the North Africans he wrote about'. In his 1959 essay 'Algeria Unveiled', Frantz Fanon anticipated by almost three decades Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's famous idea of 'white men saving brown women from brown men'. Against the Algerian backdrop, white saviour discourse allowed French colonizers to dismiss Islam as 'a repressive, dehumanizing religion for women'. By contrast, Fanon explored the haïk or veil's subversive aspects of secrecy and concealment. He also debated such issues as modest Muslim dress functioning as a type of uniform, the 'absent presence' of the covered person, and the colonial gaze. Yet, as Rae indicates, Fanon does little to shed light on any of the reasons, other than nationalist resistance, that lead Maghrebi women to wear the haïk. When Islam or religion is mentioned in Fanon's essay, it is construed as the false bestowal by 'Islam specialists' or other colonizers of an irrational belief system on those peoples they keep subjugated. Fanon was not Muslim and nor indeed was he religious in any orthodox sense. Through her character Rae, Aboulela suggests that the theorist underestimates the power of religion in his adopted home of Algeria and in Africa more broadly.

Of postcolonial theory's foundational thinkers, Edward W. Said provides by far the most substantial contribution on Muslims and religion more broadly. Said's engagement with Islam is still timely and urgent. This is because although the flashpoints and key players have altered since the publication of his groundbreaking book Covering Islam in 1981, unfortunately little has changed in relation to negative representations of Muslims. Writing in his 1997 introduction to the second edition of Covering Islam, Said asserts: 'the term 'Islam' as it is used today seems to mean one simple thing but in fact is part fiction, part ideological label, part minimal designation of a religion called Islam'. This comment has been inspiring for my own work, and that of the field of 'Muslim writing' more broadly. In my first book British Muslim Fictions, I took up Said's identification of Islam as 'part fiction', discussing the extent to which the terms 'British Muslim' or 'Muslim fiction' are illusory. Following Covering Islam's lead, I also argued that many mainstream writers' and journalists' depictions of Islam and of Muslims might themselves be viewed as types of fiction. Similarly, in their virtuosic cultural studies book Framing Muslims, Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin note the importance of Said's contribution to the field, observing that his research enables readers to ponder 'the limited and limiting conceptual framework surrounding Islam' in much depressingly circular current debate.

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by Bill Benzon

Back on June 14 Kenan Malik published an op-ed, In Defense of Cultural Appropriation, in The New York Times. I liked it; it was a good piece. But, said I to myself, he’s going to catch hell for it. And he did.

Three days later he posted a series of replies on Twitter, starting with this:

One of the more endearing traits of cultural appropriation warriors is their belief that only they have read and thought about the issue. 1/

— Kenan Malik (@kenanmalik) June 16, 2017

He then posed a series of tasks and questions for the “cultural appropriation warriors”. I’ve decided to post some replies as a means of teasing out some of the implications of those prompts. I’ve put Malik’s statements in boldface while my elaborations are in ordinary text.

1 Define a culture (‘Western culture’, ‘black culture’, etc)

One might try to define Western culture as a geopolitical entity that has its origins in ancient Greece (philosophy, math) and Israel (religion), continues in Europe and then spreads to the Americas starting with European exploration, conquest, and colonization at the end of the 15th Century. That, for example, is more or less the scope of a two-semester art history course I took during my freshman year of college some decades ago. But in what sense is that all ONE culture?

Imagine yourself transported back to the ancient world – Sparta, Jerusalem, Rome, wherever. Would you be able to function? Chances are you can’t speak the language, and whatever culture is, language is surely a big part of it. But assume that whatever magical power took you there also gave you command of the local language, would you be comfortable with the customs, the food, clothing, housing, social structure? What if, in the magic of transport, you ended up a slave? Is slavery essential to Western culture or merely contingent?

I began to have my doubts about “Western culture” when I learned that those Greek sculptures and temples in pristine white marble had not, in fact, been white. They’d been painted in shades of blue, red, green, yellow, and so forth. They’d have been rather gaudy, even, you know, “Oriental”. Whoops! Not so “Western” after all.

