Improvement

I'll never write a book so fine or so fascinating as Making sex, but I can and will improve on it. Here is the first sentence:

An interpretive chasm separates two interpretations, fifty years apart, of the same story of death and desire told by an eighteenth-century physician obsessed with the problem of distinguishing real from apparent death.

I shall improve it stylistically and substantively. First, I delete the egregiously superfluous "interpretive." Already it's better. Next a flurry of other changes. So I have

A chasm separates two interpretations, fifty years apart, of a story concerning death and desire told by an eighteenth-century physician obsessed with distinguishing death from its living double.

Now I home in on a substantive problem: Laqueur never explains the fifty year gap mentioned in his opening. He cites three interpretations of Jacques-Jean Bruhier's story: Bruhier's own (an edition dated 1749 is cited; the first ed. appeared in 1742), Antoine Louis's (1752), and Michael Ryan's (the 1836 edition provides the date Laqueur cites). What happened, Thomas?

Context suggests that Laqueur located the chasm between Louis and Ryan.

A chasm separates two interpretations, eighty-four years apart, of a story concerning death and desire told by an eighteenth-century physician obsessed with distinguishing death from its living double.

for Lizzie

We went east. We drove up into the mountains. Snow was on the trees, on the ground, on the rivers. We went into the woods with skis. Snow was in our faces, on our clothing, on our skis. We inhaled snow. Wind blew snow. We drove to the cabin and the food we had was lentil stew and apples. More snow. The sound of the snow under our boots was crisp never sorry.

The trees bore snow on their outstretched bowed limbs. The birds were nutcrackers. I scared somnolent fishes.

A quartet of hot springs collected in a pool, warming our feet our thighs our tummies our hands and arms.

We woke up at night when snowflakes infiltrated our cabin and we talked about our dreams. You were with us, nodding, smiling.

Dictionary

allegations.—always troubling.

antidepressants.—cause suicide.

Bible.—source of all truth or of all evil.

bottled water.—nothing is more wasteful.

caffeinated.—refers to people, not beverages.

cancer.—death by is always preceded by a long battle with.

comic books.—a form of literature.

decline.—always precipitous.

die.—used of plants and animals; never suitable for individual humans.

drop.—always precipitous.

ensconced.—always happily.

Flaubert.—le mot juste.

Freud.—based all his theories on his own neuroses; a dinosaur.

generalize.—do not.

grill.—always being fired up.

Harvard.—a school in Boston.

Hemingway.—always wrote short, spare sentences.

homosexuality.—a genetic condition.

increase.—always dramatic.

Jung.—we are all Jungians now.

lawyers.—make all important decisions for big corporations.

literally.—metaphorically.

Middle East.—it's all about the oil.

monolithic explanations.—reductionist and doomed.

oak.—source of all problems with wine.

pass.—die (of human beings).

periods.—use liberally.

poets.—no longer know anything about meter, rhyme, or trees.

Pollock.—mention only in the context of bowel movements and vomit.

potassium.—bananas have lots.

race.—does not exist.

reference.—a verb, meaning to mention.

revenge.—best served cold.

soy.—most poisonous substance known (see also wheat).

truth.—always set in quotation marks.

wheat.—most poisonous substance known (see also soy).

writing.—loneliest of professions.

yeah, no.—yeah.

Compass points

Somewhere in The Selfish Gene, Dawkins explains that those animals that act to maximize the well-being of close kin can pick out their cousins, aunts, and so on. Dodging the question of how they recognize relatives, Dawkins says they "just know." The authors of Baboon Metaphysics offer a similar observation. I feel that my ethics and lots of other behaviors are part of my "just knowing." I never saw my dad do it, I can't remember anything he said to me before I was sixteen, he drives me crazy, but in countless situations I act just as he would, as he must have.

Did you ever choose a certain course of behavior because it was championed in a tv show you watched or in a neatly reasoned argument endorsed by Rawls? Or did those things just come along, adhering to your awareness because they squared with your predisposition? And where did that come from?

