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.

Following on from last month’s post concerning commitment, politics and poetry, here is a poem written in 1984 and first published in 1991. When this poem was written apartheid had not yet ended in South Africa and East Timor had not achieved independence.

       And The Winner Is . . .

Comrades, citizens,
What has the century brought?
Death’s-head conferences
Laying a brutal hand
Across five continents,
Slating thousands each day.

A résumé of the past
Is sad
For the failed progress of ideals
Means a slight chance for your hopes
And where is your charity then
If history brings bad faith?

After the Great War flung its mud
Over Passchendaele
Countless foreign fields
Bloomed with crimson poppies
And Versailles broke with echoes
Of a bankrupt mésalliance.

Then the will to power got out of hand
When Schicklgruber’s revenge
Ground poor Europe a second time over,
After the night of the hummingbird’s plunder.
At Nuremberg some got their deserts
But too many flew down to Rio

Where they savoured a pleasant surprise:
Model regimes,
Few at first, cruel to the last—
Latin America under the thumb;
Archbishop Romero killed at Mass,
Death squads copying feral attacks.

Midnight panic at oven doors
Revealed the shape of genocide.
Desperate pogroms led to this
With culture’s golden prize:
A hand which grabbed at air
In rictus.

Hammer and sickle, scars and stripes,
Tattered flags;
They flap in the patriotic breeze
Above crowds that parrot yes
For the Kremlin geriatrics
And White House apparatchiks.

Why was the President killed?
Don’t ask.
And what of Stalin’s heirs?
Quiet! Do you want the knock
Of the KGB on your door at dawn
Or the CIA under your bed?

Race was a badge for destruction—
Armenian, Palestinian;
You never saw the flies
Buzzing round piles of corpses
Or felt the colonel’s boot
Kick in your aching ribs.

Yet you lived in your ivory tower
Moralising for all,
Never lifted a finger to help
One amnestied soul from its hell;
People endured
As you read the editorials.

In a free state, accustomed
To the full belly,
How could the hungry mouth
Compare to those sensual lips
Which advertise at night
Remorseless appetites.

You still put faith in a party,
You haven’t learnt;
They’ll sell your ideals from under your feet,
If you’re in the way they’ll sell you.
Stop prancing through the haze
Of right wing journals and Left Bank cafés.

There’s one born every minute
Who thinks he’s found the way,
The truth, the eternal light
(It shines from his fundament),
And when there’s at least one hundred dead
He’ll know he’s got what it takes

To ban books written, ideas expressed—
Finis to that;
The mind which thinks, unbound
By the censor’s pride,
Is likely to find its face
Crushed by the secret police.

And what if I shout in the streets of Berlin
Ich bin ein Australier?
Will the Timorese greet me,
Tasmanians cheer me?
(I mean the original, those Aboriginal);
It’s funny, they don’t seem to answer.

The dust bowls on African plains
Where rhetoric declines
Sift down a mountain of flesh
To a giant bone which seeks
At the door of Marxist states
Its liberal opiate,

While the soul with its body
Tossed in the pit
Receives a furtive requiem
With Shostakovich, Mandelstam
And those who remember at dawn
The disappeared with grief.

It’s depressing to index the crimes
Of political minds;
Their red books and other vain manifestos
Are no good to those who wait at Soweto;
Throw in the towel with that mob
Or you’ll end up a friend of Pol Pot.

This political bird with trick wings,
A decoying duck,
Brute part of the Zeitgeist’s plan,
Should depart our red planet (it won’t),
Follow the path of the Caesars
And become a quark in the stars.

Should we mutter our prayers
In suburban peace,
Be blessed in our righteousness,
Or will the tortured hostage,
Head bent in the final prison,
Atone for fate’s derision?

Will the nuclear winter sweep us
Under radioactive snow
Or can all come to keep
Freedom’s unpolluted vows?
What has the century brought
Comrades, citizens?

After the night of the hummingbird’s plunder: a reference to the Night of the Long Knives, the Nazi SS putsch against the SA, codenamed Operation Hummingbird
Will the Timorese greet me, / Tasmanians cheer me? / (I mean the original, those Aboriginal): Indonesia annexed East Timor in 1976. There is disagreement as to why the Aboriginal population of Tasmania declined so precipitously during the nineteenth century.

Written 1984 Published 1991 A Temporary Grace 101–105

Elatia Harris

It’s a day to remember in Cornish, New Hampshire, at the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site. The sky is the blue of stained glass at Chartres Cathedral, an impossible color too vivid to be entirely without edge. The sun is high, the shadows are deep, the birches silvery white. Mysteriously, though autumn has arrived 150 miles to the south, it feels like high summer here, with a breeze to take away the haze, not a yellow leaf in sight, and everywhere the scent of newly mown grass. Exactly one hundred years and one month ago, on a summer day possibly like this one, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the dean of American sculptors, died at his Cornish home, Aspet, the Federalist house on a hill that was the hub of the artists’ colony he founded in 1885, and a nexus of American artistic and intellectual life for the next quarter of a century.

I am at Aspet to interview the New England-based muralist Holly Alderman about the installation she was commissioned to do at the site – an installation that was both a departure for her and the result of an investigation of digital space that she had begun several years earlier as a Fellow of the National Academy of Design in New York. In a much earlier life, I was a muralist, and have been fascinated by Holly Alderman’s murals, which can be seen in locations from Hollywood to Maine, for as long as I’ve been aware of them.  In an age of photo-realist painting, with muralists and their assistants tracing the contours of representational scenes projected onto a wall by an opaque projector, Alderman draws and paints using free-hand perspective, for compositions in which the eye travels far into deep background or architectural space. Trust me on this one – it’s a highly unusual way to work, and you not only see but feel the difference between an original mural painted in perspective and one that is a perspective rendition from a photographic source. I was astonished, then, when Alderman set out to discover what digital space had to offer her as a painter, and what, as a painter, she might bring with her across the digital divide. For an artist who liked to climb up on huge scaffoldings and paint her own murals as well as design them, how was this going to work?

The Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site is the natural location to debut the new work, which is suffused with the spirit of classicism, a spirit that has spoken deeply to Alderman for many years, as followers of her perspective murals know.  Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907) was the pivotal figure of the “American Renaissance,” which historians of art and architecture place between the late 1870’s and the beginning of the First World War. In a conversation about the Alderman installation, Russell Bastedo, a historian and the official curator of the State of New Hampshire, pointed out to me the tremendous optimism of the post-Civil War era, founded on an exhilarating fact – that the Republic, having come so close to destruction within only 70 years of its founding, was not, after all, sundered, was instead on the verge of becoming a great world power. According to Bastedo, the affinity for the classical style in architecture and all the arts was especially keen in these years, when Americans saw themselves as the heirs to Greek democracy and wanted their public spaces to look the part.  “Expansion was an optimistic process,” Bastedo told me. “And the technology making it possible to push back the frontier was deeply thrilling to the public. The style that best expressed this was classicism. Nobody would have put it this way, but the ergonomics were right.”

Augustus Saint-Gaudens, whose work embodied the classical spirit, rose to fame on his Civil War commemorative sculptures, most notably the monumental bronze bas-relief memorial to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and his regiment of black Union soldiers, the labor of nearly 15 years. Unveiled to the Boston public in 1897, the naturalism of the figures and the dignity they achieved without appearing posed were ravishing to those at the new century’s edge. On the strength of this and other great commissions, President Teddy Roosevelt chose Saint-Gaudens to redesign the national currency, producing the high point of American numismatic art – the double eagle $20 gold piece. Towards the end of his rather short life – he died in his 50’s, having been ill with cancer for many years – Saint Gaudens took on Abraham Lincoln, creating for Lincoln Park in Chicago the brooding but kindly image with head inclined and eyes cast down that most Americans think of when they visualize the nation’s greatest hero.  Had he lived, the monumental sculpture in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, would have been his, for he had the commission.  Instead, it was done with his blessings, and very much in his style, by his friend and colleague, Daniel Chester French.

Aspet and, a few hundred yards away, Saint-Gaudens’s studio with its clerestory windows and trellised porticoes, pay homage to a life filled to bursting with work that was acclaimed throughout the land, with distinguished and loving friends. In this, his centenary year, many prestigious conferences are taking place to commemorate and look anew at his life and work. Perhaps, contemplating this era that can seem to belong to a much deeper past, an art lover might not be blamed for pondering: what happened? For a bare century ago, the mission of a great artist was to create beauty that every citizen would recognize as beauty, art that met a standard of excellence universally agreed on, that stirred patriotism and optimism, inspiring men to virtue, bringing them to their knees in recognition of the power wielded by beauty, pathos and heroism. To enter the radiant world of Saint-Gaudens, where even the weather is too beautiful be real, to wander among white fluted columns, fragrant lawns, fountains and birch lanes is — most curiously — to think about Modernism, to which the very naturalness people found and responded whole-heartedly to in Saint-Gaudens was a prelude. The classical ideal encompasses a certain large amount of naturalness, although we rarely think of it that way, and though it is a distance, it’s no great distance from there to the immediacy and intimacy found in the figural work of the early European modernists. Anyone in the mood for thinking it all through could hardly do better than to spend a day as I did in Cornish.

Does art with the sheer eye appeal of classicism have meaning not only within the culture that produces it but across cultures? That might depend on whether beauty and order are able to reach us through the “felt axis” posited by Gestalt psychologists, on whether certain proportions and geometries create in us a sense of harmony that is physiologically based. Proponents of the classical style would say that was exactly the case, that shorn of its European “high culture” associations, classicism pleases on a simpler basis – even in an irony-besotted era not so interested in being pleased by its art, compelled more by consumer culture than by high culture. Preparing to go to Saint-Gaudens for the Alderman installation, I spoke with the art historian and Egyptologist Diana Wolfe Larkin about the tension in mid-19th century Europe between classicism and romanticism that prompted so much side taking. From this distance, Larkin remarked, many seemingly contradictory tendencies – represented, for instance, by the painters Ingres and Delacroix – appear reconciled, like two sides of the same coin, so that it is possible to discern a classicizing spirit in a romantic painter, and vice versa. “There will always be a place for classicism,” Dr. Annette Blaugrund, director of the National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts in New York told me — classicism running as a current through other movements in art, its keynotes a dynamic symmetry and a balance reflecting order, not stasis.

Holly Alderman is inspired not only by the spirit of classicism but also by a long-time interest in synergetics to pursue an ideal of beauty with origins, like all such ideals, in an earlier era.  This is no retreat from our own time, however, for she is passionate and knowledgeable about the modern and post-modern in art, committed to conceptualizing new forms that can arise only from the present. Although she is far from exalting technique over the interiority of a work of art, in her life as a muralist, she has been a ceaseless technical innovator, experimenting with materials to increase the durability of her murals, and, as a printmaker, printing on unconventional substrates from silk to acetate. In the 1980’s, she chaired the Design Science Group, bringing together MIT and Harvard scientists, mathematicians, architects, writers, artists, film makers, dancers and students for a symposium on the materials, media and creative methods used to explore and teach the science of design. Entering digital space to compose there, and developing a way to print on sheer satin for a transparent output are in character for this artist both highly comfortable with new technologies and profoundly reluctant to harness them either as a shortcut to an appearance of old-fashioned skill or a substitute for originality. In a wide-ranging conversation, she and I talked about crossing the digital divide, about site-specific environmental art, about unique materials that express an artistic vision, and about the inspirations for it all.

EH: What did it feel like to put away your paints for a summer, head to New York and explore cyberspace as a painter?

