by Hartosh Singh Bal

Over the past month there have been two separate reasons to return to the story of Srinivasa Ramanujan. The first was the result of an astounding piece of mathematics by Ken Ono and his colleagues on the theory of partitions, bringing to a conclusion some of Ramanujan’s most interesting work in number theory. The second was thanks to Patrick French’s recent book – India, a portrait – which ends with a short two page biography of Ramanujan. The first Ramanujan is of course the Ramanujan who should matter, the mathematician, the second is unfortunately the Ramanujan who has come to occupy public memory, the metaphor.

It is not clear what French’s Ramanujan stands for in a chapter that seeks to explain the specifics of individual, social and organizational behavior on the basis of particular Indian traits such as religion or caste, but given the title of the chapter – Only in India – it does seem that French believes there was something particularly Indian about Ramanujan’s story.

This belief is not unique to French and has only been compounded by Ramanujan’s own description of the Goddess of Namagiri as the source of his inspiration. The result is that Ramanujan has come to embody certain romantic notion of eastern or more specifically Indian thought. Even those who want to allude to Ramanujan the mathematician do so in such terms. Paul Hoffman, in an otherwise entertaining book on the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos – The Man who Loved Only Numbers – writes, “While Hardy and Ramanujan’s partnership lasted, the two men stood the world of pure mathematics on its head. It was East meets West, mysticism meets formality, and the combination was unstoppable.”

Ramanujan’s otherwise excellent biographer Robert Kanigel devotes the entire first chapter of the book – The Man who Knew Infinity – to Ramanujan’s religious and social upbringing. However important this may have been to Ramanujan the man, the claim that it is central to Ramanujan the mathematician does not stand up to scrutiny. Ramanujan did not learn his mathematics in a temple. By the time he went to school only a few of the traditional Vedic schools still functioned. They had been largely replaced by schools teaching a curriculum based on European science.

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Justin E. H. Smith

O Isaac? Isaac! Come forthwith! The clamp 'round my gouty ankle must needs be tighten'd. That's right, Isaac. The left ankle. Yes, my loyal Clampsman. Just like that.

Do you know what I've been doing, Isaac? I've been reading about comic sections. Do you know what those are? They are the Curves produced by the Intersection of a Conus by a Plane. Now look here, Isaac. There are not only Circles and Ellipses so form'd, but e'en edifying Parabolae and whimsical Hyperbolae. Some are most comical indeed!

What's that, Isaac? You say it's 'conic' sections about which the immortal Euclid held forth, and not 'comic' sections?

Now, Isaac, did you see a Signe hanging o'er the Door of my den, warning “Let no one enter here who is ignorant of Mathematics?” You didn't? Well that's why you're allowed in, you Orang-Outang! You are here to tighten my ankle-Clamp, not to out-do the great Roberval.

Now, to our Quaeries.

Firstly, for some period, o'er a decade of Years ago now, we repeatedly heard that jubilant Declaration: Whoomp, there it is! What was discover'd at that time, precisely? A great Treasure of Portuguese Bullion? El Dorado? Verulam's Fountain of Youth? In what barbaric Tongue, furthermore, does whoomp translate the wise Archimede's elegant exclamation, εὕρηκα? Wherefore, finally, did the Jubilation cease so suddenly? Was this Discovery at length only a Fata Morgana?

Whence, moreover, all this talk of 'Wikileaks'? Wiki, we suppose, is of the same Lingua Hottentotica as whoomp, but what is leaking 'round here besides my woe-ridden joints? Information, you say? First of all, Isaac, you know not to interrupt me once I've begun. But more importantly how could 'Information' be a-leaking and a-flowing when we are unable to receive so much as a single sensible Reply to our Quaeries?

