According to cliché most artists, aside from having the key characteristics of egocentricity and vanity, are also, to a certain degree, liars. I wholeheartedly agree with this, if you can read it in a positive way. Looking at it linguistically, the difference between creative, inventive, innovative, and visionary characters is mere nuance—it’s all just a question of people who, to varying degrees, like to make stuff up. Whether their audiences then believe them or not is an entirely different matter, and no responsibility of theirs.

It’s often said that pathological liars fool no one but themselves, and herein lies the difference. To counter what many historians and critics like to think, artists working with visual and verbal material (or any other medium, for that matter) usually know what they’re up to. I was in a bookstore the other day decorated with various quotes along a series of columns. Waiting at the checkout I came across a phrase from Einstein, something along the lines of “true creativity lies in knowing how to conceal your sources.” Both the London Review of Books and the New York Times Book Review have, over the past few months, run articles and letters discussing the growing length of author’s acknowledgements, source credits, and writer’s general fear of becoming the next J.T. Leroy or James Frey. In other countries it’s perfectly acceptable to publish a book filled with extended quotes of other works as long as the author is mentioned—the title and other information about the quote’s source are seen as superfluous, and the reader just needs to know or be willing to hunt it down. In the United States a similar approach would have one publisher’s legal department phoning the other non-stop. This obsession with full disclosure is beginning to suffocate; readers and viewers are free to trust or distrust creative types, and I’d like to think they’re bright enough to distinguish things without relying on someone else to tell them what to think. That someone else might be untrustworthy anyway.

I went to see a Piranesi exhibition at Rome’s Museo del Corso, which among copper plates, sketches, and countless prints included the over 135 etchings in his Views of Rome series. I’ve never much loved his lines, and am fairly convinced he was a sell-out, but I nevertheless can’t deny his importance. The show’s curators chose to title it Piranesi’s Rome: the Eighteenth-Century City in the Grandi Vedute. A newspaper review of the show is more accurate with its title, Piranesi, or Rome as it Wasn’t. Curiously, the museum space itself was most appropriate; there wasn’t a window in the entire place, and it was depressingly dark, completely cut off from the outside world—the world that would’ve exposed some of his embellishments.

In many etchings Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778) liked to bestow the title of Architect on himself, even if—or maybe because—of his many architectural projects, only one was ever realized. That design, his renovation of the church Santa Maria del Priorato and adjacent garden on the Aventine Hill in Rome, brought him much less recognition than his obsessive, incessant print production. In a pre-photographic period he was the major promoter of ancient Rome’s grandeur, and foreshadowed the Romantics’ fancy for ruins by several decades. In 1746, six years after he’d moved to Rome from Venice, the twenty-six-year-old etcher undertook the immense task of documenting views of his adopted city. At the same time the city was being invaded by ever more foreigners on the Grand Tour; French, English, German, and people of countless other nations, primarily from northern Europe, couldn’t get enough of the decadence depicted in his work. How much the fact that he himself was a northerner at heart influenced his perspectives I can’t really say, but they can certainly be seen as propaganda. A few (and some of the most interesting) works in the show were done independently of any commission; a multi-plate plan of Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli is a visual fugue stretching over nine feet. Pope Clement XIII, a member of the powerful Venetian Rezzonico family and one of his main patrons, commissioned a church renovation that was never realized for lack of funds. So these few architectural projects are utterly peripheral in comparison to the prints that sold like hotcakes both to visitors and a vast audience abroad—people who’d never have the chance to actually see the sites he portrayed. Perhaps he would’ve embellished certain scenes and buildings regardless of his audience, but I think he gained great liberty in recognizing that there wouldn’t be any fact checkers poring over his work. Hence SPQR, the acronym of Senatus Populus Que Romanus (the Senate and People of Rome), becomes something like Sabinae Populus Que Resistet (the Sabines, People that Remain/Resist/Persist) in one of his inscriptions. Over drinks the other day I was discussing this with an archaeologist who held mixed gratitude and disapproval for the Vedute—some of them are the sole depiction of important structures since destroyed, and therefore important documentation, while some are simply made up. Most fall somewhere in between. Photoshop didn’t yet exist, not to mention photography, but Piranesi managed to fool people with many of the very same techniques of today’s advertising—bits of his richly evocative scenes are the equivalent of the perfectly blue skies, radiantly blemish-free teen models, and high-gloss world in commercials for travel and just about everything else.

He’s a little more honest in his 1760–61 series Carceri d’Invenzione, where he admits his inventiveness in the title. He’d begun exploring this theme fifteen years earlier in a series initially titled Invenzioni Capric[ciose] di Carceri, with a nod to the fundamental caprice underlying it all. Piranesi was convinced that Rome’s grandeur came not from the Greek legacy, but from the Egyptians, via the Etruscans. This explains a lot of the simply wacky interventions he adds to buildings that would otherwise be plainly classical. My question remains: does it really matter how faithful he was to the world around him? Does it really matter if he’s trying to pull the wool over our eyes, or really was convinced of his own visions?

In 1930 Henri Focillon published Esthètique des visionnaires, an essay discussing the visionary esthetics of Daumier, Rembrandt, Piranesi, Turner, Tintoretto, and El Greco. His clearest claim in what could otherwise be dismissed as a relic of Romanticism is that visionaries don’t view their subjects, they rather envision them. He goes on to say that these visionaries possess (I’d say are possessed by) a particular virtue that doesn’t alter nature, but rather imbues it with a striking vivacity, intensity, and profundity. These are mere words—he contradicts this later on by writing that visionaries can’t be contented with the real world, and so they use it as a point of departure; “They interpret more than imitate, and transfigure more than interpret.” Fine.

Returning to the so-called Architect’s one completed building project, the  church atop the Aventine is almost impossible to visit, as it’s closed to the public, but the garden next door can be viewed through the keyhole of its door, where six or seven people were lined up as I got there late this past Saturday evening. Stooping to peer through the keyhole, your eye meets an orderly perspective, lined with well-kempt cypresses, receding to the illuminated dome of Saint Peter’s at the very center of the composition. Not only is Piranesi controlling what you see (a dome framed by dark vegetation, much more orderly than the surrounding city and most of his chaotic print compositions), but he’s also dictating how you see it; you’re limited by the keyhole’s outline, then by the trees. These limits closely relate it to Borromini’s famous colonnade perspective at Palazzo Spada, the views of ideal cities produced in Renaissance Florence, and the Olympic Theater of Palladio and Scamozzi in Vicenza. This last connection, to theater, is fascinating, and reveals a lot about our contemporary culture. Going to the theater—or cinema, for that matter—people expect to be removed from their own world; it’s entertainment, imagination, fantasy, and can appear more real than the people, places, and things we see around us each day. It’s the circus, it’s make-believe, it’s the Surrealists’ theater of cruelty, it’s a theater of the absurd, it’s a theater of war. It’s Dionysus’s thyrsus-led procession, the drunken debacle that became the origin of all theater. So why do people bring such different expectations to visual art? A few contemporary artists are venturing into theater: Kara Walker’s silhouettes, although immobile, narrate past and present characters and their often frightful histories; William Kentridge’s Black Box / Chambre Noire, a tripartite riff on the themes inherent in the black box as theater (realm of performance), airplane device (to record disaster), and camera (interior between lens and eyepiece), was shown at the Deutsche Guggenheim but not in New York; and Pierre Huyghe’s puppet shows all merge static visual arts with theatrical realms.

Infinite possible worlds exist, and coming into the theater—or peering through the  keyhole (be it Piranesi’s or Duchamp’s)—a single filtered, channeled world is presented. Such miniature theater can be sculptural object, projection, installation, print, and vice versa. The grand narrative and scale of present and past history are here reduced to small theater. Piranesi’s prints, distant relatives of later architectural follies, were both products cranked out for commercial profit and visions loftier than any debate of real vs. unreal.

At times Piranesi’s hand grew heavy, and the acid bath a bit strong, but this darkness could be read as the reverse side of the Enlightenment looking glass. The nature of shadows is key; in talking about his exploration of the black box, Kentridge describes how, while observing a solar eclipse, he became aware of the process of looking, “of being made conscious of the nature of light,” and how light diffuses mystery, making “everything immediately comprehensible.” This light can be useful, but also has the power to overexpose an image, leaving a bleached-out scene, robbed of its essence—be it actual or invented.

In Parts one and two, I talked about the scholarly practice of Open Access publishing, and about how the central concept of “openness”, or knowledge as a public good, is being incorporated into other aspects of science.  I suggested that the overall practice (or philosophy, or movement) might be called Open Science, by which I mean the process of discovery at the intersection of Open Access (publishing), Open Data, Open Source (software), Open Standards (semantic markup) and Open Licensing.

Here I want to move from ideas to applications, and take a look at what kinds of Open Science are already happening and where such efforts might lead.  Open Science is very much in its infancy at the moment; we don’t know precisely what its maturity will look like, but we have good reason to think we’ll like it.

By way of analogy, think about what the Web has made possible, and ask yourself: how much of that could you have predicted in, say, 1991, when Sir Tim wrote the first browser?  Actually, “infancy” being a generous term for the developmental state of Open Science, a better analogy probably reaches further back: how much of what the internet has made possible could anyone have predicted when ARPANET first met NSFnet?  Given that last link, for instance, would you have seen Wikipedia coming?  How about eBay, Amazon.com, RSS, blogs, YouTube, Google Maps, or insert-your-own-favorite amazing web site/service/application?

The potential is immense, and from our current perspective we cannot predict more than a fraction of the ways in which openness will transform the culture and practice of science.   Nonetheless, there are signs pointing in possible directions.

early examples: sequence data

Sequence data (such as mRNA, genomic DNA and protein sequences) have long been the leading edge of large-scale collaborative science, largely because early competition among public and private organizations resulted in a series of groundbreaking agreements on public data sharing.  (For a quick tour of the relevant history, see this article.)  Among the online tools that have been developed around openly-accessible sequence databases such as GenBank or SwissProt, the flagship effort is probably the NCBI‘s online gateway Entrez.  From Entrez I can search for information on a sequence of interest on almost thirty different interlinked databases.  I can:

• find related nucleotide and protein sequences, and make detailed comparisons between them
• map a sequence of interest onto whole chromosomes or genomes, and compare those maps across ten or twenty different species
• access expert-curated information on any connection between a query molecule and human genetic disease or heritable disorders in other species
• look for known motifs or functional sequence modules in a query molecule, or use similar sequences to build 3D models of its likely shape and structure
• compare a sequence of interest across wide taxonomies, and formulate useful questions about its evolutionary history
• look for array data regarding expression of a query sequence in different developmental, disease-related and other contexts
• access genetic mapping data with which to map a query sequence in organisms for which little or no sequence data is yet available

There’s much more — that was a very brief and incomplete overview of what Entrez can do — but you get the point.  All of this analysis is only possible because the underlying sequence data is available on Open terms (and largely machine-readable due to semantic markup), and it forms a ready-made infrastructure in which further Open information can readily find a place — as soon as it becomes available.

data and text mining

In part 2 I talked about a range of efforts to make databases of other information, including text, similarly interoperable and available for mining.  Paul Ginsparg, in a recent essay, used the interface between PubMed Central and various sequence databases as an early example of what becomes possible when databases can be read by computers as well as by humans (emphasis mine):

GenBank accession numbers are recognized in articles referring to sequence data and linked directly to the relevant records in the genomic databases. Protein names are recognized, and their appearances in articles are linked automatically to the protein and protein interaction databases. Names of organisms are recognized and linked directly to the taxonomic databases, which are then used to compute a minimal spanning tree of all of the organisms contained in a given document. In yet another view, technical terms are recognized and linked directly to the glossary items in the relevant standard biology or biochemistry textbook in the books database. The enormously powerful sorts of data mining and number crunching that are already taken for granted as applied to the open-access genomics databases can be applied to the full text of the entirety of the biology and life sciences literature and will have just as great a transformative effect on the research done with it.

Donat Agosti recently pointed to three related projects: Biotext, which builds text mining tools; EBIMed, which analyses Medline search results and presents associations between gene names and several other databases; and the Arrowsmith Project, which allows semantic comparison between two search-defined sets of PubMed articles.  The latter also maintains a list of free online text mining tools, which currently includes several dozen sites offering tools for a variety of purposes, although the majority are still focused on Medline and/or sequence databases.

These sorts of tools are not only useful, they are likely to become essential.  Even now, I can hardly imagine trying to navigate the existing sequence data without Entrez, or the research literature without PubMed.  GenBank contains more than 40 billion bases and is growing exponentially, doubling every 12-15 months.  PubMed contains nearly 17 million records as I write this, and is adding well over half a million every year.  The 2007 Nucleic Acids Research database issue lists nearly 1000 separate biological databases, up more than 10% from last year.  As Matthew Cockerill of BioMed Central has pointed out, simple text searching is not enough to keep a researcher afloat in this onrushing sea of information.

bibliometrics

Data and text mining methods stand to come into their own as discovery tools once they have a fully Open and machine-readable body of published research on which to work.  Similarly, the utility of bibliometrics, the quantitative analysis of text based information, can be dramatically enhanced by Open Access.  In particular, measures of research impact can be made much more powerful, direct and reliable.

Research impact is the degree to which a piece or body of work has been taken up and built upon by other researchers and put to practical use in education, technology, medicine and so on.  Governments and other funding bodies want to be able to measure research impact in order to provide accountability and ensure maximal return on investment, and researchers and research administrators want the same measurements in order to assess the quality of their research and to plan future directions (“how are we doing? how can we do better?”).

The most important measure of research impact currently available is citation analysis, a proxy measurement based on acknowledged use by later published work; the predominant citation-based metric in modern research assessment is the Impact Factor (IF).  If a journal has a 2004 IF of 5, then papers published in that journal in 2001-2002 were cited, on average, 5 times each in 2003.  This number is probably the most widely misunderstood and misused metric in all of science, and comes with a number of serious built-in flaws, not the least of which is that the underlying database is the property of for-profit publishing company Thomson Scientific.

Despite these flaws and considerable high-profile criticism, it is difficult to overstate the influence that the Impact Factor has had, and continues to have, on all efforts to evaluate scientists and their work.  Researchers obsess over journal choice: you don’t want a rejection, which forces you to re-submit elsewhere and wastes time, but you need to get that paper into the “best” (that is, highest IF) journal you can so as to appeal to hiring, funding and tenure committees.   And that’s not unrealistic, since quite frankly the bottom line for most such committees is “who has published the most papers in high-IF journals”.  Other factors are usually considered, but the IF dominates.  It’s a clumsy, inaccurate and unscientific way to go about evaluating research impact and researcher talent.

