New York Diary

a link

2007-03-04T22:32:00.001-05:00

Okay, so it turns out I'm not housing my new blog at worlddiary. Instead, link here:

http://thiswideworld.blogspot.com

And that really is the end.

-end-

2007-02-15T10:35:00.000-05:00

Dear friends,

It's been two weeks since my last post and I think it's fair to say that this blog is now defunct. I've really enjoyed this excercise in virtual community, and I think there have been some good and interesting exchanges. Thanks to all who read and all who have posted comments. I'm surprised to say that I feel I've made a couple of friends this way (which is something completely unexpected--I was just hoping to keep thinking about the world around me, and possibly to keep distant friends and relatives posted on my whereabouts and activities). For those of you who I don't know in person but who sent me emails or replied to various posts, thank you. I am much more optimistic about "new media" and much more willing to accept that online communities really ARE communities now that I've spent a reasonable amount of time perusing them.

I rarely post about my personal life, but (oddly) I feel I owe some sort of explanation for my sudden departure. For those of you who know me personally and were shocked to see that I became a corporate hack, you'll be pleased to know that I've handed in my resignation. Don't get too excited: the exercise in shameless capitalism was a good thing, and I'm certainly not ruling out a glorious return to the private sector. I freely confess I've grown partial to lavish quarterly parties and snazzy corporate logos, not to mention my 401(k), dental insurance, and year-end bonus check. I know what I'm leaving behind, and it is a lot.

But I've always had vague plans to travel extensively. Now I will indulge them. If there's anything that being established in New York has given me, it's a renewed sense of wanderlust, along with a bankroll to finance it. In March, I fly to my home away from home in Indonesia, where I will meet old friends. From there, the world awaits.

I do love this city, though. When I started this blog, I was very much an outsider commenting upon this one-of-a-kind, crazy, glamorous, wonderful place that I was watching from my balcony. Now I'm as much a part of the scene as an observor: I care who the mayor is, whether the baseball field has artificial turf, and that too few people visit the Brooklyn Museum of art. I know where to get fantastic sushi and stylish drinks and I can wander around the Village without getting lost in the backstreets. I like it here.

But I don't think I could live in New York long-term. I miss trees and yards, beautiful vistas, knowing my neighbors, driving fast on empty roads, and a million other things that simply have no place in this city. I think I miss the academic world, too; getting paid to read is perhaps the greatest luxury there is. I'll probably go back to school before I get another "real" job (though, having had an intellectually stimulating job with great friends already, I'm still not entirely sure about this).

The next month or so is a haze of planning for my departure: moving out of the apartment, finalizing visas, wrapping up at work. I'm going to try to keep a blog while I'm on the road, too; check back at www.worlddiary.blogspot.com in March. (If I use another site instead, I'll let you know in an update here.)

Finally, you can all write to me at the addresses below. I promise a post card to anybody who does so (if I get your letter, at least). Also, if you're one of those regular readers who lives in Europe, Asia, or Africa, I'll be swinging through your neck of the woods in the next year. Want to meet up?

So long, all. It's been an awful lot of fun.

ADDRESSES, as promised

2007-02-15T02:40:00.000-05:00

Yogyakarta (mail by March 1):

LOWEY-BALL, SHAWNAKIM
Poste Restante
Kantor Pos Yogyakarta
Java, INDONESIA

Bottom right-hand corner:
Tolong simpan sampai 19 Maret 2007.

Vienna (mail by March 18):

LOWEY-BALL, SHAWNAKIM
c/o American Express Travel Service
Kaerntnerstrasse 21-23
Vienna, Austria A-1010

Bottom right-hand corner:
Please hold until April 15 2007

Moscow (for first pickup, mail by April 2; for second pickup, by May 15):

LOWEY-BALL, SHAWNAKIM
c/o American Express Travel Service
Улица Усачёва 33
Дом 1
Москва 119048
RUSSIA

Bottom right-hand corner:
Please hold until 8 June 2007

LOWEY-BALL, SHAWNAKIM c/o American Express Travel Service
Usacheva Street 33
Building 1
Moscow 119048

You can try the English address above if the Cyrillic is giving you a hard time, but no guarantees it'll make it there.

Beijing (mail by April 15):

LOWEY-BALL, SHAWNAKIM
Poste Restante
GPO Beijing
Jianguomen Beidajie
Beijing
CHINA
(phone 6512 8120)

Bottom right-hand corner:
Please hold until 26 April 2007

Istanbul (mail by June 4):

LOWEY-BALL, SHAWNAKIM
Poste Restante
Merkez Postanesi
Istanbul
TURKEY

Bottom right-hand corner:
Please hold until 27 June 2007

Cairo (mail by July 2):

LOWEY-BALL, SHAWNAKIM
c/o American Express
15 Sharia Qasr el-Nil
Down Town
Cairo
EGYPT

Bottom right-hand corner:
Please hold until 13 July 2007

Casablanca (mail by July 20):

LOWEY-BALL, SHAWNAKIM
c/o American Express
4 Rue Turgot
Quartier Racine
Casablanca 20100
MOROCCO

Bottom right-hand corner:
Please hold until 15 August 2007

Rome (mail by August 15):

LOWEY-BALL, SHAWNAKIM
c/o American Express Travel Services
Piazza Di Spagna 38
Roma 00187
ITALY

Bottom right-hand corner:
Please hold until 30 August 2007

Experiment, Part 2

2007-01-31T19:27:00.000-05:00

Hey folks. I've been kind of out of commission, but now I'm back, ready to pick up and see if anybody other than Noir actually read the Chesterton story. (Tangentially, in the meantime I read Corelli's Mandolin, and it was great. Highly recommended, especially as a study in human and humane moral ambiguities. Nobody is precisely evil, though many do terrible things; no one is precisely good, though we are nonetheless compelled to sympathize with a few main characters. Obviously, this contrasts distinctly with the Chesterton piece.)

On to Chesterton. I really like Thursday, both the straight adventure/detective story and because of the surreal twists at the end. Surely the chase scene must win some sort of award, too: foot to steed to car to fire engine, elephant, and hot air balloon... what more could one desire?

Oh, you desire questions, too, and attendant thoughts? It's your lucky day.

The Questions

1. Is this a book about the superiority of order over anarchy? Or is it a book about the unity of order and anarchy?

My first impression was the former; Zq's was the latter. Both seem plausible to me. To be sure, all of the heroes idealize order and are fighting against chaos in the world in this book; indeed it is just this struggle that is going on when the book opens and Gregory and Syme are facing off about the nature of poetry. If Syme is the hero and Gregory the villain, then perhaps we should say with Syme that "the rare, strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross, obvious thing is to miss it. We feel it is epical when man with one wild arrow strikes a distant bird. Is it not also epical when man with one wild engine strikes a distant station? Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street or to Bagdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria.... Every time a train comes in I feel that it has broken past batteries of besiegers, and that man has won a battle against chaos." This is Syme's battle, and Syme is Chesterton's hero.

But there is a compelling counterargument which points out that it is evil and chaos in the world that make order a possible choice for Syme. If Syme is a hero because he makes right choices, then surely there is some great value in the chaos that he tries to eschew (and, despite that fact, in which he constantly finds himself embroiled). Most importantly, the seeming chaos in Syme's world is not random; it is in fact a carefully controlled anarchy that leads Syme inexorably to his preordained place at the end of the book. If it is chaotic, it is also both predicted and ordered. Perhaps, then, we should say that, on a human scale at least, Chesterton is arguing for a kind of unity of the passions.

But to me, Thursday just doesn't seem to be drawing the necessary sort of equivalence between anarchy and order. It seems instead to be an apologetics for evil in the world, and it asks us to equate evil with anarchism. Perhaps Chesterton is indeed saying that most evil is illusory, or that it is necessary that even good people surrounded by uniformly good people should feel themselves alone and embattled--but this is because they have right opinions about real evil (even if that real evil is, well, unrealized), not because there is no real evil. It does seem to me that we are meant to take a passion for true chaos to be the great evil in the world, and quite distinct from a love of order and right and goodness.

2. What does it mean that the book is subtitled "A Nightmare?"

Of course this suggests the dreamlike, surreal, and unbelievable ending to what began as a well-grounded and recognizable thriller. But it also seems to suggest that Syme's world is undesirable. This seems nonobvious to me. Can we tell from this book what would be more desirable? Perhaps a world in which there is no struggle between good and bad? Or a world in which nobody has a predisposition towards anarchy?

Or perhaps this book is nightmarish simply because nothing is as it seems. Everybody goes around in disguise; good people fight against other good people; the biggest bad guy is also the greatest moral force in the world. I don't know.

3. Do you think the book has any real implications for earthly governance?

Thursday is, of course, allegorical, but on its face it is also about anarchy and government in our world. Must Chesterton think--well, anything coherent at all--about governance here on this earth, in order to maintain a consistency with his allegory or his theology?

The obvious claim, I think, is that privileging predictability over revolt and order over anarchy would argue always against revolution. There some big differences, however, between trying to overthrow God and trying to overthrow one's government (not the least of which are 1. God is definitionally good, and 2. It is possible to successfully overthrow one's government). So much of the dialogue is political argument, though, that I wonder if there are any real political opinions being expressed.

4. What the hell is going on with the notes during the chase scene?

I mean this most sincerely. I just don't get it. Here I'm talking about the notes that Sunday leaves for Our Heroes the Days of the Week as they chase him around: "The word, I fancy, should be 'pink'" and "Your beauty has not left me indifferent.--From LITTLE SNOWDROP" and "What about Martin Tupper now." Are these just random? It seems so unlikely. Beautifully, Chesterton's book is tightly ordered from the start (much as it claims all things ought to be, if you buy what I'm saying under question # 1). This is allegory, and from the beginning each secret agent somehow embodies the day of Creation that he represents. Having finished the book, if one goes back to the beginning and restarts it one finds right away that Chesterton is giving away the game to anybody who is paying attention. (The obvious fact that the police commissioner is the same fellow as Sunday only reconfirms this consistency from the start.) The story develops in unexpected ways, but it is anything but random. (In fact, this might itself be another remove of allegory: just as Syme's story is carefully crafted by Sunday, but seems chaotic, desperate, and uncertain to him, The Man Who Was Thursday has been similarly organized and pored over, despite the fact that it seems to us to be moving swiftly and wildly towards the absurd.) As a result, I feel like there should be some satisfying interpretation of these notes that Sunday sends to the members of the Council. But what could it be?

5. Doesn't Thursday imply that human suffering imparts moral force?

Chesterton seems to be answering the "Why is there suffering in the world?" question not by the (perpetually unsatisfying) appeal to free will, but rather by saying that the suffering of his heroes provides an answer to Gregory's otherwise-valid sense of moral superiority. This seems at first to be a much better answer than saying, "Well, we must have suffering in order to have free choice." By making his agents know loneliness, fear, faithlessness, and battle, Sunday negates Gregory's ability to take the moral high ground when he stands alone against a much greater power. No longer can Gregory portray his anarchism as a noble struggle against those who are perfect and who, consequently, have never have known any sort of suffering at all; we all know that it is precisely playing into the hands of Chesterton's God when Gregory expounds, "The unpardonable sin of the supreme power is that it is supreme.... You sit in your chairs of stone, and have never come down from them. You are the seven angels of heaven, and you have had no troubles. Oh, I could forgive you everything, you that rule all mankind, if I could feel for once that you had suffered for one hour a real agony such as I...." Of course the "seven angels" have come down from their thrones, have suffered real agony, and are therefore entirely unconvinced (as are we, the readers).

But what kind of world is it where suffering imparts moral force? We can see that Gregory's monologue is deliciously misguided, but taking a step back from the literary, I just don't see why it is necessary to have good people suffer real agonies just to deflate his victories. Is it such a great good, after all, that the good folks should, by virtue of their own harships, be able to ignore the sufferings of the bad people? If Gregory's stance appeared noble, is it less so because of what another, unrelated person has experienced? And if it is actually ignoble, is that affected by what Bull or Syme or the Professor has been through? Surely not. Yet Chesterton does seem to require this reading. Gregory's anarchism is base because one can suffer nobly for a good cause just as well as for a bad one.

How odd. And how undesirable in a world.

Perhaps that's why the book is a nightmare?

Life, Love, and Death at the Operahouse

2007-01-24T01:10:00.000-05:00

Zyl and I went to the opera tonight. Regular readers of this blog already know about my predeliction for opera and they're good enough not to be too harsh about my lack of modern cultural literacy (I don't even own a TV, for goodness's sake, but I do like to go hear the Verdi), so I'll spare you the full-blown account of tonight's awesomeness. Suffice it to say that Hei-Kyung Hong was uncomfortable on the high notes; Wookyung Kim was a very, very solid Alfredo; Charles Taylor made a fantastic Germont with an easy, rich, well-developed baritone; the set was as impressive as ever at the Met; and somehow Zyl managed to score us seats in the center of the front row of the balcony at a Metropolitan Opera production of La Triviata. Surely these were the best seats in the house.

There is a fine line between being so brilliant that people don't understand what you're saying and being so crazy that they don't believe you even when they do understand. Most of the time, I think, Fred Ahl finds himself on the more desirable side of this line (though he certainly has his wacky moments). Operas tend to end in ways that are rather melodramatic--and rather depressing. There are exceptions, of course (The Magic Flute comes to mind), but even when circumstances turn out exactly as one would hope, the main characters tend unnecessarily to die and to do so in dramatic fashion. This is especially true in Triviata, where Verdi manages to stretch a death scene into a whole act, and where about seven times you are convinced that our heroine is well, is cured, is feeling better, is renewed by having the love of her life back in her life, etc., only to suddenly see her collapse once again and then finally die with her repentant lover by her side. It could have been such a happy ending! And the give and take, the "now-I'm-feeling-better-and-I-shall-go-out, oh-wait-now-I'm-feeling-ill-again-and-I'm-sure-I-shall-die" literally made me laugh aloud at the operahouse. Verdi must have had a grand time watching his first audience react: "Oh no! She'll die!" "No, wait, she's well again!" "No, she's deathly pale!" "Yes!" "No!" "How will it all end?" The whole thing is very silly.

Fred Ahl (remember him?) introduced me to the very clever notion that Frenchmen and Italians are far more likely to think of love and death as ready compliments, while ourselves and the Germans are wont to find this notion a bit odd. This is for the simple reason that "l'amour" is nicely alliterative with "la mort" (as is "l'amore" with "la morte") while "love" and "life" (and "liebe" and "leben") are natural poetic partners in our more Germanic, less Latinate language. This has snowball effects: we might not remember Marlowe's

Come live with me, and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That valleys, groves, hills and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields...

But his turn of speech has made it down through the years and is engrained in popular culture. Indeed, we hear resonances of the same idea all the time when we urge others to "love life" and even when we talk about our "love lives." Love and life are very close things in our language.

Not so for those who speak romance languages. For them, rather, the poetry of the ages is more "L'amour et la mort" (a real poem by 19th-century poetess Louise Ackermann) than "Live with me and be my love." This darker love-and-death set of associations has also entered popular culture, even yielding entire academic subcultures focused on the natural polarity of love and death.

I myself have nothing brilliant to add to this (I'm no Fred Ahl), but perhaps it does give some insight into the French and Italian operatic obsession with killing off all the main characters just before the curtain falls.

Oh, and if you want an example of good thinking taken just across the borders of craziness, feel free to check out Fred's (very interesting, very clever, and, ahem, rather overly bold) Sophocles' Oedipus: Evidence and Self Conviction.

An Experiment

2007-01-16T18:31:00.000-05:00

I think it was Guy Noir who suggested a while back that we all read something together. Well, I'm going to propose now that we do this, with absolutely no idea whether or not it will take. We shall see, I guess.

Zq read a book: G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday. He then gifted me this book, which I've read. In the meantime, V, Al, and Q (none of whom check this blog, so I guess they won't be participating in our little conversation) picked it up, because I was talking about it. Well, that seems promising. And the book does have many merits that make it particularly well-suited to an experiment of this sort, namely:

It's short.
It's out of copyright, so you can get it for free on the internet if you like that sort of thing.
It's an easy read, kind of detective story-meets-adventure thriller-meets-philosophical and theological playground. You could imagine a joke: A detective, an anarchist, and God walk into a bar...
There are parts of the thing that I just don't understand, even though I really like it. It would be cool if somebody else could jump in and offer ideas (serious or wacky--whatever).

I have the beginnings of a robust reading of this book--some already put into well-formed email discussion, even--but I'll spare you for the time being and just let you read it yourself. I'll post again on this sometime next week, okay y'all? Maybe you'll join me?

***

Now for the other side of this post, which has to do with the relative virtues of the Book Club. I've never been a member of such a thing. On the one hand, I can see that sharing literature--or, for that matter, nonfictional texts--tends to make it richer, because it allows you to add other peoples' insights and enthusiasms to your own. But the flip side of this is the inability to sustain a lengthy train of thought when conversing amicably. Friendly discussion is not the place for extended monologues; devising strong readings of rich texts may well be best done by exploring an idea rigorously, however.

I think people might jump on me for antisocial tendencies if I suggest that I might rather work through literature alone than with the help of others. To forfend that possibility, I'm going to use an analogy. Let's say you've got a calculus problem in front of you, along with the solution. You have some desire to understand that problem. Well, it makes sense for you to sit down with it and to go through the solution step by step, making sure you really wrap your head around each of the elements that are going into it. It also makes sense for you to sit down with a tutor or an advisor or a friend who understands these things and whose goal is to help you understand them, too. But, I propose to you, you're not going to get nearly as much out of a group of people in a similar situation as yourself, who are all trying to understand the problem for themselves, and who are proposing various ways to solve it and starting here and there and talking about this and that possibility without really knowing what is going on. After an hour of this, you might have some ideas as to what the significance of the problem is and why the solution works. But an hour following the solution step-by-step surely would have gotten you much farther.

A book is interesting; it is analogous both to the problem and the solution. Novels contain within themselves their own answers. (I suppose the "question" of a text is not much more or less than, "What does this mean, is it interesting, and is it beautiful?") I find it immensely satisfying to sit down with a book or poem and to try to work through its richness, to come up with some strong reading of the thing. This is helped by the teacher or friend who says, "Here is what I think this book is about and the way I think these elements come together; why don't you build on that?" It isn't helped as much, at least, by the peers who are as muddle-headed as I am. It's not that I dislike spoken exchange, but that it moves too fast for me; I haven't yet explored notion # 1 to my own satisfaction before notions # 2-12 have been put on the table, tweaked, and summarily dismissed.

There's something satisfying about the written exchange, though. After all, one does get quite a lot out of sharing ideas; it's good to have others to help clear up one's muddle-headedness, if only they can do so at a pace which isn't cloying (and this is what a teacher in an ideal world does). Writing controls the flow, and lets one go at one's own speed, following this or that notion as far as one likes before accepting it--or giving up on it.

This blog thing might just be the perfect medium for group discussion of that sort. Maybe Noir is on to something.

Zeroes and the Infinite

2007-01-05T23:02:00.000-05:00

I recently read a book about the history of 0 (that is, the number, zero) and its place in the development of mathematics. The author talks about ancient Greek math towards the beginning of the work, and he suggests that the reason the Greeks had no zero was that they were fundamentally geometers who thought about numbers primarily as measures and mathematics primarily as a study of relative proportions. Ratios don't make much sense when you start to stick zeroes in there; the length of my big toe might be 3/2 as long as your big toe, but it's nonsense to say that anybody's toes could be 4/0 the size of somebody else's (and surely there's no need to compare two things if I've only got one of them, which is essentially what one is doing when one says that the ratio of apples to oranges is 0 to 52--I mean, there just aren't any apples to be dealt with in the first place).

The most interesting part of this account is not the math and it's not the history, either (both of which are really quite rudimentary here). Rather, it's the passing mention of the fact that the Greek word for "ratio" is logos. This struck me; I've always taken logos to mean something like "word" or "discourse" or even "reason"--all with very verbal connotations. The reason I was so taken with logos as a mathematical term is because I know it primarily through John 1:1.

en arch hn o logoV, kai o logoV hn proV ton qeon, kai qeoV hn o logoV.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

See? Even in its more philosophical uses, logos has clear cultural, Biblical connotations as a word to do with words. This it is; it is much more, as well.

Q offers a good historical account of where the above (KJV) translation came from--namely, the Latin Vulgate, which we presume to have used verbum in the place of logos. That sounds plausible to me, and is the sort of thing that Q would know.

But come on! Why on earth, given all the salient possibilities to do with rationality (in both the logical and the mathematical senses), would you think that the best translation of this little bit of the Gospel--the translation most likely to highlight God's inherent reason, order, and place in nature--is the one where we use the word "word" (or, for that matter, the relatively boring Latin "verbum")? Doesn't it make more sense if you say, "In the beginning was reason and mathematical truth, and these things were with God, and they were God?" That seems far more compelling to me.

Or does this just highlight that I don't really understand the compulsions of religion?

Corpo Desko

2007-01-03T18:10:00.000-05:00

My favorite cartoon currently in syndication is the politically incorrect, occasionally dark, sometimes self-referential, and often pun-filled Pearls Before Swine, by Stephan Pastis. I love the wordplay of the strip; I love the sheer idiocy of many of its various characters; I love the cowboys who settle their disputes by discussing their feelings, the vikings who like to watch Oprah, and the nonsequitorial misadventures of the ill-fated Angry Bob.

This is why, for Christmas (or Hannukah, or New Year's Day--it's not entirely clear to me), a friend gave me the 2006 Pearls Before Swine desk calendar.

This is how I know I'm a grown-up now.

The corporate desk calendar was always the domain of my father. Round about December 20th, my brother and I used to coordinate closely in order to make sure that my dad received one, and only one, desk calender at Christmas. (This has dropped off now, but it certainly used to be de rigeur.) I find it a bit odd, to say the least, that such a gift has now become practical and appropriate to give to me.

The trappings of adulthood are interesting. How is it that flying off to Ireland on my own, hosting dinner parties for friends, and reading serious history books don't appear to me to identify myself as particularly grown-up, but the possession of a calendar full of amusing comic strips does?

Weird and Wonderful World

2006-12-28T19:29:00.000-05:00

This wired, interconnected world of ours is amazing. I am writing this from New York, where I've just eaten supper. I had lunch in Charlotte, breakfast in Jacksonville, and I'll wake up tomorrow in Dublin. I've got a wireless daypass, which means I can surf the web in these airports. I have a Skype headset, which means I can chat to friends in Europe and New York.

But what really gets me is how easy and accessible these things are. I was given my headset for free, and Skyping people the world over costs precisely zero dollars. I say I have a wireless daypass, but the fact of the matter is that in neither Jacksonville nor Charlotte did I have to pay to use the airport's internet (and it seems that, by some fluke of the system, I'm on for free here in New York, too--though I don't think that's supposed to happen). It's not just possible for me to call Dublin to confirm flight times--without a phone, from an airport--but it's free.

Of course I had to buy my wireless-enabled laptop, and I had to hang out near an expat cafe in the city (where Skype was giving away free headsets), but these particular services still really do cost nothing. I didn't buy my laptop in order to chat every once-in-a-blue-moon when I'm having a long day of traveling.

And of course, the travelling isn't free. (In fact, given the decline of the dollar, international travel is insanely expensive.) But it still never ceases to amaze me. How the ancient Greeks--or even the colonial Americans--would have been stunned to see our cell phones, satellites, airplanes, and internet!

I'm stunned, too.

The Value of Money

2006-12-18T04:35:00.000-05:00

Unusual Sign the American Economy is Going Down the Tubes: Last Thursday, the U.S. Mint banned people from melting down their pennies and nickels. Given the price of metals on the open market, a new penny is now worth 1.12 cents, pre-192 pennies are worth 2.04 cents, and nickels are worth 6.99 cents. (Note that it costs more than this to make a penny; this is just the market-value of the copper and zinc (and it's the same with the nickel - 6.99 cents is the fair market value of the nickel.) Making a coin also requires paying for the shaping, melting, setting, and stamping that go into the whole deal, of course.) People are also banned from exporting the coins (because, obviously, somebody in Nefarious Foreign Country X could melt them down perfectly legally), though this has some practical exceptions for tourists and pneumismatists (and banks?). Now you tell me that if this keeps up there won't be a black market in United States coinage.

Surely the whole point of money is that it is a convenient proxy for a thing of inherent worth, not a way to artificially legislate that something inherently worthy... well... isn't.

If you go to www.coinflation.com, you can get a live tracking of the inherent value of coins currently in circulation.

Thinking about this stuff is really quite an interesting exercise. That's because, for money to work efficiently, we have to pretend that it doesn't have any inherent worth. This is an illusion, of course, and it's an illusion that financiers take advantage of all the time (even without melting coins--all they have to do is a bit of exchange rate arbitrage to show that money is itself valuable.*)

But, when I go to spend a nickel (or, more practically, a greenback), I never keep it in my pocket because of the worth of its constituent parts--and that's the idea. This is not the same as a claim about inflation. It might well be that my nickel doesn't go as far these days, and so I am more careful about how I spend it--but then, I'm hanging on to it because I'd rather spend it on product X instead of product Y, and it no longer is worth enough in the market to buy both X and Y together. But that's a different scenario. What I'm talking about is the kind of scenario where I say, "Look, I could pay for this $4 item with four one-dollar bills--but I'd be willing to give you 200 pennies instead." Nobody ever thinks that the 200 pennies would be a better deal. Why? Because the penny is a proxy for 1/100 of a dollar. That's the whole purpose of the penny--to stand in some relationship to money itself, to allow us to easily exchange our work and worth for our things (and for other peoples' works).

But if you really think about it, if those were old-style pennies, at 2.04 cents-on-the-dollar, you'd really rather have those penny rolls. And that's a bit screwy.

It seems counterintuitive to want your money to be inherently worthless, but in fact, it seems to me that that worthlessness is ennabling. It keeps people from hoarding what is, essentially, an instrument of exchange (unless, of course, they want to be able to exchange it for something else in the future). If we do hoard dollars, it's not because we want the paper they're printed on; we hoard them because we're going to buy that yacht in ten years' time, or because we think inflation is going to fall and they'll be able to buy more stuff tomorrow, or for some other reason that actually has to do with the economy and not the dollar bill.

This makes me optimistic about the cyber-economy.

*Exchange rate arbitrage: a simple concept that people like to pretend is complicated. Let's say I have 10 US Dollars. Here in New York, I can buy 1,200 Japanese Yen for 10 Dollars. Well, in Tokyo, perhaps I can buy 6 British Pounds for 1,200 Yen. And back in New York (or in London, or Chicago, or wherever at all), maybe I can buy 12 Dollars for 6 Pounds. Voila! I have just made Two Dollars, a rather ridiculously high return for rather ridiculously little risk. (Oh, and yes, of course we can buy currency--it's what you do when you go to the foreign exchange window when you get off the plane in Paris, it's what companies do when they need to pay producers in a foreign country, and it's what banks do when they want to hold their reserves in stable dollars or when they need to cover massive withdrawals in a different currency.)

This takes the cake.

2006-12-16T10:44:00.000-05:00

New York has just passed a ban on trans fats. I'm having philosophical troubles as a result.

I'm all for a reasonable amount of health-consciousness, but I just can't quite stomach the idea of the government dictating what I am allowed to eat when I go out. (I can't stomach it! Get it? I'm so funny.) In a nation formed with deference to Liberty and Freedom--instead of, say, universal health care (not that the welfare state is a bad model, mind you, but it is a different model)--this strikes me as quite an intrusion.

And it's different even from the oft-maligned no-smoking-in-public-establishments laws (with which, frankly, I have no problem). We ban smoking in commercial establishments because we are worried about how one person's carcinogen will affect another person's lungs. This is an extension, albeit a very great extension, of the ban on murder: sure, it limits your freedoms, but it does so in order to protect that guy standing next to you. The same concept informs all sorts of socially responsible legislation: pollution laws, public drunkenness laws, gun laws at a stretch. We limit what you can do because we are worried about the harm it will cause others.

But no amount of stretching makes it reasonable to ban me from publicly eating foods that are bad for me. If I like my flans nice and fluffy (that is, made with shortening) instead of densely rock-like (made with trans fat-free butter), I kind of think that should be my call.

There are all sorts of things a health-conscious legislature can do to make sure that I'm not accidentally jeopardizing my own well-being when I bite into my flan, too. It could force all restaurants to publish ingredients lists. It could run a public campaign explaining the dangers of trans fats and telling us which foods contain them. It could give tax breaks to restaurants that don't serve trans fats, or could institute a sin tax on those who do. I'd stand by any of those moves as well within the prerogative of the government (even if, separate from that issue, I might find some of them a bit silly). In fact, enabling the transfer of information really seems like an ideal government project, allowing me to make my own choices in that much more confident a way.

But banning the public serving of, say, Crisco-laced biscuits? Oh, come on. That sounds awfully like a Big Daddy State to me.

There is, of course, some real public justification for this move. Obesity in America is a true problem. Moreover, your health issues very well might affect me: if you have a heart attack and are on Medicare, or welfare, or Family Health Plus (New York's free health insurance for anybody who is 1. uninsured and 2. too rich for Medicaid), then my tax dollars are subsidizing your hospital stay. Your good health is good for my wallet.

But somehow, I think that basic universal health care is compatible with the preservation of a person's ability to do what she wants when it causes neither mental nor bodily harm to another.

Maybe what I mean is this: a higher financial cost to me--that is, slightly higher taxes--seem a worthy price to pay for the assurance that I mostly get to be in charge of my own decisions in life. It's one of the most desirable government expenditures I can think of, in fact. If your gastronomic choices had a 40% chance of giving me cancer, or if they predictably caused me serious mental anguish, then I'd say "legislate them away!" without much hesitation. But there is an essential tradeoff between the individual and the community. If the communal costs of this bit of individual choice are mostly financial, then I have to say that we privilege a person's ability to eat what they enjoy, cooked how they enjoy it.

I'm generally in favor of ensuring collective welfare through our governments--and I think, as a result, that things like Social Security and universal health care are broadly good. But, what can I say, I do detect in myself some strong libertarian tendencies when it comes to messing with the menus of my favorite restaurants. I maintain, perhaps ridiculously, that this is not a double standard.

L'homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers. Peut-être ils sont les chaînes d'une ignorance inculte et stupide, heeuuu?

2006-12-09T00:42:00.000-05:00

I've been reading Rousseau lately--not The Social Contract, which it seems that everybody reads at sometime or another, but Emile, which I first encountered when I was a freshman in high school. I didn't read it then, but I recently encountered an unglamorous Everyman's Library copy of that text in my grandfather's library, and I remembered the old intention to read it. My grandfather generously gifted the book to me.

Let me say two things upfront, for those of you who may not be familiar with either the book or its author. First, Emile is primarily a discourse on education, a hypothetical educational project in which Rousseau explains the best way to teach a child so that he grows into a self-aware, happy man. Second, Rousseau himself is a right bastard: sexist, racist, and full of himself to boot. This is not obvious from The Social Contract (or at least, I don't remember it much in that work), but it is clear as a bell in Emile

This does not make any of his educational ideas self-evidently false.

But there is something else that I dislike about Rousseau's weltenschuang (if one can appropriately mix the French and the German here)--something that I dare say is a bit more intellectual and a bit more to the substance of Rousseau's educational claims. Fundamentally, I really just don't like philosophies (and theologies) which privilege innocence, the "state of nature," and stupidity (not that their proponents would use that word, of course). Rousseau is the creator of the "Noble Savage." He is perhaps best known, in this day and age, for his declaration, "Man is born free, yet is everywhere in chains." His educational program consists, primarily, of shielding the child from the "corrupting influence" of other people and the things that they have created in this world; he suggests that we should not force a child to learn, but rather that, by secretly controlling everything from his friendships to the activities which he witnesses, we will create a world in which the child decides he is interested in "the right" things, and then chooses to learn about them on his own.

But I don't buy it. Of course it is desirable for a child--or an adult, for that matter--to be interested in the world and eager to learn things about it. But Rousseau's Noble Savage idea is a direct descendent of the Church's weird privileging of innocence and ignorance (consider the ideal state in the Garden of Eden: very, very like the state of Rousseau's ideal modern man). The problem with both of these conceptions is the idea that growing up, becoming a mature, well-educated, industrious, sexually desirable and desirous adult, is taken to be a bad thing. For both Rousseau and the church against which he so often thinks he is arguing, experience distances one from the ideal (whether we style that ideal as "savage freedom" or "Godly innocence not yet sullied by our inevitable human failings"). For Rousseau, education consists in giving a boy enough self-knowledge that his natural virtues overpower the corrupting and unhappy ways of the other people that he will meet when he is an adult.

Rousseau takes this to be a claim about freedom and happiness. His educational program is geared towards letting a child choose his own interests from the beginning, and stumbling and having to work through his own (albeit child-sized) hardships (even suggesting that it is better that a child be allowed to make his own mistakes and die in the process than to have him grow into an adult who did not have the same liberty-filled education). A self-directed life like this is, for Rousseau, the only truly happy life. So, while at the beginning we only give the child the perpetual illusion of choice while simultaneously carefully controlling all the aspects of the world he sees, later on the man benefits from always doing that which he is naturally predisposed to do, and by acting in harmony with his desires instead of getting sucked into doing what other people think is important.

In a world where there is prestige in the acquisition of things we neither particularly want or need, in which we let magazines tell us we are too fat or too ugly or too sexually incapable, in which people with all the luxuries they could want are chronically depressed and engage in all sorts of self-harm, what Rousseau says is somewhat compelling. He might be right that people are unhappy and unfulfilled in life if we do not have full moral control over our selves; he might be right that psychological pressure is the source of many of our gravest ills; he might be right that we ought to reconsider what we mean when we say that we are "free."

But Rousseau is naive to think we can escape society in the way that he suggests. He wants to educate Emile to be an individual among men - but he runs into deep and untenable difficulties when he considers love and marriage, for example. (He decides, ultimately, that the only way for Emile to continue to act as an individual is to have his wife act always according to his will, as an extension of himself: "The whole education [of women] ought to be relative to men. To please them, to be useful to them, to make themselves loved and honored by them, to educate them when young, to care for them when grown, to counsel them, to console them and to make life agreeable and sweet to them--these are the duties of women at all times." Note that this is not just an unconsidered sexism; Rousseau has written himself into a wall, strongly privileging the family unit but also placing as his first goal the absolute autonomy of his student, and that man's ability to always act freely on his desires. If Emile must always be able to make free choices, and if he is also to be able to live a life with somebody else, then it follows that she's going to have to always go along with his choices.) Rousseau finds himself in a tight spot when he dismisses everything but practical education, too, suggesting that for their own benefit all children should learn a manual trade so that they can work and be their own bosses--but this at the same time deprives society of everything from firefighters to doormen. And Rousseau doesn't even consider the possibility of the occasional failure of socialization under his progam; his entire scheme rests on the assumption that a child will on his own choose to have principles which are broadly compatible with the principles and values of the society which he will grow up to join. But what if he never wants to study basic math? What if he takes pleasure in hurting animals? What if he just learns to kill his own food--a perfectly morally defensible position, yes, but perhaps not if he later lives in an American suburb and takes this to mean that he should strangle the pigeons and shoot the dogs.

And this is precisely the problem. Rousseau pretends he wants his child to learn about himself and to discover his own desires, but in fact he wants the child to discover on his own the desires of the society away from which he is being diligently kept by his loving parents. In the meantime, he may well be discovering a great many natural principles on his own, but he is also being deprived of much of what we know, and of the kind of rigor with which we come to know things well. It may not be pleasant to memorize verb conjugations or to study the laws of physical motion (though it might be), but it is effective--and it is by doing the hard intellectual work of learning (at whatever level) that we come to know something well. Experts are made, not born.

Moreover, knowledge is progressive. The idea that a child should start from scratch when we already know so much seems to me at best ignorant and at worst immoral. The reason we teach what we know is that we already know it. A man might feel a sense of accomplishment when he invents the wheel, but surely that's nothing more than an illusion if in fact the wheel has already been around for millenia. Better to teach the man about kinetics and let him undertake a real accomplishment, let him invent a real new thing.

And better to grant that the relationships we make, the things we learn, the education we foster, is a good thing representative of very real and very desirable growth and maturity--rather than a continuous progression away from the ideal of self-centered desire fulfillment. For if it is instead the latter of these two options, then surely the prescription must be to stop our social interaction, our education, and, in the final estimation, our life as a respectable, caring, productive human being. In the final estimation, this is a philosophy neither of hope nor of happiness.

And besides all that, the whole darned program is entirely impractical and impossible to implement anyhow. I find that reassuring, I confess.

this is what happens when you don't democratize science

2006-11-28T21:14:00.000-05:00

Today's Tuesday Morning Quarterback, the best football roundup on the web (or in the papers, or on TV), explains that the Chandrasekhar limit isn't actually a limit. Gregg Easterbrook (who writes TMQ) elaborates better than I could, and I urge you to read at least that bit of this week's column, because the implications are dazzling.

But you're not going to go read it, are you? No. I know at least some of you are never going to make your way over to ESPN just to read about the latest research into type Ia supernovae. But you should.

That's it. I was going to give you the rundown myself, but Easterbrook is so readable, and this is so cool, that I really mean it when I say you ought to go over there and read it yourself. I will give you the implications, though:

1. Cosmic expansion is not accelerating
2. There's no such thing as dark matter or energy (or at least, no reason why there should be, which amounts to very nearly the same thing)

Now. Today is Tuesday, day not only of ESPN.com's TMQ, but also of the New York Times's Science Times. Why is it that the latter is not telling me about Chandrasekhar? (I did a historical search. The latter never told me about this.)

And here's an interesting story that Easterbrook doesn't tell: Chandresakhar himself was an Indian Astrophysicist. He won the Nobel Prize for his work, basically hypothesizing the existence of black holes, neutron stars, and (as yet undiscovered) quark stars. But when he presented his work to the Royal Society in the 1930s, his old Cambridge advisor Sir Arthur Eddington attacked him with what Wolfram calls "nonsensical and contradictory arguments." It was a particularly vicious move: Eddington had been inquiring into Chandra's work for months and had never commented upon it. When Chandra was finally invited to lecture to the Royal Society, Eddington had the secretary schedule himself into the following timeslot, which he used to roundly denounce what Chandrasekhar had just said. Chandra was prevented from replying, and (because of how the very influential Eddington had closed the doors to the young man) he only really had an opportunity to publicly defend his conjecture four years after the whole episode. Chandra wrote home in anger (some choice words: "Prejudices! Prejudices!" and "Eddington is simply stuck up!"). Then he packed up and moved to America.

Oh, to read the relevant TMQ bit yourself: go to http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=easterbrook/061128, search for "Chandrasekhar," and read Easterbrook's brief, clear explanation of the whole thing. (You could also read it in Nature, but that version is rather less comprehensible to the intelligent Average Joe like me.)

Turkey Day

2006-11-22T03:39:00.000-05:00

I love Thanksgiving. It's my favorite holiday. I think that's because it's such a communal event. In a place with no state religion (a good thing, by all means), we don't have the equivalent of the national religious holiday the way Indonesia has Ramadan, Athens had the Dionysia, or Britain used to have Christmas. Most of our civic holidays are undercelebrated, too: we've still got the Fourth of July, to be sure, but Veterans' Day, Labor Day, and Memorial Day are no more likely to be celebrated than not to be, and anyhow, we all celebrate those days in different ways. There is no standard, shared celebration. As a nation, we might all get the day off of work (or not, given the way the service industry works these days), but we're not particularly likely to spend that day doing the same thing (much less doing it together!).

Not like Thanksgiving! Sure, we might do different things, but there is a norm from which we will be deviating: turkeys and stuffing, football and feasting. And while there are strong religious overtones to literal thanks-giving, and strong Anglo cultural overtones when we eat meat and potatoes and gravy, fundamentally this is an inclusive and not an exclusive holiday. It is reasonable to presume that one's neighbors are celebrating--and, if they're not, obviously one should invite them over to join in the feast. There can be no offense taken: it's their holiday as much as our own. We all get to share in this day's celebration.

There are exceptions, I suppose. When I was little, we put on plays about the Pilgrims and Plymouth Rock and religious freedom from the mean old English. Subsequent years have seen the reinterpretation of the whole Pilgrim thing, of course; a cynical reading of the first Thanksgiving says that it was just the beginning of the end for the Native Americans on this continent, and that the pilgrims were themselves Puritanical crazy-crazies who refused even to celebrate Christmas because it would be, you know, too much fun (and we can't be having any fun around here). The great thing about Thanksgiving Day, though, is that we can grant the truth in these more cynical claims, and we still get to celebrate the day. That's because, fundamentally, Thanksgiving is not primarily about remembering the past but rather about celebrating the present with friends and loved ones at one's side.

That's quite an interesting phenomenon. Other holidays are explicitly memorializing, and this comes back to haunt us when Revisionist historians get their hands on them (or even just, when time passes). Christmas, Easter, Sukkot, Passover: these are religious holidays by which we remember particular events. Independence Day and Veterans' Day: these are national holidays by which we do the same. The importance of each of these wanes and waxes in popular imagination as the importance of their underlying events shrink or grow. As we reinterpret the past, we lose sight of the celebrations; Easter becomes a less salient holiday as the life (or divinity) of Christ becomes a less important piece of our social and cultural fabric, and especially as we become less willing to believe in the literal ascension which is celebrated on this day. Veterans' Day suffers simply from a removal in time: there remain a huge number of veterans of foreign wars, to be sure, but the significance of the "eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month" is quickly disappearing along with all of our World War I veterans. The day is not necessarily doomed to oblivion; we could redefine it in the same way that we've redefined Independence Day to be as much about hot dogs and fireworks and our present nationalism as about the Revolutionary War or the way we ass-whupped the British (who, I hasten to add, are our very good friends these days). But Thanksgiving is a special case, I think, precisely because it doesn't commemorate a particular event, and it never really has. Nobody celebrates Thanksgiving to remember the first Thanksgiving (though obviously the one evokes the other). The celebration has, from the beginning, been about togetherness, a shared meal, and, indeed, a sense of thanks for what we've got. It is and always was about the present. And it is great.

my mind on my mind

2006-11-15T21:38:00.000-05:00

Not long ago, Q introduced me to the Zuboff-Unger Brain Explosion, a thought-experiment that seems to indicate that there is a sliding scale of consciousness (as opposed to definitive 1-or-0-like states of either consciousness or not-consciousness). Between Mr. W's fantastic 11th-grade philosophy class, the cognitive neurolinguistics lab where I worked for a pittance as a college freshman, and engaging conversations with JH, Zq, and SS (among others), I've seen by now my fair share of interesting thought-experiments trying to tease out something tangible about consciousness. Here are a few of the best:

1. Hofstadter's Anthill, Putnam's Bees: Consider an ant colony. Each of the ants has a specific role: there are food-gatherers and soldiers, breeders and the queen. Ants are themselves unintelligent, instinct-driven, instinctual creatures that act predictably. (Indeed, we can model the behavior of a food-gathering ant almost perfectly with the following two rules: 1. if you run into something edible and you aren't holding anything, pick it up, and, 2. if you run into something edible and you are holding something, drop it. These very simple rules create ants who wander, find food, bring it back, and pile it up. Ant behavior is malleable in predictable ways, too: spread scent, and an ant will follow it.) We can feel reasonably confident that no ant consciously directs the running of an ant colony in a way that a king or CEO might consciously direct the complex interactions of a community of people. Nonetheless, however, a full ant colony seems to be an adaptive system that can defend itself, move itself, rebuild when injured, and store resources for the future. We might say that when a child stomps on an anthill, many individual ants die, but the colony itself "heals" as the anthill is rebuilt and new ants take on the function of the old ones. Roughly speaking, we might even conclude that an individual ant is to the ant colony what an individual skin cell is to a conscious person: a useful but expendible part of the whole, rather than a significant thing in itself. An ant colony may thus be seen as a system rather than as a collection of individuals.

Hilary Putnam (or possibly Barnett summarizing Putnam--I can't remember where I read it) takes this a step further with his swarm of bees idea. Imaine a swarm of bees that is organized into the shape of a giant human being. The bees perform the same functions as all of our own parts and systems: a group move together like the heart, another group relays information internally just as neurons do, etc. Nonetheless, we don't call the swarm conscious. To take Putnam's example again, if we shoot the swarm, we aren't worried about the pain that the swarm will feel, though we might worry about the pain of individual bees (or at least we might worry about the morality of killing a bunch of bees, while we aren't worried at all about the morality of hurting the swarm, which we don't take to be any sort of morally relevant agent). Conclusion drawn from all this: organized systems can look surprisingly like conscious beings--but we nonetheless have the strong intuition that organization is not itself sufficient for consciousness.

2. Searle's Chinese Room: Consider a person who sits in a room filled with books of Chinese characters. Let's call him Fred. Sinophones come to Fred with questions written in Chinese, and they pass them to Fred through a window in the wall. Fred's job is to take the pieces of paper that come through the window, follow a set of English-language instructions about how to use the books behind him, and write down whatever characters those books tell him to. Then he passes the paper back out of the window with his drawings on them.

Fred doesn't speak Chinese, but we can imagine that the Chinese-speaker on the other side of the window might think that he does. After all, if a person asked the sum of two and two in Chinese, and Fred's process led him to write the symbol for four, it sure would appear that he knew what he was being asked. If we gave him really good books, Fred could probably answer really complex questions. If we made Fred a computer, and made the books his database, and made the Sinophones ourselves, it would follow that, given enough speed of looking-up, we couldn't tell the difference between a computer that understood us consciously and a computer that was simply a dumb machine like poor old Fred in the Chinese room. Conclusion: the appearance of conscious thought not itself sufficient to prove that conscious thought is actually present (and, moreover, we can't ever know whether the thing on the other side of the window is conscious or not). Unlikely skeptical spin: Well, Fred doesn't understand Chinese, but Fred-plus-the-room-and-all-its-books-and-instructions does understand the language. So we can say that the whole room, with Fred as just a predictable cog in it, understands what it is doing in a conscious way.

3. Block's Chinese Nation: I don't know what's with philosophers of mind and the Chinese, but... imagine a person who doesn't have a brain. Every time a neuron senses something (feels, smells, tastes, etc.), the electrical impulse is conveyed not to a cranial neuron but instead via satellite to a guy in China. He looks up and sees a big sign that shows a symbol on it, and he knows that, when he gets the combination of the symbol and the incoming call, he should send an outward call back to a motor neuron. In this way, when I stub my toe, the sensory neurons in my toe wire their normal electrical impulses to the particular people in China to whom they are connected by satellite, and those people press the buttons that collectively instruct the impulses that cause my motor neurons to have me suddenly pull back my foot here in New York. If we have 100 billion neurons in the brain, then we'd need 100 billion people for this to work, of course (along with a big sign, which is just to allow for some parallel to "brain states"--so when I am excited and my brain is full of pain-inhibiting adrenaline, I might have a different reaction than when I am in a more subdued state). But pretend there were 100 billion people in China; if we had them instead of neurons, would they collectively make up my brain? Intuition, of course, says no. Conclusion: functionally brain-like conscious people can't themselves make up another conscious brain. Corollary that some folks have thrown in there: we just defined a mind to say that it interacts with the body in such a way as to cause physical reactions via neurons. But we can't really say that the Chinese nation constitutes one mind (my mind) while individual Chinese people continue to have their own minds, because then you end up with two different minds, ostensibly working off of two completely separate sets of sensory input, both affecting one Chinese person's physical actions. (Not sure why that's impossible, but so goes the claim.)

4. The Zuboff-Unger Brain Explosion: Consider a disembodied brain sitting in a vat of whatever nutrients disembodied brains need to survive. Now cut it in half. Any neurons that originally had connections to neurons in the other half are fitted with tranceivers that send and receive electrical impulses to the neurons with which it was connected before (using electromagnetic waves, say, so as to be able to do this at the speed of light). Now the brain still works as usual, but we can move the two halves really far away from each other. Well, okay, so cut each of those in half and do the same thing. And halve those, and so on, until you have the brain's individual neurons sitting in nutrient vats spread out across the globe, all sending and receiving electrical impulses via tranceiver. Is this still a brain? Is that extended network conscious as a normal brain is conscious? Zuboff and Unger suggest that it isn't. Conclusion: proximity matters. But this leads to the further conclusion that there are degrees of consciousness. When the brain is all put together, it's a brain. When it's all spread out, it isn't one. When it's only a little bit cut up, or if all the neurons are separated but really really close, then maybe it's mostly a brain. More spread out, less brainy. Less spread out, more brainy. Gee, that's weird.

My reaction to all of these is roughly similar, and it is roughly the following: why can't consciousness be big? It seems to me that self-awareness is an emergent property of sufficiently complex systems that hold a sufficiently large amount of information in them. I mean, the thing that makes Hofstadter, Putnam, Searle, and Block all skeptical of the consciousness of their constructs is that there is no identifiable place for knowledge to inhere. If you say that 3 billion bees together are conscious, or that a room and books and a machine-like man together are conscious, we want to say, "yeah, but it's absurd for a room to be conscious" or "lots of bees interacting don't have any more conscious knowledge of what they're doing than lots of bees NOT interacting." But by these arguments, we could as well say, "yeah, but it's absurd for a single neuron to be conscious" and "lots of neurons interacting shouldn't make anything more conscious than individual neurons NOT interacting." Clearly, the first is true but doesn't tell us a darned thing about the consciousness of a lot of neurons, while the second is just false.

The thing is, lots of interacting parts together really are more than the sum of the parts seperately. There's an awful lot of information stored in the state of their connections to one another, and this is value far above and beyond the information and substance stored in their individual being.

An illustrative example: when talking about artificial neural networks, we consider nodes and weights. A model of natural language might include the nodes "cat," "dog", "a," "ran," "bit," "the," "brother," "my," and "spotted." Pretend that Geraldine repeatedly feeds the model the following sentences: "The dog bit the cat;" "The dog bit my brother;" "The spotted dog ran;" "The cat bit the dog;" and "My brother bit a cat." Every time the system sees that two words appear near each other, it adjusts the weights between those nodes to be a bit stronger relative to the other weights between nodes. At the end of it all, you'd see that the network had learned stronger and weaker weights for the interconnections between relevant nodes. "The" and "dog" would be very closely linked, as would "the," "dog," and "bit." "Cat" and "dog" would also be strongly linked as an effect of how other word linkages would readjust the weights across the system. "My" and "the" would be slightly connected, while "spotted" and "cat" would be quite unrelated. If Geraldine looked at the network and saw just the nodes, she'd know something about what this network "knows" and "doesn't know"--but she wouldn't know that the system understands that "My dog ran" is a better sentence than "Spotted ran my the." (Amusingly, this particular system would be absolutely fine with "My spotted brother ran," however.) Trying to look just at the specific nodes, rather than the relationships between them, dooms the observor. (I should note here that I find all this quite compelling and I have scientific studies to back up the idea that simple grammatical systems like this can work well--but Chomsky and others still want to locate grammar somewhere, and this is a creditable alternative view. They essentially want to say that there also exists a node that explains the rules of grammar in detail, and with it we no longer need to know the weights because now we know the rules of word-combination being used. I confess, I think this is naive and stupid. It is awfully like the internet, though: all the information on the internet is contained in individual servers; the connections themselves are not very dynamic but rather simply allow the nodes to share their information. There's not much further information stored in the state of this network.)

Back to consciousness. In the example above, we can see how most of the relevant grammatical information is contained not in the nodes, but in the connections between them. Similarly, I suggest, a bunch of ants reacting simply and predictably to the pheromones left by fellow ants contains a lot more than just a bunch of ants. That colony of ants also contains an enormous amount of information about how the ants are related to one another and how the actions of one of them affects and will affect the actions of others. This complex, even intractable, set of interconnections is, to me, precisely the first building block of conscousness. Consciousness, I'd argue, isn't located in any part of the brain (and I suspect most of the above philosophers would agree with that statement, though I think doing so would be inconsistent of them); it's located in variable and varying electrical connections between neurons. Enough neurons--indeed, enough ants--and there's a mind-boggling amount of information being stored in those connections (and that, I propose to you, is where and what memory is). Consciousness is just a side effect, an emergent property of any similarly complex system (of which there are, I think, not very many of a size that we can comprehend). If the necessary billions of constantly connected, constantly re-weighted parts are spread out around the universe (a la Zuboff and Unger), I don't see any reason why it is counterintuitive that that is conscious, too. And if the ants and the bees and the guy in the room all seem intuitively unconscious, maybe that's because we aren't thinking about them on the grand scale that is required. Once we start talking about 100 billion ants all interacting together (a truly inconceivable exercise), we'll be looking at something of similar complexity to the brain. Until then, we can all agree that a bunch of ants in an anthill don't form any conscious community.

As for Block, there's no reason that conscous beings can't themselves make up some other consciousness. I just don't get it. Frankly, it seems to me that the way biology works is roughly that less complicated things join together to make more complicated things. Cells work together to make organs. Organs work together to make human bodies. Human bodies work together to make... superbodies, or something. I mean, why is that weird and unusual? Evolution starts with the simple and builds up to the complex.

More than that, though, I just don't understand the whole deal with consciousness at one level precluding the possibility of another, similar consciousness on a much greater scale. Can someone explain it to me?

Finally, I suppose I should point out that this interaction-based model of consciousness that I propose has neither an upper bound on size nor a lower bound on speed. At some point, there just aren't enough interacting parts to allow for (10^11)! connections--there is a minimum degree of complexity required. But, within the constraints of a very large universe, there's no maximum size that a conscious system could be--the elements of that system could be atoms, or neurons, or ants, or people, or even planets. Additionally, we are used to thinking of intelligence on our own time scale (and for good reason, since we live by it). I see no reason why consciousness could not be a much more lumbering thing than our own experience shows it to be, though. Our neurons take only a few miliseconds to fire, and action potentials carry electrical signals across our cells at a speed of anywhere from 10 to 100 meters per second. It seems at least conceivable to me that a system that was 1,000 times bigger and 1,000 times slower would still have as much information and as much consciousness as we do, but we might not recognize it because we simply cannot anthropomorphize things like that.

Anyway. A long post. Thanks for bearing with me. Let's talk artificial neural nets sometime, shall we?

feel like a swim?

2006-11-07T20:44:00.000-05:00

You wouldn't think there was anywhere in New York as unpeopled as Coney Island in wintertime. Iz and I were out there (to consider the fish at the New York Aquarium) and the stark loveliness of the boardwalk was staggering in its windswept emptiness. If you've ever seen the movie Pi, you'll know the scene where Max gets off the train at the end of the line, at Coney Island at the wrong time of year, and you'll have a sense of what this place can be like.

This startled me because I've always thought I hated Coney Island. In the summer the place a horrible mess, with far more people than any beachfront can reasonably support. Trying to find a space big enough to spread a beach towel is a challenge, and the New York sun is hot and unrelenting. There's sand, and a boardwalk, but most of Coney Island is paved. Blacktop in the summer is not precisely my idea of fun (though it is something of a cherished urban experience here nonetheless).

In more autumnal or even wintry weather, though, I begin to see what made this place the entertainment hotspot of New York City. The artificial wavebreaks, piles of rocks and concrete meant to keep an undertow from sucking children out into the Atlantic, become more jagged in this weather, more reminiscent of the west coast. Empty rollercoasters and bumpercar parks seem worse for their lack of people (even though I know I hate the summertime crowds). And the beach really is lovely, a thing I never noticed in the mass of people--and their junk--in a more favorable season.

I guess I like that which is solitary (or nearly so--a friend or two is always welcome to come along on my adventures). More than anything, one forgets the perpetual noise of the City when one lives here; if I stop to think, I note that I hear now cars, karaoke, somebody playing the guitar in the apartment across the way--but these are incidental, just background noises to which I pay no attention. Coney Island has in the past magnified the noise and made it noticeable again: the people screaming on the Cyclone roller coaster, the shrieks of thousands of children when the waves roll in, boom boxes and break dancers and people hawking T-shirts, batting cages and bumper cars and thrill rides. This time round, too, Coney Island again made me notice sound--but this time, it was primarily in its absence.

it's easy to be disenchanted at home, but i can't help wanting to defend my siblings while abroad

2006-11-03T11:23:00.000-05:00

I've been doing lots lately.

1. Went to the Whitney with Zq.
2. Halloween Party! Lots of fun. Sadly, I subsequently found myself quite low because of how uncommunal, uninspiring, un-autumnal, and generally un-unusual Halloween is for the kids of this city. (I mean, what's the point, anyhow, if not to have a special day for dressing up, meeting one's neighbors, and carving large garden vegetables, the last two of which, at least, no Manhattan child does?)
3. Listened to The Moral Maze on BBC Radio 4.

The Moral Maze is a program in which various smart people talk to various interested or well-informed parties about some issue, and try to tease out the moral implications thereof. This week's topic: is America a force for good in the world, or is it a force for bad?

The perspective that one gets hearing intelligent, well-informed foreigners analyzing one's country is shocking. I was extremely taken aback by the misrepresentations of my country that I was hearing on the radio. These were not born of malice, by any means; in fact, people were speaking from both sides of the debate (some suggesting that America has largely gotten things right and that our sense of American exceptionalism and strong moral and religious sentiments are admirable and noble, others suggesting that they are frightening and hubristic and that our actions in the world and even our motivations for actions are deeply immoral or at best are amoral). But despite, I think, a genuine interest in the question and real knowledge about the world (as well as a very commanding grasp of statistics about the US), these panellists seemed to me to miss something deeply essential about the relationships between religion, popular culture, and government in this country. Consider the following well-intioned, real, and to me ludicrous suggestions from the program:

1. Americans don't care about global warming because 59% of us believe that we are in the End Times, so why would we be worrying about anything of this world?
2. Songs like our national anthem and "America the Beautiful" are indicative of the deep and alarming faith of Americans, and just go to show how we constitutionally can't have patriotism without irrational religious fervor (that is, it's not in our constitution, not, it's not in our Constitution, if you see what I mean).
3. Evangelical Christianity directly and predictably drives foreign policy, and those who disagree with it are a strongly persecuted minority.

Here's what I have to say about all that.

1. We've argued that global warming is not real. We've argued that addressing it through state regulation is unlikely to be effective and may hurt businesses. We've argued that signing the Kyoto Protocol in some ways compromises our sovereignty. As a nation, we've argued a lot of ridiculous and not-so-ridiculous things about global warming, but never once in my life--about this or, indeed, about any issue--have I heard the argument that we can let the world go down the toilet because Armageddon is upon us. I don't doubt the statistic, and indeed I think it is reasonable to find it alarming. But surely, surely we don't think that Christianity in America is this crazy? Because, well, it isn't. Americans, Evangelical and not, care deeply about our country and our world. Indeed, it makes sense to argue that those who are religious believers care more about the world and doing good in it than those who do not, though I don't particularly know that that's so. I just think it's worth pointing out that one can come with a seemingly reasonable bias from either side of this equation.

2. What? Surely you jest. This from citizens of a country whose national anthem is "God save the Queen," and whose fellow countrymen sing "Jerusalem" at every sporting event ever conceived? A country with an established Church? Look, turn the mirror inward for a moment. If you're not crazy and frightening in your religion or nationalism, perhaps the existence of similarly anthemic patriotic songs in our part of the world, sung in similarly patriotic and not-so-patriotic contexts, is equally non-indicative of any scariness on our part. Yes, we're more religious than you. But again, we're not crazy. And more than that--and here's the fundamental disconnect, I think--these are patriotic songs for us. Do they mention God? Yes. Is that important to some of us? Absolutely. But singing them expresses primarily a certain patriotic fervor, and certainly cannot be taken as indicative as any sort of religious belief. People who don't believe in God sing them. Jews sing them, Christians sing them, Hindus sing them. It's okay, because what you're saying just doesn't have much religious significance for us. Not singing can be reasonably presumed to be a protest against government, not a call for further separation of church and state.

3. Finally, this is just clearly ridiculous--not in its soft form (Evangelical Christianity certainly does inform many people's judgments of our foreign policy), but rather ridiculous in the very strong form taken for granted by the panellists on this radio program. Did my Evangelical friends in school genuinely want to bring me to faith? Yes. Did they think less of me for my apostacy? Perhaps, but if so, it was a private thought. They were, genuinely, my friends. I don't think I was a social outcast, by any means, for my broad disbelief.

Of course, it is not false that religion pervades much of the public sphere in America--indeed, far more than I would like--but you can't quote a statistic that says that more than 80% of Americans are actively religious and then say that our shared religion drives our foreign and domestic policy. Surely if that were true, 80% of the population would be voting in the same way in most elections. Guess what? It isn't. The missing link is a fact that we take for granted on this side of the Atlantic: the religious lobby is clearly an interest group here in America, and it represents many but not nearly all people of faith. Whether we agree with the Moral Majority or not, we know that an affiliation with it is a political one, very like an affiliation with the ACLU or National Right to Life or any of a million other interest groups. The role of religion in our government is extremely complicated, and, I think, is not engrained in our national psyche in the way that The Moral Maze presumes.

Perhaps this is the main point I want to make, actually. Religion is deeply engrained in the personal and communal lives of many Americans, but as a people I do not think we are religious to nearly the extent that the panellists in this radio program took for granted. That is to say, Americans do not share explicitly religious ideals as national values, and indeed we all value freedom of religion. You can be a full and good American without being Christian, but it's harder, at least, to say that you're a full American if you don't believe in liberty and democracy. It's nowhere near a legitimate talking point for Bush to say we're going into Iraq because God told us to. We'll tolerate the statement happily, it's true, but nobody would accept it as justification.

We do share strong national ideals here, though. Liberty may well be the most fundamental of them all, in fact; if you suggest that we should be going into Iraq because we have an obligation to spread freedom and democracy, you certainly will get people thinking. That seems at plausible, even if we're given pause by other issues ("but Iraq is a democracy!" and "are we more right to go in to better the lives of Iraqis (pretending for a moment that we might have been remotely successful) or staying out to allow a certain amount of national self-determination?" and "but isn't this moralistic stuff just a ruse when it's really about oil?"). Freedom and democracy are elements of some shared national character, and whether you're a unilateralist (a Bush "liberating" Iraq) or a multilateralist (a Wilson trying to build self-determinitive nations), a protectionist (Washington fostering his new democracy) or an interventionist (George H. W. Bush overthrowing the military junta in Panama), these tropes inform your decisions and rouse the masses. That is not, of course, to say that all American foreign and domestic policy holds true to these ideals--after all, one can believe lying is wrong and still lie occasionally (and that does not make one's belief wrong, either), just as one can espouse the virtues of democracy while sometimes propping up undemocratic regimes. But it is to say that maybe it's a little more compelling to think that our national fervors are born of a real and, indeed, moralistic belief in certain secular ideals than in religious absolutism. To be sure, some of us may think these ideals are grounded in religion--but this is a bit circular; after all, our religion is predicated upon our sense of our (God-given? smirk. circularity.) religious freedom. And we tell that story--the story of America, the land of freedom where the pilgrims could come practice their religion without the hand of the government upon them--much more often than we tell the story of America, the land of institutionalized Christianity.

I don't mean any of this as a judgment on any of these perspectives. We have legitimate (and not-so-legitimate) arguments in this country about the role of religion among our Founding Fathers, the appropriate place of religion in civil society, and moral questions which necessarily touch on religious belief. All I mean, here, is to suggest that these are real points of debate in our public sphere, rather than internalized and agreed-upon parts of our national psyche. It bothers me that the program made someone with my own perspective, doubts, and centricism seem as if I was on the political fringe in this country. Frankly, I just don't think that's true--and moreover, I don't think others make me feel that way, either. I have big problems with prayer in schools and religious opposition to stem cell research, among other things. But this doesn't mean my fellow Americans who are religious think of me as a lesser American or a crazy liberal or something; I mean, these are the difficult issues of our day, and everybody grants that the country is in debate about them, with mainstream, respectable, and competitive political parties coming out on opposite sides of these issues.

I don't know how one goes about making one's culture transparent to the rest of the world, but I do wish we could be more successful about it. I mean, the British share our language and our news sources; we vacation in each others' backyards; we share a basis for Common Law and are clear political allies with close historical ties that go back at least to the Magna Carta. If they seem to have such a skewed sense of the role that religion plays in our society--an important role, to be sure, but completely unlike the role they seem to suggest--then what of the rest of the world?

And, as Zq pointed out to me over the phone, the excercise should suggest to me that we must be missing an enormous amount about everywhere else. Cultural tropes are impossibly hard for foreigners to pick up on. But we must try, if only because I feel right now that my own country is so gravely misunderstood, and that it would serve the world better were it not so.

17

2006-10-24T23:30:00.000-05:00

It's about 10 p.m. on a Sunday and I'm on New York State Route 17, just outside of the village of Hancock. The night is crisp and autumnal, with just a faint and lovely precipitation that freshens and cleanses.

One day soon, this road will be a part of I-86, running from Erie, Pennsylvania to the New York Thruway at Harriman, New York. Perhaps it will fill with cars. Service stations might spring up. Policement might even start to patrol the highway.

For now, though, we're the only vehicle on an empty road in upstate New York (and we, too, are empty: I am on a dark and unpopulated bus, with the two front seats to myself and with almost nobody behind me). The view out of the front window is of stars, sky, unending highway, and darkness.

Route 17 winds through Fishs Eddy and Downsville, Killawog and Liberty and Horton. If this part of the country were not so poor, it would be idyllic, nestled as it is among the Finger Lakes and rolling hills of pleasant greenery. Right now, though, the winding highway is beautiful only if one ignores the tiny clapboard houses and broken-down barns that occasionally dot the landscape. Indeed, I-86 will be something of a catalog of American poverty in the Mid-Atlantic states when it is finished. Erie, Pennsylvania, in Appalachia, is surely the highlight of the route; it's a port city that has recently been growing in population and, though heavy industry is fleeing the area, it is being replaced by numerous light-industrial plants that suggest a promising future. Corning is a nice little town, too, home to the Corning Museum of Glass, a couple of IB World Schools, and the Corning Country Club where the LPGA makes a tour stop. Other cities on the proposed route are not so lucky, though: they include Jamestown (median per-capita income: $15,316, or $33,675 per family), Olean ($17,169 and $38,355, respectively), and Elmira (a horrible amalgam of jails, strip malls, and psychiatric hospitals--with a per-capita income of $14,495 and with more than 23% of the population living below the poverty line). I-86 will also go through Binghamton, the Carousel Capital of the World. I have a soft spot in my heart for Binghamton, a city characterized by great attendance at and affinity for minor league baseball games, and a kind of picture of an out-of-date Americana that is at once enticing and far past its prime. In New York state, high school students studying for their Regents exams have to learn that Binghamton is home to a thriving shoe manufacture industry--but this is false, and has been for decades; our facts have stagnated like the city itself. In fact, the biggest local employers include Lockheed-Martin, Frito Lay, and Verizon (which operates an enormous series of call centers in the city). Once-beautiful brick buildings are falling down. A greater percentage of the population lives in poverty in Binghamton than they do even in Elmira. There's a thriving university in Binghamton, but there is nothing else.

But those are just the cities. There are no suburbs here (though sometimes people refer to "greater Binghamton," but this is a way to include the folks living in Johnson City rather than a way to talk about urban flight), and the vast space between population centers is characterized by a few ramshackle houses, a racetrack, a coal mine, and several amusingly named rivers.

As we're driving down Route 17, there are several exit signs of the blue, federally-controlled, Interstate-highway type, which are awaiting the full inauguration of I-86 down this deserted stretch of road. At exit 92, there's a sign for camping spots and I learn that one can turn off for the Russell Brook Campground. At exit 89, there's a sign for food; there's nothing on it. At exits 96, 90, and 89, somebody has put up signs labelled "Gas"--but these, too, are blank. At exit 72, there's a sign for attractions. There's nothing on it but the label.

Of course this is not yet an interstate, and I know these signs will be filled in with the relevant restaurants and gas stations soon. I can't help thinking, though, that it is somehow appropriate to pass these signs, so optimistically erected, and to see that there is nothing on offer here in the middle of nowhere. And so we drive on.

It's So Much Cooler In Cross-Section

2006-10-18T00:54:00.000-05:00

For my birthday, I recieved a surprising number of awesome gifts. (Surprising only because I thought I was old enough not to be GETTING gifts, you understand.) Somewhere in the midst of all my fantastic edible, imbibable, and readable loot was Kate Ascher's The Works: Anatomy of a City. This is riveting reading. I could tell you all the amazing things I've learned so far--but then again, you could just go read the book yourself. I've decided to pare it down and offer instead only the three coolest things. Here they are.

1. The Verrazano Narrows Bridge is so long and so tall that its builders had to account for the effects of the curvature of the earth when designing it. That's right: cables strung at the top of the bridge had to be significantly, noticeably longer than cables strung at the bottom of the bridge, because, you know, the world is not flat.

2. Mail used to be shuttled around the city at a speed of 30 miles per hour or more ---through underground pneumatic tubes. The pneumatic post connected Post Offices on Manhattan Island (as well as one in Brooklyn). As late as the 1950s, canisters filled with 500 - 600 letters would shoot through the city faster than they could have moved by rail, carriage, or foot. (But then came the car, which replaced the pneumatic post. And then came rush hour. I doubt the cars move at 30 mph these days; perhaps we could reinstate the old, still-extant tube system...)

3. Those of you who grew up in a place that was not Florida may already have realized this, but some cities have steam pipelines. New York is one of those cities. And this was news to me.

I knew, of course, that radiators get hot when we let in the steam. Obviously, it had to come from somewhere. But I figured that every building must have its own furnace or boiler room, the way my house did in college. Well, I was wrong. Get this: along with its subways, electricity lines, pneumatic mail tubes, telephone lines, and a million other buried systems, New York has an underground network of steam pipes (some as much as three feet in diameter). The Met Museum and the Empire State building are heated exclusively by piped-in steam. Laundrettes use the steam in creative ways: every morning, they just open a wall tube and use the hot steam to press suits, use the blotter (for stain removal), and even power the dry cleaner. New York City hospitals sanitize their instruments in steam rooms that tap into the central system, too. There's a whole unique economy in New York which is predicated on the existence of running, ready-to-go, on-demand steam. It's taken for granted the way you, dear reader, take for granted the electricity that you can turn on and off or the hot-and-cold running water in your morning shower.

