Face Recognition

In the five days I was out of town, Benjamin's weight shot up 10%, his cheeks lost their acne, he perfected his roundhouse and he learned to warble like a Black Capped Thrush. If Catalina weren't here to vouch for the boy, I'd swear he had been abducted by Chinese pirates and replaced by a crude Fatboy knockoff. As it is, I'm still a little sketched: perhaps they took only the chassis, left the paneling?

It is ironic that my difficulties in recognizing my son come hot on the heels of a conference whose driving concern was facial recognition. Machines are still very bad at this task, it seems, at least relative to humans (which, in light of my struggles to absorb the changes in Benny II, makes me wonder where exactly I fit on the Andropoid-Thingamajig spectrum.) Part of the difficulty may have to do with the level of mathematical hocus pocus that is brought to bear on this problem. Vast realms of theory are distilled into simple algorithms any unbaked sophomore can implement but whose intuitive connection to the task remains totally opaque to all but a handful of hoary old fossils at Harvard. The result is a raft of special purpose recognition schemes whose domain of applicability extends exactly as far as the artificial conditions specified by the author ("potential application" is a phrase one hears a lot), with spotty performance and inscrutable convergence properties. Though I shouldn't admit this, I actually view the relative lack of progress as a good thing: it means, among other things, that there's still a lot to do, i.e. more papers to write, more theorems to prove, more opportunity to play in what the greatest mathematician of the 19th century called a "paradise", the realm of pure structure, severed from function and inured to responsibility. It also means that the Artist still trumps the Processor in certain privileged spheres, and that an effective police state is still at least several years off.

The conference itself provided another opportunity for facial recognition, in the form of that favorite game "find the luminary." Context: the Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications is one of a handful of federally funded, university-affiliated institutions across the country designed to support collaborative interplay between mathematicians and their quantitative counterparts in science and engineering. As major repositories of NSF funding, these institutes draw high powered people, so that any given conference is likely to be studded with a luminous cast of optimizers, implementers, purse-holders and theory-mongers. Even among this technical glitterati, however, a truly powerful mind stands out: it charges the air, polishes the dialogue, raises the intellectual temperature. I had never met Charles Fefferman, and never seen his picture, but I knew his story (full professor at 22, Fields medalist for work done by the time he was 24) and knowing he would be present, I sought him out. It took me all of about five minutes: there he sat, bearded and smiling, his speech formal, his wit shy. He sat calm and erect, just listening, not taking notes, and seemed at times to sleep, or dream, or perhaps just take a mental walkabout, zooming off in the spaceship of his imagination, dipping a wing to reality before blasting into a galaxy where the life forms have six-eyes and rubbery tentacles. He asked "what is M?" twice, in fifteen minutes; he diffused an increasingly shrill argument about mathematical models with an arcane reference to epicycles; he said "I assume, of course, that a computer is a Turing machine." Now in his late fifties, the man spoke with the kind of reckless modesty that is the hallmark of a psyche totally untouched by doubt or failure.

Watching Fefferman was a welcome reminder that there are many ways to be a mathematician. I trained in the austere environment of Pure Theory, under mentors who had bad haircuts, mismatched socks, and no computers. I learned to say irrefutable things about irrelevant objects in a syntax that was both spare and bulletproof; I subscribed to the Suessian ethos that "a question's a question, no matter how small;" I inferred that it was better to delay publishing until you had worked out a considerable body of theory, and that it was OK to spend your life in a dark office contemplating sets of measure zero as long as posterity judged you well. How different this new world! This real world, of real applications, real money, all those realtime pressures for real results. The haircuts are sharper, the shoes are black and polished, and most people carry their laptops to the talks, either to fine tune their code or check their email, but in any case so as to occupy themselves with something more fruitful than listening to other people's theories. In this charged ambiance of powerful people, all striving to prove their relevance with a torrential publication record, multiple grants, invited addresses and commercial contracts, it is difficult to remember why I entered this field in the first place: a love of form, a talent for dreams, a belief in beauty. At the core of the original dream lay the idea of noble failure, a vision of the mathematician maudit in dogged and doomed pursuit of the Truth.

