by Kathleen Goodwin

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

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

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The Impossible Glamour of Istanbul

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Jim Culleny
11/01/14

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

by Yohan J. John

I.

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

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

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

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

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by Paul Braterman

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

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

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

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

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

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GOOD FORM

for Keith Bayard, a demigod

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

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

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

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

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

by Lisa Lieberman

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

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

Love in the Workers State

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

Work in the Workers State

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

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by Mara Jebsen

After Edward Hopper's Two On the Aisle, 1927

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

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

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

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

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

by Charlie Huenemann

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

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

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

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by Brooks Riley

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

. . . for those who love green.

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

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

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by Randolyn Zinn

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

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

by Carl Pierer

It is necessary that two men have the same number of hair, gold, and others.[i]

This meme is taken from a scene in the Cohen brother's 1998 comedy “The Big Lebowski”. During a game of bowling, Walter, in the picture, gets annoyed at the other characters constantly overstepping the line. Drawing a gun, he asks: “Am I the only around here who gives a shit about rules?”[ii]

Considering that there are roughly 7 billion people on earth, a positive answer seems highly unlikely. But it is possible to do better. We can know with certainty, i.e. prove, that the creator of the meme is not the only one. This is a simple and straightforward application of a fascinating, intuitive and yet powerful mathematical principle. It is usually called “pigeonhole principle” (for reasons to be explained below) or “Dirichlet's principle”.

***

The German mathematician Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet was born in 1805 in Düren, a small town near Aachen. Although Dirichlet was no child prodigy, his love for mathematics and studies in general became apparent early in his life. His parents had him destined for the career of a merchant, but upon his insisting to attend the Gymnasium (secondary school), they sent him to Bonn, at the age of 12. After only two years, he transferred to a Gymnasium in Cologne, where he studied mathematics with Georg Simon Ohm (1789-1854), who is famous for his discovery of Ohm's Law. Dirichlet left this school after only one year, with a leaving certificate in his pocket but without an Abitur, which would cause him some troubles later in his life. At that time, students were required to be able to carry a conversation in Latin to pass the Abitur examination. With only three years of secondary education, Dirichlet could not comply with this crucial requirement. However, Dirichlet was fortunate that no Abitur was required to study mathematics.

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by Thomas Rodham Wells

You may have heard of the gender income gap. It is one of the most obvious signs that despite being equal in theory, women still lack real equality. Some of it is still due to active discrimination by people who still haven't got the equal treatment message. But much more of it is the result of a history of unjust gender norms and factual errors inscribed into our institutions, most notably the bundle of moral expectations we hold about what can be demanded of women rather than men in terms of unpaid care of children, the disabled and the elderly.

The problem is that fairness – the principle of the equal treatment of equals – is a poor guide to action here. Our history has bequeathed us a gender injustice complex of interlocking and mutually reinforcing institutional arrangements and moral values that altogether make women less economically valued than men. The outcome is pretty clear – women tend to earn much less than men – but it is hard to pin down specific violations of fair treatment by specific agents who can be held responsible. Sexist pigs are relatively easy to pick out and chastise, and in some cases may even be successfully prosecuted for discrimination or other misbehaviour. But it's rather harder to condemn a university educated couple for agreeing between themselves to follow the traditional model of male breadwinner and female homemaker. Even if that decision is replicated in household after household leading to dramatic aggregate differences in labour market participation rates for women, especially in full-time professional work.

It is true that a great many policies have been proposed, and sometimes even implemented, to address different pieces of the gender injustice complex, from quotas in boardrooms and the top management of public institutions to compulsory paternity leave. But such reforms struggle politically, not least because they seem to impose more unfairness – the unequal treatment of men and women because of their gender. A good many people, including many women, reasonably object to the incoherence of trying to solve a fairness problem by creating more unfairness. More positive measures, such as providing free child-care from tax revenues, are considered too expensive to fully implement. And for all the political capital these policies require to be put into action, each can only have incremental effects anyway because they only address one piece of the puzzle at a time. They rarely inspire much popular support.

We've been thinking about this the wrong way, distracted by the idea that unfairness must be produced by bad motives that are best addressed by cumulative moral exhortation, or something else equally cheap like training young women to 'lean in'. If we all want gender equality then eventually, surely, it will come about by itself.

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by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

Long years ago, when I waddled around in pigtails, I said aloud the magic words that for many years characterized how I felt about the world, my world. “I will settle in America”, I said. Neither did I know how heavy “settling” can be nor was I clued into the power of words. Carelessly, toddler-ly, I threw around that which would one day make my world.We didn't say politically correct things then. As far as we all knew, all of the Americas was North America, and all of North America was the US. My father had just returned from travels to the US, and he had brought back suitcases spilling over with things guaranteed to charm curmudgeonly three year olds.

America was then not only an idea but an escape. I was charmed into thinking that going to America indicated not only the newness of a world, but a not-ness of the one I inhabited. No school, no dreary days, no strange scapes of a scary adult world with its inexplicable sorrows and forbidding rules. America was fabulous, with its flowery denims, and video games, and automatic erasers. I was mesmerized by View-Masters, with their otherworldly scuffed gaze onto so-near foreign shores.

