Oversized snowflakes drifted langorously down from the sky, piling themselves carelessly on the limbs of centuries-old cedars. A choir of unseen frogs in the lotus-filled ponds croaked out their songs of desire. The presence of Dogen Zenji, the legendary founder of Soto Zen, permeated the ancient halls of Eiheiji, the temple he founded more than 750 years ago.

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OK, so I made up the part about the frogs. Didn’t actually hear any frogs at all. But it was really snowing, although that’s not surprising since it was March and Eiheiji is located in modern-day Fukui, in the region called Hokuriku, where Kawabata set his famous novel “Yukiguni” or “Snow Country”. And there were really tall cedars, including the “Godai-sugi” located right in front of the “Sanmon” or Main Gate, and said to date back to the time of one of Dogen’s immediate successors.

As for Dogen’s unspoken presence, I didn’t actually feel that very strongly either. The dominant impression was of a whole bunch of monks eating, sleeping, and sitting. They engage in all three of these activities on the single tatami-mat assigned to them in the Sodo or Monks’ Hall, a dark, cavernous building said to have last been renovated one hundred years ago—I sure hope they don’t wait another hundred to renovate it next time! We didn’t stay there, but it looked cold. But actually that building is one of the older buildings at Eiheiji; there is nothing that dates back even close to the time of Dogen, the very oldest structure being the 250-year old Sanmon. Turns out that wooden buildings burn and fall down. Actually, it seems that the current location is not even that of the original Eiheiji, it having moved at some point in the past.

The overall layout of Eiheiji is modeled on a seated Buddha, with the Sodo corresponding to the right elbow The Hatto The Hatto (Dharma Hall) is at the top of the hill and corresponds to the Buddha’s head. The Buddha Hall is more or less in the middle and is his heart. His right elbow maps to the Sodo and the left to the Daikuin (kitchen), while the bathroom (Tousu) and bath-house are his knees. The Sanmon is his hands.

As long as we are giving the little tour, I’ll mention that the buildings are all connected by covered hallways, their wooden floors gleaming from daily polishing by the monks during samu. Other buildings in the complex, besides the new building where we stayed, include a temple dedicated to Dogen Zenji and where his ashes are kept, the 102-year-old Zenji’s quarters, where we noticed, incongruously, a pile of teddy bears sitting in the waiting area; and buildings related to the funeral business, basic to the economic model of all Zen temples in Japan.

I visited Eiheiji under the program they call “sanzen”, a sort of dumbed-down four-day intensive for lay people. I have to appreciate the effort the people at Eiheiji have gone to to make it possible for people like me to go there and have an experience of life at a monastery. They make some reasonable attempt to give you a flavor of the rhythm and style of the monastic life. Of course, you do not really live among the monks, but rather in their ugly new administration and reception building called “Kichijo-kaku”. The accommodations are spartan (futons on the floor), but at least the building is heated, unlike the Sodo where most of the real monks stay. The food is what everyone there eats and is very good, if simple.

The first meal of the day is “shou-jiki”, and is just rice gruel and pickles, although each day the gruel was perked up with something—little kernels of corn, or little pieces of mochi. That is the only meal of the day for which the spoon is used. Lunch, or “chuu-jiki”, is rice, miso soup, pickels, and a couple of side dishes, such as hijiki or boiled vegetables. Dinner, called “yakuseki”, is much the same. All of the meals are eaten in the highly-stylized “o-ryo-ki” style, which turns out to be something quite different than the much more Westernized and simpliifed system I learned at Zen Mountain Center. There was so much mental energy around eating there that sometimes I got the feeling that the real reason I was there was to go to o-ryo-ki school, with some sitting thrown in to kill time.

The differences range from additional rules about how to unpack and repack your eating implements, to new steps such as the use of both hot tea and hot water during the clean-up process. Some of the changes have an obvious logical reason, such as washing the outside of each bowl by dipping it sidewise in the next smaller bowl filled with hot water and rotating it. Overall, though, the differences give a whole different flavor to the o-ryo-ki process; instead of making it seem more artificial and ritualized, they actually seem to enrich and complete the scheme.

One particular difference is that you eat with your bowl held high, near your mouth, and your elbows held out to your sides. This has the effect of focusing your attention on the meal and the eating process. Small things, like placing your chopsticks back on the middle bowl with both hands, or picking up your chopsticks (also with two hands) first, adling them between your thumb and index finger, and only then picking up the bowl you plan to eat from, have the effect of giving the overall eating process a sort of attractive dignity.During the noon meal the offering is given to the Buddha—seven grains of rice. (For some reason, in the ZMC version, this is done during all meals. In the Eiheiji version the problem that occurs at ZMC as to which food to offer—the macaroni and cheese, or the salad?—does not arise since there is rice at every meal). One unfortunate participant managed to drop his little bunch of rice on the floor, since this is a traditional Soto monastery where you are eating on the ledge of the “tan”. The response by the monks watching over us was quite astonishing—they ran over to his seat, with everyone bowing and gassho-ing while the rice grains were retrieved from the floor. I guess this only needs to happen once or twice before you start getting very focused when sticking the offering on the end of the “setsu”, or spatula. God knows what would happen if you happened to drop your chopsticks, or heaven forbid an entire bowl, on the floor.

I found it interesting that there was no real attempt to teach anything about Zen. We learned different bowing styles; the gassho should be a real gassho, with arms held up parallel to the ground, fingers an inch from your nose. And shashu, and how to behave physically in the Zendo, including such details as the direction to rotate your zabuton when plumping it back up after sitting (clockwise). But no-one ever talked about the mental aspects of the meditation process. In this retreat, there was also no dokusan or interviews with the teacher. I imagine this is indeed how Zen is taught normally in Japan, including to the monks who come to Eiheiji to live for one or two or three years—a sort of throw them in the water and see if they can swim process, or maybe it’s more along the lines of getting them so frustrated and/or confused that when a teacher finally deigns to spend a couple of minutes with them they value the opportunity much more and take it much more seriously.

The monks that dealt with us, probably six in all, were not very chatty and as such we did not obtain much information about who they were or what they were thinking. We did get some clues, though. It seems that the majority of the 200+ monks at Eiheiji are there for a relatively short time, by which I mean 1-3 years, after which they intend to go back and run their family temple. Although they could take over the family temple without a stay at Eiheiji, by doing their time they get some kind of certification.

