By Bapsi Sidhwa

We were alone together one afternoon in Lahore when, in a fit of remorse, my mother suddenly unburdened herself of an old anguish. This was about fifteen years ago, when I was going through a spell of undiagnosed illnesses. Averting her penitent-schoolgirl’s face and displaying a chiseled profile, she solemnly said: “It’s my fault. I was young. When your ayah said she wanted to go to her village for a month, I panicked; I told her she could go only if she took you …. A few days after she returned, you got your polio.”

It must have cost her to confess. So far as I knew no other living soul was aware of this indiscretion: or at least no one had told me. To think of the pall cast over her already troubled life by such a deep well of guilt. On consideration, though, my father must have known. And, even if he had tried to shield my feckless parent from the wrath and ridicule of his austere mother and her principled daughters, they surely must have noticed my prolonged absence.

My mother’s family belonged to Karachi. Since it is customary for the first child to be delivered in the maternal household, and since my grandmother was dead, when it was time for my birth my mother went to her eldest sister Dhunmai’s house in Karachi.

Dhunmai’s husband, Kaikobad Kanga was a doctor. I was born when the European vogue to keep the environment around babies antiseptic and germ-free was all the rage even in Karachi. As behooved an up-to-date doctor’s wife, my conscientious aunt boiled and sterilized everything that mattered, and tied a white surgical mask over her mouth when she attended to me. Instructed to do the same, my mother nursed me with her nose and mouth tucked in the mask’s pristine purity.

The onslaught of the horde of germs from the buffalo-infested ponds and dung-plastered abode walls to which I was so abruptly exposed in my ayah’s village was more than my fastidiously nurtured constitution could withstand – and the feisty polio virus got me.

I was about two. My distraught mother promptly hauled me off to Karachi, and delivered me to my aunt’s surgically masked and tireless care. Dhunmai’s almond oil massages and wakeful nights must have served me well because a decade later I was not only able to climb lofty mountains but to run down them, too – and with such fleet balance that I thought I flew.

However, before I could achieve this fleet-footed surety, I underwent a series of procedures involving manipulation, heavy plaster of Paris casts, and steel calipers – all of which culminated in an operation to straighten the steep ballet dancer’s pose of my right foot.

Up to then I’d had no problems with my self-esteem; having polio as a child was like a benediction. The precipitous angle of my fallen arch set me up for favor and attention. Although I cannot vouch that I felt sorry for the herd of normal -footed children, I did, because of the kindness shown me, feel especially endowed. The prosaic accomplishments of other children were transformed into sensational feats of dexterity and intelligence when performed by me. It also helped that I could contort my body in extraordinary ways. Another favor bestowed on me by my disease.

Limping audaciously and teetering on my toes, I held my own as I ran with the other children in nursery games. Gregarious by nature and trusting too – life had not yet taught me to be wary – I was blissfully content attending school.

As the consuming regime of ultraviolet rays, casts and massages to stretch my retracted tendons got underway, a doctor – I don’t remember now if it was Colonel Bharucha or Colonel Mirajkar – counseled my parents not to send me to school. In my novel Cracking India, I transmute some of this reality into fiction:

Father sniffs and clears his throat. “What about her schooling?” he asks, masking his emotion. I can’t tell if he is inordinately pleased by the condition of my leg or inordinately disappointed.

“She is doing fine without school, isn’t she?” says the doctor. “Don’t pressure her …. She doesn’t need to become a professor.” He turns to me. “Do you want to become a professor?”

I shake my head in a firm negative. “She’ll marry – have children – lead a carefree life. No need to strain her with studies and exams,” he advises, thereby sealing my fate.

And seal my fate he did.

In retrospect, the creeping encroachment of my isolation, the arbitrary withdrawal of my right to be among other children, caused an increasing bafflement and disarray in my mind. Inevitably this led to an erosion of my self-regard. The psyche that was left intact by my polio, and in fact had waxed robust as its consequence, was destroyed, unwittingly perhaps, by the doctor.

My happy interlude at school brought to an end, I was handed over to Mrs. Penherow’s gentle tutoring. This middle-aged Anglo-Indian woman sat me down at a small table beneath shady trees, and tutored me for two or three hours a day. I remember the solitary tedium of those hours. But, as I have concluded from the unfolding history of my particular providence, almost every apparent misfortune eventually turned out to be its opposite.

When on my eleventh birthday Mrs. Penherow gave me Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, some favorable star must have kicked in. The novel sent me into an orgy of reading from which I have still to recover, and this orgy of reading jump-started me as a writer.

Bapsi Sidhwa is a distinguished writer of Pakistani origin. She is perhaps best-known for her 1991 novel Cracking India (also published as Ice Candy Man in Britain) which was made into the film Earth by Deepa Mehta in 1998.

Happy Labor Day, dear Reader. I know embarrassingly little about this North American holiday, distant and most disenfranchised relative of the redder and more international May Day, but have nevertheless enjoyed this year’s to the fullest. I’ve not partaken in any of the supposed Labor Day sales; I took a walk in the park, and am about to take another; the scent of my neighbors’ barbecues is beginning to fill the air, carried by the last few summery breezes. Aside from taking advantage of the holiday to write a true, un-premeditated Monday Musing, I also view today as my last day to really reflect on the past season before autumn sets in—which means my summer memories are in trouble, as I’ve far too many to process and absorb before midnight tonight.

Spontaneously writing “past season” brings to mind a revealing connotation I learned from a Sicilian friend and wordsmith once: the word Season, in Sicily, mentally capitalized and paired with its article as the Season, invariably means summer. Coming from central New York, this was a completely foreign concept for me, as there are (where I come from at least) four rather distinct seasons, each to be appreciated for its own different delights. I learned this new/old term one October afternoon a couple years ago, walking near Central Park. I was overjoyed by the crisp, golden autumn light, colored leaves cascading in the wind, and brisk air—all of which hinted at winter’s imminent arrival, bright blankets of silent snow, multiple layers of woolen clothing… in short, heaven. For the wordsmith of southern climes, on the other hand, that October day was supremely melancholic, and only presaged darker, colder, more melancholic days to come. After my last posting about having gone to look for America I was justly criticized for not being pointed enough about what I found. I still can’t come to concrete conclusions, but I can add a little to those incomplete thoughts.
    First, to address whether Simon and Garfunkel had gone or come to look for America (or both, in alternation): I found 500-some google hits for the latter, 700-some for the former. Where to turn? To my parents, of course, who brought me that song in the first place. According to the original Bookends vinyl sleeve, the various refrains are:

     And walked off / to look for America…
     I’ve come to look for America…
     They’ve all come / to look for America…
     All come to look for America.

According to my diligent, data-collecting father, who’s seen Simon and Garfunkel in concert thrice (don’t worry dad, this doesn’t reveal your age, as they still tour occasionally!), there are “often minor changes and ad-libs in their performances, so they may have used both gone and come at different times. But the above has been verified against at least the Bookends recording.” So, we all win—now as in the seventies people are coming and going to look for America—and today I bet lots of them could use a real Labor Day much more than I.
    Truth be told, when I was out in Michigan I didn’t really get to see as much of our famed (mal-famed?) Midwest as I’d hoped, as my TA tasks were lengthier and more laborious than I’d foreseen. But I can say, having been on the road abroad in the preceding weeks, I inevitably learn more about this country each time I leave it than when I’m here.
    For instance, returning to that song, the bad fame hitchhiking and hitchhikers acquired here thanks to the eponymous film and for other reasons doesn’t plague the practice in many other countries. Almost all of my foreign-born friends have good hitchhiking/“auto-stop” stories, virtually none of their American counterparts have ever dared even give it a try. But perhaps I’m telling you things you already know.
    People who’ve recently arrived in America bring with them some fine habits that have all but disappeared here; at the end of that art course Christin approached me with a stack of small envelopes in hand, out of which she pulled one with my name on it. Inside was a thank-you note of a caliber that can’t be replicated in any animated, jingle-enhanced e-card.
    In London an archivist generously shared his time and expertise helping me find an audio recording that for copyright reasons couldn’t be shipped to me in New York. The freeholder (landlord) of the flat I stayed in came down to check on us two Americans in town for a brief stay. When we invited him down for an aperitif a couple days later, he arrived fresh in full pinstriped elegance straight from the solicitor’s office where he works, and gave us an enchanting hour or so of anecdotes from when he was reading law at Oxford decades ago, suggesting countless stories and places I should look into when I went there for the August conference.
    In Sisteron, Haute-Provence, at my friends’ wedding, I saw the pluses of America in their exported versions. The groom, who I’d originally met in London but comes from a Jewish family in Colorado and is now at MIT, was learning both French and Italian so as to better communicate with the bride, a French native who studied in Rome and New York before leaving to work in London and later Dubai. Their ceremony was a delightful hybrid of the sort we’re accustomed to here, but I’d bet those medieval cathedral walls had never before hosted anything of the sort.
    In Milan I learned that the Anglo-American obsession with work isn’t uniquely American—denizens of Italy’s fashion, design, and industrial capital work very hard to afford their luxuries.
    In Palermo, noticing a trilingual street sign in Italian, Arabic, and Hebrew, I saw that the diversity we purport to foster in this country has existed on that island—strategically set between Italy, North Africa, Greece, southern Spain, and by extension the Bronx, Brooklyn, and basically everywhere—for centuries.
    In Rome I saw that the basalt paving stones cut by foreign slave labor and laid according to ancient emperors’ expansive aspirations took a lot longer to wear down—and will undoubtedly outlast—the BQE and most of our illustrious interstates. But I suppose the going was slower back then in all respects.
    In Oxford I learned that even if the floodwaters of the Thames had risen high enough to flow through the Bodleian and the Ashmolean, which they didn’t, those foundations are so solidly built that any such emergency would merely require temporarily moving some priceless treasures to higher floors and waiting for the old stones to dry back out afterward.
    In Saugatuck I learned that even lagoon-bound snapping turtles will grow fat if you feed them traditional American fare on a daily basis.

My sincerest apologies to anyone who sought an in-depth analysis of anything here today, it’s Monday and in good end-of-summer mode my musings are light. I’m off for my evening stroll, bid you a nice post–Labor Day night, and ask that you take your time returning to the daily grind, however figurative it might be, tomorrow and the next day and the next….

In his match against James Blake, an overmatched player named Michael Russell won a point by hitting an excellent crosscourt backhand.  At this, my friend Andrew Friedman leaned over and said, “Lucky.  He doesn’t have that shot.”  To “have” or “own” a shot in tennis means that you can hit it nine times out of ten, that you never miss it in practice, and so it is a dependable plank in your game’s hull.  Many people can hit spectacular winners once in ten tries in practice, but in match play, one is forced to rely on the shots you actually have, unless the score is 40-0, which is the go-for-broke score.  That’s when you’ll see many a great return by a player who doesn’t usually hit that well, and when you’ll hear many credulous analysts saying, “If only he could play that way all the time.”  Well, he or she can’t, because they don’t really own that massive service return.  You can hit shots at 40-0 or 0-40 that you can’t hit at 30-30.

I like the concept of “having” a shot a lot.  It applies to real life, too, as a fine corrective to the idea that some totally different set of abilities or talents lies within our reach; it’s the antidote to overreaching and wishful thinking.  So when you watch the matches this week, as the U.S. Open gets serious, remember that a couple of spectacular winners mean little–it’s about the body of work you produce over thousands of shots.  Last week, as the draw was reduced from 128 to a comprehensible sixteen, most players weren’t good enough.  Marat Safin, Andy Murray, Fernando Gonzalez, Richard Gasquet, all gone.  The best match of the last week, unpredictably enough, was Serbia’s Novak Djokovic versus Radek Stepanek, who does the old hip-hop move the worm after each victory.  The lovable Stepanek–let’s call him The Nerd–wriggled and danced and volleyed his way to a fifth-set tiebreaker with the newest hero of the men’s tennis tour.  Once there, he folded his tent pretty quickly, almost as though he was too excited by the four hours of epic tennis that had come before.  Djokovic, meanwhile, expectantly absorbed the crowd’s affection.  It was a sad end to a heroic, anti-heroic effort by The Nerd.  As for Djokovic and the other fifteen men and twelve women who remain, let’s break down their chances:

Women’s Top Half:

Notables: Justine Henin, Serena Williams, Jelena Jankovic, Venus Williams

The only word for this half is loaded.  Henin is the world’s number one player, and will play the glamour quarterfinal of the tournament with Serena Williams.  Serena started this year way down in the rankings, only to win Australia by destroying Maria Sharapova, who has yet to get back her confidence (she lost here in the third round) since that beatdown.  But Henin took out Serena, who’s nursing a sore thumb, at Wimbledon, and this court isn’t that different.  I see this match, probably to be played Tuesday night, as Henin’s.

In the other quarterfinal, Jankovic, who is a gifted retriever who wears opponents down in long matches, will face the express train that has been Venus Williams in this tournament.  Venus won Wimbledon for the fourth time in July and seems resurgent and happy on court.  When she’s on, it’s almost impossible to get a ball past her.  I think she’ll beat Jankovic to set up a de facto final in the semifinal with Henin.  Venus never takes kindly to players who have beaten her sister in a tournament, and I think she’s on her way to the final.

Women’s Bottom Half

Notables: Agnes Szavay, Svetlana Kuznetsova, Anne Chakvetadze, Agnieszka Radwanska

The bottom half has been rendered anonymous to the casual fan by the losses of Sharapova and The Nerd’s ex-fiancé, Martina Hingis.  Former champion Kuznetsova has a good chance to make another final, but I think the young Hungarian player Agnes Szavay will make the run to the semifinal.  There she will meet the player to emerge from a quality quarter than includes the only Polish top player, Radwanska, who beat Sharapova in a match that built up some Polish-Russian bad blood. (Radwanska attempted to distract Sharapova by running around while Maria served.  Maria’s menacingly delivered comment: “It’ll be interesting to see if she tries that the next time we play.”)  She will face Shahar Peer next, who is Israel’s best tennis player and has a solid all-around game. 

My prediction, however, is that yet another comely Russian, Anna Chakvetadze, who wins by consistently wrong-footing and fooling opponents with her groundstrokes, will come through all of these players and reach the final, where she’ll lose to Venus Williams.

Men’s Top Half

Notables: Roger Federer, Andy Roddick, James Blake, Nikolay Davydenko, Tommy Haas

Roger Federer has become tennis’ philosopher king.  In the third round, he taught North Carolina’s treelike rookie, John Isner, a lesson: playing matches is an exercise in finding ways to hit the shots you own while making your opponent hit the shots he doesn’t (in Isner’s case, the running forehand).  Afterwards, he was asked how he prepared to face Isner’s perfectly located, lightning-struck serves, he said, with magisterial annoyance, “I warm up.”  Asked to expand, he remarked, “You can’t get ready for a match like this. These guys are unique, you know. Every guy in the top 100 is a unique player… It’s all in the mind and all in the moment.”  You can’t say  it better than that.  Peace be upon him.

Oh yeah, the matches.  No one here can beat Federer, historically.  Nikolay Davydenko, a wonderful, mobile ball-striker who’s embroiled in a worsening gambling scandal, has lost nine of nine career matches to Federer.  The combined record of CBS-TV’s show ponies, Roddick and Blake, against the Fed is 1 win, 20 losses.   Tommy Haas, he of the perfect genetics but the questionable nerves, doesn’t have the metaphorical stones to beat Federer.  Uh, I think Roger is going to make the final–for the tenth consecutive Grand Slam.  The best anyone else has ever done is four.

Men’s Bottom Half

Notables: Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, Stanislas Wawrinka, Carlos Moya

Moya, another female fan favorite, is having a late-career hot(t) year, pounding his heavy forehand and running around his questionable backhand at all opportunities.  But Djokovic, the conqueror of The Nerd, hits everything well and rarely misses a shot he shouldn’t.  He’s likable and funny off the court and very cocky and smug on it.  Now his game seems to be coming around in time for the final week, as he blasted away the poor young longhair Juan Martin del Potro of Argentina last night.  It’s hard not to see Djokovic making the semifinal. 

There, everyone wants him to face Rafael Nadal, who he’s played five times this year already, with Rafa winning three.  But Nadal is banged up – his grinding style of play seems to wear down his knees and ankles on the less forgiving hard court surface.  Rafa is a force of nature, but perhaps for that reason he prefers natural surfaces such as grass and his beloved world of clay.  I think there is a good chance that Stan Wawrinka, the Swiss number two, might do some of Federer’s work for him and eliminate Nadal in the quarterfinals.  After that, Djokovic should have a clear path  to the final.

Only four weeks ago, Djokovic, never short of self-belief, was able to beat Roddick, Nadal, and Federer on three consecutive days to win the Masters’ Series title in Montreal.  He’s on his best surface, and most importantly, he came through the epic with Stepanek.  That’s the kind of match that can light in a player the confidence that he is playing with destiny behind him.  Federer, for his part, would love a chance to exact some revenge for the Montreal loss.  He’ll go into that match looking to teach another of his tennis lessons.  But it says here that Djokovic doesn’t need another lesson: he will emerge fully as a star player, and end Roger Federer’s three year reign in Flushing Meadows.  What do you think?

More of my Dispatches.

I sublet. Being chosen as the one fit to take care of a stranger’s prize possession, their home, is not easy. I’ve taken care of their pets, helped with moves, stored their boxes and, when told, avoided the landlord. Most have been fair. However, I recently subleased an apartment from a woman in Brooklyn. She asked me to take care of her cats, find and send important mail to her, and store her stuff in the second room. After two glasses of wine I agreed. I paid her $1970.00 a month.

Everything felt fine at first, even after I saw a notice which listed her rent at almost half my bill. She later accepted a permanent teaching position, and, at the same time, renewed her original lease. She said she did so because she liked the extra income. I started to feel uncomfortable and gave notice that I was leaving. So she asked me to show it to a couple with a baby, desperate for a place. It was one too many times. I told her that her contract violates New York state law. At most, she was allowed to charge a 10% surcharge if the apartment is fully furnished with the her furniture, not 160%. I told her that statute was in her lease that she’d signed. And that this needs to be resolved quickly.

An apology was how she proposed to resolve the problem. I have done nothing since. I wonder if another sub-tenant is being hurt, and how I could help. Note, the landlord is also hurt, essentially locked into the original tenant’s rent while she collects. In addition, the value of the owner’s rent-controlled apartment can drop considerably if the tenant or their family stays many years. This law was being abused by the very tenant that it meant to protect. However, if I report the tenant, the landlord will likely terminate the lease and evict the sub-tenant. The current sub-tenant may be on the streets again.

Even Hollywood found something to exploit in rent control. Rent Control (2002) begins with two young actors arriving to the city, fresh out of Iowa. The couple can only find affordable housing by moving in with Holly’s eccentric Aunt Agatha, and her 15 cats, in her rent-controlled, spacious 1-bedroom apartment. After weeks of fruitless apartment-hunting, they find Agatha’s dead body on the kitchen floor, on a diet pill overdose. So they pretend Agatha is still alive, to keep the rent-controlled apartment, remain in, and still have a chance to succeed as actors. A more humorous example of the conflicts this regulation can create.

Rent control had an even more chaotic start. They were first adopted in response to WWII-era shortages in the United States. It was one of many price controls introduced during the dismal and alarming period between the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and America’s turn to a full wartime economy in 1943. Together with rubber, gasoline, coffee and shoes, the housing market was seen as another thing that needed to be rationed or, at a minimum, regulated. By 1947 all these controls were phased out, except on housing, which later got another boost following Richard Nixon’s 1971 wage and price controls.

Like New York, rent controls remain in effect in some cities with large tenant populations, such as San Francisco, and Washington, DC. Smaller communities and towns in California and New Jersey can also have rent control. The laws have been adopted for mobile home parks, since residents own their homes but rent the land. The high cost of moving homes, makes mobile home owners even more vulnerable to excessive price increases. In recent years, rent control in some cities has been ended by state ballot.

