Jascha Hoffman

Maths and Mad Hatters

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 00:29:13 +0000

Nature 454, 580-581 (31 July 2008) Lewis Carroll in Numberland: His Fantastical Mathematical Logical Life by Robin Wilson Allen Lane/Norton: 2008. 237 pp./208 pp. £16.99/$24.95 reviewed by Jascha Hoffman Legend has it that Queen Victoria was so enchanted by Alice's Adventures in Wonderland that she insisted on Lewis Carroll's next work being sent to her. One can imagine her expression as she opened the book that arrived, entitled An Elementary Treatise on Determinants. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson had many careers. He is best remembered for the sublime nonsense verse he wrote under the name Lewis Carroll. He was a pioneering childrens' photographer and a lay clergyman admired for his sermons. Before all else he was a mathematician who taught generations of students at the University of Oxford, UK, contributed to the fields of geometry, algebra and logic, and used games and puzzles to entertain and instruct. In Lewis Carroll in Numberland, mathematician Robin Wilson reveals Dodgson to be the grandfather of recreational mathematics. He was precocious, orthodox and craved variety. Born in 1832 in Cheshire, UK, Dodgson was a lecturer at Oxford by his early twenties. At a time when non-Euclidean geometries were catching on, he wrote a four-act play stubbornly arguing that Euclid should remain at the centre of the Oxford curriculum. He invented a method to find the determinants of large matrices, but his strange notation meant that it never caught on. Later, he sought mathematical remedies for real injustices, suggesting tie-break methods for parliamentary elections to his friend Lord Salisbury, and devising a way to make lawn tennis tournaments fairer to the runners-up. Some work was ahead of its time, especially his efforts to bring mathematics to young people. Although pupils complained of his "singularly dry and perfunctory manner" in the classroom, Dodgson's gift for teaching shone through in dozens of self-published guides for students, and in his letters to children. Wilson shows that he found humour in the plainest of subjects and did not underestimate his young correspondents, once commenting that intelligence seemed to vary inversely with size. In person, he drew their attention using guessing games and feats of memory. He could recite the first 71 digits of pi using a series of nonsense couplets as memory aids, and once contrived an algorithm that could give the date of every Easter Sunday until 2499. Sooner or later every child who knew Dodgson would receive a brain teaser. Published in collections with titles such as A Tangled Tale and Pillow Problems Thought Out During Sleepless Nights, many of these word problems required the dutiful application of algebra, trigonometry or geometry. Some needed mere patience and common sense. One devious puzzle asked how many guests would come to a dinner party if a man invited his father's brother-in-law, his brother's father-in-law, his father-in-law's brother, and his brother-in-law's father. Others were in the form of fallacies to debunk. Dodgson once asked a 14-year-old boy to find the flaw in his proof that 2 + 2 = 5, which Wilson reveals to be a stealthy division by zero. A few problems hinged simply on a pun. Later in life, Dodgson taught symbolic logic with a board game that used red and grey counters on a set of nested squares, which he believed superseded the overlapping circles championed by British logician John Venn. In Dodgson's Game of Logic, published under his pen name to gain a wider audience, one can see some of the punctilious lunacy of the Mad Hatter. Following chains of inference he called 'sillygisms', he led readers from reasonable premises to conclusions such as "Babies cannot manage crocodiles", "No banker fails to shun hyaenas" and "No bird in this aviary lives on mince-pies". These examples are perhaps less interesting as logic than as the stirrings of a systematic kind of literature, also apparent in his symmetrical poem that can be read vertically and horizontally. Lewis Carroll in Numberland is not a conventional biography. Robin Wilson has winnowed Dodgson's prodigious output into a first-rate scrapbook of proofs and puzzles. Sadly, his tone is often fawning and flat — not up to the standard of mathematical storytelling he set in his previous book, Four Colours Suffice (Allen Lane, 2002), on the history of the conjecture that four colours can fill any map without any bordering countries sharing a colour. By immersing us in Dodgson's correspondence, however, Wilson conjures the spirit of a man who delighted in paradox yet insisted on precision, who held fiercely to the ancients while straining to understand the world around him, and who wanted most of all to stump everyone he knew. Writing for work or pleasure, for children or adults, Wilson shows that Dodgson turned the most sober of problems into child's play. "Some perhaps may blame me for mixing together things grave and gay," he wrote as Lewis Carroll in an insert to his nonsense poem The Hunting of the Snark. But, he continued, "I do not believe God means us thus to divide life into two halves." [full text] [pdf]

A Universal Library of Math?

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 19:53:52 +0000

A small group of researchers is meeting in Birmingham, UK, later this month to plan a free digital library of mathematics. All the mathematical literature ever published runs to more than 50 million pages, with around 75,000 articles added each year. Over the past decade there have been several attempts to make this prodigious body of work accessible in a single digital archive, but so far none has succeeded. A group of mathematicians intends to change this. They have started small, with a handful of digitization projects in Poland, Russia, Serbia and the Czech Republic. In a few years they hope to unite these repositories with their western European counterparts in an archive to be hosted by the European Union, according to the organizer, Petr Sojka, an informatics scientist at Masaryk University in Brno in the Czech Republic. Eventually this pan-European archive could be expanded globally, he says. To make such an archive easier to search, researchers have found ways to guess the subject of a paper on the basis of the frequency of symbols in it. But there will be many more-practical challenges, such as finding the funds to scan millions of old papers and striking deals with publishers who hold rights to them. It may already be too late to build a single free mathematical archive, according to John Ewing, head of the American Mathematical Society, which maintains a list of more than 1,500 journals whose archives have already been digitized. “A few years ago, this model had the potential to change the mathematics journal literature in profound ways,” he says. But most publishers have rushed to scan their own archives in order to lock them up and sell them to libraries. “While the effort to digitize the smaller collections is admirable, and it's certainly worthwhile, it's unlikely to effect a larger change,” says Ewing. —Jascha Hoffman

