3quarksdaily

You and Your Irrational Brain: An evening of experimentation under the stars

For those in the NYC area, this promises to be interesting and perhaps even fun:

The World Science Festival and WNYC Radio present You and Your Irrational Brain, a live, outdoor event (rain or shine) Thursday, May 29th at the Water Taxi Beach in Long Island City, Queens, NY.

Have you ever wondered why you might think it’s okay to steal a pen from work, but not money from the petty cash box? Ever splurged on a lavish meal, only later to clip a 25 cent coupon for a can of soup? Ever taken something FREE, knowing full well that you didn’t really want it? Why do we make these decisions that are so clearly irrational?

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational, along with science writer and Radio Lab contributor Jonah Lehrer, will join Radio Lab hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich to explore the often surprising factors that motivate and dictate human behavior.

The FREE event will combine discussion with live group experiments, games and demonstrations that test the ideas in Ariely’s book, followed by food, drink and music under the stars.

WHEN
Thursday, May 29th, 2008 from 7 pm to 8:30 pm, followed by music, DJ, beer and beach-side merriment

WHERE
Water Taxi Beach (Google Map)
2nd Street and Borden Avenue
Long Island City, NY 11101

The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick

Lisa Levy in The Believer:

Say it’s 1958, you are the wife of a famous poet, and it is your turn to have the Partisan Review gang over for drinks and barbed conversation. Maybe the line from Delmore Schwartz’s poem (“All poets’ wives have rotten lives”) runs through your head as you finish the grunt work of the hostess: emptying ashtrays, dumping half-eaten food into the trash, piling up as many glasses as you can carry to the sink. If you are Elizabeth Hardwick, your husband, Robert Lowell, is most likely passed out drunk or off having an affair-slash-breakdown with another woman. If the situation is the latter, he has renounced you and your daughter, Harriet, for a fascinating creature he suddenly cannot imagine living without, or he’s in an institution of some sort to treat the manic depression that inspires these cyclical acts of renunciation and affirmation. Lowell or no Lowell, there is much to do before you sleep: sweeping the floors, rubbing rings off places where coasters should have been, making a cursory pass over the upholstery, opening the windows to air out the smoke of a hundred pensive and hostile cigarettes. Thus the rhyming line of Schwartz’s poem: “Their husbands look at them like knives.”

Thinking about Hardwick in the domestic context should not detract from her status, as her friend Diane Johnson put it, as “part of the first generation of women intellectuals to make a mark in New York’s literary circle.”

Kanye West's Hip-Hop Sci-Fi Space Odyssey

Jon Pareles in the NYT:

There is a new yardstick for the size of the universe. It is approximately equal to the size of Kanye West’s ego.

That’s not necessarily bad. Hip-hop runs on self-glorification, the transformation of underdogs into self-invented legends. Sooner or later someone was bound to claim what Mr. West’s show did on Tuesday night at Madison Square Garden: that he’s “the biggest star in the universe.” That was not only part of the script but also a crucial plot twist for Mr. West’s headlining set on his Glow in the Dark Tour, a quadruple bill with Rihanna, N.E.R.D. and Lupe Fiasco.

Mr. West’s set was the most daring arena spectacle hip-hop has yet produced, and in some ways the best, even as it jettisoned standard hip-hop expectations. The rhymes, the beats and the narcissism were there; the block-party spirit and sense of community were not. Until the encore Mr. West had no human company on the arena stage.

The Fermi Paradox Revisited

Via DeLong, Charlie Stross over at his blog:

The Fermi Paradox probably doesn't need much introduction; first proposed by Enrico Fermi, it's one of the big puzzlers in astrobiology. We exist, therefore intelligent life in this universe is possible. The universe is big; even if life is rare, it's very unlikely that we're alone out here. So where is everybody? Why can't we hear their radio transmissions or see gross physical evidence of all the galactic empires out there?

If you aren't familiar with the Fermi Paradox, click that Wikipedia link above. Truly, it's a fascinating philosophical conundrum — and an important one: because it raises questions such as "how common are technological civilizations" and "how long do they survive", and that latter one strikes too close to home for comfort. (Hint: we live in a technological civilization, so its life expectancy is a matter that should be of pressing personal interest to us.)

Anyway, here are a couple of interesting papers on the subject, to whet your appetite for the 21st century rationalist version of those old-time mediaeval arguments about angels, pin-heads, and the fire limit for the dance hall built thereon:

First off the block is Nick Bostrom, with a paper in MIT Technology Review titled Where are they? in which he expounds Robin Henson's idea of the Great Filter: 

The evolutionary path to life-forms capable of space colonization leads through a "Great Filter," which can be thought of as a probability barrier. (I borrow this term from Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University.) The filter consists of one or more evolutionary transitions or steps that must be traversed at great odds in order for an Earth-like planet to produce a civilization capable of exploring distant solar systems. You start with billions and billions of potential germination points for life, and you end up with a sum total of zero extraterrestrial civilizations that we can observe. The Great Filter must therefore be sufficiently powerful--which is to say, passing the critical points must be sufficiently improbable--that even with many billions of rolls of the dice, one ends up with nothing: no aliens, no spacecraft, no signals. At least, none that we can detect in our neck of the woods.

jed perl spits on rauschenberg's grave!

Robert Rauschenberg, the man who once said he wanted to act in the gap between art and life, has departed this life, dying on Monday at the age of 82 in his home on the island of Captiva, off Florida's Gulf coast. There are few things that the men and women who run the culture industry enjoy more than shedding some tears over the passing of a bohemian bad boy who lived a full life, and in the next few weeks, there will be many salutes to Rauschenberg and his times. We will see him as a student at Black Mountain College, in the hardscrabble downtown New York days of the 1950s, and winning a Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1964. While the truth is that a lot of people who loved Pop Art never thought Rauschenberg was anywhere near as important as Johns or Warhol, for some years there was a general agreement that he was America's unofficial avant-garde ambassador-at-large, spreading the anything-can-be-art Dadaist gospel to the four corners of the earth, teaching people all over the world that, by god, you too can make a collage, you too can act in the gap between art and life. The only trouble with all of this was that there never has been a gap between art and life. There is art. There is life. For all I know, Rauschenberg's has been a life well lived. As for his art, it stank in the 1950s and it doesn't look any better today.

more from TNR here.

gitmo: stick a fork in it

Something in the unsavory history of al-Qahtani's interrogation (featuring sexual humiliation, attack dogs, stress positions, and sleep deprivation) must have proved too much for Crawford, which may reveal that Crawford has some filament of legal integrity or simply that she knows when to cut her losses. Either way, it's important that for every course correction at Gitmo from the Supreme Court, there have been many more from within the Pentagon. If the same people who joined the military in the hopes of fighting terrorism have had enough of the government's jury-rigged apparatus of Guantanamo justice, it's probably time to stick a fork in the whole thing.

