Restoring Roslvn Thanks to one couple's vision and perseverance, the village of Roslyn, tucked in a valley on Long Island, New York, has become a showcase for local architecture. Roger and Peggy Gerry, who have devoted their retirement years to preserving Roslyn's architectural heritage, are responsible for the restoration of some 50 buildings in this 350-year-old village. The Gerrys' involvement with "saving" Roslyn began in the early 1960s when they learned of plans to widen the village's Main Street. "That would have destroyed homes and turned the village into nothing but a traffic circle," says Peggy. After blocking the plans, the Gerrys formed the Roslyn Landmark Society to educate villagers about Roslyn's architectural and historical features and the need to preserve them. In 1966 they created the nonprofit Roslyn Preservation Corporation (RPC) to fund restoration projects. The Gerrys are among the three major contributors to the fund.
The RPC relies on research and modern preservation techniques to re-create the original appearance and ambience of the buildings it restores (above). For the Van-Nostrand-Starkins house (left), built in 1680and now a museum, the RPC even restored candle scorch marks on the fireplace mantel as well as the original mouseholes. Two archaeological studies were commissioned to make sure a restored well was put in the proper place. The RPC maintains control of buildings it restores through. deed covenants with the owners/tenants, laying down guidelines for everything from exterior paint to furnishings in the smallest room. The RPC has a collection of period furniture-most of it bought by the Gerrys at auctions-that it loans to homeowners. The Gerrys' dedication, tenacity-and money--have turned many a dilapidated Roslyn house into an attractive landmark. (In a similar vein, on page 38 we have an interview with Othmar Carli, an American restorer working on a palace in Calcutta.)
A LETTER FROM THE PUBLISHER
As our readers know, India's season of festivities begins with Dussehra and goes through Diwali and Christmas to New Year's Day. In the course of these several weeks, sounds of celebration fill the air. Film, dance and music festivals unfold, as national and international players take to the cultural stage to entertain one and all. I am pleased to note that this year, as has been the case on several occasions in the past, Americans will participate in a significant way. Two of our most versatile, creative and original dance troupes are scheduled to perform in India during the months of November and December. Their visits have been organized under auspices of the IndoU.S. Subcommission for Education and Culture. Both groups will start in New Delhi and continue on to several other Indian cities. The Merce Cunningham Dance Company will perform this month, followed by the Alwin Nikolais and Murray Louis Dance Company in December. Cunningham, Nikolais and Louis are world famous, each having won many U.S. and international honors, and accolades from dance critics and aficionados. "With the death of George Balanchine," wrote Dale Harris in the Wali Street Journal in 1985, "it has become very clear that Merce Cunningham now stands alone as the dominant artistic force in American [modern] dance." The Washington Post's Alan M. Kriegsman referred to Nikolais as "one of the most extraordinary theatrical wonders of the age," and Martin Bernheimer of the Los Angeles Times described him as a "composer-designer-choreographericonoclast extraordinaire." Meanwhile, Claude Baigneres of the Paris Le Figaro said, "Murray Louis and his company are masters of a movement technique pushed to the extreme point of perfection." To learn more about these artists and their work, turn to our picture feature that begins on page 46. Cultural give-and-take between India and the United States has a longhistory. A pertinent and outstanding example isdancer, choreographer and teacher, Martha Graham, now 85, who probably more than anyone person, has influenced modern American dance. She \Vas among the first Americans to incorporate the fluidity of classical Indian dance movements in her repertoire. Such cross-fertilization has become more and more evident in the performing arts of India and the United States. Certainly in dance, the contributions of Uday Shankar, Bharat Sharma and Astaad Deboo come to mind. Establishment of the Indo-U.S. Subcommission for Education and Culture by our two governments in 1974intensified and expanded such exchanges. The most important and visible effort occurred between 1984and 1986when the Subcommission organized the Festival of the United States in Indiaand the Festival ofIndia in the United States. The latter, it sometimes seemed, would never come to an end, such was the enthusiastic response of the American people. The Subcommission has sponsored numerous other exhibitions, museum exchanges, seminars and artists' exchanges over the past 16 years. And now the Subcommission has added sports to its agenda; exchanges of coaches and sports-medicine specialists are well under way. In the field of education, exchanges are taking place in science and math teaching, educational testing and textbook production. It is obvious that Subcommission efforts have strengthened bilateral ties between our two countries. And in the process, they have provided a variety of worthwhile and highly pleasurable entertainment.
2 Raining Rocks and Stones
by James Treftl
8 Trees for Life 1 1 Mind and Body
by Lisa Howard
The Mystery of Pain by John lll-Taken Decisions by Morton
Poppy Hunt
15 On the Lighter Side 16 When Government Goes Private
21 28 34 36
38 41
45 46
by Randall Fitzgerald
Riding the Pacific Tide by Mike Edwards Better Times for Black Writers? by Will Nixon Focus On ... Daughters of the Desert by Vicki Moeser Restoring a Palace An Interview With Othmar Carli by Arup De Glimpses of American Architecture The Best American Essays 1987 A Review by Banshi Dhar On Stage in India
Front cover: Lumberjack Mike Ladouceur takes his three-year-old daughter Jessie for a meadow cruise on his minibike. Ladouceur is part of Washington State's $8,OOO-milliona-year timber industry that employs 60,000 workers. A text-and-picture story on the state, which is currently experiencing an economic boom, begins on page 21. Back cover: Robert Swinston, Kimberly Bartosik and Chris Komar of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company perform in "Septet." The group is currently on an extensive tour of India. See also pages 46 through to back cover.
Publisher,
Leonard J. Baldyga; Editor, Guy E. Olson
Managing Editor, Himadri Dhanda; Associate Managing Editor, Krishan Gabrani; Senior Editor, Aruna Dasgupta; Copy Editors, A. Venkata Narayana, Snigdha Goswami; Editorial Assistants, Rocque Fernandes, Rashmi Goel; Photo Editor, Avinash Pasricha; Art Director, Nand Katyal; Associate Art Director, Kanti Roy; Artist, Hemant Bhatnagar; Production Assistant, Sanjay Pokhriyal; Circulation Manager, YP. Pandhi; Photographic Services: USIS Photographic Services Unit; Research Services: USIS Documentation
Services; American Center Library, New Delhi.
Photographs: Front cover-Sandy Felsenthal, © National Geographic Society. Inside front cover-Ping Amranand. 2-Paul Dimare. 3-American Meteorite Laboratory, National Museum of Natural History. 5-Dick Skover. 8-Lisa Howard. l().-..{;ourtesy Trees for Life. I I, 14-illustrations by Nand Katyal. 16--courtesy Britishlnformation Service, New Delhi. 19-Raghu Rai. 21-27-Sandy Felsenthal, © National Geographic Society. 29-33-© Miriam Berkley, 1989except 29 right-Keeler Photography, courtesy Little Brown & Company. 34 bottom-Avinash Pasricha. 35-AP/PTl. 36-37-Smithsonian News Service Photos courtesy of the National Anthropological Archives. 38-39Sumit Sinha. 41 top-Charles McGrath. courtesy Bonnell Design Associates, Inc.; bottom-Hans Namuth. 42 top-New York Historical Society; bottom-courtesy Frank Gehry. 43 top;--courtesy Kaplan/McLaughlin/Diaz. 44-Gordon H. Schenck, Jr., courtesy Johnson/Burgee Architects. 46-47 top-© 1983 Tom Caravaglia (2); bottom rightLance RosenthaL All pictures courtesy Nikolais and Louis Dance Theatre. Inside back cover, top left-Lois Greenfield; top right-JoAnn Baker; bottom left-Nathaniel Tileston; right-© Michael O'Neill. Back cover-Jonathan Atkin. All pictures courtesy Merce Cunningham Dance Company.
-L.J.B. Published by the United States lnfonnation Service, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001 3316841). on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. Printed at Thomson Press (India) Limited,
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Raining Rocks
and Stones
Astronomers saw it coming, but there was nothing anyone could do. Millions of kilometers away, a comet was streaking toward the sun at almost 200,000 kilometers per hour. A dirty snowball 50 kilometers across, it was making its first pass through the solar system. Against all odds, it Until the 19th century, scientists-including thefamous British astronomer Edmund Halley-refused to believe that "stones couldfall from the sky." But once the phenomenon of meteorites was accepted, hunting them became a scientific cottage industry. The Smithsonian Institution's curator emeritus Edward Henderson (below), now 90, found these meteorites in Australia's WolfCreek Crater.
was on a collision course with Earth. All too soon, the dread moment came. The comet brushed aside the first tenuous wisps of Earth's atmosphere; its outer skin heated as the air thickened. So fast was it moving, however, that it scarcely slowed during the second or two it took to reach the ground. Its tremendous momentum carried it several kilometers down into the rock. All of the energy accumulated during the thousands of years it had been falling toward the sun was released as heat. With an energy equivalent to 100,000 times the entire nuclear arsenal of the human race, the comet exploded. Rock in the immediate vicinity was vaporized; that farther away was pulverized. A plume of debris was flung up five times the speed of sound, heating the air over an area the size of Africa to 1,700 degrees Celsius. Nitrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere combined to form a red smog of nitrogen oxides. In a few seconds a crater almost 200 kilometers across had been blasted out. Pulverized rock and dust continued out of the atmosphere and into space. There most of it was slowed by Earth's gravity and started to fall back in, creating the equivalent of a 2.5-centimeterthick layer of dust on top of the atmosphere all around the planet, blocking almost all the sunlight. During the darkness, which lasted three months, smog spread out from the impact site, blocking still more light. Within a year it had spread over the entire globe. Slowly the noxious cloud combined with water vapor to form nitric acid. The skies dripped acid rain, acid as strong as that in a car battery. All this may sound like science fiction, but Ronald Pririn, professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), takes it very seriously. His computers spin out scenarios of what would happen to Earth if a giant comet or asteroid did hit. The doomsday story I've just told is the work of Prinn and his colleague Bruce Fegley; a worst-case scenario, to be sure, but a realistic one nevertheless. They suggest that scientists consider their acid rain theory as a possible cause for the mass extinction that took place 66 million years ago. "My problem isn't so much in killing things off," says Prinn, "but in finding ways for things to survive." Prinn and Fegley are not dabbling in idle
speculation. The kind of event they describe can happen; it has happened in the geologically recent past and it will happen again. Only in recent years have astronomers realized how often Earth is still being hit, and how certain is the probability that it will be hit again. We have known for a long time that our planet is constantly being pelted with small particles, mostly the size of grains of sand and pebbles. We know that sometimes the projectiles are larger-the size of golf balls, bread boxes, even office desks. Twenty tons a day fall to Earth, the detritus of interplanetary space. The heavy bombardment we associate with the early days of the solar system, the barrage that left the surfaces of the moon and Mercury so pocked, is still going on. As recently as March 1989, an asteroid three-fourths of a kilometer across, with millions of tons of rock moving at 70,000 kilometers per hour, shot by Earth at only twice the distance of the moon. If it had hit, according to Bevan French at the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the impact would have been equivalent to the explosion of 20,000 one-megaton hydrogen bombs, leaving a crater eight to 16 kilometers across and some two kilometers deep. Known only as 1989FC, the asteroid orbits the sun once a year in a regular elliptical orbit; it will be back. "Sooner or later," said its discoverer, Henry Holt of Northern Arizona University, "it will be drastically affected by Earth's gravitational well: Either it will hit us, or Earth will sling it away." No one saw it go by. Holt discovered the cosmic near miss when he looked at photographs taken on March 31, 1989, with a 45.72-centimeter telescope on Palomar Mountain. Working backward in time after calculating the orbit, astronomers realized that 1989FC had crossed Earth's orbit on March 23, 1989. If Earth had happened to be at the same point on that day, the results would have been catastrophic. As it was, the asteroid missed us by only six hours. We probably will not see the one with our name on it in any event. Asteroid hunters find their faint, fast-moving quarry by comparing photographs taken of the same sky field about 45 minutes apart. The asteroid stands out because it has moved in that time. But Carolyn Shoemaker (she and her husband, Eugene, make up one of the
premier asteroid-hunting teams in the United States) points out that one coming straight at us would not appear to move when the photographs were compared. It would most likely look like just another star, and would be ignored. A half-dozen events in this century alone have made astronomers nervous. Twentytwo years ago the asteroid Icarus sailed so close by Earth that, for the first time, scientists began to think seriously about sending up a rocket armed with thermonuclear weapons to nudge such an object into a new orbit. In 1937Hermes missed us by about as much as 1989FC did. In 1932 Karl Reinmuth of Heidelberg discovered Apollo, the first Earth-crossing asteroid to be recognized as such and the one that gives its name.to the whole family. And it was back in 1908 that an object the size ofa small office building-probably an old comet-exploded near the Stony Tunguska River in Siberia with the force of 12 megatons of TNT. Gene Shoemaker estimates that there are 1,500 asteroids and comets big enough to be measured in kilometers that could collide with Earth someday; Objects the size of mountains, moving at speeds measured in tens of kilometers per second, are out there, crossing and recrossing Earth's orbit. Sooner or later, one of them and Earth will arrive at the same place at the same time. Meteors-those momentary streaks of light we see in the sky-have always been visible to humans. Today we know that each streak marks the death by incineration of a piece of rock usually no larger than a pea, a tiny cousin ofPrinn's doomsday comet. But educated people did not always look at meteors this way. In 1718 Edmund Halley, the Astronomer Royal of Britain and no mean comet-watcher himself, explained a bright meteor that was seen over much of Europe as the ignition of certain "inflammable sulphureous vapours" in the atmosphere. Even Thomas Jefferson was not immune to a bias against objects coming from space. Told that two professors from Yale had confirmed such an event, he remarked, "I would prefer to believe that two Yankee professors would lie rather than that stones could fall from heaven." Two developments led to the acceptance of meteorites. One was the birth of modern chemistry in the late 18th century, and the consequent ability to analyze rocks
that are supposed to haveJallen from the sky and see whether they are different from their neighbors. The other was a spectacular and well-documented meteorite fall near the town of L' Aigle, in France, on April 26, 1803. A commission of the French AcademY ?f Sciences quickly traveled to the site and confirmed that the stones were not terrestrial in origin. With this "smoking gun," the artificial division between Earth and the rest of the solar system vanished. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, hunting meteorites became a scientific cottage industry. The meteorite, with its burned skin, became a/standard exhibit in the world's museums. While growing up in Chicago, I remember being tremendously impressed by a display showing a meteorite that had fallen through a garage roof, puncturing the top of a car and coming to rest in the seat. The display included the garage roof, the car roof, the seat and the stone. But for all this acceptance of the impact of extraterrestrial bodies on our planet, a curious kind of tunnel vision kept scientists' attention focused on small objects. There seemed to be no thought that if small bodies strike Earth fairly often, big ones-the sort that Prinn aind Fegley's computer envisions-would hit occasionally, as well. And this meant that no one went out to look for the large craters that would have been left behind. In 1891, for example, geologists first visited a place called Coon Butte (now better known as Barringer Crater or Meteor Crater) in Arizona, the archetype of the remains of an impact. They concluded that the crater was caused by a steam explosion within Earth~analogous to the bubbles that form when you heat thick oatmeal on a stove. Throughout the first half of this century, geologists expended extraordinary efforts trying to explain away evidence that craters on Earth had been formed by impacts of extraterrestrial bodies. Campo del Cielo (Field of the Sky) in the Argentine pampas is a place where pieces of a meteorite created several holes in the ground, some of them almost 30 meters across, with fragments of iron still lying at the bottom. A geologist studied the site and announced that prehistoric people had dug the pits to bury the iron! This uncompromising rejection of the presence of craters on Earth began to
change with the work of Harvey Harlow Nininger, a teacher of biology and geology in Kansas in the 1920s. He was inspired by a meteor he saw in 1923, and he set up a "meteor network" of newspaper editors, local officials and teachers around Kansas to report any meteoric material they found or, better yet, saw fall to the ground. While setting up this network, he found a place called the "meteorite farm" near Brenham. The owners kept plowing up bits of meteorites, which they sold to the curious and the scientific-minded. In a wheatfield on the farm, Nininger discovered a partially filled-in basin that the farmers called a "buffalo wallow"; he recognized it immedi- duce--ean be seen in their entirety only to the site would be mounted and a search made for physical evidence of impact. ately as a small crater. Subsequent excava- from the air. One early intimation of large craters Gradually, the list of craters on Earth tion turned up chunks of what was came in 1951, when pilots taking aerial grew. Some of the entries are staggering. In undoubtedly meteoric material. Buoyed by his success, Nininger quit his photographs of Algonquin Provincial Park northeastern Quebec, for example, is a ring teaching job and became a full-time mete- in Ontario, Canada, noticed a curious fea- of water inside a crater 100 kilometers orite hunter. He supported his family by ture near the town of Brent. The land- across. Known as the Manicouagan Resselling specimens to museums and, even- forms-sides of two lakes as well as curved ervoir, this is the site where a meteoric tually, by running a roadside meteorite ridges-seemed to make up a huge ring object slammed into the ground more than museum in Flagstaff, Arizona. He began more than three kilometers across. Could 200 million years ago. In the intervening his explorations of Meteor Crater by this be the remains of a crater three times time, the rim of the crater has been worn attaching a magnet to the end of a cane and larger than the one in Arizona? away and the deep hole filled with sediwalking around the crater area, picking up This question touches on an important ments from the lake that¡ formed in it. bits of iron from the gl"ound. Later, he aspect of craters. on Earth. Unlike the Today, all that is left of that catastrophic rigged a kind of magnetic rake he could tow moon, where a crater will last thousands of event is the lake ring and, of course, the behind his car to do the same thing. By the millions of years, Earth's surface is ever . evidence in the rocks. late 1940s he had collected enough frag- changing. Over millions of years, mountain Nor is Earth's surface the only place that ments to convince scientists from the chains are raised and worn down, oceans craters can be found. In the normal course Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory appear and disappear. A crater created by of geological evolution, craters can be burthat the crater had indeed been caused an impact-even a crater many kilometers ied deep underground. Below the flat by an impact explosion. They estimated across-will be weathered d9wn and plains of the Williston Basin in western that the original meteorite weighed more changed over time. The challenge to geolo- North Dakota, oil prospectors have found¡ than 10,000 tons. gists: Recognize the remains of the crater the remains of a crater almost three kilomeDespite this evidence, acceptance of the even after aeons of weathering. ters underground. existence of large meteor craters on Earth To complicate matters, the existence of The larger craters were christened was grudging. David Raup, now Sewell L. a circular structure in the ground isn't "astroblemes" (star wounds) by geologist Avery Distinguished Service Professor of enough to prove that a meteorite landed. and oceanographer Robert Dietz. Today geophysical science at the University of There are lots of ways to make circular the less imaginative but probably more Chicago, was a student in the 1950s. "We structures-volcanoes, salt domes and accurate term "impact structure" is used. were still taught," he remembers, "that . sinkholes, to name a few. Over the years, Richard Grieve of Canada's Department there were no meteorite craters on Earth, scientists have learned to identify craters by of Energy, Mines and Resources in Ottawa with one exception-the Meteor Crater in looking at the rocks for evidence of the very keeps an updated list of confirmed impact Arizona." high heats and pressures that have to be structures and publishes maps showing their locations. We know of more than 120 Aerial photography opened new vistas present when a large meteorite is stopped for earth scientists. Meteor Crater is more and explodes beneath the ground. This scattered around the world, and the list than a kilometer across, and it is easy for evidence can be in the form of minerals grows by five or six every year. The extraterrestrial stones in our musesomeone standing on the ground to see created only at pressures much higher than ums carry information about conditions in what it is. This would not be possible in a those found in volcanoes, or in characterisplaces no human being has visited. Two really big crater, though, one that is tens of tic patterns of shattering in the rock. kilometers across. You could stand in the Once it was clear that a crater need regions are sources for objects that evenmiddle of such a crater and see nothing not look like a crater, the search was tually fall into Earth's atmosphere. One is except (perhaps) a ring of low hills-the on. Geologists pored over aerial and sat- the asteroid belt, a swarm of rocks circling the sun out between Mars and Jupiter. crater's rim-in this distance. Big cratersellite photographs, searching for the telltale the kind that Prinn's scenario would pro- rings. When they appear~d, an expedition ,Asteroids are the debris left behind by a
While chemists are using the record contained in small meteorites to unravel the origin of the solar system, other scientists are studying craters to learn about the way life has evolved on our planet.