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Historians are generally quick and correct to insist that we jump to easy political analogies at our peril. One of the first lessons of historiography is that grand generalizations are more apt to flatter an author’s own sympathies than to capture a disinterested abstraction of events. Did Tunisia, Wikileaks, Facebook, or Twitter contribute to the Egyptian uprising? Possibly, but who would have the hubris to argue that any of these mattered more than local conditions: the rigged elections in December that gave the ruling National Democratic Party 93 percent of parliamentary seats, the bombings in Alexandria that left twenty-one Coptic Christians dead, the thirty years of daily personalized humiliation at the hands of a brutal police state.

And yet it seems possible to respect the importance of historical specificity while also acknowledging that popular energies can, and do, spread. Not for nothing is the rhetoric of revolution and counter-revolution shot through with the metaphors of fever, contagion, and conflagration. When yesterday’s unthinkable prospect becomes today’s historical fact, we are reminded that possibility can be more than a speculative concept. The events in Tunisia or Egypt make us feel political possibility, they make us experience it as an emotion, a passion no less infectious than anger or joy.

That feeling of possibility has already raised new questions for Uganda’s president Yoweri Museveni, who celebrated 25 years of continuous rule last Wednesday and is widely expected to claim victory in the presidential elections scheduled for February 18. When the question of Tunisia’s relevance for Uganda was put to him directly, Museveni shocked no one by arguing that Uganda’s situation is entirely different than the one that led to the ouster of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali: “I would not want you to confuse longevity with performance…social conditions in Tunisia are different to those in Uganda which are improving.”

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On Sundays, Sylvia and I go to the Shire. As anyone with even a cursory knowledge of Tolkien’s world will tell you, the Shire is a happy place. It is a place of beginnings, homecomings, nostalgia and merrymaking. I loved the Shire, and I loved going there with Sylvia. There was a train station very close to our boarding school in South Wales, conveniently located for our Shire excursions. Every Sunday at noon we met at the train station to go to the Shire.

Now that I think about it, I met Sylvia because she introduced me to the Shire. At first, I thought it was a stupid euphemism but we grew into it. Gradually, it became a habit. I was new to the boarding school and she was a senior, two years older than me. Sixteen and Eighteen, we were struck with an underdeveloped pessimism unique to growing up. Sylvia was a girl of decadent tastes: cheap white wine, unfiltered cigarettes and fishing. The only times she tried to avoid these topics was when she was in the mood to impress boys with her feminine side but these little efforts were always doomed to fail. She could not stop talking about wine, cigarettes and fishing. How a Catalan girl had developed the habits of a truant Scot, I never found out. She never talked about herself. How I ended up being friends with her was something I knew even less about: something to do with Dostoevsky, the atman, salvia and short hair. It happened in a serenely fast rush like a tide coming in to cover my feet.

One Sunday, I was early. I recognized her coming from a distance. As she approached, she planted a noisy kiss on my cheek and flashed a wide smile. The two of us, foreigners in this vast countryside of Wales, trudged along the empty tracks and made our way to a forgotten bench, around fifteen minutes away from the station, hidden in unkempt bushes and facing the tracks. There she took out the ticket to the Shire from the front pocket of her fur coat. After warming it with her red lighter she sparked the tip and, hypnotized, watched it catch fire. We each took two puffs and kept passing. It wasn’t long before we were smiling stupidly as the cannabis set in. We were in the Shire and it was a very happy place.

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The spark that lit the tinder was a series of what began as peaceful protests followed by disproportionate – and uneven – countermeasures by the Tunisian government. Protests began after the public self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor left destitute after harassment by local authorities. Early media coverage was stifled and word of the protests leaked out through social networks and satellite television. Tunisian authorities reacted violently, then backpedaled and granted elaborate concessions (for example Pres. Ben Ali visited Bouazizi in his hospital bed shortly before the latter died and former fled.) The government seemed weak, arbitrary and cruel. People quickly lost confidence.

The United States might seem immune to the miseries roiling Egypt and Tunisia, yet the lack of opportunities and bleak outlook among Arabian youth is hardly unique, particularly to a young American. Unemployment as measured by the number of Americans out of work for over 15 weeks and still looking is at a historically high 9.1 percent according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, yet that number belies deeper pools of unemployment and underemployment among segments of the population. Last month’s tally of job seekers and those “marginally attached and working part-time for economic reasons” was 16.7 percent. Among recent college graduates and minorities the numbers are higher still.

