h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Actually, it's really weird being on campus and watching kids come back. As I said before, graduate school is a way different vibe from undergrad--all the more so, I think, because mine is a professional degree rather than an academic one. There is a lot of serious talk about the workload and a reminder that one should also try to "see the city" a bit while we're here. We've also gotten a lot of handouts about registering for things. This evening, there is a small reception with cheese and crackers and wine, which I have decided to skip because my head hurts, my feet stink, and I don't love Jesus. By contrast, while walking across the main part of campus today, I could not help but notice the throngs of blue and white balloons, the kids running around in trendy clothes, the orientation leaders in their orange T-shirts, and other assorted circus-like things. I felt so old.

Williamsburg really has undergone a remarkable transformation. When I first moved here, I had a friend in W-burg that I would go visit. Even then, just a few years ago, it was still more or less a working-class neighborhood with a souped-up shopping area that they were trying to get going. Boy, how times have changed. We actually played a private party in Williamsburg--for Neil Cleary, the country singer who plays so often at 9C--and I was reminded then how much things had changed around there. After that gig, I had one of the worst pieces of pizza I'd had in a very, very long time. Life is hard sometimes, you know?

What do you mean, *secretly* stalking you? Really, though, I think that maybe you're so post-hip that you're--well, I would never dare say hip--but maybe you're so post-hip that you're actually pre-hip. If hip and un-hip is a rolling sea, you are in the troughs about to become crests. But I know what you mean. There was a point a few months ago where I thought for sure that some hack from Harper's was following me around, but I guess they've stopped doing that now.

Considering our similar tastes, it will come as no surprise when I say that I also really like Murakami. I've never heard of the other guy though. My knowledge of contemporary literature is very, very spotty. There are a very small number of authors I know very well, but I have little conception even of who's similar to who. I've spent the last couple years, though, promoting the books by William Gaddis, the best writer I've ever read that very few people seem to even have heard of. Part of his obscurity, I'm sure, comes from his length. His first novel is close to a thousand pages, his second over seven hundred. Part of it is also that the man averaged less than a novel a decade. But at this point the rate of novels shouldn't matter. I think if Gaddis had been given the promotional machine afforded Pynchon (who deserves it all the way, of course, which is more than I can say for John Kennedy O'Toole), he would be one of those American Geniuses that people actually read.

So--are you around this weekend? Steph and I have decided to stay in town, and we were wondering if you and what's-her-name (sorry, I've forgotten it) want to do something. This before I am buried in schoolwork. Let me know.

Well, Jesus doesn't love you either. Until you do something about the feet, I'm afraid it's no heavenly love and compassion for you. Anyway, it's okay, I've decided that the blessed people are just the people I would hate to spend an afterlife with, if I believed it actually exists. I personally would hope the afterlife would instead be a bit like the Strand, just kicking around through the stacks. But I suppose that's not what anybody else would like. Of course, I also think sometimes that if Jesus came back today, he'd probably be some hippie in a trailer park somewhere, but I know he really instead has amassed a small fortune as the ruthless CEO of _______.

Why did you have to love Jesus to go to that event? Was it for some campus organization or has Columbia become a religious institution? I saw some Orientation shirts for another school with quotes from the Bible on the back, so it is possible. But then it would not be the hotbed of evil liberalism scorned by many a conservative.

I've been in Grad School myself (albeit only for one year), so I know what you're talking about (I started to feel old as a senior). There's something sinister about orientation, especially when you realize that these chipper people will soon be trudging to the library at 3am through the damp gray snow. Pretty soon, the campus segregates into the happy preppie crew and the various outcasts (the nerds, goths, etc), but orientations seems to be the one day in which the administration pretends they all will be friends forever.

But enough about college. What exactly is your gradschool program? I know I can go back and look in the logs of this conversation, but it's a bit of an effort to move the mouse with a pencil.

I'm sure it must be a bit of a shock to go back to Williamsburg. It certainly seems a bit raw where the trendy new (designer boutiques)collides with the former old (the Hasidic Jews, Polish stores, and decrepit warehouses). But all it takes is the appearance of artists to spell out an area's doom. I imagine SoHo must have been the same way 20 years ago. I think we've covered this topic before, so I won't say more for fear of ruining our reputation for rambling off-topic.

I don't know too many contemporary authors either. However, I do strongly recommend WG Sebald. He's a German living in the English countryside who writes these books where he mixes fiction and facts and includes random digressions sparked by his wandering through a landscape. "The Rings of Saturn" is his latest (and best), basically stories sparked by a walk through the English countryside. He even includes pictures to give it an effect similar to Breton's "Nadja". But again I don't know many other modern authors (especially Americans). And in summer, I usually pick up old stuff for some reason (I'm plowing my way through Thucydides now), so I'm falling behind. I still read the New York Review of Books to see what's out there, so it won't get worse. I too had never heard of Gaddis, but I might go check him out now, although I must also admit I have never read much Pynchon or Delillo even. Of course, having read Musil's Man Without Qualities (look! pretentious literary name dropping!), I have no problems with the adjectives unknown, long, and good. The adjective crapulant on the other hand...