Frankly, my impression of the monks at Eiheiji was that many of them were in fact just “doing time”. It may seem strange to a Western student of Zen that someone with the chance to study at the premier Soto temple in the world would choose to just go through the paces, but that was indeed my impression. To my Western eye, the monastic life there does seem quite limited and limiting. The schedule provides no time for personal activities. Even activities such as taking a bath, which at ZMC occur during “personal” time, are carried out in groups, the monks all proceeding in a single line to the bath house and taking their bath together—something made possible by the big Japanese-style bath tub (although we were not allowed in the actual “yoku-shitsu” or bath house used by the monks). Samu is more group-oriented as well. As far as I could tell, there is little to no time at least for the junior monks to do any studying or reading either. One of the monks told us that the organization systems at Eiheiji were so well-developed that the Japanese armed forces visited them to study how they did it. Well, they should be well-developed—they’ve had over seven centuries to work out the kinks. It is quite amazing when you think about it that daily life at the temple is probably quite close to what it was at Dogen’s time—one of the few institutions in the world, I would say, that has maintained consistent forms for such an extended period of time.

The sanzen program is open to anyone who wants to come but is certainly not oriented to non-Japanese speakers. Some Westerners might have trouble with sitting in seiza for a whole hour during the morning services. The schedule itself is pretty close to a ZMC sesshin, although they haven’t gotten around to adding yoga to the schedule yet—that will probably take another 750 years.

Japanese readers can find more information about Eiheiji here.
Information about the sanzen program can be found here.
A Japanese book called “Kuu, Neru, Suwaru” (“Eat, Sleep, and Sit”), about one man’s experience as a monk at Eiheiji, can be found here.

Here is an interesting article on the making of the “Matrix” sequel, focusing on the CG techniques used.

In one big fight scene, Keanu Reeves (who I occasionally see working out at the gym I go to, looking a bit smaller than he seems on the big screen) has to battle 100 clones of the bad guy. The approach they used, essentially, was to generate the basic mechanics and kinetics of the scene using traditional CG modeling algorithms (based on motion capture data), but then to actually generate the finished scene by “painting” or “molding” actual pictures of the actors faces onto the CG surfaces. This creates a much more realistic result, with much less effort, than trying to mathematically model the face in detail. We’ll call this “reality-based CG”.

This kind of thinking has been around for a while. Back in the mid-90’s, I was involved in a project to “paint” or “wrap” photographic images of actual kimonos onto models in different poses to create catalog images. Today, many on-line clothes stores use a simplified version of this technique to show potential buyers what a piece of clothing would look like when worn by someone of a particular body type.

As an example of a similar technique, the article mentions music synthesizers. Originally, the attempt was again to model the sound entirely and create it artificially—resulting, unsurprisingly, in something that sounded, well, computer-generated. The alternative approach which is now in widespread use is to record actual instrument sounds and “paint” them onto computer-generated rhythm sequences. And I think we are all familiar with the analog in the voice synthesis area, where approaches based on recorded snippets of actual human voices being woven together are supplanting the original approach of completely computer-generated speech which ends up sounding like a robot.

Existing machine translation approaches still largely take the approach of trying to mathematically model and generate everything. Statistical and corpus-based approaches do somwhat presage the “paint reality onto the model” idea, but in practice are still basically limited to post-processing (in the CG model, “smoothing”) model-based output, to creating word or phrase-level dictionaries, or dealing with local problems such as disambiguation. We have “example-based MT”, but this has not yet reached the stage of being generally applicable.

I was thinking about the implications of this sort of idea for natural language processing and machine translation—“reality-based MT”. I think you can map the CG approach used in the Matrix sequel to an MT approach quite easily. A mathematical-type grammar corresponds to the CG model. Corpuses correspond to photographic images taken of actual reality. Treebanks and other tagged databases correspond to the step taken when photographic images are mapped to models through the use of “anchor” points, designating, for example, 10 key points around Keanu Reeve’s lips. The above elements are all well-known components of present-day MT solutions. In reality-based MT, though the transformations linking one grammar, for instance that of the source language, to another, that of the target language, need to be recast as a particular type of motion capture—remember that motion capture can not only identify linear transformations such as a walking leg, but more structural transformations, such as someone doing a somersault, as well. The totally new element in reality-based MT will be the “painting” or “wrapping” process, where “reality fragments” (of the target language) are “pasted over and around” the transformed model.

Who will be the first to create a simple proof-of-concept prototype of reality-based MT?

Recently I made a new recipe: “four-grain stuffed roast chicken”, for a guest of mine. It turned out reasonably well.

Basic starting point is simply putting a chicken in the oven and roasting it for oh, 35-45 minutes (if you have a meat thermometer it should read 160F). You can try variations such as first browning it on all four sides on the top of the stove for five minutes or so, or turning it on different sides while it is in the oven, but the basic principle of simply applying heat to the bird works perfectly well, as it does for many other pieces of meat.

The bird I used was completely keyword-compliant: organically fed, sustainably raised, free range. Whatever.

This time, I tried stuffing the bird with a mixture of the major grains which have driven human civilization. I took 1/4 cup each of rice, barley, teff, and quinoa; added 2 cups water; and boiled it for 15 minutes or until the water is absorbed. Use chicken stock if you prefer, or add butter or salt. To the cooked grains, which should still be slightly undercooked since they are going to be cooked inside the chicken, add some spices to your liking, be that rosemary, thyme, cumin, what have you; I also added some softly sauteed onions.

One cooking book I have recommends “brining” the chicken”. That involves soaking it in a mixture of water, salt, and sugar for about two hours. Can’t hurt, right?

I then stuffed the chicken, front and back, with the grain mixture. Also, take a half-stick of butter and mash it in your hands with a handful of the grain mixture (fun), and stick that in the bird as well. Then stick it in the oven in a pan with some melted butter. Baste it every 10-15 minutes. Should be done in about 30-35 minutes. Carving it is your problem; try calling on the senior male member of your household.

Oh, I made a sauce by deglazing the cooking pan with a bit of chicken stock, some vinegar, and some sherry and reducing it. Serve the sauce over the chicken and the grain mixture. Good.

We served the chicken with a ceviche and squash soup. The ceviche is trivially simple and truly good. Take some good seafood (we used scallops); add citrus juices such as lime, lemon, grapefruit, or orange; onions; peppers; perhaps some salt and pepper; and give it an hour or two in the fridge. The citrus juices “cook” the seafood, in the sense that they cause a chemical transformation similar to the one that happens when actual heat is applied. This is a staple of Pacific-rim countries such as Mexico and Peru.

The roast squash soup I made by simply cutting up some pieces of squash, laying them on a cookie sheet, dirzzling them with some oil, and leaving them in a 500F oven until they started to brown, about 30-40 minutes. Then I dropped them into a food processor and chopped them up with some cream. Add milk, sour cream, stock, water, or whatever else until you get the soup consistency. You probably won’t need much seasoning, but use salt, pepper, or whatever else as you please.