Orphans grow up without the terrible insufferable models we with parents are cursed with. Lucky, lucky orphans! Free to fuck up without feeling even dumber about it because your fuckuppery was handed you with your diapers, your bunkbed, your first car.

Original sin

Why is it Sarah's habit of baring her teeth to take food from her fork irks me far more than Alex's abominable politics? Why do we overlook a president's decision to cut off food to a hungry people and rail against him for putting his cock in a young woman's mouth? Why do we scold our children for failing to greet new acquaintances warmly when we ourselves pass up daily opportunities to lift the fallen and succor the sick?

We register the world through eyes addicted to beauty, ears long since spoiled by the most exquisite sonatas. We go for the close-up when the wide shot offends. We move along.

By the time I was thirteen I knew pretty much how things were supposed to be, and it was my job to open the eyes of anyone who'd gotten that far, or as far as fifteen, fifty, without seeing what was right in front of them. Things further off—my binoculars never quite gave me the focus I had when peering at beach glass damp in the cup of my hand, or Colby's hand. In retrospect, that all seems misbegotten, but there's no fixing it, there's only the occasional possibility of smiling with a hint of self-mockery as the correctives come pouring out.

Joe told me in 1997 that I was better then, a shade more tolerant, than I had been in 1980. Maybe. Or maybe I'm just better at the manoeuvre that elicits a compliment. The circles within circles make explanations as unending today as they were in my supremely self-conscious adolescence.

My house

I want to go back to Plato's cave, to sit with my back to the sun watching the play of light through branches and off moving cars. Sometimes, at that moment of losing day, when a book demands a lamp, I stop halfway to the switch and linger in the middle of the front room, while patterns wash over me from passing headlights.

Light, the obliterator

There is something creepy about a well-lit house. Every corner glows, all doubts vanish. No passing satellite or car stands a chance of sweeping a shadow against the floor or wall. I can't live like that.

A victim

While performing my morning round, I saw the corpse of a black cat in the street. I walked to it and bent to pick it up. A Prius hit me.

I didn't fall down. The driver had hit me with the side of his car while performing the left turn from Keokuk onto Washington. My forehead is slightly abraded and he left his filth on my left hand.

All the traffic stopped and drivers stared. The driver of the Prius pulled over and got out of his car. He stood there, staring at me, his mobile phone blinking in his ear. "Are you all right? Are you all right?"

I walked back to the house, crying. I thought the dead cat was Stumpy. Then I came upon Stumpy in the back, staring at me. I went inside, still crying. "He could have killed me!"

I got a paper bag and a pair of small plastic bags. Gloving my hands with the latter, I returned to the corner, waited until no cars were near, then went and collected the eviscerated cat.

I left the corpse in front of the house. Petaluma's Animal Control will collect it.

Being an American

I need to look at pictures like this to remind myself how odd I am by American standards. Americans think it's fine to carry loaded firearms around, to have them in a purse, a belt holster, a briefcase while eating a burger and drinking a Pepsi at the local restaurant or bar. I do not like guns and I think it's a sign of degeneracy to carry one for any reason but law enforcement. And many cops should have their weapons confiscated.

When I lived in Beijing in 1993, an adult student asked me in all seriousness, "If you go to the supermarket, and you and another customer have a disagreement, do you think it's okay to use a gun to settle the argument?" The answer I'd give today is that the American Supreme Court does not think it's okay to settle the argument by shooting my interlocutor, but it does think it's okay to show that person my gun and announce that it's loaded.

Lolita

On the bus late last night a woman was reading the edition shown above.

Here is a nice blog entry about the variety of covers:
http://greaterthanorequalto.net/blog/2009/08/lolita-covers/

A walk among the Trinity Alps

On July fifteenth, as I was walking through the woods, I met a dog. A friendly dog, glossy copper, loped up to me, his back covered with a dirty t-shirt. I smiled because I am fond of dogs of a certain size and color, and because the meeting was unexpected and welcome. One caress and he was off, back up the trail, glancing back to see that I followed. I did, but the dog outpaced me, and I never saw him again.