c
planet that never managed to assemble it- 66 million years ago, an asteroid about self.Occasionally a collision in the belt kicks eight kilometers across hit Earth. The an asteroid out of orbit, sending it toward group was headed by a father-and-son the sun. Such asteroids take up an orbit that team-the late Luis Alvart}z, a Nobel brings them looping in past Earth on their Prize-winning physicist, and his son WaIter, a professor of geology. way to the sun-the Apollo objects. The other source is the Oort Cloud, They had discovered that the rocks that described by the Dutch astronomer Jan were forming at the time of the dinosaur Oort in the 1950s. It is a region far outside disappearance contain unusual amounts of the orbit of Pluto where comets-mixtures the element iridium. This platinumlike of rock and ice-orbit the sun. Galactic metal is rare at the surface of Earth, but tidal forces or jostling by passing stars relatively more abundant in asteroids. occasionally send these into the inner solar Their interpretation of this result: An assystem, where the heat of the sun vaporizes teroid had hit Earth, raising a cloud of dust some of the frozen gases and produces the and blotting out sunlight for three months, tail we associate with comets. Some comets causing the demise of dinosaurs and twopass through the solar system once and are thirds of Earth's plant and animal species. gone. Others, like Halley's Comet, get As more and more data came in, the drawn. in by the gravitational effects of the Alvarez explanation gathered supporters. outer planets and settle into elliptical or- In the same places where iridium was conbits. When the gases have all blown off centrated, some investigators found after too many passes near the sun, these shocked quartz, a mineral made only at comets, too, become Apollo objects. Sci- high pressure. Others found traces of en~istsestimate that only a fraction of the soot~vidence of worldwide forest fires Apollo objects got their start as comets. caused by blazing fragments of the exploBy studying the pieces of this scrap pile sion falling back to Earth. And although that fall to Earth, scientists can lear-nmuch scientists still heatedly debate the Alvarez about how our planet and its neighbors hypothesis, it clearly remains one of the formed. For Edward Anders, now profes- major contenders for the explanation of the sor of chemistry at the University of Chi- dinosaurs' extinction. cago, studying meteorites was a case oflove But there is one problem with this theory: at first sight. "When I was a graduate We cannot unambiguously identify the student at Columbia, we had a lecture on crater made by the asteroid. Some geolometeorites and the speaker brought sam- gists have looked at the quartz that was ples. Just holding a piece of extraterrestrial shocked when the asteroid hit and, by material was tremendously exciting. As plotting on a map the areas where the soon as I could, I started to work on them." degree of shock is the same, have produced Capping a long and distinguished career . a series of concentric circles whose center is as an "astrogeochemist," Anders recently supposed to be the site of the crater. When made one of the most exciting discoveries this is done (and allowance made for the ever made about meteorites. He has iso- motion of the continents in the past 65 lated what he calls "pre~solar" diamondsmillion years), the best candidate lies near grains of material made by stars before the the town of Manson, Iowa. There, buried sun existed and that were swept up into under meters of rubble left by the last asteroids when the solar system formed glacier, lies a crater 40 kilometers across 4,600 million years ago. He has also found and known to us from cores brought up pre-solar silicon carbide (he calls it a kind from boreholes. This structure may be the of "galactic garbage"), a mixture of grains signature of the impact that caused the from ten or ,more stars. most famous of mass extinctions. While chemists are using the record conWhile the brouhaha over the Alvarez tained in small meteorites to unravel the hypothesis escalated, NASA beefed up its origin of the solar system, other scientists investment in the continuing search for are using the craters to learn about the way asteroids. Scanning the skies for small, life has evolved on our planet. The connec- quick-moving objects, scientists are turntion between craters and evolution has ing up new Apollo asteroids each year. beep..made only recently. In 1980 a group The mass extinction 66 million years ago from the University of California, Berke- could well have been caused by the impact ley, published a bold thesis: At the same of an Earth-crossing asteroid. If this were time that the dinosaurs were disappearing the end of the story, it would be interesting
enough, but it would not change the current view of evolution. After all, there are bound to have been occasional large-scale accidents in Earth's history. What really has the community of evolutionary scientists excited is a paper published in 1983 by David Raup and Jack Sepko ski of the University of Chicago. Paleontologists have long known that there have. been many mass extinctions during the past 700 million years; the disappearance of the dinosaurs is neither the largest nor the most recent. What Raup and Sepkoski discovered about ten such events during the past few hundred million years is that they seemed to occur regularly, about every 26 million years. This totally unexpected conclusion. is still being debated, but it leads to very interesting questions. If the dinosaurs' extinction was caused by an asteroid impact, and if that extinction was just one of a regularly repeating series, could it be that every mass extinction was caused by such an impact? Could it be, in other words, that every 26 million years a mountain-sized rock falls from the sky and clears the deck of Earth's life forms? Astronomers who think about such questions have hypothesized that there are ways that such periodic bombardments could arise. The sun, in its journey around the galaxy, for example, passes through the cluttered central plane every 26 million years. This passage could jostle the Oort Cloud and send a storm of comets raging into the inner solar system. Others have suggested that there is a hitherto undiscovered dark companion to the sun, which was quickly nicknamed Nemesis, that comes near the Oort Cloud every 26 million years, triggering the storm. If this conjectured cycle ot destruction proves to be true, it will revolutionize the way we think about the development oflife on our planet. Instead of the slow, steady replacement of one species by another, as Darwin envisioned, we would have instead a situation in which the Darwinian progression goes on for 26 million years-and then a catastrophic collision occurs, wiping out a good fraction of the species that have evolved during that time, and the whole game starts all over again. 0 About the Author: James Trefil. a physicist at George Mason University in Fairfax. Virginia. also works with paleontologists at the University of Chicago. Illinois.
A nonprofit organization started by Indian American Balbir Mathur to help fight world hunger has planted more than a million trees all over India as of now.
Balbir Mathur was flying high, literally and metaphorically, when he decided to "leave my business and devote my life to fighting world hunger," as he puts it. Mathur, who left Allahabad three decades ago for the United States, had a flourishing consultancy business. He was based in Wichita, Kansas, but his work took him all over the world. "On my return to America from a business trip one day in 1982, I was flying over the island of Cyprus when it happened," he remembers. "I looked down and the Earth looked so small. I could see how it would look to a divine eye, like a tiny speck of dust." Suddenly, the magnitude of the misery prevalent on "this tiny speck of dust" struck him: "On one side of the Earth, I realized, we have so much. On the other, so Iittle--every few seconds one child dies of malnutrition and another is blinded or becomes retarded because oflack offood. I decided that I had to do something about it. I had to help." Balbir Mathur founded Trees for Life, a nonprofit organization that in eight years, with the help of individual and corporate contributions from India and America, has planted more than a million Facing page: Trees for Life set up booths at the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad last year to distribute 200,000 guava saplings as prasad. Inset, top: Founder and executive director Balbir Mathur (k,neeling, right) examines a recently planted tree. Inset, center: Residents of Mishran, one of the many villages that have enthusiastically adopted the tree-growing program, pose before a Trees for Life sign.
fruit, fodder and forest trees in several Indian villages. Explaining why he opted for tree planting, Mathur says, "I was determined to do whatever I could to help the world's hungry. I only needed a way, an action' plan. When I learned that more than half of the world's trees had been destroyed in the past 200 years and their loss had had a devastating effect on the world's environment and food supply, I knew how I could contribute-by promoting the planting of trees that would enable people to grow their own food and ensure the food supply for coming generations. "I wanted to tackle one of the root causes, rather than the consequences, of hunger," he continues. "Besides, I firmly believe that the only way to make real progress is to help people learn how to feed themselves. The problem of world hunger can't be solved with giveaways. Food
handouts increase dependency and decrease self-respect. The solution had to be achieved by encouraging people to grow their own food." Once Mathur decided to plant trees, the obvious place to start was a country he knew and loved-:-India, the land of his birth. In 1983, while visiting his mother in Allahabad, Mathur set out to plant some fruit trees in a nearby village. At first, no one was interested; the villagers insisted that the trees would all die. But after a sadhu blessed the trees, Mathur was able to persuade his mother and 2,500 villagers to plant them. On his return to Wichita, Mathur told a class of eighth-grade students about his tree-planting effort in India. The students enthusiastically decided that they too would like to help, and they soon raised enough money for an additional 103 trees. "In that class on that day was born the idea of Trees for Life," says Mathur. A local church donated office space for the fledgling organization, and Mathur and his American wife, Treva Mathur Brown, set out to make the world a better place one tree at a time. Today both of them work full time for Trees for Life. He travels to India several times a year to supervise existing projects and to start new ones; she runs their Wichita headquarters. Trees for Life, which has rapidly gained supporters in India and the United States, relies mainly on personal contributions from several thousand American support-
TREES FOR
liFE
Balbir Mathur (left) visits India several times a year to oversee old Trees for Life projects and initiate new ones. His wife, Treva, runs the headquarters in Wichita, Kansas.
ers. Many American companies, impressed by the effectiveness of this simple program, have also reached out to offer a helping hand. The Pioneer Hybrid Seed Company in Iowa, for example, is developing a disease-free papaya seed for the organization. The Food Industry Crusade Against Hunger (FICAH), a coalition of U.S. food industry representatives, last year donated $20,000. Other companies have made donations that range from subsidized printing costs of publicity material to ice cream for fund-raisers. Trees for Life won an International Project Award from the Nebraska-based National Arbor Day Foundation in 1985. In India, the response has been just as positive. The government of Orissa has donated IS hectares of land fora treeplantation program. lTC, an Indian tobacco giant, donated Rs. 1.5 million to fund the group's projects for the next five years. Local voluntary organizations, such as Rotary International, are also extending assistance to Trees for Life. Says Kamal Seth, a Calcutta businessman and the district governor for the Rotary International district that includes eastern India, Nepal, and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, "Our Rotary Club was looking for a good project. We chose Trees for Life because it provides food for the poor and also ensures environmental protection. " Last year, Seth and other Rotarians distributed one million papaya seeds to needy villagers. Says Seth, "We need a project of this kind in India. Trees have been cut thoughtlessly in the name of development or for commercial purposes. The result has been a disaster. Vast areas of India used to be covered with lush forests at one time. Now satellite pictures indicate that less than ten percent of the land is forested-and the percentage is dwindling every day." "In India," adds Mathur, "30 trees are cut down for everyone planted." Without trees to protect the land, valuable topsoil is swept into- rivers and lakes, which, in turn, become swirling, muddy
purveyors of disaster as they overflow, flooding and destroying crops. Lack of firewood also diverts precious fertilizer from the land; animal manure, which could be used to improve crop yields, literally goes up in smoke, rather than into the soil, as the poor are forced to burn dried cow dung as cooking fuel. The result is smaller crop yields. Mathur sees Trees for Life as a small step toward changing this depressing scenario. It isn't an easy task, he concedes. He recalls that the first villagers he persuaded to plant trees turned out to be right: Most of the trees died. But Mathur brought in agricultural experts who taught the people how to care for young trees. Now, he claims, the survival rate is more than 70 percent for fruit trees-which account for approximately one-third of the plantings-and 80 percent for the forest and fodder trees. When Trees for Life initiates a treeplanting project, agriculture, forestry and horticulture experts meet with local villagers to determine what they need and what will grow in that area. The villagers make a commitment to attend educational classes and help with soil preparation and actual _ planting. Mathur points out that the trees belong to the villagers, not to an intangible organization. Therefore, the villagers' commitment is essential. Thorn fences or brick enclosures sfifeguard the succulent young trees from hungry animals. A follow-up program provides additional help on pruning, mulching, weeding and watering. Villagers are encouraged to use natural pesticides-such as the leaves of neem trees-and animal dung for fertilizer. To lessen the need for fuel in village homes, Trees for Life encourages villagers to use energy-efficient chulas. Last year the organization began experimenting with an innovative program of tree distribution. Approximately 200,000 guava saplings with planting instructions were distributed as prasad from the Maha Kumbh Mela in Allahabad. Mathur's goal is to plant 2.7 million trees a year in India and to distribute as many seeds as possible. "India has the land, the climate and the people to make this happen. It doesn't require much effort or money," he says. "All it takes is a group of people saying, 'We can do it.'" 0 About the Author: Lisa Howard is a reporter for the San Mateo Weekly in San Mateo, California.
The Mystery of Pain One thing to admire in my friend Dick Shaffer is his courage. He doesn't complain~about anything, though right now I'm thinking particularly about pain. After a car wreck in 1973 stabbed the broken ends of his right femur through his thigh muscles, he endured two years of operations, traction, casts, and learning to walk unaided, all of it adding to the pain of an already bad back. Whatever he said around his wife, Mary Ann, I've never heard him say so much as "ouch." It isn't that he is a quiet man anyway. His quietness doesn't raise any questions for the rest of us, but his response to pain does. One night more recently, a squeeze in his abdomen awakened him. Thirty seconds later he was on his hands and knees beside the bed, tapping on Mary Ann's feet to wake her up because he hurt too much to talk. A stone~a small lopsided burr~was gouging its way down a ureter from a kidney toward his bladder, producing an ache like a hand crushing something inside him. Mary Ann drove him to the emergency room. A nurse gave him a shot of Demerol. Even through the narcotic, a wave of pain caused beads of sweat to pop out all over him, and he moaned. The nurse turned back, leaned in, and said, "You have a painkiller now, so you can stop
making all that noise." The doctor on duty had just walked into the cubicle. "Hold it," he told the nurse. "Have you ever had a kidney stone?" "No," she said. "Then cool it," he said. "You can't imagine the pain until you've had one." To the Shaffers he added, "I have." Perhaps there was no man-woman tension behind any of that. It could have been just a doctor defending a patient and being rude to a nurse. Then again, perhaps the doctor was getting even for the notion that a woman knows things about pain that he, who doesn't bear babies or have menstrual cramps, cannot fathom. It's part of the lore, a deep source of the admiration men feel for women: They hurt more than men do and they're braver about it. Half a dozen of us were sitting around a table the other day, talking about work, writing, the usual stuff. By and by we got on to our worries, and the Novelist remarked, "One thing I don't need is another kidney stone." I thought of Dick Shaffer. We all looked sympathetic. The Editor said, "It's supposed to rank with childbirth for Worst Pain." The Novelist shrugged: "I don't know who'd win a 'mine is bigger than yours' contest, but I neverwant to feel anything that bad again."
