Asad Raza has written an excellent commentary here at 3QD today on the Zidane headbutt incident at the World Cup final, and I just want to add my two cents now. We still don’t know exactly what Marco Materazzi said (and did) to Zidane to make him lose his trademark cool, but out of the cloud of rife speculation two candidates materialize repeatedly: that either Materazzi must have hurled racist slurs at Zidane, or that Materazzi insulted Zidane’s family. Before I examine these two possibilities, let me say something about what I do not believe happened.

It is not possible, in my opinion, that Zidane deliberately chose a moment when the referee was busy elsewhere to headbutt Materazzi, believing that the attack would not be noticed. It is absolutely obvious to me from having repeatedly watched the video that Zidane’s actions were the result of sudden rage, which, as I can well remember from my own hot-tempered youth, always takes a few seconds to swell after the moment of provocation. Zidane could not possibly have looked around to make sure all the officials were busy, and if he were calculating so clearly, he would have known that a stadium full of people (not to mention the billion plus around the world) were watching, and he would have remembered what was at stake. No, that was clearly a moment of uncontrollable anger, the kind when the blood rushes to your head, you feel a kind of heat, your face turns red and throbs, and then you lash out. There is nothing you can do about that kind of mental storm. It is a moment of temporary insanity, not something subject to choice. And it is clear, at least to me, from the video that Zidane tried to trot away as the anger rose, but lost control and turned around…

As for Materazzi insulting Zidane’s mother (and all the possible variations on this theme), it is very unlikely that something like that could or would inflame Zidane. The reasons are twofold: first, these kinds of insults have become so common in everyday discourse that they have lost all their teeth. It is now possible to address a close friend as “Yo, Mofo…” But second, and more important, for an insult to really injure its victim there must be an asymmetry preventing the person from just yelling the insult back. It is then, when the person insulted feels he cannot reply, that he replies physically. And this is exactly what racist insults do. If a white man yells the N-word at a black man, there is no equivalent word that the black man can yell back. By using this word, the white man is essentially taunting the black man by reminding him of the abuse that he, his ancestors, his whole race have have to endure at the white man’s hand, and how he is impotent to stop it. It is like someone taunting you that he raped your mother, and you knowing that it’s true! History denies the black man the opportunity of responding in kind, and the only choice left may seem to be to demonstrate that one is not so impotent after all, that one can hit back. This, that it relies on a history of oppression and injury, and on asymmetrical relations of power, is what is so insidious about racial insult, and why we are so careful to avoid its double-injustice in decent society.

Racism is prevalent in Europe. England has its Paky-bashers and the Germans their hateful skinheads. The Italians are routinely prejudiced against their own darker southern citizens. And Spaniards, to their shame, have recently brought racism explicitly to football. This is from Wikipedia:

Luis Aragonés became Spain’s coach in 2004. During a training session with the national team, a Spanish TV crew caught Aragonés motivating Henry’s Arsenal teammate José Antonio Reyes in a strange way (“Give him the ball, and then show that black little shit that you are better than him.”) The incident caused an uproar in the British media with calls for Aragonés to be sacked. When Spain played England in a friendly match at the Bernabéu later that year, the crowd was hostile. Whenever black English players touched the ball, large segments of the Spanish crowd began to make “monkey chants.” The Spanish football federation — the RFEF — eventually fined the coach €3,000.

When I visited France about ten years ago, the helpful guidebook to Paris I had bought pointed out that “If you look like you might be an Arab, expect some hostility on the streets of Paris.” Naturally, this made me a little nervous, and in a ludicrous attempt at not looking Arab (which I am not, but I am brown and Muslim), I went around everywhere wearing a necktie! I can only try to imagine what a lifetime of dealing with racial insults and very real prejudice must do to a person’s spirit. Given the history of what France did in Algeria, is it so shocking that a person of Algerian descent would be sensitive to racial taunting?

As I write this, some reports are already filtering in that indeed Materazzi racially assaulted Zidane. Frankly, nothing else makes sense. If Materazzi had insulted Zidane’s family, Zidane could have replied in kind; but if he attacked Zidane racially, then Materazzi got what he deserved, and should be punished further. Am I excusing Zidane? If he was racially insulted, yes I am. Zidane could not help himself under the circumstances. I would excuse Zidane for the same reason that a prosecutor will, under certain circumstances, decline to bring charges against a man who comes home to find his wife in bed with her lover and, in a moment of temporary insanity, kills him. In this, there is an acknowledgment that there is not always a right and wrong in everything. Sometimes, a man loses rationality. That is just human nature. Deal with it. (Or hate all men.)

And as Western nations continue to dominate and oppress the third world by economic as well as military means and the cynical manipulation of governments, as they continue to wreak havoc on the environment, as the injustices of extreme inequality in the distributions of wealth continue to grow, it is to be expected that some will be driven to irrational anger, and will break the rules. And hit back. You can’t just show everyone a red card.

Lindsay Beyerstein has a great critical response to my argument here.

Have a good week!  My other Monday Musing columns can be seen here.

Shocking, unthinkable, infamous, ignominious: these are the words instinctively grasped for in trying to make sense of the act that irrupted into the World Cup final last night.  Rarely does an athlete, playing atop so high a mountain of adulation, so utterly confound and defy the hopeful symbolism that has been placed upon him.  It was a heavy blow, certainly, to the preformulated narrative about the exploits of multiracial soccer teams repairing the social fabric of European nations.  If Zidane was always a reluctant poster boy for that story, he has now supplied the reason: temperamental unsuitability to turning the other cheek.  The incident, amplified by taking place in the most watched sports event of the year, nevertheless brutally transcended the game in which it occurred.  It will be publicly understood, digested, for days to come.  It will lose force, be neutralized, but not without having revealed much.

What did Materazzi say?  Could it have been so unfamiliarly offensive that it incited a frenzy?  Or was it merely a petty final straw near the end of a long match, a long career, of being insulted for Zidane?  Insulting a player to incite is common enough that there’s a word for it: sledging, from cricket, where it’s apparently done with the greatest skill by the Australians.  Let’s be blunt: racial insults are the most reliable way to sledge. And Zidane, sadly, gets them not only from Europeans, but in 2001, from Algerians, who stigmatized him as a traitor.  Maybe Zidane correctly surmised that no referees were looking, only to got caught by the replay; maybe he was discouraged by Buffon’s save of his last header, and by his injured arm, and went out with some payback.

Zidane, known for violent outbursts, in a 2004 interview:  “It’s hard to explain but I have a need to play intensely every day, to fight every match hard.  And this desire never to stop fighting is something else I learnt in the place where I grew up. And, for me, the most important thing is that I still know who I am. Every day I think about where I come from and I am still proud to be who I am: first, a Kabyle from La Castellane, then an Algerian from Marseille, and then a Frenchman.”

Will that complex and precarious genealogy now be read as a liability?  Does the constant need to “know who I am” make one vulnerable to sledging?  Even the attack itself was curiously controlled, unleashed swiftly but with the choice of target (the chest, the heart, even) demonstrating an intent not to injure.  Certainly French rightists, already on record against the team’s composition, will want to link Zidane’s hyphenated identity with his unrecuperable failure yesterday as France’s captain and leader.  Those defenders of French multiculturalism wishing to argue back will try and explain the matter by a simpler biography: he has a terrible temper.  Already, many defenses of Zidane seek to sweep away the raw, disruptive moment last night.  This event might, then, fade away into the background, stalemated by insinuations and shamefaced silence in the face of them.

That would mark an occlusion of the dark side revealed by this World Cup, with its surface of friendly national stereotypes amounting to not much more than German efficiency, Brazilian rhythm, English bulldoggedness, and so forth.  The sport itself cannot be fully enclosed within the advertisers’ wholesome branding of it: it is deceptively brutal, whatever your opinions on the intentionality of Rooney.  Top players being sent off in important matches is the rule rather than the exception.  Behind national fervor, for many, lies hatred.  And worst of all, of course, is the endemic racism.  From my perspective, it’s shocking that Spanish fans are given to making monkey noises at black players, that certain players, after scoring, give Nazi salutes to the skinheads in the crowd, that a widespread opinion holds France doesn’t “deserve to win” because of all the “Africans” on their team.  I’m not being sanctimonious; this kind of outright racial prejudice is unutterable in U.S. public discourse, however widely it might be held.

Zidane’s act was also an act of contempt for soccer.  It may have clarified his priority for pride and honor over winning.  This is equally unfamiliar in the U.S., where sports are so heavily corporate that there is little tolerance for figures who do not, like Michael Jordan, always place the game above all else.  Clearly, in European soccer, such divisions cannot be maintained: explosive mixtures of nationalism and race invade the soccer pitch in a more direct way.  The celebratory rhetoric of soccer as the global, multicultural sport masks a great deal of ugly nationalist fantaticism, into which the players are necessarily, and unevenly, co-opted. 

With what disconsolate combination of ambivalence and contempt must the man who gave his name to an entire generation of French youth have left the field of play?  Finally, spare a thought for Thierry Henry, Zidane’s most sublime teammate and the player who leads soccer’s anti-racism campaign.  The bravery with which Henry returned from being knocked woozy in the match’s beginning was a sports moment of a kind we are much more familiar with than the astonishing events of the match’s end.  After all, it’s only a game, right?

Abbas has some additional thoughts on Zidane and Racism.

See some other Dispatches.

Unable to make my way home across the city after Italy’s World Cup victory last night, I was delightfully left with no option but to take to the streets of Rome along with everyone else. By midnight everyone else included: cars full of face-painted celebrants; moped drivers and passengers wearing the tricolor flag as a cape; immigrants as proud, joyous, and decorated as native Romans; a young man with his leg in a cast and a broad smile on his face dexterously moving through the crowd on crutches; a bikini-clad babe standing on the back of her man’s moped, waving the flag and her fine figure to the cheers of everyone nearby; babies in car seats, sound asleep despite the constant horn-blowing and clamor of noise-makers of all sorts; and groups of teenagers on the corner, gesticulating and affectionately yelling phrases full of celebratory expletives at anyone who wasn’t contributing to the beautiful chaos.

For the first time in twenty-four years Italy was able to explode in full World Cup celebration. For some it was, in a way, a matter of life and death—driving around Porta San Giovanni I saw several signs done in the style of the obituary announcement posters that appear around towns following someone’s death, this time mourning the French soccer team’s loss: mors tua vita mea. What is a family to do when Italy triumphs? Get everyone into the car—preferably more people than could or should normally fit into it, hence forcing windows, sunroofs, and doors open—and set the kids on the roof while cruising round the neighborhood, of course. Captured out of context, some areas almost looked like war zones, filled as they were by the smoke and flares of sparklers, sweat-covered bodies, and screams. Two days from now the taxi drivers will begin their official strike, following an angry week of unauthorized strikes and protests about deregulation of the trade, but that didn’t stop them from packing their friends and families into the now infamously inaccessible white, SPQR-labeled vehicles for one last joyride. Much like New York, yet in a very different spirit, Rome is a city where I am acutely aware of life’s overwhelming gorgeousness, and of my own deep foreignness. Yet last night any- and everyone who was out on the street was embraced as part of the champions’ extended family.

Previous Lunar Refractions can be read here.

Cockroaches of New York,

I’m sorry.

I’ll understand if you decline to read this letter; that’s why I’ve put what’s important up top.  I’ve said some mean things about you.  I find your little eyes revolting, and your little knot-sized heart makes me panic, and I hate the little click your adult body makes when you fall from the countertop to the floor.  It was horrible of you to move into my microwave last summer, and the time you somehow got into my mother’s bra during a college information session is really unforgivable.  She had to fish you out in a room full of people.  You’ve made me such a paranoid; each time my roommate S. cuts her eyes to the ceiling or a wall I think she’s seen you.  But I’m willing, right now – just now, so I’d take the opportunity if I were you – to extend the beginnings of a truce.

You might have guessed that this letter has something to do with our encounter yesterday (are you smart?  I don’t know.).  You’re correct.  But for this to make sense, you’ve got to get to know me a bit – at least the bit pertinent to this gesture.  It’s important to know that I’m a punctilious traveler, always early, fingering my ticket.  The size or significance of the journey has no impact on my behavior. I suffer pangs of remorse if I’m not on the subway car nearest to my next exit or transfer. On the way home, I root around for my house keys a block before I reach my apartment.  I’m at the airport an hour and a half before departure, always.  I tell you this because I think you might relate (you time your trips across my kitchen wall particularly well).

Being somewhat of a lazy person, this monstrous dedication to punctuality is tremendously helpful.  If I don’t have a schedule, I’m happy to stay in bed until I get too hungry or think a bath sounds nice.  I can see an elevated train and airplanes from my bedroom window; their cycles lend a pleasant rhythm to my inaction.  It’s only the thought of a place to be and a time to be there that prods me out of bed – I look at that train and those planes as if through the face of a clock, and the sweeping hands interrupt their spell.  The tendency has its drawbacks as well: I fight frustration that my boyfriend H. “walks too slow.”  I am overly resentful of latecomers, but I hate being the first to arrive. 

Yesterday morning (you remember), I flew JetBlue from JFK to San Jose.  The flight was scheduled to depart at 7:05 and the weather was clear on both coasts.  I had set the alarm for 4:45, and when it chirped I gave a morning speech to H. about how I would miss him, and then hopped right out of bed and headed for the shower.  There are only a few things short of flood, fire, and family emergency that could derail my travel agenda.  You’re one, and you stood in the curve of the tub.

I really thought I was hallucinating.  You were big that day, as big as my thumb, and so still.  I’d been  waiting for this moment since the heat set in.  I knew you would crawl up some drain, but I didn’t know when.  And you were so unbelievably still.  I must have made some noise, a strangled scream, because H. said my name.  I didn’t see him as I sprinted back to the bed.  My face felt funny; I gave myself a headache from screwing it up so tight.  H. gallantly made his way into the bathroom with a paper towel, and returned to tell me you’d gone down the drain.  Did you look up at me while I took the shower?  Do you have a sense of humor?  I was in limbo position, feet as far from the drain as possible.  I thought you might have gotten behind my shampoo, or in the soap dish, or on the ceiling.  It was the dirtiest I’ve felt while clean. 

I left fifteen minutes later, fifteen minutes late.  Any other day, I’d have been running a countdown to takeoff in my mind.  Yet: I didn’t even look at the clock.  I didn’t ask my cab driver if he had heard me properly (JFK, not LaGuardia).  I didn’t count the cash I’d just gotten from the ATM.

I got to the airport a bit after 6.  I didn’t take out the money for the cab fare until we were stopped in front of the JetBlue terminal.  I took my time at the check-in kiosk, though I had arrived well into my usual grace period.  And I stood in line to check my duffel bag, one that would probably have fit in the overhead compartment.  Hungry and on a roll, I got in another line to buy breakfast.  My flight, 169, began boarding while I was in line.  I knew this because of the giant screen above cashier, which flashed, “FLIGHT 169 – BOARDING.” But panic-free, I stayed in line. I bought my berries and cheese, and walked up to the gate and right onto the plane.  I sat in my seat, buckled my belt, and we took off 15 minutes later. 

You spent me.  I had nothing left.  An immutable struggle, me and clock, dissipated unremarkably in your wake.  Do I have a certain increment of anxiety to expend each day?  Did you sap it in less than a second?  Or could my day just not get worse?  Maybe I was in shock, just numb to the clock and the plane.  Perhaps you just did quickly what you do regularly – distract me.  In any case, look – I got on the plane on time.  I did it without being a human stopwatch.  And I want to say thank you. 

This is going to be a long road for us.  I’ve never had a positive thought, even a neutral one, about you before.  And please don’t misinterpret this letter: you are fundamentally unwelcome in my home.  But, cockroaches of New York, I’m ready to think about our relationship.

Sincerely,

Jane (Apt 2R)

[Pictured above: Beetle bracelet purchased to ward off cockroaches.]

While most of the world has been fixated on the ongoing FIFA World Cup tournament, a Hollywood film crew has been gallivanting around the globe shooting the next  installment of the hugely successful James Bond movie franchise: Casino Royale, a remake of the 1967 classic spy spoof, based on Ian Fleming’s very first Bond move. The film marks the debut of British actor Daniel Craig as the tres suave 007.

The original, of course, is considered one of the very first satirical send-ups of espionage thrillers, well before the debut 30 years later of Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. And it’s every bit as deliciously silly. The incomparable David Niven plays an aging Sir James Bond, who returns from retirement to rejoin Her Majesty’s Secret Service, specifically to head an operation bent on destroying an evil criminal organization called SMERSH.

Naturally, this involves fending off a bevy of nubile beauties desperate for a chip off the old (literally!) Bond block; a double-crossing fellow agent named Vesper Lynd (Ursula Andress); a Bond impersonator, portrayed by the always-hilarious Peter Sellers; and a crooked casino owner named Le Chiffre (Orson Welles), who supports SMERSH financially with his winnings at the baccarat tables. All Bond has to do is beat Le Chiffre at baccarat, apparently, to topple a global criminal enterprise bent on bringing about the imminent collapse of civilization. (It is a spoof, people. Work with me, here.) If that weren’t enough to deal with, Bond must also grapple with family troubles, in the form of his neurotic nephew, Jimmy Bond (Woody Allen) and an illegitimate daughter, the product of a brief liaison with the late Mata Hari.