Alda on Einstein

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 17:16:04 +0000

Nature 453, 987 (19 June 2008) | doi:10.1038/453987a; Published online 18 June 2008 Q&A: Insight into Einstein Actor Alan Alda, who starred in the television series M*A*S*H and now hosts Scientific American Frontiers on US network PBS, is fascinated with physics. At last month's World Science Festival in New York he led a panel discussing the quantum world, portrayed Richard Feynman in the play QED, and presented Dear Albert, his new play drawn from Albert Einstein's letters. Why did Einstein's letters interest you? It's very important for us to see that science is done by people, not just brains but whole human beings, and sometimes at great cost. Letters can be very personal, and sometimes confrontational. I had also planned to write a play about Marie Curie's letters. I got a little discouraged because not only are they in Polish and French, but the French letters are still slightly radioactive. After you look at them they go over you with a Geiger counter. I thought I'd wait until somebody else goes in a hazmat suit and translates them. So I stuck with Einstein. Einstein emerges from your play as a highly volatile character, sometimes spiteful and domineering, sometimes withdrawn and resigned. How do you see him? Einstein claims not to have felt lonely, but he was a lonesome figure. He could see far out into the cosmos but he was myopic about the people next to him. It was difficult for him to take the time for what he called the "merely personal". And he really did seem to take refuge in these very complicated images in his head. Like Feynman, he challenged every idea that came to him. He wanted to rethink it, he wanted to see more deeply into it. Why did you focus on Einstein's relationships with his two wives, Mileva and Elsa? Plenty of his correspondence with colleagues was about the science that he was working so hard on. But I wanted to show the personal side of the discoveries and ruminations. For somebody with hair like that, he did awfully well with the women. At one point he couldn't decide whether to marry his second wife Elsa or her daughter Ilse, who wrote to a friend, "Albert refuses to take a position on this". Will the play be performed again? I don't know. It was like a high-energy experiment: we just let the actors collide with the material. Whatever particles came out of it we could observe for a short time, and now it has evaporated. Interview by Jascha Hoffman, a writer based in New York.

Dreams and Disaster

Sun, 18 May 2008 22:39:52 +0000

Doug Loizeaux at work. His family’s demolition business is the subject of one of David Samuels’s essays. (Danny Johnston/Associated Press) ONLY LOVE CAN BREAK YOUR HEART By David Samuels. 372 pp. The New Press. $26.95. On long bus rides, David Samuels used to fake a Southern accent and tell strangers he was raised on Army bases rather than in the Orthodox Jewish household in Brooklyn where he grew up. “There was something scary about the ease with which I became a new person, a fictional character,” he has written. “I felt cold inside, and detached from my own body.” Eventually he started listening more carefully to the stories of his fellow travelers, spending much of the last 10 years on the road for Harper’s Magazine and The New Yorker, absorbing himself in the lives of a strange cross section of America: con men and fugitives, radicals and rap stars, addicts and politicians. Now we have his first collection of long-form journalism, a tribute to the twin American traditions of self-invention and self-deceit. The book is full of scenes from our nation’s underbelly, including a washed-up Red Sox pitcher in Montreal, a family of demolition experts hired to bring down a Las Vegas casino and a California convention crawling with salesmen in the grip of a pyramid scheme. What these people have in common, as Samuels explains in the title essay on bettors at a Florida greyhound track, is some version of “the demonstrably mistaken and often quite dangerous idea that if you try hard and believe in yourself the laws of chance will be suspended.” The source of both tragedy and humor here is the wide gap between the dreams that draw these men onward and the trail of disaster they leave behind. In upstate New York a concert promoter lays out his wispy vision for Woodstock 1999, where in fact young people will riot after camping out in their own sewage. In snow-covered Minnesota, Samuels finds addicts appealing to a higher power to prevent the next relapse, as a monkey in a nearby lab thumps his lever a thousand times for a single hit of crack cocaine. The portraits that emerge are exhaustive and often severe, but there is something delicate in Samuels’s method. In his stories the random flow of events takes on real meaning, allowing us to see what’s hidden in plain view and to hear what isn’t being said. He has some of Joan Didion’s gift for stripping the layers away until a fraud is exposed. But even among the most unreliable of characters, he seems to be looking for someone to trust. After the 9/11 attacks, Samuels began to search in vain for honest men in public office, first at the bombed-out Pentagon, where he found reporters demurring to a smug Donald Rumsfeld at the dawn of the “war on terror,” then at a mercenary fund-raising banquet on the 2004 Bush campaign trail in Texas. But the results are far richer when he turns his strict eye inward in a remarkable essay on his emergence from a boyish solitude into the sanctuary of a new marriage, cleverly folded into a tour of his block in Brooklyn in the months after the attacks. “It was as if the ashes from the tower had fertilized our neighborhood,” he writes. In his other new book, “The Runner,” an expanded version of his ingeniously suspenseful New Yorker article about a bicycle thief who conned his way into Princeton, Samuels writes that a decade after the impostor was unmasked, he surfaced again in Colorado, up to his usual combination of fraud and theft. Perhaps we should not be surprised, then, that the author pulls a similar disappearing-reappearing act in his introduction, announcing first that the collection will serve as “my final goodbye to the dying industry that has paid my bills,” then that “I will continue writing for magazines” because “I don’t know any other kind of life.” It’s an appropriately elastic maneuver from a brilliant reporter who has made a career of observing “our national gift for self-delusion and for making ourselves up from scratch,” as he puts it, “which is much the same thing as believing in the future.” Jascha Hoffman writes frequently for Nature and The Times.