Repression in the United States is not just economic but systematic, according to N+1’s “Intellectual Situation.” By challenging the peculiar American phenomenon of the pejorative use of the word “elite” being directed against “cultural” as opposed to “power” elites (i.e. readers of N+1 as opposed to readers of The Wall Street Journal), N+1’s editors reveal a menacing strain of anti-intellectualism that the “resentful right, under the banner—hoisted by the likes of Beck, Huckabee, and Palin—of common sense, flatters deprivation as wisdom by implying to the uneducated that an education isn’t worth having;” doing “incalculable, unforgivable” violence to the talents and capacities of millions of people.”

The root of this astringent claim is that the Right “not only brands higher education as an instrument of class domination, but… ensures the educational system increasingly functioned in such a way as to make the accusation stick.” The Right achieved this by appropriating (perhaps unwittingly) sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s argument that educated taste is a marker of “cultural capital,” and that taste functions as an index of social status, thereby enforcing class distinctions. N+1 argues that a “truly Democratic America” would instead hew closer to Ortega y Gasset’s argument that there are two classes of creature, “those who demand much of themselves and assume a burden of tasks and difficulties, and those who require nothing special of themselves, but rather for whom to live is to be every instant only what they already are.” Thus empowered the unwashed masses would admire rather than sneer at the achievements of cultural elites, and aspire for greater achievement.

A laudable goal, certainly, and one shared by both sides of the political equation, at least their more sensible members. Crudely put the Left would prefer to marshal the resources of the state to nudge people along in their self-improvement, while the Right would rather let them do it on their own, pulling themselves up by the bootstraps and presumably succeeding in a more business-like fashion. Perhaps the “cultural elite” gives themselves too much credit. Suspicion toward cultural elitism might not stem from culture itself, but rather its self-appointed stewards, the bastions of power and wealth sitting on the boards of elite universities and august cultural institutions.

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I have trouble with old pics
their sweet bitterness
their cutting edge
their tricks

—a daughter’s mittens
hung from cuffs
laid out in kodachrome
a taunt of time. Enough.

I’d rather mine old nuggets
upturn what’s scattered
in my skull —the gold

stick with what
my head will hold

I do not take nostalgic risks
The photobox stays
beneath the bed
with jewel cases of bygones
in code on disks

When my memory goes
it will not matter
I may not even know the aliens
who peer from three by fours
or are splashed on screens
in pixel splatters

Love is best as it occurs
life too;

Now is breath’s agency
Love and life are only inside time

not frozen
not shot with poignancy
not both a blur

(Wherein we dump the obsolete Adam and Eve tale of the Advent of Consciousness for a more radical and contemporary one based on evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience)

by Fred Zackel

“Something fell out of the mirror.”
“Did you hold it upside down?”
“Yes.”
“Did you shake it?”
“Yes.”
“After I told you not to?”
“I got curious.”

We must congratulate ourselves. Name another animal capable of creating its own meaning for its existence and then imposing it on the universe. We might even be the ones who most delay their own extinction.

We may not be alone on this evolutionary journey. The journey itself may not be exclusive to any one species but open to any species that ruminates over its reflection in the waterhole. Other species may be in the process of following in our footsteps. (Don’t look back. They might be closing in.) Other species have seen themselves in the mirror. Well, individuals within those species have. Have they told the others yet? Have they brought them to the mirror? As they tell the others of their Herd … could they too have their epiphany? Even more ominously to some of us, once they see themselves in the mirror, can reading (and writing) be far behind?

We human beings saw our reflections, had that epiphany, and got aimed in a different evolutionary trajectory. We survive the Crucible of the Veldt. The Crucible of the Savannah. We went looking for greener grasses elsewhere and we went everywhere on this planet. Being desperate to survive, we adapted ourselves to almost every geography and climate. Over the multitudinous millennia, we have been tempered like swords or plowshares. We survived and thrived.