I don't know if I really count as pre-hip (eg, the whole midriff fad took me by surprise really, and I still don't get raverkids), so I must instead contemplate the unsettling notion that I am actually genuinely bonafide hip (in the way Ghost World is hip). This is rather disturbing to contemplate, so I have to comfort myself by saying that nobody reads the New Yorker anymore. There, I'll just keep repeating that until I feel better.

I think we could do something this weekend. I'd have to check with her schedule as well, but I think it should definitely be possible. The only real thing on my agenda is weekend is a possible trip to the Russian Baths and a rental of a Vespa (maybe), but otherwise my schedule looks clear. Now I'll just start digging a tunnel out of here with a spoon.

Okay, so it wasn't a religious event; I just didn't feel like going. I feel somewhat like I did at the beginning of my freshman year of college, however--I tended to shy away from large groups and try instead to meet people in smaller places. Also, I'm thinking of cultivating an image as a deaf-mute sociopath.

You're right, though: Columbia seems to be a decidedly liberal institution. Its school for international affairs certainly is, especially compared to other int'l affairs programs. Harvard's and Yale's seem to be basically training for being a government shill or corporate lackey--how to roll in dough at the international level. By contrast, Columbia's angle is this sort of commitment to service, you know, making the world a better place and all that. I'm sure that many programs at many schools say the same thing, but I have the feeling that many people at Columbia actually take it to heart.

My own course of study, because I'm sure you're dying to know, is going to be some kind of human rights/economic and political development kind of thing. The idea is to have a career spent pursuing the question of whether you can develop an economy without destroying the rights of its working class. The classes I will take will be a mixture of international law (though not law classes), political science (courses with titles like "State and Society in the Developing World" and "Corruption and Development"), and some flat-out economics courses. I also plan to take a few courses about African politics, just for the hell of it, and I wouldn't mind graduating being fluent in Spanish (I'd love to also take French, but I fear it will have to wait until some other time). I learned that my Spanish today is enough to get me into the highest class that Columbia has available short of the full-on courses conducted in Spanish, so fluency is a quasi-reasonable goal.

I am pleased, as usual, to meet someone who reads things like Thucydides for fun. I actually really like Thucydides. I read him when I was perhaps too young, but I still remember the parts that made the strongest impression on me: namely, the conditions in Athens when the plague hit during the Peloponnesian War. At the time, I also remember thinking that even though Thucydides wanted to write as objectively as possible, he also seemed to write with this sense of outrage that I really responded to, and continue to respond to in others.

This is a nice segway into Gaddis, whose novels, according to their author, were all more or less written out of some sense of outrage. His mode is satire--and it's pretty withering satire--but I think he goes much farther with it than most satirists do. His books--at least the three out of four that I've read--tend to make you laugh (and think a lot) while you're reading them, but they also end up having this air of tragedy about them as well. Now, I'm reading them in chronological order and haven't read his last book (mostly because I kind of don't want to "finish" Gaddis--I need something to comfort me when I'm an old man), but of the three that I've read, I can make recommendations. All are excellent books. The Recognitions, his first one, is very funny, extremely clever, and has seemingly hundreds of characters in it. It also has a lot to say about twentieth-century art and culture in America. Though an excellent book, it doesn't *quite* come together at the end. It reminds me somewhat of Pynchon's V--it's the book where the writer still hasn't figured out exacly what kind of novelist he wants to be, so there are a lot of really great ideas but they don't quite coalesce as they could. JR, Gaddis' next book (completed about 20 years after The Recognitions) is an unqualified masterpiece. Funnier and more clever than its predecessor, it's an incredible satire on the business world and capitalism, and it's amazing to think it was written in 1974, because it prefigures the 80s and early 90s as well as anything could, I think. Gaddis saw it coming, knew where it would lead. He must have felt like Cassandra in 1987. In the 80s, Gaddis wrote a much smaller novel called Carpenter's Gothic. This is an excellent book, and probably the one I would read first if I could do it all over again, because his style is really distilled nicely in this comparatively slim volume. However, Carpenter's Gothic is much more bleak than the other two I've read--more urgent, not quite as funny--and it doesn't prepare you for the sheer comedy of the other books. If you're feeling like living with a book for a while, then Recognitions or JR will suit the bill. If you want a taste, then CG will do nicely, though keep in mind that he just gets funnier.