Most people who leave their radical roots to become Republicans once they accrete property and power end up saying that it was the political landscape that shifted, not their views. As I reflect on the shift in my mathematical environs, I wonder if I would be falling into the same trap if I were to suggest that the shift is symptomatic of a broader disciplinary trend? I think most mathematicians would agree that the days of insouciant theorem proving in a vacuum are gone, or at least ending: even at undergraduate institutions, the movement is towards student research, with tenure-stingy deans wanting to see if you can lead it, how well, and with what federal backing. Ultimately, the race is for grant funding, it having become well known that grants determine rankings, rankings draw people, and people pull in grants, in a vicious, money-and-power centered circle that threatens to overlook a basic, utopian mission of the university. But even as I condemn what I see to be a national shift towards an ugly and stultifying pragmatism, the good praktischer mensch in me sympathises with its motives. The world is melting. We need mathematicians who are capable of solving intractable technical problems, people who are both good theorists and able experimentalists, who can formulate the pressing problems of the world in clean mathematical terms and solve them in polynomial time. Why shouldn't governmental structures be set up to support such things, and why shouldn't mathematicians step to the plate? Thus rants a small but shrill voice in my higher conscience. From across the brain, there is a counter volley, also a small voice, but subdued: the risk, it warns, is that this pressing sense of mission can arise only in exactly the sort of arcadian environment in which it has no hope of a practical solution.

It's a lazy Sunday. My plans to reprocess conference threads, read papers, and start projects were mostly eaten up by the new-and-improved Zoogle, whose main link to the old Zoogle are an insatiable appetite and a binary watched-or-crying mode. We went for three walks in Frick Park today, and each time I was dazzled by the change in the look of the ravine, once a shock of impenetrable green, now a kaleidoscope of color in which dotty and garish old leaves hold on by their fingernails, defying the Great Plunge for a few more days. Like my son, and like my discipline, these woods are molting. My associated sense of loss betrays my susceptibility to the Fallacy of Perpetual Form, the idea that there is something sacred and intrinsic in the appearances of the moment, this sun-drenched knoll with its moss and catepillars, this nook in the stacks among the original sources, this clean smell of sweet milk. Under pressure, I would agree that there is something like ontological continuity, but for me identity is increasingly fantasmal, a whispy object of syntax and statistics. I am back with Heraclitus on the banks of his river. And though I though I've been forbidden to bathe again, I get wet, soap off, and I recognize the bank and the willow and my reflection, everything, indeed, but Recognition itself, the meaning behind this whirlwind of labels with which Man the Namegiver builds his kingdom. It will be many years, I believe, before a computer can imitate this sort of incomprehension.

First Snowfall

At 8:45 this morning I kissed Zoogle goodbye, hugged my wife, and boarded American Eagle flight something something something for Minneapolis, site of a mathematics conference on multi-manifold data modeling. The technical details of the trip are a blur: after two months of fractured nights, I collapsed like an old souffle, unconscious two minutes after takeoff and prodded into reluctant wakefulness only by the ghastly recorded voice of some frumpelmarm saying "please stay seated until the seatbelt sign has been turned off." Seated I stayed. In Chicago O'Hare I met a young Hasidic Jew named Lipa who was carrying an acoustic guitar. We talked chord structures and commandments before boarding, and parted on confused but amiable terms. Mid-flight he approached my seat to announce that he had remembered the remaining two commandments: no idolatry, and no eating of live animals. This revelation sparked a lively debate among my rowmates, one of whom was a churlish program director at a Catholic University, the other a jolly church administrator for a fusion Baptism-Lutheran congregation in suburban Minetonka, both of whom admitted that they would be hard pressed to recite the ten commandments in order. (I did not reveal that Lipa was working with a measly set of seven: too nice of a guy to ratfink like that.) Snow was falling by the time we touched down in Minneapolis.

This will be my first Zoogle Leave, and I confess it makes me nervous on multiple levels. First because Catalina is stuck with exclusive Zoogle duties for five days, and I fear for her sanity. I also wonder if Cosmico will remember me when I get back, and forgive me my gadabout if he does: he seems to have no head for anything but the teta, and though he doesn't seem a boy to hold grudges (how many times have I played Cosme Cohete when all he wanted to do was sleep?) it is entirely possible that behind those placid glauco eyes and ponderous animal cheeks lurks the soul of an accountant, silently taking stock of who was where, when and for how long. I also fret about missing milestone moments. It's not just that the kid gains weight like a prizewinning boar; his gaze has focused, he produces new sounds daily, and his neck muscles are as strong as a Soviet powerlifter's. I'm afraid I'll return and find that he has a full set of teeth, can flip over at will, and commands a vocabulary of 100 words.