We knew the futility of the comparison. No man can claim to have felt anything like labor pain; as comedian Robin Williams says, he'll believe it when he meets a man who has passed a bowling ball. Besides, there's the lore. "I read somewhere that women have. a higher threshold of pain than men, or maybe it's a higher tolerance," the Journalist said. Here we were, veterans at our crafts, chewing over the theory, like sophomores, that your average woman takes pain like a man while a man takes it like a baby. Or, as the Editor held up the worm of doubt for us, "Compared with women, are men sissies?" The answer from top pain investigators is no:----depending on what you measure as "pain." A sensation caused by physical damage? The point at which a person says it hurts? At which the person calls it unbearable? Any difference between the sexes, if it exists, appears trivial compared with the differences between individuals and between people-never mind gender-from different cultures. The common belief that wounds are inevitably associated with pain, and that the more extensive the wound the worse the pain, is false, wrote Henry K. Beecher, the author of a study that pretty much started the modern era of research into individual differences in pain following acute injury. Beecher served as a doctor with the U.S. Army in World War II. He was so startled by the behavior of soldiers carried into field hospitals with gaping wounds, even with limbs blown off, that he kept careful notes. Only one out of three complained of hurting enough to need morphine. By the time he saw them, the wounded men were not in shock, Beecher reported, nor were they numb to all pain; they would gripe as loudly as anyone else about a clumsy vein puncture for a blood transfusion. After the war, Beecher checked on civilian patients with accident wounds similar to the war wounds, and found that four out of five hurt enough to ask for morphine. "There is no simple, direct relationship between the wound per se and the pain experienced," Beecher concluded. "The pain is in very large part determined by other factors, and of great importance here is the significance of the wound .... " A wounded soldier might feel "relief, thankfulness at his escape alive from the battlefield, even euphoria." A civilian might view major surgery as "a depressing, calamitous event." William Brose, an anesthesiologist (as are many of the physicians who study ways of taming pain) who runs the Pain Management Service at Stanford University in Stanford, California, told me about the Beecher study as he summed up today's prevailing view that "pain is not one of the senses, such as sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell, but is, rather, an experience." It isn't entirely in your mind. The physical parts of a normal nervous system include pain receptors on nerve fibers. They are the triggers of alarms we use for survival: Something is wrong here, take action now. Children born without pain receptors usually die before they can grow up, because they keep damaging themselves-they bite through their tongues, get burned, and break their bones without knowing it. But the various ways people register pain after the first alarm, Brose said, have little to do with nerve endings and "muc\1 more to do with environment, culture and emotions." So it is "sensation plus suffering," in the words of David Spiegel, a Stanford psychiatrist who often works with Brose-"not only how much damage there is but how much attention you give it." Last year a Spiegel study of women being treated for breast cancer
showed that many of those in a support group lived longer than those in a control group; and he made an interesting side observation. Women in the support group learned self-hypnosis to control their chronic pain. After a year, they felt only half as much pain as the controls. There was no decrease in frequency and duration of pain attacks, but big decreases in levels of pain and amount of suffering. Spiegel's interpretation: "They still had the pain, but it just didn't bother them as much, because they had learned to focus their attention elsewhere." Did these women raise their thresholds of pain? No-and yes. We are, you see, dealing with not just one threshold but four. It's a simple sequence that researchers can measure with tools such as electric shocks or heat. One of the world's chief pain researchers is Ronald Melzack of McGill University in Montreal. He lines it up from (I) sensation-the level at which a subject in the lab first feels anything at all; (2) pain perception-the level at which the subject says it hurts; '(3) pain tolerance-the level at which the subject says he or she can't stand it any longer; to (4) encouraged pain tolerance-the change, if any, from (3) after extra motivation. Melzack is convinced that "all people, regardless of cultural background, have a uniform sensation threshold." Sherpas and American businessmen, given identical shocks, detect them at identical levels. So do Italian, Jewish, Irish and American women, and anyone else you test. It's from there on, at the next three thresholds, that people diverge. The Sherpas took much bigger shocks than their Western visitors before saying they hurt. Jewish women, in one experiment worthy of a sitcom, raised their tolerance levels after hearing that their group tolerated pain worse than others (a lie), while Protestant women didn't.¡ Pain research began in earnest only about 45 years ago, and it continues to this day under an awkward constraint. There is no physical quantity for doctors to see, as they can an ECG pulse or cell count, so they have to measure people's reports of what they feel. For acute pain (from injury, illness and other transitory events), a dependable gauge is the Visual Analogue Scale (VAS). The left end of a ten-centimeter line is labeled NO PAIN, the right end WORST PAIN IMAGINABLE. A patient marks the line to indicate how intense his or her pain is at the moment. Doctors use the VAS to see how their intervention, with drugs or mental exercise, affects their patients' pain. The V AS isn't very good with chronic pain, partly because there is more than mere intensity to such pain. For that, a highly regarded test is the McGill Pain Questionnaire (MPQ), which Melzack and his colleagues developed in the 1970s. Melzack points out that you wouldn't describe the visual world "only in terms of light flux without regard to pattern color and texture." The MPQ adds dimensions of quality with 78 adjectives, such as throbbing, vicious, radiating, arranged in 20 categories .. Occasionally you'll see one of those lists that purp'ort to rank pains. Childbirth stays near the top of the charts, with kidney stones, cancer, phantom-limb pain after amputation, chronic back pain, cracked ribs and so forth jockeying for position right behind. Number one for some professionals, though, is the connoisseur's choice--eausalgia, a horrible burning pain in the skin from nerve damage. But Brose, Melzack and others agree that it makes no sense to try to compare labor pain with, say, kidney stones, except in the broadest sense. They have different qualities, origins, expected outcomes and psychological surroundings. Dick Shaffer's kidney-stone ordeal started in his nerve fibers, not his imagination. The same goes for a woman whose child is
stretching the walls of her birth canal. After the start, each has some say in the ways they deal with the pain and report on it, ways that vary according to their personalities. Regarding raw ability to tolerate pain, Melzack says, the MPQ shows no difference between men and women. Individual, yes. Gender, no. "You can forget about that one," he says. Brose says, more cautiously, "I don't feel we have established any difference." Regarding differences in the ways people express pain, Spiegel says, "Men are probably more reticent, actually, than women." Spiegel has great respect for the way women deal with natural childbirth and chronic pain. Also, he suspects, "Women are better than men at accommodating to sick roles-more graceful at allowing themselves to be cared for. Men tend to either be strong and in control or regress and act like two-year-olds." On the other
hand, men are "too good sometimes at focusing away and minimizing." Sure, we can all benefit from techniques that help cope with chronic pain. "You want to say, 'I got the message, now stop bothering me,' "Spiegel observes. "But to acute pain, you want to say, 'I'm listening.' " You need the alarm. "Yet the typical reaction of a man having a first heart attack is to convince himself that it is indigestion. Many of them actually hit the floor and do push-ups to prove to themselves that they aren't having a heart attack." Acute pain means "pay attention. There are ways to cope, but first, your body is trying to tell you something." And it's not whether you're as courageous as your spouse. 0
Ill~aken Decisions Waking at night, 1 made my way in the dark to the bathroom without trouble, but when I switched on the light, I was stunned: It wasn't my bathroom at home-or, in fact, any bathroom I had ever seen. 1 supposed I must be in a hotel on a business trip-but what trip? What hotel? I had no idea. Panic such as one feels in certain nightmares swept over me, but this was no nightmare; I was definitely awake. I wondered whether some tiny fragile blood vessel in my brain had burst, wrecking the intricate machinery of the mind. Heart thudding, I stumbled back to bed; there, after long minutes of hard thought, I realized ~ was in the hospital in which I had had an abdominal operation three days earlier. Within a day after the operation, I had been perfectly rational, chatting sensibly with my wife and others, working on last Sunday's crossword puzzle (slowly, to be sure), and reading a bit. Post-operatively, my mind, though running on low gear, seemed perfectly normal. But it wasn't. Nor are the minds of most ill people. I'm not referring to the gross psychological disorders that accompany the most severe physical illnesses---delirium, depression, confusion, amnesia, which there's a vast body of medical paranoia and the like-about literature. Rather, I'm talking about certain common, but subtle and extremely important, alterations in thinking that sicknessoperations, acute episodes such as heart attacks, pneumonia or a severe flu attack-often brings about but which medicine has largely ignored. For if a patient's mental dysfunction makes no trouble for the hospital staff, few doctors or other members of the medical staff notice it or care. As a team of psychiatrists writes in the journal Cancer, "A patient's ------..~ cognitive state may arouse less concern than his or her bowel function. "
Some physicians are now beginning to take note of the problem, and one who has shown special concern in his research and writings is Dr. Eric Cassell, a clinical professor of public health at Cornell University Medical College in Ithaca, New York, and an internist in private practice in Manhattan. Cassell explains: "Sick people are different from well people. We think a sick person is just a well person with a sickness-the same person you've always been, except you just happen to have a sickness. That isn't true. "Sickness changes people's ability to make decisions. They become dependent on the doctor and others to take care of them, and focus on the!TIselves rather than the outside world. So, in many ways they become childlike. They may seem intact in all intellectual respects but, in fact, they no longer reason like well people." The changes are for the most part caused not by the physical disease itself but largely by the social-emotional shift to what the sociologist Talcott Parsons labeled the "sick role," or what Cassell prefers to call the "sickness state" or "illness state." The intellectual results of this shift have rarely been recognized by doctor or patient, both of whom may have commonly attributed any oddity in the patient's reasoning to anxiety or depression. But Cassell, who was once puzzled by the intermittent unreasonablene~s of a middle-aged man who was recovering from surgery for a gastric
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When two cups were filled with water to the same level, the patient agreed they contained an equal quantity. But when water from one cup was poured into a test tube, filling it, the sick person said the tube had more water than the remaining cup. Similarly, a sick person was unable to draw a correct water line across a tilted beaker. He drew it parallel to the bottom of the beaker because his perception was hampered by sickness.
hemorrhage, thought to himself: "If I only knew how you were thinking, I'd understand you, and sickness, so much better." It occurred to Cassell, because the patient was in some ways acting like an obstinate child, to test him by means of a well-known experiment of the Swiss child psychologist Jean Piaget. Cassell filled two little specimen cups with water and showed them to the patient, along with a tall, thin, empty test tube. "Edgar," he said, "these two cups contain the same amount of water." Edgar agreed. Cassell poured the water from one cup into the tube. "Which one has more water?" he asked, pointing to the remaining full cup and the now-full test tube. Edgar unhesitatingly pointed to the test tube. As Cassell later wrote, "My middle-aged patient's response to this classic test of reasoning on the conservation of volume was the same as that of a child under six." Edgar's was not an extreme or unusual case. Cassell and several medical students and graduate students repeated the experiment rIJ many times, not only with hos-.=:- - pitalized, but also with ambulatory patients; consistently, those who consider themselves ill, even if they seem to possess all their mental faculties, reason like preschool children in some ways. One 29-year-old social worker explained to Cassell a year after he tested her how the water-volume test had seemed to her: "I watched you do it, and I thought, 'I know the test tube can't have more water,' but I looked at it and it did. so I said it despite what I knew." If people in the sickness state can't reason correctly about so elemental a physical reality, it's no wonder they so often seem unreasonable or obtuse about their treatment or their outside affairs. Doctors and relatives ofSickness can lead to many losses of ten take this to be the willful basic reasoning. One such loss is that of crankiness of the "bad patient," perspective. Sick people are often but, like Cassell, a few other inunable to visualize or form thoughts from vestigators have recently recmore than a single viewpoint. ognized that such patients have temporarily lost some of their advanced cognitive skills. Psychiatrist Stephen A. Green, a professor at the Georgetown University School of Medicine in Washington, D.C., has observed in doing psychotherapy with people in the sick state that many regress to a level of functioning in which they find it hard to concentrate, are poor at taking in what's said to them, and cannot seem to focus their thinking on problems at hand. He says, "I think of one patient in particular, a brilliant biologist who, when he learned he had cancer, couldn't write up any of his recent experimental work in any logical, reasoned fashion. It wasn't just anxiety; for months after the tumor had been successfully removed-it hadn't metastasized-he thought of himself as sick, and remained unable to organize his data and his thoughts coherently." Psychologists Stefan Demjen and Donald Bakal of the Univer¡
B
sity of Calgary in Canada, in a recent study of chronic-headache sufferers, report that during periods of pain, such persons deny, far more titan normal people do, having other real-life problems; moreover, they are almost incapable of articulating personal feelings and concerns. This pattern, too, looks like the loss of the adult grasp of reality and communication skills. Psychiatrist Normund Wong, a professor at the University of California at S'~m Francisco, recounts in the Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic how, during his recovery from a serious operation, his total helplessness induced unrealistic thinking. He blithely assured friends he would be back at work within a few days, although experts had advised him it would be more like half a year, and he denied and ignored such symptoms as bouts of confusion, memory lapses and inability to think of the names of close friends who came to visit. But from his own disordered dreams, Wong, the psychoanalyst, realized how irrational his mind had become. Ten days after the operation, he suddenly began to cry; he had finally, rationally, recognized how close he had come to death. The tears were more than tears of relief; they were a sign of returning good sense. Eric Cassell, after his initial discovery concerning conservation of volume, went on to pinpoint certain other losses of basic reasoning skills during the sick state, again by means of techniq ues developed by Piaget. One such skill is the ability to "decenter" (as Piaget called it), that is, to imagine how a set of objects (such as three toy mountains on a table top) look from the perspective of someone on the other side of the table. Children gradually acquire this skill between the ages of seven and 12; adults, Cassell found, may lose it while they are sick-and, with it, the ability to see their illness, and other real-life problems, from the doctor's or other persons' perspectives. Even the concept of horizontality, particularly as applied to bodies of water-acquired by age eight, according to Piaget-may be lost in the sick state. A number of times, Cassell has tried the following experiment with patients: He sketches a beaker and draws a line across it to indicate that it is half full; then, drawing the beaker tipped at a 45-degree angle, he asks, "Could you show me the water level if I turned it like this?" The patients readily draw the water line-most often parallel to the bottom of the beaker, at a 45-degree angle to the ground. Now that I'm aware of all this, I hope to compensate for my loss of reasoning abilities when and if I become ill again. For one thing, simply realizing what may be happening to my thinking should help me understand why nothing the people around me are saying seems to make sense. For another, I'll be on guard against the specious wisdom so many gain in the sickbed, where they think they see at I~st what's real and important, and make major decisions accordingly. I mean to postpone any major decisions about my life until long after I'm well again. If for some reason I'm moved to change my will, for example, I shall not do it during my next bout with the flu. Most important, I plan, when next I'm sick, to go to the doctor or the hospital accompanied by my wife, trusting her to be the sane mind listening to the doctor, asking questions, making notes of what the physician says, and, afterward, reminding me of what went on and what I'm supposed to do. I'll need an alter ego, because my ego will be altered. 0 About the Author: Morton Hunt writes on biomedical research for The New York Times.
and behavioral
ON THE LIGHTER SIDE
~-
"Nice resume, but as an equal opportunity employer I must tell you that we have our full quota of Capricorns and are looking for Sagittarius accountants only. " Reprinted
with permission
from The Saturday
Evening Post Society,
a division of BFL and MS, Inc. Š 1987.
"Amazing, three failed marriages, scores of disastrous relationships, many financial reversals, and countless physical ailments, but through it all I've always had good luck parking."
P
rivatization is a quiet revolution that is sweeping the world. More than 50 countries have engaged in some form of the process-either selling off state enterprises, deregulating agricultural or industrial sectors, or contracting out government services-at a speed and breadth of global transformation that have been breathtaking. Since 1981, the trend has accelerated. It now embraces governments of all ideologies and nations at all stages of development. For nations as diverse as Turkey, Britain and Bangladesh, privatization is an idea whose time has come. A principal motivation for the spread of privatization, especially in the less developed countries, has been an awareness born of budgetary crises that state-run enterprises are usually "white elephants" that lose millions of dollars each year. In the view of one observer: "Instead of accumulating surpluses or supplying services efficiently, these enterprises have become a drain on the national treasuries." Accordingly, a view has emerged that the role of the private sector should be enhanced. Over the years, most state-owned monopolies have become nothing more than employment agencies, providing jobs for political cronies, defeated politicians and retired military officers. These government enterprises exact both direct and indirect costs from the citizens of every country in which they are found. Tax subsidies must continually prop them up, and further subsidies, siphoned off as loans from foreign and domestic banks, crowd the private sector out of capital markets. The very presence of these state firms stifles entrepreneurship and innovation. As governments have run out of money and their citizens have become disenchanted with the performance of public enterprises, pragmatism has begun to replace ideology. A realization has dawned that the social safety net of the welfare state is too often a hammock. Thus, in 1984, the state's share of the economy in 19 Western European countries began declining for the first time since before World War II. Privatization spread quickly in Europe because government ownership of the means of production did not bring about what it was supposed to-less hierarchy and more involvement on the part of the labor force. Britain took the lead in the privatization revolution by transferring about one-third of its nationalized work force-600,000 jobs-to the private sector through the sale of state-owned companies. These liquidations, combined with the proceeds from the sale of public housing to tenants, brought the British Treasury From When Government Goes Private: Successful Alternatives to Public Services by Randall Fitzgerald.
Š Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, with permission of Universe Books (New York: 1988).
In 1982, British Telecom (BT), the world's sixth-largest telephone company, was sold to the public in the largest stock offering in history till then. Picture at left shows young BT riggers being trained to climb a 36.5-meter satellite dish antenna to maintain the telecommunication systems of the company.