The argument for rent control says “that a housing shortage cannot be immediately made up, no matter how high rents are allowed to rise” However, many economists say that it overlooks one consequence. If landlords are allowed to raise rents to reflect inflation and the true conditions of supply and demand, individual tenants will economize by taking less space opening more accommodations to others. The same amount of housing will shelter more people, until the shortage is relieved.

Economic arguments against the law say that rent control discriminates in favor of those who already occupy houses or apartments in a particular city or region at the expense of those who find themselves on the outside. Since supply is perpetually low, landlords do not have to worry about tenants leaving. Unless the landlord thinks that punitive action will be taken against them for doing so, they might let building maintenance deteriorate in order to mitigate the lower rental income.

Rent control also sets people against one another. Rent-protected New Yorkers become prisoners of their bargain apartments, knowing that such a great deal is rare. They may become increasingly threatened by the new tenants as they try to protect their homes. Less lucky tenants could also harbor resentment, as one man said “It just brings out these terrible thoughts that you wouldn’t otherwise have. You see these 80-year-olds in the elevator and you think; would you just die already?”

However, advocates of controls say that the rental market suffers from information asymmetries and high transaction costs. A landlord likely has much more information about a home than a prospective tenant can reasonably detect. Furthermore, once the tenant has moved in, the costs of moving again are very high. A dishonest landlord can hide defects and, if the tenant complains, threaten to raise the rent at the end of the lease. With rent control, tenants can be certain that hidden defects be repaired to comply with code requirements, without fearing retaliatory rent increases. Rent regulation may thus compensate somewhat for inefficiencies of the housing market.

To this day New York City remains deeply divided on the law. As Paul Krugman puts it, “bitter relations between tenants and landlords, with an arms race between ever-more ingenious strategies to force tenants out… and constantly proliferating regulations designed to block those strategies”. The law has flaws, such as keeping families trapped in apartments too small for their needs, while others abuse the system, subleasing their rent controlled apartments at much higher rates.  The law gives little incentive for landlords to pay for building maintanance. However, informational asymmetries and high moving costs cut tenant’s bargaining power, so that state regulation has value. Fixing rent laws will not be an easy decision, but, at least many of the current problems are what supply-and-demand analysis predicts.

Elatia Harris

Long before my time, my mother was a young artist traveling in Italy, where every year for more than a decade she contrived to spend a cheap but luxurious low season. The dollar was not then merely strong, like a sick man set on a good day, but truly mighty, Americans the affable blundering giants familiar to readers of Henry James.  And the Italians were deep and small.  I know all this as if from personal memory, for my mother told it to me not piecemeal but like a favorite bedtime story, over and over again.  And if she had not done, then I would know it anyway from her travel diaries, which are mine.

When I found them they were knotted shut, bound with ribbons.  School-girl composition books, cardboard-sided, with taped spines — the kind you still see at the stationer’s, only now they’re even flimsier.  To these, my mother attached long silk ribbons, fiendishly knotted so that I had finally to clip them.  I wasn’t impatient — it was just that the knots failed to loosen even with skillful teasing, as if my mother herself wanted never again to page through these books without a sense of trespass.  Keeping me out wouldn’t have been an issue; writers for whom that’s an issue burn their diaries, they don’t tie them up.  I was under no pressure of curiosity, either, to learn more than I already knew of my young mother’s Italian journeys, for I have stumbled through my own life trailing her immense youth, my awareness of it perfect.  It was the knots that got me.

When I thought I’d heard it all — the long Roman winters warm enough at high noon for an hour of reading on the roof garden, the windy trips to the cemetery island in Venice, where an anguished pilgrim left on Diaghilev’s grave a black ballet slipper threaded with carnations, the white peacocks of the Villa Borromeo, white but iridescent too, the spectral feathers with their blank eyes iridescing whitely. Yes, my mother could taunt you with wants. The best defense was simply to appropriate her memories, every single luscious one. Just to take it all in through your very pores.  So it is with her diaries. My mother and I have the same name, a family name going far back and never borne by more than two women at a time, sometimes only by one.  Her handwriting too has come to me entire — I could have formed with the same pen-strokes those loops and hooks, that pitching fractal sea that reaches into my mind.

Hats, for instance.  I came to Rome ecstatically prepared by my mother’s Italian winters, when, in the chic quarters of town where she could always wangle a toehold, to be hatless was to be gauche.  No sooner had I heard my first church bells ring than, hat-wise, I knew what to do.  I simply found in the Via Condotti a couture model that was just right, then made a dog-leg to a less splendid street nearby, where within a few days a copy could be had for not much from a tiny shop without a name.  Just a door, a counter, and a display window full of undecided felt.  If you wanted not to skimp on hats, however, you went to Baronceli in Venice.  There they would fashion for you the perfect hat, and you’d walk out looking as much like Audrey Hepburn as your genetic endowment and ability to self-starve permitted. Whether this remains a hot tip, so that a girl indulging herself to look that retro could still use it, I cannot say — but it was once bedrock. 

The diaries are scattered with appreciative self-portraits, hatted just so.  Occasionally, in Venice, my mother drew herself masked — masked in her own diaries.  Although I do not believe she went out on the town in maschera, even at Carnival time. She would have told me — if for no other reason to let me suppose she sinned more impressively than she can have done.  Sinned the way a young masked woman does, in a city where the unreality of self once obliged residents to go out masking six months of the year, sporting in the brim of a hat multiple masks in case more than one false self at a time was needed. Of course I still have my mother’s hats. I understand her balking, however, at the purchase of a Venetian mask — a good one being custom-made to fit your face so well that no method of attachment is necessary.  You could jiggle plenty and it wouldn’t fall off.  Whoever you are, you cannot but be glad that your mother never had a mask like that.

Before starting a new diary, to stiffen and decorate the inside covers and create end-papers my mother would collage train tickets, hotel stationery, soap wrappers, cafe napkins, bottled water labels, concert programs, even the tiny paper parasols from tropical drinks.  I must say she filched soap and stationery from awfully good hotels to make this attractive effect. And she was crafty at peeling thin strips of posters off outdoor walls — about a lecture on nose jobs given years earlier by a Milanese professor, about the sold out engagement of an exotic dancer, Sissy Chinchilla, in a strip club in Bari, about the canceled appearance at the Verona amphitheater of The Virgin Prunes, a rock band whose fame must even then have been hazy.

That such as Sissy Chinchilla had made a splash in Bari mattered to my mother. She would say that if you took in a new city without paying heed to those hoary masonry walls where everyone with anything to tell the world pasted a notice, using such stubborn glue that the rain of years was not enough to wash it away, so that ultimately whatever was there became informational lichen, then you might as well not have stepped down from the train that brought you.  Leaving aside whether the salient point of a thing eluded her — and believe me, it often did — my mother held ephemera in a tight grasp.  Literally, for I can see now her gloved hands — gloves from Sermoneta by the Spanish Steps, such supple skins they used — stripping from communal walls those intensely meaningless paper shards that rustle and shift in their delicate moorings when you smack her diaries wide open. Dark now with time, for her they were the sparkle on the water. 

Little in my mother’s diaries struck me harder than the rather deep relationships she entered into with animals.  Take her affecting sketches of Fafner, a brindled dachshund of Catania.  She measured him at 4.5 feet long, from the nose to the tip of his tail, and made notes on other minutiae pertaining to this Fafner — his “balls like wild plums” for instance.  There was the Neapolitan mastiff, Boss, a Cerberus of a dog who kept his owner well guarded in her little shop in the Via Borgognona.  Boss, with his gunmetal coat and golden eyes roaming horribly over any threat.  And what of the mongrel she followed all one long afternoon on Capri?  It’s not a thing you think to do with a Capri afternoon, to follow a dog.  The creature kept glancing back over its shoulder at her, whether beckoning her on or glaring at her to make her go away, my mother never knew. 

What kind of woman carries on so, about lower mammals she has known in foreign parts?  Such tales excite no one to envy, and my mother when she chose could make a listener glitter with it.  Take the day in Tarquinia that she and a few others were let into the frescoed tomb of the ravishing Velia, a noble Etruscan maiden with a pouty sneer.  What had got Velia in a state of perpetual affront down there?  Her own death, most likely.  And it was wet enough in her tomb to grow mushrooms.  After a frigid half hour with a guard shining a flashlight on every painted square inch of the two thousand-five hundred year-old chamber, my mother and the others climbed the numerous and slippery steps leading back above ground — to the sun, the grass in the wind, the satiny red poppies dotting the long field that overlay the necropolis. Cued by nothing they could name, the women in the little group ran as one to tear poppies from the earth and weave them into their hair.  Judging from my mother’s diaries, however, it took no more than a black and white rabbit in the petting zoo of the Public Gardens in Taormina to outweigh, page for page, the psychic density of that maidenly tomb.

Were the animals stand-ins?  That is, was it a kind of maternal behavior — observing closely the tender Sicilian rabbit, feeding it daily with pale lettuces and corn?  I think the rabbit was no placeholder, for Italy was and is full of the most cherubic bambini, the sight of an unencumbered girl stopping a pram to pet and coo a common one.  Why, the sheer Eros of Italian motherhood famously lulls you to fecundity, yet my mother held back and held back and held back — slender, hatted, attentive to rabbits, dogs and mute stones.  And of all the beings — cat ladies, Jesuits, Mexican Holy Year penitents with running mascara, aged countesses, smoldering waiters – that appeared in her decade’s worth of diaries, there is not a single drawing of a single child.

Rather, she made sketches of children’s graves — the life-sized marble effigy of a chubby-ankled Victorian pre-schooler in the English cemetery in Florence, for instance, and the nearly featureless grave of Alberto who died aged 9 in Venice, every other detail of his headstone, even the tiny photo under glass, having weathered too poorly to be discerned. That marble toddler in Florence — I never visited the exact grave — wore a cunningly chiseled velvet frock that made you want to touch the nap. She planted her feet wide on her tomb slab and raised her arms so high in a “Not me!” appeal to Fate that her petticoats showed. Tell me, what grieving couple of the Brownings’ circle could have possibly taken comfort in that?  Surely it was not quite as my mother saw it, and the actual marble baby balances sweetly between two worlds, her hands held out in welcome. But then, I know at this distance certain things that my young mother couldn’t have then known as she furiously drew and made notes – how the grave of a child must not look, for one thing.

Remember that my mother was a painter who made whatever she saw her own, often without regard to how it really appeared.  Really appeared to whom? — I can hear her ask, and yes, she would have said whom.  Her grammar was both leisurely and perfect — oh, that was a mask.  Like the mask of generalized leisure the diaries wear, for she had by the standards of today almost endless time in Italy – time that keeps on expanding, a wavy transparent upload allowing me to know more than I can, like the android in Bladerunner who didn’t know she could play the piano until she sat down at one and played it.  So it is that I know my mother’s idea of herself as a young artist abroad, and where she thought she fitted in.  She was rather unconcerned to fit into the 20th century schema, figuring that was bound to happen whether one wished or unwished it.  It is as plain from her diaries as from her paintings that she was after something altogether different – not timeless, just different.  Be who you are, she would say, it’s the Socratic lesson. Yes, follow that star – as I have done.  Long before she knew me I sensed my own coming on, permeable as Orion as I then was, and I stepped down from her sky, not to be stopped.

One winter, she took a room with a roof garden – you could get them cheap, the Italians think their winters are cold — not far from Goethe’s house on the Corso, where, in his 30’s he had lived for two years, registering himself in the parish of Santa Maria del Popolo as “Filippo Muller” – a slightly younger man.  After visiting the Sistine Chapel, Goethe most famously roamed the Campagna – his friend and Corso housemate, the German painter Tischbein, immortalized him there in a broad-brimmed hat and a garment that is partly toga and partly duster.  My young mother set out to roam the Campagna, too, wearing I believe a voluminous beret with a feather. How things had changed in the 200 years since Goethe! The grotto of the nymph, Egeria, its mouth splashed with lime and flanked with heaping garbage trucks, the temple of Deus Rediculus now the mainstay of a trailer park where wood fires burned.  One could still hear the cowbells and smell the clover that would have penetrated the sensorium of Goethe, however. And there were my mother’s usual strays – underfed dogs, out for themselves on this comfortless Fellinian terrain, cats stretching in the faint sun.

Would it have made a painting? The colossal disregard for their cultural patrimony and their environment shown by the Italians – the empty Fanta cans silting up the tombs at Cerveteri, the plastic bags of picnic litter tied insouciantly to low branches beside the storied Lake of Nemi – my mother described it all without any wish to paint it. Only to know it as she painted what she painted, and to make sure Antiquity never took on the aspect of a polished white thing in a well swept museum.

But what, if not sketching for her paintings, was my mother doing with these months-long chunks of her youth? She had a career, and she had to mind it — although one is tempted by the diaries to imagine she merely went forth to take Italy in, including all the pricey lunches that she left frank, unashamed records of, so that I am staggered at the things she could afford to eat, spending what she believed was very little. My mother would hurriedly jot down notes on an early morning visit to the church of Sant’ Agnese in Agone, say, and then add a line about dashing over to the Galleria Doria-Pamphili because she’d heard the private apartments might be open from 11 till noon – she was all for private apartments – where she caught sight of a reliquary full of  “festooned saint bits,” the saint herself in a vitrine, “child-sized with thin sox. ”  But it was the day’s luncheon that was detailed utterly without haste.  On the day of the saint bits, for instance, she lunched at the Costa Balena, a favorite trat near the Porta Pia, tucking into Jewish-style artichokes, followed by trenette al’ pesto and grilled rospo with lemon and herbs. The rolls were crusty, the Frascati just the right temperature not to mention an arresting straw color unusual for Frascati, and as a digestivo there was a big mason jar full of almond-scented ratafia ladeled out by the owner to every thirsty comer.

Pick almost any day anywhere in Italy, and you read of something similar laid before my mother, whether she lunched alone or in company. She would paste the restaurant receipt into her record of the day, occasionally surrounding it with exclamation points, wings, shafts of light penetrating cloud cover, volcanoes erupting or some other private though easily decoded symbol denoting whether the lunch had been so-so — or epiphanial.

I submit there is something not quite right about a girl barely out of her teens caring so what she eats, knowing not just bad from good but which foods are a full expression of terroir and which are but vitiated things, knowing when a whole civilization speaks to you through your sense of taste and when it is mute and you are …only eating.

And when did she work, for Heaven’s sake? Do you spend the morning running around Italy, then lunch like she did, and still get any work done?  I’m afraid so.  Anyone who doubts my mother was working has only to take a look at her paintings, of which I am the chief guardian. They are all around me now, even on the floor turned to face the wall – just so that I can turn them to the room again when I freshen things up.  I am like Boss, the golden-eyed mastiff, alert to any threat to my stock and its provider.  So it is surely not for nothing, all the work she did.

For a long time my young mother and I only brushed as in a crowded passage, though when at last we met we tangled into a knot.  Until then, however, I would see her standing at the far end of San Marco, against the blazing facade — gloved, hatted just so, too slender to be feasting like I know she did.  And she would fling her crusts to the hideously thronging pigeons that never alarmed her no matter how fast they came or how greedy, because animals and their demands were easy, and she was without them violently discontent, knowing perfectly that no tomb was worth a rabbit yet spending her youth at graveyards and at laden tables. And because I know what she knew at any given moment, I see that she had no awareness of me then in the shadowy portico, moving in and out of view like a masker awaiting an assignation. It would be long years before I overtook her, and there was much observing left for her to do.

Whenever she departed a town – Taormina, for instance, to which she always returned — my mother would leave it as if for the last time, with a rhapsodic backward-glancing drawing of a thing seen from the moving train.  I too am fond of looking backwards — I prefer to sit facing that way when my train pulls out.  So I know the long vistas of departure, and that wide nexus of gravel and track where trains appear almost to collide before one switches off at a saving angle and the other hurtles on. But there is a dark mountain I have not seen, leaving Taormina station, that I know my mother saw.  Not just drew, but saw. A dark mountain cleft on one side, with paths converging on a villa halfway up — and in the villa, truth to tell, I do not quite believe. Yet behind shut lids I see that mountain as if from a searing retinal imprint when racketing towards the Straits of Messina and the mainland beyond, I widened my eyes, knowing I was leaving for the very last time.

How good are the tennis players competing in the U.S. Open, which starts today?  Consider these names: Frank Dancevic, the Canadian number one, who beat Andy Roddick three weeks ago; Aisam-ul-haq Qureshi, the Pakistani number one, who played Marat Safin at Wimbledon this year; Israeli number one Dudi Sela; and Japanese number one Takao Suzuki, who last October came within four points last fall of defeating Roger Federer. What do these players have in common?  They weren’t good enough to be guaranteed spots in the draw.  All of them played in last week’s qualifying tournament, in which 128 men and 128 women compete to fill the final 16 places in the men’s and women’s draws.

I watched Qureshi play two qualifying matches last week, the second against Scoville Jenkins, an African-American player who has given Rafael Nadal a difficult match in the past.  The level of play was nearly indistinguishable from that of the best players – after all, even Federer and Nadal, who dominate their peers like no other duo in history, only win 55% of their points played.  Qureshi is an exciting player who forces the action by coming to net after every serve, but after winning a dramatic first set in a tiebreaker, he injured his wrist in the second and retired, ending his hopes to qualify for the main draw.  Jenkins’ reward for qualifying?  To face Federer in the first round.  On outer courts this week, you’ll see the stylish Dancevic as well as many more familiar names.  In Arthur Ashe and Louis Armstrong stadiums, where tennis’ upper crust perform their magic, court-side tickets are very difficult to obtain, so it can be hard to see human drama that is so palpable when sitting a few feet from a player. 

Tennis is a sport afflicted by its white-shoe image.  Investment advisers, insurance companies, and gold watchmakers lavishly sponsor the sport,  but it’s a case of very unequal revenue sharing.  Players outside the top fifty make much less than comparably ranked athletes in other sports, and the Jenkins’ and Sela’s of the tour scrape to pay for flights, hotels and coaches, despite the relative closeness of their abilities to the best.  Marketers have tried to inflate professional tennis into a kind of upper-middlebrow fashion show, yet beneath this lies a rigorous sport that demands the discipline, dexterity, and intense focus of a concert violinist. 

If you do get great seats at Arthur Ashe stadium, though, these skills will be displayed quite fully.  Last Thursday afternoon, Roger Federer, practiced there.  With an audience of about five security guards and your excited correspondent, media badge nervously clutched, in the empty 22,000-seat arena, Federer goofed around between points against Germany’s Nicolas Kiefer, then proceeded to hit his stunning and flawless strokes.  Seen at close range, I can perhaps best describe his play as explosively graceful, or violently precise.  He wasn’t very focussed, though, missing some shots and laughing, “Nein!”  (Federer tends to exposulate in different langauges, using “Allez!” for the French, and “Come on!” in Queens.)  At one point, Kiefer aced him, and Federer, without looking, smashed the ball off the tarp behind him, neatly banking it into the hands of a waiting hitting partner.  It was the kind of thing you might see a magician do, yet for Federer it was just an absent-minded expression of annoyance.  Such is life as the greatest practitioner ever of tennis.

Rafa Nadal, meanwhile, was literally waiting in the wings for his own practice session with the former world number one Juan Carlos Fererro.  But Federer didn’t clear out of his chair, continuing to laugh and joke with Kiefer.  Finally, Nadal, whose eagerness to hit tennis balls is infinite and joyous, walked out onto the court.  At this Federer stood began to pack up his bag, with his back turned to his greatest rival – perhaps a subtle psychological tactic?  Not to be ignored, however, Rafa playfully tapped Roger on the calf with his racquet as he passed, to which Federer brightly responded, “Hey Raf!,” and left Nadal to perform his own tricks.

The U.S. Open starts today.  The schedule is here.  A grounds pass is $45.00, and gains you admission to every court other than Ashe.  Take the 7 train to Willets Point-Shea Stadium and follow the devotees.