It's good to be in Minneapolis. The bracing cold is good for the spirit, and the place has character, with its riverfront, its flourmills, its ubiquitous bars and their grungy denizens, tall headband toting blonds with Judas Priest paraphernalia. And I confess that it will be nice to sleep through the night, talk research, and have some uninterrupted time for work. But as I pull the heavy drapes over the sealed window, and contemplate the inoffensive, forgettable wall art in its thick gilt frames, brush my teeth and think about sinking into my king size bed, I feel a certain chill in the air, an absence of vital energy and a distance from the warm center of life. My intuition says that it has nothing to do with the first snowfall of the season.

Of square pegs and round holes

In what is destined to become a classic training video for military aptitude tests, Zoogle seeks, and finds, a relation between mouth and thumb. Like many great scientific discoveries, the path to eureka was neither short nor straight. When Edison was asked if his 100 failed attempts to invent the light bulb had discouraged him, he is reputed to replied "Discouraged! Why, I am 100 attempts closer to a solution!" Zoogle tries first the fist, then a finger in the nose, then a thumb in the nose with his finger gently scratching his eyelids, then his palm, then his knuckles, then his forearm. Discouraged? "Drop dead" a peevish Zoogle fires back, "I know this bastard has a solution." Summoning his resolve, he rolls up his sleeves and gets to work: he adjusts the position of his arm; he observes the rotational asymmetry of the hand; he interpolates the mouth between nose and chin; he regularizes the 3-D reconstruction of that 2-D visual projection, invoking some apriori knowledge of handedness. One percent inspiration, ninety nine percent perspiration. Edison would be proud. He nails it. You can watch the process here.

This cat ain't got no snoozebar

The good news is that Benjamin is sleeping through the night. The bad news is that 'sleeping through the night is a technical term meaning he makes a milk run no more than three or four times in any eight hour period. The boy is killing us. Not that I'm in a position to complain (all I need to do is snatch the boy from the crib and feed him to the teta, which I can accomplish almost without waking up), but my poor wife is running on empty, her physical resources taxed to the point of metastatic protest, her new phenotypes huge ojeros, a zomby shuffle, and an absolute incapacity to understand anything I say.

This last feature is perhaps the most interesting. I bound from the kitchen trumpeting the glories of my new loaf, she dreamily responds "I think Zoogle will have blue eyes." I have scoured the Baby Books for references to spousal aphasia, and am astounded that nothing has been written about the topic. Can we truly be the first family to suffer total communicational atrophy within two months of having a child? It is as if the gremlins that run Catalina's language filters had issued a no-pass order for my particular pitch and cadence, allowing all the other language slop to pass unimpaired but cracking heads when they catch the slightest whiff of me. All the restrictions are on the antenna side, curiously: the transmission side seems fine (she's still doing criticism, still translating, still writing poetry. Still telling me to wash diapers and do dishes.)

Meanwhile, Gloobel's blooming language skills are causing the opposite problem in my own speech centers: my transmitters have been corrupted by baby noise so horrible as to result in an almost totally unintelligible signal. How I have always secretly detested these "oochy coochy" kinds of guardians who dangle dolls, screw up their faces, and speak in that horrid high pitched I-am-a-moron kind of tone that betrays a total lack of both self respect and social consciousness. Yet here I am, returning from my oh-so-sober day job, seizing Cosme Cohete by the armpits and making rocket sounds as I whirl him to the ceiling and back, cackling like a gypsy, screaming "goy goy goy" through puckered lips in perfect, inane imitation, fishing for a smile, or a look, or a sign that he finds me amusing. How can I have fallen so low? Where does this kid get his corrupting power?

The cats feel it too. They stand outside our door at night and yowl like Minnesota timber wolves. They know that the days of little mice on strings are long gone, as are the meticulous combings, the nail trimmings, the ear rumplings, the glam-shots in cardigans, the special treats. The hands that once lingered soft and loving on their bellies are now nowhere to be found, and they sing their loss to the moon, to the walls, to the downstairs neighbor, at night, behind the door, cold and in unison. And when morning comes they are still howling, and continue through the pounding of every goddamned shoe I can hurl against the door, shoes that go thudding like iguanas on tin rooftops, shoes that bore into the neighbor's dreams and wake my son and piss off my wife, but that do nothing, absolutely nothing, to silence the anguish of the cats.

Redeye

Benjamin's right eye seems to be mildly infected. A colony of yellow barnacles has set up permanent residence around the perimeter, the upper and lower lashes are connected by a web of white stringy mucus, and the area around the iris has turned a dull red. Fearing early stage river blindness, we have chosen to follow doctor's orders and apply antibacterial drops, "directly in the eye, four times daily." If we're interpreting the corresponding display of howls, shaken fists, and bodily convulsions correctly, Benjamin is not a huge fan of the drops.