Since the inception of the commissions, the brakes have almost always been applied when some member of the military has balked, even when going along would have been the far easier course. These refusals—some silent, some very public—have combined to stall the tribunals. The clearest sign that the military system is working is that the military itself has refused to let it go forward.

more from Slate here.

fritzl/turmalin

Life in Austria seems to be competing with literature. Since late April, we have been learning with horror and fascination how Josef Fritzl lured his daughter Elisabeth into a carefully designed, soundproofed cellar (for which he had secured planning permission), kept her there for twenty-four years, and sired seven children on her; of these, one died, three lived in the cellar, and three, still more incredibly, appear to have been deposited on the family’s doorstep in Amstetten and adopted by Fritzl and his wife as foundlings. This immediately recalls the case of Natascha Kampusch, who escaped two years ago from her eight-year captivity in Vienna. But to anyone familiar with Austrian literature it also calls up a host of literary reminiscences.

“Tourmaline is dark, and this story is very dark”, begins the story “Turmalin” (1852, revised 1853) by the great prose writer Adalbert Stifter. The porter in a semi-ruinous city mansion dies by falling off a ladder; the neighbours enter the cellar where he has lived, and find it inhabited by a tame jackdaw and a teenage girl with a swollen head and a barely intelligible manner of speaking.

more from the TLS here.

Thursday Poem

///
Translating Apollinaire
bpNichol

Icharrus winging up
Simon the Magician      from Judea    high in a tree,
everyone reaching for the sun

                       great towers of stone
built by the Aztecs, tearing their hearts out
to offer them, wet and beating

                        mountains,
cold wind, Macchu Piccu hiding in the sun
unfound for centuries

cars whizzing by, sun
thru trees passing, a dozen
new wave films, flickering
on drivers' glasses

flat on their backs in the grass
a dozen bodies slowly turning brown

sun glares off the pages, "soleil
cou coupé", rolls in my window
flat on my back on the floor
becoming aware of it
for an instant



Nichol's series: Translating Tranlating Apollinair

//

Better Baby-Making: Picking the Healthiest Embryo for IVF

From Scientific American:

There's new hope for the more than 7 million American women (and their partners) who long for a child and are plagued by infertility. Australian researchers have developed a method for screening embryos created through in vitro fertilization (IVF) to select the ones that have the best shot of developing into healthy babies. The process, reported in Human Reproduction, utilizes DNA fingerprinting (an assessment of active genes in a given cell) to boost the success rate of IVF and lower the chances of risky multiple births by identifying which of several five-day-old embryos are most likely to result in pregnancy The new method, which will replace unproved alternatives such as choosing embryos based on their shape, is likely to up the success of women becoming pregnant and lower their chances of having multiple births.

In IVF, eggs from a woman are fertilized by male sperm in a Petri dish and allowed to grow for five days until they become blastocysts consisting of about 50 to 65 cells. Because there are currently no precise methods for selecting viable embryos, couples typically choose to implant multiple blastocysts to enhance  their chances of conceiving, which may also result in multiple pregnancies. According to the study, about 42 percent of women who go through in vitro fertilization today become pregnant; of those, 32 percent give birth to twins, triplets or even more babies,  according to the Centers for Prevention and Disease Control.

More here.

Sloths are no lazier than the average teenager

From Nature:

The average day of the average sloth isn't so different from yours or mine, it seems. It goes something like this: 8 a.m.: wake up; 6 p.m.: dinner; 11 p.m.: bed.

Although that schedule doesn’t sound too hectic, it is a lot more activity than was previously expected from sloths. Studies of captive sloths had suggested that the animals slept for almost 16 hours a day. But the first recordings of brain activity from wild animals show that the actual figure is less than 10 hours. “I was astonished — I expected minor differences, but six hours a day is a very big difference,” says the study’s lead author, Niels Rattenborg of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Starnberg, Germany. The finding shows that the amount that animals sleep in the lab might not reflect how much shut-eye they get in the wild. And it suggests that comparisons of the sleeping patterns of different species need to take into account many different behaviours and environmental factors.

More here.

The Effects of the Religious Right on Politics and on Religion

Damon Linker in TNR:

Who would now deny that the political ascendancy of the religious right has been bad for the United States? Its destructive consequences are plain for all to see. It has polarized the nation. It has injected theological certainties into public life. It has led political leaders to invest their aims and their deeds with metaphysical significance. It has made America a laughingstock in the eyes of the educated of the world. And it has encouraged devout believers to think of themselves as agents of the divine, and their political opponents as enemies of God.

So much for the political damage. What about the consequences for religion itself? The strongest arguments for separating church and state--including the classic ones advanced in the writings of John Locke, accepted by America's constitutional framers, and codified in the First Amendment--have always emphasized that separation benefits religion as well as politics. The secular political order of the United States not only helps to ensure the perseverance of limited government; it also permits religion to thrive, uncorrupted by political ambition and petty partisanship.

chartres

Chartres cathedral is a marvel but also a mystery. Nobody knows who designed it or what they were trying to express. Begun in 1200 and finished in 1226, it was the crowning example of the gothic style and marked, Philip Ball suggests in this lucid and resplendent book, a shift in the way the western world thought about God, the universe and man's place in it. Romanesque churches with their vast walls and narrow windows had been dark and inward-looking, and signified, he argues, monastic seclusion. Chartres changed all that. Its walls were diaphanous membranes of glass set in cobwebs of stone. On the outside, flying buttresses propped them up to prevent them collapsing under the soaring vaults of the roof. It was “transparent logic”, a celebration of the light of reason, banishing the old gloom, and progressing from an age when God was feared to one where his works could be understood.

That, at any rate, is the theory.

more from the Times Online here.

burma land

There's no excuse for the behavior of Burma's leaders, but history offers an explanation that goes beyond sheer autocratic barbarism. As friendly as the Burmese can be to Western tourists, they have reason to be suspicious about their neighbors and outside powers -- they have been sandwiched between empires in India and China; subjugated and exploited by Great Britain; devastated by Japan (and the Allies) during World War II; and vulnerable in the second half of the 20th century to meddling by Thailand, rogue Chinese nationalists, and other factions and interests. Hand in hand with that xenophobia goes a fierce pride: For much of their history they've been not just survivors, but builders of a Burmese empire that, at its zenith in the mid-11th century, controlled a large chunk of mainland Southeast Asia.

Made in Burma, the junta reflects Burmese characteristics that won't necessarily go away once it's removed. Consider the junta's seemingly laughable reliance on omens and lucky numbers to set government policy, whether it involved moving the capital or changing the currency. In July 1947, a few months before independence, Burma's Cabinet resigned en masse because it discovered that the day when most of its members had taken the oath of office was "inauspicious."

more from The Atlantic Monthly here.

A Look at Hijras

Nick Harvey in The New Statesman:

Something old, something new, something borrowed, something … transgendered? If you are an Indian in need of some luck on your wedding day you could do no better than seek the blessing of one of the country’s estimated 200,000 male to female transsexuals or "hijras".

Hijras have a recorded history of more than 4,000 years. Ancient myths bestow them with special powers to bring luck and fertility. Yet despite this supposedly sanctioned place in Indian culture, hijras face severe harassment and discrimination from every direction. Deepa is a 72 year old hijra living in Mumbai: “Nobody says, “I’d love to be a hijra!” Not if they know what happens to us. But what else can we do? A hijra has a man’s body, but the soul is a woman.”

