FERMENT Volume XII,#6 November 12,1998 Editor, Maestro Roy Lisker Liberty Commons#306 8 Liberty Street Middletown , CT 06457 E-Mail: (1) aberensh@lynx.neu.edu (2) rlisker@yahoo.com Internet: www.rendezvous.com/ferment www.umsl.edu/~skthoma/ferment.htm Age: 18.000144 x107s.Born: 61.2204x 109s. C.E . Weight:29,483.48 gm Height: 1816.1 mm. """""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" Summer, 1986: Two Sketches I. A Philadelphia Story * Preamble January 20,1993. A winter evening, rainwrapt, just after nightfall. I sit in the back room of the Cafe Coquelet, placed at the intersection of University and Milvia Streets in downtown Berkeley. The Coquelet is an ideal habitat on such nights, a refuge from the weather, the university, the derelicts, the traffic. There are only a few other customers in the room, where I sit alone behind a 9 square foot stolid ochre varnished-and- polished redwood table. The lights on the fixtures overhead are deliberately turned too low for comfortable reading. The Iranian management discourages studying. To no avail; the after dinner crowd will soon arrive and convert the entire cafe into a study hall. Not everyone considers the possibility of ruined eyesight a disadvantage. Some may even welcome it as security for the career of compulsive bookworm. The air vibrates from the sounds coming out of half dozen speakers placed near the ceiling around the room . The music is good. Very good: Handel, Mozart, Berlioz. It is a delight to be seated here, but I will soon have to make my escape. It is less than an hour away to the moment when the speakers will vomit out Madonnas gutsy groans as she licks the head of her microphone and salivates. A slimy morphless ooze will squirt from the speakers to cuddle in the cubicles of our cochlear chambers. But by that time I will be gone. Enjoy it while it lasts! , I tell myself, and prepare to write. Yet, through some miracle of synchronicity , with the lifting of my pen the Sicilienne of Marie-Therese von Paradis for violin and piano, performed by Itzhak Perlman , comes over the speakers . Such, at least , is the claim in the CD brochure. The Sicilienne is the only piece in the current classical music market associated with her name. Alas, the attribution is false. This popular encore solo was written by Samuel Dushkin, who then put her name to it. In so doing, Dushkin merely drove his Cadillac along the highway so magnificently asphalted by Fritz Kreisler at the beginning of the century. Between enrolling in medical school, disentangling himself from WWI and emigrating to the US, Kreisler built his career as a violinist on a portfolio he"d compiled by searching the libraries of European schools and monasteries, of dazzling curiosities by forgotten composers of the 17th and 18th centuries . All written by himself, of course. Dushkins Sicilienne is short, easy to play, bittersweet, beautiful and moving. Any violinist recognizes that the musical content is cribbed from the first movement of Tartinis Devils Trill Sonata. Perlmans recording includes Wieniawski"s Scherzo-Tarantella , Deep River , Raffs Cavatina , Dvorcaks Humoresque , and the ultimate high camp pinnacle of violin encores, Bazzinis, Ronde des Lutins . I draw inspiration from listening to this music. It sets me to thinking upon the events of the summer of 1986 in France, when I wandered the roads with backpack and fiddle in search of the sources of musical art, of adventure, and friendly encounters with like-minded souls. A month later I traveled to Sweden to deliver a paper at the 11th General Relativity and Gravitation Conference in the StockholmsFolketshus . And two years afterwards I would be retracing a similar route in my search for the whereabouts of the distinguished Alexandre Grothendieck. The events surrounding my visit to Monaco on the earlier trip were unique in several respects; before the termination of the Sicilienne Id already started to transcribe them for posterity. The second part of this Ferment issue continues with report on the 11th General Relativity and Gravitation Conference, held in Stockholm between July 6th and 12th, 1986. II. De La Musique, Surtout! Fact supplies the best fiction. In fact, this fiction is fact. All fiction, in fact, is fact : were it otherwise, fiction would not be fiction, but falsehood. Out of context, fact itself may function effectively as falsehood. Politics, law, religion, education, even science, are ever eager to exploit this strange ambivalence. Why then do I belabor the fact that the following story is, in its essentials , factual? (1) Its" readers will know what to expect if they end up in Monaco. (2) They will learn why the masthead says Maestro Roy Lisker. (3) The story, although "too good to be true", is nevertheless true. (4) The narrated incidents overflow with timely political lessons. All of us, even unsocialized anarchists like myself, must keep up the pretense of being revolutionaries in these troubled times. """""""""""" June 21st, 1986. Three days earlier, I "d checked into a commodious and conveniently cheap hotel on the French Riviera, adjacent to the train station in the Mecca of lotus eaters, Cannes. Its name may even be L"Hotel du Gare , which says everything. But since June 21st is the one day of the year on which the French nation actually honors the itinerant musician, the "Festival de la Musique, there was no longer any purpose to be served by remaining there. I had no option but to roam. The Festival de la Musique is typiquement fran?ais - as so many things are. More than mere tradition, the festival is on the civil calendar, a true holiday. From Nancy to Brest, from Toulon to Lille, from Bordeaux to Metz , the citizenry of this bureaucratic conspiracy ,( as the author deems all nations) , is encouraged to promenade about the streets with penny- whistles, accordions, guitars, double-basses, pots-and-pans, spoons, castanets, or - ( in default of all else) - their unrestrained voices, to bang, scratch, screetch, schnoodle, yell, simper, cry and croon from dawn to dusk , heaping the generous effrontery on the creaking altar of St. C"cilia. There is some snobbery in my description: professional