So the boy looks like something of a cyclops right now, a one-eyed hairless micro-sumo with Parkinson's and an attitude. He is surreal in other ways, too. He now weighs 15 pounds, exactly as much as our friends' five-month-old. Random people who see him in public are confused: they see the face of a newborn, but the body of a toddler. They respond as if they had just witnessed some really cute version of the mythological Chimera, with the lion's mane replaced by wispy baby hair and the goat body by a beer belly. "Cute, but still a freak," I can see them saying to themselves.

Catalina has decided that the boy will be an art critic when he grows up. His vision has improved to the point where his gaze focuses on things beyond the breast (already miles ahead of most men), and though vast spaces of blank wall continue to exercise a strange fascination for him, he seems especially drawn to a large water color collage Catalina made for me as a gift back in our courting days, a playful fusion of symbol, scale, and color. He also seems to ogle the crappy watercolors that line the walls of the Make Your Mark Cafe, a child-and-laptop friendly coffee space to which Catalina and I make ritual pilgrimage every Friday morning. It should be admitted that his choice of subject matter is rather idiosyncratic; for example, he will choose to look at objects exactly 37 degrees to the right and 15 degrees above straight ahead and level, and he will enthusiastically absorb everything within that line of sight, turn him as we will. At times, this approach seems to place undo emphasis on traditionally undervalued objets (e.g. the space three feet above the frame) but Catalina thinks it is a decidedly modernist approach whose time will come.

Other interesting behaviors: the Mystery of the Green Poo continues, with roughly every eighth diaper a spectacular mass of fluorescent green goo. We have turned these random color shifts into a kind of household game show: whoever rolls green on a diaper change gets one free pass on washing dishes. (Needless to say, we are both competing to change as many diapers as possible.) Yesterday he used his own hand to take the glombus from his mouth, bringing it to the level of his navel before he realized what he was doing, panicked, and let it fall. We were impressed. (Now if he would just move it in the other direction.) He often suffers acute squirminess, especially when he's trying to sleep, his fists clenched, his arms swinging, his legs bicycling frantically. Perhaps his is training too hard to become Baby Heavyweight Champion of the World? We need to talk to him about separating his professional and his personal lives.

There is new baby media: a batch of photos (all captions courtesy of Catalina) and a short video showing this heavyweight contender in the agonies of one his training regimes (the famed Stomach Time.)

Class Conflict

Yesterday Catalina and I took Cosmico for a hike in the woods. We went out to McConnell's mill, an old wooden framehouse on the bank of a small river about an hour north of Pittsburgh. Built in the 1800's, the mill was active until the 1940's, at which point it was closed, refurbished, and turned over to the state as a tourist destination. These days, visitors can walk freely among the old machines, following little signs that explain how, e.g., the function of the Thresher differed from that of the Crusher, and why this rust covered medieval device in front of you, with its seven gears and five pulleys, is of such supreme historical, technological, and economic relevance. It's a tight space; you have to duck to avoid getting clocked by beams that run at crazy angles, and at every turn there is a gear or a chute or a piston, ready to smash fingers and devours hands. One sign said that the mill had been run by a black man named Moses Whorton, who was paid $14/month for his services and had to supplement his income by grooming horses at 5 cents a hoof.

Benjamin was unimpressed by the mill, so we left and hit the trail. But as we made our way through the woods, with leaves of every color luminous against the sun, wildflowers rioting on the hillsides, and lichen-tufted rocks preening in the stream, my mind was not so much on the beauty of my surroundings as on the industrial icon we had just left. How many fingers had those gears swallowed up, back in the day? How many arms? Moses was reputed to be a 'merry fellow, much loved by all.' Was that because he was willing to work 60 years at slave wages, supporting with his one meager portion of life a system whose basic inhumanity runs so deep that it becomes as invisible to us as the air we breathe?

Horrible working conditions are much on my mind these days: I'm reading Howard Zinn's classic People's History of the United States, and finding it a fascinating lens through which to look at some of the basic suppositions, ambitions, and lifestyle choices of my contemporaries. The basic tenant of the book is that the history of America has been one long story of capitalist aggression, with Have's squeezing Have-Nots with the consistent, merciless brutality that is the antithesis of the egalitarian humanism that we (mistakenly) associate with the essence of the country. Zinn's thesis is that reforms have been introduced grudgingly, at a great price of blood and suffering, wrung from the ruling class again and again by a class so oppressed that death and defeat became welcome alternatives to perseverance in the status quo; he claims that the middle class was constructed as a protective buffer between the leisure classes and the explosive discontent of the labor classes.