What are you guys doing Friday or Saturday night? If you're still free, we could meet up for dinner somewhere. My only stipulation is that it be reasonably priced and also a place I could go to in a T-shirt.

Sadly, neither Friday or Saturday night work out. Perhaps Sunday or Monday? There is an unfortunate crunch since next Tuesday is the PJ Harvey concert and next Thursday we're off to N'awlins for a week or so (SIGIR 2001 conference). I suppose if worse comes to worse, there will be time next week.

Actually, Monday is just fine for us, if it really is fine with y'all--sounds like you guys have a busy week. Come to think of it, I'll just call you. I have your card, after all.

Hey there. So we had a good time on Monday, and it was good to meet Jessica. Hope the feeling was mutual, and I really hope your neighbor finished up doing whatever it was he was doing as we were walking out.

I'm afraid there's not much to report around here, as it is nearly bedtime and I've been running around ragged getting my classes together. I'm still not used to the big university thing, the at times actually physical rush to get classes in order. Signing up for lab sections reminded me of the mosh pits I was in as a high schooler, wasting my time getting bounced around in ska clubs. One guy today flew out of the side of the crowd and just about crashed into a desk. Clearly there has to be a better way for eighty people to get their names onto two sheets of paper, but I haven't found out what it is yet.

All right. I'm going to bed. G'night.

It was lots of fun, but I'm afraid our neighbor is always like that. It's been a rather long day for both of us here, and I think it's going to be a bit longer. I have to dial in to finish up some last things before we leave for N'Awlins tomorrow. It should be fun. Bjork of all people is on Charlie Rose, and I wonder how she decides which accent to use for each sentence.

I assume you're still in New Orleans right now, but I figured just so you know I didn't disappear...

I'm currently up to my armpits in books. It's a lot of fun being back in school, actually; fun learning stuff. The readings from different classes even complement each other--a rare occurence during my undergrad years.

In interesting personal news: I have been asked to run a fiddle workshop at this annual old-time bluegrass thing that goes on in Brooklyn the last weekend in September. This is rather flattering, actually, but it's making me think kind of hard about what I want to teach people. See, the way these workshops usually run is that you learn a tune, and if the instructor is clever, by learning the way the instructor plays the tune, you have learned a new skill of some kind--a new bowing, a new turn of phrase, something like that. That particular trick is fairly easy to pull off. But then there's this more, ahem, holistic approach that I think I want to try to impart. Y'see, many people who play old-time are, shall I say, traditional in a limited sort of way. When people say, "Who shold I listen to?" they throw all these Smithsonian recordings of dudes from the 1920s at them. This is not without value, but I think too often it promotes the idea of old-time music as a long, thin tradition that has grown up entirely in isolation of other music, when the reality is that old-time is already and always has been a conglomerate of disparate musical styles: dance musics from Ireland and West Africa. When someone asks me what recordings they should listen to (as they invariably will), I want to tell them to go out and buy some Parliament, Funkadelic, Sly and the Family Stone, King Sunny Ade, Fela Kuti, and Kanda Bongo Man records. I want to tell them to absorb as much dance music from all over as they can (DJ Shadow, Fanfare Ciocarlia, Juan Luis Guerra). I want to tell them that playing the fiddle isn't about knowing lots and lots of individual tunes and where they came from; it's about learning how to get your groove on. Once the groove is in place, I want to say, the tunes come a lot easier. But I don't want people to look at me cross-eyed when I say this. I want people to feel like they got something out of the workshop, and more to the point, I want to be invited to do more of these so as to spread the groove gospel. Here's the problem: many of the people at the workshop will be eople who are essentially folkies, people who have retreated to old-time because they don't like a lot of contemporary music. People who are a generation above me, and so grew up in an era when white and black music simply did not mix, not like the smorgasbord that it is today. I'm not saying they're closed-minded; I'm just saying that it may be too much too fast, too many logical steps, like making second-year Spanish students read Borges in the original. What do you think?

Jake,

Just checking to see if you're back yet, or if you've relocated to New Orleans permanently. Things are still pretty weird around here.

Brian

Brian,

I got back last night (landed at 6:30 PM, got into Manhattan by 9). It was heartrending to see lower New York from the plane (I did not recognize my city at first), and to realize the Empire State Building is the tallest building in New York again. On the way into the Lincoln Tunnel I saw it again and a white hospital ship steaming up the Hudson flanked by military helicopters. Driving into lower Manhattan, we encountered at least 10 different candlelight vigils and people walking around in hushed tones. And the jets roaring overhead are startling.

I still am not used to looking south and seeing a white cloud where the buildings I used to love and mentally wave to every day used to stand. Even to see the buildings that survived all dark is a shock. I will be going to work on Monday, and I know the walk there will be weird. There are no words that really describe the true horror of this situation, the violation I feel, and the grieving for what has been lost.