Mirrors and reading – now we are capable of symbolic thought and we can pass that information on to anyone in Our Herd. We can pass the Good News onto the Next Generation. And the one after. And the one …

(That’s why libraries are so very dangerous to the religious, by the way. As the pulpit bullies always say, Quick, let’s burn the books. All we need is my Holy Scriptures. No, not yours but my Holy Scriptures. Yours are alternatives to mine, options to my agenda, and therefore these “choices” must be heresies. You and your ideas, your visions and priorities, must be destroyed and eradicated.)

I do not know how many epiphanies we as a species have had and learned from. But a dangerous few knocked us for a loop. They have threatened us as few others have done since the inaugural Epiphany at the waterhole.

Let’s start with Galileo’s telescope. Let’s go back 400 years almost to the month. In 1610, Galileo published his “Sidereus Nuncius” (aka “The Starry Messenger”), describing the surprising observations that he had made with the new telescope. That epiphany changed how we looked at our place in the Cosmos, our position in the Great Scheme of Things.

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The proper basis for a marriage is mutual misunderstanding. —Oscar Wilde

People necessarily make use of assumptions in speaking to one another, choosing their words to convey necessary information succinctly and effectively. The assumption process creates a theory of mind regarding the audience, including their culture, motivations, previous experiences, etc. While communicating with a stranger or an unfamiliar audience, the speaker will seek to include extra detail or background to be certain that the message is understood. But old acquaintances share more history and might require less information to understand the speaker’s intent (and may regard excessive detail as condescension). This habit promotes quick and effortless communication. Reciprocal theories of mind between long-time friends will grow into a shared ecosystem, with experiences, inside jokes and deep comprehension.

Or not. In the case of long-married couples, spouses sometimes communicate ambiguous information no better than strangers would. Two psychologists, Boaz Keysar and Kenneth Savitzky, have been studying how people interpret and misinterpret ambiguous communications. They devised an experiment in which participants sat in a circle with their backs to one other and tried to discern the meaning of spoken ambiguous phrases chosen from everyday conversations. The “speaker” was given a list of ambiguous phrases, and instructed to read each one aloud to communicate which of four meanings was intended. For example, “it’s getting hot in here” might be a flirtatious overture, a comment about tempers rising, a warning that the cops are closing in, or a hint to open the window. The listeners in the experiment chose from among the four possible meanings based on the speaker’s verbal delivery, and the speaker would rate the likelihood that each listener got the correct message.

Even with a lot of contextual information stripped away, all listeners were able to guess the speaker’s intent at well above chance levels, which is a testament to the utility of the social assumptions the researchers are investigating. However, the speakers in this experiment consistently overestimated their own ability to communicate the appropriate meaning, and they overestimated their ability more so toward their partners than toward the strangers. They thought their spouses “got it” for 6 out of 10 phrases, when in fact the spouses averaged the same as strangers, at around 4 out of 10.

The scientists who designed this study chose the conditions to illustrate the flip side of a developed intimacy. The habits of ellipsis and allusion can become counterproductive when the topic falls outside of the shared sphere, or, as in this experiment, context is removed to the point of real ambiguity (in real life, think of emails or text messages; or, speaking near a running faucet). Speakers presume that they’re being clear; and a listener, may use their own take on the shared relationship to mistakenly believe they don’t need clarification. Preventing this sort of miscue is the basis for an entire cottage industry of counselors and marriage therapists.

Reference:The closeness-communication bias: Increased egocentrism among friends versus strangers. Kenneth Savitsky, Boaz Keysar, Nicholas Epley, Travis Carter, and Ashley Swanson. J. Exp. Soc. Psychology 47:269-273, 2011.