HA: Wild and free! I had a fellowship at the National Academy Museum to work on very large-scale murals in a program about revitalizing mural painting in the U.S. Cyberspace was a revelation, not an intention. The work I started out to do felt a lot like preparing for painting because I was thinking like a painter, trolling the city – especially Central Park — with my new digital camera for images that might be digitally manipulated by me, but which I believed would take their final form in paint.  I actually spent lots of time sketching with a pencil, and Xeroxing historic picture research.  I redesigned three locations including the neo-classical dining room of the National Academy townhouse on Fifth Avenue, with panel murals composed in digital space.  I’d kind of begun wondering what it would be like to paint something that came from the process of image capture, not from drawing… Then I had a moment of hyper-clarity – about not painting it because it really didn’t need to be painted.

EH: What was this “it” that didn’t need to be painted?

HA: Nine composite images built of smaller ones from around Central Park, which I had created with the idea of scaling up to paint on 11-foot panels. Like you see in the maquette. The most familiar figures in it are the traffic signal – the silhouette dotted in light that blinks on to tell pedestrians to cross the street – juxtaposed with the falconer statue from Central Park. These became iconic to me. They arose from digital space and they lived there – I was extremely surprised and intrigued with how they looked on the monitor, and wondered how I would paint them.  Then I wondered — why would I paint them?  It would have been almost like killing and stuffing them.

EH: Quite a moment for a painter…

HA: It was.  On a personal discovery scale, it was like Columbus making landfall or Fermi engineering the first atomic chain reaction.

EH: Were the other Fellows experiencing something similar?  What about the teacher?

HA: People were inspired to all kinds of insights – it was a heady time.  We had a fantastic leader, the painter Grace Graupe-Pillard. Most of the time in design, using a computer is a way to save yourself some wear and tear by making it very simple to try out something new without destroying what you’ve already done.  My father and grandfather were architects who drafted with pencil on paper and before that with crow quill pen on starched linen, on the same drafting board I used until about two years ago, when I left it behind for digital space.  My father the modernist actually made perfect drawings with a pencil every time, and found CAD absurd. When you’re doing mural design, you appreciate the efficiency of composing with whole images, and not having to sketch every detail from scratch to do that. But in making art, you’re much more sensitive to the process itself and what its potential is, so you stop and look at what is in the moment, and set aside preconceived ideas. At least, that’s what I do. My biggest preconceived notion was that I was at the Academy for a summer of enlightenment that would result in new visions for painted murals. That’s just not what happened there. I think I bring with me wherever I go the processes of an artist – one who lives to invent, not to streamline.  I always feel the pull of terra incognita very strongly, and the first thing I want to do is explore it, not bend it to my will.

EH: That comes later…

HA: Oh, yes. It certainly does.

EH: When you realized you were entering a world that might not lead you back to painting on walls – that sounds very difficult.  Was it?

HA: It was very exciting. I knew I was starting on a period of form-finding, and that’s always a great feeling. One day, crossing Columbus Avenue and heading towards the Academy, I realized I was ecstatic about art – as happy as I had been in college.  I was inventing. What especially struck me about digital space were the layers and scale and transparency. I’ve been working with illusions of depth for a long time – nearly all muralists do – and there’s a way to simulate depth in architectural space with a computer program.  But that wouldn’t work for me, since it’s the sort of thing I greatly prefer to finesse by hand for blends and effects. What is really fascinating is how you achieve a feeling of fluidity and depth by layering transparent images that you’ve captured.  This isn’t about speed or efficiency, and it’s very freeing.  I think it’s one of the great gifts of technology to artists because it’s a new metaphor for layers of memory, in a way not comparable with composite images that are not transparent.  For example, I find one image showing with tremendous clarity in the shadow of another – something that has obsessed painters since Pontormo, nearly 500 years ago.

EH: Yet none of this you wanted to take, as a painter, and run with.  What were you thinking about outputting it?

HA: I’ve always thought of myself as an environmental artist who creates many different kinds of environments, and for most of the hours we spend, walls do form our environment. It’s true, I didn’t want to paint onto walls what I created in digital space, yet I badly wanted to see it out in our environment. Inventing how to do that was my new big and daunting challenge. What I was looking for was a fluid support for a fluid medium – a flexible, transparent substrate that would be an analog for the luminosity of the monitor.  This needed to be a fabric – one that could suggest either an enclosure or a window.

EH: This sounds like a big departure in working methods.

HA:  Totally!  It meant a deeper inquiry into materials and techniques than is normal even for me, and I like to experiment. But it was a conceptual shift, too.  I moved my digital studio out of doors to help push that along. There’s a convention in Roman fresco painting that fascinates me. They would paint the walls of a room that gave onto a garden with a view of the very same garden. Or, was the painting on the walls the prototype for the garden? There was an intimate back and forth with gardens and landscape that I was interested in. So when I moved my digital studio outside, right into my garden and in sight of Mt. Monadnock, I started thinking of digital output as both window and wall, and I also started thinking of environmental art as imagery that could be transparently integrated into landscape.

EH: You mounted your first output as big silk banners.  What about printing them? I can’t imagine…

HA:  It’s like printing on air.  That is, that’s the idea.  But for a long time there were technical difficulties — to say the least – in creating that effect. Then my sister Mary Lord, a digital photographer, told me about a genius of a printmaker, Dan Saccardo, and together we started to print my transparent, layered images onto a transparent substrate. It was very important to me that the banners have a surface that would hold color and bounce light back, yet allow light to filter through from behind, too.  The luminosity of the monitor held such an attraction for me – I wanted to hold onto it. So finding the right fabric was a thrilling adventure!  As well as looking right, the fabric had to stand up to the weather.  And so did the ink.  Finally we had a banner that you could hang outside in a rainstorm and let dry in the sun.  Environmental art really has to perform that way. My banners survive giant hailstones and hurricane conditions.

EH: Your palette is so remarkable and intense to find on something so sheer. What was it like changing over to a digital palette?

HA: Like painting with veils of color. I use entire photographs as glazes. Since there are colors you can blend in digital space that you’ll never see in nature or in output, getting the intensity I desire for the images to fuse yet remain clearly recognizable is a patient and delicate process. I love color, and I want to use the palette of nature for works that integrate with nature. And to have presence when backlit by the sun, the banners need highly saturated colors. Color is key to emotional intensity, too. Discovering the right materials and techniques is an adventure in the service of a vision, not a goal in itself. You’re going for an emotional effect, after all.  And an environmental art installation that had only a cerebral appeal would be…oh, empty, for me.

EH: Is that a romantic idea?

HA: Well, maybe it’s romantic by way of classicism. The ravishing, ecstatic relation to nature is a romantic idea – I so relate to that. You sense it in the works of Caspar David Friedrich, who had an amazing way of combining the colors of glaciers and snow with bright colors. But classicism isn’t all about restraint and white and gray marble. It’s also about a feeling of vibrancy and optimism – qualities that are well within the ability of line and form and color to communicate, and that have a re-invigorating effect on people. The archetypes from classical mythology are still very much with us, so much that it’s quite normal for us to recognize them instantly.  So these are powerful images to conjure with, and they have a 2000-year long association with gardens. Classicism is found in a certain touch of civilization on nature — the very light restraining hand that makes the difference between nature and a garden. Although sometimes you do have to detach from a lot of bank architecture to see it that way.

EH: Was it this feeling for the classical style what attracted you to Saint-Gaudens?

HA: Well, my art studio is in southern New Hampshire, where Saint-Gaudens is not just the pre-eminent America sculptor of all time, but a familiar and beloved hero. Saint-Gaudens home in Cornish is the only national historic site in the state. Cornish was an artists’ colony from the time Saint-Gaudens made it his summer home in the mid-1880’s, and it was on the cultural map for visits from many distinguished Americans in the New York, Boston and Washington, DC world of arts and letters.  There were receptions and studio concerts in the summer. Saint-Gaudens created a huge amount of work while being very social and hospitable – he was an awesome genius! As his health worsened, he came to live here fulltime, and remained productive as an artist until the very last few weeks of his life.  He was the son of a shoemaker, born in Ireland, and he had no great education to start with. Yet he lived in and died in this miraculous place, where as you see, there really is something special about the atmosphere, and created a body of work that is profoundly revealing of the American experience.  For all my love of modern art, I can’t imagine who wouldn’t be inspired by this.  I started making photographs here last summer and fall, more than a year before I was invited by the Saint-Gaudens Memorial to produce a special exhibition. I was appropriating Saint-Gaudens and the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site as my subject, you could say.

EH: It’s a huge installation, isn’t it? The banners are all over the site.  I like the way they move in the breeze.

HA: There are 40 banners here, the biggest ones about 4 by 6 feet. That they have motion from unseen forces is very important to me because it simulates the fluidity of images in digital space. And it adds to their memory dimension, because memory is fleeting – not the same if you look twice.  Also, the banners are soft, not static like a painted wall, and they should respond to changes in light and atmospheric pressure.

EH: I was talking with Diana Wolfe Larkin [art historian at Mt. Holyoke College] about this work, just to get an art historical perspective on an installation that is site-specific in an historic site. She called the banners a study in how to bring memory into art, and said that looking at each one was like looking through time and accumulated memory.

HA: Oh!  Yes, I’ll take that — thanks, Diana!

EH: She also said you were in unashamed, unabashed pursuit of beauty – although she told me it was possible to get into trouble using words like “lyrical” and “beautiful.”

HA: Yes, beauty is crucial – even magical or mystical — to me.  The banners are murals of cyberspace, and cyberspace is very beautiful even just to think about, as the place where so many impossible connections are possible. Here, outdoors in natural light, we see complex images only possible in cyberspace.

EH: Does beauty create its own mood? Is it about a certain mood?

HA: Well, it’s uplifting.  It almost can’t help but be.  And we all know there’s a lot of wonderful art that isn’t uplifting. I read that Brice Marden, whose abstract paintings are so very beautiful, shied away from the word beauty in favor of the term enhancement. But I love the eternal depth of meaning, the aspiration, discipline and courage involved in trying to reach the perception of an aesthetic deliverance – call it beauty.  It’s beyond self-expression, but it’s self-expression too. And the very search for it creates a certain vibrant mood that is artistically sustaining to me. For this body of work, the search came from the classical spirit – it’s pervasive here, as anyone can see, as well as a good fit for me.  But this is a site-specific installation, and it brought out in me a highly specific response.   Any image I create, whatever it may look like, will be created purely for aesthetic adventure, to invent and discover new ways of seeing unique in our time.

EH: Is that the way it is when you’re painting, too?

HA: Totally the way it is.  But, you know, cyberspace has changed everything, and presented us all with the imperative to forge a new aesthetic.

See Holly Alderman’s installation through October 31st, 2007, at the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site in Cornish, NH. Visit www.sgnhs.org for hours and directions.

RESOURCES FOR THIS ARTICLE

Holly Alderman

http://AldermanSaintGaudens.com/

http://MonadnockPhoto.com

Augustus Saint-Gaudens

http://www.sgnhs.org/

http://www.metmuseum.org/TOAH/HD/astg/hd_astg.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustus_Saint-Gaudens

http://americanart.si.edu/education/fellows_interns/2007_symposium/index.cfm

http://hoodmuseum.dartmouth.edu/calendar/calendarextra.html

There are two kinds of people: there are the kooky kind who will spend $4,000 on dialysis for their cat whose kidneys are failing (substitute some significant expenditure of resources for individuals in differing financial circumstances—you know what I mean), even if only to extend its life briefly; and then there are the kind who will make fun of the former (or even regard them with moral disapproval—that money could have been used for better purposes, etcetera). Recent events surprised me by showing that I belong in the first category. And now that I know I belong there, I am going to attempt an explanation or at least hazard a conjecture, a speculation, a plain guess, at what puts some people there.

