by Michael Blim

Now begins the end game of the health care reform legislation. The President has spoken, and Senator Baucus has finally made his play. The results could not be more disappointing.

These latest contributions to the health debate leave millions of people uncovered, and everyone else save people on Medicare and Medicaid and patients of the Veterans Administration health system still contracting insurance for care and cost with the same insurers that helped create the health care morass we have now. For our pains, those of us now insured or who will be insured under pending legislation, receive the guarantee that our coverage cannot be cancelled because of illness, pre-existing condition, or job loss. While important guarantees, they do nothing to answer how we will pay for rising premiums or combat the war for payment or reimbursement raged by providers and insurers even on people now adequately insured.

But the bottom line is that these latest proposals are neither universal nor fair: They do not guarantee every person equal access to medical care s/he needs. The proposals invite the creation of a plethora of complicated rules and regulations that will render difficult or impossible redress by ordinary citizens.

Some have reminded us of the old adage that law-making is a little like sausage-making. The result may be good, but you wouldn’t want to see how it’s done. In this instance, the probable result is as ugly as the process.

Try this analogy instead: our health system is like the Gordian knot. Only cutting it asunder will work. The Democratic Congress and President Obama have been trying carefully to untie it. This is a mission that can never succeed.

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By Namit Arora

(This five-part series on early Islamic history begins with the rise of Islam, shifts to its golden age, examines two key currents of early Islamic thought—rationalism and Sufi mysticism—and concludes with an epilogue. It builds on precursor essays I wrote at Stanford’s Green Library during a summer sabbatical years ago, and on subsequent travels in Islamic lands of the Middle East and beyond.)
__________________________________________

Imagine the Middle East in the early centuries of the Common Era. There is no Islam. The two dominant powers in the region are the Romans and the Persians, with a long history of fighting over territory and trade routes. The border between their two empires keeps shifting across Syria and Mesopotamia.

To the north of this border, in the steppes, are the Turks, deemed ‘savage and warlike’ by Ammianus Marcellinus, a fourth century Roman historian and native of Syria. To the south, in the desert, are the Arabs. Neither the Persians, nor the Romans, took much interest in conquering these semi-nomadic tribal peoples. Instead, they followed that most pragmatic of imperial policies: turn these ‘semi-civilized’ folks into allies and use them opportunistically to score against their main rival.

At stake, besides territorial control, were the trade routes to the East for Chinese silk and Indian spices, which either went through the northern Turkish lands, or across the Sinai and the Red sea, or over the caravan routes hugging the western Arabian coast down to Aden and beyond by sea. [1] The Persians, during times of conflict, blocked all overland eastern access for the Romans.

So the two empires acted like modern corporations doling out political ‘contributions’, and the Arabs and the Turks learned to exploit the situation to their advantage, extracting a variety of military and economic subsidies from both empires. The Romans, after a botched military campaign to gain a foothold at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula and the Red sea, preferred thereafter to rely on the principalities of Arabia for the safer overland route to Aden. This caravan trade soon supported several small towns and kingdoms in Arabia. The imperial powers, by and large, sought to maintain some form of indirect rule or clientage.

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by Shiban Ganju

We had assembled outside Lucknow to train ‘master trainers’. They had travelled from their villages, one to two hundred miles away, for a six day education in health care. Women outnumbered men in this group of thirty five. We believed, on their return, they would become health trainers in their native villages.

Today was the fifth day. We had an open interactive session, where the trainees got to express their thoughts freely. They had already bonded with each other; camaraderie flourished from giggles and side chatter. Inhibitions had eased.

Puja, a small woman sitting near the window, stood and said she had just composed a poem, which she wanted to recite. The group shouted a noise of approval. She began. She had captured the essence of maternal and child health in rhyme. Trainees murmured appreciation; she was their resident poet.

The girl in yellow Sari, sitting on the opposite side, rose. She introduced herself, “My name is Mehrunissa. I want to express my gratitude to all of you and the organizers to let me participate here. I joined the women’s group one year ago. I started attending their meetings. Till that time, I had never participated in any group. For the first time in my life I started stepping out and this is the first time in my life that I have stayed out of my house on my own for seven days.”