In the Bond Universe of 1967, the fictional fate of the civilized world rested on baccarat. No doubt it’s still 007’s favored game, being the cosmopolitan super-sleuth that he is. But these days, the rarefied game of baccarat has been eclipsed by the huge mainstream popularity of that gambling workhorse, poker, especially the Texas Hold ‘Em variety. Some people attribute this in part to the introduction of online poker and the invention of a camera that can show a player’s “hold cards” to a TV audience, thereby turning tournaments into spectator sports. Not only can we tune in for live coverage of World Series Poker and the World Poker Tour, but now we can combine our love of poker with our celebrity gawking fixation by watching Celebrity Poker Showdown.

I hope nobody thinks the less of me when I confess that I’m a diehard fan of the latter series. It’s not just because of the celebrities, although the comedians who participate in particular provide endless entertainment. Nor is it for the pleasure of rattling off the cool-sounding jargon: you can “up the ante,” “see the flop,” “raise the blinds,” and if you’re really unfortunate, you might get “sucked out on the river.” (That’s what happens when you have the best hand until the very last card is dealt, losing the pot in one fell swoop.) Ultimately, the appeal is the game itself. Watching the hands and rounds of betting unfold is oddly addictive, plus there’s the play-by-play commentary by an in-house poker expert (although I mourn the departure of original commentator, Phil Gordon, who has been replaced by the far doughier — albeit knowledgable — “Captain Sideburns,” a.k.a., Phil Hellmuth).

Devoted fans of baccarat might sniff dismissively at my fondness for this rather crass, bourgeois upstart, but poker is has an equally long history, although not entirely illustrious. There’s some debate as to its specific origins, but it most likely evolved out of early games that all relied on betting against ranked card or domino combinations — not to mention the practice of “bluffing” to bamboozle one’s opponents. For instance, around 969 A.D., the Chinese emperor Mu-tsung reportedly played “domino cards” with his wife on New Year’s eve. In the 12th and 13th centuries, Egyptians used playing cards, as did the Persians in the 16th century. In fact, there’s a Persian game called  As Nas — played with 25 cards in five different suits — that could be considered one of poker’s forebears. Poker derives its name from 17th and 18th century French and German games, called poque and pochen, respectively. Those in turn evolved from a 16th century Spanish game called primero, widely believed to be the game most directly related to modern poker.

That should convince the most hardened skeptics that poker is every bit as international in scope as the ongoing FIFA World Cup. Alas, much of its history in the rough-and-tumble atmosphere of the New World isn’t quite so civilized. We can blame the spread on the French: poker mania began in Canada with the immigration of French colonials, who brought their national card game, poque, to the New World with them. Those French settlers then drifted south to found New Orleans in the early 18th century. From there the game spread West via Mississippi riverboats, growing ever more popular, until it reached the Western frontier, finding a home in the proliferation of saloons that popped up in response to the California Gold Rush.

The riverboats functioned as lowbrow casinos, and back then, poker was largely the province of cheats and outlaws. A Time-Life book on the history of poker, called The Gamblers, relates the story of a night in 1832, when three professional card sharks aboard a Mississippi steamboat attempted to cheat a young man from Natchez out of his money via a rigged poker game. They succeeded, and the financially ruined young man was on the verge of hurling himself into the river in despair, when a mysterious observer came to his aid. That observer, one James Bowie, took on the three gamblers himself, catching one of them in the very act of cheating. He redeemed the lost money at knife-point on the young man’s behalf — although it must be said, he kept $20,000 of the $70,000 pot for himself as a reward. So he wasn’t entirely altruistic.

There were some “gentlemen gamblers,”  like Bowie, who viewed the game merely as a form of entertainment, to be practiced in moderation, and who abhorred the practice of cheating. But this period also saw the emergence of professional gamblers whose sole aim was to fleece unsuspecting players out of their hard-earned cash. In fact, it was the professionals who are responsible for the evolution of the game’s rules, to enhance their profitability, most notably via the addition of “draw cards” and a second round of betting. In the original version of the game, players received five cards face down, with no chance to improve their hands with draw cards. (Random bit of trivia: the Joker was introduced to the deck as a wild card in 1875.)

Modern tournaments didn’t really start to flourish until the 1970s, when the World Series of Poker debuted, prompting the publication of several books about poker strategies to fuel the growing public interest. And now people are flocking to casinos all over the country, hosting games of Texas Hold ‘Em in their homes, and frittering away untold hours playing in online tournaments. Local bars have even started hosting weekly “poker nights.”

Nonetheless, I managed to resist poker’s irresistible lure for quite some time, despite my fascination with Celebrity Poker Showdown. Still, I suppose it was inevitable that I would purchase that first computer game on CD and begin my descent down the slippery slope to moral depravity. Even now, I primarily play against the computer, and eschew the online tournaments. But then I went to Las Vegas in June for the first-ever YearlyKos conference, and, well, my downfall was complete when I summoned the courage to venture into the MGM Grand casino and join a low-stakes 2/4 table.

It was admittedly a bit intimidating at first, forking over $100 in exchange for a rack of chips and sitting down to a table filled with utter strangers intent on taking my chips away from me. Even though I was familiar with the rules of play and a bit of strategy — thanks to My Main Man, Phil Gordon — it took me a few hands to catch the rhythm of the game. I bided my time, playing tight, folding most of my hands before the flop, finally catching a pair of 8s (dubbed “snowmen”). And with trembling hands, I called the blinds. There’s something to be said for beginner’s luck: I picked up an extra 8 on the flop, and played my “trips” out to victory. Then I relaxed and lost myself in the game for the next few hours. In all honesty, I was prepared to lose that first $100, and I did get sucked out on the river a few times. Those are the breaks. But I made up the losses with a few well-timed wins, and ultimately walked away $90 richer, feeling quite chuffed at my modest fledgling success.

Skeptics would say that’s how they suck you in, much like drug dealers provide the first “hit” for free. Undoubtedly some people have been ruined by an addiction to gambling. But for me, the true allure of poker is not the gambling: the stakes are just a sidelight. Poker, at its heart, is an intricate, complex game, steeped in statistical probabilities, which might explain why it holds so much fascination for the mathematically inclined.

I am not so inclined. In fact, I don’t even pretend to understand the underlying statistics, although I’m slowly developing a deeper appreciation for that aspect of the game. For me, the play is made that much more interesting by the unpredictability of the “human factor”: people tend to follow their hunches, even when the conventional strategy tells them to do otherwise. So every hand unfolds just a bit differently, every round.

Poker experts often bemoan those sorts of people, because such players throw off all their carefully calculated odds with their infernally illogical unpredictability. The best players don’t always win,even on Celebrity Poker Showdown. But even the poker experts might admit, when pressed, that it makes a weird kind of sense. You can’t adhere strictly to the rules all the time, after all; every now and then, you have to take a gamble, although I prefer to think of it as a calculated risk. Sometimes it pays off. Sometimes it doesn’t. Poker is a lot like life, that way. Perhaps even James Bond would agree.

When not taking random walks at 3 Quarks Daily, Jennifer Ouellette muses about physics and culture on her own blog, Cocktail Party Physics.

Do women deserve the same prize money at Wimbledon as men?  I’ll get back to that – first, a meandering introduction.  Feminism, since at least Mary Wollestonecraft, has always maintained a productive tension between agitating for gender equality and elaborating gender difference.  The very fact that equal rights for women as subjects and citizens is the legacy of feminist thought opens the ground for a philosophical argument about gender difference itself: what is its “nature,” what are its features, and how do these features affect a political program?  These issues, largely irresolvable products of the collision of activism and philosophy, play out as conflicts within feminist thinking between schools, generations, nations, etc.  In the academy, for instance, a theoretical split was seen to develop between French feminists such as Cixous and Irigaray, who argued for the intrinsic difference of women and their language, and those who argued, with Butler, that gender difference is always inessential and ideologically produced.

In more mainstream U.S. terms, in what I think of as “magazine feminism,” a similar argument has been understood as one between two generations, the “Second Wave” of the 1960’s and 70’s and the “Third Wave” of the 80’s and 90’s.  (Incidentally, the “First Wave” mostly concerns the suffrage movement: 1919, remember?)  Here’s the generational conflict in a nutshell: venerable figures such as Gloria Steinem were seen to derogate femininity in order to make the case for women’s equal abilities – their idea being that traditionally feminine traits were imposed upon women as a form of domination.  It’s all a bit unfair to the Second Wavers, since of course the Third Wave rehabilitation of femininity was made possible by the argument over capabilities having been won already.  All the same, by a dialectical movement, we find ourselves in a moment where femininity, having been cast aside in the fight for Title IX and other equal rights, and then diagnosed by high theory as nothing but a social construct anyway, is now being championed again.  (I know, I know, I’m oversimplifying and begging many questions in this little peanut of a summary.)

Let me try and illustrate these shifts using fashion.  Think about it: during the Eighties, while the Second Wave was still dominant in the mass, we had Amazons, tall, striking, intimidating women like Elle MacPherson or Grace Jones.  Just physically they were much larger than the models of other eras, and with the angular shoulder pads of their double-breasted jackets their sillouettes emphasized a masculine strength.  In the movies, overly jocky men were often rejected, while when little geeks like Corey Haim in Weird Science tried to invent the perfect woman, what happened?  Kelly LeBrock showed up and scared the crap out of him: this is the model system for a female identity concerned with appropriating equal power.

By the nineties, with Judith Butler on every sophomore’s dorm desktop, gender was fictive and boys and girls differed only in their ideological software.  What did fashion give us?  Androgyny, duh.  CK One was a unisex scent.  Read that again; is that even imaginable, let alone saleable, today?  Grunge-era Kate Moss and Jenny Shimizu dressed in white tees, combat boots and jeans, while guys dressed in…  the same.  Non-tomboy femininity, where it existed, had to do with ironic appropriations of extreme girlhood: Hello Kitty, little backpacks, Japanese animé.  The one place where extreme femininity was accepted was on men, in drag culture, which by its nature points up the mutability of gender.  The idea of young actresses glamming it up in makeup, heels and dresses every night, a la Jessica Simpson, would have seemed totally anachronistic, premodern. 

Except, of course, that’s exactly where mainstream taste did go, back towards female sexuality considered as power/agency rather than a concession to the male gaze.  First, fashion just dipped a toe in, with the mid-Nineties fetish for artisanal Italian shoes, pace Manolo Blahnik, and then gradually the entire female body was resexualized, through an alliance of endless red carpet shows, lad magazines, and “sex-positive” feminists.  Katha Pollit recently recalled Steinem comparing women who liked pornography to Jews who liked Mein Kampf; nowadays that view is less likely than a young feminist having made some of her own.  Being comfortable as the object of a sexual gaze, anathema to an earlier generation, have become the potential sign of an embrace of femininity, especially for younger women.

And here we stand.  It’s hard at the moment to tell feminism from its backlash, or maybe I should say that which is which depends on who you ask.  Anyway, recently the issue I started with came up in the popular press that brings a lot of this stuff into relief.  In case you forgot: do you think women deserve as much prize money as men at Wimbledon?  No, seriously, it’s a real question and I want your opinion on it.  Cause to be honest, it seemed like a no-brainer to me for a long time: of course they do!!!  But discussing it, several female tennis-fan friends made the case to me that they don’t, and the whole thing started to seem like an object lesson in the philosophical transformations of feminism.  But let me give you the facts first.

Wimbledon, conserver of tennis tradition and requirer of tennis whites, is the last of the four major tennis tournaments (the Grand Slams) to award different amounts to the male and female winners.  This year Roger Federer (whoops, I mean whoever the winner is) will get 655,000 pounds, while the female winner will get 625,000, for a paltry difference of 30,000 pounds, or less than five percent.  The U.S. Open has paid equally for decades (hey! something to be proud of this July 4th, damn it!), Roland Garros (the French Open) began just this year.  But the All-England Lawn Tennis Club hangs on to their petty disparity, infuriating lots of female players and much of British society, and contributing generally to worldwide distrust of old red-faced white men having clubs.  American Venus Williams is the leader of the player’s movement for equal pay, Tony Blair and John McEnroe have come out in support of it, and the Times of London (hardly a bastion of leftism) had this to say: “And by its mean-spirited defence of an anachronism well beyond its sell-by date, the All England Club has forfeited any vestige of quaintness.”  So what’s the problem?

Well, pointed out my interlocutors, for starters, women only play best of three set matches, not best of five as the men do: this means the men are already being paid less per game played (a set is up to six games) than the women.  Secondly, the women’s field is clearly less competitive than the men’s leading to a great number of easy matches in the early rounds.  (And, ugly irrelevant truth though it is, the respective levels of play are not close.)  Now, you might say (and I did say) that tennis is a sport, and sports are entertainment, and we don’t pay entertainers based on how long the album or movie or play is (if so, Andy Warhol might be the richest filmmaker of all time).  You might say that the competitiveness of the respective tours is irrelevant; they are evolving differently, and the principle of equality doesn’t change based on that evolution.  You might say, as Venus Williams did: “It has nothing to do with our campaign for equality. The time spent on court or the sets played is a moot topic. We are not arguing about that. It’s about being treated equal as human beings.”

You might also realize that this is a cosmetic issue that’s easy for politicians to look good decrying (new maxim: the cosmetic is the political?).  Women are underpaid relative to men in all the smaller tournaments, earning about 66% of their counterparts (even though both sexes play best-of-three sets in those), just as they earn less in every other industry (except modeling!).  They even get less as a per diem at many tournaments, which is despicable.  Yet the symbolism of Grand Slam prize money overrides all this: tennis is the most visible womens sport in the world.  And the U.S. Open’s equality on this has rightly and for a long while been a great source of pride: here in the nation of Billie Jean King, Second Waver extraordinaire, we do symbolic equal rights right. 

Yet here’s another difference between Billie Jean and her modern descendants: the sexual marketing of female tennis players (males too, for that matter) has accelerated considerably.  And just as in the world of fashion, modern women tennis players quite consciously trade on their appearance for major endorsements.  The tennis/fashion crossover means that Stella McCartney makes outfits for Maria Kirilenko, and Serena Williams designs clothes with Kimora Lee Simmons.  Of course, the queens of the scene still tend to be not so much beautiful as possessing all the signifiers of commercial beauty: blond hair and long limbs.  (Meanwhile, the truly gorgeous female tennis players, such as Ana Ivanovic, are ignored by the marketers in favor of the Sharapovas and Kournikovas.)  Does this sexualization constitute new-style feminism, or a backlash?  And how does this affect the drive for equality of paychecks?

The several people (all women) who argued with me that women don’t deserve equal money argued that to take the same pay for (shorter, easier) labor is unfair to men, and an unnecessary politics of gesture.  Perhaps this is the sign of truly consolidated strength, a confidence in one’s power and security that means one doesn’t have to accept merely symbolic gifts.  Okay, but the equal-pay movement going on right now is possible because the women’s game is nearly as popular (and occasionally more, in the ratings) as the men’s game now.  And in part, this is because of the women knowingly playing up to tennis’ image as an sanctioned arena in which to watch beautiful female athletes.  If sports are profit-seeking entertainment, and sex helps sell tickets and commercials (“Make every shot… a PowerShot”), then shouldn’t women demand an equal share of the pie, even if it’s for unequal on-court labor?  Or does that demean the principle of equality that women have fought for, as my opponents argued?  Which is capitulation, and which steadfast determination?  It’s a conundrum.  My gut is still heavily with equality, but what do you think?

Here’s the rest of dispatches.

At first, I thought it was an item from that old underground favorite, Tales of the Weird. But no, it was from the Boston Globe, under an April 18 byline by Globe staffer Carolyn Johnson:

Three hundred “pet waste removal” companies are reported to be operating nationwide. They have formed their own trade association, have annual meetings, and an annual “Golden Shovel” award. Poop-scooping has even been franchised by an outfit named “Doody Calls.”

A Boston-based poop-scooper cleans a backyard once a week for $10-15. Business, as he puts it, picks up in the springtime as people put their dogs out in the yard, and “the aroma starts hitting the open window.” Apparently friendly client-provider relationships are formed: 90% of this scooper’s clients come out and talk with him while he scoops their dogs’ poop.

You can chalk it all up, this pooper-scooper story, to another instance of how markets work to satisfy the needs of both buyers and sellers. Yes, it is about dog shit. But poop-scoopers wouldn’t offer the service if they didn’t want to, would they? And, after all, think of how many people make their living, and a good one, off of shit, from the plumber to the sewer worker to the sanitation works supervisor. You might reply that they worry about human, not dog shit. But let’s not forget where all of that Tidy Cat stuff goes…. As someone’s father always says, it is a free country. If people want to scoop up dog shit for a living, well, Godspeed. Or as the Godfather says, as long as their interests don’t conflict with mine, good luck.