(For more of my 3quarks tennis writing, click here, here, here, or here.)

Surood e rafta baaz ayad kay nayad
Nasim e az hijaz ayad kay nayad
Saramad rozgar e ein faqeeray
Dagar dana e raaz ayad kay nayad

It was a lovely winter evening in 1983 when I first met Aini Apa at the home of my beloved Misdaq Khala Jaan (Saleha Abid Hussain, the prolific Urdu writer) in Okhla (New Delhi). She looked even grander in person than I had imagined and by the end of that evening, I was completely ravished forever by her palpable charisma, her sharp intellect and her great good humor. She, on the other hand, thought I was a snob and said so to my dearest friend Sughra Mehdi (a famous writer in her own right and the adopted daughter of Misdaq Khala Jaan and Janab Abid Hussain Sahib). The reason she thought I was a snob is quintessential Aini Apa. My visit to Delhi, along with my mother, had been hastily arranged from Karachi, while I was home from the USA for two short weeks and our stay in India was going to be quite rushed. The dinner had been arranged by Misdaq Khala Jaan so Ammi and I could meet our friends and relatives in one evening. Aini Apa was living in Zakir Bagh at the time, being the first occupant of the Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan Chair at Jamia Millia, and was a frequent presence at my aunt’s home. She considered Sughra Mehdi as her friend and confidant (Aini Apa bestowed the title of “Musheer Fatima” on Sughra as Sughra is forever being solicited for practical advice by the young and old alike).

Like every other reader of Urdu literature, I worshipped Aini Apa and was dying to meet her, but had been duly forewarned by Sughra not to show my adoration as Aini Apa was known to be irritated by all manner of people claiming to be her fans. As a result, I spent the entire evening regaling her with juicy gossip about our common acquaintances (she loved to gossip), jokes (she had a fantastic sense of humor and she roared with complete abandon if she liked the joke), poetry (I lay claim to knowing hundreds of Urdu verses, including some wicked and funny ones) and conspicuously avoiding any acknowledgment of her as the greatest living writer of her time. The fact that Aini Apa minded my deliberate avoidance of the subject is why I say it was quintessential Aini Apa. She was full of surprises and contradictions. For example, she once asked a famous critic repeatedly to tell her what he thought of her latest book, while he tried helplessly to excuse himself modestly from doing so because he felt he was not good enough to critique her work. At her insistence, he finally caved in and feebly critiqued a few very minor points in the novel. Aini Apa’s subsequent unbridled wrath which immediately and ferociously descended upon the miserable chap and lasted late in to the night, lived up to its legendary reputation. Paradoxically, when the famed Urdu writer and tri-lingual poet, and my flamboyantly gay best friend (we were known as the Hag-Fag couple in Chicago, and he insisted that he was the hag) Ifti Nasim was invited by Jawarhlal Nehru University in Delhi to give a series of lectures, one of his major attractions was to be able to meet Aini Apa. He asked me for an introduction to her and I called Aini Apa to request some time for Ifti. She was completely smitten by him forever as on the first meeting, he promptly produced a lipstick from his pocket and said, “You will love this Aini Apa because I use the same shade.”

It took two more meetings before we really became friends, and then stayed in touch ever since. I invited her as a guest of my literary club Urdu Mehfil in the summer of 1992 to Cincinnati [photo on the right shows us at that time], and during the few weeks that she stayed with me, we traveled (Buffalo, Niagara Falls), laughed hysterically, had serious bitching sessions, ate out at fancy restaurants, and talked endlessly about subjects ranging from Masnawi e Zehr e Ishq, Dilli kay karkhandar, Mir Anis, and Bollywood to how sweet she thought EM Forester, Arnold Toynbee and John Dos Passos were in person, and how arrogant Steinbeck. During this stay, I taped many hours of serious conversations with her. She agreed to be interviewed only if I would write out my questions in advance and she would decide whether they were worth answering or not. I will transcribe these in Part Two of this article. She had very definite likes and dislikes and two things she hated with a passion were any mention of her writing and all desserts. The latter prompted my darling Zakia to compose the following parody of Ghalib’s ghazal on the spot while we were all together in Cincinnati:

Zindagi youn bhi guzar hi jaati
Kyoon jawani ka figure yaad aaya

Munh mein rasgulla na aya tha hanooz
Aini Apa ka qahar yaad ayaya

Some years ago in Chicago, I was complaining about the malice and political acrobatics of a peer to my dear friends Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge when Arjun cut me short and made the following profound statement: “Azra yaar, there are very few people who are truly the A-team (Beethoven, Einstein, Freud, Michelangelo…..you get the picture). The rest of us are all just B-team. What difference does it make to complain or feel competitive within the B-team?” I can safely say that of the five A-team people I have met in my life, Aini Apa heads the list.

She was born with a silver spoon in her mouth and grew up among the exclusive elite circle of her famous parents Sajjad Hyder Yildirim and Nazr Sajjad Hyder. At 19, she astounded the world of Urdu with her first novel, Meray Bhi Sanam Khanay which dealt with the theme that occurs repeatedly in her subsequent works; the tragedies and social betrayals resulting from the partition of the subcontinent. Where history is concerned, the devil definitely lies in detail. With profound insight, exquisite sensitivity and heartbreaking prose, she chronicled the stories of families and individual lives as they were rent asunder in parallel with the fissuring of the country. This is what C.M. Naim, Professor of Urdu Literature and Languages at the University of Chicago says in his introduction to “A season of Betrayal” which contains the English translations of her short story Patjhar ki Avaz and the two novellas, Sita Haran and Housing Society:

The days and months that preceded and followed August 1947 – when the Indian subcontinent became free of colonial bonds – were filled with most horrific acts of physical violence. It was also a time of other, equally rampant violations that were not any the less scarring for not being patently physical. These were violations of trust; they wounded and maimed the psyches of their victims, leaving the bodies intact. And their time – that season of betrayals – lasted longer than just several months. At the time, most major Urdu writers – they were almost all men – wrote about the horrors and brutalities that some human beings could deliberately inflict upon others in the name of religion. Only later did some of them –Rajinder Singh Bedi, for one – turn their attention to the other, less overtly bloody tragedies: what had happened and continued to happen to individual and families at that human site where there had been no “riot” and yet there were any number of victims. Prominent among the latter was Qurratulain Hyder, who may also have been unique among all writers, women and men, for having experienced and written about such tectonic upheavals in all the emergent borders – in India and in both West and East Pakistan. Interestingly, she first responded in the form of novels, as if the magnitude of the events demanded a larger canvas, and only later turned to shorter genres. In some sense however, she never stopped examining the consequences of those events, as is evident even in her most recent works.

The second last paragraph sums it up beautifully:

In almost all her writings Hyder has been concerned with Time, that faceless presence which transforms all appearances and which we ignore only at our own peril. Though this inevitability of change is our only permanent reality, Hyder persistently urges us to recognize both its faces, one of gain and the other of loss. A linearly progressing time brings about changes. Should we then take sides? Should we say that change is progress? Or should we sat it is decline? Either according to Hyder would be simplistic and perilous, for such issues are not settled by a reference to the material world alone. What counts for her is the human spirit and relationships it generates and nurtures. That is where the linearity of time seems to curve into a spiral, urging us to recognize a past that never quite disappears.

I may be stretching the point but it seems to me that what Hyder tacitly offers us is nothing but that wise Candidean response: even in the best of all possible worlds, it is best not to neglect to tend our garden. Certainly, through the several thousand pages of her writings, she has shown herself to be an eloquent witness to that truth.

A Season of Betrayals (Oxford University Press).

At 28, she published her magnum opus, the landmark Aag ka Darya, which is arguably the best book in fiction, occupying that coveted place in Urdu which Garcia Marquez’s One hundred years of Solitude occupies in Hispanic literature. The world of Urdu changed forever after this book was published since every subsequent writer has been influenced by Aini Apa (yes, including Salman Rushdie):

It was the season of beerbahutis and rainclouds, some time in the 4th century B.C. In a cool grotto Gautam Nilamber, a final year student at the Forest University of Shravasti chances upon Hari Shankar, a princeling yearning to be a Buddhist monk. He falls in love with the beautiful, sharp-witted Champak. And thus begins a magnificent tale that flows through Time, through Maghadhan Pataliputra, the Kingdom of Oudh, the British Raj, and into a Time of Independence. This fiery river of Time flows along the banks of their lives as they are reborn and recreated, weaving through twists and turns, the flows and eddies, keeping them together, keeping them apart. The story comes full circle in post-Partition India where Hari Shankar and his friend Gautam Nilamber Dutt meet in a grotto in the forest of Shravasti, and mourn the passing of their lives into meaninglessness, their friends who have left for Pakistan, and what remains of their country of which they were once so passionately proud. What happens between then and now is history, full of the clangor of conflict, the deviousness of colonizers, the apathy of maharajahs, and the irrelevance of religion in defining Indianness.

(Publishers note on River of Fire).

I read this mesmerizing book once every 2-3 years, and to me, in addition to its captivating prose and the stories themselves, it also represents one of Aini Apa’s central and profound tenets: current events, history, and most importantly, the past, have a nasty habit of intruding into our lives no matter how private a citizen we wish to be. Should we then abandon society and lead the life of an ascetic Jain? Well, as she deftly shows in the interconnected stories, even that does not protect us. In fact, one of the major messages of the book is exactly the message which Ghalib sends in the following brilliant couplet.

Dair naheen, haram naheen, dar naheen aastan naheen
Baithay hayn rahguzar pay hum, koi hamayn uthai kyoon

Aini Apa’s memory was extraordinary and flawless, her intelligence was dazzling, her knowledge of Urdu, Hindi, and English literature, archeology, dance, classical music, (her last book is a biography of Ustad Baray Ghulam Ali Khan), painting, etymology and history was astonishing. I never heard her utter a platitude in all the times I have spent with her, and she was equally brilliant in both Urdu and English. Aini Apa was a fantastic mimic and could adopt a series of perfectly authentic regional accents. She thoroughly enjoyed a good joke, especially if it involved her. She loved the hajv written by her cousin which begins with the following lines:

Qurratulain hayn adab may dakheel
Jaisay Mulk e Arab mayn Israel

She was a stunningly good looking young woman and cut a striking, imposing and graceful figure when older, and when she was not writing, her pet hobby was painting. I have never met anyone who valued her family more than she did. There was unconditional love in her heart for each and every member of the extended Hyder clan and for that of her mother’s side as well. Her glorious personality sparkled and lit up every room she was in. When I was in Delhi in 1992, Shabana Azmi had come to see me at my lovely friends Zakia and Akku Zaheer’s home in Ashadeep. Aini Apa was also there for dinner that night. It was a magical evening with Sughra, Saiyeda (Hamid), Zakia, Aini Apa, Shabana, my friend Mehro and her husband Samar. Sparks of wit, hypnotizing Urdu couplets, and funny lines ranging from Ajit epigrams to Blonde jokes were flying all over. I saw Shabana, who is no less magnificent a person, an icon of Bollywood cinema with hundreds of millions of devoted followers, being completely blown away by Aini Apa. Such was her charisma, such her charm.

Aisa kahan say laain kay tujh sa kahain jissay?

I never met anyone whose set of values was as decent, who combined her celebrated wisdom with mind-boggling innocence and vulnerability, who was easily the kindest, gentlest, most sensitive person around and yet who did not suffer fools lightly. Javed Akhtar once said to me that the names of people Aini Apa really likes can be written on a grain of rice (secretly, both he and I were unabashedly confident that we were among those) and yet her circle of friends and acquaintances was exceedingly wide. She was compassionate to a fault and could feel the pain of the haves and have-nots with equal sensitivity.

As a friend, she was breathtakingly generous and thoughtful. During one of my visits to Delhi, she arranged an amazing evening for me. My favorite Urdu poet (who I think is as great as Ghalib) is Mir Anis, the acknowledged King of elegiac poetry (marsias), and whose unique style of reciting marsias was legendry in Lukhnow. Aini Apa invited the grandson of Sir Sultan Ahmed for a majlis at her place because Tanveer has learned to copy Mir Anis precisely, from gestures and voice intonations to the angarkha and dupalli topi he wore. I was more deeply touched by her thoughtful gesture of holding a majlis for me because she was not a practicing Shia (although her mother was), but did it because she knew of my absolute devotion to Anis. She was also a great admirer of Anis and her story, “Qayd khaney main talatum hay kay Hind aatii hay” is a lovely reminder of that.

Aini Apa could do no wrong as far as her diehard admirers like me were concerned for one simple reason:

Wu tu iss funn ka Khuda hay yaaro
Uss ko har baat rava hay yaaro

(She is the Goddess of her field
Everything is permissible for her)

Last year, we were chatting on the phone when something I said reminded her of a wonderful anecdote about the great Ismat Chughtai. Ismat Apa was trying to give some extra money to her washerman, an extremely poor, illiterate man from some hinterland in UP. He asked her what he was supposed to do with the money, and Ismat Apa said what do you mean what are you supposed to do with the money? Buy toys for your children. His response was a drawled out “Phaiiiiinh???” (the Purbi version of phir which means and then?). And Ismat Apa said, well, buy some new clothes for your wife, and he said “Phaiiiiinh???” And on and on. So Azra Begum, this is what life is all about…..a never ending series of “Phaiiiiinhs???” I got the Sahitya Academy Fellowship …. “Phaiiiiinh???” I got the Bharatiya Gnanpith (India’s highest literary award)……..“Phaiiiiinh???” I get the Nobel Prize tomorrow …… “Phaiiiiinh???”

During my last trip to India in 2004, I drove from Janpath to Noida every single day to see her. Her breathing problems caused by severe and progressive pulmonary fibrosis were getting visibly worse. One afternoon following lunch, I cornered Aini Apa and suggested immediate re-evaluation of her condition by a fresh team of specialists. She was adamant in the beginning, insisting that she had the best physicians taking care of her already, but over the next few days, was finally convinced to follow my advice, and subsequently, did better for a long while.

The first evening I went to see Aini Apa in 2004, I had taken my 9 year old daughter Sheherzad with me. Aini Apa was exceedingly attentive to her, had her recite lots of poetry by Ghalib and Iqbal which I have made the innocent one memorize since she was three years old, encouraged her on during and after each poem by applauding loudly. When she found out that Sheherzad had been taking Kathak dance lessons, Aini Apa was visibly delighted and insisted that she does a few steps for the guests which included the Vice Chancellor of Jamia. Such was Aini Apa’s aura that without a peep, my daughter got up and performed an entire song for her.

On my last day in Delhi, Aini Apa insisted upon coming to see me herself for lunch at Abid Villa in Okhla. Walking into the house from the car which had been pulled up in the driveway almost to the front door, Aini Apa was completely out of breath and had turned blue. It took many puffs from her various inhalers, and the connection to her portable oxygen tank before she could catch her breath sufficiently to be able to talk. Then she was unstoppable. During this memorable afternoon, as we sat in Sughra’s verandah, enjoying what Josh Sahib has named the gulabi dhoop of a January afternoon, the front door bell rang. Sughra’s young niece Zehra answered the door, and then to our great delight, yelled out in all earnestness, “Sughra Apa, the beggar is here. What do you want to give him today, lunch or lecture?” At last, the time came for us to part. We walked Aini Apa to the car, a few short yards bringing on another severe attack of breathlessness. When she was safely seated in the car and had caught her breath somewhat, she asked the driver to open the trunk. “I have been thinking about what to give you” she said, “and decided upon a very special gift.” Out of the trunk came a huge, beautiful, bright yellow satin quilt with silver stripes on top and brown lining at the bottom. “I got this made in Radoli because I always felt cold in America, so I know this is one present you will definitely use.” Needless to say, I had to borrow an extra large suitcase from Sughra to fit this lihaf in for the trip back home to Chicago, but it remains one of my prized possessions. She gave me a big kiss and we stood on the road waving to her until her car turned the corner and went out of sight. This was the last time I would see Aini Apa.

In March of this year, as my other A-team member friend Sara Suleri Goodyear and I were working on our book Ghalib: Epistemologies of Elegance, we agreed that the best person to write a foreword for our book would be Aini Apa. Given the highest esteem in which we both hold Aini Apa, we felt it called for a trip to India in order to make the request in person. Sara by the way, who has never met Aini Apa, but is nonetheless an admirer of hers, reminds me uncannily of Aini Apa: the same regal personalities, equally intelligent, classy, wise, witty, sensitive, generous, and above all, both have a wonderful sense of humor. Had they so chosen, each could have become a great actress. It was one of my wishes to see them together in the same room. We called Aini Apa and asked her if she could spare a week for us, to which she readily agreed and insisted that we stay with her. As our bags were packed and all preparations were complete, including a menu for our various meals at Aini Apa’s by her devoted housekeeper Rehana, at the last minute Sara was denied a visa by the Indian consulate in New York. We later learned that this was a tit-for-tat game being played between Pakistan and India. Pakistan had denied a visa right around the same time to Javed Akhter, so India was going to do the same for a prominent Pakistani. We were heartbroken. When I called to tell Aini Apa about the visa situation, she was incensed and threatened to call the Prime Minister and protest. Unfortunately, it was too late as Sara’s Spring break at Yale was going to be over soon and she had to start teaching again. We decided to go during her Winter break. Alas, Aini Apa did not wait for us.

My last phone conversation with Aini Apa was some six weeks before the end came. She was her usual sparkling self and we gossiped and chatted for a long time. In early August, I had some kind of a premonition, and called her only to be told that she had been admitted to the ICU that very day with a severe pneumonia. I called regularly, and received increasingly ominous reports from Sughra, Bacchan (Aini Apa’s grand-niece Huma Hyder who was adored by Aini Apa like a daughter and who did more for Aini Apa than any other soul) and Rehana. I talked to Dr. Shukla, her personal physician, and learned that even as she was improving in some ways and had been transferred from the ICU to the step-down unit, her lungs were not cooperating since almost no functioning pulmonary tissue was left. At 11:00 p.m. on August 21, Sughra called with the news that Aini Apa was no more.

Kaheen andheray say manoos hu na jaayey adab
Chiragh taiz hava nay bujhaaey hain kya kya

–Kaifi Azmi

Aini Apa no more? That can never be. Even if it sounds clichéd, as long as Urdu is alive, she truly will always reign supreme as one of its most dominant writers, and she will live through the several generations of writers she has already and indelibly influenced, with many more to come. So instead of saying Inna Lillah, I am going to say:

Aini Apa Zindabad!

————————————-
Note: This article is dedicated to my brother Abbas who first requested nicely that I write something about Aini Apa and when I did not respond (so heartbroken I felt by this terrible loss), he browbeat me into it.

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

The politically-engaged poem follows in the wake of the horrors of history, or as a literary tremor in the tidal pool of self thrust into a furious universe with no undue ceremony. Some cultural and economic theorists say all action and thought is political and thus all literature is political too. Can a poem change the course of political devolution? Can you save the world with a song, with performance poetry—‘Strange Fruit’, ‘We Shall Overcome’? Despite all evidence to the contrary, a poet likes to think it can be so, despite the cynicism of ‘All art is quite useless’.

We are the language animals, and if we end up distrusting words, nihilism follows close behind. Blake had none of these doubts. Here is a poem from Songs of Innocence and of Experience.

         The Chimney Sweeper

A little black thing among the snow:
Crying weep, weep. in notes of woe!
Where are thy father & mother? say?
They are both gone up to church to pray.

Because I was happy upon the heath.
And smil’d among the winters snow:
They clothed me in the clothes of death.
And taught me to sing the notes of woe.

And because I am happy. & dance & sing.
They think they have done me no injury:
And are gone to praise God & his Priest & King
Who make up a heaven of our misery.

