Tendencies

Seems like today should in some way be significant. I mean, it's the tenth day of the tenth month of the tenth year of the millennium - 10.10.10.

It can seem scarily portentous, like the alignment of the planets which, in 2012, is predicted by some to lead to the earth's being torn apart by chaotic gravitational struggles. Think the opening notes of Beethoven's Fifth: ten ten ten TEN.

It can seem final - how many AM radio stations are at 1010. Is it only New York's that's called "Ten Ten Wins"? What does that even mean?

Or it can just seem the reductio ad absurdam of our digital - meaning ten-fingered - existence. (In neither the Simpsons' Springfield it wouldn't matter; they dodged this bullet on 08.08.08.) That and the consequences of dating the birth of Christ when we did. (In neither Jewish nor Islamic calendars is it 10.10.10 either.)

In the end, my punning mind just hears an open-ended ellipsis. In Japanese (although in Japan it isn't 10.10.10 but 22.10.10) てんてんてん (ten ten ten) is how you say "dot dot dot."

...

ホトトギス

In the Brooklyn Botanic Garden (rapidly becoming a Saturday staple) today's great discovery. Behold... the Toad Lily (tricyrtis 'sinonome')!

This flower might strike you as at best an oddity, but it has great significance for me. You see, in Japan it is a rare and auspicious Fall flower, with the rather more interesting name (though still a mouthful) hototogisu. What's more, in its gawky way it provided entré to Japanese intellectual life for me.

Shortly after I arrived in Tokyo in 1992 for my year as a Japan Foundation-supported research fellow at Tokyo University, there happens to have been an article about this rare flower in the newspaper. I marveled at the flower's rather unbeautiful mug and stumbled over the name a few times; a Japanese friend taught me that the emphasis falls gently on the third syllable. The next day, in a little vase on the desk of the assistant of the Ethics Department, there was one. "Hööööee..." I said, "hototogisu deha nai ka?! [Isn't that ... hototogisu?]" Lucky for me, it was. And it was a big deal. Within an hour, the entire institute had heard about the strange American who knew the name of the hototogisu. In vain did I protest that this was the only flower name I knew in Japanese besides sakura - the damage was done, and I was in.


The best part about encountering this flower today was that it found me as I was walking with an old old friend and his wife. How old? We haven't seen each other since we were undergraduates at Oxford (he on junior year abroad from Carleton) in 1984-85. I think we've aged well!

Ethical calculus

Meet EthEl, an Ethical Eldercare robot of the Nao family - apparently the first machine ever programmed with "ethical principles." Her programmers describe their work in the new Scientific American. They are inspired by the "moral arithmetic" of Bentham and Mill (and not aware that someone might see Bentham and Mill themselves as inspired by machinery), despite its problems:

Most ethicists doubt [Hedonistic Act Utilitarianism] accounts for all the dimensions of ethical concern. For example, it has difficulty capturing justice considerations and can lead to an individual being sacrificed in the interests of the majority. But at least it demonstrates that a plausible ethical theory is, in principle, computable. (74)

Knowing this shortcoming, couldn't one just program EthEl with a "justice" principle? That's just what they did.

An ethical calculus has long been a dream, but Aristotle famously argued that the difficulty in ethical life isn't knowing principles but knowing how to apply them. Phroneisis (practical wisdom) is the pearl of great price, and only a very few people achieve it. Particular cases are unclear. (One might add that clear cases are of limited use. And, as the lawyers say, "hard cases make bad laws.") Pretty much the only way to learn is to find a phronimos and imitate him.

But EthEl and her ilk learn, and can presumably even share what they learn with each other. The article's illustration shows a more old-fashioned tin-man robot who somehow learns how to find the right balance of three principles: Do Good, Prevent Harm, Be Fair. EthEl seems to operate with an additional principle, which the authors call the Duty to Maintain Herself.

The principles they come up with have a distinguished history they don't name. Ulpian's basis of Roman Law was: neminem laedere [harm no one], suum cuique tribuere [to each his due], honeste vivere [live virtuously/piously]. The 17th century Natural Lawyers, whose thought forms the foundation of modern liberalism, condensed and amplified these as self-preservation and concern for others; from these the others were thought to flow. (Skeptics already then wondered if even putative concern for others didn't also flow from self-preservation.)