Something, however, is beginning to alter in the traditional Indian mindset as right now there seems to be both subtle and appreciable changes taking place in terms of how this group are being treated and recognised by mainstream society. Over the last few months India has seen its first transgender fashion model, a transgender television presenter and in the recent Bollywood epic Jodhaa Akbar a hijra, instead of hamming up the usual comic role, was portrayed as a trusted lieutenant of the female lead.

literary science?

Not every literary scholar is so pessimistic, but most would agree that the field's vital signs are bad, and that major changes will be needed to set things right.

Though the causes of the crisis are multiple and complex, I believe the dominant factor is easily identified: We literary scholars have mostly failed to generate surer and firmer knowledge about the things we study. While most other fields gradually accumulate new and durable understanding about the world, the great minds of literary studies have, over the past few decades, chiefly produced theories and speculation with little relevance to anyone but the scholars themselves. So instead of steadily building a body of solid knowledge about literature, culture, and the human condition, the field wanders in continuous circles, bending with fashions and the pronouncements of its charismatic leaders.

I think there is a clear solution to this problem. Literary studies should become more like the sciences.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

Paul Ewald Examines if We Can Domesticate Germs

Structured Procrastination

John Perry elaborates:

I have been intending to write this essay for months. Why am I finally doing it? Because I finally found some uncommitted time? Wrong. I have papers to grade, textbook orders to fill out, an NSF proposal to referee, dissertation drafts to read. I am working on this essay as a way of not doing all of those things. This is the essence of what I call structured procrastination, an amazing strategy I have discovered that converts procrastinators into effective human beings, respected and admired for all that they can accomplish and the good use they make of time. All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you. The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, like gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they get around to it. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because they are a way of not doing something more important. If all the procrastinator had left to do was to sharpen some pencils, no force on earth could get him do it. However, the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.

[H/t: Lindsay Beyerstein]

Recollections of Rorty

Via Crooked Timber, Raymond Geuss remembers Richard Rorty, in Arion:

When I arrived in Princeton during the 1970s my addiction to tea was already long-standing and very well entrenched, but I was so concerned about the quality of the water in town that I used to buy large containers of allegedly “pure” water at Davidson's—the local supermarket, which seems now to have gone out of business. I didn't, of course, have a car, and given the amount of tea I consumed, the transport of adequate supplies of water was a highly labor-intense and inconvenient matter. Dick and Mary Rorty must have noticed me lugging canisters of water home, because, with characteristic generosity, they developed the habit of calling around at my rooms in 120 Prospect, often on Sunday mornings, offering to take me by car to fill my water-bottles at a hugely primitive and highly suspicious-looking outdoor water-tap on the side of a pumphouse which was operated by the Elizabethtown Water Company on a piece of waste land near the Institute Woods. This pumphouse with its copiously dripping tap was like something out of Tarkhovski's film about Russia after a nuclear accident, Stalker, and the surrounding area was a place so sinister one half expected to be attacked by packs of dogs in the final stages of radiation sickness or by troops of feral children who had been left by their parents to fend for themselves while the parents went off to the library to finish their dissertations. On one of those Sunday mornings in that insalubrious, but somehow appropriate, landscape, Dick happened to mention that he had just finished reading Gadamer's Truth and Method. My heart sank at this news because the way he reported it seemed to me to indicate, correctly as it turned out, that he had been positively impressed by this book. I had a premonition, which also turned out to be correct, that it would not be possible for me to disabuse him of his admiration for the work of a man, whom I knew rather well as a former colleague at Heidelberg and whom I held to be a reactionary, distended wind-bag.

Spike Lee gets ready to do battle with Miracle at St Anna

From The Telegraph:

The story is Miracle at St Anna, drawn from the novel of the same name by American author James McBride. Recounting the deeds of four "Buffalo Soldiers" from the US Army's Negro 92nd Division, who are trapped behind enemy lines in Tuscany, the book is like a Roman mosaic, piecing together different narratives to reveal the complex moral landscape of war. Lee is using native actors, speaking their native tongues, and in the scene we have just witnessed English, German and Italian rattled around the room. Of the American actors, the best known is Derek Luke, who was excellent in Phillip Noyce's apartheid film Catch a Fire and also starred in Robert Redford's Lions for Lambs.

At first glance, a war film might seem an unusual departure for Lee. The 57-year-old director has tackled a number of genres in his 20-year career, but he forged his reputation by tackling issues - many of them controversial - that affected modern-day African-American communities. With films such as School Daze, Do the Right Thing, Jungle Fever and Clockers, he studied conflict within the black community, interracial tension, interracial sex and the horrors of the drug trade. "Actually, people don't realise that it was the return of the black soldiers from the Second World War that laid the foundations for the civil rights movement," he says. "There was a new militancy happening, and at the various training bases around the country you had violent outbreaks. And these negro soldiers had guns, too, so they weren't going to take too much!"

More here.

Regulating Evolution: How Gene Switches Make Life

From Scientific American:

For a long time, scientists certainly expected the anatomical differences among animals to be reflected in clear differences among the contents of their genomes. When we compare mammalian genomes such as those of the mouse, rat, dog, human and chimpanzee, however, we see that their respective gene catalogues are remarkably similar. The approximate number of genes in each animal’s genome (about 20,000 or so) and the relative positions of many genes have been fairly well maintained over 100 million years of evolution. That is not to say there are no differences in gene number and location. But at first glance, nothing in these gene inventories shouts out “mouse” or “dog” or “human.” When comparing mouse and human genome, for example, biologists are able to identify a mouse counterpart for at least 99 percent of all our genes.

In other words, we humans do not, as some once assumed, have more genes than our pets, pests, livestock or even a puffer fish. Disappointing, perhaps, but we’ll have to get over it. If humans want to understand what distinguishes animals, including ourselves, from one another, we have to look beyond genes.

More here.

Wednesday Poem

///
The Mushroom
Robert Bly

This white mushroom comes up through the duffy
lith on a granite cliff, in a crack that ice has widened.
The most delicate light tan, it has the texture of a rubber
ball left in the sun too long. To the fingers it feels a
little like the tough heel of a foot.

One split has gone deep into it, dividing it into two
half-spheres, and through the cut one can peek inside,
where the flesh is white and gently naive.

The mushroom has a traveller's face. We know there
are men and women in Old People's Homes whose souls
prepare now for a trip, which will also be a marriage.
There must be travellers all around us supporting us whom
we do not recognize. This granite cliff also travels. Do we
know more about our wife's journey or our dearest friends'
than the journey of this rock? Can we be sure which
traveller will arrive first, or when the wedding will be?
Everything is passing away except the day of this wedding.

