I arrived at the Basquiat exhibit in a suspicious and haughty frame of mind, like an obstinate mule towing my stupidity along behind me. The first thing I noticed about his paintings is that they were made with the express purpose of being noticed. Basquiat embedded in his canvases little tricks and riddles and hints in order to keep the viewer’s gaze on them for as long as possible. He designed them with his viewer in mind. This added to my annoyance; though, to his credit, Basquiat was forthright about it. He admitted that he would write words into his canvases and then scratch them out, not to hide them but to draw attention to them. He knew that the eye enjoys lingering over what appears to be hidden or erased rather than what is right there in front of it in plain view. This meant that I was obliged to look at his paintings and think to myself, “Now I am looking at this painting and I am noticing it further because the painter has performed a little magic show here that is not the painting itself or its subject matter but the tricks that draw me into it and keep me lingering over it.”

My companion laughed at me. “What did you expect?” he said. “Basquiat was a graffiti artist. If it doesn’t gain your attention, according to its own criteria, it is a failure.” I am nothing, but the criteria of graffiti art are not my criteria.

I found this “need-to be-noticed” in Basquiat very vexing at first, because I tend to art that doesn’t seek attention for itself. Why sign your work? I like art that erases the ego of the artist; I like the stuff that points me in certain oblique angles or reorients my gaze so that it searches for things beyond the canvas or beneath it. Unless I happen to own the work and can therefore live with it, mining its secrets and limning its meanings, my experience of it can only be temporary anyway—so why build in these little tricks to gain notice and hold my attention when my attention can only ever be a fleeting thing? Yeccch.

I tend to abhor cleverness in art. It’s a dead-end. A Jeff Koons. An ego trip. An act of self-promotion. Even those paintings that claim to be about nothing more than their own materiality (their “flatness,” in a word) succeed because they avoid the pitfalls of cleverness, because they end up pointing to something beyond themselves. I went in expecting to despise what I was about to see, and I was disappointed. Basquiat, I realized, is the last of the New York painters; and his work knocked my little world on its ass.

New York is a beachhead that one must (if one lives here) attempt to gain every-fucking-day. The opportunities for humiliation, abasement and defeat are endless. Just yesterday morning I had to slap a punk on the subway because he was up in my jock and talking smack. He was right: I was hung-over and I looked like piss, but who needs the obvious pointed out to them? The ego exists here in a state of siege. The city is an enormous grinding machine, and it chews up and digests nothing so quickly as ego, which means that memory doesn’t stand a chance. If you linger too long in the past you will disappear, because every day erases the previous one, which has erased all the days before it. New York doesn’t care about you.

This is of course one of the reasons that those of us who love the city love the city: it forgets everything. It isn’t catty. It doesn’t hold grudges. It moves on. But it is precisely this quality of the urban experience that is New York that also lends our existence within it a deep and abiding poignancy. We move through it but we are nothing to it. We recognize things, we welcome certain changes and deplore others, but it is already ahead of and beyond us. It has no memory. It exists only in the present and forces us to straddle the fault line between what was—once upon a time–and is now gone, and what is here today, at the edge of the future. In other words, it is nothing so grand as Death that one is forced to confront here; it is rather the possibility of non-existence, the nothingness that haunts our consciousness. The city does not notice us.

Against my will, I have felt raw and exposed since having seen the Basquiat exhibit. His genius (if I may be so bold as to claim to recognize it) lay in his ability simultaneously to make manifest his present and to bury it like a secret, preserving it within his paintings. That is the direction to which all his hints and riddles and scratched-out words and “Notice me! Stay with me!” signposts point: not to the paintings themselves but to the maelstrom of experience that animated them. They point to New York. If I could lick one of his paintings it would taste like the day upon which he made it. Entering his work involves stepping into a moment that is eternally and irretrievably lost to us. His paintings are time machines. Looking at one of them, noticing it, lending oneself to its artifice, is to gain access to a New York City that will never again exist: the New York of 1980, when being bohemian was (incredibly!) a life choice rather than a style, when Madonna was a performance artist you could pick up in a bar, when you had to take your life in your hands after dark in the East Village, and when the precondition for transcendence was commitment to the holiness of the present.

One hundred years ago this month, twenty-six-year-old Albert Einstein published a paper entitled “Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper“ or “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”. As we all know by now, 1905 was Einstein’s annus mirabilis, the miraculous year in which he published four papers in the Annalen der Physik. The first was a paper on the photoelectric effect; the second on Brownian motion; and the third, which we have already mentioned, spelled out the ideas which would come to be known as special relativity. In case you are less than sure why Einstein’s name has become a metonym for extreme intelligence, consider that there is broad consensus among physicists that any one of these three papers by itself would have been more than enough to win Einstein a Nobel Prize. The fourth paper, by the way, used the axioms of the third to derive a nice little result equating energy and mass: E = mc², probably the most famous equation of all time. Not only that, he would certainly have won another Nobel for general relativity, which he published a decade later. In other words, you can safely think of Einstein as someone who, in a fairer world, would have been at least a four-time Nobel winner. As it is, the Nobel committee cited only the photoelectric effect when they awarded him the prize in 1921.

Einstein’s results were disseminated and understood so slowly (especially in the English-speaking world) that when Sir Arthur Eddington lead an expedition to prove general relativity correct by showing that the light from stars near the Sun in the sky would be bent by its gravity (during a solar eclipse in 1919 when you could actually see stars close to the Sun), and a journalist asked him: “Is it true that only three people in the world understand relativity?” Eddington reportedly responded, “Who’s the third?”

This year has been declared the World Year of Physics in commemoration of the centennial of Einstein’s annus mirabilis, and in that same spirit, I would like today to attempt to give you a sense of what the theory of special relativity (SR) is, whose 100th birthday we celebrate this month. Most of you have at least some vague idea of what SR implies: you have heard that time slows down when you start traveling very fast (near the speed of light); that lengths contract; and almost everyone knows the Twin Paradox, where one twin travels out into space at high speed, then returns, say 6 years later to find that her twin on earth has aged 39 years while she was gone. You have probably also heard that Einstein is responsible for inextricably entwining space and time into spacetime. I will explicate all these aspects of SR, and I will not do it by using crude analogies, which tend to confuse more than they illuminate; instead, I will use the actual math so that you fully understand the beauty of this theory. Wait! Don’t stop reading just yet. The math required is no more than simple high school algebra, so if you remember how to do that, stay with me. If the sight of even the simplest equation makes you tremulous, then I can only say: learn some math! Einstein himself famously stated that “The presentation of science to the public must be made as simple as possible, but not more so,” and we cannot but follow his dictum here, where our very aim is to celebrate his science. (The beauty of SR lies in the incredible conceptual leap which Einstein made. The mathematics is relatively (!) straightforward, and this is what makes my elucidation of it possible. The mathematics of general relativity is much more advanced, indeed far beyond the abilities of most people who, like me, are neither mathematicians nor physicists. Even Einstein needed some help from mathematicians to work it all out.)

THE BACKGROUND

A century ago, this was the situation: Galilean and Newtonian physics said that any descriptions of motion by any two inertial observers (for such observers, bodies acted on by no forces move in straight lines) in uniform (not accelerating) relative motion are equally valid, and the laws of physics must be exactly the same for both of them. Bear with me here: what this means is, for example, if you see me coming toward you at a speed of 100 mph, then we could both be moving toward each other at 50 mph, or I could be still and you could be moving toward me at 100 mph, or I could be moving toward you at 30 mph while you are coming at me at 70 mph, and so on. All these descriptions are equivalent, and it is always impossible to tell whether one of us is “really” moving or not; all we can speak about is our motion relative to each other. In other words, all motion is relative to something else (which is then the inertial frame of reference). So for convenience, we can always just insist that any one observer is still (she is then the “frame of reference”) and all others are in motion relative to her. This is known as the Principle of Relativity. Another way to think about this is to imagine that there are only two objects in the universe, and they are moving relative to one another: in this situation it is more clearly impossible to say which object is moving. (Think about this paragraph, reread it, until you are pretty sure you get it. Just stay with me, it gets easier from here.)