“Did your husband or mother in law object?” asked the moderator.

“In the beginning my mother in law asked some questions but now she is used to it. My husband has supported me.”

The group cheered – men a little louder than the women – for this empowerment in action!

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The Ghost of the Arrow of Time

An hypothetical-resurrected-formerly-dead
in a daydream arrived with a scent of dread
which I could not put my finger on

yet knew that I knew
the way I know a déjà vu and
you

came as something I ephemerally knew
came as something ephemerally new

as a bud for instance at the tip of a limb
that once before has never been
but anyway was last spring again

came as a ghost with a cock-sure grin
in a hunter’s cap camouflaged and slim

so thin as to almost disappear
as it turned, the way a tide rolls out and in
almost as if it were never there

as a bow wave breaks in heavy seas
as now breaks over thee & me

to shudder us deeply along our keels
sometimes bringing us to our knees

scouring stains as a burglar steals
to wake-off distantly from our stern

as foam and eddies and whirlpools curl
as flotsam bobs and minutes burn

by Jim Culleny; Sept 2009

By Aditya Dev Sood

I have been directed to a line that says C.P.L.P. for some reason. Most of the passengers around me are holding Brazilian passports, though a series of flags, mostly unrecognizable to me, are flashing on the LED display. The Comunidades dos Países de Língua Portuguesa, I later learn, is a radically alternative way of cutting up the planet, predicated on Portugal’s colonial heritage and historical experience of the wider world. Along with Portugal, it includes Brazil, Angola, East Timor among other member states, while also acknowledging India (because of Goa) and China (because of Macau) as associate members.

I’m here because my company, the Center for Knowledge Societies, is being showcased as one of seven design firms from around the world at a exhibit called The Pace of Design, curated by Tulga Beyerle. It is part of a design biennale festival called ExperimentaDesign, directed by Guta Moura Guedes. Without the long and pedigreed design traditions of, say, Rotterdam, Berlin or Milan, Lisbon seems a quaint location for a major European design event. But the enthusiasm of the festival’s founder and director, Guta and her dedicated team have made the festival a relaxed yet comprehensive review of what contemporary design is and what it means for the cultures of Europe and the world.

Conferencing starts at a leisurely 11.00 am in the morning, and then only when the event bus arrives or quorum is achieved, whichever is later. The most important talks are scheduled at three in the afternoon, and then they last a professorial hour, rather than the 6 minutes 40 seconds that have become de rigueur in the design world. Openings are scheduled, for ten, eleven, and later in the evening, after a series of other dinners and ceremonial events, and well past midnight we’re still early birds at the nightclub party. In India, we are so used to taking grief from foreign visitors about time and timings, that it is oddly disconcerting to find oneself in the faster lane, shuffling so as to slow down and find the rhythm of one’s hosts, which is languid, fluid, flexible, and calm as the afternoon sun.

The air in Lisbon is gentle, and the sun looks to be taking all afternoon and evening to set, showing the city’s yellow, blue, and pastel-shaded buildings in their best light. In the city center are the municipal buildings in a dirty, almost acid, yellow that could only look poetic in this peacable and becalming light.

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Justin E. H. Smith

The Franco-Romanian aphorist and pessimist Émile Cioran describes his childhood in the Transylvanian village of Răşinari as follows:

My childhood was a paradise. Really! The Boacii hill is for me something entirely essential. Everything else seems to be of an incomparable mediocrity… You cannot imagine the extent to which those images are present to my mind. Without diminishing them in the least, an idiotic period that I regret having lived through has imposed itself between them and me.

I personally could not care less about the vividness of Cioran's memories of childhood. What matters to me are my own memories, not of Răşinari circa 1920 but of Rio Linda circa 1980, of the insects and the birds I encountered, of the fox that I imagined to live in what we called the ‘back pasture’ even though I'd never seen him; of the leaves I tore off from our garden's specimens, rolled between my fingers, and sampled on my tongue; of the mole I once found floating dead in the swimming pool; and of the cans of Del Monte vegetables I once discovered in the cupboard, bloated from botulism like a mole in a pool.