Happily, there is a better way just over the Open Access horizon.  Once a majority of published research is available in machine-readable OA databases, the community can get out from under Thomson’s thumb and improve scientific bibliometrics in a host of different ways.   Shadbolt et al. list more than two dozen improvements that OA will make possible, including:

• A CiteRank analog of Google’s PageRank algorithm will allow hits to be rank-ordered by weighted citation counts instead of just ordinary links (not all citations are equal)
• In addition to ranking hits by author/article/topic citation counts, it will also be possible to rank them by author/article/topic download counts
• Correlations between earlier download counts and later citation counts will be available online, and usable for extrapolation, prediction and eventually even evaluation
• Searching, analysis, prediction and evaluation will also be augmented by cocitation analysis (who/what co-cited or was co-cited by whom/what?), coauthorship analysis, and eventually also co-download analysis
• Time-based (chronometric) analyses will be used to extrapolate early download, citation, co-download and co-citation trends, as well as correlations between downloads and citations, to predict research impact, research direction and research influences.
• Authors, articles, journals, institutions and topics will also have “endogamy/exogamy” scores: how much do they cite themselves? in-cite within the same “family” cluster? out-cite across an entire field? across multiple fields? across disciplines?
• “Hub/authority” analysis will make it easier to do literature reviews, identifying review articles citing many articles (hubs) or key articles/authors (authorities) cited by many articles.

Existing metrics (which basically means Thomson’s proprietary data) are simply not rich enough to support such analyses.  There are already efforts underway to mine the available body of text for better ways to evaluate research.  Hirsch’s h-index, an alternative way of using citation counts to rank authors according to their influence, can be calculated online using Google Scholar.  Bollen et al. have proposed a method for using Google’s PageRank as an alternative to the Impact Factor, as well as their own Y-factor which is a composite of the two measures.  The Open Citation Project built Citebase, an online citation tracker which has been used to show that downloads (which are measured in real-time from the moment of upload) can predict citations (for which data one must wait years).  Authoratory is a text-mining tool based on PubMed, and is capable of co-author analysis, authority ranking and more.

As the body of OA literature expands, these and similar tools will provide a far more reliable and equitable means of comparing researchers and research groups with their peers than is currently available, and will also facilitate the identification of trends and gaps in research focus.  The downstream effects of increased efficiency in managing and carrying out research will be profound.

commentary and community

Andrew Dayton recently described another feature of the coming Open Science world, which he calls Open Discourse:

The internet is expanding the realm of scientific publishing to include free and open public debate of published papers. […] How often have you asked yourself how a certain study was published unchallenged, without the results of a key control? How often have you wondered whether a paper’s authors performed a specific procedure correctly? How often have you had the opportunity to question authors about previously published or opposing results they failed to cite, or discuss the difficulties of reproducing certain results? How often have you had the opportunity to command a discussion of an internal contradiction the referees seemed to have missed?

Stevan Harnad has referred to a similar idea as peer commentary, calling it a “powerful and important supplement to peer review“.  It’s important to note that a number of journals, such as Current Anthropology or Psycoloquy, offer “open peer commentary” which is not actually open to public contribution.  Similarly, the phrase “open peer review” is typically used to indicate that reviewers are not anonymous, rather than that review is open to the public.  Neither of these pseudo-open concepts rely on “openness” in the Open Access/Open Science sense, whereas Open Discourse as Dayton means it is, of course, utterly dependent on such openness for its subject matter.

There are a number of venues which enable fully Open Discourse as Dayton means it.  OA publisher BioMed Central offers a public comment button on every article, and Cell allows public comments on selected articles.  BMC also publishes Biology Direct, which offers both an alternative model of peer review and public commentary, and PLoS has just launched PLoS One, offering standard peer review followed by public commentary, annotation and rating.  Philica will publish anything, and provides public commentary which can also serve as a form of peer review through an authentication process for professional researchers.  JournalReview.org is set up as an online public journal club, and Naboj is a forum for public review of articles posted to arxiv.org.   BioWizard is somewhat similar, but is limited to articles accessible via PubMed and offers a number of other tools, such as a blogging platform and a rating mechanism designed to identify popular papers.  Both JournalReview and BioWizard notify corresponding authors so that they can participate in the discussion.  The British Medical Journal offers a rapid response mechanism which, having posted over 50,000 public responses to published work, sounds a cautionary note for more recent arrivals on the public commentary scene: in 2005, the journal was forced to impose a length limit and active moderation in order to avoid losing the desired signal in a flood of uninformed, obsessive noise.

Speaking of floods of uninformed, obsessive noise — what about blogs?

Of course, I’m kidding.  I actually have high hopes for the future of blogs in science, centered on three themes: commentary, community and data.  Blogs are an excellent medium for commenting on anything, and with web feeds and a good aggregator it’s pretty easy to keep track of a selected group of blogs.  If Technorati worked, it might allow interesting views of the science blogosphere; fortunately, we have Postgenomic, which indexes nearly 700 science blogs and then “does useful and interesting things” with the data.  For instance, you can see which papers and/or books are getting attention from science bloggers; there’s even a Greasemonkey script that will flag Postgenomic-indexed papers in Connotea, Nature.com’s social bookmark manager for scientists, another for PubMed and yet another for journal websites.  A new Digg-like “community commentary” site, The Scientific Debate, allows trackbacks and so can interact with regular blogs.  The discussion above about text mining applies, of course, to blogs, since they are typically openly accessible and friendly to text mining software.  For instance, Biology Direct or PLoS One could interact with the blogosphere using linkbacks, or by pulling relevant posts from Postgenomic.

Blogs also tend to create virtual communities, such as the one that centers on Seed’s ScienceBlogs collection of, well, science blogs.  This group of about 50 blogs is rapidly becoming a hub of the science blogosphere, and even gave rise to a recent meatspace conference that bids fair to become an annual event.  Such self-selected communities foster a sense of cameraderie and strongly encourage co-operation over competition, which can only favor the advance of Open Science.  (It’s not just blogs, of course, that can take advantage of community building.  The Synaptic Leap, the Tropical Disease Initiative, OpenWetWare and BioForge all provide infrastructures that enable collaborative communities to do Open Science.)

Finally, blogs (and wikis) have immense potential as a scientific publishing medium.  They are, to begin with, the perfect place for things like negative results, odd observations and small side-projects — research results for which the risk of having an idea stolen is greatly outweighed by both the possibility of picking up a collaboration and the importance of having made available to the research community information which would never surface in a traditional journal.  Most research communities are relatively small; it would not be difficult for most researchers to keep up with the lab weblogs (lablogs?) of the groups doing work most closely related to their own.  I know of a few blog posts in this category.  This and this from Bora Zivkovic are, I think, the first instances of original data on a blog. This series from Sandra Porter is earlier but involves bioinformatic analysis (that is, original experimentation, but no original data), as do this and this from Pedro Beltrao.  Egon Willighagen blogs working software/scripts for cheminformatics, and Rosie Redfield and her students blog hypotheses, thinking-out-loud and even data.  Blogs are also good for sharing protocols, like the syntheses posted by the anonymous proprietor of Org Prep Daily.

Beyond that, it’s possible to do fully Open Science, publishing day-to-day results (including all raw data) in an online lab notebook.  I know it’s possible because Jean-Claude Bradley is doing it; he calls it Open Notebook Science.  His lab’s shared notebook is the UsefulChem wiki, which is supplemented by the UsefulChem blog for project discussion and the UsefulChem Molecules blog, a database of molecules related to their work.  There is nothing to prevent Jean-Claude from publishing traditional articles whenever he has the kind of “story” that is required for that format, but in the meantime all of his research output is captured and made available to the world.  Importantly, this includes information which would never otherwise have been published — negative results, inconclusive results, things which simply don’t fit into the narrative of any manuscript he prepares, and so on.  Being on a third-party hosted wiki, the notebook entries have time and date stamps which can establish priority if that should be necessary; version tracking provides another layer of authentication.

At the moment the Bradley lab is the only group I know of that is doing Open Notebook Science, but of all the glimpses of an Open Science world I have tried to provide in this entry, Jean-Claude’s model is, I think, the clearest and most hopeful.  Only when that level of transparency and immediacy is the norm in scientific communication will the research community be able to realize its full potential.

that’s all, folks

I promise, no more obsessive posting about Open Science here on 3QD.  If I’ve managed to pique anyone’s interest, I recommend reading Peter Suber’s Open Access News and anything else that takes your fancy from the “open access/open science” section of my blogroll.  And as always, if I’ve missed anything or got anything wrong, let me know in comments.

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

Thank god, the lawyers of Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh are appealing the decision of a London court that Dan Brown did not plagiarize their book, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, for his blockbuster novel The Da Vinci Code. 2007 begins to look so much less drab when I consider the spectacle of this ongoing legal battle. Consider, Reader:

1. The pure cheek of the whole thing. Whether they win their appeal or not, surely the best thing that ever happened to Baigent and Leigh was Dan Brown, since their book tended to be displayed alongside The Da Vinci Code, unquestionably boosting its sales. (One of the authors was prominently featured in a History Channel “documentary” on the truth beyond the Da Vinci Code – There isn’t any, by the way. Or is there? No, there isn’t. Or is there?) And of course each new phase of the case is essentially a free advertising spot. There is no scenario in which any of the parties can lose, really, if one keeps in mind the fact that legal counsel is a tax-deductible business expense. I say fight it all the way to the supreme court of the European Union if necessary.

2. The world-historical implications for global capitalism at stake here, since it involves Random House kind of appearing to sue itself (because it published both books), or something, while simultaneously reaping the publicity benefits of any possible outcome – the late, great William Gaddis would have loved this case, and I wish he were alive to see it and write about it.

3. The exquisite legal paradox facing Baigent and Leigh. The fact is that their book, purporting to have found an ancient conspiracy leading back to a sexual relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, is a work of fiction. The irony of fate here is pretty sublime. Their plagiarism case would be much stronger if they had told the truth and said that they had made it all up. As it stands, however, the pretense of the conspiracy-theory genre forces the authors to pretend that The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail is based on actual research etc. rather than being a fabrication of two very inventive minds.

4. What does all this imply about Dan Brown? It’s possible that he is only a figurehead or sort of corporate entity (“Dan Brown”) that involves the research genius of his wife, Blythe, and some sort of marketing genius (the real Dan Brown or his agent, etc.) who has mastered the art of narrative cliffhangers to such a degree that even a complete inability to write English prose doesn’t get in the way of the story. (Please read Anthony Lane’s priceless review of the film here; Mr. Lane made it all worthwhile.)

A Final Note: The ultimate Da Vinci Code experience, for my money, is neither the book nor the film, but the audiobook. The actor they hired to narrate, Paul Michael, is a very competent person, and I mean no real disrespect to him. But he is male, and this hopeless job forces him to do the female dialog in an sort of falsetto Inspector Clouseau French accent that makes hottie archaeologist Sophie Neveu, supposedly a descendant of Jesus Christ, sound like a breathless tranny. “My grandfather, my grandfather…” Oh my, Sophie, tell me more!

Read an excerpt from Holy Blood, Holy Grail.

From January 25 until March 3 of this year, Cindy Workman is exhibiting twelve new works—inkjet prints all—at the Lennon, Weinberg gallery in New York City. I have been a fan of hers for several years, and the current series is in my opinion some of her finest work to date. She is an artist at play in the world, and the stuff is arresting, provocative, curious, charged, and suffused with what I can only describe as a kind of tempered joy. The opening is on this Thursday, from 6:00 to 8:00 pm. Do not miss this show.

She has entitled it “les demoiselles,” and I got the sense from looking at each print that Ms. Workman had chosen to break Picasso’s large canvass into its constitutive elements, so that what we get is a series of neo-cubist portraits, in which many surfaces are present at once, and the cumulative effect of which is a larger portrayal—and hence, interrogation—of contemporary female identity, what it is and how it is constructed and experienced. Layering drawings of idealized girls taken from the envelopes of sewing patterns on top of or behind soft-core porn shots from the 1950’s, and then blending them into a single composition, Workman creates images that are simultaneously familiar and jarring. These women are sexualized in ways familiar to us all, but inappropriately so. One is attracted and repulsed at the same time. Imagine looking at what appears to be a little girl, only to realize that she is a woman who, in her attempt to look like a sexy little girl, has had too much plastic surgery—and you begin to get the idea. (Conversely, imagine that you are looking at what appears to be a voluptuous sex object, only to discover that you are seeing a little girl in a sailor’s outfit…)

Breasts are prominent in these works, in part because for Workman they are a source of identity for women and in part because their exposure renders that very identity exposed. Workman isn’t just asking you what it means to have breasts; she is asking you what it means to be a breast-having-object, what it means to be an object whose existence depends on having breasts and what it means to want to be such an object: what it means to be a commodity whose consumer appeal is proportional to the heft and shape of one’s breasts. Workman, however, is not making anti-porn, anti-consumer agitprop. There is nothing hectoring or scolding in or about these pieces. The subjects know that you are looking at their breasts, and you are invited, even expected to do so. The result is art as a kind of reportage, an art that talks about things we can’t otherwise talk about.

In “les demoiselles,” Workman continues her practice of collage, but this time the background is stripped out. This, to me, is where things get very interesting indeed. The subjects appear in color fields (the artist described one to me as “Indescribable pink. Pinky-mauve. Dirty-bright pink.”)—hues in which they are suspended and from which they are irretrievably separated. They will never again dress in the colors that surround them. This composition of containment lends to the subjects an auratic, glowing, elevated status—they have become archetypes of sexualized femininity—but that very elevation cuts them off from the world in which they appear and exist. That woman surrounded by pink, hovering in pink, one feels, will never again experience pink. She has exchanged for her elevated status the very quality that made that status possible; it is lost to her, and she to it. She is eternally lonely, and these works are a profound meditation on the contemporary condition of loneliness.

After looking at each print, I had to admit to Ms. Workman that she had put my back-brain and my super-ego in conflict. I found the work sexy; I knew I shouldn’t, for many reasons; but I couldn’t help myself. I practically apologized for that. She just laughed. That’s part of the point, I realized. And then she said it for me: “That’s because men are more visual, and women are more cerebral.” Indeed. This show makes that clear, and brilliantly so. Touché, Ms. Workman.

Big Brother. Not the leader of Orwell’s claustrophobic dystopia, but a brightly coloured reality TV show format, that has waded into controversy in the UK this week. British viewers watched the programme with increasing discomfort, as loutish English celebrities bullied (and most say, racially abused) well known Bollywood actress, Shilpa Shetty, live on air.