///

Fafblog Interviews Hillary Clinton

For those of you who haven't notice, fafblog, perhaps the greatest blog in the history of the blogosphere, returned on April 1st after a long hiatus. Fafnir:

FAFBLOG: Wow, Hillary Clinton, right here on our little blog! Well, we don't want to waste your time so let's cut to the chase! Why should we vote for you for president?
HILLARY CLINTON: One word, Fafnir: experience. I have thirty-five years of experience working for change, building a list of accomplishments so lengthy and impressive no one else even knows what they are. Why, I could go on for hours just about the policies I advanced as First Lady, from critical legislation like the Mumble-Something Act to my efforts to bring peace to the troubled region of Upper McDonaldland.
FB: And millions of Americans still enjoy the benefits of your successful health care plan in some distant parallel universe!
CLINTON: That's right, Fafnir. No one has more experience failing to fix health care than me. I worked in the White House for eight years failing to fix health care, and as president I'll make failing to fix health care my number one priority.
FB: Well that sounds pretty good, Hillary Clinton, but what if I wanna vote for someone with even more experience, like John McCain or Zombie Strom Thurmond or Andrew Jackson's collection of antique spittoons? Those spittoons have been in the White House for a long time an I hear they got a formidable command of foreign policy.
CLINTON: Ha haaa! Well you know, anyone off the street with a scary black pastor can talk about change, but it takes a fighter to fight for change. And I'm a fighter. I'm tough. And if you lived my life you'd be pretty darn tough too. I mean, I had to go to Wellesley. That was my safety school. But I was strong anyway and I endured. And as president I'll fight the insurance industry and the pharmaceutical industry and the health care industry, just as soon as they stop giving me millions of dollars!
FB: That's that no-nonsense down-to-business style I like about you, Hillary Clinton! You don't just talk about change. You talk about how much you don't just talk about change!

Fusion 2.0

Over at Cosmos, Robin McKie looks at the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor:

Recreating the fusion process clearly offers great rewards, but it is not an easy task – to say the least. In particular, the business of containing a cloud of plasma that has been heated to around 100 million degrees Celsius has taxed the imaginations of a great many scientists. You can’t hold super-hot matter in an old bathtub, after all. In the end, it took the ingenuity of Russian scientists Igor Tamm and Andrei Sakharov, working at Moscow’s Kurchatov Institute in the late 1950s, to come up with the answer: the tokamak.

The key feature of a tokamak is its central chamber which is shaped like a giant, hollow doughnut or torus, and which gives the device its name. Abbreviating the Russian ‘TOroidalnaya KAmera v MAgnitnykh Katushkakh’ results in ‘tokamak’, or its similar English equivalent, TOroidal CHAmber in MAgnetic Coils (tochamac). Powerful electric currents are passed through coils that wind round the doughnut-shaped chamber and through the plasma inside it, creating a twisting magnetic field that holds the super-hot plasma in a tight, invisible grip.

However, massive amounts of electricity are needed to create this unseen container, and to date, far more energy has been spent powering-up tokamaks than has been released through the resulting fusion of atoms. For example, JET soaks up 25 megawatts of electrical power to generate only 16 megawatts of fusion power. However, ITER – which will be the biggest tokamak reactor ever built when completed – is scheduled to have an output of 500 megawatts for an input of only 50 megawatts of electricity.

Hillary Clinton and the Undoing of a Stereotype

Barbara Ehrenreich in The Nation:

A mere decade ago Francis Fukuyama fretted in Foreign Affairs that the world was too dangerous for the West to be entrusted to graying female leaders, whose aversion to violence was, as he established with numerous examples from chimpanzee society, "rooted in biology." The counter-example of Margaret Thatcher, perhaps the first of head of state to start a war for the sole purpose of pumping up her approval ratings, led him to concede that "biology is not destiny." But it was still a good reason to vote for a prehistoric-style club-wielding male.

Not to worry though, Francis. Far from being the stereotypical feminist-pacifist of your imagination, the woman to get closest to the Oval Office has promised to "obliterate" the toddlers of Tehran--along, of course, with the bomb-builders and Hezbollah supporters. Earlier on, Clinton foreswore even talking to presumptive bad guys, although women are supposed to be the talk addicts of the species. Watch out--was her distinctly unladylike message to Hugo Chávez, Kim Jong-Il and the rest of them--or I'll rip you a new one.

There's a reason it's been so easy for men to overlook women's capacity for aggression. As every student of Women's Studies 101 knows, what's called aggression in men is usually trivialized as "bitchiness" in women: men get angry; women suffer from bouts of inexplicable, hormonally-driven, hostility. So give Clinton credit for defying the belittling stereotype: she's been visibly angry for months, if not decades, and it can't all have been PMS.

But did we really need another lesson in the female capacity for ruthless aggression?

Robert Rauschenberg, 1925-2008

In the NYT:

A painter, photographer, printmaker, choreographer, onstage performer, set designer and, in later years, even a composer, Mr. Rauschenberg defied the traditional idea that an artist stick to one medium or style. He pushed, prodded and sometimes reconceived all the mediums in which he worked.

Building on the legacies of Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Cornell and others, he thereby helped to obscure the lines between painting and sculpture, painting and photography, photography and printmaking, sculpture and photography, sculpture and dance, sculpture and technology, technology and performance art — not to mention between art and life.

Mr. Rauschenberg was also instrumental in pushing American art onward from Abstract Expressionism, the dominant movement when he emerged during the early 1950s. He became a transformative link between artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and those who came next, artists identified with Pop, Conceptualism, Happenings, Process Art and other new kinds of art in which he played a signal role.

Warp Processors

Via Cosmic Variance, over at UC Riverside (also see here):

Imagine owning an automobile that can change its engine to suit your driving needs – when you’re tooling about town, it works like a super-fast sports car; when you’re hauling a heavy load, it operates like a strong, durable truck engine. While this turn-on-a-dime flexibility is impossible for cars to achieve, it is now possible for today’s computer chips.

A new, patent-pending technology developed over the last five years by UCR’s Frank Vahid, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, called "Warp processing" gives a computer chip the ability to improve its performance over time. The benefits of Warp processing are just being discovered by the computing industry. A range of companies including IBM, Intel and Motorola’s Freescale have already pursued licenses for the technology through UCR’s funding source, the Semiconductor Research Corporation.

Here’s how Warp processing works: When a program first runs on a microprocessor chip (such as a Pentium), the chip monitors the program to detect its most frequently-executed parts. The microprocessor then automatically tries to move those parts to a special kind of chip called a field-programmable gate array, or FPGA. “An FPGA can execute some (but not all) programs much faster than a microprocessor – 10 times, 100 times, even 1,000 times faster,” explains Vahid.

A Discussion on Modes of Philosophizing

"Should philosophy have something to say to non-philosophers? Should philosophy be pursued only by those trained in philosophy? Should academic teachers of philosophy consider themselves philosophers in virtue of the fact that they teach philosophy? And should analytic philosophers deny that continental philosophers are philosophers at all, or acknowledge that they represent different modes of philosophizing?" Jonathan Barnes, Myles Fredric Burnyeat, Raymond Geuss, and Barry Stroud debate, over at Eurozine:

[Raymond Geuss]: On what grounds is it reasonable to say that someone should not do X, e.g. should not study philosophy? In contemporary Western European societies people are, by and large, assumed to be free to engage in any activity not explicitly forbidden, and in general for an activity to be forbidden it is thought to be necessary to show that it is in some way harmful. No one else is harmed if I paint an uninteresting picture, and if an aesthetically obtuse person buys my painting, caveat emptor. On the other hand, if the building I construct falls down, indeterminately many people at some later time may well suffer, and a surgical error can be fatal to a person who is in no position to make an informed antecedent judgment about the skill of someone who offers to perform a certain operation. This gives a clear sense to the "should" in "surgery should be performed only by those with appropriate medical training". The "should" here depends on two distinct features of this situation, first that bad surgery imposes material harm on others, and second that by giving prospective surgeons medical training one can reduce the risk that they will perform poorly. The second feature is as important as the first. If medical training really had no effect on surgical results, there would be no grounds for requiring it. So is studying philosophy really like performing surgery or practicing as a civil engineer?