Still, life is returning to something approximating normal. Last night was the quietest Friday I can remember, but many businesses here are open and people are returning to their routines. There is no shortage of volunteers and workers, but most of us are not needed and can better serve by just returning to business as usual it seems.

Today I went to the Met to find comfort in the art and then I went to Central Park. I was able to forget that anything had happened for a few hours, and it was a good thing.

How has it been with you? Has Steph been on duty at the hospital? Do you know anybody who is missing? Do you feel like you need to find friends? Do you feel your faith (not in God, in anything) has been damaged? I feel I've realized a lot about who my friends are, what is important, and even the nature of death in some ways. Being an atheist, I can never be comfortable with death, but I have found solace in the Upanishads and some other ancient philosophy (like Thucydides writing about the plague). And I hope we can rise above this, I hope we can do the right thing (not the easy way of more vengeance), and I hope this city I love so much can be healed.

Yours,
Jake

"The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the storymy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity too great for the eye of man." - William Blake

Jake,

I agree with you exactly. It's crazy to think that the smoke is still there because, nearly a week after the attack, something in there is still burning.

Steph says that the hospital has been normal. The day of the attack, Steph and I both went over to the hospital (I figured they'd need all the help they could get). We, and hundreds of other people, waited and waited for the first of the injured to arrive. We waited some more. Finally they had us put our names on a list if they needed us and sent us home. They never called. It only occured to me later than the hospitals above 14th Street never saw any of the injured because, after the collapses of the buildings, nobody made it out.

Most definitely, something like this puts your life very much in perspective. I think everyone experienced the sudden, strange ordering of their lives, of people, of things, of priorities. For me, studying what I do, there is this weird sensation that what I want to do with my life career-wise is maybe of more importance than I thought it was; on the other hand, what I'm studying right now to prepare for that career--economics, international law--and even that I'm sitting around studying at all, seems almost insultingly irrelevant. Hopefully this contradiction will settle down enough for me to do something useful with it at some point.

Oddly, my faith in things in general has not been shaken. Maybe it was my old job looking at violence all the time, or my generally bleak outlook on the world (I find much of what I believe in the attitudes of Old English poetry, if that gives you any indication). My own atheism translated itself into social outrage long enough ago that the anger and confusion that accompanies the situation is not terribly new (although much more intense). And for me, it is offset by the incredible acts of selflessness you see surrounding it, the willingness of people to help out total strangers. The firefighters and policemen who went in there right after the buildings collapsed--those people are heroes, in every sense of the word, and it is their heroism, and the heroism that I see people showing every day, that really gets me choked up. At my old job, reading about the terrible things that people have done to one another throughout history taught me a sort of corollary lesson: that people, as a whole, are really resilient. They're stronger than anyone knows. And now I'm seeing this for myself.

Okay, I should stop before I say something really, really embarrassing. Do you like tacos? Recently, I've been discovered the glories of the taquerias of Spanish Harlem, and was wondering if you'd like to join me sometime. Eating one requires you to eat somewhat low-grade meat; on the other hand, they run you about a dollar-fifty, two dollars a pop, so who can complain? Plus, you get to hang out in Spanish Harlem, where people are about as friendly as you can imagine.

Must go to class,
Brian

You all right? I hope I didn't offend, or sadden.

Brian

No, you did not offend or sadden me. It's just been extremely busy here. We opened up again on Monday with a whole slew of problems. For two days, the building was powered by external generators and had no A/C (a room full of servers gets quite toasty). We lost a few drives and equipment in the initial failure and surges. Several of our communication lines have had to be restored and we still have no line between our offices and offsite hosting facilities. Transferring machines between here and the other facility either involves handcarts or exploiting one of our workers in the National Guard. One of our biggest servers here is completely dead now. We finally got back building power on Wednesday and AC, but then were hit by the new Windows/NMDA trojan horse (Microsoft IIS has no security and runs in a lot of surprising places). I've spent the last few days containing and cleaning up after it. In addition, my own machine died while trying to apply a Microsoft patch. All in all, it's been a rather long week. In other news, one of the databases I'm responsible for was sporadic since 9/11. I asked the provider and they said the data came from Salomon Smith Barney located in 5 WTC, and they're having a lot of problems now. Ouch.

Sounds like a real mess. So far, my day-to-day life shuttling back and forth between Mount Sinai and Columbia has been little affected by the whole thing, and Columbia, being the ivory tower that it is, is pretty well-insulated. The School of International Affairs, however, is getting a fair amount of publicity from all this, as apparently people in the university are looking to us to answer some questions, as if we know anything. Interestingly, though, I emailed my old bosses to tell them about how half of the international affairs literature has been rendered suddenly obsolete (all this cold-war state-actor stuff that was sort of on its way out anyway, but this really shoved it straight into uselessness), and they said that they are in fact funding a lecture or two at my graduate school about terrorism. The apple--i.e. me--hasn't fallen too far from the tree just yet, I guess.