At the same time, James Clerk Maxwell‘s equations of electricity and magnetism implied that the speed of light in a vacuum, c, is absolute. The only way that this could be true is if Maxwell’s equations refer to a special frame (see previous paragraph) of reference (that in which the speed of light is c) which can truly be said to be at rest. If this is the case, then an observer moving relative to that special frame would measure a different value for c. But in 1887, Michelson and Morley proved that there is no such special frame. Another way of saying this (and this is the way Einstein put it in 1905) is that the speed of light is fixed, and is independent of the speed of the body emitting it. (The details of the Michelson-Morley experiment are beyond the scope of this essay, so you’ll have to take my word for this.)

Now we have a problem. We have two irreconcilable laws: 1) The Principle of Relativity, and 2) The absoluteness of the speed of light for all observers. They cannot both be true. It would be another eighteen years before a young clerk in the Swiss patent office would pose and then resolve this problem. Here’s how he did it: he asked what would happen if they were both true.

Next, I will show how the various aspects of SR fall straight out of the assumption that both of these laws are true. I will focus in greater detail on the slowing down (dilation) of time, and then speak more briefly about length contraction, and the intertwining of space and time.

TIME DILATION

As I have mentioned, Einstein began by assuming that the following two postulates always hold true:

1) The Principle of Relativity, and

2) The speed of light will always be measured as c by all observers

Now, keeping these in mind, let us consider a simple mechanism that we will call a light clock (shown in Fig. 1). The way it works is this: the top and bottom surfaces are perfect mirrors. The distance between the top and bottom mirror is known exactly. The light clock’s period is the time that it takes light to go from the bottom to the top, and then to come reflected back. Since the mirrors are perfect, light will keep on bouncing back and forth like this forever. All observers can build identical clocks with exactly the same distance between the two mirrors, ensuring the same period. And since the speed of light is always c, and the distance between the two mirrors can be measured precisely, we know exactly how long one “tick” or period of the clock is in seconds.

Let us now say that there are two observers, each of whom has such a clock. If one of them is moving past the other at a velocity v, something close to the speed of light, then the first observer, F, will see the second observer S’s clock as something like what is shown in Fig. 2. Of course, by symmetry, and the principle of relativity, S will see F’s clock the same way. Take a little time to look at Fig. 2 and convince yourself of this. (This is basically like thinking about a man moving a flashlight vertically up and down on board a train; if the train is stationary relative to you, you will see what is shown in Fig. 1; if the train is moving by you, you will see what is shown in Fig. 2. It should be quite obvious once you try to imagine it.)

Since S’s clock seems to be moving to F, it will seem to F that the light travels a longer path than just the vertical distance between the two mirrors, because after the light leaves the bottom mirror, the top mirror keeps moving to the right, and the light beam travels a diagonal path up to where the top mirror has moved to. (Imagine the whole apparatus moving to the right as the light beam goes up from the bottom mirror, or look at Fig. 2.) Since the speed of the light must still be measured as c by both observers, and according to F, the light beam is traveling a greater distance, it must be taking longer to make the trip to the top mirror and back. Therefore, according to F, S’s clock is ticking more slowly, and vice versa!

Someone might object that this is a special kind of clock, and maybe we could construct a different type of clock that would not slow down when seen speeding along relative to some other observer. This cannot be true. The reason is that if we were able to construct such a clock, it would violate our first postulate, the Principle of Relativity. Remember that in saying that only relative motion is physically significant, we are insisting that nothing done by S can tell her whether it is she who is moving past F, or vice versa. Suppose that two different types of clock were synchronized (one of them a light clock of the type we have been describing), then both of them are sent off with S at high speed,  if they do not behave exactly the same way and were to fall out of synchronization, this would tell S that it is she who is really moving, and this contradicts the first postulate. All clocks must therefore slow down in the same way when they are observed in relative motion close to the speed of light. In other words, this time dilation is not a property of any particular type of clock, but of time itself.

So how much exactly is S’s time seen to be slowing down by F? To answer this question, consider the situation in Fig. 3. As shown, the light clock is moving to the right at a velocity v. At rest, the light clock has a period T. In half that time, when stationary, the light beam travels the distance A, but when moving, it has a slower period T’ because it travels the distance C at the same speed. This means that the ratio of the distances A/C is the same as the ratio of the times taken to traverse them, T/T’. (At the same speed, if you travel twice the distance, it will take you twice as long.) So,

(1) A/C = T/T’

Now while the light beam travels the distance C, the mirrors have moved a distance B to the right. The ratio of these two distances B/C, traveled in the same amount of time, is the same as the ratio of the speeds with which the distances are covered. (Moving for a given time at double the speed just doubles the distance covered.) So,

(2) B/C = v/c

Look at Fig. 3 again, and notice that the sides A, B, and C form a right triangle, so by the Pythagorean Theorem:

(3) A² + B² = C²

Dividing both sides by C² we get:

(A/C)² + (B/C)² = 1

Subtracting (B/C)² from both sides we get:

(A/C)² = 1 – (B/C)²

Taking the square root of each side we get:

A/C = sqrt ( 1 – (B/C)² )

Now if we substitute for A/C and B/C from equations (1) and (2) above, we get:

T/T’ = sqrt ( 1 – (v/c)² )

And finally, inverting both sides, we get:

(4) T’/T = 1 / sqrt ( 1 – (v/c)² ) = γ (gamma — the relativistic time dilation factor)

Since the speed of light is so high (186,000 miles per second or 300,000 kilometers per second), gamma is not significant at speeds that are common to our experience. For example, even at the speed which the space shuttles must attain to escape Earth’s gravity (11 km/sec), gamma is 1.000000001. At fifty percent of the speed of light (0.5 c), gamma is 1.155. You can confirm these values by plugging in the speeds into the time dilation equation above. One way in which we know that Einstein was correct about time dilation is that particles with known half-lives decay much more slowly when they are accelerated to near the speed of light in particle accelerators. For example, muons, which have a half-life of 1.5 microseconds, are observed to decay in 44 microseconds on average in a CERN experiment which accelerated them to 0.9994 c, at which speed gamma can be calculated using the equation above to be 28.87. In perfect agreement with the theory, 1.5 microseconds multiplied by 28.87 comes out to 44 microseconds, exactly what is seen in the experiment. There are countless other very exact confirmations of relativistic time dilation effects.

LENGTH CONTRACTION

This time, imagine the light clock lying on its side (in other words, Fig. 1 rotated by 90 degrees counter-clockwise). Now the motion of the light pulse is back and forth in the same direction that the whole clock is moving. What happens this time? Well, as the light pulse leaves one mirror and heads toward the other, that mirror advances forward to meet it. This trip is shorter than when the clock is stationary. On the way back, though, the light pulse is chasing a retreating mirror, and the trip takes longer than it would in a stationary situation. This round trip period, T”, is longer than T’ by the factor 1/γ. (This is similar to the case where an airplane traveling across the Atlantic with a steady headwind against it, and then returning with the same wind at its back, will take a longer time for the round trip than if there were no wind at all. I leave the simple math here as an exercise for the reader.)

Now if this were all there is to the story, the amount of time dilation would depend on the orientation of the clock relative to the direction of motion, but then this would violate the Principle of Relativity. What prevents this violation is a shortening of lengths along the direction of motion. The distance between the two mirrors would thus contract by the factor 1/γ, reducing T” to the correct value T’ as it should be. So, lengths are observed to contract along the direction of motion by a factor of 1/γ. Again, this only becomes noticeable at very high speeds, approaching c.

SPACETIME

Newton’s notion of absolute space and absolute time are no longer valid for us. We have seen that measures of time are relative to the observer, as are measures of space. The good news is that different observers of the same reality can agree on something. And this is what it is: we know that

T/T’ = 1/γ

Substituting for 1/γ from equation (4) and squaring both sides we get:

(T/T’)² = 1 – (v/c)²

Multiplying both sides by (cT’)² we get:

(cT)² = (cT’)² – (vT’)²

Here, vT’ is just the distance L’ that the moving clock travels in time T’. Meanwhile the stationary clock doesn’t go anywhere in time T, so L = 0, and by substituting that L² = 0 and L’² = (vT’)² into the equation above, we get:

(cT)² – L² = (cT’)² – L’²

Here, finally, is a quantity that is the same for both observers. It is not a measure of time or a measure of space; instead, it is a spacetime measure. So we find that in the end, though observers cannot agree about measures of space or time by themselves, it is possible to weave them together into a spacetime measure that everyone does agree on. This is what is meant when it is said that space and time have become interwoven after Einstein.