more than $26,000 million and reduced the state's share of total domestic output from ten percent to six percent. With the aim of making Britain a nation of homeowners and shareholders, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's government introduced a form of privatization known as popular, or worker, capitalism, offering to sell or give away stock in some state enterprises to their employees. For example, in 1982, employees of Britain's largest trucking company, the National Freight Consortium, purchased 83 percent of company stock, contributing about $500 each. Since the buyout, employee productivity has increased 30 percent, and the company is so profitable that the stock is now worth more than 40 times the price employees paid for it. Next to be sold was British Telecom, the world's sixthlargest telephone company, which needed capital to modernize its technology. In the largest stock offering in history as of that time, the British government sold a 51-percent share to the public. British Telecom employees were given first preference, and 96 percent of the work force bought shares. After privatization, British Telecom posted a profit increase of 25 percent. When Prime Minister Thatcher came into office in 1979, one home in three in Britain was government-owned and rented at subsidized rates. Over the next six years, nearly one million homes-about 17 percent of the nation's public housing-were sold to tenants at discounts of up to 60 percent, depending on the number of years they had been renting. In late 1986, an $8,000 million public offering of British Gas Corporation-the nation's gas-supply monopoly-became one of the world's biggest stock flotations and the British government's single-largest sale of a state enterprise. Advocates of competition criticized the sale for passing over opportunities to break up the monopoly and introduce competition into gas provision by separating local supply lines from the national network. Competition was sacrificed to enable the government to raise quick revenue, since the funds generated by such asset sales were enabling the government to avoid raising taxes, borrowing, or printing more money to maintain desired levels of state spending in support of social programs. At the end of 1987, the state sector of industry in Britain was 40 percent smaller than when Prime Minister Thatcher took office. Tn 1979, only five percent of the British public owned stock; by the end of 1986, the figure had reached 16 percent. An American syndicated economics columnist, Warren T. Brookes, attributes much of the success in reducing Britain's inflation rate from 24 percent to four percent to the government's sell-off of nearly half of the nation's state-owned industries. Even in that diminished public sector, Brookes calculated that government cost inflation was running more than seven percent in 1986 compared to only three percent in Britain's private sector. For the United States, Brookes contrasted costs for two largely
government-subsidized services-health care and public education-to the rise in consumer prices for such largely private services as housing and transportation. He found consumer prices for the two government services escalating at about eight percent a year, versus less than three percent for the private sector services, supporting his argument that government ownership embodies fewer incentives to hold down costs and restrain inflation. Since Britain's privatization program began, delegations from more than 20 countries have sought advice from the British Treasury on how to go about privatizing their economies. At least 22 different methods of transferring government entities and functions partially or wholly into the private sector have been identified. These techniques range from selling or giving away state enterprises to contracting out services, establishing user charges, selling public housing to its occupants and repealing state monopolies to enable competition to spread. France's National Assembly and Senate approved a law in August 1986 permitting the denationalization of 65 state-owned companies and banking groups over a five-year period to raise $50,000 million. Foreign ownership was limited in the sales to 20 percent in deference to national pride. By June 1987, some ten companies had been sold, raising the number of French people owning stock from two million to five million. Many of the stocks were intentionally underpriced to broaden stock ownership among a population that had traditionally stayed away from the stock exchange. The government also came to regard its version of "popular capitalism" as a way of giving French companies more freedom to compete in international markets. Austria's ruling socialists decided to rescue the state holding company-comprising 198 enterprises that together had lost $1,400 million in the three-year period through 1985-by selling off chunks to private investors. In the view of Austria's Minister for Transport and Nationalized Industries, Rudolf Streicher, "It's not a question of theology or of selling out principles but of practicality." Spain's socialist government sold more than 200 corporations from its holding company. Privatization momentum in Italy and the Federal Republic of Germany was fueled in part by the misuse of public monies by local and national officials and by inefficiencies of government bureaucracy. Sale of the national telephone company, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT), a 100 percent government-owned monopoly, brought the Japanese government more than $13,000 million in 1986 on an initial sale of only one-eighth ofNTT stock, making it the world's largest privatization of a government enterprise. By law, proceeds from the sale went into a special budget account for retiring Japan's national debt. Japan also began the process of placing its deficit-plagued national railways-which lost $11,000 million in 1985-in private hands by splitting the passenger and freight lines among seven companies. A survey of 13 Latin American countries found that the ratio of government spending to gross domestic product (GDP) had risen from 15.5 percent in 1970 to 20.6 percent in 1980, creating economic havoc. Costa Rica began borrowing heavily in the 1970s to finance the expansion of its government but was forced to stop in 1981 when the government suspended interest and principal payments on its foreign debt of more than $4,000 million. The government began divesting itself of many state enterprises and liberalized its economy until the GDP-which fell 9.2 percent in 1980-82-grew again, by over ten percent, in 1983-85. Brazil's government, reeling under a $100,000 million foreign
debt and burdened by state enterprises that accounted for 60 percent of the nation's economic output, sold off a dozen state firms in 1985 and drew up a list of 77 other enterprises for privatization to reduce the cost of subsidies and raise muchneeded capital. President Jose Sarney vowed in June 1981' to further deregulate Brazil's economy, allowing the conversion of20 percent or more of the nation's commercial debt into foreign equity investment. Mexico, suffering from similar debt pains, put 236 state-owned companies up for sale in 1985 and has offered to sell 80 more, including the national airline, Mexicana. Chile in 1973 had 377 state enterprises that accounted for 39 percent of the nation's GDP. Under its version of popular capitalism, Chile's military rulers distributed among many investors the shares in state-run companies-mostly banks, insurance firms and utilities-until only a few dozen of the state enterprises remained intact. Turkish Prime Minister Turgut Ozal was elected in 1983 as a result of promising to sell most of his nation's more than 200 stateowned enterprises. A year later, the Bosphorous toll suspension bridge linking Europe to Asia was sold to the public, offering investors an 18 percent return over three years. Besides selling revenue-sharing certificates in the Keban Dam (an electric hydropower station), Turkey plans to finance future power plants with private investor groups by using long-term contracts for the government to purchase the electricity produced. Under a master privatization plan developed in 1986 by a U.S. bank, Turkey began a two-step process of privatizing 40 state economic enterprises that accounted for one-third of the nation's industrial production. Each required heavy government subsidies to compensate for overstaffing and management inefficiencies. Bangladesh, too, has been putting far greater reliance on the private sector. Since 1975, the country has denationalized more than 600 state companies, many in the chemical, textile and jute industries, and it has privatized the distribution of fertilizer, an action that substantially increased retail fertilizer sales. Within two years of privatization, the new textile mill owners were making substantial profits compared to heavy losses suffered by the same mills under government ownership. Entire economic sectors worldwide are undergoing a privatization transformation. Brazil, Malaysia and the Republic of Korea now encourage private-sector generation of electricity, having previously prohibited the sale of privately produced power. In North Yemen, workers in villages pooled their resources and purchased new generators to electrify their communities. In transportation as in agriculture and other fields, especially in less developed countries, private systems already existed, but they operated unofficially as part of the underground economy. Now goverriments are encouraging the underground economie~ to rise to the surface. In Malaysia, private minibuses have been allowed to run. In Bangkok, Thailand, and in Singapore, formerly illegal taxis have been recognized and licensed. What was illegal in many economies is simply being made legal. In India, the city of Calcutta had banned private buses when a state transport corporation was formed. With the state firm losing money and riders, Calcutta sold permits for private buses, quickly spawning a fleet of 3,400 vehicles that now operate at a profit without government subsidies. Africa presents a particularly challenging environment for privatization. After independence, nearly all African leaders renounced state capitalism and embraced socialism. Private companies were nationalized and replaced by state enterprises, controls were raised over the entire range of economic activities-imports,
When the city of Calcutta sold permits for private buses, a fleet of 3,400 vehicles quickly materialized and now operates at a profit without government subsidies. exports, rents, prices-and collective agriculture or state farms squeezed out most private tillers. However, the new ideology proved to be the wrong one in the wrong place at the wrong time. Village markets in Africa historically had been free, open bazaars, and Africa's traditional village chiefs had never imposed price controls, free trade restrictions, or other market restraints on their subjects. Much of the funding that allowed the less developed countries to expand state ownership over industry and agriculture, then prop up the inefficient enterprises with subsidies, came from Western governments and lending institutions. At a meeting of the Organization of African Unity in July 1985, the assembled heads of state conceded publicly that "the primacy accorded to the state has hindered rather than furthered economic developemnt." World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) lending policies were beginning to pressure numerous recipient nations to enact austerity programs, forcing them to privatize state-owned enterprises. Togo embarked on a privatization splurge in 1983 after "consultations" with the World Bank and the IMF, resulting in the sale or lease of five state industries ranging from a dairy processing plant to a marble quarry. Tanzania in the mid-1970s established free enterprise incentives for farmers; within a year, for the first time in a decade, Tanzania's economy grew faster than its population, enabling its farmers to begin exporting some crops. Privatization's winds of change have swept much of the communist world as well. In the People's Republic of China, four "special economic zones," with tax rates lower than even nearby Hong Kong's, attracted more than $3,000 million in foreign
investment in the five years after 1979, prompting China to extend similar free market incentives to 14 coastal cities. Within these zones, China has privatized the provision of roads and other infrastructure, relying on private foreign firms for planning and construction. Free zones such as these, offering a combination of low tax, tariff and deregulation incentives, have been adopted by other governments seeking to stimulate private development. Since 1978, the number offree zones worldwide has exploded from 220 to more than 800, employing more than 4.2 million people. An "individual labor" law that went into effect in the Soviet Union in May 1987 legalized 40 categories of private services, from plumbers and hairdressers to cafe managers. By issuing licenses and taxing earnings, the law brought into the open a huge underground economy. Although the new law restricts the size of these private enterprises and prohibits the hiring of outside labor, its very existence is noteworthy. For all types of economies, privatization holds the prospect for reinvigoration. But limiting privatization to the lifting of price controls or the sale of a few state assets misses the opportunity to revitalize the entire economy, especially in less developed countries, by turning over a range of services to private competition. "If privatization in the developing world is to succeed," says Peter Young of the Adam Smith Institute, "then its vision will need to be broadened. Privatization must be understood as a creative process, a process designed to shift whole areas of economic activity from the politicized, noncommercial state sector to the consumerresponsive profit-making private sector." Since World War II, America has provided other countries with more than $330,000 million in aid, making it the world's most generous donor. Each year, through foreign aid, U.S. taxpayers give away, on average, $14,000 million to more than 100 countries. American foreign assistance is distributed through the Agency for International Development (AID), an economic development arm of the U.S. State Department. AID defines its role as promoting economic self-sufficiency in recipient countries, encouraging them to adopt policies to increase food production and give full play to .free market forces by privatizing costly and unproductive state-owned enterprises. But this targeting is not always rigidly accomplished. Problems of overgenerosity confront recipients of foreign aid in some countries, and they become saturated with development assistance. For this economic assistance to be effective, AID maintains that recipients must undertake internal reforms eliminating government subsidies, price and wage controls, inefficient state-owned enterprises and, in the words of former AID Administrator M. Peter McPherson, "other similar forms of interference with market solutions." In my view, it is foreign investment, not foreign aid, that offers the greatest assurance of success for policies to encourage selfsufficiency, sustained economic growth and political responsibility. Debt-for-equity swaps, in which bank loans are exchanged for ownership in developing countries, provide one such vehicle. In 1986, these swaps, where banks sold their foreign loans at a discount to companies wanting to invest in the Third World, reduced the debt of developing countries by about $5,000 million. Creation of free ports and free trade zones can be facilitated by using debt conversions to attract investment capital, a concept developed and put into practice by an international consultancy group based in the Washington, D.C., area. This group specializes in free zones and privatization reforms in developing countries
Privatization diminishes neither the concept of community nor the sense of public purpose. Pursuing rational self-interest can benefit society at large. and has applied these especially to the Caribbean area. Costa Rica became the first country to approve a debt conversion for free zone development by establishing a private zone near San Jose; similar initiatives have been undertaken in Jamaica and the Dominican Republic. By reducing tax burdens, permitting the duty-free movement of goods and deregulating foreign exchange controls, free zones can create islands of prosperity within countries unable to adopt nationwide policy liberalization because of entrenched institutions that resist significant dilutions of government economic control. Within these zones, privatization of airports, roads and telecommunications services is commonplace, providing a role model for host countries. Britain has made frequent use of employee buyouts of stateowned firms, as have other nations, as a way of avoiding huge, continuing subsidies or other payments to these firms. Besides the capital raised, the benefits of state-enterprise sales include the expansion of capital ownership by giving employees stock and giving fair treatment to government workers who took jobs in the expectation of benefits and job security, using worker buyouts to transfer those rights for a corresponding market price to employee-owners. Ownership can also reshape the work standards and expectations of employees previously inclined to a narrow "labor" point of view. For nations with a collectivist tradition or outlook, or those that lack experience with free enterprise, worker ownership of state industries offers a convenient compromise between ideology and economic circumstance. In Somalia, the fishing industry's entire fleet of 700 boats had been owned by the government. A former World Bank consultant on Africa found that a "lack of incentives for proper maintenance, low official prices and other unsuitable policies" kept most of the fleet idle. In 1982, about 110 of the boats were sold to their crews. Within two years, 85 percent of the privatized boats were operating efficiently and with much greater productivity than the boats that remained in government hands. Since 1981, at least 30 companies in Guatemala have turned over ownership to their employees under employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) modeled after a program in Costa Rica, where more than 700 companies and 120,000 employees are ESOP participants. Transforming government workers into owners can, in similar fashion, advance the common good on two levels: Economically, by divesting the state of resource-draining holdings and giving the working class an opportunity to profit, while relieving the enterprise of many problems that plague other forms of ownership; and politically, by endowing the powerless with incentives to defend and expand the free enterprise system. Opposition to privatization usually comes from the public employees' labor movement, which often sees it as a threat to jobs in overstaffed state enterprises, from government bureaucrats whose power of control would be diminished, and from expoliticians and military officers who serve on the boards of many" state industries. Constituencies must be created for reform in order for privatization to succeed, which means workers and management must profit from the public-to-private transformation. If a country lacks sufficient private capital markets to finance
the buyout of state-owned firms, the fi"rms could simply be given away to the management and employees, giving workers a stake in the company's future and eliminating any further subsidy burdens on taxpayers. Providing employees with stock makes them responsible for managing costs and improving service-incentives that ultimately benefit both the company and the public-while allowing them to participate directly, often for the first time, in the dynamism and opportunity of a competitive economy. Privatization can be a whole new layer of decision-making that some people would rather not bother shouldering. The fear of choice and responsibility may produce an even greater clinging to government among that part of the citizenry, especially in the older urban areas, that are long accustomed to the seemingly secure environment of monopoly providers. Partial privatization through contracting out poses certain dangers that could undermine public support. If politicians and bureaucrats resort to the exclusive use of franchising or solesource contracting, or if they fail to re-bid contracts over a long period of time, private monopolies might evolve replacing the government monopolies, eliminating the benefits to consumers and taxpayers from competition. Political temptations may also prompt officials to rewrite bid specifications so that only one favored firm qualifies or to allow favored firms to buy into contracts and later raise prices. The only sure antidote to these abuses is open, fair, competitive bidding. Privatization diminishes neither the concept of community for society nor the sense of public purpose of a program. Pursuing rational self-interest is not synonymous with greed. It is precisely those most obvious yet subtle forms of self-interest that often advance the greatest civic virtues. Social institutions must be devised to synchronize private incentives and social returns in an efficient, cost-effective manner that simultaneously promotes moral imperatives. But publicspiritedness as a motivation for behavior in the governing process need never be diminished by privatization and the emphasis on self-interest that this term implies. To the extent that policymakers and.the public understand that privatization is a tool, no less than a program, public spirit can still be harnessed to make the delivery of services connected to policy goals more effective. Using private delivery mechanisms to replace government delivery, bureaucracies may actually reinforce norms of public-spiritedness by offering policy-makers wider and wider choices in how to implement decisions designed for the common good. Government may then have more resources to devote to its primary taskmaking sound and just laws in response to the popular will. The global nature of privatization is tacit acknowledgment that statism and socialism have led to stagnation. Privatization offers. the promise of raising standards of living by introducing competition that will bring about efficiency, lower costs and improved service. Selling assets affords governments potentially large onetime capital gains, which may be the sole impetus for some debtravaged nations to experiment with denationalization. For that reason, those who defend government's role as central to human economic existence will portray privatization as nothing more than a fad, a momentary swing of the pendulum. If indeed we are in the midst of such a pendulum swing, it may last far longerperhaps even centuries-than any statist could envisage. 0 About the Author: Randall Fitzgerald is a staff writer for Reader's Digest and afrequent contributor on public policy issues to The Wall Street Journal.
Riding the Pacific Tide An assault on Japan is being planned in the city of Wenatchee, in central Washington, down by the railroad tracks, where the warehouses are. In this war cherries are bullets and apples are bombs. As president of the Chief Wenatchee fruit growers' cooperative, Ted Zacher is one of the generals. His uniform of a Saturday was jeans, knit shirt and a big silver buckle with an American Indian visageChief Wenatchee, of course. I was in his office when the phone rang. "Harada-san!" he said. "Where are you?... Seattle! Can we have dinner?" Would Zacher-san drive 225 kilometers across the Cascade Range to entertain his caller, representative of a Japanese trading house that already buys Chief Wenatchee cherries and might someday buy apples and apricots? Is there a dam on the Columbia River? You betcha, as Washingtonians say (especially in eastern Washington, where the kinship with the states of Idaho and Montana is strong). As Washington begins its second centuryit became the 42nd state on November 11, 1889-the gaze of many Washington businesspeople is fastened upon the Pacific Rim. They court not only the Japanese. Regard, in the rich farming regions around Chelan and Yakima and Pullman, the delegations from Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, even Thailand and Singapore. Limousines whisk them to view orchard, field and packinghouse. Washington sells the world not only fruit but also dry peas (India curries them), wheat (to Italy for pasta) and potatoes (everywhere for fries). This is a state of hucksters-you betcha! Products worth $55,000 million pass through its ports in a good year, and international trade pays one jobholder in five. Chief Wenatchee has shipped cherries to Japan for a decade, though the fruit must be rigorously fumigated to satisfy Japanese agricultural officials. Even tougher restrictions protect Japanese apple orchards from foreign contamination-and competition-one result being that the Japanese housewife pays $5 for
Washington completed a century of statehood last year. In this article, the author takes a look at the state that gives the world apples, wheat, peas (to India), planes and personal computers.
a single red globe. Yet Zacher-san, on one of his 15trips to Japan, succeeded in selling a few apples there. Not luscious, juicy apples graded Washington Extra Fancy; merely frozen fruit whose juice would be mixed with yogurt to make a tangy elixir. The buyer, a dairy company, advertised it as the "apple drink from the Rocky Mountains." Zacher did not think it necessary to challenge his customer's geography; after all, there are rocky outcrops of lava around the Wenatchee orchards. Speaking of geography, the State of Washington holds an abundance. It seems like an up-coast California-without (fortunately, say I) the glitz. I remember a day when I exited a lush forest in the Cascade Range as the sky spat snow. I was soon in.... Afghanistan, or so it seemed among the treeless, sagey camel backs around Yakima. Rain-shadowed by the mountains, the east is big-vista, small-town, large-farm country. Much commerce in this region inclines toward Spokane, a sturdy city of 170,700, whose banks and hospitals minister to an "inland empire" spilling into Idaho and Montana. Livability is enhanced by parks, especially Manito, noted for its well-tended gardens and Riverfront, which has a dandy
1909 carousel. Riverfront, on the Spokane River, was skid row and railroad tracks until civic leaders (who had long wanted to clean up the place) mounted the world's fair, Expo '74, in itself an achievement for a small city. Eyesores became fairgrounds, then a 40-hectare greensward. Western Washington State, poised to receive wet kisses and balmy breezes from the Pacific, sprouts not sage but fern, not ponderosa but ponderous cedar. It lives by, and upon, water, washed by island-fleeted Puget Sound. The sound area is booming-60 percent of all Washingtonians live there-and booming not only because Boeing enjoys a $68,000-million backlog of orders for airliners. Seattle is the handsome centerpiece, though its skyline (now soaring to 76 floors) does not please everyone. Concerned that their city's prized livability may vanish, citizens recently voted to restrict downtown development and to limit heights to about 40 stories. Meanwhile, suburbs like Redmond and Bothell, semirural a decade ago, house the brainpower of new endeavors-programmers staffing 500 computer-software companies and scientists exploring the potential of biotechnology in two dozen laboratories. Nearly one-and-a-halfkilometers high, and north nearly to Canada, I switchbacked up a trail in North Cascades National Park. My quest was a vision of glacial sculpture, of ridges flaked by ice until they resembled American Indian stone knives, of vertical walls cupping obsidian lakes. I scrambled up a bladed ridge and gazed out at snowy Mount Triumph (there is a Mount Despair beyond) and the Picket Range, glittering white. With equal grandeur the panorama swings southward, to mountains named Torment and Forbidden, rising from ice fields like enameled fangs. These are not lofty peaks, seldom topping 2,440 meters. But some Americans call them "our most magnificent, our Alps."
I wouldn't argue too much with them. Much more familiar is that "round snowy mountain" British Captain George Vancouver named for Admiral Peter Rainier in 1792. What can sweeten the spirit more than the sunrise sight of Rainier beaming like a scoop of orange sherbet? What is more delicious than raspberry Rainier at day's dying? What is Paradise? Paradise is 1,650 meters up Rainier's slope, a place of paintbrushed meadows, with an old lodge soaring on great timbers. Mountains shape not only the weather but also the Washington mystique, begetting the Mountaineers, a venerable outdoor club; the twin brothers Whittaker of Mount Everest fame; and REI, the outdoor equipment co-op. Lou Whittaker, now in his sixties, laid-back
and loquacious, has climbed Mount Rainier 175times, has taught climbing to many others there, has brought down the bodies of friends smothered in avalanches. For both Lou, who led teams on Everest in 1982and 1984, and his brother, Jim, the first American to reach the summit in 1963, as well as for many other American Everest climbers, Rainier was the ideal training mountain. "You can get minus 45 degrees Celsius here, as cold as Everest," Lou said. "And the training is incredible for the aerobic need, the craving for oxygen, that you have on Everest." The first Mountaineer to earn a coveted Six Peaks pin for ascents in one season was Lloyd Anderson, who climbed Rainier, Adams, Glacier, St. Helens, Baker and Olympus
in 1930. Climbing gear was expensive: $20 for an ice ax, in Depression times! Then Anderson got one from Austria-for $3.50. Friends asked him to buy for them too. Such was the genesis of Recreational Equipment, Inc. (REI), now a huge mail-order and retail operation. With 22 stores and yearly sales of more than $180 million, it is America's largest consumer cooperative.