musicians always fancy that they play better than amateurs - who deem themselves superior to beginners - who sneer at the untrained. Concert professionals will likewise sneer at me. No matter: Music is an intention, not an act ; although the sage insight of John Keats, "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter ", does not apply to all situations . One has to be grateful that, as a youth, Jascha Heifetz was not unduly influenced by 19th century British poetry. The vagrancy laws against street musicians are rarely enforced here anyway ; there will always be the overly- officious cop. June 21st is the one day on which the French police are restrained by law from proscribing street music. At 8 in the morning, after storing most of my luggage in the stations lockers at Cannes , I boarded a train, setting out on a concert tour that would take me along the eastern part of the Riviera, through Antibes, Nice and Monte-Carlo and Monaco. The journey would terminate at Menton, which is virtually on the Italian border, by 7 PM, at the local Youth Hostel. My equipment consisted of a violin, large boom-box, and a collection of Music Minus One tapes: piano and orchestral accompaniments of violin pieces without the violin part. For costuming I wore a fantastic Mexican party shirt, courtesy of the Goodwill Thrift Shop in Santa Fe, New Mexico, $3.50 cash on the line. And a light backpack holding a few books, journals, maps, clothing. Arrival at Antibes, 11:30 Mediterranean Azure Time. Antibes is a scenic delight; but then, so is the rest of the Riviera. A good archaeological museum, a good Picasso museum ( strictly speaking in Vallauris, which is close by), even a Napolean museum: I did not visit this memorial to that historical curiosity. Antibes was founded by those ancient paradigms, the Greeks. This being their westernmost settlement, they named it "Anti- polis": the anti-city. Since they were Greeks, each early inhabitant must have had his or her own idea of what the "anti" of their city consisted of. Even 25 centuries ago it was a popular resort. Everybody wanted to live there and real estate speculation sent prices soaring. Legend states that Antibes has not been the same since F. Scott Fitzgerald invented Gatsbyism there during a week-long drunk . Although a reputed temple to Aphrodite is intact and erect, one must travel to its pungent suburb of Juan-les-Pins for the aphrodisiacs. Modern Antibes is not as it was then. I arrived to discover that the 3- hour lunch-break siesta was roaring full blast. The streets were void of audience and prospective customers, nor were there many places to perform if they should happen to materialize. Bowing to the inevitable, the restaurant to which I made my retreat served up a delicious omelette aux fines herbes avec crudites swaddled by un bon vin de Provence. Onwards, to Nice which, for me on that day, lived up to its" English homograph. A gorgeous day, good playing and generous tips. Back to the train station, another short journey, and descent at Monte-Carlo by mid- afternoon. III. Monte-Carlo/ Monaco Physically , Monte Carlo is in French territory. Ideologically also. The Casino is in Monaco, a different country. Outside the station, I opened the violin case and placed it on the sidewalk. Two hastily lettered signs were balanced inside the lid before taking up the violin. " Vive Le Festival De La Musique! " and " Je Viens de Philadelphie, La Ville De Princesse Grace! " Which is nothing less than the truth. The sounds coming out of my fiddle scraped tolerably against the harpsichord and orchestra contributions to Bachs Brandenburg Concerto #5. Neither my stirring performance nor the information provided by the cardboard notations had much influence on passengers leaving and entering the train station. The receipts were scarcely enough to offset inflation in this paradise of the super-rich. This was not surprising. The train station is quite literally on the other side of the tracks. Monte-Carlo itself could not be much more than the dormitory town for lackeys, servants and serfs that puts down roots alongside every plastic preserve of plutocratic pulchritude: Westport has its" Bridgeport, Sausalito its" San Rafael, Newport its" New Bedford, Montauk its" Easthampton. What hope was there, even for chump change, in this popular setting of ticket takers, caf? gar?ons, clerks, office workers, street sweepers, traveling salesmen - a class no wit inferior to any other, mind you, yet hardly the proper reception committee for a co-metropolitan of Princess Grace. As an artist who has journeyed to France for no other purpose than to play his heart out at the Festival de la Musique , I had every right to insist that my performances be attended by the real people ! My proper audience should be royalty, (deposed or otherwise), movie stars, tycoons, politicians! With a write-up in Vanity Fair, or People Magazine, or Paris-Match! And photograph, ( complete with Harlequin party-shirt), up there next to Catherine DeNeuve! " Sil vous plait monsieur: ou se trouve le Casino!?!" A cab driver pointed down the boulevard : " Vous y aller tout droit !" Down the Yellow Brick Road, off to the fabled Casino of Monaco, Europes last bastion of monarchism, fabulous amphitheatre of swindles and suicides, patron of grand opera and ballet, birthplace of Monte Carlo methods in Black Jack, quantum statistics and elementary particle theory! Soon I found myself on a winding causeway surrounded by tall needle- sharp cliffs, cavernous abysses, staggering architectural miracles . Far away to the right sparkled the ashen foam off the bitter waters lapping the docks of the port of La Condamine ; to my left a dizzying mega- cathedral of high-rise apartment complexes bursting forth from the sheer cliff faces. Too overdone to be designated either beautiful or ugly; a grand passacaglia atop the groundswell of Fritz Langs Metropolis . This exotic wasteland, fascinating as it might be, could not continue on forever , and I eventually entered onto a stretch of clean, quiet, well gardened and paved streets sloping downwards into the plaza of the historic Monaco casino. I wont try to describe this thing. I