But first let me tell what happened: my wife Margit and our cat Freddy (about whom I have written before here) left New York City to take up residence in the northern Italian alps at the beginning of September. My wife is from that lovely German-speaking area known as the South Tyrol and is now teaching English there, and I will be joining her quite soon for an indefinite duration.

Freddy is a young cat with a unique personality of great beauty, and we went to some lengths to try and make the journey as stress-free for her as possible, buying her an expensive soft mesh carrier and a “cat ticket” so she could travel in the aircraft cabin with Margit rather than be scared alone in the cargo hold. It is a long trip even for humans, including a 4-hour drive at the end.

While Freddy did okay on the trip itself, she stopped eating soon after arriving there. After a day or so of this, Margit noticed that she regurgitated a piece of a thick string toy that she usually likes to just play with. Thinking she may have swallowed more of it from the stress of being in a new environment (cats are very territorial and do not like moving houses) she took her to a vet, who X-rayed Freddy and thought that she saw something blocking her intestines. Surgery was scheduled for the next morning.

Upon cutting her open, the vet found nothing inside. At this point, the diagnosis was changed to something called Feline Adipose Liver, which is something that cats can get by not eating from stress. If caught early enough, most cats can be made to survive this condition by being force fed by mouth as well as by injection for a few days or sometimes weeks. This regimen was started immediately, causing great difficulties for Margit who had started her own stress-inducing new job the day after arriving in Italy, and who kept having to take time off to attend to the cat and her many appointments at the vet’s. Still, we talked about it, and I told her that even if she has to quit her job she should do so to try and save Freddy’s life, and we also agreed that whatever material resources we have would be expended for any reasonable chance of making Freddy feel better. But she got worse.

Her eyes glazed over, she could not move with ease and hardly did, her breathing became labored and loud, and it became clear that she was dying. At this point, Margit was told that the vet she had been seeing was not the most reliable, and was known for operating unnecessarily on animals just to charge the large fees that such surgeries entail. Trust me, you cannot imagine my rage at this thought.

Now, after much research, Freddy was taken to a different vet, who criticized the first one for not having performed a standard series of blood tests to rule out common feline ailments, and when these tests were finally administered, the news was shocking: Freddy’s blood came back positive for Feline Infectious Peritonitis, an incurable viral disease (related to the human SARS virus) which quickly kills cats in a most painful way, causing them to lose their eyesight, and their organs to fail rapidly one by one. She already had many of the symptoms of the disease, especially the labored breathing which is typical of FIP. She was in pain and the vet recommended that she be brought in the next day at noon (a week ago Saturday) to be killed by lethal injection, sparing her (and, of course, Margit) a slightly more drawn out death of terrible suffering and agony. I spoke to Margit on Friday night and tried as best as I could to steel her for this duty and then canceled all posting at 3QD for that Saturday in a private act of mourning. Since the day I started 3QD more than three years ago, we had never had a day without any posts until then. (Did you notice?) And then I felt dejected and disconsolate, even desperate.

Since that time, I have thought a bit about my own reactions which, as I mentioned above, surprised and even embarrassed me. It is obvious that different people feel various degrees of affection for their pets. This can depend upon the type of pet (very few people, I imagine, are capable of feeling very strongly about a goldfish, or a snake, or even a hamster), how much time you have spent with the pet, the nature of your interaction with the pet (how much you play with the pet, whether the pet sleeps with you, how much time you are alone interacting with the pet, whether it is the only pet in the home), and so on. And, of course, it depends upon the type of person you are, and how much empathy you have for other creatures. Now I am not a cat-lover in general. Other people’s cats do not evoke much affection from me and just bore me, and I am mostly indifferent to many animals. (I am also a meat eater, so clearly the slaughter of animals for my consumption has never been much of an ethical problem for me.) So why this reaction, which I might have laughed at in someone else?

Here’s what I think: while you can have various degrees of affection for pets, there is a quantum leap that you can make (and this is a Rubicon that cannot be uncrossed): if in your own psychological representation of your pet, you habitually grant them personhood, then there is no choice but to treat them as you would a person because different parts of your mind which specialize in generating the emotions which allow you to interact with (and love) other humans come into play, and these are irresistible impulses. You might as well try to not care about your children. I believe that some animals, like cats and dogs, have through their long histories of living in people’s homes as pets (more than 10,000 years in the case of cats), been naturally selected to encourage human empathy. Imagine what a survival advantage it is to the household cat that its young behave in such ways and make such tiny, vulnerable (to the human ear) sounds that it takes a particularly monstrous human to harm a kitten. Similarly, they have, I think “learned” (even if they do not have the equivalent emotion–after all, just as I don’t know what it is like to be a bat, I don’t know what it is like to be a cat either) to express emotions that move us and encourage us to conceive of them as persons. I can recognize fine distinctions, I imagine, in Freddy. She appears very much an adolescent (which she is): pouty, moody, angry, playful, lazy, affectionate, awkwardly sexy, etc., in turn. The fact that I work from my apartment and therefore have spent most of my waking days around Freddy since she was even younger doesn’t hurt that I have developed a very fine-grained sense of her moods and feelings. And it doesn’t hurt that Freddy has a bizarrely human and intelligent personality either. She likes to constantly imitate me in a million ways, lying down in a very unnatural (for a cat) position on her back next to me in bed, with her head on the pillow next to mine. Or look at this photograph in which she is copying my pose almost exactly (I am lounging on the other corner of the same sofa with my spread-eagled legs on a table) which shocked Margit so much that she captured Freddy with a camera:

Freddy is an indoor cat and I felt bad that she does not have as much stimulation as she should, so I bought some DVDs made for cats to watch on a High Definition TV. These show birds, insects, mice, etc. Freddy loves to watch, and does so with attentiveness and excitement. Don’t believe it? Check her out:

The objection that one should not waste ones money on things like cats is spurious and basically silly. I am not objecting to someone spending $20,000 on a cruise to the Antarctic, or a set of bigger breasts, or whatever. Is their travel or vacation or how their breasts look so important that they couldn’t spend the money saving childrens’ lives in Africa with it instead? This is crazy and would make it immoral for any human to live a life better than ANY other human on Earth. I’m not stealing the money, after all, I can spend it any way I like! Some might say that since cats have no sense of their future (hopes and dreams for it, for example) and they have no sense of their own mortality, it is not worth it to try and save their lives. Try telling that to the parent of a one-year old child, who also doesn’t have these things! Oh, I’ll stop there with my defensiveness. Ich kann nicht anders.

So what happened to Freddy? As Friday night wore on I became more agitated. I read on wikipedia that 19 out of 20 cats who have FIP will die. And then in the middle of the night here in New York, and only a couple of hours before Freddy’s appointment with eternal sleep, I called Margit and we agreed that there was no reason to rush this. I said that she is such an unusual cat in so many ways, maybe she will be that twentieth cat! We convinced ourselves that she would be. And we decided to let her suffer and die at home and to suffer along with her, rather than kill her.

With Margit’s constant and attentive care, a day later she started eating again, and for the last four or five days, Freddy has been COMPLETELY normal, running up and down the stairs, playing with her ball, eating with gusto, sleeping well, breathing completely normally, and making friends with other humans. And I have my hopes.

This post is dedicated to Ruchira Paul.

All my previous Monday Musings can be seen here.

Have a good week!

Michael Blim

“What has that got to do with the price of wheat in Russia?” This was my father’s way of saying that an argument had nothing to do with his.

So too says the Federal Reserve and the financial community, except they ask the question in reverse: What does the price of wheat in Russia have to do with inflation? According to them, nothing. Nor do the prices for all food, gasoline, natural gas, and heating oil count. None of their price rises or falls, they believe, are relevant to measuring real inflation. They are excluded from “the core rate” of inflation, the index of price rises that is the gold standard central bankers use to raise or lower the interest rates on money. They set the prime interest rate that is the benchmark for all other interest rates, from passbook and money fund savings rates, to house mortgages, car loans, credit card debt, and anything else you owe on.

In contrast, “headline inflation” measures the rise in the prices of all that we consume. It is about the wheat in Russia, and how their wheat, our wheat, and the rest of the world’s wheat is worth over twice what it was worth 10 years ago, and 50% again over the course of the last year. That’s headline inflation. Its rise worries some economists, but it is not currently the stuff of policy.

Unfortunately, it turns out that as Russian wheat goes and the world’s wheat goes for that matter, so go the rest of our food costs. World corn prices are a third higher than 10 years ago, and have jumped and another 60% in the last year. The world price of soybeans has increased 30% over the last ten years, but is expected to jump another 30% within the space of this year. “Food prices,” said The Financial Times on May 27, “are heading for their biggest annual increase in as much as thirty years.“

The costs of feeding a family, driving a car, and heating a house in the US are also going up. Like food, they are running well above the core inflation rate of 2% between August 2006 and August 2007. Crude oil at last week’s $80 quote is running 18% higher than last year, and a gallon of gas last week cost $2.78. Natural gas is up 5%, and heating oil 5.8% over last year, according to the September 11 report of the federal government’s Energy Information Administration. Perhaps this Sunday’s Boston Globe’s business lead story banner says it best: “Cold Comfort: Winter is coming, oil prices are at a record high, and you haven’t locked in a price.” The cost of home heating oil this winter at $2.67 a gallon is 60% higher than a decade ago.

Is anything cheaper for Main Street Americans? Not medical care, crossing over once more to double-digits this year. Houses are, and ex-Fed guru Alan Greenspan forecasts further price declines. Though usually good news for buyers, this time it is not clear whether banks and mortgage brokers will lend people money at a rate they can afford or lend at all. And if fewer people buy first homes, rents may go up.

We’ve got it bad, and that ain’t good. But as usual, poor people here and abroad have it worse. Poor people in the US spend more of their income on food. Though the majority receives food stamps, large increases in food costs hit them harder and can run ahead of new food stamp funding increases. Though the average American spends just 3.6% of after tax income on gas, people in the lowest income bracket in 2005 spent 9% of their after-tax income on gas. The more one spends on life’s basic necessities – those items not included in the core inflation index – the more vulnerable one is to inflation as a whole.

Abroad the poor are even more vulnerable. The average Mexican, for instance, spends 26% of disposable income on food. Ten days ago, after the cost of tortillas had shot up almost 30% almost overnight, the Mexican government imposed a price freeze. Given the record world demand for corn, the action may only marginally affect the tortilla price while lowering the supply of corn available to Mexican consumers. People in poor countries spend up to 65% of their income on food. Though poor farmers can in theory protect themselves from food deprivation by planting crops for household consumption, the prices for seed and fertilizer rising with food inflation. And this year marks the first time in human history that the majority of the world’s population lives in cities. No maize plots for them.

People around the globe are served by the same markets for food and fuel and also have begun to experience the worst of both worlds: rising prices and diminishing supplies. Worldwide, wholesale food prices have increased 21% thus far this year. The Forbes September 20 issue reports that even as world wheat prices are at historical levels, wheat stocks are the lowest in 33 years. Though a predictable effect of supply and demand, its consequences are both worrying and dangerous. Food price inflation in India is running in the double digits and nearly so in China. The new middle classes of these two industrializing giants, a fraction of their combined 2 plus billion population, can doubtless afford to pay more for food, but the poor masses behind them are much more vulnerable to food insecurity.

Economists discount headline inflation precisely because food and fuel are volatile commodities. Bad weather, wars, and pestilence, among other things, create too much uncertainty for standard economic equations. The Fed, bankers, and most economists prefer the core inflation index because its curve is more gentle, its movements more predictable – all the better for figuring out how to make money from one quarter to the next, and from one year to another.