You might be acquainted with quinoa, the Andean grain. Obtainable in natural food stores and even many supermarkets these days. This was the cereal eaten by the Incas. Every time I think about the Spaniards arriving in Peru in the early 1500’s, I am amazed at how foreign, literally, the whole country must have appeared to them. Every plant and animal would have been unfamiliar, starting with the llamas; of course, the Spanish horses were equally unfamiliar to the Incas, who had no better way to refer to them than to call them “large llamas”. Another unfamiliar plant: the potato, which originated in the Andes, and which experts consider to represent one of the single most major impacts which the Andean civilizations had on Europe and the world as a whole (another being the gold found in the Andes, and its impact on European economies).

Quinoa can serve as the basis for a number of interesting dishes. (One plan is to take couscous recipes and adapt them for quinoa.)

Basically you can cook quinoa by sticking it in water or stock (try a 1:2 ratio) and boiling until the water is absorbed. Probably best to wash the quinoa first. A useful variation is to sort of roast the quinoa by itself for a few minutes before adding liquid. Or, saute some onions in a bit of oil and then add the quinoa after the onions have softened and cook for a few minutes. In any case, the result will be three times the original volume of quinoa. It’s hard to screw it up.

A recipe I invented early on was quinoa with bell peppers; try a combination of red, yellow, and orange peppers, julienned or something and then sauteed; the color is fabulous, the texture inviting, and the taste remarkable. Or if you’re so inclined, roast the peppers, either on the grill or in the oven; or puree them and mix them with the quinoa. Or, try quinoa with asparagus tips—fabulous. Although all of these approaches lack in historical veracity, since the Incas had neither peppers, nor asparagus.

They did have peanuts, however, so by all means let us add peanuts to our quinoa and get that crunchy texture and earthy flavor. They also had trout, swimming in their mountain rivers, most notably the Apurimac River flowing through the middle of Cuzco, the capital of ancient Imperial Peru, and then, 80 miles further north, along the bottom of the towering slopes on which Machu Picchu lies. So by all means let’s add trout of some sort to our quinoa, perhaps baked and crumbled; the Incans almost certainly did, although there is no definitive record of their doing so. Of course, the Incan emperors also had the system of the chasquis, or runners, waiting by their stations every 5-10 miles along the fabulous Incan road system, ready to convey the latest military or other information from the regional commander to their ruler or vice versa. But guess what: these chasquis were also used to bring fresh ocean fish 400 miles inland to the table of the ruler himself, in less than 24 hours, directly up the mountain slopes. So we can easily conjecture that at least the ruling classes had fresh ocean fish to eat alongside, or most likely mixed with, their quinoa. Let’s mix it in too—how does tuna sound? Or Sea Bass? We do not know exactly what greens the Incas used, but hey—throw in some chopped parsely, or cilantro, or how about even mint?

The Zen Mountain Center where I just spent a week publishes a cookbook called Three Bowl Cookbook, the name derived from the ancient custom of Zen monks taking all their meals using a set of three bowls. This book gives a couple of quinoa recipes. One, which I made recently, adds cucumber, onion, parsley, lemon juice, oil, feta cheese, and olives, and calls the result “Quinoa Tabbouleh”. This was good.

Here’s some other ideas to play with: mix quinoa and mashed potatoes and deep fry them! Or just view quinoa as a sort of rice replacement and make quinoa pilaf. I have a recipe that puts cubed cooked chicken together with quinoa, which sounds quite good, although I have never tried it; and of course, let’s not forget that quinoa is a grain, which means it can be ground up and made into bread (although there is no record of the Incas ever having done this). So grind up quinoa (your blender should work OK) and try it in your next bread recipe!

On October 26, 2001, I attended the world premiere of Toei’s new movie “Genji—A Thousand Year Love”, or, in Japanese, “Sennen no Koi—Hikaru Genji Monogatari” (home page). The premiere took place at the historic El Capitan theater in the middle of Hollywood. Yoshinaga Sayuri, who played Murasaki Shikibu in the movie, graced the premiere with her presence, as did numerous other celebrities. Toei made this film as a celebration of its 50th anniversary.

If Toei’s intent was to showcase its movie-making prowess, it succeeded, but not in the way they wanted to. The movie is a sterling demonstration of just how completely and stubbornly Japanese cinema is stuck in the past, a startlingly comprehensive catalog of every poor cliche of Japan filmmaking since the war, covering every conceivable aspect of cinema—acting, scriptwriting, photography, and special effects.

Perhaps the problems started with the selection as screenwriter of the geriatric Hayasaka Akira, who penned a series of forgettable scripts over the last several decades, most notably “Seishun no Mon” and its sequel. The first and only notable aspect of this particular script is the way, in the words of the program, that it “entwines the real life of Lady Murasaki Shikibu…with the action and characters of the novel itself.” That concept itself seems workable, if not very original, The execution, though, is wholly uninspired, as if Hayasaka was writing the script on automatic pilot.

The idea is that Shikibu is called back to the court in Kyoto to train a nobleman’s young daughter in the arts necessary for her to be chosen by the Emperor as a member of his harem, and eventually, it is hoped, to mother for him a son who would be in line for the throne. During the training Shikibu tells the young woman, Shoshi, about the novel she is writing. We then experience the story of the Tale of Genji itself through the inevitable flashback mechanism. During her talks with Shikibu, Shoshi makes a series of vapid comments about Genji and the story, each giving the movie makers the chance for additional shallow observations on the moral of the Genji story. According to the movie notes, when Genji’s pathological philandering finally drives Shoshi to ask “What is it that men want?”, or something along those lines, Shikibu “pointed the way to her enlightenment by giving her a message that shook her to her soul”. As far as I can tell, that earth-shattering revelation was something along the lines of men wanting variety. Amazingly, the film leaves us with something that is decisively less than the sum of its parts—either the Tale of Genji itself, or the story of Murasaki Shikibu.

The viewer is left slack-jawed by the selection of the Takarazuka actress Yuki Amami to play the role of Genji. For those acquainted with Takarazuka, it is an all-female musical group, where even male roles are played by the girls. The Japanese preoccupation with this idea of girls playing boys, or its converse, the onnagata males playing female roles in kabuki plays, is a complete riddle to the average foreigner. There must be something profound here related to the Japanese conception of male and female and their respective roles in life. In any case, I cannot see any meaningful reason in this film to cast a woman as the dashing Genji character. It would seem that he should be the personification of masculine charm, so why is he being played by a woman who actually has plucked eyebrows and wears lipstick?

Or perhaps, muses the Western viewer, this is all part of a huge put-on, a sly parody! That explains it! The caricaturized delivery of lines, the absurd shot composition, the bizarre casting decisions, the weird Seiko interludes—Toei must just be making huge fun of itself, of the half-century of formulaic period dramas it has produced. Alas, this theory greatly overestimates the Japanese sense of humor. Every indication is that the onagenarian executives at Toei intended to, and thought that they had, created a new landmark in Japanese historical drama filmography.