The account I have followed in explaining special relativity is essentially that used by Richard Feynman (who invented light clocks as a way of explaining SR) and Julian Schwinger. The two of them shared the 1965 Nobel in physics with Sin-Itiro Tomonaga.

Thanks to Margit Oberrauch for all the light clock illustrations.

Have a good week!

My other recent Monday Musings:
Vladimir Nabokov, Lepidopterist
Stevinus, Galileo, and Thought Experiments
Cake Theory and Sri Lanka’s President

At 9pm on May 7th, 2005, in an art space in Queens, New York City, three novelists were enclosed within three individual habitats designed and constructed by three teams of architects/artists. For the past twenty-one days, this has been their reality. They are not allowed to leave the building and they are granted ninety minutes of free time each day, for which they must punch a time clock to gain. In seven days time, they are to emerge from their habitats having completed a novel. The name of this conceptual art project, created and hosted by Flux Factory, is Novel: A Living Installation.

This work emanates from the Flux Factory collective. In case you haven’t heard, Flux has taken some heat in the press for their work, most notably from the editorial page of the New York Times. The Times’ criticism amounted to a claim that this project trivializes the act of writing, because it takes writing out of the hands of the writers and spatiates it, mechanizes it, and tethers it to time: “part of the meaning of making a novel is commanding the time to do so and owning the workings of imagination, however they pace themselves.” So says the Times. The criticism is unfair, in my opinion but not because it is inaccurate.

The Flux oeuvre (and—full confession— I say this as a frequent collaborator on their projects) rests to some degree on exploiting the trivial, the absurd, and the happenstance. Flux makes you look at exactly what is in front of your face. (The Dadaists did the same thing.) As a result, their projects often run the risk of becoming gimmicky acts of self-promotion; but when they succeed they succeed either because they manage to transform the trivial and the everyday into something meaningful or because they manage to mine the trivial and the banal for the potential profundities they occlude. Many of their projects function as almost artistic analogues for Socratic irony. They are like gadflies on the ass of the art world.

In this regard, the criticism is unfair because it misses the point. Novel’s aim was never to re-enthrone writing as the queen of the arts and to produce three masterpieces of contemporary American fiction. The point was to remove the crown that writing wears and peer into its brain, to resituate writing as an obsessively mechanical process alongside the other obsessively mechanical processes that comprise the manufacturing of art objects.

Embedded in the criticism, then, is a notion that we may or may not agree with: that writing is most emphatically not an art form. The intention of the curators at Flux was to interrogate that very notion. There are three forces at play in this installation, three intentionalities. This first one is a conceptual force.

The second force at play in this installation, the second intentionality at work, is that of the architects who designed the writers’ habitats. Where space is empty, it is not space—it is nothingness. What I have always found fascinating about architecture is that it seems to have a unique ability to sculpt somethingness out of the nothingness of empty space. In that regard, the work of the architects has been the most under-discussed element of this project. For them, the installation was an exploration of space with the aim of creating new space; and the spaces they have carved (really, out of thin air) are not merely holding pens or empty frames for the work of the writers within them. They were made to give rise to new spaces of the imagination; they are the material politics that make possible the very work that transcends them.

The third force at play is the actual writing that the novelists are doing. They have asserted that their writing is paramount and has superseded the restrictions under which they are laboring. (An interesting discussion remains to be had about the point—or points—at which the formal restraints they have to deal with, restraints of space and time, have actually become opportunities for the liberation of the imagination…) As one of the three groups of artists involved in this project, the novelists (fed and housed for a month, with nothing to do other than write) have had perhaps the easiest task—if one thinks that being oneself is an easy task. But if what one is, is a writer, theirs has also been the most difficult task because, unlike much of what passes for art, you cannot fake writing. As a writer you can’t hide under bells and whistles and wisecracks; you can’t call it in; and you are obliged to work with the knowledge that you have been assigned a Sisyphean fate: Sisyphean not because it is futile, but because it will always remain, to some extent, unfinished and unfinish-able.

So what we are dealing with, in toto, are three forces at play, three intentionalities: the intentionality of the curators (conceptual), the intentionality of the architects (spatial), and the intentionality of the novelists (literary).

What puts the “aaargh” in “art”? My pet theory, which I am testing out when I look at Novel, is that art is the stuff that’s left over. It’s the thing that occurs when intentionalities collide, like flint and steel, when the intent of the artist meets the (often hidden) intent of the material with which she is to work. Art is not the material object that artists produce, it is not the concept or the space or the words we create as artists. It is the stuff that remains; the stuff we are left with after we have said or made or thought or written what we have to say or make or think or write. It is—to borrow a phrase from Slavoj Zizek—the “indivisible remainder” of the interaction between our intentions and our materials. If Novel succeeds as an artwork, then, it does so not because it creates a closed universe of meaning, but because it creates aporias in art, because it throws something up that escapes the intentions of any of the artists working within it.

[Abbas Raza is filling in for J.M. Tyree, who is on vacation this week.]

As in the case of many sciency types, my mostly informal education in the humanities has been somewhat arbitrary and certainly very spotty. I can reliably amuse and horrify more erudite friends by reciting lists of authors and books I’ve never read. Fortunately, Nabokov is not on those lists. I say fortunately, and I mean it literally: in 1986 I was in Buffalo, New York, spending a few nights in the hospital with my mother who was having a back operation, and I needed something to read. Wandering into a nearby bookstore, I was looking for something by Naipaul in the alphabetically arranged fiction section when, purely by luck, I came upon Lolita. The name triggered only a vague memory of something salaciously exciting, and I picked it up. Thus began an obsession with Nabokov that reached its acme when (at the invitation of my dear friend and mentor Laura Claridge) I taught Lolita to the midshipmen (and women) at the United States Naval Academy a couple of years later. (This picture shows the paperback copy of the book I had bought that day, and not wanting to sully my lapel with adhesive, had affixed the hospital visitors’ sticker to its cover instead.)

Nabokov’s (the name is stressed on the second syllable, so that it rhymes with “to talk of”) reputation in the world of letters is so gargantuan that it is easy to forget that he was an accomplished scientist. Nabokov was a serious entomologist; more specifically, a lepidopterist specializing in the identification and classification of a major group of butterflies, the Latin American Polyommatinae, of the family Lycaenidae, more popularly known as the “blues”. For six years in the 1940s, Nabokov held an appointment at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, as a Research Fellow. During this time he was responsible for organizing and supervising additions to their extensive butterfly collection. His enthusiasm for the difficultly precise minutiae of taxonomy can be gauged by the exuberant tone of the following passage in a letter to his sister Elena Sikorski in 1945:

My museum — famous throughout America (and throughout what used to be Europe) — is the Museum of Comparative Zoology, a part of Harvard University, which is my employer. My laboratory occupies half of the fourth floor. Most of it is taken up by rows of cabinets, containing sliding cases of butterflies. I am custodian of these absolutely fabulous collections. We have butterflies from all over the world; many are type specimens (i.e. the very same specimens used for the original descriptions, from the 1840’s until today). Along the windows extend tables holding my microscopes, test tubes, acids, papers, pins, etc. I have an assistant, whose main task is spreading specimens sent by collectors. I work on my personal research, and for more than two years now have been publishing piecemeal a study of the classification of American “blues” based on the structure of their genitalia (minuscule sculpturesque hooks, teeth, spurs, etc., visible only under a microscope), which I sketch in with the aid of various marvelous devices, variants of the magic lantern….

To know that no one before you has seen an organ you are examining, to trace relationships that have occurred to no one before, to immerse yourself in the wondrous crystalline world of the microscope, where silence reigns, circumscribed by its own horizon, a blindingly white arena–all this is so enticing that I cannot describe it.