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by Jalees Rehman

How many hours of sleep does the average person require? The American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society recently convened an expert panel which reviewed over 5,000 scientific articles and determined that sleeping less than 7 hours in adults (ages 18-60) was associated with worsening health, such as increased obesity and diabetes, higher blood pressure as well as an increased risk of stroke and heart disease. In addition to increasing the risk for illnesses, inadequate sleep is also linked to impaired general functioning, as evidenced by suppressed immune function, deficits in attention and memory, and a higher rate of errors and accidents. Since at least one third of adults report that they sleep less than 7 hours a day (as assessed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in a survey of 444,306 adults), one can legitimately refer to insufficient sleep as a major public health issue. Even though insufficient sleep and other sleep disorders have reached epidemic-like proportions affecting hundreds of millions of adults world-wide, they are not adequately diagnosed and treated when compared to medical risk factors and conditions. For example, in most industrialized countries, primary care physicians perform annual blood pressure and cholesterol level checks, but do not routinely monitor the sleep duration and quality of their patients.

One reason for this may be the complexity of assessing sleep. Checking the blood cholesterol level is quite straightforward and provides a reasonably objective value which is either below or above the recommended cholesterol thresholds. However, when it comes to sleep, matters become more complicated. The above-mentioned expert panel acknowledged that there can be significant differences in the sleep requirements of individuals. Those who suffer from illnesses or have incurred "sleep debt" may require up to 9 hours of sleep, and then there are also significant environmental and genetic factors which can help determine the sleep needs of an individual. The average healthy person may need at least seven hours of sleep but there probably groups of individuals who can function well with merely 6 hours while others may need 9 hours of sleep. Then there is also the issue of the sleep quality. Sleeping for seven hours between 10 pm and 5 am has a higher quality of sleep than sleeping between 6 am and 1 pm because the latter will be associated with many more spontaneous awakenings and interruptions as well as less slow-wave sleep (a form of "deep sleep" characterized by classical slow wave patterns on a brain EEG recording during sleep). Unlike the objective cholesterol blood test, a true assessment of sleep would require an extensive sleep questionnaire asking details about sleep history and perhaps even recording sleep with activity monitors or EEGs.

Another reason for why insufficient sleep is not treated like other risk factors such as cholesterol and blood pressure is that there aren't any easy fixes for poor sleep and the science of how poor sleep leads to cognitive deficits, diabetes and heart disease is still very much a topic of investigation.

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Blots

In inkwell times when quills were used
(ends of sharpened feathers split
which above a writer's work twitched
as when a bird would scratch an itch)
we scratched our hieroglyphs in night-black licks
pausing intermittently to dip the split quill's end
into wells candlelit in nights as black as pitch

We coaxed from shades what they might think.
We spilled their tells upon a page
by sucking spells from pots of ink.

To unmask what we thought it was about
we scribbled convoluted ropes with knots.

We now imagine we've come far:
we scratch our licks with keyboard clicks
to spread fresh algorithmic tropes;
divining printed-circuit blots
we gaze at screens of Rorschach strokes
.

Jim Culleny
3/4/17

Painting: Jackson Pollock

by Daniel Ranard

Sometimes it's easier to understand abstract math with a story. W­hen I explain bits of math to unsuspecting friends, I'm always happy by how quickly they follow. Even precise definitions and proofs are easy to learn with a little work. But for the uninitiated, eventually the words and symbols start to slip from the mind, the thread of logic lost in a haze.

That's where a story can help. You don't need plot or character development, just a loose narrative frame. Our brain is a logical powerhouse, but it's used to dealing with people, not abstractions. By casting mathematical notions within a narrative about people with intentions, we're more likely to remember them.

Storytelling is not just a crutch for novices. Some imagine mathematicians are a weird breed, better equipped to deal with symbols than with people. But in my anecdotal experience, experts use stories all the time. It becomes automatic, and the stories shrink to scraps of human narrative: anthropomorphized symbols, definitions imbued with intentionality, proofs framed as struggles. Sometimes a student is lost in the fog of abstraction, only to seize at these imagined human elements and successfully finish an argument. It's a skill to be learned, like so much of mathematical "talent." Eventually, the abstractions may become familiar like friends, no longer requiring the imposition of human costume.

I'll share a story about infinity, dreamed up by the mathematician David Hilbert in a 1924 lecture. It's called the Paradox of the Grand Hotel, or Hilbert's Hotel. Although it's more story-like and less precise than the "stories" I mentioned above, it's a nice introduction to the notion of infinity.

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by Brooks Riley

First, the jungle out there:

Sound familiar? Hint: It’s not the clatter of journalists in a feeding frenzy over the latest insanity to emerge from the White House. Just an ur-Twitter storm here in Mitteleuropa at 4 in the morning, recorded from my balcony.