New York's steam is administered by ConEd, our local electricity supplier; we pay for use the same way we pay for every other utility (though, since landlords are required to heat all New York apartments and to pay the heating bills, no normal renter ever sees an invoice for steam). (Incidentally, it makes perfect sense that our power company is the same as our steam company. When we consider how coal plants generate power, for example, we can see that you have to burn a lot of coal to move the turbines (that are connected to bundles of wire running through magnetic fields) to generate electricity. Given that setup, we may as well run big water pipes through the same burning-hot chamber, while we're at it. This, of course, will turn the water to steam, and from there it's a short step to piping the steam into the city alongside the power we're already generating.)

Cities are cool, no?

Museum Showdown!

2006-10-10T19:14:00.000-05:00

Last Friday, I went to the Museum of Modern Art here in New York. (Allow me an unsolicited shout-out to Target and its free Friday MOMA nights!) I love the Met's historical bent, it's archaeological and cultural exhibits, and the expansiveness of its collection--but I hereby pronounce MOMA to be hands-down far, far better than the Metropolitan. Taken as a whole, MOMA's collection is much stronger then the sometimes-it-seems-like-they're-just-hoarding collection at the Met. Architecturally and spatially, MOMA's building is lovely, a truly successful marriage of form and function. And, most incomprehensibly, the curation at MOMA is so much better than the curation at the Met that it borders on the embarrassing. The Met should be ashamed. MOMA has converted me.

"Modern art" is always a little hit-or-miss. I confess to being unconvinced by Martin Creed's Work No. 227, The Lights Going On And Off (the curatorial note at this link is uncharacteristically bombastic and horrible, I would like to note). I am a fan Mark Rothko, but would say that some other adherents of the color-field movement are more provocative than painterly. Negotiating the difficult space of modern and contemporary art must be like walking a precipitous ledge: the view is amazing, but if you make a mistake, it's sure to be a doozy.

Maybe this helps to explain the fantastically good collection at the MOMA. There's a lot of deplorably poor "contemporary art" out there, but very little of it in this museum--indeed, the works at MOMA are almost consistently top-notch and moving. The Met can buy a painting from a 16th century minor artist and not be ridiculed ("not as good as a Da Vinci, but still a nice little addition to our collection"), but MOMA simply can't get away with buying modern art that's not particularly good--because it is so obviously, so clearly not particularly good. In consequence, the Met's collection, taken on the whole, simply can't hold a candle to the collection at the MOMA.

But even if it could, the MOMA is smarter. If the Met is about knowledge and learning--here's how a Baroque artist would have learned perspective; here's the story that's being told on that Egyptian roll of papyrus; here's a crucifixion whose significance you won't truly understand unless you know that this is the wheel of St. Catherine, that that's St. Stephen with the arrows in him, not to mention the whole of New Testament Biblical history--then the MOMA is about thinking. It is no coincidence that it was the MOMA that made the mistake of giving Creed a forum for his inane on-again, off-again overhead lights; indeed, The Lights Going On And Off is in some ways an inherently thinking-man's work. It provokes conversation and consideration of artistic merits--even if it oversteps an indefinite boundary and leads all and sundry to conclude that, no, it's not any good, and, no, it's not art either.

The very different "knowing" and "thinking" models of art museums are both entirely viable, though perhaps almost mutually exclusive. There certainly are successful ways to approach the contextual project that characterizes the Met; to be sure, I love the opportunity that such a large and varied collection presents to immerse oneself in 14th Century Poland, or Middle Kingdom Egypt, or the Byzantine Empire, or even something so recent as fin-de-siecle France. If the Met wanted to make the most of its collection for the public, it would have curatorial notes that explained the context, relevance, and symbolism of its works--and this should be not just a cursory or obvious explanation ("This 17th Century crucifixion features a wounded Christ"--I mean, duh, I can see that by looking at the picture). Texts in other languages should be translated. A coin on a shelf should be labelled not simply "Coin with Justinian's Head," but should include some sense of who Justinian was, who might have made the coin, why it's an impressive piece of metalwork, and why it's phenominally interesting that this particular coin was dug up in China (which, as it is today, might not even be mentioned at all). A Metropolitan Museum for smart non-specialists needs to embrace context in a way that it emphatically does not do today.

The MOMA, by contrast, has a far lesser need for this kind of curatorial note (though that need is not entirely absent). For a couple of reasons, the works in that institution are less context-specific than those in the Met: first, we are more likely to be familiar with the world in which a contemporary piece was created (nobody needs an expert to explain the cultural significance of Maralyn Monroe or Campbell's Soup when trying to figure out what Andy Warhol was doing), so we don't need nearly as much coaching to see what's going on; and second, the works are far less likely to have been created for practical or useful reasons (a functional altarpiece, a coat of mail, a tomb, a table), the knowledge of which might give us a much greater appreciation of the object in question. What the MOMA does need are notes which, like many of the pieces within its walls, are thought-provoking. Both kinds of curation are trying to explain what's going on in a work of art--but what's going on in some art is primarily contextual, a question of story and style, while what's going on in some other art is primarily theoretical, a question of ideas and emotions.

So when I say that the MOMA is "smarter" than the Met, what I mean is this: its curatiorial notes succeed in making its works intelligently interesting in a way that the Met's notes do not. They explain what is going on, why the work is controversial (or much-loved or whatever), and why we should care about preserving it. To some extent, to be sure, the MOMA does this out of self-defense; nobody asks the Met to justify the inclusion of a 13th century figurative painting in the permanent collection, but we all want to know why an empty room or a monochromatic blue canvas gets to be included in a collection of the world's greatest artistic masterpieces. But this fact aside, MOMA's notes are well-researched and thought-provoking, and show a real consideration of the worth of the museum's pieces.

This curatorial consideration is extended beyond notes on the works and into the organization and structure of exhibits, as well. Curation at the Met is lazy. Curation at MOMA is not. Galleries there are not the organized along the predictable "artist-region-year" vectors, but rather offer more carefully considered comparisons across artists and genres. Seeing Braques and Picasso side-by-side gives me a new appreciation for Picasso's superior ability not to lose the object of his paintings amid the complications of his Cubist style; looking at Chagall and Kandinsky in the same room is an exercise in how very different two works of similar colors, materials, and brush strokes can be; five sloping, modernist chairs presented together are just enough to consider their myriad differences and essential formal and practical similarities, without overwhelming a viewer to the point of saying, "Oh, look, it's yet another chair in this endless string of Chippendale chairs." Special exhibitions at MOMA are organized not by artist, but by theme. (The current special gallery is set aside for Out of Time, a look into the ways that art in its various forms has played with conceptions of time and historicity. It's the kind of exhibit that could coherently accomodate both Dali's Persistence of Memory and Warhol's Empire, a movie showing the Empire State building as it changes in real time). A room of architectural drawings and building schemata is introduced by a compelling statement on the way that the size of an architectural work affects--or is affected by--the subject matter; viewers are invited to note how the bigger pieces in the gallery generally show the outsides of buildings--the "artist's renditions" of various finished structures--while smaller sheets of paper were devoted to careful diagrams and building plans. This was not precisely an exhibit designed to show off the thesis presented at the beginning; rather, it was a case of a curator looking at the MOMA's collection of architectural work, noticing something interesting, and pointing it out to viewers to give us a guide as to how to look at the entirety of collected works. That's a fantastic curatorial model.

In fact, the only one-artist room that I found in the whole of the Museum of Modern Art, a room full of Jackson Pollocks, also offered excellent, thought-provoking juxtapositions. All of the pieces shared the same energy--perhaps we should say, "the same sense of urgency"--but some were far more representational than others, and each was quite distinct in character. To be sure, it was not a room of endless and poorly-connected Pollock drip paintings, the likes of which are so common at the Met. Instead, like the study in architecture several galleries over, the Pollock gallery provided a carefully curated set of inviting comparisons. It was great.

So there you are. I recall reading that the average tourist is several times more likely to visit the Met than they are to visit any other museum in New York City. Well, average tourist, now I'm talking to you. Go to the MOMA instead.

You are what you eat?

2006-10-03T17:55:00.000-05:00

Flipping through The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan, is an enlightening exercise in understanding one's food. Who would have thought that the calories we Americans eat are to an unprecedented extent derived from corn? Who considers the lack of a "food culture" in America to be an important factor in everything from dieting fads to obesity? Who, other than Pollan, is crazy enough to produce a meal by hunting and gathering, in this day and age?

Some of these insights about food are really quite shocking. In just one example, we learn that the energy in a chicken McNugget comes almost exclusively from corn--from the nearly-exclusively corn-fed chicken to the modified cornstarch that binds the meat together, from the soy lecithin for flavoring (the name is deceptive--it can be, and usually is, derived from corn) to the corn flour breading on the outside, and even to the corn oil that the thing is cooked in. In some very real sense, a meal of chicken McNuggets is processed corn held together by processed corn, breaded by processed corn, fried in processed corn. And don't even get me started on the sauces for this scrumptious meal. (They're full of high-fructose corn syrup, corn starch, xanthan gum, dextrose, and even caramel color, all of which are corn-derived.) It's an historical anomoly to eat like this: in other times and places, chicken feed off of wheat and grubs (which in turn feed off of myriad kinds of vegetable matter), corn and grass and millet and barley. Flour for breading might be wheat-based; flavoring would be herbal and therefore derived from a selection of varied and aromatic plants. Oil could come from corn, or soy, or olives, or sunflower seeds, or indeed from any number of available trees and plants. Sweetness (in a dipping sauce, for example) came from cane sugar, palm sugar, honey (flower-derived), or molasses (from sugar cane, the sugar beet, or sorghum). Corn-derived preservatives and colorings are a new culinary invention.

This is not to say, precisely, that there's a problem in depending on only one plant to convert solar energy into the bulk of our food, nutritious and not-so-nutritious--but it is to point out how strange this moment is in the history of human gastronomy. We Americans eat more single-mindedly than anybody else, ever. This represents a monocultured victory over environment: corn is a versatile, hardy, nutritious foodstuff. It's not crazy that we should depend on it more even than the Inuit depend on fish (which, incidentally, eat any number of varied aquatic vegetables anyway). Pollan does a superb job of showing how strangely we eat, however, and I find this rumination compelling.

But what's more interesting--and, sadly, less emphasized in Pollan's book--is the author's take not on food, but on people. He hypothesizes that the uniquely American dilemma of obesity stems from a uniquely American lack of a food culture. The French know how to eat healthily, Pollan suggests, because they have a long tradition of eating and eating well that has been passed down over hundreds or even thousands of years--and this tradition informs their food choices still today. Americans fall for ridiculous dieting schemes (no butter! no carbs! lots of protein! minimal protein!) because we don't have a strong cultural grounding in reasonable eating habits. The argument is a bit questionable, of course, if only because increasingly we are seeing that the "uniquely American" obesity problem is finding its way into numerous other countries with much more entrenched eating habits. Still, it's an interesting thought (and that always attracts me, what can I say). Moreover, it does seem intuitively true that a culture with no sense of "summer vegetables," a decreasing awareness of the starch-meat-vegetable mealtime trio, the need for a government-sponsored food pyramid, and no national cooking style, should be far less sure about what its people ought to be eating than another, more gastronomically aware culture.

The most interesting idea Pollan's whole book, though, is not even this speculation on the healthful influence of national pride through foodstuffs. It is instead an idea that Pollan tosses around in the introduction and then quickly dismisses as inessential to the main investigation of his text. That's a shame. Where our food comes from, and how it gets to our table, does make for interesting reading. But the idea that our biological ability to eat nearly any organic thing has made us smarter and more social--well, that makes for interesting thinking. And it's an idea that Pollan never follows up on, and one whose case he doesn't compellingly make.

I wish he did. For the Omnivore's Dilemma, succinctly put, is the question of what to eat. It's a question that doesn't plague many animals: "The koala bear doesn't worry about what to eat," Pollan rightly tells us. "If it looks and smells and tastes like a eucalyptus leaf, it must be dinner. The koala's culinary preferences are hardwired in its genes." But for omnivores like ourselves--and rats, for that matter--the question of what to have for supper is much harder to answer. The abundance of choice creates a stress where other species have none. At the same time, though, omnivory allows us great versatility: people (and rats) can live almost anywhere on earth (which stands in stark contrast to the Australia-bound koala). Our ability to eat almost anything shapes us in many more ways than simply determining the kinds of nutrients we ingest.

By far the most provocative claim that Pollan makes along these lines--the claim he doesn't follow up on, and the claim that I wish was the basis for this book--is that omnivory implies mental acuity. After all, Pollan says, unlike other animals, we have to have complex memory and pattern recognition skills just to eat. The fact that our food preferences aren't genetically hardwired means that we have to consider food anew each time we are hungry. What do I feel like eating today? Are those the same berries that made me sick last week, or are they more like the sweet berries I picked for supper a week ago? Is it better to roast my fish or eat it raw, like sushi?

There's a social and educational angle to this, too: maybe I've never encounetered these berries before, but my parents tell me not to eat them because they're poisonous. I was taught to cook my food, to grind my grain to make flour, to shop at Wegman's and to put the leftover chicken in the freezer. Baby humans starve when left alone; grown men have learned to feed themselves. For people, eating implies memory, learning, conscious consideration, and possibly even rationality.

This leads Pollan ultimately to suggest that "the reason we evolved such big and intricate brains was precisely to help us deal with the omnivore's dilemma" (though he foists responsibility for the claim onto "many [unnamed] anthropologists"). In other words, people are smart--at least in part--because it's impossible to survive as a dumb omnivore. If we were stupid, we'd starve.

Pollard's book is more about food than it is about people (grand designs to the contrary notwithstanding). But it seems to me that the smartness claim might be interesting and easy to test--and not by anthropological theory, but rather by hard scientific experiment. If we looked at the brains of people and of rats and discovered that they both had disproportionately large frontal lobes, for example--while intermediate, non-omnivorous species did not--that would provide some compelling evidence for a specific, definable link between what we eat and how our brains are wired. And that would make for a great book.

Why I'm Not a Character in A Farewell to Arms

2006-09-25T16:50:00.000-05:00

There is a saying about Hemingway: "He never says someone is sad; rather, he makes it rain."

There is in this a great conflation of setting and character, a way of taking the mood of an individual and making it environmental. (There is also a lot of truth in the sentence, as well, and it reminds me of one of my favorite jokes. Q: Why did Ernest Hemingway's chicken cross the road? A: To die. Alone. In the rain.)

It was always hard for me to understand the "mood" of a novel. People have moods. Houses, trees, activities, the stuff of fiction: no moods. It's all an elaborate metaphor. And that would be fine, except that they test for this sort of thing on the SAT.

The flip side of this metaphor, however, I understand. My own moods are tightly linked to the weather around me. Yesterday was the first wind-whipped day of the year, and walking outside, I felt the same energy that I could watch blowing tree-leaves upside-down and newspapers across the avenues. When skies are grey and greying, or even tinged with a menacing green, I internalize a certain excitement that anticipates the electrical storm that is to follow. When the air is cool and brisk I want to play; when it is hot I am miserable (and not just, I think, because of the uncomfortable temperature or the too-bright sun); when it snows I am happy.

This is not entirely crazy. I may be highly attuned to the weather, but everybody is somewhat attuned to their environment. When lights are bright, we are all less likely to sleep (and this explains the well-lit garishness of malls and casino floors); when it's warm, we're more likely to be drowsy; if there's techno music and strobe lights, our pulse is likely to be relatively fast (even if we're not dancing); if we smell food, we're more likely to salivate and to feel hungry.

Still, I can't help but think that I take this to a strange extreme. So I don't think books have moods, and I certainly don't think rain makes this day sadder than the next (even if I do think Hemingway uses the conceit to excellent effect). But I do like to entertain the notion that I am myself a metaphor for the environment around me, that my moods reflect the world (and not the other way round). It is a nice reversal of the literary.

Jimmy's from Georgia

2006-09-21T20:08:00.000-05:00

I went to see Jimmy Carter speak last night. In many ways, he was a compelling and interesting man, full of a desire to do good in the world and pleased to be using his post-Presidential time realizing that desire. Much of the event I was at was a question-and-answer session, and that, too, was interesting, with discussion running the gamut from the role of the UN and the appropriateness of the Iraq war to people's moral obligations in everyday life to this country's changing political landscape.

With all of this as food for thought, it might be a bit surprising that the thing I have been chewing on is the fact of Carter's amazing identification with Georgia. Carter, so a friend tells me (I haven't looked it up), is 82. And he is firmly, staunchly, happily from Georgia. He lived there, he built his Presidential library there, he returned after his time in the White House, he talks with an old Georgia twang and he made a point of centering the Carter Center in Atlanta. This is Carter's home. He doesn't want to live anywhere else, and when he was in Washington, by his own admission he missed his home.

People of my generation just aren't like that. We are citizens of the world, or at least of America, far more than we are of this or that state. There is a kind of cosmpolitanism that has taken hold across this country.

That's not to say that we forget where we come from, or that New Yorkers and Bostonites aren't in some ways fiercely loyal to their cities, but that those identifications are no longer as geographical as you might think. A friend of mine here in New York thinks of himself as a Chicagoan, to be sure, but it isn't anything geographical or even practical that he misses. He has explained to me that he will probably never live there again, in fact; his preferred jobs are in New York, while his idealized retirement is in Europe. Clinton may have grown up in a small house in Little Rock, and he may have put his Presidential library there, and he may even have been governor of Arkansas, but he's a New Yorker now.

Or, no, scratch that. He's not really a New Yorker. He's a citizen of the world, in a way that Jimmy Carter simply is not and could not be. Clinton could be at home in New York or Arkansas, London or Tokyo or Seattle or Toronto. Jimmy Carter could spend time in each of these places, could live there, but he'd never make them his home.

I don't know what to make of this. It's just a reflection...

9/11 in NYC

2006-09-11T22:33:00.000-05:00

This whole thing is fucked up.

I don't want to participate in the glamorization of 9/11. I don't want to participate in the hijacking of this date for a political agenda, right-wing or left-wing or even appealingly moderate. I don't always feel like compromising or being nice. I don't see what thanking the Marines has to do with remembering the collapse of the twin towers. I don't think all idologies are created equal. I don't like people's morbid fascinations. I don't want to hear another one of those calls from people trapped inside the buildings to 911 crews who couldn't get to them. I wish people noticed the flags at half mast. I'm tired of the bickering over the WTC site. I hate the World Trade Center movies and I wish people wouldn't watch them. I'm disgusted by evocative video montages that toy with emotions just for the sake of toying with emotions. I'm tired of people who pretend not to remember that anything happened. I'm tired of people who remember too much, too vocally, too voyeuristically. I'm tired of this whole goddamned thing.

like a puerto rican rocket, perhaps?

2006-09-07T19:04:00.000-05:00

Every Thursday afternoon there's free music in the marble-and-pavement, fountain-and-9/11 memorial park on 45th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues. Usually, this means that a bunch of corporate types are serenaded as they take a hurried lunch before running off to go do something corporate again. Sometimes, however, the music is good enough that people really listen and enjoy it.

Sometimes, it's good enough that we dance.

And this, my friends, is how I spent my lunch break today. There was a three-man band, featuring a drummer, a keyboardist, and a trombonist/trumpeter/flutist (floutist?), playing fantastic Puerto Rican music, bantering with the audience, inserting lyrics about the various people eating lunch. And at some point while I was there, a random fellow started to dance. And then a girl with him. And then somebody else, this one in shirt and tie. And pretty soon, there were a bunch of us, some of us in pairs salsa dancing to what was obviously not quite a salsa beat (it was close, though), others on their own just doing their thing. It was great.

My friend MJS has this great obsession with fads. (Perhaps weirdly, he has now been published in Science and has had his research splashed all over the pages of the New York Times and the BBC. You can make anything academic if your research is good enough.) Years ago, back before he was academical hot stuff, MJS was trying to figure out pogs. You remember them? Everybody I knew collected the cardboard disks. We played at school. On school buses. At home. It was a dumb game: you throw one pog at a stack of other pogs (to which you've contributed your fair share), and you get to keep the ones you flip over. Then your opponent does the same. The point was to relieve your friend of all his pogs without losing very many, or any, of your own. It was gambling for eighth-graders, the most positive outcome of which was that one might win some cardboard circles.

What MJS said, and he was right, is that it's an awfully weird thing that this game would take off like a rocket. I mean, lots and lots of kids play hearts on the busride in to school, but those of us who don't do so don't feel particularly uncool and don't particularly wish that we did. Lots of adults play poker and make winnings, but people who don't play certainly don't feel left out. So what's the difference between hearts and poker, on the one hand, and pogs, on the other?

MJS posited that it had to do with numbers. Surely, he said, there had to be some critical mass of kids who played pogs before suddenly everybody felt they had to get in on the action. If enough people played hearts, the rest of us would want to, too, he thought. MJS likened the process to a state change in chemistry: just as one can add heat continuously to a solid and it just becomes a warmer solid until suddenly it hits that critical temperature at which--wham bam!--it becomes a liquid, one can add people to an activity and it just becomes a slightly more widespread activity until--wham bam again--it takes off like a rocket and becomes a fad that we all have to get in on.

I like the analogy. I like the question of why people are wired like that, if in fact we are. And I like the uncertainty about just what that critical number of people is. (Just think how much money you could make in marketing if you knew how many people in a given population you had to get on board before your product's popularity would snowball on its own!)

In the case of dancing in the marble-and-pavement park on 45th Street, though, I posit that we can know that critical number. It's three.

three operas in three days

2006-08-29T10:58:00.000-05:00

Last week, I went to three operatic performances. That's right. Three.

Yeah, I'm young and hip.

I've posted about opera once before. I am firmly convinced that it's the next big thing, or at least, that it should be. We all think of opera as this staid and boring Classical Music experience, with the capital C and capital M and stuffy old men and fat singing ladies with horns and viking helmets (which, you've got to admit, is actually a pretty cool costume). Truth is, there is some "high" opera which you have to be a connosieur to appreciate--I'd put Wagner in this bunch--but most of it is very low-brow and rousingly populist when you actually get into the nitty-gritty of it. Mozart's best operas are comic love triangles full of infidelity, attempted affairs, and mistaken identities (Figaro, for example). He's got tales of a couple of men running around after the girls of their dreams (The Magic Flute), too, as well as the great Don Juan story in which, in high operatic form, we are regaled by a cataloque of the title character's many--2,065--conquests (that's Don Giovanni). Bizet's great opera Carmen is about a woman who seduces a military corporal, causing him to commit mutiny and ultimately to join a band of smugglers. Enter love interest # 2! Carmen leaves the former military man--now ruined--for a bullfighter. In a very soap-opera twist, man # 2 unknowingly tells man # 1 that his current girl had an affair with a soldier. Soldier-man is irate, and vows to kill Carmen, which he does. Nobody's happy! Yippee! End of opera. Or there's Verdi: Aida is about an Egyptian soldier who loves an Ethiopian slave and has to choose between her and his duties to the Pharaoh. Oh, and did I mention that, in the meantime, the Pharaoh's daughter is in love with him? Or take La Triviata, which is about a wild courtesan who--gasp!--falls in love with someone! This causes much difficulty, as his dad doesn't approve of the match (obviously). She leaves the guy ("to protect him"), he publicly shames her by throwing money at her ("for services rendered" while they lived together!), and then in the end he realizes she always loved him after all. But she dies anyhow.

As the World Turns, you've got nothing on me.

It's not just lurid plotlines and complicated relationships that should get anybody who watched The OC or One Tree Hill into an opera house, though. It's also the fact that the music really is rousing. I mean, we all hum opera music already, because it's in every car commercial ever invented. Do you need more of an indication that it's catchy and memorable?

And there's lighting, and staging, and all that other stuff, too.

It baffles me that we all pay $60 or $80 a pop to go see a show on Broadway--great fun, I agree--but nobody under 70 pays the exact same amount to see an equally awesome show at the Met or the New York City Opera. The opera is the musical of the 17th century. The two genres should really be in direct competition with each other, drawing from the same audience pool. But somehow, we've managed to make opera seem decidedly unfun. Um, that's silly.

To be sure, both the Met and the Opera NYC now have super-cheap tickets available for young folks. This is great. There's a concerted effort going on to get new people into opera, and I applaud that. But it is still the case that opera takes itself altogether too seriously. The marketing ploy shouldn't be, "Here I have this elite thing, and you too can learn about it and show off how cultured you are by talking about Aida and leaving your ticket stubs lying around your apartment." Most opera is very fun and often quite funny as well, surprisingly accessible, and quite catchy. The marketing ploy should be, "Nobody ever told you you'd like it, did they? Cuz you will." As it is, I think our opera production companies here in New York are appealing to young folks who want to appear a certain way, instead of to young folks who might actually, genuinely like opera.

I used to think "pithy" meant "light" or even "trite." oops.

2006-08-25T16:10:00.000-05:00

Hi folks. Of late, I've been reading Francis Bacon's Of Empire, a collection of his essays. He's got a few pithy lines in there among his instructions as to how to build the ideal garden (30 acres, open galleries, fruit trees, an artificial heath) and how to travel the world (with a tutor, keeping a diary, and without putting down roots in any one place). My three favorite quotes are below. (Let me add, however, that this man is no Shakespeare--offbeat speculations aside.)

Pithy quote # 1: "There is no question but a just fear of an imminent danger, though there be no blow given, is a lawful cause of war."

I used to think of this as the Bush Doctrine. Turns out, unsurprisingly, that it's been around much longer than Mr. Bush, and, again unsurprisingly, that it has been more explicitly and concisely stated than ever the President has done. What's interesting about Bacon, though, is the reasoning that informs the sentiment. Bacon's concern is with relative power: in a finite world, your gain in territory or trade comes only at my loss. Every time you become stronger, I become relatively weaker, and this is all that matters. Perhaps what Bacon says is obviously true in the case of territory, but it is nonobvious in the case of trade; we think of free trade and manufacturing for comparative advantage as helping all involved, but Bacon would argue that the disproportionality of benefits is deeply problematic. A neighboring state's growing power is a threat, even if that state is peaceful, and even if it comes with your own, relatively slower, growth in power. (This is, of course, an oversimplification; if my state is growing in power relative to 10 states, but to do so must lose power relative to an 11th state, we would be well-advised to accept the deal for the time being. Our world is not a two-state system, after all.)

The other interesting thing about Bacon is his presumption that all leaders and rulers will, and should, follow this precept. His understanding of war (and indeed of international negotiation) is vastly different than ours. It is one that allows for a noble enemy, one which doesn't necessarily cast armed conflict in terms of right vs. wrong, but rather in terms of two rulers each struggling to protect their nations against the encroachment of the other. For Bacon, it is morally equivalent to say, "I attacked because I felt imminent danger" and "I was attacked because I presented imminent danger." (It is not practically equivalent, just morally. What I mean is, Bacon doesn't feel the need to pick sides, or to discover which cause was the more just.) Indeed, for Bacon, a bad leader would be one who does not fight to protect his people, or even just to make them great.

If his take is very equitable, it is also very mechanistic. (Perhaps we should expect this of a sometime-dabbler in Enlightenment sciences.) While he has a sense of the noble cause, Bacon also has a strong sense of human nature; it is his contention that fighting to preserve one's nation, for example, is noble--but also that it is unavoidable. When we look at Henry the Eighth of England, Francis the First of France, and Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire, Bacon would have us see that they formed alliances and waged war in very similar ways and for very similar reasons. One reason not to proclaim the moral high ground in armed conflict, then, is the possibility of one's enemies' nobility; another reason is the certainty of our inherent similarity.

Pithy quote # 2: "All precepts concerning kings are in effect comprehended in those two remembrances: Momento quod es homo, and Momento quod es Deus or vice Dei: the one bridleth their power, and the other their will."

First, a quick translation: "remember you are human" (or, "remember you are a man"), and, "remember you are God, or God's regent on earth" (or "a God," "one of God's viceregents," etc. with various articles flowing in and out as the translator sees fit).

I like this. You're in charge--you get the power, you the responsibility, you get to boss people around and create worlds and all that. On the other hand, you're just a person, nothing special, what makes you think you deserve all this anyhow?

I'm not really in favor of divine monarchy or the whole leader-as-God's-regent kind of thing, I have to say. Give me a democracy any day. But if you have to explain the trappings of monarchy, this is not a bad beginning.

Pithy quote # 3: "It is good also not to try experiments in states, except the necessity be urgent or the utility evident; and well to beware that it be the reformation that draweth on the change, and not the desire of change that pretendeth the reformation."

Well said, Sir Francis. Spoken like a true conservative indeed.

I mean, I take the point that reformation and revolution do not break out of nowhere, and so must generally have some more immediate cause than the continuing status quo. The problem here is not the observation, but the prescription that comes with it, the "...it is good not to experiment, because that might cause--gasp!--reformation!" I mean, there is a difference between reform and out-and-out revolution, no? And there are real goods to come of change, too. I mean, Bacon is basically saying, "It's no good to change things, because changing things might cause a clamor for further reform, and reform is a kind of change, and obviously we presume that it is no good to change things." Come now. Surely this is circular. Bacon's whole prescription relies on the idea that his readers are already predisposed against any sort of governmental reform.

This, I note, was probably a good assumption. I mean, if you are at the top of an arcane pecking order, you'd rather stay there, too, wouldn't you? Suddenly you'd go all-in for the perpetual stability of the current regime, right?

Well. Or something. So there you go. A three-bulletpoint summary of Francis Bacon on statehood and empire.

Of Blogging

2006-08-15T23:55:00.000-05:00

There is only one poem about poetry that is any good.

If that.

I waffle; today I find that it is pointed and well-wrought; today again I find that it is empty or hollow.

Here I am thinking of Archibald MacLeish's Ars Poetica. It starts with an apparent contradiction, saying that poetry should be "mute," "dumb, "silent," and, finally, "wordless." Taken on their own, of course, these sentiments would be baffling--but from the start we are also given the better alternative to loud and wordy poetry (even if it takes a while to understand that fact). For MacLeish, a poem's power is in its palpability, its ability to show, not tell. Indeed, he says straight out, first line, "A poem should be palpable..." but it's only in the final section of the poem that his meaning comes clear: no poet should write the "history of grief," but should rather show grief with "an empty door and a maple leaf." No poem should say "I love you," but should instead speak of "the leaning grasses and two lights above the sea."

And this is precisely the problem with Ars Poetica and all other poems about poetry. Ars Poetica is indeed a pretty good poem (especially its semantically-complicated second section, actually, which I haven't even touched on here)--but MacLeish, like every other poet on poetry that I've read, is unable to take his own advice when writing about poetry itself. If poetry should make its point palpably, should show and not tell, then his explicit exhortations are of an inferior sort. To be sure, they're far better than the incredible self-indulgence of Wislawa Szymborska or the ridiculousness of Naoshi Koriyama's A Loaf of Poetry. (Note to Koriyama and numerous others: metaphors do not a compelling allegory make. It is not enough to write, with Billy Collins, about the horrors of "torturing a confession out of" a poem; there is no torture, and no confession, and we all know that what is stake here is the meaning of the work. By happy contrast, when Shelley reflects on the brevity of human life and dominant civilization, we are meant to believe that there is an actual Ozymandias, that there are statuary remnants in the desert, and that the moral is the metaphor and the palpable image the reality--and not vice versa.) Somehow, even very great poets seem to lose themselves once they take on the subject of poetry itself, and their literary efforts inevitably fall short. It is not cleverly self-referential to write about verse in verse if the verse is no good in the first place.

This leads me to today's rumination. Do I blog more when more interesting things are happening to me, because I have more to say? Or less, because I have less time for this virtual world when fully engaged in the real world?

I suspect that I fall into a third category altogether. I write a post, generally speaking, when I feel like I have an interesting idea or observation--but surprisingly, this does not appear to me to be particularly correlated with doing interesting things in life. Of late I've noticed, in fact, that the more often I go out, the more often I drink Belgian beer on Friday nights and go on urban treasure hunts on Saturdays, the LESS often I seem to engage with interesting ideas (which you'd think would be more forthcoming as I do more varied and interesting things). Is this a comment on my friends? Our conversations? The (less analytical?) way I'm coming to look at and live in the world? Maybe just the way in which I am more settled in my reasonably boring job? Or what?

I feel like I'm losing my sharpness, and my blog seems to me to be a chronicle of this. When I fail to post, it is not because I'm doing something else (which I think is the stereotype), but because I feel at a loss for anything to say.

End of self-indulgence. Back to normalcy now.

Madness

2006-08-08T01:19:00.000-05:00

Once a year or so, a whole bunch of New Yorkers get together for the enormous scavenger hunt/treasure hunt/codebreaking camp/exercise in sleep deprivation which is Midnight Madness. This has us doing such diverse things as interpreting art installations (How many seconds after the lightning does the thunder roll? Which light sticks are flashing and in what order? How can you put that together to get a phone number in Long Island? Is the curatorial note relevant?), following Lincoln around Chelsea (Oh look, here are some pennies on the ground. Which way is Lincoln's face pointing on that one? Oh, look, if I walk in that direction a few blocks, I find another bunch of pennies. Etc.), and assembling flip books based on the first 1200 digits of pi (hrm... 3.14159265357989... um... perhaps we should look this up). We began at about 11 at night. We finished at about two in the afternoon. And we won. Fantastic.

That's all, really. Obscure clues, strange puzzles, fierce competition, no sleep. What a great weekend!

now & forever

2006-07-30T10:19:00.000-05:00

Q has given me a fantastically good book about Cicero. Reading it, I find myself coming back to the oft-considered idea that the narrative of historical progress is largely a myth. I am struck by the fact that the Roman Republic, even in decline, would in many ways have been surprisingly familiar to us today: warring political factions, questions of the role of populism in the governing of the democratic state, issues to do with citizenship, courtroom trials and legalistic loopholes, land reform, taxation structures, professional sports, class woes, and on and on and on. The debates and problems of Cicero's Rome are precisely the sorts of debates and problems that I could easily imagine preoccupying Congress today. Some of them give me a ridiculous sense of déjà vu; redistributing somebody else's land to soldiers as a reward for and incentive to service is a common feature of both ancient Rome and modern Zimbabwe, while a political rival's decision to raze Cicero's home on the Palatine Hill and to replace it with a state-sponsored temple smacks to me of the common tactic of using eminent domain to further one's political ties to friendly, well-connected developers--or, even more, it makes me think of the recent politically-motivated attempt to seize Justice Souter's home in order to teach him a political lesson.

It's not just the politics and psychology of ancient Rome that we would have found familiar, however. There were physical similarities (if also great differences), and we would recognize everything from sports arenas to the library. There weren't really recognizable banks, but people did give loans and there was even a legally-mandated maximum interest rate. There were tenement blocks, single-family houses, homeowners, renters, and even occasional running water. Roads had mile markers. Girls had dollhouses.

It's not surprising that one can paint an engaging picture of Cicero and his life, either. It's got to be relatively easy to write a book about the historically distant politician--after all, we have his extensive correspondence, his books, and his speeches (improved for publication), just as we have for somebody as recent as Adams or Einstein.

But this is not meant to be a lament for progress in the world, or even an exposition of the lack thereof. I do think there are some ways in which we have undeniably learnt, built, created, and improved over the years. Modern medicine comes readily to mind, as does space exploration. Perhaps the development and use of the internet is another major progressive step, though I am somewhat skeptical. At any rate, I feel comfortable saying that there exist, simply put, new things that we can do now that we could not, and did not, do before, and that these things bring about real change in the way the human life is lived or the way that we think about ourselves and our place in the world; medicine and space exploration are some of those things. Moreover, these are things we understand now that we did not understand before, too. Voila! Progress.