Let me switch the context a bit. You are an untouchable in rural India, and your job is to clean the shit out of upper caste people’s outhouses. Lacking baggies, you use your hands. The horror, the outrage your plight ignites in western readers. How can Indian society tolerate your humiliation, your degradation?

Of course, it could be the species shift. Perhaps dog shit is cleaner than human shit. Of course, I forgot salvation by baggie. When picking up my dog’s shit, I myself prefer the blue New York Times wrappers to the Globe transparent plastic wrappers: it places a micro-thin membrane between me and the shit.

However, I don’t know whether the average Westerner would feel that much better if somehow Shiva would shower baggies on the rural untouchables, or even New York Times wrappers for that matter. The degradation is done, not by contract, but by caste.

The contract, that great leveler of social difference, stands between buyer and seller of doody scooper-power in the USA. It saves the seller from degradation and the stigma of being a poop-scooper and the buyer from the responsibility of having degraded the scooper. As long as the doody-scooper scoops up some cash, most moral doubts are resolved. A cancer cure it’s not but not everyone can have interesting, life-affirming work. And if everyone is happy, far be it from me…..

Their mutual consent to a contract prevents us from asking: why is there a market for poop-scooping anyway? Here I would argue that Blim’s Law of Degrading Labor applies: the cheaper labor becomes, the more degrading it becomes. Look, poop-scooping is never going to become my favorite job or yours. When I get the short straw at home, my partner puts the Globe bags in my hand (no blue Times bags are left, the cost of having cancelled our subscription on account of the Iraq War), and hustles me out the door with the injunction: “Let’s be careful out there. It’s a minefield.” Of course, I wish he had drawn the short straw. Does any young child wake up in the morning with the fantasy that she is going to grow up to be a poop-scooper?

Of course not. Two conditions transform my weekend nightmare – and perhaps yours – into a world where mine or your dog’s shit can be picked up for a fee. First, to avoid picking up your own dog shit, you need to have some money. If I had some money, poop-scooping services would not be high on my list, but if a person has a lot of money, my preference-ordering, and my scruples for that matter, become irrelevant. Let us suppose for a minute that everyone would hire a poop-scooper, if they could. The second condition then becomes the key. The cheaper poop-scooping is, the more likely a person would be to hire a scooper.

But what determines the cost of poop-scooping? The supply of poop? The number of scoops(ers)? Only in part. The fact that America has more rich and well off persons as a proportion of its population now than even in the Gilded Age over a century ago counts for something. There are a certain number of people, not just the Buffetts and the Gateses mind you, that have the cash. Examine your own bank accounts, and at least to thine own self be true.

The general cost of labor also weighs in. Poop-scooping labor is cheap. If you can get your yard done for $10 a week (my dog does it 2-3 times a day, so let’s call it 15 poops at 67 cents a scoop), eyeball it. That’s cheap. Economists would say it’s cheap too because people are able to replace the $10 they spend on a poop-scooper in less time that it takes the poop-scooper to scoop up the dog shit. If poop-scoopers charged as much per hour as their clients made per hour, you can bet there would be more people out in their back yards with those Times or worse Globe bags scooping up dog shit.

Don’t believe me. A recent analysis of the Swedish economy by the McKinsey Global Institute, meant to be the business guide to economic policy in social democratic Sweden, laments that high wages protected by government unemployment and welfare policies means that fewer people avail themselves of personal services and fewer frequent restaurants than any other rich society. Why? Because the services and restaurants cost so much, labor being, ahem, much more expensive than in other societies that people end up doing things for themselves. A Stockholm lawyer must reflect on whether she wants to spend $400 dollars on a meal for two at a restaurant, roughly twice her after-tax hourly wage, or stay home and cook it herself. Or per chance, pick up her dog’s shit herself. When labor is more expensive, people degrade workers less. Or it must cost them significantly to do it.

As Blim’s Law of Degrading Labor would predict, as the cost of labor in America slips, more workers do degrading labor.

With July Fourth, summer vacations really begin. If you travel abroad and find yourself in a poor country, notice how so many people do so many things, often embarrassing and degrading things, for a pittance. Or travel in America for that matter, and ask why that hotel room is a bargain, and the maid is so friendly. In both cases, you have entered lands where labor is cheap, Blim’s law applies, and cleaning someone else’s shit, and the degradation it implies, is cheap too.

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

If Solomon Volkov’s Shostakovich memoirs are to be believed, Stalin was listening to Mozart before he died. And Mahler had a secret passion for The Merry Widow. And Hitler liked The Merry Widow too. And Mahler was a great Wagner conductor. How easy it is to get all worked up about the chance encounters historical figures can make. Are we to enlist Mozart as the avenging angel of Stalinism. Was Mahler a proto-Hitlerite: you know he liked The Merry Widow too and was prone to dictatorial mannerisms just like . . .  The absurdity of thinking in this way is clear. In the case of Wagner, such false historicism seems to be the only way that some people manage to cope with complexity. An important artist is always going to be misunderstood at first. With Wagner the misunderstandings show no sign of diminishing. If only Wagner hadn’t written Judaism In Music or any other of those interminable essays he cooked up in between bouts of supreme creativity. That is just the point. Artistic grandeur survives the unedifying spectacle of an advancing anti-Semitism. Even as Wagner died he was trying to give theoretical shape to the enormity of existence so convincingly conveyed in his music. The theory fails, the art succeeds. Art does not seek to explain. It expresses our mystery, our tenderness and joy, our beauty, and our destructive capacity too. When we listen intently to Wagner’s music we undergo an aesthetic experience which transcends our usual gravitational urge to banality. That some find the experience tedious or incomprehensible is no criticism of Wagner. The art waits for us; if we are not worthy of it there is always some cultural product that will be.

To call Wagner a Romantic does not get us very far. The so-called Romantic poets—Byron, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge and Wordsworth—are often lumped together despite the fact that each has an independent sensibility. The mania for classifying performs no useful function for the artist concerned. After all, Schumann, Brahms and Chopin get called Romantic composers too, but does that label really help us to come to terms with each of their unique oeuvres. The appeal of Wagner to modernists as diverse as Baudelaire, Eliot and Joyce should warn us of the dangers inherent in this unsatisfactory label. Wagner belongs to the world of Freud and Ibsen as much as to that of Heine and Caspar David Friedrich.

There are some who regard all this concern with Wagner as so much antediluvianism. They look to Pound, Marinetti, Gertrude Stein, Pollock or whoever as the way forward. The concept of cultural heritage does not figure prominently in their attitude. They favour the approach of the tabula rasa, like Pol Pot emptying Phnom Penh, murdering all the professionals and starting up from primitive scratch. A wholly new approach can sometimes yield worthwhile cultural results—Rimbaud, for example—but most artists know that the inheritance of the past must sit on their shoulders and bear down on them with its splendours. Wagner knew that. The regular readings from the Greek tragedians, Shakespeare and Goethe tell us as much as the concern with Beethoven and Weber. Wagner was honest enough to admit that his great bête noire, Mendelssohn, would have been horrified to see how he composed. In other words, Wagner was an artist who cared about musical technique and the degree to which he could use that technique to convey the cultural heritage of the past to the future. If a critic today looks on the basilisk face of Wagner and sees only overweening arrogance, how little do they find of the real Wagner, the Wagner whose insecurities and bad dreams still reach out to us today. We have our bad dreams too. Only now our bad dreams are realities. If we could listen to Wagner with open ears we would hear the voice of an art that, to use Grillparzer’s phrase, transfigures what it consumes. If darkness is visible in this art, so much more truthful is it in portraying the human element in its entirety. The ideal can only be approached after an exhaustive struggle with reality—Parsifal’s lonely years of wandering finally allow him to understand the significance of the Grail. Name calling of the Jews and the French might have been a popular pastime at Tribschen and Wahnfried, and Alberich, Mime, Beckmesser and Klingsor may have begun life as Jewish caricatures—Wagner knew perfectly well that art had to get beyond chauvinism and prejudice if it was to take its place in the great chain of cultural being.

Whereas the Greek work of art expressed the spirit of a splendid nation, the work of art of the future is intended to express the spirit of free people irrespective of all national boundaries; the national element in it must be no more than an ornament, an added individual charm, and not a confining boundary.                                                                                                                                              Art and Revolution

Wagner was an arch-hypocrite on the subject of the Jews, displayed nowhere more clearly than in his investment of a 40 000 thaler gift from Ludwig in 1865 with the Jewish banking firm of Hohenmeser in Frankfurt. However, if we are going to look for moral perfection in an artist we have absolutely no hope of finding within ourselves, then we are participating in the very hypocrisy we criticise the artist for. Science tells us that dinosaurs roamed the Earth for millions of years before the most enigmatic arrival of all—that of Homo sapiens. Artists of Wagner’s significance do not come along very often. To reduce an art as grand and poetic as Wagner’s to the level of a series of moral failings simply wont do. We all of us have moral failings, but we are not very likely to leave a Ring cycle behind as our calling card to posterity.

What a cast of characters can be called in to witness the Wagnerian biography as it makes it stormy progress from one unsettled residence to yet another, dogs in faithful attendance. It is just as well there are biographical remains for us to look at, otherwise we would be hard put to understand just how the art and the life all got fitted into the space between 1813 and 1883. Aspects of that life still fire the imagination with their drama and passion, perhaps nowhere more profoundly than in that great moment when Ludwig summoned Wagner for the first time. How one would have liked to be a fly on the mental wallpaper of that first encounter. Naturally, this friendship has been trivialised and parodied beyond the point of no return. A sober and detached view would reveal one of the most significant cultural and political relationships in the history of artistic endeavour. To sit in the theatre in Bayreuth and see a performance there is to participate in a poetic ideal, an ideal that still comes to the world across minefields of ideology and propaganda. Wagner once commented that every part of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus was stained with his and Cosima’s blood. That is probably true but it is terribly unfair to Ludwig. It is all very well to say that Ludwig was unsuited to the task of kingship or that Wagner manipulated the rhetorical tone of his letters to the king so as to ensure a codependent relationship. Let us remember Ludwig’s steadfastness; without it there would be no Bayreuth ideal, an ideal that goes beyond Wagner and Wagnerism, the fairy-tale castles or the drowning in Lake Stamberg. And let us remember too that Ludwig, who must surely be the most perfect Wagnerite of all time, completely rejected Wagner’s anti-Semitism. Adomo once claimed that attending the Bayreuth Festival was akin to actively participating in one’s own oppression. Ludwig gives the lie to this idea right from the start, because not only did Ludwig occasionally tire of the whole Wagnerian circus, staging works in Munich when he lost patience with the composer’s grandstanding; he actually refused to attend a premiere in the Festspielhaus itself. How annoying for the composer that the king, his great benefactor, should turn out to be so independently-minded. In fact, Wagner’s attempt to get the world to think as he did has failed. We are Ludwig’s heirs as well as Wagner’s in that regard. We can honour the greatness of Wagner the artist, but we do not leave our conscience or our critical faculties at the door of the Wagner treasure trove.

Part 3 of Orpheus Ascending can be read here.

The end of the Ring with the Wiener Philharmoniker conducted by Sir Georg Solti and Birgit Nilsson singing in the Culshaw Decca recording can be heard here. 8′ 30”

I’m currently living temporarily in Parkersburg, West Virginia, a state of affairs that has led me to think quite a bit about locality.  My dreams, of course, before coming here were to finally make contact with authentic American folkways, and hopefully foodways, to find local diners and farm markets and maybe even meet a grizzled trapper, a la Withnail and I, who would supply me with rabbits or venison or brook trout.  Ah, Asad, you idiotic city slicker.  The most popular grocery in town is at Wal-Mart, and the diner is Denny’s.  (Though the Georgian fast-food chain, Chick-Fil-A, and their superbly simple chicken sandwich (toasted buttered bun, fried chicken cutlet, pickles), leaves me overjoyed.  When I get back, I think I’m going to open a Chick-Fil-A on, like, Metropolitan and Lorimer and rake it in.)  If anything, the national food distribution system is more entrenched and dominant here in sleepy P-burg, with its forty thousand people, than in New York, where I can choose which season’s milk I want my Parmigiano-Reggiano from DiPalo’s to have been made from, thank you very much.  (I like winter, and I am insufferable.)  But the experience of extreme difficulty finding any locally, sustainably produced food here in WV has gotten me thinking.

A couple of years back, my aunt was kind enough to invite me to a house she rented in Cape Cod during the summer.  Naturally, given my fish obsession, I visited the well-stocked local fish store, excited about the prospect of partaking of the local catch.  Yet upon questioning the honest staff about the provenance of their selection, I learned that while some fish was locally caught, much of the fish was shipped in by truck – swordfish from the Carolinas, bluefin tuna via Boston or even New York’s now-defunct Fulton Fish Market, etc.  I’d had a similar experience in the charming little English seaside town of Aldeburgh, where there was a great selection of fish trucked in from Billingsgate, London’s wholesale market, resting prettily on ice, or being fried and wrapped in newspaper at the delicious fish-and-chip shop on the high street.  (Random aside: I groggily concussed myself one morning there because of the medievally low doorframes.)  Somehow, this seemed wrong, even though in London I would happily buy little vongole shipped from the Adriatic, cause that seems like a metropolitan prerogative.  I was buying into the pastoral myth of the countryside as the authentic source of food.

So, the fish shops of Wellfleet and Aldeburgh are far better than the fish shops in, say equally picturesque mountain villages, yet the fish they stocked was, for the most part, equally accessible to retailers anywhere.  Why the paradox?  Expectation creates demand, and people expect fish near the sea, and like to assume it came right out of that sea, and usually don’t ask if it did.  So fishmongers do business by the sea, often selling farmed fish like cod and salmon that it’s really hard to catch in the sea nowadays, while local fishermen cannot get distribution locally.  Of course, there is wild seafood to be had in Wellfleet and Aldeburgh, it’s just harder to come by in this confusingly globalized day and age.  In the case of Cape Cod, strolling down to the beach revealed thousands of native Wellfleet oysters lying around; I’m happy to report that we gathered and ate at least two hundred, and that my little nephew Sam really liked the tiny crab hitchhiking in our bucket.  The point, however, is that locality is very difficult to ascertain in our current food system, dominated as it is by supermarkets with global supply systems.  Even regional food preferences, where they exist, are largely now maintained for show rather than for the traditional reason that a particular food is in prolific supply in a region, with a few exceptions, such as Maine lobster, Maryland crab and Pacific salmon.

There’s a reason those three items are all, well, seafood.  Fish and seafood are the last wild creatures we eat much of.  But even farmed food’s origins are increasingly unclear these days, as I was finding here in Parkersburg, where my fantasies of connection with the land were being completely thwarted.  By coincidence, the new Michael Pollan book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, had just come out.  Really three books in one, it recounts three meals in Pollan’s trademark analytical goody two-shoes style, one following a confined steer to McDonald’s, one from an organic farm, and one foraged and hunted by Pollan.  The McDonald’s meal comes at the end of a long, and utterly fascinating, description of the dominance of subsidized corn production in the U.S. economy, and how the overabundance of cheap corn threatens to ruin our environment and our very selves.  Pollan makes the astute point that industrial monocultures such as the corn, chicken, and beef industries transform the nation’s landscape into a dystopia.  Rather than the aesthetically pleasing little system of a Georgic ode, we have instead literally disgusting operations the sight and smell of which must be kept in quarantine out of sight.  The synthetic fertilizers and pesticides that industrial agriculture requires pollute water tables and turn frogs hermaphroditic.  The addiction to feeding cheap corn to cows, a ruminant that evolved to eat grass, means that harmful bacteria such as E.Coli multiply in their stomachs.  And finally, the transformation of the rest of that pile of surplus corn into byproducts such as oils, starches, syrups and stabilizers means that most of our cheapest food is just corn byproducts (it occurs to me, with horror: et tu, Chick-Fil-A?).  If I was to propose the simplest possible anti-industrial agriculture diet, I’d say: just don’t eat or drink anything with high-fructose corn syrup or vegetable (i.e. corn and soybean) oil.

To my pleasant surprise, however, Pollan’s second meal is a sunny account of Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm in the nearby Shenadoah Valley.  Salatin is a hero of the “managed pasture” movement, which entails rotating animals on pasture and allowing the grass to recover, rather than separately inputting synthetic fertilizers, corn, and antibiotics.  He pioneered moving chickens in mobile coops after his cows, allowing them to pick grubs and worms out of the cow’s manure, in the process fertilizing the fields, keeping the steer disease-free, and filling their own stomachs.  He has created similarly symbiotic relationships between the pigs, rabbits, and sheep on his farms, all of which rotate around the property while never being allowed to exhaust the pasture.  Salatin’s beef eat only grass, which according to Pollan makes for a much healthier and beefier beef, which is confirmed by my experience of Argentinian grass-fed beef (which, sadly and absurdly, is as illegal here as Pakistani mangoes and unpasteurized French cheese).  And I know for a fact that free-ranging chickens eating a varied diet as Salatin’s do make for much better eating than do your average Purdue broiler.  Salatin is a bit of a nutcase (when Pollan asks how people in New York can get access to food like this, Salatin replies, “Why do we need a New York City?”) but his methods are impeccable, and from 100 acres of farm and 450 acres of forest he produces 30,000 dozen eggs, 11,000 chickens, 25,000 pounds of beef, 25,000 pounds of pork, 1000 turkeys, and 500 rabbits annually.  Of course, this is a drop in the ocean: we’d need thousands of farms like Polyface to feed people this stuff, and food would be much more expensive.

Although, I wonder if it wouldn’t be a good thing for meat, at least, to be a great deal more expensive.  Why should we subsidize the cost of disease-ridden meats itself produced from subsidized corn when people spend barely any money on food as it is?  Would less meat and less sugar in the American diet be a bad thing?  Maybe the worst and most objectionable thing of all, though, about contemporary U.S. foodways is the flavor.  Let’s be honest.  The U.S.A. has the worst quality produce in the world.  An apple or a peach or a strawberry from an average supermarket taste like mildly flavored cellulose.  An apple from an orchard, ripe, in October, tastes complex and perfumed; a summer strawberry from an allotment is like an uncloying little sugar bomb; a real ripe peach from, say, Turkey, in summertime is simply absurdly good to eat.  Yet here we are in the richest country in the world, etc, etc, etc, and we eat food that’s fit for the table of some Protestant Low Country in which toil and suffering in this world bring redemption only in the next.  Unpasteurized cheese, which millions of Europeans eat safely every year, is illegal here out of fear.  Yet the FDA would rather irradiate beef, killing its taste entirely, than impose any punishment upon producers whose product is routinely contaminated with lethal fecal matter.  How are we screwing up this bad?

I don’t have an answer, other than to say that I’m going to be heading over to Salatin’s to fill a cooler with grass-fed beef and chickens and eggs soon.  Pretending to be Argentine, by eating that beef with some chimichurri and some Malbec will be nice.  So, I have realized, will eating food that accords with my general philosophy of taste: it’s better to perform labor procuring something that tastes good than trying to redeem something that doesn’t.  A subway ride to a good butcher is better cooking than following thirty-six steps from Eric Ripert’s cookbook with watery scallops and woody rosemary.  The increasing spiciness of American fast food, I think, is tied to an increasing need to camouflage the blandness and insipidity of the main ingredients.  Not that I’m saying spicy food is bad; I’m Pakistani, after all.  But excessive concealment is a sign of bad ingredients – I have my mother’s father’s favorite cookbook, from 1920’s India, and the recipes are amazingly simple: korma has chicken, onions, ginger, red pepper, and saffron. 

New York is as guilty of overcomplexity as anywhere, with its chattering vogues for senseless combinations and magical thinking about this season’s ingredient, be it lotus bulbs or pork belly.  How often do you see pastas or sandwiches that have four or five too many things on them?  And how rarely do you see people with the rigor of gastronomes past, with a steady assurance as to what goes with what, in what season?  Now we ridicule such inflexibility, residing bravely as we do in the great masala of today, where we have  oversweet versions of Thai food served to us by French chefs.  Take that, orthodoxies of yesterday!, comes our adolescent cry.  Meanwhile, we’ve never eaten the simple, decent reduction from which the lemongrass reduction departs, and have no sense of which rules are being broken.  And lest you think that cooking rules are some kind of dead-European-male thing, some sign of domination, remember this: all cuisines are bounded languages in which utterances have a grammar, and Mexicans, Provençals and Indians are equally protective of their regional foodways.  There’s much pleasure to be had from intermingling them, but much to be lost by forgetting that people ate certain ways because long experience and settled tradition embody much more knowledge of their food than we have.

I recently tried to convince my sister that no spices whatsoever are needed to enhance a good chicken, and thusly cooked her the dish whose recipe I’m about to give you, along with some by-recipes that come along with buying a whole animal and using it unwastefully.  But don’t try it with a factory bird from Giant Eagle, as I did recently, the flesh is mushy and dry simultaneously, and the muscle tone is weird, and the bird just doesn’t taste like anything.  So get something good and then don’t do much to it.  Try this if I haven’t convinced you.  All you need is one good chicken; of course, finding one is harder than it should be.

ROAST CHICKEN

This dish is a touchstone of simplicity, and won the argument with my sister.  I like it with mashed potatoes.  I read accounts of roast chickens in food books all the time, and often order it to test a kitchen, the same way you might do with tandoori chicken and naan at a tandoori place.  By the way, Simon Hopkinson’s Roast Chicken and Other Stories is one of my favorite cookbooks, simple and methodologically sound and really indicative of a chef’s whole style, and he recounts some great tales of L’Ami Louis in Paris and their roast poulet de Bresse with fries.  Oh man.

Serves 4

One chicken, smallish (free-range essential, organic preferable)
Half a lemon
Butter
Salt
Pepper (don’t even ask; yes, freshly)

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees Farenheit.  Take the neck and organs out of the chicken’s cavity, reserving for stock, and put the chicken in a roasting pan.  Put the lemon half in, cut side “up.”  Smear butter all over the chicken, leaving a prodigious amount on the breast.  Sprinkle with a lot of salt and pepper.

Put the chicken in the oven and leave it for an hour.  Open up and check if it’s getting too browned, if so, turn down to 350.  If not, leave and check again in fifteen minutes.  Pull the chicken out, and poke a paring knife into the thigh – the juices will come rushing out clear as a bell.  You should have a really beautiful bird with burnished dark-golden, crackling skin. 

Carve the chicken into pieces (drumsticks, thighs, wings and breast) and remove to platter.  If you don’t know how, just do it; you’ll be fine, it’s dead easy.  Now pour off the accumulated juices into a small saucepan, spooning off excess oil, and squeezing the lemon half into the mix, and boil for a bit (you can mix in some flour here if you want a thick gravy – I prefer thinner juices as a sauce).  Spoon over the chicken, or pass around.  Putting these pieces of chicken over mashed potato provides more starch to absorb the reduced chicken jus, which is a great idea.  Make it with a good chicken, and I guarantee this recipe.

CHICKEN STOCK

Roast chicken bones (including what’s on people’s plates – don’t be shy)
Peppercorns
Bay leaf
Onion, halved
Celery stalk, broken in half
Slice of ginger
Clove of garlic

Put it all in a pot, just cover with water, and bring to boil.  Skim, turn down, and simmer for two hours.  At this point, you’ll have a nice chicken-y stock that beats the pants off any can or cube and you can salt it properly and strain it.  But don’t throw away the bones; take the leftover chicken pieces from the stockpot and pick the meat off the bones – there will be a great deal on the back, especially the two little pearly nuggets on the underside.  French people have some sexy name for them, and they are good.

THREE CHINESE CHICKEN SOUPS

A good way to use chicken stock and meat; funny and old-fashioned but comforting and nice.  Another is to use all the meat for a nice chicken salad.  Another is to cook any vegetable in season (asparagus, celeriac, peas, nettles, you name it) in the stock and then puree it, topping with more pepper and a little Parmigiano, if you want.  Another is to braise lamb shanks in it with onion and fennel and top them gremolata (minced parsley and garlic, mixed).  Another is… well, you get it: it’s good to have some stock around.

Chicken stock with extra chicken meat (see above)
Vinegar
Soy sauce

Flake the reserved meat into the pot of stock, which is simmering on the stove.  Add a little vinegar and a little soy sauce.  Simmer away for a while and then pick one of these three options:

1. Egg Drop: Mix about two tablespoons cornstarch and equal water, then mix into stock, stirring vigorously.  Let thickening magic occur for a while.  Beat an egg in a bowl, and pour into soup, stirring.  You’re done.  Serve with thinly sliced superhot little Indian chilies soaked in vinegar in a little bowl.

2. Chicken Corn: Add a couple of ears worth of corn kernels or a can of corn to the stock.  Then follow the instructions for Egg Drop.

3. Hot and Sour: Add sliced fresh mushrooms, cubed tofu, julienned bamboo shoots, some sliced pork if you have it, extra soy and vinegar, and a mess of white (or black) pepper.  Then follow the instructions for Egg Drop.

The rest of Dispatches.

Dear Shakespeare,

The other day I counted the word “sleep” in 167 passages of your work and I am sure I did not count them all. You have penned sleep in its own image and as a metaphor. You knew sleep:

“The innocent sleep, sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care, The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, Chief nourisher in life’s feast.” (Macbeth, Act II)

And you knew sleep’s associated afflictions, especially its deprivation: insomnia.

Enjoy the honey-heavy dew of slumber: Thou hast neither figures nor no fantasies Which busy care draws in the brains of men; Therefore thou sleep’st so sound. (Julius Cæsar, Act II)

The purpose of my letter is to share with you new information we have learned about sleep and insomnia since your demise in 1616.In the intervening four hundred years; we have invented complex contraptions to study a sleeping person. We can record the brain activity, eye movement, muscle tone, breathing patterns and measure the levels of various substances (chemicals, molecules, hormones) floating in the blood. All these studies have yielded considerable information.

We now describe the architecture of sleep according to the movement of the sleeping eyes, which when moving rapidly is the “rapid eye movement” (REM) phase; the rest is the non rapid eye movement phase (NREM). We start our sleep with NREM and get into REM before waking up. NREM starts with easy arousal light sleep (stage1 and 2) and marches into deep sleep (stage 3 and 4) from which a slumbering person is difficult to arouse. The unpleasant experiences of night terrors, sleepwalking and bed-wetting – the afflictions you are familiar with — occur during deep sleep.

Macbeth had a troubled stage 4 sleep:

“Ere we will eat our meal in fear and sleep In the affliction of these terrible dreams That shake us nightly: better be with the dead, Whom we, to gain our peace, have sent to peace, Than on the torture of the mind to lie In restless ecstasy” (Macbeth, act III)

And Lady Macbeth too sleep walked in her deep stage 4 sleep:

“Since his majesty went into the field, I have seen her rise from her bed, throw her night-gown upon her, unlock her closet, take forth paper, fold it,. write upon’t, read it, afterwards seal it, and again return to bed; yet all this while in a most fast sleep.” (Macbeth, Act V)

Mr. Shakespeare, Did Parolles wet his bed in REM sleep or deep sleep?

“In his sleep he does little harm, save to his bed-clothes about him” (Alls Well That Ends Well, Act IV)

The sleep cycle starts with stage1 during which we drift in and out of sleep, our brain activity slows down. Then we enter stage 2: our brain activity slows down further; our muscles may suddenly jerk but our eyes do not move. Stage 3 shows periods of slow moving delta waves on recording of the brain activity and in stage four our muscles are immobile and brain activity reflects only delta waves. REM sleep follows stage 4: the eyes throw jerky movements, blood pressure rises, breathing becomes shallow and rapid, temporary muscle paralysis ensues, heart pounds faster, men get penile erections and the brain waves gather speed. We indulge in dreams during this active stage of sleep — the brain is hardly idle. (Most mammals and birds show REM sleep, but cold blooded animals and reptiles do not. Do other mammals dream?)

Mercutio got it wrong:

“True, I talk of dreams, which are the children of an idle brain” (Romeo and Juliet, Act I)

We sleep in cycles of NREM and REM and about 90 to 100 minutes elapse from the beginning of stage 1 to the end of REM. This cycle repeats 3 to 6 times at night. In a cycle of 100 minutes, the duration of stage 1 is 10 minutes, stage 2 is 50 minutes; stage 3 and 4 is 15 minutes and finally REM lasts 25 minutes. If we miss our REM sleep, we fall into REM the next night without other stages, till we catch up with this REM deficit.

We flash signals from the base of the brain which either awaken us or put us to sleep. These chemical signals or neurotransmitters like serotonin and norepinephrine exude from the nerve cells (neurons) of the brain stem and keep the brain awake. Other neurons at the base of the brain turn off the awakening process and we fall asleep. The levels of adenosine build up while we are awake and subside during sleep. Caffeine containing potions like coffee and tea inhibit adenosine.

REM sleep is regulated by the part of brain — we call Pons, which sends signals to other parts of the brain and also inhibits neurons in the spinal cord causing temporary paralysis.

We have learnt our bodies function in a cyclic rhythm spread over 25 hours: we call it circadian rhythm. Mere 200,000 neurons in the suprachiasmic nucleus (SCN) of hypothalamus play the role of the body clock. Sunlight or other bright light and even external noise triggers SCN which signals the pineal gland to shuts off the production of melatonin. The pineal gland secrets melatonin (a drowsiness inducing hormone) at night and in darkness. Some people with blindness suffer from sleeping disorders because they are unable to respond to light. Traveling long distance in a short period (jet lag) or change of shift at the work place can disrupt the circadian rhythm.

The neuro-chemical control of sleep is autonomous and we can not voluntarily deprive ourselves of sleep. Cleopatra in her raging defiance may have succeeded in starving herself but to defy sleep was an empty threat.

“Sir, I will eat no meat, I’ll not drink, sir; If idle talk will once be necessary, I’ll not sleep neither: this mortal house I’ll ruin, Do Caesar what he can. Know, sir, that I will not wait pinion’d at your master’s court.” (Antony and Cleopatra, Act V)

Voluntary sleep deprivation may not be possible, yet we have enough reasons to loose sleep: anxiety, depression and body pain. Iago could not sleep because of pain…

“And, being troubled with a raging tooth, I could not sleep.” (Othello, Act III)

And King Richard was anxious.

“For never yet one hour in his bed Have I enjoy’d the golden dew of sleep, But have been waked by his timorous dreams.” (King Richard III, Act IV)

In our “progress” we have added a few more causes of insomnia: jet lag, shift change and stimulant drugs. People who work at night and travel through time zones disturb the sunlight stimulus to circadian regulation.

We have found that sleep is essential for survival – at least for rats. Scientists made rats live on a platform floating in tub of water. When rats drifted into REM sleep their muscles got paralyzed and they slipped off the platform and fell into the water. Poor rats! Wet and drenched they struggled and climbed back onto the platform went into paralyzing REM sleep and fell into water again. Deprived repeatedly of REM sleep, they died in 3 weeks instead of usual 2 to 3 years.

Mr. Shakespeare, do you accuse us of being sadistic? We defend the progress of science at all costs! This very scoundrel race of rats spread the germs that devastated London with bubonic plague which must have caused you a few sleep less nights! Well, we people are adept at taking revenge for historical blood feuds; in his case it is against the rats. Well, they are all rats!

You ask what have we achieved in the past 400 years? We have accumulated wealth and information; yet it is true that our restless days still end up in sleepless nights. King Henry also knew it; money can buy you a bed but not sleep.

“Not all these, laid in bed majestical, Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave, And, but for ceremony, such a wretch, Winding up days with toil and nights with sleep,” (King Henry V, act IV)

You probably think the information gained in the last 400 years has cured our insomnia… not so Mr. Shakespeare: 30 to 50 percent of our people now suffer from insomnia; we are a sleep deprived world. Here is some news for you from the Boston Globe:

The Institute of Medicine report said loss of sleep has increased in recent decades due to longer workdays and computer use and television watching taking up more time. Lack of sleep increases the risk of a variety of health problems, the report said, including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and heart attacks. It also raises the chances of injury or death due to accidents at work, home, or in automobiles. Studies in the 1990s estimated the cost of medical care for sleep disorders at $15.9 billion, the report said. In addition, fatigue is estimated to cost businesses about $150 billion a year in lost productivity and mishaps, and damage from motor vehicle accidents involving tired drivers amounts to at least $48 billion a year. The National Sleep Foundation issued a report indicating only 20 percent of US adolescents get the recommended nine hours of sleep a night.

So, here we are, four centuries after you! Amazing: so much knowledge, yet how little we have learned! We have coaxed but a few ounces of wisdom from the tons of information we have collected and culled. Our data could fill the cavernous base of a medieval church and all the wisdom will rise but slim as a spire. From you we need to learn to build with in the scaffold of wisdom and not on the foundation of data. We need at least as many seers as we have scientists.

“Not poppy, nor mandragora, nor all the drowsy syrups of the world, Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep, Which thou owedst yesterday.” (Othello, Act III)

Let me confess at the outset that my lack of interest in the World Cup is matched only by my ignorance of the sport itself. Call me what you will. A philistine. A provincial. A vulgarian. An ugly American. But I have not been getting up in the morning to watch the matches. There is a reason for this I think. Sports are an acquired taste and deeply autobiographical. I grew up on the Jewish faculty-brat diet of baseball and basketball. By the time I was in college and self-consciously developing an interest in the arts and literature, televised sports seemed like something from a distant planet. When I returned to watching sports in my thirties, it was with the intense relish of rediscovering forgotten pleasures. I wanted the sweet succor of bygone days and older knowledge. Learning new things was for different regions of my brain and other times of day. Thus soccer fell between the cracks in my life. Too bad for me, I hear you say.