cannot, without descending to a kind of base, exaggerated caricature that might do permanent damage to my literary technique. The Monaco casin0 was designed by Garnier, the same person who did the Paris Opera House; either building can serve as a calling card to the other. Across from the entrance to the Casino sits a traffic island seeded with grass, gigantic palm trees and little walkways. I walked to its edge and placed my violin case on the ground in such a manner that a line drawn from it to the Casino would form the minimal perpendicular to its grotesque facade. A business calculation - the sign explaining my kinship to Grace Kelly had been tossed away - " Vive la Festival de la Musique!" would be quite enough for the present circumstances. I began with a Mozart concerto, #4 in D major, without any orchestral background. From where I stood I could observe the dull, disinterested stares of persons walking through the Casinos entrances into those dark moronic mills filled with one-armed bandits that are identical, (so I have been told), in almost all respects, to the machines in Reno, Las Vegas and Lake Tahoe. I doubt that Id played as much as 3 minutes before noticing a heavyset, jowled, scowling, weaponed, over-bathed, starched and booted, conscientious and much irritated local cop, goose-stepping his way through heavy traffic to get at me. " Quest que vous faites la?" (What do you think you"re doing there?") " Making music. Je joue un concerto de Mozart!" On has to understand that in France the name of Mozart conjures up, to the uninitiated, everything that is most bourgeois in culture, thought, art, education, class..You must pronounce it as " Mowzzzarrrrr.....". I could not have presented a better passport to respectability. " Oh? Really? Who gave you permission to do that?" " Isnt June 21st the Festival of Music?" " In France; not here." " I didnt know that. Im just an American tourist." " On ne fait pas la musique a Monaco!" This inimitable phrase might be rendered in at least 3 ways: (a) You cant make music in Monaco (b) One doesnt make music in Monaco (c) Music is not made in Monaco! (c) is probably the most accurate. It implies that the making of music is somehow alien to the Monagasque national character. Strange indeed that he should make such a claim . Did he not know of the operas commissioned from Camille Saint-Saens and Jules Massenet by the mighty sovereigns of this land? Nor of the sensational concerts of Paganini and Lizst ? Nor of the world premieres of Stravinsky scores? Nor of the world-renowned Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, heir to Nijinsky, Bakst and Diagheliev? I was not about to remind him of this distinguished history. I figured that either, (1) He was a boor, argument with him therefore being useless. Or, (2) The entire nation of Monaco has back-slid into barbarism ever since Aristotle Onassis took control of the Societ3 des Bains de Mers which runs the Casino and the other tourist traps here .This happened just before the Cinderella wedding of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier on April 19, 1956. I cannot believe that there is any merit in (2). I have before me at this moment of writing, a biography of Grace Kelly ( Princess Grace by Sarah Bradford; Stein & Day, 1984 ), which indicates that she was fond of good music from her childhood. I quote, ( pg.36): " Her favorite mood was "sentimental" and her taste in classical music romantic, Griegs Piano Concerto and Debussys "Clair de Lune", which her classmate, Doris Snyder, used to play for her on the piano at lunch time in the barn where they liked to put on records, jitterbug and giggle." This leaves only (1). My shock was therefore understandable. Who was this man to tell me that "music is not made in Monaco", when Ive accumulated so much evidence to the contrary? I knew more about this subject than he did! Little difference that he had probably lived here his entire life. But I was tired from a hard day, nor disposed to argued with 250 pounds of muscle, a weather-beaten and trenched face, a pistol, club and tear-gas canisters all gathered in a single locus in association with one lost human psyche: " Im sorry, I repeated, "I didnt know that the French festival of music isnt celebrated here. Ill leave right away." " No. You will pack your things and come with me." Not a cloud troubled the sky of this now deeply troubled bright summer day as we walked the block and a half to police headquarters. I recall nothing about the building we entered; but the room into which he ushered me was narrow, painted a drab uniformly pastel blue, with a bit of sunlight coming in from a few small transom windows. There was no furniture. Facing the entrance stood a high semi-circular counter; behind it sat another policeman . A telephone sat on the counter in front of him. The table at his left held a computer monitor. His uniform resembled that of his friend. Crewcut, younger and thinner, he combined a goofy grin with a tendency to laugh at just about everything. He found it particularly funny that I also thought the situation comic, if not downright ludicrous: who is this strange American, he seemed to be asking himself, who appeared to enjoy the prospect of spending the next ten years in solitary confinement! On the back wall, at the level of the razed plain of his scalp, stood a round electric clock. Above it was suspended, in an ornate frame, a large, intensively retouched photograph of the late Princess Grace Kelly- Rainier. Pearls bubbled from the corners of her eyes, their pupils enlarged, perhaps after a recent visit to the optometrist , by belladonna. Odours of American Beauty roses wafted around the edges of ruby-red lips. Her bared, delicate throat lay poised to allow the passage of that familiar "can of Heinzs tomato soup" voice which is almost a trademark of us Philadelphians. Her green dress crinkled like crisp money. My rude guardian took my passport and passed to his colleague. " Scan the records to check if weve got anything else on this bum!" He unhooked the telephone receiver and dialed the number of his commanding officer: " Hello? Captain? This is Frank. I brought in this Ameriloque ! You wont believe it! He was begging in front of the Casino! Yes - you heard me right the first time - begging ! " Ah! What linguistics can do to honest toil! Obviously I hadnt been begging. Yet, even had it been so, stack this up against the millions of dollars pissed away at the roulette tables while most of the world goes hungry. But who am I to argue against the moral priorities of Ruritanias? He hung up the telephone and waited for the results of the computer search. I used the interlude to point to the royal countenance: "Thats Princess Grace, isnt it?" I began, " I come from Philadelphia myself. In fact, my family knows her family." Necks craned in my direction : " We went to the same performing arts academy . She studied theatre; I studied violin playing. We also went to the same high schools." Now they were listening seriously, " When I return home, I"m going to let the Kellys know how their son-in-law treats visiting Philadelphia artists." Could I be telling the truth? Their glances became uneasy. These were unsuspected dimensions! " Go on." I waved at the computer console, "You can check the records. Ive lived in Philadelphia most of my life. Its a small place; everybody there knows the Kellys." One can see that a degree of poetic license was being worked into these revelations: Stevens School for Girls is not Central High School, nor is the American Academy of Theater the same as the Settlement Music School. Although there are connections: the girls at Stevens dated the boys from Penn Charter; my two sisters went to Friends Select, a similar "elite" private Quaker high school. And Grace and I may not have attended the same performing arts academies, but all of us glamorous Philadelphia superstars , like Mario Lanza, Sylvester Stallone, Bobby Darran, Grace Kelly and yours truly, learn the secrets of our craft from walking the resonant sidewalks of our hometown, unrivaled in music and dramatic art since Lorenzo da Ponte, Mozarts librettist, opened a preparatory school there and taught Italian to Jeffersons Afro-American children. And every native Philadelphian has certainly met someone from the ubiquitous Kelly family at least once in their lives. Then I uttered the most important of my claims , which had the additional merit of being true: " When I return home , I have only to pick up a telephone to contact the Philadelphia Inquirer. Thats the city newspaper. Theyll be thrilled to run this story." Again the cops darted furtive looks at one another, their attitudes of suspicion not unmixed with fear. With an exasperated gesture, ( the Gallic shrug), the arresting officer retrieved my passport from the other guy , and returned it to me. There was nothing in my criminal dossier anyway. I appeared to have won this round. Under other circumstances, I would have been locked up overnight, my passport stamped Entry Denied . " Monsieur; you can go." His tone of voice was weary - a job as hard as this one wasnt worth the pay - He raised his voice and cried: "This is not France!" Waving his arms, he pointed to the north. "In Monaco there is no Festival of Music! When you walk out of here, you go straight - that way! Go past 2 traffic lights - then turn left. Thats France! " He rubbed his hands together , washing off so much dust: "There you can play music until you collapse." He returned my violin case and we shook hands. As I stepped out the door he delivered the "afterthought", - as in the movies, when the police sergeant packs up and is ready to leave, then turns around and says , "Oh, by the way, we checked the registration of the gun. It"s in your name." - " So." he casually remarked , pointing to the violin: "You must have learned to play that thing in a good school." " Of course. Philadelphia has the best music schools in the United States." All Philadelphians believe this. Walter Kapell, Marion Anderson, Peter Serkin, Samuel Barber.... Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. didnt get into the movies for nothing. " Indeed, Ive heard of it: LEcole des Quatre-Vents! " With that he waved me out the door. I raced in a state of elation down the street, towards the two indicated traffic lights. Graduate of LEcole des Quatre-Vents ! Literally, The School of the Four Winds : Alma Mater of quacks, charlatans, cranks, schnoodlers, con-artists, poetasters, and all self-promoted vagabonds ! A badge of honor, a credential to carry with pride , bestowed upon me by a renowned academy, by virtue of the powers invested in a Monagasque cop! Granting rightful entry into any co- fraternity of troubadours, Cours des Miracles, Estaffod, Mead Hall, or gypsy caravel anywhere in the cosmos! It needed only this to complete the requirements for my degree of Maestro of Teleology , earned in different places around Europe over the course of this summer of 1986. In a few weeks I would be meeting with Ren? Thom, discoverer of cobordism and Catastrophe Theory, to discuss the paper I would be presenting the next month at the 11th General Relativity and Gravitation Conference in Stockholm, Sweden. Attendance at this conference would determine my lifes trajectory for the next six years. All of my friends, many of them distinguished maestros in their own right, should take notice: I, too, have won my laurels at the shrine of Music , and expect henceforth to be treated with the deference appropriate to my entitlement!! 