Zinn writes with fervor. He believes (correctly) that he is saying something true and important. "The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don't listen to it, you will never know what justice is", he quotes, and his book becomes a long litany of these cries, the cries of tortured slaves, of indentured servants, of workers and natives and woman and children. His objective: to keep sharp the memory of suffering, not in the abstract form in which it finds expression in periodicals and government documents, not even in the subdued objectivity of the scholar, but on the level of story, of a narrative with engaging characters. "My viewpoint, in telling the history of the United States, is...that we must not accept the memory of the states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have been." What Zinn is really writing about is collective, community memory.

One of the pleasures of reading indiscriminately is that one is always surprised when things link up, i.e. two authors who should have nothing in common end up saying something similar, which then becomes a kind of personal key, a gift from the heavens, a sign that you should go away and reflect that this matter and not come back until it has cracked and yielded its secrets. In this case, it was Ernesto Sabato, writing from a very different perspective in a very different place, who provided an echo to the message I was getting from Zinn. In an essay on fascism, Sabato notes that "individual memory can be good or bad, but collective memory is bad," and goes on to connect the development of fascism with a strongly capitalist agenda, ultimately claiming that "one can... legitimately sustain that far from being an anti-capitalist movement, fascism began as the most brutal and cynical manifestation of a regime in bankruptcy." Writing in 1947, Sabato was alarmed that the world had already forgotten that at the heart of the holocaust lay a crude and cynical capitalism.

Sabato sees socialism as a solution. "Socialism", he claims, "is something more than the nationalization of production and consumption. It is a profoundly moral movement, destined to ennoble man and raise him from the physical and spiritual mud in which he has been submerged during the course of his slavery. In some ways, perhaps, it is the secular interpretation of Christianity." In light of Soviet abuses, Sabato eventually abandoned this stance, just as I suspect Zinn rejects it, recognizing, as Camus does, the fluid, universal interchange between Victim and Executioner. Still, here we have two men ruminating on capitalism, who agree that the central problem is one of memory, either of its absence, or, perhaps worse, its standardization, wherein the grave injuries to body and spirit that are the necessary counterpoint to institutionalized self-interest get reduced to a few buzzwords, or glossed in headlines like "Bomb kills 10", "Strike turns violent", or "30% of all black men are in prison."

As the Soviet experiment makes clear, of course, this memory loss (which may in fact be a perceptual loss) is by no means limited to capitalism, which makes me wonder to what extent economics ends up being the scapegoat for the raft of spiritual and intellectual ailments whose real roots lie elsewhere. There is no doubt that conditions of state affect conditions of mind, but to subsume the basic moral disposition of a people to a structure of government seems reductionist and dangerous. Avarice does not require wide margins to thrive. Cruelty rides the coattails of social service. "Without enthusiasm, we have chosen enthusiasm over truth", says Benjamin Lerner in his recent book of poems 'Angle of Yaw', an obscure, kabbalistic verbal blitzkrieg over the boarders of syntax into the black heart of modern America. I am part of this we: it seems reasonable to ask when and what have I chosen?

A friend of mine writes a blog for the Handord Sentinel, and he recently adressed the increasingly trendy issue of acedia, which is a latin term that refers to the ossifying of spiritual energies, a terminal sloth in matters of the soul. He quotes an article citing Walker Percy, one of my favorite American novelists, saying what concerned him most about the future of America was "probably the fear of seeing America, with all its great strength and beauty and freedom… gradually subside into decay through default and be defeated...by weariness, boredom, cynicism, greed, and in the end helplessness before its great problems." Acedia is nothing new, of course, but I begin to see how it plays itself out. I look around and I see how Pittsburgh has been messed up by attention to the bottom line, how what could have been a beautiful city ended up with gray industrial bridges, a massively polluted river, little pedestrian space, narrow roads with no margins for bikes, and, at least in the poorer areas, no trees. I see my friends that live in million dollar houses, and my other friends that live hand to mouth, and I ask, who has chosen what, and how consciously? I contemplate my soulless job for the DOD, with its ridiculuously high paycheck, and my current job, with its medium size paycheck, and the job I would like to have, with its vanishingly small paycheck, and I wonder if my shifting relation to liquid capital can have any bearing on my relation to the dynamics of class conflict? Did I choose something bigger than I knew when I chose to take a salary cut and get back to teaching? How many of our allegiances are accidental? And might it not be this very sense of accident that lies at the root of our acedia, a sense of being beset by forces so large and ungraspable that we seek refuge in our own small burrows, cashing out to support the dream of The Family, building our retirement accounts with the dumb industry of beavers?