Here's my armchair grad-school spiel, though, for what it's worth. Bin Laden sort of breaks the mold in terrorist research. Most "terrorist" organizations (and here I put it in quotes because "terrorist" in most cases depends on who you are--could be "freedom fighter" or whatever) actually do fall into a certain trend. Take, say, the IRA and PLO (both of whom I sympathize with somewhat, to be honest). Both of these groups has certain things in common: they are relatively small, financed by expats, and have a pretty clear political agenda. The literature also clearly suggests that these organizations have resorted to violence mostly because the structure of the society they live under has deprived them of legitimate means of political action. While the news in the 80s liked to paint all of these groups with the same crazy fanatic brush, it's more useful to consider the groups as rational political actors who have fallen on violence as something of a last resort. And recent history has shown this to be the case: PLO violence is almost exactly inversely related to the level at which Palestinian concerns are considered in Israeli politics (and it's therefore no surprise that violence has increased with the adoption of Sharon's hardline policies); IRA violence has decreased considerably since the British government adopted a more compromising standpoint.

But Osama bin Laden doesn't fit this picture. He is self-financed up the wazoo, commands a network that supposedly works in 50 countries, and his political motivations are much less clear, at least as far as I can make out. He has this sort of vague "bring down the West, unite the Arab world" thing, but that's really really nebulous, especially compared to the IRA's and PLO very focussed campaigns (give us back six counties, give us back the West Bank and Gaza Strip, give us more political rights and representation, give us economic opportunities). Bin Laden is, in short, unprecedented. Granted, all the smaller terrorist groups have formed a sort of informal network of their own--they even have conferences sometimes where they deliver talks and trade ideas, I'm not kidding--but bin Laden's sprawled, obscenely-financed thing--headed by a perrson who actually might be a little off balance--is another thing altogether. The advice the research suggests may be useful in the long run in chipping away at the number of people willing to work for bin Laden--economic development, political empowerment of the marginalized, you know all that stuff--but it's hard to know what to do in the short run. Hard even to get your head aroud what kind of organization it is. Seems to me that bin Laden's thing (al-Qaeda?) is part terrorist organization, part multinational corporation, and part totalitarian dictatorship--but which parts, and how much, I have no idea.

Anyway, that's my quasi-academic trying-to-sound-smarter-than-I-am spiel these days. If you don't want to talk about this so much, it's perfectly understandable; I'm close to full myself--although I did find myself watching CNN last night at about 3:30, listening to a discussion of just how many Pakistanis don't want us there (it seems, incidentally, that the protestors are in the minority). I find that, while I've sort of come to terms with it mentally, emotionally, what have you, I have been plagued by pretty severe insomnia. It's making me very productive in my studies, but it's also turning me into a coffee addict, which I have been trying to avoid for years, and also has to be contributing in its own way toward said insomnia.

Of course, I've always been a little insomniac (look! new topic!) and worse, it seems to run in my mother's family. My grandmother hardly sleeps at all; my mother, meanwhile, has been known to get not a single wink of sleep some nights for no appparent reason. This has only happened to me once (while I was teaching English in Japan), but a few days out of every month, I will be simply unable to get to sleep before some very ungodly hour, and then, oddly, not quite tired enough the next day to really catch up. The result is a kind of spaced-out dizziness that really keeps me on my toes for a couple days. I suppose there are worse things to have running in one's family--narcolepsy, for example, or explosive diarrhea--but it's frustrating because I have yet to learn how to really make use of the time. See, part of me imagines that I will become so insomniac that eventually I am just super-productive, capable of holding down two jobs while also raising a family and writing six novels simultaneously, instead of doing some more schoolwork and then watching CNN and the movie Dreamscape on the Sci-Fi Channel. But that would take some discipline that I don't yet have. Maybe some training will help.

Things are a bit better now. Thanks to a few of our single-handed efforts, we were able to contain and rout the Nimda virus from spreading like wildfire within our systems. Other of our business partners were not so lucky (not our fault), and they cut off all communications. Even the DSL provider yanked all web browsing for a few days, while telling us to download patches from a URL. I'm not sure who this made sense to. The upshot of this is that more and more people are running more services that were inconceivable a few years back (if you had told me 5 years people would be running web servers on personal computers, I'd laugh at you), and the security of these services has been ignored in the face of convenience and ease of use (gee, isn't that a now familiar refrain), so it has consistently created problems. Even when bugs are discovered and patches issued, there is no guarantee users will apply them, because many are probably unaware of the stuff running under the hood. It's easy to blame Microsoft for this, but in more cases, that blame is actually right. They've consistently followed the philosophy of fixing problems in the next version, but that's the wrong way to handle computer security.