Who cares, you say, and that is in part my point. We each care about our own childhood thing, and can't believe that others, who've failed to share in it, nonetheless go about their adult lives as though nothing were missing. But while the particular details of Boacii Hill or of Rio Linda cannot be expected to matter, the fact that each of us has our own version of these places is worthy of some reflection.

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Watching the legions of Michael Jackson fans make pilgrimages to and build cairns of flowers and stuffed toys at the Neverland Ranch in southern California, I can’t say I shared their sorrow exactly. I did sympathize: Boy, had I been there. When David Foster Wallace hanged himself at his own southern California home on September 12, 2008—that’s the closest I’ve ever been to crying over the death of someone I didn’t know. What roiled my emotions all the more was the now-too-late conviction that I’d betrayed Wallace.

DFW called himself a novelist, wanted to be remembered as a novelist, corresponded with novelists about the craft, labored for years over the 2.75 novels he managed to finish (the last 0.75 of which unfinished novels is being molded in a full 1.00 novel called The Pale King by editors at Little, Brown, his publishing company, at this very moment). But as of September 12, 2008, beyond the disappointing exception of a 3,209-word New Yorker story (“Good People”), I hadn’t read more than a few spare sentences of the fiction Wallace considered his life’s work. Instead, all the riffs on dictionaries and tennis and John McCain and porno award shows that I’d committed to memory practically (I don’t even play tennis), all the lines I quoted to uncomprehending family members and the pieces I forwarded incessantly to friends who never read them, were from magazine articles. I loved Wallace for journalistic essays—what in less polite terms novelists often refer to as hack work—that Wallace did for mercenary reasons, because an editor dangled a paycheck, and he was polite, and he needed money like the rest of us.

Now there’s no reason to think Wallace loathed writing nonfiction—it just wasn’t his passion. He aligned himself with Dostoevsky and Pynchon, not Capote and Talese, and there’s even scuttlebutt out there that he killed himself in despair over his unshapely mess of a last book and the pressure of never living up to, well, himself. I will read that last book when it comes out, for sure, and since last September I’ve decoded a fair number of his hermetic short stories and even committed a month to finishing (and I did finish!) all 1,079 pages of Infinite Jest, down to every last little cross-eyed footnote’s footnote. I felt less guilty after finishing, but yet finishing only reinforced what I’d suspected. When the Library of America editors get around to selecting a picture of the long-haired, bandana-ed, tobacco-cheeked Wallace for its 2050 catalogues, they’re not going to spotlight his fiction in this first volume. It’ll be the nonfiction he composed during spare hours.

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by Jeff Strabone

What kind of space is cyberspace? Of all the things we take for granted, cyberspace is near the top of the list. The promise of the internet in the twenty-first century is to make everything always available to everyone everywhere. All of human culture and achievement, the great and the not so great, may, one day soon, be a click away.

When one is online, cyberspace can seem a lot like outer space or, to use the latest jargon, 'the cloud'. It appears infinite and ethereal. The information is simply out there. If, instead, we thought more about the real-world energy and the real estate that the internet uses, we would start to realize that things are not so simple. Cyberspace is in fact physical space. And the longer it takes us to change our concept of the internet—to see quite clearly its physical there-ness—the closer we'll get to blogging our way to oblivion.

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Lucky Again

Yesterday today
might never come but
I'm lucky again

It did and here you are
my bulwark against
a stark sea

In the garden you began
years ago in our plot of sand
where little grew but

wild strawberries
close to the ground their
tendrils groping dry earth

we now have hibiscus
with blossoms the size of
dinner plates

and day lilies in colors
of all things that make
death an illusion

For years under your baton
we’ve sown our sand with
death’s stuff

mown grass, dry leaves,
the remnants of meals,
manure of nearby farms

until what was dry is lush
was empty is full
was barren is flush

Today tomorrow
may never come but here
you are and I am…………………………….

lucky again

by Jim Culleny; August 2009

by Daniel Rourke

Japan. That’s where I am. With the rice-triangles and the tatami-mats and row upon row of vending machines. In a country where serving others is paramount, and where holidays are something that other people do, I find myself being served – on holiday… I am the ultimate gaijin ¹ and every ticket I buy and photo I take seems to confirm this. I came to see Japan. But now I realise that the culture of seeing has been commodified into an experience in itself, and perhaps not an experience any of us are capable of moving beyond alone.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I love Japan. I lived here from 2004 until 2006, teaching English on the outskirts of a medium sized city on the island of Kyushu. The experience enriched me, precisely because it tore me from my anchors. Because it helped me understand where I had come from. On the surface Japan behaves like the perfect machine, with all its components functioning within designated parameters. And what’s more, that machine just seems to work, with hardly anyone screaming to get off. The Japanese are a nation in a very different sense to us Brits. And for a small-town, West Yorkshire boy like myself, being part of that nation, that huge entity, all be it for only 24 months of my life, is still one of my most humbling experiences.

But even as I gush about Japan being here can often feel like toiling through an endless urban labyrinth. With little of cultural merit to distinguish the pachinko parlours from the snack bars and multi-storey car parks Japan can seem grey, shallow and everything but refined. But when it surprises you, whether you’re picking blueberries in the mountains or being served delicate morsels of fish in the private room of your ryokan, Japan redefines the word privileged. I feel privileged to have lived here, I feel privileged to be travelling through it. Yet, keeping hold of that feeling is not always easy.

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This text, which appears on 3QD as the last of a four-part post, was begun as a musing on the theme of series and repetitions in modern and contemporary art inspired by a challenge issued by an art historian colleague of mine. For the previous posts—considerations of the work of Wade Guyton, Frank Stella, and Georges Seurat, respectively—click here, here, and here.

Allan McCollum Allan McCollum
Plaster Surrogates, 1982–1984 The Shapes Project, 2005–2006
Enamel on cast Hydrostone 7,056 framed digital monoprints, 4.25 x 5.5 inches each
Installation: Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York, 2006

Conclusion: Once Again, in Other (Perhaps Entirely Unrelated) Words….

We now find ourselves at the end of yet another summer, looking toward yet another autumn, and I’ve yet to bring this wandering tetralogy to a close. Today’s the day. While a neat little conclusion summing up (dare I say repeating?) all that was said of the previous artists’ work might be a nice way to end it, I must confess, dear Reader, that I’m in the mood for neither clarity nor ease. Initially, I’d hoped to trace these many artists’ work in series back to some multiform, manifold re-, which I’d perceived as echoing through the arts—from photography to painting to print to music to mass-produced goods—between the late nineteenth and early twenty-first century. The heat and rains of summer seem to have dampened my springtime ambition, hence I’ve deemed it perfectly permissible to nod at the work of yet another artist dealing with repetition, and then wash it all down with a little list of res.

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By Evert Cilliers

Who is the quintessential American character?

Honest Abe Lincoln, whose war killed more Americans than Hitler? Founding father Jefferson, who bonked his favorite slave in secret? Jaunty FDR, who betrayed his own class? Preacher MLK, that oddest of American leaders: a fellow driven by morality? Genial Ronald Reagan, a stalwart stooge for the rich? Muhammad Ali, once the most famous American on earth? Or face-shifting Michael Jackson, now the most famous American on earth?

Maybe 30 years ago, one or two of them might have qualified. Now it's not so easy to define the American character anymore, what with white people set to become a minority by 2042 and WASP domination shrinking fast as all the Micks and Guineas and Hymies and Wops and Wogs take over from Buzz and Skip and Topsy. Then there's our new melting-pot-in-one-person President Obama, so frightfully un-American that 50 million Americans believe he was born elsewhere.

It might just be that all we have left of the American character is a simulacrum from our dream factory. To wit, the Hollywood action hero: the go-it-alone, action-at-all-costs, win-against-all-odds, kill-all-the-bad-guys splat!-bang!-kaboom! individual.

