How to Travel With a Salmon and Other Essays (11 page)

1990

The Italian government has given assurances that something will be done to guarantee the autonomy of our country's universities. Italian universities were autonomous in the Middle Ages, and they functioned better than they do today. American universities, whose perfection has become legendary for Europeans, are autonomous. German universities are under the jurisdiction of the regional authorities, but local governments are more alert than a centralized administration, and in many cases—like the appointment of professors—the regional parliament merely ratifies formally what the university itself has already decided. In Italy, if a scientist discovers that phlogiston doesn't exist he will most likely be able to announce his finding only if he happens to teach a course on the Axiomatics of Phlogiston, because a course title, once it is on the ministry's lists, can be changed only after protracted negotiations among all the institutions of higher learning in the country, along with the Superior Council of Education, the Minister, and some other organizations whose names escape me.

Research goes forward because someone glimpses a path that no one has seen before, and a few other people, with exceptional decisional flexibility, decide to believe in him or her. But if someone wants to move a desk in Vitipeno, a decision must come from Rome, after consultations with Chivasso, Terontola, Afragola, Montelepre, and Decimomannu, so obviously the desk will be moved only when the move is no longer necessary.

Teachers engaged on temporary contracts ought to be outside scholars of great reputation and irreplaceable expertise. But between the submission of the university's request and notification of the ministry's approval we usually reach the end of the academic year, with only a few weeks of instruction remaining (unless the ministry simply says no). Clearly, in such an aleatory situation, it is hard to attract a Nobel laureate, and we end up with the dean's unemployed sister-in-law.

Research bogs down also because the bureaucratic routine makes us waste time in solving ridiculous problems. I am the head of a university department. Some years ago we were told to make an inventory of the department's physical possessions, a scrupulous list. Our only available employee was supposed to deal with a thousand other questions. But it was possible to farm out the task to a private organization that asked for three hundred thousand lire. We had the money, but in funds meant for inventoriable materials. How could we declare that an inventory was inventoriable?

I had to set up a committee of logicians, who suspended their own researches for three days. In my statement of the problem they saw something comparable to
The Set of Normal Sets.
Then they decided that the act of compiling an inventory, as it is an act, is not an object and therefore cannot be inventoried, but they further decided that its output is the catalogue of the inventory and, as this is an object, it can be inventoried. We asked the private firm to bill us not for the act but for its result, a result that we then inventoried. For several days I distracted serious scholars from their specific tasks, but I avoided going to jail.

Some months ago the janitors came and told me we were without toilet paper. I told them to buy some. The secretary told me I currently had funds only for inventoriable materials, and pointed out that while toilet paper can be inventoried, the natural tendency of such paper is to vanish, for reasons I prefer not to go into, and once it has vanished, it vanishes also from the inventory. I formed a committee of biologists to ask how we could inventory used toilet paper, and the answer was that such a thing is possible, but at a very high human cost.

I summoned a committee of jurists, who supplied me with the solution. I receive the toilet paper, I inventory it, and I require its distribution among the rest rooms for scientific purposes. If the paper disappears, I report the theft of catalogued material by unknown criminals. Unfortunately, I have to repeat this process every two days, and an inspector from the Secret Services has uttered some heavy insinuations, criticizing an institution that can be infiltrated by unidentified crooks so easily and so frequently. I am under suspicion, but I have an iron-clad alibi. They'll never get me.

The flaw is that to find the solution I had again to remove illustrious men of learning, for days and days, from research that would be of use to our country, while we wasted taxpayers' money on hours of work from teachers and staff, not to mention telephone calls and fax paper. But no one is ever indicted for squandering government money if everything is done within the law.

1986

When I call the dentist to make an appointment and he tells me that he does not have an hour free at any time in the coming week, I believe him. He is a serious professional. But when someone invites me to a conference, or to a roundtable discussion, or asks me to edit a Festschrift, or write an essay, or join a panel of experts, and I say I haven't time, no one believes me. "Come now, Professor," he says, "a person like yourself can always make time." Obviously we humanists are not considered serious professionals we are idlers.