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MIDDLETOWN CT 06457 TEL: 1-860 " 347 " 1194 FAX: 1-860 "347-8856 MON-FRI 8 AM " 9 PM SAT & SUN 9 AM " 6 PM """"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" KLEKOLO WORLD COFFEE 181 COURT STREET MIDDLETOWN CT 06457 1-860-343-9444 E-MAIL: klekolo@aol.com """"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" John Miltons PARADISE LOST Is BEING TOLD!! By JOHN BASINGER 133 LINXOLN STREET MIDDLETOWN, CT 06457 1-860-346-3262 ALL TWELVE BOOKS BY THE MILLENIUM! """""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" II. 11th General Relativity and Gravitation Conference Stockholm, Sweden July 6-12,1986 In 1985 , on a certain early morning ..in August August Strindberg, in his little apartment on the 5th floor of the Blue Tower at the far end of Drotninggatan in Stockholm, Sweden , arose from his bed a few hours earlier than was his custom. He applied the extra time to measurements of the Cosmological Constant . Readings taken from thermometers sticking up from the mound of marmalade filling his bathtub were put into his journals. It was in this way that he established that the value of the Cosmological Constant is "", give or take a factor of 10-13. The data was stored away in a desk drawer, pending delivery the following summer at the 11th conference of the General Relativity and Gravitation Society. His work terminated, August Strindberg limped across the room and looked out the window towards the river. On the many rivers interlacing fair Stockholm, swarthy Vikings on longships and pirogues lay aside broadaxes and swords, to carouse about the decks consuming great quantities of mead and ale. Later that afternoon he walked to the Centraal subway station. On his way through its darkened corridors, or gangtunnels as they are called there, Strindberg stumbled over the huddled body of an 80-year old woman, of mischievous smile and draped in a black shawl. At the time he ran into her, she was playing the Blue Danube waltz on her clarinet from a magic book. Arriving at his destination he climbed a steep hill to the restaurant located in the Mossebacke Gardens. Here, surrounded by a panorama of steeples, towers and rooves , Strindberg spent the rest of the day working on his novel: "The Red Room". On a sunny day in August of 1986 Sonya Kovalewski , Swedens greatest mathematician emeritus, sat on the terrace of the Red Room, proletarian restaurant and all-night taxicab rendezvous, waiting for a bacon and cheese omelette. To pass the time she set about calculating the length of time required to compute the number of Swedish meatballs needed to completely fill the Blue Room of Stockholms Town Hall. This problem had been proposed to her by the City Council but she believed that the suggested fee, 7,000 kroner, would not be enough. Sonya Kovalewski was a Russian ?migr? and a nihilist. The Red Room was Democratic Socialist. Later that afternoon , in the gangtunnel of the Centraal subway station, a starched, wrinkleless city official interrupted the glad music- making of the withered 80- year-old clarinet player. A mass of wrinkles, she was draped in a black shawl and flashed a mischievous smile. The official informed her in a kindly baritone voice modulated by years of accumulated deference, that the City of Stockholm was extending an invitation to her to an official banquet that evening in the Blue Room of the Rathus. The entree would be Swedish meatballs ;lots of them. The guest- list included August Strindberg, playwright; Sonya Kovalewski and Magnus-Gosta Mittag-Loeffler, mathematicians; the munitions magnate Alfred Bernhard Nobel; and the scientists from the GRG11. It was rumored also that Albert Einstein himself, suitably disguised, might be putting in an appearance. She merited this distinction through having been chosen by the Royal Swedish Academy and the Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize Committee, to receive the All-Scandinavia "Great- Grandmother of the Century Award. In fluent Old Icelandic she replied that she would be honored to attend. Above the cries of tourists, street urchins and drunks filling the streets of the Old City rose the spirited warblings of the bird-shit on the statue of Gustavus V. In the depths of the river, near the place where chicken bones, lettuce, apple cores and other refuse from the floating restaurants intersected the irregular tilings of the waterwaves, swordfish and carp pursued futile arguments for and against the hypothesis that space -time really has 105 dimensions. The gathering at the Folketshus was talking about little else besides the activities of the Bulgarian crank, Casimir Marinoff. The latest news was that the Swedish border patrols continued to maintain a critical distance between him and the GRG11. Marinoff , who is chronically void of funds, had been detained at the border for over a week , ever since Dr. Lorentz, the conference director, refused to grant him a stipend. It was also rumored privately that a certain, ( unnamed) famous physicist was angry with Marinoff for failing to replace some defective parts in the perpetual motion machine he sold him in the 60"s. While he drafted an appeal to the crown, Marinoff was being installed in a centrally-heated warehouse in Helsingborg. The Swedish government was showing itself more than willing to give him room and board to see that justice was done. It was certain that the last word on this matter had yet to be heard . Early morning, July 7, 1986. The immensely distinguished, incredibly honored, transcendentally dignified, disgustingly overqualified and horribly learned 11th General Relativity and Gravitation Conference was officially opened by formal preambles, arrogant apologetics and outlandish claims. When one considers the sheer extent of the chaos of last minute preparations. combined with the lackadaisical pace of on- going bureaucratic ramifications , this was no mean achievement. The first lecture of the first morning session was delivered in the baggy cryptlike auditorium on the second floor of the Folketshus . The lecturer was a prize-winning, frequency modulated astrophysicist, Hadron """"" is the elder of the two protons in the nucleus of the helium atom stored in a tank in the cryogenic laboratory of the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Wroclaw, Poland. "" is without a doubt the worlds leading living authority on the physics of minute perturbations at the extreme edge of the knowable universe. The magnitude of his eminence can be judged from the fact that less than half of his audience was asleep. To the astonishment of his listeners, Hadron "" translated the radio spectrum of a 2 billion year old cosmology lecture emanating from the pulsar system Mercurochrome VII. As the ideas in this lecture are considerably in advance of our own, one can only begin to imagine the advanced state of science on Mercurochrome VII today. Provided it still exists. "" "s lecture informed the physics