The authors describe the balancing of principles in a typical EthEl day:


They hope that EthEl will not only succeed in her work, but contribute to moral philosophy. They quote Daniel C. Dennett asserting that "AI makes philosophy honest." Perhaps they're right. Perhaps making a machine simulacrum of the human - ethics now, not intelligence - can bring us closer to understanding what makes us human (the first discover will surely be like that in the case of AI - our intelligence is fiercely difficult to replicate). Perhaps it can even make us better at being human. Who knows, maybe sharing our humanity with machines will make our ethics less mechanical.

Daily

I baked this - with the help of a food processor with a "Dough" function, and a baking stone. A tasty start! But I really want to learn how to make "Old World" sourdough rye breads, which are, unsurprisingly, much harder to pull off. (I know - I tried. Don't ask.) Wish me luck!

New York is

New York,
you know,
is water towers.






Can you see the 17 here, and the tip of the spire of Grace Church?
Oh, and reflections, like these hieroglyphs on Old St. Patrick's Cathedral.

Before the law

Figures flanking the broad entrance to the Brooklyn Supreme Court.

Kallenism

Got to participate in a panel discussion around Jewish studies themes tonight - I imagine most in the audience assumed I was Jewish too, which is a kind of privilege. I never claimed to be, but everyone else in the panel was, and I was the one enthusing about the glory of the University in Exile, swooning about Horace Kallen, and generally declaring the fruits of Jewish experience indispensable for understanding community, pluralism and identity.

À propos Kallen, I'm fascinated by the man, and puzzled that he's fallen out of the narrative of The New School. He was the only one of the founders to stay on long term. (Okay, so he was also a youngster, and they were approaching emeritus status; but still - he was here for fifty-four years!) His courses, notably the recurrent "Beauty and Use" and "Dominant Ideals," defined the New School's distinctive education for decades. When Kallen turned 65, Alvin Johnson (New School's founding president) described him as the soul of the school:

With the development of the institution, Kallen's position, which had at first seemed far off center, came to express more nearly than any other the real meaning and objectives of the New School.

By one of the happy chances that occur every six hundred years, the New School was able to set up a University in Exile, manned by scholars selected from the lists of those thrown out of their chairs by Hitler.
They were selected with a view to their development of creativeness, in the frame of the New School adult education organization. With their selection Kallen had much to do; but Kallenism had more to do with it. Kallenism is the principle that we live in a multiple world, multiple in national and racial characteristics, in art and letters, in religion and philosophy. It is the essential doctrine of Kallenism that out of multiplicity alone, multiplicity accepted with eager interest, can the creative process grow, in matters intellectual and in life itself.

Foreward to Freedom and Experience: Essays presented to Horace M. Kallen,
ed. Sidney Hook and Milton R. Konvitz (Ithaca and New York:
Cornell UP for The New School for Social Research, 1947), xii, xvi

(Not content to be in the shadow of his predecessor, the new president Bryn J. Hovde claimed to understand Kallen better: He is no lover is "isms," and the last thing in the world he hopes for is an "ism" of his own. (Postscript to Freedom and Experience, 331.))

Whether it was an ism or not, was Kallen's idea something he'd have wanted to see discussed in this setting? Yes and no. Best known as "cultural pluralism," he also referred to this idea by other names, including "aesthetic pragmatism," "the American idea," and - yes - "Hebraism." But the point was that these were all the same. Hebraism - a distillation of Jewish experience disconnected from Jewish religion - was, he thought, the inspiration for the Puritans, who in turn made possible the American experiment. And the American experiment is best understood by pragmatists like Kallen's teacher William James, and in the creative arts. Hebraism was worth celebrating and protecting - Kallen was a pioneering Zionist - like any tradition, but also because it was the tradition which helped shape an appreciation of the equality without sameness which defines this many-named American ideal.

I know Kallen in another connection. In 1918, he published a book on Job - reprinted a few times in the interim (my paperback reprint is from 1959). The Book of Job as a Greek Tragedy is a strange and inspired book. The author of the Book of Job, Kallen hypothesizes, was familiar with Greek tragedy and inspired specifically by Euripides. The drama he wrote was unfortuantely buried in transcriptions - later scribes didn't recognize the CHORUS, for instance, and assigned these lines to speakers in new and inappropriate places. Kallen manages to "restore" the original Euripidean Job with minimal amendment.