This directness and simplicity, this eloquent concision, had, by the mid-twentieth century, turned into something like this:

The monopoly
Of the slave trade,
                           at this time Gibraltar
and the old bitch de Medicis died in miseria,
                ‘29, John Law obit
as you may read in San Moisé, in the pavement,
                                                             SUMBAINAI
Grevitch, bug-house, in anagram: “Out of vast
a really sense of proportion
                                  and instantly.”
wanted me to type-write his name on a handkerchief.
In 1766 was beheaded, in the charming small town of Abbeville,
                Young Labarre, for reading Arouet de Voltaire,
where the stream runs close to houses.
                                 Ezra Pound The Cantos Thrones de los Cantares XCVl–ClX  C

Pound said that he would like a Chinese ideogram for sincerity on the title page of The Cantos. Is this the sincerity of fragmentation?—regarded as a virtue by the Imagists.

Pound’s style was not an option for a poet like Osip Mandelstam. Here is the poem about Stalin that got Mandelstam arrested and sent into exile. Privations and sickness followed, homelessness, then a transit camp, and death on December 27, 1938.

                    The Stalin Epigram

Our lives no longer feel ground under them.
At ten paces you can’t hear our words.

But whenever there’s a snatch of talk
it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer,

the ten thick worms his fingers,
his words like measures of weight,

the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip,
the glitter of his boot-rims.

Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses
he toys with the tributes of half-men.

One whistles, another  meouws, a third snivels.
He pokes out his finger and he alone goes boom.

He forges decrees in a line like horseshoes,
One for the groin, one the forehead, temple, eye.

He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries.
He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.

                          [November 1933] Translated by Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin

The Russians give the permanent lie to idea that poetry can not be intimately related to the life of the people without work descending to propagandising. As the Blake poem shows, this direct confrontation with political realities was nothing new in poetry. Shelley took on Liverpool’s government, after the Peterloo massacre in Manchester in 1819. Here is an excerpt from ‘The Masque of Anarchy’:

                       II
I met Murder on the way—
He had a mask like Castlereagh—
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven blood-hounds followed him:

                       III
All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed the human heads to chew
Which from his wide cloak he drew.

                        IV
Next came Fraud, and he had on,
Like Eldon, an ermined gown;
His big tears, for he wept well,
Turned to mill-stones as they fell.

                         V
And the little children, who
Round his feet played to and fro,
Thinking every tear a gem,
Had their brains knocked out by them.

The emotion still leaps out across the years. You know this is not feigning, or something written to order. Almost any poet worth the name is capable of harnessing the Muse to the sudden immensities, splendours and awfulness of politics. A problem can arise when a reader is unaware of the events that gave birth to the poem. Edith Sitwell, confronted by the realities of the Second World War, suddenly lifts herself above the word games and indulgences to the hard biblical utterance of ‘Still Falls The Rain’ as the bombs fall on London. But if you don’t know what happened to London during the war the poem isn’t going to make much sense. Here is the beginning of the poem.

Still falls the Rain—
Dark as the world of man, black as our loss—
Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails
Upon the Cross.

Still falls the Rain
With a sound like the pulse of the heart that is changed to
   the hammer-beat
In the Potter’s Field, and the sound of impious feet

On the Tomb:
                    Still falls the Rain
In the Field of Blood where the small hopes breed and
   the human brain
Nurtures its greed, that worm with the brow of Cain.

This poem is—perhaps—more a personal response to political events than a politically-engaged poem. It’s interesting to go back and look at anthologies to see how well the poems stand up to the slew of time. Jon Silkin’s Poetry of the Committed Individual published by Penguin in 1973 provides some interesting examples. Emanuel Litvinoff wasn’t letting T. S. Eliot off the hook back then either. Here is an excerpt from ‘To T. S. Eliot’:

I am not one accepted in your parish,
Bleistein is my relative and I share
the protozoic slime of Shylock, a page
in Sturmer, and, underneath the cities,
a billet somewhat lower than the rats.
Blood in the sewers. Pieces of our flesh
float with the order of the Vistula.
You had a sermon but it was not this.

Other poets in this anthology include Hill, Harrison, Holub, Brecht, Ungaretti, Hikmet and Tsvetaeva.

The problem in art comes when you start to look for ideological correctness. Life is messy, confused, and art reflects that. We sometimes compromise our ideals. If we say we don’t we are probably lying. And how would we behave in the situations the poets above found themselves confronted by? ‘The banality of evil’ is the omnipresent reference of our time, but, if you’ve ever met it face-to-face, perhaps evil wouldn’t seem banal at all.

The truth is that all, poets included, live in a state of contradictoriness and illogicality. But poets can be wise, sometimes. Lorenz Hart asks in the song ‘My Funny Valentine’—‘Is your figure less than Greek? / Is your mouth a little weak? / When you open it to speak, are you smart?’ Well, poets can have weak mouths and torsos less than Greek. If they can’t always be expected to be heroic, like Mandelstam or Celan, they try to understand the world in poetry, which is not an essay, not philosophy and should not be a tract. But sometimes they are smart, smarter than all the tracts and propaganda, all the journalism, all the surrounding sound and fury.

‘And The Winner Is . . .’, which follows in the tradition of the politically-engaged poem, can be read here.

Billie Holiday sings ‘Strange Fruit’ here. 2′ 33”

Count them up: a bridge collapse, sleazy mortgage-writing, record home foreclosures, killer pharmaceuticals, deathly toys, a stock market meltdown, e. coli and salmonella outbreaks. Would you like to add to my list?

Even if you believe in nothing positive about the role of government, doesn’t this litany give you pause? This side of sanity, there are a scant few who don’t believe at least in a watchman state that protects its citizens against violence, theft, fraud, and breach of contract. This is the maximum a state should provide, according to the late libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick, perhaps the most famous believer in the minimal state of our time. The state is our watchman, the minimal protector of our rights not to be robbed, violated or killed by another, and is the guarantor that we will not be defrauded and that contracts we make will be enforced.

Well, the watchman is asleep, drugged and nearly done in by 31 years of neoliberal rule. That’s right Clintonites and those who still feel sorry for Jimmy Carter. Oh, and you irreconcilable Nixon-haters (yes, me still, I admit), recall that he helped start Medicaid, the last Great Society program of the last century. After Nixon then, and for 31 years, the foxes have run the federal chicken coup, and they have cleaned out the hens that once laid the golden eggs of protection and regulation. The malicious and ideological government haters, the industry lobbyists running departments that regulate their industries, and flimflammers that pretend that self-regulation is really regulation, have made sure that even if the federal government wanted, it could not protect us from the fraud and the theft of our well being now in full swing.

For many of our problems, there are simply no watchmen left. The Food and Drug Administration has 1962 food inspectors (down from 2200 in 2003) that must assure the safety of food imports. They sample 1% of the imported food we eat. As you know, even Fido needs to worry about poisoned pet food. They are also charged with assuring that the 12,000 food production facilities states-side are not slipping us poison.

The Department of Agriculture and state departments of agriculture, have 7,700 inspectors – a seemingly bountiful staff when compared with the FDA. Yet, they must account for the safety of all animals and the food products that are produced from them. You may recall the Jack-in-the-Box e.coli outbreak that arose from infected ground beef. Because of over-stretch, these departments must rely in part on self-regulation, which usually means that employees in slaughter houses and packing plants are designated to monitor the everyday through-put onsite and report possible violations to designated state or federal inspectors. A fair-minded person might doubt whether an employee would rat on his firm, or how a boss would resist firing the employee who ratted. She might even think it irresponsible to leave the public safety in the hands of potential code and law violators.

Do you wonder now why 73,000 people, of whom 60 die, come down with e.coli in a typical year? There is listeria and salmonella to think about too.

Speaking of self-regulation, how about those 12 million Mattel and Fischer-Price toys in America’s play pens contaminated with lead? The producers recalled the products upon discovery, it’s been reported. Less well known is the statement of the US Consumer Product Safety Commission that it doesn’t test toys for dangerous substances or even for dangerous designs and parts. It too relies on the self-regulation of toy makers, who seemed to have missed the problem 12 million toys ago.

Then there are the dangerous drugs. (I reported on TV pharmaceutical advertising in my last column.) Recall the Vioxx scandal? An estimated 100,000 people suffered unnecessary heart attacks and strokes because they took Vioxx. A former FDA higher-up in 2004 reported to Congress that the FDA is approving questionable drugs. Download this list and check your medicine cabinet:

1. Accutane, an acne drug that can cause birth defects
2. Crestor (remember Mandy Patimkin walking down that endless flight of stairs, presumably on his way to catch an ax murderer?), a cholesterol drug that can cause a muscle-wasting disorder
3. Baycol, another cholesterol drug related to muscle-wasting
4. Bextra, a Cox-2 inhibitor like Vioxx that may increase cardiovascular risks in some people
5. Prilosec and Nexium, the most popular drugs in America, have recently been cited in research as possible causes of heart failures and premature heart-related deaths

There are likely more. This is just a list I scraped up in an hour’s time. Once more, not only do the pharmaceutical companies do the efficacy studies themselves for drug approval, they pay doctors directly to produce additional studies. Medical ethics presumably protect us from the worst fraud, but it is important to keep in mind that data are highly interpretable. Like the glass, results can be interpreted as half-full or half-empty. The subtleties of drug-testing results could enable doctors to honor their paymaster while not blemishing their careers. How many have tipped the scientific scales in favor of the pharmaceutical companies, we will never know. But, again, does it seem reasonable to you to leave those who will profit from a positive outcome in charge of the efficacy research?

The Minneapolis bridge collapse. Danger noted, no one notified, nothing done. No one knows who is the watchman in this case, but each party is fearful that they will be named, blamed, and billed for building a new one.

The mining accident in Utah. 47 miners in the United States died last year, a small number considering mining fatalities in China said to be in the thousands, Russia (approximately 1000), and the Ukraine, where an average of 300 miners die a year. Thus far, the thinking is that it was an unfortunate accident not attributable to misfeasance or malfeasance on the company’s part. But again, if you listen to the whole story, you hear about hundreds of safety violations discovered in the company in question’s mines on a yearly basis. Note too that the cost of the fines probably doesn’t add up to a day’s receipts. Would you stop driving because of a parking ticket? In parts of Boston where I live, people in some neighborhoods consider parking tickets as simply part of the cost of living in a trendy surrounds. The mining companies may treat fines this way too. However, miners die because the fines don’t interrupt the flow of business and have a minimal impact on company profits. Here we have the weak watchman.

Then, there is the swindle of the month – subprime mortgage loans. Have you ever tried to read a mortgage contract? In a comfy middle class world, people hire a lawyer to do it, and given that banks like to keep middle class customers happy, the lawyer doesn’t have to do much because their isn’t much to worry about. The fine print is not friendly but at least it is relatively benign.

On late-night television, on smarmy and network channels, you begin to sense that there is another world out there filled with people who would be thieves and con artists if the watchman weren’t drugged and asleep. From the depths of America’s financial world come the debt consolidators, the credit card purveyors for the bankrupt, and the Wimpy salesmen who will give you a loan on your civil suit judgment today in return for the settlement money tomorrow, a hefty interest charge, of course, appended.

Then there was my favorite. I found him so despicable that I cannot remember his name or his firm, which, come to think about it, might save me litigation costs, if his dubious little business has escaped the sub-prime landslide. He, the president of the firm, was there to give you mortgage money, even if you had been turned down elsewhere. The tag line of the commercial says it all: “When the bank says no, we say yes!”

And so did they all. And this year, 760,000 households will lose their homes. Another estimated 940,000 households will be dispossessed of their homes in 2008. The causes are many: adjustable rate mortgages, balloon payments, high mortgage insurance, high late charges, as well as job loss, family disruption, and bankruptcy. (N.B. Did you know that the medical bills are the single biggest cause of personal bankruptcy in the United States?) And don’t forget; they don’t call them sub-prime mortgages for nothing. Borrowers were paying at interest rates 3%, 4% and sometimes 5% above the going rate.

Many times, people did not know what could happen to them. They lacked that lawyer who, in their cases, would have had a lot to do protecting their clients from unfair lending conditions. Sometimes, borrowers were simply in over their heads, and no one told them how fragile their toehold of the American Dream was. A tiny slip in world financial markets could ruin them.

And so it did. But there’s more. There was still more money to be made off the struggles and sacrifices of the subprime borrowers. The Alfred E. Newmans of the banking world packaged the risky loans in with the good, sort of like when the fish vendor slips a smelly fillet in among the others on the scale. The bundled mortgages backed bonds, “structured investment vehicles,” and back room credit swaps. Even German banks got taken in. So much for their legendary probity.

No American watchmen took notice. Not the state legislatures, the Congress, the White House, the Federal Reserve, or the federal agencies that could or do regulate lending. Nope, not a one. Like Sergeant Schultz, they knew nothing. But all it took was to watch late night TV. Or read the corporate reports. Or watch investment banks gobble up the subprime lending firms. The only people for whom this scam was a secret were the now hard-pressed borrowers.

Now the watchmen are awake and worried about the financial world tanking over the swindle of the sub-prime mortgage borrowers. There are calls, not unanimous by any means, to help out the victimized households with refinancing. Add up the figures provided above. By the time Congress or the Federal Reserve acts, say by the end of 2008 – there is an election going on after all – 1.7 million households may have lost their homes.

Is it asking too much for a watchman to be put back out on the perimeters of the state once again? Can the government at least guarantee us protection from violence, fraud, theft, and breach of contract?

It would not be the dawn of a new age, but simply the recreation of the American conservative dream. Chump change politically for our bankrupt political class.

Justin E. H. Smith

In Harlem, ten years or so ago, I overheard two elderly ladies waiting for a bus underneath a billboard that read: “Depressed?  It’s Chemistry, Not Character.”  This slogan was followed by a 1-800 number which would put the caller in touch with a medical professional able to write a prescription for antidepressants, that is, to set the chemistry right by preventing the reuptake of serotonin.  The one lady said to the other: “I went to my doctor and he told me that’s what I got.  Depression.  I always knew it was something.”

I confess I feel tremendous inhibition at the thought of taking up the topic of reuptake inhibitors.  This is because it is, unlike my usual preoccupations (God, animals, language), by no means just an intellectual exercise for me.  Over the past 18 years I have been on at least six different kinds of SSRI, each one bearing a brand name that sounds more like a Lexus model than the last.  (Could I have been taking something called ‘Selexa’, or did I just see one parked outside of Starbuck’s?)  In the long run, they never quite do the trick, or if they do, then they do that plus a whole lot more one would rather avoid.  And so invariably I wind up back where I started: lucid yet burdened, supremely sane yet stalked by a particularly dark demon, my constant companion, my familiar. 

I have chosen to write about this condition not out of desperation –no, the drama of it was all played out years ago, and now I am nothing if not stable–, but rather out of a sort of calling, rare for me, to enter into identity politics.  I am tired of all the stupid things I hear said about my fellow depressives.  It was not so long ago that Jesse Helms, or perhaps Strom Thurmond, described Jean-Bertrand Aristide as a confirmed ‘psychotic’ when he learned of the Haitian president’s Prozac prescription.  My fellow philosophy professors thoughtlessly invoke ‘happiness pills’ as the easy way out for the philosophically lazy, while the general public seems to perceive antidepressants as a crutch for the frivolous, as a Hollywood indulgence, as a symptom of privileged frailty.  This moralistic condemnation is usually counterbalanced only be the equally unsubtle medicalistic reduction of our emotional lives to chemical imbalances.  I am neither crazy, nor lazy, nor is my state entirely explicable in terms of a certain disequilibrium of fluids.  I am a depressive, which is to say a person who experiences the world in a certain way.  Now I am every bit as materialist as the cynical doctors who paid for that billboard, yet I dare say that when I talk about my depression what I am talking about is nothing other than my ‘character’. 

There I go philosophizing again.  I had set out to tell a little something about myself, and before I know it I’m talking about the mind-body problem.  I will not claim that to know that black dog, as Churchill put it, in itself gives one insight into this deep and intractable riddle.  What I will claim is that reflection upon the nature of depression, and upon the actual (as opposed to commercial) virtues of antidepressants is for me a central part of the Socratic project of self-knowledge.  Some people take paper-making classes, others learn the ancient art of retreating to weekend wellness spas.  And some heed the oracle.  Chacun son passe-temps.

My particular diagnosis has generally been depression with obsessive-compulsive symptoms, a mixture often found, they say, in ‘high achievers’.  When I was an undergraduate I was so obsessed with obtaining top grades that I found myself symbolically swallowing every letter A I came across, and symbolically spitting out every B, C, D, and F.  If I accidentally swallowed while looking in the direction of a C or a D, I would have to quickly go in search of compensatory A’s to ingest.  I cannot describe the deep sense of dread that such a mistake was able to bring about.  There were times when I would inadvertently swallow looking at the wrong part of a sign along the freeway, and I was thereby compelled to exit at the next off-ramp, drive back to a point before the sign, turn around again, and drive back past, swallowing up the A’s, if there were any, or spitting out the low marks that I had inadvertently ingested on my first pass.  In reading books, if I came across a sentence with too many bad letters in it, I was compelled to look away from the book and to mouth any one of a stock of sentences containing no bad letters and plenty of A’s. “That’s not great, lovely man,” was for some reason the most therapeutic sentence I could conjure.  It was (I think?) meaningless, but phonetically very satisfying.  The ‘l’ sound was also very satisfying, and sometimes I would add it in where it did not belong just to make sure to get the needed relief: “That’s not great-l, lovely man-l.”

My compulsions were not just orthographic and phonetic, but numerological as well.  I could not tolerate odd numbers, and if when walking along my head was grazed by a leaf hanging from a tree, I was often compelled to turn back around and let it touch me a second time. At times I could not resist breaking pencils in half in order that one would become two, and each half, now a whole, would have its other.   

I do not do these things anymore.  Today, I do other things, generally so subtle as to go unnoticed even by me.  I am one of the fortunate ones: I’ve learned to channel my possession into socially acceptable, because socially invisible, directions.  One channels, but one never exorcises.  The symptoms mutate, but the state causing the symptoms remains, one single and monolithic constant, a lifetime’s fellow traveller, a Lebensgefährtin.  The woman always knew it was something.  It always was something.   

**

I am a materialist who nonetheless would be frightened in a graveyard by myself at night, and I am a good and intelligent reader of statistics who nonetheless gets sick with fear every time I am obliged to get into a goddamned airplane.  I believe in what Ernest Gellner described as “the world of regular, morally neutral, magically unmanipulable fact,” yet I go about my life as though the world were some sentient agent ready to take its vengeance upon me should I fail to follow its harsh and arbitrary commands.  This condition has led me to believe that the stupid things we do generally have nothing to do with false beliefs.  Would that it were that simple!  Superstition bubbles up from the unperceived depths, and enlightenment is no cure.  My beliefs are just fine, yet I am sick.

Perhaps we focus on false belief as the root of our problems simply because it is relatively easy to correct.  Ever since the Stoics, cognitive therapy has stood out as a promising path towards feeling good about one’s lot in life: belief modification, it has been thought, coming to live in the light of the truth, could free one from fearful superstition and thereby lead to emotional well-being.  And all without chemicals!  But I have been insisting that superstition is independent of belief, and that one’s character, the general way one fits with the world, has little to do with the descriptions one gives of it, with the list of things and forces in one’s ontology. 

Once one has solid first-person evidence of the futility of belief modification in the quest for happiness, chemical modification starts to seem like the best option.  If the eradication of false ideas changes nothing, then perhaps the simple accumulation of serotonin will help to make the universe a more charming place.  The genie of the future will not have to give a choice of wishes, for now we know that all of that stuff about finding love or treasure or gaining power was really just about stimulating the pleasure centers in the brain, and any  scientifically literate wisher would do better to just wish for that directly: constant and intense neural euphoria.  I can remember being on a new SSRI at a conference in Rome or New Orleans, or somewhere else one is supposed to want to go, and thinking: I’m just going to lie down there on that hotel bed and enjoy my brain.  Everything else –the Colosseum, the French Quarter, the entire world beyond my neurons– was superfluous.  My happiness, such as it was, did not come from making my thoughts fit the world, as the Stoics had counseled, but by cutting the world altogether out of the picture. 