I've done some figuring. And I would urge my colleagues with similar occupations to make their own calculations and tell me if I am right. In a normal year (not a leap year) there are 8,760 hours. Reckon eight hours' sleep per night, one hour a day to get up, shave, and dress, add a half hour for undressing and setting the glass of water on the commode, and no more than two hours for meals, and we reach a total of 4,197.5 hours. Two hours for getting around the city adds another 730 hours annually.

Holding three classes a week, each lasting two hours, and setting aside one afternoon for advising students (100 hours), I spend at the university—in the twenty weeks into which I condense my teaching—220 hours, to which I add 24 hours of exams, 12 hours of examining theses, and 78 hours for faculty meetings and committees. On an average of five theses a year, each averaging 350 pages, each page to be read at least twice, before and after revisions, calculating three minutes per page, I come to 175 hours. For shorter papers, since my assistants deal with many of them, I assume only four for each of our six sessions, averaging thirty pages each: counting five minutes per page what with reading and preliminary discussion; add another 60 hours. Not including my own research, we reach 569 hours in all.

I edit a semiotics review,
VS,
which publishes three numbers yearly, a total of 300 pages. Not counting time spent reading and rejecting manuscripts, ten minutes per page (evaluation, revision, proofs) comes to 50 hours. I direct two series of scholarly volumes pertinent to my field. Six books a year totaling 1,800 pages; at ten minutes per page, we have another 300 hours. Translations of my own texts—essays, books, articles, papers read at conferences: considering only the languages I can check, I cover an annual average of 1,500 pages at twenty minutes per page (reading, checking against the original, and conferring with the translator, in person, by telephone, or by letter), and that makes 500 hours. Then there are my original writings. Even assuming I do not write a book, essays, papers, reports, notes for lectures, etc., easily amount to 300 pages. If we include time spent thinking, making notes, writing, and revising, at least one hour is spent on each page—another 300 hours. My weekly magazine column, at an optimistic estimate, what with choosing a subject, making notes, consulting a few books, then drafting it, cutting it to the required length, dictating it, and sending it off, takes three hours each week. Multiplying by fifty-two weeks gives 156 hours. (I am not calculating time spent on other, exceptional articles.) Finally, my mail, to which—still leaving much unanswered—I dedicate three mornings a week from nine to one, occupies 624 hours.

I calculate that last year, accepting only ten percent of the proposals received, and limiting myself to conferences closely associated with my discipline, at which I presented my own or my colleagues' research, and various unavoidable appearances (academic ceremonies, meetings required by the relevant ministries), I have totaled 372 hours of active presence (I do not count wasted time). Since many of these engagements were abroad, I calculate 323 hours of travel. This calculation considers that a Milan-Rome trip involves four hours, including taxi to the airport, waiting time, flight, taxi into Rome, settling in at the hotel, and arriving at the meeting place. A trip to New York consumes twelve hours.

It all adds up to 8,121.5 hours. Subtracting them from the 8,760 hours in a year, I am left with 638.5 hours, in other words about 1 hour 40 minutes per day, which I can devote to sex, conversation with friends and family, funerals, medical care, shopping, sport, theater. As you see, I have not calculated the time spent reading printed matter (books, articles, comics) not part of my work. Assuming I spent my travel time reading, in 323 hours, at five minutes per page (simple reading and annotations), I have had the possibility of reading 3,876 pages, corresponding to a mere 12.92 books of 300 pages each. And what about smoking? Sixty cigarettes a day, if each one requires half a minute (finding the pack, lighting up, putting it out), comes to more than 182 hours. Too many. I have to give up smoking.

1988

The aircraft flies majestically over boundless prairies, immense deserts. This American continent can still offer moments of solitary, almost tactile encounter with nature. I am forgetting civilization, but it so happens that in the pocket of the seat back before me, along with instructions for rapid evacuation (of the plane, in the unlikely event of an emergency), a pamphlet with information about the in-flight movie, and the program of the Brandenburg Concertos available through the headset, there is a copy of
Discoveries,
a brochure that lists, with alluring illustrations, a series of objects that can be purchased via mail order. In the days that follow, on other flights, I discover analogous publications:
The American Traveler, Gifts with Personality,
and their similars.