Whatever merit this has as an account of the origins of the Book of Job, it is certainly very interesting in the context of Kallen's circuitous journey to "Hebraism" and Zionism. The son of an orthodox rabbi (Horace was born in Silesia, but his father was from Lithuania), he abandoned his faith, but found his way to a different kind of appreciation of Jewish tradition through lectures on American literary history delivered by a (gentile) professor at Harvard named Barrett Wendell. There's probably no small number of readers, estranged from religious upbringingings (Jewish and Christian) who have found Kallen's linkage of the profundity of the Book of Job with the Greeks liberating permission to re-engage at least this Biblical text as a work of "universal" significance.

Trails

I've always been fascinated by rain, and especially by the trails drops make on windows. (For some reason I associate them mainly with train windows. Growing up in largely rainless, trainless Southern California but often enjoying the trains of rainy Northern Europe might explain it.) Today it started raining just as I walked across the bridge at school. Here's what I saw, with and without flash. (Always carry a camera!)

If happy little bluebirds fly

Beyond the rainbow

Why, oh why can't I?

Thousands of people sing "Somewhere over the rainbow" of a wet Washington Square Park evening, in hushed tones, perhaps like the lullaby in which Dorothy once heard of Oz. Rain mixes with our tears.

It was a beautiful moment of shared sorrow and of resolve, which followed a few minutes of silence as glowsticks were held high (no candles allowed in the Park), which in turn followed a few brief speeches. Wonderful Christine Quinn enjoined us not to let our sadness become bitterness and resignation; "our children are dying." David Paterson spoke movingly, too, of the scars of bullying and intolerance.
The occasion, of course, was the tragic suicide of 18-year-old Rutgers freshman Tyler Clementi. And of the five other boys - at latest count - who were driven to suicide in the last weeks by homophobic bullying:

Asher Brown (age 13)
Seth Walsh (age 13)

Justin Aaberg (age 15)
Billy Lucas (age 15)
Raymond Chase (age 19)

One would like to think this was an exceptional month, but there's little reason to suppose it was. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered teenagers - and others suspected of being so - are harassed all the time. Nine in ten, according to one survey. One in four just within the last month, according to another. GLBTQ teenagers are four times as likely to attempt suicide as their peers (and eight times, if rejected by their families, we learned from Governor Paterson). This month's toll is surely more than six, and many more than six will have attempted suicide.
What can be done? Bullying, especially cyberbullying, has to be checked somehow - not easy, but at least we can stop normalizing it, accepting it as natural and inevitable. Homophobia must be curbed - especially that of religious bigots (the most vociferous of whom, with a grim and tedious predictability, turn out to be closeted) - also an uphill battle. And something positive is needed, too. An affirmation not just of diversity and of the dignity of the individual, but of privacy: of a person's right to live a life free of the intrusion and judgment of others.

And to the Ashers, Seths, Justins, Billys, Tylers and Raymonds, the message we're all sending out, as hard as we can: It gets better. You are loved. You deserve to be loved. Two adorable old guys, Harry and Wayne (an Episcopal priest!), inspired to make their first youtube video for the "It Gets Better" series initiated by Dan Savage, put it perhaps best of all:

"You have to survive high school
because there's someone out there waiting
for you to be the love of his life or her life."

BBG

(At bottom, a view through part of Patrick Dougherty's woven-wood sculpture "Natural History," created for the BBG's centennial this year.)

Druidic religion and politics

In other news, Druidry has just been officially recognized as a religion by Britain's Charity Commission. This status, which brings some tax privileges, seems like a judgment of what we sometimes lampoon as "nice religion," the liberal idea that true religion simply makes more law-abiding citizens: "The commission says the network's work in promoting druidry as a religion is in the public interest." I suppose I should find out more... In the meantime, the BBC website reported:

Senior druid King Arthur Pendragon, told the BBC News website the organisation had had to "jump through hoops" to meet the commission's requirements.

Although he runs his own druid order, he said the Druid Network's achievement was a celebration for all members of the faith.

He said: "We are looking at the indigenous religion of these isles - it's not a new religion but one of the oldest."

The 56-year-old added that people were becoming more interested in finding spirituality and the decision reflected this.

"I think people are looking to their roots and looking back at the secular world certain that things don't work.

"This decision shows how important our faith is. We are getting credence from a secular government about our belief structure - which not only shows it is valuable but also valued by us and others."

Mr Pendragon, of Stonehenge, said he would not be seeking charitable status for his own order - the Loyal Arthurian Warband - as it was a political wing and therefore had no need to be recognised as a charity.