These were dark thoughts for what was undoubtedly the most spectacular day of the year. As I waded through the thick piles of leaves, capered with sun motes, chased salamanders, and rattled pleasantries at every oogling mother in the grip of my son's charms, it occured to me that perhaps it would behoove me to enter into the spirit of my surroundings, to accept graciously what limited reprieve nature has to offer, to set aside these ponderous and intractable issues of social utopia and find meaning in natural beauty. Perhaps I should just focus on my son, take notes on his quirky behaviors and put them in my blog?

But maybe the real question is this: in twenty years, will Benjamin want to be reading about how he clenched his tiny fingers around a leaf and stared riveted at the river, or about how his father came to grips with some of the basic issues of living in a capitalist society? Probably neither. But within the framework of doomed writing, let me suggest the following: that when I write about him, I do so for my own pleasure, in order to create a register of facts and benchmarks that I can later hold up against normative elements in babybooks and help answer the question "who is this guy, and what's his relation to me?"; and when I write about myself, perhaps I do so for him, so as to create a register of thoughts and impressions that he can hold up much later, when he is an adult and casting about for meaning, setting it against the backdrop of the World as he has come to know it and using it to gain perspective on the same difficult question.

I tried to run all this by Benjamin, but he wasn't interested. He was also unimpressed by the trail, unfortunately, except for one brief moment by the river when we stopped for lunch, at which point he woke to roar his anger at the trees, poop, snack, and roar one more time before falling once again into a milk coma. The boy has no real feel for class conflict.

The Deep Pocketed Uncle Andy

In the poker hand of life, no role rules supreme: kings stew under the weight of state while paupers idle peacefully. But some hands (connected healthy professional) tend, in a statistical sense, to beat others (pock marked pig rustling pariah.) Fatherhood is one of the Great Hands: if it shows up in your cards, the smart money says double down. But beware, for it can be trumped: what you really want is Unclehood.

Understand: I like being a father. The role fits me, a dotty, potterring figure with graying temples, slow humor, and steady presence. But I have long understood too that the day I come into my alterego is the day my siblings have kids. That's when the fangs will grow, the fur thicken, and the nose turn nobby and moist, when I will at long last howl loud and free beneath my fool's moon of prank and eccentricity. Until then, all I can do is watch my younger brother, listen for the telltale cackle, lay traps, take notes; hope that he doesn't use up all the Uncle tricks before he begets me a nephew.

How does he do it? He is a presence: cock-sure, wise-cracking, a crazy cackling jackle-man in ripped jeans and lace. He never arrives, he materializes, suddenly, amid smoke and flames, the sound of shrill laughter preceding the first dull padding of paws, the thud of the Giftbag hitting the chimney, the "hey ho merry oh" rattling the house like a natural calamity. He's got merry eyes, a quick smile, shiny teeth, more battle scars than skin and more ailments than function. He has been places, done things, places and things of which you and I only dream, or dread, or know from books: off the roadway, on the sauce, behind the bar, inside the body. He's got more stories than a haremful of Scheherazades.

I have a vision: Christmas day, 2015. Young Benny Toews sits stewing in his own juices next to an evil smelling stove in a gnarled cabin on the crest of a mountain, curled up on a sofa with Ma and Pa. The stove is no match for the bitter cold; everyone wears multiple beanies, three sweaters, wools socks, hand-knit mittens. They are playing the traditional Toews Christmas Game, Reading With the Family: Pa looks looks up from his math book to contemplate the ceiling, Ma mutters verses, Benny plods through the sordid but predictable misadventures of the Hardy boys. Suddenly, there is a knock at the door, and before anyone can get up to answer, the door flies open and there is Uncle A., covered head to toe in snow, snowshoes in hand, gift sack already open, roaring hellos and scattering snow as he bounds towards the bench, kisses the missus, bearhugs the bro, and spins wide-eyed Benny in wild circles around the room, winding down like a crazy top until he sputters to a stop by the stove, setting the boy gently on the mantle, dizzy and delighted and precarious, the Magic and Splendor of Christmas restored.