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When people who’ve lived in Boston talk to each other, their reminiscences are often wildly variable, depending on when they lived there. A mentor of mine lived in Somerville in the 1980’s, and has a memory of this city I can’t believe. It sounds like paradise. This is because I lived there during the Big Dig, the federal highway project which temporarily re-routed, demolished, then restored, several miles of superhighway through the city. The Dig affected every aspect of the city, constricting traffic miles away by remote influence, and in my opinion infused the city with a powerful, unfocused daily rage. A predisposition toward hate. This is the second of a series of stories about the eruptions of anger, difficulty and pain I witnessed.

Read “A Stain on Boston, Part I,” at The Owls site.

A Stain on Boston

By Ad Hamilton

Eighty-year-old man hits the ground outside the Senior Center doing ninety and dies. Splat. The jury’s back in the case of Mortal Coil v. Boston Department of Public Works Sidewalk, verdict unanimous. Unlucky, clumsy, depressed or pushed, who knows, another day in Boston, another poor fuck accelerating at 9.8 meters per second squared toward nothing good.

To understand this tragedy, you have to understand architecture. The discipline, not the artifacts. Your affection for the Chrysler building relates to Architecture just like your appreciation for Hubble photos relates to Plasma Physics: which is to say that they have no relation whatever.

And to understand architecture, you have to understand architecture school. The crucible that forms a deranged and flagellant tectonic culture. It’s kind of like Opus Dei, but much less important.

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By Katie Bierach

The Tragical History of Divine Comedy: Reasoning Faith while Maintaining Faith in Reason

Introduction by the Author

Reason relies on assumptions in which people put their faith. We need to believe in the same certain things, a code of communicable ideas, in order to reason anything at all. The relationship of faith and reason has a complex history; the two forces are inextricably connected, yet they repel each other when taken to extremes. Does one tend to lend more understanding than its friend? How will they help us in The End? How do they each reveal holiness? Where is God in this picture? The two powers take turns driving our decision-making processes, whispering in ears as they sit on shrugged shoulders. In best cases, the pair can be found ice-skating hand in hand, gliding together in harmony with coolness and ease. More often than not, however, one will gain more power than the other.

Prologue: Reader, Take Heed!

Meet the unexpected on your journey forward

and keep your faith so you can be rewarded.

Have faith here—where reason may not lie,

where reason is more reticent—do not say goodbye.

May faith guide you onward to this story’s close

and yet be reason’s steward as both take heated blows . . .

Chapter One: in which the Medical Importance of Aforementioned Components is Expounded

Millions of people worldwide suffer from faith and reason imbalances. Doctors who prescribe daily doses of faith and reason must first consider the patient’s tolerance for such ideas (as some have weak constitutions); usually the substances should be taken together, with water, in equal parts, as balance is critical for happiness and longevity. Faith is reasonable to a certain degree, and so much faith must be bestowed in reason so that the soul isn’t annihilated in a downward spiral of skepticism and doubt, which may lead to intense existential anguish.

An overdose of either faith or reason is a prescription for madness. Faith, in low dosages, helps us to function in our daily lives: we have faith that the airplane will stay in the sky and that the pedestrian will not jump in front of our cars. Faith can also have benefits in higher dosages, when taken moderately: faith in metaphysical ideas such as immortality can lead to mental health and thereby social cohesion, curtailing violent crime and allowing for physical fitness. Take as directed. Excess levels of faith in the body can diminish its stores of reason without allowing time for it to replenish. Excess levels of faith, also known as Fideism or Blind Faith (generic) may lead to trauma, madness, serious injury, or death. Fideism is the leading cause of heart disease, kidney failure, suicide bombings, midlife crises, and genocide. Side effects may include redness, swelling, intellectual drowsiness, headache, mania, loss of memory or ability to concentrate, itching, hallucinating, or chest pain. If symptoms persist contact your consciousness immediately. Women who are pregnant or may become pregnant have an increased risk of fluctuating faith and reason levels.

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I love words and the convolutions of language; how we arrange and rearrange it; how we invent new ways communicate old things; how we nurture its nuances —which is where poetry comes in.