The multireligious past

Rioting and bloodshed was expected when the Indian Supreme Court announced its verdict on ownershup of the land in Ayodhya where Hindus believe Ram was born, and a mosque (the Babi Masjid) stood for over three centuries before a Hindu mob destroyed it in 1992. In the riots which followed the destruction of the Babi Masjid, 2000 people were killed, mostly Muslims. Fearing a repeat of this, the government apparently stationed an extra 200,000 state and federal policemn across the state.

So far, there's been no rioting. The Supreme Court surprised everyone by deciding that the land should be co-owned by the Hindu and Muslim communities. (Hindus get the use of 2/3 of it, including the place where the Ram temple and Babi Masjid stood.) Intransigent folks on both sides have been huffing and puffing (including no small number in the reader's comments section of the Times article on it). It seems at first a Solomonic judgment, in the pejorative sense, but it may prove Solomonic in a different way. If Solomon's apparently callous call to cut a child in two succeeded in identifying the true mother and exposing the imposter, this judgment might succeed in identifying two rightful parents.

The basis of the judgment, apparently, was historical evidence that both communities worshipped together in this space for centuries, until the British Raj segregated religions in the 1850s. This shared religious past is something historians of religion know about. A study of religion based in Asian, especially South Asian, rather than European experience would give you a very different sense of how religious traditions interact. It would lead you to expect coexistence (if not always peaceful) and devotions crossing religious lines - Hindus venerating Sufi saints, Muslims celebrating Hindu holidays, etc. (It happens to this day.) This story can't be told without attending to power, of course - the Babi Masjid was built on the site of an earlier edifice by a conquering power, for instance. But power alone can't tell the story.

Devotion goeth where it listeth. "Religion" - that European Enlightenment category, defined by what it excludes - has a hard time following, often giving up in exasperation and judgment: true religion, it insists, is pure, not "syncretic." The history of Hindu-Muslim relations in the Indian subcontinent since the Raj shows that more than ink is shed when such conceptions of religion predominate.

A model of religion - or shall we call it religiosity, or piety, or even spirituality - which recognizes that the seeker of power or meaning or whatever will observe communal boundaries only in the breach could change one's view of a lot of things. Like the blessed confusion of contemporary American religion, for instance. Perhaps it's not an exceptional phenomenon, possible only now and only here, but a return to form of a quest deformed by understandings of religion from the age of nations and empires. Perhaps it is not syncretism and pluralism but purism and exclusivism that are the exceptions.

As for Ayodhya, one hopes the memory, or the experience, of this tolerant religiosity remains strong enough to silence the ideologues. Indian secularism builds on this experience, and this tolerance.

Spineless wonders

The newly redesigned Scientific American seems to have more short articles of general interest - good for readers like me, I suppose. In one we learn that scientists have discovered that squid can fly - as much as 10m, propelled by jet-like streams of expelled water. Someone's finally caught it in pictures, which expert eyes even think confirm that "mollust aeronautics" involves using fins for navigation!

Who knew?

The latest Pew Forum survey on religion finds that Americans, while very devout, don't know much about religion. Those who did best in identifying "core teachings, history and leading figures of major world religions" - answering on average 20.9 out of 32 questions correctly - were Atheists/Agnostics, with Jews a close second at 20.5; Mormons were third at 20.3. Golly! But what does this tell us?

It gets more interesting as you break it down further, but the main headline shouldn't be surprising. Minorities always have to understand majorities; the contrary doesn't happen - certainly not without concerted efforts at public education. Further, the study finds that education correlates with higher scores, and Atheists/Agnostics and Jews are more educated than the general public. (And note that "Atheist/Agnostic" is a self-identifying, not a default group, distinguished from "Nothing in Particular"; the survey found 212 of the former, 334 of the latter.)

But there's more going on. As study after study shows, religious people generally don't know much about their own traditions either. Should one be surprised that:

More than four-in-ten Catholics in the United States (45%) do not know that their church teaches that the bread and wine used in Communion do not merely symbolize but actually become the body and blood of Christ. About half of Protestants (53%) cannot correctly iden- tify Martin Luther as the person whose writings and actions inspired the Protestant Reformation, which made their religion a separate branch of Christianity. Roughly four-in-ten Jews (43%) do not recognize that Maimonides, one of the most venerated rabbis in history, was Jewish.