By not developing an interest in the World Cup, or at any rate by not professing one, I am something of a traitor to my own professional class. Even the most sports-averse and tweed-adorned professor these days can be seen taking a break to watch the surprising run of Ghana or the stalwart march of the Germans. (I find no great surprise, for example, that this very website, ordinarily so earnest and sober, so interested in international affairs, science, and medicine, has two separate bloggers reporting from the games.) The World Cup has in other words developed an odd kind of reach. It is both sports and not sports. Clearly billions of people who grew up in countries other than my own feel an intensity of fandom I cannot really understand, but which equally clearly provides the kind of visceral pleasure in viewing I can. I am however not interested here in what motivates soccer fans in the countries where the sport thrives. What I’m interested in, rather, is the acquired situational appreciation of soccer and its elevation into a sport that is more than a sport.

Perhaps I should just phrase this is as a simple question. Why do intellectuals or the chattering classes or the intelligentsia care so much about the World Cup? The least generous answer is simple Europhilia. Like smoking Gauloises or eating haggis, watching the tournament expresses a kind of vicarious belonging to a different continent, a sign that you spent your junior year abroad in Florence or Paris or Edinburgh and, when pressed, even know a word or two in a different language. Seen this way, one’s viewing habits provide a form of cultural capital and means of distinction. The sport is not simply a competition like the World Series; it is rather something of an aesthetic artifact, the appreciation of which becomes a badge of sophistication. It is, in the words of the New York Times, a “beautiful game.”

To be a little less cynical, the World Cup is for some clearly less about sports than about international relations and politics. On this account, the games are interesting for their allegorical significance. Teams really do represent nations after all. If say Ghana defeats France then centuries of colonialism and domination are momentarily upended in a great reversal of fortune. Even the uglier dimensions of the tournament—violence, “hooliganism,” racism, and the like—are interesting because they express some underlying sociological or political cause. One is interested in the sport not because it is a “beautiful game” but because of what it reveals about class tensions, race war, the new Europe, etc.

In either case, viewers of the World Cup watch the game from a sort of distance: the distance of aesthetics or of politics. The first translates the game into a mark of distinction and cultural capital; the second translates the game into an allegory or a symptom. The thing about such distance, at least for me, is that it gets in the way of the deeply intuitive and primal enjoyment that accompanies watching a sport with which one is intimately familiar. So I return to autobiography. Suburban kids now seem to be introduced to soccer as a matter of course. (Hence the specter of the American “soccer mom” looming large over pollsters and politicos everywhere.) When I was in elementary school back in the 70s, however, soccer was only beginning to be touted as the next thing to come. Some day soon, we were told, everyone would be kicking checkered balls, right about the same time as we would be measuring things in metric. The great metric conversion never came. And by the time soccer camps and leagues sprung up I was very much into other things. I simply never developed the self-transcending pleasure watching soccer that I did with other sports.

I tend not to think my own history is that unique, so I doubt that many Americans of my generation did either. While I am interested in the interest in the World Cup, therefore, the tournament itself leaves me bored.

The first part of this essay can be found here.

Inevitably, the exaltation and dreams of unity that she harbored during the Sixties were to disappoint Sontag, as they did everyone else. She was going to have to come down from those heights and find her own version of Zagajewski’s soft landing. And that is another thing that makes Susan Sontag so remarkable. At her most exalted, writing in 1968, just after returning from Hanoi, she says:

“I recognized a limited analogy to my present state in Paris in early July when, talking to acquaintances who had been on the barricades in May, I discovered they don’t really accept the failure of their revolution. The reason for their lack of ‘realism’, I think, is that they’re still possessed by the new feelings revealed to them during those weeks—those precious weeks in which vast numbers of ordinarily suspicious, cynical urban people, workers and students, behaved with an unprecedented generosity and warmth and spontaneity toward each other. In a way, then, the young veterans of the barricades are right in not altogether acknowledging their defeat, in being unable fully to believe that things have returned to pre-May normality, if not worse. Actually it is they who are being realistic. Someone who has enjoyed new feelings of that kind—a reprieve, however brief, from the inhibitions on love and trust this society enforces—is never the same again. In him, the ‘revolution’ has just started, and it continues. So I discover that what happened to me in North Vietnam did not end with my return to America, but is still going on.”

The world did return to normalcy, if not worse. But Sontag didn’t indulge in the outright lunacy of the New Left as it spiraled off into fantasyland. (Though she did endorse something of the mood of the New Left in one of her less successful and rather more hysterical essays “What’s Happening in America? (1966).” Still, when the chips were down she didn’t take that path. She kept her head.)

And the hint as to how she kept her cool is already there in the above passage. Her commitment to the integrity of the individual mind was a buttress for her. The solid structure of her mental edifice, built with that sternness of pleasure she never abandoned, allowed her to come in for a soft landing while people like the Situationists or the Yippies or The Weathermen floundered or came apart at the seams.

More than that, she was able to recognize her own missteps and rethink her exaltation. Even as she continued to lament the way in which her new experiences were sullied and her new consciousness never came to pass, she realized that much of its promise, especially in its political variants, had been an illusion. Increasingly in her essays in the Eighties and Nineties she celebrated the writers and artists of Central and Eastern Europe who fought the disaster of the ‘revolution’. In 1997, she was to write, “Intellectuals responsibly taking sides, and putting themselves on the line for what they believe in . . . are a good deal less common than intellectuals taking public positions either in conscious bad faith or in shameless ignorance of what they are pronouncing on: for every Andre Gide or George Orwell or Norberto Bobbio or Andrei Sakharov or Adam Michnik, ten of Romain Rolland or Ilya Ehrenburg or Jean Buadrillard or Peter Handke, et cetera, et cetera.”

She came to see that communism in Vietnam had been a lie and a farce, even as the Vietnamese resistance to the American war machine had been noble and just. She went to Bosnia again and again and never, for even a moment, indulged in the repellant apologies for Serbian nationalism that many of her colleagues on the Left dishonored themselves with. In fact, she always saw Europe and North America’s failure in Bosnia as another manifestation of the shallow interest in material happiness and comfort.

Such a vapid happiness was not what Sontag was referring to in her quest for difficult pleasure.

***

This is not to say that she was happy about politics and culture after the Sixties. Sometimes she was outright despondent. Sometimes she felt she had been tricked. She marveled how her own arguments had come back to haunt her. Things that she had advocated for in the Sixties were realized in ways completely contrary to her original intentions.

For instance in her seminal essay “Against Interpretation” (1962), she argued that criticism had become too Baroque. It was preventing immediate appreciation of things as things. So she made a call for transparence. “Transparence,” she said, “means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.” And then notoriously, at the end of the essay, she proclaimed, “In place of a hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art.”

Later, she came to realize that history had pulled something of a fast one on her. People did begin to appreciate, even worship, surface and appearance. Camp moved further into the mainstream. But it wasn’t happening in the way that Sontag intended. In a preface to Against Interpretation written in 1995 and entitled “Thirty Years Later . . .” she addressed the issue.

“It is not simply that the Sixties have been repudiated, and the dissident spirit quashed, and made the object of intense nostalgia. The ever more triumphant values of consumer capitalism promote–indeed, impose–the cultural mixes and insolence and defense of pleasure that I was advocating for quite different reasons.”

She won a battle at the expense of the greater victory she was hoping for. There was a revolution in a sense, and a democratizing of culture. But Sontag realized that it wasn’t leading to pleasure, real pleasure. Instead, it led to a devaluation of the seriousness of intellect that Sontag took to be a prerequisite for genuine pleasure. In what she calls her own naiveté, Sontag, in the Sixties, made an appeal for changes that consumer culture was only too ready to provide during the next few decades. But those changes came as an empty package. Talking thirty years later about the essays of Against Interpretation, she says, “The judgments of taste expressed in these essays may have prevailed. The values underlying those judgments did not.”

In response to this cruel trick of history, Sontag did verge dangerously close to nostalgia on occasion. Perhaps that is understandable. Her problem was even more acute than the problem of the Central Europeans for whom she had such sensitivity. Central Europeans might look back with some wistfulness on the intense seriousness of the ‘bad old days’ but they were, still, the bad old days. For all of Sontag’s hesitation in identifying with the Sixties as a movement, it was during those years that she experienced her greatest pleasures in art and understanding. They weren’t bad old days at all for her.

And she felt that as she was getting older she was simultaneously witnessing the disappearance of much of what had given her the greatest pleasure. In 1988, she expressed this as a European elegy. Europe, to Sontag, always represented resistance to the tide of philistinism—she even calls it barbarity—that emanates from America and its consumer culture. She says, “The diversity, seriousness, fastidiousness, density of European culture constitute an Archimedean point from which I can, mentally, move the world.”

By the late Eighties, she believed that that Archimedean point was drifting away as Europe became more homogeneous and “Americanized”. Without naming it directly, her contempt for the idea of European integration (this, again, in 1988) is palpable. What she calls the ‘diversity’ of Europe is predicated, for Sontag, on preserving the differences that come with national and thereby cultural boundaries. But with all the language of preservation and loss, Sontag manages to rescue the essay from outright nostalgia. She recognized the malleability and relativity of the “idea of Europe”. The idea of Europe is at its most potent, she argued, when wielded by the Central and European intellectuals who used it, implicitly, as a critique of the Soviet domination they were resisting. But Sontag was also aware that the rallying cry of “Europe” was distinctly unpalatable when raised in Western Europe as a warning against the new immigration. This latter point has only become more incisive in recent years. As always, Sontag was ahead of the times.

Indeed, by the end of her lament for Europe, Sontag turns a corner. Having aired her grievances, she begins to move forward. She comes in for another soft landing. She begins to shift onto another battlefield, moving just as quickly as modern experience does. That quickness, that readiness to move at the pace in which new experiences present themselves allows her, in seeming paradox, to find what is solid and lasting in things. “The modern has its own logic,” she writes, “liberating and immensely destructive, by which the United States, no less than Japan and the rich European countries, is being transformed. Meanwhile, the center has shifted.”

Having started “The Idea of Europe (One More Elegy)” by veering into a cultural conservatism that she spoke so eloquently against in her earliest essays, she manages to steer herself back into more Sontag-like territory. She is prepared to become an exile again, as she always was in the first place. Exiled in the sense that every intellect of integrity stands alone in the last instance, as a self. In asking what will happen next, as the greatness of Europe fades and transforms, Sontag refers to Gertrude Stein’s answer to those who wondered how she would deal with a loss of her roots. “Said Gertrude Stein, her answer perhaps even more Jewish than American: ‘But what good are roots if you can’t take them with you’.”

***

Susan Sontag always understood the melancholic personality lingering in the back alleys of modern consciousness. She understood the will to suicide in men like Walter Benjamin. She knew why Benjamin lived under the sign of Saturn and could write:

“The resistance which modernity offers to the natural productive élan of a person is out of proportion to his strength. It is understandable if a person grows tired and takes refuge in death. Modernity must be under the sign of suicide, an act which seals a heroic will . . . . It is the achievement of modernity in the realm of passions.”

Sontag understood the will to death and failure in Artaud. She understood the will to silence in Beckett and John Cage. Not only did she understand these things, she could write about them clearly, put her finger on them. She knew that Nietzsche’s prognostication about the coming nihilism had come to pass in much of the modern, and modernist, aesthetic she cherished so dearly.

She felt the exhaustion of the modern spirit. But she wasn’t exhausted by it. In her essay on Elias Canetti, “Mind as Passion,” she wrote the following;

“‘I want to feel everything in me before I think it’, Canetti wrote in 1943, and for this, he says, he needs a long life. To die prematurely means having not fully engorged himself and, therefore, having not used his mind as he could. It is almost as if Canetti had to keep his consciousness in a permanent state of avidity, to remain unreconciled to death. ‘It is wonderful that nothing is lost in a mind’, he also wrote in his notebook, in what must have been a not infrequent moment of euphoria, ‘and would not this alone be reason enough to live very long or even forever?’ Recurrent images of needing to feel everything inside himself, of unifying everything in one head, illustrate Canetti’s attempts through magical thinking and moral clamorousness to ‘refute’ death.”

Sontag is writing about Canetti but she is writing about Sontag too. As much as she measured and reported the pulse of an era in thought, art, morals, . . . as much as she eulogized its passing, she also stood for the brute continuation of life, of pleasure, and of joy. She’s dead now, but there is nothing that stimulates a desire to live more than reading one of her essays. If it so happens that we’re stumbling into an age of new seriousness and new sincerity we’re doing so partly because Susan Sontag showed us how important the world can be.

Justin E. H. Smith

[An extensive archive of Justin Smith’s writing can be found at www.jehsmith.com]

Hamburg, Germany

I have just given a talk at the University of Hamburg in the Ernst Cassirer Memorial Lecture Series. What my hosts did not tell me when I was invited was that the event would coincide with some of the early matches of the World Cup, being hosted this year in (just my luck) Germany. I had come to Hamburg to discuss the legacy of Aristotle in the Protestant Reformation, but ended up being practically shut out by the nationwide roar accompanying the Poland-Germany match, with borderline hooligans –and as far as I’m concerned they’re all borderline hooligans– roving the streets shouting ‘Tor!’ as I droned on to an empty auditorium in poorly accented German about Martin Luther’s commentary on Genesis. Today I would like to explain why not just the victory of Germany over Poland, but also the victory in Europe of the drunken rabble over traditional piety, of the circus over the temple, is a thing to be bemoaned. I recognize that some in the 3QD community are ‘pumped’ about this year’s competition, and I do so hate to be a prick. But the fans among you may take comfort in the knowledge that I am grossly outnumbered, and that my quaint plaidoyer will assuredly come to nothing.

How, I want to know, does it manage to command such passions, this month of noise in which the outcome is known in advance? The winning team is of course not known in advance; what is known is that one or the other of them will win, according to inflexible rules that bind all of them equally. The only way the affair can amount to anything more than a mere stochastic process –as when atoms are bound to decay, even if we can’t say which ones– is if something goes terribly wrong, if some non-sportive interference breaks into the flow of events, some interference from the truly interesting domain of politics, a domain from which the fans like to sanctimoniously claim sports gives us a needed reprieve.

Thank God for the irruptions of the political, I say. Without them, there really would be no reason to pay attention to international athletic competitions. With them, we get bizarre reports of Iran’s soccer team being made to watch Sally Field in Not without my Daughter during their visit to France for the 1998 World Cup; we get a Cold War sublimated through doped-up East German shot-putters and 75-pound, slave-driven Chinese gymnasts. And we get Kim Jong Il at his zany best. In 1972, the now-Dear Leader gave a speech to the North Korean national soccer team: “It is very important to develop sports,” he declared. “Pointing out that physical culture is one of the means to strengthen the friendly relations with foreign countries, the great leader [Kim’s father, Kim Il Sung] said that physical culture should be developed. At present, however, the instructions of the great leader are not carried out to the letter in the sphere of physical culture, and sports exchange is not conducted properly, as required by the Party. A common example is the fact that our soccer players were defeated in the recent preliminaries for the Olympic Games.” Kim takes defeat as itself proof that the athletes are lapsing into counterrevolutionary laziness. Should this unsubtle hint that the higher- ups expect to start seeing some victories cause a bit of stress, the Dear Leader has a cure: “As for those whose nerves are on edge,” he assures the team, “they will get better if they live in tents on Rungna Islet.”

(Speaking of geopolitics, why is it that every time American football is brought up by, or in the company of, a European, an awkward apology has to be made for the sport’s name? There are millions of Americans who believe that what they watch on Sunday mornings is football, and as far as I understand language that is enough to make it so. Nor shall I make any apologies for calling soccer ‘soccer’. That is just what it is called where I am from, and to do any differently is nothing but an affectation, like spelling ‘color’ with a ‘u’, or saying ‘bloody’.)

With the end of the Cold War, for the most part sporting events are no longer about nationalism, but about transnational corporations. Nations either prove they can behave themselves, like the perpetually prostrate Germans, or they are not invited, like the North Koreans. An important part of good behavior is to allow yourself, your team, your stadium, and your country to be covered in advertisements.

The corporations have proved better than the old nation-states at pretending that what they are doing is not political. Rather, it is at its dreariest just business, and at its best downright fun. Nike and the other image-makers have convinced us that competitive sports are something that one gets involved in not for love of Fatherland, but for the sheer, personal enjoyment of it. To be Beckham, the suggestion is meant to be, would be to know a life of unmodulated, unadulterated joy.

I am a runner, and so I have no choice but to go into some of the same stores, and think some of the same thoughts, as soccer fans. I buy Nikes and knee-braces, and I run round municipal lakes and parks with athletes and fans of competitive sports. This is the closest I ever come to community with them. When I run in Germany I am often asked by these over-earnest folk, “Ah so, you like to make sport?” Yes, I want to say. Gern. It gives me great joy. It makes me feel like Beckham. With the right shoes on, and the right sport-beverage, I almost feel as though I’m in a commercial, as though I’m moving in slow-motion, as though the promise of the masses chanting ‘We will, we will rock you,’ is at long last coming true.

Bullshit. I run because I’m afraid of letting myself go, as they say, since to do so would be to allow the inevitable unraveling of this mortal coil to define the terms from here on out. It has nothing to do, in other words, with fun. It has to do with sheer terror. In a bygone era, there were many Germans who wrote with conviction and power about terror in the face of death. Now they ‘make sport’.