**

Jede Krankheit ist eine Geisteskrankheit, said Novalis: Every illness is a mental illness. This inverts the billboard’s message, according to which every mental illness is an illness plain and simple.  For Novalis, it is not that the soul should be assimilated to the pancreas, but vice versa: that diseases of the body, like depression, have their meaning only in the way they are experienced. This is not to say that your illness is your own damned fault and that you are simply being punished for your failure, as was vividly imagined in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon.  It is to say that any illness, ‘physical’ or ‘mental’, is an illness at all only insofar as it is experienced by some subject.  A rusting bar does not suffer from the metallic equivalent of cancer. 

**

Whether we are going to speak about a tortured soul or about a defective brain seems to depend mostly on the rhetorical purpose at hand.  Students hoping to be excused from some responsibility or other have learned to talk the medical talk very skillfully: how can a mere Ph.D. in philosophy, they seem to be saying to me, possibly argue with a medical note from a real doctor?  We’re talking about an illness here, not some fleeting mood.  Doctors take on the social role of magicians, able to transfigure any procrastinating or hard-partying adolescent into a special kind of creature –a depressive, a manic-depressive, an obsessive compulsive, a sufferer from attention deficit disorder– usually with nothing more than the most perfunctory speech act.  I am not saying these categories do not exist (at least as far as the first three are concerned).  Indeed, I have claimed some of them for myself. But I doubt that their reduction to medical conditions like any other is what best helps us to understand them, or to live with them.

In the past several decades we have witnessed the encroachment of medical talk into nearly all domains of social life.  The refusal of some drivers to wear seatbelts is spoken of as a ‘public health problem’.  Of course, a smashed skull is truly a medical condition, but must that mean that every course of action that could lead to its smashing is also medical?  Similarly, is the undeniable existence of a chemical substratum to our conscious experience sufficient reason to conceptualize unpleasant or burdensome mental states as medical?

I do not want to take this line of questioning too far.  I have cited Novalis’s idealist motto as a counterbalance to the prevailing view that every illness, including mental ones, is a medical condition.  But I am not an idealist, as I believe the body is its own thing and there are plenty of context-independent facts about it.  I am willing to concede that chemotheraphy works on cancer cells in the same way whether one takes cancer to be the consequence of witchcraft or of environmental pollution; and an insulin shot will do the same good in a superstitious diabetic as in a scientistic one.  But SSRI’s have turned out to function in society rather less like medical insulin than like herbal infusions, yoga, or the cocaine that Freud once thought, not too long ago, would bring about a revolution in the treatment of mental illness: that is, they have vastly different effects depending on what is expected of them.  And this only shows that the well-being of the soul is something not nearly as easy to control with medicine as is blood-sugar level.   

Somewhere Lévi-Strauss discusses the magic-mushroom habit of the berserkers– i.e., those medieval Scandinavian warriors who put on the ‘bear shirt’ and were thereby transformed into bears during battle, giving them full license to rape and kill with extra ursine vigor. Now, those of you who have dabbled with psylocibin will probably agree that raping and killing were not foremost among your desires during your trip.  The trip was all-natural, indeed, as shroomers never tire of pointing out, yet it was strongly mediated by culture.  And this is why your reaction to mushrooms was different from that of a Viking warrior.  I can imagine, similarly, a culture that takes Zoloft before raiding coastal villages, and another that reserves it for monks in an ascetic order dedicated to knowing God, and perhaps another culture still, a tightly controlled millenarian sect, that distributes it to its initiates in preparation for mass suicide.  (This last case is not so far from reality, as antidepressants have been shown to increase the risk of suicide– a fact that should cause any thinking person to doubt the simple, reductionist belief in a cause-and-effect relation between the inhibition of serotonin reuptake and the qualitative experience of well-being.) 

Why is the experience of antidepressants so variable?  Medical anthropologists have known for a long time that medicines are not just taken by bodies; they are incorporated into cultures, that is to say into preexisting cosmologies that permit certain reponses to things ingested, encourage some, and exclude others.  There may be a single, context-neutral fact about what St. John’s Wort does in the body (as it happens, probably nothing); but there is no such fact about the role that said wort will play in a culture.  In our bodies, it brings about its minor effects and passes through; in our culture’s fantasies –and in our culture’s economy– it does a good deal more: it contributes to that nebulous condition we call ‘wellness’; it cleanses its consumer of vaguely defined toxins; it purges ‘free radicals’, whatever the hell those might be; it signals ‘consciousness’ to other consumers.  It is not to be mixed with gin or Diet Dr. Pepper.  Now of course consumers of St. John’s Wort are likely to be suspicious of chemical antidepressants, but many of the same considerations may be brought to bear in the one case as in the other.  For both, success in our culture depends upon the substance’s symbolic role in a system of oppositions.  Better living through mere chemistry is never enough; the pharmaceutical companies  understand that it is principally through marketing –that is, positioning some chemical or other in the desired social role– that that chemical comes to be perceived as a means to better living.

**

It should not be controversial for me to say that the reason for the existence of antidepressants is the profit of the pharmaceutical companies that produce them.  This is not to say they don’t work. People who are made happy by new products, who can invest their hopes in wellness accessories available for purchase in Skymall catalogs, people who get a wellness charge from St. John’s Wort or from hot stones strategically placed on the back, might also be made happy by the opportunity to take a new antidepressant (one of these, ‘Wellbutrin,’ has explicitly incorporated ‘wellness’ –a term that only caught on because those who stood to profit from it were unable to gain permission to make explicit health claims on their product labels– into its name.)  Things are rather more complicated for those of us who live under the black sun, as Julia Kristeva called it, but are nonetheless perfectly clear-sighted about our plights, and about the real prospects for escaping them.

Berlin, August 17, 2007

—

For a comprehensive archive of Justin Smith’s writing, please visit www.jehsmith.com.   

Edward B. Rackley

Celebrate India. On second thought, maybe not. Such is the dilemma for many Indians as the country braces for its sixtieth anniversary this month. Politicos in New Delhi warn of extremist attacks. For August 15, Independence Day, workers are staying home, shops are closed and circulation is discouraged. India’s 1.12 billion citizens—one sixth of the world’s population—along with its far-flung global diaspora, are wondering what exactly the nation has made of itself in sixty years of freedom.

Profiles of famous Indians born in 1947 abound in the newspapers as Independence Day approaches. These are India’s “Midnight’s Children,” a notion made famous by Salman Rushdie’s 1981 bestseller and since anchored into the national psyche. Newspaper pundits speculate on the causes for the different fates of India and Pakistan, the latter born of partition with India sixty years ago. [1]

Still a young nation by any standard, India’s youth belies its age as an ancient cultural manifold, claiming more than 5000 years of continuous existence. An effervescent, song-and-dance present cohabits with the deep humming of millennia past. As a modern state, cultural and political pluralism is the primary success story of the world’s largest democracy comprising more than two thousand ethnic groups. Every major religion is represented, with a bewildering number of religious sects and spiritual leaders, gurus and “god men.”

India-US relations are complex, and India is a steadfast member of the Non-Aligned Group. Western culture is particularly suspect. A recent national poll showed a majority of Indians blame “western influence for making sex and crime acceptable.” Like most westerners, Indians are gleeful consumers. To a foreign visitor, however, the presence of dreaded western culture is imperceptible; a fierce attachment to local traditions and culture prevails. I see very little to no western media, for instance, and nothing “western” is for sale (well, Pepsi in some big cities).

OK Tata Horn Please

Fifteen years have passed since my last visit. The information technology sector and the all-consuming Bollywood juggernaut (other cinematic forms have all but perished) have achieved global reach and recognition. A clutch of family-owned companies, now closely-guarded dynasties, continue to dominate entire sectors (Tata motors, Mittal steel, etc.) thanks to protectionist market policies aimed at nurturing a robust national economy. Hence the ubiquitous “OK Tata” stencil on the rear of every commercial carrier, inevitably followed by “Horn Please.” No one uses rear or side view mirrors, making the horn the sole means of communication in a throng of rabid lane-jockeys and oncoming daredevils.

India’s chaos is one that never ceases to surprise, seduce, unsettle. The road traffic, one confluence of noise, aggression and cooperation, coheres into flowing function—with regular tragedy, to be sure. The number of pedestrians and pilgrims killed on the roadside, for instance, figures prominently in newspaper headlines. With such wide shoulders on the roads, one asks, why do so many insist on walking in the middle of traffic? In a recent send-up of Indian mannerisms, one journalist solved the riddle: “This is why no one ever walks on the [sidewalks], even when there are no chai stalls or beggar families taking up the space. We walk in the middle of the road because that’s where all the other people are.” [2]

“Shit on your shoe, Sir!”

Caca Cola, Nike, Starbuck’s and McDonald’s do not haunt this place as they do in, say, mainland China. With manufactured goods mostly domestic, there is little globalized branding here. It’s all Durga’s Veg and Tiffin, Anand Vests and Briefs, the Bell Brand Umbrella Shop, the Raj Lucky Metal Store. Sounds quaint, but the Lords of Indian Industry have enjoyed market control by huge family-owned Indian brands in the absence of external competition. Naturally their political allies who perpetuate these lucrative regulations eat equally well, sleeping the slumber of giants.

“India the software superpower” is a source of pride to all Indians, but who acknowledges the staggering development challenges the country faces? The economy is firing all pistons, but nothing trickles down to the urban and rural poor. Eighty-hundred-and-fifty million Indians, or 70% of the country, survive on nine to twenty rupees per day (25 to 50 cents). [3]

Large-scale famines were common right up to the end of the Raj, and India has not produced a major famine since initiating multi-party democracy in 1947. Still, extreme suffering is on naked display here, as is the hand of human cruelty. Bigger child beggars beating up smaller child beggars in the midst of an indifferent traffic jam. A maimed, mangy puppy tied to a stake to die. A rogue shoe shine boy in New Delhi who surreptitiously flicked feces onto my sandals, then demanded to clean them for money, drove home the desperation of street survival. It’s in everyone’s face but no one seems to notice.

In New Delhi and Mumbai, basic municipal infrastructure is crumbling and many tax-funded public services are functionally inert—open sewers ferry human waste; no trash removal service exists. A half day of rain leaves the largest cities inundated and paralyzed. Drainage ditches are clogged by discarded plastic bags and mounds of garbage dumped at curbsides. Colonial building facades continue their path of poetic decay, determined to defy their final collapse into mute rubble.

The makeshift shelters of sticks and plastic bags densely clustered in camps outside the ubiquitous mountains of rubbish on the outskirts of towns and cities resemble the sprawling patchwork of African refugee camps. I’m told these are Dawit communities, outcasts, who scavenge and sift through mile-high mounds of human waste for re-sellable or edible goods, competing with goat herds and packs of wild dogs. Colleagues who’ve worked in India’s devastating floods of recent years tell of government officials refusing to allow helicopters to evacuate affected populations (they were Dawit), instead directing international monies to save local cows.

Holiness still has its virtues on this earth. Who decides who lives or which objects are holy, dignified and thus worth preserving? The decision seems arbitrary to an outsider. There is nothing rational about the blind force of faith and tradition. Sam Harris’ book The End of Faith is much on my mind here.

Houses of the Holy

As India turns sixty its social problems and poverty are mounting in direct correlation to the wealth amassed by its tiny elite. Fascinating perhaps, but that’s not why we came. We’re here for a quick sprint through India’s most famous temples and pilgrimage sites. We began in Varanasi, considered the most auspicious pilgrimage site for practicing Hindus. Many bring the bodies of loved ones to the banks of the Ganges for cremation. Varanasi claims to be one of the oldest living cities in the world, a center of Hindu learning and culture for over 2000 years. On a speaking tour in Varanasi before the end of British rule, Mark Twain captured the agelessness of the place, joking to a crowd that “[Varanasi] is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together.”

We arrived during a Shiva festival, the deity presiding over the city. Fire ritual, hymns and incantations, or puja, were performed at sunset every evening at the bathing ghats, near where funeral pyres burned. One tourist we met had brought her father’s ashes from the US to be set afloat on a bed of candles and flowers, following a ceremony of prayers and chanting with a local Brahmin priest.

In infrastructural terms Varanasi is barely hanging on. No renewal or renovation projects are visible. One exception was the lodge/temple where we stayed, owned by a Brahmin priest. Tiny shrines to various deities could be found in corners throughout the house. He hired local temple craftsmen, particularly painters, to decorate the old house with murals from the Bhagavad Gita and Mahabarata. With no new temples being built and no old ones being renovated, the skills of these unique craftsmen are no longer in demand. The art of tempura mural and fresco painting in Varanasi is dying out.

In contrast to Varanasi, centers of Buddhist learning and culture in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh are in good repair, supported by large monastic communities from as far as Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. A steady stream of international tourists and cash from other Buddhist countries in the region keeps them afloat. Just off the Grand Trunk Road in Bihar, a sixteenth century highway running from Amritsar on the Pakistan border to Kolkata—often just a marathon of bone-shattering potholes, becoming a giant dustbowl or an open lake depending on time of year—lies Bodhgaya, site of the ancient Bodhi tree, under which the Buddha achieved enlightenment.

A Mecca of sorts, Bodhgaya is also the wintering station for the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Buddhist community in exile. The serene grounds around the tree are filled with stupas of various shapes and sizes. Hundreds of pilgrims and monks visit daily to do prostrations, meditate and offer prayers.

But because it is in India, Bodhgaya is still a chaotic place. Outdoor eateries are ideal for taking in the passing parade of barefoot pilgrims. (See also: swerving rickshaws, lumbering horse-drawn passenger wagons, overloaded oxcarts, Tata trucks and battered buses with horns blaring, wayward cows and darting dogs). Stay too long in this tableau vivant of the entire Indian animal kingdom on the move and suffer industrial-strength deafness.

In a remote wooded valley sixty km north of Udaipur in Rajasthan stands the Chaumukha temple, one of the largest and most important Jain temples in the country. Built in 1439, it houses 29 halls supported by 1444 massive, intricately carved marble pillars; no two are alike. Only one in this “city of pillars,” according to our guide, is imperfectly crafted. Its maker “suffered from hubris” and thus failed to achieve perfection.

Female visitors were reminded that during their “moon cycle” they were not to enter the temple. Besides shoes, any leather belongings were left at the door. As I entered the inner sanctum of the breezy marble labyrinth, a small group of “maidens” were singing bhajans to Jain deities.

A suit of silver meditation armor lay against a column beside the chanting girls. I gathered its symbolic purpose (it would suffocate or crush an actual wearer) was to ward off evil temptations of the flesh while meditating in hot pursuit of the divine. As I wandered the sprawling marble edifice I listened for some whisper of divinity. Crows cackled outside. I’d have settled for a cosmic brain thud, but none was offered. Jainism is famous for its deliberate lack of exegesis, and this temple’s secrets were the most impenetrable of any we visited.

A few kilometers north of Kanniyakumari, the southernmost tip of the subcontinent, stands the famous Hindu temple of Suchindram, built in the southern Dravidian style. It is dedicated to a representation of the combined forces of Siva, Vishnu and Brahman, the Hindu holy trinity. Like the Jain temple in Rajasthan, this was another stone labyrinth, though without reflective white marble or sufficient sunlight to illuminate its interior grottos. Thousands of tiny oil lamps glowed dimly in every stone recess, along every wall, before every stone carving of a deity. Bare-chested priests were scurrying about, performing ablutions of idols large and small carved from the stone walls, taking offerings from devout visitors, or chanting alone to themselves. Children laughed and played. The overall effect was not unlike a county fair minus the corndogs and sno-cones.

The air inside was cool, still and humid, much like a deep earth cave. Oil lamps illuminated the temple’s darker recesses. Highlights included a cluster of musical pillars (each with a different tone) played ably by our priest-guide, and a twenty foot stone statue of Hanuman, the monkey god and servant of Lord Ram. Ram is Vishnu’s most famous incarnation (along with Krishna) and the protagonist of the Mahabarata, a Hindu epic. With a muscular human frame and monkey’s head, Hanuman is typically worshipped by athletes (he often holds an iron dumbell), service industry folks and fanatics of Ram.

Hinduism gets a bad rap because devotees ritualistically clothe, bathe and make offerings to their idols as if they were Barbie dolls or voodoo effigies. Superstition is a problem among lay practitioners, and worship is aimed at “getting something” (fertility, worldly goods, liberation from the cycle of rebirth, etc.). Hinduism also lacks a succinct set of instructions to direct right action (as does Buddhism, for instance), although the lives of Ram and Krishna serve this purpose to some extent. Except for Catholicism, Hinduism is unique in accepting living deities, holy men and gurus to guide and counsel worshippers, ascetic monks and pilgrims. This seems to liberate the practice of Hinduism from reliance on a given holy text (“The Word of God”), which could explain why it feels more vibrant and alive to me, given my Christian background with its intensely scriptural orientation.

I finally got my encounter with divinity. I wandered too close to the giant grinning Hanuman just as a priest dumped a bucket of ghee and jasmine flowers over his head high above. I was splattered with the fragrant goo of warm ghee, the purified butter used in Indian food and as fuel in votive lamps. It certainly wasn’t shit on the shoe, nor was it a whisper from a deity frozen in stone. Did it mean anything at all? Sure, I realized as I picked up my shoes leaving the temple. At the very least, it showed the force of gravity was alive and well here in the frenzied midst of religious fervor. Some things are above the vagaries of human faith. That’s cosmic indeed.

——-

[1] When asked whether Pakistan and India can reunite, 34% said ‘never’, 22% said ‘probably’, and 16% said ‘yes’ (28% ‘can’t say’). In a similar vein, 43% perceive Pakistan as the major block in the peace process, 24% think it is the US. Only 13% blame India. The Week, Aug. 19, 2007: www.the-week.com 

[2] Scroll through the filter blog India Uncut www.indiauncut.com for a quick apercu into the cultural and political banter of Delhi’s chattering classes.

[3] States with the least amount of extreme poverty (e.g., where the majority are literate and employed but functionally poor, like Kerala) attribute their success not to the IT boom but to remittances sent home by migrant workers in Gulf countries like Dubai. In Kerala, unskilled labor is done by Indians from poor states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. They can earn 75 rupees or two dollars a day in Kerala, 2000 miles from home, where they make 15-20 a day (40-50 cents).

My brother in law (BIL) needs just enough sugar to sweeten his three cups of coffee a day. Beyond that he can do away with sugar.

But BIL, the hedge fund manager, has always chewed candy to relieve the woes of wealth. And lately, with gyrating Wall Street and the stress of possibly losing it all, he is on a hedge-fund-melt-down-candy-binge; he has a bowl of jellybeans on his office desk, a basket of coffee bon-bons in his family room and a box of butter fingers in his car.

Over the years, his waist has expanded, the leather belt has slid down to his pubis and his blubber belly hangs over it. How did the sugar travel from the lips to settle on his hips?

Chemically speaking, BIL is in love with sucrose or saccharose – a sweet, water-soluble carbohydrate – commonly called sugar. The plants acquire their sweetness mainly from three carbohydrates: saccharose, fructose and glucose. The sweeteners often exist in combination; honey, for example, is a combination of all these three sugars. As sweetness goes, fructose is the sweetest of them all; about 173% percent sweeter than glucose while lactose is only 16% as sweet. Several hundred less sweet carbohydrates exist in plants, but none is of commercial value.

Edible carbohydrates generally occur in nature as a combination of two or more molecules. Sucrose is glucose plus fructose; lactose is glucose plus galactose. BIL also eats multi-molecular carbohydrates like starch and glycogen besides many others of more complex structure.