I mentioned the photography. I am no student of Japanese film, but the images here are instantly recognizable as being in the mid-20th century style of five decades ago. We see the wide screen filled with intensely bright, contrasting colors, resembling paint-by-numbers pictures painted with a palette that included far too many pure, piercing greens, reds, and blues, whether it be the shots of Genji’s fabulous Pavilion of the Four Seasons, the evening sky over the buildings of the royal court, or the provincial home by the ocean where Murasaki lived away from the capital. These images repeat endlessly, without connection, overly rich festivals of color appearing one after the other, without transition. The overall effect is simply numbing.

One of the most puzzling things about this film is the role of Seiko Matsuda, the washed-up idol singer from the 80’s. Looking quite strung out on speed, Seiko appears in a handful of singing and dancing interludes completely detached from the flow of the movie. The songs are fine if you like Seiko and she can still belt out a tune, but the poor girl looks as if she never passed lip-synching 101. More basically, it’s a complete mystery what Toei was trying to accomplish with her appearances. Perhaps the octagenarians planning the project thought she would appeal to the “younger” generation.

The Genji website says the the budget for the film was 1.4 billion yen, or about $12 million at current exchange rates. Of course, the Japanese stars work for far less money than the eight digits per picture that their top American counterparts get. but still this is a real low-ball affair by American standards. Toei might have been willing to spend more money on their big anniversary movie, but the producer and director probably have been making movies on the cheap for so long they would have had no idea how to use the money anyway. Remember, this is the company whose main claim to fame is the 48-film “Otoko wa Tsurai Yo (It’s Tough Being a Guy)”, the budget for each installment of which was probably more like $5M, if that.

Certainly they did not spend the money on any special effects. The special effects here look like those from a semester project in a high school film class. Let’s see, to create the illusion of flames around Genji in a dream he is having, how about shooting some burning paper, then layering that image over that of Genji half-transparently, resulting in something that looks like a 50’s TV program? Why am I not surprised? Photography was handled by Tatsuo Suzuki, who has handled that chore in a prodigious 57 forgettable films since his debut more than three decades ago.

Bob was still working on his formula, but not making much progress.

He had first started thinking about the formula when doing his weight training. As the motto “no pain, no gain” implies, he thought, he could view weight training as a kind of trade-off between some level of current pain (or discomfort) and the future benefits that were supposedly going to accrue from his spiffy new body. Now, there are different types of pain and discomfort involved in any kind of physical training. Some people might say that just being on the treadmill for half an hour in and of itself constitutes discomfort, if for no other reason than being boring. If you run faster and start getting tired, or do some other exercise that requires a similar level of significant effort, that can get painful or uncomfortable. At some point you may run into real muscle pain and soreness, which comes closer to what people normally think of as pain.

With weight training, there’s the minor discomfort that comes from exerting yourself and sweating, but at the end of a set if you are pushing yourself there’s a very specific kind of muscle pain that the experts usually explain as the effect of a particular chemical being released in your muscles. No study has identified a single cause for this discomfort, although the fact that it occurs more quickly in a muscle with a limited blood supply suggests that the culprit is a product of muscle metabolism. Common wisdom is that this is lactic acid, although experts say that the pain may also be due to ionic shifts at the cell membrane level and actual changes in the muscle cell proteins themselves. In any case, it hurts! It’s pain!

And there are other types of pain associated with exercise as well. Your muscles can start getting painful or sore sometime after you finish your training (so-called “delayed onset muscle pain”), which Bob on occasion had experienced lasting for as long as three or four days. In fact, Bob had been having this specific type of pain in his triceps for the last two days after a particularly hard workout.

But all this pain is some kind of advance payment towards a well-formed, strong body, right?. Bob supposed that this kind of great body, once he got there, would probably bring some kind of future pleasure in and of itself (which he called “future intrinsic pleasure”)—first and foremost, the pleasure resulting from him being able to just sit there and think about how nice his body was or look at it in the mirror. Then there was the future pleasure Bob would derive from knowing that he had set a goal and achieved it! In addition, certainly walking down the street and having people sneak admiring looks at his muscular physique would bring yet more future pleasure; being able to talk to his friends and acquaintances about his working out, in a thinly disguised superior way, would yield additional pleasure. Probably being stronger and looking better would mean that Bob could have better sex, something associated with pleasure no matter who you talk to. It could also mean more and better girl friends, which could in turn easily lead to better sex.

There were additional types of pleasure as well, though, and that was what Bob was wrestling with in trying to put together his formula. Like any formula, Bob’s formula was supposed to yield a specific answer, in this case to a question that had been bothering him: what if he was working out so hard that the pain he was experiencing in the present actually outweighed all the future pleasure he could expect? That would call for taking it a little easier in his workouts. Conversely, what if with a little bit more exertion and pain, say 10% more, he could get maybe double the future pleasure? That would certainly be a worthwhile investment that he should choose to make. The formula he was working on should be able to capture all these relationships, and when solved for P, the pleasure/pain variable, could tell him exactly how much current pain it was worth enduring.

Things started getting tricky when Bob realized that the formula was going to include pain and pleasure happening at different points in time. But obviously pleasure right now and pleasure sometime in the future, or pleasure in two days and pleasure in two years, are not interchangeable. In a funny way, pleasure at any point in the future is unreal, Bob pondered, since it had not happened yet. On the other hand, he ruminated further, once you get into the future, well, pain that happened in the past is unreal as well. So how could the two be connected? Bob turned to finance for a possible answer. When calculating the value of a present and future flow of money, he knew, you could use the concept of discounted value; in other words, a dollar you get a year from now is worth maybe 95 cents now, assuming you could invest the 95 cents and with interest it would turn into a dollar in a year.

Bob applied this concept to pleasure, and named it DPF, or discounted pleasure flow. But there were problems with this. With money, you discount future inflows using something like the interest rate on treasury bonds. But what is the right discount rate on pleasure? Bob figured that it was higher than a typical interest rate, maybe as high as 90%, meaning that ten units of pleasure a year in the future shouldn’t be traded for much less than one unit of pleasure right now. But the more basic problem that the future pleasure is not happening right now, and in that sense is somehow worth nothing, remained. This conundrum led Bob to a major breakthrough in this thinking: the value of future pleasure is the pleasure that he could get right know thinking about that future pleasure. In other words, even if the future pleasure is in some sense just a chimera, the anticipation of that pleasure is something that he could experience right now. This led him to reinterpret the discount rate; it was really the coefficient that, when applied to a particular amount of future pleasure, gives the quantity of current pleasure that can be derived from sitting there and thinking about how great it’s going to be to have that much pleasure in the future.