(I cannot resist an aside on Nabokov’s false modesty: this I-cannot-describe-it Nabokov–after having just described looking through a microscope like no one else could–is the same one who is able effortlessly to evoke entire worlds of sensation out of the simplest possible raw material. Just look at this:

Without any wind blowing, the sheer weight of a raindrop, shining in parasitic luxury on a cordate leaf, caused its tip to dip, and what looked like a globule of quicksilver performed a sudden glissando down the center vein, and then, having shed its bright load, the relieved leaf unbent. Tip, leaf, dip, relief–the instant it all took to happen seemed to me not so much a fraction of time as a fissure in it, a missed heartbeat, which was refunded at once by a patter of rhymes…

Nabokov wrote this to describe the birth of his first poem, which he wrote at age 14. I cannot describe it, indeed. And while we are still on the subject of Nabokov’s coy modesty, let me also quickly adduce this, from the afterword to Lolita–which, unlike Nabokov’s early work, was written in English:

My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody’s concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses — the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions — which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way.

So much for Nabokov’s descriptive incapacity and his second-rate English.)

Back to Nabokov’s lepidoptery: even among many of those who know of Nabokov’s butterfly work, there is a lingering suspicion that he was essentially a dilettante in the field. This relegation of amateur status is not fair. At the time, the distinction between amateur and professional lepidopterist was not made as starkly as it might be today. Much serious work in the classification of animal and plant species was done by gentlemen-scholars, and in any case, as I have mentioned, Nabokov held a coveted academic appointment and was paid as an entomologist for six years by Harvard. As Brian Boyd shows in the second volume of his biography, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, though Nabokov had no formal education in entomology, his early fascination with and dedication to the study of butterflies eventually made him a world-class lepidopterist. Throughout his life whenever he had a chance, Nabokov visited museums of natural history to examine their butterfly collections. While he collected many and varied species, his scientific work was limited to the Polyommatinae on which he published more than a dozen technical papers, including “The Nearctic Forms of Lycaeides Hübner “; “Notes on the Morphology of the Genus Lycaeides“; “The Nearctic Members of the Genus Lycaeides Hübner,” and “Notes on Neotropical Plebejinae .” Nabokov’s contemporary scientific colleagues consistently acknowledged his expertise, and his classifications and other technical work have stood the test of time.

As Stephen Jay Gould pointed out in an essay on Nabokov’s lepidoptery (not available online, but printed in his I Have Landed), another common objection to Nabokov’s lepidopterological work is that although it may have been competent, it does not compare with his prodigious literary achievements. This is true to the extent that Nabokov was not a theorist in science, and he is not responsible for significant scientific innovations. Having said that, one should not belittle the careful, precise, and painstaking work, requiring extensive training and practice, that it takes to accumulate scientific knowledge one small bit at a time. What data would theorists have to work with if not for the Nabokov’s of the world?

Nabokov discovered and named more than twenty genera, species, and subspecies of butterflies. These include Carterocéphalus canopunctátus NABOKOV 1941, and Cyllópsis pertepída avícula NABOKOV 1942 (pictured here on the right). In addition, many butterflies have been name for Nabokov by others, such as Cyllópsis pyrácmon nabokóvi MILLER 1974, and Nabokóvia HEMMING 1960, while yet others have been given Nabokov-related names like Madeleinea lolita BÁLINT 1993: “a polyommatine butterfly known from just one locality in Peru’s Amazonas department (Huambo). Only its males have been examined. They are blackish brown with iridescent metallic blue basal and medial diffusion.”

Nabokov himself, even after attaining monumental literary success with the American publication of Lolita in 1958, regularly expressed his lifelong ardor for lepidoptery. He says in Strong Opinions:

Frankly, I never thought of letters as a career. Writing has always been for me a blend of dejection and high spirits, a torture and a pastime — but I never expected it to be a source of income. On the other hand, I have often dreamt of a long and exciting career as an obscure curator of lepidoptera in a great museum.

He once said, “I cannot separate the aesthetic pleasure of seeing a butterfly and the scientific pleasure of knowing what it is.” His literature and his scientific work share the same qualities of obsessive attention to minute detail, an unabashed respect for facts, and an almost painfully sharp appreciation of the aesthetic pleasures of small things, which would produce in him what he famously once described as “intolerable bliss.” I will give VN the last word:

“A Discovery”

Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss
Poems that take a thousand years to die
But ape the immortality of this
Red label on a little butterfly.

Have a good week!

My other recent Monday Musings:
Stevinus, Galileo, and Thought Experiments
Cake Theory and Sri Lanka’s President

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,

Perusing the bargain shelf at the Harvard Bookstore this weekend, we picked up a bruised copy of the Kenneth Peacock Tynan’s biography and found ourselves charmed yet again by the man, his persona, and the caliber of his critical output. Hailed as “the greatest theater critic since Shaw,” Tynan is up our alley: an intellectual dandy. He had the following pinned above his desk: “Rouse tempers, goad and lacerate, raise whirlwinds.” We appreciate his aphorisms, observations, worldview: “A critic is a man who knows the way but can’t drive the car”; “The buttocks are the most aesthetically pleasing part of the body because they are non-functional. Although they conceal an essential orifice, these pointless globes are as near as the human form can ever come to abstract art”; “Art and ideology often interact on each other; but the plain fact is that both spring from a common source. Both draw on human experience to explain mankind to itself; both attempt, in very different ways, to assemble coherence…”

Of Tynan, a commentator once wrote, “He was the sort of character every era needs to polarize opinions and sort out its prejudices.” As we attempt assembling coherence here, we muse: where is today’s Tynan? We are unfamiliar with contemporary theater critics but Tynan’s heirs in literary criticism, Dale Peck and James Wood, either bark or bite, and their legacy is uncertain. Peck, the enfant terrible of contemporary literary criticism, has already been swallowed up by the earth, much like Rumpelstiltskin. And the venerable Wood, who has become of the most important critics today, could prove to be a fad. (After all, presently, postmodern prose is out and Henry James and George Eliot are in.)

Altogether, they really don’t compare.

So who in recent memory polarized opinions and sorted out our prejudices? Edward Said perhaps? Since Said’s demise, the landscape of discourse seems oddly barren, doesn’t it? Of course, Said was marginalized by mainstream media a long time ago. And now the likes of Bernard Lewis – the half-witted dinosaur – lumber through the corridors of power while the feted jackass, Thomas Freidman, passes gas for wisdom. Perhaps our expectations are too high. And perhaps we digress, attempting to straddle ideology and art.

Actually, our beef with contemporary criticism and discourse has to do with something more mundane, our other weekend activity: a coerced viewing of the horrible “Revenge of Sith.” A.O. Scott of the New York Times – arguably one of the most important film critics today – gushes: “This is by far the best film in the more recent trilogy, and also the best of the four episodes Mr. Lucas has directed. That’s right (and my inner 11-year-old shudders as I type this): it’s better than ‘Star Wars.’” This assertion, ladies and gentlemen, is not only preposterous but irresponsible: whether we like it or not, film critics are today’s public intellectuals. We’ve had beef with Scott before but this time our inner thinking man shudders: Scott doesn’t know the way and can’t drive the car. Our sensibilities cohere with Anthony Lane’s: “The general opinion of ‘Revenge of the Sith’ seems to be that it marks a distinct improvement on the last two episodes…True, but only in the same way that dying from natural causes is preferable to crucifixion. He continues: “it takes a vulgarian genius such as Lucas to create a landscape in which actions can carry vast importance but no discernible meaning, in which style is strangled at birth by design, and in which the intimate and the ironic, not the Sith, are the principal foes to be suppressed. It is a vision at once gargantuan and murderously limited, and the profits that await it are unfit for contemplation.” Lane is no Tynan but he sure sticks it to Scott.

Perhaps the age of intellectual dandies and public intellectuals has come to pass: Capote, Vidal, Mailer, in this part of the world; Josh, Manto and Sadequain, in mine; and, of course, Tynan and Said, who straddled divides. It seems that in our coarse times, we have to rely on our own sensibilities.