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The woods that Washingtonians love to tramp are changing. To a visitor who had last hiked in Washington in the 1970s, opposing evolutions stand out. First, more areas have been preserved as wilderness, but large reaches of forest look like a bad case of mange. On the Olympic Peninsula are big bald spots--on lands of American Indian tribes
Above: Migrant workers camp along the Yakima River. Seasonal applepicking jobs draw thousands of such workers to Yakima Valley, whose orchards help make Washington America's number one apple producer. Right: Nirvana, built by two young entrepreneurs, buzzes across Seattle's Lake Union, one of the city's many tourist attractions. Right, below: Seattle's popular, old-style Pike Place Market was savedfrom demolition by citizens who approved a bond issue to rescue it from developers. Above: Palouse, east of Washington's Cascade Range, rolls in waves of wheat. The region's rich, deep topsoil produces some of the highest nonirrigated wheat yields in the world.
Below: A Korean trade team tours a 1,200-hectare wheat ranch in Palouse. Most of the state's soft wheat goes to Asian buyers.
and the U.S. Forest Service, as well as on tracts managed by the state Department of Natural Resources, an 800,000-hectare timber lord. Controversies about cutting aren't new in this state that brims with environmentalists and also has an $8,000-million-a~year timber industry with 60,000 workers. And while experts say the industry's future is assured from the vast tree plantations of Weyerhaeuser and other companies, some sawmillers as well as tree lovers are angry. Jack Dickson, vice-president of Summit Timber Company, for instance, who gazes across the Pacific Rim and laments: "We're becoming a colony of Japan. We raise timber for them so they can have a better way oflife." Japan, enjoying a housing boom, bears off, as whole logs, 20 percent of the commercial timber felled in Washington every year. The preferred wood is clear of knots and finely grained, from the dwindling supply of ancient giants called old growth. Buying from state lands or private companies, the Japanese pay two or three times as much as the U.S. market will bear. China and South Korea are other major log buyers, though they are not so keen on quality. Foreign competition has been a death knell for small mills, many of which have closed. But for big companies fortunate enough to own old growth, foreign sales fatten dividends. Pacific Rim purchases also build schools; profits from state-owned timberlands poured $130 million into education in 1988. In his own backyard-the Mount BakerSnoqualmie National Forest-Dickson has no competition from dollar-flush Japanese buyers, since Forest Service logs cannot be sold abroad. Here he confronts the environmental movement. Wilderness protection, habitat for the northern spotted owl, and other preservation measures have curbed the "allowable cut" on this and Uncle Sam's four other forests in the Cascade and Olympic ranges. And the competition is intense among mills like Dickson's, fighting to stay in business. For Darrington (population: 1,020) the stakes are daunting; Summit Timber provides 440 jobs. To keep going, Dickson bids for timber as far away as 300 kilometers. Not all is conflict and frustration, however. In Olympia, the capital, people were surprised to see environmental groups and American Indian tribes joining hands with government and timber industry officials. They agreed on more stringent regulations requiring loggers on state and private lands to protect streams and lakes. Screens of trees, eight meters wide
and more, will preserve water quality and totaled hundreds of millions of dollars. wildlife habitat. The mountain, once a graceful cone, is now Said a forester: "We're finding that it's flat topped, with a great yawning maw. The easier to work with one another than to sit landslide and eruption cost it 396 meters of its across the table and yell." height. Small earthquakes still occur, recorded on seismometers watched by the U.S. In supporting the new rules, the Tulalip, Geological Survey. "It's possible St. Helens Lummi and other tribes acted to protect vital has had its last eruption for decades or fish habitats. Washington's 70,000 American Indians have come to the fore as people proud centuries," declared the Survey's Don Swanson. "On the other hand, this could be and passionate, as activists and litigants. Nothing has afforded them greater redressjust a [brief] hiatus." or dignity-than a 1974 decision by U.S. DisScientists on the scene soon after the catastrict Court Judge George Boldt. On the basis of trophe discovered that not everything died. treaties made when Washington was a territory, Huckleberry bushes and small trees survived he awarded the tribes half the catch of North- . under snow. Some of the rodents lived west salmon and steelhead trout-fish upon through it in their burrows. Most plants and animals that were present which they historically depended. On the Yakima Reservation, 550,000 hect- before the blast are now represented, though ares in south-central Washington, Cecilia Eli some are few in number. Snakes, for example, told me that only 20 years ago the dialects of are scarce. Herds of elk and deer have re14 scattered groups could be heard. turned; bears and a mountain goat have been "I speak two of those languages. But we sighted. Winds blew in seeds and insects. Biologist Bob Lucas still marvels at steelhave lost ten others." She blames that on Bureau of [American] Indian Affairs schools head trout he found swimming in rivers that punished students for speaking their own clogged with silt a month after the blast. Apparently they had survived in less affected tongues. "I hated school," she says. Eli now teaches those two dialects, and tributaries and returned to the main streams one evening a score of teenagers and adults after the water cooled-though it still was as came to the reservation high school to begin thick as a chocolate milk shake. her course. She explained to them nahme But in the you-betcha state, even adversity mushkyumt, "our philosophy." The students can be put to use. Already richly endowed repeated a tenet of this traditional faith: with tourist attractions, Washington now has "Thlowk toon ewa coosim-We are all one with a different appeal. A million visitors the same ...." a year come to gaze benumbed at the devShe reminded the students that whatever is astated landscape, now preserved in a 44,500on Earth is the work of Tomunwethla, the hectare national volcanic monument. Creator. And: "Never be ashamed of what you are. No matter what people may c~ll you, If 36 centimeters of precipitation falls on they cannot take away your [American] In- eastern Washington in a year, it's a deluge; in dian blood." I am sure her students walked many areas 15 or 20 is usual. But to travel this home a little taller. region is to view a sky full of rainbows as irrigation systems fling sustenance at an n May 18, 1980, in the Cascade assortment of crops. Wheat (often the biggest Range in southwestern Wash- money-maker), potatoes, lentils, mint, hops ington, mother nature displayed for beer, asparagus, alfalfa, a dozen kinds of her awesome power. At 8:32 fruit, including fine wine grapes and half of a.m. an earthquake registering the nation's apples-with 300 sunshiny days, 5.1 on the Richter scale shook loose a bulge eastern Washington is a cornucopia. Just add that had been swelling like a boil on the north water (and nutrients), and you've got yields side of volcanic Mount St. Helens. Suddenly worth more than $3,000 million a year. more than 670 cubic meters of mountainside Above the Columbia and north of Wecame roaring down. The volcanic vent spat a natchee, Don Heinicke's orchard spreads along benches left by Ice Age dams. From the torrent of tephra-grainy ash and rock-that darkened the sky 28 kilometers up and 190 river he draws enough water in a year to cover kilometers away. Lahars, or mudflows, fed by his 110 hectares of trees to a depth of a little melting snow and ice, gushed downward. A over one meter. powerful hot breath toppled forest giants in a Heinicke spends a million dollars a year to 595-square-kilometer area; searing winds grow apples. In the spring, for example, he killed timber 28 kilometers distant. Fifty- hires the pollinating services of 350 hives of seven persons died; damage and cleanup costs bees at $22 a hive; the job is too big for the
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locals. Packing and shipping cost another million dollars. Most of Heinicke's pickers are Mexicans. "They're not going to be satisfied with just seasonal work," he prophesied. "Pretty soon they'll open grocery stores, clothing stores. They're going to be here. And I think they're going to be good citizens. They'll bring back some of the work ethic we once had." At lunch a German businessman posted to Seattle offered a Teutonic judgment of the city: "It will never amount to much-people don't work on weekends." Indeed, Seattle does not aspire to the title of "ulcer capital of the world," but it is a saver and a striver. Consider Pike Place Market, a national treasure where farmers bring gorgeous vegetables and mongers cry the virtues of crab and oyster. When developers craved the four blocks of shops and the priceless view ofPuget Sound, the citizens rescued all of it with a bond issue. Then they applauded the preservation of Pioneer Square, where the city took root. Then they went sea kayaking or skiing or to the opera or down to the International District for dim sum or sushi. Seattle's culture has been greatly enriched by the Pacific Rim. Hmong and Mien refugees from Laos are the latest in a procession of Asian immigrants that began with Chinese laborers before Washington had statehood. Among older Japanese painful memories linger of the removal to inland locations during World War II. Oldsters still will not speak of it, although the Seattle community began the campaign to win redress from the federal government-granted by Congress in 1988. And Chinese? They are thriving. Newcomers from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Vietnam revivify the culture, and community acceptance of the Chinese shows in politics. In 1961, when a Chinese first stood for election to the city council, Ruby Chow stuffed fortune cookies in his behalf; if you went out for foo yong, an endorsement of Wing Luke topped off the meal. Luke won the election. Other Chinese went to judges' benches and the legislature. The soaring beehive hairdo of Ruby Chow herself became familiar in the King County council, where she served 12 years-the rare Chinese woman holding elective office in America. No person enriched the Seattle region more than a fellow who arrived in 1908. His father, born in Germany, had prospered in timber in Minnesota. The son had come west to buy About the Author: Mike Edwards is a senior writer with National Geographic.
timber-and then took a fearsome risk. He learned to fly aeroplanes. Then, in 1916, William Edward Boeing, Sr., helped by a friend, built two seaplanes. Thus began the Boeing Company. In lean times after World War I it made furniture. But the engineers, many of them homegrown, also developed advanced craft. In 1933 the Boeing 247 became the first modern airliner to carry passengers (all ten) in comfort, with good speed (248 kmph). Facilities in the Seattle area-in Kent, Auburn, Everett and Renton-hum with Bill Boeing's legacy. Boeing's airliner business is booming as it never has before. This and military- and space-hardware sales, and even computer services, pour more than 100,000 Boeing paychecks into the Seattle economy. iftythousand," he said. Nosy, I had just asked a computer-software developer how much he earned. Not bad for a 27-year-old. But it isn't unusual in the 15 buildings of Microsoft, cascading into trees in the suburb of Redmond. My well-compensated friend sat in a room with five others about his age, all degree holders in mathematics or computer science from such institutions as MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Caltech (California Institute of Technology). And all casual: jeans, sweaters. "We like your tie," one said politely. Jabe Blumenthal allowed, "I used to keep a suit hanging in my office, for when IBM came." One of the best customers for Microsoft computer programs, IBM js severely buttoned down by comparison .. Don't let the jeans fool you. There is plenty of pressure here. Just before the "drop dead date" for finishing a new program and getting it to manufacturing, software developers work around the clock to eliminate bugs. Sometimes the delivery date is missed-as happened early last year with two new versions of a word-processing program. Those delays cost Microsoft's chairman, Bill Gates, $175 million in paper losses when Microsoft stock fell nearly 14 percent. Shed no tears. Gates is still a billionaire on the strength of the company he founded with a fellow math whiz, Paul Allen. Gates was 19 in 1975 when they wrote a program for an early microcomputer. The personal computer took off, using Gates-Allen languages and, later, that workhorse operating system MS-DOS. While Microsoft grew as much as 70 percent a year, the Seattle area exploded into a major software center. "There was a kind of developing energy," Jim Knopf said. "Tech-
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nical people were here, printers got used to doing technical manuals-it built on itself." Ex-IBM technician Knopf started his own company to produce computer programs called ButtonWare-button being the translation of his German name. He gives his wares away. "We bypassed the advertising campaign," he said. "Our advertising was, 'You guys copy the disks and share them. And if you like the shareware, would you please send $70 for a manual and any updates?' " So far, 150,000 have. Another brain trust sprang up in biotechnology, stimulated by research at two Seattle institutions, the University of Washington School of Medicine and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, leaders in the field. In his office in a converted warehouse on the Seattle waterfront, Stephen Duzan recalled that when he was looking for a new business in 1981-having sold a company that produced food packaging-he was introduced to two Hutchinson scientists who talked about the "T-cell growth factor" and a strain of cells that might lead to drugs useful against cancer by stimulating the immune system. "They gave me some references to check," Duzan said. "About half were Nobel Prize winners." Christopher S. Henney and Steven Gillis joined Duzan in creating Immunex Corporation. In compensation for their research at Hutchinson, the center's faculty endowment fund was made an Immunex shareholder. Stock issues raised $98 million for Immunex. Some of that went to develop Interleukin-2, a drug shown effective in tests for treating certain cancers. Immunex expects the drug to win government approval for marketing soon.
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Fifty-six kilometers south of Duzan's waterfront office, the light chop of Commencement Bay laps against the wharves of Tacoma. When Washington got statehood in 1889, Tacoma was the chief Puget Sound port. It had a railroad, and thus union with the rest of the country, before Seattle. After transcontinental rails reached Seattle, Tacoma watched cargoes and jobs go north. It took Tacoma years to shed its jealousy of higher-rising Seattle-if it has. But Tacoma has become a pleasant workingman's city, willingly floating bonds to build schools and save old buildings. And it will seldom snare you in a Seattle-style traffic jam, save when Bruce Springsteen plays the Tacoma Dome. On the waterfront, Tacoma remains a keen competitor. I was standing in the pilothouse of the tug Henry Foss when something like a
floating apartment building appeared at the mouth of Commencement Bay. This was the Arild Maersk, more than two football fields long, stacked five stories high with freight containers. As Henry Foss nudged the Danish-operated visitor against the dock, trucks revved up to accept those containers and their multimillion-dollar Oriental treasure-VCRs and microwaves from Japan and Korea, shirts and raincoats from Singapore and Taiwan. Transferred to freight cars just about a hundred meters away, these goods would soon be in American markets. The Arild M aersk departed in less than 24 hours, carrying lumber, machinery and frozen French fries. No matter which deepwater port shippers use-and Washington has nine others that handle such cargoes as grain, logs and wood
pulp-the U.S. trade deficit is writ large on the wharves. Some farm machinery and automobiles depart from Tacoma and Seattle and, of course, Boeing sells aircraft worldwide. But imported cars and other manufactures are to a large extent swapped for such raw materials as timber and grain. As port officials see things, that's a problem that must be addressed in that other Washington, the capital of the United States. Whatever the outcome, Washington State begins its second century on a rising Pacific tide. . D Right: Seattle's mountain-bike patrol is the brainchild of two police officers who became frustrated with the /imitations of patrol cars andfoot beats.
Above: The Omak Suicide Race, "the wor/d's most dangerous horse race," is a 50-year-old annual tradition among Washington's American Indians. Riders plunge down a near vertical embankment into a river and across to a rodeo arena.
Right: On his return home after 70 days at sea, a crewman of the V.S.S. Georgia is greeted by his wife at dockside in Bangor. In addition to serving U.S. Navy, Washington's ports handle $55,000 million worth of international trade annually. Below: Rick Fitchett rests after sawing a 600-year-old Douglas fir in the Olympic National Forest. Washington's $8,000 million-a-year timber industry employs 60,000 workers. Right center and bottom: Under a 1974 court
decision, American Indians are entitled to half the total catch of Northwest salmon and steelhead trout,fish upon which they have historically depended. Regulations also dictate the number of fish that can be caught and when. Only the Yakima tribe can fish along the Klickitat River gorge (bottom). Most American Indians are satisfied with the regulations, but not David Sohappy (right center), who contends that fishing "whenever I want" is his native right.
Better Times for Black Writers? There must be days when Charles Johnson's wife and daughters wonder why he didn't choose an easier profession. Not long ago, as one of the judges for the National Book Awards, he stayed up until 6 a.m. to read three more novels, then disappeared to his office at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he directs the creative writing program, and finally came home at dinnertime-only to fall asleep. But, since the age of 26, when Viking published his first book Faith and the Good Thing in 1974,Johnson has been a dedicated novelist, and he finds the present an especially encouraging time for black American writers. "Right now, almost every [black] writer I know has a book coming out from a commercial press in New York, or one that has just gone into paperback," he says. Johnson notes that Al Young's first novel in eight years, Seduction by Light, appeared from Delta in November 1988, that Atheneum recently published Ishmael Reed's essays, Writin'Is Fightin', and his New and Collected Poems, and has begun reissuing his backlist in trade paperback. Johnson himself is about to deliver his next novel, Rutherford's Travels, five years in the writing, to Atheneum. Johnson adds, "It was really good for a while for black women writers because of the women's movement, I think, but suddenly I see everybody bringing out books. I could be wrong, but there doesn't seem to be a dominant trend, so they're willing to try many different kinds of things." "There's always something I'm jotting down that I want to get to read," says Reprinted from the February 17, 1989, issue of Publishers Weekly, published by the Bowker Magazine Group of Cahners Publishing Co., a division of Reed Publishing USA. Copyright Š 1989 by Reed Publishing USA.
Opinions vary, but some black American authors and editors think that publishers are more receptive to them now than at any time over the past two decades. Adrienne Ingrum, executive editor of Perigee Books, who remembers days when books on black subjects seemed much scarcer. Recently, Ingrum received Gar Anthony Haywood's first mystery novel, Fear of the Dark, from a friend at St. Martin's; now she is reading Mississippi Solo, Eddie L. Harris's account of a trip down the river. Evidence that black writers are advancing seems to surround Ingrum. Her husband, who works in advertising, constantly brings home screenplays by friends hoping for novelizations-a sign of what Vanity Fair has dubbed "The Black Pack." Ingrum regularly sees proposals for books on black subjects, and although she may not always bid, they frequently do sell to major American publishers. "You only need three or four major sellers by black authors to see a market," she says, a discovery she thinks many publishing houses are making. Yet, of the 120 books Johnson and his colleagues read for the Nationa.1 Book Awards, only two were by black authors. "There are 250,000 writers in the United States, but when you count up the black authors who are publishing fiction steadily, you're talking about 25 or 30, maybe 50," Johnson says. "And even if it was 200, that's not very many to represent 27 million black people." Such numbers cause other
observers to sound much more pessimistic. "I don't know anyone who says these are the glory days for black writers in America," says Trey Ellis, whose first novel, Platitudes, was published in 1988by Vintage Contemporaries. Ellis, at 27, knows of almost no other black writers his age. "Publishing is completely Ivy League, completely white. They don't think a minority audience is worth going after." "It's harder for a black writer in America to become a superstar," says John Edgar Wideman, who has written novels since the 1960s. "A few have, but 99 percent of minority writers don't make that jump, so they fall under that large category of people who are struggling just to stay in print." "I don't think any such thing as 'black writing' exists," poet and novelist June Jordan says with some anger. "I would have thought that that kind of typecasting would have long ago passed." In the late 1960s, one editor rejected Young's first novel with the comment, "It's a little too sweet for a ghetto novel." While Holt later published Young's Snakes, the books that caught the American public imagination back then often saw racism as an open wound needing to be bled. "Even after more than 20 years, The Man Who Cried I Am reads like a loaded pistol," Johnson writes of John A. Williams's highly regarded 1967bestseller in his recent Being & Race: Black Writing Since 1970 (Indiana University Press). "Williams's barecknuckled narrative pummels you with an indictment of American racism and imperialism, and the most completely detailed portrait of the social condition of the black writer in print." Young's Seduction by Light, the warmhearted story of a Hollywood housekeeper who once had a movie career of her own,
AI Young recently published his novel, Seduction by Light, which has had the largest first printing of all his books.