An hour after that meeting, I emerged from the woods and stepped into an alpine meadow, long and wide, stippled here and there with granite slabs. This was Morris Meadow, and it was as far as I'd walked when I first took the trail from Cherry Flat with my father probably thirty-two years ago. Six or seven years ago I'd tried the trail again, the trail that climbs and falls beside the Stuart Fork for mile after mile. On that outing I'd barely slowed for the meadow, and I'd reached Emerald Lake, a sort of El Dorado in my family.

So I decided, months ago, to repeat that feat, but at a more leisurely pace.

This is what I wrote as I sat eating my lunch at the edge of Morris Meadow:

From my rented car at Bridge Camp I walked two hours and forty minutes to get here. Left a bit after eight; it's now 11:30. Hot for the last bit—otherwise shady & cool. Two bridges along the way: reached #1 at one hour, #2 at two hours. Left Achilles tendon a bit sore. Splendid day. I'm on a big black rock in the shade facing across the meadow toward the trail, the river, the ragged snow spattered peaks two miles away. Before Cherry Flat a fawn bounded away then stopped and stared: gorgeous, spotty. Later two does and a special secret spot up the hillside where five species of butterfly supped on the nectar of soft white flowers. A tiny trickle of water over parti-colored stones. Much lichen on the dry rocks. A junco preening. Mountain roses. Spikey plants with tiny white flowers capping the stalk. Sun warming the hillside. A butterfly landed on my hand, its infinite tongue lapping vainly at me. Another flew between my legs. Minutes later another (the same one?) on my cuff, then my wrist. I shook it gently off. Huge tiger swallowtails feeding on the handsome white blooms within my reach.

Here on the rock I opened my shirt and the breeze chilled my soaked chest. Sound of distant water, birds, flies whizzing.

Shall I descend to the stream for a rinse?

I decided not to, instead following a faint trail that curved along the edge of the meadow, parting from it to inspect patches of orange lilies, clumps of columbine. I even found a small collection of Calochortus elegans, an example of which appears above.

Maybe I should have remained in the meadow, but it's often hard to give up on a project even when you've been shown a host of reasons. And in this case the reasons were not yet apparent.

Into the woods again, the trail now narrower, less kempt. Two boys turned the corner up ahead, walking toward me. One held a snake, and when we were face to face I asked about it.

"A rattlesnake I killed just up there. It was in the middle of the trail."

The animal was still coiling and uncoiling around his arm as he spoke.

Facebook math

response rate ∝ 1 / seriousness

response rate ∝ mentions of children or athletics

Psalm 1

I am struck, in Psalm 1, by the sense of a single enlightened figure who stands apart from a multitude. Ever one man, a figure whose meditations suggest solitude, an inward light. Here is one who listens not to the ungodly counsel of others, but who stands, in the psalm's central metaphor, like a tree--not one tree among many, as in a copse or a vast forest, but a tree unshadowed by neighbors, and indeed one may speak of this righteous figure as the tree, figuring Man and Woman through their initial defining act, The Fall, and the Son of Man, who mounted a tree at Calgary.

There is a basic rhythm in the verses, a pendular swinging back and forth between the ungodly and the godly, until in the final verse the two are united in God's Manichean vision of the World. The Jew, like the early Christian, was a being apart, one who dared stigmatize all who followed other paths. And the God worshipped by the Jew wielded a type of power always accompanied by force: law. Laws can only exist where force exists, as Tolstoy reminds us in that memorable passage late in War and Peace that shows Pierre Bezukhov facing a military tribunal that exists only "to inculpate him."

Judgement seems somehow, for me, far from the vision of a tree on a river's bank, but the same winds that ruffle an elm's heavy plumage disperse the chaff that has no place in an elysium.

A small sampling of reasons to hate J. D. Salinger

From the first ten pages of "Raise high the roof beam, carpenters":

some twenty years ago
Along about two
as far as I remember
At one time or another
at least as far as
I, for one
so to speak
To make things still more provocative
I might well bring in here
that specific time
in my opinion
ostensibly
invariably
unspeakably
technically
typically
presumably (page 7)
all but exclusively
almost directly
not quite parenthetically
a trifle guardedly
presumably (page 8)
apparently (page 9)
laboriously
roughly
religiously
only nominally
apparently (page 11)
suddenly
interestedly (last three all in one sentence)
rather immoderately
indescribably hot (page 11)
stifling hot (page 11)
extravagantly speaking
with perhaps typically pungent Coast-to-Coast irony
. . .

