Samir Chopra's Blog, page 108

Miranda July’s Little Gem

Miranda July‘s Me and You and Everyone We Know–she wrote, directed and acted in it– is a little gem of a movie. (I have no idea how I missed it for so long; it was released in 2005; thanks Netflix!) It’s the kind of film you could describe as a ‘quirky indie’–for it wears that genre’s aesthetic quite prominently on its sleeves–and you’d be right. There is a plot of sorts, some very talented young actors, and a wry humor–part visual, part verbal, part physical–that suffuses most of its frames. It begins slowly, finding its way tentatively, and the viewer struggles to find his bearings at first. A few minutes later, you realize you are watching a movie with great comic potential and heart, and you settle in for the ride.

It’s a gentle one, punctuated by moments that are ostensibly outrageous but which, because of July’s deft touch–both behind the camera and in the script–never  seem overstated. (Having once seen Me and You and Everyone We Know you’ll certainly never think of ‘back and forth forever’ and the brand new emoticon ‘)) <> ((‘ in quite the same way again; those that frequent chat-rooms for a little virtual sexual adventure or two might have their universe of ‘who could it be at the other end’ expanded.) These moments–which earned the movie an R rating from the unsurprisingly prissy MPAA “for disturbing sexual content involving children,”–are also quietly hilarious, because they tap into some simple, yet universal, facts about humans: that children, both teens and pre-teens, like it or not,  have a sexual sense and are infinitely curious about it, that adulthood does not always bring sexual satisfaction and completion. You will squirm a bit, giggle too, and in the climactic scene–no pun intended–laugh out loud.

But Me and You and Everyone We Know is ultimately a movie about love: the variety that goes bad and more importantly, that kind which seeks to blossom.  Because it begins with the former and ends with the latter–in not just one, but perhaps two venues–it is a hopeful movie. It showcases the central oddity of love: that it may blossom in the strangest of locales, bringing together odd pairs of fellow travelers in the strangest of ways. The awkwardness and gentleness of the encounters between the ‘couples’–Pam (JoNell Kennedy) and Richard (John Hawkes) (love gone bad),   Richard and Christine (Miranda July) (love coming good), and Sylvie (Carlie Westerman) and  Peter (Miles Thompson) (proto-love, maybe?)–are testaments to the way love can make fools and angels of us all.

A few days ago, I wrote a scathing review of an expensive, bloated, ponderous, big-budget, 3-D action movie–Prometheus–that wanted to claim for itself a piece of the cinematic philosopher’s pie and thus raise itself to the level of a serious intellectual statement. Me and You and Everyone We Know doesn’t aim that high but it still shows that that can be done for far less money and with much less pretentiousness if the essentials of good cinema and storytelling are followed.

The Revealing Game of Time Machine Travel

For some time now my favorite ‘after-dinner game’ has been to ask my respondents the following questions: If you had a time-machine, where and when in the past would you go? And when you arrived, would you rather be a fly on the wall that merely observes the action or would you want to jump in and be a participant?

I find the answers to this question–and my asking of it so that time travel is restricted to one direction–revealing in more ways than one.

First, there is the National Geographic answer: I want to see dinosaurs walk the earth; I want to see sabre-toothed tigers and mammoths go at each other.  I suspect this group of respondents likes the idea of a human-free earth and wonders what it was like before homo sapiens queered the pitch; the time machine enables its inspection. Perhaps we imagine a pristine, unspoiled state; perhaps our minds bear the impress of the archetype of the Garden of Eden and hanker after it.

Then there is the History Channel or the ‘Seeing Great Folks in Action’ answer: I’d like to pay witness to Napoleon directing his marshals at Austerlitz, to life in Constantinople during the glory days of the Ottomans, or to Michelangelo hard at work on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.  I’m an enthusiastic subscriber to this line of thinking: I would like to attend the courts of the Mughals, see a wartime camp of Genghis Khan’s, or witness the great air-sea battles of the Second World War. These answers seek to bring to life the imagined contents of history books; its respondents pride themselves on a sensitive appreciation of their offerings and seek to make real the metaphorical travel afforded by their contents.

In both kinds of answers those who participate in these fantasies of mine prefer to be flies on the wall; they are aware, I think, of the impossibility of being able to ‘participate’ in any meaningful—or safe–way in the times they are visiting.