In any event, it is interesting to see how this has changed a lot of philosophy and arguments. Take the current debate over missile defense. On the one hand, it's a boost for the MD supporters, since Osama Bin Laden fits the definition of a rogue state perfectly, and it seems there is no country associated that could normally be cowed by nuclear deterrance and that he does not have the same rational motivations that we normally model. On the other hand, it's a boost for opponents like myself, since who would need missiles if you can do something like this? And even with missiles from a rogue group, it's possible to figure where they came from by tracing the trajectory. I imagine we'll see many more debates of such sort in civil liberties, encryption, surveillance, etc. Not quite as arcane as the models you're discussing, but pertinent nonetheless. I'm very concerned over the coming war, since we need to be very careful about not alienating the Islamic nations, especially Pakistan and its nuclear arsenal. Thankfully, there is a clear awareness among the right people (perhaps Bush, definitely Powell), that we have to tread carefully on this one. I just hope we do the right thing, considering how many policy mistakes over the last 20 years have created this mess.

I'm frankly a bit disturbed by all the American flags and signs proclaiming "God Bless America" I have seen. I'm not against patriotism, and I love my country, but I'm also wary of jingoism, and the calls to imprison Arabs and other extreme rightist mutterings that have been reported. Still, talking to my conservative coworker, we actually both agree that civil liberties must be protected in times like this, and it was encouraging to see even Bush declare that Islam is a "religion of love" and this violence blasphemes against Allah. This was largely meant to reassure Arabic nations abroad, but I hope it can quell some of the internal anti-Arab violence I've seen reported.

I've also been seeing lots of talk lately about how there are no words that really describe the horror of what has happened down at WTC. Indeed, I felt the same way at first, but now I've changed my mind. It's not that the words don't exist, just that we've forgotten in some sense what they originally meant. We can read translations of Thucydides talking about the plague (topical now) or accounts of the great fire in London. They aren't using different language, but we've become too accustomed to abstracting away the horror, the omnipresence of death behind clinical terms, show business, and religious mysteries. Zbigniew Herbert (creator of Mr. Cogito by the way) has a great poem about this where he muses on the "aritmetic of compassion." When something like this happens, when we are confronted with the blind indifference of events, we don't really know what to say, because we've never used the words that way before. It's one thing to be horrified by bodycounts in disasters abroad. It's another to walk past the pictures covering every wall of St. Vincent's and read the names of the missing. I hope this would awaken a compassion in those calling for us to nuke and pave, but I don't know if that will happen.

I too suffer from insomnia invariably. Instead of tossing and turning, I now get up and read or write a poem. I can't say I get to sleep any earlier, but at least I can pretend I'm doing something productive. I think insomnia is an inherited trait in my family, but I think it's also related to my mild depression at times or stress. I also sometimes seem to function better on 6 hours of sleep sometimes than 8. The last few weeks have made it difficult to sleep, and that has not been helped by the construction workers who have woken me up at 8 am both mornings this weekend when I have wanted to sleep in. They were blasting Guantamera and The Girl from Ipanema, which was bad not only because it was loud but seemed intentionally targeted to be what we were supposed to expect for the Hispanic laborers. I hate it when anybody embraces a stereotype. I would have been more forgiving if they were playing much cooler Latin American music. While we're talking about Latin America, Jessica and I would love to get together in Spanish Harlem sometimes (maybe later this week), although I must admit I don't really eat beef anymore. I like to think of it as sticking in unity with my fellow mammals. Don't mention the leather coat please. Thank you.

Otherwise, I just ficnished reading a slim little book I think you'd like. Called "Kafka Americana" it's a collaboration of stories by Jonathan Lethem and Charles Stoltz about everybody's famous depressed modernist placed in America. In one story, he writes several movies for Frank Capra. In another, he's put on trial for forging those sad-eyed child paintings. In my favorite of the bunch, he meets Charles Ives and Wallace Stevens at a hotel where all three are attending an insurance convention. I thought you might find that notion a hoot. Otherwise, hang in there and give Steph my regards.

Hey there. Sorry about the delay--Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday are turning into pretty hectic days for me, and it's hard to find time to do anything but go to class and study. Thursday and Friday are big sudy days, but only study days, so it's easier to find time to write messages and catch up on what the rest of the world is up to. You know how this is.

I'm of two minds about the proliferation of American flags. On one hand, I think it's a sign of one of the good things that is coming out of this, the sense of national solidarity despite the vast differences (vas deferens?) among us. On the other hand, my guard is up because a situation like this can slide easily from national pride into jingoism, into the alienation of non-Americans, into the... well, you know where that sort of thing leads. So far, it doesn't seem so nefarious to me, but I understand totally why many people find it creepy. And the anti-Arab violence, which seems pretty widespread, is disgusting.