Cartoon © Randy Glasbergen from www.glasbergen.com <http://www.glasbergen.com>, used with permission.

by Jenny White

I’m a faithful reader of the New York Times Science Section, cover to cover, because I want to know about things, not be caught flatfooted. Somehow it seems necessary for survival to know about quarks and bosons, the social structure of ants, scientific explanations of the smile, and the sexual life of grapes. I had a fling with books explaining how to endure being stranded in snow (make an igloo) and identify edible weeds in the park. What does this say about me? I never kept any extra food in the house beyond what was fresh in the fridge until after 9/11 when I laid in some canned beets and tomato sauce and a gallon jug of water. The tomato sauce exploded and the water leaked, so clearly I am batting zero as a survivalist. Perhaps knowing things about the world lets me feel that nothing can surprise me, jump out of the dark corners beyond my peripheral vision. Illness is like that. Two months ago I saw spots and flashes in my right eye and was told I had a partially detached retina. Why? No reason. Out of the blue. Once I was allowed to read again after the repair, I read a lot about retinas. But what do we really learn about how illnesses and the body work from reading popular science? Recently, I had a long conversation with a prominent scientist at Harvard, the molecular biologist Michael R. Freeman, who explained to me what cancer was. It wasn’t anything I expected, even after years of reading science stories. It was as if he had opened a door into an alternate universe. Below is a transcript of part of our conversation.

Jenny White: Tell me what we should know about cancer?

Michael Freeman: Cancer is an uncontrolled proliferation of cells, so a tumor is actually is a swelling or a cyst, something that isn’t necessarily life-threatening, but a malignancy is something that has the potential to grow and spread in the body and its the spreading in the body as well as the growth that is lethal. We’re still trying to understand fundamental processes that are part of cancer. A recently recognized process involved in cancer, for instance, is autophagy, which means “self-eating.” This is a normal way that cells use to conserve energy and nutrients, and it’s a process that can be used by cancer cells to progress to malignant states. Tumor cells generally are in a very stressful environment, so there’s a Darwinian pressure to select for variants that can overcome various stresses. So if you’re a tumor cell and your descendants have the ability to take in nutrients from this process of autophagy, then you have a selective advantage over other cells that might be killed in the stressful environment.

JW: So basically the Pac-Man cells survive because they eat the cells surrounding them.

MF: They actually eat themselves.

JW: Are there any other cool concepts that are out there? Autophagy, self-eating Pac-Man cells. What else is going on?

MF: There’s another concept that was very new when I was a postdoctoral fellow, but is now very much understood to be a fundamental process in tumor biology, which is apoptosis or programmed cell death. This is a program that cells initiate that causes them to die. It’s basically cell-suicide. There are signaling molecules that can initiate the suicide program that’s built into the cell. This is a normal process that takes place during development. The fingers on your hand were created in part through an apoptopic mechanism, where the webbing between the digits was formed by cells killing themselves. In development, in the formation of the body plan, there’s growth as well as loss of structure. It even happens during normal life as an adult. It’s like what a sculptor does, right? A sculptor creates form by removing things.

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On the anniversary of his death:

A tribute to Omar Azfar by Azra Raza, M.D.

There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’t is not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all.

Shakespeare, HAMLET, Act v. Sc. 2.

At the end, the readiness to face whatever providence had in store was there, both in the case of Omar as well as his mother Naheed. I only saw him two or three times without Naheed in the roughly 16 months of our acquaintance in New York, therefore it is hard for me to think of them separately. She brought her two sons to meet me in September of 2007 shortly after I had moved to New York. Omar, the 38 year old elder son, a graduate of Oxford and Columbia, had been diagnosed with a highly malignant osteogenic sarcoma of the left shoulder. He had received a round of aggressive chemotherapy a few days before and his mouth was a battlefield of raw ulcers, abraded mucosa, bleeding gums. As we sat down to an elaborate meal with family and a few close friends, Omar calmly produced a bottle containing some sort of a bland, soothing drink and sipped away as if it were an equally exclusively prepared gourmet meal, all the while entertaining us with his signature brilliant quips and observations. Such was his class, such his chic. My childhood friend and the current Consul General of Pakistan, Mohsin Razi and his lovely wife Sarwat were present at dinner that evening. Earlier this year, when Mohsin and Sarwat heard about Omar’s death, they rushed to offer their condolences to Kamal and Naheed, both tearing up in the car at the memory of this dinner when Omar had shown such an astonishing and calm acceptance of his condition.