They make irresistible reading, I am won over by them, and I forget nature, so monotonous because, at least here, "non facit saltus" (and I am hoping my aircraft will behave in the same fashion). Culture, as we know, is all the more interesting if it serves to revise and correct nature. Nature is tough and hostile; culture, on the contrary, allows people to do things with less effort, saving time. Culture frees the body from the enslavement of toil and opens the way to contemplation.

Just think, for example, how tedious it is to handle a nasal spray, one of those little pharmaceutical bottles that you press with two fingers to allow a beneficent aerosol to penetrate the nostrils. But relief is at hand! Just insert the bottle into the Viralizer machine ($4.95), and it is squeezed for you, so efficiently that the spray reaches the most intimate areas of the respiratory tract. Naturally, you have to hold the machine in your hand, and the photographs suggest a Kalashnikov being fired, but then everything comes at a price.

I am struck (but I hope not literally shocked) by Omniblanket, which costs all of $150. At the simplest level, it is an electric blanket, but it can be programmed so that the temperature varies from one part of your body to another. In other words, if during the night your back feels cold but your groin tends to sweat, you adjust the program accordingly. Omniblanket will then keep your back warm and your groin cool. If you are nervous and toss and turn in your sleep, ending up with your head at the foot, then you're just out of luck. You will roast your testicles or whatever you have in that area, depending on your sex. I doubt the inventor can be asked to make improvements, because it seems he was burned to a cinder some time ago.

Naturally, in your sleep, you might snore and disturb your partner, if you have one. Well, in that case, try Snorestopper, a kind of watch you fasten onto your wrist before sleeping. The moment you begin to snore the Snorestopper, alerted by an audio-sensor, emits an electronic signal that, from your arm, reaches some of your nerve centers and interrupts something or other; anyway, you stop snoring. It costs only $45. One drawback: it is not advisable for those with heart trouble, and I wonder if it might not endanger the health even of an Olympic athlete. Furthermore, it weighs two pounds. You could use it, no doubt, with your husband or wife after decades of familiar intimacy, but hardly with a near-stranger during a night of romance. Making love with a two-pound weight on your wrist could cause alarming side effects.

It is well known that, to reduce their cholesterol levels, the Americans have long since taken up jogging: they run for hours and hours until they drop dead of a heart attack. Pulse-Trainer ($59.95), worn on the wrist, is attached by a wire to a little rubber sheath slipped over the index finger. When your cardiovascular system is on the brink of collapse, an alarm goes off, apparently. A real achievement, if you consider that in underdeveloped countries a person stops running only when he is out of breath—a highly primitive criterion, and perhaps for this reason children in Ghana are not brought up to jog. It is curious, however, that despite such neglect, their blood cholesterol levels are almost imperceptible. With Pulse-Trainer you may run without a care and, further, if you attach to your chest and your waist the two Nike Monitor straps, an electronic voice, programmed by a microprocessor and featuring Doppler-Effect UltraSound, will tell you how many miles you have run and your median speed ($300).

For the animal lover I would advise Bio/Bet. You slip it around your dog's neck and it emits ultrasounds (Pmbc Circuit) that kill fleas. And it costs only $25. I don't know whether, applied to your own body, it would eliminate crabs; I'd be afraid of overkill. Batteries not included. The dog has to go out and buy his own.

Shower Valet ($34.95), a single unit that can be hung on the wall, provides you with a no-mist shaving mirror, integrated radio-TV, and both razor-blade and shaving-cream dispensers. According to the ad, it can transform your boring morning routine into an "experience to remember." Spice Track ($36.95) is an electric machine stocked with little tubes of all the spices you might wish. In poor households the spices are kept in a row on a shelf over the gas stove, and when, for example, the family wants some cinnamon on its daily dish of caviar, they have to sprinkle the spice with their fingers. But, as a member of the privileged class, you will simply tap out an algorithm (in Turbo-Pascal, I believe), and the spice of your choice will come spinning to a stop right in front of you.