This is just a vision; it may or may not come to pass. But in some ways, something similar has already come to pass, on numerous occassions and in multiple forms: Andrew arrives, and our lives lighten. Smiles that haven't been seen in years find their way to our faces; toasts that have lain dormant find themselves paired with shots; capers long overdue find themselves being drafted, armed, and set in motion. Example: Francisco ribbed Andrew and Juana that one of their responsabilities as godparents would be to send a monthly check to the Benjamin Fund, a liquid reserve for Moral Betterment and Cultural Enhancement. Andrew's first check arrived a couple of weeks ago, $61 dollars, to be drawn from a real account in a real bank, with the memo "cash this fucker quick, I run a tight bottom line." Puts me in a quandry, of course: how the hell can I justify cashing my broke-ass brother's charity check, when he lives in one of the most expensive cities in America and makes sustenence-level wages? So I stalled, and now Uncle A. is riding my back, saying "I did NOT ask you to examine your damn conscience, I asked you to cash the damn check: get that bastard in the bank." So I will, of course, and we will dedicate the money to supplying invigorating Spirits at the next Powow on Benjamin's Moral Betterment, which will be a marvelous time for everyone except Benjamin, of course, who won't be able to sleep through the blasting of the mariachis and the clanking of glasses and the sound of bodies hitting the floor.

Andrew is a wonderful Uncle. And he's got a blog which is a lot better than this one: check it out, http://angrydrew.blogspot.com/.

Confraternité

Yesterday on the way to watch 12th Night in the park, Zoogle, Babe and I found ourselves surrounded by dog owners. (I confess that I don't actually don't know that they were owners. They could have been borrowers. Let's call them Dogowners, au sense plus grande du terme.) I find the Relationship between Man and Dog a source of endless fascination, not as an evolutionary abstraction, but as it plays itself out concretely on the level of particular pairings. The eery mirroring between the chubby jowls of the accountant and the slack gumtissue of his hound represents for me a kind of Weltschlüssel, a key that opens a door into the soul of the world. I don't wish to exaggerate my powers as a psychologist (or expose my weakness for stereotype), but I feel as if one glimpse of such a pairing reveals the whole romantic, economic, and social history of the Man (I judiciously make no attempt to analyze the Dog.) In this sense, watching dogowners is like watching Shakespeare: if you do it well, you regain the entirety of the human experience, played out within a small but complete subset of the species, filtered by circumstance and costume (doublets and codpieces; leashes and frisbees) but undistorted, microcosmically preserved in all its essential, secretious squalor.

If I ever write a book on the topic, I will call it something like "Woah, Cover Up: How Your Beast Exposes You." The slack jawed setter with gingivitus, betraying an old house, rusting firearms, family money, and in some cases, kindness as weakness, though it depends on the context; the socially ackward techie with his robust shorthair, a sign of functional dexterity, comfortable bottom lines, limited wants and achievable dreams; the hoary cigar smoker, name and fortune in the bag, allied to one of the Noble Rats, a miniature grayhound or some such abomination, because he can, because his dignity is ossified enough to take it; the financial analyst with her terrier, small but expensive, an ostentatious constraint; the adolescent girl with the family mutt on a leash that's just a little too tight. The list goes on. Oh what fun.

Normally, I would wince hello and walk on. After all, what do I have in common with urban dogowners? The only reason to live in the city is to devote all your time to a job, or art, or culture; the only reason to have a dog is to devote all your time to the dog. Urban dogowners are fundamentally confused; they pursue ends that are mutually exclusive and psychologically injurious. Lfe is quite complicated enough without these doomed, quixotic dogfriends.

But yesterday, for the first time, I found myself looking at dog owners with new eyes. As I crossed paths with a thirty something, long haired, unshaven bohemian in the tow of a joyous golden retriever, I tried to take his measure with my usual unerring mixture of scorn, irony, and contempt. What I noticed was that he was taking mine: that he was looking at the thirty something, long haired, unshaved bohemian going the other way with a baby boy stashed in a garish purple sling, and thinking, ah the old Maya wrap, clearly a hippy math guy. Our eyes met, two smiles bloomed: spotted people spotting. We passed without a word.

I bet that guy is writing a book. I bet it's called "Whoa, Cover Up: How Your Baby Exposes You". I wonder if we could collaborate?