Before the Revolution

In Artforum, Arthur Danto remembers the protests of 1968 at Columbia:

As I left the building, I was told by several students that I didn’t understand what was happening, that this was the revolution! Well, revolution was much in the air. How was I to know? How was anyone?

Early the next morning, the phone rang. Someone said, with great urgency, that I had to get over to campus immediately, that the black students had taken over Hamilton Hall. I asked what he thought I could do, and he answered: “Negotiate!” It was still pretty dark, and I remember seeing Mark Rudd, the leader of the Columbia chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), loping across the campus. He was heading toward Low Library—the university administration building, home to the president’s office—which I was shortly to find had been occupied by the white students who had been thrown out of Hamilton. “Are the blacks still in Hamilton?” I asked. Rudd answered, “I wish I were in there with them!” From that point on, the event becomes a blur to me. I remember a meeting at Lionel Trilling’s apartment, the gist of which was, What could we do to save the university? That was the first meeting of what came to be the Ad Hoc Faculty Group, which met throughout the crisis in the Graduate Students’ Lounge in Philosophy Hall. Living in history has, in retrospect, something of the form of a partially restored mural, in which irregular islands of painted incident are all that remain, set into a wall of blank white plaster. There is no better example of what I mean than Fabrizio’s disconnected battlefield experiences, in Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma, in what he afterward learns was the Battle of Waterloo.

What I did learn from the meetings of the Ad Hoc Faculty Group was how such groups move in increasingly radical directions. It was like it must have been in the French Revolution. Initially, you have moderates making impassioned but rational speeches to one another. But then the Jacobins move in and discourse takes a more and more vehement tone. At Columbia in 1968, at least, this phenomenon was the consequence of external uncertainties.

Brooks on Neural Buddhism

Robert Boyle once described the natural world as "brute and stupid."  This view gained prominence in institutions like the Royal Society, helping to disenchant the world, meaning the non-scientific question whether there are values in the world (out there) or not was usurped by science in favor of the latter.  This criticism of science's ostensible overreach has been made by not simply philosophers.  Lawrence Krauss, for example, has recently embraced something like this view.  (This issue is separate from the question of the existence of god or gods.)  It seems  to be part of the zeitgeist, having now made it even to the hands of David Brooks who contorts it in his David Brooksian way, in the NYT:

This new wave of research [on the neural instantiation of transcendent experiences] will not seep into the public realm in the form of militant atheism. Instead it will lead to what you might call neural Buddhism.

If you survey the literature (and I’d recommend books by Newberg, Daniel J. Siegel, Michael S. Gazzaniga, Jonathan Haidt, Antonio Damasio and Marc D. Hauser if you want to get up to speed), you can see that certain beliefs will spread into the wider discussion.

First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions. Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.

In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It’s going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism.

The human brain is a less-than-perfect device

From Newsweek:

Despite the fact that humans have been known to be eaten by bears, sharks and assorted other carnivores, we love to place ourselves at the top of the food chain. And, despite our unwavering conviction that we are smarter than the computers we invented, members of our species still rob banks with their faces wrapped in duct tape and leave copies of their resumes at the scene of the crime. Six percent of sky-diving fatalities occur due to a failure to remember to pull the ripcord, hundreds of millions of dollars are sent abroad in response to shockingly unbelievable e-mails from displaced African royalty and nobody knows what Eliot Spitzer was thinking.

Are these simply examples of a few subpar minds amongst our general brilliance? Or do all human minds work not so much like computers but as Rube Goldberg machines capable of both brilliance and unbelievable stupidity? In his new book, "Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind," New York University professor Gary Marcus uses evolutionary psychology to explore the development of that "clumsy, cobbled-together contraption" we call a brain and to answer such puzzling questions as, "Why do half of all Americans believe in ghosts?" and "How can 4 million people believe they were once abducted by aliens?"

According to Marcus, while we once we used our brains simply to stay alive and procreate, the modern world and its technological advances have forced evolution to keep up by adapting ancient skills for modern uses--in effect simply placing our relatively new frontal lobes (the home of memory, language, speech and error recognition) on top of our more ancient hindbrain (in charge of survival, breathing, instinct and emotion.) It is Marcus's hypothesis that evolution has resulted in a series of "good enough" but not ideal adaptations that allow us to be smart enough to invent quantum physics but not clever enough to remember where we put our wallet from one day to the next or to change our minds in the face of overwhelming evidence that our beliefs are wrong.

More here.

Two New Ways to Explore the Virtual Universe, in Vivid 3-D

From The New York Times:

The skies may be the next frontier in travel, yet not even the wealthiest space tourist can zoom out to, say, the Crab Nebula, the Trapezium Cluster or Eta Carinae, a star 100 times more massive than the Sun and 7,500 light-years away.

But those galactic destinations and thousands of others can now be toured and explored at the controls of a computer mouse, with the constellations, stars and space dust displayed in vivid detail and animated imagery across the screen. The project, the WorldWide Telescope, is the culmination of years of work by researchers at Microsoft, and the Web site and free downloadable software are available starting on Tuesday, at www.WorldWideTelescope.org.

More here.

Monday Poem

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Frida Kahlo's Brows
Jim Culleny

Who would not be blown away
by Frida Kahlo’s brows?

They soar over her eyes like a crow
broad      black      wings      spread

two hooded planets in its grip
scanning for a place to light and dine

the back-to-back parentheses of her nose
poised beneath, but above the pursed lips
of a rose

From portrait to portrait they fly
within the riveted space
of Kahlo’s face, changeless
as a signature

“This is me, Frida,”
they say. “This black crow
is my revelation to you

This raven mark is the sign of a Mexican girl
who realized her peculiar beauty with
bristles of brushes in odors of oil

"Once you see these brows," says Frida,
"I will be indelible. My brows
will be stamped in your mind’s eye
until the day their pigments die
or till the descent of a crow
cradling two eyes in its claws
becomes impossible because
all the thoughtful will have
vanished.”

///

Elise & Me: A Tale of Extreme Optical Seduction

 

Elatia Harris

The year I was 9, I made every effort to turn Japanese.  I padded around the house in tabi and a kimono, elongated my eyes with my mother’s make-up – she wasn’t using it  – and did up my long dark hair in what I regarded as geisha poufs anchored with chopsticks. I even packed a small bag with tissue-wrapped favorite possessions, in case the opportunity to leave permanently for Japan came all of a sudden – as I had faith it would. Beneath the dress-up, however, and the very strong signal that I was not best pleased by life as a child in the West, was the real ardor I felt for the art of Japan. It looked so right to me, it just was right. Why was that? What was the secret? 