Ever since November 9, 2016 I’ve been looking for distractions. On that fateful day after, wading through the tsunami of reactions to the US election results, I found what I was looking for: Alex Ross’s absorbing New Yorker article on Death Valley (no irony intended), a bone-dry place to get lost in and never come back. This was my oasis manqué–a desert so quiet, so neutral, so pure, so inviting, so nearly absent of humanity with its messy societal occlusions and noisy fallacies, so mesmerizing in its own right, with a breathtaking geological exegesis that shut out all the flak flying through the airwaves.

I’m not the only one looking for distractions. In an essay on this site last week, Elise Hempel described munching on a coriander leaf, while ‘thinking of everything not Trump’.

I wanted more than that: a parallel universe that could be explored without any reference points to a reality I know all too well. Something immersive, challenging, ongoing, but above all distracting. And presto, the genie of nature answered my wish. On the morning of March 15, I was awakened by birdsong outside my bedroom window–not just any old chirp-chirp, but the loud crystal-clear melody of a turdus merula or European blackbird. The concert season officially began that day, and will last until mid-July. Curtains up on a parallel civilization right outside my door.

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by Genese Sodikoff

The story of kuru is a classic one in anthropology and medicine. Called the "laughing death" in the Australian newspapers, the disease swept over the Fore population of Papua New Guinea's eastern highlands over the course of the 20^th century, peaking in the late '50s and early '60s.

Victims experienced body aches and instability at first. They'd become emotionally labile, trembling and laughing involuntarily. Gradually, they lost control of bodily functions and the ability to swallow or stand. Their bodies wasted away, immobile until death, which could occur anytime between six months to a year after the onset of symptoms.

For decades, scientists were stumped as to how it spread. The usual signs of an infectious agent were not apparent, yet people were dying by the hundreds every year. The disease struck mostly adult women and young children. Women died of kuru at approximately three times the rate of men, leaving hamlets bereft of mothers and wives. It was a "demographic emergency," explains anthropologist Shirley Lindenbaum, who began research among the South Fore people at the height of the kuru epidemic in the early 1960s. As she describes in her 1979 book, Kuru Sorcery: Disease and Danger in the New Guinea Highlands, the Fore blamed the deaths on malevolent sorcery. They believed sorcerers were pushing them toward the brink of extinction.

I have been writing here about the anthropology of zoonosis, disease that spills over from animal to human. Zoonotic diseases interest me in part because they trouble our sense of species boundaries, or reproductive and even immunological divides. The lines of class difference (Mammalia, I mean) sometimes seem thinly sketched.

Kuru was not zoonotic–-quite the opposite. It was a disease borne of cannibalism.

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by Dwight Furrow

Wine and science writer Jamie Goode's post What is Greatness in a Wine? is insightful because it moves greatness out of the realm of subjectivity and personal preference:

"Greatness is conferred on wine by a community of judgement. When we, as the wine community, taste wines together, we recognize the great wines. It's an aesthetic system, where we form a judgement together, by tasting together, discussing, listing, buying, consuming."

This is indeed how a consensus forms about which wines are great. But ultimately this kind of answer is unsatisfying. When the wine community confers greatness on a wine presumably there is something about the wine that warrants such a judgment. Without an account of what that is, the judgment is threatened with arbitrariness. The job of a critic is not merely to announce greatness but to explain it by giving reasons. A genuine understanding of "greatness" would include those reasons not just the fact of widespread agreement.

Such an account, of course, is hard to provide. As Jamie writes, "There's no definition that we can apply to determine whether a wine is great or not." Each great wine will be great for different reasons and general rules that mention complexity, harmony or finesse will not capture the individuality of great wines. The best we can do is use metaphor or some other rhetorical device to call attention to those features that seem salient but are difficult to articulate.

Yet, perhaps Jamie's idea is in the right direction. A great wine is great because it appeals to a wide range of people in the wine world who agree it's a benchmark but often for vastly different reasons. Each person's account of why the wine is great will differ due to biological differences, differences in descriptive powers, aesthetic preferences, and the fact that we all have different tasting histories. Thus, perhaps what makes a wine great is its ability to generate a verdictive consensus despite those differences. Greatness in a wine lies in a wine's capacity to be appreciated from many different perspectives, a multi-dimensional potential that invites a common verdict despite vastly different ways of arriving at it.

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by Misha Lepetic

"These are the guys that were
too tough for the chain gang."
~ Bomber

Back in the mists of time, at the dawn of the World Wide Web, the promise of an open, decentralized, disaggregated network seemed to stretch limitlessly past the horizons of doubt and cynicism. Most iconically, John Perry Barlow's A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace began with the stirring, uh, rejection: "Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather."

