The Road

Here is a sentence Cormac McCarthy wrote:

Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts.

You have to be really sick to write that sort of shit.

(Later, same page: he would . . . see him standing there in the road looking back at him from some unimaginable future, glowing in the waste like a tabernacle.)

The victory of the automobile

Amazing how quickly it happened. First is a street scene from 1903:



Then from 1913 (0:31 to 1:10):

Trash

How do you know trash when you encounter it? Is there any reason to ask the question? Labeling things is often a way of pushing them away to a certain distance, not necessarily a bad thing. When we call someone "distant" we are not offering a compliment, and that's a shame. Compliments sound like this: open, warm, engaging, effervescent. I'm not against Champagne (as long as it's from Champagne), but I don't want it all the time. Four times a year is about right. Compare that to twenty times a year for Riesling, fifty for apple juice, one thousand for water. Water is divine, yet it's still, colorless, kind of distant. I am quite fond, maybe too fond, of labels. As a teenager I was fascinated by what Milan Kundera said about kitsch and figured he had to be right. So Horowitz was forever shit (a subset of k, i, t, s, s, h). The beauty of labels is they come off whenever you peel them. The book I'm reading about Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and (to a lesser extent) Joan's little sister and the man she married is called Positively 4th Street, and it's trash. Very well researched and entertainingly set forth, with plenty of intelligence and a bit too much smartyness, the book is loaded with substantiated gossip, cheap shots, infelicitous turns of phrase (page 181: "a handful of the espoused's friends"), contradictions within the same paragraph (see p. 165, lines 7-11, 21-23), and solecisms (routine use of adjectives as adverbs). But these things don't make it trash. It's the misapplication of talent and smarts that do that: the book succeeds at doing what it intends to, but it never rises to the level of either providing a penetrating insight or moving one to much beyond the occasional laugh.

A voice for animals at The Lancet

An editorial in vol. 373, issue 9679 (June 2009) of The Lancet emphasizes the need to think carefully about the rights of animals before designing experiments. Only in England, the birthplace of the animal rights movement, would such a compassionate essay appear in a leading medical journal.

Though their results are of dubious value, many scientists now use transgenic mice to study human diseases. It seems that transgenic primates are next up for slicing and dicing. I am opposed to all animal testing, so I was heartened when the author of the editorial mentioned Pope's great essay, "Against Barbarity to Animals" in which appears the following precept: "The more entirely the inferior creation is submitted to our power, the more answerable we should seem for our mismanagement of it."

My backpack

In 1986 I went to Taiwan for the first time. A few months after my arrival, I bought a blue Rhino brand backpack from a shop near the Taipei train station. I can't remember owning a backpack before that time, but I suppose I must have. Still, for me the Rhino bag was the first backpack in my life that mattered. When I traveled to China with my sister Jenny in 1988, I carried only that backpack, often with an enamel cup dangling from a clip. The bag imposed a limit on what I could take, and I respected that limit, even when I realized that I'd need to buy warm gloves and boots in Chengdu if I was going to spend time with pandas in Jiuzhaigou. The only thing I did not manage to fit into the backpack was the Tibetan coat two American women I met in the Sichuan alps insisted I buy; that was fine, since it was so cold I was always either wearing the coat or sleeping under it.

In Los Angeles the backpack served me well. Every day I rode my old ten-speed from Lincoln and Cedar to UCLA, showered, took my change of clothes out of my bag, went to class, changed back to my shorts and t-shirt, and rode home. Sometimes, on the way home, I stopped at Rhino Records, where the backpack often elicited happy comment.

In 1996 I went to Taiwan for the third time. I had no money. The point was to do nothing but study at the Stanford Center, and had it not been for my friends Jennifer Rudolph and 祝平一, I'd have subsisted on little but soymilk and rice porridge that summer. I brought the Rhino bag, carried it from Yonghe to Tai Da every day, and then, at the end of the school term, I retired a very weary backpack and, at that store near the train station, bought a second blue Rhino backpack.

The second bag has been to New Zealand with me, back to Taiwan, to France, to New York, and has carried my groceries from stores in Venice, Santa Monica, West Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Petaluma. Not just groceries: loads of laundry, sacks of horse shit, library books, duct tape and fabric for capture the flag, bottles of wine, and my pruning equipment. More than once I've repaired it, passing a very large needle through the seam where shoulder straps meet bag, and those straps are not going to come undone any time soon. I need the thing to work because I'm one of those people who rarely leaves the house without draping a backpack over my shoulders, though I'll admit it does not go well with my old Peter Tilton suits.

The zipper that fastens the main compartment is not what it once was. This may mean retiring the bag. I am loath to do this, and it is not likely that I'll be making a trip to Taipei this summer. I managed to coax the zipper into sealing a load of laundry last night, but I was anxious that at any moment my turtlenecks would spring from the bag with the impetus of a parachute. For now I'm using an old bag of my dad's to carry my lunch to work, and even that feels a bit like betrayal. The old Rhino bag, limp, a jellyfish on the beach, lies on the bedroom floor, beseeching me to make a decision. But I can't.

ADDENDUM: I bought this: