Happy holidays

I've been home for Thanksgiving, which has been utter bliss. The food is delicious, the house is so nice, and my family is wonderful! The only noteworthy occurrence has been:

The setting: Thanksgiving evening, the extended family sitting around and pretending to watch some football game on Fox. Fox apparently has this new CGI robot representing the NFL. It looks like this:



My mother: Do you think that's animated, or a real person in a suit?
Rachel: It's animated.
My grandfather: Oh, it's a real person in there.
Rachel: It's definitely animated.
My grandfather: He's a negro.
[silence]
My mother: How can you tell?
My grandfather: The way he moves! [sagely]
[general pandemonium]

The look on my sister's face at this moment can best be described with an emoticon:

Welcome to the holidays at my house!

"Music is, fundamentally, the art of feeling."

Yesterday, I had one of those once-in-a-lifetime experiences that happen surprisingly, delightfully often here.

My beloved orchestra, the Bach Society Orchestra (a.k.a. BACHSOC), played John Adams's "The Wound-Dresser," a setting of a Walt Whitman poem for baritone and orchestra. Then, Professor Helen Vendler, a scholar of poetry, President Drew Faust, a Civil War historian (and president of our glorious university, and object of my undying love), and John Adams himself oh my god had a casual panel discussion about the piece.

John Adams is possibly the most significant living American composer. His music is just transcendent--if you've heard it, you'll know when I mean when I say it can be like drinking light. It is amazing. I'd actually never listened to Adams before this year (ah, that's an embarrassing revelation), but I've been on something of a binge lately, and he has definitely rocketed up to my twentieth century top ten list.

On a more personal note, he conducted BachSoc back in the day when my father played clarinet in it, and apparently they knew each other and played chamber music together. Incredible!

John Adams impressed me a great deal. His commentary on the piece when he coached us during the dress rehearsal cut right to the heart of the musicality, his speech was peppered with metaphors--I love finding out the images composers use to visualize their music. He spoke just brilliantly on a dozen different things--choosing which verses of a poem to set, the meaning of the vernacular in literature and music, technology in music, etc etc etc...

One of the coolest things I learned is that when he sets a text, he will record himself speaking the line and then consider the rhythm and intonation in natural spoken American English when he puts it to music.

The title of this post is his--and I think it is quite admirable for a man who is obviously so deeply intellectual about music to say that it is "the art of feeling."

I think this reflects his commitment to musically coherent music. I'm not at all one of those bitter classicists who whines about this newfangled modern music what with its minimalism and its atonality and why don't any of these whippersnappers write tunes anymore (and it's not like John Adams is known for his hummable melodies, anyway). So I don't at all believe that music has to be tonal and melodic and pretty to be good. But I do think, as I am led to believe John Adams probably does, that the purpose of music is to stimulate the emotions.

It's notable, I think, that music is unique among art forms for actually being incapable of communicating ideas. (I assume this is somehow a controversial statement, and it is definitely not my own thought--I don't remember where I read it, though...) While adding words or accompanying information certainly allows music to communicate ideas (see: opera), music itself says nothing. You can't teach facts or tell a story through music. Music isn't even really about anything.

If we believe that, then I think we have no choice but to declare music "the art of feeling." Because even without words or historical context, the "Ode to Joy" from Beethoven's 9th Symphony and and the "Dies Irae" from Mozart's Requiem (please excuse the cliché examples) still somehow communicate things that are very different to us. I wish I could speak with some real understanding about this, but I am fundamentally ignorant about music--I can just say that to me, music that succeeds in causing its audience (even an audience as ignorant as I am) to feel is good music.

P.S.: All countless millions of you who asked me, "John Adams, the president?" are philistines and uncultured rubes, so there! (I am mostly kidding. Mostly.)

The Inner Life of the Cell

A series of exams + proposals + thesis deadlines (none of which I have fulfilled in a satisfactory manner) has left me with very little time on my hands. So here is a cop-out post: a short video on the inner life of the cell, from the Department of Mollecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard.

I won't write anything here about the miracle that is life, but I doubt I need to. Watching the clip gives me a little perspective: alright, so I have a thesis deadline that's overdue, but at least my RNA and, consequently, all the proteins in my body, self-assemble. What a relief I don't have to do both.

In English

"In English, we have this expression: 'It's all Greek to me.' Do you know what that means? It means I don't understand what I'm looking at."


I was talking to my supervisor at the library this past Thursday, and we were trying to figure out how to deal with spine labels for a series of Chinese books. She wanted me to translate a few titles from their English transliteration back to the original Chinese, no big deal. In the process, she made a joke about the total incomprehensibility of Chinese characters to her, resulting in the above quote. So I find myself in the bizarre situation of sitting there, nodding my head and trying to contort my face into a look of dawning comprehension, as my supervisor slowly explains (the way one might explain something to the very young) a basic idiom in a language I have long considered my native tongue.

Thank you, very much, for teaching me the mysterious ways of your language. Bilingualism is a rare thing indeed if you cannot grasp the concept that there may not be an exclusive one-to-one correspondence between my ethnic appearance and the languages I speak.

Texas

America is a pretty big place, and every corner of this big place has staked out its identity. Sometimes, being from Texas on the East Coast feels like a burden. There is a hint of the self-righteous in New England liberalism: at the same time it condemns death penalties, it also, by implication, condemns the people of a state that makes use of the death penalty seemingly without care. A classmate once told me that Texas is an awful place, and he doesn't need to visit it to know this certainty.

A whole place (and all its people) written off because of ideology that isn't even shared by all? Laaaaaaame. It disappoints me that my peer would say such a thing; it seems so contrary to the spirit of inquiry that brought us here in the first place.

The longer I am away from home, the more I miss it. Texas is a contrast to New England in many ways. The weather is certainly less moody; the people are incredibly friendly and warm. Doors are consistently held open for me; men address me as "ma'am" (which makes me giggle a little), and women call me "hun." Here, I sometimes get doors that shut in my face, and pedestrians passing each other avoid making eye contact.

I realize that I am making sweeping generalizations, but I would like to say that there is much about my home that is valuable. To this end, I am appending a post I wrote for the 60th JASC AEC blog earlier in the year:

+ + + +


I feel that Texas has an undeservedly bad rap. I'm not saying that Texas is a money-bush or something equally awesome. It's just that people think it's really, really awful. To wit: I was at my professor's, feeling full of nerves and trying to impress Her Highness. Her guests ask me where I'm from, and when I reply "Texas", they start laughing! When I failed to join in their laughter ("Yeah, you're right, it IS funny that I'm from the ass-end of America!"), they reluctantly stopped.

I'm very fond of Texas, though. I like the overabundance of Ford F-150s on the road. I like the generous cordiality that is so very much a part of the place. And I like that the "In Texas, we like it BIG" joke refers to everything from steaks to anatomical parts. The list goes on. More specifically, however, the Texas landscape can be breathtaking.

Over winter break, we packed ourselves up into an SUV and went down to Big Bend National Park, perched on Texas' southwestern border with Mexico. And this is what we saw:


I felt oddly inspired. It's difficult to feel unhappy or deeply burdened in a place that exited long before me and will continue to be here, unchanged, long after. Encounters with nature on a grand scale always leave me with a diminished sense of self-importance.


On this glorious camping trip, I also:

1) slept in a tent in below-freezing weather. My god I haven't gone to sleep whimpering and full of tears since I was sixteen, when my life was powered by teenage angst.

2) called 911 because we were followed by an aggressive man, who kept up an utterly unnecessary commentary on his ability to "kick ass" as he tailed us in his truck. A breathtakingly frightful span of time later, we lost him. I was gratified to note that he had a California license plate. Not Texan, then.

3) drove for hours and hours on a road that doesn't end. Kerouac, you crazy drug fiend, I get you.