community on planet Earth that New Inflationary Scenarios are two billion years old. All contemporary theories of cosmic inflation invoke a mechanism for freezing the Big Bang so that certain hypothetical variables which no one needs anyway come out with the right values. To quote "" : " Since the Big Bang is too simplistic and explains nothing, our cosmologists have introduced inflationary modifications with lots of technical complexities that explain nothing. To paraphrase: after the Big Bang came the Big Chill, followed by the Big Bubble. Then, to preserve the Big Picture, the Big Bosons disintegrated. "New Inflation" is Big right now, builds Big Reputations and raises Big Money. I think it is fair to say that its" proponents are in for a Big Surprise. In this universe, if you dont think big, youre nowhere. The fundamental theorem of the theory of inflation theories is that all traces of the inflation field must vanish without a trace in some untraceable microsecond of the unfathomably distant past. " Looking up to regard its audience, "" removed its glasses, scratched off a few hundred thousand quanta, and commented: " Wed really be in trouble if any of those traces ever do show up. Its so much easier to push a theory for which no evidence exists one way or the other. In any case, you must admit that my erudition is impressive." At the very moment that Hadron "" resumed reading from his notes , August Strindberg removed one of the thermometers from the seething marmalade mound filling his bathtub, inspected the temperature and re-confirmed his finding of the previous year, namely that the Cosmological Constant is "" , give or take an error of 10-13 . "Its all relative." , he chuckled. " continued: "The Inflationary models developed 2 billion years ago on Mercurochrome VII are much like our own. There is a vector field , the gradient of a scalar potential " , which operates like a refrigerator and crumbles at exactly the right fraction of a split second to give the Cosmological Constant the value of " give or take a factor of 10-13 . We are indebted to our distinguished colleague, August Strindberg, for this determination. On the basis of arguments which are no less reasonable , we know that the scalar bubble field A vanishes without a trace at the same instant. If you dont like these ideas may I suggest that you go listen to the spontaneous warblings of the birdshit on the statue of Gustavus V. There is in fact nothing new under the sun, even in theories of cosmic inflation , even if that sun happens to belong to the star triplet at the center of Mercurochrome VII, 600 megaparsecs away. Their theories just happen to be better than ours. Neither my fellow proton, Boson " , nor I , give a damn because some critics point out that theyre also worse than ours . There is really only one question worthy of mention: Will the field of inflation theories, like the "-field and the A-field, also be nice enough to vanish in a split nanosecond, leaving no trace of its" existence? "Hadron"" blinked, scratched off a quanta cascade, and irradiated itself back to Wroclaw. The morning session in the Folketshus concluded with a lecture by eminent academician Pavel Pavlovich Samovar. His principal distinction consisted in precisely this: that he was allowed to leave Russia to attend this years GRG ( the 11th) over 259 far worthier colleagues who"d begun sending in their applications 25 years earlier. His talk, addressed to the 1% of the attendance who had not fallen asleep on the way out the door, was about the 105-dimensional spaghetti of Dialectical Materialism . From dawns metacarpals first arthritic spasms, onto and beyond the bloodshot eyes of descending twilight, the paving-stones of the little churchyard swayed beneath the dismal shufflings of mourners by the grave of assassinated prime minister Olaf Palme. In a neighboring block , piles of wreaths and candles marked the place where he was slain. A pair of Indian physicists, both Hindus, stepped out of the GRG11 conference to observe the scene. The first quoted a sutra which states, in essence that, like life itself, grief is only temporary. The other explained an idea which had been gathering momentum at the conference and had the potential to swell into a full-bloodied paradigm: that the "temporal" is the universal solvent of Natural Philosophy . "Anyway ", chuckled the first , "its all relative." At a desk in the centrally-heated warehouse in Helsingborg, having used up 25 pages of his appeal with invective against his powerful enemies in the scientific establishment, the much persecuted servant of truth, self- sanctified zealot, of- worldly- honors- contemptuous, of- comfort- indifferent, incurable Bulgarian crank Casimir Marinoff dived into page 26, beginning with the long list of his inventions: - An electricity generator driven by the ether wind. He"d invalidated the Michelson-Morley experiment in 1975 ; -A perpetual motion machine operating under the influence of the Black Hole in Cygnus X-1. The eternity of the action of the machine was subject to the eternal existence of the Black Hole which, he observed, had not been his idea! As for Hawking radiation, he claimed to have found a way to channel it back into his machine. -An anti-gravity box that worked by converting gravitational into inertial mass. His disproof of Einsteins Equivalence Principle was announced in 1982; - a gadget for scrambling eggs without breaking their shells; - an atomic shoelace knotter; -a device that detects crank in the same way that a lie detector detects liars; - over 200 more incredible inventions. Down the dusty steps of the Centraal gangtunnel ran an elaborately camoflaged Albert Einstein. His right hand gripped a gooseberry wreath, his left closed about the handle of his violin case. He had perhaps just enough time to take a subway over to the Old City, lay the wreath at the foot of the monument to Tor Aulin, and play the tender lullaby that had endeared this composer to him since childhood. Then he had to hurry back to the afternoon sessions at the Folketshus to defend his ideas against the string theory factions. As luck would have it, he stumbled over the ancient clarinettiste, great-grandmother Magda who, draped in a black shawl and mischievously smiling, played the Blue Danube from a magic book. She dropped her clarinet which rolled down the long gangtunnel to fall onto the tracks. An advancing subway crushed it to a Frisbee. Einsteins violin case also flew out of his hands, bounced against the walls and floor, and in no time at all it was blown out of the tunnel. 