The digestive enzymes break the ingested carbohydrates into absorbable molecules; the enzymes in BIL’s saliva, stomach, pancreas and intestines cleave the carbohydrates into simpler single molecules, which the cells of intestinal lining transport into the blood stream. Next stop is the liver; which under the spell of floating chemicals can convert absorbed carbohydrates into glucose, amino acids and fats. Liver also stores glucose as glycogen, which is a readily available to maintain a steady glucose level in the blood.

Glucose, the final transformed form of almost all absorbed carbohydrates, is the main energy source for muscular activity and cellular metabolism. The tissues pick up glucose from the blood and utilize it in the presence of oxygen (aerobic) or sometimes in its absence (anaerobic) as during prolonged strenuous exercise. The metabolism of glucose produces energy rich phosphate bonds of ATP (adenosine triphosphate).

While fats can substitute as the energy provider for some organs, brain functions only on glucose. Its depletion can damage the brain. For survival, maintaining the blood glucose level with in a narrow range is the result of many interacting hormones. Insulin and glucagon take the lead in this balancing act. Pancreas secrets insulin in response to high blood glucose levels, which brings the sugar level down by pushing it into cells and also converting it into fat. Low blood sugar stimulates the pancreas to secret glucagons. Other hormones like ACTH and growth hormone from the pituitary, steroids from the adrenals interfere with the uptake of glucose by various tissues, thus maintaining the blood sugar level.

If BIL continues to binge, his insulin will fail to clear the blood of excess glucose – termed ‘insulin resistance’- which will trigger his pancreas to produce excessive amount of insulin, which may still not push the glucose into the cells. Now BIL has diabetes.

With continued over indulgence of calories, BIL progresses into a full-blown metabolic syndrome – a deadly combination of high cholesterol, diabetes, hypertension and obesity. It is likely his abdominal circumference will be more than forty inches, which classifies him as a veritable time bomb, ready to implode with stroke, heart attack or cancer.

BIL has to choose between debility and health. The simplest choice is to eat less, give up his job and join an NGO dealing with world hunger. But that also is the most difficult choice.

The other choice BIL can make is to substitute artificial sweeteners, which is useless unless he reduces eating all carbohydrates and other calories; sugar substitutes offer a false psychological comfort in the absence of reduced intake of calories. Cakes and cookies made with artificial sweeteners still carry a load of other carbohydrates. BIL should not worry about their safety. Common sugar substitutes, aspartame (NutraSweet, Equal), Saccharin (Sweet’N Low, SugarTwin), acesulfame K (Sunett, Sweet One) and sucralose (Splenda) are harmless in moderate amounts as suggested by the FDA.

BIL could make an extreme choice. What happens if BIL starves? In this unlikely and not-advisable scenario, he will not die – not right away – if he hydrates himself daily with about 3 liters of water. During the first 48 hours of starvation his liver will pump out glucose from stored glycogen; in about 72 hours he will start using accumulated fat as the primary source of energy. Utilization of fat will produce ketones, which will give him mild nausea and suppress his appetite. But the brain needs glucose, so he will break down his muscle protein and amino acids like alanine to manufacture new glucose. BIL has a reasonable chance to last a few weeks if he behaves like an IRA prisoner who starved himself to martyrdom in 37 days.

There will be one visible benefit, if he survives the ordeal: his belt will be a few inches tighter and it will move up where it really belonged.

I love the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles but, generally speaking, I think it’s pretty underappreciated. Sure, people know it. They recognize it, it’s generated it’s share  of buzz (let’s be honest, mostly not very positive). It has won the hearts of post-modernists and ironic architecture-appreciating hipsters during its various oscillations on the so-wacky-it’s-cool spectrum. But I think where it really earns the most points is in its sheer lack of apology or regret.

In April of 2006, initial renderings were released of Cesar Pelli’s third installment of the Pacific Design Center. The bright red building, which resembles a Star Wars ship going into hyperspace in freeze frame (or a 21st century Titanic ready to fight the icebergs back), will complete construction in 2009 and follows its equally brilliant predecessors with as much eyebrow-raising and eye-catching gusto, which is no small feat.

The first iteration of the Pacific Design Center was completed in 1975. It was, and remains, enormous at 245 feet wide by 530 feet long with over 750,000 square feet over seven stories. There are bigger buildings out there, certainly, but few in Los Angeles and certainly fewer in West Hollywood. The building wears a skin of ultra-reflective royal blue glass—most of which lets little light into the interior—and its shape has been described as a blow-up of an architectural molding. Given its scale, shape, color, and context, the building elicited its share of derision from local citizens, critics, and vocal enthusiasts alike. Los Angeles Times critic John Pastier—a figure most notable for getting fired after a series of columns criticized development in which the paper had political and financial interest—equated the building with a whale, a nickname which it has since held.

While perhaps not the most graceful or popular building on the block, the design center held its ground and stayed with little apology. So little, in fact, that in 1988 a second building called “Center Green” opened. Though smaller, at 450,000 square feet, the new building was equally noteworthy for its bold and colorful design—this time a deep forest green and dotted with pixel-like square windows of transparent glass. Its general aesthetic was in keeping with the original but its form and structure indicated a significant evolution of Pelli’s own work and reflecting his departure from Gruen Associates, where he left in 1976 to form his eponymous firm. Center Green blends the corporate orthogonality and rigid geometries of his world financial center (completed 1988) with the vocabulary of the earlier building.

Twenty-one years after the second the third should be completed. Given its site in L.A., one would imagine that this is the final leg of the trilogy. And like genre films, the Pacific Design Center has provided a fantastic allegory of architecture’s own development over the past three decades. By working in the same “style” of bright colors and loud geometric expressions (all three buildings don’t stray far from the exclamation point as their preferred punctuation) but with significant variation in design, Pelli has, with tremendous success, given us a history to experience physically and a narrative to hold on to.

And that’s no small feat in architecture, a profession plagued by apologies and regret. Rather than celebrating the brutalism of the 1960s or the corporatism of the 1970s and 80s, we are apologizing and trying to erase them. Boston’s City Hall, finished in 1968 by Kallmann, McKinnell and Knowles and one of my favorite buildings, is under threat because it doesn’t project the right image of what we want city hall to look like. We shouldn’t be allowed to revise history and ignore that there was a moment during which this is what our perception of city hall was.

The Pacific Design Center stayed against many odds, however. It was never hidden and never apologized for. It was instead expanded. Twice. It not only represents a moment in history—and its place in L.A.’s urban design history is important as it represented, against the wishes of Tom Bradley’s coalition for Downtown development, the continued economic success of the West side business district—but three distinct moments interwoven in a story that centers on one architect, and one vision spread over both his and his profession’s shifting ideologies.

Over the last few years, there has been a tremendous increase in global interest in biofuels, a term that refers, broadly, to transportation fuels derived from biomass.  Bill Gates, Richard Branson, British Petroleum, General Motors, most giant food companies, and countless other people and institutions haves dabbled in these fuels lately.

There is an enormous amount of news reports, analysis, discussion and media attention given to biofuels.  One is first struck by the incredible variety of opinions expressed on the matter; from over the top excitement hailing biofuels as the answer to all of the world’s environmental, economic, social and political problems, to severe criticism that views biofuels as an ultimate evil that will have a profoundly negative impact on forestation, food supply, poor-country economics and just about everything else.

I have been researching this topic for a while, and will attempt to use this column to lay out the (very rough) outlines of the current state of thinking on biofuels—this is, more or less, the local-bar-discussion version of my knowledge of biofuels.  I will attempt to provide a short (vastly over-generalized) assessment of the scientific literature on the issue, highlight future possibilities, and discuss how government policy is probably playing a negative role in this process—at least in two specific cases.

The biggest question in biofuels circles for the last few years has been concerning whether they are efficient or not (meaning: do they reduce our use of fossil fuels or use up more energy in their production than they give out when they are burned) and about what their environmental impacts might be.  Dozens—if not hundreds—of studies have been done to assess these two questions and have arrived at conclusions so contradictory they may as well have been totally random guesses by children.  I will not list those studies and attempt to critique them all, but will outline what I view as the conclusions drawn from assessing the most widely accepted and scrutinized results, dividing them by the type of biofuel assessed:

Corn ethanol seems to be a bad unsustainable idea which is only alive thanks to very generous government subsidies in America, which are estimated to be around a mind-boggling $1/gallon, as well as import tariffs that prevent ethanol from other countries from competing with American ethanol.  Environmentally, corn ethanol doesn’t seem to offer many benefits, but producing, manufacturing and distributing it may be more harmful to the environment than just using regular oil. Note that these results will probably not change if the price of oil goes up: oil itself, and many other fossil fuels, are used extensively to produce corn ethanol and a rise in their price will also increase the cost of producing corn ethanol, raising its price as well.  The survival of this brand of ethanol is almost exclusively due to the power of the farming lobby, and other special interest groups in America who ensure all the generous subsidies, as well as the fact that Iowa, the country’s main producer of corn is the first US state to hold Presidential primaries, making politicians eager to please its corn farmers for votes.

Sugarcane ethanol, which is mainly produced in Brazil, does seem to be a good idea that everyone is happy to endorse: it is efficient and it reduces CO₂ emissions.  However, most of the studies done on sugarcane are based on Brazilian production, and it is unlikely that conditions would be as favorable in other countries.  Secondly, most of the analysis of Brazilian sugarcane ignores fundamentally important issues: whether sugar cane replaces forests, indirectly replaces forests by displacing other crops which then displace forests, and whether its impact through land use change poses significant environmental damage. This will become a more important question with time as sugarcane production increases and encroaches on more and more land.

Cellulosic ethanol is to biofuels what Barack Obama is often portrayed as being to Democrats: the new shining hope that will fix everything and solve everyone’s problems.  Needless to say, there is cause for caution in both cases.  Cellulosic (often referred to as Second Generation) biofuels will mark a revolutionary way in producing biofuels, with whose technical details I will not bother for this piece. Everyone seems to agree it will be more efficient, cleaner, and able to produce much larger quantities of fuel; yet no one has perfected the industrial process that will be able to produce it en masse, and therefore, any estimates on its efficiency and environmental impact remain, until now, tenuous.  With enormous difficulties in measuring the environmental impacts of biofuels that have been produced for decades, it might be a tad over-optimistic to take at face value any estimates of the efficiency and impact of something that hasn’t been produced yet; similar, perhaps, to measuring the fuel-efficiency of the Flying Ferrari from your childhood dreams. I remain pretty skeptical about it until I see some more concrete evidence.

Biodiesel (usually produced from palm oil, soybean, jatropha or rapeseed) seems like a good idea initially, if one were to look at reduction in Carbon emissions and a basic energy balance. However, on closer inspection, one finds that it is usually a terrible environmental disaster in the making.  Nitrogen-based emissions, which also have a large impact on global warming, are produced at very high rates in biodiesel production. Further, in many locations where biodiesel is produced, it has caused massive deforestation, soil damage, environmental degradation, and species extinction. This remains the least researched of the biofuels, and new techniques and plant feedstocks are proposed every day, meaning that there might be possibilities for better applications of it.

It is important to note that these studies are inherently marred with enormous problems that might turn a skeptic away from even bothering with their results at all. Many of these studies have a bad methodology and employ some really egregious assumptions about certain parameters.  There is a long debate about what parameters are to be included, and how they are measured. Yet, even if one were to somehow overcome these methodological problems and find the “best” papers employing the most impeccable methodology, problems persist.  Even the “best” of these studies still employ a large number of assumptions and predictions of factors which are almost impossible to predict.  Everything from the future prices of oil, to the price of cattle feed to demand for oil and price of land is factored into these models, and extrapolated into the future with the swaggering certainty of the captain of the Titanic on the eve of its maiden voyage from Southampton.

Here, one could ask a very pertinent question: Why bother attempting to answer such difficult and laborious questions in universities and think-tanks and research centers?  The market system on its own can make decisions for us without someone anointing themselves as an all-knowing prescient central planner ready to predict for us everything from the price of oil to demand for cattle feed in 2030, a quest in which they will invariably fail.

Without subsidies, farmers will only produce what is economically efficient, and everyone will be better off, right? Not exactly.  The reason this wouldn’t really work in the case of biofuels (and in many cases related to environmental issues) is that the market can not (at least in its current state) factor in the all-important issues of environmental costs and benefits.  Biofuels would compete with oil purely on technical and economic grounds, and the issue of the environment will not factor in the market-decisions of rational actors in any way. This will ignore the environmental damage and produce an incentive to over-exploit fuels that would be harmful to the environment.

Here one would hope for public policy to attempt to make things better, or at least not make things worse.  A reasonable course of action would consider funding research into biofuels, since if some of their benefits do materialize, a good argument could be made that these benefits are public goods for which subsidy might be appropriate.  Another avenue would be to set the regulatory and economic framework for the fuel market to take into account the environmental benefits and damages accruing from biofuels to assure an incentive for producing the cleanest and most economic forms of fuel.

Unfortunately, public policy seems to be doing the exact opposite: aggravating all the bad aspects of biofuels production and providing incentives for everything but good energy and environmental policy.  There are two main policies that I refer to here, and they are common in America and Europe: the subsidizing of biofuel production and the issuing of mandates for a certain percentage of biofuels to be used in transportation fuels.

When production of biofuels is subsidized, governments are practically taking a product which the markets says is inefficient and forcing its production, without much knowledge of whether this increase does indeed have any benefits worth subsidizing, and without even a clear knowledge of whether this subsidy will lead to an incentive to innovate better biofuels, or to promote lethargy among producers whose incentive shifts to lobbying for more subsidies rather than innovation.

But perhaps what is more egregious than subsidies are the mandates forcing a certain level of biofuels to be blended in with regular fuel.  The most important of these regulations is the EU directive stipulating a 5.75% share of biofuels in transport fuels by 2010. What this effectively does is encourage the production of any type of biodiesel worldwide to meet the needs of the EU market, with total disregard to their environmental impact.  As European demand for biodiesel sky-rockets, the production of the dirtiest and most polluting biodiesel in the world is encouraged, along with all that that entails in deforestation, emissions, and environmental destruction.  This is most pronounced in Indonesia and Malaysia, where Orangutans are facing a real threat of extinction from encroaching palm oil farming for biodiesel.  The EU will be reducing CO2 emissions coming out of its own cars, but in exchange, probably increasing emissions in other places that supply the biofuels as well increasing deforestation and harming ecosystems.

The incentives from such policies are a textbook example of the law of unintended consequences, and of how government can so often make things worse when attempting to make them better.  The original goal of these policies, addressing global warming and environmental damage, has been replaced with the tool that was supposed to address them: biofuels.  These laws have converted the means into the ends, and while concentrating on producing legislation that convinces voters that the government is “doing something” about global warming, are instead possibly producing more global and far-reaching damage to the environment.

Far better for all involved (except the producers benefiting from subsidies) would be for governments to get out of subsidizing production and placing mandates, but instead make sure that the market for all fuels internalizes the costs of the environmental damage that they produce.  This would provide actors in the global fuel marketplace with the incentive to look for the fuels most efficient economically and environmentally, and allow the market and the collective wisdom of millions of decision makers to arrive at the best outcome.  The most obvious way of doing this would be to press ahead with plans for a global market for carbon emissions.

When that happens, maybe biofuels will really turn out to be the panacea that will save humanity, or maybe we will find out that they are a completely pointless, expensive and counter-productive invention and that we would all be better off utilizing other forms of energy.  It is impossible to be able to answer this question now, no matter how good the data and the methodology employed.  We are much better off remaining agnostic and skeptical; and working to ensure that a system exists that allows the market itself to answer this question clearly.

It is important to note, however, that a lot of the environmental damage that comes from biofuels’ (and all other fuels’) production is not restricted to carbon emissions, but also extends to issues of biodiversity, water pollution, habitat destruction, air pollution, and countless other issues, all of which would not be captured in a market for Carbon.  Addressing these issues is no mean feat, but would probably be best achieved through mechanisms that internalize the price of positive and negative externalities into production, allowing the market to decide on what is economically, socially and environmentally optimal.

Two stupid wars and no new racial slurs; no caricature of our enemies to destroy reluctantly, decisively, with a passing smile of satisfaction; no black toothed turban wearing Shiite-Sunni-Kurdish amalgam, a bomb belt so naturally on his waist it looks fashionable, to scare our children with; no super bad leader for only the most perverted boy to play during backyard battle reenactments; no one for the cab driver of yore to curse. Another George Bush failure? Of course my imperialist Yankee satanist reader. By taking on terror! instead of a peoples, our strain of retarded president has robbed the English language of the easily siphoned and spread froth at the top of war time rhetoric that makes killing other humans easy to accept.

I have heard, never convincingly, “towel head”, “a-rab”, the significantly more insulting to our own intelligence “sand coon”. None fits as snuggly, gives that reassuring condom-just-on snap of our earlier enemies: the japs and krauts, charlie and the evil empire, the almost fifty years of reds, commies and the effeminate pinkos. In 2002, left uncomfortable by the wet kiss on the cheek of a plea to humanism we took on France, the easiest target of all. In New York, normally a tan-o-rama of liberal rays, I witnessed adults pouring French wine into a sewer grate across the street from the Guggenheim (fine looking stuff too, and my baster at my mother’s). Back then my job took me to the courts downtown and few clerks’ yellow walls did not have the New York Post cover with Osama bin Laden’s picture bracketed in old Western style font by “wanted dead or alive” the “alive” forever sharpied out.

Osama bin Laden, bearded, making pronouncements and mixtapes from caves, himself the entire cassette tape market, shuffled out of a comic book, the best bad guy since Hitler and, of course, we did not catch him and probably never will and he might be dead and lives on anyway like the lifelong scar from a drunken fight we should have won and do not want to talk about. Moktada al-Sadr is even more painless to make a caricature of. His teeth are very nasty. He is turbaned and has his own evil private army. Where bin Laden is musing and sedated, al-Sadr is angry and brutish. But, al-Sadr is a weight watchers slice in the shit pie eating contest for one we were dared into. We cannot point to him anymore than we can the ambulance chasers and salesmen types of the Iraqi government or the faceless heads of terrorist splinter groups.

Six years of fighting abstraction has also robbed us of the geography lesson war previously afforded, the latitudinal lines and cities with strange names that become part of our language. We have no new glorious history lesson in the making pulling at the rope through our national identity, coated in victories, taught with measured rightness.

We ignore the din increasing in size and volume: Muslims pointing to baroque Zionist conspiracies, Israelis certain of genetic Arab flaws, Russians kicking Uzbek produce vendors out of Moscow, the 700,000 Mugabe displaced out of Zimbabwe’s capitol to “drive out trash”, every new academic who really believes that the holocaust did not happen, the thousand other caricatures that make what almost all deplore bearable to societies, all united by one image of Americans as belligerent fools, destructively and begrudgingly on their way out.

Talking to people of different opinions is nice, but equally essential to a democracy is the right to stand across from people you disagree with and scream at them and call them names with few repercussions beyond a bruise to the ego from a well placed quip, and with the expectation that one’s earnest screaming, if loud and persuasive enough, can have an impact. Most Americans are privileged enough that the majority of their opinions are formed from hypothetical scenarios. (My opposition to the death penalty does not answer the question supporters of it often ask, “if someone killed your family, wouldn’t you want that person to be killed too?” because no one in my family, or most Americans families, has been murdered.) With all the post 9/11 flags and pro-USA graffiti on overpasses, I figured a couple of years of self-assured slurring was inevitable. Few protests have stopped the start of a war, but at least I could assume my place across from the kind of aggression I believe foolish to passionately bleed my heart out, to yell and try to swing the rightness in question of the war in my direction.

Warmongering months passed. I had less and less to say. The flag waving reached a stasis. A war that cannot be won or stopped, that is not engaging or inspiring, hatched, fledged and flown by crazy men, has robbed all sides of meaningful convictions (this essay too has a place in the heap of irrelevance). Walmart sized generalizations about Muslims only muddle and distract. Soldiers and soldiers’ families suffer. We stare at inkblots of our own silhouettes, saying, “I don’t know. A dinghy? You tell me.”