A week ago, I realized that the 50th anniversary of the Bandung Confererence (the first Afro-Asian Summit in Bandung, Indonesia) had come and gone. There was no real mention of the anniversary in the papers. The blogosphere ignored it, including on its left-wing. Speaking of the left, neither Z Magazine, nor Counterpunch.org, nor The Nation had anything on it, at least that I could find. I found one article in Le Monde Diplomatique, on the lost illusions of Bandung (subscription required).

What surprised me was that it was passed over in relative silence by the media in the Third World itself. The Indian press, which I occasionally look at, said very little. The pieces that were in places like Al-Ahram, which I also occasionally look at, read more like encyclopedia entries telling their readers of the event, or used the anniversary of the Bandung Conference as a frame to discuss American power and its wars.

One exception seemed to be the Chinese press, which did say a lot, which in turn was odd since China had been the odd one at Bandung in 1955—so many of the participants were suspicious of or hostile to Communism. Abdel Nasser, with his hatred of Communists, hadn’t recognized the PRC, and wouldn’t do so until 1956. Still, Hu Jintao, Manmohan Singh, and Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono stood and walked in place of Zhou En Lai, Jawaharlal Nehru and Sukarno, with no one to stand in for Abdel Nasser.

This silence was strange, and the classroom tone of what wasn’t passed over in silence was surprising, because it was after all the 50th birthday of the “Third World”, though the term itself was coined and the place (as opposed to places) noticed in 1952 by a French economic demographer and historian, Alfred Sauvy. In 1955 at Bandung, the Third World had taken care to formally notice and assert itself. That desire was neither tragedy nor farce, and reading of it now, it strikes me how much the conference struck the tone of promise, however precarious that promise was in hindsight. (Reading Nehru’s and Sukarno’s speeches, I’m surprised by how precarious it all sounded even at its inception.)

Three years earlier in 1952, Sauvy, writing of this region that was lost in what had become the Cold War, had called on the rest of the world to take note of the newly decolonized and decolonizing states, “…because, this ignored, exploited, scorned Third World like the Third Estate, wants to become something too.” Nowadays it seems that the countries that make it up would like the Third World to be forgotten, after the decades of non-aligment, aligment, coups, wars, posturing, degenerations of societies into personal fiefdoms, and, in its worst moments, a murderous local fascism, at times justified with the rhetoric of Third Worldism.  Or I should say that they would like the Third World to be forgotten, save in the most anodyne form possible.

Perhaps it was inevitable.  Of the conference, Richard Wright had written in The Color Curtain:

“The despised, the insulted, the hurt, the dispossessed—in short, the underdogs of the human race were meeting. Here were class and racial and religious consciousness on a global scale. Who had thought of organizing such a meeting? And what had these nations in common? Nothing, it seemed to me, but what their past relationship to the Western world had made them feel.”

A strange cause of a birth, and a strange thing to be born. But it was a birth nonetheless, by an experience that captures the vast majority of humanity. So, I offer a belated but sincere Happy 50th birthday to the Third World!

Happy Monday.

People look at me truly aghast when I reveal to them that I often book flights with the most amount of connections possible. I love airports. Probably it is a sickness of some kind and a personal problem. I like to be in airports. I like to wander around in them. I like the way they smell and the way the world feels inside of them. I like grandiose and beautifully constructed airports but I like crap airports too. I like the airports of the first, second, and third worlds. I like regional airports and airports where you have to walk out onto the tarmac to board your plane. I like picking people up at airports. I like waiting for them. I like airport bars and the way margaritas taste at airports.

If you had to pick a symbolic structure for the 20th century it might very well be the airport. Through all the disappointments, failures, violence and horror of the 20th century it is also the century that took flight. The airplane, metal birds, improbable sky captains. They are funny things and they are beautiful. I like to watch them, from inside of them and from without. I like the fact that when you enter an airport you leave the particular and enter the universal. I like the comings and goings of the airport because it feels like an intensification of all possibilities.

I was joking with a friend recently, at an airport, about what it would mean to become ‘airport man’. Airport Man is a version of Nietzsche’s overman without all the contempt for everyday experience. The Airport Man is able to adjust his own experiences to the fact that the airport is a site for modern experience. If you aren’t comfortable in an airport, you aren’t adequate to the present age and you aren’t preparing yourself for the future. You must love the airport, you must become one with the airport. You must will that all experience be airport experience.

We imagined a re-writing of literature. “Lady Chatterley’s Airport”. “Airports in the Time of Cholera”. “Catcher in the Airport”. “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Airport”. “Remembrance of Airports Past”. “The Airport of Wrath”. “The Unbearable Airport of Being”.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the airport is its basic assumption: people need and want to go other places to deal with other people. This is one of the most lovely aspects of human need. The world can be a fascinating and joyful place. The airport is the strange, anonymous, beautiful, ridiculous vehicle for that need. The airport is good.

I love airports.

Happy Monday.

Late on a rainy night some years ago, a few blocks away from home on Broadway, I happened to give a homeless man a dollar or two. In gratitude, he handed me a book. It was very dark, so I had to wait until I got home to see that it was a wet, worn and torn, pale blue copy of Studies in Mathematics, Volume XI:  Mathematical Methods in Science by George Polya, edited by Leon Bowden. Leaving it to dry on the radiator overnight, I looked at it the next day. It turned out to be a course of lectures that Polya had given in the summer of 1962 at Stanford to high school teachers of mathematics, under the auspices of the National Science Foundation. (Confession: the book has a Hunter College stamp in it, which may mean that I am in posession of a purloined library book.)

As I skimmed through the book, I found much fascinating material, but most of all, I was struck by a short introduction to the work of Simon Stevinus. I had never heard of Stevinus before this, and I would guess that many of you might not have either. It turns out that Stevinus was a brilliant 16th century Dutch mathematician, engineer, and scientist; a contemporary of Decartes, who even anticipated some of Galileo’s work. Stevinus was the first to use decimal fractions and showed their usefullness. As an engineer, he constructed dykes which are in use to this day.

What I want to talk about today is this: contrary to popular caricature, science does not always advance by observation and measurement. Often, it is a simple thought experiment which results in new insight. Einstein’s musings about what would happen if he sped along with a wave of light at a speed close to its own resulted in a rather famous conclusion, for example. (Of course, even Einstein’s thinking was connected to reality by the experimental and observational work of others.) And this serendipitously-discovered book exposed to me a truly marvelous thought experiment I hadn’t ever known about. I would like to explain this physically-intuitive proof in some detail to you, by which Stevinus derived the Law of Inclined Planes. In going through this step-by-step, I hope to illustrate the power of the thought experiment in general, and the elegance of Stevinus’s imaginative formulation in particular.

Now bear with me here: it is obvious that pushing an object up an inclined plane is easier than lifting it up vertically. (The weight of an object is simply the force required to lift it up vertically.) This is why a brewer will load his wagon by rolling casks of beer up a ramp, and it is pretty obvious that the steeper the ramp, the harder it is to roll the casks. The closer the ramp becomes to vertical, the closer the force required to roll (lift) the cask up becomes to its actual weight. But what exactly is the force required to roll a cask up a given inclined plane? This is the question that Stevinus set out to answer.

His first important move was to ask the question in a clear way. He realized that he must simplify the situation so that only the relevant physical quantities come into play, so he decided to ignore friction (something all of us are now used to doing from high school physics!). Deciding what is relevant and what isn’t is, in fact, half the job. This is how he put it: given the setup of inclined plane and pulley in Fig. 1, what weight would Y have to be, to balance X and keep it from sliding up or down the plane? Keep in mind that movement of X on the plane is frictionless (or you can imagine that the weight X has little wheels that allow it to roll on the plane), as is the pulley.

Stevinus’s next move was to realize that the vertical drop is just a special (extreme) case of another inclined plane, so he was able to generalize his question to this one: given the new setup in Fig. 2, once again, what weight does Y have to be, to balance X and keep it from sliding up or down the plane? (This time, imagine Y as also having little wheels, so it can slide up or down its own inclined plane without friction.)