At first blush, the pleasure discount rate seemed like it should be a constant, in the mathematical sense. But was it really? It certainly was something that might differ from person to person. In fact, it could be one of the fundamental aspects of a person’s personality. How much do YOU discount future happiness by? There may well be people out there who are working with a discount rate of only 50% per annum; they’ll trade one unit of pleasure now for a mere two units a year in the future. Ideally, then, the formula might also yield a solution to what the “right” discount rate was. Are you better off working with a discount rate of 90% or 50%? Bob’s intuition was that a lot of people were working with lower discount rates than his 90%; in other words, they were more aggressively investing in future pleasure than he was. But a single formula could not possibly be solved for two variables, the discount rate plus the pain versus pleasure ratio. It’s just basic math that solving for two variables requires two equations. But what was the second equation?

Then there was the problem that even for one single individual, the discount rate might, or maybe even should, change over time. Sort of like the physicists who recently discovered that maybe the speed of light was changing gradually. Things were getting more and more complicated.

But how did Bob get the idea for working on this formula at all? Bob still remembered that magic moment in high school math class when he used formulas to show how slicing horizontally through a cone with a plane results in an circle. He started with the formula for the cone, which is x2+y2=z2; then tossed in a formula for a horizontal plane, which is just z=1. Then a simple substitution gave him x2+y2=1, the well-known formula for a circle! If you tilt the plane a bit, you get an ellipse; and if the plane is oriented vertically, so that it sort of slices off part of the side of the cone, you get a

bola. That’s why circles and ellipses and

bolas are called “conic sections”—they are what you get when you slice a “section” of a cone with a plane. Anyway, even though this was pretty basic introductory calculus level stuff, Bob was quite impressed with himself; and his 11th grade math teacher, Mr. Vance, even singled him out in class to praise his seminal contribution. (Mr. Vance didn’t know that Bob had his eye on his willowy 10th grade daughter.)

The pleasure formula, if it could be built and solved like the formula for conic sections, held immense promise. Exercise was just one possible application of the formula. To take a really mundane example, most people say you should make your bed when you get up in the morning. It may not fall under the category of “pain” to make your bed, but it takes time and energy. But making your bed gives rise to future pleasure, although the “future” in this case is pretty much limited to the next 18 hours until you sleep in your bed again: the pleasure you derive from looking at the bed during the day every time you walk into your bedroom and thinking how nice it looks, the chance for the pleasure that would result from someone else who happens to peer into your bedroom and see your well-made bed and think what a well-organized guy you are, the pleasure stemming from the great feeling you have all day long, even if you are at work, knowing that your bed is sitting there in your bedroom all pretty and well-made, the pleasure that comes that evening from flipping back and slipping into the taut blankets and sheets. This may seem like a trivial example, but all these things are undeniably derived from the simple act of making the bed in the morning. But what is the real exertion/payoff ratio? Bob thought if it could be quantified, using his formula, which would once and for all answer the age-old question of should people really bother to make their beds in the morning?

Bob was still confused, though, by how the pain or discomfort or exertion and the happiness or pleasure could be quantified. Without quantifying them, there was no way to build a formula. In other words, what is one unit of pain? Or of happiness? Pain is a little bit easier. But still, Bob realized that care was required here. There is instantaneous pain, and then a total amount of pain resulting from a particular amount of instantaneous pain occurring over a period of time. He could use a lower-case p for instantaneous pain levels, and P for pain occurring over a time interval. p=0 is just sitting in your easy chair. Climbing up the stairs to his second-floor apartment was probably around p=0.1 for Bob. Since that takes about 10 seconds, P=1.0 for that whole process, where the units are pain-seconds. (This is a well-established concept; think of a car, which might have an instantaneous speed of 50mph; if it continues along this at this speed for an hour, it will have covered 50 miles.) The strong muscle pain that occurs towards the end of a weight lifting set is something like p=2.0; since that usually lasts about 10 seconds, we have p=20.0 for the set, or, if there are 12 such experiences in the course of a one-hour workout, p=240.0. If you assume that the pain level for the non-intense periods of the workout, which still include huffing and puffing and sweating, is twice that of climbing the stairs, or p=0.2, and lasts for 58 minutes, or 3480 seconds, we get a P of 696.0, for a total work-out P of 936.0. It may or may not be interesting that the more intense bursts of pain at the end of each set therefore account for around 25% of the total pain associated with the whole workout.

But then Bob had an odd thought. He must be thinking about the formula because he expected that figuring it out would increase his overall pleasure. After all, if he could determine the right level of momentary exertion or pain in relation to the amount of pleasure it would generate over all future moments of time, then he could adjust things to optimize the total amount of pleasure during his entire life. To take a simple example, maybe he could “pay” ten units of exertion now for a twenty units of discounted future pleasure flow. Or, alternatively, he could pay twenty units now to get forty in the future. Clearly, he should choose the latter, since it would net him an extra ten units of overall pleasure (twenty versus ten in the first case), even though it required more pain right now. But he couldn’t make this choice, indeed would not even know that he had it to make, unless he first figured out the formula, so in that sense figuring out the formula was worth those points. Then again, though, the whole process of mental effort in building and solving the formula was in itself a sort of pain, which in the worst case could actually be greater than the ten points of pleasure he could gain by successfully applying the formula once it was solved. That would mean that the whole formula project itself was perversely decreasing Bob’s overall lifetime pleasure total! But the problem was circular—he had no way of knowing whether or not it actually would until he finished working out the formula. In the worst case, he might work and work and work and never solve the puzzle, digging himself into an immense hole of pain and effort that he would never be able to climb out of.

But in a way Bob was gaining some pleasure each moment that he worked on the formula. This was distinct from the pleasure relating to his expectation for some future flow of pleasure. It was somehow intrinsic in the very process of working on the formula. But at the same time the exertion, which did not really extend to the point that most people would call painful, but which Bob still considered to fall into the broader abstract category that he was calling pain for the purposes of the formula, was quite real. And he had another feeling that could be called pain too, although maybe dissatisfaction would be a better word: the feeling that maybe, just maybe, the whole project was doomed to failure and was just a massive waste of time. There sure were getting to be a lot of elements in this equation! Exertion just working on the damn thing, pleasure from anticipating increases in future pleasure, pain from that uneasy feeling that it wasn’t going to work, and then the intrinsic pleasure from twiddling with the formula. (There was also undeniably another pain element in working on it, regardless of its chances for eventual success: a kind of low-level, droning pain, which came from the feeling that maybe he was missing the chance to work on other, more pleasure-inducing projects; this Bob called “opportunity loss pain”.)