But the most interesting kind of answer to my frivolous questions is provided by those who suggest they would use the time machine to engage in personal archaeology: to visit their home-town before their birth, to see their parents on their first date, and perhaps most exotically, to visit a younger version of themselves. I’ve provided variants of this kind of answer: I would like to see my father at work as an air force pilot flying into combat, my mother attending classes in her university days, my grandfather in our ancestral village in that part of Punjab which now belongs to Pakistan. And so on.

These answers are not merely nostalgia-mongering, the sentiments underlying which are sometimes revealed in the urge we may have to jump into and through an old photograph. Rather the space-time locales we indicate as our destinations in time traveling reveal an abiding fascination of ours for getting to the root of ourselves, perhaps as clue to present behaviors of ours that we find inexplicable, as solutions to enduring conundrums created by our lack of transparency to ourselves.  So time-travel becomes a means of self-discovery, the latest addition to the ever-expanding quivers and arsenals of tricks and weapons with which we imagine and understand ourselves.

To travel backward in time is to engage in a form of speculative discovery familiar to those that spend much time in the clinic, on the couch, accompanied by the therapist, holder of the mirror that reflects our autobiographical confessions. The advantages of supplementing or perhaps replacing the fifty-minute paid-for session—controlled by Svengali-like figures—are tempting. Those long, rambling, tentative tramps through our memories—while we worry about whether we might be engaged in an elaborate self-serving fiction—could be replaced by the empirical verification made possible by time travel. This is how it happened, this is what ‘really’ took place; and so, I whip out my lab notebook and scribble notes, filing them away for future reference, recall and guidance.

A strong desire for personal archaeology may be prevalent in parents who have become aware–thanks to the birth of their children—that they are likely to remain mysteries to their offspring. This disconcerting thought in turn evokes the mystery associated with their own parents. What were my parents like—independent of being those who gave birth to me? Conversely, there is the great mystery of childhood memory: we know so little of the period when we were at our most formative, when the seeds of our origins were taking root. What was I like as a child? Did I cry as much as my own child, seem as terrified, cause as much bother and anxiety?  The most fascinating mysteries might reside within, and in those closest to us. Sometimes they may only be solved by being eyewitness to the events that lie at their heart.

So it may be that the most interesting histories for us are not the ones that talk of brave kings, beautiful princesses, and tales of valor and bravery on bloody battlefields, but rather, the much more mundane stories of our own lives, which add up to the history of our times. I suspect this ‘revelation’ is like discovering a good documentary can be as riveting as a feature movie; the time machine is our way for viewing the documentary of our lives.

Some of the fascination with the time machine should be a familiar one. We are, after all, chroniclers of our lives: diaries, photographs, autobiographies. When we peer at photo albums we are fascinated by images of ourselves, struck by the mystery of the person whose body we currently inhabit. The urge to inquire into its provenance is   irresistible. In response, our memory aids are ever more elaborate. Besides ourselves, we videotape our children; we photograph them. Most children in first world industrialized democracies have extensive photographic records and large video libraries of their lives available to them. Soon, with digital storage easily and cheaply available it will be possible to make an entire childhood available on high-definition streaming video: a movie of one’s life for on-demand watching. The time machine is but a viewer of sorts for this unmade movie of our life.

There is a wrinkle to the fly on the wall behavior the time machine permits. Consider for instance that I might want to travel back to my father and mother’s lives as a young couple, perhaps recently married, to witness their interactions, to listen into their conversations as they plan the decisions crucial in my family’s history. This is a distinctly voyeurish desire. My parents’ lives were their own; they were constructing their relationship in their expectation of an intimate space. My acting like a Peeping Tom seems like an inappropriate intrusion, a gratuitous violation of their privacy. Our use of the time machine might need to be tempered by norms of a type sensitive to its powers.

If the answers provided by my respondents in this ‘game’ are revelatory, so is the asking of the question that prompted them. For in trying to elicit responses, I seek to inquire whether others are as perplexed as I am by the bits and pieces that make up my life, and don’t mind a little fantasizing as antidote.

Note: This piece is an extended version of an older post titled ‘Time Travel and Psychotherapy.’