I do not spend all that much time in Germany, but somehow have managed to be here just in time for the past three World Cups. If it weren’t for these coincidences between my research and lecture schedule on the one hand, and the world’s athletic schedule on the other, I would have no idea of soccer beyond my youth-league misadventures. My first lessons about the World Cup were in 1998, when a gang of German hooligans rampaging outside a stadium in France ended up killing a French policeman. Helmut Kohl went on TV with utmost contrition. He noted, rightly and obviously, that this event brought back distressing memories of a still living history, and declared, wrongly, that this murder had nothing to do with the true spirit of competitive sports. The German people rushed to agree with him on both of these points. Might it be worth considering, though, that far from being the cancer cells of fandom, the hooligans are in fact the true fans, making explicit what it is all this shouting and side-taking is really all about? To wit, violence, in its mild form only vocal and gestural, but not for that reason categorically different from a kick in the shins or a brick in the head.

Heidegger liked to say that the ‘forgetfulness of Being’ that came with the rise of Western rational thought had its ultimate issue in Gerede or pointless small-talk. Heidegger was of course pumped up in his own idiotic way, but still it seems to me that there is something we may justly call ‘forgetful’ about sports fandom. There are, in marked contrast, many other things human beings do in order to come to terms with their fate, rather than to avoid it. These are, in their own way, the opposite of sports. I for my part would rather go to church, I would rather go to a funeral, than to invest one second of my attention in a staged contest between men, in the aftermath of which everything, but everything, is destined to remain the same.

I recently read the novel Saturday by Ian McEwan. I have to admit that in the proverbial sense, despite all the excellent reviews this book has received since its release last year, it really is very good. Near the end, Mr. McEwan’s plot started me thinking about issues related to medical ethics, patient-doctor relationships and the difference between cure and healing. The book tells the story of a Saturday in the life of a neurosurgeon. Right from the start, this weekend is quite extraordinary starting with the doctor chancing upon the sight of an exploding airplane from his bedroom window in the early morning hours and evolving into an increasingly macabre day, finally ending with the doctor and his family held hostage in their own home. Without wishing to divulge any crucial aspect of the plot in this exceptionally well researched and equally well written book, I would like to get to the part that I found thought provoking. In the course of the evening, the criminal who has singularly invoked the wrath of the good doctor by abusing his beloved wife and their twenty-something daughter, retains a head injury. The police and ambulances arrive and the abuser is rushed to the hospital under police custody. No sooner has the family finally soothed their frayed nerves enough to have a drink and think about the dinner they never had does the phone ring and a medical colleague on the line requests the doctor’s expert services urgently at the hospital. The criminal who was just brought in with the head injury is turning out to be a complicated case and therefore in need of greater expertise than what the inexperienced registrar on call could offer. In fact, the neurosurgeon is badly needed. The doctor who called of course has no idea of any connection between the neurosurgeon and the injured patient. The neurosurgeon decides to go and lend his expertise to save that miserable low life who only hours ago had desecrated all that was precious to him. Here is the problem. If he does not go, the man is likely to die. If he does go and operate, can he be trusted to save the life of a man who just a short time ago had inspired the deepest hatred and anger that the doctor was capable of feeling towards another human. Can the doctor be impartial?

I faced an interesting dilemma myself some years ago which made me question my own ability to be impartial. I had received a scientific grant to review from a Government agency. I read it, took detailed notes throughout, and formed a generally negative opinion of the grant. However, before I wrote the formal review, I decided to read it yet another time since something somewhere in the grant had left me feeling uneasy. Sure enough, I realized the source of my discomfort rather quickly upon the next read. There were several passages in one of the published papers sent as supplemental material with the proposal which were much too familiar. In fact, I recognized them as having been written by one of my post docs in a paper we had submitted for publication, and which had been turned down by the reviewers. Now at least we knew who the reviewer was. Apparently he disliked our paper enough to recommend rejection, but liked it enough to plagiarize parts of it. More importantly, we had subsequently submitted our paper to another journal where it was already accepted for publication and was in press. This meant that when our paper finally came out, it would contain passages that had already been published by another author and ironically enough, we are the ones who would appear to be the plagiarizers. Plagiarism is a serious offense and needed to be reported and of course I felt angry and violated. The question was whether I should send in my review of the grant anyway or not. Eventually, I decided to excuse myself from the review process, even though my negative opinion had been formed prior to the discovery of the plagiarized piece, because I did not wish to even give an appearance of a conflict of interest.

It is worthwhile at this point to recall the following Principles adopted by the American Medical Association. These are not laws, but standards of conduct which define the essentials of honorable behavior for the physician.

A physician shall be dedicated to providing competent medical care, with compassion and respect for human dignity and rights.

I. A physician shall uphold the standards of professionalism, be honest in all professional interactions, and strive to report physicians deficient in character or competence, or engaging in fraud or deception, to appropriate entities.

II. A physician shall respect the law and also recognize a responsibility to seek changes in those requirements which are contrary to the best interests of the patient.

III. A physician shall respect the rights of patients, colleagues, and other health professionals, and shall safeguard patient confidences and privacy within the constraints of the law.

IV. A physician shall continue to study, apply, and advance scientific knowledge, maintain a commitment to medical education, make relevant information available to patients, colleagues, and the public, obtain consultation, and use the talents of other health professionals when indicated.

V. A physician shall, in the provision of appropriate patient care, except in emergencies, be free to choose whom to serve, with whom to associate, and the environment in which to provide medical care.

VI. A physician shall recognize a responsibility to participate in activities contributing to the improvement of the community and the betterment of public health.

VII. A physician shall, while caring for a patient, regard responsibility to the patient as paramount.

VIII. A physician shall support access to medical care for all people.

Adopted by the AMA’s House of Delegates June 17, 2001.

Obviously, writing a negative grant review is not the same as saving a life, but the point is how each of our actions would be perceived given that they were performed while we functioned under a spell of psychic violation. Two important tenets of medical ethics are important in this context. In the words of Eric Issacs, M.D., Director of Quality Improvement, San Francisco General Hospital:

Beneficence: refers to acting in the best interests of the patients. This concept often is confused with nonmaleficence, or “do no harm.”

Veracity: is truth telling and honesty.

Clearly, as the only neurosurgeon on hand who could save the patient’s life, the doctor had no choice but to operate and therefore practiced beneficence. However, given the extraordinary circumstances under which the doctor was operating, it was all the more important for him to practice veracity. The patient was unconscious and there was no immediate family to whom he could have spoken, but there were other members of the medical staff and the operation theatre as well as the police escort. I think that under the extraordinary circumstances, the honorable thing to do would have been to practice full disclosure and then proceed with the operation to save the life of a fellow human.

Since the criminal had been caught, one can imagine that now the doctor could overcome his anger and afford to treat him only as a patient. The problem here is the paradox of cure and healing; the doctor may have been cured because the criminal was caught, but not healed. The doctor’s wife asks:

“You’re not thinking about doing something, about some kind of revenge, are you? I want you to tell me.”

“Of course not.”

The distinction between cure and healing is best summarized in this excellent passage by a real life good doctor, Abraham Verghese (“The Healing Paradox” The New York Times, 12-8-02): “If you were robbed one day, and if by the next day the robber was caught and all your goods returned to you, you would only feel partially restored; you would be cured but not healed, your sense of psychic violation would remain. Similarly, with illness, a cure is good, but we want the healing as well, we want the magic that good physicians provide with their personality, their empathy and their reassurance. Perhaps these were qualities that existed in the pre-penicillin days when there was little else to do. But in these days of gene therapy, increasing specialization, managed care and major time constraints, there is a tendency to focus on the illness, the cure, the magic of saving a life. Science needs to be more cognizant of the other magic, the healing if you will, even if we reach for the proven cures. We need to develop and refine that magic of the physician-patient relationship that complements the precise pharmacologic interventions we may prescribe; we need to ensure the wholeness of our encounter with patients; we need to not lose sight of the word “caring” in our care of the patient. And doggedly, in this fashion, one patient at a time, we can restore faith in the fantastic advance of Science we are privileged to witness”.

For a while now, sculpture and painting’s preeminence among the plastic arts has seemed a little anachronistic.  Painters such as Richter or Freud who stick to using paint to do two-dimensional figurations, or sculptors like Serra who stick to ‘raw’ materials like steel over the found objects that decorate so much installation art, feel classic or even old-fashioned.  After Pop art, art and photography that mix media became much more common: Gilbert and George, Lee Bontecou, landscape art, Bruce Nauman.  More recently, the materials of plastic art keep getting more worldly.  Witness the Young British Artists:  Rachel Whiteread (plaster casts of negative space), Chris Offili (dung), Marc Quinn (blood), the Chapmans (figurines), Tracy Emin (household materials and furniture).

While the world has been intruding into art’s materials, and art has been escaping the gallery (as with street art), I’ve been thinking about another development lately, one which leaves plasticity behind altogether: the use of computers, not just to create art, but as the subject of art as well.  For two or three years this field has been gathering momentum, and it feels like a generational shift.  There’s now a group of people approaching thirty who have grown up in an entirely novel social condition, that of having used computers all their lives, and for whom navigating the programmed landscapes of operating systems and icons is as natural as Wordsworth rambling the Lake District.  This is neither a good nor bad development, it’s history.  Anyway, I don’t believe in being too technologically determinist about kinds of art, but looking at the work of this group is incredibly exciting because the kinds of inquiries they make denaturalize and probe their environment, which in their case happens to be the space of computing.  They add computing to the world, and add the world to computing.

Let’s start with the celebrated Cory Arcangel.  Cory’s work usually uses obsolete game systems, computers, file formats, and other computing detritus as the basis for experiments and invasions.  His most famous work is “Super Mario Clouds,” in which he hacked a Super Mario Brothers cartridge to display only the blue sky and floating clouds, a work shown at the Whitney Biennial.  Other stuff includes a shooting game hacked to make Andy Warhol the target, with Flavor Flav and Col. Sanders the decoys;  matching Kurt Cobain’s suicide letter with ads from Google AdSense; rearranging the DVD chapter markers on ‘Simon and Garfunkel Live at Central Park’ to notate all the moments where they look like they hate each other; and so on.  Are you thinking this stuff is juvenile?  You’d be wrong, but in a way, you’d be right: Cory conserves the open-source ethos of young hackers, to the point of supplying instructions for how to replicate his most famous works. 

Cory’s instructions to “Super Mario Clouds” are a very strange and very fascinating kind of aesthetic document.  (They’re also funny.)  As it turns out, his manic methods are refreshingly low-tech, born of a taste for the ground floor of computing.  He writes a new set of instructions that uses the game’s existing graphics, compiles it (translates it into 1’s and 0’s, or assembly language), and burns it onto to the same chip that the original Nintendo uses (he has a chip burner used by Nissan hotrodders who use it to hack their engines).  Then things get even more basic: he takes the game cartridge, desolders and removes the program chip, and solders in his newly burned chip, cutting a hole in the plastic casing to fit it.  The result is a slightly haunting image of a glowing blue sky and those iconic Super Mario Clouds, floating right out of the collective imaginary.

You might wonder why Arcangel doesn’t just make the image on Photoshop; it would be a heckuva lot easier.   Here are his own learned and excitable words:

“A typical NES Cartridge has two chips. One is a graphics chip, and the other is a program chip. Basically the program chip tells the graphics chip where to put the graphics, and thus if you do this in a interesting manner, you have a video game. When making a “Super Mario Clouds” cartridge, I only modify the program chip, and I leave the graphic chip from the original game intact. Therefore since I do not touch the graphics from the original cartridge, the clouds you see are the actual factory soldered clouds that come on the Mario cartridge. There is no generation loss, and no “copying” because I did not even have to make a copy. Wasss up.”

See, these are the real “factory soldered” clouds, chief.  Surely one of the more bizarre yet convincing determinations of authenticity I’ve seen in a while, Cory expresses perfectly the thrill of using the actual relevant materials to create an artwork.  Simply Photoshopping the image would be fake, clearly, yet it’s hard to explain exactly why, a mark of art that applies itself to present conundrums.  Maybe the physical Nintendo cartridge matters because it’s the real physical object that inflected our world, and it’s important to use it, understand it, and work with it.

The first Palm Pilot was exciting to lots of computer geeks because its tiny memory meant ingenious little games were invented and shared, as they were in the initial stages of personal computing.  (I remember writing simple BASIC programs for my Atari 400 and saving them on cassette tapes, which I excitedly played to hear the “sound” of my code, not that I was ever a dork or anything.)  Arcangel returns to the obsolete technologies of his childhood, not as nostalgic fixations (he claims never to have liked playing Mario), but as an aesthetic embrace of the real.  Surrounded by these things, he developed an entirely artistic fixation with changing them, interfering with them, transforming them.  His work, over time, keeps getting simpler, showing how little it takes to get into the cracks of things that appear seamless, like hardware and operating systems.  He takes on challenges for the sake of curiousity: he recently calculated where the exact Manhattan center of Starbucks gravity is, and explained how.  What’s implicit is how just paying the right kind of attention keeps the world interesting, fully alive and of the moment.

The official art world has already begun to sanction this type of work, as the Whitney Biennial makes pretty clear, as well as a recent show at the slightly old-school Pace Wildenstein gallery, curated by Patricia Hughes and featuring Arcangel, Brody Condon, the collective Paper Rad, and others.  Another feature they seem to share is an eclecticism with respect to materials and genres: many of them make music as well as art, and all seem to be feeding off of the whole range of waste-products of consumer obsolescence, rotting eighties junk that begs to be categorized and indexed.  Underneath a lot of this work is a desire for mastery, for lost comprehension, that’s so hard to satisfy in the present condition of unprecedented epistemological overload and confusion.  Cory again:

“We [BEIGE, Cory’s art/music collective] started using fixed architecture machines, computers which are no longer being developed, at this time because it is impossible to keep up with commercial software and hardware. Imagine trying to play Bach on the piano if they switched keys around every few years … and charged you for it! Plus the limited capabilities of these computers allows us to understand every aspect of the machine.”

Hence the attraction to precisely the limitations of older systems.  To take another recent example, have a look at this short animation from Michael Bell-Smith, entitled “Keep On Moving (Don’t Stop).”  The use of the squarish graphical template of early role-playing games has a similarly aesthetic, as opposed to nostalgic, motivation to that of Arcangel’s work.  It’s got the immersion in music too: yellow is color of sunrays.  The cheery quest followed by the recursive, fractal surprise at the end – trapped! – suggests the computer game as a new locale of the culture industry, appropriating all attempts to escape.  Adorno would have liked to have predicted it, but here the feeling isn’t as dour, it’s more pragmatic: we’re stuck with this world, so let’s transform it.  This topos isn’t chosen because of fondness, this is part of the air, part of the world and how we represent ourselves now.  And because computer avatarship is inescapable, it’s all the more important to subject computing to an aesthetic investigation.  I’ve seen works by the macro-photographer Andreas Gursky and the miniaturist painter Shazia Sikander that use computer animation, but this current group goes further.  They make art, not just using computers as a engineering tool, but out of and delving into computing as a cultural form.

See some more Dispatches.

Professor Robert Langdon, hero of Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code,  is a well-known symbologist, American, and bachelor.  In the space of a few days in Paris and London, Langdon is accused of murder, seeks the Holy Grail, and gets the first date he’s had in years.  He’s a classic bumbling hero, roused from a hotel slumber to meet Bezu Fache, the captain of the Central Directorate Judicial Police who is hell-bent on arresting him; Sophie Neveu, a cryptologist who believes Langdon can help solve the mystery of her grandfather’s murder; and Sir Leigh Teabing, the world’s preeminent Holy Grail scholar.  Dan Brown doesn’t give us too much personal information about our hero, preferring instead to let chatty Langdon provide most of the historical exposition, but we do know that he has had but one love in his life, a woman named Vittoria who drifted away a year before The DaVinci Code picks up.  Langdon, like most every other character in the book, is looking for a lady.

The DaVinci Code is a competent thriller, but it takes more than that to sell over 40 million copies and nearly $200 million worth of movie tickets.  Dan Brown’s genre elements – murder, escape, conspiracy, romance – exist first in the primary plot starring Langdon and company, and finally in a more famous plot starring Jesus Christ and his disciples.  Murder, escape, and conspiracy are all familiar Biblical elements, but romance?  There’s where the 40 million copies come into play.  Robert Langdon’s newest manuscript asserts that the Holy Grail is the sarcophagus of Mary Magdalene and documents that trace her bloodline into the present day.  Why Mary?  She allegedly married and bore the child of Jesus Christ.  This is more than Biblical gossip though, because Dan Brown’s Catholic Church has suppressed Mary’s claim to the church (ie, the sacred feminine) and seeks to destroy the Grail and murder Christ’s living descendents.  The DaVinci Code is ostensibly a book about restoration of (or failing that, reverence for) female power – so how come there’s only one female character in the book?