All well and good for them. But what happens to the rest of us when faced by an inflationary tide surging beyond their sacral standard? The US headline inflation rate has outpaced the core inflation rate every year since 2002. An economist for the Deutsche Bank reported to The Financial Times on May 24 that “there is growing concern within the food industry that the present upswing in soft commodity prices is structural rather than cyclical.” What about fuel prices declining significantly? I wouldn’t bet on it. Whether caused on the one hand by trends such as population growth, increasing affluence in formerly poor countries, or the current corn into ethanol craze, or on the other hand by accidents and acts of god, inflation itself is becoming a trend that is being built into the basic cost of living.

This is not good news for anyone. The Mister Moneybags of the world, as Marx caricatured capitalists, will see their real capital shrink, and their loans repaid by debtors proffering devalued dollars, Euros, renminbi, or yen. But debtors beware: if incomes continue to stagnate, or if they decline relative to inflation, your temporary advantage is lost. Interest rates will tick up, outrunning by Federal Reserve intent the inflation rate. Any debt you hold, if you haven’t locked in the interest rate via a contract, will become more expensive still.

And then, you might agree that the core inflation rate, while good for bankers, is a mighty thin and risky reed upon which to support the economic well being of the billions of people on the world’s Main Streets, whose cost of living and economic vulnerability, though overlooked by the Wall Streets of the world, is growing day by day.

by Edward B. Rackley

Historically, most “first contacts” were initiated by westerners. First they came as commercial explorers and intrepid traders. Later they arrived as occupiers and settlers: Victorians, colonials, missionaries. Progenitors of Edward Said’s Orientalism. It’s easy to be ashamed and indignant about this historical aspect of global encounter. Those who aren’t point out that cruelty, plunder and occupation are immutable norms, as human as domesticity or story telling. I often wonder what of today’s norms will repulse future generations. Television, our use of chairs for sitting, other norms less benign. It could be anything.

One such norm, transplanted religion, intrigues me because of its dual aspect. Missionaries transplant religion across cultural divides and feed it to non-believers, sometimes with messianic zeal. Spiritual seekers transplant themselves into different belief systems, unknown cosmologies, strange practices before an alien divine.

Of these two sides of transplanted religion, I find spiritual seekers the more intriguing. In my experience, missionaries exude righteousness of purpose, sometimes tempered by a humble certitude. They are earnest, committed, leaving little to chance. Spiritual seekers tend to be grounded in curiosity, a healthy dose of insecurity and imprecision. Uncanny things happen in their company.

Zealots and messiahs

That said, I’ve met missionaries working in difficult contexts whom I could respect—not all are zealots. We met in places from which aid workers, diplomats, entrepreneurs and every other would-be savior had long fled. But I’ve also seen missionaries wait out the worst periods of internecine violence, only to become sectarian supporters of one ethnicity over others. The role of the Catholic Church in the Rwandan genocide is a famous example.

During Congo’s war, I once stayed in a rural village with an American Baptist family living there for generations. Over time, they had abandoned proselytizing and the conversion imperative for more thoughtful, constructive works. According to the wife, her great-grandfather had first settled there in the early 1900s. Upon arriving, his first public act was to toss the local shaman’s fetishes into the river and burn down his hut. Back then, a heathen was a heathen. Now, she explained without pride, shamans are consulted before the missionaries begin a project; their children attend the mission school.

Both aspects of transplanted religion, missionaries and seekers, are viewed skeptically, for different reasons. Missionaries have God on their side; inside they know their calling is just. Not so for spiritual seekers, clearly the meeker, the less certain of the two. Because they have no version of righteousness to defend, their preconceptions of otherness are generally positive, albeit sometimes naïve and romanticized.

I remember an Osho devotee I met in Lucknow, a seemingly wealthy divorcée from L.A.  I was on my way to Rishikesh, a pilgrimage site in the Himalayan foothills. The year was 1992 and Baghwan Shree Rashneesh, or Osho as he later preferred to be called, had recently passed away. A group of his sannyasin had set out from their Pune headquarters to identify other living sages, substitutes for Osho.

We had just finished darshan with a guru called “Poonjaji,” a sweet and ironic elderly man with a tattoo of a wristwatch where he would normally have worn one. A close group of six disciples sat on stage with Poonjaji during meditation and the talk that followed. They were mostly westerners; many wore the deep crimson robes of Osho sannyasin. A festive sense of connection pervaded the room. It was a similar vibe, I imagined, to what Osho offered his community. As devotees came forward to kneel for his blessing, a touch on the forehead, the guru joked, “Anything you touch will bite you, wait and see.”

As the room emptied I found myself facing a woman with large pendant earrings, from which white ceramic cubes dangled and bobbed to distraction. As she enthused about how radiant Poonjaji seemed that day, I noticed that each side of the white cubes bore tiny images of Osho’s bearded face. The many faces of a shrunken guru, bouncing beneath a devotee’s ears—it was all too jarring. In that moment, she embodied the caricature of a spiritual seeker: grasping and ecstatic because hollow.

As I walked outside, a phrase I had copied down that morning came to mind: the taming power of the small. The Osho earrings weren’t just mindless baubles. How much she needed the constant presence of her ideal, this guru, to remind her of … something dear to her, something unchanging. Her vulnerability suddenly made her real, and my judgment a lazy habit of thought.

If curiosity is a reliable indicator of an active mind, then spiritual seekers can at least be credited with having a brain. Unlike missionaries, seekers are empty vessels and their mental life moves in a particular way. They are “strangers and pilgrims,” curious people “moved by disappointment with the familiar,” Alan Watts wrote. A beatnik scholar and Californian convert to the “mysticism of the East,” Watts was the first figure of transplanted religion I read as a teenager. The Way of Zen struck me, but The Wisdom of Insecurity slammed my teenage mind. Leafing through it now, it’s still a potent reflection on the flux of individual identity, of our unfulfilling drive to “fortify the I.”

Filling the vessel

Leaving Zimbabwe in 1991 for my first visit to India, I traveled directly to the Sivananda Vedanta Ashram in the wooded hills above Thiruvananthapuram, capital of Kerala. Through a friend I knew the Ashram would be holding a five-week intensive training for aspiring yoga teachers, which I was not. I knew nothing of yoga besides its sequence of warm-up of postures, the so-called “sun salutation.” The training would force me to dive deeply into yoga, well over my head—exactly how I like learning experiences to be.

Yoga basically means “union,” it is the Sanskrit ancestor of the English word “yoke.” In practice it is an integrated ensemble of eight paths or “limbs,” described by Patanjali in the Yoga Sutras (200 BCE).  Each limb compliments the others; practicing them together prepares the aspirant to “transcend the ephemeral universe.” What is known in the West as ‘yoga’—a cycle of postures or asanas—is just one of Patanjali’s eight paths. For a $30 yoga class in Manhattan, you get one-eighth of the real thing.

Life in the Ashram was closely structured around a long list of “austerities,” practices intended to silence and prepare the body and mind. There was no “free time”; the very concept now brings a smile to my face. The day was carved into neat slots of specific, mandatory activities from 5 am to 10 pm, with six hours of asanas a day. Silence, except during chanting, was strictly observed. Within a week, the rhythm of daily activities had become a natural flow.

Days passed and the start date of the training neared. Scores of participants arrived from around India and the world. A handful of teachers began to arrive as well. These were a mix of Swamis or monks, and Brahmacharis, aspiring monks and nuns who had taken vows of celibacy. Besides being experienced yoga teachers, all were lucid expositors of Advaita Vedanta, the school of Hindu philosophy followed by the Sivananda Order.

The lead trainer, Swami Sankarananda, had the physique and bearing of a career military man. After years of apprenticeship and study in India, he was now running another Sivananda Ashram in the Catskill Mountains. Later we became friendly, bonding over shared experiences in different African conflicts. An anti-apartheid activist in South Africa, he later served in Angola as an army officer during Savimbi’s pro-western insurgency, backed by South Africa and the US.

The training came and went. I stayed on at the Ashram teaching yoga classes and studying Vedanta and Sanskrit under the permanent staff of Swamis and Brahmin priests. In the quiet of the Ashram, six months passed quickly and the time came to discover the rest of India. I headed slowly for Rishikesh, savoring rural areas and avoiding cities, stopping at other Ashrams and yoga centers on the way. 

The Divine Life Society in Rishikesh, another branch of the Sivananda Order, was my final destination. Permission from Swami Krishnananda, the head monk, was required for entry. No interview or references were needed. I had only to sit through darshan and ask to stay during the discussion period that followed. Easy enough.

Sitting on a raised dais, Krishnananda was decorated with flower garlands around his neck and surrounded by disciples, many of them internationals. The feeling in the room was unlike anything I knew from other Sivananda Ashrams, had glimpsed with Poonjaji in Lucknow or other gurus met along the way. The room was crowded; the vibe was anxious and somehow intimidating.

After meditation, Krishnananda gave a short lecture. A number of things struck me. On asceticism and renunciating worldly life, “We do not deny the universe; we deny a universe without God.” In a long riff about the impossibility of politics to ever end suffering, an allusion to Sartre: “The sole function of the ego is to repugnate [sic] the other.” Eyes sparkling, adorned with flower garlands, I began to suspect this was an exceptionally bitter man.

The time came to declare my wish to stay. The Swami would decide the appropriate length of my visit. I raised my hand and spoke. “You are a seeker, wandering from place to place,” he informed me and the crowd. “You are looking but you do not see.” Some in the crowd turned to look at me. Clearly this was no usual rebuke. Inside I burned, but he was right.

The left hemisphere

A month later I left India to return to work in Somalia and Sudan. Two years passed. Somalia scarred me, almost killed me. The cynical manipulation of relief efforts by Sudanese military enraged me; the failure of aid agencies to condemn this disgusted me. By early 1994, my idealism was desiccated. I wanted psychic recovery. A few months back at the Sivananda Ashram in Kerala would sort me out before I began doctoral studies in New York later that year.

When the Rwandan genocide broke in late April, my plans changed. By mid-May I was on a plane to Kigali to help start relief operations, working through the end of August when studies began. Off the plane from Rwanda, Manhattan was overwhelming. I sought refuge at the Sivananda Ashram in Chelsea, on 24th and 7th ave. Rent was offset by various chores. I taught regular yoga classes, prepared recycling materials for pick-up, helped out in the kitchen. The daily structure, observances and austerities were identical to the Kerala Ashram. In my spare time I pored over Marx, Aristotle and Plotinus, attending evening lectures on the same.

Some weekends I took a bus to the Ashram in the Catskills, where my relationship with Swami Sankarananda deepened. At dusk one frozen winter day, a milk cow escaped from the barn. We leapt up from chanting and bolted out the door in bare feet. An hour of shouting and calling through thick underbrush turned to laughter as we ran the cow to exhaustion, then led her back by the nose. Months later I was told, without elaboration, that Sankarananda had disappeared from the Ashram to elope with a Brahmachari. That he was human I could appreciate. But his absence from the Order was a painful blow. I decided to leave Ashram life for the concrete tundra of secular Manhattan. I taught yoga there for a couple more years, but gradually lost touch with the Order.

In 2005 I was in London working as an adviser on Darfur to the British government, a heady but brutally exhausting job. Inebriated with fatigue, I needed simplicity and silence. I remembered a Sivananda Ashram in Putney where I’d taken a class or two years ago. I looked it up and took the train out for a visit. I was nervous, like seeing an old lover.