The Big Brother concept has made a pretty packet for its creator, Endemol, the brainchild of Dutchman, John de Mol, with the format being successfully sold to broadcasters in no less than 70 countries – most of which have been prime time hits. The format of the programme is simple. Contestants enter the “Big Brother” house to win cash prizes, or in celebrities’ cases “money for a favourite charity” although they are normally paid a hefty fee to turn up in the first place (in Shilpa Shetty’s case, a reputed £350,000). To win, contestants must avoid nominations for eviction from their housemates, with the public deciding whom amongst those nominated will ultimately get the boot. It could be a social experiment in hippy, free-loving communal living, except that the point of Big Brother is to foster division, arguments, and sexual tension, all of which makes for great ratings.

To a great deal of surprise, Shilpa “the Body” Shetty, a Bollywood siren, with at least 50 movies under her belt, and a command of 8 languages, shimmied off Bollywood screens and into the UK’s “celebrity” version of Big Brother at the beginning of this month. Given her 15 million pound fortune, and true A-list credentials, nobody understood why she would want to enter the Big Brother house with a bunch of International and British low life celebrities, the best of the bunch being, Dirk Benedict, yes “the Face” from the now defunct A Team, and Jermaine Jackson, brother of the now defunct Michael Jackson.

In doing so, the clearly successful Shilpa, has attracted a great deal of envy from the worst of the bunch: three non-entity, female English celebrities, who are famous for very little apart from once being in manufactured pop bands, or, indeed once having been in other reality TV shows. Jealousy, envy, and misunderstanding soon descended into intermittent slanging matches, and a clear policy of segregation. The bullies have mocked the laxative-like properties of her Indian cooking, made frequent silly jokes about Indians and India, said Miss Shetty should “fuck off back home”, repetitively mimicked and mocked her accent, excluded her from their conversations, refused to sit next to her in communal areas, and one woman – insisting that “Shilpa” was unpronounceable – opted to call her “the Indian” instead. Ms Shetty, while bearing the treatment with a great deal of dignity, has broken down on a number of occasions.

The issue has become emotive, and has been blown sky high. On Monday last week, Ofcom, the UK TV regulator, had received 2,000 complaints from the viewing public asking that the programme be pulled off the air – more complaints than had ever been received in relation to a single programme. By Tuesday, Asian MP, Keith Vaz, had tabled a motion in Parliament and by Wednesday Tony Blair expressed criticism of the show in the Commons. In the meantime, the hapless Gordon Brown, Chancellor of the Exchequer (and Prime Minister in waiting) found himself in India struggling to reassure Indians that Britain prided itself on “fairness and tolerance”, as Shilpa Shetty’s treatment was brought up in press conferences, meetings with junior ministers, and finally with Manmohan Singh himself. By Thursday, the Carphone Warehouse, Big Brother’s main sponsor had withdrawn its £3 million sponsorship deal citing racism, and the perfume line brought out by one of the celebrity bullies was taken off the shelves. By Friday, David Cameron, leader of the opposition, urged viewers to “switch off”, and complaints at Ofcom had reached the heady heights of 30,000. Most worryingly of all, Gordon Brown, still stuck in India, and faced with public demonstrations and the smell of burning effigies, declared “a vote for Shilpa is a vote for Britain”. We knew then, that the shit had really hit the fan.

Finally, on Friday evening, the main instigator of the bullying, Jade Goody, was voted out of the Big Brother House, after a week of national soul searching, and a five day stretch of the programme continuously hitting the headlines in both the broadsheets and the tabloids. Every single person I have met over the past week has raised the issue, from my doorman, to the guys at work, to my most self interested friends, usually oblivious to the world around them. This is publicity no money could buy.

While people have been piling over each other to comment on the matter, it is Meera Syal, the comedian, who has hit the nail on the head. She says “What this treatment of Shilpa has done is remind a lot of Asian people in Britain of the type of uncomfortable treatment they’ve received themselves over the years.” Asians switched on in droves and worked themselves up into a kind of collective rage. They then switch on the PC in droves and sent hundreds of emails of complaint in a kind of collective avengement. It seems there is nothing that brings the Indian diaspora together like a Bollywood star being bullied – I should know, after just two days of watching the programme to see what all the fuss was about, I found myself angrily logging on to the Ofcom website along with everyone else.

Has the whole incident been blown out of all sensible proportion? On one level the answer is a clear yes. Why should playground taunts on a reality TV programme engage the public so much, when there are far more serious issues out there? At the end of the day, all the celebrities in the house will be evicted, collect their fat pay checks, and return to their lives of varying privilege. The Big Brother house, despite its tag of Reality TV, certainly isn’t any of the contestants’ true reality.

And yet, the BBC Asian Network has described the issue as their biggest story ever – bigger than Saddam’s botched execution, bigger than Inzamman Ul Haq’s cricket ban, bigger than the rise of the British National Party in last local elections. My view is, why should we all act so surprised? Every Asian in this country has experienced some degree of petty racism in some form or the other, and suffered some kind of silent grievance. This issue has shown that the Asian community in the UK, when united, is a force to be reckoned with. While no one would deny that a number of English viewers complained about the programme, it was the Asian community that forced the issue with regulators, the TV producers, and an Asian MP who forced the issue onto the floor of parliament.

What most members of minority communities know is that petty racism is much easier to identify with, than out and out racial abuse. Most of us would agree that we live in a broadly tolerant society, and certainly a society that has shown itself time and time again, to have at least, the right ideals, even if it sometimes falls short of them. But watching the treatment meted out to Shilpa Shetty, has served to highlight how difficult it is to identify racism. It would have been easier if one of the other contestants broke, and simply called her a paki. But instead we saw the singling out, the bitching, the bullying, and the creeping isolation that the Indian celebrity was subjected to. We were only able to put two and two together, because the programme enabled us to listen in to the conversations between the perpetrators who disclosed a number of ignorant and racist views. The frustrating thing was that Shilpa Shetty suspected she was the target of racial discrimination on some level, but had no way to prove it.

It was this, I suspect, that rankled most with Asian viewers – that we could see it happening, but she could not. Many of us could identify with the slow and painful realisation that we are encountering prejudice, but are defenceless against it, because it is simply a gut feeling that cannot be proved. Despite the pro equality policies, and the anti discrimination legislation in this country, calling treatment racist, is often still seen as playing the race card, and secretly people wonder whether the complainant is being overly sensitive, and to be quite frank, really rather weak. While racism is not a word that should be used lightly, many of us are frustrated, that we cannot call it like we see it.

The attitude of the broadcasters fuelled this frustration. Channel 4 knew that the row over racism was TV gold, but that continuing to air the programme (or at least refusing to discipline the offending housemates) could put both the producers and the channel at risk of race relations offences, and their public funding, and broadcasting license, at serious risk. The channel’s statements to the press, and official stance on the matter, were a case book study in legal obfuscation. Rather than mention the dirty “r” word, the producers first put Ms Shetty’s treatment down to “girly rivalry”. They then upgraded their assessment to “bullying”, and finally, when the issue exploded into international politics, put the whole thing down to a “clash of class and culture”, rather than racism. It was clear that the programme’s lawyers were busily working away in the background. Channel 4’s latest stance, has been that the programme has served the public interest in that it had helped to promote a discussion of racial tolerance – the language could have been lifted from the duties incumbent on the broadcaster under recent race relations legislation.

The dust has now settled, but this has been a fairly incredible week for race relations in this country. All of us watched while Shilpa Shetty, after a ninety minute conversation with the programme’s producers in the Big Brother House (reportedly persuading her that she had not suffered racism, and that an allegation of racism, would only harm her interests) made a statement that she did not think her treatment was a racist. In a twist, Jade Goody, has acknowledged that her behaviour in the house was racist, and has asked for forgiveness in true Mel Gibson style, clearly alive to the fact that her career is going down the toilet.

A number of other race related stories, have also floated into the news in the wake of Big Brother publicity. Most notably, the case of a criminal who had refused treatment from a Pakistani police surgeon, calling him a “fucking paki” and asking for an English doctor instead. Charged with racial harassment, a judge told the defendant that he should have called the doctor “a fat bastard” instead. Rather than taking anti discrimination seriously, it is clear that some, even those in power, are simply fostering, or permitting discriminatory treatment while ensuring the language used cannot be caught by the law. The important thing for people of this ilk, are the legal loopholes, and not the spirit of the law itself.

I must say that, despite my knee-jerk complaints to Ofcom, in retrospect, I am incredibly grateful this programme was not pulled off the air. It has exposed the sometimes two-faced response of the authorities to allegations of racism. It has also exposed the British viewing public to be unconditionally fair, and egalitarian – a public that I am glad to be part of. But most importantly, this year’s Big Brother has allowed the Asian viewing public to state categorically what is, and is not, accepted to be racist behaviour with a sense that they have every right to be here, and a confidence that they are welcome.

A lot of secularists mistakenly believe that religious discrimination is somehow different from racial discrimination. The tipping point that drove me to write this article was reading about Sam Harris’s beliefs about the acceptability of denying Muslims basic civil rights. Since being religious is a choice, the argument goes, there’s no real analogy between religion and race.

But in fact, religion is very much like skin color, in that it’s an ethnic marker. Endogamous cultural groups can be distinguished on the basis of language, color, national origin, or creed. In the US, the difference between blacks and whites is about color while this between Hispanics and Anglos is a combination of color and language. In Bosnia, the difference between Muslims, Serbs, and Croats was entirely religious, as is the difference between Sunnis and Shi’as in Iraq. The exact nature of the difference rarely matters; there’s no material difference between distinctions based on religion and distinctions based on skin color.

Like the other ethnic markers, religion is intimately connected to group identities. Even apostates often have some cultural connection to religious customs: secular Jews hold Passover Seders ex-Christian atheists usually celebrate Christmas, and secular Muslims in Turkey tend not to eat pork. Ontologically, Stephen Roberts made sense when he said, “I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.” Sociologically, he didn’t, because a person’s religious identity tends to be independent of what religion he adheres to. This religious identity is weaker among secular people, but it doesn’t disappear entirely, as Bosnians discovered in the early 1990s; analogously, linguistic identity is weaker among polyglots than among monoglots, and racial identity is weaker among people whose social circle is racially mixed than among people whose social circle is racially uniform.

And politically, it’s easier to understand conflicts when one regards religion as just another ethnic variable. The Bosnian genocide involved peoples who differed only in religious markers, but proceeded like any non-religious ethnic conflict. Al Qaida provided aid to the Muslims, while Russia sided with the Eastern Orthodox Serbs; however, that religious sense of kinship was hardly different from the pan-Germanic and pan-Slavic movements that fueled World War One. Of Iraq’s three constituent groups, two are distinguished based solely on ethnicity and language, while two are distinguished based solely on religion.

Further, group distinctions can morph over time. European anti-Semitism began as exclusively religious in the Middle Ages. As Jews accumulated money in the late Middle Ages, it became increasingly a class issue, and then, during the Enlightenment, focused more on culture and less on religion. By the late 19^th century, it became racial, reflecting an overall increase in the prevalence of racial pseudoscience in Europe; it has had a strong racial component ever since. But that story will reveal very little about the exact ways anti-Semites hurt Jews. A more instructive way of characterizing it is that anti-Semitism has been populist for most of its history, but was systemic between roughly 1890 and 1945.

The artificial division of religious and nonreligious distinctions seems by and large restricted to the secular West. It’s a mistake endemic to atheist activists, like Harris or Richard Dawkins, that religious conflicts will disappear if atheism only gains more credence. In fact, although religious fundamentalism has been a motivating force behind Western supremacist views, the Western elites justify supremacist views based entirely on secular arguments. Samuel Huntington doesn’t say that the West is special because the Reformation’s theology is the best of all the theologies of major religions and denominations; he says the West is special because of its mix of human rights, democracy, and separation of church and state.

Ultimately, this is a conflation of two different dimensions of religious distinctions. The first, the one between secularism and fundamentalism, is what is most familiar to people who are only familiar with one religion, such as most Westerners. That distinction is similar to distinctions between liberals and conservatives, and has very little to do with ethnic markers. But there’s another distinction, that between different religions. Plural religious societies, such as those of India or Iraq or even those Islamic societies that are in regular contact with the West, tend to emphasize that distinction instead.

This conflation allows a lot of people to hold beliefs about religious groups whose racial equivalents are too racists for any member of the Western elite to fathom. For example, take the idea that Islam is inherently degrading to women. In a way it is, but so is Christianity; the implicit idea is that Christianity is superior to Islam, because Christianity has been less successful at defending its misogynist traditions than Islam. Arguments rarely get more self-contradictory than that, but the conflation of cross-religious differences with the difference between secularity and religion effectively masks that contradiction.

But in fact, there’s little difference between distinctions of religion and distinctions of language or race. Different religions have different practices, but that hardly merits a special mention, in light of the different customs of different nationalities or cultural groups. In particular, discrimination and conflict have very little to do with whether the bone of contention is religious or national. Very rarely, religious groups will wage an ideological religious battle, as in the Crusades. More frequently, religion will be a proxy for something else—nationalism in the cases of Al Qaida, Israel, and Palestine; racism in the case of Western anti-Muslim attitudes; and a combination of racism and class consciousness in India.

The common secularist belief that every religious conflict can be analyzed in the same way as American-style culture wars is just not true. Most people never choose their own religion in the same way secularists chose to be nonreligious. In practice, religion works more like skin color than like the secular/religious spectrum; holding supremacist views about one religion is racism; and massacring people of a different religion is genocide.

Past, present and future are literally in the cards for the characters that populate Charles Williams‘ 1932 novel The Greater Trumps. Curmudgeonly, perpetually dissatisfied Lothair Coningsby, a Warden of Lunacy having a bit of a mid-life crisis, has inherited a collection of rare decks of cards from a late close friend. Among them is a hand-painted deck of Italian tarot cards, dated circa mid-15th century, that turns out to be very special indeed.

It is the original tarot deck, and corresponds to miniature golden figures that move as if by magic across a golden plate, in an intricate interlocking pattern that seems to defy human understanding. Each figure corresponds to a card in the deck: four suits, each with 10 numbered cards, and four “court cards” (Page, Knight, Queen and King), plus the so-called “Greater Trumps,” or Major Arcana. In the midst of all those figures is The Fool, or Nought, which anchors the entire deck and yet doesn’t seem to move at all (or does it, if one only has eyes to see)?