Stevinus realized that the shape of the weights X and Y is irrelevant, and in an extraordinary leap of imagination, he replaced them with just a uniform rope (or chain). This situation is shown in Fig. 3. Assuming that the rope can still slide without friction on the inclined planes, it is clear that if the downward force is greater on the segment AB, then the rope will slide down that plane. If the downward force is greater on the segment BC, then the rope will slide down that side, and if the forces are in equilibrium, then the rope will stay balanced as it is. So which is it?

Again, in a brilliant move, Stevinus imagines the two ends of the rope connected by an additional loose length of rope. So now we have a closed loop of rope draped over the inclined planes. The situation now looks as shown in Fig. 4. We can see that although the situation is asymmetrical above the line segment AC, it is the same on both sides (the A side and the C side) below it, where the rope simply hangs in a symmetrical U-ish shape (called a catenary, and while we are on the subject see also this). Whatever forces the rope below AC exerts on the part of the rope above AC, must therefore be the same at A and at C. (The part of the rope below pulls equally on both sides.) So now the startling conclusion: if the part of the rope above AC, on the inclined planes, were to tend to slide down to one side, this would result in perpetual motion in that direction! (Because as it slides down a little bit, an equal part of the rope which had been hanging below would go up the inclined plane on the other side, and the situation would be identical to what we started with, therefore more of the rope would slide down, and it would just keep going like that forever.) We will have constructed a pertpetual motion machine. Since this cannot be right, Stevinus concluded that the parts of the rope above AC on the inclined planes must also be in equilibrium. Since X and Y are in equilibrium, and we also know that the weight of the rope is proportional to its length, this means that at equilibrium, the ratio of the weights X/Y justs equals the ratio of the lengths AB/BC. This finally answers our initial question from Fig. 2: What weight does Y have to be, to balance X and keep it from sliding up or down the plane? Simple algebraic manipulation shows that since X/Y = AB/BC,

Y = X * BC / AB  — and this is the Law of Inclined Planes

And there you have it! The weight needed at Y will always be as much less than X, as the length of the side it is resting on is less than the length of the other side. If BC is only half the length that AB is, then only half the weight of X will be needed at Y to balance it. And this conclusion holds no matter what the actual inclinations are, because we have (or Stevinus has) derived this result generally, without specifying any particular angles of inclination. In other words, the law will hold even for the vertical case of Fig. 1. (If you still don’t get it, you could try the explanation here.) I find this a very beautiful result, especially as it relies on extraordinary imagination guided by good intuition at each step. In addition, the proof exploits considerations of symmetry, which were to become of paramount importance in 20th century physics, through the connection of symmetries with conservation laws.

For all his work with inclined planes, even Galileo’s reputation as an experimenter is probably exaggerated. For example, it is unlikely that Galileo bothered to drop objects of different weights from the Tower of Pisa to show that they fall at the same rate. He was too smart to have needed to do this, and had his own thought experiment to show that objects of different weights must fall at the same rate: imagine that you have two objects, say iron balls, one of which weighs 20 pounds and the other 5 pounds. Now, it was thought that the 20 pound ball falls faster (say at some rate F) than the 5 pound one (which falls at a slower rate S). Imagine connecting the two balls with a chain, then dropping them. What will happen? Well, presumably the 20 pound ball should pull the lighter object into a faster rate than S, while the lighter ball should slow down the 20 pound ball from its fast rate of F. In other words, joined together, the balls should drop at some intermediate rate between S and F. But now consider that the two balls joined by a chain can also be construed as one object with a weight of 25 pounds, which should fall even faster than the heavier ball alone, or faster than F! Here we have a contradiction, so they must fall at the same rate. Such is the beauty of the thought experiment!

Stevinus is even supposed to have proven that objects of different weights fall at the same rate before Galileo did. He did work in hydrostatics, noting that the pressure exerted by a liquid depends only on its height and is independent of the shape of the vessel containing it. He also invented a sail-powered carriage which could outrun horse-drawn vehicles of the time, shown here in the picture. He was quite a guy.

Thanks to Margit Oberrauch for doing all the inclined plane illustrations.

Have a good week!

I was thrown into a quandary by a remark in the most recent Editorial of the Wilson Quarterly: “The Web, for all its marvels, hasn’t yet provided a home for the kind of focused and sustained dialogue that smaller magazines create.” This comment struck me as both curious and characteristic of a certain residual attitude of disdain for online writing that it is still possible to find in intellectual circles. Part of it, I think, is a natural tendency toward the Luddite in literary folks, particular in those over a certain age.

Some of America’s greatest magazines still treat the web browser like a second class literary citizen. Harper’s, one of the flagships of American writing, has a miserly approach to the internet. You can find many brilliant Features at Harpers.org, as well as great Readings, and fine Cartoons. They’re laid out in an incredibly weird narrow long format that seems to assume its readers use a screen the size of an ancient iMac. Another problem: I can buy a copy of Harper’s at the newsstand before they update their “Current Issue” page. The Prize Winner in the category “Worst Web Site for Best Magazine,” however, with its frames layout (making linking intolerable) and contempt for graphical prettification, has to be Dissent. Harper’s and Dissent, of course, are fine magazines and will continue to be so. Right now, the web needs them more than they need the web, although this might well change over time. The reason, I would argue, is that so much of the national conversation about ideas, culture, and politics now takes place online, via web logs and email. The Right-wing has been savvier in its approach to its message on the internet, with a far more closely connected network of sites linking to each other.

There’s an understandable negative intellectual response to the web. It’s unholy and overwhelming. I often hear in literary circles a snobbish notion of a world awash in barbarous blogorrhea. Certainly the idea of cutting out the middlemen of traditional media – editors and publishers – also means eliminating those people who can act as a writer’s best friend. (By saying, “Listen, you might want to cut this,” or, “Whoa, dude, that’s just crazy.”) The online world, as a great leveler, the ultimate Whitmanesque democratic experiment in free expression, is the central fact of its fizz. But the web is also a great proliferator of nonsense, propaganda, misleading information, and terrible writing. Here’s a site, Boring Boring, that only lists “dull things.”

So, is there online literature yet? Will there ever be? There’s some truth to the claim that many online-only journals either seem like vanity presses or else attempts by the impoverished to mimic the effects of print. But WQ is wrong if it means to suggest that there aren’t good online journals, of which I like the classy and subdued GutCult, the engaging nthposition, smallspiralnotebook, and The Drunken Boat. The most interesting example, however, is Agni, which runs an lively and excellent online parallel journal separate from but connected to its great print organ. Agni might be a model for other journals to follow, since, for established magazines and nonprofit organizations, creating parallel online journals would be an extremely cheap way to boost prestige. It’s paradoxical, however, that one of the best online journals in America would be edited by Agni’s Sven Birkerts, who has decried the death of print louder than anyone else.

One last comment. Somebody ought to start developing some ideas about what writing works best online and whether online writing will change literary production. LitBlogs are certainly changing the way that books get their word-of-mouth buzz these days. What we don’t know yet is whether new literary forms will emerge from online publishing, especially web logs. Will short fiction, for example, get shorter? Will anybody use a web log to create a great fictional persona or literary character? (This one, purporting to be the diary of Captain Morgan, the swashbuckling Rum salesman, is not exactly what I had in mind. Here is the very silly blog of the Incredible Hulk.) Will there be a great American novel that is written on a web log? Right now, the answer seems to be: “Not if there’s no money in it.”

Our friend Ram recently gave a talk at the Asia Society here in New York on the tsunami and peace in Sri Lanka. It touched on a larger question, or an antecedent question: can you negotiate with people who use suicide bombers?

The LTTE in Sri Lanka has been responsible for the majority of suicide bombings in the recent decades, and it has done so for explicitly secular nationalist reasons with bombers who are largely Hindu and Christian. Ram’s take is that while he doesn’t know whether you can negotiate peace with those who use suicide killers, he thinks that negotiations can delay war. The Sri Lankan state, of course, has little choice, given the balance of forces.