A side point, connected. Please watch the following trailer for the upcoming fourth installment of Rambo. A quick synopsis for those who cannot watch the clip follows.

John Rambo is living on his own in Bangkok (good place to typecast a 16-year-old boy, girl or ladyboy into the imagination), monk-like, salvaging PT boats and tanks to turn to scrap metal. A missionary group he escorts up river, which includes a hot blond, is heading into Burma to save the Karen people from genocide. The missionary group is captured by Burmese soldiers. Rambo goes in to save them and kills a whole lot, I mean seriously a whole lot, of Burmese because, as he puts it, “when your pushed, killing’s as easy as breathing.” For those who are unsure from the clip he does not punch that guy’s head off, he has a knife, but it looks like he punches the head off. Rambo and the blond are the only ones to make it out, end of story.

The movie, despite youtube member skinheadben’s assertion that, “this is what America needs . . . knife decapitating action [to] put a little steal in hippies spine,” begs the question valtheon asks, “what’s Rambo doing all the way over there? He should be in Iraq”. He adds, I am not sure what he means, “lol”. Aoenflux67, a prolific Amazon reviewer of ancient historical fantasy books, answers, “too politically incorrect for Hollywood wussies to consider Iraq now. Burma only scrapes in because no one cares about it.” Too true, Mr. or Ms. Flux67. Even Rambo, long disturbing PSA for war time PTSD, who went into Vietnam to save POWs and to Afghanistan to help the same men who became the Taliban, would not know who to fight, whose throat to rip with his hands, which men to turn to sauce from the close range of a 50-something caliber machine gun. Too bad, some could have used him.

(The movie, in a nod to the times we live in, does feature a mercenary who was a marine that completed three tours of Iraq. He is black and dies swiftly.)

Farrokh Bulsara was born in 1946 in the British colony of Zanzibar (now part of Tanzania). His parents were Zoroastrians (Parsis) from India. As a boy he was sent back to India to attend boarding school in Bombay. He did very well in studies, was a competitive boxer, and also learned to play the piano–even participating in a 5-person band called The Hectics. He graduated from St. Mary’s High School, and then moved to England where he obtained a degree in Art and Graphic Design from Ealing Art College. In 1970 he joined a failing rock band in London named Smile when their lead singer quit, renaming the band in the process.

I first encountered his music when I happened to move from Pakistan to the United States in September of 1975 at age 11 for almost two years, and immediately upon my arrival was completely taken, as was all of America and much of the rest of the world at the time, by a song that Bulsara wrote and sang with his rock group. Interestingly, and though I did not know this until recently, among his important musical influences, Bulsara has cited the legendary Bollywood playback singer Lata Mangeshkar. My own infatuation with Bulsara and his music has well-outlasted his tragic death of AIDS in 1991 at the age of 45, and I remain, like many others, including, of course, Wayne and Garth, a lifelong devotee. You probably know Bulsara better as Freddie Mercury (recently voted, once again, the best rock singer of all time). The name he gave his band was Queen. And the 1975 song I mention above is, of course, “Bohemian Rhapsody” (recently voted again: best rock song of all time).

Okay, before anything else, just watch and listen to this:

While writing this short tribute I listened to many Queen songs turned up very loud on my quite powerful sound system (to the chagrin of my thin-walled upper-west-side-of-Manhattan neighbors), and as I was listening to this live version of “Under Pressure,” I found myself suddenly and shockingly but not completely unpleasantly reconnected with the remaining hormone-drenched vestiges of my teenage self, standing up (ridiculously alone!) in my living room to accompany Brian May with a spastic air guitar, then getting more and more emotional at the mostly-inscrutable-yet-movingly-poetic lyrics, until the unbearable and insane buildup when Freddie is singing “Insanity laughs, under pressure we’re breakin’…” and then by the time, a second later, when he sings “Can’t we give ourselves one more chance… Why can’t we give love that one more chance… Why can’t we give love… give love… give love… give love… give love… give love… give love… give love… give love,” I felt like I was in a trance. If you don’t believe me, try hooking up your computer to a decent sound system, and then just sit there and play the song!

By the way, during an early Queen concert Freddie’s mic stand broke in half and he continued carrying the broken half around. Later, this became a trademark style of his.

Among other things, Queen were a particularly well-educated rock band: all four members held college degrees, and as we reported here, Brian May recently turned in a Ph.D. dissertation at Imperial College in astrophysics. He defends it on August 23rd.

Freddie Mercury displayed an energy and dynamism and theatricality and showmanship in live performances which is truly awesome. Queen were the most important forerunner (and later practioners) of stadium rock, and Freddie Mercury actively engaged even large audiences and often made them participants in the music. The a capella playful vocal beginning of the video above reminds me of the immensely talented Pakistani vocalist and qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan who like our friend Freddie had immense vocal range and liked just playing around with his amazing voice–just because he could. Queen taylored some of their music for large stadiums, hence it is not surprising that some of their songs (“We Will Rock You,” “We Are the Champions”) have turned into worldwide sports anthems. This is from the Live Aid concert in 1985:

Freddie mercury and Montserrat Caballé live:

And, of course, Bohemian Rhapsody:

All my previous Monday Musings can be seen here.

Have a good week!

I write you now from a sand dune in Michigan, an entirely new state for me. I’m on an oxbow-shaped lagoon near Saugatuck, and when I first heard that name the Simon and Garfunkel song America got immediately stuck in my head: “it took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw / I’ve gone to look for America…,” just replace Saginaw with Saugatuck (something a native Michiganer would likely never do).

I suppose I’ve been looking for America since childhood, and now that I go abroad for a few weeks each summer the search has taken on new forms. When I was a kid my brother and I collected state magnets on family trips; our refrigerator became quite full, but—symptom of being born on one of the coasts—there remained huge gaps in the middle, between the parentheses of the western and eastern coasts. I now call these magnets a part of my former “checklist” approach to looking for America.

On my travels I’ve encountered many others who are also looking for America. A teaching assistantship at a summer arts institute brought me to this particular sand dune, and last night I met the class; during introductions one of the students, Jeong-Suk, said her name but then explained that her name (her “other” name, her “real” name now) is Christin, pronounced “Kristin.” The professor I’m working with was highly bothered by this; I see it as an understandable attempt at assimilation, and Jeong-Suk/Christin is clearly well on her way to finding her America.

It’s a lot like the quintessentially American summer camp here; much like the one I went to as a kid, but without those weird songs that I never understood until years later, when I figured out they were religious—“Morning is here, the board is spread, thanks be to God, who gives us bread…”. It had never occurred to me that saying grace before a meal had to do with divine grace. I suppose such sayings predate the addition of “under God” to our hotly contested national pledge. In any case, the search for America cannot overlook its various religions, no matter how much you might prefer it to.

After being out of the country for six weeks, on the eight-hour flight home (after entertaining the idea of a movie, but declining because I was undecided between two US- and UK productions, Blades of Glory and 28 Weeks Later) I got to thinking about just why I’d followed such a crazy itinerary this summer, London–Sisteron–Milan–Palermo–Rome–Oxford–Saugatuck. Absorbing so much in so little time is absolutely impossible. There’s always the reason of work—clients to meet with, research to do, old texts to complete and new ones to begin—but it takes more than that to get me on a plane (or six) now that massive delays and lost luggage have become the norm. Aside from visiting friends, going to their weddings, and attending an annual papermakers’ conference, I realized this search was one of the things driving me.

The bell has just rung to begin the half-hour countdown to breakfast and class. It reminds me of the oversize, wrought iron triangle that hung on our back porch, which my mother would ring to call us in from summertime evening games in neighbors’ back yards. In the Simon and Garfunkel song, arriving in Pittsburgh Paul reflects on where he’s come from: “Michigan seems like a dream to me now…”. It does to me, too. I’ve never been happier to have gone looking for—and return, however temporarily to—America.

Previous Lunar Refractions can be read here.

When Abbas offered me the keys to the liquor cabinet here, he asked that I write about science — which was just as well, because I don’t know about anything else.  I barely know anything about science, either, but perhaps what distinguishes science from other pursuits is exactly that: the average practitioner’s willingness to be overwhelmingly honest about what they know, and how tenuous a grasp they have on even that little knowledge.    When I look around at science writing, a lot of it seems to pander to my earliest ideas about science: namely, that science is a place to go for answers.  Good science writing also tells about how the answers were found, and really good science writing gives a sense of how secure (or otherwise) those answers may be, but for all that the emphasis is on answers.  To me, and I think to most working scientists, that’s largely backwards — because science as practiced is mostly about questions.

So for this month’s column and the next, I thought I would just do some thinking in public, about a problem that has come to my attention.  Not all problems are scientific in nature, that is, amenable to a solely scientific solution; but the methods and cast of thought that we associate with science can bring information to bear on at least some aspects of most problems.  Science seems to me to be necessary but not sufficient for the solution of most of the important problems facing our species.

Background: Chemists Without Borders

Chemists Without Borders began with a letter from Bego Gerber to the editor of Chem & Eng News:

Thank you for an excellent article regarding carbohydrate vaccines (C&EN,   Aug. 9, page 31). On page 35, John B. Robbins is quoted as saying that Salmonella typhi is “the best typhoid vaccine that’s ever been made …   vaccines don’t make much money. The Vi conjugate vaccine is so revolutionary, and typhoid is such a common and serious disease around the world, but no manufacturer in  the U.S. or Europe is interested in it.” Is this still true? If so, shame on us. What stand will the American Chemical Society take to catalyze implementation of such a vaccine?

Could this be our “Chemists Without Frontiers,” à la “Médicins Sans Frontières?”

Bego and co-founders Steve Chambreau and Lacy Brent are not the first to decide that doctors should not be the only profession without borders.  There are also Laywers, Teachers, Sociologists, Builders, Engineers, Clowns and I daresay a good many other Professions Without Borders.  All of them seek to do, within their own fields of expertise, something roughly on par with the mission of MSF. So really, the name of the organization largely explains what CWB are about:

Chemists Without Borders is a public benefit, non-profit, international humanitarian organization designed to alleviate human suffering through the use of proven chemical technologies and related skills. Our primary goals include, but are not limited to, providing affordable medicines and vaccines to those who need them most, supplying clean water in developing countries, facilitating sustainable energy technologies, and supporting chemistry education.

I became aware of CWB through their commitment to Open Chemistry, and then by taking part in their conference call series I learned about their interest in groundwater arsenic remediation, which is the problem I want to think about here.

The Problem: Groundwater Arsenic

Element number 33 in the periodic table, arsenic (As) is a greyish metalloid solid at room temperature.  It’s a common constituent of the earth’s crust, and is readily leached into groundwater from a variety of minerals.  It’s tasteless and odorless — and it’s both toxic and carcinogenic. The effects of chronic arsenic poisoning are complex and interact strongly with genetic and environmental factors, and (especially in the case of cancers) usually take at least 10-15 years to manifest.  Symptoms include pigment changes, hyperkeratosis and cancerous lesions of the skin, cancer of the lungs, kidneys, liver, prostate and urinary bladder, peripheral vascular degeneration (which may lead to gangrene), peripheral neurophathy (which may include partial paralysis), anemia and leukopenia.  In addition, arsenic is a teratogen, and chronic exposure of a population can lead to increased incidence of spontaneous abortion and congenital malformations.

The World Health Organization Guidelines for Drinking Water Quality include a provisional target of 0.01mg/l for safe drinking water.  By this criterion, and even by the earlier WHO target of 0.05 mg/l, there are dangerously contaminated groundwater sources in, inter alia, Argentina, Bangladesh, Chile, China, India, Mexico, Thailand and the USA (recent review here). Of these risk areas, Bangladesh has attracted particular attention, not only because of very high arsenic levels in parts of the groundwater supply but because widespread reliance on this water supply, and the concomitant public health disaster, appears to be the direct result of overseas aid:

In the 1970s, international agencies headed by the United Nations Children’€™s Fund (UNICEF) began pumping millions of dollars of aid money into Bangladesh for tubewells to provide clean drinking water. According to the World Health Organization, the direct result has been the biggest outbreak of mass poisoning in history. Up to half the country’s tubewells, now estimated to number 10 million, are poisoned.

Tubewells are narrow bore, drilled, pump-operated wells designed to access relatively shallow aquifers; millions of these wells were dug as a response to the region’s abnormally high infant mortality rate, much of which was attributed to microbial contamination of surface water. 

In 2000, the WHO estimated that between 35 and 77 million of Bangladesh’s 125 million inhabitants were at risk from arsenic-laden water.  A 2003 paper estimated that current contamination levels could be expected to cause “600,000 cases of keratosis, 125,000 cases of skin cancer, and 3000 fatalities per year from internal cancers”, and in 2004 further studies demonstrated that a large proportion of groundwater supplies throughout the Ganga-Meghna-Brahmaputra Plain may be contaminated, putting at risk a total population of well over 450 million.  These numbers put the Asian arsenic crisis at the head of any list of public health disasters, dwarfing Bhopal or Chernobyl.

Tune in next time

In keeping with my claim that scientists tend to be overwhelmingly honest, I will now confess that not only have I run out of time, I have not finished reading for the rest of this article.  Already, however, one can see a number of questions to which various sciences can perhaps provide answers:

•     Geology, chemistry: where does the As come from?  How much of it is there, and where is it going?  
•     Chemistry: how can As be removed from water supplies?  
•     Biology: is there a better way to remove As?  
•     Chemistry, biology: would it be better to return to surface water supplies and deal with waterborne disease in other ways?  
•     Sociology: how do we get the actual people affected to adopt and maintain various solutions?  

Next month, I’ll do my best to find answers to these, and whatever other questions occur to me along the way.  As always, please use the comments to let me know what I’ve missed or got wrong.

….

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

Elatia Harris

In the studio on his farm in Manchester, Michigan, Keith Hill makes musical instruments, has done for 35 years.  Until recently, most of those instruments were harpsichords played by professional musicians all over the world.  But then he began questing for the maker’s grail – a violin from his own hands to equal those of Antonio Stradivari and Giuseppe Guarneri.  It’s a long quest, and he has plenty of company.  For the secrets of the great violin makers of Cremona have, famously, never been penetrated, and the attempt to make an instrument sounding that gorgeous has been the fruitless life’s work of countless luthiers in the 250 years since Giuseppe Guarneri made his last.

How is it that Keith Hill could be the maker who gets there?  And how close has he already come?  That’s what I wanted to look into, intrigued that instruments made by some of our era’s most illustrious luthiers do not sound necessarily better than much cheaper mass-produced violins.  Why not?  When physics, mechanics and acoustics have been brought to bear on Cremona violins, and luthiers spare nothing of craft to copy them, creating instruments capable of extreme optical seduction.  And yet, what goes missing is the sound – characteristic, authoritative and ravishing.

Over several years, and more recently, over several focused conversations, Keith Hill and I have talked about the approaches that makers have taken to reclaiming the lost art.  In the world of violin making, Hill is not just a particularly fastidious maker, but a real maverick who conceives of his task differently than others, and is – to use a term that weighs heavily with him — prepared in his imagination for a different result.

EH: What do you think happened between the time of the great makers — Amati, Stradivari, Guarneri — and the present time for their methods to be such a puzzle to modern makers?

KH: The modern frame of reference happened, and it takes some doing to know the world as a maker of the 17th century would have known it. This includes thinking about acoustics from a completely different point of view. There was a huge shift in the whole basis of scientific culture between the 17th and 18th centuries – towards observation, verifiablility and mathematical proof.  Science began to be dominated by the eye.  Before that, science was closer to what we think of as alchemy, with one favorite activity of a scientist being to draw correlations between everything in the universe.  A musical instrument was a microcosm, governed by Pythagorean ratios and proportions, and before attempting to understand the makers’ way of doing things, it’s necessary to remember that the great violins got their start in the time just before Galileo.

EH: And that the last of the great makers had died before the Enlightenment got underway?

KH: That’s right.  The instruments we’re talking about came from the workshops of three makers in Cremona, between the final years of the 16th century and the first half of the 18th century.  The first was Andrea Amati, who invented the violin as we know it, but the best of the Amati line was his grandson Nicolo, the teacher of both Antonio Stradivari and Andrea Guarneri.  Stradivari was almost 40 by the time he went out on his own in 1680. He was active for a very long time, until the late 1730’s, and extremely productive — he averaged about 25 violins a year, compared to 3 or 4 a year from a good maker today.  Stradivari’s workshop, but not his genius, passed to his two sons. Giuseppe Guarneri “del Gesu” was the grandson of Andrea – the top of the line and rather short-lived.  He died in his 40’s only a few years after Stradivari, in 1744.  So these were family businesses, with the greatest instruments produced by Antonio Stradivari and Giuseppe Guarneri in the early 1700’s.

EH: What would a violinist today be thinking about in choosing one of these instruments over another?

KH: A violinist is always going to be thinking of the best-sounding and most playable instrument he can find for the money — whatever the money. And even among the best of the best, there is something to choose.  A Guarneri “del Gesu” is about twice as loud as a Strad. It has vocal qualities, whereas a Strad has qualities that are more organ-like.  So it’s apples and oranges.  And of course these instruments don’t change hands very often.  Fritz Kreisler, Jascha Heifetz and Yehudi Menuhin played Guarneri “del Gesu” violins.  Itzak Perlman was playing a Strad in the 1970’s, but he also owns a Guarneri “del Gesu.” By the way, the term “del Gesu” comes from Giuseppe Guarneri’s personal label, which incorporated the intitials I-H-S.  It’s how you tell — from looking, that is — his violins from others of his shop.

EH: What about the differences between them from the modern maker’s point of view?

KH: It’s important to me that Amati used non-harmonic ratios – minor thirds, perfect fourths, minor sixths, and so on. Whereas Stradivari pioneered the shift to harmonic ratios and knew how to tune wood perfectly.  But it’s pretty easy on a Strad to squeak when you play.  When I discovered the connection between tuning with harmonic ratios and the ease of squeaking, and the difficulty caused by these ratios to the ease of speech of the string, I called the effect “distortion resistance.” And Guarneri worked very hard to overwhelm that, which increases the playability of his violins.

EH: It’s interesting you don’t say a thing about the differences in how these instruments appear. Is it important what a violin looks like?

KH: No, but that’s what later makers have fixated on anyway.  The great violins do present different appearances.  An Amati is a gorgeous-looking violin.  Stradivari had a very good eye.  A Guarneri violin can show a certain indifference to craft, although that’s not always the case.  By the 1690’s, Strads had found their way to all the ports of Europe, and they are certainly beautiful-looking instruments.  Within 10 to 20 years, Stradivari’s reputation had taken hold securely, and within 100 years of that the demand had taken off.  So copies of Strads and Guarneri violins had become common by the late 18th and early 19th centuries.  If you’re copying, you’re relying on your eyes – the more exact people can see that your copy is, the better for you.  Not everyone who could afford a copy of a Strad had actually heard one played, but they’d heard of it, and knew it ought to look like a rare, fine thing. This is when a cabinet making approach began to dominate violin making, and the level of craft a maker could bring to an instrument decided its value. It’s still that way, with Strad copies taking months to make and looking very close to a real Strad costing lots of money on that basis alone.

EH: Something is wrong with this picture…

KH: It is. This is because a violin isn’t an artifact that looks a certain way to please your eyes, and when you make one you shouldn’t be testing it with your eyes but with your ears – just as you test the worth of a recipe by taste, and not by how the dish looks when it’s presented.

EH: But looks aside – why isn’t the whole point of all that craft to make a great-sounding violin?  One that rivals or matches the great violins in sound?