The ‘Anxiety of Influence’ and Scientific Discovery

In his essay on scientific discovery, ‘Scotoma: Forgetting and Neglect in Science’, Oliver Sacks writes:

Darwin was at pains to say that he had no forerunners, that the idea of evolution was not in the air. Newton, despite his famous comment about ‘standing on the shoulders of giant,’ also denied such forerunners. This ‘anxiety of influence‘ (which Harold Bloom has discussed powerfully in regard to the history of poetry) is a potent force in the history of science as well. One may have to believe others are wrong; one may have to, as Bloom insists, misunderstand others, in order to successfully develop and unfold one’s own ideas. (‘Every talent,’ Nietzsche writes, ‘must unfold itself in fighting.’) [links added]

The persistent worries–in science and elsewhere–about being ‘scooped’ and the unending desire to be ‘original’ are reinforced, of course, by romantic notions of the ‘author’ and ‘creativity.’ In the aesthetic and moral domain that is engendered by such concerns, no sin is more unforgivable than to permit the provenance of one’s work to be visible; its traces must be kicked over and buried. Novelty is the aspirational peak; the discovery or invention must represent a singularity of sorts. An unoriginal work is irredeemably sullied.

The modern political economy of academic work–the structural apparatus of universities, grant agencies, promotion and tenure–has not helped either. It still sets much store by ‘originality’ and, what, for lack of a better word, one must describe as ‘individuality’: the notion that co-authored work is somehow inferior to ‘solo’ work, that it betrays an inferior work ethic, that only ‘lazy’ people need ‘help’ in producing their work. In this regard, the multi-author publications now so common in science reflect a welcome trend: they have acknowledged for a long time now that science is a collective enterprise. (Those who read biographies and histories of the early Nobel Prize winners in the sciences will often find awards made to those who headed groups of researchers.)

The desire to be original that is genuinely productive and which Sacks, Bloom and Nietzsche allude to above means that in the struggle to fight against influence, against one’s artistic and intellectual forebears, the writer, the artist, the scientist can seek out new directions of inquiry that may lead to ever more fruitful and interesting endeavors. This still may not  result in something ‘original’ for the putative explorer might only stumble onto yet another beaten path. But so long as he is ignorant of this, his anxiety may cease and permit the unveiling of his work.

Note #1: Quoting Nietzsche above reminds us of Freud’s ‘anxiety of influence’:

According to Ernest Jones, biographer and personal acquaintance of Sigmund Freud, Freud frequently referred to Nietzsche as having “more penetrating knowledge of himself than any man who ever lived or was likely to live”. Yet Jones also reports that Freud emphatically denied that Nietzsche’s writings influenced his own psychological discoveries.

Ronald Lehrer’s Nietzsche’s Presence in Freud’s Life and Thought (SUNY Press, 1994) provides a detailed analysis of this famous relationship.

Note #2: Sacks excerpt taken from Hidden Histories of Science, Robert B. Silvers, A New York Review of Books Book, New York 1995.

A Boy’s Favorite Iron Horses

The domain of transportation often introduces us to dramatic, otherworldly creatures: the precision engineered soaring airliner, the majestic ship cleaving through oceans, the sleek automobile whizzing down highways. The steam locomotive was one of its most distinguished representatives; it quickly became, across country and culture and time, the vehicle–no pun intended–for a very particular romantic notion of travel.

And no aspect of that romance was more vivid than the first glimpse of the awesome, clanking, fire and brimstone behemoth, its pistons furiously pumping away, the hiss and sizzle of the steam it emanated from its every pore, the roaring flames of the combustion chamber, the grimy, soot-covered engine-men, the piercing whistle. A steam locomotive pulling into a station with a full load of passenger coaches, blasting through a countryside trailing a plume of smoke, taking a turn, or best of all, slowly, irresistibly grinding into motion, were all memorable sights that brought together power and beauty. A young boy, when confronted with such visions, could offer no resistance; his soul was putty.

The most common railroad journey in my childhood–that to my grandfather’s home in Central India– tracked the displacement of the steam locomotive quite well.  When my family began undertaking it, we caught the Upper India Express from New Delhi, a coach from which was attached to the Bombay Mail at Allahabad. The Mail then took us to our final destination. At first, a steam locomotive powered the entire trip. Later, a diesel locomotive took over for part of the journey. Still later, when portions of the railway lines had been electrified, an electric locomotive took over partway. That line is now fully electrified. The changes sometimes took place at night, sometimes at day, but I could feel the difference in the way the train first moved out of the station – the acceleration of the engines was quite distinct. At night, lying in my berth, still awake, I could hear the difference in the whistles.