20 years from now it will be rediscovered floating on a fjord above Narvik. Einstein promised Magda that the organizers of the GRG11 would present her with a new clarinet when she came to dinner that night in the Blue Room of Stockholms Town Hall to receive her award as the All- Scandinavia great-grandmother of the century . As he continued down the gangtunnel to the trains for the Old City, Albert Einstein remembered that he had already demolished string theory in a footnote to an unpublished paper written around 1908. He could therefore afford to skip the afternoon session and just show up for the dinner. Not so the rest of the delegation. Over a thousand scientists crowded into the second floor auditorium in the Folketshus to hear the latest claims about superstrings defended by a spider web from the Amazon jungle. It had been blown across the Atlantic to Stockholm just that morning on the jet stream. Almost no-one was asleep: so compactified was the accumulation of scientists that it would have been impossible to snore without rude jostling by ones neighbors. " In the hierarchy of knowledge", the web began, " one often encounters this curious phenomenon - let me not call it not just a phenomenon but rather an anomalous ambivalence - that the obduracy of precisely determined facts puts difficulties in the way of the requisite suppleness of grandiose theories. One ought not forget that the way ideas look is not at all the same as the way ideas seem. Ideas must be considered to have a life of their own in order to keep attracting new candidates into scientific careers." " I now want to review with you the state of the impasse in which all of our understandings concerning the deep structure of matter appear to be perpetually mired. One might as well go back to the Copenhagen Interpretation, which shows that there is indeed something rotten in the state of Denmark. The advent of the Quantum Electrodynamics of Feynman, Schwinger and Tomanaga came later, much later . This gave excellent results but was opaque to axioms. The electroweak theory of Weinberg, Salam and Glashow, also known as Quantum Chromodynamics , gave excellent predictions and had the advantage of giving the field some class by bringing in more confusing mathematics. Grand Unified Theories followed. These had little experimental justification but made up for this deficiency by oodles of axioms. It takes some guts to build Super G.U.T.s , for which there is no experimental evidence, but they can be combined with string theories, ( which have no predictive value whatsoever ) , to produce superstring theories, which lack both, and in addition have no theoretical justification. We have reached our ultimate goal: the description of nature by an axiomatic scheme in which there is no place for fact. What is a superstring? Imagine a playful God fooling around with a cosmic Yo-Yo. God created Himself in His own image, that is to say, infinitely clever. He can therefore perform every Yo-Yo caper devised by Man , as well as some that He alone can conceptualize. ( This final point is very important, given the enthusiasm of modern theoretical physics for non-conceptualizable entities. God, naturally, can imagine them quite easily ) : epicycles, standing waves, butterflies, cats cradles, moires, Lissajous figures, Feynman diagrams, Dirac belts, Tait diagrams, trajectories forbidden by Newtonian physics, by Thermodynamics or by Quantum Mechanics, and so on. He makes all these things using just one Hand, the other being employed in pulling from between His Teeth an infinitely long strand of bubble gum. By blowing into the gum at regular intervals He is able to lay down an infinite sequence of inflationary bubbles. God's Supreme Intellect never mixes up the Yo-Yo string with the bubble gum. Since God has at least 6 arms, ( we are indebted to the Hindu cosmologists of the Third Millennium before Socrates for this important discovery ) , He is also slurping in spaghetti from a bowl at a distance of 12 billion light-years from His Refulgent Entelechy. The Cosmic Superstring is fomented by the spaghetti winding around the bubble gum and getting knotted up with the Yo-Yo . It vibrates with the regularity of God's cosmic Breath, while His groans, sighs, belches and even farts jolt it into various resonant modes. It is a far from accidental feature of this scheme that we physicists believe that it makes for very beautiful mathematics. Mathematicians do not share that opinion. What the physics community is trying to invent are good-looking equations. The process has become standardized: starting with 4 dimensional space-time, another 6 are added and immediately stuffed out of sight. That's called compactification. Taking on another 16 dimensions is but a small step for a man, thought perhaps a giant one for mankind. It's done via a corporate agency called The Monster Group, capitalized at 1 billion pounds sterling. the worlds largest expediter of theories from the Sublime to the Ridiculous. I've forgotten the exact sequence of steps whereby one jumps from there to 105 dimensions. The inhabitants of the Amazon jungle have more pressing concerns. Yet once youve got 22 undetectable dimensions of an undetectable vibrating string at undetectably high energies ,well, anything is possible. "And, the web chuckled, "everything is relative." The Rathus is one of the handsomest buildings in Stockholm. Banquets and other receptions, at which the city plays host to dignitaries, scientists, beauty contests, astrologers, insects or elementary particles are usually held there. The Blue Room is. The evening banquet, a dull smorgasbord of flavorless elementary particles, waited. Sooner or later all of the delegates did, as did the guests of honor, arrive . Placed around a table