The man did not believe that one could add too many adverbs to a story.

Announcement

I intend to devote an essay to the Johnsonian dictum "The same proposition cannot be at once true and false." My reflections will inspire a new generation of Wittgensteins, some of them pianists.

Keys, black and white

To my ear, the geese seemed stuck
in some sorry squawk-show rerun,
their sloppy V the envy of no commuter
in her orderly lane.

No beauty queen queueing for lip gloss
fretted about her animal past,
what a life spent erect might
and might not yet mean.

On my chair, worrying a wan dream,
I saw roadside ditches
full of fur, feathers, lost bodies.
I slumbered on coals.

The queer pianist took a breath,
determined to play pitchblack
on snow white keys:
rapping cantilena.

Floral remains

Here is an exchange between two members of the Pacific Bulb Society. I find the image remarkably poignant and extremely beautiful.

My question is this: along with daffodils and Hyacinthoides, what other winter-spring flowering bulbs are likely to persist and thrive, decades after planting? Which crocus, tulips, etc, are truly survivors that outlast their gardens?
—Kathleen Sayce

Around Denton, TX where I lived for six years, the outlines of old homesteads are delineated with persisisting Muscari neglectum, Rhodophiala bifida, Lycoris radiata, Narcissus jonquilla, and a few other types of Narcissus. There were also clumps of Cooperia pedunculata at these sites, which were farther north than that species normally grows I think. Many of these places have been lost since the 1990s as undeveloped gaps in the urban landscape are filled in.
—Shawn Pollard

a beginning

Wet wasted leaves crowd the steps
From a place dry and seldom swept
Just outside my door, never locked,
A white rectangle spotlit by the sun.

My halting mind returned early
Freighted with headlined names
Halted by the door, hesitated.

They burn easily, kindling arias.

Hands on

How can people be so dim? Slamming a movie for being "manipulative" is akin to praising a corkscrew for opening a bottle. Was Aeschylus not manipulative? If a movie is to be faulted, it should be for a failure to trigger strong feelings, for a reliance on hackneyed devices, for speaking an emotional language more primitive than a punch in the nose.

Help

She was lying on the pavement, rolling slightly. I stopped my bike, got off, asked whether she needed help. She did. I gave her one hand, but she needed two. A white woman, abrasions on her very pale face, very drunk. I asked where she needed to go and she said the bus stop. We were halfway there when she said something about a man forty feet ahead. Her companion. He marched towards us, several inches taller than I, sober, angry. She'd been pulling this all day long, he said, falling down drunk, getting people to help her, and that was fine. He barely knew her, had never hit her, had let her sleep at his house the night before, but had not, he insisted, had sex with her. I looked at him and told him that I was going to help her to the bus stop. He wheeled and stomped away. She called out to him. He came back, told her he wasn't waiting for her, she'd dropped her bus pass, he was going to Longs, and if she showed up she showed up. Her knees buckled and, as I had earlier, I said to her, "You can make it. Keep walking." We got to the meager bench and she sat. I asked did she have her bus pass, she tried her pockets, nothing. I went back for my bike, felt a pang as I rode past her. A hundred feet further the tall angry man was lurking in a doorway.

Newspapers

If I knew the world better, I could explain it, predict its next moves. Not just financial markets, flows of precious metals, outbreaks of violence, but the complexion of next week's clouds above the Atlas mountains, the number of grains of sand that will lodge in my sweatshirt pocket during a Christmas Day walk on the beach--it would be something fine just to be able to count these. As my determination to master the world grows, as I have cards printed that read "S. R. Gilbert, Supervillain," I lose some of my focus, some of my hair, some of my memories. Cats still come running when I whistle, no matter what alley I'm moving along, and that hardens my resolve.