How Faces Share Feelings

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 18:42:33 +0000

P. EKMAN/M. MCGOWAN EXHIBIT REVIEWED The Search for Universals in Human Emotion: Photographs from the New Guinea Expedition Forty years ago, psychologist Paul Ekman took his camera to the island of New Guinea to photograph the faces of the South Fore people. He wanted to prove that the expressions on their faces did not mirror social convention but were universal displays of human emotion. A set of these photographs, which launched Ekman's long career deciphering the secrets of the human face, is now on display in the new Mind exhibition at San Francisco's Exploratorium. In the 1960s, many anthropologists thought that a smile could convey joy in one culture and disgust in another. Ekman had a hunch that this relativistic thinking was wrong. Almost a century before, Charles Darwin had conducted his own international survey of facial expressions in the belief that they were universal. Inspired by this approach, Ekman secured military funding for a series of experiments that showed that people from Japan and Chile, among others, could read expressions on North American faces. When the American anthropologist Margaret Mead protested that exposure to magazines and films might have obscured the differences between cultures, Ekman set out to test the most isolated humans he could find. "I needed to study people who had never had contact with the outside world," he explained. "I wanted to settle it decisively." When he arrived in New Guinea, there were some misunderstandings. Ekman's attempt, recorded on film, to inspire fear by lunging at a South Fore boy with a rubber knife caused nothing but laughter. After this experiment failed, he had to hand out cigarettes and soap to get people to take part in further ones. Yet when participants were asked to point to a pictured face that matched the emotion evoked by a particular story — anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness or surprise — they made the same associations as people living elsewhere. There was one exception. The South Fore people did not distinguish between fear and surprise. Ekman now speculates that they may have had trouble telling these two emotions apart because, as he says: "In that culture, anything totally unexpected is going to be threatening." Since his South Fore study, Ekman has found only one more emotion with a universal expression: contempt. Some other emotions, such as guilt, shame and interest, have not been added to the list of universals because they are expressed in different ways even in the same culture. One might expect some expressions to be learned by mimicry, but Ekman cites evidence to the contrary: psychologist David Matsumoto found that blind judo wrestlers show the thrill of victory and conceal the agony of defeat in precisely the same ways that sighted athletes do. "It's not something we have to learn by observing others," Ekman says. "It's got to be stored in the brain. Nobody knows where." Ekman went on to devise a system to classify facial expressions using the movements of 43 muscles in the face. He discovered that hidden emotions, such as those caused by lying, can be revealed by fleeting 'microexpressions'. His system is now used by computer animators to create realistic facial animations and by police officers interviewing suspects. Ekman is also working with the US Department of Homeland Security to train airport staff to identify potential hijackers by searching for suppressed fear and disgust in passengers' faces. One item in the exhibition stands out. A tiny video screen shows Ekman's 1967 footage of a group of boys playing outside the window of his hut in New Guinea. After disappearing from view, a young boy suddenly sticks his head back into the frame and pulls faces at the camera. The scene is so familiar, yet, after one has paid such close attention to facial detail, it seems utterly foreign. It is a reminder of how flexible our faces are, and of how much we can convey when we know someone is watching. [full text at Nature]

Besieged

Sun, 09 Mar 2008 08:29:02 +0000

Beaufort Castle after the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000.
Ahmed Mantash/Associated Press

BEAUFORT By Ron Leshem. Translated by Evan Fallenberg. 360 pp. Delacorte Press. $24. Beaufort Castle, built by crusaders on a mountaintop in what is now southern Lebanon, passed through many hands before being captured from the P.L.O. by invading Israeli troops in 1982. In this gritty first novel, the young Israeli journalist Ron Leshem imagines the tedium and terror of a small group of soldiers inside the fortress walls in the months leading up to the Israeli Army’s withdrawal in 2000. The story is told by Liraz Liberti, an impulsive 21-year-old Sephardic officer who has been put in charge of the little band. He recalls “the feel of the wind up there, the taste of the schnitzel, and the smell of Lysol,” as well as the “five-foot-tall wet thistles that bury you.” It is through Liraz that we meet the 13 “human puppies” in his squad, young men without combat experience who spend their time inventing slang and making “killer cheese toasts with pesto.” The unit’s tour of duty feels a bit like Zionist summer camp until the soldiers are shelled during a predawn ambush. Liraz doesn’t cope well on the battlefield: when a roadside mine explodes in the face of his bomb expert, Liraz berates the attending medic, then collapses in shock while the corpse is loaded onto a stretcher. As Israeli public opinion turns against the war and soldiers along the front lines are picked off by enemy fire, the mission begins to seem increasingly futile. Rather than preventing Hezbollah from raiding the Israeli border, the fort has become just another target. “We sit up here at Beaufort,” the medic explains, “disconnected from everything, drawing rockets and mortar shells and explosive devices, endangering our lives, just so we can continue sitting at Beaufort.” What began as a game of capture the flag has become a sort of Masada. Even after Liraz learns that Israel never meant to take the mountain in the first place, he remains committed to defending it. But this isn’t because he buys the “embarrassing mix of Zionism and kitsch” that passes for patriotism at Beaufort; it’s because his men have risked their lives for him and he wants to do the same for them. The novel requires some stamina on the part of the reader. The authentic details of gear and slang, drawn from Leshem’s extensive interviews, weigh down the plot. And it’s not easy to tolerate the soldiers’ hunger for easy Orthodox girls, their scorn for dovish Israeli reporters and their lack of interest in the Lebanese whose lives have been disrupted by the fighting. But Liraz has a certain vulnerable charm, and this is what pulls the reader through. When “Beaufort” was first published in Hebrew, the Israeli soldiers who read it might have paid scant attention to its prediction that they would eventually return to Lebanon. The enemy, Leshem’s narrator argues, will “take a soldier hostage, commandeer a jeep at the border fence, bombard some northern settlement with mortar shells. ... We’ll march in there, ... pass from house to house.” This is essentially what happened when war broke out again in the summer of 2006. Reading the novel now, in Evan Fallenberg’s expert translation, as Israel is under pressure to go back into Gaza, one is reminded how easily an army can find itself trapped in enemy territory, sunk, as one general puts it to Liraz, “deep in tactics, without strategies.” Jascha Hoffman has written for The Boston Globe and Nature as well as The Times. [full text at nytimes.com]

Home Cooking for Hackers

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 00:21:21 +0000

Raspberry gumdrops with ant venom. Image: MagicSafire.