When a train journey in the days of the steam locomotive was over, and I had reached my destination, one of my first tasks was to shower and wash my hair; the soot blowing back from the locomotive had swept in through the open windows of my coach and come to rest on my scalp. That washing out, that cleansing, was tinged with disappointment, not relief; it signaled the end of not just a holiday but a journey as well. And that is always cause for a peculiar melancholia all its own.

Note: The Wikipedia entry for steam locomotives has a disappointingly short section on their use in India:

In India, steam locomotives were built as late as 1972 and in use until 2000; they were replaced by a combination of diesel and electric locomotives. A steam locomotive celebration run was organised between Thane and Mumbai to commemorate the 150th year of railways in India.

The brevity of the passage above is partially compensated for by its seeming accuracy. Even though, as Wikipedia notes, worldwide, steam locomotives were, from ‘the early 1900s…gradually superseded by electric and diesel locomotives‘, in India, they were still being used extensively much later; I think the last time I might have seen a steam locomotive in action would have been in the mid-eighties.

Crossfit and the Military: A Way Forward

As a long-time member of Crossfit South Brooklyn, I have blogged here on Crossfit-related issues before (posts on Crossfit and the military, Crossfit and women, and of course, some training notes on weightlifting.) I’m not done yet writing about Crossfit, especially when it comes to issues of inclusiveness. On that note, I’m glad to welcome a guest post by Noah Barth, also a fellow Crossfitter, who has written a thoughtful post on the vexed relationship between Crossfit and military culture, topic which I discussed as–a while ago–in one of my most-read and discussed posts.

Noah offers a critique of Crossfit-military ties and goes on to suggest a possibly new orientation and focus for the community at large. It is his hope that by writing this post, he can spark a broader discussion about Crossfit–its past, present,and future.

Without further ado, here is Noah:

Like all successful companies in the modern age Crossfit does not sell a product but a brand.  I was a dedicated member of Crossfit South Brooklyn for about 19 months, initially attracted by the branding aspect of uniquely high levels of athleticism.  One piece of the brand identity that never sat well with me was Crossfit’s identification with the military.  The central website regularly featured photos of military personnel; in discussing “types” of Crossfitters “tactical athlete”—denoting military or police personnel—is commonly listed alongside “sports athletes,” “casual athletes” and so on; uniformed service personnel—including police and fire—receive discounted memberships; and the hardest workouts are “Hero WODs” named for deceased military personnel who were Crossfitters

The prominence of military reference in the Crossfit brand identity always seemed a bit odd to me.  Understand this- the gym I worked out at is located in Park Slope, a highly liberal, fairly affluent part of New York City.  While the gym has plenty of prototypical athletic types it also has many members that do not fit a generic “athlete” mold and I would estimate that half of the membership is female.  We have movie night and play The Big Lebowski, there is a book club and a movie club- this is not an uber-macho environment by any stretch of the imagination.  I didn’t feel especially imposed on regarding the military and figured I should be flexible as not all elements need to cater directly to me.  I was getting results from the program, I enjoyed the company of my fellow athletes and the culture was generally agreeable.

This past Memorial Day my opinion changed.  As is done at many Crossfit gyms we celebrated Memorial Day by doing a Hero WOD called Murph followed by a barbecue.  Murph is a pressure test: a one-mile run followed by 100 pull-ups, 200 push-ups and 300 squats, topped off with another mile run.  If you’re really game the instructions say “if you have body armor or a weight vest, wear it.”  I did Murph on Memorial Day last year and it took me about 50 minutes which I was told was a great time for a newbie.

This year although I sat it out due to injury I came to the gym to cheer on friends, eat and socialize.  The tenor of the event however was different.  When I arrived at the gym I found it decked out with flags from each branch on the military and seemingly everyone wearing t-shirts made for the day: a Marine Corps emblem inspired graphic on a military green background that said “Crossfit South Brooklyn Supports the Troops.”

I understand that Memorial Day is a national holiday meant to take time and recognize those who lost their lives in military service. It ensures that we, collectively as a society honor and remember their lives and deaths.  I respect that notion but am bothered when it is couched in the language of “sacrifice” and/or “service to America” or “us.”  Personally I do not feel that the vast majority of these women and men died to make me safer, to defend America or to protect my freedom.  I and many people like me feel that hundreds and thousands of service people unnecessarily die every year to further a political agenda which we fervently disagree with.

I have spoken to many gym members in the months since Memorial Day who have some military connection; their responses on Murph invariably center on the ability to separate honoring a soldier(s) and supporting the institution of the US military.  I too have family and classmates that have fought in war but “putting politics aside and honoring the troops” simply doesn’t work for me. It feels like a dishonor to those women and men’s memories by masking the ill-intentions of our military complex behind something sacrosanct like a soldier’s death.  Many people partake of the Memorial Day event for the workout and community interaction. Previously that separation was easily negotiated as the military aspect was not terribly overt.  This year’s presentation of military insignia and nationalistic statement however made me feel guilty to even be present.

I try to be open-minded so I stayed; to spend time with my fellow athletes but also to mull these thoughts over and observe how they progressed.  In speaking with friends that day it was clear that I was not the only one uncomfortable with the pageantry.  Afterward it occurred to me that there were likely many more beyond my immediate circle that held similar sentiments.

On a basic level I felt a social pressure to accept a set of values on a very touchy issue: the military.  By the manner of presentation it felt assumed that all present accept a certain interest or allegiance to a viewpoint.  I felt that it was an inherently non-inclusive space within what is usually an extremely inclusive environment.  Crossfit is often accused of being a cult, a claim which I think this is hyperbole- I firmly believe that Crossfit is what you make of it.  That being said there are many people who are new to the gym and/or New York and are eager to find social acceptance; this can come with a level of conformity to community norms that can be inadvertently dictative.  With them in mind, I want to voice to an alternate view on Memorial Day to the way the event was presented.  I want such people to understand that working out at Crossfit South Brooklyn doesn’t mean that you have to support a specific value chain.  I would posit that if the central idea of Memorial Day is remembrance of life lost than it should be a somber occasion where we meditate on the devastating costs to life and society that we pay by conducting world affairs this way.

If the idea is to “support the troops” than I and those of similar disposition would state that a more effective method is to actively defend those troops’ lives by fighting to keep them out of unnecessary wars in the first place. The fact is that the majority of military personnel join while young and undereducated.  It has been disclosed numerous times throughout the course of history, including in recent years by whistle-blowers and persons at the upper reaches of the chain of command that the young and underprivileged are disproportionately targeted by institution-wide recruiting policies.

This brings me back to my original question: why the military referencing?  Most answers begin with Crossfit’s early adaptation and support by military personnel.  That sounds like pandering; one group supports your product so you tailor it to reinforce their culture.  If true I reject being a part of that.  This however is explained away in a nonchalant, “Oh, well that was back when…” kind of way.  If so, than why does the ideological bent continue?  Crossfit is a global brand with Reebok and ESPN endorsement; there are scores of Crossfit apparel and athletic supply lines.  There is no need to appease one segment of your membership base at the expense of alienating the rest.

The next explanation centers on Crossfit honoring the service provided by military personnel make in a non-political tone.  How can honoring and offering financial incentive to one group and not others, not be an inherently political statement?  Furthermore, if you want to honor their work in a general way and not support violence or war per se than why not celebrate and reward others that similarly work for the avowed benefit of society?  Crossfit South Brooklyn instituted a discount for teachers to address this exact point, but why stop there?  Why not a discount for all municipal employees?  How about non-profit employees? If you want to say that the discount for uniformed service members is not a glorification of the military but has to do with recognition of efforts to make our society a better, safer place than why not extend the same courtesy and respect to those who accept a life of underpayment in the struggle to create a better world?  Why not support those who pursue a professional life guided by the pursuit of societal betterment rather than financial profit?  Then we can begin a real discussion about community and non-aggressive sport; otherwise the discount appears to me to be a pandering scheme based on military fetishism.

Crossfit has already evolved since its early days of the “Pukey the Clown” and “Uncle Rhabdo” mascots.  Crossfit as a brand has reached a major crossroads in its proliferation and needs to decide how to further adjust its brand identity to accommodate this.  Gyms such as Crossfit South Brooklyn have taken progressive steps to confront its mainstream presence such as the teacher discount and hosting of LGBT workout events.  Still, Crossfit’s stance and vocabulary on certain topics remain at odds with its purported emphasis on community and inclusiveness.  Gyms such as Crossfit South Brooklyn by virtue of their location, size and reputation are poised to be at the vanguard of the brand’s next evolution to a more inclusive, dynamic identity.

Here is a final suggestion to the greater Crossfit community: pretty soon our country will celebrate another major holiday: Labor Day.  Why not develop an event similar to the Murph Memorial Day celebration but theme it around the efforts of the millions of blue-collar workers that form the ideological backbone of this country?  Why not physically endure in recognition of those whose very existence is under assault by economic depression, a shift to a tech-based economy, outsourcing and labor exploitation.  Celebrate them, ask your community to push itself to its physical limits in their honor and you’ll see me there, draped in an American flag with bloody calluses.