The worldview I am presenting, then, is not one in which I descend into a chaotic postmodern narrative of human development in which we never learn and in which quality of life never improves, and during which we can never hope (as a species, or a nation, or a family, or any other group) to achieve any great goal or to approach any knew sort of objective knowledge; I emphatically find such a worldview to be false. At the same time, though, I do tend to approach narratives of progress with a major grain of salt. We can move forward, but it is hardly the inexorable march to modernism imagined by Marx or anybody else. (I'm not saying that such an idea is particularly Marxist, just that he is the proponent of it who comes most immediately to mind.)

Tangentially, I note here that I have just rhetorically placed myself somewhere between modernism and postmodernism, which is sort of amusing. Perhaps I can coin a new "ism" halfway between the two: "stmodernism," or "osmodernism," or something else with only half of the "post" included.

The thing is, it seems to me that most of our tangible improvements (both "hard" improvements like the development of pacemakers and heat-efficient buildings and fiberoptic cables as well as the more theoretical "soft" improvements in understanding, like our knowledge of how synapses work and why heat rises) are scientific. To be sure, the random legislator has at least as much and, generally speaking, probably a lot more, power over an individual's life and happiness than does a random scientist. But the legislator is doing exactly what legislators before him did, trying to balance the same forces, encouraged by the same kinds of promises and ambitions, and plagued by the same kind of difficulties. There may be different sorts of political leaders today (a king here, a Congressman there), but both seem to me to be practicing old methods of governance, necessarily rehashing again and again what has already gone before.

This is not a bad thing. I use the word "necessarily" with care; we need governance, social work, an economy, and literature and story as much now as ever anybody did then. (The "then" being some unspecified time in the past, I know, I know.) But these things are at once ephemeral and repeating; we will play them out now, and people will replay them over and over again into the future; and they played out in various permutations in the past as well, wherever and whenever there have been people out there (I imagine).

The work of science--at least some of the work of science--is different. It is not ephemeral, but timeless: we can forget a discovery, but it cannot be less true in the future (whereas the best way to run a society may very well change as the people change). This is complicated, of course, by the way that philosophical arguments turn into scientific investigations--but I think that that is not so difficult for us to understand intuitively. We know that Aristotle's physics and our own are different sorts of beasts; we know that Descartes talking about the mind is not the same as Harvard Med School studying the brain while looking at the output of a PET scan.

But that is, again, tangential. In the end, where I mean to be going is here: I think that all of this presents to me a sense of who one is helping when one prefers a political, social, religious, or literary calling over a scientific or mathematical one (or vice versa). In their noblest form, the former kinds of work engage in the eternal struggle to make life better for today's people (though, in more ignoble form, they can of course be used to make life worse, or to make the power-hungry happy, or for other nefarious but short-lived purposes). By contrast, scientific work is forward-looking, more about the good it can bring to people and the world in the future than about solving present and pressing problems (or doing harm--this, too, can be seen from a more nefarious flip-side). Even the person looking for an AIDS vaccine, very much with a mind to helping her world today, is learning something which will be useful and lifesaving even more in the future than it will be during her own time. Politics is not primarily about making the world better for all time, but shepherding one's compatriots pleasantly through the present. No politician is under the illusion that she will broker a lasting and permanent peace for all people. A scientist, however, is precisely under the impression that, if successful, she will discover (or create) something forever relevant to everybody.

This does not make the social sciences more parochial than the hard sciences, nor does it make the hard sciences more divorced from today's reality than the social sciences. But it does clarify a continuing tension in my own mind. I studied history and government in school (because I loved the former, at least, and was good at both); I believe in the public service of politics; I think history and story are deeply important, underappreciated, and excitingly able to give people a sense of themselves in the world, of cultural affinities, of analytical yet abstract thought, and even of right, good, and decency, all while being straightforwardly fun. I have occasional crises of conscience, however, in which I consider that I should devote my life to science--especially privileging medicine, physics, certain kinds of engineering, and math (don't ask). I would not be as good a physicist as I am an historian, but I wouldn't be too shabby--and it seems, on occasion, that that would be the best way to do good in the world. The question of how to make my world a better place is idealistic and perhaps even silly, but it does deeply matter to me nonetheless; it is helpful to think of these two kinds of pursuits as so explicitly complimentary, then, and so equally necessary. (I mean, we say that all the time, but we hardly ever act that way...)

$11

2006-07-23T23:45:00.000-05:00

I was buying ice cream at Cold Stone a couple days ago when presented with a conundrum that has bothered me ever since. I lay it out here for your consideration (and my own).

While standing in line, I found $11 on the floor. I'm pretty sure it wasn't there when I first started looking at the ice creams, which means that somebody in the line probably dropped it--and whoever it was probably still was in that line, or at least in the store, when I found the cash. Brilliantly, I announced that I had just found $11 on the floor. Whose was it?

Predictably, I suppose, no fewer than six people claimed the cash as their own. Well now, what to do? Nobody gave up their claim, and in the end there was just no way to decide between them. I kept the $11 (and subsequently put 10 of it into the United Homeless Organization's collection bin, feeling something of a guilty conscience).

Nobody in the crowded shop complained at this except those who said it was their money in the first place, so I take that as a tacit statement that this was fair. Nonetheless, I'm pretty sure that somebody got screwed out of their money. I was in a store--they easily could have given me change for a ten and a one, and I could have divided the money up between all the claimants. But that doesn't really seem fair, either; five of them were lying, after all. At least I was telling the truth when I walked out with the cash.

But that seems suspiciously ex post facto, as an attempt to justify the fact that I left the shop $11 richer for no apparent reason. What's more, I'm pretty sure that one of them was telling the truth, too, since I really do think that whoever dropped the money was probably in the store at that moment. Obviously, the cash was more rightfully that person's money than my own.

The problem here is not what I did, so much as the fact that I don't really know what I should have done. If presented with the same situation, would I handle it any better? I don't really think so.

I might not announce the amount, of course, and that seems like a sound starting point. But I also know that I never know exactly how much cash I'm carrying. If I lost $11, I might be able to see that I'm a bit short, and I might even know that I had a 10-dollar bill in there which appears now to be missing. But I'd never manage to get the exact amount with any certainty.

I imagine that others are like me in this way. I may be wrong, and, in a similar situation, there may indeed be somebody who can claim his exact loss. But if not, how does one handle this? I mean, I walked out of the store with somebody else's money, and that person was probably right there telling me that it was hers. And if so, she got totally screwed.

Stacy Kent

2006-07-20T22:32:00.000-05:00

It's too darned hot.

I'm hot. My neighbors are hot. My coworkers are hot. While playing softball in central park, I downed--and sweated out--more water than you could get out of a small swimming pool.

But the big problem is not that people are hot here in this city. It's that the city itself can't handle the heat.

Consider, if you will, the fact that two subway lines have stopped running, a third isn't running in Manhattan, and two more are only running a few local trains and no expresses--all because there isn't enough power for them. Houses and businesses in Queens are powerless, too. People are blaming ConEd, the local energy supplier. This is largely fair, in that they are in charge of powering the city--but it's unfair, too; Monday, New Yorkers set a new consumption record of 32,624 megawatts. We're running air conditioners at record rates, far above what our power grid can handle. Today, City Hall has dimmed its lights and upped the indoor temperatures in a bid to get others to do the same so that maybe, just maybe, normal city services can come back online.

Or consider that two days ago, a sixth train line was defunct. This was also because of power, in a way, but was decidedly not ConEd's problem. The third rail--which powers the trains--had buckled in the heat. Oops. No power along the line. Guess they weren't counting on days of 100+ degrees when they built the system.

Well, so New Yorkers can slow down a bit in the heat. It's not the end of the world. Washington, DC, shuts down when it snows. Why don't we get days off when it's hot?

Philharmony

2006-07-18T21:38:00.000-05:00

I went with LRand, DJ, and a few others to Central Park this evening to listen to the New York Philharmonic play on the Great Lawn, to an audience of at least a couple hundred thousand (I'd guess). People were spread out, picnicking, bantering, and listening.

This is a very populistic event, a civic and public event. Music in the park is the kind of thing that anybody and everybody goes to. And we go to listen, sure, but also to chat amongst friends and to sit on the grass and enjoy a New York summer evening. The songs chosen are crowd-pleasers; there are fireworks at the end.

All of this makes it very different from a night at the symphony, perhaps, but it also makes the evening fabulous in its own way. We were sometimes straining to hear the music, and sometimes annoyed, and all few hundred thousand of us were amused when the heavens broke forth with a rainstorm of epic proportions just after the last of the fireworks had gone off to good effect--but music in the park is first and foremost a very lovely thing. It is, I think, a very democratic thing. Certainly, it is a social and cultural unifier; it is familial (what with all the kids dancing through the opening strains of bum-bum-bum-BUMMMMMM it can't help but be); it is friendly.

I must say, I liked especially the fact that the best seats in the house for the music (in the north) were the worst for the fireworks (in the south, over the city skyline)--and even more than that, I liked the way that everybody was out running through the driving rain afterwards, soaked to their bones, screaming and laughing in a very unusual shared social pleasure. I've never seen anything like it before. We were all laughing together.

Something I Didn't Consider in College

2006-07-12T18:55:00.000-05:00

I find, as I become more firmly ensconced in the working world, that I become more boring as well. This seems to me a shame, but also not entirely a bad thing: being boring is not the same as being bored, after all, and I suspect that boringness and dependability go hand-in-hand in this world of ours. A student--of the humanities or liberal arts, at least--is expected to spend her time reading interesting things and commenting upon them all day long. She has the summers off to travel, or to work in one of many short-term jobs (each short enough to remain perpetually new and interesting), or to spend time with friends who are, one hopes, prolifically interesting when at their leisure. She can stay up late at night to talk about the meaning of life, and if she is tired in the morning, she can go to class groggy or skip class altogether.

Others get paid to lead interesting lives: the travel writer, I suspect, must work very hard to make her life uninteresting.

But the tradeoff is very real. The travel writer doesn't precisely have a home (even if she has a house), doesn't have a dependable income, doesn't have a family (or else doesn't see them very often, or else has to figure out how to move frequently with spouse and children in tow). In being predictable, one is also predictably available; I may go to work every day from 9 til whenever, and I may go to class once a week for my own perpetual sanity, and I may see the same people at each place day in and day out (and this may indeed be relatively boring)--but at least my work friends and my classmates and my bosses all know how to find me. My buddies know I'm in the city, and I will be next month, and they can plan on that. My landlord knows where my rent will come from. I know, roughly, whether or not I'll have time to go see a show on a Monday night in three weeks.

It's a boring, plodding kind of life, but it is still a good life. One needn't dislike what one boringly does.

Here, however, is an insight: professordom is an anomaly. Convincing somebody to pay you a regular, dependable salary for work that is discrete (a paper here, a new discovery there, a 9 month pedagogical period) seems to me reasonably unusual. It is made more remarkable by an expectation that one will read and investigate precisely that which is thought-provoking; indeed, this is often considered the most important part of the job. And this all seems truly fantastic when one considers that the professor does all of this in a context in which it is considered necessary to take extended periods time off (summers, sabbaticals) in order to do or discover or create explicitly interesting things. Indeed, the university professor is largely being paid to be perpetually exciting or noteworthy; if her ideas, lectures, and papers present nothing new and pique no one's interest, she has not done her job well.

There may be myriad other jobs that successfully combine stability and excitement (whether that excitement be merely intellectual or physical and bodily as well); Anderson Cooper undoubtedly has one of them, as does Derek Jeter. The insight is not therefore that professors have the best jobs in the world, but merely that such professions do exist, and are popularly attainable. Though certainly it has never before occurred to me that my fascinating history prof was as much a product of his lifestyle as a driving force behind it...

birds 'n planes 'n moral indecision

2006-07-03T21:16:00.000-05:00

What a splendid weekend! Friday featured a high-scoring and victorious softball game. Saturday, I awoke early early and went with Bean and Ned to hike a bit of the Appalachian Trail. (Railroads, incidentally, are spectacular inventions. We took the Metro North up to the trailhead; the stop was literally a platform about 6 feet by 3 feet in size. Imagine how comical, then, this enormous commuter train looked pulling up at the stop and opening the door--one, single door--to let some 5 or 6 hikers out to make their way into the wooded, flooded wilderness.) It felt good to walk, though I was surprisingly slogged by the end of it all.

Sunday I had brunch with friends out near Columbia, and then N and I tromped off to see Superman Returns. Now I'm sitting on my balcony (with my computer, thanks to the magic which is wireless networking), enjoying a cool breeze and a laid-back New York evening before the Fourth of July holiday. Tomorrow I plan on going to a ballgame and seeing some fireworks. Hot dogs may also feature prominently.

This is the good life.

But this post was meant actually to be about Superman. N and I considered that Superman is a problematic hero. He himself is morally uncomplicated: Superman is a defender of right, good, and justice. Where Spiderman struggles internally with his powers and considers using them for revenge and personal gain, Superman remains always unequivocally good. We are meant to see his actions as invariably heroic. When Superman goes wrong, it is with the best of intentions and the purest of hearts. When he has to choose between Lois Lane and Gotham City, he always casts a wistful look in her direction and then saves the rest of the world instead. (And then, because he's Superman, he goes and saves her too.) The Superman of the movies, at least, is always a a sympathetic character. He has no internal struggles.

Superman Returns flirts with, but never fully draws out, the problems inherent in this heroic conception. There's something more than a bit distasteful about Superman as lovestruck temptation to marital infidelity, after all, and putting Lois Lane into a serious relationship is therefore an inspired move. It's not a move the film is prepared actually to make with any spine, however. What we see instead is a watered-down version that allows Superman a relatively easy way out of any moral or emotional conundrum: we are talking here only of near-marital fidelity, though the movie would have been better for an honest-to-goodness marriage that we couldn't wrong-headedly rationalize away as immoral or unimportant (relative to Superman's own great love, of course). Adding a child to the mix is similarly inspired, because it makes the right course of action so painfully clear and so painfully contrary to Superman's desires (and actions--he's never quite blatantly inappropriate, but confessing one's love to somebody in a committed relationship, with a kid, knowing she loves you back, is inadvisable and even manipulative). Making that child (so very predictably) Superman's son completely undoes the interesting twist that his presence provides, however. Instead of feeling more uncomfortable with the way that Superman is disrupting Lois's life and the life of her partner (because there's a child involved), we now feel less uncomfortable (because it's Superman's child, and so he suddenly has a much greater right to continued involvement with this formerly happy family). The moviemakers nearly manage to bring in the tension of a competing love interest without the attendant moral quandary that the situation so obviously prompts.

But the Superman stories oughtn't so easily escape that quandary. (It's a different question whether Superman himself would be a better character if he was ever confronted by moral misgivings, or whether it's enough for the audience to sometimes recognize an irony or inconsistency in his savior-like charicature (played up particularly in this latest film) and his human-like actions and reactions.) When one is cast as the embodiment of good in a black-and-white, good-vs.-evil kind of world, surely the moral considerations follow.

Can you have a Superman who isn't always right, who isn't always good, if only because he lives in a world in which "good" isn't always clear? I'm not sure. But it seems to me a worthy lesson that sometimes questions are hard, and answers non-obvious. Given the way the movie sets this up, it's a shame they back away from it so emphatically by the time the credits roll.

Petanque. Piano. Reading Room. Wireless Access. Movies on Monday Nights.

2006-06-28T18:56:00.000-05:00

Today the rain is gone! To celebrate, I lunched in Bryant Park, as I often do on nice days.

Bryant Park is an awesome place. It's a very New Yorker place, too: tourists go to Times Square, if they're in the area, or to Central Park, if they want a park. But Bryant is where it's at for free entertainment, lovely weather, an open lawn, and the rushed lunches of the New York native.

Today at lunch I played pétanque (say: PAY-tonk). This is a game in which one throws heavy metal balls at a light little wooden target on the ground, while at the same time trying to knock competitors' balls away from the target. In other words, it's curling for the south of France. I played with a student, with a fellow I-work-in-finance type, and with a couple old men who were just out to enjoy the unusual sight of the sun. Lessons are free in Bryant Park. Equipment is available. Spectators are inevitable.

On Monday nights, there are free movies at sunset, projected on a giant screen on the main lawn. From 12:00 to 2:00 in the afternoon, there is very often a piano right next to the pétanque space, with a pianist providing the background music for one's lunch. On less athletic days (if one can call the playing of pétanque athletic, which one really oughtn't), one can lounge about in the Bryant Park Reading Room--that lovely, open-air library, complete with reference section, newspapers, poetry, and murder mysteries.

The library is a particularly cool idea. Just cross the imaginary line between grassy lawn and betabled reading room, and there you are, sitting at a shaky metal table, eating lunch, and reading Kafka.

Or you could, of course, be working: the whole park is rigged for wireless, and suit-clad men let their jackets hang off their chairs, roll up their sleeves, and log in as they enjoy this little bit of the great outdoors. People bring reports outside with them, and rocks serve as paperweights. It makes me dream of a day in which we can all work, cell phones and computers in hand, in parks, or at poolsides, on mountaintops, in our bedrooms. This is a horrifying thought; we don't want work to invade our personal non-workspaces. We want to be able to find places in the great outdoors where the burdens of civilization do not quite reach, where our cellphones don't work and where we can't do anything about looming deadlines. But this is at once an uplifting thought, too: if I could work 9 - 5 from a cabin in South Dakota, or a park in New York, it would sure beat working 9 - 5 in a cube farm.

I realize that very many somebodies get left out of this idealized vision of work and workspace, and those somebodies are (primarily) service workers. It's easy to see how I could write computer programs or do research or conduct netmeetings or even answer customer support hotline cellphones from Bryant Park, but it's much harder to see how one could serve Starbucks Coffee or McDonald's Hamburgers, make hotel room beds or bus tables from anywhere but a very particular non-park site. Online classes notwithstanding, it's hard to see how you could teach first grade. You can't play professional baseball from a South Dakotan cabin. You can't drive a cab or conduct a subway train while taking some sun outdoors.

So a lot of people don't get to participate in this vision. But there are other ideals: if a machine could make our beds, perhaps our bedmakers could run hotels--from Bryant Park. If nobody's congregating in big cube farm office buildings, maybe Starbucks will give way to outdoor coffee delivery service, which must be a better job in all but the worst of weathers. Maybe pro baseball players don't have that many quality of life issues to worry about anyway.

Still, it's a problem. We have lots of ways to make life more pleasant and convenient for "working professionals," but nothing very inspiring to say to professional workers. I'm all for making life better for even a small segment of a population, but the growing disparity between service workers and knowledge workers is not merely a product of bad social or economic policy. It is also a product of good, but lopsided, policy. Wiring Bryant Park is a great idea; having increasingly healthy and happy accountants with lots of vitamin D in their bodies and fresh(-ish) air in their lungs is fantastic; having increasingly healthy and happy accountants while at the same time having an increasing number of relatively pale, perpetually-on-their-feet Starbucks baristas who serve the accountants on their way to work in the Park--well, that's nothing if not widened social inequity, and that's not so great after all.

Relative disparities matter more than we might find immediately obvious. Blanchflower and Oswald found that a rise in everybody else's income makes you feel less satisfied with your own income. Clark and (the same) Oswald discovered that a rise in the wages of other workers lowers your job satisfaction as much as an equally large raise in your own pay lifts it. Solnick and Hemenway conducted a particularly telling experiment, which found that most people (for the purposes of this survey, "most people" refers exclusively to Harvard grad students) would rather make $50,000 a year where others made only $25,000 than they would make $100,000 a year in a world where most folks are earning $250,000. Traditional economic models don't quite get this; the whole idea behind comparative advantage and the benefits of free trade is that we can both be better off by producing more stuff and earning more income. But if you're earning that extra income hand-over-fist, while I'm only earning, say, 2% more GDP, then there may be a problem after all.

It is not crazy, of course, that relative well-being should so occupy us humans. An evolutionary narrative that comes readily to mind suggests that we are programmed, first and foremost, to be competitive. From the standpoint of a species, what's the point if all the individuals have enough food to survive, if the most well-fed aren't the ones who are best equipped to go out and propogate? As a result, perhaps, we feel keenly the desire to one-up our neighbors.

But you don't need evolution to explain the link between relative well-being and happiness; there are simple rational reasons for it, too. If I make twice as much as everybody else, I can buy twice as much as everybody else. If I make 40% of what everybody else makes, I can only get 40% of the goods that my neighbors are getting. It's not, of course, a perfect correlation. There are successful bargain-hunters out there who can stretch that 40% income to 60% of the stuff, and there are people who don't like caviar and wouldn't buy it no matter how much money they had--but it's still true that health, wealth, and goods can be largely swapped about. If not caviar, leg of lamb. Or a new car, or a better doctor, or a McMansion. Having absolutely more food, houses, or workaday happiness in the world may mean that there is more to go around to everybody, but it doesn't necessarily make us happier on the whole, at least not if it's distributed in a radically inequitable way. Well, and what good is greater workaday happiness, anyway, if it doesn't make us happier?

Head Cold

2006-06-23T18:38:00.000-05:00

I'm sick. Not exciting, stay-home-from-work, go-to-the-doctor sick, just runny-nosed and stuffy-headed. It's no fun.

I suppose being sick is never any fun, but I nonetheless do remember the days when being sick meant staying home and watching baseball and Matlock, reading, and drinking Kool-Aid. At some point, it just became a hassle to stay home if sick. At some point, it became an irresponsibiity.

And so, my friends, today was a work day like any other, except that I went through two boxes of Kleenex and several individually-wrapped packets of Advil. (Ah, luxury, to work at a place that provides such ridiculously cost-ineffective things as individually-wrapped Advil tablets.) For lunch I had soup. I worked more slowly than usual.

Why do we work like this? Sanity and germ control indicate that I should have taken this day off to rest and recover before becoming actually sick. Personal and professional responsibility dictates the opposite. There's a trade-off between duty overlap and absence coverage in the workplace, and it's not clear where the happy medium should be. The more that someone else can cover for me in my absence, the better. But the more that people can cover for me, the less I'm needed to do my job even in my presence.Too much overlap, and there's no point in paying me in the first place. Too little, and it's a crisis if I can't come in.

Of course, once it's reached a certain size, a company can just about always count on somebody being out on any given day. In that case, one can predict redundancy. Sure, we might hire 100 people to do the work of only 99, but if any given person has a 1/100 chance of being out on any given day, this allows for reasonable coverage. And it's not like a single individual is the redundant one; they're all a bit redundant, in a wholly reasonable way.

Smaller companies, or smaller departments within large companies, or small groups within departments, have it much harder. If I'm one of only four people at the office who does anything related to Product X, it's makes a lot less sense to hire a fifth employee for the group just to help cover on the odd days when I or my three coworkers are out. Most of the time, there'll just be no work for employee # 5 to do.

This, of course, is the great argument of scale. It forgets something important, though. Sure, it might be rough on my three coworkers when I'm out sick, but the flip side is that I actually might know all three of them well. We aren't just cogs in a giant scaled-up corporate machine; we have drinks together, sympathize when others are sick, and cover for one another out of slightly more than just professional obligation. What we lose in cost efficiency and predictable sick day coverage, we make up for in actually liking our jobs and knowing our coworkers.

This is no small point. Wall Mart, are you listening?

Architecture

2006-06-20T19:01:00.000-05:00

I've been in and out of the city over the last week or so, but the rain seems to be following me. I'm beginning to feel a bit like Noah at this point, what with the downpour at about 4:00 every day. Perhaps global warming has moved the tropics far enough north to explain the rainy season in New York and Michigan.

Anyway, you should see the water zip down and pour off of the sides of this building. The building itself always makes me think of racecars defying gravity and zooming up the sloped sides. No reason for that, I suppose; it's just the way things are. There's a nice parallel, then, in actually seeing the water zoom on down.

Diplomacy 101

2006-06-12T19:22:00.000-05:00

It's the World Cup!!! Yippee!

And I'm not the only one who thinks that, either. Living in New York, it's hard to disaggregate soccer enthusiasm into its two constituent parts, namely, the growing sense of World Cup excitement among Americans, and the preexisting enthusiasm among the foreigners and recent immigrants who so enliven this city. I can't tell: are we that much more aware of the WC than we were four years ago, or is it just that NYC is that much more cosmopolitan than Ithaca, New York? The latter is clearly true to some extent, but then again, a renowned college town is hardly lacking for successful students (and academics) from other countries.

Either way, people here are watching the World Cup. And this, despite the fact that America is currently poised to go down as soon as possible, perhaps without scoring even once (though we can always hope).

At work, I've seen people bring their company-issued laptops to the office, so that they can bring them into the break room and work while watching the game. On the streets, bars and restaurants have the games on; while buying lunch today, some 20 people were huddled outside the window just to watch the USA game on inside. A friend tells me that his trading floor had the game on instead of MSNBC. Another friend suggests that one could surely make a killing off the London markets if you made a point of calling just as England was scoring a goal. ("Their brains would be addled," to paraphrase his point.)

And, of course, there's nothing like the World Cup to bring out national rivalries. This doesn't yet really apply to most Americans, who would of course prefer their side to win, but who also feel that they have very little invested in the contest. Soccer is not a particularly American sport. None of us really know who the main competitors are, anyway.

But people are walking around the streets in team colors. They bring national flags to work, hang them in doorways, dress up their bars to favor one nation or another, and make a point of following their team's games. Certain matches take on added significance: an Angolan acquaintance was devastated when Portugal beat his team handily, even though this was to be expected. (Angola, I hasten to point out, was once a Portuguese colony.) Imagine the strong feelings surrounding a USA-Iran match, if such a thing could happen (and it could, theoretically, though it won't). Does anybody remember when upstart Senegal beat reigning champion France on the first day of 2002's World Cup? It was a popular victory in a way that the Yankees beating the Red Sox could never be.

I'm a big fan of national pride through sporting contests. Sports provide one of very, very few ways through which we can all come together as a single nation supporting a single cause, proud of our country, and leery of dissenters, without being frighteningly jingoistic. I do think moments of national unity are good: they are stabilizing, they make people feel like they are supported and part of something bigger than just themselves, and (obviously) they help sometimes very different community members to band together behind a shared cause. I broadly approve of these things--it's just that I just think that such moments should be orchestrated around things other than political causes. Thus: sports!

More than that, though, I think national rivalry through sports is good. The Indians and the Pakistanis may not be the best of friends, but surely it is a step in the right direction that both sides are deeply invested in winning their regular cricket matches against one another. They can boo the other team, wear national flags, cheer their own side, crowd around TVs en masse, and loathe the good batsman on the opposing team, but they each need the other for the match ever to get off the ground. Sporting contests are strange beasts: they are contests, yes, but each requires a mutual respect and an agreement on everything from ground rules to location. We could bomb random country X any day, but we couldn't play them in soccer unless they agreed to a number of mutually-acceptable rules.

And it's not just the teams that have to enter into the joint project of a match before they try to humiliate one another on the field; in most cases, especially the ones where the feelings run the highest, governments have to do this, too. Pakistan opened its borders to thousands of Indian cricket fans during their last Test match, negotiated a new cross-country bus service with the Indian government, and had to figure out where Indians were going to stay in their country. In the Japan-Korea World Cup, those countries had to work together economically, structurally, and politically--and the Japanese had to welcome finalist China into their midst along with a multitude of Chinese fans. Despite huge fears that this would go off badly indeed, it didn't. To be sure, the Japanese fans booed the Chinese team (which went home in ignomy having played poorly indeed), but after the match they turned around and hawked their World Cup wares to every Chinese tourist that would buy them. And the Chinese? Well, they bought them.

The Cost of Things

2006-06-01T00:01:00.000-05:00

Tim Harford wrote an interesting piece on inflation for Friday's Financial Times (which, oddly, you can't read on their site unless you have a subscription, but which you can read on slate for free). The basic claim (you should read it yourself) is that it's really hard to measure inflation, if not impossible. This is for two reasons: the same object in times past and today is not always equally desirable, and the same object 100 years ago and today is generally not actually the same when you get all nitpicky about it. So, even if you can say that a hat today costs 50% more in real dollars than it did 100 years ago (and this itself is hard enough to establish), this doesn't take into account the fact that a hat was far more important socially and culturally at the turn of the 20th century. It's true that a hat may be more expensive now, but we just don't care, because owning one is hardly a necessity for professional life. The cost of living is not more expensive today because hats are more expensive. The flip side of this is that objects themselves change and improve. We may be spending 10 times as much on the average warship today relative to 1776 dollars, but the average warship can do far more than 10 times as much damage. Cell phones may be more expensive in real dollars than the old rotary phones ever were, but cell phones can go anywhere. (Heck, normal, off-the-shelf, land-line phones may be more expensive, too--but they're also probably wireless, equipped for conference calling and multiple lines, come with hold buttons and caller ID, and have a volume control. Perhaps you're not paying more because the value of the dollar went down, but rather because the quality of the phone went up)

All of this makes sense to me, and complicates the idea of measuring the changing value of the dollar. I think Harford opens the door to a further aspect of the inflation problem, though, without ever really considering it well.

We measure inflation by comparing the cost of a static basket of goods over the years. If the entire basket costs $2,000 in 2000 and $3000 in 2005, we've just seen a 50% inflation rate over the last 5 years. The basket is big; it contains everything from college tuition to men's shirts, uncooked long grain white rice to haircuts to instant coffee to sports equipment (and a million other things, which you can see here). But just as not all of these things were equally important to daily life 5, 10, or 100 years ago, not all of these things are equally important to people of different social classes today, nor do they require an equal proportion of different people's incomes. Over the last century, the cost of technology has generally been decreasing. The cost of food and rent, however, has generally been increasing. If you're the kind of well-to-do person who owns (or even who has inherited) your home and who makes enough money to have to spend only a small percentage on food (freeing up a large amount for, say, flat-screen TVs and new computers and other high-tech toys), the inflation rate on the things that you buy has been very low. If, however, you are the kind of working-class person who spends the bulk of your income on rent and supper, then you're feeling inflation very much indeed. If you are a businessman, the increasing real price of suits is troublesome. If you're in construction, the decreasing real price of boots is encouraging. For the former, wardrobes are becoming more expensive every year; for the latter, they are becoming cheaper.

To try to account for all of this, the basket of goods that is used to determine inflation is meant to reflect some average of what Americans purchase (in rural and urban areas--there are two different baskets that divide along these lines). But few Americans actually purchase the "average" number of computers, for example. Rather, Bill Gates owns an awful lot of 'em (as do even the normal upper-class families--a laptop for dad and another for big sister, a PC for mom and little Jimmy to share, plus sis's old computer in the back room and that new laptop on order now that Jimmy is old enough to start typing his assignments for school), while people on the other end of the economic spectrum own one computer or none at all. Similarly, it's not the case that most Americans include one package of Ramen noodles--or 1 ounce of fresh cheese--in their shopping baskets each week. Rather, some people are eating a bunch of Ramen, and others are eating gourmet cheese. These people may indeed overlap--the same person might just LOVE both chicken-flavored noodles and fresh Parmesan--but it seems unlikely that anybody is regularly buying a single package of Ramen for 20 cents, or cheese in anything less than 5- or 6-ounce chunks. In other words, the inflation rate is being calculated on a basket of goods that reflects not the average American, but rather the nonexistent American.

Maybe we would do better to try to calculate inflation based not on the mean (= number of things / number of people, so that 100 computers / 50 people means each person has to have bought 2 computers even if in actuality one person has 35 computers, 60 others have 1, and the remaining 5 have none at all), but on the mode (= the greatest number of people in today's population have 1 computer, therefore we include only 1 computer in our basket of goods, even if that one guy had to have bought 35 of 'em for this to work out). Better yet, maybe we ought to look at different consumer price indexes for members of different tax brackets, much the way we already recognize that urban consumers have different needs and desires from their rural counterparts. After all, just as a Manhattanite can be presumed not to need a tractor and large quantities of fertilizer, and not to own vast swathes of land, while a rural Iowan can be assumed to have a lesser need for the Club (for the car) or a gym membership, America's richest families feel the effects of inflation when it hits investment returns, new car prices, technology, jewelry, wine, and other luxury items, while our poorest families most strongly feel the decreasing real value of the dollar when they discover that a greenback will buy less food, gasoline, or health care.

This is important, because tweaking the value of the dollar might have radically different effects, depending upon which sectors get tweaked. Moreover, it's worth pointing out that inflation actually benefits debters (since the amount they have to pay back is worth less in the world than it was when they borrowed it) while hurting lenders (since the interest they recoup today buys less than it would have 10 years ago, when they made the initial loan or bought the bond or whatever).

When we talk about inflation, then, it makes sense to ask "whose inflation?" But even then, it's hard to see how we could ever produce a personally-applicable picture of the value of our currency.

Oh, brilliant

2006-05-26T21:09:00.000-05:00

It's Fleet Week here in the city, which means everywhere you look there are uniformed men and women overrunning the city. Truth is, it's kind of nice to see them mingled in with the crowds. An awful lot of people are out there serving our country militarily these days (whether they want to or not, given our lovely stop-loss programs), but it's easy to never see them if you live on the Upper East Side and work in Times Square; the New York Times reported a few months ago that ONE PERSON enlisted from my zip code in the past year (enlistment = different from joining the officer corps, fyi). A little mingling is a decidedly good thing, if you ask me.

All this mingling is bringing out some interesting behavior from New Yorkers, however:

Interesting Behavior Exhibit A
Random man on subway to uniformed sailor from the USS Kearsarge: Hey son, I was on the Kearsarge in 95 and 96.
Sailor: Um, yep.
Random man: And I served on X, Y, and Z other ships, too.
Sailor: I've only served on the Kearsarge.
Man: How long've you been in the service?
Sailor: Uh, two months.
Man: Let me take you out for a drink, son.
(Man moves over to sailor, and they fall to talking and laughing as opposed to shouting at one another from opposite sides of the train.)

Interesting Behavior Exhibit B
Iz and I were climbing rocks in Central Park and considering throwing a frisbee when a man approached and asked us for change. Turns out he was a military man on active duty, on leave for the week. He and a bunch of others were spending their leave collecting change in New York, "to help out a bunch of vets in the city," he said. "The government's not doing it, so we're doing it ourselves."

We both gave the guy what we had--more than just a few pennies, too. You can argue broadly against the amount we Americans spend on the military, but you have to admit that this fellow has a good point about veterans' affairs and about how little we spend on, say, VA hospitals. Considerations of this sort always lead to me to sad reflections about military spending and the way we allocate our (substantial) DoD money.

At any rate, the guy sat down and talked to us briefly, and he was quite cool, really pounding the pavement for a cause he believed in. Begging for quarters is not, generally, how I picture the members of our armed forces. It was an interesting sight.