Life

Come home.
Check mail.
Cook meal.
Wonder what to do next.
Turn on computer.
Peek at others' lives.
Feel cold.
Hear phone ring.
Check email for umpteenth time.
Turn off computer.
Wonder what to do next.
Think about a movie.
Think about a book.
Wash dishes.
Make bed.
Check to see if front door is locked.
Stand on front porch and look at moon.
Wonder what to do next.

Ruby, no slipper

I've told a friend that I'll write something about my injury for his company's blog. The small nonprofit sends doctors to very poor nations to provide those who need them with prosthetic limbs; I suppose many of the injuries are due to American landmines. My experience is only in some distant way comparable to that of a person born with a clubfoot or shorn of an arm, but I will try to convey something of what it's like to move between ability and disability, how confusing it can be, how it directs your vision into the mirror even as you suddenly see every broken person as a sister or brother.

I've been walking for a few weeks without my crutch, but I have a limp, my calf muscle is weak, and if I stand still for a minute my foot becomes bloated and ruby. My surgeon told me he believed I'd always limp, so of course I will do all I can to prove him wrong.

Seeing something else

You're sitting with a friend and you're talking about what you see. It's a field, it's a bay, it's a city. As you talk, it becomes clear that what you see is not what she sees. You keep talking about different things, sort of trusting that your friend simply sees something you'd see if you were in her place. Because masts, trees, rocks, clouds, and cars block your vision, but from where she sits no cloud or giant is in the way. You move over a bit and you say, "Oh! Yeah!"

Everything is a little different for having seen what you couldn't, but you shift back and now you're right where you were.

Walking, not walking

When my esteemed surgeon, Jack Schuberth, told me to wean myself of my protective plastic boot over three weeks, I thought that was an awfully long time. But now I doubt that I'll lose my crutches by the three-week mark. To my surprise, walking is very painful, two weeks after Schuberth spoke. When I do put aside my crutches, taking more or less normal steps, setting all my weight on my left leg, I can go three or four steps before pain begins to shoot from my heel.

This injury has marked one of the few times in my life when I've desperately wanted to be normal. The discovery that I suffer from osteoporosis exploded that hope. But I do want to be able to walk, and I do not think this much pain is normal.

How my foot looks

Until Thursday afternoon, I'd been permitted only occasional glimpses of my injured foot. Between casts, while wheeling from podiatry clinic to X-ray, I stared and on occasion touched the strange flesh that had once been part of me but now belonged to doctors and nurses and technicians—and to that same category of existence that lodged many of my life's unpleasantnesses, and which was understood to fall outside of The Meaningful, The Useful, The Relevant.

Now the foot and the leg attached to it are naked, and though they are far from perfect, their care and improvement have been left to me and to an occasional black boot, no longer to a bent plaster tube.

This is not my foot as I remember it. The skin is dry, peeling, wrinkled, splotchy. The area around my ankle is swollen and I don't recall that freckle. There is a cut along the left side of my heel, with tape strips crossing it. Some dried blood. Much of the skin is shiny; what isn't tends to ruddiness. I can wiggle my toes and rotate my foot, but I don't do much of the rotating because it hurts a little.

The leg, too, is foreign. Bruises streak and stripe it, and I did not know that bruises came in such colors. Much yellow, some purple. The calf muscle is gelatinous, unsightly.

Lots of skin is flaking and sloughing from the toes and between them. I've been leaving the cut alone, but I suspect that while I sleep the cat or I may try to lick it. Maybe it tastes metallic, or maybe it's like licking a battery.

My heel

On July 25 I broke my heel bone. Since that time I've been unable to set any weight on my left leg, which has changed things for me. For instance, here's how I get my mail. I put on my knapsack and crutch my way to the mailbox. I then lean my crutches against the fence, balance on my right leg, and unlock the mailbox, hanging onto it for extra balance. I then struggle out of my knapsack, unzip it, and use my right hand to hold the knapsack while using my left to stuff mail in, all the while wobbling quite a bit. I then zip closed the bag, shoulder it, close and lock the mailbox, and lift my crutches from the fence. Soon I'm back inside--unless I'm so tired by all this that I make it no further than the chair on the back porch--and I set my crutches against something and allow myself to fall onto the floor. I love the floor.