on an elevated platform sat : Sonya Kovalewski , mathematical nihilist emeritus from the University of Stockholm; August Strindberg, TV script- writer, misogynist, alchemist and part-time loony; Magnus-Gosta Mittag-Loeffler, another ghost mathematician; and Alfred Bernhard Nobel, philanthropic death-merchant. Nobel sat at table working on a speech declining the Chemistry Prize offered him by his own foundation. Also Marinoff the crank, flown in from Helsingborg by helicopter, beneficiary of a royal dispensation granted at the last minute; Albert Einstein in jungle fatigues; and Magda the antique clarinettiste. The smorgasbord included Swedish meat-balls, lots of them; Kitsch Lorraine, ( a compote assembled from Joan of Arc legends) ; the leftovers from a church potluck in Goteburg; crunchy carrots, broccoli, celery, potatoes; drowned flounder pie; crudites Chernobyl; white wine and beer. The scientists, being essentially of a child-like mentality, raced from the cloak room into the dining-room to pelt one another with the Swedish meatballs. All the guests of honor burst into frank laughter combined with undissimulated rancor. It was going to be a merry evening. August Strindberg used his shirt cuffs to take notes for the opening scene of a new novel: "The Blue Room". He waited for the laughter to die down before announcing his recent scientific discovery: that the Cosmological Constant is equal to " , give or take a factor of 10 -13 . Sonya Kovalewski , herself an amateur novelist, remarked that there was nothing fundamental about his result inasmuch as it was trivial; which set Mittag-Loefflers ears twitching. It was a deep result of meta- mathematics, he commented, that "triviality" and "fundamentality" were not mutually exclusive. Science could be both fundamental and trivial at the same time. "Take, for example, the Fundamental Theorem of Inflationary Superstring Theory, announced a few days ago at this very conference by a team of brash young scientists in tenure-track positions at Stanford University." "Is that the one that states, more or less, that Gods giant spaghetti picks up spatial dimensions as it loop-de-loops through Time?" , Sonya Kovalewski asked. " Youve got it, sweetheart. Although its fundamental, its merely a trivial application of Lie Algebras, Monster Groups, Calabi-Yau Manifolds, Symplectic Structures, Super-Gravity, Super-Strings, Kaluza- Klein formalisms, Grand Unified Theories , and a little dickering with your Cosmological Constant , Dr. Strindberg. A babe in arms could prove it. " Alfred Bernhard Nobel stomped off the platform , cursing : "Damned if I"m ever going to give my prize to a mathematician!" The mezzanine formed a quadrangular balcony above the spacious interior of the Blue Room. Upon it dancing couples, visible from the ground, transmitted the gaiety of a carnival projected onto a cinema screen. Among the dancers one made out Albert Einstein playing a violin and Magda with her clarinet. They danced across the space of the balcony in wide arcs, improvising Jewish wedding and other klezmer melodies. In the shadows crouched the embittered ghosts of centuries of Swedish heroes and saints. Soon the sprightly old woman would break free and begin to spin like a gyroscope around the building, unearthing lugubrious tritones from the bowels of her clarinet, terrifying the scientific community with premonitions of ultraviolet catastrophes. """""""""""" Dramatis Personae August Strindberg (1849-1912) : Playwright, journalist, novelist, pseudo-scientist professional woman hater, theosophist, part-time psychotic.Quite screwed up. Writers dont come better than him. Sonya Kovalewski (1850-1891) : The greatest woman mathematician of the 19th century. After Magnus-Gosta Mittag-Loeffler appointed her a full professor at the University of Stockholm in 1889 , August Strindberg wrote a letter to the papers declaring that the day of such an event was the blackest in human history. Magnus-Gosta Mittag-Loeffler (1846-1927) : Distinguished mathematician and editor with lots of political clout. He needed it to carry off making Sonya Kovalewski the only woman professor in all of Europe. Alfred Bernhard Nobel (1833-1896): A madman who believed that the discovery of dynamite would end war. His delusions spilled over into the Nobel Prize which has debauched science for almost a century. There is some suspicion that he did not endow a prize in mathematics because of his rage at learning that Mittag-Loeffler had given a full professorship to a woman Albert Einstein (1879-1955): One shrewd customer. """""""""""" """"""""""""""" * A reprint, with revisions, of Volume VII #9 ; January 25, 1993 Almost the whole of Ferment"s Volume VII is devoted to Marie-Therese von Paradis. Raff has a curious place in musical history. Consumed by spite, Tchaikowsky once wrote somewhere that Brahms" music was worse than Raff"s . It is also said that Brahms once encountered some workmen putting up a monument to Raff. He assured them that their job was secure: they would soon be employed again in taking it down. Reprinted and revised from Ferment, Vol.V,1986 The over-riding consideration. There is a reason why the French mainland is nick-named "the hexagon". "Antibes has been a quieter place since the Fitzgeralds and their self-destructive high-jinks set a precedent no alcoholic writer or artist has been able to match." Cadogan Guides: France-Cote d"Azur, 1996 It is only fit that I use this opportunity to acknowledge and give full credit to the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra, to whom the world owes many excellent recordings of the Music Minus One catalogue. We will have him speak in French or English, as the narrative dictates: His real name escapes me. The Genoese pirate, Frank the Rogue. conquered Monaco in the 13th century . See the article following. The paper, Causal Algebras, is now in revision. The earlier version is available for the cost of printing and mailing, which is about $5.00 The House of the People, from whose sanctified vaults Social Democracy"s messages of eternal salvation emanate in an endless stream . I just made that up. #15. Click to previous Ferment! (Nash bio review.)