My intellectual life

In the course of my rigorous thesis research, I came upon a rare film that, I think, perfectly expresses my current intellectual state:



MY BRAIN HURTS
NO NO NO MY BRAIN IN MY HEAD
GET BETTER BRAIN

DC!

I am currently in our nation's capital, meeting with President-elect Barack Obama...


...and eating tacos with him. Mmm, delicious tacos.

No, I kid, although President-elect Obama is never far from my mind, because I'm a "cock-eyed optimist," in the immortal words of Rogers and Hammerstein, and I go all weak in the knees over the prospect of a president whose policies aren't a slap in the face to all I hold dear. Hurray!

Actually, I'm in DC for the JASC fall meeting awesome amazing great so cool!

Because of various transportation difficulties (from hell's heart I stab at thee, Delta Airlines!!!), I arrived a full sixteen hours later than I should have. While this was enormously terrible in every way and a huge waste of time for me and others, it had the advantage of allowing my favorite pastime--clueless Rachel wandering!

But Rachel, most of your time is spent in clueless wandering! How is this any different?

I will tell you!

I am sessile. I am a deeply rooted plant. I walk the same paths every day; I stay in my room, my building, and my city. This is partly by choice and partly by habit, but either way, I end up spending most of my time in one place. This feeds my (usually unfulfilled) wanderlust.

So when I arrived in DC, without a map, without even the vaguest knowledge of the layout of the city or its subway, I was filled with totally childish glee. I loved figuring out how the ticket machines in the metro worked--and the metro stations in DC are so gorgeous and modernist and freaky--wandering around and figuring out the layout of the streets--tracking down some wifi to make this post--awesome, all of it.

Here's to a weekend of adventure!

The City

"Beneath the haze stirred up by the winds, the urban island, a sea in the middle of the sea, lifts up the skyscrapers over Wall Street, sinks down at Greenwich, then rises again to the crests of Midtown, quietly passes over Central Park and finally undulates off into the distance beyond Harlem. A wave of verticals. its agitation is momentarily arrested by vision. The gigantic mass is immobilized before the eyes. It is transformed into a texturology in which extremes coincide -- extremes of ambition and degradation, brutal oppositions of races and styles, contrasts between yesterday's buildings, already transformed into trash cans, and today's urban irruptions that block out its space. Unlike Rome, new York has never learned the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts. Its present invents itself, from hour to hour, in the act of throwing away its previous accomplishments and challenging the future. A city composed of praoxysmal places in monumental reliefs. The spectator can read in it a universe that is constantly exploding."

-- Michel de Certeau, "Walking in the City", The Practice of Everyday Life



I know people who profess a love for New York as if the city were an intimate friend. And in many ways, the city has become The City, both animated and personified. I hesitate to cite Sex and the City -- because, seriously, how obvious and tired an example is that -- but the show has made New York into a glamorous persona of its own. Who is Carrie Bradshaw, or indeed any of the ladies, without the beautiful, intimidating, and Sphinx-like background of The City?


What I do think is amazing is the ways we have come to conceptualize urban space. City brings to my mind grand skylines, and some cities have come to be defined by the peculiar features of their horizon: Seattle's Space Needle, Dallas' Reunion Tower, New York's World Trade Center (which is as evocative in its absence as it was in its presence). This view of the city (what Michel de Certeau would term "god's gaze") is so alluring that painters in the Middle Ages began depicting their urban spaces from this perspective even though the means of realizing the vantage-from-on-high -- namely, skyscrapers -- did not then exist. A specific subgenre of impressionist paintings, which sought to depict the realities of urban life, often adopted a bird's eye perspective so that it could reveal, in one sweep, all the motion and anonymity of city life (shown Claude Monet's Boulevard des Capucines, 1873). But this is not how we actually experience the city: in our daily lives, we more often walk the alleys of the city than see its peaks. I'd like to think that the expansive horizon of the city is so attractive not because we are voyeurs looking for an image of other people's lives, but because we are looking for a reflection of our own, and perhaps a confirmation that we are, happily and inescapably, a part of The City.