But there was yet another fly in the ointment. It was indisputably true that if Bob did solve the formula then he would increase, probably greatly increase, his lifetime pleasure. (Besides the direct pleasure boost, he would also get lots of pleasure from becoming famous and respected as the man who had solved this problem, which come to think of it is almost certainly one that has been around for a long time with lots of different philosophers weighing in on it, although he was pretty sure that nobody had thought of the simple approach of approaching it through a formula.) This future pleasure gave him current pleasure as he pondered it. But let’s say that all his work on the formula turned out to be for nothing—in that case wasn’t it a contradiction that he could get current pleasure from anticipating future pleasure which wasn’t even certain to materialize? The right answer to this dilemma, Bob pondered, was to say that current anticipatory pleasure could be weighted based on the probability that the future pleasure will actually happen. For instance, if some future pleasure would give you 100 units of current anticipatory pleasure if it was absolutely sure to happen, then it would give you 25 units if there was a 25% chance that it would happen. Of course, Bob had no way of estimating the probability that he could actually finish working out the formula, so this insight was not of much help; but he thought his chances were reasonably close to 50/50.

The more Bob thought, the more complicating factors he came up with. Consider a person in an instantaneous state of happiness 10, for whatever reason; maybe he or she is having sex. This type of happiness is heavy on the intrinsic side, but there is also an anticipatory side—pleasure coming from the future prospects of having more sex like this, begin able to tell your friends about it, or getting more sex partners because of your improving technique—as well as a recall-based side, when the sex reminds you of all the good sex you’ve had in the past. The current and future and past pleasures are kind of all mixed together into a pleasure cocktail. But there’s another type of future pleasure involved here: the future pleasure resulting from looking back on this particular roll in the hay and thinking about how pleasurable it was. See the circularity? Bob was getting pleasure now, in part from anticipating pleasure in the future, where that pleasure in the future was in turn partly derived, through the act of recall, from the pleasure he was having now. In mathematical terms, the whole thing was in danger of breaking down, the pain or pleasure variables on both sides of the equation cancelling each other out, leaving nothing but a meaningless formula like 1=1, or, worse, 1=0. On the other hand, this was the sort of interdependency relationship which could be the key to the solution.

Bob thought that a good starting point for the formula might be:

Pl(t) = PI(t) + PA(t) + PR(t)

where Pl(t) is total pleasure at time t, PI is intrinsic pleasure, PA anticipatory pleasure, and PR recollection-based pleasure.

Now, assume simplistically that PA(t) is some amount of pleasure at dt time in the future, appropriately discounted using the anticipatory pleasure discount factor r1, whether you think that is 90% or 50%:

PA(t) = Pl(t+dt) * r1

and PR(t) is some past amount of pleasure also discounted, but this time into the future (assuming that more recent pleasures remain more vivid in your mind) by the recollection-based happiness discount factor r2:

PR(t) = Pl(t-dt) * r2

Bob substituted:

Pl(t) = PI(t) + Pl(t+dt)*r1 + Pl(t-dt)*r2

And then substituted once more to see how things would develop:

Pl(t) = PI(t) + r1*(PI(t+dt)+PA(t+dt)+PR(t+dt)) + r2*(PI(t-dt)+PA(t-dt)+PR(t-dt))

which expands to

Pl(t) = PI(t) + r1*(PI(t+dt)+r1*Pl(t+2dt)+r2*Pl(t)) + r2*(PI(t-dt)+r1*Pl(t)+r2*Pl(t-2dt))

He brought out the Pl(t) terms, to give

Pl(t) (1 – 2*r1*r2) = PI(t) + r1*PI(t+dt) + r1*r1*Pl(t+2dt) + r2*Pl(t-dt) + r2*r2*Pl(t-2dt)

Now he used a trick of mathematics based on the fact that the discount rates r1 and r2 and both less than 1, and thus when multiplied by themselves become asymptotically close to zero, to go ahead and get rid of those terms, yielding:

Pl(t) (1 – 2*r1*r2) = PI(t) + r1*PI(t+dt) + r2*PI(t-dt)

In plain English, what this says is that for purposes of calculating pleasure at time t, Bob needed to take into account intrinic happiness at time t+td, but not double future anticipatory happiness at time t+td based on overall happiness at time t+2td; that’s too far away and the multiple discount factors will conspire to make it irrelevant. By the same token, in calculating his happiness now, he didn’t need to take into account the portion of his future pleasure that was based on looking back and thinking how happy he was now; these two bounces back and forth in time end up multiplying two small discount factors by each other with the effect fading out quickly.

This equation can be solved, if values for r1 and r2 are assumed. For instance, if r1 and r2 are both assumed to be 0.1 (remember this means that a specific amount of future happiness is experienced anticipatorily as one-tenth that amount of happiness right now; and a specific amount of past happiness is also experienced in recollection as one-tenth that amount of happiness right now). The result is startling: given an intrinsic level of happiness of 10, our overall level of happiness is just under 12. According to this theory, Bob’s overall current happiness could best be maximized by first, of course, maximizing intrinsic momentary pleasure; but also, importantly, by decreasing his pleasure discount factors; in other words, experiencing past and future happiness as more happiness right now. This was obvious once you thought about it.

But actually, this is completely wrong, or rather, right only as far as it goes; it uses only a single point of time in the past and another single point of time in the future. In fact the anticipatory component of our current happiness, Bob realized, is the sum of all the discounted future happiness moments:

PA(t) = sum(T=t to death) [ r1^(T-t) * Pl(T) ]

and similarly for recollected pleasure:

PR(t) = sum(T=birth to t) [ r1^(t-T) * Pl(T) ]

But even without trying to solve these equations (Bob had the feeling that they probably weren’t solvable), just writing them down gave rise to a doubt in Bob’s mind. Wasn’t all this pleasure being recalled and anticipated just a little too much? In the worst case, it could totally overwhelm a guy. In fact, why wasn’t it overwhelming Bob all the time? The reason could be that people put up some kind of filter to keep out too much recalled and anticipated pleasure. Or maybe it’s less like a filter and more like a conscious decision to only go out and fetch some recalled or anticipated pleasure or pain when they need it, or want it. But there was a twist here too. Making this sort of conscious decision was a type of exertion, which Bob was classifying under the broad concept of pain. If he was going for a particular level of pleasure, and then decided to go out and grab some anticipatory pleasure in order to reach that level, he would have to grab a little bit more than otherwise required in order to make up for the exertion/pain involved in going out and grabbing the future pleasure in the first place. And wasn’t it possible that there was actually more potential intrinsic current happiness available than people actually experienced, and with a little bit of extra effort he could fetch more of that too?