Certainly, states negotiate with people who use terrorism quite often. And the world accepts people who used terrorism to achieve political aims. This is as true of Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir (their Irgun and Lehi past respectively) as it is of Arafat or the ANC. And most terrorist groups, I suspect, would gladly trade resources and methods with their adversaries.

Suicide bombing conjures up different images. Morally, there is little difference from a suicide bomber who kills civilians and a terrorist who fires a rocket propelled grenade into a crowd of civilians, except that the latter may still be left to carry out another attack. But we have this image of suicide bombers as beyond reason, negotiation, and self-interest. That is, it’s hard to imagine what could possibly reach them, what, short of total surrender could appease them if they’re willing to so far as kill themselves in this way.

This image, of course, confuses the bombers themselves, with those who use them. (Or perhaps not entirely.) One can’t really imagine the Old Man of the Mountain, the leader of the Assassins, one of history’s early suicide killers, himself carrying out a suicide attack, or beyond negotiation. Bin Laden’s video message just before the elections seemed in this line and an offer to negotiate. Needless to say, this is not at all the same as saying that one should in this instance, but rather it is to raise the question of can one (in the sense of possible) negotiate with those who use suicide terrorism.

My old classmate Mia Bloom, author of Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror, met with the LTTE in 2002, as she was conducting surveys of Tamils in LTTE controlled regions. Her impressions and experience are telling.

“I remarked how friendly everyone was and asked the guard, ‘Is he [Secretary-General of the LTTE Peace Secretariat S. Puleedevan] a killer?’

The guard smiled: ‘Oh yeah.’ I never expected terrorists to be so pleasant.

. . .

Puleedevan acknowledged that after Sept. 11, 2001, the tactics that had worked so well for them in the past were no longer appropriate.”

What that all says and means is unclear? If those who use suicide bombers appear more open to reason, to appeals of self-interest, and negotiation, then they seem more morally culpable than before, as the actions seem less born of insanity than of strategic calculation and moral choice. And if that’s the case, then perhaps some states do not have the luxury of not talking to them and trying to appeal to reason.

This is the second of 3 Quarks Daily’s Monday columns. Abbas started us off in fine form last week with a wholly fabricated yarn about his meeting with the president of Sri Lanka and talking to her about cake. He even presented some doctored photos.

I will change gears a bit with some real information about places that actually exist. In this case, Paterson, New Jersey. Now you may ask, with some puzzlement and bemusement, why Paterson. Especially if you’ve been there. Granted, history has not been so kind to Paterson. A once booming industrial town known as Silk City, it was recently described to me by a resident as ‘a complete shit hole’.

But it isn’t a complete shit hole. It is a special place. I’m not sure exactly what it is about Paterson that makes it special but I’ll try and jot down a few notes in that direction.

First of all, Paterson is wonderful because it is a ruin and ruins are beautiful. But that is too aesthetic and trite. The shallow romantic love of ruins is wistful and nostalgic, full of longing. I am talking about a love of ruins that is more like the attitude that Walter Benjamin took toward the Parisian arcades of the mid-19th century.

Ruins are interesting because when a world falls apart you have that much more of an opportunity to understand it. It lays itself bare. And Paterson isn’t just any kind of ruin, it is an American ruin. This is the city that William Carlos Williams wrote a five volume poem about. He picked Paterson as the place where he could write according to his precept “no ideas but in things.” He was trying to find an American idiom, like Whitman. He was trying to deal with America.

Paterson became Paterson because of its beautiful falls. But it wasn’t their beauty that mattered, it was the power to turn the mills. The weird American dynamic between nature and the city is right there in about two hundred yards of Paterson real estate, from the Great Falls down the street to the forgotten and decaying mills. A few blocks away can be found the truly sad and melancholic park in honor of Lou Costello (of Abbott and Costello fame). There, the drunks flout the posted suggestion that alcoholic beverages be consumed elsewhere.

In all that has fallen apart about Paterson, New Jersey, there is much that comes together. Paterson is about the meanness, and stupidness, and brutality that is America. The very failure that is Paterson is kind of perfect. But there is something tantalizing about it too. There is that infinite potentiality of Americanness lurking just beneath the surface of Paterson. It seems like that was what intrigued Williams too. Why can’t Paterson be more like what it gives you in glimpses and glimmers? Of course, that is a question that goes beyond Paterson to human civilization in general. But who wants to talk about human civilization in general. Right now, we have Paterson.

Have a lovely week.

Even though we are for the most part a “links” blog, the editors of 3 Quarks Daily have decided that we will take turns writing a short column each Monday, where we can talk about whatever we feel like. No one else wanted to do the first one so it has fallen to me by default, and I’ll take this opportunity to just ramble on about a bunch of things…

Last fall, the President of Sri Lanka, Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, gave a very good speech on conflict resolution at the Asia Society in New York City, at which I was present, and in which, among other things, she commented that:

Conflict resolution has become today, a high profile subject taught in universities and lectured on, at many a seminar and conference. Experts in this field are held in awe in some circles in many countries. Yet, conflict resolution is not new. It has only been packaged differently in our age.

Afterwards, there was a reception and a friend introduced me to the President, to whom I said that although she was right about there being a lot of fancy repackaging of age-old wisdom in the academic field of conflict resolution, there have been some interesting intellectual developments, in mathematics, for example, which do provide new tools for avoiding or even resolving conflicts. As an example, I brought up cake theory.

Cake theory basically looks at methods of how to divide a cake among n persons so that each of them feels they got a fair share. For example, for two persons, one method would be to have one person cut the cake into two pieces, after which the other person gets to choose which piece she wants. This obviously gives the first person great incentive to carefully cut the cake into equal halves, otherwise she will get stuck with the smaller one. It gets a little more complicated for greater numbers of persons, but the problem has been solved for arbitrary n.

One method for dividing the cake into an arbitrary number of portions is described in the Wikipedia this way:

Another method begins with the first person portioning off 1 / n of the resource (for n people). Each following person then examines the portion in turn, removing a part for themselves if they believe the portion to be larger than 1 / n. The last person to remove part receives the portion. The process continues until the entire resource has been fairly divided.

The problem may be modified by requiring the division to be envy-free: that is, each recipient should not only believe that they have at least 1 / n of the resource (according to their measure) but that no other recipient has received more than they have.

The President seemed interested, so I went on to point out that this method has already been used in the Law of the Sea Treaty to divide under-sea mining resources between industrialized and developing countries:

The Convention of the Law of the Sea, which went into effect in 1994, incorporates such a scheme to protect the interests of developing countries when a highly industrialized nation wants to mine a portion of the seabed underlying international waters. The country seeking to mine would divide that area into two portions. An independent agency representing the developing countries would then choose one of the two tracts, reserving it for future use. [See more here.]

At this point, Madam President’s philistine handlers decided that she had been subjected to a long enough insane-sounding harangue on “cakes” and “the sea” by me, and she was dragged off to be introduced to someone more polite. But she was interested, and subsequently had my wife, Margit, and me over to the Presidential Palace in Columbo for drinks when we were visiting friends in Sri Lanka later in the year.

Anyhow, we had a great time in Sri Lanka, and were saddened to hear that, among so many lives and so much else, the beautiful old hotel we stayed at on the beach in the coastal city of Galle was destroyed by the tsunami. But even that most horrific of disasters may have a silver lining in terms of our theme of conflict resolution, making possible more fruitful negotiations between the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tigers (the LTTE): there is more about that here.

I was reminded of all this by a great post yesterday at Something Similar by Jeff Hodges, about The Fair Division Calculator.

Have a good week!

It’s official: H.P. Lovecraft isn’t just some creepy schoolboy’s secret literary fare anymore, but a bona fide Amercian Author. At least that’s how I read the Library of America’s recent publication of Lovecraft’s Tales, edited by Peter Straub. Why all the sudden interest in Lovecraft? The Believer recently published French enfant terrible Michel Houellebecq’s essay on Lovecraft and intends to publish Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life at some point soon. (Lovecraft is to Houellebecq what Poe was to Baudelaire; I’m not sure what it is about ornate American works of terror that so rivets the French imagination, but hey.) Nick Mamatas of the Fortean Bureau has already pointed out that Lovecraft entered “the Canon” (if you’re worried about such things) when Penguin published his work. Meanwhile, Laura Miller finds both Lovecraft and his admirers a little loathsome in her firm but pretty fair Salon review. Miller rightly dwells on Lovecraft’s pathological racism (see, e.g., Lovecraft’s “Rats in the Walls”), but that never slowed down the Canonization of Chandler or Jack London either. More provocatively, Miller asks Why Lovecraft? when Edmund Wilson doesn’t have a Library of America volume yet.