Interesting Behavior Exhibit C
New Yorkers flooded the 311 lines yesterday. (311 is a brilliant New York-only phenomenon, a line you can call when you need help of a non-emergency kind--when you have a city question, when a pothole needs to be filled or you want to know where to find a local hospital or hardware store, when your building has rats or the people outside are too loud or you want to know what voting district you're in.) The cause? Supersonic jets buzzing Manhattan landmarks. Oops. Someone forgot to tell New Yorkers that the Blue Angels were planning on a couple of Fleet Week flyovers. Um, hello? Post-9/11 world? Paranoid citizens? Tight aerial formations past important city landmarks? For goodness's sakes. Could you be more brilliant? Perhaps somebody could have reported on this before the fact. (As it is, newspapers and TV stations are treating it as news that people called them to ask what was up. "Frightened New Yorkers called this newspaper to figure out what is going on!" "Our news show reassured New Yorkers worried about supersonic jets from Harlem!" "We didn't know what was going on either, but we went to find out and now we are reporting on it for you!" And so on and so forth.)

boys will be boys, i suppose

2006-05-22T17:12:00.000-05:00

I went last week to hear a concert given by the St. Thomas Choir of Men and Boys (and several soloists, and of course the attendant musicians). The concert was, I think, of variable quality; the choir was unfailingly excellent, but the soloists had their better and worse moments, and the orchestra was not quite top notch.

St. Thomas Church has a choir school, the last church-affiliated school in the United States (or so they claim). It is strange to consider the boys who go there (and who thus sing in the choir of men and boys). They are small; the youngest are in the fourth grade (and a third grade will be opening next year). They are professionals, too: musicians of a high quality--indeed, some of the best in their field. Few people are more suited to singing the soprano lines in the Bach Cantatas than well-trained choirboys (since, after all, it is well-trained choirboys for whom those lines were written in the first place).

This is highly unusual. Many children work in this world of ours, but few are better at their jobs than an adult would be. As a general rule, this is all the more true when it comes to skilled labor. Yet choral works written for boys' voices are best sung by, well, boys. Most adult men cannot hit the notes; most adult women do so with a different vocal timbre. This is not necessarily bad, but it is importantly different. You can have a couple of oboes playing the Bach double, and it might be an excellent performance--but surely we recognize that this is not the same as having two violins playing instead. It is relevant that the piece was written for violins; it is also relevant that the soprano and alto parts of the cantatas were written for boys.

But this presents a problem. The boys of the St. Thomas Choir School are well-compensated for their time and effort. They recieve a first-class private education very cheaply; they recieve a near-unrivalled classical musical education; they get the run of a church and a professional resume before even reaching their teens. But they are still professionals, still obligated to work in a very real way, still living a serious lifestyle that today might make us uncomfortable when we consider that the youngest of them are nine years old and all are boarding away from home.

Still, I find that I cannot want the school to close. After all, if there really are only two English-language church-affiliated choir schools left in the world, we've got to encourage them to stick around. I find it sad to think that in 20 years, say, there won't be any boys left who can sing the Bach Cantatas. That would be a real loss.

Besides, these professional kids seem to be funloving enough. I managed accidentally to wander into the bowels of the church during intermission (oops--was looking for the public bathroom), and what did I see but a bunch of kids in full performance dress, kicking a soccer ball irreverently past cruxifixes, bumping into walls (and guest soloists), and just generally causing a ruckus. The soloists and conductor may have been annoyed (though maybe not, I don't know), but I thought it was great.

top of the tower

2006-05-14T20:28:00.000-05:00

If you walk straight back into the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you will get to a room with tapestries on the walls and an enormous choir screen in the middle dividing the east end of the room from the west end. If you then turn left and walk for a good distance, you will eventually pass a pair of relatively nondescript elevators on your right-hand side.

Unlike the other elevators in the Met Museum, these elevators will take you up to the roof. If the day is nice, you can buy a drink and lounge about on benches while enjoying a fantastic view of Central Park and midtown Manhattan.

This is what I did yesterday. It was an accident. As a "contributing member" of the museum, I get the privilege of paying a ridiculous sum to dine in the special members' dining room. I was walking past the museum on my way out of the park when I thought, "Gee, I wonder where the members' dining room is." It turns out it's on the fourth floor, just below the roof, also accessible by this special elevator.

I didn't go to the members' dining room. It was not actually my plan to eat alone in a particularly expensive place simply because I've never done it before, after all. I did, however, make my way up to the sparsely populated roof, from which New York looks surprisingly green and inviting. There was an installation by Cai Guo-Qiang up there. Some of it I just didn't "get"; without more in the way of explanation or interpretation, I'm hard-pressed to appreciate crocodiles stuck with knives and scissors. (I admit that it was a briefly clever gag; the sharp objects had all been taken from airport passengers as they went through security, and the title of the works was the official-sounding Move Along, Nothing to See Here. A good momentary evocation of the confiscation, but still not, I think, good art.) More interesting by far, also amusing, and visually striking, was Transparent Monument (pictured, above). This is, essentially, an enormous piece of tempered glass, slightly tinted. The amusing bit is provided by the dead birds placed around the base, as if they'd flown into the window and knocked themselves out.

But the interest was provided, for me, much more by the tint and the way the glass divided such an open space, without precisely making it less open. I liked the way the color of the sky was slightly different through the glass, the way it played with color in our world. I liked its openness; it was well-conceived for the available space. And I liked even the title of the work, "monument" being such a loaded word ("monument to what?" we might ask, especially given the prominently displayed Egyptian obelisk not far off in Central Park).

The Apartment (Finally)

2006-05-04T23:26:00.000-05:00

Also, in other news, I've finally moved into the 21st century with a new computer that can handle images. Yay! So, finally, here's a taste of my spiffy New York apartment. To the left, you see a mirror and some interesting spatial stuff going on with the hallway between the living room and the (New York-sized) kitchen area. I like what the mirror does to the angles of the room.

And here's, um, a wall (with glass coffee table in the foreground). The pyramid, red pentagon dice game, and cube on the coffee table are all math games. The pyramid took me two years to solve; it represents a kind of pinnacle of my college career, and I'm exceedingly proud of the fact that I managed to get all those pieces together in a regular form. It's not news to any of you, my readers, that I'm a big dork.

That reminds me of a joke told to me by cousin R. God creates the animals and the people and He says, "Go forth and multiply!" Well, everybody is very pleased with this commandment and they multiply just as fast as they can. Except the snakes. God, annoyed, comes down and says, "What's wrong here? I gave you a commandment. I'm God!" The snakes sort of waver a bit and try to say that they can't reproduce quite like the others, but God'll have none of it. "Just do what I say!" he commands. So the snakes slither off and the next day God comes down to check on them. To his dismay, there are still only two snakes! God is annoyed and chastises them, and they sort of hem and haw and then finally say, "Well, we're not like the others. Do you think you could knock down a couple of trees for us?" God can, obviously, and he does, but he leaves in a bad mood and assures the snakes that he'll be back the next day to check on their progress. Well, Lo and Behold!, on day # 3 God sees that the snakes have finally managed to go forth and multiply in fine fashion. He is pleased. So he praises them a bit and then asks, "What on Earth was the problem?" The snakes turn to him. "We're adders," they say. "We need logs to multiply." (Lamp and windows up by the beginning of this joke. More with the table just above. No pictures of the bedroom, kitchen, or bathroom in this installment...)

Green in the City

2006-05-04T22:46:00.000-05:00

New York is a neat city because it has really rather a lot of green space. This is lovely. My own apartment is beautifully nestled between Central Park four blocks to the west and Carl Schurz Park (home of Gracie Mansion) on the river, four blocks to the east. Last weekend, Lrand and buddy M and I went to the Cherry Blossom Festival at the brilliantly-blooming Brooklyn Botanic Garden (which I persist in wanting to call the "Brooklyn Botanical Garden," though why I like the redundant adjectival suffix is beyond me). I routinely play softball in Riverside Park in Manhattan, in the ubiquitous greenspace on Roosevelt Island (technically in Queens, but actually in the middle of the East River between Manhattan and Queens), and in Central Park. I eat lunch on the lawn of Bryant Park, just a couple of blocks from the office.

This must be a fantastic cosmopolitan luxury. New York City's Parks Department is per capita very well funded (at least by comparison with other cities of reasonable size). Moreover, there is an enormously strong popular appreciation for public greenery, public playing fields, and public art here. Communities take an active interest in their local parks; downtown, everybody and their brother is taking part in the discussion about how to turn the high line into public green space, while up here on the Upper East Side, people turn out every two weeks to tend to the gardens in Schultz park. This is a social as well as spiritual activity. The green is important.

All of this has very real, and very desirous, consequences. It means that, in the middle of the Manhattan, you can watch hawks from the Boathouse in Central Park and you can jog along the river under shade and through gardens. It means that you can grow things in the middle of this big city. It means that you can play frisbee on open lawns even when you only own a single-bedroom fourth-floor apartment without so much as a front stoop. I don't think non-New Yorkers can appreciate how nice--and how important--our parks truly are, concerned as they are with seeing the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty.

I mention all of this because I was dismayed--and surprisingly, viscerally annoyed--to discover that the softball field I played at last week was carpeted with, horror of horrors, artificial turf. Goddamn it, this whole CITY is artificial turf. And that's okay: the city is an amazing, fuel-efficient, heat-efficient, space-efficient, hip, fun, populous urban hotspot where people use public transit and where we build up and not out, leaving a brilliantly small footprint on the earth. But the softball field was in a PARK; why the heck tear up the turf in order to put in rubber "sod" and sandpapery "grass"?? (I also maintain, for you grammarticians out there, that those question marks really should be outside of the quote marks. It's because I'm feeling ornery.)

I take some solace in the fact that I am not alone in my dismay. New Yorkers everywhere agree: actual grass--and, for that matter, actual dirt--are an important part of this city.

Time to pony up in a little more tax money then, I suppose. I wish there were a "save the grass" foundation to which I could give!

The Political Song and Dance

2006-04-26T22:49:00.000-05:00

Tonight in New York City I saw something I never once saw at Cornell University. Here, three thousand people rose up in unison, unprompted, to sing Cornell's alma mater. We did it because the CD that was playing in the background featured some Cornell group or other, and they came to singing the alma mater, and apparently the natural thing to do was to stand and sing along. It was something to behold.

But of course, we were not hanging around the Beacon Theatre to listen to mediocre piped-in music. We were, in fact, hanging around waiting for Walt LaFeber to come out and give his last public lecture. I had the insight that, with a full house and people being turned away at the door, we Americans yearn for something of the academic in our daily lives. We are not getting it. Smart professionals may know everything about stock pricing, or podiatry, or the layout of New York's pipelines, but we have very little opportunity for lifelong general education. It is a real lack in our society today.

Dr. LaFeber spoke about the spread of democracy in the early years of this country, about Woodrow Wilson's ideal of making the world safe for democracy, and about the later revival of Wilsonian rhetoric in the 60's, 70's, and 80's. He spoke well and comfortably, telling us about how Thomas "Inalienable Rights" Jefferson refused to grant the vote to New Orleans after making the Louisiana Purchase, because he feared that the region (full of foreigners and criminals from the states) didn't have the right culture and institutions to allow democracy to work yet. Jefferson instituted martial law in New Orleans instead, and said that when enough Americans moved there, it could become a territory and then a full state. This is exactly what happened.

Dr. LaFeber told us about how Wilson and his crowd of idealistic liberals set out to give self-determination to the world. It worked, for a bit, in Hungary--but then the Hungarians voted in a communist, and Wilson realized he had little choice but to go in and persuade the people (using food as a bribe) to vote in someone more amenable to our point of view. It never worked at all in Mexico, Wilson's first international relations test, leading instead to a powder keg and a narrowly averted war over California and the southwest after we sent troops into Mexico City to influence the vote (worried, you see, that the duly elected government was planning on nationalizing Mexico's oil). Exporting democracy and self-determination didn't work in Eastern Europe, after the Russian Revolution. It emphatically didn't work in China, where we let Japan invade (for very practical reasons having to do with the League of Nations); indeed, after this last debacle, many of the young Americans who had accompanied Wilson on his European tour to make the world safe for democracy resigned. Wilsonianism faded.

It came back 50 years later, though, according to Dr. LaFeber. There weren't many things Nixon and Carter agreed on, but exporting democracy was one of 'em. Wilson became everybody's favorite President, and a new rhetoric of republicanism took root in American civil discourse.

And that is where LaFeber's story leaves off. He never once mentioned Bush, or Operation Iraqi Freedom, of Afghanistan, or 9/11. He didn't talk about the price of gasoline or offer moral judgments. But this is, nonetheless, the story he was telling us: the founding fathers didn't think democracy was easily exportable, Wilson proved the fact, and from the 60's onwards we've been diligently ignoring the lessons of history.

It is convenient to be an historian. Dr. LaFeber can stand up there and tell us that we don't know how, or when, or if, to give democracy to someone else (though we did once have a codified route to statehood and democratic self-governance in this country--a thing LaFeber failed to mention but which I think may be richly suggestive). He doesn't need to have an alternative to democracy-building, though, to offer his assessment (and to offer it in fine form). Dr. LaFeber is a student of American diplomatic history; I wonder what he suggests we do when our neighbor to the south descends into chaos, or when a trading partner half the world away stops exporting to us. Does he recommend the glorious isolation advocated by Washington? But that leads to questions of moral culpability for non-intervention (consider the case of World War II), and may not be viable anyway (as in the trading-partner case, when we have a real need for the foreign goods). Does he recommend a return instead to the colonial model advocated in Wilson's time by Britain, France, and, to a lesser extent, Italy? But, while democracy may not be practicable, surely subjugation is more problematic still. Perhaps we should be explicit about installing a friendly government--but that, too, has its dark side.

This is not to say that I don't take Dr. LaFeber's point; I personally tend to privilege stable governments over democratic ones (though all else being equal I like democracy especially, both for its deference to vox populi and for its inherent stability when compared with, say, monarchy, where the whim of a single individual is enough to dramatically change things). I only want to point out the difficulties of practicing politics, and the relative ease of studying it.

Nonetheless, Dr. LaFeber is right that we rewrite history all the time--and that it's all the easier to do so when we smudge over the details, and that historians have an important role to play in trying to resurrect those details once again so that the lessons of the past are not lost to the future. After all, it's easy to call Wilson one's favorite president for theoretical reasons, and it's all the easier when never looking at the more detailed successes and failures of his administration. Or, to put it a different way, it might seem natural to stand up and sing songs from one's bright college days when one is 55, but it's worth remembering that we never would have sung them at 20 (when we were instead busy thinking about all the ways that college could be just a bit better).

Collapse

2006-04-24T17:34:00.000-05:00

Easter Island has no trees.

This is striking because Easter Island was once a forested, tropical paradise. The island was home to native varieties of the giant palm, the tree daisy, the toromiro, and numerous kinds of shrubs, among other plant and tree species. All are now extinct.

Easter Island has no people. This is striking because the island does have buildings, quarries, trash heaps, tools, and monuments (the famous moai, Easter-island's giant statues), which could only have been left by people. Indeed, high-end estimates suggest that, at its peak, Easter's population may have reached 30,000.

Jared Diamond, Pulitzer-prize winner and author of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, suggests that the lack of trees, and the subsequent lack of people on Easter Island, is no coincidence. After all, he says, it wasn't like a natural disaster uprooted all the trees, leaving the population stranded without food, fuel, or the raw materials for boat-making and composting for their fields. No, what happened on Easter Island was this: the Easter Islanders cut down all the trees. Every single one of them.

That's it. In what turned out to be an act of societal suicide, this group of rational-actors, people who had managed roadways and agriculture, a strictly hierarchical society, and complex mining operations, cut down every single tree until they were living on a barren rock. Without the fruits of their trees and without the ability to build fishing boats out of wood, and with increasingly poor soil due to erosion and lack of organic compost, the Easter Islanders had nothing to eat. In desperation, they turned to cannibalism. Then they starved to death.

Jared Diamond doesn't think the Easter Islanders were particularly bad environmental managers. After all, he points out, lots of other Pacific Islanders chopped down trees and raised livestock and set up a complex agrarian society and burned forests to make room for fields. Many of those people are still around today, on Hawaii and elsewhere, practicing those same kinds of farming techniques. The difference is that, based on everything from average rainfall to (the lack of) soil-renewing fallout from the Central Asian dust cloud, Easter Island is one of the places most susceptible to deforestation in the world and certainly in the South Pacific. It wasn't that the Easter Islanders were unusually thickheaded or stupid, then, or that they were particularly unlucky in the lifestyle decisions that they made. Rather, according to Diamond, it was Easter Island which was unusual and particularly fragile environmentally. The Easter Islanders just had the misfortune of living there.

But let us consider the story of the Greenland Norse. Unlike the Easter Islanders, perhaps, these were people we could really understand: they raised sheep, goats, and cattle; they had churches and a grand cathedral with stained glass windows and an eighty-foot-tall bell tower (as well as bronze candlesticks, Communion wine, linen, silk, jewelry, and even a bishop from the mainland); they regularly tithed ten percent to the Roman Catholic Church; they grew hay in the summer and built state-of-the-art barns to keep their cattle warm in the winter; they had pets. They had well-developed civil procedures, too: two people wanting to marry had to read the banns out for three consecutive Sundays beforehand (lest there be objections), for example, and there was a required number of witnesses at marriage ceremonies. If someone treated you unfairly, stole your goods, or threw around their power just a bit too much, one could always take a civil suit to the Greenland Assembly.

In one way, though, the Greenland Norse are like the Easter Islanders, and that is that there aren't any of them left. They chopped down their forests for fuel, they dug up their turf to build well-insulated homes (often with six-foot thick turf walls, meaning that a typical home destroyed about ten acres of grassland), they grazed their sheep and cattle on the grass that was left, and, ultimately, they starved to death. In one particularly harsh winter, the Norse at Gardar ate every single one of their remaining cattle down to only the toe bones. They ate the calves (ensuring in the process that they would be unable to regrow the herd in the spring). In the end, they ate their dogs. When they had nothing left to eat, they died.

We might be tempted to chalk the disappearance of the Greenland Norse up to one very harsh winter and to leave it at that, much like the way we chalked up the disappearance of the Easter Islanders almost exclusively to environmental factors beyond their control. To be sure, the Norse could not have known that they would be entering the Little Ice Age any more than the Islanders, on arrival at Easter, could have known that it would take burned or chopped trees twice as long to regrow on their Island as it would on neighboring Islands. But Diamond is at great pains to prove that he is not an environmental determinist (as the subtitle of his book should serve to show us), and the situation of the Greenland Norse is far more complicated than that of the isolated Easter Islanders. After all, at the same time that they lived in Greenland, that island was home to many Inuit people--and the Inuit survived the harsh winters and still survive today. What was it, Jared Diamond wants to know, that caused the well-formed Norse society to collapse so quickly that valuable wooden objects remain strewn about on the floors of their ruined houses, while their Inuit neighbors continue to thrive centuries later?

What it is, we discover quickly, is that the Norse were too attached to Europe to be attached to Greenland in a reasonable (some would say "sane") way. They spent their summers hunting Walruses, valued on the mainland for their ivory, and traded these for luxury items and theological needs that reaffirmed their European culture; Diamond points out that they might otherwise have spent these summers trading for wood on Labrador, like the Inuit, thereby alleviating the environmental pressures on their part of Greenland. The Norse valued cattle, too, just like their ancestors in Norway, and rich chiefs spent great time and effort raising their cattle and growing hay to sustain the herds through the winter. For some reason, they had a taboo against eating fish: one researcher sifted through 35,000 bones from the garbage of a Norse farm and found only two fish bones (and other researchers have had similar results). The Christian Norse looked on the "pagan" Inuit with scorn and considered their own ways to be far superior.

And the Norse were right; many of their ways were far superior. The Norse had iron tools, a more diverse potential food supply than the Inuit, and ready European trading partners. But the Norse came to Greenland with a strong sense of culture that kept them from adopting many of the more rational ways of the Inuit, too; the Norse never learned to hunt the ringed seal, plentiful in wintertime (when the hayless cattle were starving), they never learned to build igloos, preferring instead European-style wooden houses even in a land where ice was plentiful and wood was not, and they never hunted whales. In a land where one can pluck fish bare-handed from riverbeds, they chose never to eat fish. Summers that could have been spent preparing for the winter were indeed spent haying--but also looking for European luxury items and gathering necessary tithes, and trading their goods away for stained glass and silver chalices. Winters were spent using up their stores even as seals and fish were out in abundance. In the end, the Greenland Norse starved to death in a land of plenty.

This is a sad story, but also a baffling one as we look back on it from the perspective of hindsight. Why on earth wouldn't the Norse fish? Why would they spend so much time and effort hunting walruses, but never think about hunting the ringed seals that were so plentiful in winter? Why would they privilege beef, the least hardy of their animals and the least land-efficient as well, over their much hardier and efficient goats?

Diamond distinguishes between cultural and biological survival, and he is right to do so. The Norse didn't just want to continue to exist as people; rather, they wanted to continue to exist as Norse. Rich Norsemen keep cattle. They pay tithes. They keep wooden crucifixes in their houses and make sure they announce the banns for three consecutive Sundays before marrying, in a church, in front of the right number of witnesses. They are not pagans, and they don't hunt seals or live in iceboxes or do any of those backwards pagan things. These considerations are important, Diamond rightly points out. The Greenland Norse were not trying to commit biological suicide, but were rather trying--desperately--for cultural continuation and for differentiation from the Inuit.

In this, to the end, they succeeded. In one harsh winter, the Greenland Norse all starved to death--but they never did eat fish, and they never did take down the roofbeams from their churches in order to carve out hunting boats. That would be un-Christian. It might be Inuit. It would, at any rate, be un-Norse.

After all, without one's values, without one's cultural inheritance, what is there left to die for?

What's happening to high school?

2006-04-20T01:28:00.000-05:00

Okay, friends o' the blogosphere, I need a little input. Turns out I'm getting a whole bunch of hits on my Picture of Dorian Grey post. Turns out a whole bunch of them are coming from domains with names like www.prepschooloruniversity.edu. Turns out I got an angry email from a teacher letting me know in no uncertain terms that his students are copying pieces of my post and turning it in as their own work. "You are the kind of person that makes cheating easy," he says. "Someone who cares about literature as much as you seem to should make an effort to chastise cheaters, not help them."

I take your point, Mr. Jackson. But I enjoy literature myself, and as much as I want to live in a world where high school students think about the things that they read, I also want to live in a world where non-students think and talk about what they read. Moreover, I think through ideas by developing them as I write; I'm not one of those people who outlines an essay before writing it. (If I could do THAT, then why would I need to write the darned thing? For me, being forced to put my ideas down on paper (or computer screens, as the case may be) helps me to clarify my thoughts and, indeed, leads me to new thoughts. Once I've figured out what it is that I have to say about something (by writing out my thoughts on the topic), I can go back and add the stupid introductory bit that essentially says, "What I will show in this paper is X." I don't know what X is until I've written it. That's why having a blog suits me so well: it allows me to think through interesting bits of my life.)

I might also point out that my one or two eminently stealable posts aren't even drops in the bucket when it comes to the lucrative and enormous industry of internet plagiarizing.

Still, I do feel bad, and I do suspect that not all teachers are nearly as proactive, or as computer-literate, as the annoyed Mr. Jackson. So here's the dilemma, blogophiles. Do I take down my posts on books? Do I refrain from writing them in the first place? Do I keep them up just because I happen to like posting them? Does it really matter anyhow? And if you're here looking for one of those posts in the first place, it might even be interesting to consider why that's okay, and under what academic circumstances stealing my ideas could be justified. Is there anything to the whatever-it-takes-to-get-ahead mentality that could make me feel better about aiding and abetting those who stand by it?

I'd love it if visitors to this blog would take a second to offer their thoughts on this post in particular.

the first line says it all

2006-04-18T02:04:00.000-05:00

religious practice... making the world safe for the sanely religious... eating together as elemental, Communion as not... this Christianity as an empty religion... the problem of mystery: its unbelievability and its desirability... I like hymns

RLC asks me why I "did the whole Lent thing." (I gave up sweets, desserts, mochas from Starbucks, that sort of thing.) He wonders why I'd go to church on Easter, much less Good Friday. He points out, correctly, that I don't really seem to believe in God and that I don't have a pre-existing religious community here in New York to which I might be bound by ties of friendship, kinship, or local tradition (as I might be bound to certain congregations in Florida and Connecticut, for example). Moreover, he wonders if the broader ties of tradition that do exist provide any real good to me or the world generally; he points out that the Lord's prayer may be a valuable but not unique memory exercise if there is no Lord in the first place, while Communion without belief is an empty gesture characterized by cardboard-like wafers and poor-quality wine. Other, more do-gooder aspects of the church are in no way inherently religious, he maintains: you don't need any kind of religious faith to work at a soup kitchen.

RLC's reading of my religiosity is quite accurate. Ask me if there's a God and my answer is something like "I don't know, but I sincerely doubt it, and at any rate the question has little practical influence on my life." This is not to say, of course, that I am not concerned about doing good in the world. It's not even to say that I don't care about going to church every now and again or about knowing the Bible as an important cultural reference. Simply, it's to say that the reasons that I think we ought to care about acting morally and about maintaining many of our religious traditions don't have that much to do with the carrot and stick of a heavenly or hellish afterlife, or even of God's pleasure and displeasure.

But then, back to RC's question, why do the whole Lent thing? Or the whole religious thing more generally?

My responses are really of two very different types: a personal, "but I like it" response, and a broader, making-the-world-safe-for-the-sanely-religious response. I also sometimes think about the preservation of human story and history, though I don't think that this itself could ever be enough to successfully urge me into personal religious practice.

Let's take these things in order. In the first place, and about Lent specifically, I think the institution of the Lenten fast is a good one. There is, of course, the fact that we often choose to give up something which is bad for us (or which we think of as bad for us): candy, alcohol, cigarettes, soap operas. That constitutes a very real and practical good. More important to me, though, is the exercise of will that is inherent in the choice to do without (or to actively do) something (like exercising, talking to your kid more often, something like that). For me, an awful lot of the appeal of Lent is the ability to say: "Sure, I love Breyer's ice cream, and I eat it often because I have the luxury of sufficient income, sufficient metabolism, and sufficient exercise to make that not unreasonable. But just because I have ice cream every few days doesn't mean I must have ice cream every few days." A time-delineated personal sacrifice gives us a ready-made mechanism for reminding ourselves to want to do that which we do do. I want to eat ice cream because I enjoy it, not because I'm in the habit of it, or because I don't feel like cooking supper, or because I can't help myself. The fact that I can give it up for a month and a half makes that more obvious. (For the record, unlike some, I don't give up for Lent that which I mean to give up permanently. I want to reinforce in myself the idea that I do what I choose, not the idea that I can wait until Lent to stop doing things I shouldn't be doing in the first place. Moreover, I don't mean to give up things I enjoy forever; rather, I mean to question whether I actually enjoy them, or whether I am doing them out of habit or instinct or addiction or something. Let me tell you, I enjoy Breyer's ice cream. Ergo, I am now pleased to be eating it again.)

More broadly but still in the "but I like it" category: I like hymns, I love evensong services and I think some liturgical music is absolutely fantastic, and I am strongly moved by many religious spaces. I go to church, on the rare occasions when I do, for deeply-held aesthetic reasons. I do not think that this is a bad thing.

There is another reason why I go to church and, moreover, why I like to present myself as a person who sometimes does so. It's the reason RLC knows I was celebrating Lent in the first place. That is, I want this country to be a place in which normal, sane, doubt-filled, non-ideological people might self-identify as Christian, with all the history and rhetoric that entails--and, conversely, I want it to be a world in which people who self-identify as Christian might aptly be described as normal, sane, non-ideological, and even doubt-filled. I fear that the Evangelical movement has cornered the market on the church in America. Certainly Evangelicals have every right to be a PART of American Christianity, but any religious movement ought to be tempered by questions from within, because without those voices one can't help but be ideological (simply because religion is founded on a premise of absolute morality and truth). I don't like the politics of God that characterize "Christianity" in America today. At the same time, though, I fear that much of the political left has become decidedly anti-religious as a backlash to the megachurch movement (instead of as a considered position). It seems like the more education one has, the more likely one is to forget the very real good things that are linked to religious practice--from touchy-feely good feelings to very real incentives to help others or to not steal even when no one is watching. Moreover, by coopting the term "Christian," Evangelical Christians may have successfully built their movement, but it also makes it too easy for atheists to paint all Christians with a single brush--which usually comes out as something like "they're all crazy" or even "they're all bad for America." Not true--so I don't like the anti-God politics, either. Making it clear that I am Christian (by upbringing and familial background, at least--certainly I'm not Muslim or Jewish or Bah'ai or Hindu or anything else), that I occasionally go to church (I'm a stereotypical Christmas-and-Easter type), that I'm celebrating Lent, and that I know the Bible stories--but also making it clear through my actions that this is a cultural and religious identification and not a political one--places me firmly in the middle ground. I want this shrinking middle ground to continue to exist, to mediate between the crazies on both sides of the religious divide. I think that those of us who think that Christianity can be real, good, yet neither all-consuming in life nor absolutely determinative of our morality, have an obligation to live a life that points to that fact. It would be great if we as a nation could care deeply about morality and character without automatically being assumed to care deeply about, say, the Bush presidency. There is a space for such sentiment within religion (any religion), and it would be nice if some Christians would choose to occupy it on occasion.

All that said, it's hard not to feel that traditional Protestant Christianity is an empty faith in America today. There's not much spiritual sustenance in a sparsely populated church, and this is all the more true when religion is made devoid of mystery as seems to be de rigeur these days. Frankly, I'd rather have the arcana and doubt its worth than have the religion say nothing but believe it.

Nowhere is this more obvious to me than in the sacrament of Communion. For Protestants, even those who believe doubtlessly, the sacrament is nothing more than a symbol. A priest stands up there, says some stuff in English, you go up, eat a wafer and drink some wine, and then you reflect on being a part of the spiritual body of the church. It's a ritual with important significance theologically, but very little significance experientially. Compare this with the Jewish tradition of praying over the bread and wine, washing before eating, and breaking the silence with the food (an obvious comparison at Easter, to me, because of the fact that the last supper was a Passover meal). The contrast is startling. There is something elemental about eating together, and that thing is absent from the "bread" and wine of Communion. Moreover, the linguistic shift (into Hebrew for the prayers) unites Jews everywhere and makes you a part of a larger religious body in a very obvious way, while the subsequent shared meal means that those who pray together over the bread later talk to each other and enjoy each other's company--meaning that, in other words, they actually DO form a community. Taking your wafer and getting the hell off the kneeling pad so somebody else can get on is not actually very communal, and can't hold a candle to a real meal when it comes to the practical interpenetration of religious tradition and real life.

you see the weirdest things...

2006-04-12T21:38:00.000-05:00

Yesterday night, I was riding the subway home from GreenDrinks (a place to meet environmentally conscious Manhattanites who like to hit on girls who work for hedge funds, perhaps because, to the uninitiated, "hedge" sounds more like a green leafy thing in your front yard than like a bold statement along the lines of "I work for the man") when what did I see but a man wearing bright purple alligator-skin (snakeskin?) shoes. This, I tell you, was a bit odd.

It was not as odd as the man carrying a 47-pound tin of lard, however. (The can looked roughly like the one pictured, though it was newer and the label was differently colored.) I was shocked! Who knew they even made such things anymore? Or ever?

And why, I had to ask myself, 47 pounds? That's an awful lot to carry around. Moreover, and this is what really got me, it's not a nice round number. Hell, 47? It's prime, at least, I grant you that. But why not 45 or 50?

I've done a bit of research on this question (no kidding), and it seems that historically lard was sold in 50 pound tins. Indeed, lard is presently sold in 50 pound tins as well (just check out the "quantity discount items" at that link!). This makes sense to me. If you're going to sell large quantities of lard, at least have the human decency to do it in some sort of increment divisible by 5. Whoever it is that makes the 47-pound tin-o'-lard is out of step with all the cool kids and their round 50 pounds of lard.

In completely unrelated news, while researching lard I stumbled across a 1904 Supreme Court case that found, among other things, that a licensed margarine dealer could not buy the particularly gruesome concoction of, and in perhaps the strangest ever reference to a Supreme Court decision I quote, "oleo oil, 20 pounds; natural lard, 30 pounds; creamery butter, 50 pounds; milk and cream, 30 pounds; common salt, 7 pounds" while paying a mere 1/4 cent-per-pound tax. Rather, he was required to pay the full Congressionally-mandated tax of 10-cents-per-pound. Reactions: 1. That smarmy oleomargarine dealer! He should have known better. (This actually WAS the government's winning position.) 2. Congress passed a federal tax on margarine, and, moreover, taxed it at two separate rates depending upon its color??? How nitpicky can you get? 3. And in his defence the margarine dealer argued that taxes deprive him of his property without due process of law? Over 10 cents per pound? Perhaps he'd have done better to argue about property taxes, hrmmm? 4. Also, there are margarine dealers looking to turn a quick buck by buying cheap and selling at full markup?

The things I learn in this city.

nobody ever reads the small print anyway

2006-04-02T21:25:00.000-05:00

As those of us who occasionally go away for the weekend can tell you, LaGuardia airport is not connected to the subway system. One can, of course, take a cab there, but that's expensive. A friend asks me, "Why on earth isn't LaGuardia hooked up to public transport???"

News Flash! New York City has a public bus system! For those of you who would rather not spend $45 on a cab from Manhattan to the airport, might I recommend the M-60? This fine bus has all the latest features, including a wheelchair lift, fabric-covered seating, a system for requesting your stop, and even windows. It makes stops at all the coolest places, too, including the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Metro North Station on 125th Street, and the Apollo Theater. And for all those of you who think New York public transportation isn't real public transportation unless it includes a stint underground, this fine bus also stops mere feet from the entrance points to the 1, 2/3, A/C, B/D, 4/5/6, and N/W subway lines (to which you can transfer for free). Surely this fine offer is too good to be true.

But no! It can be yours for just four easy payments of $0.50! That's right, folks. For just two American dollars, you too can enjoy spectacular views from the Triborough Bridge. But wait, there's more! If you order now, you'll also be able to ride all the way to Morningside Heights, where the bus makes a stop at lovely Morningside Park. You can disembark here or continue south-westward until the end of the line at 105th street.

But that's not all! The M-60 runs not only on the west side of Manhattan, but also on the east side and in the middle too. At the other end of this fine bus's Manhattan route, then, you'll find yourself in East Harlem, where you can go shopping at the PathMark supermarket and get your hair braided on the street corner. As an added bonus, you're sure to derive great pleasure out of smirking at those who are paying the outrageous pump prices at the BP station across the street from the empanada stand just this side of the East River. Continue in this eastwardly direction, and you'll enjoy the rebellious thrill that comes with travelling a toll road without paying any toll! You'll then have a brief view of Astoria before reaching, finally, the parking lots and terminals of New York's second-finest airport. View the Northwest/Delta terminal up close! Check out the AA baggage claim area! Board an airplane, if it suits your fancy and your budget.

But remember folks, this offer is being made for a limited time only and is not available in stores. But if you act before the 2008 fare hike, you too could take advantage of the M-60 bus route with easy subway connection and free bus-route-map add-on for just four easy payments of $0.50, or a $2 lump sum. And we'll toss in a bus driver for free!* And unwitty ads on the side of the bus to boot!

But we don't take checks or money orders, so be sure to have your MetroCard or exact change ready at boarding. Call soon! Act fast! If you don't, you might just miss your plane.