If Dan Brown doesn’t tell us much about Robert Langdon, he tells us even less about Sophie Neveu.  At least Langdon’s ramblings and manuscripts are evidence of his own passion and intellectual life; Sophie’s interest in cryptology is attributed directly to the design of the grandfather who raised her. If Sophie had a love at one point, he doesn’t get a name – we know just that she is lonely.  She’s useful to the search for the Grail only because of her hazy childhood memories.  Sophie is a human code, and she needs Langdon to help her read herself.  There’s nothing inherently wrong with a lonely repressed lady cryptologist, but Brown isolates her in a world where female power has been lost, and encourages only the men to reclaim it.

When Langdon informs his lecture hall of the “mind boggling” “concept of sex as a pathway to God” held by the early church, he fields a question from the crowd:

“Professor Langdon?” A male student in back raised his hand, sounding hopeful.  “Are you saying that instead of going to chapel, we should have more sex?”  Langdon chuckled, not about to take the bait.  From what he’d heard about Harvard parties, these kids were having more than enough sex.  “Gentlemen,” he said, knowing he was on tender ground, “might I offer a suggestion for all of you.  Without being so bold as to condone pre-marital sex, and without being so naïve as to think you’re all chaste angels, I will give you this bit of advice about your sex lives.”  All the men in the audience leaned forward, listening intently.  “The next time  you find  yourself with a woman, look in your heart and see if you cannot approach sex as a mystical, spiritual act.  Challenge yourself to find that spark of divinity that man can only achieve through union with the sacred feminine.”  (310)

What’s interesting here is that Langdon responds only to the “gentlemen” in his class.  He perceives the question – a misunderstanding of his lecture – to be fundamentally male, and assumes either that women already have an appropriate attitude toward sex or that perhaps they don’t need that appropriate attitude if the man has it.  There’s no space in his treatment of the sex act for female sexuality except as a conduit for a male experienced “spark of divinity.”  Sophie Neveu is positioned similarly in the narrative – there’s no space for her experience of the murder or Grail quest outside of what it means for her late grandfather and her male companions.  She is the portal through which the academics finally make tangible their theory.  Her agency is only as great as the extent to which Langdon and Teabing exploit her.  Dan Brown offers few clues, in a 454 page bestseller about the suppression and celebration of the ‘sacred feminine,’ as to how a woman might negotiate her own intrinsic divinity.

Sophie, though she serves as an object of desire for the bulk of The DaVinci Code, only behaves sexually after she learns herself to be the direct descendant of Mary Magdalene and Jesus Christ.  It’s as if Brown can’t ask his heroine to reevaluate her sex life in the same manner that he asks men, through Langdon, to; instead he fashions Sophie as a blank slate.  She doesn’t endure a reawakening at the conclusion of the novel, but an awakening:

The stars were just appearing, but to the west, a single point of light glowed brighter than any other.  Langdon smiled when he saw it.  It was Venus.  The ancient Goddess shining down with her steady and patient light…Langdon looked over at Sophie.  Her eyes were closed, her lips relaxed in a contented smile…Reluctantly, he squeezed her hand…Langdon felt an unexpected sadness to realize he would be returning to Paris without her.  “I’m sorry, I’m not very good at—”  Sophie reached out and placed her soft hand on the side of his face.  Then, leaning forward, she kissed him tenderly on the cheek.  [Langdon asks Sophie to meet him in Florence the following month, and she agrees as long as they avoid museums etc.]  “In Florence?  For a week?  There’s nothing else to do.”  Sophie leaned forward and kissed him again, now on the lips.  Their bodies came together, softly at first, and then completely.  When she pulled away, her eyes were full of promise.  “Right,” Langdon managed.  “It’s a date.”  (448-449)

This is an unremarkable conclusion to an unremarkable romance plot, except for the fact that Brown offers no representations of female desire not explicitly allied with a Goddess.  If her enlightened sex with Langdon will in fact help her explore her spirituality, why does this probihit Brown from acknowledging her prior sexual impulses?  Jane Schaberg and Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre point out in their article “There’s Something About Mary Magdalene” that female sexuality in The DaVinci Code exclusively “helps men achieve their full spiritual potential,” but they also posit that Brown’s Christianity is one that “appeals to those looking for a spirituality not based in creed or authority, but on knowledge, personal reflection and an embodied life in the world.”  (Ms. Magazine, Spring 2006)  In The DaVinci Code, however, no woman who is not literally the descendant of a goddess negotiates such a spirituality.  Individual women – like Vittoria, who made choices illegible to Langdon – are absent.  Brown keeps women abstract by referring to them only in groups: Langdon’s female students “smiled knowingly, nodding” (but don’t speak to each other as the men do), no female participant in a traditional sex ritual is identified (as Sophie’s grandfather is), an unnamed Parisian academic reminds Langdon of all the simpering women back home, a nun is emblematic of a body of believers, and Sophie’s grandmother represents the entire bloodline of Mary Magdalene.  For the individual woman in The DaVinci Code, there is no “embodied life in the world” if it does not involve a male body – or if she is a part of the literal bloodline of Jesus and Mary.

One scene in The DaVinci Code stands out from the rest.  It’s not included in the screen adaptation by Akiva Goldsman.  In it, Langdon and Sophie take a cab ride through the Bois de Boulogne:

Langdon was having trouble concentrating as a scattering of the park’s nocturnal residents were already emerging from the shadows and flaunting their wares in the glare of the headlights.  Ahead, two topless teenage girls shot smoldering gazes into the taxi.  Beyond them, a well-oiled black man in a G-string turned and flexed his buttocks.  Beside him, a gorgeous blond woman lifted her miniskirt to reveal that she was not, in fact, a woman…Langdon nodded, unable to imagine a less congruous a backdrop for the legend he was about to tell.  (157)

Sophie doesn’t have trouble paying attention; her eyes are “riveted” on Langdon. It’s also worth noting that the women appear in groups here as well.  But the scene’s explicit depiction of a secular shadowy sexual marketplace is unique within the novel. Here a more complex web of connections between individual and temporal sexualities, lifestyles, and belief systems is glimpsed. Langdon himself seems to congratulate his author on the decision.  Unfortunately, the cab-driver’s radio begins to crackle with news of the fugitives, and Langdon and Sophie have to hightail it out of the Bois de Boulogne, and it’s on to a Swiss Bank to search for the distillation of the sacred feminine.

Leonard Cohen’s music first came to me in my early teens. I fell deeply in love, and thought, this will pass, this is an adolescent thing, a phase, an infatuation; time or luck will have me grow out of this.

His words came to me—as many great things come to me, in pathetic or even hideous masks, to test whether or not I am easily fooled by the disguises woven to hide their wondrous nature—in Oliver Stone’s 1994 movie Natural Born Killers. It is a rather dismissible movie, though the soundtrack is amazing (thank you, Trent Reznor et al.), and it did its job of delivering the unexpected, unforeseeable goods.

But by then I already, albeit unwittingly, knew these two introductory songs, “The Future” and “Waiting for the Miracle,” from one of my friend Vanessa’s mixed tapes. I just didn’t know who was behind the suave voice. A few years and several album acquisitions later, an acquaintance in Rome asked me what I was listening to at the moment, and it was Cohen’s 1973 album Live Songs. The response so impressed me that I bring it to you verbatim: “Leonard Cohen? Nobody listens to him anymore. We were all listening to him in the late seventies, when we were young and radical and left.” Yeah, I left. I’m fine being told that my tastes are quite yesterday, and I knew this guy probably didn’t get it because he was, well, who he was. He was also definitely one of the numerous Europeans who helped make Cohen more popular over there than in North America by not understanding his lyrics.

Well, to echo the rampant name-calling that follows him everywhere, the Ladies’ Man, the Grocer of Despair, grandson of the Prince of Grammarians, has just published a new old book, titled Book of Longing, and was on the radio three weeks ago chatting with Terry Gross. She did a fairly good job, considering that the usual sort of questions, many of which she tried, really didn’t fit here, and Cohen seems to be no comforter.

Lie to me, Leonard

Firstly, he lied his way through the entire hour. Okay, perhaps they weren’t all lies, and the ones that were lies were committed with some definite * intentions (*I’m at a loss for the appropriate adjective: honest? Low? Lofty? Sick? Sweet? Romantic? All of the above?). The truth is that he can’t help how charming he is, and frankly it’s a miracle he’s done what he has to melt deeply frozen hearts. He had tea on April 21 with his Zen master in celebration of the latter’s ninety-ninth birthday, but immediately backtracks to point out that it wasn’t tea—it was liquor. In his poem “Titles” he reads that “I hated everyone / but I acted generously / and no one found me out.” He valiantly assures the listener that this is true, and equally valiantly contradicts it in song and in print. Plus, I can’t help but suspect that many people have found him out. Is it possible to feign this man’s passion? Probably, but I just don’t want to think so.

Alright, that’s not so many lies. But a lot of interesting things came up. When discussing the idea of composing a poem versus composing a song, Gross asks him about the early sixties song “Famous Blue Raincoat” and which of those two it originally was, to which he replies, “It’s all the same to me.” [Aside: forgive me for sticking to the script here and bringing up the blockbuster songs, when I’d rather fawn over the lesser-known songs like “Teachers,” “Passing Through,” “Who by Fire,” “If It be Your Will,” “Here It Is,” etc.]

A lot of what one might call romantic creation is touted here. Ignoring the famous traits of “despair, romantic longing, and cynicism” alongside the idea that “at the same time, there’s a spiritual quality to many of his songs” mentioned as an introductory nothingness on the radio show, when asked where “Famous Blue Raincoat” came from, he replies, “I don’t know, I don’t remember how it arose—I don’t remember how any of them get written.” When asked why he left the Zen center after five or six years of work there, he replies, “I don’t know… I’m never sure why I do anything, to tell you the truth.” About the creation of “Everybody Knows,” “I don’t really remember…. You see, if I really remembered the conditions which produce good songs, I’d try to establish them,” going on to mention the use of napkins, notebooks, etc.

Then there’s the sheer hard labor of it:

You get it but you get it after sweating…. I can’t discard anything unless I finish it, so I have to finish the verses that I discard. So it takes a long time; I have to finish it to know whether it deserves to survive in the song, so in that sense all the songs take a long time. And although the good lines come unbidden, they’re anticipated, and the anticipation involves a patient application to the enterprise.

Of the early-nineties song “Always,” Gross points out that he’s taken a song by Irving Berlin and added a few lines, making it “suddenly very dark and sour.” His quick reply: “Well, you can depend on me for that…”. His is “a kind of drunken version of it.” He’d like to do a song in the vein of those great American songbook lyricists he doesn’t feel equal to:

I have a very limited kind of expression, but I’ve done the best that I can with it, and I’ve worked it as diligently as I can, but I don’t really—except for songs like “Hallelujah,” or “If It be Your Will,” I think those are two of my best songs—I don’t live up to… those great songwriters….

There’s a lot of things I’d like to do, but when you’re actually in the trenches, and, you know, you’re in front of the page or… the guitar or the keyboard under your hands, you know you have to deal with where the energy is, what arises, what presents itself with a certain kind of urgency. So, in those final moments, you really don’t choose, you just go where the smoke is, and the flames and the glow or the fire, you just go there.

The Ponies Run the Girls are Young

But enough about composition. My favorite bits are where Cohen plays the role of the [not exactly dirty] old man. Page 56 of his new book carries a poem for a certain Sandy, and what girl doesn’t occasionally want to be the Sandy sung to here? “I know you had to lie to me / I know you had to cheat / To pose all hot and high behind / The veils of sheer deceit / Our perfect porn aristocrat / So elegant and cheap / I’m old but I’m still into that / A thousand kisses deep.” Age is very present here, and while he’s sung of so many other mortal weaknesses over the past forty-plus years, it seems he had to wait for this particular one to sink into the bones before it began to permeate his work. In four short lines on page 171 you learn the sorrows of the elderly. Go to page 14 to read my favorite tidbit written to a young nun, speaking of staggered births, time disposing of two people whose generations separate them, and whose turn it is to die for love, whose to resurrect. This one is too beautiful to steal from page to pixel.

Betrayal also comes up. In the end the letter writer who sings about that famous blue raincoat has his woman stolen by the letter recipient. In speaking about such games, his age now seems to save him:

Fortunately I’ve been expelled from that particular dangerous garden, you know, by my age… so I’m not participating in these maneuvers with the frequency that I once did. But I think that when one is in that world, even if the situation does not result in any catastrophic splits as it does in “Famous Blue Raincoat,” one is always, you know, edging, one is always protecting one’s lover, one is always on the edge of a jealous disposition.

Later he specifies that one does not become exempt from that garden, but is just not as welcome. So what are the trade-offs for no longer being welcome? If nothing else, there’s a special voice, which in Cohen’s case is undeniably alluring. He apparently acquired it through, “well, about 500 tons of whiskey and a million cigarettes—fifty, sixty years of smoking…”. I didn’t know tar could be turned to gold.

The Fall

Then comes the most terrifying subject of all, beauty—physical beauty, superficial beauty. We are either enslaved by it, embody it, or attach ourselves to someone who does. He is still oppressed by the figures of beauty, just as he was thirty-two years ago. And here he’s at his most graceful:

I still stagger and fall…. Of course it just happens to me all the time, you just have to get very careful about it, because it’s inappropriate for an elderly chap to register authentically his feelings, you know, because they really could be interpreted, so you really have to get quite covert as you get older… or you have to find some avuncular way of responding, but still, you just, really are just, you’re wounded, you stagger, and you fall.

One feels deeply in love, and thinks this will pass, this is a phase, an infatuation; time or luck will have me grow out of this.

A Monday Musing by Morgan Meis about Cohen is here, and previous Lunar Refractions can be seen here.

What is the legacy of two thousand years of Christianity? What are the specific qualities that the Christian tradition has instilled and cultivated in the minds of men? They appear to be twofold, and dangerously allied: on the one hand, a more refined sense of truth than any other human civilization has known, an almost uncontrollable drive for absolute spiritual and intellectual certainties. We are speaking of a theology that through St. Thomas Aquinas assimilated into its grand system the genius of Aristotle and whose Inquisitors in the Church bequeathed to modern science its arsenal of weapons for the interrogation of truth. The will to truth in the Christian tradition is overwhelming. On the other hand, we have also inherited the ever-present suspicion that life on this earth is not in itself a supreme value, but is in need of a higher, a transcendental redemption and justification. We feel that there is something wrong with us, or that the world itself needs salvation. Alas, this unholy alliance is bound finally to corrode the very beliefs on which it rests. For the Christian mind, exercised and guided in its search for knowledge by one of the most sophisticated and comprehensive theologies the world has ever seen, has, at the same time, been fashioned and directed by the indelible Christian distrust of the ways of the world. Such a mind will eventually, in a frenzy of intellectual honesty, unmask as humbug what it began by regarding as its highest values. The boundless faith in truth, a joint legacy of Christ and Greek, will in the end dislodge every possible belief in the truth of any faith. For the Christian, belief in God becomes—unbelievable. Ergo Nietzsche:

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in broad daylight, ran to the marketplace and cried incessantly: “I seek God! I seek God!” As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? Emigrated? Thus they yelled and laughed.

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God? I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers… God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

His listeners fell silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. “I have come too early,” he said then; “my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men… This deed is still more distant from men than the most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves.”

God, as Nietzsche puts it, is dead; and you and I, with the relentless little knives of our own intellect—psychology, history, and science—we have killed him. God is dead. Note well the paradox contained in those words. Nietzsche never says that there was no God, but that the Eternal has been vanquished by time, the Immortal has suffered death at the hands of mortals. God is dead. It is a cry mingled of despair and triumph, reducing, by comparison, the whose story of atheism and agnosticism before and after to the level of respectable mediocrity and making it sound like a collection of announcements by bankers who regret that they are unable to invest in an unsafe proposition.

Nietzsche brings to its perverse conclusion a line of religious thought and experience linked to the names of St. Paul, St. Augustine, Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Dostoevsky, minds for whom God was not simply the creator of an order of nature within which man has his clearly defined place, but to whom He came in order to challenge their natural being, making demands which appeared absurd in the light of natural reason.

Nietzsche is the madman, breaking with his sinister news into the marketplace complacency of the pharisees of unbelief. We moderns have done away with God, and yet the report of our deed has not reached us. We know not what we have done, but He who could forgive us is no more. No wonder Nietzsche considers the death of God the greatest event in modern history and the cause of extreme danger. “The story I have to tell is the history of the next two centuries,” he writes. “Where we live, soon nobody will be able to exist.” Men will become enemies, and each his own enemy. From now on, with their sense of faith raging within, frustrated and impotent, men will hate, however many comforts they lavish upon themselves; and they will hate themselves with a new hatred, unconsciously at work in the depths of their souls. True, there will be ever-better reformers of society, ever-better socialists and artists, ever-better hospitals, an ever-increasing intolerance of pain and poverty and suffering and death, and an ever more fanatical craving for the greatest happiness of the greatest numbers. Yet the deepest impulse informing their striving will not be love, and it will not be compassion. Its true source will be the panic-stricken determination not to have to ask the questions that arise in the shadow of God’s death: “What now is the meaning of life? Is there nothing more to our existence than mere passage?” For these are the questions that remind us most painfully that we have done away with the only answers we had.