"I think of cooking as hacking," says Californian computer programmer Marc Powell, who led a 'Kitchen Hack Lab' demonstration at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego this week. In the kitchen, we're all amateur chemists. Protein, carbohydrate, fat and water react to changes in pressure and temperature during cooking. Just as a hardware hacker adapts an electronic device to a new purpose, a food hacker recombines ingredients in unconventional ways. Powell wants to bring "the red-headed stepchild of molecular gastronomy" to the masses. At Unicorn Precinct XIII in San Francisco, he hosts a 'collaborative supper club'. Guests can sample blood ice cream, chocolate monkfish liver and savoury bubble tea with squid ink tapioca pearls (http://up13.org). A chemical logic underpins Powell's odd blend of ingredients: one batch of gumdrops used raspberry, rum and ant venom because they all contain derivatives of formic acid, which has a strong, tangy taste. After the dot-com bust, Powell trained in the kitchen of Heston Blumenthal, head chef of The Fat Duck in Berkshire, UK. Blumenthal founded his own research laboratory to refine such culinary techniques as sous vide, or slow cooking in vacuum-sealed bags. In recent years, a handful of molecular chefs — including Ferrán Adria at Spain's El Bulli and Homaru Cantu at Moto in Chicago, Illinois — have used liquid nitrogen, lasers and inkjet printers to expand the range of possible flavours and textures. Ultramodern kitchen experimentation has largely bypassed the amateur because of the high cost of equipment, such as rotary evaporators or an 'anti-griddle' that chills to -34 °C. But vacuum-sealers and smoking guns are relatively cheap and, as food scientists such as Harold McGee and Hervé This have shown, there is also room for innovation using standard ingredients and appliances. What sets Powell apart is his home-grown approach. He invites strangers to bring their own ingredients into his kitchen and hack alongside him. "I think food cooked at home is always better than what's cooked in a restaurant," he says. Plus, unlike many restaurant chefs who keep their recipes secret, Powell encourages 'open-source recipe development' (http://wiki.foodhacking.com). For when inspiration fails, his website program (http://deliciouscorpse.com) generates random recipes — such as 'grub-injected wasp caviar with salt-baked spider bun' — that can be tailored to the contents of your larder. It remains to be seen whether the invention of such new dishes, as the French epicure Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote in 1825, "does more for human happiness than the discovery of a new star". —Jascha Hoffman Nature 452, 32-33 (6 March 2008)

From the Depths

Sun, 20 Jan 2008 14:50:07 +0000

New York Times Book Review [pdf] [full text] Survivors of Buchenwald at the time the Allies arrived in April 1945. (Eric Schwab/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images) THE SEVENTH WELL By Fred Wander. Translated by Michael Hofmann. 160 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $23.95. By JASCHA HOFFMAN At the end of Fred Wander’s novel about life in the Nazi camps, the narrator lies in the children’s barracks of Buchenwald between a dead man and a pack of starving Jewish boys. It is April 1945; American tanks are at the gate. Delirious from typhus, he is overcome by hope as he watches the boys slice up a potato. “Some might say the camp and its bestial conditions had destroyed their human substance,” he writes, but “I knew right then: everything will start over, nothing has been lost.” In light of all Fred Wander did lose to the Nazis — his mother, his sister, most of his 20s — this may seem a strangely optimistic statement. Born to Jewish Galician parents in Vienna in 1917, he was deported as a young man to a series of French work camps and survived the death march from Auschwitz to Buchenwald. After the war he eventually settled in East Germany, where he made a new life as a reporter and photographer. It was only in the late 1960s, after his 10-year-old daughter died in an accident, that he began to revisit his past. The result was “The Seventh Well,” a novel narrated by a young man who attempts to maintain his own sanity in the death camps by immersing himself in the lives of his fellow prisoners. Originally published in 1971, it is now available in a superb new translation by Michael Hofmann. Wander does not guide the reader on his own journey from boxcar to barbed wire, as Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi have done. Rather, his anonymous narrator undergoes a sort of spiritual education as he studies the doomed men and boys around him. The result is an indirect portrait of a man trying to grasp an unthinkable trauma. “A man lugs rocks, lugs wood, cracks lice, fights over a potato ... learns to blow his nose downwind with one finger, wraps his sore feet in rags,” Wander’s narrator writes. “What keeps a man alive?” For him the answer is affection for others, memories of home, language itself and some dim hope of survival. These signs of spirit can vanish without warning. To survive in the camps one must adapt, but there is a fine line between adapting and surrendering. After his lover is hauled off from a French camp to Auschwitz, for example, a formerly rebellious young man gives himself up without a fight. Wander’s narrator observes his surroundings, from the eating habits of his fellow prisoners to the shifting colors of the sky, with an attention that verges on defiance. When an exhausted man steps out of the march to Buchenwald to defecate, he is shot in the head. This happens repeatedly, but the narrator takes in each murder with fresh shock, as if by the strength of his gaze alone he can rescue these strangers from the ditch. The sense that anyone can be saved, however, begins to crumble when he loses his bunkmate Tadeusz Moll, a teenager rumored to have been saved from the gas chamber by a guardian angel. As punishment for an unauthorized nap, Tadeusz is put out in the forest overnight to freeze and is later publicly hanged. Lying in bed, the narrator imagines the boy’s last moments: “Perhaps life, compressed into that tiny remaining time, sharpened by barely imaginable sufferings, perhaps life has become distilled into some quintessence of itself.” But he reconsiders. “No. ... Let’s take it at face value: dying means dying.” Veering between the sentimental and the brutal, Wander tries to make sense of his own random survival. Sometimes his memory of the camps seems too generous: Did Buchenwald really simmer with “curiosity, wonderment, thirst for knowledge”? Was there really “earnestness and dignity and purpose” in the faces of the dead? But most of the incidents Wander describes — for instance, that “one of us choked to death from a hemorrhage incurred from laughing” — have a pure horror that can’t be varnished. Throughout the novel runs the voice of Wander’s own Virgil, Mendel Teichmann, the gaunt and charismatic 50-year-old who teaches him to tell stories in the barracks after dark. At first Teichmann devours his ration of bread, but as his strength ebbs he learns, like the others, to make a crust of bread into a seven-course meal. Teichmann, an agnostic, tries to make sense of the Holocaust by comparing it to the water of the seventh well described by the 16th-century Rabbi Loew of Prague, which leaves Jews naked and pure. It may be hard to believe that a man could keep that much dignity while he is preoccupied, as the narrator puts it, with his own “piecemeal execution.” In the end Wander does not ask us to: when Teichmann dies there is no attempt to redeem his suffering. Wander writes, “He died a senseless and undignified death, let me pass over it in silence.” Jascha Hoffman is on the editorial staff of The New York Review of Books.