These were the eighties. India was a sovereign, socialist, secular, democratic republic with one, and later two, television channels. We all read the national pledge aloud in school, that went something to the effect of “India is my country and all Indians are my brothers and sisters”. We all suffered one heckler in every class who would mutter sotto voce “Well who do I marry then?” We received our news from singular sources and imagined our leaders sovereign, if ineffectual. We trusted secularism, even if in its often troubled avatar, tolerance. We muddled through power cuts, and ration cards, and held onto a quiet, steely middle-classness. Benedict Anderson would have pronounced us a truly well-imagined nation; or at least, some of us.

In this world, America's otherness beckoned ever so strongly with its free love (read sex), and rampant spending; with its alter-egoness of individualism and seeming control over the world. But India allied with the USSR. The mythical Russia communicated to us only held Mathematics books, fairy tales, and War and Peace in stock. I hated math, much preferred the Brothers Grimm, and to date, am at odds with the melancholies of Tolstoy.

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by Gerald Dworkin

Tom Paulin

In the light of the recent fire-storm over the hirefire of Steven Salaita, I thought it might be interesting to revisit a case which raised similar issues about whether there are limits to what a University may do with respect to controversial speech. This was a case which did not raise issues about hiring and firing and procedural justice so it may perhaps be a better one to focus on.

In 2002, the Harvard English Department invited the Irish poet Tom Paulin to give a poetry reading as the Morris Gray lecturer. Shortly thereafter it was brought to the attention of the inviters that Paulin had made the following statements in an interview to an Egyptian newspaper.

“Brooklyn-born settlers in the occupied territories should be shot dead. I think they are Nazis, racists, I feel nothing but hatred for them.” Brooklyn? Has the man no shame?

The newspaper also quoted him as saying: “I never believed that Israel had the right to exist at all.” In a poem published earlier in the Observer he referred to the “Zionist SS” .

Another comment was “There's something profoundly sexual to the Zionist pleasure w/#Israel's aggression. Sublimation through bloodletting, a common perversion.” Oh, sorry that was Steven Salaita.

As a result of this, and without as far as we know any influence by Harvard donors, the English Department retracted their invitation.

A hail of protests ensued. Strange bedfellows issued letters. This one came from Alan Dershowitz, Laurence Tribe and Charles Fried.

“By all accounts this Paulin fellow the English Department invited to lecture here is a despicable example of the anti-Semitic and/or anti-Israel posturing unfortunately quite widespread among European intellectuals (News, “Poet Flap Drew Summers' Input,” Nov. 14). We think he probably should not have been invited. But Harvard has had its share of cranks, monsters, scoundrels and charlatans lecture here and has survived.

What is truly dangerous is the precedent of withdrawing an invitation because a speaker would cause, in the words of English department chair Lawrence Buell, “consternation and divisiveness.” We are justly proud that our legal system insisted that the American Nazi Party be allowed to march through the heavily Jewish town of Skokie, Illinois. If Paulin had spoken, we are sure we would have found ways to tell him and each other what we think of him. Now he will be able to lurk smugly in his Oxford lair and sneer at America's vaunted traditions of free speech. There are some mistakes which are only made worse by trying to undo them.”

James Shapiro, of Columbia where Paulin was visiting, condemned Harvard's actions as “disastrous”.

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by Rishidev Chaudhuri

At first (and at second, and third) glance, the use of spices in the cuisines of the subcontinent is a subtle and mysterious art, full of musty cupboards staffed by aging apothecaries (and grandmothers) and intertwined with theories of humor-balancing and our particular relationship to the gods. Recipes and spice blends are passed on in scribbled old notebooks and on furtive scraps of paper, copied and recopied like the epics, with long lists of spices and proportions, some crossed out and replaced with others for inexplicable reasons. The spices are essential, we are told, the order in which they are added is crucial, the mind of the cook must be perfectly clear, and the incantations must be uttered perfectly resonantly.

But how to make sense of this confusion if one did not grow up hovering over a mortar and pestle? Or even if one did and was momentarily distracted (perhaps by adolescence)? One route is a close reading of existing recipes and practices, noting patterns, highlighting parsimonious explanations and gradually drawing grander and grander conclusions. Equally useful is naïve phenomenological experimentation: an analytic strategy, where we isolate and examine spices to see what they bring to our senses. In this we should be motivated by Blake's dictum that to know what is enough we must cross it: the most clarifying way to figure out what a spice is doing is to increase its proportions in a recipe ad absurdum, until the structure starts to crack and you glimpse what column of the edifice was being held up by that particular spice. Unfortunately, while this is the right way to conduct disciplined phenomenological inquiry, it is not the right way to make something to eat, and so we will scale our ambitions back and instead simply exaggerate the spice that is being studied and strip away some of the surrounding complexity. This is an ongoing project of mine, as I try to understand subcontinental food, and I'm particularly interested in collecting and devising one-note recipes that highlight a particular spice (see this article on pepper, for example).

Coriander fruits, also commonly called coriander seeds, are good for this kind of analysis. Their flavors are crucial to many subcontinental foods, and are part of what makes the cuisine distinctive. Yet, unlike a number of other spices, coriander tends to be gentle and forgiving. It's a friendly spice, with flavors of citrus and flowers mixed in with a warm spiciness. If you have coriander seeds in your pantry, chew on a few seeds as you read this and you'll smell and taste the flavors I mean (you can do this with the powder too, but it's less pleasant and it'll dry out your mouth). There's also a slight soapiness, which I'm told some people pick up on more than others. If you're curious about the chemistry of coriander, Harold McGee's book On Food and Cooking is wonderful (as usual).

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