*Bus driver only free for tourists. Though bus driver appears to be free to those who live or work in New York City, this is only an illusion and should not be confused with fact. Free bus driver offer contingent upon the City of New York taxation structure and continued negotiations between the MTA and the transit union. This offer can be changed or revoked at any time without notice, much like an MTA employee's health care plan. Bus driver not available for personal use and actually a human being, so it would be nice if you'd talk to him sometimes. Assaulting a bus driver is a felony and also just plain mean, so don't do it. And other small print which doesn't matter, since nobody ever reads the small print anyway.

Fabulous Complexity

2006-03-28T23:33:00.000-05:00

Last weekend, relatives came to town and we went to the Bodies Exhibition at South Street Seaport. Let me tell you, folks: this was nothing short of awesome.

The exhibit was well put together, moving deliberately and carefully through the various systems of the body, and working up in complexity. You could look at individual bones in cross section or at particular joints, and only then move on to see a whole skeleton put together. From there, you might go see a skeleton with deep muscles attached, and so on and so forth. I left with a far better understanding of human anatomy--and a far greater appreciation of it, too. It's truly amazing how round the ball in the shoulder joint is; how complicated our neural networks are; how fractal-like our blood vessels are.

The best part of the wholly-excellent exhibition, in my opinion, was the section on the circulatory system. Via a remarkable process whereby a cadaver's blood vessels are injected with some strong substance while the rest of the body is dissolved away, one ends up with displays of full-body blood vessels without any body to get in the way. It is TRULY awesome. The lungs are permeated by millions of tiny little blood vessels, as are the kidneys; the ankle has very, very few blood vessels flowing through it indeed; the artery on the inner thigh is absolutely huge. It's fascinating. Having seen how the bones and muscles fit together, this emphatically showed what was flowing through them in a way that you simply can't show by normal drawings or even dissections.

A few thoughts:

1. The brain is such a mystery! The Bodies exhibition devoted a whole room to the brain, and I couldn't help but think: yeah, the midbrain? I can see how that works. But the cerebellum? Nope. Here we have eight or ten different brains, whole, in vivisection, with chunks removed, etc--and they all look exactly the same. There are no moving parts, no (macroscopic) tubes carrying information or fluids or both. You can see how a muscle works, how the heart works, how neural impulses move through the body, how joints turn, even how the pituitary gland and medulla oblongata manage to do things. But the cerebellum, where we do our higher-order thinking and processing of an awful lot of sensory data, is just a mystery. It's just wrinkly grey stuff. Awesome.

2. It's strange but true that internal defects or illnesses are viscerally gross-looking. There seems to be no obvious reason for this. Why should a cancerous prostate, a clogged artery, smoke-weakened lungs, a stroke-stricken brain, or a cirrhotic liver look gross? Two hypotheses present themselves. First, maybe the world in which I've grown up has been sufficiently affected by knowledge of what sick body parts look like that our concept of the grotesque has been changed to reflect the idea that these things are gross. In other words, we have learned to think of certain shapes, textures, and colors as yucky because we have seen that they reflect sickness in the human body. Alternatively, to paraphrase a suggestion from Zq, maybe we can attribute this reaction to an inherent appreciation of symmetry and pattern. Cancers, nodules, lopsided shrunkenness or engorgement, and uneven coloration all offend against a human desire for predictability and pattern in the world. (I point out here that I think the first explanation here is more plausible, while the second rings truer when I think about the experience of seeing, in the final room of the exhibition, the malformed and diseased body parts. I certainly felt like my reaction and that of those around me was visceral in a pre-existing and reasonably unconditioned way.)

3. If you want to argue that there's a God, there's no better way then to go to an exhibition like this. People are so complex, and the way all our parts fit together is absolutely amazing. It is as nearly inconceivable that we could have evolved to be so fabulously complicated as it is that the gods might have created us so.

How come I have to find these things out from a British newspaper?

2006-03-24T00:10:00.000-05:00

Today's news flash: Texas arrests people for drinking in bars. I mean, is this not a bit over-the-top?

If you click on that link and read the article, you'll notice that the primary justification for this has to do with the prevention of driving under the influence. Two immediate reactions: 1. Wrongful arrest! 2. Thought police!

First, as the fellow in the telegraph article points out, there's no guaranteeing that any particular drunk bargoer is planning to drive home. What if I was going to take a cab? Or be a passenger in the car of my sober friend? Or bike home? Or have my husband come pick me up? Or walk?

Moreover, though, even if I was planning to drive home drunkly (a think which, like the police, I suspect most of these people are planning to do), my future plans are not enough to justify my arrest. Now, to be fair, the 2200 unfortunate Texans arrested so far haven't been arrested for DUI; they've been arrested for public intoxication. Well, okay, so I grant the legality. I merely state that the justification doesn't square with the action. Insofar as it's true that this is a part of a campaign against drunk driving--and, given that that's what everybody is saying, I believe that it is--it is a campaign aimed at the intention to drive drunk. That may be legal here, but it also goes against the spirit of innocent-until-proven-guilty, and I don't like it.

Finally, to justify this law on other, self-preservationist grounds (like protecting a drunkard from jumping off a balcony into a pool, only to miss) is stupid. The point of public intoxication laws is that there may be some public good associated with enforced sobriety. For example, barring public drunkenness in the streets weighs an individual's rights over his own body and what he imbibes against a community's desire to sleep soundly at night and not have its houses pissed upon. This is a reasonable public good, it seems to me; it is, at least a plausible public good. On these grounds, we might even grant the (silly!) idea that, because sober people cannot drive drunk, nobody ought ever to be drunk in a bar. But we would be hard-pressed to think that the government has any right to keep me from getting drunk when I am alone in my own home--even though I may do myriad stupid things. If I have a swimming pool in my back yard and a balcony on the third story of my house, the government is no more allowed to arrest me for drunkenness than if I live in a padded room where I could not possibly bring myself to any kind of accidental harm. This is the idea of a man's home being his castle; the idea behind the Supreme Court's recent ruling in Georgia v. Randolph; and the idea behind an American government dedicated to protecting individual rights.

So: the spate of arrests are no good on the grounds of protecting individuals from themselves. They're a bad way to prevent drunk driving (not a poor way--they might be very effective--but a bad way--they're not-quite-evil) because they punish you before you've ever committed the crime, and because it's quite possible that you never planned to do so in the first place. And finally, they're a silly way to prevent public intoxication. After all, the clear intention (and the clear good) of public intoxication laws has very little to do with people who are drinking indoors in a bar, even if it is a public space. We have such laws to protect people, property, and eardrums--all of which are doing fine if people are sitting in bars and drinking. And if they are standing in bars, shouting, and fighting--well, then the bartenders call the cops anyway.

It's Like Ken Burns... But So Not.

2006-03-19T16:27:00.000-05:00

This weekend, Zq and I went to see CSA: the Confederate States of America at the IFC. (The IFC = the Independent Film Center in the Village.) I thought the movie was good; it definitely took me out of my comfort zone, and it was sufficiently thought-provoking that I left wanting to know more about the alternative world that filmmaker Kevin Willmott had imagined. Post-movie conversation also brought Zq and I around to discussions of the unconscionable gloss that Native American history gets in basically all American education, which was interesting. (I should point out that that discussion was a non-obvious, if direct, consequence of watching the movie.)

By way of a short summary: CSA is a Ken Burns-like mockumentary put out by the (fictitious) British Broadcasting Service and viewed as if on TV. The movie itself is interrupted by commercials for everything from life insurance to restaurants, while the program itself features talking heads arguing about the significance of the various "historical" events portrayed. Violins play heart-twanging music as soldiers fight for home and family; a narrator with an English accent walks us through crucial events in our nation's history; copious documents are shown, quoted, described, and even revered as the film goes on.

The twist, of course, is that the South won the Civil War (erm, that is, "the War of Northern Aggression"--which is what one of my teachers in North Florida indeed called it).

Most reviewers think Willmott's effort is successful. I think they're right. The movie is enjoyable, if a bit uncomfortable at times; I especially liked the skill with which Willmott integrated real footage, quotes, and facts, with contrived ones. Did Lincoln say that he'd save the union without setting any slaves free, if he could? Yes. Did Oliver Wendell Holmes have a relative of the same last name who advocated making Christianity official? I don't think so, but I'm not sure. Did we build a wall separating ourselves from Canada? Obviously not. But it is in these questions, and in the more subtle allusions to this or that public official, this or that world event, that CSA is most successful. Little details that are merely glossed over--headlines in the newspapers strewn around in old video footage, for example--hold great richness and make the film a kind of scavenger hunt.

But reviewers get it wrong when they suggest that CSA presents a coherent alternative history. Indeed, as a "what-if" statement, the movie is not very convincing. This is not damning; precisely what I liked was finding the implausible parallels between Willmott's alternative world and my own real world. After all, is it likely that we'd have erected a "cotton curtain" between ourselves and Canada, instead of an Iron Curtain in Europe? Is it likely that there would still have been a Great Depression in 1929 after 65 years of a very different economic system here in the States? Is it likely that Willmott's world, like ours, would produce a Pacific Theater of War in the 40's (even as, apparently, it failed to produce a European war), and that this would in turn give us the iconic image of the raising of the (Confederate) flag at Iwo Jima? Or that, lacking a Cold War, Willmott's America would still manage to put a man on the moon in the '60's, giving us that other iconic image of man-in-spacesuit, next to flag-on-moon?

Of course not. But I can't help thinking that CSA is not about constructing a likely alternative world. It is rather about constructing a parallel alternative world. Indeed, it is, in some ways, really the story of several isolated incidents that define our national history: What if we were a slaveholding country at the end of the civil war? What if we were a slaveholding country when the stock market crashed? What if we were a slaveholding country on VJ day, when Nixon ran against Kennedy (happens in the Confederacy, too), when Kennedy was shot, when Elvis invented rock 'n roll? And what if we still held slaves today? (This last question is disturbingly answered, in large part, by the many sometimes-too-close-to-truth-for-comfort "commercials" that interrupt the "broadcast" that we are watching.)

In the end, Willmott reimagines these events in often very interesting ways. They are nonetheless poorly connected, however; would there ever have been a Kennedy in the first place in a world where Boston was burnt to the ground in the Civil War, and in which nearly all whites were slaveowners? It seems, ahem, less than likely.

A bigger problem, though, is that ultimately Willmott fails to make much of a social point. It is tempting to think that this is not so big a failing after all; to be sure, millions of movies "fail" after this fashion simply because they have no great social ambitions in the first place. And, as I say, CSA remains an interesting and thought-provoking film without this element: I left the film wondering what modern-day Europe looked like in Willmott's imaginings, and trying to reconstruct it from the clues he gave. I was interested and engaged by the quotes he used, and the question of how many of them were real (which, indeed, could turn into real social commentary if in fact it turns out that the most unlikely of them are real--but it doesn't).

I also left the film a bit unsettled, however. CSA is treading on sensitive ground here, and it's an uncertain laughter that grips the audience at suggestions that Long Island has been turned into a reservation for Jews or that Canada is home to everything from extraordinarily successful (integrated) Olympic teams to Mark Twain to jazz music. And the discomfort is far more palpable when the film hits the black-white race issue head-on. Is it funny that the grinning white kid holding the fried chicken is a "breast man?" Even when he's eating it at the Coon Chicken Inn? Even when he's being served by a black woman? Even in a world where blacks are slaves? I can't help but admire the impressive spoof on a "Cops" commercial (this time for a show called "Runaway," however); it's exactly spot-on, completely believable as an artifact of our modern era--but that fact is precisely what is discomforting. "Cops" commercials look exactly like this because (to state the obvious) this is how they look: white officers wrestle black criminals to the ground, talk meanly at them, treat them inhumanely.

But the "Runaway" ad is really the only instance of strong social commentary here. To be sure, other moments catch us staring into the same is-it-okay-to-laugh? headlights, but they don't really make us reflect on the similarities between our world and the one depicted (which is Willmott's stated aim, after all). A pharmaceutical ad for a happy-drug to keep one's "chattel" from being difficult or trying to run away is funny because of its resemblance to the frightening, ask-your-doctor-to-give-you-this-drug, you-should-never-be-unhappy-or-uncomfortable antidepressant ads today, and it's uncomfortable because of the continued presence of slavery, the idea that you'd give it to your "servants" (a common euphemism in the imagined Confederacy) to keep them from causing trouble, and the closing one-liner, "ask your veterinarian about it today." But this seems almost gratuitous. It's disturbing not because it makes you think about how effed-up our world really is, or how unfair, or how racist, but rather because racist provocation was included in order to make it disturbing. I certainly left CSA having felt many, many times that the world depicted was a bad, bad, bad world--but it hardly told me much about the world in which I live now. As a result, the alternative history has to work very hard to make CSA worth the offense it gives.

As I say, I think it succeeds. And I think, moreover, CSA's most gratuitously uncomfortable moments are tempered (practically--not that they necessarily should be) by the fact that Willmott was explicitly trying to make a film that shows us, in his words, that "in many ways, the South did win the Civil War. Maybe not on the battlefield, but they won the peace. They won the fight for their way of life." We all know that Willmott is trying to tell us something about the world today, and that it is a thing that is both critical and emphatically anti-racist.

But Willmott doesn't manage to say this thing. The movie took me out of my comfort zone by breaking taboos, not by revealing some of the worst facets of our country (which are very real, I hasten to add). That doesn't make CSA a failure by any means--and I do recommend it--but it is worth pointing out. Much of the most objectionable material is included for the purpose (or at least with the primary effect) of making interesting and parallel fictitious history, not in order to make a point or make us think very critically about that material on its own. It would be easy to leave this film with a thank-God-we-didn't-collaborate-with-Hitler, thank-God-we've-done-away-with-slavery, thank-God-it-was-us-who-invented-Jazz kind of attitude. I think it would be much harder to leave with the insight that Hey! That world looks a lot like this one! for any essentially race-related reasons. Indeed, the continued existence of slavery is nigh-on the only feature which makes our world look different from the one in the movie--and insofar as Willmott's world resembles our own, it's because the cinematography is the same, because the pharmaceuticals are similar, because small-budget ads are equally stupid, because they've also put a man on the moon, because Washington is a founding father, and because the White House looks the same.

As an alternative history, then, CSA provokes speculation. And as an alternative history of an American Confederacy, it gestures at questions of racial inequities and our own inglorious past. It fails, however, to give us much of a thesis about (or even much of a lens through which to view) these questions, and it's not even very good at provoking conversations on these issues.

All that said, CSA's parallel history very clever, and it is as a result a reasonably good film. If you're lucky enough to have something like the IFC where you live, go see it (and let me know if you hated it, or loved it, or you think it is strong social commentary, or you otherwise think I'm full of it with this review).

Dates, Establishment, and the Tourist Exchange

2006-03-17T17:54:00.000-05:00

When I was 16, I landed in Dublin at about 8 am St. Patrick's Day morning, much to the chagrin (and, I think, the surprise) of my high school teachers, who had hoped to bring us on an educational tour of England and Ireland. They were stymied, for a bit at least, by the parade, the free-flowing Guinness, the blocked-off streets, and the newfound liberty of their otherwise unaccompanied charges. We had a grand time.

I mention this only because I feel it gives me a certain amount of credence when I say that there is nothing in the world quite like the New York St. Patrick's Day parade.

Police from as far away as Canada and from what must've been nearly every county in New York (as well as groups from Connecticut and New Jersey, among others) were on hand to march. There were extraordinary numbers of pipes and drums and literally thousands of people in kilts (because, after all, Scotland and Ireland are really just exactly the same, aren't they? I mean, who can tell two different islands whose inhabitants speak very differently inflected forms of English apart from one another?). There was such a crush of people around the parade route (where I went during lunch) that at one point I was bracing (hard) against a wall so as not to be either caught up in the flow or trampled. And, of course, there were neverending hordes of Irish-Americans marching under the banners of, among others, "The Bronx Gaelic Society," "The Ancient Order of Hibernians" (established: 1836, making them truly ancient indeed), "Brooklyn Irish League," and such IRA-friendly-sounding names as "The Independent Irishmen" and the "Irish Republicans of America." And of course there were, conservatively, two million spectators.

All of this leads to an interesting question. Dublin's St. Pat's parade (established: 1996, for all you who thought this was a celebration with long and storied Irish origins) drew "hundreds of thousands of people" this year. From my own experience, I would suggest that a hefty proportion of these were Americans. New York's parade, by contrast, is populated by----you guessed it--people from Ireland, to judge by the accents on the street today. Not exclusively by people from Ireland, but a fair number of them were certainly mingled in among those two million spectators.

So here's the question: netting tourists over the week surrounding St. Patrick's day, do we send more people to Ireland, or do they send more people here? And, relatedly, does more money flow from us to them in this week, or from them to us? (Okay, two questions.)

Of course, contrary to the belief of some Americans who seem to fetishize the Irish (and don't get me wrong--I absolutely loved Ireland, but I think we have a rather ridiculously romanticized notion of the place and its people nonetheless), it isn't crazy that "real" Irish--that is, people who actually live there or who hold Irish citizenship--might come to the Big Apple for their St. Patrick's day holidays. After all, we've got the biggest celebration in the world here. And remember how Dublin's parade is a product of the 1990s? Well, New York's celebrations date back to 1756, making it the second oldest official civic celebration of the holiday anywhere in the world (and predating the Declaration of Independence by 20 years, much to the surprise of those of us who think of Irish immigration as a product of the mid-19th century).

Where was oldest civic celebration of St. Pat's Day, you ask? Also in the US, in Boston, Massachusetts, where popular recognition of the holiday dates back to 1737--and where March 17 is also celebrated as the officially observed Evacuation Day, which conveniently gives the population the day off from work and school without the need to deal with the sticky issue of publicly recognizing what is, technically at least, a religious holiday.

we're all the same in the eyes of the traffic cops

2006-03-14T22:08:00.000-05:00

Question: What do Purim, Diwali, Holy Thursday, January 2nd, the Feast of the Assumption, Idul-Adha, and Lincoln's Birthday all have in common?

Answer: They are all New York City parking holidays.

On most days, New York City has alternate side parking. This is not quite what it sounds; one may park on both sides of the street for most of every day---but for three hours, usually in the middle of the working day, one side or the other is off-limits (for street cleaning, we are told). This effectively means that most people who park on the street have to move their car from one side to the other every night.

But not today! Interrupting my regular-scheduled radio programming of BBC Newshour this morning--sadly a fairly sensationalist treatment of the news, I confess--was the New York City Radio Announcer, who assured me that alternate-side parking was suspended today "because of the holiday." "What holiday?" I thought. "Is it a federal holiday? Is it a religious holiday? And if so, whose religious holiday?"

Leave it to New Yorkers to be more concerned about where their cars go than about who's celebrating what and why.

Today is Purim. Happy Purim! Eat some Hamentaschen, drink some wine (or whatever), and think of me on Easter Sunday. (What's that you say? Easter Sunday is NOT a parking holiday!?! But Holy Thursday and Good Friday ARE? What? The logic is baffling.)

Mars!

2006-03-13T19:41:00.000-05:00

For those of you who haven't noticed, there now exists Google Mars. This is awesome. I take it as some great testament to mankind that we can map other planets, hurl ourselves through space, find liquid water on Saturn's moons, and speculate intelligently about life in the rest of the universe. But Q points out to me an interesting fact: if we count the ocean floor as mappable (which we should), then we now have better maps of Mars than we do of Earth. Mars, conveniently without liquid water, is easily mapped by satellites with high-resolution cameras. But Earth is different. We have clouds and haze and fluids that interfere; hover long enough over New York and you can get a good picture on a clear day, to be sure, but no amount of hovering is going to show you land features in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. This may well mean that we can tell each other more about the geological history, volcanic features, and plate tectonics of other planets than we can of our own Earth where these questions matter so much for practical reasons like that of tsunami prediction.

If we apply the Socratic injunction to "know thyself" on a rather grander scale than Socrates himself was thinking, then we might conclude that we'd do better to invest our resources into Earth studies than into grand schemes for space exploration. And, indeed, there's a lot of work to be done here--an infinite amount, perhaps--in order to understand our own world and, in the process, to benefit human life. It would be an undeniably good thing to have reliable early warnings of major earthly disasters, after all.

But I cannot get past the idea that cosmology, astronomy, and space exploration all get at fundamental questions about the nature and development of our universe that really oughtn't be pushed aside. This is non-obvious; one very smart coworker asks me, more or less, "Who cares?" He is not convinced that there is any point in the study of history, on an earthly or (especially) on a cosmic scale (since such histories, he maintains, don't even tell us about our own families, values, or cultures). He is all the more unconvinced that there is any reason to invest in understanding the mechanisms which govern very large objects--that is, objects and systems that are far larger than anything sensible on a human scale. What good is it, he asks, to know how big the universe is, or why red giants turn into white dwarfs, or how relativity curves spacetime?

It's a valid point. But it is also a point that calls into question the study of everything from particle physics to English literature, archaeology, and philosophy. Much of what we study--indeed, much of what we do, even if we don't "study" anything in any formal sense--is not instrumental. People have an unusual fondness for understanding; two-year-olds never shut up when asking "Why this? Why that? Why, why, why?" And the truth is, we very often discover that such investigations ultimately do help us get along in the world in very instrumental and useful ways.

But even if they don't, I think the asking is worthwhile if only for the possibility of some greater understanding. And it is not a good enough criticism, I suspect, to ask why we should desire understanding per se in the first place; such a desire seems quintessentially human to me, and not a question of "should" so much as a question of "must." In investigations of modern Mars and ancient Rome alike, I think what is going on is an attempt both to understand and to construct for ourselves our place in the world. We want to know where we come from, who we belong to, how we got here, how we work, what "our" culture is and how it developed. And, I dare say, we people want to have answers perhaps even more than we want to have right answers. Whether our stories place us in "the Western philosophical and literary tradition"; or whether they posit God, or gods, or evolution, or some combination thereof; or whether they tell us about the fundamental forces holding our atoms together or blowing them apart; we spend an inordinate amount of time investigating and retelling about where we belong in the order of things. And when we don't know, we still find reasons: the river flooded because the river gods made it to do so; the Earth is held up by Atlas, or tortoises, or is floating in some liquid; we got fire from Promethius. This is very odd.

But then, we like order and classifications. Our brains are designed to find patterns, and so we find them--even when they aren't really there. It's no surprise that we want to order ourselves and our place in the world, too.

What is surprising, perhaps, is that sometimes we manage to figure out natural order that really is there. That's where, for me, the whole "testament to mankind" thing comes in. I think we do that here on Earth with really quite surprising frequency. But it's all the more impressive an endeavor if we've managed to derive natural laws that work on a universe-sized scale, rather than merely an Earth-sized scale. Einstein trumps Newton any day.

And for all you English lit and philosophy types out there (and I include myself here): the prospect of floating around in space is awesome in the literal, non-colloquial sense of the word--the sort of brush with grandness that, I suspect, cannot but help to inspire such froofy things (and, yes, I say that with sarcasm) as poetry and the kind of wild philosophical speculations in which there may be great richness indeed.

as if with treasure-map in hand

2006-03-07T18:10:00.000-05:00

One of the first people I spoke to after moving to New York was a Russian woman who lives in my building. She came in with grocery bags as I was retrieving my mail, and I (outsider that I was) thought to ask her where the grocery store was. "I go to the organic vegetable mart, just three blocks down," she answered.

"On Second Ave?" I asked.

"Of course!" she replied in a thickly accented English. "Everything's on Second Ave!"

This, my friends, sums up something strange and wonderful about New York. Everything is on Second Avenue. And everything, equally, is on First Avenue. And Tenth Avenue. And Seventh Avenue. Except for purposes of catching a train or getting to the Port Authority, there is no reason to walk cross-town here, no reason to leave the comfort of your Avenue with anything like quotidian regularity. All normal needs, from new socks to take-out Thai food, exist within a few blocks up- or downtown. Indeed, why would one explore the next block over, much less the next neighborhood over or--gasp!--the next borough over? What wonders could those places possibly hold that could not be gotten two blocks uptown?

As I say, it is a strange and wonderful thing to have everything at one's fingertips like this--but it is, too, a temptation to a kind of cosmopolitan parochialism. We live in this big and varied city, and yet we only ever see the few blocks on our avenue, the small radius containing convenient lunch spots near the office, the walk to and from the bus stop or the subway, and the occasional sports arena, national monument, or performing arts center.

With that in mind, a couple of weekends ago I took the subway into the heart of the Bronx and wandered around among buildings that looked nothing like mine, streets filled with privately-owned cars (unheard of!), and above-ground "subway" trains. This was for no other reason than that I had never been to the Bronx, and had certainly not wandered there on foot. It is a place that is so very near to me in my Manhattan apartment, and yet so far from it that it seems impossibly unlikely that any of my fellow apartment-dwellers will have gone there in the last year for more than a Yankees game.

But now I am exploring New York anew, drawn out by a scavenger hunt forced upon me by the city's library system. For you see, I have been taken in by Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, and by extension, by Milton's Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, and by Susan Cooper's Dark is Rising sequence (which, ironically, I own and have safely left in Florida lest it get lost on my hopefully-parepatetic post-collegiate journey). But the NYPL tells me that these books are all perpetually checked-out, or lost, or on hold, or in transit. Yet I continue to devour these stories at the rate of one a day; and as a result, every day I am reduced to figuring out which of the library's 85 branches holds a copy of the next book on-shelf, and which of those few libraries is open until at least 7pm (or, better yet, 8). And then the journey begins: Sunday night, I found myself in Greenwich Village; yesterday it was Brooklyn; today I will be going to the Bronx.

And it occured to me, today, that I could, of course, pick up more than one book at a time. If the Mott Haven Branch where I am going today happens to have three of Cooper's books, then I can grab them all and fill in the gaps when I come to them. There is no need to go every day, book by book, to find the next of my texts. It is silly to hurry off every day to a new and sometimes hard-to-find location if I could save myself the effort.

But I am discovering that I love this forced exploration. It is not aimless wandering: I have a destination, a goal. Yet these excursions are not quite event-oriented, either; I pop into the library for 10 minutes at most, find my book, and leave--and then there I am, with all the time I could want, in Crown Heights or the East Village or Harlem or Parkchester.

Of course I want to get home and read. But I also like the idea that, while I cannot get The Subtle Knife for free on Second Avenue in Manhattan's Upper East Side, I can get it in New York--and I know wherefrom.

Lifestyles

2006-02-25T02:48:00.000-05:00

Yesterday evening, I went to a large party at the phenomenally opulent Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center, where I ate well, drank well, laughed, and enjoyed a truly splendid view of the city from on high. No pictures were taken (nor were they allowed to be taken), sad to say, so you'll just have to imagine milling around, very fine (complimentary) cocktail in hand, looking out over the city as the sun sank into... well, into New Jersey, to be fair. But still. It was great.

We had butlered service, splendid food, aged whiskey, genuine celebrity entertainment, the works. There are members of this place, and people who make a habit of their $200-per-person dinner-and-dancing nights (which must be absolutely lovely, but would you go every week at that price?). I left thinking (and still have this sense about me even now) that New York is such a place of opulence, a place where jackets are required and New Year's party reservations can easily top $1000.

But descend the 57 floors from the Rainbow Room back to street level, and you are suddenly surrounded by normal people. All of New York is not opulent.

There is a flip side to the normalcy below, however. The Rainbow Room is no jewel in the heart of abject poverty, no Jakartan high-rise amid the slums; it is, instead, a jewel just above and among millions of unremarkable middle-class folk, window-shopping on Fifth Avenue (and occasionally buying things), watching their kids skate at Rockefeller Center (and paying an obscene amount for the privilege), taking pictures, and chatting about the Iraq war. One is supposed to leave the Rainbow Room with my sense that this was a unique glamour, one that is unattainable by the masses. The decor says it; the dress code says it; the rhetoric certainly says it. (Just consider what is going on with this language: From the beginning, "the Rainbow Room has epitomized New York style, glamour and sophistication." It began as "an intimate establishment where the elite and influential of New York could gather to socialize over cocktails, dine on fine cuisine, dance to the strains of legendary big bands on a revolving floor bathed in color lights from the organ," and it has "flourished in quiet opulence throughout the past century by cultivating members who appreciate the nature of private clubs....") But the truth is, the vast majority of the window-shoppers and picture-takers below could easily afford a night out at the Rainbow Room if that's how they chose to spend their money. $200 is not pocket-change; but it is not crazy, either. Someone who chose to forego Time Warner Cable's triple-play package could attend one of these dinner-and-dancing events once every six weeks--but she couldn't watch the Sopranoes or the Simpsons or Dawson's Creek reruns. One could go to one of these dinners for less than the cost of a Playstation Portable--but you couldn't look hip playing that ridiculousness on the subway. You could have brunch at the Rainbow Room for less than a new pair of shoes, less than a nice shirt, less than you'd spend on admission for yourself and one child at Disney World.

America has class differentiation, to be sure--but it seems to me that this differentiation is in large part due to self-identification rather than true economic differences. I don't mean to write off the problematic, and probably undemocratic, attitudes that allow our average large-company CEO to make 500 times the salary of the average employee at their company, but I do mean to point out that we often seem to make cultural distinctions much more strongly than economic ones. I mean, a ticket to hear the Rolling Stones and one to see the New York City opera are pretty much interchangeable price-wise. You can buy a grand Texan ranch and wear flannel and a cowboy hat with your oil money, or you can buy a grand yacht and wear suits (and both are culturally acceptable, and situate you squarely within a community of like-minded millionaires). You can see arthouse films or blockbusters, and you'll be spending the exact same amount of leisure time and the exact same number of dollars.

The Rainbow Room likes to cultivate the idea that it isn't just for anybody, that it is rather for the rich, the cultured, and the important. They write as if you're supposed to mill around and smoke your thousand-dollar cigar in your waistcoat and tie, taking the spectacular view for granted and downing champaigne like water. The truth is, of course, that some people can do that, and others nonetheless have a perfectly lovely time having made the conscious decision to spend that money tonight, and still others are very pleased to spend the evening eating burgers, fries, and ice cream ($20), drinking beer ($10), watching pay-per-view wrestling ($25), grabbing a bag of chips and some dip ($7), cheering, listening to stadium music downloaded from itunes ($15), and watching their favorite stars getting bashed over the head with an unending supply of folding chairs. This is not, I note, a $200 evening--but it is a $77 evening, and it does represent a choice of cultural activities as much as brunch at the Rainbow Room or an evening in very good seats at the Lincoln Center (both of which, I note, could be had for very nearly the exact same price).

the new and the old

2006-02-15T21:58:00.000-05:00

Are universities (and other institutions of learning - Medieval monasteries, yeshivot, perhaps even prep schools) necessarily conservative in nature?

This is a conversation I've had several times in the past few weeks. It all began architecturally: I suggested to H that the new residential buildings at Cornell are monstrosities that look unfinished. They have a kind of fake-brick siding that doesn't meet up at the edges, which I hate; I may have said, "Forget the siding--they should just make them of real brick." But perhaps I actually suggested that they should be made of stone. Certainly, I made it clear that anything with even minor pretensions to permanence should be built from a medium that could age well.

H averred. There might be other benefits to Cornell's building choices, benefits that have little or nothing to do with their looks but everything to do with aging well. For example, he said, it might be convenient and intelligent to think about moving or modifying these buildings in the medium- or even near-term. Maybe a university does itself a disservice if it isn't adaptable (here we're still talking architecturally). Universities are always on the cutting edge of research; they grow and change quickly as they discover new things; and they're the home of the stereotyped ivory-towered liberal who is the vanguard of a new morality, a new set of ideals, a new way of life (and here we are suddenly talking politics). The modular dorm may be both an artistic reflection of this fact and a practical way of letting the university change its space to better serve new ideas, new experiments, new students.

Let us put aside the virtues of Cornell's new west campus dorms (if any virtues there be) in favor of a different question: When did it happen that the university became a stronghold of the liberal crowd? I mean, the first modern universities were theological in nature, a natural outward expansion of the monastery-as-repository-of-knowledge way of doing things. Such institutions were necessarily conservative, by virtue of expounding an eternal and unchanging worldview (even if the details were as-yet-unknown). If God made the earth to be the center of the galaxy, it's a good bit harder to make the jump-shift to heliocentricism than it is if previous (merely human) scientists made some incorrect assumptions.

But there are other reasons that universities, even secular universities, might be generally presumed to be conservative. First, they are places where the old teach and have power over the young. Unrestrained twenty-year-olds might be young and idealistic and likely to (try to) change the world, but we may be forgiven for thinking that twenty-year-olds who are awestruck by their brilliant (septuagenarian) history instructors, who worry (at least a bit) about their grades from said instructors, and who must attend class most days and buckle down to work on serious term papers and theses, might be somewhat more restrained in their radicalist tendencies.

Second, the university is an established institution with a very respectable place in modern society. When one tries to get into a good university and to get out of it again with a good degree in order to get a well-paying, respectable job, one is doing exactly the sort of thing that the government wants and has always wanted from its people. This does not represent a radical break from society or even a minor threat to established social mores; indeed, it is a pure case of working within the system. Most people who go to universities are still planning to travel an old and well-trodden path.

And finally, the nature of imparting knowledge as such--even merely man-made, man-discovered knowledge--seems inherently conservative. Whether I'm telling you God made it this way or nature evolved this way, whether X is Absolutely True or merely taken to be true because it's the best explanation we have, the university is a place where students sit down and are lectured on the wisdom of their forebears. Some young people may not respect their elders--or their elders' values--but you'd think that students at top universities would be some of the first to recognize the worth of older wisdom.

Despite all of this, though, for some time now universities have been hotbeds of liberalism, of reform, of novelty, and occasionally of radicalism, both in this country and abroad. In America, this is evidenced by an intriguing split: universities and churches, once bosom-buddies, now find themselves reliably on opposite sides of nearly every social issue to rise to public importance.

P & P (boyfriend and girlfriend) suggest that the new liberalism makes a kind of sense given the post-Enlightenment (and particularly 20th-century) focus on academic research. The main goal of academics, after all isn't to impart knowledge anymore. Rather, it's to make new knowledge. Academia, they say, is all about the new these days.

P & P have a good point. But perhaps we'd do well also to consider an argument put forth by J, a correspondent of mine from Florida. She suggests that greater educational opportunities for people from all backgrounds--a thing H, P & P, J and I all agree to be an unequivocally good thing--has helped to do away with a rhetoric both of social superiority and of leadership, character, and moral formation in the academy. Back when the members of the student population were being groomed by their rich, Senatorial, businessmen fathers to be rich Senators and businessmen themselves, college was largely about instilling a certain character into young men and providing them with a successful and aristocratic social network. Students like this are still very much in evidence in our most elite universities--but there are lots of other types, too. Now, students are as likely to aspire to professordom as to public service in the established government; the professor is no longer "merely" educating next year's leaders, but is rather a leader in a field him- or herself. In the meantime, students are taught the excitement of academia as much as (or probably more than) the duty of public service. Getting back to P & P's point, students are not merely made aware of new discoveries, but are encouraged to take part in them as well--and not as hobbies or interesting pastimes, as in the old tradition of the recreational scientist or the war-fighting poet, but as a full-fledged professional with the possibility of major awards and popular recognition (apparently called "the Einstein effect" these days). In other words, it's not just the professors who privilege their research more highly than their teaching--the students do it, too.

For J, the movement away from grooming university students for public service and worldly success is a good one. Divorcing the academy from the church, first, and from the government, later, has given it a new independence and has led to many great scientific and technological advancements. J only wishes this whole grooming-for-power thing was done away with once and for all.