KH: If that were the whole point, it would have been done by now, and many reasons have been given by makers why their violins do not come up to that level – lack of the right woods, the right varnish, the right number of decades for their violins to age to have a shot at sounding like a Strad.  If time was what it took, Guarneri “del Gesu” violins would not have come into their own for decades after Giuseppe Guarneri died, and Strads would not have been coveted all over Europe within 10 years of Stradivari setting up his own shop.  It’s true, even a great violin has to be played-in to sound wonderful, but that can be brought about in a matter of days. We have the choice of wood the great makers had, and then some.  But we don’t even use some – like willow – that they did use.  As for varnish, it really can be a tricky affair, but myths about holy varnish should be disregarded, because the violin has to be a great-sounding violin before it is varnished.  If it isn’t, no varnish will make it so.

EH: You sound like you had a lot of trial and error yourself.

KH: Enough to eliminate a great many false paths.

EH: So, if it’s not the wood, and not the varnish, and not the years, and if makers like the lady with all the machines and meters and earphones in that classic Nova episode “Secrets of the Great Violins” haven’t gotten close –

KH: That’s Carleen Hutchins.  She’s very committed to her own approach, which she believes is a scientific one, and she’s trained many students to do the work the way she does it.  The fact that she is shown on Nova in her workshop “tuning” a plate using the tone generator and wearing ear protectors says just about everything regarding her approach.  To me, the notion of building a musical instrument without the benefit of hearing is…well, what can I say?

EH: Then how do you even get on the path to go after these secrets?

KH:  By not conceiving of them as secrets, to start with. Contrary to popular opinion, there were no secrets in the musical instrument workshops of the 17th and 18th century makers. This is because everyone knew just about the same things as everyone else, and left to his own devices in the privacy of his studio each maker developed personal habits and ways of doing things that were distinctive and even unique.  A maker who had some special knack for making a wonderful sound was merely considered more talented, just like today. So the main question is, what did the best makers of the past know about how to make a wonderful sound that we don’t seem to know? To answer this question, you need to know how they thought about sound.

EH: And you have some ideas about that…

KH: I have made some discoveries about how the great makers may have considered acoustics so as to build sound the way they did.  It takes into account a worldview that has been eclipsed, scientifically speaking, but is no less accurate now than then, when applied to the making of musical instruments. Modern science has been just about useless in that pursuit, if the idea is to make a great violin that can speak to us as the great violins of the past do.  For that, we need to go straight to what the great makers knew.

EH: Something that’s kind of mystical?

KH: No, just something about the way they saw the world.  For instance, I observed about 25 years ago that nature constructs living organisms and tunes the parts of their structure to pure musical ratios — this is what the ancient makers must have known.  Our bones, then, are tuned to pure musical ratios that are part of the harmonic series, and it is the complex of these harmonic ratios in the various bones that makes each of our voices unique. The ancient musical instrument makers then figured out how to “build” these musical ratios into all the parts of their instruments and the results were musical instruments that sound like human voices. This way of thinking is what was lost shortly after the death of Antonio Stradivari and Giuseppe Guarneri, as makers became fixated on mass production methods and lost touch with the other practices of their traditional acoustical infrastructure.

EH: This is where there have to be similarities between your work and that of Stradivari and Guarneri – in the acoustical infrastructure.

KH: My work is entirely based on acoustical principles, not on copying the appearances of violins that the great violinists have come to love, respect and covet.  If my violins bear any similarity to the work of Giuseppe Guarneri, it is not because I copied one of his violins, it is because, in a manner of speaking, I copied his mind-set.

EH: The better to make the same discoveries he did?

KH:  Exactly. There are principles that I have discovered, learned, intuited, or received from one or two researchers in the field who had a good idea. But I base my designs mostly on my own discoveries about how the sound of the violin can be enhanced. When I discover a way to enhance the sound of my violins, I try to inspect a great antique violin to notice if that same idea was used by any of the great antique makers.  When I can observe that the great makers used that same idea in their making, I know that I have found yet another piece of the puzzle. When I put all the discoveries together in a single expression – in my design for a violin, that is — it will usually end up looking exactly like a 17th to 18th century Cremona violin.  If I am missing a piece of the puzzle, then I can see and hear and feel the differences when I compare my work directly to a great antique violin.  And the closer I get to a sound that compares with a Strad or a Guarneri “del Gesu” violin, the more obvious the perceptual “holes” become.

EH: Why is that?

KH: Because anytime you enhance the perception of a thing you enhance everything about it, including all its defects. Sometimes the perceptual “holes” are of such a nature that the idea, concept or principle needed the fill the hole is really elusive.  This is especially true about the violin, and it’s why the solution to the problem of how the ancient makers built sound has universally managed to elude makers, ever since the18th century.

EH: I noticed that Richard Tognetti, the music director of the Australian Chamber Orchestra, was recently made a long term loan of a Guarneri “del Gesu” violin – the “Carrodus” – but that’s a 10.5 million dollar instrument the likes of which very few even fabulously gifted violinists will ever get to play.  Are you making instruments with them in mind?

KH:  No. It is not enough to build something that is good enough to satisfy even a great musician because too often even the greatest musicians will be impressed and satisfied if an instrument works well enough to play music on, and sounds good enough not to annoy or irritate the sensitive ear, and is suggestive enough of good sound for them to imagine enjoying playing it again.  I asked Isaac Stern to play my first violin – not because I wanted to know what he thought of it, but because I wanted to know what I thought of it being played by him.

EH: Okay! What did you think when you heard Isaac Stern playing your first violin?

KH: It sounded pretty good – no thanks to the violin. We are talking here about the difference between musicianship and building sound. If you have the musicianship, you can compensate very well for a less-than instrument.  For me, that is not good enough, and if I was forced to build instruments of that calibre, I would rather do something that makes tons of money much faster than violin making.  It is only good enough to build a sound that totally inspires the souls of players and listeners.  That is my standard.  If this standard is so high that it will always be out of my reach, I can live with that and die in the process of solving the puzzle.  But both Stradivari and Guarneri knew how to consistently create instruments that inspire the souls of men, so it is not an unreachable goal.  My task is to avoid being influenced by the expectations of the culture at large – and this includes players of genius.

EH: Sounds a little lonely out there.

KH: Sometimes I relate to that very old movie about Pasteur. Everyone who disagreed with Pasteur was utterly convinced they were doing good work, and that he was the one on the wrong track.

EH: So, where are you in the quest to build that sound?

KH: Well, you’re asking at an interesting time.  Just in the last two years my own estimation of my violins has significantly increased in proportion to how close they sound to what I’m after.  But they aren’t 100% there yet, although my last violin is especially close.  I’m not interested in showing these violins to concert artists just yet, even though I know that at this point they are better than the best 19th century violins, and better even than the second-best 18th century Italian ones.  Having the reputation of a maker who aspires to equal the great makers of Cremona does not interest me.  I have to determine for myself that my violins are indisputably among the best of the best, and when I do that, I will have built sound ready for the best players.

EH: How easy is it to isolate what’s still missing?

KH: I listen simultaneously for many, many qualities in the tone of the violin, and I listen to assess its playability. The more you can discern these numerous criteria for judging an instrument, the better you will know which are missing from your own.  I continuously ask myself not only what is missing, but what is missing from my violins that is not missing from the greatest violins of the great period.  Right now I’m working on a component I call directness.

EH: How do you define directness?

KH: Well, it’s the absence of indirection.  The difference between suggesting a point and making a point truthfully, with immediacy, and without regard to how it will be received. And it’s a quality that is both wide and focused.

EH: You can tune for such a quality?

KH: What I found recently was the precise cause for that effect and I can now produce it reliably on each instrument I make.  Before that, I was working on the effect of velvetiness. 

EH: How would you describe velvetiness?

KH: When you hear mellifluousness in a voice, what that translates to in a violin is velvetiness.  It’s the complete absence of anything harsh or grating.  It’s soft to the touch, but intense to perception. It’s like velvet in that it really calls attention to itself, and can’t be mistaken for anything else.

EH: How many qualities of this type do you listen for?

KH: At my webpage on how to evaluate or judge violins, I have a list of criteria with 33 traits that anyone listening to a violin can learn to hear in the sound of just about any great violin.  Yet, I suspect there are more that I have yet to isolate in the sound of the antique violins.  As soon as I am aware of them I will be able to figure out exactly how to build those remaining traits into my violins.

EH: This reminds me of the distinctions that perfumers make – they describe scent fluently in ways that most of us would never have imagined being able to apprehend it. 

KH: If you’re talking about mastery, you can only control what you can articulate for yourself – not necessarily for others, but for yourself.  Horowitz really analyzed the business of touch – he had around 30 different touches for the piano.  He obviously didn’t think that was more than he needed.

EH: Do you think other people can learn to build their violins for these effects? 

KH: I know they can, but they do need to have normal hearing, not less.  My recent Internet friend Pierre Leiba plays the violin and is a mechanical engineer — as a maker, he’s a neophyte.  We’ve been corresponding about an aspect of instrument making I call “area tuning.” On these first MP3 sound samples, you will first hear Pierre playing a violin he made before doing the tuning.  Next, you’ll hear him playing it in two different samples after he took it apart and tuned the wood according to the area tuning principle, but still insufficiently.  Finally, for the last two MP3 recordings, Pierre popped the violin apart and tuned the wood for more precision.

MP3 #1    MP3 #2    MP3 #3

EH: That’s an incredibly dramatic before-and-after demo.  Is there more?

KH: Yes, here’s Pierre again – he’s playing his violin, and it’s his tuning, after spending a week refining the tuning at my suggestions. What do you think?

MP3 #4    MP3 #5

EH: Wow — that’s no accident.

KH:  No.  No accident.  And pretty soon Pierre should be able to tune wood like a real pro, rather than repeatedly popping the violin apart and going back to revise what he’s done.  The goal is to be able to bring an instrument to completion before you evaluate it. To get the result you are prepared for in your imagination every time.

EH: Tell me about “tuning the wood.”  And more about “area tuning.”  I’ve heard you refer to these things a few times, and I think I’m getting what you mean.  But it could be I’m not the only one who has a mental picture of a violinist tuning an instrument by twirling its pegs to tighten or loosen the strings…

KH: Well, that’s not quite it. The way I teach people about how tuning works is to make an analogy to road engineering.  That is, the sound energy from the string is like a super expensive racing car that is the fastest car ever made.  The sounding surfaces of a musical instrument are like the road.  The question for the driver is: do I want to drive on a road that is full of potholes, bumps, and ruts, or, do I want to drive on a smooth uniform pavement that angles against the curves and offers no impediments or barriers to driving as fast as my car can go?  Every musical instrument begins its existence like the road with all the potholes, bumps, and ruts.  Every Stradivari violin began its existence that way. Every Guarneri violin began its existence that way.

EH: Why?

KH: It is the nature of the materials, especially wood, that they are out of tune.  Meaning, the road is full of potholes.  The business of area tuning – and of the tuning principle specifically — is to systematically acoustically fill all the potholes, acoustically grind down all the bumps, and acoustically grade the surface to remove all the ruts.  To acoustically engineer the musical surface so that the sound energy encounters zero impediments to its motion through those materials and to make its way out into the atmosphere where the sound can be heard.  Anything that slows down this energy causes the listener’s perception of that sound to be radically reduced. 

EH: Then a maker can’t prevent that reduction by copying how a great violin looks?

KH: When makers think they are doing something responsible by making an exact copy, they are deluding themselves and others into thinking that the end result will be of the same quality as the original.  When they assume that making iron filings dance around in patterns by adjusting the flexibility of the violin plates, as so many so-called scientific instrument makers do, they are pretending to do something significant.  The truth is, they are deceiving themselves and others by building the road and leaving it full of potholes, bumps and ruts.

EH: You’ve met a lot of resistance to this thinking, though.

KH: Absolutely. The resistance I’ve met is because of a nasty problem caused by enhancing a sound – that everything in the sound becomes obvious to the ear.  That is, all the other acoustical defects that were hidden by the un-tuned wood are now out in the open for everyone to hear, notice, and be disgusted by. This happened to me too, when I was figuring out harpsichords, so I know how awful it feels.  But the proof of the pudding is in the eating. The more purely and more carefully the wood in the violin is tuned, the more sweet, resonant, intense, brilliant, focused, expansive, and carrying its sound will be. Only the courageous instrument maker will prevail.  Though this is the point at which most makers who try area tuning revert to the safety of their old bad road building habits.  After all, who can tell that the road should have been inclined upwards into that curve to help keep the car on the road if the car can’t travel any faster than 5 miles an hour?

EH: So how does a maker know to push on with area tuning rather than push off?

KH:  You take the attitude is that you can only fix problems in the sound that you can hear.  What you can’t hear, you can’t fix.  I want to hear everything, all the problems and all the good things.  The good things I want to keep and strengthen and the bad things I want to systematically eliminate.  And I will keep at this until I am dead.  Only the truth sets you free.  Only the truth allows you to know what not to do.

EH: I don’t want to ask you for trade secrets, but — seeing the principle, I want to talk about how it might translate directly into decisions you make at your bench. And directly into the specific sound a player would make with that violin.

KH:  Area tuning works like a stencil.  With a stencil you create the pattern you want and the stencil eliminates every other possibility for you.  The musical ratios you select for your tuning system are like the holes in the stencil.  The size of the areas to which you tune a ratio is like the size of the hole.  That is, if you want to hear lots of nasalness in the sound, you choose a larger area for the 3:2 ratio that makes the sound, or you make more than one area with the 3:2 ratio.  The stencil or pattern of ratios controls how much of such and such an overtone will be apparent, of the various harmonics you select.  So, when the violin is finally playing, the sound you hear will reflect that ratio according to how much surface area is devoted to that ratio.  In other words, the ratios you select for the tuning system will be heard in the sound in amount according to how much surface area you gave to that ratio.  It is a direct correlation.

EH: This is wonderful of you to talk with me.  It’s what I’ve been hoping for years to make a start on understanding. I’ll be back!

KH: It is important to me that the rest of the world, and not just the aficionados of the violin, be able to comprehend the true nature of sound and all that there is in a great sound to be delighted in.  The more mystery is removed, the more wonderful the experience of listening is made because it is in the very nature of complexity that it delights the mind the more its intricacies are grasped by everyone.  Knowing about how things work only increases our feelings of wonder and awe about them, just as keeping things mysterious only causes us to argue and opinionate.  As one acoustical scientist once told me, in science we try to keep things simple…if it isn’t simple enough, we can’t study it. So maybe that is why they have failed?

WEB RESOURCES FOR THIS ARTICLE

http://www.keithhillharpsichords.com/
http://www.violins.keithhillharpsichords.com/judging_violins.html
http://www.instrumentmaking.keithhillharpsichords.com/areatuning.0.html
http://www.instrumentmaking.keithhillharpsichords.com/areatuninghints.html
http://www.violins.keithhillharpsichords.com/antiqueing_article.html
http://www.instrumentmaking.keithhillharpsichords.com/hillviolinvarnish.html
http://www.musicalratio.com/
http://marianneploger.com/

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

A recent performance of the Sixth Symphony at the Sydney Opera House put me in a continuing Mahler mood, as could be expected. This great work imposed its cataclysmic lurch from exaltation to vertiginous despair and its final pizzicato abandonment of hope with the usual directness. However, this time, some vitality and inwardness stayed after the performance, something that countered the tragic import of this most brutal of symphonic works.

My reactions to performances of Mahler’s music always vary. There is so much malleable psychic energy in it. Pain and beauty rear and twist in the air with never-to-be-resolved tensions. Dylan Thomas’€™ line from €˜’Fern Hill’—’€˜Though I sang in my chains like the sea’—seems true to the Mahler soundscape: bound in flesh, yearning for transcendence, alive to the beauty of the world but always aware of looming disaster, the whole threaded with nervelines of alpine respite or ominous farewell. Sometimes the endings are heroic and confident, as in the Second, Third and Eighth symphonies; at other times, as in the Sixth, the final sense is one of exhaustion. Unchained melody liberates from the sheltering sky an apparent freedom to explore the boundless world of our feelings, the Alma-inspired celebrations at the end of the first movement and the hammer blows in the final movement of the Sixth paralleling our own confrontations with fate.

Ever since I was a teenager, I have loved Mahler’€™s music. I remember being at the first Australian performance of Deryck Cooke’s performing version of the Tenth at one of the Sydney Proms, conducted by the indefatigable John Hopkins, seeing Solti take the Chicago Symphony through a chilled Ninth, hearing a grave, burnished Seventh with Dean Dixon, near the end of his life, and so much more. Always, new revelations, new orders of feeling.

The sickly young boy from Kalischt who became the director of the Vienna State Opera and universally-admired composer never had easy successes. The struggle to get through the rampant anti-Semitism of his time left markings that eventually led to transatlantic crossings. There were also his own personal tragedies to contend with—the death of his siblings and of his daughter, the diagnosis of his heart disease. Kindertotenlieder, the songs on the death of children, are a lugubrious reminder of Mahler’s personal biography. It’€™s hard not to think of Schiele’s emaciated figures when listening to them. Though Mahler was triumphant at the Opera, he was particularly vexed at Richard Strauss’ musical successes, his own being so much harder-won. Taking up with Alma Schindler, Kokoschka’s €˜bride of the wind, wasn’€™t going to lead to a settled existence either. The Mahler world: a combination of sensuality and puritanism, composed by a liberal, conducted by a martinet. What did Mahler want to be when he grew up? ‘A martyr’€™ replied the man-child. All of this can be felt in the music. Overriding all is a love of the world and a celebration of the self that is liberating, when, as in the performance of the Sixth in Sydney, the music is given its due.

Mahler’s biographer, Henry-Louis de la Grange, may have marked out the life biography comprehensively, but the spiritual biography of the music remains elusive, containing, as it does, so much contradictory and combustible emotional material. I don’€™t believe in the predictive powers of music—€”I don’€™t think Mahler foresaw the Holocaust. But I do know his music expresses our fears and joys, wonder at nature, spiritual doubts, and splendour. And his music is equal to tragedy, swooping from above, covering all in the shimmer and glint of tremolo, brass fanfare, harp glissando. The wound of life sometimes shrieks or offers praise. Suddenly, all is lost, or won. Summer marches in. Autumn prepares for final things.

Finally driven from Vienna, the Mahlers set up home in New York. A moment I should like to have witnessed. Mahler has just finished a rehearsal of the complete Rachmaninov Piano Concerto No 3 with Rachmaninov at the piano. Just as the orchestra is about to break Mahler insists on a repetition of the entire concerto. Rachmaninov fears an outbreak of ‘a taxi for the maestro’. But Mahler gets his way. Just as he makes us listen to his supersized symphonies with their Promethean heights and depths. Perhaps Mahler’s feeling for the poetic helps here, the sensitive settings of Des Knaben Wunderhorn and Rückert, a feeling that gets into all of his music. It could all be seen, and sometimes has been, as straining for significance by those who don’t like the music. When some cultural product now resembles landfill, how good to have every bar alive with energy and poetry, to find, amid today’€™s contemporary brouhaha, a gold standard for our uncertain leaps to the sublime, in which we don’€™t believe, our slippages into convenient self-approval. However, the price to be paid for this standard was Mahler’s relative unsuccess in his own life. The cult of Mahler came later with its cycles of recordings, the Ken Russell film, the festivals and scholarship. 

When some are now discontent with their first life, pursuing a second one in cyberspace, Mahler asks that we confront our first life directly, no squirming into an avatar’€™s disguise possible. But Mahler does not make it easy going for us on the journey. He insists on you considering your own seriousness, which some don’€™t want to do.

Vorbei!—€“it’€™s over—€”Gustav Klimt commented as the Mahlers left Vienna, bound for New York, the perceived cultural richness of the Sezession beginning to fragment.

But no. A faltering heartbeat. Veni creator spiritus. A drinking song of the earth’s sorrow. Resurrection. The great cyclothymic spirals of musical DNA cross, connect and part, forever trying to reconcile the fraught human condition in song, hymn and elegy.

Sir Simon Rattle conducts the end of Mahler’s Symphony No 8 with its setting from Goethe’s Faust here. The National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain is performing at the 2002 London Proms. 7′ 42”