Dreams of the Father

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 04:25:55 +0000

Nextbook.org In 1990, Rodger Kamenetz traveled to Tibet with a group of American Jews to meet the Dalai Lama. On that trip, which he describes in The Jew in the Lotus, he happened to learn that some Buddhists meditate within their dreams. He began to wonder how dreams had been understood in Jewish texts and found that, while they had once been considered a source of revelation, dreams had been all but exiled from the tradition because they were deemed too disturbing or difficult to understand. As Kamenetz went deeper into his own dreams, which he calls “the oldest spiritual technology on the planet,” he found that they did not have any explicitly Jewish content. But in their own strange way—as he recounts in his new book A History of Last Night’s Dream—they did, over the years, begin to lead him back to something like God. You say that dreams have been exiled from Judaism since Genesis. There is a twin tradition. One is of the dream as direct revelation that requires no interpretation. That’s embodied in the dreams of Joseph as a boy, and in Jacob’s dream of a ladder between earth and heaven. And then there is the whole tradition of interpretation which actually begins with Joseph’s brothers, who have been quite correctly identified as the first dream interpreters. Their interpretation is full of anxiety and rage. And you see that same mistrust reflected in the Talmud? To give them credit, I think the rabbis were concerned for the average person who may not want to take a mystical venture into dreams, or who may not be equipped, or who may be fearful. They also wanted to assert that the Torah is the primary spiritual guide. They limit the scope of the dream very severely based on a passage in Deuteronomy essentially saying that no dream can contradict the Torah. How has this affected the way we understand dreams now? Our own response to dreams is often that they’re painful or that they are difficult. They bring up feelings we don’t want to face and we call out for an interpreter who will remove the sting of the dream and soothe us. One can find this not only in the rabbinic project but in the Freudian project, which says that the real meaning of the dream is hidden. But in my view the real meaning of the dream is right on the surface. You once dreamed of an enormous book that was keeping you from writing. I walk into my study and I have this feeling I’m going to write something. But in front of the computer monitor is this very large blue book with the letters “K de G” on the cover. The author is the Rabbi K de G, which seems to stand for “Kamenetz on Genesis.” The book reads from back to front and it appears to be a commentary on Genesis. As the dream ends, I’m thumbing through the pages from back to front and have completely missed the fact that behind the book, at a distance, was my father who had given it to me. So the problem wasn’t so much that this holy book was keeping you from writing, but that it was standing between you and your father? The book was a gift from my father that could have brought me closer to him. A few years ago I had a dream where my house is falling down and I just call my dad and ask for help. And he comes with a bunch of painters and carpenters and suddenly the house is repaired. It was just the first in a series of dreams that helped to lead me closer to him. One of the great gifts for me was to have this different relationship with my father in the last years of his life. And what was coming between you and your father in waking life? My pride. There’s another dream where we’re sitting at a kind of Talmud study. My father knows what a certain word means and I don’t. But I don't ask him; I think I can figure it all out for myself. I don’t want to be the vulnerable son who needs help. But at a deeper level, this was not just about my relationship to my father, but about my relationship to the Father. You hear people talk that way in church, but not as often in synagogue. My answer would be two words: Avinu Malkeinu. Our Father, our King. Obviously Jesus said stuff like that because he also went to Rosh Hashanah services. There’s a whole Yiddish tradition of referring to God as tateynu, as “dear Father.” Our ancestors were very comfortable with the idea that God was a father and a king and a shepherd. But now if we have an emotional relationship to God, that’s immediately seen as goyish. We have drained the feeling level out of our liturgy and then we wonder why people can’t connect. They’re not just words. If God is a father, then I must be like a child. So how does God appear to you in your dreams? At the end of the book, I describe a dream where an orphan boy is being visited by his father. The father shows him his hand and says, “My hand is the same as yours.” Then the father leaves and the boy starts sobbing and looks in the mirror. And he’s me: I see my face. That sadness of having lost the Father, in this case not my father but the Father, that yearning to reconnect, not to be an orphan but to be his son—that’s the quest. It’s rather like what Rabbi Nachman said: You have to connect to God from your broken heart. The dream reawakened the feeling of loss, the pain of the separation from God. It’s a tremendous gift to feel that. You’ve been studying under Marc Bregman, a self-styled "dreamworker" in Vermont. Marc Bregman grew up as a Jewish kid in Philadelphia in a kind of anti-Semitic environment. He had a strict Jewish father and he rebelled in the 1960s. After he moved to Vermont he was working in the post office by day and seeing clients about their dreams at night. He’s certainly not a traditional Jew or even a nontraditional one. But I know that he is a man of God. And you have your own clients now. How do you work with their dreams? We meet once a week for an hour. We try to find the feelings in the dream, the belly button, as Marc calls it. Then we have homework, which is to visualize a moment from one of the dreams that needs change. There’s a rhythm back and forth from night dream to daydream and from daydream to actual life. Usually people come with a problem they’re trying to wrestle with but the dreams often point to some underlying predicament. It could be other people’s expectations. It could be family obligations, guilt, or a sense of duty. We just keep going deeper and over time there’s a shift. The dream becomes a live rehearsal. The changes you make in dreams can change how you behave. In what sense is this approach to dreams Jewish? When you’re taking a dream seriously it becomes a spiritual practice. How does that connect to what’s offered by this tradition we belong to where we have Torah and commentary and rabbinic authority and services and holidays and all of that? We struggle with a feeling of loss of connection to God. Religion tries to give us intellectual or ritual answers. People often outsource their spiritual struggles to the experts. Hence the tremendous pressure on rabbinic figures in our community. If we don’t have a personal feeling of a quest, at least if some of us don’t, then it makes the rabbi’s job very, very hard. Could you have understood your dreams without coming to them from a Jewish angle? It seemed necessary for me to go through the books, to go through Genesis, to go through the rabbis. And yet it’s true that having done that, it no longer seems quite as relevant. You can find the gift of the dream without Genesis. But it’s promised there. You had a series of dreams in which men kept trying to feed you meat. I had alternated between various dietary restrictions from semi-kosher to vegetarian and wasn’t too faithful to any of them. And all of a sudden these guys are showing up in my dreams serving meat. It started as hors d’oeuvres and ended with giant hunks of beef thrown on a grill by bare-chested Mexican chefs. It was obvious that these were good guys and that they were challenging me with a kind of a male generosity of spirit. What did you dream last night? Recently I dreamed I woke up and went to the window. I looked outside and the ground was covered with snow and I felt such joy. It took me back to being a kid in Baltimore thinking, I’m going to spend the whole day playing and I won't have to go to school. You worry and you plan, you try to make yourself happy, you try to make other people happy and then the snow just falls, you know? It falls on its own. Jascha Hoffman is on the editorial staff of The New York Review of Books.