Another problem. Bob had been thinking of pain as pleasure as lying along some numeric spectrum, with zero being the absence of either, negative values representing pain, and positive ones pleasure. But there were times when he was sure he felt pain and pleasure simultaneously. So the simplistic approach of saying that you could just subtract the pain number from the pleasure number and end up with an overall value somewhere on the pain/pleasure scale didn’t seem right. Bob did really think that the pain and pleasure that he sometimes felt didn’t combine or average out in his mind, but remained quite distinct. This would call for a major change in the formula. He would need two different variables, Pa for pain and Pl for pleasure; that in itself was simple enough. But he would also need a way to relate the two to each other—a sort of “price”, in pain dollars, for one unit of pleasure. He had assumed that 10 units of pain together with 20 units of discounted future pleasure would result in 10 units of lifetime pleasure, but if pain and pleasure were distinct, this would be like adding apples and oranges. It would be easy enough to define the pain and pleasure scales so that one unit of pain offset one unit of pleasure at a particular time for a particular person such as Bob, but couldn’t this easily be quite different for other people, or even change over time for the same person, or be subject to change through diligent effort? Perhaps people could do some kind of training or something that would have the effect of decreasing the cost of pleasure in pain dollars, allowing them to get more pleasure for less pain.

But even after you have pleasure prices denominated in pain, there’s an aspect that the whole monetary analogy doesn’t really deal with well. That’s the fact that the pain was there and is real. With money, you pay it and it is gone, but with pain, you pay it and it is still there and you have still undeniably experienced it. Pondering these complications, Bob was consumed with doubts about whether the whole formula project was in fact moving ahead at all.

The next thought hit Bob like a thunderbolt. What if pleasure and pain are not really smoothly changing over time, like a car’s speed, but instead are little tiny se

te bursts? Come to think of it, Bob had never really experienced pleasure or pain as something that was really continuous; they did seem to come in little spikes! That could also explain the observation that sometimes Bob seemed to feel pleasure and pain simultaneously but se

tely; maybe it was really a spike of pleasure and then a spike of pain happening immediately afterward! This also was a potential answer to the question of too much future and past pleasure and pain converging on the present. If the future and past pleasure and pain were really just spikes in between periods of nothing special happening, then even when added up over some period of time they would represent much less pleasure and pain to overwhelm you with in the present! This was sort of like a car that moved by spurting forward several meters, then coming to a complete stop, then spurting forward again.

This idea was quite hard to express mathematically, though. Bob vaguely remembered a mathematical concept of a function f(x) which was defined as

f(x) = ( 1, if x is rational (in other words, can be expressed as i/j) ( 0, if x is not

which seems to have the desired kind of spikiness; but it might not work because there were so many rational numbers that there would be way too many spikes. Besides, Bob was not sure how “pliable” this type of function was to further mathematical manipulation. Probably not very. Then Bob imagined something truly ridiculous: perhaps the mathematician who thought this up did so based on his own experience of the spikiness of his pleasure and pain, as a means of expressing it? It seems unlikely, but you never know.

The spikes seemed very interesting, but Bob couldn’t figure out where they were taking him. He was getting farther and farther away from getting any useful results from the formula project.

Perhaps more light would be shed on the matter by finding a case where people pay for current pleasure with current pain. The only example that came to Bob’s mind was that of the masochist, who whipped himself because it felt good; or partially hung himeself in order to get a better erection and orgasm. In the hanging case, since people sometimes die doing this, in addition to the direct pain of feeling strangled, there was probably also a conditional pain based on some small probability that you might die. Say that the pain of dying is 100, and the probability of dying is 1%, so the conditional pain associated with the possibility of dying is one unit; the pleasure value of the orgasm is ten, by definition; and perhaps the pain of the strangling feeling is four. That means a total of five units of pain for ten units of pleasure. So is it possible that the price of one unit of pleasure is one-half unit of pain? If you believe that the pleasure discount factor is 0.90, meaning 10 units of happiness a year from now is worth one unit of pain now, that meant that he should be willing to pay one unit of pain now for twenty units of pleasure a year in the future. But Bob didn’t really know where to go with this insight either.

In any case, Bob kept on working on the formula. It was just that, well, working on it gave him pleasure.

The New York Times Obituaries column on May 15, 2001, ran the article “Joseph Greenberg, 85, Singular Linguist, Dies”.

I had never heard of Dr. Greenberg before. His books, such as “Indo-European and its Closest Relatives”, sound a bit intimidating to the casual reader such as myself.

Dr. Greenberg’s focus was apparently finding relationships between languages and placing them into groupings. He grouped most of the world’s languages into 12 superfamilies.

Most interesting: Dr. Greenberg postulated that the world’s original, ancestral language contained the word “tik”, Its reflection in the Indo-European language group includes the words “daktulus”, “digitus”, and “doigt”—Greek, Latin, and French for finger, as well as in the English word digital.

What other words from the human Ursprache did Dr. Greenberg deduce? Could “tik” have been the first word spoken by humans, and if so is it a coincidence that it in its “digital” form it defines a leitmotif of our culture 100,000 years later?

My ex-wife’s brother Hisao Nagashima, nicknamed Chabo-chan, died on January 25, 2009. He had emphysema.

My ex-wife notes:

I had been going up to regularly for two years to take care of come. After he left the hospital and moved in with Emiko [his sister}, I went up every week on Saturday to spend the night and take care of him. Emiko is a little bit out of it sometimes. This was the first time I had approached someone dying so closely. Mom and Dad died so suddenly it never really sunk in. I did go the hospital the day before he died and spoke with him. In Japan they keep going with the 49th day and one-year services. This all really made me think. I felt the way someone brings their life to a close matches the life they lived. The relationship you had with someone is mirrored at the end as well.

I’m pleased to make available a new compendium of my Dogen translations, under the name “First Dogen Book,” including my most recent project, a translation of “Why The First Patriarch Came From The West.” I have also revised and updated my previous translations.

As with my previous translations, this translation is distinguished by an intensive level of research and analysis not seen elsewhere, as well as an obsessive attention to style, rhythm and nuance.

The four essays in the book span the range from introductory to advanced. “Dialog on the Way of Commitment,” or Bendowa, is an introductory essay directed towards the newcomer to Zen Buddhism. “Truth Unfolding,” or Genjo Koan, is a definitive, elegant exposition of the importance of practice, one of Dogen’s primary themes. “A Particular Hour,” or Uji, is a compelling testament to the urgency of attending to the moment. Finally, the latest translation “Why the First Patriarch Came from the West,” or Soshi Seirai I, is a Zen meditation on the human condition. Together, they represent the essence, albeit highly distilled, of Dogen’s writings and teachings.

The translations are exhaustively annotated. The annotations are not in general meant to elucidate the essays’ deeper meaning. Dogen can speak for himself if only given the voice to do so. Rather, the focus is on pointing out interesting aspects of Dogen’s prose and possible alternative interpretations. The notes also present historical and cultural background.

I recently picked up a book by Joyce Carol Oates at the airport on our way to spend a couple of days in Baja California, thinking I would need something to read at the beach—the one called We Were the Mulvaneys.