John A. Williams, author of the highly regarded The Man Who Cried I Am, now deals with a small, independent house in New York in order to get his out-of-print titles republished.
has had the largest first printing of all his there was a lot of protest literature, and it books, partly because it was one of several was considered an honorable genre," Wiltitles launching Delta's new trade paper- liams adds, referring to the progressive era back fiction series. Once branded an before World War I and then the 1930s. assimilationist, Young says he was ap- "But when black writers point out probproached after a recent talk by members of lems, it becomes something else." the audience who said, "You're talking While two careers hardly make a trend, about love. Our young people need to hear the shifting fortunes of Young and Wilfrom you." liams do seem emblematic of a broad Williams, still highly regarded by his . change among both writers and publishers peers, now publishes with the small, in- in the United States. Though protest has dependent house Thunder's Mouth Press been part of black literature from the slave (seebox on page 33) in order to get his out- narratives to Beloved, the particular wave of-print titles republished. "I guess every- of protest writing that rose in the 1960s has one considered me to be a political writer, largely fallen into decline. and that places limitations on who wants At the start of her career, for example, you," he says. "There was a period when Bebe Moore Campbell wrote angry poems,
getting none published, before turning to other emotions and other forms of writing. "Sometimes black writers need to give themselves permission to talk about the good side, what has been human in our experience," she says. "Because we are a minority, there has been some need to hold up a portrait of what needs to be changed. Usually that's a book of protest. And for a number of years publishers seem to have preferred a negative view of black life." In response to one particular stereotype, that of black men as uncaring, absent fathers, Campbell wrote a piece for the Washington Post that has now grown into a book, Sweet Summer: Growing Up with and Without My Dad, published in 1989 by
Trey Ellis, whose first novel, Platitudes, was published in 1988, notes: "J don't know anyone who says these are the glory days for black writer~ in America."
Adrienne Ingrum, executive editor of Perigee Books, finds black writers advancing all around. But, "There need to be more black editors."
Putnam. "I've had a happy life and a lot of my friends have too," she says. "That's what I chose to write about." "One of the good things about the 1970s," Wideman says, "was that even though there weren't many books published, we were beginning to get variety. There were stories about rich plack people, people in the Caribbean, people who traveled all over the world. So we began to get reflected in the fiction a multifaceted world that the Afro-American culture always has encompassed. "That continues to a degree," Wideman adds, "although the tendency to push one or two books at the expense of publishing many different books is an invitation for formula, simplicity and the least common denominator. So there's a real threat that only certain visions of Afro-American culture will get through to a big audience." Ishmael Reed takes a stronger view: "I think what happens is that the powers that be seem threatened by a proliferation of black genius. In other words, they're only comfortable with one at a time." "Look at Alice Walker," says agent Marie Brown, arguing that Walker reached superstardom because she had strong support from her editors and publishers long before The Color Purple. "Maya Angelou. Toni Morrison. These are people who represent positive attitudes of publishing houses. But for each of them I could name ten people who had the promise, but no encouragement, no support, no editor called them up to say, 'Hey, what are you working on next?' That's so important." A pioneer of sorts is Haywood, whose Fear of the Dark won a Private Eye Writers of America award. An avid mystery reader for 20 years, Haywood knows of few black mystery writers from the past, and has met only one contemporary. Though puzzled by the scarcity of blacks working in this genre, he has a theory. "There aren't enough black writers who sit do\\:,n at the typewriter and start with the premise that they're going to write a mainstream novel or bestseller," Haywood says. "Unfortunately, I think many black writers start from the premise that 'I am going to write a black piece of work.' " "There are no black western writers, yet there were blacks in the West, right?" says Johnson, adding, "One of the great tragedies is, we always tell people, 'You should write about what you know.''' His preferred advice is that people should write what they read. "The next step will be
somebody saying that because you're black, that's what you know best. But the fact is, you may know detective fiction best." Johnson caught the tail end of the 1960s surge of black books that allowed a number of writers to break into print fairly young; but though publishing in the United States has been on a youth kick again in recent years, very few of the writers have been black. "We don't have a lot of people coming up right behind us," Johnson says. "To me that's troubling." Statistics promising the vast majority of writers less than $5,000 a year from their work aren't a great draw. But another explanation may simply be raw math. At Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, for instance, Randall Kenan often found himself the only black in his undergraduate writing classes. Now 27, Kenan works as an editorial assistant at Knopf and has a novel, A Visitation of Spirits, published by Grove in July 1989. He suspects many more young blacks may be writing now than anyone realizes, but unlike the 1960s, an era of very visible writers' groups, they seem scattered today. He also notes that the American publishing industry, daunting enough to any young writer, may look especially daunting to blacks because of the impression that publishers, rarely black themselves, have very limited interest in their work. Some confirmation of this view comes from Terry McMillan, who is now compiling an anthology of current black writing, the first in two decades, for Viking Penguin. Of the 90 writers she has approached
for material, a good third have almost no publishing history. "I write short stories, and I've been reading all these anthologies, the best of this and that," McMillan says. "And I was getting a little peeved that there was never really any black representation in them." A handful of the major names might appear, like Walker, but rarely any newcomers. "We don't get the exposure we need," she continues. "A lot of times, being in these anthologies is a way these writers get discovered. "Our work has changed a lot from the 1970s," declares McMillan. "There's a lot of diversity. We've got science ficti~n writers out here, people who want to write erotica, humor and serious stuff, too. And' our voices have changed. We're not writing defensively now. We're writing stories that reflect our experiences, and they may have absolutely nothing to do with race." "I'm not concerned about black versus white. I'm concerned about black versus black," asserts Ellis. "Whites should read these books the same way they read Czech or Latin American literature." He lumps his Platitudes together with the movies of Spike Lee and George C. Wolfe's play The Colored Museum in what he calls the New Black Aesthetic, an approach that cannibalizes and satirizes conventions that have arisen in the black arts over the past two decades. One fan of this younger generation is Reed. "I think the younger black writers like Trey Ellis have benefited from the 1960s and 1920s and gone beyond," he says, referring to the Black Arts Movement
and the Harlem Renaissance. "They're much more daring. They take more chances. They are smarter. So I think we have a third renaissance on the way." Marie Brown, now an agent, joined Doubleday in 1967 as an editorial trainee. "During that first period I was responsible for working on black books, as were most of the black people in American publishing," she says. The Civil Rights movement, the birth of black studies programs and large governmental funding to libraries for multicultural books all encouraged commercial publishing's first major excursion into black subject areas. "It seemed to be a period when you couldn't publish enough," Brown recalls. After moving to California in 1969, she returned to Doubleday in 1972 to find a changed atmosphere. "The rap became: 'Black people don't buy books.''' Brown continued to publish books on black subjects with the house's support until leaving for Anchor Press in 1981, but she believes the dearth of blacks in publishing today causes severe problems: "Editors publish what they know. If people are not familiar with black experiences outside of slavery or pathology or deviance or crime, then these books are not going to get published because people say, 'Oh, that's not black.''' Malaika Adero, an associate editor at Fireside' Books, agrees that American publishing favors certain versions of black experience-for example, the "escape from the ghetto" story-over others. "People assume they know everything," Adero says. "But a lot of editors don't pay much attention to black culture. They never
Beating Depression Depression afflicts 'one in 12 Americans. Three decades of research have fin~ny resulted in greater understanding and more effective treatment'of this disease that can cloud the life of even the most creative individuals (novelist Virginia Woolf, for example).
Country Music American country music, despite. its international appeal (including a large following in India), has an elusiveness that makes it difficult to define. It can be soft and wistful, rough and rumpled; it can speak of tranqmrdomesticity or the disappointments of modern life.
The Buck Starts Here No commonly handled manufactured goods in America are more painstakingly produced than currency notes and coins. Apart from making money, the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing also examines forgeries and redeems mutilated currency from mattresses, shotguns, debris .~nd, on one occasion, from the stomach of a cow.
sit down and read black magazines such as Essence or Ebony. They don't know about Callaloo, the black literary journal." Stil1,as Marilyn Ducksworth, vice-president and associate publisher at Putnam, points out, publishing hasn't been an industry that goes out and recruits anyone, no matter what their color. "It's a debate for young blacks. 'Why should I go into publishing? It's really not a field blacks work in,'" says Faye Acker, senior editor at Howard University Press. In the early 1980s the press started a publishing institute. The program's administrator, Avis Taylor, also travels to the black col1eges of the South to introduce students to the whole notion of publishing as a career. But her efforts aren't helped by the low starting salaries. "Ultimately black people are responsible," Ingrum insists. "There need to be more black editors, more people who care enough to devote their careers to it." The notion of a feud between black men and women writers causes many to chuckle and shout "Media hype!" Not Reed. His satirical novel.Reckless Eyeballing has the feminists transforming
Marie Brown, a literary agent, believes the dearth of blacks in publishing is one reason for their not getting into print as much as they should: "Some white editors do a magnificent job for the one or two black authors on their list. But that's one or two."
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even Eva Braun into a heroic victim of male oppression. "Right now, since 80 percent of the American book-buying public are women, we have a rise in books by some black feminist writers whose values dovetail with those of the white feminists," Reed declares. Few men go so far as Reed in accusing some women of deliberate male bashing for fun and profit, but many have felt hindered at times by working in an era so dominated by what scholar Henry Louis Gates dubs "the Black Women's Writers Movement." Novelist David Bradley doesn't believe the problem has ended yet. "Within the black intel1ectual, academic community I think there is a very sad fragmentation between men and women," he says, adding of the women writers, "I think the writing is good. That's real1y the issue." People offer various reasons for the fact that black women writers in America have been more successful, both at getting published and at reaching a wide audience, than their male col1eagues. Black women, for example, have been helped by the women's movement, an audience American publishing has proved adept at reaching. With both black and women's studies sections to fil1,Bradley believes bookstores order 20 percent to 30 percent more copies of black women's books. Also, men may be harder to lump into a movement that provides a sales handle. "I was just reading a biography of Langston Hughes," says Paula Giddings, author of the recent In Search of Sister-
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"As are so many writers, he was confronted by this idea that no one can find the black market, that black people don't buy books. He said, of course that's ridiculous, but it's much more helpful if you bring books to black readers. So whenever Hughes spoke to a black audience, he brought his books and they always sold out." As if to prove the point, Morrow set up shop at a sorority convention and sold 4,000 copies of Giddings's new book to the 10,000 women who attended. But Giddings, who worked for years at Random House and then at Howard University Press, believes Morrow's enthusiasm remains more the exception than the rule for books on black subjects. "They're usually not the status books to be handled by the editor, by the publicity person, by the promotion people," she says. "As a result there's not as much marketing as there could be." Perhaps no one has worked harder to promote his or her own book in recent years than McMillan. She says, "I knew that, as a black writer, if you don't get on the bestseller list or make a serious splash, nothing will happen to you." During the six months prior to Mama's publication, McMillan mailed out 3,000 promotional letters. When invitations to read came, she often accepted. Reviews broke in her favor, and Mama wound up selling th~ough three hardcover printings. Using McMillan's notes and computer disks with lists of contacts, Doris Jean Austin made a similar effort for her novel After the Garden (NAL). But neither writer plans to do it again, believing that promotion should be the publisher's responsibility. Black writers in America have a long history of developing independently of the university system. Richard Wright started writing short stories for the John Reed Club in Chicago. The Harlem Renaissance produced its own publications and had a busy literary network. The Black Arts Movement of the 1960s was dotted with writing groups. But no organization has shown the staying power of the Harlem Writers Guild. Founded soon after World War II by Killens, Rosa Guy and John H. Clarke, the group has nurtured such writers as Paule Marshall, Ossie Davis, Louise Merriwether, Wesley Brown, Brenda Wilkerson, Walter Dean Myers and many others. By some estimates, members have gone on to write more than 100 books. 0 About the Author: Will Nixon is a New Jerseybased free-lance writer.
I
l .... At Thunder's Mouth: Keeping Black
P
ublisher Neil Orten berg is reluctant to admit that his Thunder's Mouth Press specializes in black authors. "I don't think of us as a black studies publisher. I don't like to be locked into a category like that," he insists over the racket of workmen at the press's new offices on Greene Street, in New York's Soho district. Begun nine years go as a publisher of two or three books of poetry a year, Thunder's Mouth has now spurted in size to 25 titles annually. "If you look at our list, certainly there are a number of black authors," Orten berg acknowledges, guessing that they've accounted for half of the press's books. "When you compare that to most publishers, who do very little publishing of black authors, somehow in that context we get pigeonholed. I think the truth is we've tried to create a strong literary publishing program of books, some of them by black authors and some not." The press's Classic Reprint Series includes Richard Wright's Eight Men, Langston Hughes's The Big Sea and Chester Himes's If He Hollers Let Him Go, a work by Nelson Algren, and the novels of John Clellon Holmes, whose Go anticipated Jack Kerouac's On the Road by five years. "I really like Beat writers,"
Writers in Print
Orten berg says with conviction. Still, in a world that thrives on simple labels, Thunder's Mouth has become best known for its interest in black authors. For example, the young poet and short story writer Henry Dumas became a cult figure of sorts within the black community after he was killed by a white transit policeman in Harlem in 1968, but his three books, first published under Toni Morrison's editorship and Random House in the early 1970s, had remained out of print for a decade until Thunder's Mouth issued his Goodbye, Sweetwater: New and Selected Stories in 1988. John A. Williams may be the press's most widely recognized writer of the moment. "We hit it off personally," says Ortenberg, who first met Williams at a cocktail party several years ago when the novelist was searching for a reprint publisher for The Man Who Cried I Am. Thunder's Mouth has subsequently published Williams's new novel, Jacob's Ladder, and reissued other old titles. "The irony is that everyone thinks if you're a small independent house your duty is to explore the unheard voices and then establish them," Ortenberg says. "The truth is it's very hard for a small house to take an unknown voice and make it known." 0
FOCUS Musician Extraordinary "Bernstein
was the most unique musician
no doubt about
of this century.
There is
it."
-Zubin Mehta,music director, New York Philharmonic "...was an incomparable musician whose enthusiasm making music were a constant delight."
and joy in
-Claudio Abbado,artistic director, Vienna State Opera
symphonies, a violin concerto and music for five Broadway shows, including West Side Story
These are just two of the many tributes paid by colleag ues in the music world to Leonard Bernstein after his death in New York on October 14 of a sudden cardiac arrest. He was 72. Bernstein was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He catapulted to fame on November 14, 1943, when, at the age of 25, he was unexpectedly called to conduct the New York Philharmonic in place of the scheduled guest conductor who had fallen ill. Although he had no time to rehearse with the orchestra, young Bernstein dazzled the audience and critics alike. In a rare gesture, The New York Times printed its review of the concert on page one. Bernstein went on to achieve one success after another; he was invited to conduct almost every prestigious orchestra in the world, including the Vienna Philharmonic, the London Philharmonic and the Orchestre Nationale de Paris. In 1953, he became the first American to conduct at La Scala in Milan. In 1958, he became the first American-born musical director of the New York Philharmonic, a position he held until 1969. Bernstein equally excelled as a composer. He wrote three
in 1957, perhap~ his most successful work. In fact, Bernstein himself had very high hopes for the musical. A few hours before the show's premiere, he told reporters: "If it works, it will be a landmark ...a step toward the future of American music." His goal, he said, was to create "a marvelous mixture between abstract and realism, poetry and prose-both, and yet neither." West Side Story was wildly popular, and in 1960 it was made into a movie, which also became a hit around the world, including India. It won ten Academy Awards. Bernstein was also a consummate teacher of and spokesperson for music. Through his book, The Joy of Music, and through televised lectures, he created awareness, interest and enthusiasm among the general public for serious music. Says Zubin Mehta, "He educated a whole generation in America with his televised educational concerts, and produced hundreds of recordings that have become a household item in every music lover's home." With his passing, to quote violinist Isaac Stern, "goes a special era in American music-making."
On September 7, he received a tumultuous applause from the people of Calcutta at the premiere of Baarishwala-a Hindi adaptation of The Rainmaker by American playwright Richard Nash-which he directed for a local amateur theater group, Padatik. Two days later, on September 9, he was dead. He was B. Rodney Marriott, associate director of Circle Repertory Company in New York City and one of America's most acclaimed offBroadway directors. Marriott was 52. Marriott had come to Calcutta on July 30 at the invitation of the U.S. Information Service to assist Padatik in its production of Baarishwala,Dur-ing his six-week sojourn, despite poor health, he gave himself totally to the production-supervising rehearsals until late in the evenings, conducting workshops, holding seminars and meeting representatives of the media. "His sudden death," wrote Business Standard, "was a painful event for the city's theaterlovers, especially for those who worked with him for the production and those who enjoyed every moment of its premiere."
Said a member of Padatik, "Marriott's death was a rude shock to all of us. Though he looked tired and pale, we never could think that his end was so near. In just six weeks that we worked with him, he endeared himself to us with his dedication, gentleness and, above all, thorough professionalism." . Marriott graduated from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1960 and taught English there .for a year. In 1961, he joined the University of California at Berkeley, California, as a Woodrow Wilson fellow but, as he said once, "I soon tired of sitting in a library and wanted to work with people." In the mid-1960s, he joined the Peace Corps and went to Nigeria where he taught at Lagos University and later at a remote village school. Marriott joined the Circle Repertory in 1979. Among the plays he directed at Circle were Milan Stitt's The Runner Stumbles, John Heuer's innocent Thoughts, Marsha Norman's The Holdup and Jim Leonard's The Diviners. He also directed scores of plays for a number of regional theaters and universities in the United States. In 1987 Marriott directed The Fantasticks for the Central Opera Theater in Beijing, the first American musical produced in the People's Republic of China. In 1988 he directed Karori Marco, a Hindi adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's Marco Millions, for the National School of Drama in New Delhi (see SPAN December 1988). During rehearsals of Baarishwala, a member of the cast asked him why he was moving away from the stage and keeping in the background. Marriott replied, "I am moving further away from you all. My work is done."