Concert at the Corner

The boy with the violin case came around the corner. On time, as always.  Head bowed, feet dragging on the sidewalk, the case drooping by his side, as always. He approached A__’s gang, scattered on the sidewalk, oblivious to their presence.

Till A__ spoke.

‘Hey!’

The boy looked up, alarm running through his body quickly and efficiently, flushing his cheeks and warming his ears, bringing him to attention. He had dreaded this confrontation, accepting its inevitability, and yet was no less stricken by fear when it finally arrived.

“What’s in that case?”

“My violin.”

“Yeah? What’s it for?”

“I play music on it’.

“Yeah. Well, play it for us, maestro. Let’s see what you got.”

It wasn’t an invitation to play; it was a message indicating the penalties for refusing to play. An elementary inference.

The boy picked up the violin. Lessons for the day had ended a while ago; his performances hadn’t. And his taskmaster in the chambers he had left behind was, despite his gruffness, brusqueness and peremptory commands, an infinitely less demanding audience than this one.

He began to play, drawing the bow across the violin’s strings. He always wrapped himself around the strange new beast–violin plus bow–that emerged when horsehairs made contact with catgut, but today, he held on to its familiar shape just a little tighter. As if it could protect him from the beating that lay close by in his future.

He picked the longest composition he knew, the Spring Sonata that would go on and on for twenty-two minutes. He’d enjoy them while it lasted.

The notes rang out clearly and sharply; they moved down the street and around it; they floated up around the gang’s ears.

They reached A__ too. He had heard violins before. He had heard their sound. Sometimes his uncle, his mother’s brother, who lived crosstown and visited for dinner when his father didn’t mind, played the violin as accompaniment to a meal he had finished quicker than the others.

The sound was familiar but still novel. At home, his uncle often played over the sounds of dinner: plates and spoons clanking, babies crying, men shouting, women chattering. At home, the violin was background music, just one more component of an inchoate sound that filled their home in the evenings. It was never allowed to stand out, always relegated to a humble plebeian standing.

This was different.

A__’s gang stood on the street corner, not moving. The maestro stood next to them, playing, not daring to look up. Eye contact might break the spell, might dispel the mood. It was not a chance he was willing to take.

A__ was motionless. He wanted the music to stop. He wanted to get on with the rest of the act: the smashing of the violin on the sidewalk, the flinging of the bow across the street, the punch in the face and the kick in the pants that would propel that little whiner home.

He remained motionless.

The sonata ran out. The boy added a flourish or two and then stopped. The bow came off the strings; the violin dropped to his side.

A__’s boys stared at him, awaiting directives for their deployment.

A__ finally spoke.

“Go home.”

An Independence Day of Sorts: Beginning a Migration

15 August 1947 is Independence Day in India. It is also my father-in-law’s birthday, a midnight’s child. And it is the day I left India–in 1987, forty years later–to migrate to the US.

My ‘migration’–such as it was–consists of pretty standard fare: I began as a graduate student, armed with an admission letter to a graduate program in technology and engineering, headed for a small technical school on the US east coast; later, after obtaining full-time employment and a visa change to a ‘skilled worker in short supply’,  becoming a ‘permanent resident’ and after returning to graduate school to initiate a career change via a move to a different academic field, I would become a naturalized citizen.

But it all began with a one-way journey on a British Airways flight to London and then on to New York. My mother drove me to the airport after a sleepless night; my flight left at 6AM, which meant checking in at 3AM. I had never flown in an aircraft before. (Well, as an adult; apparently, I had accompanied my mother on a short flight in the Indian northeast when I was a six-week old baby.)

The flight to London felt long and tedious, its monotony only partially relieved by the awe-inspiring landscapes occasionally visible through our windows, and the beers we drank and the cigarettes we smoked. (I was accompanied by a pair of acquaintances also headed for graduate school in the US, and yes, in those days you could smoke, at high-altitude, inside the pressurized cabins of transcontinental airliners.)

After arrival at, and departure from, London’s bustling and intimidating Heathrow, I finally arrived, a little wide-eyed despite the exhaustion engendered by yet another eight-hour flight, at JFK airport.  The dreaded INS officers were little softies, and soon I was in the arrivals hall, waiting for an old high-school friend to pick me up.