First Slump

For the last six days a shattering cough has been sending shrapnel into the walls of my skull. My eyes burn, my throat has white spots, and Fevers vie with Chills in a vicious turf war for my interior thermostat. A touch of the old Mongolian Death Flu, it seems, and about time, too: five weeks on five hours a night has finally caught up. But why now, precisely, on the heels of the in-laws? It is as if in their wake they had left a power vacuum, and all my agents of resistance, suddenly underemployed, had scattered to the four winds, abandoning the capital to the barbarian hoards.

These are the Dog Days of parenthood, the end of the Rush, the beginning of the Slog. Everyone has been sick. Benjamin continues to wheeze and splutter in his sleep, with small shrieks rising like arias above a symphony of bleats, snores, groans, and gaspings, always resolving to that falling down gutter drunk rasp hack rattle breath that has become his signature. His breathing is a Soundman's sample box: it includes breaking glass, surf slapping against a reef, fists against jawbones, flesh against blacktop. And on the rare occassions he isn't busy running through his sound effects, he gets vertigo, hands shooting into the air, eyes suddenly wide and fingers stiff and spread, the gesture of a man falling off a cliff backwards, or a vampire taking virgin blood: the Moro reflex. Does it help that Wikipedia assures me that the Moro phenomenon is apparently the only unlearned fear in human newborns, and that "its absence indicates a profound disorder of the motor system?" Fact: the boy is afraid. The boy is afraid, and I'm sick, and Catalina is tired, and our cats are neglected, and our friends are bored, and the neighbor is exhausted from listening to diaper changes and everyone that was going to congratulate us on our child has already done so, and now winter's coming and it will be six irredeemable months of gray slush until finally, sometime mid-may, we can finally think about going outdoors again, at which point Benjamin will be too big to carry and I'll need to wait until he can carry a pack before I even think about hiking again.

Worry is something I like to consider containable, if not totally extinguishable. If by some motherly afflatus you think that bilirubin comes heralded by a diaper demon in greasy green curds, well, don't worry, just find out: talk to the doctor, look online. To my surprise, turns out that the Worry problem is promulgated as much by too much information as by too little. Our pediatrician takes calls seven days a week, we have massively knowledgeable friends to call on (some of them doctors), we have access to all the information on the web, we are awash in technical books on Babies and their Multifarious Travails. But just as a hypochondriac will subject the Merck Manual to the most liberal and creative exegesis to convince himself with near certainty that he suffers half a dozen tropical ailments, in spite of the fact that he's never left the continental United States, so the new mother will tax the powers of her creative imagination in weaving a web of potential illness around the natural, statistical variations in her baby's functioning. Dr. Sears says "do no worry if your baby has the occasional green diaper." Hey, did you see that green diaper today? Think we should call the pediatrician? Further questioning reveals no reason, formal or anecdotal, to suspect that the green diaper is any cause for alarm, nor that the boy has had more than one, nor that there is any sign that the boy is feeling bad. Still.... It's those "Still..."'s that get you, the lingering suspicion that you're missing something. This is exactly the kind of suspicion that the academic is trained to cultivate, is rewarded and published for cultivating: we are professionally conditioned to detect obscure and unfathomable patterns amid reams of dense information (novels and criticism, on the one side, math texts and journals, on the other.) Though in context this skill set has its points, it happens to coincide with a clinical definition of paranoia: the finding of patterns in places no patterns exist, the seeing of structure in the void.

So that's where things lie this week. Benjamin is fine. Monstrous, but fine, a blooming, melon-cheeked boy with powerful lungs, intelligent eyes, and a whole suite of coos and clucks he breaks out in his moments of 'quite attentiveness' (baby book term.) He slays church ladies by the dozen. Catalina is fine. Tired, and a little paranoid, but doing well, heroically managing a few pages of Jameson and the New Marxism between diaper changes, sneaking out to poetry readings, catching Shakespeare in the park, tutoring ESL, a beaming, radiant woman in the full bloom of first motherhood. Even Carl the Grouch is fine, a little grimy, perhaps, in need of a shave and haircut, but basically, in spite of his cough and his deadlines and his ennui, a man who feels lucky to be where he is, a lumbering oaf a dad who secretly loves the chance to coo and glooble with his child. This Slump isn't so bad. It's just a trough between crests, a topological corollary to the fact that those crests exist at all; an artifact of being able to ride those long rollers with style and pleasure. And this is how we're taking them, sputtering, mouths full of salt water, Need whipping the surf, the Steady State looming like a reef, as we cruise from novelty to familiarity and watch adrenalin dovetail with endurance. Grouchy as fishwives. Tough as urchins. Happy as clams.