E. Donnall Thomas (far left) Joseph Murray
Eight Americans won Nobel Prizes this year, matching a record achieved only once before, in 1980. The Nobel Prize for medicine was awarded jointly to two American doctors for their pioneering work in organ and bone marrow transplants, which has given a new lease on life to thousands of severely ill patients around the world. They are Dr. Joseph Murray, a surgeon at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, and Dr. E. Donnall Thomas, a researcher at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington. Murray, 71, gained recognition in 1954 when he performed the first human kidney transplant on two men who were identical twins, thus avoiding any immunological problems. In 1962 transplants gained broader acceptance when Murray and colleagues solved the problem of organ rejection by using the immunosuppressive drug, azathioprine. Thomas, who shared the $730,000prize with Murray, pioneered the bone marrow transplant procedure, a therapy considered to be the only hope for people afflicted with certain leukemias and other blood-related and genetic disorders. In leukemia some of the body's white blood cells become cancerous and gradually crowd out the normal, blood-producing cells of the bone marrow. Thomas, 70, developed a technique by which leukemia patients were given a supply of healthy bone marrow after their own diseased blood cells were destroyed by high-dose chemotherapy. Like Murray, Thomas first tried the procedure on iden-
tical twins, performing the firstever bone marrow transplant in 1956. Through later research, he demonstrated that transplants could also be done between unrelated individuals, provided there is a perfect match between the immune systems of donor and recipient. The Nobel Prize for economics was jointly won by three Americans-Harry Markowitz of the City University of New York, William Sharpe of Stanford University in Stanford, California, and Merton Miller of the University of Chicago, Illinois. Markowitz, 63, was cited for his contribution to the field of financial economics in the 1950s. He developed the socalled theory of portfolio choice, a theory of how households and companies allocate their financial assets under uncertain conditions. Howard Ross,chairman of the department of economics and finance at the City University, says, "Markowitz's work is at the foundation of the theory of modern finance." Sharpe, 56, built on Markowitz's theory and showed how prices can be calculated for risky assets. His Capital Asset Pricing Model, said the citation, "is considered the backbone of modern price theory for financial markets." Miller, 67, was cited for his fundamental contributions to the theory of corporate finance. Miller initially collaborated with professor Franco Modigliani of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who won the Nobel Prize for his work in 1985. Later, he refined the theory, explained in his seminal book, The Theory
"The book," says John Gould, dean of Chicago University's graduate business school, "has changed the way finance is taught in the United States and around the world." Assar Lindbeck, a member of the Swedish Academy of Sciences, told reporters that it was natural to give the three economists the joint $700,000 award because their contributions are complementary. "They provided one building block each for the theory of financial economics," he said. "The theory would have been incomplete without all three blocks." Two Americans and one Canadian have shared the $700,000 Nobel Prize for physics fortheir breakthrough discoveries about minute particles that form more than 99 percent of all matter on Earth. They are Jerome Friedman, 60, and Henry Kendall, 63, both professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and Canadian Richard Taylor, 60, a professor at Stan'ford University. Through their pioneering work carried out during the late 1960s and early 1970s,the three physicists were the first to find evidence of quarks, now believed to be the basic building blocks of matter. They showed that the protons and neutrons that make up the nucleus of an atom, and formerly thought to be fundamental particles, were made up of even smaller components called quarks. The discoveries were made using the Stanford Linear Accelerator, an "atom smasher" that produces high-speed collisions of subatomic particles in an effort to of Finance.
discern their properties and structure. The sole winner of the Nobel Prize for chemistry this year is Jerome Friedman Elias Corey, 62, of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for developing simpler ways to make complex chemicals. Corey was also one of the first to use computer graphics to speed up the synthesis of new chemicals. In its citation, the Swedish Academy said that Corey synthesized about 100 important drugs and other natural products, and that his research has simplified the production of plastics, paints, dyes and pesticide~, which have contributed tothe high standards of living and health. Corey's method of synthesizing chemicals, called retrosynthetic analysis, involves taking a chemical structure and manipulating it in the laboratory step-by-step to identify a series of simpler molecules needed to construct the original compound. This procedure is the reverse of the usual way of thinking of synthesis, which involved starting out with simpler compounds in an attempt to form a more complex substance. Corey's initial work was often greeted with ridicule by colleagues who thought natural products were too complex to be dealt with in such a manner. On hearing the news of the $700,000 award, Corey said, "The revolution [in organic chemistry] that this decade has seen will continue into the next 50 years. The growing power of modern synthesis will be central to the development of therapeutic agents for years to come."
Daughters of the Desert Babcock, a professor of anthropology and director of the PemIn the spring of 1929, archaeologist Alfred Kidder offered an explanation to Elsie Clews Parsons as to why women should be broke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown Uniexcluded from the Museum of New Mexico's Laboratory of versity in Providence, Rhode Island, describes many ofthe "DaughAnthropology field schools: "This business of women in anthropolters of the Desert" as having been restless and rebellious. "We found ogy is a perplexing one," he wrote in a letter. "A young woman, that most were a bit unconventional, in that they were more because of the likelihood of her marriage, is an unreliable element to adventuresome than the stereotypical woman of the late 19th and build into the foundation of a staff structure." early 20th centuries who adhered to restrictive Victorian standards." Florence Hawley Ellis, now in her eighties and living in Santa Fe, "They were explorers," Parezo adds, "interested in discovering New Mexico, remembers that it was nearly impossible for a woman different cultures. Unlike other sciences, anthropology can't be to land a position on an archaeological excavation in the 1920s: "In learned in a laboratory. It entails fieldwork. These women willingly the first place, it was unheard of for girls to wear pants, and, bucked the thinking of their day which claimed that, by going to the secondly, there was the matter of the number and placement of American Southwest, they would foolishly be risking their lives." lavatories. " Babcock points out that many of the "Daughters" were indeed Despite discouragement, Parsons carried ont fieldwork in the the figurative or literal daughters of men who provided intellectual American Southwest, Latin America and the Caribbean and, or financial support to their efforts. First, there were male scholars having been born to wealth, generously financed the research of who did welcome women into the field. And, several of the countless other women. She served as president of the American women-including Parsons, wealthy Bostonian Mary Cabot Folklore Society and the American Ethnological Society and was Wheelwright and Millicent Rogers, whose grandfather was known the first woman elected president of the American Anthropological as the "hellhound of Wall Street"---ehanneled their considerable Association. Ellis (who, like Parsons, was married) was one of the inheritances or family influence into subsidizing expeditions and first American women to receive a doctorate in archaeology and to publications. Some worked to establish national parks, schools and use statistics and tree ring dating in her analyses. museums around the United States. The first woman ethnographer to collect data in the Southwest Parsons and Ellis are just two of the women featured in "Daughters of the Desert: Women Anthropologists and the Native was Matilda Coxe Stevenson. After graduating from Miss AnnaAmerican Southwest, 1880-1980," an exhibition that was recently bele's Academy in Philadelphia and studying law with her father, Stevenson accompanied her husband, James, and several others to shown in the United States. It examined the role women have played the Pueblo villages of New Mexico in the study, presentation and presA pioneer in anthropology, Matilda Coxe Stevenson, in 1879 on the first collecting and ervation of native cultures in the seen in 1907 with a Taos Pueblo woman, opened Southwest. It was the result of research expedition of the Smithup the field to future generations of women scholars. sonian Institution's recently nearly six years of research by formed Bureau of American Ethanthropologists Barbara Babcock nology. While the men did survey and Nancy Parezo. work, she learned the Zuni lan"The exhibition highlighted guage and gained entrance not only some 45 women and their work, into the tribal Indian women's doconcentrating on those who began mestic domain, but the men's relitheir careers before 1940 and who gious rituals as well. worked primarily with indigenous cultures of Arizona and New MeAs a pioneer in the emerging xico," explains Parezo, associate field of anthropology, Stevenson curator of ethnology at the Ariquickly developed a reputation as zona State Museumin Tucson. "As a diligent and enthusiastic scienscientists, humanists, novelists and tist. Her sometimes prickly dispoactivists, they significantly shaped sition and zeal in collecting data anthropological understandings, occasionally offended her subjects. public conceptions and governHer colleagues told the story of ment policies regarding Ameria name the American Indians ga ve her, which she proudly informed can Indians and the Southwest," friends was an affectionate soParezo asserts. briquet meaning, alternately, "Washington Mother" or "Little
sician. who achieved some recognition in her piano and organ Flower." In reality, the translation meant "big broad buttocks like performances, Densmore subsequently recorded more than 3,350 a mesa." Native American songs. Throughout her career, she faithfully Says Parezo, "After her husb.and's death in 1888, Stevenson was hired by the Bureau of American Ethnology to put James's notes in submitted her notes and recordings to the Smithsonian's Bureau of American Ethnology, where they were received with enthusiastic order. Two years later, the position became permanent, making her the first, and for a long time the only, woman to be paid as a appreciation. Today, the Densmore Collection is available for study at the U.S. Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. government anthropologist." Stevenson's extensive ethnographic "The women's interpretations have taken many forms," Parezo studies of the Zuni and Zia American Indians were to become a adds, "including Laura Gilpin's photography and Laura Adams foundation for future Pueblo research. Parezo reports that Stevenson's participation in collecting Armer's children's books. But this is not to imply that their expeditions was generally supported since, as a woman, there was a contributions have been limited to cultural anthropology." Florence Hawley Ellis, for example, applied her influence and expertise belief that she would have access to American Indian women and to help establish Pueblo claims to land and water rights. children whose knowledge was crucial to anthropology but inaccessible to male researchers. Thereafter, women were allowed, indeed In their research, Parezo says, she and Babcock also found that women scholars often competed equally with men for publishing invited, into the realm of American anthropological research. opportunities and research grants. Nonetheless, there was a crunch At the turn o[the century, most anthropologists were largely selfwhen it came to career movement. Bertha Dutton, they say, is an taught and many were employed by museums and trained in the field. After about 1911, U.S. universities began to offer courses in exampleofhowone woman circumvented that obstacle. Dutton left Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1932 and headed to the Southwest with the anthropology, combining methods and theories with fieldwork. cash settlement she received from a traffic accident and enrolled in "While their male colleagues worked at being more 'scientific,' " the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. In 1936, shejoined Babcock observes, "most of the women drawn to anthropology dethe staff of the Museum of New Mexico as assistant to the director. voted themselves to translating the findings of anthropological reAlthough she earned a master's degree in anthropology the search and the complexities of American Indian cultures to the following year, Dutton's job remained essentially clerical. "After general public. They made notable contributions to such areas as a few years I suggested to the director that he create a department folklore, linguistics and ethnomusicology." of ethnology," the distinguished archaeologist recalls. "He did Natalie Curtis and Frances Densmore studied the music of and I was appointed curator. various American Indian In those days, you had to groups. After a visit to her A collector of American Indian music, Frances Densmore recorded invent your job in so many brother in Arizona in 1900, 3,350 songs between 1901 and 1940. This 1916 photo shows Mountain places." Dutton still lives Curtis gave up a career as a Chief, a Blackfoot American Indian, interpreting a songfor her. in New Mexico and regularly concert pianist and concenwrites for a number of trated on recording Ameripublications. can Indian music. She was After more than I00 years, instrumental in persuading women anthropologists in President Theodore Roose. America continue to venture velt not only to remove the to the Southwest. "The ban tha t preven ted American desert is no lady," wrote poet Indians from singing native Pat Mora, but its lure of songs as part of an effort to native peoples and well-preassimilate them into the white culture, but also to forserved prehistoric ruins has mulate a policy to preserve provided a continuity whh and encourage American Inthe past and nurtured the dian music, art and poetry. spirits of five generations of Densmore's early work fopioneering women. 0 cused on the lyrics of American Indian music, until she About the Author: Vicki Moeser realized that "nothing is lost is a member of the editorial staff so irrevocably as the sound of of the Smithsonian News Service a song." A professional muin Washington, D.C.
Carli in Calcutta
Restoring a Palace American conservator Othmar Carli was in Calcutta recently to guide the restoration of an 18th-century palace as part of the city's tricentenary celebrations. Carli, whose visit was sponsored by the U.S. Information Service, conducted workshops at the palace and a few other historical sites in Calcutta in coordination with a Calcutta-based architects' organizationConservation and Research of Urban Traditional Architecture (CRUT A). He also held a workshop in Burdwan under Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage auspices. In the following interview, Carli talks about the Calcutta project and looks back at some of the highlights of his restoration career. ARUP DE: Let's begin by discussing the reason for your visit to Calcutta-the restoration of an old palace here. OTHMAR CARLI: I am working on Sobhabazar Rajbari, a huge palace built in the middle of the 18th century by Raja Nabakrisna Deb, a wealthy and influential prince. In fact, the word "rajbari," as you know, means king's palace. This magnificent building, like many others in north Calcutta, is on the verge of collapse. Plaster has peeled off walls, exposing corroded
bricks underneath; doors and windows made of solid teak hang menacingly off the hinges; the courtyard is full of overgrown grass and weeds; the dance hall is in ruins. DE: Two hundred years isn't much in the life of a building. How has the palace become so dilapidated in such a short time? . CARLI: Well, disintegration of the palace soon after it started long ago-possibly, was built. It worked insidiously. The main defect in the planning of the building is the absence of an underground drainage system. Rainwater runs in under the foundation and goes up the insides of the walls by capillary action, bringing a large deposit of salt to the walls and the columns. Salt destroys plaster. The plaster of the Rajbari has become so soft and brittle that it flakes off even if you tap the wall lightly. Yet the palace is a splendid piece of architecture, displaying a remarkable blend of Indian and Moorish styles with a few classical flourishes. Old photographs reveal how grand it once looked. DE: The Sobhabazar Rajbari was, in fact, once the main seat of Calcutta's social, cultural and political activities. It has been a silent witness to many momentous events.
The people of Calcutta would love to see it restored to its old glory. But by the looks of the building that seems an almost impossible task. Can it be done? CARLI: The job is formidable, but not impossible. Technical methods developed in America over the past 20 years can restore old buildings more effectively than ever before. The life expectancy of a building so restored should be at least 75 years, provided routine maintenance is done. DE: What is the exact nature of your involvement with the Rajbari project? CARLI: I am here mainly to conduct workshops to show how plaster on walls can be strengthened and restored. I am also giving CRUTA an overall outline of how I feel the palace can be brought back to its original shape and glory. At the workshop that I held at the Rajbari's thakurdalan (place of worship), I demonstrated to the students how they should apply conservation materials to solidify the wall. I explained that when a restorer works on an old building, he installs a chemistry. All the materials I used at the Rajbari are part of that chemistry. I told the students to spread the chemical on, or inject it into, the walls and the pillars.
In architecture, there is a growing worldwide movement toward restoring and preserving old buildings. Left: Othmar Carli, an American conservator, was recently in Calcutta to help restore the Sobhabazar Rajbari, an 18th-century palace. He is seen giving a demonstration at a workshop held in the thakurdalan of the Rajbari. Above: A detail of the palace courtyard.
One has to administer the injection carefully,for the needle quite often breaks off. Sometimes it becomes necessary to bore a hole in the wall for the purpose.
drainage in the yard and making the foundation waterproof. Then would come the architectural trimmings. Personally, I would like to take off the balcony, a part of which is already destroyed, and put a new one in its place. I regret that I cannot stay longer in Calcutta because of my preoccupations at home. But I hope to come again, probably next year, with enough time to take part in the restoration project in a bigger way.
DE: What does this chemical do?
CARLI: It repels water and solidifies plaster, which then takes about three weeks to harden and set. DE: What materials and tools do you use?
CARLI: I use paints, plaster, varnishes, xylene and a variety of tools of different shapes and sizes, starting from surgical knives down to scrapers. Many tools need to be improvised on the spot to suit the shape of the building. It is important that people should fashion their own instruments to suit local requirements. DE: What is your overall plan to restore the Rajbari palace?
CARLI: Undertaking a complete restoration of the Sobhabazar Rajbari would be an expensive job. But the disintegration could be frozen at a comparatively low cost. All existing structures should be protected. A temporary roof has to be built so that work can go on. The most important part of the restoration is installation of
DE: As you must have noticed, the Rajbari isn't the only building in Calcutta that needs restoration. As a restorer, what is your reaction to this city? You must have been to many other important towns around the world in connection with your work. How does Calcutta compare with them?
CARLI: At the outset, let me say that I am honored to have been invited to Calcutta for this restoration project, which forms part of the city's tricerrtenary celebrations. I enjoy going to new cities, I like to meet new people. In Calcutta I have been staying with a Bengali family in a gracious house. They make me feel absolutely at home. I eat Indian food, talk with my hosts about their culture and philosophy. This has been a most enlightening experience. As far as my work here is concerned and your question of comparing Calcutta to the other cities I have visited-I have worked in two Asian cities before, Tokyo and Seoul, but they can hardly be called Asian, except in the geographical sense. They have
all the features of a well-planned Western town. I am an artist and look at a city from the conservator's point of view. Calcutta has immense architectural importance. I find the old buildings of north Calcutta as . beautiful as those of Rome and Florence. In fact, I see here a more diversified styling which makes it extremely interesting. I believe that once Calcutta is restored-of course, I realize it cannot be done overnight-it will become one of the most desirable places in the world to go to for seeing old architecture. But old Calcutta has reached a stage when restoration and conservation should start right now in real earnest. The task is not easy, for it involves huge expenses, expertise and a strong will to get the job done. Moreover, it is not a job for experts alone. The lead has to be taken by the people. All sections of Calcutta's population should be involved, all resources raised. The job may be costly and difficult, but once completed, it will be a reward in itself. A restored Calcutta would be a great tourist attraction. There would be a whispering around the world: "Have you been to the beautiful city called Calcutta? You must go there on your next vacation." DE: Given the state of the buildings, do you think such restoration is possible?
CARLI: In Austria, my homeland, many of the buildings were in similar or worse condition because of war damage. But they have been completely restored and revitalized. They function in modern society as much as they did in the old days. Ifit could be done in Europe, it can be done in India just as well. DE: Are you an Austrian by birth? CARLI: I am an American of Austrian origin. I was born and raised in the Austrian city of Graz. DE: How did you acquire a taste in art and restoration?