But this particular tarot deck isn’t just about the symbolism; it possesses real power over the traditional four elements (earth, air, fire and water). As Henry Lee, the gypsy-blooded fiance of Nancy Coningsby explains, “It’s said that the shuffling of the cards is the earth, and the pattering of the cards is the rain, and the beating of the cards is the wind, and the pointing of the cards is the fire.” (Indeed, when he and Nancy put the cards to the test, her shuffling does indeed produce actual dirt.) “That’s of the four suits. But the Greater Trumps, it’s said, are the meaning of all process and the measure of the ever-lasting dance.” The Fool is the key to understanding that great cosmic dance, enabling the one with that comprehension to predict the future based on the present. Henry Lee and his grandfather desperately want to have that power, and their desire fuels the events that ultimately unfold — first with catastrophic, then with sublime, results.

Williams is hardly a household name in today’s literary circles. He is one of the lesser known members of the so-called Oxford Inklings. (C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien are the most famous members.) He was forced to leave University College London before completing his degree for financial reasons, but that didn’t keep him from pursuing a life of letters, and eventually acquiring an honorary master’s degree for his trouble.

He worked (initially as a proofreading assistant) at Oxford University Press from 1908 until his death in 1945, work which apparently left him plenty of time to write. In addition to his novels, he wrote Arthurian poetry, numerous works of literary criticism, and The Figure of Beatrice, an analysis of the Divine Comedy that is still cited by today’s Dante scholars. When the Press moved from London to Oxford after the outbreak of World War II, Williams began attending the Inkling meetings on a regular basis, getting their input on his final novel, All Hallow’s Eve, and having the privilege of hearing some of the earlier drafts of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy-in-progress.

Like Lewis, Williams was a devout Christian, but his belief system had a few odd quirks, with more than a hint of mysticism and a fascination with classical philosophy and pagan myths. That pagan/mystic bent infuses all his novels, in which supernatural forces routinely impinge on ordinary daily lives, transforming his characters in the process. Doppelgangers, succubi, ghosts, palmistry, the Holy Grail, African tribal lore, and the Platonic archetypes all make appearances in Williams’ fiction. He briefly belonged to the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, an offshoot of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn — which is probably where he acquired his familiarity with the tarot cards that play such a central role in The Greater Trumps. (The Golden Dawn established most of the various “meanings” associated with modern tarot cards.)

Tarot decks have a murky, frequently disputed history; the Wikipedia entry is littered with missing citations and cautionary notes. But the bits of history Williams relates in The Greater Trumps is fairly accurate, considering their mysterious provenance. While there are many legends that purport to tie tarot decks with ancient Egypt, there is no reliable evidence for this. Historians generally agree that generic playing cards first appeared in Europe in the late 14th century, probably migrating over from Islamic Spain, and there is certainly a tradition of using more traditional decks for divination purposes. Tarot as a game seems to have emerged in the early to mid-15th century in Northern Italy: a normal deck of 52 cards, to which the  21 carte da trionfi (“triumph cards”) were added, along with the Fool.

Tarot decks were used for gaming at first; written records of their use in divination don’t appear until the 18th century, when they became quite popular with leading occultists of that period, and became associated with magic and mysticism. The alleged Egyptian connection is attributed to a Swiss clergyman named Antoine Court de Gebelin, who believed the popular Tarot de Marseille represented the mysteries of Isis and the Egyptian Book of Thoth. (It wasn’t true, but nonetheless the legend spread.) A prominent French occultist named Alliette used the tarot to tell fortunes just before the French Revolution, and Napoleon’s first wife, Josephine de Beauharnais, was fascinated by tarot readings, which helped popularize them further. Today, the most widely used deck in the US is the Rider-Waite Tarot, featuring images drawn by artist Pamela Colman-Smith in accordance with the instruction of Christian mystic/occultist Arthur Edward Waite, first published in 1910. (Both Waite and Smith were members of the Golden Dawn.)

No doubt because of the rich complexity of their symbolism, tarot cards figure in almost every artistic medium imaginable. For instance, Bizet’s Carmen has a pivotal scene in which Carmen and her two gypsy pals read their fortunes in the cards. Her friends see love and wealth, but the doomed Carmen can only see her own death. Sci-fi author Roger Zelazny has his characters in the Amber fantasy series use magical decks of tarot cards to communicate with each other (each of the Major Arcana represents a character). Television is rife with tarot references: the decks are a major feature in the HBO series Carnivale, and have been featured in episodes of the 1994 teen drama My So-Called life, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and (more recently) Monk. Woody Allen’s latest film, Scoop, features a serial killer in London whose signature is a tarot card left at the crime scenes. And the cards have become an art form in and of themselves: all manner of uniquely designed decks have cropped up, from mystical New Age decks like the Tarot of the Cat People, to decks based on Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series, and even a deck devoted to computer geeks, where the major arcana cards include The Hacker, Flame War, and The Garage. (The suits are Networks, Cubicles, Disks and Hosts, while the court cards are the CIO, the Salesman, the Marketer and the New Hire.)

Clearly, tarot cards hold a fascination for us that has little to do with divination, igniting our imaginations in some very intriguing ways. I learned how to read tarot spreads myself in the 1990s — not because I attribute any special powers to either myself or the cards, but because I was fascinated by their symbolism and how they could be arranged in so many different combinations to essentially tell a story. There are certain universal elements that seem to resonate with the human psyche, and these are built into the tarot design, and the associated meanings of each card. Noted psychologist Carl Jung was fascinated by tarot symbolism — like me, not because he ascribed to them any mystical powers, but for what those symbols revealed about human nature in general, and the specific fixations and subconscious yearnings of his patients.

Jung might have been onto something. People do seem to crave reassurance about their decisions and direction in life, even if their “fortunes” merely serve to reinforce what their gut instincts have already determined. They look to things like crystals, tarot cards, and astrology, in addition to psychotherapy, as one means of getting that reassurance — and perhaps as an avenue to acquiring deeper self-knowledge. A recent article in the Washington Post by the self-described “spiritually sensitive” Rachel Machacek relates her experiences visiting five different psychics in a single day as an exercise in determining whether there is anything to be gained by such ventures. She concludes:

“My day of fortunetelling included some nerve-jangling moments. And it got me thinking about where I’d been, my current situation and what the future holds for me. And I suppose that’s the point of any therapy: awareness and acknowledgment of your issues, and moving forward guided by positive forces.”

That’s the sort of mushy, unfocused, vaguely New Age sentiment that sets a skeptic’s teeth on edge, especially if said skeptic has any background in science. After all, science is predicated on our ability to make accurate predictions about the world based on precise, universal physical laws, using the language of mathematics. Well, sort of: things can get a bit weird at the subatomic level, where we can only assign probabilites, because the very act of observing something causes it to change, such that any information we glean about, say, an electron is no longer valid a moment later.  We can use science to make useful predictions about some things, but not others: the weather, for instance, remains unpredictable beyond a few days, and while statistical analysis can help traders on Wall Street better navigate the rising and falling of the stock market, it can’t determine those fluctuations with 100% accuracy. There are just too many variables.

So, while the old Pythagorean notion of the music of the celestial spheres might have fallen by the wayside, that doesn’t mean Nature isn’t engaged in an elaborately intricate dance all her own. Williams’ novel even cites the movement of electrons (discovered just a few decades earlier) as being among those steps. Nature’s dance includes “everything that changes, and there is nothing nowhere that does not change,” and it is that change that makes the future so hard to predict. Even if the characters in The Greater Trumps can pin down one exact moment, in a flash, that moment is over and their observation is no longer accurate.

And it can change in a myriad of different directions, each change begetting more change, branches upon branches in the evolutionary timeline.  Replay the same scene and alter just one tiny element, and you may find — as meteorologist Edward Lorenz did in the 1960s when he sought to create a predictive model for the weather — that things play out in entirely different ways, with dramatically different outcomes. Our fortunes, the twists and turns in the road of human life, just have too many variables. In their own way, the fictional Henry Lee and his gypsy grandfather are pursuing a sort of science, seeking absolute truth in a constantly changing world. But as physicist Richard Feynman once shrewdly observed, Nature doesn’t always willingly reveal her secrets. Certain elements of the great cosmic dance seem to be always hovering just beyond our ken — which is what makes life so interesting. We continually seek new knowledge and greater understanding, and this in turn raises new questions and mysteries to be solved. It is, indeed, a never-ending cosmic dance.

When not taking random walks at 3 Quarks Daily, Jennifer Ouellette writes about science and culture on her own blog, Cocktail Party Physics. Her latest book, The Physics of the Buffyverse, has just been published by Penguin.

A month ago in 3QD, I argued that microfinance wouldn’t eliminate poverty or do much in advancing global economic equality. Two weeks ago, I proposed that it’s no use thinking you can eliminate global poverty without achieving economic equality, something now supported by even the World Bank. Equality eliminates poverty, but poverty elimination doesn’t achieve equality. It produces people who are less poor at best, and who are not able to protect any economic gains they might make via poverty reduction programs. Several months ago, I argued that poor countries could not close the inequality gap between them and us without rich countries sharing some of their wealth.

One 3QD respondent asked, given my dim view of microfinance, what I would propose instead. I want to take up one proposal and show how it would be superior to more investments in microfinance.

Suppose you want to invest a dollar with the goal of increasing world economic equality, and so you are considering how to make that dollar work to the best advantage of poor people in poor countries. Consider subsidizing poor family incomes by rewarding people for keeping their girls in school. That is, give a family that keeps its daughters in school a monthly income supplement for every girl in school.

The Benefits of Educating Girls and Subsidizing Families to Do It

Why? Because economists and poor people’s advocates alike will tell you that spending money to put poor girls through school is the best way to build sustainable and poverty-free economies. Further, girls’ education is key to achieving gender equality, and as an added benefit, a family subsidy helps reduce poverty at home. Not incidentally, if people are induced to put girls through school, the evidence suggests that they will endeavor to keep their boys in school too.

The economic benefits are significant. Economies grow faster the more education women have. Not only do societies produce more because they have more workers, productivity improves because you are enabling the least qualified persons to be more qualified for more difficult and rewarding work. At the same time, one need not settle for improvement solely in the relatively small industrial economies of poor countries. Educated rural women improve agricultural productivity as well – a significant step forward for poor societies considering that women perform the lion’s share of agricultural labor.

Women with more education in poor countries have children who live longer, are better fed, and experience better cognitive development. The children are more likely to be immunized against basic infectious diseases. Increased women’s earnings are also more likely to be used to support children than if men remained the sole money source of the family.

As economist and former Harvard president Larry Summers argues, educating young girls is the best single investment a poor society can make.

How Does It Work in Mexico?

Increasing girls’ school attendance by providing their families with income supplements is not cheap. Mexico has an exemplary program of providing monthly stipends for keeping poor children in school. Though the state pays a subsidy for every poor boy and girl, more is paid for the education of a girl. The further the girl goes in her schooling, the monthly stipend increases so that, for example, when a girl reaches her third year in secondary school, her family receives a monthly grant equivalent to 46% of an agricultural worker’s monthly income.

The results have been terrific. School enrollments have grown by as much as 17% in the crucial higher grades, a time when children are often taken out of school to work in the fields. Now girls attend middle school in roughly equal proportion to boys, and both sexes have now passed the 75% rate of school attendance.

As I said, the program is not cheap. In 2004, the program did reach 5 million poor Mexican households, twenty percent of all Mexican households. The cost, 2.3 billion dollars a year, is certainly a lot of money, but proportionately is only 1.5% of the Mexican federal government’s budget, and a fraction of 1% of the Mexican national output.

Suppose you took the same dollar and put it as capital into non-profit microfinance. You might be surprised to find out that providing poor people with small loans to start and improve small businesses costs much more on a mass basis than educating their children and subsidizing their monthly incomes. The United Nations Capital Development Fund, the sponsor of an initiative to spread microfinance operations worldwide, but especially among poor people in poor countries, estimated in 2005 that it takes 22 billion dollars to adequately serve the microfinance needs of 100 million poor people.

Let’s do the math for Mexico. Half of Mexico’s 100 million people, or 50 million people, are poor. So, if we were to provide Mexico’s poor with adequate microfinance funds, it would cost us 11 billion dollars a year, or half of what the United Nations estimates is needed to cover 100 million poor people.

In contrast, suppose we provide education subsidies to all poor families sending their children to school, and for as long as they attend school. Right now, as noted above, the supplement program covers 20% of all households. Given that I do not have average Mexican household size by income handy, I ask your indulgence here. I am assuming for the purposes of the argument that the average size of a Mexican household is the same from top to bottom of the income distribution. In other words I am supposing that the 50 million Mexicans (half the population) whom we know live in poverty compose half, or 12.5 million of Mexico’s 25 million households. That means that the education subsidy program would have to be increased two and a half times its present rate of 2.3 billion dollars a year to cover all poor families. This would cost approximately 5.75 billion dollars year.

There is a certain dumb luck, perhaps, in how symmetrical the numbers here turn out to be.

An anti-poverty program that by supporting girls’ education increases the prospects for ultimately greater economic and gender equality while providing cash income support to all Mexico’s poor households costs a little more than half as much as availing them of microfinance. Even assuming poor households are significantly larger than rich and middle class households, the difference between the cost of microfinance and the cost of education subsidies is large enough to cover any mistakes made in estimating the number of poor children with change to spare.

The difference between Mexico and very poor countries is that Mexico, at least, has the state funds to provide education subsidies on a large-scale basis. If the lesson that education support is better and cheaper than microfinance holds, rich countries in assisting very poor countries will need to provide proportionately more money support. Being a very poor country means lower incomes and few state resources. Again, though, it seems to make more sense than pumping up the poor with microfinance.

The worldwide campaign to make microfinance the key to eliminating poverty and improving economic opportunities for the poor looks both expensive and likely to be ineffective, I hope my previous column Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime? gave you reasons why in principle you should not support microfinance. Recall too that microfinance has not been shown to measurably reduce poverty in poor countries, and almost by definition cannot be expected to help eliminate economic inequality. Quite the contrary: if it works well, microfinance should create a probably a minority stratum of small business people who by their success would be a cut above the poor. Microfinance, if it succeeds, then, could actually increase economic inequality in poor countries.

Well, reader, place your bets. Where would you, and where should we, put that dollar to work? Education for poor girls that puts money in their parents’ pockets or small, high-interest loans for a minority of their mothers in high-risk enterprises? Me, I’m sticking with Larry Summers, perhaps for the first time in my life.

Next time, I will write about global, universal health care.

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.

To commemorate the centenary of the birth of the poet W. H. Auden which falls on 21 February, 2007 I am posting my poem ‘Asking Auden’ written in 1984 and first published in A Temporary Grace in 1991.