The answer, I think, has something to do with Lovecraft’s strange enduring influence, his weird mythology the nightmare American version of J.R.R. Tolkien’s steadily increasing stock, which is something other than strictly literary. I have one Lovecraft theory, rather political in nature, which I wouldn’t go out on a limb to defend. When a continent is conquered by war, slavery, and racial extermination, the landscape, only seeming to lack a persistent cultural memory, could come back to haunt us, with monsters bred out of the sleep of reason. In this sense, I see Lovecraft in a line with William Burroughs, whose conclusion from a superficial and exoticized look at the native culture of Central and South America, in addition to the white madness that displaced it and the native peoples of North America, was that America was simply an evil land. It is surely right to place Lovecraft’s externalized demons back into his head, biographically speaking, but there’s something odd and inexplicable about his cultural persistence. What it boils down to, perhaps, is not only that America is haunted, an “old world” also (at last, the truth admitted), but also that in Lovecraft we see the ultimate denial and dramatic reversal of the original American Dream of Starting Over in an Edenic land of boundless possibility and natural beauty.

On a recent trip to London I rekindled an old passion for stamps and stamp-collecting, that ultimate nerd hobby whose very name, “philately,” is a sure-fire ticket to the deformation of any young boy’s social life. At the newish British Library, there’s a fantastic stamp collection located in the prestigious area of the, er, well, it’s actually in the cafe. You can browse it while inhaling the remnants of other peoples’ lunches.

Of particular note were the World War II collections, including stamps from Nazi occupied countries, the “Judenpost” of the ghettos, and the various underground Polish postal systems. The Polish government-in-exile created stamps in London for circulation in occupied Poland depicting various liberating aircraft and tanks. (Polish political prisoners also sent letters from Auschwitz, according to this illustrated article.)

The Poles also had an underground post operating under the noses of the Germans, complete with time-date stamps, an entirely alternate system. The punishment for discovery was death, so that there is something immensely civilized about the use of official stamps and seals on the underground letters. The Model Collection displays various Allied stamps in the Occupied Zones of Germany set up by Yalta. Stamps with Hitler’s image on them had to be recycled, and each of the occupiers had different systems for attempting to oblierate the image using various ink blots and geometrical patterns.

For the past two years or so there’s been an interesting discussion going on about how to review books. On one side of the divide are Dale Peck’s Hatchet Jobs and the genre of the polished and witty negative book review that is supposed to be more entertaining than the book itself. There is also a mode of philistinism setting in that involves the rubbishing of challenging books, epitomized by B. R. Myers’ A Reader’s Manifesto and Jonathan Franzen’s regrettable attack on the late William Gaddis in the New Yorker. The other main development is the philosophy of reading set out by Heidi Julavits in the inaugural issue of The Believer, which attacks the “snarkiness” of much contemporary reviewing, where fatuous savagery and faux-learned ridicule have replaced any serious consideration of authors and ideas. In this spirit, The Believer recently published a long “letter” from Rick Moody defending Nicholson Baker’s novel Checkpoint from a swipe in the New York Times Book Review. The Moody/NYTBR agon brings to mind the old clash between Eggers and the Times dwelt upon at length in this Slate item.

These debates have come home to roost in the form of Charles Taylor’s new Salon.com review of Nick Hornby’s new book, The Polysyllabic Spree, the first title from Believer Books. The book collects Hornby’s hilarious Believer columns over the last year and is a gem. Hornby is one of the funniest writers around, and the idea of his column, “Stuff I’ve Been Reading,” is brilliant insofar as it allows him to write about whatever books he has happened upon, old or new, classic or oddity, rather than reviewing current titles alone.

Taylor has written a weird review of the book for Salon that can be read in its entirety here. It is written in praise of the book but against the mentality of The Believer, which he describes nastily as a kind of literary Up With People. Charles Taylor, who I presume is neither the great Converse sneaker-king nor the Canadian philosopher nor the Liberian war criminal – unless he is a very busy man indeed – argues that “Where [The Believer] deserves credit for bucking a trend that is harming contemporary criticism isn’t in its attitude toward negative reviews but in the freedom it has given Hornby for his column.” His argument is strange because it makes it seem as though Hornby’s accomplishment has nothing to do with The Believer or was acheived in spite of its editorial direction.

He is also referring to the fact that The Believer doesn’t print soley negative book reviews, and asked Hornby not to explicitly name books he hated when he discusses them in his columns. Is this a problem? I happen to know from personal experience that The Believer isn’t in the business of puffery, or producing good reviews of bad books. In fact, the purpose of The Believer’s newish one-page reviews section is to draw attention to literary fiction that isn’t ordinarily picked up by larger book reviews. At any rate, all this wouldn’t be worth going into if it didn’t open up some bigger issues about reviewing. Personally, I don’t mind extremely negative reviews, because sometimes they get me intrigued and upset and stir things up. I had never read Rick Moody, for example, until Dale Peck described him as “the worst writer of his generation” – a clearly false statement since there must be someone Moody’s age writing copy for douche ads. But now I’m going to read Moody. There’s nothing more curiosity-inspiring than attempted censorship or apoplectic castigation, and when somebody at Slate trashes Wes Anderson’s new film The Life Aquatic I get myself to the theatre as fast as I can. There’s another matter, of course, which is that some of the best nonfiction ever written, such as Mark Twain’s “Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” takes the form of negative reviewing.

My own view, for what it’s worth, is that negative reviews are a branch of humor writing, and that the best comedy comes at the expense of the powerful, pompous, and pretentious, or what Laurence Sterne called “false gravity” in Tristram Shandy. I would argue that novelists as a rule are not the enemy, and that crushing a first-time novelist or a person trying to express something is a little like pushing a baby stroller down the subway stairs.

On the other hand, a critic’s first duty is honesty, and if there is no way out of an assignment then it does nobody any service to soft-pedal something one has taken a strong dislike to. Snarkiness is the mediocre mind’s second-rate, knee-jerk response to the culture of puffery and hype; in fact they are two sides of the same problem (and feed off one another) rather than true adversaries. My utopian suggestion would be a restoration of the concept of real criticism – independent, honest, passionate, partial, and decently paid – rather than the devolution of book reviewing into a badly-paid arm of publishing PR or the smarmy posing of middling minds who percieve contemporary literature as an endless river of bilge that threatens the sanctity of their precious critical faculties.

I’m not sure if it’s due to sunspots or historical circumstances, and I know my friends who write fiction and poetry will be unhappy that I’m saying this, but it seems to me that nonfiction is sometimes more exciting than fiction right now. Certainly the stastistics show a decline in fiction sales even while publishers are putting out 17% more titles. (Bowker has the full story.) Biography, history and religion showed double-digit increases for 2003. Some account for this as a post-September 11 reaction – unprecedented American interest in the outside world. It is also possible to view the trend aesthetically and suggest that perhaps fiction hasn’t been keeping pace with current events. (Indeed, how can it?) If this turns out to be the Age of Nonfiction – for talent follows the money – then this could explain the increasing interest in what is detestably called “Creative Nonfiction.” (Detestable because all writing ought to be “creative,” and because “creative” is a cruel term for good writing, so that the phrase “Creative Nonfiction” is doubly appalling from an artistic point of view.) Aldaily.com recently posted a link to an essay called “The Age of the Essay” by Paul Graham. Graham, famous for his work on Spam and Spam filters, has this to say about writing essays:

“What should you think about? My guess is that it doesn’t matter – that anything can be interesting if you get deeply enough into it. One possible exception might be things that have deliberately had all the variation sucked out of them, like working in fast food. In retrospect, was there anything interesting about working at Baskin-Robbins?”

Read the whole essay here.