The reunion was sweet, subdued, and therapeutic. The head Swami was warm and welcoming, interested in my previous life in the Order but never prying. He remembered Sankarananda fondly. Everyone in the Order does; he was an incandescent light. I continued my visits to Putney, and my health and energy improved. Yogic practices and observances returned to my daily life without effort, almost unconsciously. I repeated what I’d said for years: I must get back to Kerala.

I had my chance this summer. The Ashram had grown since my last visit in 1994. New buildings and dormitories had sprung up among the coconut and rubber tree plantations. I walked in the gardens by the lake, checked on the ceiling paintings and murals of the Gita etched in my mind from years before. On the wall of the main worship hall, I noticed a photo of Swami Vishnudevananda, founder of the Ashram and Sankarananda’s guru, who passed in 1994. The caption stated he was performing a “fire walk” in Amritsar. 

In the image, Swami Vishnudevananda did not regard the smoldering embers as he made his way over the short distance. His face was open and readable, smiling as he always did. He was still relatively thin; I guessed the photo dated from the early 1980s (as here right). Two disciples stood behind Swami Vishnu, preparing for their turn on the coals. One I recognized immediately: Swami Mahadevananda with his Roman nose, straight black hair and rotund belly. In between Mahadev and Swami Vishnu was another disciple staring down at the smoking coals, revealing little of his face to the camera.

I stared at the photo. Which western disciple would have been closest to Swami Vishnu in the early 1980s, on the Pakistan border? In a gestalt flash, I recognized the profile as a young Sankarananda, years before he was inducted into the Order. Seeing him again brought back a flood of feelings. My history with this Order, its thoughtways and lifeways, was not over. For anyone who bothered to look, it was a mere photo on a random wall. For me, it was a precious fragment of meaning on an otherwise opaque personal journey.

I spent my final days in Kerala not at the Ashram, but in a sleepy beach town called Varkala. Precariously perched on a cliff overlooking the Indian Ocean, it was beautiful. I wandered around, I ate, I read. On a quiet afternoon with no wind, a sign advertising yoga classes led me to a thatched hut in the village. A teacher waited inside while his young daughter sat coloring pictures. We chatted; I was the only student. Upon hearing I’d studied at the Sivananda Ashram, he gazed at me for a long moment and smiled. Did I know Swami Sankarananda?  We traded recollections; he had been a teacher to both of us. He was an exceptional human being, we agreed, and sat down for opening prayers.

by Shiban Ganju

This world has two kinds of people: those who flip from one diet to the other without shedding a pound and those who reach the same goal without trying. I met both of them on last Sunday: my brother in law (BIL), the non-dieting-hedge-fund-manager and his friend, a serial-dieter-hedge-fund-lawyer (HFL). Yes, she assured me, there was actually such a job.

Out of their compassion, they wanted to volunteer for an NGO. We decided to meet at an Indian restaurant in Chicago and discuss this over dinner.

My sermon to BIL on 3QD on sugar free diet had as much effect as a barking dog has on a speeding truck. HFL also had read my last post on BIL’s sugar addiction and was so affected that she had started Atkins, which coaxed her to gorge on fats and loathe all carbohydrates like poison ivy. And this was on her sixth diet.

She arrived for dinner in a loose white T-shirt, which announced in red letters,“ I am on a thirty day diet and have already lost fifteen days.”

Her – the hedge fund lawyer’s (HFL) – current fad made my job easy in this Indian restaurant, where fat was as readily available as sand in Sahara and it stared at me from the menu with names like Butter Chicken, Daal Makhani, Panir Burji. . Sympathizing with their fat cells I ordered the food to meet their metabolism. I thanked Atkins.

Fat cells or adipocytes are the primary storage bins for fat. These cells scatter themselves through out the body but preferentially nest themselves around the waist of a male and hips and thighs of a female, which silhouettes him into an “apple” and her into a “pear.” A woman normally has 20 to 25% fat by weight and a man has 10 to 15 %. Anything more than 30% for women and 20% for men is unhealthy. Waist circumference is an indicator of risk of cardiovascular disease – the upper limit is 40 inches for men and 34 inches for women. Fat cells can increase or decrease in size depending on the accumulation or mobilization of fat. Obese people have overstuffed cells and also carry more adipocytes: 60 to 100 billion in contrast to 30 to 50 billion for non-obese adults.

Fat is a trigyceride – three fatty acids mounted on a scaffold of glycerol. Fatty acids are molecules of carbon and hydrogen strewn together like a chain and glycerol is a kind of alcohol. The metabolism of fatty acids produces carbon bits, which further transform into a molecule called Acetyl Coenzyme-A. Utilization of the cleaved carbon bits and the Coenzyme yields 17 molecules of energy-laden phosphate, which makes fats a highly potent storehouse of energy. An average body stores about 60,000 kilocalories worth in fat cells and another 3000 kilocalories in muscle cells. Some fat (trigyceride) floats in the blood and may sometimes settle inside an accommodating liver.

Fat cells contain an enzyme named ‘hormone sensitive lipase’ (HSL), which under the influence of epinephrine (adrenalin) cleaves fat and releases fatty acids and glycerol into the blood stream. The fatty acids travel to the muscles, which utilize them for energy and glycerol enters liver for metabolism. Epinephrine levels increase during exercise, which stimulates HSL to mobilize fat from adipocytes but obesity blunts the sensitivity of HSL to epinephrine.

Action of epinephrine on fat cells also depends on the kind of receptor sites they carry to lock epinephrine. There are two of them: beta and alpha. Epinephrine can increase breakdown of fat through beta-receptor and inhibit it by acting through alpha-receptor. While fat cells have both the receptors, one may be more abundant and sensitive to epinephrine. Fat cells around abdomen are more sensitive to epinephrine than those around hips and thighs, which means it may be easier to loose fat from abdomen than hips.

Another ubiquitous enzyme – lipoprotein lipase (LPL) – lines all the blood vessels in the body and is also present in liver and fat cells. LPL breaks down the fat attached to cholesterol and proteins floating in the blood and acts as a gatekeeper to regulate the distribution of body fat.

Adipocytes also produce a hormone – leptin, which signals to the brain to regulate hunger. Starving fat cells flood the body with leptin, which stimulates hunger and eating; conversely satiated fat cells produce little leptin, which suppresses hunger. Leptin deficiency results in enormous appetite and massive obesity.

What would decide how much food we would eat at the restaurant? Externalities like the aroma, taste, ambience and company were all conducive to a good appetite. But within each one of us a battle of four hormones raged: ghrelin and cholecystokinin from the gut, insulin from the pancreas and leptin from the fat cells. These hormones worked on the hypothalamus to regulate our eating. When we walked into the restaurant, our ghrelin was high and insulin was low, which made us hungry. When food stretched our stomachs ghrelin level dropped and gut secreted cholecystokinin, creating satiety.

As carbohydrates entered the blood stream from the intestine our pancreas flooded us with insulin, which helped mop up sugar and convert excess into fat. Our willing fat cells readily welcomed the floating fat and in return secreted leptin as a signal of engorged satisfaction. Here we were, four adults believing in free will, yet slaves to our own unwilling hormones.

When we had settled half way into our dinner, we started talking about the voluntary work with an NGO that may engage them. They had considered Green Peace, Oxfam and Human Rights Watch. They had done their homework. They told me their concerns and passions and I enquired about the time they could spare from their busy lives.

I forked a piece of succulent chicken from my plate and deposited it my mouth. Relishing the aroma of cumin and ginger, I suggested, “ Why don’t you work with an NGO on world hunger?”

Did I say earlier that the world has two kinds of people: dieters and non- dieters?

I was wrong. There is the third kind that goes to bed every night – hungry. And the world has over 800 million of them, of which fifty percent live in south Asia, forty percent in Africa and ten percent in the developed world. The World Health Organization has estimated that one third of the world population has over-stuffed fat cells, one third has empty cells and one third are simply starving.

BIL and HFL were stunned at the numbers and were earnest in knowing more. I continued, “Every year 15 million children die of starvation. It is estimated that one in 12 children in the USA go to bed hungry.”

Presently the waiter appeared and asked, “ Would you care for dessert?”

BIL ordered a Mango Kulfi.

“ I guess, since we entered the restaurant, probably 400 people have starved to death.”

HFL asked for a Ras Malai.

“What the world spends on its military for a week could probably prevent starvation deaths for ten years. And about three billion people in the world battle with life daily with less than two dollars a day.”

I was too full and shipped the dessert; I ordered a glass of twenty year old tawny port.

“ Every four seconds some one dies of hunger.”

Justin E. H. Smith

Hail myself! Hail the iron law of my development! In just five years I have increased fat production by ten percent, and average snore decibels by twice that. In keeping with actually existing conditions, I have also reduced shampoo use to austerity-era levels, and increased fourfold the daily repetition of tales of the courage I showed in youth.

And hail my future! In five years’ time, I will surpass my father, that running-dog of the Oak Park branch of State Farm Insurance, in nap-minutes per afternoon, in handfuls of Costco pretzels, consumed without deliberation, as the will of the hand and the mouth dictates.

And the ear-hair harvest will enjoy record yields, as Ninelle procures the latest machine for its removal –the removal of actually existing hair– which works as well in nostril as in ear, the greatest achievement yet of the November 11 Technical Innovation Shock Brigade: The Nozdromat-5!

Lo, but the future burns bright, like the titanium-laptop glow that has spread from capital to province in just ten years, and in another ten will glow in every room of every apartment bloc, in every corner of our steely bathroom. Ninelle will have only to brush the warm screen with her breath, and it will perform her very toilet for her.

And O! how radiant she will be, like the Queen of the Cybernetics Pavilion at the All-Union Exhibition of the Detritus of the People’s Dithering, back in… well, before the end of history, anyway.

And I, adorned with medals of valor –the valor of just continuing on under actually existing conditions, not quite those promised in the frenzied first months of the Revolution, when new hair signaled not demise but unbounded potential– will sit in my own glow, where Ninelle may not enter, in a room I call a study.

And I will study actually existing conditions, and at scientifically determined intervals I will grit my teeth a bit, and mumble nichego, and slip into yet another dream of the kindly, buxom Czarina.

—

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

I like to take the train from Penn Station out to Paterson. It stops in Secaucus Junction, a new and gleaming place that never seems to have anyone in it, just cavernous halls of light marble and a lonely bar tucked in one corner, the woodwork of which seems laughable and out of place and therefore sympathetic. The barkeep told me it would be a great place to work if a few hundred more customers came through every day.

I always ride in the space between train cars from Penn to Secaucus. It is loud and feels like what I imagine train travel to have been like in the olden days; jarring, big, transformative. The train smells more like itself between the cars, especially when it is raining in the evening. As you bumble your way out of the big city and into the tunnels under the Hudson you can watch the rivulets of water splashing down into the lonely puddles that pockmark the railway trenches of the far West Side. The last few streams of light make their way through the clouds and glimmer in the raindrops and the dirt like a faded painting.

I don’t object to the changes in all things. I don’t object to the fact that all experiences are washed away in time. But I like the way that the little metal platform between train cars is protecting a feeling that has barely changed for generations.

The train pulls out of Secaucus Junction and then putters along through the marshy fields that make up the Jersey wilds just outside of Manhattan. There is tantalizingly little to see until the industrial ruins of Paterson begin to show themselves with not much fanfare. The train ride doesn’t get somewhere so much as end.

*

No one knows exactly why William Carlos Williams chose Paterson as the subject and location for a new poetry. He was working on his variable triadic foot. It was a new meter, so he said. It has never been entirely clear how it’s supposed to scan. Maybe Williams himself never really understood it. But he was messing around, trying to capture the American idiom and thereby the American experience. He stayed in New Jersey while all the other Americans went to Paris or wherever chasing something they thought was going to turn out big. For some it did. For some it didn’t. Williams stayed and stayed some more. He wasn’t having fun, he was working. He was listening to the Paterson Falls and he was crafting in his forge. “No ideas but in things”: a new poetic empiricism.