The time, Nietzsche predicts, is fast approaching when secular crusaders, tools of man’s collective suicide, will devastate the world with their rival claims to compensate for the lost kingdom of Heaven by setting up on earth the ideological economies of democracy and justice, economies which, by the very force of the spiritual derangement involved, will lead to the values of cruelty, exploitation, and slavery. “There will be wars such as have never been waged on Earth. I foresee something terrible, chaos everywhere. Nothing left which is of any value, nothing which commands, ‘Though shalt!’” Ecce homo; behold the man, homo modernus, homo nihilismus. Nihilism—the state of human beings and societies faced with a total eclipse of all values—thrives in the shadow of God’s death. We have vanquished God, but we have yet to vanquish the nihilism that has risen up within us to take God’s place. There is a profound nihilism at work in this world. How are we to deal with this, the legacy of our greatest deed? There is no going back; there can be no going back. We are perched atop a juggernaut; the reins of that sad cart have been passed to us by the four Horseman of modernity—Nietzsche, Freud, Marx and Darwin. Do we heave back on them now? I think not—we must drive them ever faster, until the juggernaut topples and we nimbles, we free spirits, have the opportunity to leap forward and beyond our time. Play more soccer.

Garbed in cap and gown and subjected probably for the first time in their lives to quaint Latin orations, three quarters of a million students, sheepskin in hand, will bound forth into the national economy, hungry for jobs, economic security, and social advancement. They exit a higher education economy that looks and works more and more like the national economy they now enter. The ivory tower has become the office block, and its professors highly paid workers in an $317 billion dollar business.

Some of this is, of course, old news. From the Berkeley 1964 Free Speech movement onward, the corporate vision of American universities as factories of knowledge production and consumption bureaucratically organized as the late Clark Kerr’s “multiversities,” has been contested, but has largely come to pass.

But even to this insider (confession of interest: I am now completing my 20th year before the university masthead), there are new lows to which my world is sinking. They amount to the transformation of American universities into entrepreneurial firms, and in some cases, multinational corporations.

Most of you by now are used to the fact that universities are big business. The press never stops talking about the $26 billion Harvard endowment, or how the rest of the Ivy League and Stanford are scheming to be nipping at old John Harvard’s much-touched toes. But many non-elite schools are joining the race for big money and to become big businesses. Twenty-two universities now have billion dollar fund-raising campaigns underway. After talking with a colleague from the University of Iowa on another matter, I went to the university web page to discover that Iowa has raised over a billion dollars in a major campaign since 1999 – not bad when you recall that the state itself only has 3 million residents. Even my university, the City University of New York, the ur-urban ladder to social mobility for generations of immigrants and poor, has announced that it is embarking on a billion-dollar crusade.

In addition to billion-dollar endowments, there is revenue to consider. You might be surprised at all of the billion dollar universities in neighborhoods near you. All it really takes to put a university over the billion-dollar revenue mark is a hospital. Iowa, for instance, is a half billion a year all-purpose education shop; add its medical school and hospital system, and its revenue quadruples. A big enrollment urban school like Temple does a billion dollars of health care business in Philadelphia, easily surpassing its educational budget of 660 million. These university budgets often depend as much on the rates of Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement as they do tuitions from their various educational activities.

Tuitions are no small matter, of course, for those who pay them. The elite schools have recently crossed the $40,000 a year threshold, but the perhaps more important and less noticed change in higher education finances is that states are passing more of the burden for public college and university education directly onto the students themselves. The publics enroll three quarters of the nation’s students. As late as the 1980s, according to Katharine Lyall in a January, 2006 article in Change, states paid about half of the cost of their education; now the proportion has dropped to 30%. For instance, only 18% of the University of Michigan’s bills are paid by the state; for the University of Virginia, state support drops to 8%. Baby-boomers on that six-year plan at “old state” where they paid in the hundreds for their semester drinking and drug privileges find themselves now paying an average yearly tuition of $5,500 a year for their kids. When you add in room and board, a year at “old state” now costs an average of $15,500 a year, a figure that is 35% of the median income for a U.S. family of four.

So under-funded are important state universities that they are resorting to tax-like surcharges to make up for chronic state neglect. The University of Illinois, for example, is adding an annual $500 “assessment” on student bills for what the university president Joseph White, as quoted by Dave Newbart in the April 7 Chicago Sun-Times, describes as deferred maintenance. “The roofs are leaking and the caulking is crumbling and the concrete is disintegrating,” President White says. Next year it will cost $17,650 to go to Champaign-Urbana. The state will cover only 25% of Illinois’ costs.

Illinois’ President Newbart may be a bit old-school, and perhaps has lagged back of the pack of higher education industrial leaders. He should get smart. Instead of milking the kids on a per capita basis and incurring undying consumer wrath (after all the plaster was cracked way before I got there, I can hear a student voice or two saying), Newbart should join his peers in a little financial manipulation. What do big firms with billions in assets and large revenue flows do? They sell bonds! So much money, so little interest. And with principal due after a succession of presidents has become so many oil portraits in the board room, so little personal and professional exposure. With the increasingly short tenure of university presidents, even Groucho Marx’s Quincy Adams Wagstaff could get out in time.

American universities have made a very big bet on their future prosperity. They have issued over $33 billion in bonds, according to the May 18 Economist. For the multinationals like Harvard, this is sound money management. To raise working capital, rather than sell some of their stock portfolio at a less than optimal moment or sell the 265-acre arboretum near my house which would diminish the university endowment, Harvard can use its assets as guarantees. The university’s credit is AAA, interest rates are still historically fairly low, and their tax-exempt status makes them attractive investment choices. Harvard can deploy the money in new projects, or re-invest it in higher-yielding instruments and pocket the difference tax-free.

The entrepreneurial universities, that is, those not internationally branded and not elite, are trying to gain a competitive edge. They borrow through bonds to build dormitories, student unions, and to beautify their campuses. Many are borrowing money they don’t have or can’t easily repay. As the saying goes, they are becoming “highly leveraged.” A turn around a town with more than a few universities will likely reveal how it’s raining dorm rooms locally. Here in Boston, it has afflicted universities on both sides of the Charles. Even an avowedly commuter campus like the University of Massachusetts-Boston is building dorms to create that market-defined “campus” feel. Bonds pay for the dorms, and the students through higher rents, pay them off.

The educative value of dorm living, smart remarks aside, is rather problematic. Talking with an old friend who heads an academic department at a Boston university, I have begun to understand, however, the business logic at work. His bosses have explained the situation thus: the last of the baby boomer progeny are passing through the system, and a trough lies behind them. The children of baby-boomers, alas, prefer the reproductive freedoms of their parents, and are having children late as well. International students, full-tuition payers and once the source of great profit, are choosing increasingly non-American universities, for a variety of reasons, some related to our closed-door policy after 9/11. Add income difficulties among the American middle class, and the entrepreneurial universities calculate that they must improve their marketability and take business from others. Expand market share, create new markets (new diplomas, new student populations), or fight to keep even, they reason. Or face decline, now perhaps even a bit more steep since they are into hock for millions of dollars in bond repayments. The “high yield” customer is the traditional customer, a late adolescent of parents with deepish pockets. So dorms, fitness gyms, and student unions it is, and the faculty is mum.

In the great expand-or-die moment occurring among America’s entrepreneurial universities, you would think faculty would be making out, but they aren’t. Let us set aside for another time comment on the highly limited American Idol, star search quests among the elite schools and the entrepreneurs’ somewhat desperate casting about for rainmakers and high-profile individuals who can help in creating a distinctive brand for their paymasters. College and university faculty salaries as a whole since 1970 have stagnated, the U.S. Department of Education reports. Part of the reason is that although the number of faculty has risen 88% since 1975, the actual number of tenured faculty has increased by only 24%, and their proportion of the total has dropped from 37% in 1975 to 24% in 2003. Full-time, non-tenure track and part-time faculty are being used to meet increased demand. Universities are succeeding in gradually eliminating tenure as a condition of future faculty employment.

Forty-three years after Kerr presented his concept of the “multiversity,” the facts conform in many respects to his vision. American universities are massive producers of knowledge commanded by technocrats who guide their experts toward new domains of experiment and scientific discovery. They possess a virtual monopoly on postsecondary education, having adapted over the past half century to provide even the majority share of the nation’s technical and applied professional training.

But swimming with instead of against the stream of American capitalism over the past half century has cost American universities what few degrees of freedom they possessed. They have become captives of corporate capitalism and have adopted its business model. They are reducing faculty to itinerant instructors. Bloated with marketeers, fund-raisers, finance experts, and layers of customer service representatives, they are complicated and expensive to run, and risky to maintain when the demographic clock winds down or competition intensifies. Moreover, as Harry Lewis, a Harvard College dean pushed out by the outgoing President Larry Summers, put rather archly in the May 27 Boston Globe, students whose parents paying more than $40,000 a year “expect the university to treat them customers, not like acolytes in some temple they are privileged to enter.”

As a priest in the temple, it hurts to note how much further down the road we have gone in reducing teaching and learning to a simple commodity. However, in demanding to be treated as customers, students and their parents are simply revealing the huckster we have put behind the veil. Their demands cannot change the course of American universities for the better, but they tell those of us still inside where we stand, and where we must begin anew our struggle.

While a large part of mainstream America was blissfully enjoying their long Memorial Day weekend, fans of the Ultimate Fighting Championship franchise were glued to their Pay-Per-View TV sets, watching the end of an era. In the pinnacle event of UFC-60, the reigning welterweight champion, Matt Hughes, faced off against UFC legend Royce Gracie — and won, by technical knockout, when the referee stopped the fight  about 4 minutes and 30 seconds into the very first round.

To fully appreciate the significance of Hughes’ achievement, one must know a bit about the UFC’s 12-1/2-year history. The enterprise was founded in 1993 by Royce’s older brother, Rorion Gracie, as a means of proving the brutal effectiveness of his family’s signature style of jujitsu. The concept was simple, yet brilliant: invite fighters from every conceivable style of martial art to compete against each other in a full-contact, no-holds-barred martial arts tournament, with no weight classes, no time limits, and very few taboos. No biting, no fish-hooks to the nostrils or mouth, no eye gouging, and no throat strikes. Everything else was fair game, including groin strikes.

(Admittedly, the fighters tended to honor an unspoken “gentlemen’s agreement” not to make use of groin strikes. That’s why karate master Keith Hackney stirred up such a controversy in UFC-III when he broke that agreement in his match against sumo wrestler Emmanuel Yarbrough and repeatedly pounded on Yarbrough’s groin to escape a hold. I personally never had a problem with Hackney’s decision. He was seriously out-sized, and if you’re going to enter a no-holds-barred tournament, you should expect your opponent to be a little ruthless in a pinch. But the universe meted out its own form of justice: Hackney beat Yarbrough but broke his hand and had to drop out of the tournament.)

The first UFC was an eight-man, round-robin tournament, with each man fighting three times — defeating each opponent while still remaining healthy enough to continue — to reach the final round. Since no state athletic commission would ever consider sanctioning such a brutal event, the UFC was semi-underground, finding its home in places like Denver, Colorado, which had very little regulations in place to monitor full-contact sports. Think Bloodsport, without the deaths, but plenty of blood and broken bones, and a generous sampling of testosterone-induced cheese. (Bikini-clad ring girls, anyone?)

Rorion chose his younger brother, Royce, to defend the family honor because Royce was tall and slim (6’1″, 180 pounds) and not very intimidating in demeanor. He didn’t look like a fighter, not in the least, and with no weight classes, frequently found himself paired against powerful opponents with bulging pecs and biceps who outweighed him by a good 50 pounds or more. And Royce kicked ass, time and again, winning three of the first four UFC events. (In UFC-III, he won his first match against the much-larger Kimo, but the injuries he sustained in the process were sufficient to force him to drop out of the tournament.)

He beat shootfighter Ken Shamrock (who later moved to the more lucrative pro-wrestling circuit) not once, but twice, despite his size disadvantage. His technique was just too damned good. Among other things, he knew how to maximize leverage so that he didn’t need to exert nearly as much force to defeat his opponents. Shamrock (pictured at right) has said that Gracie might be lacking in strength, “but he’s very hard to get a hold of, and the way he moves his legs and arms, he always is in a position to sweep or go for a submission.”

UFC fans soon got used to the familiar sight of the pre-fight “Gracie Train”: When his name was announced, Royce would walk to the Octagon, accompanied by a long line of all his brothers, cousins, hell, probably a few uncles and distant cousins just for good measure, each with his hands on the shoulders of the man in front of him as a show of family solidarity and strength. And of course, looking on and beaming with pride, was his revered father, Helio Gracie (now 93), who founded the style as a young man — and then made sure he sired enough sons to carry on the dynasty.

Royce’s crowning achievement arguably occurred in 1994, when, in UFC-IV’s final match, he defeated champion wrestler Dan “The Beast” Severn. Many fight fans consider the fight among the greatest in sports history, and not just because Severn, at 6’2″ and 262 pounds, outweighed Royce by nearly 100 pounds. Technique-wise, the two men were very well-matched, and for over 20 minutes, Severn actually had Royce pinned on his shoulders against the mesh wall of the Octagon. Nobody expected Royce to get out of that predicament, but instead, he pulled off a completely unexpected triangle choke with his legs, forcing Severn to tap out.

For all his swaggering machismo, Royce was one of my heroes in those early days, mostly because I had just started training in a different style of jujitsu (strongly oriented toward self-defense), at a tiny storefront school in Brooklyn called Bay Ridge Dojo. True, it was a much more humble, amateur environment than the world of the UFC, but Royce gave me hope. I trained in a heavy contact, predominantly male dojo, and at 5’7″ and 125 pounds, was frequently outsized by my class mates. My favorite quote by Royce: “I never worry about the size of a man, or his strength. You can’t pick your opponents. If you’re 180 pounds and a guy 250 pounds comes up to you on the street, you can’t tell him you need a weight class and a time limit. You have to defend yourself. If you know the technique, you can defend yourself against anyone, of any size.” And he proved it, time and again.

For smaller mere mortals like me, with less developed technique, size definitely mattered. The stark reality of this was burned into my memory the first time one of the guys kicked me so hard, he knocked me into the wall. Needless to say, there was a heavy physical toll: the occasional bloody nose, odd sprain, broken bone, a dislocated wrist, and a spectacular head injury resulting from a missed block that required 14 stitches. (I still proudly bear a faint, jagged two-inch scar across my forehead. And I never made that mistake again.) I didn’t let any of it faze me. I worked doggedly on improving my technique and hired a personal trainer, packing on an extra 30 pounds of muscle over the course of two years. Not very feminine, I admit: I looked like a beefier version of Xena, Warrior Princess. At least I could take the abuse a little better. In October 2000, I became only the second woman in my system’s history to earn a black belt.

I learned a lot over that seven-year journey. Most importantly, I learned that Royce was right: good technique can compensate for a size and strength disadvantage. It’s just that the greater the size differential, the better your technique has to be, because there is that much less margin for error. And if your opponent is equally skilled — well, that’s when the trouble can start, even for a champion like Royce.

After those early, spectacular victories, Royce faded from the UFC spotlight for awhile, focusing his efforts on the burgeoning Gracie industry: there is now a Gracie jujitsu school in almost every major US city. He’d proved his point, repeatedly, and it’s always wise to quit while you’re at the top. But every now and then he’d re-emerge, just to prove he still had the chops to be a contender. As recently as December 2004, he defeated the 6’8″, 483-pound (!) Chad Rowan in two minutes, 13 seconds, with a simple wrist lock. (“Either submit, or have it broken,” he supposedly said. Rowan wisely submitted.)

The very fact of Royce’s success inevitably caused the sport to change. Fighters were forced to learn groundfighting skills. Back when the UFC was all about martial arts style versus style, many fighters in more traditional disciplines — karate, tae kwon do, kickboxing — had never really learned how to fight effectively on the ground. The moniker changed from No-Holds-Barred, to Mixed Martial Arts — a far more accurate designation these days. Today, the UFC has time limits (with occasional restarts to please the fans, who get bored watching a lengthy stalemate between two world-class grapplers), and even more rules: no hair-pulling, and no breaking fingers and toes. The formula is commercially successful — UFC events typically garner Nielsen ratings on a par with NBA and NHL games on cable television — but these are not conditions that favor the Gracie style. Eventual defeat was practically inevitable.

And so it came to pass over Memorial Day weekend. The UFC torch has passed to Hughes. But Royce’s legacy is incontrovertible. He changed the face of the sport forever by dominating so completely, that he forced everyone else to adapt to him. That’s why he was one of the first three fighters to be inducted into the UFC Hall of Fame (along with Shamrock and Severn). Royce Gracie will always be a legend.

When not taking random walks at 3 Quarks Daily, Jennifer Ouellette muses about physics and culture at her own blog, Cocktail Party Physics.