Starting with the first note I received from Omar via cyberspace in the summer of 2007 which was copied to Ama, and ending with my last glimpse of him as he lay dying with his mother curled up next to him in bed, straightening his blanket, holding his hand, I was exquisitely aware of what a unique privilege it was to be witnessing this sublime relationship. Of course love is never quantifiable. In Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra, Act 1 Scene 1, Cleopatra demands to know how much Anthony loves her.

Cleo.If it be love indeed, tell me how much.

Ant.There’s beggary in the love that can be reckon’d.

Cleo.I’ll set a bourn how far to be belov’d.

Ant.Then must thou needs find out new heaven, new earth.

The friendship alone that existed between Omar and Naheed would require new heavens and new earths to accommodate it.

Arz o samaan kahaan teri wusatt ko paa sakay

Mera hee dil hai wu kay jahan tu samaan sakay

Continue reading here.

There has been much concern in the American media about Jared Loughner’s sanity, lots of talk about the fact we cannot comprehend the mind behind that cold face, talk followed by overextended attempts to mine that mind’s deepest veins. “If you think what happened in Tuscon is incomprehensible…” a 60 Minutes piece from last week began, keep watching, we’ll help you comprehend. Is Loughner “disturbed enough to be found guilty but insane?” the New York Times mulled in the Magazine last weekend. The answer is yes, they hint.

But no one is calling Loughner a terrorist.

In May 1995, Time had a terrorist on the cover: Timothy McVeigh was shown with the caption, “The Face of Terror.” Time’s lede for another story on McVeigh is also pretty clear in its framing:

Terrorists succeed by remaining faceless. Their very anonymity allows them to move unnoticed among and around the people they plan, for reasons of their own, to maim or murder. But terrorists also occasionally get caught, although often, alas, after they have done their worst. And then the sight of their faces only deepens the mystery of their actions.

Like McVeigh, Loughner targeted a symbol of government power, and hurt innocent people. Like McVeigh, Loughner had a complicated relationship with the military and, like McVeigh, he apparently had a deep mistrust of the United States government. Jared Loughner, like Timothy McVeigh, “had reasons of his own,” which are and always will be inaccessible to the rest of us.

But we called McVeigh a terrorist. Why isn’t Loughner a terrorist? Has America redefined its criteria for who can be one?

This is not to say Loughner’s actions weren’t swept up into other people’s political frameworks. To be sure, after the shooting, there was a flurry of conversation about politics. Or rather, “politics.” David Brooks argued that mainstream coverage overemphasized possible political motivations, with all the talk of Sarah Palin’s map and the “violent rhetoric of the Tea Party.” Brooks describes “a news media that is psychologically ill informed but politically inflamed, so it naturally leads toward political explanations.” Brooks is right in his diagnosis, but I see the opposite symptom: the media may be psychologically ill informed, but that hasn’t stopped them from attempting to psychologize Loughner to the nth degree.

Moreover, such an excavation of Loughner’s mind as those extended by the Times and 60 Minutes seems to be a privilege the media only affords, in 2011, to some violent men. Men who are called terrorists are ascribed political, ideological motivations. Loughner’s mental illness does not preclude such motivations – but our media’s language does, dismissing his admittedly confused political logic as the babble of a madman.

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by Colin Eatock

Last year, in my essay “What’s Wrong with Classical Music,” I discussed the causes of the marginalization of classical music in the Western world today. That essay approached the topic from the outside, examining the reasons why people who don’t like classical music are put off by it. In this “sequel,” classical music is approached from the inside. To do this, I’ll take a more subjective approach, addressing those aspects of the classical music world that I personally find troubling.