An interesting sidenote: a couple days after the attacks, I was going to the post office on 110th St. and Lex to pick up a package and passed by a taqueria where the owner had put the entire issue of the Daily News (or maybe the Post) in the window for folks to read. I was reading it (the Daily News and Post, I find, have more to say in times like this, when local viewpoints are more savvy than state and national ones) and a guy came up to me.

"You live around here?"

"Yes... well, sort of."

"F**king unbelievable, isn't it. Even though it's something that happened in the city, it affects all of us."

"The city?" We were on 106th and Lexington. This made clear to me just how deep the divide is between Harlem and points south. It had occurred to me before hearing folks talk as I walked home the day of the attacks, but this crystallized it: for people in Harlem, this was something that happened to the rich white people downtown. It didn't make it any less shocking or terrible, but it didn't feel close to home to them. And why should it? How many businessmen in the WTC lived in Harlem? I'm sure somebody did, but the general difference between Harlem, where life goes on apace, and the Upper East Side, which is still reeling somewhat, is obvious.

I like your bit about finding the words to describe this. I think the "no words to describe it" thing has a lot to do with its total lack of precedent in the American experience. Some people in my program, however, had many words to describe it--people from countries where this sort of thing happens, if not all the time, then at least occasionally. My economics professor was particularly capable of talking about it, and he summed up the shock of it better than anyone I've heard has. He grew up in Iran, worked there as an economist for a number of years. He saw buildings bombed, villages blown to pieces, public executions, planes shot down by anti-aircraft fire. It happened so often for a while that he thought he would get used to it. But he found that no matter how many times it happens, no matter how much you see, whever something like this happens, there's a shock, all over again, the sense that this sort of thing just isn't supposed to happen. He said you never really get used to it, and the ability to function, really, comes with being comfortable with the idea that you're never going to get used to it. He didn't say it quite that way--he said it better, obviously--but I liked the general idea very much: in contradiction to Western psychological notions of "working through trauma" or "coming to terms" with something, maybe it's better to just accept the confusion and shock of something like this and go from there.

Anyway, I went down to the local fire station the other day, which lost eight of its guys that day. It was something. The building was plastered with notes from people talking about what heroes the firemen were. Lots of flowers and food and donations to the fire widow's fund, to which I contributed. I talked with the firemen for a bit (they were out and greeting people). They're pretty incredible guys, better at talking about this than most people you'll see on TV. The whole thing reminded you again how much things have changed around here, how we're living through a time that really is going to go down in history. Bizarre.

About meeting up: my parents came down to visit, so I should spend some time with them, but maybe next week? That'll buy me some time to find a place in Spanish Harlem that doesn't reqire you to eat meat. If not, maybe I could just cook dinner for you guys. My food ain't pretty, but it smells and tastes good.

All right, must get back to studying.

It's pretty interesting to read that about Harlem. It makes sense in a way, but it really is unexpected. Meanwhile, you'd think Park Slope is part of Manhattan, walking around there and reading the posters. Still, even though there aren't many executives from Harlem, I've gotten the impression from the posters that most of the missing were not exactly senior management. Every business is organized like a pyramid, so an even swath of destruction seems to hit lower employees the hardest. Which is more unfortunate.

I've had a few more musings about words. In essence, the reason why we aren't used to the words being used in that way is that because even when they are used to describe horror, we're invariably talking about a movie or a book rather than an actual happening. Watching the coverage and witness reactions, it was striking how many people kept saying it was like a movie. And we want it to be a movie, we want there to be easy answers and justice administered out of the barrel of a gun. What's eerie to me is that I was talking to Jessica about this two months ago, our hiding in movies and ignorance of real suffering found in many places around the world. Now, we've been woken up. And we must face the situation in its awful truth. It's not easy to escape from history.

Anway, have fun with your parents. I actually do eat meat like chicken and fish. I just don't tend to eat beef or pork, although I will admit to occaisional lapses.

Actually, as I was walking home the day of the attack after watching that footage (awestruck and confused, along with the rest of my classmates), I was hit by how different it was from watching a movie. Specifically, I compared it to the end of Fight Club (one of my more favorite movies around), where a series of buildings go down in a similar way. At the end of that movie (which I fell for entirely, by the way), the destruction of those buildings, to the anthemic squall of the Pixies, was a moment of triumph. This was horrifying. I do know the interviews you're talking about, and I think you're right. It seems more like a defense mechanism to me--very few people in this country have seen anything like that for real, so it makes sense that they have to fall back on what they've seen in entertainment.