Through the glass walls of the terminal all I could see was an airport. But I knew I was in a different land. Outside, it was America.

Later as I was driven back to my first night’s digs in Hicksville, Long Island, I marveled–like a good old-fashioned rube—at the cars, the crowded expressways, the gleaming supermarket–and the dazed and confused cash register clerk–where we stopped to pick up supplies. My first meal was microwaved pizza washed down with a Löwenbräu. It was not a particularly distinguished culinary kick-off and gave me some inkling of the nature of a very particular deprivation that awaited me.

15 August 1987 was a longer day than most. I traveled from summer to summer, traversing ten time zones and spent most of the day, ironically, at rest, cramped and uncomfortable, even as I traveled thousands of miles away from all that had been familiar and comprehensible for twenty years. I moved to a place I imagined I knew well but which was to prove, unsurprisingly, far more intractable to my understanding than I might have reckoned with.

Twenty-six years ago, I began the process of placing quotes around ‘home.’

Ridley Scott’s Promethean Stinker

I often disagreed with Roger Ebert‘s rating of movies. Sometimes, our disagreement would be a simple matter of Ebert being a little too kind, a little too forgiving. The latest instance of this discord may be found in our differing assessments of Ridley Scott‘s Prometheus. Ebert gives it four stars. I don’t.

I found Prometheus to be a failure as a horror film, a philosophical meditation, or an action movie.   A few visually striking images, some memorable set pieces and an interesting character–the android David–did not compensate for a movie that felt stale quite quickly.

My disappointments began early. Indeed, matters go rapidly downhill once the humans wake up from their hibernatory slumbers on the good ship Prometheus, Their motivations–despite the avowedly profound goal they declare themselves dedicated too–are not particularly interesting and neither are their resultant interactions. Try as I did, I found it hard to get worked up about their fates. So in a movie whose central characters frequently emphasize their soul-centric humanity to their android interlocutor, it is the latter is that is more emotionally affecting, a more compelling focus of our attention and interest. (I think I could have stood a version of Prometheus–shorter, of course–that features David navigating–by himself–the mysteries and attractions of  the LV-223 moon).

The central conceits of the movie–that it can simultaneously terrify, edify and entertain–are rendered false by its failure to address any of these goals with consistency and depth. The horror scenes strive, and fail, to put new spin on old, familiar tropes, sometimes drawn from close by in the director’s own oeuvre; the debates between science and religion–as ludicrously instantiated in human form in its characters– are sketchy; the central speculation–creation and design of humans by giant, really buff dudes who look like Olympians on ‘roids and live in a galaxy far, far away–isn’t particularly exciting; the action scenes suffer from a familiar modern failure: sound and fury with no heart. I am a little baffled by some of the critical acclaim the film has garnered; so impressed are the critics it seems by the overt claims of the film to profundity–the origin of man, the central epistemic and moral crisis of the science versus religion conflict–that they seem not to have examined the evidence presented to them.

Perhaps I’m being harsh. Perhaps. It might also be that when I am presented with glittering surfaces, I expect sublime depth will follow.  Prometheus fails because it seems to devote a great deal of energy in getting its stage to look good without bothering itself with the human-machine-creatures conflict supposed to play out on it. Strangely enough, by the end of the movie, so stricken had I become by the ennui dispensed by its central human characters, that I stopped caring about the human planet itself. I was curiously unaffected by any response approaching anxiety as the mighty Engineer’s spacecraft took off on its putatively Earth-destructive mission; and so, concomitantly, unafflicted by any pride or joy in Captain Janek’s Kamikaze-like ramming action.

Prometheus aspired, I think, to a kind of greatness; its failure is correspondingly larger.

Enrico Fermi, Abduction, and Slow Neutrons

In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1938, Enrico Fermi spoke briefly and thoughtfully about the theoretical and experimental work which had earned him this honor.  His talk, ‘Artificial Radioactivity Produced by Neutron Bombardment,’ is a little gem of scientific writing, which showcases not only descriptions of the results of the groundbreaking work in atomic and nuclear physics he had engaged in, but scientific explanation as well.