*

These days Paterson is broken, let’s be honest. She has her honor, like an old hooker, but she’s broken. It is probably impossible to know what finally breaks a city, what makes it give up and fall apart into petty fiefdoms and the inability to live. All the factors, of course, play their roles: economics, politics, the ongoing terrible American abyss of race. But something else happens when a city breaks, something nobody has a handle on exactly. In that way a city can be like a person. And no one can say precisely what happens to a person when they walk outside and look at the bricks around them, the houses and buildings, and suddenly see nothing at all. What seemed to be a world of meaning around them, the context for living a life, turns into something empty and irrelevant. When that happens you’re not living in the world anymore, you’re simply existing alongside it.

*

There’s a statue of Alexander Hamilton standing at the Paterson Falls, just looking. The Paterson Falls ought to be a marvel of the East Coast. They are nature in its aspect of the sublime. To one’s consistent amazement, they sit there in the midst of a neighborhood, right there in the lap of a city that suddenly shifts gears and gives way to a torrent of rushing water and black rocks.

Hamilton stands there and watches the falls decade after decade. Not many people remember it anymore but a battle took place here long ago. It was a struggle between competing dreams. To simplify, one was Jeffersonian and one was Hamiltonian. Jefferson dreamed of something agrarian, something manageable. He wanted a small democracy built up of autonomous men. It was a decent dream so far as it went. Hamilton dreamed of something else, of the wheels of industry churning out goods and wealth within an urban milieu that the world hadn’t seen yet.

One wonders what Hamilton would have thought about the actual history of Paterson. The way that Paterson ended up being intertwined with the American imagination, the American tragicomedy, the American story, is hundreds of times more complicated than he could have dreamed. But he dreamed it all up nonetheless. Now he stands at the Falls with his back to the city and watches, just looking.

by Ruth Crossman

“I don’t know how things work in America, but I’m sorry, you’re not going to find a single bank in London open on a Saturday.”

I was standing in front of the Willesden Green Tube Station with all of my earthly possessions in a pile in front of me, on the phone with the manager of London Accomodation. Five minutes earlier, her Australian secretary had assured me that there was an HSBC in Tottenham Court which was open on Saturday, and so if I was willing to make the schlep I could go there and deposit my meager severance packet. But Lady Posh had a point to prove and I was in no mood to argue. I had just been sacked from my job at an EFL summer camp after an unfortunate incident involving a bomb scare at a national monument, and I was desperate for a room. I just sighed and said that in that case, I would be paying half the deposit in cash and putting the other half on my nearly-maxed American Visa card. I had gotten used to acquiescing to the Brits, especially when I heard the phrase “I don’t know how things work in America, but here in England…”

I had been the token American at the summer camp, and had begun to wonder if “take the piss out of the Yankee” was some kind of national sport. The string of questions and comments was endless-“why do you smile so much?” “why do you say like all the time?” “why did Bush get re-elected if so many of you voted for Kerry?” At first, I had tried to play the role of the cultural translator. But after a while I just started staring my tormentors down and fixing them with a grim smirk. That usually shut them up. At least in Westonbirt, I had been gainfully employed and given free room and board. London, as I was soon to find out, would be a whole different story.

Camus once compared the concentric canals of Amsterdam to the circles of hell, and I began to feel much the same way about the Tube zones in the Big Smoke. A city full of immigrants rubbing against horrified locals, each group of foreigners occupied their own level. The Desis ran the off-licenses and sold the cell phones. The Poles unclogged the toilets. The French waited tables and ran the kitchens. But the most ironic level was reserved for the native speakers-the Aussies, the Kiwis, and the Yankees. The others were there either out of dire economic need or a desire to learn the language. Our reason for coming could usually be summed up in two words-“pound sterling.” We were the paper pushers, the petty bureaucrats, or, in my case, the substitute teachers. English culture has a strong streak of xenophobia to it, but the English seemed to reserve a special brand of contempt for the Americans. I remember explaining to a Polish friend of mine that while the Londoners seemed to resent the foreign influx, my case was rather special. They might feel guilty for the misery their empire had brought to India and Pakistan. They might pity the Poles because of the history of their country. They might look down on the Aussies and Kiwis, but they saw them as brothers in the commonwealth, bastard children of the Queen Mum. For the Americans, they had not a shred of sympathy. I saw a definite glitter in the eyes of my landlords and employers when they realized I needed something from them. So, Yankee, the tables have turned. If you want my money, if you want my flat, be prepared to get on your knees and beg for it. And I did.

I spent a miserable four weeks fighting for survival in London before I gave up. I had a free apartment and a cushy teaching job waiting for me in Slovakia in mid-September, so in the last week of August I scraped together all the money I had left, bought a one way ticket to Bratislava, and made a call to my new boss. I fell in love with Slovakia the minute the plane touched down. The people were warm hearted, they were loud and flashy, and they were emotionally demonstrative, like the Americans. Despite the language barrier, I felt a hundred times more comfortable with the Slovaks than I had with the English.

But Britannia gave me one last parting shot. I was in a hostel, preparing to move into my new apartment, when two English girls with the kind of posh London accent that sets my teeth on edge walked into the room.

“So how long have you been here?”

I could have pretended I didn’t speak English, but I decided to be civil.

“About a week.”

“It’s a bit of a dive, don’t you think?”

“You mean the hostel?”

“No, the city. It’s really a mess, isn’t it? So dirty and ugly. Not like Vienna.”

My gut reaction was to slap them across the face and tell them to home if they hated it so much, but I bit my tongue and chose my words carefully.

“You know, the thing about Bratislava is that the people are nice. The same cannot be said for London.”

And with that, I grabbed my backpack and walked out of the room, slamming the door behind me like an uncouth Yankee.

Ruth Crossman is a free lance writer and English teacher currently based out of Bratislava, Slovakia. Her interests include language acquisition, travel, and international politics.

Imagine an American TV network deciding to take the American Idol format and apply it to poetry; lining up poets to read their poems in front of temperamental judges while the nation gets out its mobile phones to vote for its favorite poet. One can be sure the show would not survive the first commercial break before the chastened executives pull the plug on it and replace it with yet another series on the Life and Times of Nicole Ritchie. Yet, that was exactly the formula for the latest TV sensation to take Arab countries by storm.

Perhaps the only thing that is as hard as translating Arab poetry to other languages is trying to explain to non-Arabs the extent of poetry’s popularity, importance and Arabs’ strong attachment to it. Whereas poetry in America has been largely reduced to a ceremonial eccentricity that survives thanks to grants and subsidies from fanatics who care about it too much, in the Arab world it remains amongst the most popular forms of both literature and entertainment. Whereas America’s top poets may struggle to fill a small Barnes & Noble store for a reading, Palestine’s Mahmoud Darwish has filled football stadiums with thousands of fans eager to hear his unique recital of his powerful poems. And while in America a good poetry collection can expect to sell some 2,000 copies, in the Arab world the poems of pre-Islamic era poets are still widely read today in their original words, as are those from the different Islamic eras leading to the present. The late Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani had a cult following across the Arab world, and his romantic poems have for decades constituted standard covert currency between lovers.

The Arab World has had its own enormously successful pop music answer to American Idol in Superstar which has concluded its fourth season with resounding success, unearthing some real stars of today’s thriving Arabic cheesy pop scene. But a few months ago, the governors of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi took a bold move by organizing a similar contest for poets. This comes as another step in Abu Dhabi’s ambitious attempts to use its petro-dollars to transform itself into the capital of Arab culture, and one of the world’s leading cultural centers; a Florence to Dubai’s London.

The show, named Prince of Poets, was an enormous success. Some 4,000 poets from across the Arab world sent in submissions to be considered. 35 were chosen for the show, and millions of viewers from across the Arab world tuned in to watch them recite their poetry, get criticized by Arab poetry’s answer to Simon Cowell, Paula Abdul and Randy Jackson (5 older poets and professors), improvise verses on the spot, and address wide-ranging issues from women’s rights, Iraq, love, democratization, Palestine and the old staple of Arab poetry: self-aggrandization. The winner would not only gain fame, but also a grand prize of 1,000,000 UAE Dirhams ($270,000).

The success of the show was wilder than anyone could’ve expected. The Arab press has had reports about how it has achieved the highest ratings in its spot, overtaking football matches and reality-TV; and millions have paid for text messages to vote for their favorite poet.

The turning point in the show’s popularity, many have speculated, came when young Palestinian poet, Tamim Al-Barghouti, read his poem “In Jerusalem“. Tamim, who is a distant cousin and close friend of mine, is the son of famous Palestinian poet and writer Mourid Al-Barghouti (author of the excellent I Saw Ramallah) and Egyptian novelist Radwa Ashour. Tamim’s charisma, poetry, personality and politics captured the imagination of the Arab world. A veteran of years of student political activism in Palestine and Egypt, Tamim was once deported from Egypt by the authorities after engaging in one too many anti-Iraq War protests for the liking of Egypt’s regime. He then moved to America where he completed a Ph.D. in Political Science at Boston University in only three years, before working for the United Nations in Sudan. Through all of this, he has managed to publish four collections of poetry that have received critical acclaim and is expanding his Ph.D. thesis into a book on political identity in the Middle East to be published in 2008. He is now headed to Germany to become a fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study.

While many contestants opted away from talking about politics in their poems, hoping to not cause any grievance to the generous leaders of the United Arab Emirates who are hosting this show, or to any of the other Arab leaders, Tamim’s poetry was almost entirely political. Whether it was about Palestine, Iraq, or Arab dictatorships, Tamim was as courageous as he was eloquent, raising a few eyebrows in the quiet Emirate where discussing regional politics is not considered the wisest choice of discussion topic.

“In Jerusalem” is a poetic diary of Tamim’s last visit to his land’s occupied capital; a sad traverse through its occupied streets defiled by the occupation soldiers and the illegal settlers living on stolen Palestinian land, and around the apartheid walls choking the city with their racist denial of Palestinians’ basic freedoms and rights. Nonetheless, the poem ends on a cheery and optimistic tone, leading to the jubilant excitement with which the Arab world enjoyed the poem.

Palestinian newspapers have dubbed Tamim The Poet of Al-Aqsa; his posters hang on the streets of Jerusalem and other Palestinian cities, where key-chains are being sold with his picture on them. Sections of the poem have even become ring-tones blaring out from mobile phones across the Arab World, and 10-year-old kids compete in memorizing and reciting it. Hundreds of thousands of people have seen Tamim’s poems on Youtube and other video websites.

But perhaps Tamim’s most amazing feat was how he has galvanized all Palestinians into following him and supporting him. After all of the troubles that Palestine has been through recently, and all the divisions that have been spawned within the Palestinian people, it was very refreshing to finally find something that unequivocally unites all Palestinians, and rouses millions of Arabs behind the cause that was tarred recently by the actions of some Palestinians.

This unifying effect was most glaringly captured when the TV stations of both Hamas and Fatah threw their support behind the unsuspecting Tamim, broadcasting his poems repeatedly, and urging people to vote for him, catapulting him from a little known young poet into a symbol of national resistance and unity. Finally, after months of divisions amongst Palestinians, there was something uniting them: a reminder of the true essence of the cause of the Palestinians, of the real problem, the real enemies and the real need for unity to face these challenges for the sake of Palestinian people and their just cause.