The furthest I've walked since my injury is around the block. I've done that three times. Mostly I just sit inside or, better, lie on the floor, listening to Mitsuko Uchida play Mozart's piano concertos. Which is not all that different from how I spent my time before my injury. Except now I don't even walk to the grocery store, the prospect of which makes me anxious. I may try tomorrow.

I was misdiagnosed. My ankle was terrifically swollen and the nurse who looked at the first x-rays concluded that I must have strained a ligament since the ankle was not broken. She missed the line running through my calcaneus. So I went home. Later I had to visit the San Rafael emergency room to get a cast put on. That was July 26.

On July 31 Jack Schuberth opened my heel, aligned the odds and ends that had once been my calcaneus, and drove four metal screws through them, an especially long one from the back of my heel up at a forty-five-degree angle, the three others at a right angle to that. I think I now have some titanium in my left foot, but I keep forgetting to ask Jack what sort of metal he chose.

The operation left me with a nasty case of contact dermatitis all over my back and sides, but I've had no pain and have consumed none of the vicodin I was issued early on.

And sometimes music is something else.

Wow, his ear is really big.

Music, the net

Music connects us. We went to the concert together, I gave you the CD, we sang along as we drove the moving van from Chicago to San Francisco. I wrote a song with John that he sang with Erika at Pam's house. I brought a record to the Mallarkeys' party that Peter danced to ten times in a row. We could never agree on what the words were. You mentioned a record and I bought it before you knew my name. We saw the band play it on Saturday Night Live, twenty years before we met. I know the words and you know the tune. Together we can just about sing it. Come on, let's try it now.

It's good to be a boomer.

A study summarized in the most recent issue of Science has shown that guessing Social Security Numbers can be quite easy if one knows the person's place and date of birth--which often appear on facebook, for example.

Every Social Security number starts with three digits known as an "area number." Smaller states might have only one, whereas New York, for example, has 85. The next two digits are "group numbers," which can be anything from 01-99, but don't correspond to anything specific. The last four digits, the "serial number," are assigned sequentially. . .

When economist Alessandro Acquisti and computer scientist Ralph Gross of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, compared SSA's public death records with birth data, they found that area numbers are not rotated until all 9999 serial numbers have been assigned. . . . After 1989, individuals started receiving Social Security numbers at birth, rather than at their discretion (often when they began their first job), so pinpointing these people's numbers is especially easy, says Acquisti.

So easy in fact that Acquisti and Gross were able to do it themselves. Using fairly standard computer algorithms, the duo predicted the first five digits of Social Security numbers for people born after 1989 44% of the time on the very first try. On a handful of attempts, they managed to get all nine digits on the first try, but at the very least they could predict the full numbers of 8.5% of those born after 1989 in fewer than 1000 tries, they report online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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:

Dolphins are still neat

The following is a passage from one of John C. Lilly's early studies of bottlenose dolphins:

"When a female and a male dolphin are confined in a relatively small area in captivity, the courting behavior is rather violent. If they are isolated with a movable barrier between them, they will resolve all kinds of problems in order to be together, e.g., opening a gate to gain access to another pool and closing it behind them. As soon as they are together they start pursuit games. The initial phases of this behavior appear violent and can continue for the first 24 hours. If the female is not receptive, the male continues to chase her, exhibits erections, rubs against her, and tries to induce her to accept him. They bite one another, they scratch each other's bodies with their teeth. During the mating procedure; they will develop lesions practically everywhere on their bodies specifically on the flippers, on the back, on the flukes, on the peduncle, and around the head region.