It's sort of shocking but - to this scholar of religion at least - not surprising. Lived religion and textbook religion are different animals. Indeed, I read about this study shortly after giving a presentation in a class (on population demographics) in which I drove home the "religion is not belief" theme by giving examples like this. I mentioned a finding from an earlier Pew survey you might remember. How many American Catholics were found to believe in reincarnation? More than one-in-four (28%)! "So can you be Catholic and believe in karma?" I asked. And was very pleased when someone answered: "Yes."

I'm not advocating ignorance. I'm appalled at this, for instance:

Has anyone noticed? Long overdue, the MTA has a new format for service advisories. It's more colorful, and much more detailed.

Broader than the measure of the mind

A beautiful but difficult service at church today, saying farewell to a beloved Associate Rector who's served here for twenty-one years, and is moving on to new challenges. It's called a Service for the Ending of a Pastoral Relationship and Leave-taking from a Congregation. After a festival Eucharist with many of her favorite hymns (including the mesmerizing 469, right, which seems to roll powerfully on and on "like the wideness of the sea") and a wonderful last sermon, came these words:

I ask if you, the people of ___, recognize and accept the conclusion of this pastoral relationship, releasing me from my responsibilities as ___.

People: We do.

And I in turn release you from turning to me and depending on me as a pastor in this place. I offer my blessing, support and encouragement to ____, and the other clergy who will serve after me.

It was a good demonstration of the power of ritual. Without it, I suspect we would all have burst into tears.

Kallen

Horace Kallen, an all-around public intellectual, taught at the New School from 1919 until 1973 (!). Kallen is now remembered as the author of the idea of "cultural pluralism," an alternative to the "melting pot," but his interests were far broader. Pragmatist, democratic theorist and early Zionist, he was a mainstay of New School life. He was a wit too:

'The scholar's world, like the story-teller's, is the world of stories ... and it is true that most of them are false ideas. Were most not false, there would be no generations of scholars to count."

The Book of Job as Greek Tragedy
(NY: Hill and Wang, 1959 [1918]), xviii

College Prolongs Infancy

Title of a pamphlet from 1932

People say they cannot change the past. But Kallen asked: "What else is there to change? What else is the present but the past changing?"

Milton R. Konvitz, "Horace Meyer Kallen (1882-1974): In Praise of Hyphenation and Orchestration," in The Legacy of Horace M. Kallen, ed. Konvitz (Herzl Press 1987), 33

Lost in translation

Pope Benedict broke with his usual rule only to preside at canonizations when he presided at the beatification of John Henry Newman in England last week. Father Keith Beaumont, official Church biographer of Newman, has suggested that Benedict XVI relaxed his rule because he feels a special kinship with the intellectual, artistic and spiritual Newman, and the quality of his engagement with his times.

To the people of today, Blessed John Henry Newman proposes "the model of a penetrating, vast learning, willingness to engage with all the currents of thought of his time, of profound respect of the 'real' -- his thought is worlds apart from any form of ideology, and of great openness of spirit, all allied to a profound and intimate sense of God, to a constant search for God, to a profound love of God," the biographer said.

It's likely Newman will ultimately be canonized and declared a Doctor of the Church, something Beaumont reports all the Popes since Pius XII have wished for. (Source for the famous Millais portrait.)

Beatifying Newman was a cheeky thing to do, given Rome's recent efforts to lure traditionalist Anglicans back to Mother Church. Newman, probably the most famous Anglican convert to Catholicism, was nevertheless opposed to such doctrines as papal infallibility, but is being presented as a glorious example of human intellect submitting to the authority of the Church. Newman's "grammar of assent" is a bit more complex, methinks.

His life, too, is a little more complex than that of your standard issue saint. He was extremely close to another priest, Ambrose St. John, and they lived together for thirty years. (Painting above by Mary Giberne) It is probably anachronistic to suppose them sexually involved, but soulmates they clearly were. The connection was strong enough that Newman insisted on being buried in the same grave as St. John.

They were together in death 118 years, but in 2008 Newman's remains were removed from the grave - they are needed as relics. The double grave with its awkward questions will have no place in the cult of Blessed Newman. But Perhaps someday all of Newman's life will be remembered and revered.

Two-dimensional

It's probably snobby of me to say this, but the theater projections of live performances of opera and theater which are the latest thing, miss their mark. This judgment may be precipitate: all I've seen is two of the Met in HD ("Doctor Atomic" and "Carmen") and the London National Theatre's inaugural broadcast (Racine's "Phèdre," with Helen Mirren in the title part), which was just rescreened this evening - all rebroadcasts. But these, at least, had the same shortcomings, and make me wonder at the whole enterprise - though curious about another approach.