As weird as this might sound, this has actually been on my mind for about two years--the incredibly sheltered existence that Americans live in. What happened here was awful, but in many, many countries in the world, this sort of thing happens fairly often (and often funded by us). From that perspective, it's easy for me to understand why some people celebrated upon hearing of the attack: finally, they say, Americans get to see what it's like. We get to join the rest of the world in not feeling safe any more. And in the long run, I hope this becomes a good thing. The optimist in me wants to believe that the fear of another attack, and the sense of violation that many Americans experienced, will translate into hesitancy to indiscriminately bomb others as we have since the early 80s (it's a little-discussed fact that Clinton bombed as indiscriminately as the Republicans ever did: Afghanistan, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Sudan...) now that we understand a little bit more what the effects of a bombing campaign can be. More far-reaching, the optimist wants to believe that Americans will realize that they have an obligation to the rest of the world to try to do something about the incredible inequities that exist in the world, and that American corporations consistently take advantage of. I went to a lecture today that reported an interesting finding: that Americans conceive of their country as very generous in the realm of foreign aid, when in fact we give less than a penny for every ten dollars earned--putting us 30th among developed countries in the amount of foreign aid we give out. But the pessimist in me thinks that, just as likely, Americans may instead retreat into a sort of rah-rah isolationism. That's when all those flags around start to spook me out.

You realize of course that by talking about this for two weeks now, we've broken our long-standing tradition of ripping from topic to topic likes chickens with our heads cut off. I want to launch straight into a conversation about polyrhythms and their ability to reorder the way you think, but I have to go to my international law class. See you.

Oh yeah--if you're at all interested, I'm going to an mbira concert at 8 in your neck of the woods--the Washington Square church. The price is a little steep--$20--but I can't imagine it not being good, if you like mbira music. At any rate, let me know if you two want to come up for dinner next week. Does Thursday work for you?

Brian

Yeah, even in parts of Europe (esp. London), some people were saying "Welcome to our world," where any random package really could be a bomb and there is a long history of terrorism. It's true that the globe has shrunk and we can no longer feel isolated and safe because we have an ocean on either side. I am also well aware that Clinton was just as awful as Bush in indescriminately bombing (the cruise missile retaliation destroyed 4 mosques.), and in general our entire foreign policy over the last 20 years has been finding temporary allies for a short-term expediency and then running away instead of helping the survivors. Bush Jr. spoke with disdain in last year's debates about the prospect of ever doing "nation building," but it's something we did well with the Marshall Plan and did not do with Afghanistan after the Soviets and look what happened. I'm not clear he's changed his mind on that issue, and it troubles me. And the number of monsters we've created in the name of this policy amazes me (Osama, Saddam, Noriega, Pinochet, etc.) Now, what concerns me is that we're doing it again with the Northern Alliance (hardly a stellar human rights track record), with Saudi Arabia, and other Middle Eastern states. The terrorists don't hate us for being a beacon of democracy, I think it's more for not being one.

But, I tried to steer us off course before. I mentioned the Kafka book and even threw props to Charles Ives. But did you take the initiative to go off on a tangent?! No. I guess I'll have to take matters into my own hands. Did you know that Indiana produces a great goat cheese called the Wabash Cannonball? Also, on Japanese TV, there's a kid show with a giant brown boxlike monster who hatched from an egg, fell into a rabbit's house where he watches TV, and he passes wind when he's upset. I'm not making it up, and I think it looks really cool (Domo-kun) is the name. Okay, it's not really a great tangent, but it's the best I could come up with on short notice. I did like the subtle reference to the Magnetic Fields 69 Love Songs if that is what you were shooting for with the "chicken with the head cut off" metaphor.

Sadly, we can't do next Thursday. One of the cats, Cleo (the gray one), has an annual checkup then, so we have to take her to the vet. This is just another of the many reasons why the cats will one day rebel and get back at me. Or maybe it's just another excuse, because it's hard for me to hire on short notice the same actors I used last time for dinner so you would not guess I'm really an 80 year-old woman. Maybe I can hire someone similar enough and cover his face with a cape the entire time as in Plan 9. That might work...

Today, I learned that 'funk' has multiple associated meanings. Besides the musical form, it can mean a strong odor, strong fear, and being cool. The earliest meaning (the smell) is from the early 1600s from the French "funkier" meaning to blow tobacco smoke on somebody. The sense of abject terror dates from Oxford Uni slang in 1743 and is said to be from the obscure Flemish word "fonck" which means fear. In 1920s America, the term 'funky' was invented to refer to people who smelled bad, especially of sweat. It later came to mean something worthless, and short after something very good (like 'bad' and 'wicked' did as well). In the 1950s it described the music, largely as a backformation from this sense of being cool, but I imagine also to describe the sweatiness of those dancing to it. Just thought you'd be interested.