All of which made the final result of the contest most surprising. After having consistently received the highest ranking from the viewers’ votes and the unanimous flattery of the judges, and after a barn-storming flawless last poem that had the judges gushing, Tamim ended up in fifth place out of the five finalists. The poetess that was expected to most strongly challenge Tamim, the Sudanese Rawda Al-Hajj, who had focused her poems on women’s empowerment, finished fourth. The winner, perhaps unsurprisingly, was Abdulkareem Maatouk, a poet from the host country, the United Arab Emirates, whose poems had steered clear of anything political or controversial.

Though Tamim refused to comment, speculation was rife that the results were rigged. That Tamim and Rawda, widely viewed as the two best poets, would finish bottom of the finalists was certainly implausible, and one could not help but imagine that politics came into play. Abu Dhabi may want to fashion itself as the capital of culture, but it probably values its political stability more than any cultural pretenses. Arab regimes may have behaved like warring tribes with narrow self-interest over the past century, but there is one thing in which their cooperation was always exemplary: the effective suppression of all voices of dissent. As the contest became more popular, and the crown of the Prince of Poets more prestigious, it may have become too hard for the organizers to accept giving the trophy to a Palestinian rabble-rouser who in one of his poems bemoaned the times that have “degraded the free amongst us, and made scoundrels into our rulers.”

Nonetheless, there is no doubt who the real winner was; it was not just Tamim and his poetry which will now rival Mahmoud Darwish’s as the voice of the Palestinians, but also the Palestinian people who were reminded of the meaning of their unity, and their cause, which has found its best advertisement that has strengthened the mutual affection, dedication and support of millions of Arabs in the midst of one of its darkest hours.

For more of my writings, see my blog The Saif House

by Ram Manikkalingam & Pablo Policzer

On September 11, 2001 Al Qaeda conducted an attack that ‘shocked and awed’ the United States. The US responded with a military attack on Al Qaeda at its center: Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. It also pursued a further strategy of tightening the noose around Al Qaeda’s funding, arms supplies, recruitment, ideologues, and supporters. Notwithstanding the overthrow of the Taliban regime and the expulsion of Al Qaeda from its base in Afghanistan, six years on the US war against Al Qaeda has reached a stalemate. Osama Bin Laden remains at large, Al Qaeda has not been defeated, and there is growing speculation that it possibly cannot be defeated, at least in the near term. Opposition to the United States and support for Al Qaeda have both increased over the past several years. Moreover, Al Qaeda has learned how to disperse and survive in response to US military pressures, and it is arguably a more formidable adversary, and harder to annihilate, than in the past.

On September 10th, the eve of the sixth year of the attack by Al Qaeda, I thought it might be appropriate to summarize and link a paper I wrote with my colleague Prof. Pablo Policzer for a conference a few months back on a different approach to Al Qaeda, prompted by our dissatisfaction with what we see as the two dominant approaches – fight smarter or talk harder. (short version & long version)

The first response deplores the distraction of Iraq and the dispersion of US national security attention away from the focus on Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. This response argues that the current US approach, especially on Iraq, has multiplied the number of enemies poised against it, weakened its position in the world, and undermined its own citizens’ security. The second type of response urges recognizing Al Qaeda as a rational actor with clear political demands, and calls for negotiations with the group over these. The argument here is that such political engagement offers more promise than a prolonged military standoff.

By contrast to both of these positions, we argue that Al Qaeda’s dispersion needs to be taken more seriously as a political, military, organizational, and analytical challenge. Paradoxically, the same dispersal strategies that have allowed the center of Al Qaeda to survive by making it harder to target militarily, make it easier to bypass politically. In other words, the very adaptation that has led to the calls for talking to Al Qaeda – its flexibility and resilience – is also the strongest reason for not doing so at its center. Instead, engagement should take place at the periphery. Devolving engagement in this way requires disaggregating demands, evading global divides, and multiplying local and regional responses.

Understanding the organizational, political, and military challenges of engaging Al Qaeda will shed light on the more general challenge of engaging armed groups. Al Qaeda is not the exception to this challenge (a position implicitly shared by the advocates of military as well as political engagement of Al Qaeda at the center), but the latest, if most complicated, instance of it.

Seen this way, the conflict between Al Qaeda, and the United States and its allies, begins to look less like a global clash between two formidable opponents, and more like a series of overlapping local, national, and regional conflicts with multiple players, some more connected than others. Similarly, Al Qaeda begins to look less like a single transnational terrorist organization capable of carrying out devastating attacks anywhere in the world, and more like a number of armed groups that are more or less allied to one another (and to some states), confronting and combating a number of states that are more or less allied with one another (as well as to some armed groups). These conflicts are more numerous than the single contest of the United States against Al Qaeda, but they are also possibly more amenable to resolution. This is because some of these armed groups may themselves be more willing to resolve their conflicts, and because we are more familiar with the tools — security, military, political, humanitarian and economic — that can be applied locally, nationally, and regionally in such cases.

Building on this notion, the focus of our attentions should not be a single Al Qaeda center, albeit with many peripheries. It should be multiple centers and peripheries, with varying degrees of attachment to Al Qaeda and to Osama Bin Laden, and with varying degrees of commitments to the political, ideological, or social projects espoused by them. Each of the numerous armed groups – such as the Taliban, Abu Sayyaf or even Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia – can be distinguished by its organizational structure, aims and capacities from Al Qaeda. And each of their goals may, depending on the shifting political and military context, range from clinics to treat the sick to the global caliphate to convert the unbelievers. Similarly, each of the problems, such as democratic transition, immigration, pluralism, and state-building, that are lumped together, can and should be disentangled from the single divide between Islam and the West that the conflict with Al Qaeda suggests. And should be addressed autonomously, on its own terms. All of these challenges are familiar to us, not because we have always been successful in addressing them, but because we have dealt with them before in other parts of the globe.

A review of The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, by Steven Pinker

One of my favorite science books… no, wait… one of my favorite books altogether, is a shortish volume by Steven Pinker entitled Words and Rules. (I cannot remember how many copies of that book I have bought for various friends over the years, but I can pretty safely say that Pinker owes me a drink or two from his royalties.) I admired Pinker before I had read this book because I had already admired other books he had written. The first of these was the first book Pinker wrote for a wide audience: The Language Instinct. I read this book while I was still a very serious young student of analytical philosophy of language and mind in a Ph.D. program at Columbia University. Some of my philosophy professors didn’t like the book, but I did. Here’s why: Pinker knew a lot about the philosophical issues we were worrying about in our seminars, and he had empirically verifiable things to say about them. In fact, he had identified important and deep linguistic issues which had testable implications. And he always backed up what he said with a lot of footnotes (meaning he always cited studies to back up whatever it was he was asserting). This was very exciting and pleasing to my sciency heart. (My undergraduate degree is in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.) What he was saying in The Language Instinct actually made predictions and retrodictions (explaining what we already know to be true from past observation is just as important in science as any soothsaying of the future) about very concrete patterns in how language is actually acquired by children, and used by adults.

In any case, the reason Words and Rules is such a favorite of mine is that in it, Pinker manages to squeeze a shocking amount of intellectual juice out of something seemingly quite dry: the nature of regular and irregular verbs (walk–walked/go–went) and regular and irregular noun plurals (kid–kids/child–children). It is truly a tour de force: one of those rare small books (like Language, Truth, and Logic by A.J. Ayer, Fact, Fiction, and Forecast by Nelson Goodman, or The Idea of a Critical Theory by Raymond Geuss) that changes how we think about something very important. But I really don’t have space here to tell you why that book is so wonderful. On the other hand, before we get to The Stuff of Thought, we can and should try to answer this: why is language and how we actually use it so important? It’s because of nothing less than this: we want to know what the meaning of life is.

I’m going to make this story very simple: In 1879 a man in Germany named Gottlob Frege wrote a paper entitled “Über Sinn und Bedeutung.” (That means “On Sense and Meaning.”) For more than two thousand years before Frege, the Western world had been worrying about all kinds of philosophical questions: What is the nature of justice? What is the nature of beauty? What is the nature of truth? And, of course: What is the meaning of life? After Frege, we (at least Anglo-American analytical philosophy) have spent the last century-and-a-quarter mostly wondering whether it makes sense to even ask such questions, and to answer that, focusing on language itself. From Bertrand Russell’s attempts to model natural languages with formal ones such as the predicate calculus, to Wittgenstein’s language games, to the verificationism of logical positivism and the Vienna Circle, to Rudolf Carnap’s confirmation theory, to Gilbert Ryle and J. L. Austin, to W.V.O. Quine, to, in more recent times, Hilary Putnam, Donald Davidson, and my own Ph.D. adviser (and Davidson’s student) Akeel Bilgrami, the struggle to elucidate the workings of language, and therefore the meaning of meaning, has been the primary focus of philosophers, as well, of course, as of linguists. Suppose for a second that we had been struggling with the question “What is the color of love?” for all that time. Wouldn’t that have been silly? Is it not obvious that to ask, “What is the color of love?” is a category mistake? Purple, after all, is not a predicate that applies to the category “love,” just as “brittle” is not a predicate that applies to something like the number 17, say. Noam Chomsky famously coined the grammatically perfect but nevertheless meaningless sentence “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” as an illustration (partly) of this point. (And this is also the basis of Douglas Adams’ joke that the meaning of life is 42.) What if the basic questions we have been grappling with for millennia are so intractable precisely because they are nonsensical? (I say all this by way of motivating the minute attention to details of language that is soon to absorb us.)

Things become especially interesting when we come to the predicate “true.” What does that apply to? Clearly not to words, as it seems obviously stupid to ask if “cat” is true or not. Clearly it also does not apply to very long collections of words, as it seems equally nonsensical to ask whether “Hamlet” is true. So, what does “true” apply to, properly? Basically: propositions, or more loosely, sentences. Something like “Snow is white” can actually be true or false. It happens, in this case, to be true. And it is truth which connects philosophy through language to science, because science is concerned with representations of the world which are true. Not beautiful, not good, true. So a map can be “true” to the degree that it correctly represents a given terrain. Similarly, “Snow is white” is a bona fide scientific statement. It is a representation in language of a state of affairs in the world. But we represent reality in our minds in other ways besides language and those representations are not all available to our conscious selves by simple introspection. What Steven Pinker is out to do in The Stuff of Thought is to tease out what our patterns of language use can tell us about how we think and the very nature of our minds. This linguistic approach to cognitive science turns out to be very fertile indeed, and combines and connects the subjects of Pinker’s previous books on language, which I have already mentioned, with some of the ideas expressed in his How the Mind Works. In fact, if it weren’t so unwieldy, the title What the Language Instinct and Words and Rules Tell Us About How the Mind Works could have been pressed into service.

Rather than make a futile attempt at summarizing 439 idea-crammed pages, what I’d like to try to do here is give you a flavor of the kinds of things the book is about by briefly explaining one of the many fascinating stories that Pinker tells about language and what it entails for “conceptual semantics”–the concepts and schemes that we use to think–indeed, the language of thought itself. Let’s jump right in: we begin by considering what one of Pinker’s colleagues once jokingly referred to as one of Pinker’s “little friends”: the verb “to load”. Take a sentence like Hal loaded hay into the wagon. [All linguistic examples used in this review are Pinker’s own.] This is what linguists call a content-locative construction because it is the contents being moved that are the object of the sentence. Notice that this sentence is indistinguishable in meaning from Hal loaded the wagon with hay. This latter sentence is known as a container-locative construction, since it is the container which is the object here. One can do also perform this operation (call it the locative rule) with other transitive verbs:

Jared sprayed water on the roses.
Jared sprayed the roses with water.