CARLI: I have always had a keen interest in art. Perhaps my interest in restoration came about because of Graz being an ancient town. I lived in a 600-year-old house and went to a church that is 1,100 years old. The house and the church had a formative influence on me. They induced in me a spirit of the past. But it was art that I was most interested in. I had my first lessons from a street artist who painted in a park. I used to stroll by and watch him work. After SOl}1edays he
noticed my interest and began to ask me questions. I used to show him my work to get his opinion. I was also a frequent visitor to the Graz museum. One of the guards noticed my keen interest and told the director, who was kind enough to invite me to a workshop being held at the restoration department of the museum. From then on I started attending lectures at the museum in my free time and soon began thinking of taking up restoration as a profession. My father, who was a chemist, convinced me that besides my artistic endeavors, I must also study chemistry, which is the second most important ingredient in restoration work. It is essential for conservators to know the chemical and physical makeup of antique materials so that we do not inflict additional damage to them by mistake. I received an education in restoration and conservation-with an emphasis on fieldwork at historic sites-at the National Styrian Museum in Graz. I also took a course in chemical technology at Graz University. Besides, I learned sculpture, anatomy and fresco painting at Urania Art School in Graz and the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. In 1960 I received a degree as Bildhauer (sculptor), which is the ultimate accreditation artists can obtain under the Austrian system. DE: Why and when did you decide to immigrate to the United States? CARLI: I met an American woman, a singer who had graduated from the Juilliard Music School in New York. She was in Austria on a Fulbright fellowship. She came to sing at the Austrian National Theatre where I was then working as a stage designer. We fell in love and got married in Austria. When she was expecting our first child, my wife was keen to move back to America since she wanted the baby to be an American citizen. So in 1962 we came to America. I was then 29. I received American citizenship in 1977. DE: How did America shape your career? CARLI: America stimulated me to develop the ability I had brought from Austria and helped me to mature as an artist. When I came to America, I had no intention of following the career of a conservator. I became a teacher. I taught at several institutions in Pennsylvania including Penn State University in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia and Wilson College in Chambersburg.
I developed a fresh interest in restoration in the late 1970s and the early 1980s. That was the beginning of the American restoration movement. Americans had been seeing so much of the modern matchbox houses that there was a backlash. It created a renewed interest in the upkeep of old, traditional structures. I quit teaching and became a professional restorer and art consultant in the United States. DE: Does the U.S. government take an interest in restoration? CARLI: Yes, a very keen interest. And it takes a keener interest when it finds that a citizens' group is interested in restoration and maintenance of a particular building. In almost every American town there are some citizens' groups that take the responsibility of conserving old, traditional buildings classified as "house museums" (see inside front cover). They organize themselves as nonprofit corporations, which is a special status given to them for tax-relief purposes. The government gives them grants and tax credits. Many people donate money for restoration. DE: How does one go about launching a restoration project? CARLI: You have to create enough interest among the people to raise the funds necessary to begin the job. After that you start researching to work out details of the project. This gives you an idea of what the cost will be. Then you apply to the historical commission of the U.S. government, which has several state branches. They give matching funds. For example, the restoration of the Adams County Courthouse in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, which I did five years ago, cost about $250,000. This was borne jointly by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, and the U.S. Department of Interiors. DE: What other sites have you worked on in the United States? CARLI: The buildings I have restored include St. Anthony of Padua Church in Lancaster and the State Theater in Easton, both in Pennsylvania. In 1986 I undertook a complete redecoration of the church and recovered six murals from 1870 that had been overpainted. I also recovered a dec-. orative painting in the outer lobby of the theater in Easton and restored it to its original 1926 appearance. St. Anthony, which was modeled on European churches, was one of the most
important assignments of my career. I used ten shades of white to lighten its dark colors. I used a technique called trompe l'oeil to create an illusion of depth. I uncovered a medallion of St. Cecelia, patroness of music, above the organ at the back of the church. It had been painted over during an earlier restoration. It was one of several murals that originally lined the ceiling over the central aisle of the St. Anthony of Padua Church. Last year I worked on the Manhattan Supreme Court building in New York and the home of President Woodrow Wilson in Princeton, New Jersey. At the Supreme Court I tested the original historic finishes to determine the extent of damage and suggested the methods and technology required to recover or replicate those finishes. My job at the President's home was of the same nature. I am currently working on some projects of about the same size as the Sobhabazar Rajbari in New York City and Philadelphia plus a few minor jobs in smaller towns. In Radio City Music Hall, New York, I am examining and testing murals painted by Ezra Winter in 1932. I am also engaged in mural restoration at Old Salem Church in Lebanon, Pennsylvania. DE: Your work in America has won you many honors, including a citation from the Senate of Pennsylvania and the Distinguished Service Awardfrom the County of Adams. How do you intend to hand down your knowledge to the next generation? CARLI: Restoration is essentially a sharing of ideas and opinions. I work with a team. My daughter has been working with me for quite a few years now. My son-inlaw, a photographer, helps me to document the projects. There are others on the team. Although I quit teaching on a professional basis long ago, I have been grooming my team members in my own way all these years. I have also been lecturing on theater architecture and stage design for Opera Outreach in America. DE: As an artist, how do youfeel when you finish a project? CARLI: Ajob done properly and well is the best reward an artist could receive. I feel good when a project is completed and someone comes and says to me, "It is just like I thought it should be." 0 About the Interviewer: Arup De is a sub-editor with Jugantar, a Bengali daily in Calcutta.
Glimpses of American Architecture
Where is American architecture going in the 1990s?In architecture, as in life in general, the past often is a prologue. The decade of the 1980s in the United States saw postmodernism burgeon as a reaction to the cold, sterile internationalism of the 1960s. This was accompanied by some other isms--eontextualism, historicism and, most recently, deconstructionism. Regionalism also asserted itself, with, for example, buildings in the American Southwest resembling the shape and texture of those of the Spanish colonial era, and homes in the Northeast displaying wood-construction techniques of a century or more ago. Through all of these developments a strong appreciation, some may even say reverence, has emerged for architectural treasures of the past. Vestiges of the past are what give postmodernism its cachet. One of the best-known examples is Philip Johnson's AT&T
Michael Graves is one of the leading exponents of postmodern architecture and famous also for painting his architectural designs. He is seen above infront of his mural, Alternative Landscape. He designed the showrooms at top for Sunar, a textile and furniture manufacturing company in Dallas, Texas.
building in New York City, which, with its split pediment top and Renaissance arches, has been dubbed the "Chippendale Skyscraper." Where the past is receiving greatest attention, however, is in the growing movement in restoration and rehabilitation (see inside front cover and Carli story on page 38). George Notter of Charlestown, Massachusetts, a former president of the American Institute of Architects and an eminent restoration specialist, says, "You probably could hardly find an American architectural firm that would not say [that restoration] is a major part of its work." Appropriately enough, Washington, D.C., the nation's capital, boasts two of the best-known examples in the rehabilitation of large public facilities-the Old Post Office Building (see SPAN October 1984) and Union Station. M-ost of the photos on these pages come from an exhibit that the U.S. Information Service has mounted for showing in Calcutta (as part of the city's tricentenary celebrations), Bombay, Madras and New Delhi. The exhibit reviews a wide range of American
architectural styles and developments over the past several decades, including the works of such luminaries as Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Kahn (well known in this country for his design of the Indian Institute of Management in . Ahmedabad) and Buckminster Fuller, as well as such current iconoclasts as Michael Graves and Frank Gehry. The exhibit has been created partly in connection with American participation in the International Conference and Exhibition on Architecture of Cities this month in Calcutta, sponsored by the West Bengal chapter of the Indian Institute of Architects. Christine Boyer, a city planner and specialist in the historical analysis of city form, will participate in several. programs and deliver a talk on "Urban Designs for the Rich and Poor." Boyer is chairperson of the department of city and regional planning at the Pratt Institute School of Architecture in Brooklyn, New York. 0 Louis Kahn designed the library of Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire. Open beam trusses tie the inner concrete structure together.
The Jefferson Market Courthouse in New York City was selected as one of the ten most beautiful buildings in America shortly after ii was constructed in 1877. Preservationists rescued the Victorian Gothic structure, which had sat vacan tfor years, from the wrecker's ball in the early 1960s and had it converted into a branch of the New York Public Library.
Frank Gehry, identified with deconstruction ism , says that modern artists such as Jasper Johns and Carl Andre have greater influence on him than any architectural trends per se. Gehry designed the Wosk Residence (left) in Beverly Hills, California, in 1982.
The Montgomery/Washington Tower in San Francisco, designed by Kaplin/McLaughlin/Dia?,.is a mixed-use highrise comprising 15 floors of office space, six floors of residential condominiums, retail space, and two levels of parking. The upper floors feature rounded solariums that soften the building's silhouette and offer dramatic panoramic views.
The Garden Grove Community Church in California is sheathed in reflective glass that screens all but eight percent of the sunlight. White space trusses form a kind ofmodern, tough filigree work. The church, which is larger than the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and can seat a congregation of up to 3,000, was designed by Philip Johnson in collaboration with John Burgee Architects of New York.
The Best American Essays 1987* Gay Talese (ed.), Series Editor: Robert Atwan, Tickner
& Fields, New York, 1987,
pp. 323, $1695.
This anthology contains 20 essays published ifl various American periodicals in 1986, and it features a large number of young and upcoming writers who are making their reputations through essay writing. The selection, put together by Gay Talese, falls into four broad categories-the character essay, the personal essay, the contemplative essay, and the nature and adventure essay. It is noteworthy that they have been taken from a wide variety of periodicals covering the entire spectrum of contemporary life. Incidentally, they also reaffirm the fruitful nexus established between the essay and journalism in the early 18th century. There are seven character essays in the anthology on which the influence of the techniques of the New Journalism is clearly perceptible. Three eminent practitioners of the New Journalism-Tom Wolfe, Calvin Trillin and Richard Ben Cramer-are represented by one piece each. Cramer's "What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?" stands out by virtuf of its fidelity to facts and dramatic presentation of traits of Williams's character. Wolfe's vivid portrait of the wellknown American inventor, Jerome Lemelson, in "Land of Wizards" enables the reader to perceive the feverish dream of an inventor. Daniel Mark Epstein's "The Case of Harry Houdini" is a meticulous account of the miraculous life and work of the famous American magician and escape artist; it is reminiscent of William Hazlitt's portrait of John Cavanagh in "The Indian Jugglers." Garry Giddins's "This Guy Wouldn't Give You the Parsley Off His Fish" is a gripping piece relating how, the wellknown American vaudeville player Jack Benny achieved his comic effects with a limited repertoire of histrionic tricks. Flating E. Morison's "The Master *The book is available at the American Center libraries in Bombay, Calcutta, Madras and New Delhi.
Builder" is an intimate account of the unique life and work of his great-grandfather, the pioneering American engineer, George S. Morison. Cast into the narrative mold, John BFlrth's "Teacher" portrays the protagonist both as a social type and an individual. In "Rumors Around Town," Trillin builds his narrative around the folkloristic motif of the preacher and the loose woman against the backdrop of a "peaceful front-porch life" of the small town of Emporia, Kansas, documenting it assiduously from newspaper stories. In the category of personal essays, Gregor Von Rezzori's "A Stranger in Lolitaland" is an unromantic celebration
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of the author's "genuine and honest confrontation" with his newly adopted motherland, America. In the same unromantic, but straightforward, vein is the engaging piece of reminiscences, "Pictures," by Samuel Pickering. It is prompted by old family photographs, letters, books, Bibles, etc., because, as the essayist says, "Life is frayed around the collar. .." and "As I age my world constricts, I do not want to confront my past and be compelled to judge it and then regret life missed." Philip Lopgate's "Against Joie de Vivre" is an honest, cogent but offbeat piece pleading against "stylization of this private condition into a bullying social ritual." Scott Russell Senders's "The Inheritance of Tools" is an analytic and interpretative piece into
the making of which goes an intimate knowledge of handling tools; tools which "pared down to essentials" hold up well "beside those other classics-Greek vases, Gregorian chants, Don Quixote, barbed fishhooks, candles, spoons." John Dunne's "On Writing a Novel" prOVIdes a peep into the world of an author's creative efforts. The contemplative essays are distinguished by a discursive stance on social, artistic and topical issues. For example, in "They Said You Was High Class," Joseph Epstein deals with the problem of social classes, concluding with the sane advice: "When we think too exclusively as members of our class, we all, essentially, stand by our vices...the trick of being a human is to stay away from them." The traditional American interest in nature and the phenomenal world inherited from John James Audubon and Charles William Beebe is reinforced by Gretel Ehrlich in "Spring" and by Donald Hall in "Winter." Both writers are keen observers of the procession of seasons, the latter adorning his essay with weather-lore and myth. Barry Lopez in his piece "The Stone Horse" extends this interest to antiquity, seeking an ancient stone horse in the Southern California desert. The call of the wild takes Geoffrey C. Ward across seven seas to the game sanctuaries of Rajasthan in India. In "Tiger in the Road," he describes his safari, with splashes of local color and anecdotes. On the whole, the American essay is forward-looking, paying no tribute to any great master of the past except Hazlitt; like him it cherishes honesty and straightforwardness. The publication of three representative anthologies of the contemporary American essay in the past six years-The Penguin Book of Contemporary American Essays (1984), The Best American Essays 1986 and the present edition proves that the essay in America is a flourishing business and is being practised with dexterity by many established writers and a large number of upcoming writers. 0 Banshi Dhar, former
director of Jodhpur University's Institute of Evening Studies, is currently associate professor in its department of English.
On Stage in India
Two of America's most celebrated modern dance troupes-the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and the Nikolais and Louis Dance Companywill be performing in India in November and December, respectively.
A few scenes from the works of choreographers Alwin Nikolais and Murray Louis, whose dancers are scheduled to perform in Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta, Madras and Trivandrum in December. Above and above left: Nikolais's "Liturgies." Left: Louis's "4 Brubeck Pieces." First created in 1984, it will be one of the works staged in India.
M
odem dance, quintessentially an American phenomenon, best reflects the country's inventive genius in the performing arts. And among its doyens are Merce Cunningham, Alwin Nikolais and Murray Louis, who have over the decades redefined and refined the idiom, freeing it from conventions and canons. Despite their ages, which range from 64 to 80, they remain inventive, creative and eloquent geniuses. Cunningham, 71, studied under the legendary Martha Graham, whose name is synonymous with modern dance itself; he was a soloist in her dance company from 1940 to 1945. However, he felt stifled by her narrative element, firmly believing that the business of dancing is not to "tell a story" but simply to dance. As he once said, "If the dancer dances, everything is there. The meaning is there, if that's what you want." So in 1945 he left Graham and began to work independently. When he finally formed his own group-the Merce Cunningham Dance Company-in 1953, he jettisoned all vestiges of storytelling. Then came the most controversial of his innovations: He discarded dance's reliance on music. From the start of their association in 1944, Cunningham and composer John Cage, the company's musical adviser, have proceeded on the assumption that dance and its score are separate, independent events taking place within the same moment of time. "The use of time is the one element dance and music have in common," Cunningham says. "They can go on at the same time, but one need not support the other. The dancers should stand on their own feet, not on the music." To watch a Cunningham dance is to enter a world in which the only really familiar component is the human body. Singly or in groups, the dancers walk, twirl, twist, turn and bend. The result is a kind of ordered anarchy in which the dancer remains an individual while the dance becomes a form of pure movement. Although some audiences feel cheated by the lack of conventional virtuosity they expect of dancers, many more give themselves over to the kaleidoscopic whirl of joyous movement that his works inspire. In a career spanning half a century, Cunningham has choreographed more than 100 works for his company, some of which have been included in the repertoires of ballet and modern dance companies around the world. He has also choreographed works for such companies as the New York City Ballet and the Paris Autumn FestivaJ, and collaborated with filmmakers, including BBC, to create dance works for video and television. To date, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company has performed in 300 cities in 35 countries, including twice in India. Earlier this year, Cunningham, a highly decorated dancer, received the highest honor that the United States bestows on its artists-the National Medal of Arts. If Cunningham has been the enfant terrible of modern dance, Alwin Nikolais, 80, and Murray Louis, 64, have for decades been expanding its vocabulary with their own individual, distinctive dance styles. A little over two years ago, the choreographers decided to combine their two companies to form the Nikolais and Louis Dance Company. Their creative association goes back four decades. Louis was a leading dancer of the Nikolais Dance Theatre for four years before he founded his own troupe, the Murray Louis Dance Company, in 1953. However, over the years, they have actively
consulted each other on their works and sometimes even shared dancers between their two companies. Although one discerns glimpses of his mentor's influences in Louis's dances, their styles are quite distinctive. Nikolais, an expuppeteer who creates the music as well as the costumes and lighting for his dances, is a master of kaleidoscopic stage illusions, summoned through subtle manipulation of motion, light, color and sound. Louis is more concerned with the articulation of movement and contrasts in mood, by turns antic, bouncy and acrobatic. "I have a strong focus on the visual impact of dance, whereas Louis is more oriented toward kinetic detail," says Nikolais. Louis recently told Sorab Modi, a U.S.-based Indian expert on the performing arts, "My work is more like the mudras and is full of poetical details. Nikolais's is more like Kathakalioverwhelming in its theatricality." Recently Nikolais and Louis attempted to fuse those approaches in their joint creation, "Segue," each creating alternate sections of the work and then collaborating on the transition to bind them. "It's terribly challenging and draining," says Louis. "One of the biggest difficulties is having to look with each other's eye at the piece instead of only with your own eye. You see the way you would go, and then you say to yourself, 'No, he's seeing it another way.' It has to develop as a double choreographic vision, and you start to feel schizophrenic." Nikolais got his first commission as a choreographer to create a ballet in 1940. In 1948 he became director of the Henry Street Playhouse, and soon afterward he formed the Playhouse Dance Company, later renamed as the Nikolais Dance Theatre. However, Nikolais first came to national prominence when his company was invited to perform at the American Dance Festival in 1956. Since then he has performed at most every major theater in the world. Recipient of countless awards and honors, including the National Medal of Arts in 1987, Nikolais at 80 remains, as Anna Kisselgoff wrote not long ago in The New York Times, "a very special choreographer. ..his work defies imitation." Louis, like his mentor, is an outstanding dancer. His reputation as a master of the language of modern dance grew as he developed an eclectic, poetic and skillfully articulate choreography. Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1926, Louis's interest in dance was fired by his sister who studied dance and took him to many of the early modern dance concerts. After his discharge from the U.S. Navy in 1946, Louis began to study dance, and during a summer session at Colorado College in Colorado Springs he first met Nikolais. In 1953 Louis founded his own company. Since 1968, when his company was chosen by the U.S. Department of State for a two-month tour ofIndia, he has given performances all around the world. In addition to some 100 works that he has created for his company, Louis has choreographed for some of the world's leading companies, including the Royal Danish Ballet, the Hamburg Opera Ballet and the Berlin Opera Ballet The appearance of the Nikolais and Louis Dance Company in India this December will mark the first time that Nikolais's choreography will be seen here. So, in the permissive and uninhibited atmosphere of modern dance today the Indian audience had better be prepared for some surprises. They are almost guaranteed. 0
Some of Merce Cunningham's'creations include, above, "Fabrications," described as a "beautiful, difficult" work; left, "Grange Eve," an exquisite attempt at showing that the past is always with us; below, "Rainforest," first choreographed in 1968, and scheduled to be shown in India. It is famous fur its silver clouds-helium-filled pillows, created by artist Andy Warhol, that float, cluster and gently bob.
Merce Cunningham, who brings his dance company to Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta and Bangalore this month, is no stranger to India; his company earlier gave dance performances here in 1964 and 1984.