I provide here a little extract to show Fermi demonstrating abduction–inference to the best explanation–in his recounting of the phenomena of ‘slow neutrons’:

The intensity of the activation as a function of the distance from the neutron source shows in some cases anomalies apparently dependent on the objects that surround the source. A careful investigation of these effects led to the unexpected result that surrounding both source and body to be activated with masses of paraffin, increases in some cases the intensity of activation by a very large factor (up to 100). A similar effect is produced by water, and in general by substances containing a large concentration of hydrogen. Substances not containing hydrogen show sometimes similar features, though extremely less pronounced.

The interpretation of these results was the following: The neutron and the proton having approximately the same mass, any elastic impact of a fast neutron against a proton initially at rest, gives rise to a partition of the available kinetic energy between neutron and proton; it can be shown that a neutron having an initial energy of 10^6 volts after about 20 impacts against hydrogen atoms has its energy already reduced  to a value close to that corresponding to thermal agitation. It follows that, when neutrons of high energy are shot by a source inside a large mass of paraffin or water, they very rapidly lose most of their energy and are transformed into ‘slow neutrons.’ Both theory and experiment show that certain types of neutron reactions…occur with a much larger cross section for slow neutrons than fast neutrons , thus accounting for the larger intensities of activation, observed when irradiation is performed inside a large mass of paraffin or water.

This explanation of experimental data–or ‘interpretation’ as Fermi terms it–is, I think, a particularly elegant one. It is concise both in its form and content; it does justice to the observations with very few claims on our credulity; it integrates the new into the old with a minimum of effort. It is dazzling too–as many explanations of that heady time in atomic and nuclear physics were–in the seeming sleight of hand it performs: it takes the broad, chunky, mundane details of macroscopic phenomena and reduces them to the minute interactions of invisible particles. It pulls off that trick that is so distinctive of so many memorable scientific explanations: such sparse data, such elaborate theory.

I first read of the phenomena that Fermi describes in my eleventh-grade physics textbook; it is only recently that I have read of them in Fermi’s own words. The explanations seemed elegant then, but their style is even more acute in Fermi’s formulation.

Quotes from: Emilio Segrè, Enrico Fermi, Physicist, Appendix 2, University of Chicago Press, 1970, pp. 217-218.

On Meeting a Veteran

I have lived in New York City through the ten years that the twin wars of our time, the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan, have been waged. In that time, I’ve met a few members of the armed forces who have served in those operations. (Their willingness to talk about their experience has varied: some reticent, some garrulous.)

I met another war veteran last week. He had served in Afghanistan, done his time, come back home. Back to high school friends, a girlfriend that is now his wife, and perhaps even the life he left behind. The war hadn’t left him alone. It had extracted its very particular grim price. Both his feet were gone, blown off by an improvised explosive device that had sent him flying twenty feet away. The military doctors had removed one foot almost immediately; they had fought hard, for weeks, to save the second foot before eventually giving up and removing that one too. The feet–and the legs till halfway up to the knee–had been replaced by prosthetic limbs. They  looked new and high-tech, marvels of science and technology, the products of the latest materials science and bio-medical engineering. He was already comfortable in them; he drove a truck, and casually crossed his legs as anyone else might.

When you think of ‘veteran’, you think perhaps of old men, grizzled types with blazers, medals, regiment caps, fading memories, reunion dinners and back-slapping bonhomie about postings to far off lands and the now-memorable discomforts of barracks life. What you might not immediately associate with ‘veteran’ is young, barely-twenty men with missing limbs who are expected to carry their experiences lightly, who might attempt a studied nonchalance about their catastrophic encounters with fate.

When you think of the costs of war, you often think of the trillion-dollar budgets and cost overruns that threaten bankruptcy and the straightforward, now numbing, numbers of the dead. You tend, sometimes, to forget the injured, those who returned, altered forever by what the war did to them. They are back, traveling along the modified trajectories of their new lives, leaving ripples around them in their families and communities,

I had traveled to Ohio, to the American Midwest, to attend the celebration of Eid, the Feast of Breaking the Fast, with my wife’s family. During the day, as the eating progressed, her cousin decided to expand the celebration by inviting his high-school friend–the vet–to come and partake of the lavish spread of curries, rice, sweets, and salads that we were noshing on.  M___ showed up; he had always liked these slightly chaotic, well-fueled gatherings that his friend had called him to for years.

We greeted him, we chatted; he ate a bit, and then stepped out on the porch to smoke a cigarette with his friend, my wife’s cousin. As I watched him from inside the living room, I was struck by how the weekday flirted with the dramatic: two friends sharing a quiet, utterly unremarkable moment together, one that could still be placed into a radically different context.