The San Francisco Chronicle said, in an excerpt printed on the back cover, “A grand, symphonic novel—one of Oates’ finest”. The New York Times Book Review, which I like and trust and actually read almost every week, said “What keeps us coming back to Oates Country is her uncanny gift of making the page a window, with something happening on the other side that we’d swear was life itself”. The Detroit Free Press went so far as to say that this was “a book people will be reading a century from now, the way we read Dickens and Henry James”. So there I was, thinking I had it made, with a book that sounded highly readable while allowing me to avoid the mental self-stigma resulting from anesthetizing myself by just reading the latest Patricia Cornwell or Robert Parker potboiler. It seems to me that I had read at least one book by her a long, long time ago; although nothing on the “Other Books By” list rang a bell in particular. Still, I had a some image of incisive, insightful, human, storytelling.

This book, though, I am still trying to figure out. Or more accurately, I am afraid I have figured it out. I don’t really think it can just be a lightweight, poorly-told, drawn-out, cliche-laden, Sidney Sheldon-wannabe novel, right? I mean, Joyce Carol Oates (who is, let’s remember, the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton University) would not actually write a book which essentially starts out as a cartoon of a inordinately happy American family in the mid-1970’s, then shifts unaccountably to being a different cartoon of a family in crisis and broken apart for reasons she never even attempts to elucidate, then finally reverts to a final, formulaic cartoon of a happy family having found itself once more, literally playing softball on a warm July afternoon at a family picnic; nor would she inexplicably fail to use the book to establish any viewpoint whatsoever on the nature of writing and fiction (something all authors do, right?

The closest she comes is the comment made by her stick-figure caricature of a poet, Penelope Hagstrom, who, in response to one character’s question “Can’t poetry be just what it is?” has nothing deeper to say than that “Nothing is, my dear. Only what our opinions make of it”. These two lines are literally the extent of anything bearing on literary criticism in the entire novel by someone who is ostensibly one of the top half-dozen active American novelists). She would not base a entire story around a date rape incident without finding any way to explore the subtleties of that topic with the reader, right? And she would not pen an entire book with virtually no surprises, synchronicities, or connections, whether disturbing or satisfying, right? And she would not carry on for 400+ pages in what quickly turns into a quite annoying writing style, with her run-on phrases, italics to paraphrase what someone was thinking, and frankly quite uninventive and often actually inappropriate not to mention downright ungrammatical turns of phrase, right? She probably imagines she is earning her keep by fulfilling her quota of at least one hyphenated adverb per page, such as “chalky-pale” and oh, please, her nasty verbal tic of using her favorite words like “carroty”and “pebbled” ad nauseum. And she would not fail to develop in any meaningful way even a single member of her cast of characters, would she?

So here were some of the theories I came up with. Maybe Joyce Carol Oates is really unhappy that John Grisham not only makes ten million bucks from his novels directly but then makes another five or ten or who knows how much from the movie rights, and she was trying to write a novel that could be flipped quickly onto the big screen. I mean, you don’t want too much intellectual activity or character development or, God forbid, self-referentiality, in a movie script for Christ’s sake, and this book dutifully skips any and all of that kind of thing. The pictures she paints, whether it be the reds and oranges of the lush autumn foliage at the Mulvaney’s idyllic farm in upstate New York during their happy family phase, or the cliched, filthy flophouse where Mike Mulvaney Sr. ends up after his tragic reversal of fortune, or many others, one can certainly imagine looking quite grand on the silver screen in the hands of the right director; and all the stock characters Oates trots out, ranging from the silver-haired aunt with her hair in a bun, to the loony spiritual leader trying to sleep with all the cute female acolytes, would certainly not challenge the casting director. The plot development is just about the right level of shallowness for an easy movie going for, say, 98 minutes.

But that’s a little bit mean. It’s probably more likely that what Oates was really doing was a extremely sophisticated criticism of all of the lightweight, easy summer reading novels that are floating around today. The index of just how sophisticated is that not once does she allude directly to the sardonic ulterior motives of the book, not even a casual mention or putdown-in-passing of one of the books she is trying to pan, to the degree, in fact, that not even a well-educated reader like myself, albeit one who is by no means a literature expert, can detect those motives until nearly through the entire book. Oates fashions the most potent possible indictment of all against the low-level, deadening, superficial, repetitive popular literature of our time: namely a perfect replica of that literature itself, droning on interminably for an incredible 454 pages.

Or here is a variation on this theme: perhaps Oates is making a veiled criticism of the currently in-vogue theory of the narrative viewpoint in modern fiction. Maybe she got tired of teaching about this in her graduate seminars and is just trying to say, look, does it really matter so much, goddamn it, can’t we just get over this fixation on the integrity of the narrator structure and pick any old narrator we want, preferably randomly, except that it might actually be better to choose someone in “Mulvaneys” such as Judd who is actually so far away, both physically and emotionally, from much of the action, that the poor guy will have to spend most of his time framing the story in clumsy constructions like “Marianne must have been thinking that” or “I later found out that”, in a way that makes “It was a dark and stormy night” seem like Proust?

But perhaps this also misses the point. The proximate topic of the story is rape, and how it destroyed a family. I don’t want to take anything away from the suspenseful ending of this novel, but the story is basically that there is this really happy and successful family, then the cheerleader daughter gets date-raped, and then everything falls apart for the whole family, I mean the business failing, losing the farm, one brother dropping out of school, parents divorced, father turning into an alcoholic bum, and so forth, except that in the last few pages they sort of miraculously get back together and are one big happy family again except for dad who died. Anyway, we can assume that Oates is not really trying to say something about rape, since she, umh, didn’t say anything about it. So she must be trying to say something more complex. Maybe that in a family happiness is fleeting, stability a mere mirage, either subject to being brutally overturned at any moment by any random occurrence? But then again, if this theory is to be correct, shouldn’t Oates have provided us with at least one clue relating to the potential unhappiness or instability, showing how the rape then tore apart the family along the pre-existing fracture lines? Or shown us, conversely, how the long wavy lines of continuity between the 1975 Leave-it-to-Beaver familial bliss and the happily-reunited-once-again family of 1993 managed to cross that abyss of the deepest imaginable pain?

But perhaps we got sidetracked here, and in spite of appearances Oates is really at some level trying to address the topic of rape. This book was written in 1997, when if I recall correctly date rape was a topic of some degree of urgent social attention. A message that could have made sense if Oates had bothered to try to tell it would have been one about how individuals and families and communities and society at large deals with rape, or could deal with it, or should deal with it. The story told in this book is essentially what results when people react in a panicked, frantic, horrified, judgmental, and paralyzed way; and how those reactions on the part of a group of people can multiply themselves geometrically as they interact. The story would have been useful had she shed the least amount of light on the deeper origins of those types of counterproductive reactions, or showed us ways to overcome them, or painted scenarios of how things could be. In the end, Oates ends up doing none of these things, telling no story, and making no point at all.