Idioms have always intrigued me. They’re short poems. One-liners created to make startling something banal and obvious. Idioms lighten things up. They renovate tired and dilapidated bits of worn truth and create more transparent windows on the world and the things we do in it.

I learned recently of a book containing a collection of international idioms which are indeed startling, funny, and fun. The book, by Jag Bhalla, is called I’m Not Hanging Noodles on Your Ears, which is a Russian way of saying, “I’m not pulling your leg.”

Bhalla’s book is sure proof that humans are humorous and truthful when we dump the BS. These idioms have nothing to do with BS. They present the truth with humor and a sometimes brutal directness, but they never veer into hypocrisy.

I had some fun this past week with a few snippets from Noodles myself. The poetic tale below (enlightened by the glossary that follows) was built with an arrangement of Jag Bhalla’s idiomatic bricks (in italics).

I’m Not Hanging Noodles on Your Ears

Unable to stop being an owl
my eyes were stolen
by a piece of the moon.

I thought, what curves
and me without brakes.

It was dry firewood meets flame.
I wanted to be your leg, your goat,
your bumblebee.

Swallowed like a postman’s sock
and steaming like water for chocolate,
I was so far gone I’d completely
eaten the monkey.

I mused, if only
I could drink your lips
and we, in the midst of a
buckle polish,
under the sway of the
ever romantic Tony Bennett
might, in the magical afternoon light
pluck the turkey.

But love means having
no time to die; although
for you I'd surely
break my horns.

Yet if one day, despite all,
the tomatoes had faded
and you were a red apricot
gone over the wall
and I took the rake
and was left nailed
I'd still hope that perhaps
(just maybe) we might
reheat the cabbage and I,
instead of being a
lonely yawning mussel
(but with fast hands),
might find that you were
once again a sweet potato
for me

—and I’m not
hanging noodles on
your ears

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Michael Blim

So the Prez says we’re in a wee-wee period. Well, I am in a pee’d off period. Looks like nobody is going to rid me of my private health insurance. The public option looks dead.

I’m lucky. I have something I wish to be rid of. At least 46 million Americans don’t have anything — not private insurance, Medicaid, or Medicare. According to experts quoted in the New York Times (8/23/09), another 25 million are badly under-insured.

I work for the City University of New York. My union along with other unions representing New York City employees has been able to negotiate decent health benefits. We have an array of plans we can join. All city agencies, including the university, contribute to the purchase of health insurance, $418 a month per person or $1025 a month per family, using the premium for a modestly priced plan with pretty modest benefits as its baseline. If you take the baseline plan, then it’s a wash. Your health insurance is free, though many costs fall outside the plan, and according to colleagues, it’s often tough to find a doctor who accepts patients with it.

So, for every employee, city agencies are paying either $5000 per person per year or $12,300 per family per year for health coverage. Every employee can choose more expensive insurance than the baseline policy, but the additional cost is on them.

I live in one state and work in another. I have access to treatment at a top-notch research hospital where I am domiciled. The insurance plan carried by the city that I have covers me in another state and includes most of my providers. Last year the plan cost me $306 over and above what the university paid for, which amounts to $3672 in premiums that were deducted from my pay.

The university contributes $800 annually to a union welfare fund that helps pay for our drug and dental expenses. I put in $50 a month to the welfare fund as well.

To summarize: The university contributes $5800 a year to cover my health, drug, and dental plans. I pay in $4300 a year. Together, we are paying $10,100 in total health insurance premiums. I’ve asked around. It could be a lot worse.

What do I get for $10,100? A lot of very good care. I do end up paying on average about another $2,500 a year for drugs and co-pays.

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Is the Baroness right?

Susan Greenfield, the Baroness in question, says that “happy people” are “not the people who build civilizations.” Dr. Greenfield is Fullerian Professor of Physiology and Comparative Anatomy at Oxford University, and she made the remarks in response to questions posed by Discover Magazine. Here's the context:

Isn't it desirable to bioengineer our children to be happy?