What all three had in common was what any self-respecting film will nowadays have - multiple camera angles including wide-angles from the corners of the stage and closeups of performers, and the occasional shots where cameras move horizontally or vertically to follow an action or show a novel perspective. This allowed the audience to see things which only select members of a real audience could. But at what cost?

I'd assumed, when the Met in HD series was inaugurated, that the intention was to recreate the experience of being in the opera house, but something entirely different is going on. Since the camera has no fixed point of view, the viewer is in no fixed relation to the stage. She's everywhere and nowhere. And since most scenes are close-ups rather than images of the whole stage, there's no possibility that the film viewer could feel she was is in the same space as the performers. The NT production at least had the curtain call at the end, but the Met productions edit out the audience completely - no applause, even. The performance is in a void, not even aimed in any particular direction. The director's, set designer's and performer's orientations are scuttled. For instance, the stunning (if ultimately wearisome) screen which dominated "Doctor Atomic" below (a picture from the house, not the film), was never once shown from head-on as it was meant to be seen.

While visually pretty interesting, the film versions cut up what should be experienced as a Gesamtkunstwerk - a total work of art, I realized on watching the films, that includes the space of the performance hall, the air breathed by performers and audience alike, the space which both audience and performers strive to traverse with gazes and sounds.

I saw "Doctor Atomic" from the Family Circle, and was keen to compare the Met in HD version as the original had seemed insufficiently operatic - the director was a film director who'd never done opera before, and who seemed to me unable to fill the stage, used as she was as a film maker to being able to simply turn the camera from one scene to another. But seeing it now as a film I realized that the opera's power such as it was was that of opera, of a single overpowering whole which challenges and embraces you. The film version bungled the two main coups de théâtre of the production: the appearance of that row of life-sized kachina figures at the top of the screen, emerging ever so slowly from the dark in a place which had earlier contained something else, and, earlier in the opera, the lowering into the center of the space of the stage of the bomb. Hanging there, mute and threatening, its true power unknown by any of the characters on the stage, it took over the whole space of the Metropolitan Opera House, in an utterly terrifying way. And it just stayed there, mutely threatening, the sense of ominousness building and building. In the film version, we actually looked up with a camera to see it lowered by a boom from rafter full of lights, etc.; obviously a prop, it then disappeared from view except for brief cuts to closeups. No deal.

And in tonight's "Phèdre," something analogous. As the smitten Phèdre writhes in anguish at her impossible love for her stepson, members of our movie audience giggled. Giggled! They would never have dared if in a space with actual actors. Indeed, the very lines which elicited the nervous giggles were among the play's most powerful - in some cases precisely because they were slightly ridiculous. That's the extent of her tragic derangement. That's part of the pity and horror. I realized that it only works if the actor suffering before you makes it impossible for you to look away, to think "it's only art" with relief or pleasure or disappointment. Film can generate immediacy of its own, no doubt. But the immediacy of live performance is different, and gets lost in the translation to film. I was reminded of Grotowski's manifestos for a "poor theater," a theater does what only it can do. For him it's all about the reality of the performers' bodies, and their pain - not feigned but real. Only being made witness to that can the viewer be affected in a real way by the performance.

But I don't want to conclude that there's no way of sharing live performance with remote audiences. What if, instead of trying to make it satisfying the way films are (changes in angle, scale, etc., and available in a non-space for viewers to imaginatively enter), the experience of the actual audience member were recreated: a fixed view (from the best seat in the house, of course), but in sufficient detail (HD!) that the viewer could focus on particular scenes and performers, as one naturally does. (The eye, as we know, bounces around scenes it surveys, all the time.) Instead of 3D glasses the audience coud be given disposable opera glasses! If you were surrounded by other viewers in a similar relationship to the performance - seated next to and behind you and in front of you in the movie theater - and knew the broadcast to be live, you just might get some sense of participation in the spectacle, of sharing that space and that time with these performers. Very old fashioned, I know. But I suspect it might work. Only for those who've had the good fortune to taste the genuine article? Perhaps, but maybe not. It's worth a try. For the three-dimensional experience of live staged performance, the audience needs to feel part of the same space as the performance.

Nothin' like a dame

Found myself on the website of a British publisher today (ordering a desk copy of a book on religion and American popular culture, as it happens) and was caught off guard by the multiplicity of possible Salutations. Où est madame?