                   Asking Auden

‘Who,’ the inquisitive will ask
‘Was he?’ A writer who spoke honestly
Of his time and character
On this abrasive satellite,
Acknowledging the muck
Words can make whole.

Don’t get uptight
Or too plastered
As you prime your pals—
Chester, Igor, Rhoda;
Think of this poor planet,
Rotten with bad sorts
And horrors greater than any
Ever imagined before.

I can hear you bitching on,
Calling out the old complaints:
Frog effusions are offensive.
Why are people always late!,
Looking like a scruff and dropping
Ash upon the Muses.

Wystan, tend attentive ears,
Bless us on the earth below,
Sens a rhyming, mystic message,
Drop it in the Grand Canal
Where The Rake was first presented
And your hotel rooms were bad.
Let the gondala ferry forward
Through the reeking air and slush,
Bringing with it new precision,
Agape and eros, beauty,
Mastery of form and space.
Wystan! Please stop gossiping,
Listen to my plea,
Send unconscious powers aplenty,
Send the critics out to sea.

Suddenly a voice is heard,
Genial features looming:
These interruptions just won’t do.
Be yourself without my help.
Be true to truth and ready for the worst.
Work hard and don’t expect
That God is easily pleased!
With that he sighed, sat back, relaxed,
Ethereally smoked, and drank a glass of schnapps.

A promise then, remembering
The folds of that transatlantic face—
To summon up fresh energy
For the new century of the race
Called sapiens, whose language grabs
From past and future tense
Continuing words of grace.

Chester, Igor, Rhoda: Chester Kallman, Igor Stravinsky, Rhoda Jaffe

The Rake: The Rake’s Progress, opera premiered in Venice September 11, 1951, libretto Auden/Kallman

Jared Diamond’s overarching thesis in Guns Germs and Steel—that the fate of human societies is largely determined by their capacity for food production—is beguiling for its simplicity, and for the tapestry of learning he brings to its defense. To some, it is the versatile pragmatism of the thesis that seduces. For others, any attempt at a unified field theory of human progress bears the mark of the devil and cannot, de facto, hold water.

The source of my affinity for the theory lies, I confess, rather with the man’s Norwegian homesteader beard: such a countenance cannot not be trusted. See the DVD version of GGS, with Diamond traversing the globe and expounding his theory alongside hunter-gatherers in Papua New Guinea and weeping in African HIV hostels, to appreciate his truly endearing qualities. Your next move might be, as mine was, to scour the consumer parking lot of Ebay for a lifesize, cardboard cut-out likeness of Professor Diamond to stand guard over your living room.

‘By accident of their geographic location’, Diamond likes to say, societies either inherit or develop food production capacities that in turn facilitate population density, germs, political organization, technology, and other ‘ingredients of power’. Diamond applies this reading to a number of human societies, including those on the losing end of history. And they lose, it turns out, by the sheer accident of their less endowed natural environment. For the world’s remaining indigenous peoples, particularly those whose mode of production is dominated by hunting game and gathering wild foods, their geographic locations may be diverse or dull, fertile or barren. Common to their respective natural environments is an absence of plant and animal species suitable for domestication and cultivation, an obvious pre-requisite for the creation of surplus.

Africa’s most renowned hunter-gatherer groups, the Pygmies[1] of Central Africa and the Khoisan or ‘San’ of the Kalahari Desert, are surrounded by a cornucopia of edible plants and wild game. Diamond examines the dominant flora and fauna in these two regions to show that that neither Pygmies nor San—or their farming neighbors—have succeeded in domesticating a single native plant or animal species for cultivation. Sub-Saharan Africa’s crops and livestock, like the practice of cultivating them, are all non-indigenous. Both the practices and the raw materials were gradually imported over centuries by invading Bantu farmers from West Africa[2] and, to a lesser degree, by colonizing whites. Both San and Pygmy hunter-gatherers were engulfed by a Bantu majority, to which they reacted by further compressing into their respective natural habitats.[3]

As minority hunter-gatherers surrounded by a farming majority, Central Africa’s Pygmies have fared far worse than the San of the Kalahari. Unlike the Pygmies, San hunter-gatherers retained their original language and lifestyle—against forced modernization efforts by the Botswana government—by remaining geographically concentrated in a harsh desert world whose sole monetary resource is subterranean (diamonds). Not so for Pygmy groups. Seeing their forest world first conquered by outsiders, then divided into protected reserves and game parks, and now increasingly deforested and mined by extractive industries, Pygmies have scattered into a thin diaspora across nine different countries. Displacement and ensuing marginalization has not meant banishment from their forest home, but Pygmies did lose their original language in the process, attesting to the extent of their self-estrangement.

Over the last five years, I have had two occasions to work with different Pygmy groups in the Congo, and hope to again this year. In both instances I was struck by the automatic and fierce prejudice with which they were treated by the surrounding Bantu Congolese, subsistence farmers living at the same level of extreme indigence and dispossession as the Pygmies themselves. The other primary characteristic of their misery was the degree to which they had internalized the Bantu discourse of their inferiority and ignorance.

They were at such a nadir that they actually believed the racist slander to which they were constantly subjected; their inferiority complex was total and all-consuming. Every aspect of their lives was to them proof not of the injustice of the discriminatory discourse around them but of their own failure, their incompetence, their baseness. Their identity as they expressed it in focus group discussions consisted precisely of the very insults they heard throughout their lives from their Bantu neighbors. It was stunning and tragic—they were totally brainwashed.

Of course there is much to romanticize in the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, partcularly that of Pygmies, whose place in the Western fantasy of primordial proximity to enchanted nature is deeply entrenched. In this spirit, National Geographic has an excellent website devoted to the Bambuti Pygmies of northwestern Congo. It captures the beauty of certain unbroken traditions, the spiritualization of their forest world and the ceremony of certain maturation rituals.

Visual documentation of their exile and destitution among the Bantu are few, to my knowledge, but a series of gripping images by Dutch photographer Chris Keulen provide such testimony. To see them, go to Keulen’s site and look under ‘Stories’, then click on ‘Congo DRC 2001’. The Pygmy photos are not marked because they are part of a larger series on living conditions for civilians at the epicenter of Congo’s war in 2001. In the series, images of people standing or sitting outside or beside makeshift shelters are generally of Pygmies (I only know this because I was indirectly involved in the shoot). Those seated indoors, in health centers or schools, are generally Bantu. The trauma is evident and Pygmy living conditions defy description: the one of a girl lying face down on volcanic rock (# 007) is to me the most poignant in the series.

For 2007, UN agencies are considering intensive programming aimed at establishing the equal rights, access to health care and education for Congolese Pygmy groups. I am curious to see how the UN approaches the issue: clearly the dominant Congolese (Bantu) society is at fault, rife as it is with profound racism and prejudice towards its original inhabitants. Project proposals I have seen base themselves on UN legal precedents recognizing and protecting the rights of indigenous groups, based on the principle of ‘autochthony’.

But are victimhood and a history of oppression the most constructive rhetorical arguments to restore equality between peoples? Victimhood as a tool of empowerment does not seem to result in sustainable integration or equality between peoples, although it is very effective in generating and perpetuating a discourse of difference and resentment, particularly the entitlement mentality.

What would Prof. Diamond say about all this? Hunter-gatherers availing themselves of legal instruments to survive is positive, as the San are doing to reclaim their ancestral homelands in Botswana (having been forcibly evicted four years ago). The Pygmies lack sufficient representation and mobilization capacity, dispersed as they are across nine countries in small groups (their total population is estimated between 300,000 and 500,000). Diamond’s contingency thesis would appear to hold, as the legal and political leverage hunter-gatherers deploy will only be as effective as the national legal codes and judiciary system of the day. In the Congo, after all, justice is sold to the highest bidder. Their Bantu compatriots, like the flora and fauna of their forest home, may not prove receptive to legal settlements over land rights for Pygmies. Sadly, the fate of Pygmies will likely remain beholden to limitations imposed by their environment.

[2] A term conventionally used for settled farming peoples, although these groups include Oubangian and Sudanic language speakers as well as Bantu language speakers.

Here in Karachi the solidity of the world around you dispels much of that sense of precariousness one gets by reading about Pakistan from afar. My dashing, mustachioed cousin Munib still rides his father’s forty-year old blue Vespa around the chaotic streets, just as he did in his late teens. One change in his riding habits, however, is that he now often has his two children, aged seven and three, hanging on to him, and their mother riding side-saddle behind. When you see them pull up, you might fear for their lives, if you didn’t know they’d been doing this for the intervening three years since you last saw them. Similarly, coming to Pakistan is a good corrective to much of the doomsaying rhetoric about it emitted by public intellectuals, who hold that Pakistan continually teeters on the edge of viability. I suppose this is related to the commonplace that other countries exist in an earlier historical time, that the desired trajectory of all countries is to imitate and approach the United States. On the subject of Pakistan, most commentary is concerned with its precarious deviations from the prescribed path to modernity.

“Failed state,” “stalled democracy,” “sectarian violence,” “torn social fabric,” “endemic corruption.” These descriptions, which I’ve been hearing for decades, are belied by the simple fact that, well, Pakistan rolls on: the kites and kites (hawk-like birds of prey and child’s contraptions, respectively) still circle lazily overhead. Plus, these days, the damage America’s reputation as the anti-banana republic has sustained lessens the accusatory power of such characterizations: if the narrative of U.S. strategic benevolence, political integrity and institutional expertise was once somewhat believable, surely that bubble has burst. (I shudder to imagine what depths of irrationality the U.S. government would sink to if, like Pakistan, the U.S. had been the subject of 600 acts of terrorism, killing over 900, in 2006.) Also, for the entire class of professionals who left for the U.S. and Britain over the generation between 1970 and 1990, repeating Pakistan’s “failed-state” status has become a kind of reassuring mantra, perhaps because it makes it easier to justify having left.

If anything, Pakistan and America are becoming more, rather than less, similar over time. In Pakistan, invented in 1947, political insecurity correlates to defensive national fervor: one of the saddest things is how often people conceive of Pakistan and India’s relationship as a zero-sum game; praise of one automatically implies derogation of the other. It’s utterly silly. (These days, Pakistan is faced with more instability in the form of seditious disquiet in the province of Balochistan.) In the U.S., of course, a similar experience of retrenchment has been underway for five years now, a festering provincialism that was always the least attractive part of America’s cultural self-understanding anyway. In my last dispatch, I tried to suggest, maybe not clearly enough, that it’s wrong to identify a country with the people who proclaim themselves as its most representative representatives. Just as, purely by definition, the residents of Dearborn, Michigan are as representative an American as those of Alexandria, Virginia, regardless of how important Americanness is to either group as an elective affiliation. Every nation, including these two, suffers from boorish patriots who claim to speak for it – that doesn’t mean we should believe they do.

In both countries, a bunker mentality has led to increasing self-isolation, and in both an increasing disparity between haves and don’t-haves has led not to social change, but to greater emotional insecurity and the segregation of “gated communities.” In both places upper-middle class parents wistfully recall the days when children, in their little mobs, could be given the run of the neighborhood without any particular need for an adult overseer. As a replacement for the loss of a more tangible community, the U.S. and Pakistan have turned, inside the home, to the inner space of pixellated screens. Today only the impoverished and privileged children of both countries have access to old-fashioned styles of recreation, like playing outside or swimming, while the average kid makes do with myspace.

The U.S. consumes more provincially. In Pakistan, as flyovers, underpasses, fast food chains, and supermarkets proliferate, its elite more and more resides in a globalized cultural zone, though one that’s not just American – cable TV is an awesome hodgepodge of BBC, Al-Jazeera, Fox, StarTV (India), Geo (Pakistan), Sky (Australia), etc. Britain’s cultural currency is the most widely traded. There are lots of generalizations to be made here about the British colonial experience creating a greater sense of comfort traversing national boundaries, etc., etc., but the basic evidence is that English Premier League matches and English comedians (Ricky Gervais, Sasha Baron-Cohen) have much wider purchase in Pakistani bourgeois pop culture than, say, baseball. (And on the other side of the coin, most Americans are probably unaware of the degree to which their own television is a series of British shows remade.) Pop music is harder to divine, but much of the American pop that makes it here makes it by virtue of British distribution, just as you are much more likely to hear, say, Cheb Mami in Karachi or in London than in Chicago.

However, this global stuff is only one soapy, superficial layer. Beyond, much remains underdeveloped – and I say that with relief, “development” in the real-estate sense being a depressing if hard-to-avoid urban fate. As in most major metropolises, the best escape from mallified sameness is market culture. Here in Karachi, Sunday brings the Sunday bazaar, where people of every variety and class come to shop for kurtas, custard apples, shawls, scissors, canes, shoes, tiny lemons, fabric, tea, greens, spices, toothpaste, sundry. The one by the beach in Clifton is a beautiful place, if wheezing with dust. It’s an enormous tented enclosure that gets seasonal produce (you eat your guavas for the year right now, and there won’t be a mango in sight until March), used clothing, and many other unique items to people much more efficiently and cheaply than any other system I know. I bought a single-buttoned suit jacket, two round-ended fruit knives, and some dried cherry peppers to garnish lentils. The Sunday Bazaar is sanguine proof of the hoary leftist idea that “development” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be – a supermarket/big box retailer would so clearly not be an improvement on it.

Even more importantly still in place than weekly markets, however, is the Pakistani tradition of hospitality. If these mannered rituals belong to the historical past, then I hope the slouching future never fully arrives. Paying visits and drinking tea, the scourge of childhood, becomes a little more pleasant as an adult when you realize that second cousins you’ve met once, fifteen years ago, remember you and know your current doings. And it’s not as if people don’t have many to keep track of: I have eighteen first cousins, which I thought was a lot – my niece Tania has forty-five. Much of my trip has been spent visiting an aunt and uncle who are both ailing. My aunt Farhat suffers from cerebellar ataxia, which affects coordination and makes it very difficult for her to walk, talk, write, chew, swallow. She is largely bedridden, as is her brother in the bedroom next door, and has very little outside contact. Her major concern when we visit is making sure, by whatever means necessary, that we are comfortable. She has made it clear that she expects us to lunch with her, so that she may serve as our host. And she most certainly does not live in a timeless past. As I left after our first meeting on this trip, she struggled to pronounce something. “Aaaee ooo eee.” “AAAAee OOO eee.” I couldn’t understand. Frustrating. Before trying again, she stopped and laughed, eyes sparkling. “Happy New Year!!!”