My mother knew what there was to know about how to look at Western painting, and together we looked at hundreds of paintings on the walls of museums and galleries and inside books. Though I might wait weeks for her to find an hour to page through a certain art book with me, I never pushed ahead without her until I began turning Japanese. She experienced the japonesque as chic, a deft touch in any environment, but the true family aesthetic was one in which Jules Verne duked it out with Henri Matisse. I will not forget what it was to be profoundly attracted to something my brilliant mother didn't particularly get -- it was a real rite of passage. From this distance, I see how kind she was to encourage me on my way away from her.  In the photo to the left, however, I appear a bit resentful. She had asked me to look up from what I was doing -- assuredly not my homework -- and I didn't like my concentration to be broken. If at this age I was found drawing, then I was drawing something that looked -- to me at least -- Japanese. But I needed a guide to that universe of art and taste that drew me in, and it could not be my mother.

Enter Elise Grilli – a woman whom I suppose I never knew, although it does not feel that way.  I first encountered her name on the cover of one of my most beloved childhood books, Golden Screen Paintings of Japan. You can see the scan of my personal copy below left – it’s dog-eared the way a book gets if you sleep with it for many years. On the upper right corner, there is ink I spilled from copying something inside it. Akiyama Teruzawa’s big book from Skira, Japanese Painting, was similarly pored over by me, and is now obviously distressed, like the Modern Library edition of The Tale of Genji, written by the world's first novelist, Lady Murasaki, and translated by Arthur Waley. Nobody in this bunch wrote for children, but in fact they all wrote for me. Especially Elise Grilli.

From the post-war years through the 1960's, curiosity about the art and culture of Japan was likely to lead a reader of any age to a kind of book that would today be hard to find -- one that unabashedly played up the otherness, not to say quaintness, of things Japanese. Asia was called the Orient then, and the modifier for anything east of Vienna was "Oriental" not "Asian." (Well, I exaggerate -- but not by much.) The Allied Occupation of Japan did not end until late in 1951, and even by the time I began studying the subject that would fill so much of my childhood, Japan was still Other. It was certainly the antithesis of the maroon sides of beef slathered in barbecue sauce, the morgue-temperature air-conditioning, and the fevered visual excess I considered to surround me, and that alone would have gotten it my childish attention -- but perhaps not for long. And we are talking about long years of being absorbed in a subject, so that when in school I could pick my topics and write to please myself, I would write about Japanese gardens, Japanese creation myths, Japanese tea ceremonies, or some aspect of Japanese art. A teacher in the 6th grade made fun of me for this -- gently. And even after years of child-time, it was not that I had learned so much, but that I had looked so much. For this was all about extreme optical seduction, the ideas and feelings it can give rise to.

It happened through books -- tiny books, at that. In the late 50's, Elise Grilli wrote two 7" x 7" soft cover companion books for Crown, Golden Screen Paintings of Japan and Japanese Picture Scrolls. Each is one-quarter of an inch thick, with about 30 pages of text and 36 plates, mostly color. They belonged to the "Art of the East Library" series, and they cost $1.25 each. My mother must have bought them for me at the local museum book store -- I don't remember wheedling her, but I wouldn't have been above it. There was also the Kodansha "Library of Japanese Art," brought to Western readers by an arrangement between Kodansha, an old Japanese publishing house, and the Charles E. Tuttle Company. These were amply illustrated soft cover monographs on leading Japanese artists, from Sesshu to Taikan. I see that the 7 volumes -- about the height and width of paperback mysteries, but perhaps 30% of the thickness -- I have owned since the age of 8 were marked down from $1.25 each to 75 cents. Of the Kodansha books I owned, Elise Grilli wrote or co-wrote the texts on Sesshu, Sotatsu and Hokusai. I've read them all many, many times. Her name became very familiar to me, as did her words, her beautifully chosen words.

            

The image under the title is a four-panel screen from the Room of Maples and Flowers, painted in the late 16th century by Hasegawa Tohaku and now in the Chishaku-in, a temple complex in Kyoto. Each gold foil panel is a bit under 6 feet in height. I first became aware of this work of art reading Golden Screen Paintings of Japan, my $1.25 book by Elise Grilli, and it was the most gorgeous thing I had ever seen, period. Paging through the book late at night, I would have to sneak up to it, because it was almost too much, and because the ravishing pleasures of anticipation were not to be disdained. The same artist, Tohaku, painted the monkey panels, above. These are ink paintings on paper, incorporating a gold wash, now in the Kyoto National Museum. Oh, their fur, their presence.

Unfathomably, it was the same Tohaku who painted the pair of six-paneled screens below, Trees in Fog, now in the National Museum, Tokyo. These are slightly over 5 feet high, just sumi on paper. No gold. If you imagined them side by side you would set the right edge of the topmost at a slight distance from the left edge of the bottom screen.  So that, considering the twelve panels as a whole, there would be two -- almost three -- largely empty panels in the middle.  Before I got a look at Trees in Fog, I didn't know there were compositions of this kind. I knew it was bad composition to put something smack in the center of your drawing, but I did not know you could put so much nothing there.

Might you not be better off doing as Tohaku did in the Room of Maples and Flowers, and drawing a tree that reached diagonally across the center of your composition, while truly inhabiting areas just to either side of it? Trying to find the right way to draw things, I was instinctively attracted to an individualistic painter of vast and wide-ranging genius. My first sensations of wonder and bewilderment have stayed with me. They remain the correct response to the daring and naturalism I saw, that I was too young to know I could not as an artist aspire to.

Thanks to Elise Grilli, I was beginning to understand there were two long traditions in Japanese painting that occasionally inter-penetrated but were also separate. Very roughly, there was a tradition that overwhelmingly reflected the civilization-changing influence of China and Buddhism, and one that was Japan's unique contribution to world art, with each flaring into greater vitality at different times over almost 1500 years. Another distinction to look out for was that between art of a private, contemplative nature -- a scroll that is unfolded slowly in the hands, a poem card -- and art best understood as a large element in an entire surround, like the screens above. In the West, the same distinction might attach to the difference between drawing and painting, the former usually done by artists for themselves, the latter having a necessarily public intention. In the West, too, the same artist might excel -- that is, live equally -- in both drawing and painting, but in Japan, with staggering though very few exceptions, art that was contemplative would not issue from the mind or hands of a great decorator-painter.

That was a matter of different trainings, temperaments and positions in society, I learned from Elise Grilli. Reading about Sesshu, the priest-painter who in 1467 had gone to China to study, returning to Japan to found an academy, I saw that for some kinds of painting, you needed to be a philosopher.  Oh, perhaps even an aristocrat. Not like Tohaku, whose birth as a dyer's son conferred outsider status on him, making it anything but a sure thing he would gain a toe-hold as a screen painter in an elite studio -- as indeed he did not. As a Buddhist priest born to a samurai clan, Sesshu occupied a troubling position too, however -- he was both a master of ink painting, a suibokuga, and one in a long tradition of adepts whose first allegiance could not be to to anything in the samsaric world, not even to brushes and paper. And yet, this detachment was essential to his art -- something that made no sense at all to me, until I was able to see that that was the point.