Betsy splashed paint on the wall.
Betsy splashed the wall with paint.

Jeremy rubbed oil into the wood.
Jeremy rubbed the wood with oil.

The mind of a child might absorb such a pattern (linguists call it an alternation) as a generalization. So now, if you heard someone say brush paint onto the fence you might guess that brush the fence with paint is also fine. So far so good. But now consider a different sentence: Hal poured water into the glass. It cannot be transformed in a similar manner: Hal poured the glass with water sounds immediately wrong to a normal speaker of English. Similarly, problems arise in the other direction with other verbs like fill: while the container-locative construction Bobby filled the glass with water is fine, the content-locative Bobby filled water into the glass is not grammatical English. Why? As Pinker puts it, “How do children succeed in acquiring an infinite language when the rules they are tempted to postulate just get them into trouble by generating constructions that other speakers choke on? How do they figure out that certain verbs can’t appear in perfectly good constructions?” (p. 37)

Pinker now considers and rejects three possibilities: First, maybe we have over-generalized the rule. Maybe verbs have some trait that children can sense that indicates that they resist this alternation. But if such a trait exists, it is not very obvious what it could be since load, pour, and fill are all ways of moving something to another place, but pour only allows the content-locative (pour water), fill only allows the container locative (fill the glass), and load allows both (load the hay, load the wagon).

Second, it might be that children simply memorize which constructions are allowed for which verbs, one at a time. This is unlikely because children have to master an infinite language and only have a very limited set of samples to learn from. Also consider that when new words (or new senses of words) enter the language, such as burning songs onto a CD, no one has trouble generalizing to the container-locative burning a CD with songs. Indeed children do generalize to the container locative even when they could not have heard the usage from their parents. Many examples can be found in children’s speech which has been recorded by psychologists, such as “I hitted this into my neck.”

The third possibility is that children do make generalizations, but are corrected by their parents (or others) when the generalization leads to a construction which, like “I hitted this into my neck”, is not allowed. Well, even attempts to show that parents react differently to their children’s deviant sentences, much less correct them, have not come up with anything. And there is a bigger problem: Even if parents were trying their best to always correct their children, this would not be enough to explain the strong intuitions people have about what verbs can and can’t do: “People sense that they would never say They festooned ribbons onto the stage or She siphoned the bottle with gasoline, yet word-frequency counts show that these verbs are literally one in a million. It is unlikely that every English speaker uttered each of the obdurate verbs in each of the offending constructions at some point in childhood (or, for that matter, adulthood), was corrected, and now finds the usage strange on account of that episode.” (p. 40)

So where does that leave us? Pinker lists four apparent facts that can’t be all true at the same time:

• people generalize
• they avoid some exceptions
• the exceptions are unpredictable
• children don’t get corrected for every mistake

One of these, at least, must be false, and indeed when we examine them carefully, the one that seems weakest is that the exceptions are not predictable. What if they are somehow predictable? “Often a linguistic pattern that seems haphazard turns out to have a stipulation that divides the sheep from the goats. For example, the mystery of why you can’t apply —er and —est to certain adjectives, as in specialer and beautifullest, was solved when someone noticed that the suffixes apply only to words that are monosyllabic (redder, nicer, older) or have at most an insubstantial second syllable (prettier, simpler, narrower). Perhaps there is also a subtle criterion that distinguishes the verbs enlisted into the locative construction from the draft dodgers.” (p. 42)

The breakthrough came in a paper by Malka Rappaport Hovav and Beth Levin who realized that it is not just a Chomskian matter of cutting and pasting phrases, such as moving a prepositional phrase leftward into the position of a direct object (in the case of changing a content-locative into a container-locative construction) or moving the direct object rightward into a prepositional phrase (in changing from container-locative to content-locative construction), with the meanings left indistinguishable. It is something more abstract: the rule actually transforms the mental framing of events that goes into a construction. Pinker explains:

Imagine that the meaning of the content-locative construction is “A causes B to go to C,” but the meaning of the container-locative construction is “A causes C to change state (by means of causing B to go to C).” In other words, loading hay onto the wagon is something you do to hay (namely, cause it to go to the wagon), whereas loading the wagon with hay is something you do to the wagon (namely, cause it to become loaded with hay). These are two different construals of the same event, a bit like the gestalt shift in the classic face-vase illusion in which the figure and ground switch places in one’s consciousness.

In the sentences with the hay and the wagon, the flip between figure and ground is not in the mind’s eye but in the mind itself–the interpretation of what the event is really about….

When conceived as a conceptual gestalt shift, the locative rule is no longer a matter of cutting and pasting phrases in complicated ways for no particular reason. It can now be factored into two very general and useful rules:

• A rule of semantic reconstrual (the gestalt shift): If a verb means “A causes B to move to C,” it can also mean “A causes C to change state by moving B to it.”
• A rule for linking meaning to form: Express the affected entity as the direct object. (p. 44)

The really interesting bit is that this gestalt-shift theory implies that the two constructions might not be completely synonymous (they are two different construals of an event, after all), and when we think about it carefully, that is indeed the case:

When one loads hay onto a wagon, it can be any amount, even a couple of pitchforkfuls. But when one loads the wagon with hay, the implication is that the wagon is full. This subtle difference, which linguists call the holism effect, can be seen with the other locative verbs: to spray the roses with water implies that they all got sprayed (as opposed to merely spraying water onto the roses), and to stuff the turkey with breadcrumbs implies that it is completely stuffed.

The holism effect is not an arbitrary stipulation tacked onto the rule, like a pork-barrel amendment on a spending bill. It falls out of the nature of what the rule does, namely, construe the container as the thing that is affected. And that, in turn, reveals an interesting feature of the way the mind conceives what things are and how they change. The holism effect turns out not to be restricted to the locative construction; it applies to direct objects in general. For instance, the sentence Moondog drank from the glass of beer (where the glass is an oblique object of from) is consistent with his taking a few sips. But the sentence Moondog drank the glass of beer (where the glass is a direct object) implies that he chugged down the whole thing.

But the holism effect has even wider applicability. It is really not even a property of the direct object, but of the affected entity which normally happens to get expressed as a direct object. So in constructions where the entity affected is the subject, you have still constructions displaying the holism effect, such as:

Bees are swarming in the garden.
The garden is swarming with bees.

So then why is the content interpreted as a whole in these container-locative constructions? I’ll let Pinker explain again:

The reason is that English treats a changing entity (a loaded wagon, sprayed roses, a painted door) in the same way as it treats a moving entity (pitched hay, sprayed water, slopped paint). A state is conceived as a location in a space of possible states, and change is equated with moving from one location to another in that state space… (p. 47)

And also:

When the mind conceptualizes an entity in a location or in motion, it tends to ignore the internal geometry of the object and treat it as a dimensionless point or a featureless blob…. So, the figure being positioned and the place where it is said to be located are treated differently in language: the first is reduced to a dimensionless speck, whose internal geometry is ignored; the second is diagrammed, at least schematically. Take the English phrases on your hand, under your hand, and in your hand. Each picks out an aspect of the geometry of the hand, namely its top, its bottom, and a cavity it can form…. This leads us to a deeper explanation of the holism effect. In the locative alternation, when the container (such as the wagon in load hay into the wagon) gets promoted to direct object, it is also conceptually reanalyzed as something that has been moved in state-space (from the “empty” slot to the “full” slot). And in this reconstrual, it gets compacted into a single point, its internal geometry obliterated. Wagons become loaded, flowerbeds sprayed, turkeys stuffed, not as arrangements of matter in space with niches and hidey-holes that may separately accommodate bits of matter, but as entities that are, taken as a whole, now ready for carting, blooming, or cooking…. But if an object can be thought of as changing state even when it has stuff in just one part, then the container locative may be used there, too. Thus we can say that a graffiti artist has sprayed a statue with paint even if he has colored just one part of it, because a single splotch is enough for people to consider it defaced. (p. 49)

We have been discussing the holism effect to show that what we have come to realize is that the way the gestalt-shift theory of the locative explains why some verbs allow the shift while others don’t is that it establishes a relationship between the meaning of the construction and the meaning of the verb. As Pinker points out, one can throw a cat into the room, but one cannot throw the room with a cat because throwing a cat into a room cannot be construed as a way of significantly changing the state of the room. And this same kind of reasoning applies to all the other cases we have discussed. As a last example, let us return to why one can’t pour a glass with water:

Verbs that differ in their syntactic fussiness, like pour, fill, and load, all pertain to moving something somewhere, giving us the casual impression that they are birds of a feather. But on closer examination each of these verbs turns out to have a distinct kind of semantic fussiness–they differ in which aspect of the motion they care about.

Take the verb pour, and think about when you can use it. To pour means, more or less, to allow a liquid to move downward in a continuous stream. It specifies a causal relation of “letting” rather than “forcing,” and it specifies a manner of motion; these are the bits of meaning that differentiate it from other ways in which liquid moves, such as spray, splash, and spew. Since pour says something about the motion, it can be used in the construction that is about motion; hence we can say pour water into the glass. But pour doesn’t care about how or where the liquid ends up. You can pour water into a glass, all over the floor, or out the window of an airplane, dispersing it into a mist. Nothing predictable happens to the destination of a poured liquid, and so the verb is inconsistent with a construction that specifies how the state of a container has changed. And thus we can’t say she poured the glass with water. (p. 50)

Other verbs which, like pour, do not allow the locative alternation (you can’t dump a truck with iron) are: dribble, drip, drop, dump, funnel, ladle, shake, siphon, slop, slosh, spill, and spoon. On the other hand, here are some seemingly similar verbs that do allow the alternation (you can smear grease on the axle, or you can smear the axle with grease): brush, dab, daub, plaster, rub, slather, smear, smudge, spread, streak, and swab. To see why they are different, we can once again look at the physics underlying their meanings: in the first set of pour-like verbs, we let gravity do the work, while in the second set, the agent applies force to the substance and pushes it actively onto it. And the mind makes these fine distinctions when deciding whether the alternation should apply or not.

Pinker gives many more examples, and cites many experiments to confirm the theory that I do not have the space here to convey. As it is, I have distilled this brief exposition from over twenty pages of flavorful prose, peppered with interesting facts such as the one I mentioned above about why specialer and beautifullest are not proper words, and full of Pinker’s delightfully wry sense of humor which made my wife wonder why I kept laughing as I read a serious book on language and mind. I can’t resist just one of many examples:

Even the most palpable cognitive distinction–who did something, and who had something done to him–can be mentally flip-flopped, as when a hockey player shouts, “Kiss my elbow!” or when Woody Allen in Play it Again, Sam gets roughed up by some bikers and tells his friends, “I snapped my chin down on some guy’s fist and hit another on the knee with my nose.”

I hope I have managed to give some sense of the content and tone of the book. The rest of it is just as jam-packed with facts and ideas about how and what the structure of language can tell us about how our minds work, as the small part I have presented. Pinker also discusses ideas that he thinks are wrong. One of my favorites was his destruction of Jerry Fodor’s Mentalese, but he is equally effective in dismissing other interesting but ultimately fruitless ideas. It seems conventional when reviewing a book favorably to trot out a few petty criticisms to give the appearance of objectivity and balance. I shall commit no such crime and recommend the book as highly as I can recommend any book, without reservation. It ships on September 11th, but you can order it now. Buy it. And read it. You’ll find yourself educated and entertained at the same time.

Full disclosure: when the publisher sent me a review copy of the book, I was pleased to find my own name cozily nestled in the list of those thanked in the acknowledgments section, to which after reading the book I can only say: no, Steve, thank you.

All my previous Monday Musings can be seen here.

Have a good week!

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”