I’ve been around the classical music block – as a composer, critic, scholar, educator, booking agent and administrator. As a result, I find that my own “issues” often differ from the concerns of people blissfully unaware of what lies hidden behind classical music’s façade. Yet even though some of the things I find problematic might not be readily identified as problems at all by many others, they have an adverse effect on classical music in the world today. I believe that if my various concerns were successfully addressed, the changes wrought would be beneficial in subtle yet far-reaching ways.

Fixation on the Canon

In the hyper-canonic world of classical music, there are only a few dozen composers who really count. All the rest – those composers you can’t buy a plaster bust of – receive little or no attention. I don’t have any great quarrel to the composers who have been accepted into the pantheon: Bach, Beethoven and Brahms wrote some wonderful music. However, I do question the idea that the formation of the canon was, as some people believe, a “natural” process caused by “the cream rising to the top.” (To accept this idea is to place far too much faith in the universe’s propensity for justice.) And I do have a quarrel with the idea that the composers who have somehow risen to the top are the only ones worthy of the world’s interest.

There are, to be sure, advantages to this star system. By focussing narrowly on a small number of composers and works, commonly shared tastes are cultivated, and a securely large audience for popular repertoire has been built up: a core audience for a core repertoire. Few musical organizations would dare to present a concert season that contained no widely acknowledged masterpieces by great composers, fearing box-office death. But they know they can rely on a handful of famous composers and works to sell their tickets.

On the other hand, fixation on “greatness” leads to repetitious programming. It’s also alarmingly unimaginative: for people to unquestioningly accept, holus-bolus, a repertoire based on decisions already well established in their grandparents’ day smacks of cultural sclerosis. One exceptional corner of the musical world – where a process of re-evaluation and enrichment took place throughout the twentieth century – is the early-music movement. But even the early-music specialists are losing their sense of adventure nowadays, and are settling into a core repertoire of their own.

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Photo Credit: Angie Hill

by Meghan Rosen

Last year, while doing our taxes, my husband and I were surprised to discover that we weren’t as poor as we thought we were. As lowly graduate students making a combined income of about $50,000 per year, I had assumed we were on the penny-pinching side of the national pay scale. But when I compared our income to the median income in the country, I found that we were sitting comfortably in the center. We had made it; we were officially smack-dab in the middle class. I thought it would feel different.

In the United States, nearly 25% of the population makes less than $25,000 per year. At this bottom level, a few households squeak by the poverty threshold, but just barely: in 2010 it’s estimated at just $22,314 for a family of four.

This year, 16 million children will be born into poverty (1 out of every 5 children born in the US). The lives of these children often follow a common stagnant storyline: poor nutrition, delayed mental and emotional development, academic deterioration, criminal activity, and frequently, early parenthood. As young parents, they are more likely to be unwed, more likely to drop out of high school, and more likely to stay impoverished. The cycle is vicious, and unrelenting. But is it possible to escape? How early is the influence of our environment engraved into the patterns of our development?

In 2003, a study from the University of Virginia showed that 7 year-old fraternal twins raised in families with low socioeconomic status had almost no variability in IQ. Why is this surprising? Fraternal twins are as genetically dissimilar as any other pair of non-twin siblings—their IQs should have been different.

Unlike identical twins, which come from the same blend of a single sperm and a single egg’s DNA, and have matching sets of genes, fraternal twins are completely unique. Two eggs and two sperm form two separate embryos: two genetically distinct individuals that share only their time and space together in the womb. The height, build, athletic ability, and IQ of one fraternal twin can be as different from the second as any of their other brothers or sisters. In fact, differences between fraternal twins are not only common; they are expected.

Why then, were these differences not reflected in the mental abilities of the 7-year olds? Is it possible that variation in IQ doesn’t occur until later in childhood? Or did their low socioeconomic environments somehow mask their inherent genetic potential?