The painting above, left, Sesshu's Winter Landscape, in the National Museum, Tokyo, to me sums up kara-e -- Chinese-style painting as it is done in Japan. Because of a book that cost 75 of my mother's cents when I was 8, I have had decades to think about Sesshu -- not a task you can fully accomplish in a lifetime. A child of the mid-century, I could not look at the central area of the background of this landscape and fail to wonder how a priest in Japan the 1400's had found his way to abstraction -- which of course belonged to my own era. To painting an idea of winter and ice on rock, and not its appearance. I showed my mother, who knew everything about modern art. Her mind boggled, too, that the crowning achievement of the painting of our time -- radically to simplify, to search for essences, to suggest -- could have been thus anticipated. Much later as a college girl, I would learn from another wonderful teacher, Katherine Caldwell, how through the centuries Chinese painting veered towards an appearance of abstraction. For the time being, however, my mind was on a handful of long-dead Japanese painters. Among the very great benefits of turning childish attention upon the long ago and far away is a world view that, even if it is inaccurate, is thrillingly grand, that will impart the habit of looking for connections.  Sometimes, after all, they're there.

That which was uniquely or at least especially Japanese in painting -- yamato-e -- stirred me beyond anything. Not always -- occasionally yamato-e could look phoned in or precious, and, developing an eye for this stuff, I could see that something was amiss. Too much has been written on the differences between yamato-e and kara-e; whenever you think you've pinned it down, you can, yourself, produce an exception. Greatly to simplify, kara-e is line to which color or modeling is added, yamato-e the juxtaposition of flat areas of color. Looking again at Tohaku's screen from the Room of Maples and Flowers (under the title), you see a blue curving shape in the panel second from left that you know to be a body of water receding into the distance -- a winding stream. The gold ground stands equally for riverbed and sky -- you sense this without needing more. That's yamato-e, which could not and did not happen in China. Looking at Sesshu's Winter Landscape, the primacy of line is apparent -- it is specific, suggestive and expressive, and it is through the weight of the line, from dark and bold to faint and attenuated, that you apprehend the recession of objects in space. I am not so sure that, in the 502 years since he died, any painter has taken kara-e further than Sesshu. Or shall ever do.

But where do these distinctions leave us when we look at Tohaku's Trees in Fog?  This shattering masterpiece, almost 24 feet long, and according to a 2001 poll, Japan's best loved painting, is neither juxtaposed areas of color nor line in the sense of contour-line.  Using enormous brushes, Tohaku made a brush stroke the very shape of a trunk, a bough, a clump of pine needles. So that line is never exactly descriptive, in that you can't separate it from form. The radiant fog here is what establishes distance, some trees standing before us, roots to crown, others veiled.  You know the forest is dense, for you can see trees that are pushed aslant by the upright growth of others, yet a shimmering bright fog is everywhere moving in and out. The painting itself has almost an aural quality -- of deep hush. You can tell that if it were not for Chinese civilization, which changes everything it impinges on, and has always done, this work would not have come into being, but it's transcendantly yamato-e.

Has yamato-e reached such an apotheosis with color? Oh, I have long thought so so. On the cover of Elise Grilli's 1959 book, Masterworks of Japanese Painting, 15th -- 19th Centuries, there is a close-up photo of an iris from Ogata Korin's pair of six-paneled screens, Kakitsubata, below, painted in about 1705, now in the Nezu Art Museum, Tokyo. The screens refer to a wistful verse in a 10th century romance, the Ise Monogatori -- everyone who looked at them would have known it. Unusually for an art historian, Elise Grilli writes about the in-and-out aspect of a folding screen -- a byobu -- which, standing on its own before you, would give an experience that cannot really be simulated in 2-D space. The irises would take on a different presence, with your seeing them as if from both above and below -- a manipulation of your "felt axis" that would gently and pleasurably disembody you, putting you in iris-space the way Monet would place you among waterlilies, looking impossibly up at the high horizon of the pond. This is a perspective that Western painting discourages, and that you can enter through tiny portals -- books only twice the size of a deck of cards.

 

 

                                             

I still have and read Elise Grilli's books, although I no longer sleep with them.  In writing about their place in my childhood, I haven't wanted to quote from them.  I'm turfy about her -- she's mine.  And anyway, what if readers found her less entrancing than I did, and do?  Hers is the voice of a charming, educated mid-century writer who gently impels you to see and to love what you see, who has the gift of creating interest before she imparts information. I don't know if she was thought of as a formidable scholar -- so many formidable scholars of the era are no longer consulted, yet, in preparing to write this post, I learned that her book on Sharaku, written in the 50's, was just last year re-issued. For the most part, her books can be found on the secondary market, where they cost a lot more than $1.25.

Who was Elise Grilli, really?  I never knew in any detail until a few weeks ago. She lived in Japan from the late 40's through the mid-60's, and raised her children there. She spoke, read and wrote Japanese, and wrote articles on art for The Japan Times, for which her husband was a music critic. That figures -- she was fond of using musical and also literary analogies to illuminate art that was still very foreign, comparing and contrasting what readers might know with what they probably did not, the better to facilitate optical seduction. It's a habit I see I've caught -- although my mother did it too. Her biggest book, The Art of the Japanese Screen, Weatherhill, 1970 -- and you will never know a better treatment of the subject -- I did not as a child get my hands on.  It was published posthumously. She died in 1969, at work at that time on a book about calligraphy in China and Japan. She was not much older than my mother -- something I'd always sensed.

That's a bad loss, that she did not complete and publish the work-in-progress. I only just found out, and I am passionately sorry, and sorry for her children too, who would have then been young adults.

At around the same time, I was beginning to learn about calligraphy, about the syllabary that Lady Murasaki used to write the Genji Monogatori, in the Heian Period, when men at Court wrote bad poetry in Chinese and, in Japanese, women wrote good novels. Chinese calligraphy looked to me then like ideas, Japanese like a language to record utterances. I went further back than the Heian Period, to the 9th century, to the time the Japanese, who did not write at all before contact with China and the extreme alterations that it wrought, began to develop a written language that diverged from the grafted-on Chinese, that was more suitable to their own spoken language. A calligrapher-monk, Kukai, may have been instrumental in this process. He had been to China, returning to found the Shingon Buddhist sect, headquartered at Koyasan. There, beyond the darkly forested Okuno-in, for centuries the cemetery of choice for Japanese Buddhists, beyond the Lantern Hall where two lanterns have burned for 900 years, in an underground chamber of Mt. Koya, Kukai had not died, but had entered eternal samadhi -- deeply concentrated meditation -- to await Maitreya, the Buddha of the Future.

I was a big girl now, and I was off.

Gypsies

Justin E. H. Smith

Romania has its share of track-and-field athletes, and even some marathon runners, but don't ask me where they train. In all of my dozens of visits there, I am the only person I have ever known to run in public parks and along public streets. I do it expecting harassment. What choice do I have? I confess I experience groups of street kids the same way I do street dogs: as a threat. I also confess that in general I am repulsed by the swarming crowds, so familiar throughout the Balkans, of scowling young men in shiny track-suits with gold-capped teeth and gold chains. Of course I am. I want to be surrounded by people who look like they’ve been to college, who look ready to discuss Aki Kaurismäki, or the prospects for a post-Mugabe Zimbabwe, or the plausibility of the punctuated-equilibrium hypothesis. Shouldn’t there be a way of just admitting as much and moving on? Is this gut-based aversion really what needs to be overcome in order that a more just society might come into being?