Suffice to say, this stern invocation has not aged well. For one thing, Barlow's declaration is merely concerned with governments, and doesn't mention corporations. Perhaps this was because Barlow delivered these remarks at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in 1996, and the matter required a certain deference. Perhaps he was under the sway of the idea – fashionable at the time – that history had indeed ended, with democracy and neoliberalism the unquestioned victors. Perhaps corporations, and capital generally, were not such a matter of concern twenty years ago as they are today. Nevertheless, in only a few years, the Wild West promise of the Web led to the giant pile-on of capital that would fuel the first dotcom bubble and its subsequent collapse, around 2001.

The resurrection of internet entrepreneurship following that first, intemperate bender resulted in a different model, with a somewhat subtler promise. ‘Web 2.0', as it was popularized circa 2004, was premised on the idea that information was no longer static, and that participants could interact with content, and that content could be assembled, on the fly, for a specific viewer. A bit further behind the scenes, Web 2.0 benevolently assumed a rich ecosystem of application programming interfaces that would allow for seamless communication of data requests between platforms that were burgeoning with information. You can think of an API as recipe book for how to interact with a given site's data, or a membrane that allows certain requests and not others.

So our notion of the Web was abstracted upwards, from scrappy libertarians doing whatever they wanted in some curiously disembodied space, to one that was more about to giving platforms the freedom they needed to interact with one another. This had several consequences (and I realize that I am being very simplistic here, but bear with me for the sake of the subsequent argument). On the one hand, the stage was set for the evolution of social media networks, which are more or less the ne plus ultra of Web 2.0. On the other, and inseparable from the first, was the growth of the vast and unregulated infrastructure that tracked users' online behavior.

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by Katrin Trüstedt

Our way of life is based on externalizing its costs and living at the expense of others. Hard and cheap labor, the consequences of climate change, the diverse forms of trash our lives produce – we cannot just not know that we put all these burdens on those in the global south who cannot afford the very way of life they make possible for us. And ultimately, we seem to outsource even our acknowledgement of this outsourcing. People coming from the global south into the northern developed countries seem to appear as a consequence of our outsourcing and as a threat to our way of living – "they are coming to take what is actually rightfully theirs". In a strange dynamic, this perceived threat does not seem to lead to recognition of its cause, however, but rather to its avoidance. Because migrants from the global south appear as the embodied threat to our way of living and externalizing, we seem to block the acknowledgement of our part in this system, and instead turn it against them: It is those fleeing the crisis we have produced in their countries that actually are the parasites, living off of our work, taking, or seeking to take, what is rightfully ours (our jobs, our welfare, created by our hard work).

For the meat that Westerners eat, vast areas of Latin America (and other parts of the world) have been turned into rapidly eroding agricultural monocultures to produce the soy used to feed our animal industry complex. The ubiquitous use of agrochemicals in these monocultures severely affect the environment and the inhabitants in these countries, with higher cancer and infant mortality rates. People who used to live from the lands have to move, and they migrate to ever growing slums around the cities. In his book Around us, the deluge: The externalization society and its cost ("Neben uns die Sintflut: Die Externalisierungsgesellschaft und ihr Preis"), the German sociologist Stephan Lessenich traced such developments under the term externalization as an organizing principle of our world order. What is externalization? Economically, it means that "external costs" – as e.g. the pollution caused by a factory and the costs of its consequences – are not included in the calculation of the actual price of the product. The modern capitalist work structure based on the bourgeois household serves Lessenich as a paradigm for externalization insofar as the costs of housework and childcare that enable the male worker and make it possible for him to devote all the time to his work remain hidden and unaccounted for. In contemporary societies in which more and more women work, the costs are now externalized to underpaid care worker in the global care chains who often have to leave their own home and take care of a foreign family at the expense of their own. Externalization means that most of our products are only as affordable or as profitable because certain costs are unaccounted for and covertly shifted to others. The cotton industry in Asia that produces cheap clothes for the world exploits workers, destroys and consumes the local environments and lets others pay the actual price of the product we design, market and wear. The smartphones we use depend on cobalt that is extracted from children working in mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo under life-threatening conditions. And the leftovers of all the unnecessary and underpriced products we consume pile up in the waters and lands of the global south. It is not that we have achieved a standard of living that most people around the world unfortunately have not achieved yet. It's that we have this particular standard of living because most other people don't.