G(reenfield): Some people think happiness is spending their days on the beach, at the bars, on drugs. Is that happiness? It might be. People do pay money to do those things. But then you are no longer self-conscious, because you have let yourself go; you have lost your mind. You are no longer being a human being. For instance, you are at a party and the hostess says, I will put you next to Jane. She is an extremely happy person. She has never been miserable. She has never had a bad love affair. She has never had anyone ill. She has never had to face a big crisis. She has never failed at anything. How do you feel about this person? You would want someone who knows adversity, who was rejected and worked hard, who had a bad affair—it would make her more interesting.

Are happy people more passive than people who want to improve their lives?

G: Happy people know what they want, but they are not ambitious. They are not the people who build civilizations.

Interesting comment, but is it true? I have a visceral reaction that says no, based on my sense that unhappy people tend more toward passive despair that corrective action. I have a more analytical reaction, too:

Show me the data.

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… the “Law of Frequency of Error” … reigns amidst the wildest confusion. The huger the mob, the greater the anarchy, the more perfect is its sway. It is the supreme law of Unreason.
^{……………………………………………………………….} —Victorian statistician ­Francis Galton

The Frequency of Error

The frequency of error
is not a count of radio waves
or of an articulation of sound
radiating from me to you
through space with
ample atmosphere

The frequency of error
is the number of times,
in the fog of Me,
I’ve stumbled into doors
and bashed my head
on low-hanging branches
of the tree-of-knowledge-
of-good-and-evil
yet against all odds
have lived to tell the tale

The frequency of error
is not a dulcet wave
but a mob of mad particles
which routs the better angels of my nature
hammering them with crude clubs
made by my own hand
in fits of.id

by Jim Culleny; August 2009

by Colin Marshall

Where Apurba Kumar Roy goes, so goes death. As well as we know the events of the films that chronicle his life, what mid-1950s viewer could have predicted that the wide-eyed, bobble-headed tot introduced in the first would, by the third's end, have seen off nearly his every family member? Perhaps readers of Pather Panchali, Bibhutibhusan Bandopadhyay's classic piece of Indian literature, had some idea. But while that particular bildungsroman's fame remains Subcontinental, the trilogy that Satyajit Ray grew from its seed stands tall and proud over all the world 's cinema culture.

You can see this in the name-dropping alone. A range of filmmakers as diverse in aesthetic and sensibility as Abbas Kiarostami, Wes Anderson, Carlos Saura and Danny Boyle profess to have learned much from the films. Even François Truffaut, who at first expressed displeasure at the mere idea of watching “a movie of peasants eating with their hands,” eventually admitted its influence. Top accolades have poured in from such authoritative organs of cultural journalism as Sight & Sound, The Village Voice, the New York Times and Rolling Stone. And can the creators of The Simpsons have dubbed Springfield's beloved Kwik-E-Mart clerk “Apu,” the nickname that gives the films their collective title, coincidentally?

Given such publicity over the past half-century, does more need be said about the Apu trilogy? I submit that, like any great film, their bottomless capacity to generate discussion ensures that more can always be said, written and exchanged. (If you're looking for an elegant definition of greatness, consider that a candidate.) Ray performs three acts of apparent cinematic alchemy with these pictures, creating a product whose mastery, nuance and purity inspire the awe of jaded cinephiles out of an inexperienced cast and crew, the equivalent of a few thousand U.S. dollars and the simple tale of a rural boy gone cityward.

1955's Pather Panchali (“Song of the Little Road”) introduces a very young, very energetic Apu; his older sister Durga, given to occasional thievery; his unambitious, sporadically-employed scholar father Harihar; his long-suffering mother Sarbajaya and his aged, toothless aunt Indir. Durga and Apu play in the forest, trail the local candy salesman and watch passing trains, concealed in a field of tall Kans grass. Indir irritates Sarbajaya with her very presence. Harihar promises Sarbajaya he'll find work outside the village. Durga steals fruit, which she passes along to Indir. Sarbajaya indignantly refutes the neighbors' accusations of theft. Apu observes.

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