Shortcomings

Thu, 06 Dec 2007 03:58:17 +0000

Under the dust jacket of Adrian Tomine's first graphic novel, "Shortcomings," printed along the bottom edge of the front cover, lies a ruler. It's a gentle nod to a recurring joke that reveals the insecurities of the book's main character, Ben Tanaka, a chubby, grouchy movie theater manager recently abandoned by his girlfriend. At one point, as he is considering dating a lesbian in the hopes that she'll be less "size-conscious," he repeats a riddle he heard in college: "What's the main difference between Asian and Caucasian men? ... The Cauc." Stereotypes aside, Tomine must also be feeling his own pressure to measure up. As a teenager in Sacramento, Calif., he began to hand-distribute his "Optic Nerve" series of comics about young Bay Area loners. Over time, after he moved to Berkeley to major in English, and as the issues of "Optic Nerve" were collected in the books "Sleepwalk" and "Summer Blonde," the stories grew longer and more subtle. The wait for the next issue has been getting longer every year, perhaps because Tomine's exacting standards keep getting higher. This new graphic novel -- Tomine's first -- would seem to mark his arrival as a peer of the great cartoonists of Generation X, such as Daniel Clowes and the Hernandez brothers. His publisher has printed an unprecedented first run of 25,000 copies and the book has been acclaimed by novelists such as Junot Díaz and Jonathan Lethem. (The latter has called Tomine's work "as deceptively relaxed and perfect as a comic book gets.") If the critics are to be believed, Tomine's small lonely moments are destined to stand with those of Raymond Carver and Alice Munro. The reigning mood of his work is a sort of detached longing. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his single-panel illustrations. For instance, a cover he drew for the New Yorker shows a clean-cut young man on the subway who locks eyes with a stunning blonde reading the same book on a passing train. The moment is both detached and intimate, mundane and yet somehow heartbreaking: You could imagine him just sighing and going back to reading -- or madly scouring the city for her. Many of Tomine's characters are, in fact, ordinary people who find themselves turning into stalkers and creeps. In the title story of "Summer Blonde," for example, a timid man begins to follow a girl he meets in a greeting card store and unthinkingly gives away one of her closest secrets. In "Hawaiian Getaway," another story from that collection, a lonely Chinese-American woman unintentionally meets a nice white boy while making a prank call, then invites him to her grandmother's funeral. Like most of Tomine's vignettes of love-starved Gen-Xers, the charm of these stories lies in their subdued tone and bittersweet endings, which often hold open a slim chance of redemption. "Shortcomings," which binds together three recent issues of "Optic Nerve" that tell a single continuous story, is Tomine's most ambitious work by far. Its length is something of an obstacle, as moments that might have been charming in a shorter story seem to hold back the plot. It deals with race and sex in a way that is more playful and explicit than anything Tomine has done before. Compared to earlier work that was more brooding, the tone is light, with plenty of allusive banter and satire. But it is also a real tragedy whose central character seems intent on standing by as his life falls apart. Ben Tanaka, a 30-year-old movie theater manager in Berkeley, treats his girlfriend Miko poorly, alternating between bitter criticism and sullen withdrawal. After she discovers his all-white porn stash, Miko suggests they "take some time off" and moves to New York City. Ben is crushed but in time he begins to pursue a series of blondes. Following a failed attempt to kiss the artsy punk girl who takes tickets at his movie theater, he has a brief affair with a bisexual graduate student who soon dumps him with the sendoff, "I could be totally brutally honest about why I'm doing this, but I'm going to restrain myself because I'm not sure you'd ever recover." Shaken, Ben flies to New York City, where, spying on his own girlfriend, he discovers that she has been sleeping with a white man. Tomine has said that there was a time when he felt that to avoid being seen as a crusading Asian cartoonist he had to "make race a non-issue and deny its impact on life." Clearly this period is now over: Nearly every page of the novel deals with an anxiety specific to his own brand of ambivalently Asian Gen-Xers, or, as Tomine calls them, "characters that happen to be Asian." At the outset, Ben repeatedly denies that being Japanese means anything to him. But he is conflicted about his own assimilated status: He squirms when confronted with spoken Korean and Japanese, rendered in a series of panels that will be as unintelligible to most readers as they are to Ben. As should be clear from his dating patterns, Ben clings to an obvious double standard: It's fine for Asian guys to hit on blondes, but white boys had better stay away from those helpless Asian girls -- especially his own Japanese girlfriend. This kind of double-think is not Ben's only shortcoming: He is a bitter narcissist with, as his own girlfriend points out, "weird self-hatred issues," "relentless negativity" and a pathological fear of change. Tomine depicts these flaws almost too faithfully in Ben's consistently sullen expression, which stands out all the more among the other characters' precisely inflected faces. Ben does have a half-redeeming friendship with Alice, a serial-dating Korean dyke who is something of a narcissist and a hypocrite herself. And he has his tender moments. But he seems consistently clueless about his many flaws. After a hundred pages with such a grating character, the reader may feel pushed beyond pity to a sort of morbid curiosity. Although sour protagonists are not new to comic books or literary fiction, it is still a serious choice to put one at the center of a graphic novel; after all, he's there in nearly every panel staring the reader down. In response to the piles of letters he has received complaining about Ben, Tomine has written that while he is "disappointed if someone hates the book because they hate the character, I also feel somewhat gratified." This suggests that Tomine knows exactly how abrasive he has made Ben, and even that he relishes the chance to confront us with him. In the end, Tomine is such a skillful cartoonist that it doesn't really matter how you feel about his characters. His panels are exceptionally easy to read, combining the precision of line drawings with the gentle pacing of art-house film. The facial expressions and gestures are subtle, and they stand out against the storefronts of Berkeley and Brooklyn, N.Y., which he renders with uncanny fidelity, down to the old light fixtures of Chinese restaurants that have since been remodeled. His dialogue is sharp and true whether he's portraying a squabble in a dive bar or the negotiations that precede a kiss. In this book there is also a strong element of visual satire, taking aim at politically correct Asian American cinema and American Apparel ads. And Tomine leaves a little room to breathe by inserting silent frames: While Ben is escorting Miko to her plane, for example, we see only a haunting series of aerial views of his empty car in the parking lot. Despite all the technique involved, the story itself does feel a little slow, perhaps because Tomine is not yet fully comfortable piecing together his vignettes into a full-scale plot. And it takes some patience on the part of the reader to stay with Ben to the bitter end. But the book is so pleasurable and ambitious that these come across as minor shortcomings. -- By Jascha Hoffman