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by Paul Braterman

"Our MPs will be the kingmakers, playing a huge role"
(From victory speech of Gregory Campbell, on right, 1 a.m. Friday 9th June, 2017)

Overview: I am assuming as I write this that the Conservative Party will remain in power in the UK for the immediate future. As a matter of arithmetic, this will require the cooperation of the Democratic Unionist Party. All this may, however, change at any time.

Update on the Orange Walk issue: it's already happening: "Supporters of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) are demanding Theresa May allow a banned loyalist march as part of an agreement by the Northern Irish party to prop up a minority Conservative government." Independent, Monday 12 June

Kingmakers. There is no doubt that this is how the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) see themselves. And there is no doubt that they aim to exploit this role to the full. Not by formal coalition, the trap into which Nick Clegg so disastrously led his party in 2010, but "confidence and supply", which will leave them free to make new demands and to threaten to withdraw support at any time. I will not attempt to unravel the complex affairs of Northern Ireland, but with the settlement there more fragile than it has been for some years, the strengthening of one partisan faction must be a matter of concern. Anyone requiring evidence of the DUP's ruthless political infighting, inflammatory rhetoric, and skill at reopening old wounds is invited to visit their web site at http://www.mydup.com/.

L: Saint John's College, Cambridge, where Nigel Dodds studied law

Nor should we fall into the trap of underestimating the DUP intellectually because of the crudeness of their dogmas. Nigel Dodds, of whom much more below, has a first-class honours degree in law from Cambridge University, while Ian Paisley Jr., MP for North Antrim and son of the charismatic Reverend Ian Paisley who founded the party, holds BA (hons) and MSSc degrees from Queen's University Belfast in History and Irish Politics.

Sectarianism and links to violence: The DUP is a sectarian party, founded by former members of the UUP (United Unionist Party) who considered that party's leadership too conciliatory towards the large Republican (i.e. Catholic) minority. In the late 1980s and 1990s, there were strong links between the DUP and Protestant paramilitary groups involved in arms smuggling and assassinations. The DUP now renounces violence, but there are strong family connections between the current contingency of DUP MPs, and the former leadership, and one of these MPs, Sammy Wilson, is on record as saying that if politically ignored, the people (i.e. Protestant people) of Northern Ireland may need to resort to violence.

Welfare: On welfare policy, the DUP is to the left of the Conservatives. They are opposed to the bedroom tax and means testing the winter fuel allowance, and wish to keep the "triple lock" on pensions.[1]

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by Christopher Bacas

In 1980, a college music student, I took a job at a Bar-B-Que joint. It was a mile walk from my place. I went in once or twice a week for a closing shift. A full size covered wagon sat on a pedestal in the parking lot. It looked shabby, but functional. I watched it survive North Texas weather over the two years I worked there. The restaurant had two sides, a burger counter and cafeteria-style BBQ. I worked with the pit crew; cutting and trimming brisket, ribs and chicken and serving our BBQ customers. Jim Lake managed the location for Mr Henry Lasalle, the millionaire owner. With his thick mustache, high cheekbones and cleft chin, Jim looked like a composite of Dudley-do-Right and Snively Whiplash. He wore cowboy boots and immaculate denim. I never saw him take off his ten-gallon hat. The day I showed up for training, he was busy out back in the BBQ pit. A guy named Mike trained me. He had an easy way with clientele:

"Whut kin ah git fer ye?"

"Yessir. Slice beef. Ye want plate er sammich?

" Po' Boy er regler?

"Ye want sauce on that?"

"I kin give ye some in one o these sauce deals."

"Yep. Now, the rib sauce IS sweeter. Yessir"

The step up to the cutting board passed through a pair of louvered saloon doors. They swung tightly on noisy springs. Mike showed me how to remove the top of the brisket with a smooth sideway cut. That left a juicy, stringy slab ready for against-the-grain slicing and a fatty top pushed aside on the white plastic block. Mike swept scraps into a removable steel drawer recessed under the block. The knife had to be sharp. Mike showed me how to sharpen it with a butcher steel. He told me Mr Lasalle had come behind the counter a few weeks before and grabbed a knife away from an employee and "chewed their ass rill good"

"Ya'll are RUININ' these knives!" He shouted.

Mike mentioned the owner was drunk, a description I'd hear often.

The BBQ pit was a shed attached to the building. A zigzag black pipe vented smoke. The meat rotated through the heat on a set of swinging ledges propelled by a variable-speed motor. Manager-on-duty had to monitor the pit temperature and cooking cycles. In Texas summer, the area around the pit, buffeted by wood smoke, was this heathen's idea of Hell on earth.

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