The rest of my Dispatches.

by Ram Manikkalingam

I read two books recently. Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekeran recounts experiences of the administration of Paul Bremer and the occupying forces of the US in the Green Zone. The Last Mughal: the Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857, by William Dalrymple, on the extra-ordinary story of the last Mughal emperor of India – Bahadur Shah Zafar – in the Red Fort. The disgusting and disturbing spectacle of Saddam Hussein’s hanging and my chief editor Abbas Raza’s constant pressure to name my favourite books of 2006 got me thinking about the curious coincidence that two among my favourite books last year link imperialism and evangelism, and recount the remaking of other societies.

Comparisons are odious, particularly between the tolerant, gentle and cultivated head of a great dying dynasty and the unsophisticated evangelical representatives of a declining superpower, although both were cocooned in their respective courts. The last Mughal built his own world of poetry, music, hunting, dancing and partying in the Red Fort. The Americans built their’s of BBQs, movie theatres, trailers, press conferences, bars and discos in the Emerald City.

Shah Zafar, a poet who understood his condition as a virtual prisoner of the British living out the end of a dynasty, wrote:

Who ever enters this gloomy palace,
Remains a prisoner for life in European captivity.

Although an expert marksman, Zafar was no warrior. He patronized the poets, musicians and intellectuals of Delhi. And focused his energy and effort on the intellectual and cultural life of the city. He was tolerant towards all faiths: refusing to bow to the conservative imam’s demand to change his doctor who converted to Christianity and wary of Muslims who insisted on converting Hindus or slaughtering cows to fulfill Islamic obligations. On non-religious occasions, Shah Zafar is known to have refrained from entering mosques, since he also could not enter temples. He was not very adroit at managing his complex and cumbersome harem of many wives and concubines. His “harem was notoriously lax as far as discipline and security were concerned.” And the punishments he meted to his concubines who crossed the line were lenient, if administered at all.

The mutiny of 1857 took not just the British, but also Shah Zafar by surprise. The Indian troops – Muslim and Hindu – rallied around him as the rightful ruler of India with the political objective of restoring the Mughal Empire. The pious old (he was 82 years at the time) Sufi poet Shah Zafar, suddenly became the reluctant head of a rebel army that rallied to Delhi as the last seat of Mughal sovereignty. He vacillated, not because he was timorous or weak, but because he was torn among knowledge of imminent failure and duty towards the troops rebelling in his name, and a desire to protect his subjects, the Delhi dwellers caught in between two contending armies.

The rebellion had powerful religious overtones to it. The divide was as much between British rulers and Indians ruled, as Christian versus Hindu and Muslim. The rebellion struck a chord, because it was responding to an imperial shift away from a religiously tolerant, even assimilationist form of British rule, to one that combined Christian evangelism with British power. British agents, who had once taken on Indian wives and ways, and even Muslim religion and Hindu rituals, refraining from eating pork and beef, now felt that they were there to remake native societies in their own image. The rebels spared Muslim Englishmen (yes there were some in Delhi) but not Christian Indians. There were atrocities committed against English men and women trapped in Delhi. But all of this paled in comparison with British reprisals after the rebellion collapsed. The British soldiers committed mass murder, rape and the wholesale destruction of one of the world’s most beautiful cities. Palaces, mosques and madrasas were destroyed in a misguided effort to punish a city for the rebellion.

Shah Zafar was exiled to Rangoon, shortly afterwards, and died there in 1862, at the age of 87. He led a sad and humiliating exile. And his chief wife and surviving sons were not allowed to return to India under British rule. Today Shah Zafar’s burial place is, fittingly for a man who loved poetry and was both religious and tolerant, a Sufi shrine where Muslims in Burma come to worship.

Imperial Life in the Emerald City describes a very different form of isolation- rulers choosing to set themselves apart from the ruled by building a bubble around themselves. The members of the occupying authority ate pork (served by Muslim workers), drank alcohol, and touched not a morsel of food grown in Iraq within the green zone. The only contact with Iraqi’s were those who worked under them, and were therefore hesitant to criticize them, and Iraqi politicians dependent on the occupying authority for their power.

The rulers in the green zone demonstrated a remarkable lack of curiosity and interest in Iraqi history and politics. They believed that they had correctly conceived the new Iraq. And all that was required to execute this conception was the right combination of men, guns, dollars, and cement. In their evangelizing zeal, they believed that Iraqi politicians and American soldiers who raised questions about how exactly to execute this conception of Iraq, or needing more men and dollars, were inadequate to the task at hand. As the going got tougher, the plans got fancier.

Efforts were made to privatize state industries running at a loss, lay off workers and secure foreign investors, at precisely the time when unemployment was the biggest challenge facing Iraqis, and no foreigners could travel to Baghdad to view their potential investments, let alone try to turn them around. Other plans that would have had a far-reaching impact on ordinary Iraqis included taking away rations of food in exchange for cash, at a time when transporting goods to the market, not the money to pay for them was the key issue. More fanciful plans included giving debit cards to families to pay for food in a country where phone lines did not work because of regular losses of electrical power.

My favourite is the plan to have a state-of-the-art stock market, with the fanciest computers and the most squeaky clean transparency regulations to ensure that Iraq’s stock market would be up and running, when all the Iraqis wanted was a large room with dry-erase boards. The young American advisor spent months and hundreds of thousands trying to get the stock market off the ground with his grandiose plans. Two days after he left Baghdad, the new Iraqi stock market opened successfully with white boards to write bids and chits of paper to note transactions. The American advisor expressed frustration at the lack of Iraqi cooperation. Still, he felt that if he had not done his job, maybe nothing would have happened at all. When asked what would have happened in the absence of the young American advisor, the Iraqi Chairman of the Stock Exchange responded that they would have opened months earlier. At precisely the moment when no American civilian members of the occupying authority could travel outside the green zone, the planning for the wholesale economic reconstruction of Iraq got more and more ambitious.

Like Shah Zafar who wrote his beautiful poetry and encouraged his court musicians to sing and intellectuals to write, because he knew he had no power outside the Red Fort, the rulers in the Emerald City were encouraged to formulate plans and promulgate laws they need not ever worry about implementing. But unlike Zafar in the Red Fort, these officials of the occupying authority were out of touch with reality. Zafar was a sad old man, who wrote poetry because he knew he had no power to do anything else. By contrast, the new rulers in Iraq were strutting around the Emerald City, spending more and more time drawing up grander and grander plans, without realizing that they were doing so at precisely the moment when they no longer had the ability or power to implement them.

by Beth Ann Bovino

[For information about 3QD and what we are all about, click here, or here for our main page. Also, after appearing on 3QD, this story was picked up by several news organzations, and even the FBI commented on it. For example, see this from the front page of the NY Daily News.]

A man called the other night and asked to speak with Beth Ann Bovino. Not interested in a conversation about the midterm elections or whether I need a new phone service, I considered “She’s not home”. Instead, I asked “whom may I say is calling?” He said his name (correctly, I had caller ID). He then ran into a series of statements about me: that I live at 304 West XXth Street (I do) and that I have a one bedroom with a fireplace (yes again). He asked if I am renting my place (I’m not). That’s when he told me that someone had placed an ad on Craig’s List in my name.

According to the ad, I live on the 5th floor of an elevator building (an upgrade from my 5th floor walkup). It comes at the low monthly rent of $1500 including utilities. (Later I found out they also had it listed at times for $1190 and $1100.) It has a deli, a grocery store, and a laundry room. I have a washer/dryer in my apartment, so maybe they could have charged more.

I had it delisted from Craig’s list, but decided to apply. I know from experience it’s a pretty nice place, and even at $1500 it’s a steal. I applied to the ad’s email [email protected]. Ann Bovino (she said “Beth Ann Bovino is my full name.”) got back to me. She wrote “I have available the apartment but now I’m in Fremont – CA. This is the reason that I want to rent it. To start this deal you have to send me 1 month in advance and I will ship you the keys overnight. You can move in the apt in the same day when you receive the keys.”

She included pictures of “my” home: http://pictures.aol.com/galleries/annbovino. [All photos here are taken from this site.] Aside from the picture of my building, the rest are fiction. The bathroom fixtures received a lot of attention. The tub made it in over half the photos, while the modern faucet got a close up. However, I already have furniture and since there wouldn’t be any moving costs, I asked for a discount if the place comes unfurnished. I also asked if there was anyone else at the building who could show me the apartment? A super or someone else?

Ann Bovino wrote: “I understand your position but the keys are with me and the only option is to ship you the keys. I have an idea for this deal. First you have to send me money on your friend or relative name via MoneyGram because I want to be sure that you are a serious person and you really want to rent my apt. In the same day I will ship you the keys via UPS and after you will see the apt and you make a decision you have to resend the funds on my name for pick up the money.” She generously offered to support all MoneyGram fees. She also cut the rental price to $1400, unfurnished.

I responded that I was concerned about sending money without talking to someone over the phone. The same “I understand your position” piece was sent in reply, but it added “PS. I would love to speak with you by phone but I can’t because I’m a deaf-mute person and I am teaching in CA for a deaf-mute school.”

So there it is. I’m a deaf-mute person who moved to Fremont, California to teach deaf-mute children. I understand other people’s positions and will even bend on the price. I may even be able to pro-rate the agreement (though that was unclear). While this was entertaining, my real self got concerned. Ann Bovino reposted the apartment rental. A number of people came by to check out this dream apartment. I let them know just that. It was a dream. And a fraud. I called 311 to find out how to stop this. 311 didn’t have the facts to help much. Though they were supportive, they sent me to the N.Y. State Attorney Local Office, who sent me to Consumer Affairs, who told me, for some unexplained reason, to contact my local post office. However, an intensive internet search gave me some information to act, or at least know what I was up against.

I found out that this kind of fraud is a variation of the “Four-One-Nine” (419) or “Advanced Fee Fraud,” which has been around since the early 1980’s and that we have all seen. Emails sent with the SUBJECT: URGENT!!! in the header undoubtedly lead into this kind of fraud. It was dubbed “419 Fraud” after the relevant section of the Criminal Code of Nigeria. Usually it operates as follows: the target receives an unsolicited fax, email, or letter, usually from Nigeria or another African nation (though not always), and contains either a money laundering or other illegal proposal. Or you may receive a Legal and Legitimate business proposal. Variations of Advance Fee Fraud seem endless. At some point, the victim is always asked to pay an Advance Fee upfront.

There are a number of web sites that look into this. One particularly interesting and very funny site is http://www.scamorama.com. Together with the book, scam-o-rama, it is designed specifically for scam busters (or those that support their cause). On their site they ask the question: “Can a scammer pretending to be an orphan from a Sierra Leone mining town find happiness scamming people? Well yeah, if he gets away with it.”

Their research, on an admittedly small data set, suggests disturbing trends: Travel and banking in West Africa are fatal to imaginary people. Airplane crashes have the most fatalities overall, while the Sagbama Express is most dangerous road. They write “the ‘bank customers’- all foreigners (European, Asian, Arab, American) – have died, usually in ghastly (air, motor) accidents. The banks may exist. The victims’ names may belong to real people who probably want them back. (I do.) Some names belonged to real people whose tragic deaths were lifted from obituaries. Some victims have died multiple times, not learning from previous experience. Some died from combinations of natural disaster.”

The book and the web site detail the ‘419’ advance fee fraud scam and the damage it does (hundreds of millions of dollars yearly). They also document the people who try to get back at them. On one side are the scammers, those who commit the fraud. Then there are the ‘scambaiters’- those who write back to lead the scammers on with stories and waste their time. There is one scambaiter who actually got money FROM the scammer (about $3). It inspired my game.

It has now been over three weeks since I first heard that my name has been used. Given the stats, my name has now likely been involved in a few more devastating accidents/illnesses/natural disasters. I could suffer still more virtual tragic ends if I do nothing. I contacted the local police department with no luck. However, one web site finally offered a chance to redeem my name. The Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) http://www.ic3.gov/faq/ is co-sponsored by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C).

The IC3’s mission is to serve as a vehicle to receive, develop, and refer criminal complaints regarding the rapidly expanding arena of cyber crime. The IC3 aims to give the victims of cyber crime an easy-to-use reporting mechanism. The web site receives thousands of complaints each month. The complaints filed are all processed and may be referred to the appropriate law enforcement or regulatory agencies for possible investigation. Ultimately, however, investigation and prosecution are at the discretion of the receiving agencies.

If you’re a victim, keep any evidence you may have relating to your complaint, such as payment receipts, mail receipts, a printed copy of a website, or copies of emails. Keep phone numbers or addresses of anyone connected, either the culprit or other targets. You may be requested to provide them for investigative purposes. While it seems farfetched, there have been arrests. Most recently, the FBI and Spanish police have arrested 310 people in Malaga, Spain in connection with a €100m bogus (email) lottery scam run by Nigerian gangs. The gang also offered rewards for those willing to stash money taken out of Iraq by the family of Saddam Hussein or money found after the 9/11 attacks. It was the biggest 419 bust in history, and may result in drastic reductions of scam mails.

The scammer posted my apartment again. I remain a Californian deaf-mute. As of this date, my horrible airplane or automobile death has not been announced.

Beth Ann Bovino is a new columnist at 3 Quarks Daily. She will be added to our About Us page presently.

No, it is not about the death by the deranged beast in us that wages war and genocide, nor is it about the economics of episodic mania of nature unleashing its fury, but of that death which takes us away quietly in our un-heroic old age. It is about the economics of snatching a few extra days from the clutches of death when frayed emotions bargain with the inevitable.

How furiously should we ‘rage against the dying of the light’?

Here is a true story: cast your decision.

An 86 years old man, afflicted with shakes and frequent ‘fall attacks’ of Parkinson’s disease, stumbles at home. His skull crashes against the travertine and spews blood. The paramedics whisk him away; the neurosurgeon valiantly operates on him and admits him to the ICU. He is unconscious but his lungs bellow with the help of a respirator. The doctor says that the skull has fractured; the brain is lacerated and delivers ‘no hope’. You are the family; what would you do now?

1. Do every thing possible to keep him alive.
2. Disconnect the life support.

Both the answers are right; that is the dilemma.

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THE COST BURDEN

‘I want to die on schedule.’