From my end, I am left with a question: But where would those kids go? It is true that research and teaching are two very different functions. It is also true that many of our greatest research institutions in America appear to milk their undergrads for money in order to support their deservedly-renowned research functions, without giving a fair return of knowledge for dollars; Cornell, for example, puts 400 students into introductory physics classes--and uses the tuition payments to fund Mars Rovers. (Don't get me wrong--the Mars Rovers are awesome, and somebody ought to be paying Steve Squyres an amazing sum for his efforts--but it probably oughtn't be, in part, students who think they're paying him to teach their astronomy classes when he's just earned the right not to teach for a long while.) But if the academy should rightfully become the home of research and discovery exclusively, leaving all that conservative good-grooming, old-style education stuff for somebody else, then we need to ask who is prepared to take on that function in today's world. As it is, we could do worse than letting our future world leaders putz around for a few formative years in the presence of some of the most profound, interesting, and intelligent new discoveries, and discoverers, that there are.

guitar; bed; bear; mirror

2006-02-07T10:58:00.000-05:00

I've got a new digital camera. Alas, my antiquated computer can't run the software to let me upload the images. What to do?

Enter Zq with his digital camera (and his photo-friendly computer). The photo credits on this one go to him.

I enjoy my camera very much. I like taking photos. I love the ability to see my results right away and to reshoot if they're sub-par. I'm creating albums upon albums. And they all live within the camera, since I can't export them to the computer on my desk.

I have discovered that I'm a luddite. I think I've been in denial about this. But I realize now that not only don't I have an internet connection at home (which I have previously defended on "I don't want to waste my life surfing the net" grounds); I don't even have a computer that can run today's most universal programs and software. Perhaps, and I say this with skepticism, but perhaps, it is time for an upgrade.

(The photo's of me.)

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: just a few of the several States of our Union

2006-02-06T20:48:00.000-05:00

I've been out of commission for a while--there was an interesting scare at the surprisingly empty, surprisingly responsive, and surprisingly concerned St. Luke's/Roosevelt Medical Center Emergency Room--but that shan't keep me from commenting on the now week-old State of the Union address. A quick highlights reel:

1. Bush's best rhetorical move: linking economic strength and economic leadership in the world at large to democracy, anti-terrorist activities, and the war in Iraq.

By railing against isolationism generally, the President crafted a non-obvious yet very clever and fairly compelling link between the two seemingly-disparate goals of a strong economy at home and a strong (read: forceful) foreign policy abroad. We need to keep our markets open, he said; we need to welcome foreign workers; we need to adapt to the new global marketplace in order to maintain our position as an economic leader in the world. In short, we need to take an active part in the global economy and cannot descend into economic isolationism or high-tarriff protectionism if we want to maintain our competitive edge. And while workers in threatened industries might want to see their jobs saved, nearly all of us know that what Bush said on these counts is true. It is in our best interest to take an active interest in world markets.

The clever move that followed was the suggestion that an active interest in foreign governance is also in our best interest, for the exact same reasons. Moreover, it is allowed--nay, responsible--for the same reasons that active participation in the global economy is allowed and, indeed, responsible. We can't accept isolationism economically: our economy will flail and fail. We can't accept isolationism politically, either: our government and our institutions will also flail and fail. Just as we have seen the dollar threatened when we try to protect jobs and divorce certain industries from worldwide economic trends, we have seen that unstable governments abroad and foreign terrorism can come back to bite us at home. We can't just live in a bubble of democratic goodness here in America; we must reach out, by force if necessary, and engage in an active foreign policy--for the good of polities in the world at large, to be sure, but also for the domestic good.

2. Bush's worst rhetorical move (and I quote):

Ultimately, the only way to defeat the terrorists is to defeat their dark vision of hatred and fear by offering the hopeful alternative of political freedom and peaceful change. So the United States of America supports democratic reform across the broader Middle East. [One short paragraph about Egypt here.] The Palestinian people have voted in elections, and now the leaders of Hamas...

Okay, come on now. Like the two measly sentences of the intervening paragraph are going to keep us from noticing that the Palestinian election brought a terrorist government into power. Whichever of Bush's speechwriters brilliantly placed the two news items "democracy brings peaceful change" and "the Palestinians just democratically voted for terrorists" next to one another should be shot. (Well, no, okay, that's rather a harsh overstatement. But the move is rhetorically terrible. It highlights the problems with Bush's doctrine of democratic superiority, not the success thereof.)

The speech may have been the worse for this move, but it's worth pointing out that the juxtaposition presented here did get me thinking (specifically, about the problems of democracy and the Bush democratic doctrine, unsurprisingly). I tend to privilege democracy highly. After all, it ideally gives a people self-determination, which is a very great good indeed; I may even be prepared to state that this is an inherently moral good.

But there are some difficulties in Bush's firm belief that democracy is the political ideal that brings peace and justice to wayward states. First and most obviously, we should point out that the masses in any given state are not necessarily nice, just, or fair. The majority of people in a state may favor the destruction of Israel; or warfare in Iraq; or harsh measures against some political, ethnic, or religious minority; or even just theft from the rich; but majority support doesn't make any of those things right. In such circumstances, it's hard to tell whether justice, fairness, and decency on the one hand, or democracy on the other, is the greater good. (Indeed, it's not clear to me that there's even a general rule; perhaps we need to take things on a more pragmatic, case-by-case basis: democracy may be the greater good when the question is one of property rights and popular repossession without compensation to the owner, but it may be the lesser good when the question instead concerns killing or radical destruction of human life. But such pragmatism has, I think, dire consequences for coherent and determinative moral systems (the kind which are useful by virtue of offering us instructions by which to live our lives).)

Of course governments must always balance basic morality and indivual rights against popular desires--we Americans try to do that with our Bill of Rights; the Brits do it with their unwritten Constitution and an explicit, legally-binding dependence upon decency and common sense in daily actions--but the problem of fair and moral governance nonetheless seems particularly acute in a democratic system. It is a system that breeds ideologues and encourages strong speakers who can arouse passions in a crowd, not, I note, a system that easily allows independent thinkers to rise to the top while practicing careful deliberation on any given issue. There are many things to be said for democracy; but there is, perhaps, something also to be said for a Platonic aristocracy of the best-educated, most thoughtful, most moderate voices, led at the top by a philosopher-king who has been raised to consider problems of good governance. (There is much to be said against such a system, too, to be fair: democracy comes with the possibility of mob rule and shameless demogogues, but monarchy is closely allied to tyranny.)

The second big problem with the democratic doctrine as practiced by Bush is the percieved right--perhaps even obligation?--to impose democracy abroad. Even if Bush is right about the stability and moderating effects of democracy, I can't help but think that our "encouragement" has done anything in Iraq (for example) but destabalize the government and foment anti-American, anti-European radicalism. In almost all circumstances, I tend to think that stability is a far greater good than any particular governmental system; life is better if it is predictable, even if not ideal (or even harshly oppressive). This is contraversial, I know, but I just don't think we've shown that democracy trumps other governmental forms when it comes to producing happy people. If we're worried about unhappy people coming to blow us up, I'm just not sure forced democracy is the way to go regardless of whether the system brings greater domestic stability. If it's not making us appreciably safer, though, I have a hard time with the idea that we are justified in overthrowing someone else's government. We would do well to remember that that's a way to scuttle self-determination, too.

After all, it's problematic to assume that, because democracy works for us and we're a powerful country, monarchy or oligarchy don't work for others. It's just not clear to me that a rich, relatively permissive, and practically undemocratic U.A.E., for example, yields people who are yearning for political change. (Actually, judging from my friends from Dubai, it is rather more clear that they would be horrified by the prospect.) Yet we as a nation persist in the belief that democracy is the only government worth having.

Of course, none of this means that Bush is necessarily wrong about the desirability of the recent Palestinian vote. It may well be that democracy is moderating and that the vote represents real promise in the Middle East. After all, Hamas is suddenly going to have to deal with domestic issues: with clean government (given that Fatah was largely overthrown because of its pervasive corruption), with education, with hospitals. They're going to have to negotiate with the rest of the world on everything from disarmament (where they may hold their own) to environmental issues (where they'll want to appear respectable in the world). Even if their ideals don't change, the end of Israel is hardly going to top Hamas's to-do list. And, anyhow, their ideals might change, merely for pragmatic reasons of maintaining their power and avoiding domestic violence on their watch. Perhaps Bush is right that, in the long term, democracy breeds peace.

The thing is, that's not clear yet. And he was stupid to put it in his speech. And he was stupider still to use the Palestinian election as an example of a newly spreading, peaceable democracy.

Assassin!

2006-01-28T11:51:00.000-05:00

I recently read Bernard Lewis's The Assassins, a reasonably scholarly account of the Ismailis generally (they being the second largest Shi'a community after the Twelvers) and the Assassins in particular (they being a particular Ismaili sect, now pretty much defunct). Their historical story is gripping, and it kind of surprises me that we don't have more references to it in popular culture.

Reading about the Assassins in a post-9/11 world must be a very different experience than doing so just 5 years ago, I realize. While it doesn't seem prudent to make the claim that the Assassins were the first terrorists (history is long, and I'm hardly an expert on such things), they certainly do seem to prefigure terrorism today--a point that Lewis makes abundantly clear in his (new?) final chapter. The assassins sent people out to murder political and religious enemies; they privileged martyrdom and promised paradisal rewards to those who died while carrying out a mission; they appeared cult-like and secretive to those around them; they followed even self-destructive orders with uncanny devotion; they performed their killings in public, apparently in order to inspire fear; they didn't often control territory, and didn't particularly appear to want to do so (that is, they weren't fighting for land--which is part of what made them so frightening to their contemporaries); they infiltrated governments and killed heads of state routinely.

But there are important differences, which, perhaps, are not played up enough. The Assassins were Shi'a; most of their murderous efforts were directed against the (Sunni) Abbasid Caliphate. For most of their history, their disagreements were over the correct succession of power after Mohammad--a political problem, to be sure, but also a religious problem set squarely within a shared Islamic context, and buttressed, at the beginning at least, with significant amounts of religious scholarship and well-drafted theological philosophies. This was not interreligious terrorism as we know it now, then (even if, later on, the Assassins were occasionally thought by their neighbors not to practice Islam; and they allied with Crusaders from time to time; and they eventually practiced a kind of populist, millenialist, firebrand religion in which Islamic law was sometimes suspended).

Moreover, it's worth noting that the Assassins didn't kill innocents. While they publicly murdered numerous heads of state, political advisers, and Sunni religious leaders, they were painfully careful to do so in a well-ordered manner (usually leading to their own capture) in order to avoid harming others. They almost always killed with a knife, from close quarters; they wouldn't shoot arrows or use poison to attack their victims. They didn't wreak havoc, but sometimes spent years gaining the confidence of the intended target in order to get close enough to attack. Assassins never chose to attack large numbers of people ("all the people at the Sunni court," for example), instead focusing on carefully chosen individuals whose names they recorded and whose death they prepared for with a kind of single-minded devotion. This is scary and indeed caused great fear among the enemies of the Assassins, but is hardly equivalent to today's terrorism.

And finally, the Assassins were recognized as a (sometimes quite powerful) government unto themselves. They certainly sponsored terror-like practices, and horrific killings, but they also entered into alliances with other, clearly legitimate powers. They had serious negotiating power (as evidenced, for example, by their ultimate truce with Saladin after he had been bent on destroying them). To be sure, the Assassins were recognized as odd, frightening, and disturbingly obedient to their leaders--but they were also recognized.

It's easy to fall into the post-9/11 trap of viewing those who consistently use murderous means to achieve their ends as terrorists. The parallel between terrorist and Assassin seems even stronger, I posit, because of the Islamic character that we give to each of them these days (though that's hardly fair these days; we would do well to remember the IRA, for example). We should be careful here, though. While the history of the Assassins may indeed shed some light on terrorism, it cannot, I think, correctly be called terrorism itself.

Associations

2006-01-24T03:54:00.000-05:00

On Sunday, I went to hear William Unwin, tenor, sing (along with the entire Monteverdi Choir) at Lincoln Center. They offered up a solid rendition of Mozart's C-minor mass and a perfectly splendid version of the Requiem. By way of associating myself with greatness, I'd like to point out that just hours before the concert, I'd been hanging out with Will on the 102nd floor of the Empire State Building. It's a small and awesome world.

Everything's always better in Canada. Sigh.

2006-01-20T00:04:00.000-05:00

I admit it: I struggle to get the plastic stay-fresh seal off the top of Starbucks "frappuccino coffee drinks" like those pictured here. Those damned seals! They're shrink-wrapped on or something, so that you have to bite or cut them to get them off. Since I get my frappuccinos for free, I confess that this still seems worth it to me; the annoyance is a small price to pay for a smooth chocolatey milk-filled fake-coffee drink. Nonetheless, I hate those plastic seals. They are one of those small annoyances in life that really make a bad day seem horrid. They vindicate the idea that the human race is, on occasion, idiotic.

This brings me to my second point. In Canada, Starbucks frappuccino coffee drinks look very much the same as their US counterparts (except for the fact that they feature French on the label as well as English, at least sometimes). One might therefore overlook the most impressive feature of the Canadian frappe: perforation. As I recall from my lengthy trip to Alaska last summer, Canadian Starbucks stay-fresh seals are perforated. This, needless to say, makes it far easier to remove them in order to enjoy one's caffeine, which in turn makes it far easier to continue to drive to Alaska (or whatever).

The patriot in me says: Those Canadian wusses! They need perforation in order to open the seal! They must have very little tooth-strength.
The rationalist in me says: Why would this be? We must have a law that specifies that it can't be too easy to break this seal. Perhaps this is a reasonable law in order to ensure freshness and untampered goodness. Perhaps.
The disgruntled idealist in me says: Mountains! Manners! Gun laws! Hockey! Immigration agents! Niagara Falls! Beaches! Winter! And especially plastic bottle seals! Everything's better in Canada. Sigh.

How do you write a limit in html?

2006-01-17T21:07:00.000-05:00

A couple days ago, I finished reading The Infinite Book, by John D. Barrow. Though I think overall the book was hit-and-miss, some parts were thought-provoking indeed. The two most fun games that Barrow gives us follow.

1. The problem of infinite numbers of actions in a finite amount of time. We know that the infinite sum 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + ... + 1/(2^n) approaches 1 as n approaches infinity. But concieve of it this way (Barrow's way): a demon switches a light on after half a minute, then off 1/4 of a minute later, then on 1/8 of a minute later still, and so on and so forth (literally ad infinitum). After 1 minute has passed, will the demon have done an infinite number of tasks? And will the light be on or off (or both, or neither)?

2. The problem of infinite size in a random universe. If the universe is infinitely big (or, as an alternative statement of roughly the same problem, if it has been around for an infinitely long time), and if we don't presume that some larger intelligence is conspiring to make earth special, then must we presume there to be an infinite number of earths with an infinite number of people who are exactly like ourselves (or, in the formulation instead of the infinite age of the universe, must we presume that those people did and will exist)? This is the same idea as the monkeys on the typewriters: enough random combinations of atoms in space (letters on the page) and you will get other Earths (other copies of Shakespeare's plays). Of course, the probability of any sufficiently large number of atoms combining to form another you on another Earth around another sun in another spiral galaxy is extremely low. But if you have infinite numbers of atoms combining in infinite numbers of random ways, then even an extraordinarily low probability translates into an infinite number of instances.

There are ways around these mind-benders, to be sure. #1 doesn't take into account the relativistic effects of moving very, very fast. Eventually, you've got to be turning the light on and off at speeds that are appreciably close to c (the speed of light). In fact, the way this problem is set up now, you eventually would be turning the light on and off at speeds faster than the speed of light. This is of course impossible; as you approach c, time slows down so you're never able to exceed the speed of light (or, perhaps, reach the end of the minute?). Even if you could transend c theoretically, though (which you can't), it may not be trivial that no person could ever do this practically: you'd run out of energy from all the work and die first (or, if it wasn't a person, then whatever the power source was would run eventually out of energy), and anyhow you'd be going faster than any known body would be able to go. Maybe the universe is set up not to let us dabble in infinities in any practical way, ever. Maybe infinity has no real, non-mathematical meaning.

The ways around # 2 are rather different. We could of course posit some sort of divine selection that makes our world unique, thereby avoiding the problem of infinite earth-worlds (since the infinity-hypothesis only works if we assume that the creation of our earth was not special). Or we could presume that the universe is neither spatially nor temporally infinite. This kind of makes sense, too, even though we don't have a clue what that would mean we'd see if we looked out from the "edges" of the universe: it would not be absurd to posit that time began with the big bang, that space did too and is merely a function of our universe (or our experience thereof), and that the universe is "closed" and so will not continue to expand infinitely long and far. All these things are at least plausible. The big question here, though, is why # 2 is paradoxical or problematic in the first place. To be sure, it's a little weird to think that not only might we not be special cosmologically, but we might not even be unique (instead, living the exact same lives, with the exact same motivations, and in the exact same observable world, as someone somewhere else in an infinitely large universe). But let's say it's true. Is there anything logically wrong with that?

Chronicles

2006-01-16T14:10:00.000-05:00

Despite myself I saw the Chronicles of Narnia yesterday night. Without commenting particularly on the movie per se (which I confess I found surprisingly good, if a bit heavy with the Christian allegory), I have a few thoughts:

1. The frame of the movie seemed unneccessary. Why doesn't it seem so in the book?
You might recall that the children in the Chronicles of Narnia are sent out to live in the English countryside during World War Two. It is while there that they stumble into Narnia and have all of their adventures. I was struck by the fact that you could have just had Narnia, in the movie at least, without needing an explanation of how the kids got there or where they came from. Perhaps the book is stronger on the idea that they are strangers in Narnia (which is importantly true for the flow of the story) and so their backstory is also more important. Or perhaps the frame in the book works because it seems to take a story of "real" kids, whereas in the movie they are already fictional characters merely by virtue of being onscreen. But that seems unlikely and inconsistent, since they are as much characters from the opening pages of the book as they are from the opening shots onscreen.

2. There's a problem with treating ever-older "children" as kids.
If you can send your 8-year-old off to live with relatives she's never met in World War Two, and she can buck up and take it and even feel that there's some purpose in doing so; if you can marry your daughter off when she's 15 if you live in 15th-century Verona, and she can run a household and have a family (albeit probably not that happily); if you let your 11-year-old run away in the 1920s and he can support himself by sweeping shops; then how come 25-year-old Americans today live at home, don't have jobs, and are quick to feel discouraged, unhappy, and incapable? Were we never given any responsibility growing up? Or was there no responsibility to give, since everybody was going to be okay anyway? Or do our actions (or lack thereof) just never seem to matter (either for ourselves or for anybody else)? Or what?

3. Our wars often allow us to abstract far from actual killing.
In historical terms, it's a strange, strange thing that we can destroy our enemies without ever seeing them. In the Chronicles of Narnia, two wars take place, and they are represented very differently on film: one features hand-to-hand combat, the other is epitomized by the Luftewaffe bombers conducting air raids over Britain. Bows and arrows abstract away from actual physical contact; guns abstract away once more; bombs do so yet again. ICBM's represent the farthest we can do this and still be on earth, I take it. None of this is a new thought, but the relative newness of this ability still strikes me. It's a rare thing to be able to destroy from such a distance.

For Goodness's Sake...

2006-01-10T17:49:00.000-05:00

... greater cost does not equal better product!

Or at least, not always.

Why on earth do people--and here I mean lots and lots of people--go ice skating, repeatedly, at Rockefeller Center? Bryant Park is less than a mile up the road, right on the orange subway line (and one block from Times Square, which is to say, one block from every other Manhattan line but the 4-5-6); it's at least as easy to get to as the Rockefeller ice rink.

Price of an ice skating session at Rockefeller Center: $13 (winter and spring, but not during the "Holiday Season" when prices are higher)
Price of an ice skating session at Bryant Park: $0

Not being a financial idiot: priceless? I mean, there are plausible real benefits to going to Rockefeller Center once. It's a storied holiday activity, there's the view of the big Christmas tree (and maybe this just warms your heart, I don't know), there's getting to say you've done it if you're a tourist, there's the fact that your kid really wants to skate when you take her there and, like any decent parent, you like to indulge your kid sometimes. But after doing the Rockefeller Center thing once, don't you think native New Yorkers should go somewhere else for their skating pleasure?

I <3 iPod

2006-01-06T19:08:00.000-05:00

My parents recently gave me an iPod (a thing I have very much wanted for some time now). I am quite taken by it. Already I've grown attached to slipping it into my back pocket and running a soundtrack to my life. I like choosing the music; I like being absorbed in the sound; I even like the slimness of its body.

But wearing an iPod is a problematic thing, far more problematic than listening to music in other ways. It is unlike the radio, because you can't share it with anybody else while listening, or, at least, you can't effectively talk about it (or anything else) while mutually listening. It is unlike a Walkman, in that a Walkman is too bulky to always carry with oneself, and too unreliable, generally, even to take jogging (buffering notwithstanding). It is unlike both in that one can easily pick out songs to listen to on an iPod. These are all selling points: an iPod is quiet and doesn't bother the people around you; it is small and easy to carry, and can clip onto an armband if you're jogging; and you get much more choice over your playlist than you do if you rely on tapes, CDs, or a DJ to play the next song.

As I listen, however, I can't help thinking of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind: "Nothing is more singular about this generation [that of students and "young people"] than its addiction to music. This is the age of music and the states of soul that accompany it," he wrote (in 1987, the age of the Walkman). So far, so good, and apparently true today as well. But then Bloom continues, perhaps as an alarmest, but nonetheless essentially correct in what he says: "It makes conversation impossible, so that much of friendship must be without the shared speech that Aristotle asserts is the essence of friendship and the only true common ground.... As long as they have the Walkman on, they cannot hear what the great tradition has to say. And, after its prolonged use, when they take it off, they find they are deaf." Extreme? Perhaps. But not essentially wrong. Indeed, even if we toss out any philosophic attachment to "great tradition," the point about friendship still stands boldly on its own two feet.

Or let us consider "Harrison Bergeron," Vonnegut's short story about a truly equal dystopia. Those who are "unfairly" smart are fitted with earpieces; and the constant sounds in their heads break up their thoughts and distract them from the activity at hand. This resonates rather strongly with me at the moment (resonates-- get it? get it?). After all, the iPod, with its excellent technology, is not merely an earpiece projecting disruption into you; rather, it really makes it seem that the music is inside your head. If it is a disruption, it is therefore a rather more disturbing disruption than the one Vonnegut envisions.

So does wearing an iPod make you antisocial? It is perhaps arguable that strangers in New York are never very social anyhow--but it seems clear that the short answer must be "yes." Do they addle the mind? Well, let's just say that the precipitating force behind this blog entry was that I spent over an hour trying to solve a sudoku puzzle today--and then I gave up. Before I was the kind of person who plugged in, I was the kind of person who would do a sudoku every morning in the seven minutes it takes me to get from 86th Street to Grand Central Station. I could probably still do that if I wasn't listening to my iPod at the same time-- but the point is, I probably will be listening.

There's a third problem with the iPod, though, and one that seems very widespread indeed. It may even mark a significant social and cultural change, one that radio and Walkmans (Walkmen?) have not prefigured during their respective heydays. With the iPod and other mp3 players, listeners are, for the first time, able to choose their songs at a whim. Of course you can call in to a DJ, make a mixed tape, or burn personal CDs and thereby hear the song you're looking for-- but those activities require planning and forethought, and with them you can't reorder something next week when you feel like a different song. The iPod, however, is a very different creature. It offers the capacity to write one's own playlists on the fly, to pick individual songs as one goes, or even to scramble between a very select group of songs or artists. But, cool as these things are, and gratifying as it is to hear just what you want to hear, it is in this wealth of choice and subsequent near-immediate gratification that there lies the most insidious problem with the iPod: emotional masturbation, to say it crudely.

We all like picking our songs (myself included). But at some point--a point which, it seems, most iPod owners quickly reach--this means that we are no longer merely listening to music. What we are doing, rather, is consciously writing the soundtracks to our lives. Angry? Turn on the Ride of the Valkyries or Tupac Shakur. Happy? Go for Weezer. Sad? Find something in a minor key. And don't worry about sharing it with anybody else--it's your iPod, after all, a nice hand-held portable headphone-rigged personal music player. But what does this active approach to choosing one's music actually mean? Well, suddenly our music has become a thing where we express ourselves to ourselves. We feel one way, we share it (with our iPod!), and it responds sympathetically. Meanwhile, no other person is involved. No longer is it just that personal music isolates you from the rest of the world when you're listening (which is Bloom's big concern); now, sometimes at least, we show strong feelings through the iPod while at once not caring that nobody else is paying attention. This, some might say, is a productive dialogue with the self. But I think I buy that it is a dialogue with a muddle-headed self, an indulgence that at once expresses a mood and dulls one's capacity for thought Vonnegut-style.

The Impossible Forest

2006-01-05T17:40:00.000-05:00

New Yorkers are finally (finally!) tossing out their Christmas trees here in the city. This rather unremarkable seasonal phenomenon has had, of late, a rather unlikely and impressively strong influence on me, however.

Walking to work (well, to the subway to work) takes me through the residential neighborhoods that characterize the Upper East Side. Cross streets are rarely flecked with restaurants or stores: the population density of our blocks must be stunningly high. This translates, this time of year, into an enormous number of Christmas trees in front of every apartment building.

And that, in turn, translate itself into a pervasive smell of fir trees. Between this week's particularly crisp outdoor chill the ever-identifiable odor of fir and pine trees (fun fact: a douglas fir is actually a kind of pine!), one could be forgiven for mistaking January on 84th street for the wintertime of the countryside.

It's really a nice feeling. I love the city: so much is happening, so much is available, and there's a kind of elegance in a brick-walled upper-east-side apartment with clean lines and suave furniture. But closing my eyes and walking down 84th reminds me how much I'd hate to live here all my life.

houses, society

2005-12-28T02:46:00.000-05:00

There's a big problem with the (slowly deflating?) housing bubble that has installed itself as a seemingly permanent feature of the American economy. (It is not, of course, permanent; such a setup must eventually fall through--but for the time being, most homeowners are acting on the presumption of its permanence.) The problem is summed up in the following question: where are people of my generation going to LIVE? Perhaps a related question, though not as clearly derivative from the booming housing market, is: just how indebted to the rest of the world are we going to be, and how will we ever pay off that debt? War, to make it obsolete? Not a good answer.

My family spent Christmas at my grandparents' home in Litchfield, CT. Their home is lovely and in a beautiful, walkable town, and I had the abstract thought that this was a place I'd like to live, a place to have a family and a livelihood, a place to settle down. So just out of curiosity, I went to the government website and pulled up the recent sale prices of housing in Litchfield (this information being in the public domain). My reasonably well-informed estimate of the cost of an average single-family home there? $1-3.5 million, depending on location, land, and age of the building (older, strangely, seems more expensive...?).

In some ways, this is exactly what owning a home is supposed to be like. You put a lot of money into owning your house and land, but it's considered a solid investment anyway because real estate always rises in value (or so says conventional wisdom). The people who bought these homes 30, 20, or 10 years ago are all, I'm sure, very pleased with the cost of their home these days.

But what about those of us who were only 13 years old ten years ago? Where will we live? Even the cheapest of actual homes, physically sound (if imperfect fixer-uppers), in the cheapest housing markets in the country, are easily topping $150,000 (except in Alaska, it appears). The US Census Bureau tracks statistics for the cost of new homes each quarter; you can see here that in 2005, a new home in America is far more likely to go for between $300,000 and $500,000 than for any other price. And the average price of a New York City apartment--sans yard, sans space, sans parking--has just topped a million dollars.

This is a problem. Homeowners who bought their first house for $80,000 15 years ago can now sell it for $300,000, which they can then use to buy a new home in some other, more convenient place. Even if they can't buy an appreciatively nicer home, they can still move fairly easily. Moreover, they could move from a one-family home to a smaller apartment (now that their kids have moved out, for example), and take the price difference (say, $100,000) off the top to buy a new boat and car or to set aside for retirement. And these people can also get credit and borrow money against the value of their home, allowing them many more financial options than those who don't have homes.

But those of us whose starter home is going to cost $200,000? Well, most of us will simply never get a starter home under these circumstances (much less in the very expensive market that is Litchfield, CT). What will we do in ten years' time, when we want a loan to start a business? What will we do when we want permanency in our lives? The great thing about owning a home, instead of renting, is that after 20 or 30 years of paying your mortgage, it's yours. Markets may fall, Armageddon may break out, you might lose your job or become bedridden--but even if you can't sell it on the open market, your home and your land give you a permanent place to live. Indeed, anybody with a small yard can have a garden and make their own food in an emergency. Anybody with a bedroom has shelter. In short, owning your home means not just having a large financial asset to your name, but actually, physically having a place to stay even if you're unemployed or in otherwise dire straits.

But my generation? We don't really have much of a foothold on the homeowner ladder. In part, it's because we're more wandering and unsettled (not with a bad connotation) than twenty-somethings of previous generations. But in large part, it's because we couldn't buy a home if we wanted to. Our actual assets, as a general rule, are tiny.

That's a big problem. People who don't own their home can easily be kicked out of it--via everything from rent increases to eviction. No landlord has an obligation to re-up your lease, after all. But dependable permanency is a necessity for reliably run businesses, too, and for reasonably good schooling (consider the school where all students are drifting in and out--so much for the student-teacher relationship), and even for simple human contact and getting to know one's neighbors. Moreover, relatively reliable permanence helps make people stakeholders in their societies; you care who the mayor is, who the governor is, whether this lot turns into a park or that one becomes an apartment complex, how big class sizes are in the local elementary school, and what the seatbelt laws are, because you buy into the idea that this place is somehow yours and the place where you will continue to live.

But if young-ish adults aren't able to break into the housing market, we face a lot more apathy. (Look at voters by age in America, and we'll see that this is something we already face.) Moreover, in the more distant future, we face a world in which either one of two scenarios come into being. On the one hand, it could be that in forty years it will be my generation that comes to own the homes as our parents and grandparents move to smaller apartments, nursing homes, and (sorry to be crude about it) the grave. To accomplish this, I suspect there will be a rapid decline in home costs, thus radically shaking up our economy and likely causing an overall financial imbalance that could lead to serious instability and possible depression. On the other hand, it might be that we never really manage to break into the market at all. But then what? We'll be paying rent our whole lives? We already graduate from college with an average of over $2500 in credit card debt--not to mention as much as $250,000 in financial aid that needs to be repaid. We're swiftly becoming a debt-based economy. If we could be "renting to own," that is, paying a mortgage, then eventually we would have much more disposable income (when the house is paid off and there is no more rent on it), which we could use to back up and pay off debt (the way most homeowners generally do it even now). Alternatively, we could just run an account deficit of an increasingly large number of trillions of dollars, until the rest of the world figured out that the only thing underlying this is superior military power (since the economic power is actually in the hands of the lenders). Not a lovely scenario, either.

Actually, a third possibility comes to mind. Those of us with homeowning parents might eventually inheret the homes that they cannot themselves afford, while those whose parents don't own a home will simply be out of luck. What a superb way to widen the income gap and stem social mobility!

This is an obvious and problematic economic reality. The papers and the markets are aware of it. But it seems like nobody is paying attention to the political and social implications of a generation of wandering, uprooted, unconnected people. This is precisely the opposite of community, and seems likely to lead to problematic overindulgence in individualism, less and less enthusiasm for supporting social safety nets for others, far less self-policing and communal pressure to act decently (and therefore greater legalism and opportunism, both of which lose the point of the rules in the first place), and a power disparity between the haves and the have-nots which might even go so far as to effectively disenfranch the latter and threaten our democracy on a grand scale. It's the doomsday scenario, to be sure. But I do think it could happen.

Work, work, work

2005-12-20T19:03:00.000-05:00

The problem with working is... well... that you have to work. Even when you don't want to.

Being young and new to my job, I get the worst schedule while others take time off. (Seniority does buy you something, even in the most profit-driven companies around.) I will be working through Friday, and then again from the following Tuesday. Over here it's Christmastime, though, and I happen to be one of those who celebrate Christmas. Of course, normal responsible adults work such schedules (unless they are lucky enough to be self-employed and solvent, teachers, or members of Congress), but this is my first Christmas in the normal adult world. I'm not sure I like it. Give me the six-week-long vacations of my college days!

Quite seriously, I'd like to see a large company that gives well-considered, universally-applicable time off (whether at Christmastime or not is relatively unimportant). The French get three weeks in the summer (or, at least, this is a French ideal). Small businesses close their doors when the owners go away. In Brooklyn, whole neighborhoods close shop for Rosh Hashana. There is space in this time for relaxing, for cultural activities, for life outside of work. Perhaps this is not competitive, but it is human--and I suspect it doesn't actually cut the competitive edge so much anyway.

So here is a resolution: If ever I start a company that becomes a giant success--not likely, I confess--I'm going to simply close the doors for a week or two every year. All employees get the time off. Paid? Okay. It might mean that salaries are a little lower. But at least there's no pressure. You haven't shunted your work off onto someone else while on vacation, and you aren't behind when you return. Simply, the work ceases to exist, and we all go on vacation.

How wildly implausible is this?

Strike!

2005-12-20T00:35:00.000-05:00

Tuesday, 20 December: Strike! Just in time for Christmas and New Year's Day!

Walking nearly three miles to work every morning is not going to be fun for long, I have no doubt. However, walking to work today turned out to be great. Everybody was walking. For the first time in my experience, New Yorkers turned out en masse to do something together. We chatted with strangers as we moved up and down the streets. We laughed about the strike, the difficulty getting to work, the gridlock, and how pleased we were to live in Manhattan (pity the poor Brooklynite who has to walk to Times Square!). We speculated with neighbors on how long the strike would last. Everybody was open and pleasant, very un-New Yorkerly; suddenly the city, home of eight million different cultures, languages, and people, became a much smaller, much more intimate place.

New York is truly an entity unto itself. To be sure, it exists with New York State, within the United States, within an interconnected world. But the experience of living here is really quite unique. If transit workers (or teachers, or builders, or whomever) struck in Jacksonville, there would be difficulties, there would be havoc, there might be big problems. But here, life itself changes. Attitudes change. New services spring up overnight: taxis take off, Starbucks must be making millions (every businessman who formerly took the subway stopped in to have a coffee as he walked, it seems), shoe stores opened early (no kidding), wireless hotspots are filled with people commuting "from home." The roads change (direction, and parking rules and driving permits are suspended), the school schedules change, the stock market changes, one's relationships with neighbors change, ambulances drive differently, business acquaintences chat about getting to work over the phone before moving on to important issues: everything changes. And it is annoying, yes, but not MERELY annoying. It's an experience.

And it's not all bad, either. My walk this morning took me through Central Park, which was lovely. I liked talking to random folks, joking with those who made it into work, noticing the cool weather and seeing people laughing in their filled cars. All things considered, a day or two of this might be great.

(Of course, the strike is sure to last longer. Oh well.)

NY's "Fair" Employment Act

2005-12-16T02:50:00.001-05:00

New York State Civil Service Law, Article 14, §210.2(f): Payroll deductions. Not earlier than thirty nor later than ninety days following the date of such determination, the chief fiscal officer of the government involved shall deduct from the compensation of each such public employee an amount equal to twice his daily rate of pay for each day or part thereof that it was determined that he had violated this subdivision...