Science in Arabic

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 20:28:26 +0000

Hundreds of science books, including classics by Isaac Newton and Stephen Hawking, will be translated into Arabic for the first time. The ambitious plan by a non-profit group in Abu Dhabi has the backing of the Crown prince and funding from the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage. The project, called Kalima (“word” in Arabic), is an attempt to address the fact that, although there are more than a quarter of a billion Arabic speakers worldwide, only a few hundred books are translated into Arabic each year. The group is working with more than 20 publishers throughout the Arab world. It plans to help them acquire, translate, publish and distribute about 100 books in Arabic every year. Around a quarter of these will be science titles. “There is a particularly large gap in the Arab library of books in the natural-science category,” says Karim Nagy, the Egyptian entrepreneur and book collector who directs the project. “We have therefore purposely placed a heavier weighting on it.” One book already translated is A Briefer History of Time , Stephen Hawking's revision of his best-seller (see right). Next year, Kalima will translate books by Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Max Planck and Richard Feynman into Arabic, and prepare Arabic versions of recent works by Roger Penrose, Steven Weinberg and Freeman Dyson. Other scientists to be translated include Stephen Jay Gould, Stephen Wolfram and James Watson. Eventually, Nagy hopes also to begin translating Arabic books into English and other languages.

Criminal Element

Sun, 21 Oct 2007 16:50:11 +0000

Has the Clean Air Act done more to fight crime than any other policy in American history? That is the claim of a new environmental theory of criminal behavior. In the early 1990s, a surge in the number of teenagers threatened a crime wave of unprecedented proportions. But to the surprise of some experts, crime fell steadily instead. Many explanations have been offered in hindsight, including economic growth, the expansion of police forces, the rise of prison populations and the end of the crack epidemic. But no one knows exactly why crime declined so steeply. The answer, according to Jessica Wolpaw Reyes, an economist at Amherst College, lies in the cleanup of a toxic chemical that affected nearly everyone in the United States for most of the last century. After moving out of an old townhouse in Boston when her first child was born in 2000, Reyes started looking into the effects of lead poisoning. She learned that even low levels of lead can cause brain damage that makes children less intelligent and, in some cases, more impulsive and aggressive. She also discovered that the main source of lead in the air and water had not been paint but rather leaded gasoline — until it was phased out in the 1970s and ’80s by the Clean Air Act, which took blood levels of lead for all Americans down to a fraction of what they had been. “Putting the two together,” she says, “it seemed that this big change in people’s exposure to lead might have led to some big changes in behavior.” Reyes found that the rise and fall of lead-exposure rates seemed to match the arc of violent crime, but with a 20-year lag — just long enough for children exposed to the highest levels of lead in 1973 to reach their most violence-prone years in the early ’90s, when crime rates hit their peak. Such a correlation does not prove that lead had any effect on crime levels. But in an article published this month in the B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis and Policy, Reyes uses small variations in the lead content of gasoline from state to state to strengthen her argument. If other possible sources of crime like beer consumption and unemployment had remained constant, she estimates, the switch to unleaded gas alone would have caused the rate of violent crime to fall by more than half over the 1990s. If lead poisoning is a factor in the development of criminal behavior, then countries that didn’t switch to unleaded fuel until the 1980s, like Britain and Australia, should soon see a dip in crime as the last lead-damaged children outgrow their most violent years. According to a comparison of nine countries published this year by Rick Nevin in the journal Environmental Research, crime rates around the world are just starting to respond to the removal of lead from gasoline and paint. “It really does sound like a bad science-fiction plot,” says Nevin, a senior adviser to the National Center for Healthy Housing. “The idea that a society could have systematically poisoned its youngest children with the same neurotoxins in two different ways over the same century is almost impossible to believe.” The magnitude of these claims has been met with a fair amount of skepticism. Jeffrey Miron, a Harvard economist, wonders how lead could have had such a strong effect on violent crime while, according to Reyes, it showed almost no effect on property crimes like theft. He also doubts that the hypothesis could explain the plunge in the U.S. murder rate from the 1930s through the 1950s. “I certainly think it’s a reasonable exercise,” Miron says. “We just have to be appropriately suspicious of how much you can actually show.” The theory will be put to the test as children grow up in Indonesia, Venezuela and sub-Saharan Africa, where leaded gasoline has just recently been phased out. Meanwhile, the list of countries that still use lead in gas — Afghanistan, Serbia and Iraq, as well as much of North Africa and Central Asia — does not rule out a connection with violence. No matter how suggestive the economists’ data, it takes a doctor to show that some of the people most damaged by lead are out there breaking the law. Herbert Needleman, the University of Pittsburgh psychiatrist and pediatrician whose work helped persuade the government to ban lead in the 1970s, recently studied a sample of juvenile delinquents in Pittsburgh; the group had significantly more lead in their bones than their peers. And lead may not be the only source of damage. The National Children’s Study will soon begin to track more than 100,000 children to determine the effects of exposure to common pesticides, among other chemicals. Jascha Hoffman is on the staff of The New York Review of Books.