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A fair amount of teasing from friends has nearly weaned me of the impulse to rush to the aid of every Japanese salary-man I see passed out on Tokyo’s late-night streets. These men, always men, of all ages, used to cause me a great deal of concern. I try to fold my concern inward now, in a way that doesn’t slow my step or disturb the flow of my thoughts as I pass by. Or I give myself over to observation: of the jacket loosely enveloping a thin middle-aged man balled up like a black seed against the bathroom wall – a little kernel destined no doubt to sprout into domestic trouble the next morning. Or of the tailored suit holding itself up against that building, the man inside it swallowing air loudly to prevent vomit from rising up from his stomach. The vomit rises despite his efforts, and soon – very soon – I think to myself, he’ll be horizontal on the street, passed out on those stairs over there where I had seen a man passed out the previous week.

There was a late-night television show where a microphone had been set up in front of a bustling subway station. A sign posted in front of the unsupervised amplifier read something like “The Drunk’s Sermon: Please Step Up.” The speeches were all variations on the monstrous condition of salary-man life and the restorative properties of alcohol: “Life is hell…drink to forget.” “Drink is the only escape from this hell.” “Drink makes life worth living.” “Kids,” intones one older man whose eyes reveal that he has a few children himself, “You may think I am repulsive but soon you will be just like me.” So unoriginal, so badly executed, so hackneyed and broken were these rants, that they couldn’t help but touch on some larger if also colorless truth about Japanese men and their relationship to alcohol.

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Fire in the Brain

God is a fire in the brain Nijinsky said
which is as close to the truth as
anything a dancer might dance
with a bonfire burning in his head

God may put you in a trance
with the fluttering of cardinal wings
or with the way the moon looks
mounting the mountain’s back
on the other side of the river
—a bright hole in the dark
a splinter of hope
a sliver

Sometimes beyond the blazing bars
of your incarceration
you hallucinate stars

You surmise the sun’s a substantiating eye
but fear that every distance is not near
(not close enough to make the untellable clear)

You dream days
You dream nights

Sometimes you lie without a clue
in the hour of the wolf
waiting for the wolf to bite

or you wait for the blue to light
When it does you see crocuses

You taste a sweet cloud of honeysuckle
that drifts across the yard
where at a certain spot
between the garden and the shed
you swear paradise was there
—precisely there where a skunk
had shred the grass the night before
grubbing while you were in bed
; grubbing with a skunky conflagration
in her head

God may burn a brain and brand it
God may shrink it or expand it

This is the bed in which
our ignorance reposes which,
by every blister on our brain,
is both a bed of coals
and roses

by Jim Culleny, 1/22/11

by Hasan Altaf

Several years ago now, in one of those brown-meets-white movies whose titles are as impossible to keep straight as their plots are predictable, the brown girl attempted to explain Bollywood movies to her white boyfriend. He asked, “So they’re like soap operas?” and she replied, “Basically… just with bigger bubbles.” I’ve forgotten all the other details of that particular movie, but the line stuck with me as an apt description of the genre. No one watches Bollywood movies for “reality” – we watch for an escape: More than anything else, the movies, offering a little something for everyone, are fantasy.

I readily admit to a deep and abiding fondness for Bollywood; my experience with soap operas, on the other hand, began this past summer, when I spent two weeks in Lahore visiting my grandmother, who had been bedridden for a few months and spent her time watching Indian soaps. The TV in her room was always on, and it was soaps, soaps around the clock, Star Plus and Colors, sometimes the same episode repeated innumerable times in a day. Only when the power went out was there a brief hour of silence.

The soap operas were, to put it mildly, an education – and a shock; for some reason I had expected them to be more or less like the movies, and I was surprised at how different they were. In many ways, the first issue I had is still the one that bothers me the most: Why do the women all sleep in full makeup, wearing pounds of jewelry, wrapped in fabulous saris? This happened on every single show, without fail, and it seemed neither practical nor comfortable. I might have been willing to let this one thing go, but the more I watched, the more questions I had. Why do the women never seem to work? Why are men essentially absent? Why are all the characters, always, without fail, Hindus – and Hindus, at that, of the same caste, culture, and language? How many small towns exist in the world in such a state of homogeneity?

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