December 16: The midnight deadline for the Transit Union to call a strike here in New York has come and gone, and the subways and busses are still running (much to the relief of the vast majority of the city). Contract negotiations haven't finished, but at least they seem to be getting somewhere; a new Tuesday deadline has been set, and we shall see if the city descends into chaos then. (Contingency plans seem a desparate effort, at best: no cars on the road with less than 4 passengers, taxis to pick up multiple passengers (but note the cabbies' claim that they won't be scabs for the MTA), walking lanes on bridges into town (as if commuters from Westchester are going to walk to Manhattan Island), and several streets closed to anything but emergency vehicles in anticipation of incredible gridlock. My company even went so far as to put people up in hotels in Manhattan so that they could get to work in the case of a strike.)

Needless to say, then, I'm pleased that I didn't have to walk two-and-a-half miles to work this morning. And, my populist tendencies aside, I have to say that I think the MTA has some solid proposals in this very disruptive, very tense dispute. I know the union hates the idea of conductorless, remote-controlled subway cars, for example, because it gets rid of many jobs--but it does seem the way forward into a more-efficient, more cost-effective, high-tech world. I know the union wants a bigger cut of the MTA's one-time budget surplus, too--but, I mean, half that surplus is going towards paying down debt on the employees' pension plans. It's not that the employees are getting screwed by the MTA, but rather that they won't see this money until they retire. And then, I suspect, they'll be glad for it.

So, in a different world, I might have great sympathy for the MTA, and I might even be inclined to tell the union to suck it up and compromise a little bit more: longer contracts in return for high-tech conductorless trains; no broadbanding (when one employee, often skilled, is required to do several unrelated, often unskilled, and usually lower-paying jobs in addition to her skilled work) in return for no one-time kickback from the MTA's surplus.

But you know what? In this world, I can't help but to be on the union's side all the way. That's because the MTA is shameless about playing the press, about screwing the union, and about not giving an inch at the negotiating table. Heck, everybody knew (for years!) that December 15 was the contract deadline. You'd think the MTA would have proposed a contract, then, by, oh, let's say December 8th. That would give them at least a week to try to hash out the details. But instead, they went to the governor, the mayor, the courts, and the press, outlining their demands. And they never--or not, at any rate, until very recently, handed the union a sheet of paper with proposed contract details. How is the union supposed to respond to hints of MTA contract negotiations, without actually seeing any well-formed proposal? Of course things went down to the wire; the union had no choice but to wait until they had a document to work with (and yes, it was the MTA's responsibility to propose the contract in the first place). When the papers asked union reps what they thought of the MTA's compensation proposals, what was the TWU supposed to say but, "We don't know, we haven't seen them yet?"

You know what gets me even more annoyed than the MTA, though?

The state.

In the last few days, I've learned a lot about New York's Public Employees' Fair Employment Act (generally known as the Taylor Law, perhaps in an attempt to replace the obvious misnomer in the proper name). I've even gone so far as to read the whole damned thing. It's horrible. How on earth can it be legal for New York State to ban strikes? To ban them. To fine striking workers twice their rate of pay for every day, or part of a day, that they strike. How can it be legal to simply presume that somebody who is out sick, and whose boss doesn't believe his excuse, can be fined for striking? (I quote: "An employee who is absent from work without permission, or who abstains wholly or in part from the full performance of his duties in his normal manner without permission, on the date or dates when a strike occurs, shall be presumed to have engaged in such strike on such date or dates" and shall be subject to all the punishments laid out in the law for strikers.) How can it be that, in determining whether a union helped foment a strike (thereby making it subject to extensive legal action), "compliance with the technical rules of evidence shall not be required?" Don't we Americans generally require evidence before the law? Don't we presume individuals to be innocent until proven guilty (instead of presumed to be striking--illegal!--if absent)?

To be sure, none of these provisions seem to be dissuading the union too much; transit workers seem almost eager to strike even if it means paying the required fines, while the union is declaring that possible financial and legal repercussions (to the tune of several million or even hundreds of millions of dollars) will not keep them from supporting a strike if need be (Governor Pataki's "don't do it!" and declarations of illegality clearly notwithstanding).

But why should they have to pay? I could choose not to come to work any day of the week. I could quit. I could walk off the job. My friends could do it, too. It wouldn't be nice; the company would be left in difficult straits; I'd be unemployed; our clients would be left in the lurch. And, to be sure, my company would be welcome to fire me or to withold pay for the days I was absent (beyond my paid leave, I suppose). But my government, certainly, has no right to fine me or, God forbid, throw me in jail if I don't pay their fine. That is one of the things that it means to be a free woman in an free society. That's why I live here, for goodness's sake. If I want to stop working--because I don't like working conditions, because I'm bored, because I get a better job offer, because I marry a rich guy, because whatever--I can. It's that simple. My government cannot, or at least, emphatically ought not, be able to tell me that it is illegal not to work--and even moreso should they not be able to tell me that it is illegal not to work for somebody in particular (in this case, the MTA)!

There is an argument, of course, for balancing public good against individual liberties. And, indeed, doing so is in fact the role of government. A transit strike would wreak havoc on this city, it's true, and perhaps that gives the government some special right to step in and arrange things, even to the detriment of individual transit workers. Forcing people to go to work, however, is going far, far too far. A government can arrange new forms of transportation (which might undermine the strike's effectiveness to some extent); it can let cabbies carry multiple passengers; it can stop street parking to open up more driving space in a congested city; but surely, surely, it cannot force people to work for the MTA if they don't want to.

They Say the Neon Lights are Bright...

2005-12-11T17:41:00.000-05:00

...on Broadway.

I've had visitors here for much of the last week (yay for cousins and significant others!), and this has forced me to get out and go to a couple of Broadway shows. I'm living a cliche: never seeing New York until the family comes to visit, so to speak (or, perhaps in a better light, seeing the real New York as opposed to the staged one).

I'm not so into musicals, I'm the first to admit. They're good for a fun time, but often don't really make one think: more spectacle than substance, one might say. This pretty much sums up what I thought of Chicago, too. There were very catchy songs, singing, dancing, all the requisite musical things--but overall, I remained relatively unimpressed (which is not to say I didn't enjoy myself).

But the truth is, Chicago has a harsh and thought-provoking moral, of sorts: in America, the innocent but uninspiring are hanged; the guilty but interesting are let off the hook (with the help of expensive, manipulative lawyers and a good sense of creating a story for the press); and the boring, dependable, good-hearted, and hardworking are alternately ignored and manipulated by those who are in the spotlight. This is a moral to think about. Moreover, its presentation is interesting; we are first introduced to and most enamored of (or, at least, most invested in) Roxie and Velma, two murderers yearning to be in the public eye (one of whom has also been unfaithful to her very loyal but very boring mechanic of a husband). The play is a comedy and not a tragedy, in a Shakespearean sense, however, because both women get off and even end up sharing the spotlight in their own vaudeville show (fulfilling a kind of dream for each of them). It would indeed be shocking and displeasing were they to be convicted of the murders (which they both very much did commit), and worse were they to be hanged for their crime. They are the characters whom we the audience follow and with whom we sympathize (insofar as there is sympathy for anybody in the show). There is room here, then, for thought, both political and literary: we might fruitfully consider whether good story management really does make such an enormous difference in the way that justice is dished out in America (or elsewhere) today, and we might wonder about the narrative forces that turned the least sympathetic characters in real life into the most sympathetic characters on stage.

But Chicago does not really invite these considerations, I find. Perhaps it lives up just a bit too much to its own lyrics:

Give 'em the old razzle dazzle
Razzle Dazzle 'em
Give 'em an act with lots of flash in it...
How can they see with sequins in their eyes?

I'm having trouble reconciling my relative disdain for Chicago with my great appreciation for The Producers, however. After all, this latter, too, was a comedy, and full of spectacle. But The Producers had many genuinely funny moments in a way that Chicago never did; Chicago's pleasures were dependent upon spectacle and song and dance, rather than enhanced by them. What's more, The Producer's funny moments were of many types: the slapstick physical humor that has two men end up on top of each other in compromising positions; the amusing and exaggerated facial expressions that make us grin simply because they look silly; witty repartee; puns, both bad and good; a clever plot; even the slightly uncomfortable but very funny humor that comes from exploiting stereotypes (of relationships, of the elderly, of producers, of Swedes, of accountants, of women, of gays, and, yes, even of Hitler). Even the spectacle part was infused with humor: in the opening song-and-dance number, for example, the observant audience member would have noted that among the tuxedoed men and the be-gowned women could be found a pair of nuns, for no reason other than to highlight the unexpected.

Perhaps its greatest virtue, however, is that The Producers never takes itself too seriously. Maybe I'm wrong to criticize Chicago for not being particularly thought-provoking, then; maybe, in fact, the problem with musicals is that they often try to be serious love stories or (un)reasonably deep politically or philosophically important works--but really, how often do your very somber lovers burst out into a fully orchestrated, four-part-harmonized song-and-dance number? To be sure, some musicals try with moderate success to explain away this strangeness in order to maintain a kind of consistency (necessary for gravity); The Phantom of the Opera readily comes to mind as a show of this kind (as if setting the thing in an opera house really makes it less ridiculous that Andrew Lloyd Weber should pop into the mind of a lovestruck ballerina). So maybe Chicago, with its heavy-handed gesture towards a more serious criticism of American justice, simply gets bowled over by its own flashy song-and-dance, scantily-clad women, and unlikely lyrics.

The Producers, on the other hand, takes the ridiculousness and runs with it, with no pretensions to anything but good comedy. "As long as we're going to burst out into song anyway," the actors seem to be saying, "well, forget consistency and toss in a couple of nuns, a few tap-dancing old ladies (played by young men, I note), women in evening gowns and men in neon green visors." There is little attempt to try to justify the spectacle as an integral part of the plot; rather, the emphasis is making sure it is as spectacular as it can be (without, however, sacrificing all relationship to what is going on in the rest of the show).

There is a way that the musical numbers of The Producers reminded me of the best of Bollywood. It was ridiculous, to be sure, but laugh-aloud funny, and very well done. In deciding to embrace all the strangeness, absurdity, and sheer good fun of the musical medium, The Producers succeeded brilliantly where most other works simply flop (in my opinion, at least).

I guess that means I don't dislike musicals after all.

Let the Trumpets Blare

2005-12-05T22:45:00.000-05:00

There is something sad about the musical instrument wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. To be sure, it is filled with lovely things: harpsichords, a gorgeous cello, guitars, even a harpo-lyre. I can't help thinking, however, that this is little more than a chronicle of instruments unplayed.

It is of course true that some of the items on display are more works of art than works of instrumental craftsmanship, and perhaps it makes sense that Namur's Belgian guitar (with its parquetry decoration) or Voboam's 17th-century Parisian guitar (complete with patterns of tortoiseshell, ebony, and ivory) should be on permanent display in the art museum. Maybe we can justify the Tibetan trumpet, the Chinese gongs, and numerous other foreign instruments, too; after all, they are instruments that we don't see every day, and the museum is a valuable cultural as well as artistic repository. But the three Stradivarius violins? The numerous pianos? Even the organ, not particularly remarkable and very like those found in any number of churches across America? Sure, in some way they chronicle the development of modern instruments, and in some way each are objects of great worth and value that, it is at least arguable, ought to be publicly accessible.

But not like this. Not silent, unplayed, in a museum with deaf ears. These instruments are preserved, looked after, researched, and analyzed--but they are nearly never played. What good is an exhibit like that?

Incidentally, and not that tangentially, I feel the same way about rare old books. They should not be acquired by museums merely to be put behind glass, allowing us to appreciate all of two whole pages. Rather, we should put them in publicly-accessible archives (or even private libraries) where they might be read, enjoyed, researched, and--gasp!--handled as books are meant to be. One of my greatest joys at Cornell was to venture into the Rare Books and Manuscript Collection, to request a lovely old volume, and just to sit and read it. Because, after all, old (or financially valuable) things should not be so revered that we forget what they are for, and thereby lose all joy of them.

Whose internet?

2005-11-30T17:17:00.000-05:00

Recently, the UN has been debating the issue of internet control. The question, of course, is why the United States has it and other governments do not (though Slate's Adam Penenberg righly points out, "the idea that the United States 'controls the Internet'—or could control the Internet—through ICANN is a canard" because the internet is very much an independent, disaggregated, and uncontrollable entity). Penenberg is certainly right, which might render the whole debate rather moot in the long run.

Still, for the sake of argument and perhaps also because I find something compelling in the idea, I'm going to take sides in this one. And, perhaps much to the surprise of those who know me as an ardent internationalist, I'm siding with the United States.

It is of course arguable--quite compellingly arguable--that the internet is primarily a social good. As such, it seems, the UN might indeed be the natural administrator and governor of the net. Moreover, the internet is a rather strange entity, unlike other commodities in that monopoly makes it work not more sluggishly, but better. If we had 15 different competing, unconnected worldwide computer networks, we'd each have access to far less information, and the whole thing would be less useful. This is a ridiculous idea anyway; the nature of the net is such that a single person's computer could serve to link two separate networks--and it seems near impossible that this wouldn't happen given a parallel network of any size. The upshot? There is one internet, for all practical purposes, and it's not like the UN could construct (or purchase) a different one for the non-Americans on this earth who don't want to be bound by ICANN's internet laws.

But here's the thing. ICANN doesn't really make internet laws--at least, not in the way that the UN is thinking. ICANN is a technical body. Its systems let us type in domain names instead of number strings in our internet search bars, and its rules organize different websites into the .gov, .edu, .ca, .org, and .uk varieties. They don't do a darned thing about the content of sites posted at these names, though. And while its true that no government or organization is likely to be able to control the internet's content, bad governance COULD undermine the net so as to make it practically useless. The main problem, after all, is neither hostile governments nor pretensions to content control; it is rather the more mundane problem of bad convention-building.

Here's what I mean. What makes the internet such a valuable tool is its relative order alongside its popular accessibility. Wikipedia might be seen as a microcosm of the internet itself (and as such it will, I hope, serve as a valuable example); there are commonly agreed upon rules and standards which govern the writing of Wikipedia articles, and which make the site searchable, predictable, and useful--but anybody can update the articles and add their knowledge, which makes it a wonderful and, indeed, useful repository of facts, fiction, and stories. What we need--and largely what we have--is a balance between order and information. The problem with government regulation (whether that means regulation by a heavy-handed US government or regulation by a UN body) is that politicians and diplomats may have a lot to say about the implications of internet control, but very little to say about practical code-writing, domain-name organization, or suggested internet standards that keep the whole thing from degenerating into an unusable bit-filled chaos.

I would see nothing wrong with handing internet control, such as it is, over to a government that truly wanted to control and improve the organization and structure of the internet (though they'd have to realize that much of this control takes the form of practical suggestions that make the internet easier to navigate, and not actual legally-binding rules). But others can already do that (though why they'd want to remains a question); you could build a parallel number reader that would take an IP address and show "Gobbledegook On The Net" instead of "www.google.com"--and this would be wholly legal (with absolutely no question if you happened to be located outside of the United States--and, within, doesn't the US have legal power domestically?). You could create an organization to list and label all the addresses already listed and labelled by ICANN, assigned with the new names. You could therefore use today's information to create whole new styles of web browsers and whole new organizational schemes. The point isn't that it can't be done, then, but that the UN doesn't feel like starting from scratch. And for good reason: ICANN's system works. Well, fine, so let's do it ICANN's way. But that gives the international community no right to take it over.

For what it's worth, I will say that ICANN is already a highly internationalist institution, employing people from all over to help make routing and domain name control reasonably intuitive for and compatible with systems owned by people the whole world over. Disbanding it, or simply moving it under UN auspices, at best won't have much effect; at worst it may lead to a much less usable internet. And besides, ICANN (or some similar body) has to be located somewhere in the physical world, and the truth is that it seems obviously better that that somewhere be here in a rich and stable United States than in Tunisia or China or someplace where actual internet bullying may take place or where, perhaps more frighteningly, ICANN servers could fail (which would halt domain name assignment). Perhaps we could nominally declare ICANN offices to be on UN property, but there doesn't seem to be much substance in the change. In short, if the UN wants to be in charge of the internet while making few or no changes in the practical work of ICANN, then I don't see the point and I fear possible future consequences of meddlesome governance. And if the idea is instead to make real changes while disbanding ICANN's current organization in the process, then I confess that I am worried.

But the real truth is, I don't think UN member states are actually concerned about the technical and organizational state of the internet. (In fact, neither is the US government, which is a very good thing.) The biggest problem seems simply to be that ICANN is a public-private not-for-profit nominally acting under the auspices of the US government. Well, so why don't we just set it free? Get rid of that annoying public-private partnership status and let ICANN float alone like an NGO or an unafilliated company. It can remain a not-for-profit, but let's get rid of the governmental ties. Perhaps that would soothe the restless minds, without turning the internet into a big mess. Moreover, it would allow ICANN free motion; if in fact the US government started passing problematic or restrictive laws, ICANN could relocate to another place. (Note that this is a far harder thing for an overcontrolled UN institution to do; UNESCO can't just pick up and move to Zurich or Mexico City and declare itself free of UN rules, after all.)

So this is a joint call, I guess: to the UN, to not mess too much with the wonderfully democratic and populist thing that is the internet; and to the US government, to stop laying a claim to ICANN and just to let it live peaceably within our borders and subject to US law.

(Just out of curiosity, I know I have regular readers in Canada, the UK, and Malaysia. Comments?)

Flying NYC

2005-11-28T23:34:00.000-05:00

Best Cheap Thrill in NYC: The Roosevelt Island Tram

Before a wintry chill set in, I played softball on Roosevelt Island (technically a part of Queens) a few times. To get there, I'd always hop on the F Train near my office and emerge into daylight on the island. For the cost of a subway fare, though, you can instead take the commuter tram at 59th and 2nd. That's how I got home after the games.

The tram has got to be the awesomest cheap thrill that New York has to offer. A friend remarks, "it's like a helicopter ride through the city," and he's right. From high in the air you can see the MetLife building, the Chrysler building, and the Empire State building. You sail over the East River and the Queensboro Bridge, with an excellent view of a part of Yorktown to the north. The whole thing only lasts a minute or two, but, come on, you only paid two bucks for the privilege.

Here's what I don't get. People who live on Roosevelt Island take this ride every day. Every day! They sit there and read their papers, they forget to look out the windows, they get annoyed that the trip is taking so long. I mean, I know this is a part of the daily commute, but come on. We people are so easily jaded, so swift to be discontented. I'd like to think that I would look out the windows every day if that were my commute. But then, I note, I don't pay attention to the subway which I do ride every day.

Still, flying high above the city seems somehow different than shuttling around deep within its tunneled-out bowels. It's freer, more open... and more unusual.

Contra Dancing

2005-11-21T19:20:00.000-05:00

Last Saturday, LRand cajoled me into going out to eat and then contra dancing immediately thereafter. My goodness it was great! (I have just been told that LRand beat me to the punch and has already posted a write-up here. Oh well.)

I love dancing. Contra dancing is particularly fun, because you don't have to know anything but how to follow a lead in order to get in the dance steps... and because there's room for improvisation. The basic steps are outlined at the beginning of each dance, but there's generally time for an extra twirl here, a sneaky double-time step there. It's LOTS of fun. I'd never been contra dancing before, but I really enjoyed myself. (It couldn't have hurt that the music was excellent folk, played by a fine live band on a stage at the front of the room.)

The other great thing about contra dancing (at least at this particular venue), a thing which just isn't true at balls or proms or homecoming dances, or at Salsa night at the Ithaca club Common Ground, or even in most dance classes, is that you really, truly don't need to bring a partner. Everybody is expected to switch partners for every dance. Of course you might favor somebody with two dances in a night (gasp! but there is a closing waltz for just that purpose, it seems), but you'd never stay with a single partner all night long (even if you're married to that partner!). The culture of the dance is one of great inclusivity. It is a group project, and a really fun one.

No highfalutin observations here. Merely, I'm not sure I've ever had such fun dancing (though a particular swing dance does come to mind as close competition). I will definitely be going back!

Power to the People?

2005-11-19T12:28:00.000-05:00

I was asked today who my heroes were. (Actually, the question was originally, "Can you tell us one of your heroes from the 21st century?") I couldn't name anybody. It's appalling.

Certainly, there are many people I admire greatly--the names Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mahatma Ghandi were suggested to me, and they certainly fall into the category of great people who did great things. I don't much subscribe to a "Great Man" view of history, though, and this makes naming heroes difficult. I can list several great leaders whom I admire: John McCain, for his convictions and moral uprightness; Bismarck, who managed an amazing excercise in the balance of power and who managed to unify Germany in the 18th C; Washington, who defined what it was to be a democratic President (after the American model); Pericles, the great rhetorician who led Athens through a golden age; and certainly Martin Luther King and Mahatma Ghandi, both of whom managed to radically change their respective political systems to give voice to the unrepresented in society.

The thing is, it's hard for me to think that somebody wouldn't eventually have each done these things. The English and Germans may forever squabble over whether it was Newton or Leibniz who discovered calculus--but the truth remains, in my mind at least, that the state of physics and math was such that the time was right for the development of a mathematics of continuous functions. If it wasn't Newton, it was Leibniz; if it wasn't Leibniz, it was Newton; if it wasn't either of them, I am sure that somebody (or several somebodies) would have come along in a few years' time and worked out the functions anew. And this is how I feel about most of these "heroes": there had to be a first President, and if it wasn't Washington, it would have been somebody else--somebody who would have shaped the Presidency differently, to be sure, but who knows whether or not our country would not be better off for it? The civil rights movement needed to happen, desperately, and the Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., was a brilliant man and an amazing orater, as well as an excellent organizer. But if he hadn't been there, would the movement still have taken form? I hope so--and I think so, also.

Of course, there must be SOMETHING in these people that makes them the leaders who actually did emerge. It may be that the time was ripe for calculus, or a unified Germany, or whatever, but it still happens that particular individuals were, whether by chance, or motivation, or an accident of birth, on the front lines of those events. I myself have a strong desire to improve the lot of the people in my country and the world at large--and what is this drawing on if not some belief that, at some level, I as an individual actually can make a difference (and perhaps even a large one)?

I'm stumped. I'm thinking. Maybe the point is that we shouldn't overly privilege a view of history that says, "Let us learn about Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Louis XIV, Henry VIII, Thomas Jefferson, Abe Lincoln, Mao Zedong, Stalin, Hitler, Churchill, and then we're done with history"--but at the same time we can't forget those people, either. They did, after all, do VERY important things. And perhaps they did them because they were particularly impressive (if not necessarily good) individuals.

Is Neutrality Necessarily Good?

2005-11-16T18:31:00.000-05:00

Condoleezza Rice has earned my respect with her recent negotiations in the Middle East. Not that I haven't thought her a smart woman and a shrewd political actor in the past, but now I have finally been convinced that she is highly competent and that she has the ability to do what she thinks should be done, with the convictions to back it up.

That's not to say I always agree with her convictions, though.

I used to pride myself on a kind of political neutrality. I wanted to look at candidates individually, on their merits, and not simply as a product of their party platforms. I'm still registered with no party affiliation, but I wonder: did Bush sour me on that neutrality? I now tend to view members of his party--nationally prominent ones, at least--with a strong skepticism at the start, and they have to prove their abilities for me to grant them real respect. I'd rather give everybody the benefit of the doubt, though, presuming at first that they deserve the respect due their office--and only revoking it once I've seen them do something stupid, immoral, or incompetently. I think that's still how I view and judge individual Dems. It doesn't seem quite right, though. Partisan bickering, without thought and a willingness to grant the good arguments and abilities of the other side, is no great boon to this (or any) country.

Wilde about art

2005-11-14T21:10:00.000-05:00

The artist is the creator of beautiful things.
To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.

So was Oscar Wilde a proponent of Aestheticism, or was he not?

I mean, those two lines--the first two lines of the preface to Wilde's only novel, The Picture of Dorian Grey--argue strongly in the affirmative. And, certainly, during his lifetime, Wilde was known as a man who privileged art over all else. He was a dandy and a wit, and he concerned himself with being interesting and clever, and with creating art and beauty and amusement. He strongly rejected the Victorian (and Platonic) notion that art should serve a social or moral purpose: "Vice and virtue are to the artist [merely] materials for an art," he tells us, and, "There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."

But if this is the case, then what on earth is Wilde doing with The Picture of Dorian Grey? I mean, Wilde creates a character that seems to embody his aesthetic ideal. Dorian is a "fascinating," "beautiful," and "perpetually young" member of English society. He is seduced by the promise of a life of beauty and sensuality, and he indulges himself in any number of pleasures. He is able to look upon the most horrific scenes with a kind of amoral (not necessarily immoral, mind) aesthetic satisfaction; in his first major exploit of this sort, he dismisses his deadly cruelty towards (the ominously named) Sybil Vane as merely "the wonderful ending to a wonderful play. It has all the terrible beauty of a Greek tragedy, a tragedy in which I took a great part, but by which I have not been wounded.... It has been a marvelous experience. That is all." (It is, perhaps, worth noting that Dorian's cruelty in this case was caused by aesthetic agonies, too: "I was bored," he tells Sybil after watching her final performance. "You used to stir my imagination. Now you don't even stir my curiosity. You simply produce no effect. I loved you because you were marvelous, because you had genius and intellect, because you realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art." When Sybil acts poorly, though--because, she says, she cannot act the mere shadows of a love that now she understands in its true glory--Dorian responds not by understanding love but rather by falling out of love with her. Sybil is nothing to him without her acting, without her art. True love is grotesque to him; its masterfully-executed artistic representation is beautiful.) When Dorian comes to view Sybil's death as the realization of an aesthetic ideal, instead of as the horrific result of his own moral failings, we see that he has himself become a particular kind of aesthetic ideal. He is the perfect realization of the pure Aesthete, a man who lives for enjoyment and passion, for beauty and youth and a perpetually interesting life.

We might expect Wilde to idealize Dorian's life, since in his own life he seems to have idealized the aesthetic principles that drive his character. Yet the moral of Dorian Grey seems to be the rather Aristotelian idea that man in fact cannot succeed in living the beautiful life separate from the good life. If this is unexpected, it is also surprisingly refreshing; it is pleasant to reflect that beauty alone does not atone for one's sins (though that may be a highly problematic conflation of aesthetic and moral sense!).

To be sure, Dorian tries to separate soul and body, morality and sensuality. He wants to live an aesthetic life, to privilege only the latter of each of those pairs. And, indeed, he nearly succeeds in separating the two, in acting for sensuous reasons while disregarding morality. Dorian never quite manages the disaggregation, though, and he goes through several periods of anger, fear, unhappiness, guilt, and conscience when he remembers (or is shown) his moral failings. If Dorian is trying to live a purely aesthetic and therefore conscience-free life, he is in the end a miserable failure.

But what about the message from members of "society?" Sure, Dorian fails by his own lights, but in social circles he is constantly held up as a kind of ideal. He truly is perpetually interesting, always lovely, a splendid pianist and delightful flirt. Yet Dorian's social acceptance is based on naive misunderstanding; others--Lord Henry excepted, perhaps (but perhaps not)--think not that Dorian has succeeded in pushing morality aside, but rather that he represents the perfect melding of beauty and goodness. If they hold him up as a kind of ideal, then, it is only because they are deluded by his beauty and their own conviction that such outward delicacy could not hide so horrible a soul.

There is an interesting thematic tangle here. On the one hand, Wilde's novel questions the authenticity of appearances, and suggests that members of society are naive to judge Dorian's character by his looks. After all, Lady Narborough's pronouncement to Dorian that "you are made to be good--you look so good" rings obviously false for those of us who know the vices of Dorian's day-to-day existence. Her equation of beauty and virtue, we realize, is clearly misguided. Yet on the other hand, A Picture of Dorian Grey simultaneously reaffirms the idea that, for most of us, appearance does betray morality. After all, while Dorian's face never turns savage, nor cruel, nor grotesque, this is only due to his extraordinary (and unbelievable) circumstances. When it comes to everybody else, however, Wilde seems to imply that we in fact can judge by appearance. We wear the burdens of our souls upon our faces, and the ugly is the bedfellow of the immoral. Only when one's soul becomes, like Dorian's, a feature of a painting (instead of a feature of our person) is this not true.

This is a tangle that is never resolved. Is Wilde truly suggesting that, for the non-Dorian Greys in the world, beauty and goodness are practically interchangeable, and that one is a stand-in for the other? This is the implication, but it seems to be belied by the rest of the novel. Perhaps the only resolution (and a weak one at that) is that the two are linked, if not precisely the same thing. Just as Dorian cannot live an aesthetic life while removing himself completely from the cares of morality and virtue, then, others cannot privilege morality without showing it in their carriage, in their expressions, and on their faces.

If on the one hand The Picture of Dorian Grey is a book about the impossibility of the purely aesthetic life, though, it is also a book about the terrible consequences of putting too much reality into art. Just as man is inherently a moral creature, Wilde seems to be saying, art is an inherently aesthetic endeavor. And since the artist's goal is to create "beautiful things," to "reveal art and conceal the artist," then Hallowell's picture of Dorian Grey is a grand artistic failure. It is a technical masterwork, to be sure, but even Hallowell knows from the first that he has committed an offense against art; before ever seeing the picture with its grotesque changes, he is aware that he has put "too much of himself" into the painting, that it is too expressive, too Romantic, too emotionally connected. It was painted to express a kind of joy and inspiration felt by the artist, and not to amuse others or to show them unadulterated beauty. This is too personal, Hallowell knows; though the painting is beautiful, its object is not beauty, and so it is not what art should be. And this becomes all the more true as the painting changes to reveal Dorian in all his truthful perversion. In representing Dorian this way, the work becomes itself a grotesque object, if an accurate portrayal of what Dorian should look like. But art is not meant to be accurate; it is meant to be beautiful. Such a picture, it is clear, is a failure.

We see, then, a neat reversal in this book. The painting is the possessor of a conscience or soul, and its appearance reflects a moral instead of aesthetic state. Dorian, on the other hand, is the possessor of eternal beauty, a man who is neither moral nor immoral but who is unfailingly sensual, interesting, beautiful, and "well-written" (an apt description for a literary character). Neither artwork nor man succeeds in this reversed function, however. The painting appears ugly and so it is horrific; the man acts immorally and so he is horrific. While good art is amoral and good men may be ugly, neither painting nor person is any good at all in Dorian Grey. In the end, then, we are left with the conviction that one cannot--ought not--live life as art (though we may be less convinced that art should be merely beautiful, or at least interesting). To be sure, we, like Dorian, can base our actions primarily on aesthetic considerations--but this is inhuman, degrading, and ugly in a man. Dorian indulges in hedonism and aesthetic pleasure left and right; he justifies cruelty and immorality (as well as kindness and friendship) by their beauty and the sensual joys he derives from them--but in the end even he cannot escape his conscience. Indeed, one last desperate attempt to do so is his undoing: he tries to ruin the painting that has served as the repository of all his sins, the reminder of his moral failings and the embodiment of his spiritual hideousness--but in doing so, he only ruins himself. Those moral failings are his own, and if he destroys them he destroys himself.

Having written this veritable tome (well, not a tome, and so not veritable: a complete misuse of language), I find that I emerge with no good sense of Wilde's ideal life. Is it primarily aesthetic? That would jibe with my conception of Wilde's own life and his self-professed affinity for the Aestheticist movement. But clearly Dorian Grey, the aesthete extraordinaire, lives a contemptible and unhappy life, and dies a horrible death. Wilde's own life aside, that seems a near-impossible reading of this particular text.

Perhaps, though, Wilde is advocating a kind of tempered aestheticism, a vaguely moral (if only for practical purposes?), primarily indulgent life. This seems to describe the life the Wilde actually lived (as opposed to the one that he theoretically advocated, above), and it is not without a grounding in the novel: for those readers who object to my bringing Wilde-the-author into the discussion of a text which may have little or nothing to do with his personal beliefs, I point to Lord Henry Wotton as a textual example of this ideal. Lord Henry is a wit and a charmer, and it is he who in many ways leads Dorian down his hedonistic and sensual path. Henry is enamored of the aesthetic, and propounds radical theories of art, morality, and truth. Yet he is largely playing an intellectual game with these theories; he is most certainly not living by them. Though Henry says he is a hedonist (and he indeed may believe in hedonistic ideals), and though he purports to dismiss morality as an acceptable justification for action (preferring to justify things by their beauty or interest value), he leads a relatively conventional and unexciting life. Where Dorian finds pleasure in the practice of his hedonism, Lord Henry finds pleasure in its theory. Under this reading, then, Wilde may simply be cautioning us not to go too far in our pursuit of the aesthetic, even as he urges us to privilege the sensual and the beautiful. The problem is, Lord Henry is never made out as an impressive character; indeed, he is hardly even a well-rounded character. Henry doesn't develop, and he doesn't seem to understand the moral and practical implications of his ideals. If in fact Wilde means to suggest a tempered aestheticism, then, he manages do so only weakly. It is not the obvious message to take home from this book.

Alternatively, and in many ways far more plausibly, The Picture of Dorian Grey is written as an argument against a life lived in pursuit primarily of the beautiful. After all, Dorian's own life is a failure, and he dies enraged, unhappy, guilt-racked, and painfully. Even were we to accept his life on his own (aesthetic) terms and so not be horrified by Dorian's many terrible actions, we cannot escape the fact that Dorian is several times dreadfully unhappy, and that he dies an unhappy man in the end. Is the novel then reserving the aesthetic as the exclusive sphere of art, and suggesting that it is rather morality that is natural to man and necessary for man's happiness? Does the book ultimately extol virtue? But that seems at odds with Wilde's own life, and I am not of the school that thinks his life to be wholly irrelevant to the work that he has produced. Moreover, the book itself certainly implies that a moral life lacking aesthetic consideration would be boring and unpleasurable at best, and worthless at worst.

The final possibility, of course, is that the book suggests that we embrace a happy medium that exists somewhere in the space between the aesthetic and the moral. But then why condemn Dorian so emphatically? Merely as a lesson against his extreme aestheticism? There is no equally strong lesson against living an extreme moral life, however, even if there is the hint that such a life would be boring and therefore unexciting for one's friends. If this is where Dorian Grey leaves us, it does so uninspiringly.

So what are we to learn from Dorian Grey and his sad existence? Was Wilde a proponent of the hedonistic, passionate, sensuous life, or of a kind of considered, intellectual Aestheticism? Or was he recanting these ideals (which seems both the most obvious reading of the novel and the most unlikely explanation of it)? Or could it have been that Wilde was merely tempering his formerly strong statements about the primacy and desirability of a life lived for art's sake, suggesting that morality has an important role, too? (I might point out that this last option could have served as a kind of hedge against public sentiment that was turning against his own "immorality"--and which led to a trial in which A Picture of Dorian Grey was ultimately used as evidence for Wilde's "gross indecency" (read: homosexuality).)

Of course, Wilde himself would probably tell us--art for art's sake, forget the interpretation and the attempts to draw moralizing ideals, and just enjoy the book, damn it!

Still, it seems disingenuous to simply dismiss the questions that Wilde so explicitly raises. If nothing else, how are we to be interesting, witty, and intellectual, if we are not supposed to think?

Vote!

2005-11-08T11:21:00.000-05:00

Today is voting day in myriad places across the country. If it's voting day where you are, for goodness's sake, get out and VOTE!