Louder Than Words

Sun, 26 Aug 2007 04:28:37 +0000

THE SONG BEFORE IT IS SUNG By Justin Cartwright. 276 pp. $24.95. Bloomsbury. In July 1944, a member of the German resistance slipped a briefcase of explosives under Hitler's table as part of a conspiracy to take down the Third Reich. The bomb went off, but someone had unwittingly edged the briefcase aside and Hitler of course survived. The conspirators were arrested, their failure confirming Hitler's belief that he had been chosen to make history. Among those rounded up was the German lawyer and aristocrat Adam von Trott, who as a Rhodes Scholar in prewar Oxford had been a friend of the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin. Their troubled friendship is the basis for Justin Cartwright's ninth novel, a meditation on loyalty and fate that spans the 20th century. In his reimagining, the young German aristocrat, here named Axel von Gottberg, arrives in Oxford believing that history has chosen him to save his country from the Nazis. The Berlin character, named Elya Mendel, is wary of his friend's ambitions. We learn how a rift opened between them through the present-day perspective of Conrad Senior, a former student of Mendel's whose obsessive efforts to write a book about the friendship drive his wife from the house and bring him to the verge of an early midlife crisis. The novel gets its momentum from a rapid alternation between the present and the past: as Conrad's marriage unravels, he learns how the Oxford friendship soured in the years leading up to World War II. Conrad travels to Jerusalem to see the hotel where Mendel first slept with a woman he later lost to his German friend, but soon learns that the real breach was over politics. In 1934, von Gottberg claimed in a letter to a British newspaper that Jews were receiving equal treatment in the Hamburg courts, and Mendel was furious. On the eve of war von Gottberg returned to Oxford arguing that Britain should negotiate with Hitler - "There is another Germany, Elya ... a decent, a noble Germany" - and Mendel concluded that his friend was dangerously deluded. Conrad, who knows that these statements may have been a calculated part of von Gottberg's plan for a coup, can't help feeling that Mendel's judgment was too severe. He imagines their last meeting in Oxford: "I have had to make compromises ... but I am not confused," the young conspirator says. Later, over dinner, Mendel quotes Turgenev, saying that while he is fascinated by radicals he could never be one: "I have no capacity for action. All I can do is talk." But this is not strictly true. Mendel, like Isaiah Berlin, goes on to work closely with British and American intelligence during the war. In the end, Mendel's skepticism about his German friend may have contributed to the conspirators' failure to get Allied support. Cartwright's title refers to a question posed by the Russian philosopher Alexander Herzen, Berlin's favorite thinker: "Where is the song before it is sung?" The answer, Berlin wrote, was nowhere: people are free to make their own choices and history unfolds without a plan. It speaks to Cartwright's skill that even though it is clear from the beginning that our German aristocrat will be hanged when the plot fails, we still hope he might by some miracle survive. After Conrad finally uncovers gruesome proof of the execution in the form of a reel of film shot by a Jewish cameraman, he is paralyzed with horror, the death "inhabiting not just his mind, but his skin and his clothes." As he slips back into his old routine at Oxford and writes his book, however, Conrad comes to accept, as readers also must, that there will be no answers from the dead. Jascha Hoffman is on the editorial staff of The New York Review of Books.

Sugar and Spice

Sun, 13 May 2007 18:32:56 +0000

HOW I BECAME A NUN
By César Aira.
Translated by Chris Andrews. 117 pp. New Directions.
Paper, $13.95. César Aira is a 6-year-old Argentine girl whose first taste of strawberry ice cream is tainted with cyanide. “I was a devoted daughter,” she says as she lifts the spoon to her lips. “Dad could do no wrong in my eyes.” After she retches, though, her father flies into a rage and murders the ice cream vendor, and the child collapses into a monthlong toxic delirium. She wakes in a hospital bed to a doctor who asks, “And how are we today, young Master César?” Lucky to have been one of the survivors of an unexplained wave of food poisoning, César still has one big, though unstated, problem: she is a precocious little girl trapped in the body of a boy. So begins this strange novella by the Argentine writer César Aira. He has written more than 30 books, including a study of Edward Lear and a novel about a group of writers who decide to clone Carlos Fuentes, and has translated Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Raymond Chandler. Until now only two of his novels had been translated into English, both tales of Europeans drawn into strange quests in 19th-century Argentina. The most recent was “An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter,” in which a German artist is struck by lightning and dragged face-down across the pampas by his horse. Aira’s sharp eye and supple imagination follow the artist after his accident, as he crosses the continent sketching gauchos and Indians, his mangled face hidden behind a black veil. Despite the title, no veils or vows are taken in “How I Became a Nun.” Instead, Aira draws on a tradition of picaresque novels in Spanish that extends back to the 16th century. But he subverts the genre by allowing his narrator to escape from her daily life into a series of grandiose reveries. When she visits her father in prison, César crawls through a hole in the wall, imagining that “each successive incident, right from the start, from the moment I tasted the strawberry ice cream, had been leading me to this crowning moment, preparing me to be the angel, the guardian angel of all the criminals, the thieves and murderers.” When a word she deciphers on the wall of the boys’ bathroom gets her in trouble at school, she retreats to the attic to play teacher to a roomful of imaginary dyslexic children, then becomes her own pupil by giving herself minute instructions to accompany every waking act: “How to manipulate cutlery, how to put on one’s trousers, how to swallow saliva.” These good works in the privacy of her own mind are the closest César comes to becoming a nun. In real life, however, she is a compulsive liar. She lies to the doctor who treats her for cyanide poisoning. She humiliates her mother on a public bus by asking, loudly and repeatedly, whether her father is dead when she knows he is not. Then she lets the reader in on the secret to lying well: “Pretend convincingly not to know certain things.” This habit of omission may be how she convinces herself that she is really a girl, although it’s not entirely clear that she’s deceiving herself at all. Why can’t César face the truth? The closest she comes to an answer is when she says that after the poisoning “something had broken inside me, a valve, the little safety device that used to allow me to switch levels,” presumably between fantasy and reality. But she is also trying to escape from a body of the wrong sex and from a sense of guilt, however misplaced, over the ice cream vendor’s fate. On another level, though, César’s ambitious delusions seem imposed by the author. Despite Chris Andrews’s clear translation, Aira’s prose seems hesitant, his imaginative flights clipped by the 6-year-old mind he is trying to inhabit. As a result, these perplexing episodes don’t quite add up to a credible story. But Aira does evoke a sense of childhood that is chilling and bittersweet — like a poisoned cone of strawberry ice cream. Jascha Hoffman is on the staff of The New York Review of Books.

Comparative Literature

Sun, 15 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Translation by the numbers, as featured on the back page of the New York Times Book Review. [full text][pdf].

(Sources: Andrew Grabois, Chad Post.)