Optimism, a rhapsody

A Newsweek article, "This is Your Brain on Optimism," from almost exactly a year ago links optimism to better physical health. A UPenn research interviewed by Newsweek offers two possibilities: 1) optimists take better care of their health since they believe in the potential positive outcome, or 2) optimists are more likable and build better social networks, which has been linked to longevity. The article concludes that optimism is a fundamental brain pattern and possibly an evolutionary survival strategy.


I wonder to what extent optimism is a biologically determined trait, and to what extent it is shaped by our experiences. Is trauma more likely to create or destroy optimism? Or perhaps the answer depends on the circumstances surrounding the trauma? If life does tend to be a self-fulfilling prophecy (on both ends, for the pessimistic as well as the optimistic), then research on how to facilitate optimism -- how to cultivate hope -- may have profound socio-economic impacts.

It would also make me more likable (one of my long-standing dreams is to have infinite charisma), more able to build social networks, and live longer. Benefits all around!

Atrophy

Upon entering college, I was fairly convinced I wanted to study economics, and not just the fuzzy track of basic theory, but the kind that at least tried to be mathematically rigorous. So, in my freshman year, I took Math 21a. Multivariable Calculus.

Here are four True/False questions (out of a total of 20) on my first hourly exam, in October 2006:

A line intersects a hyperbolic paraboloid always in 2 distinct points.

1. There is a quadric surface, each of whose intersections with the coordinate planes is either an ellipse or a parabola.
2. The level curves f(x, y) = 1 and f(x, y) = 2 of a smooth function f never intersect.
3. The equation x^2 + y^2 − z^2 = −1 defines a one-sheeted hyperboloid.

Then a series of short answer questions, such as:

Imagine the planet Earth as the unit sphere in 3D space centered at the origin. An asteroid is approaching from the point P = (0, 4, 3) along the path ~r(t) = ((4 − t) sin(t), (4 − t) cos(t), 3 − t).

a) When and where will it first hit the Earth?
b) What velocity will it have at the impact?


I went to office hours all the time and developed nervous habits; after each exam, I exited the auditorium with both a diminished sense of self and ragged nails. Nonetheless, I'm pretty sure that I could answer at least half the T/F questions on sight back then. When I look at the questions now, my mind can't even glean meaning from the scattered symbols. One-sheeted hyperboloid? Quadric surface? Re-enacting Armageddon?

This was three years ago. I don't think I will ever need this knowledge again, though my ego would love it if I could still juggle x, y, and z axes and recognize an elliptic paraboloid just from its function. What bugs me is that I so easily lost not just a formula but an entire body of knowledge. And I notice that after each summer, I read less quickly, communicate less smoothly, process ideas with less acuity. Every skill atrophies with disuse, but I am unaccustomed to thinking of thinking as a skill. So much of who we are seems to reside in our consciousness, which includes our ability to comprehend calculus but also encompasses the whole range of beliefs, responses, and impulses that accompany us through the day and makes us us (to invoke Descartes in a totally irresponsible way).

It's midterm season, so I see copies of old Math 21a hourlies -- now posted as practice exams -- floating around the computer lab. And I am reminded that what I take for granted is not a constant. After all, I've read Flowers for Algernon.

And this too shall pass

Smadar Lavie wrote an ethnography of Bedouins set in southern Sinai. In this particular episode, he is with the Bedouins in their tents, telling stories, joking, making fun of tourists, complaining about military rule, and also listening to the Arabic version of BBC World Service.


The Ghalid continues, "The Greed were here nd left behind the Monastery, the Turks were here and left behind the Castle, and the British drew maps, and the Egyptians brought the Russian army (and a few oil wells), and the Israelis brought the Americans who made the mountains into movies, and tourists from France and Japan, and scuba divers from Sweden and Australia, and, trust Allah to save you from the devil, we Mzeina are nothing but pawns in the hands of them all. We are like pebbles [...]"

-- Smadar Lavie, The Poetics of Military Occupation


The geopolitics of change, which even nomadic peoples do not escape. In the end, we outlast; time is the survival strategy of even the passive.