Man lived up to the age of 47 years in 1900 in the USA and many years less in other less fortunate lands in Asia and Africa. Good nutrition, improved sanitation, mass immunization and a few antibiotics increased the life expectancy to 67 years by 1960. But since then, in the past 40 years, it has struggled up by only 7 more years. (See table: Life expectancy of males at birth in the USA: National Center For Health Statistics):

1900-1902 47.9
1909-1911 49.9
1919-1921 55.5
1929-1931 57.7
1939-1941 61.6
1949-1951 65.5
1959-1961 66.8
1969-1971 67.0
1979-1981 70.1
1989-1991 71.8
1997 73.6
1998 73.8
1999 73.9
2000 74.3
2001 74.4
2002 74.5
2003 74.8
2003 74.8

Expenditure on health in1960 in the US was $144 per capita which amounted to 5% of the GDP. By 2003 the corresponding figures had escalated to $5,635 and 15%. The gluttonous medical industrial complex gobbled up hundreds of billions of dollars without proportionate improvement in health. Ironically, it is not the old age but the process of dying that devours a substantial part of this swollen sum; the last year before death consumes between 26% and 50% of total lifetime health care expenditure.

Investigators at Rutgers University compared expenditure of terminal year with non-terminal year for people over 65 years. Between 1992 and 1996 the mean expenditure was $37,581 in the terminal year compared to $7,365 for the non-terminal year.

US Medicare spends 28% of its budget in the last year of the life and most of it in the last 30 days. Death in the hospital is costly. 4,692,623 persons died in the US hospitals in 2003. The hospitals received an average of $ 24,429 per person for terminal care for an average stay of 23.9 days. [Dartmouth Atlas of health care.]

Larger percentage of older people in the population strains the healthcare financing, as far greater numbers at an advanced age are likely to die in the following year. According to the Canadian health tables ‘the probability that a male aged 40 will die during the next year is 0.2%, while at age 70 it is 3.0%, and at age 90 it is 18.6%’.

But people who express their wishes about terminal care fare differently. In a study done between 1990 and 1992, persons who had directed in advance about the intensity of service they wanted near death, spent much less: $30,478 compared to $ 95,305 by those without an advance directive. [Archives of Internal Medicine, 1994.] Those with an expressed ‘do not resuscitate’ before admission to the hospital spend much less than those who order this during the course of their hospital stay.

Can we afford the ever-increasing cost of the terminally sick? Maybe, it needs a different perspective.

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THE REVENUE MODEL

‘Don’t agonize about prolonging life, just postpone my death.’

The flip side of cost is revenue. The cost to one business system shows up in the revenue column of another business. The transfer of this cash creates jobs in its transit and in this case, in an industry, which tends to the sick and attempts to keep the rest healthy.

In 2004, health care was the largest industry, had 545,000 establishments and employed 13.5 million people. About 19% of new jobs will be created by this industry up to 2014 — more than any other industry.

Hospitals comprise only 2% of the healthcare institutions but they employ 40% of all workers. It is calculated, that hospitals accounted for Medicare revenue of 114.6 billion dollars in 2003, for the care of the terminal 23 days of persons over 65 years.

Health expenditure in the US in 2005 was $1.7 trillion, which makes it probably the largest single industry in the world. One could make a reasonable argument that the economy generated by the health care industry is more desirable than many other industries like alcohol, tobacco and the other two big industries: war and religion.

Health care’s contribution to the GDP was 15.3% in 2005 and should increase in coming years. And why not!

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THE AGONY OF ETHICS

‘Economics is the bastard child of ethics.’ –TS Elliot.

An isolated cost versus benefit matrix should not determine the end of life measures. The insatiable appetite for technology makes the choice between cost and ethics even more difficult for the family and the health care providers. In the absence of an advance directive, often, all the options in the care of the terminally sick seem ethically right. Sometimes, the quality of remaining life helps in deciding the course.

About 10% of all who die after age 65 are severely impaired and 14% are fully functional. Between these two ends of the spectrum are partially functional people. Disability increases with age. In a survey done in 1986, only 20% between the ages of 65 and 74 were completely functional and 3% were severely disabled. At age 85 about 22% were incapacitated and only 6% were functioning fully.

Most people will agree that prolonging life of everyone irrespective of the disability is the right choice, but standing by the bedside of the terminally sick person the questions are: is it worth it and at what emotional and financial cost? There are no wrong answers.

“Most Americans can’t afford a comfortable death. More than likely, their savings accounts won’t hold up after intense hospitalization. And, as the insurance system now works, benefits will cover ample surgeries and procedures, but once those limits are met there is nothing left for palliative care…”

“At least three barriers block the way for a more comfortable death… (1) The health-care system fails to offer an institutional structure to support appropriate choices for dying patients. (2) Insurance mechanisms fall short of providing adequate support beyond high-tech care. (3) American culture embraces high-tech medicine while harboring an overwhelming fear of painful death. Discussions of palliative care rarely enter into the picture.”— From the September 1996 Medical Ethics Advisor.

We can devise the cost controls, extol the virtuous revenue, debate the knotted ethics but which balm will soothe the emotions?

**********

The cremated remains of my father slid from my fingers. The slow breeze hugged the ashes gently and floated them away into the heaving Ganges. His last remains bobbed and crested the waves and then merged with the primordial waters from whence he had sprung as ‘life’ many eons ago.

I saw him disappear –forever. But a thought lingered: maybe we shouldn’t have pulled the plug.

I presume that at the end of each year, pundits, writers, and bloggers gather to discuss the year’s political trends. Most of what they discuss is invariably pulled out of thin air, but I hope I’m basing my own analyses on enough evidence to escape that general description. It’s accurate to characterize 2004 as the year of liberal democratic hopes: the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the new parliamentary elections in Georgia consolidating 2003’s Rose Revolution, the calls for democratic revolution in Iran. This continued into early 2005 with Lebanon and the scheduled elections in Palestine.

And then it all crashed. New Ukraine was plagued by corruption. The Tulip Revolution didn’t go anywhere. Frustration with the slow pace of reform in Iran catapulted Ahmadinejad to power instead of ushering in a new democratic system. Fatah looked weak on corruption, weak on Israel, and weak on public order, while Hamas looked like a fresh change.

In the Middle East, 2006 was the year of dashed hopes, even more so than 2005. Iraq was irrevocably wrecked long before 2006 started, but 2006 was the year the violence escalated. Most wars kill many more people than any subsequent occupations; in Iraq, there were more people killed in 2006 than in 2003. The Sunni-Shi’a rift had been there for fifteen years, but intensified over the course of last year, and spilled over to other countries in the region: Iran, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon. Throughout most of the year, there was only escalating violence and increasing legitimization of Muqtada Al-Sadr, but right at the end, the execution of Saddam was probably carried out by Al-Sadr’s followers, rather than by the government.

The single country in the region whose hopes were dashed the most was of course Lebanon. The Cedar Revolution was supposed to usher in a new age of democracy built along the same pillarized model that had worked in the Netherlands for about a century. Hezbollah was supposed to reform itself from a terrorist organization to a legitimate if fundamentalist political party. And the country was supposed to become independent of Syrian and Iranian influence. To a large extent due to Israel’s lack of knowledge of foreign policy responses that don’t involve military force, those hopes disintegrated in the summer of 2006.

In Palestine, Hamas won the parliamentary election, which Israel considered equivalent to a writ permitting the IDF to kidnap elected Palestinian officials at will. As had happened in Nicaragua in the early 1980s, the Hamas government found itself stripped of development aid, and became increasingly radicalized as a result. Israel responded the only way it is familiar with, i.e. with military force, and killed 655 Palestinian civilians in the Occupied Territories, up from 190 the previous year.

And in the US and Iran, two conservative Presidents with a vested interest in muzzling liberal democratic opposition escalated their saber-rattling game. In Iran, that meant crackdowns on opposition media, especially in the wake of Israel and Hezbollah’s war. Although toward the end of the year, reformists gained power in the election, real power in Iran lies in the hands of unelected Supreme Leader Khamenei, who is as opposed to democratic reforms as Ahmadinejad.

At the same time, 2006 was the year of recognition. In Iraq, the situation became so hopeless it became impossible to pretend everything was going smoothly. Right now the only developed country where the people support the occupation of Iraq is Israel, where indiscriminately killing Arab civilians is seen as a positive thing. The Iranian people did the best they could to weaken the regimes within the parameters of the law. Hamas’s failure to deliver on its promise to make things better led to deep disillusionment among the Palestinians, which did not express itself in switching support to even more radical organizations. And most positively, the Lebanese people, including plenty of Shi’as, came to see Hezbollah not as a populist organization that would liberate them from the bombs of Israel, but as a cynical militia that played with their lives for no good reason.

Elsewhere, there were no clear regional trends. However, the political events of 2006 in the United States might point to a national trend of increased liberalism. On many issues the trend is simply a continuation or culmination of events dating at least fifteen years back, but on some, especially economic and foreign policy ones, the shift was new. In 2002 and 2004, the American people voted for more war; in 2006 they voted for less. While they didn’t elect enough Senate Democrats to withdraw from Iraq, they did express utter disapproval of the country’s actions in Iraq. This trend originated in the Haditha massacre of 2005, and Bush’s approval rating crashed in 2005 rather than in 2006, but it was in 2006 that the general discontent with the direction of American politics was expressed in a decisive vote for a politically weak party over Bush’s party.

So after the hope of 2004 and early 2005, 2006 was not just the year when violence rebounded and democracy retreated in the Middle East, but also the year when public unrest with the status quo grew. This unrest did not manifest itself in any movement with real political power, and I don’t want to be too naively optimistic to predict that it will. I mentioned that the Iranians did everything within the parameters of the law to support democratic reforms; but Iran’s system is so hopelessly rigged that nothing within the parameters of the law can change anything. Still, indirect action typically sets the stage for direct action; Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement stood on the shoulders of decades of NAACP and ACLU litigation.

The cliché way to end this would be to look at the situation in Iran and to a lesser extent Lebanon and Palestine, and posit that the country is now at a crossroads. I don’t think it is; the Iranian people have had the infrastructure and social institutions to overthrow theocracy for a number of years now, and came closest to doing so in 2002, before the US invasion of Iraq. It may be that the Iranian people have grown so tired of the regime that even “We hate America and Israel more than our opponents” isn’t enough to hold Khamenei and Ahmadinejad afloat. Or it may be that Israel will decide to save the regime by launching military strikes against its nuclear weapons program. And it may be that after either of these scenarios, there will be a political reversal the next year modeled on a color/flower revolution or on a reaction against such a revolution. Hopes can be dashed, and dashed hopes can be rescued, as 2006 taught us.

Justin E. H. Smith

In The World Viewed, Stanley Cavell wryly comments that it was not until he reached adulthood that he learned “where movies come from.” As it happens, movies come from the same place I do: California. Now as an answer to the question of origins, this is hardly satisfying. “California,” as a one-word answer to anything, has the air of a joke about it, whereas we at least aim for earnestness. This is a problem that has vexed many who have left California and attempted to make sense of it at a distance. The turn-of-the-century Harvard philosopher Josiah Royce once declared of his home state that “there is no philosophy in California.” Yet the state’s generative power, and my attachment to it, have left me with the sense that something of philosophical interest is waiting to be said, by me if I’m lucky, if not in it, then at least about it and its exports.

My sense is that these two questions, the autobiographical and the film-historical, may be treated together. This is not because I was born into a Hollywood dynasty –far from it– but because throughout most of my life, memories were something shared, something public, something manufactured. By this I mean that, instead of memories, we had movies, and instead of conversation, we mimicked dialogue. I use the past tense here, as in the title (though there in acknowledgment also of a debt to Joan Didion), because it is already clear that movies will not be the dominant art form of the twenty-first century, and if we agree with Cavell that a movie is a sequence of automated world projections, then movies are no longer being made.

A contingent development in the history of technology left us with an art form thought by many to reveal something very significant about what we as humans are. Cavell chose to express this significance in the Heideggerian terms of film’s ‘world-disclosing power’ (did Heidegger ever even see a movie?). Already before 1920, Royce’s Harvard colleague Hugo Münsterberg had argued that the ‘photoplay’ serves as a powerful proof of Fichtean idealism: what need is there for Kant’s thing-in-itself if a ‘world’ can exist just as well projected on a screen as embodied in three dimensions?

I take it for granted that the world disclosed to us today is the same world to which human beings have had access for roughly the past hundred thousand years, that is, since we became anatomically, and thus we may presume cognitively, modern. For this reason, what interests me most about movies is the question: what is it that our experience of them replaced? We have only had them for a hundred and some odd years, not long enough for our brains to have evolved from some pre-cinematic condition into something that may be said to have an a priori grasp of what a movie is, in the same way that we now know that human brains come into the world with the concept of, for example, ‘animate being’. We are not naturally movie-viewing creatures, though it certainly feels natural, as though it were just what we’ve always done. What then is it that we’ve always done, of which movie-viewing is just the latest transformation? What is that more fundamental category of activity of which movie-viewing is a variety?

One well-known answer is that watching movies is an activity much like dreaming. This is evidenced by the numerous euphemisms we use for the motion picture industry. In his recent book, The Power of Movies: How Mind and Screen Interact, the analytic philosopher Colin McGinn explicitly maintains that the mind processes cinematic stories in a way that is similar to its processing of dreams. He even suggests that movies are ‘better’ than dreams to the extent that they are ‘dreams rendered into art’.

But what then are dreams? To begin with, dreams are a reminder that every story we come up with to account for who we are and how we got to be that way is utterly and laughably false. Everything I tell myself, every comforting phrase so useful in waking life, breaks down and becomes a lie. For eight hours a day, it is true that I have killed someone and feel infinite remorse, that my teeth have fallen out, that I am able to fly but ashamed to let anyone know, that the airplanes I am in make slow motion, 360-degree loops, that my hair is neck-length and won’t grow any longer. None of these things is true. Yet, some mornings, for a few seconds after awakening, I grasp that they are truer than true. And then they fade, and the ordinary sense of true and false settles back in.

The images that accompany these feelings –the feeling of shame at levitating, the feeling of being in a doomed airplane—are relatively unimportant. They are afterimages, congealed out of the feelings that make the dreams what they are. As Aristotle already understood, and explained in his short treatise On Dreams, “in every case an appearance presents itself, but what appears does not in every case seem real… [D]ifferent men are subject to illusions, each according to the different emotion present in him.” Perhaps because of this feature of dreams –that they are not about the things that are seen, but rather the things that are seen are accompaniments for feelings– dreams have always been interpreted symbolically. This has been the case whether the interpreter believes that dreams foretell the future, or in contrast that they help to make sense of how the past shaped the present. Psychoanalysis has brought us around, moreover, to the idea that retrodiction is no more simple a task than oneiromancy, and that indeed the two are not so different: once you unravel the deep truth of the distant past, still echoed in dreams even if our social identities have succeeded in masking it, then by that very insight, and by it alone, you become master of your own future.