Romanians will often tell me that the people triggering my aversion, the people to watch out for, are the Gypsies. I am finally beginning to be able to distinguish members of this legend-laden ethnos from their non-Gypsy neighbors, but I hasten to add that by no means is everyone a Gypsy who matches that particular thuggish description just given, and by no means is the ethnic boundary nearly so clear as the non-Gypsies insist. The Balkans are not so much an ethnic patchwork as a seamless ethnic continuum, and sharp boundaries are emphasized the most where they are in fact least secure. As one Romanian revealed to me, showing me photos of a recent trip to a Greek Island: "Greece is very very beautiful... Very clean... No Gypsies there... No Romanians." It was clear from the context that the last two sentence fragments constituted one proposition, not two.

I have heard repeatedly that ‘Roma’, as a name for the Gypsies, is entirely unconnected etymologically with the capital city of Italy and the center of the Roman Empire, which lent its name centuries ago to Romania (i.e., the land of the Eastern Romans, in contradistinction to the Greeks and Turks and Slavs surrounding them), that it is a name that came with the Gypsies from India, but I have immense difficulty believing this. It is true that rom means 'husband' or 'man' in the Romany language, but this word itself has shadowy origins, and my guess is that it comes from the Southeastern European region in which the Roma people settled, not from the India they left behind. Rom- and rum- are too ubiquitous in the names of places and peoples in the region they would come to settle for the current preference for ‘Roma’ in denoting the Gypsies to be explained by chance convergence.

In France one often hears of the ‘Romanian problem’. French people will tell my Romanian wife that France is being overrun with 'Romanians', that you cannot go 10 metres without bumping into one begging in the street. When the Romanian director Cristian Mungiu won the Palme d’or at Cannes for his excellent film 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, a cartoon in a French newspaper showed him holding out his hand as if begging, and attempted a fairly uninspired jeu de mots involving ‘palme’ (i.e., the frond of the palm tree as well as the part of the hand a beggar extends). It is not clear whether the French believe they are being politically correct in avoiding the term ‘tsigane’, or whether they mistakenly believe that ‘Romanian’ is the proper ethnonym for the Roma people, but one thing is clear: the newly politically correct ‘Roma’ is not making things any simpler. 

I'm sticking with 'Gypsy'. The newer term is simply confusing, and, I believe, responsible for the decidedly politically incorrect conflation in France and elsewhere of Romanians and Roma. (Again, this conflation is not just a product of French xenophobia. It is also a part of the Romanian identity itself: fear of Gypsies grounded in the fear of being a Gypsy.)

My wife and I speak only French in the streets of Bucharest, permitting us to prance around like 19th-century nobles (or at least me; for Romanians speaking French is de rigueur, like knowing your multiplication tables). We always choose to say ‘gitane’ rather than ‘tsigane’, since the latter has its cognate in Romanian, whereas the former enables us to talk about the Gypsies without, we suppose, being understood. Just like Brooklyn Jews used to talk of the ‘schwarze’. I do enjoy this opportunity to say 'gitane'. The word calls to mind not the Gypsies of Slovakia or Romania but those of Spain and southern France, as also the cigarettes, Picasso, Hemingway, and other stupid clichés. Les gitanes will seduce you; les tsiganes will send their toddlers to poke your kneecaps with needles until you turn over the contents of your pockets.

We probably shouldn't be talking about them, using our secret code so that they won't understand. I feel like an asshole but I keep doing it. I can't not talk about the people around me. I just can't.

*

For reasons I need not explain here, I found myself recently with temporary custody of a seven-year-old Romanian girl, whom I will call 'Maria'. Our task was to kill a few hours in the provincial Moldavian town of Bârlad, where fortunately the warm spring weather had brought a sort of temporary amusement park to the central municipal gardens. I paid for Maria to go on a sort of blow-up rubber slide shaped like a castle, three lei for five minutes, and while she was climbing up and sliding down I stood and held her jacket, her umbrella, and a Romanian translation of the latest issue of the “Totally Spies!” comic book, about three high school girls in Beverly Hills --Clover, Sam, and Alex-- who are, as luck would have it, not just high school girls but also spies. 

A Gypsy girl saw the comic book and exclaimed ‘Wow, Spioanele’! I smiled and held it out to show her.  She called over her two little friends, perhaps her sisters or cousins, and they all smiled and said many things, of which I understood mostly just the word ‘Spioanele’ repeated many times.  Maria saw me holding out the photo and yelled to me: ‘Hey! It’s mine!' The girls continued to hover around me, their leader (the one to the left in the photo) smiling beautifully, the funny looking dirty girl (in the photo to the right) looking at me confusedly and seeming at instants to apprehensively extend her little palm.

When she was done on the slide I went with Maria to the ‘Wheel of Fortune’, a giant vertical roulette wheel that the kids are permitted to spin for three lei, after which they receive a Chinese toy worth far less than three lei corresponding to the number on which the wheel stops. The Gypsy girls followed us. Maria spun the wheel and won a particularly cheap little bird with a chip inside that played an annoying, greeting-card tune.  The leader of the Gypsies continued to smile at us. I asked her if she wanted to spin the wheel, and of course she said yes.  I paid the obese carny --visible from behind in the photo-- and he grudgingly allowed the Gypsy girl to spin it. She won a cheap shiny plastic crown. She unwrapped it and touched the tiara and it lit up. A red light spun around in a circle at the center like a warning flash worn by a nocturnal cyclist. ‘It lights up!’ she said with joy, as if the cheap plastic Chinese toy were a real crown. 

Maria wanted to go back to the slide and she asked the girls to come with her. ‘Nu au bani’, they said. No money. I gave the newly crowned queen nine lei, enough for each of the three to join Maria on the slide.  They all ran over. Maria and the beautiful girl and the funny-looking girl tore off their shoes and scrambled up the slide. The third Gypsy girl, the one at the center of the photo, stayed at the bottom of the slide, holding the beautiful girl’s crown, staring up and frowning. Photographs lie, for looking at the three of them now it seems to me that the third girl, the one who stayed behind, is the beautiful one, and the girl to the left seems positively plain. In reality, the one who looks plain was radiant, and the one who looks beautiful was a distant shadow of the other two.

I bent down and asked the shadow if she wanted to go up. ‘Ce?’ she asked. I pointed up the slide to her friends.  She shook her head no. The parents gathered at the bottom seemed alarmed that I was talking to her.

The carny yelled ‘Gata! Terminat!’ after five minutes had passed and the three girls --two Gypsies and Maria-- came down laughing and out of breath. ‘A fost super!’ they all exclaimed.  The little shadow girl who did not go up, but stayed at the bottom and frowned, held out the flashing crown to the beautiful girl.  The beautiful girl thanked me profusely and continued to smile. 

I wanted to cry. I had taken Maria out to treat her to something special, because I had felt bad for her, in view of her parents’ divorce, her little sister’s departure for Italy (along with so many millions of other Romanians) to be raised by relatives, the difficulty of growing up a girl in the harsh banlieues of Bucharest.  I had taken her out to treat her, to buy her Spioanele merchandise (there are puzzles and 'detective kits' and make-up cases and fake cellphones), to play Curious