It seems to me that we don’t have an adequate way of talking about dreams. The topic is highly tabooed, and anyone who recounts his dreams to others, save for those who are most intimate, is seen as flighty and mystical. Of course, the consequence of this taboo is not that dreams are not discussed, but only that they are discussed imprecisely. For the most part, we are able to explain what happened, but not what the point-of-view of the dreamer was. This is overlooked, I suspect, because it is taken for granted that the point-of-view of the dreamer is that of a movie viewer. What people generally offer when prompted to recount a dream is a sort of plot summary: this happened, then this, then this. Naturally, the plot never makes any sense at all, and so the summary leaves one with the impression that what we are dealing with is a particularly strange film.

Certainly, there is a connection between some films –especially the ‘weird’ ones– and dreams, but only because the filmmakers have consciously, and in my view always unsuccessfully, set about capturing the feeling of a dream. From Un chien andalou to Eraserhead, weird things happen indeed, but the spectator remains a spectator, outside of the world projected onto the screen, looking into it. We are made to believe that our dreams are ‘like’ movies, but lacking plots, and then whenever an ‘experimental’ filmmaker attempts to go without plot, as if on cue audiences and critics announce that the film is like a dream. Middle-brow, post-literate fare such as Darren Aronofsky’s tedious self-indulgences have further reduced the dreamlike effect supposedly conveyed by non-linear cinema to an echo of that adolescent ‘whoah’ some of us remember feeling at the Pink Floyd laser-light show down at the planetarium.

Dreams are not weird movies, even if we recognize the conventions of dreamlikeness in weird movies. Weird movies, for one thing, are watched. The dreamer, in contrast, could not be more in the world dreamt. It is the dreamer’s world. It is not a show.

However problematic the term, cinematic ‘realism’ shows us, moreover, that movies can exhibit different degrees of dreamlikeness, and thus surely that there is something wrong with the generalized movie-dream analogy. In dream sequences, we see bright colors and mist, and, as was explicitly noted by a dwarf in Living in Oblivion, we often see dwarves. When the dream sequence is over, the freaks disappear, the lighting returns to normal, and in some early color films, most notably The Wizard of Oz, we return to black-and-white, the cinematic signifier of ‘reality’. My dreams are neither like the dream sequences in movies, nor are they like the movies that contain the dream sequences. Neither Kansas nor Oz, nor limited to dwarves in the repertoire of curious sights they offer up.

A much more promising approach is to hold, with Cavell, that movies are mythological, that their characters are types rather than individuals, and that the way we experience them is probably much more like the way folk experience their tales. Movies are more like bedtime stories than dreams: like what we cognize right before going to sleep than the mash that is made of our waking cognitions after we fall asleep.

If anything on the screen resembles dreams, it is cartoons (and thus Cavell is right to insist that these are in need of a very different sort of analysis than automated world projections). Cartoons are for the most part animistic. It is difficult to imagine a dream sequence in a Warner Brothers cartoon, since there were to begin with no regular laws of nature that might be reversed, there was no reality that might be suspended. For most of the early history of cartoons, there were no humans, but only ‘animate’ beings, such as cats and mice, as well as trees, the sun, and clouds, often given a perfunctory face just to clue us into their ontological status.

The increasing cartoonishness of movies –both the increasing reliance on computer graphics, as well as the decreasing interest in anything resembling human beings depicted in anything resembling human situations (see, e.g., Pierce Brosnan-era James Bond for a particularly extreme example of the collapse of the film/cartoon boundary)—may be cause for concern. Mythology, and its engagement with recognizably human concerns about life and death, is, it would seem, quickly being replaced by sequences of pleasing colors and amusing sounds.

I do not mean to come across as a fogey. Unlike Adorno with his jazz problem (which is inseparable from his California problem: the state that made him regret that the Enlightenment ever took place), I am a big fan of some of the animistic infantilism I have seen on digital screens recently. Shrek and the Teletubbies are fine entertainments. I am simply noting, already for a second time, that the era of movies is waning, and that nothing has stepped in, for the moment, to do what they once did.

A video-game designer recently told me that ‘gaming’ is just waiting for its own Cahiers du Cinéma, and that when these come along, and games are treated with adequate theoretical sophistication not by fans but by thinkers, then these will be in a position to move into the void left by film. I have no principled reasons to be saddened by this, but they will have to do a good deal more than I’ve seen them doing so far. Now I have not played a video game since the days when Atari jackets were sincerely, and not ironically, sought after. But I did see some Nintendo Wii consoles on display in a mall in California when I was home for the holidays this past week. The best argument for what the crowding mall urchins were doing with those machines is the same one, and the only one, that we have been able to come up with since Pong, and the one I certainly deployed when pleading with my own parents for another few minutes in front of the screen: it seems to do something for developing motor skills. This makes video games the descendants of sporting and hunting, while what movies moved in to replace were the narrative folk arts, such as the preliterate recitations that would later be recorded as Homer’s Odyssey. These are two very different pedigrees indeed, and it seems unlikely to me that the one might ever be the successor to the other.

Dreams are the processing of emotional experiences had in life, experiences of such things as hunting, or fighting, or love. Narrative arts, such as movies, are the communal processing, during waking life, of these same experiences. Movies are not like dreams, and video games are not like movies. And as for what experiences are, and why all the authentic ones seem to have already been had by the time we arrive at an age that enables us to reflect on them (seem all to have happened in California), I will leave that question to a better philosopher, and a less nostalgic one.

**

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

Two years ago we at 3QD as well as Richard Dawkins independently decided to celebrate December 25th as Newton’s Day (it is Sir Isaac’s birthday). You can see my post from last year here. So here we are again. This year I will just provide two interesting things related to Newton, who some argue was the greatest mind of all time. For example, did you know that he hung out in bars and pubs in disguise, hoping to catch criminals? He did. Read this, from wikipedia:

As warden of the royal mint, Newton estimated that 20% of the coins taken in during The Great Recoinage were counterfeit. Counterfeiting was treason, punishable by death by drawing and quartering. Despite this, convictions of the most flagrant criminals could be extremely difficult to achieve; however, Newton proved to be equal to the task.

He gathered much of that evidence himself, disguised, while he hung out at bars and taverns. For all the barriers placed to prosecution, and separating the branches of government, English law still had ancient and formidable customs of authority. Newton was made a justice of the peace and between June 1698 and Christmas 1699 conducted some 200 cross-examinations of witnesses, informers and suspects. Newton won his convictions and in February 1699, he had ten prisoners waiting to be executed. He later ordered all records of his interrogations to be destroyed.

Newton’s greatest triumph as the king’s attorney was against William Chaloner. One of Chaloner’s schemes was to set up phony conspiracies of Catholics and then turn in the hapless conspirators whom he entrapped. Chaloner made himself rich enough to posture as a gentleman. Petitioning Parliament, Chaloner accused the Mint of providing tools to counterfeiters (a charge also made by others). He proposed that he be allowed to inspect the Mint’s processes in order to improve them. He petitioned Parliament to adopt his plans for a coinage that could not be counterfeited, while at the same time striking false coins. Newton was outraged, and went about the work to uncover anything about Chaloner. During his studies, he found that Chaloner was engaged in counterfeiting. He immediately put Chaloner on trial, but Mr Chaloner had friends in high places, and to Newton’s horror, Chaloner walked free. Newton put him on trial a second time with conclusive evidence. Chaloner was convicted of high treason and hanged, drawn and quartered on March 23, 1699 at Tyburn gallows.

More from Wikipedia here. And if you are in the mood for something much more substantive, I highly recommend watching this video of my mentor and friend, Professor Akeel Bilgrami, delivering the University Lecture at Columbia earlier this fall, entitled “Gandhi, Newton, and the Enlightenment.” I admit that the subject is only weakly related to Newton, but it is well worth watching on Newton’s Day nevertheless. The following description is excerpted from a Columbia University website:

Bilgrami devoted much of his talk to tracing the origins of “thick” rationality as well as the critiques it has received over the years. He identified the 17th century as the critical turning point, when scientific theorists such as Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle put forward the idea of matter and nature as “brute and inert”—as opposed to a classical notion of nature as “shot through with an inner source of dynamism, which is itself divine.”

Even at the time, there were many dissenters who accepted all the laws of Newtonian science but protested its underlying metaphysics, Bilgrami explained. They were anxious about the political alliances being formed between the commercial and mercantile interests and the metaphysical ideologues of the new science—anxieties echoed by the “radical enlightenment” as well as later by Gandhi.

According to Bilgrami, both Gandhi as well as these earlier thinkers argued that in abandoning our ancient, “spiritually flourishing” sense of nature, we also let go of the moral psychology that governs human beings’ engagement with the natural, “including the relations and engagement among ourselves as its inhabitants.”

Bilgrami expressed a certain sympathy for this dissenting view, noting that even if we moderns cannot accept the sacralized vision favored by these earlier thinkers, we should still seek alternative secular forms of enchantment in which the world is “suffused with value,” even if there is no divine source for this value. Such “an evaluatively enchanted world” would be susceptible not just to scientific study, Bilgrami argued, but would also demand an ethical engagement from us all.

See the video here.

And Merry Christmas!!!

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.

One of my favourite television shows in recent times has been Curb Your Enthusiasm. Larry David, Executive Producer of Seinfeld, plays ‘Larry David’ in a largely-Los Angeles milieu. Life seems to be either a series of excruciating personal humiliations or monumental social faux pas. The humour here is by turns uproarious, occasionally wistful and often very, very rude. I recommend it to anyone who wants to clear away the blues. Larry’s long-suffering ‘wife’ Cheryl has to put up with Larry as he tries to get along in a world that is always at a tangent to where Larry wants it to be. The lesson seems to be: curb your enthusiasm. Venture outside the expected and you will be unmercifully crushed by status quo expectations.

Which is just what you must not do in art if you want your work to have any chance of making it past the present moment. Don’t curb your enthusiasm. That is the main lesson. Your enthusiasm may be somewhat forbidding—Ibsen, unfashionable—Rachmaninov, or a variety of volupté—take your pick. The essential thing is the passion you bring to bear on your work, which naturally has its own tides of compulsion and lassitude.

Speaking of Rachmaninov, there was an outstanding concert given here in Sydney recently when Vladimir Ashkenazy took the Sydney Symphony Orchestra through an all-Rachmaninov program of the Three Russian Songs, the Piano Concerto No 1 (Alexsey Yemtsov) and The Bells (Cantillation, Steve Davislim, Merlyn Quaife, Jonathan Summers). Poor Rachmaninov, who had so much bad press dumped on him in his lifetime and who had to put up with continual sniping by 12-tone monomaniacs. But it has ended up being Rachmaninov who has triumphed. His music is heard and enjoyed across the planet for the reason that it is in touch with the human on a deep level. It does not deny our humanity. Here in Sydney Rachmaninov’s music surged through the Concert Hall with a grandeur and spirit that was electrifying. This effect did not appear out of the blue, but came through rehearsal, the careful harnessing of resources and, no doubt, long hours of practise by choir and soloists. Yemtsov, the pianist, had enthusiasm in spades. He didn’t behave as if he was being crucified at the piano as he performed, in the manner of some virtuosi. The music came first and last.

A few weeks earlier the Wiener Philharmoniker under the direction of Valery Gergiev performed in Australia for the first time. In advance, the programming didn’t look all that interesting. Tchaikowsky 5. Brahms 4. But how wrong could one be. The Brahms was a performance of a kind where you felt you were being forced to look at a terrifying piece of unearthed Greek statuary. What could account for this intensity? Perhaps the Beslan massacre was uppermost in Gergiev’s mind as he conducted, or maybe it was the orchestra’s close association with the composer—the Fourth Symphony played by the Vienna Philharmonic was the last concert music Brahms heard. At any rate, enthusiasm was the key. The players love making music together, and it shows. I guess that follows for Nine Inch Nails or U2 as well.

Enthusiasm that tears a passion to tatters is no use at all. You may feel something strongly, but that won’t get you through in art where you must apply technical skills, and subtlety, to the finished product. One skill which seems in short supply these days is the ability to see, on the whole, Mozart and Picasso notwithstanding, that less is more. Poetry especially seems to be experiencing the equivalent of bulimia as books pour forth. Just who is going to be reading all this stuff in the future? Very few people I should think, though I’d be happy to be proved wrong. For writers, enthusiasm means quiet persistence, letting the praise or blame fly by, going from A to B without getting diverted by the passing parade. And I think it means putting greatness of spirit in your way—it should be sitting on your shoulder.   

Caspar David Friedrich had enthusiasm, even as his work fell from popularity. Need anyone still point out the profound example of Vincent van Gogh. Cole Porter with his crushed legs but indomitable spirit had it. You feel it right through Gershwin, though a brain tumour killed the composer at far too young an age. There is so much creative beauty in the world and it is all filled with a kind of joyfulness at the fact of existence. It is there in philosophical enquiry and mathematical modelling. Surely Nietzsche had it, along with his migraines and bad digestion. And when the clerk in Berne came up with the Special Theory of Relativity, there too was a superabundance of the fröhliche Wissenschaft.

Well, you may end up in art having to do the equivalent of Larry David at the end of the second season of CYE when he is made, after another disastrous imbroglio, by court order, to carry a scarlet letter placard saying I STEAL FORKS FROM RESTAURANTS in front of The W Hotel as his erstwhile employees in the television industry, on their way to a network symposium, frostily avoid him. And Larry is probably thinking, along with Mahler—my time will come. However, whether it comes or not, in culture there can be no trade-offs with those who (don’t) know. That is clear. 

The worms will come out of the woodwork. People will be unkind, to put it mildly. Your work will be ignored or misrepresented. All that is to be expected. At all events, the lesson must go home. In art, in life, don’t curb your enthusiasm.

                                                                         *

               ICI REPOSE
        VINCENT van GOGH

Not here the slippage
Of motive, the bull market,
Dressage of cocktail and auction;
Neither the victory lap nor prize.
And yet, pushed out, vertiginous paint,
Cypress and flower spinning,
Nature’s cusp stubbed on canvas,
A bandaged head staring with love,
And that alone, at each malignant defeat.

Ours is a tepid dreaming
With not even the courage of beauty.
We wish our Age of Noise
To be an almanac footnoted,
Its mug celebrities
Caught in silverfish pages,
But still we won’t avoid
An empty room dimming our glamour.

Theories puffed, the boast
Of a thousand critical niceties,
Are shed in the fierce night,
One name cast
Near sulphurous soil,
Whose paintings keep,
For we who believe
Not in greatness, nor the strength of art,
In the space reserved for grace,
The sharktooth eye
Of a winnowing field
And yellow starlight shining.

Written 1989 Published 1997