"The erection in the male occurs with extreme rapidity. We have observed and timed it in our own tanks: it is something on the order of three seconds to completion, from the time the penis first appears in the slit. It can collapse almost as rapidly, and it looks almost as if it were being done in a voluntary fashion. It is very easy to condition a dolphin to have an erection. The stimulus, for example, can be a single visual signal. One trainer chose to raise his arm vertically as a signal, and the dolphin would turn over and erect his penis in response. If Elvar, one of our dolphins, is alone and a small ring, about a foot in diameter and an inch thick, is tossed into the water, he will have an erection, with his penis lift it off the bottom and tow it around the tank."

Heroism

I don't have many heroes. Thoreau I revere for his love of truth and of beauty; Coleridge I think the greater for all his shortcomings. But I do have a passionate belief that heroes must be courageous. And I do not call shooting three men who pose no threat to you courageous. The assassins aboard the USS Bainbridge were not heroes; they were technicians. Their performance was not daring; it was as routine as a city worker emptying a garbage can. Only a nation obsessed with carnage and starved for military success could celebrate Easter by cheering the deaths of three thieves.

The Alexandria Quartet

I read Durrell's collection when I was in my mid-twenties and was ravished. Today I am less naive, less satisfied by the lazy repetitions, the obsessive obsessing. Still, the achievement, the singularly narcissistic—in its way, far more narcissistic than the unreadable diaries of Nin—quartet, with its mirrors, its scrapbook approach to novelizing, is impossible to dismiss. It is one of the last great acts of Orientalism.

Recognition

It's like seeing sky after years in a closet. Suddenly it's there, and you know it's sky, and it can't be anything else but sky, and there is absolutely nothing better. That's what it means to experience a work of art made by hands born to the task. Often the finished product is far from perfect: so it is with the movie I watched tonight, after quitting a piece of hack work with not a convincing moment in it. It makes little sense to say that someone was born to make movies: it's like saying a cat was born to curl up on my lap. But certain sensibilities do find their finest expression, today, in making people move around and make sounds in front of a camera and some lights and a team of people holding their breath until the scene is over. Tavernier is a recent discovery of mine, and Coup de torchon is a far better work than Ça commence aujourd'hui, which is often preachy and relies too much on cute kids and extreme situations, but it is also wonderful, real, impassioned, hopeful, sad. Still, I felt a disappointment every time the immaculately beautiful Maria Pitarresi appeared: she belonged on a billboard advertising lipstick, and making her a sculptor was another false note. Her looks clashed painfully with the utterly convincing homeliness of the schoolteachers and the slatternly mothers of the kindergarteners. One longed for her scenes to end, so that we might see the scarred and cloud-smeared sky again.

With

Things I have:

lamps
books in foreign tongues
a Tibetan coat
an automobile
100 bottles of wine
preserved lemons
cross-country skis
two bicycles
pens
50 cookbooks
a diploma
deer antler
a vacuum cleaner
2 cleavers bought in Taipei in 1986
spices
teas
photocopied Qing military examination records
lots of records and compact discs
a MiniDisc recorder
dozens of videotapes and DVDs
a sleeping bag
5 pillows
dog toys
the lock from Fred's storage unit in southern California
pictures of Eloise and Lucy and Itzhak
nice cotton shirts
a Brioni suit
other suits
bow ties
a garden hose

Without

Things I do not have:

a cellular telephone
a Blackberry
an iPod
a Wii
a laptop
a big TV
a cable connection
a dog
a baby
debt
a digital camera
a garage
a washing machine
a dishwasher
hired help
self-control
trackmarks
a tattoo
a piercing
discursive flexibility
a table saw
a Ph.D.
Harry Potter books
a couch
a pocket knife
a pirate costume
facial hair
a brother
a leather jacket
a yoga mat
cocktail glasses
a firearm
issues

Baboon vocalizations

Thanks to a kind communication from Dorothy Cheney, one of the authors of the magisterial and utterly fascinating Baboon Metaphysics, I've been listening to a variety of calls made by male and female baboons.

Males use forceful and deep vocalizations, called "wahoos," to assert dominance: rather than attack each other, two males in conflict launch into wahoo contests. The animal who can produce sustained, resonant calls while leaping about is fitter, and this display settles differences without the need for high-risk fights.

Here is a wahoo or two, both from Cheney's research section of the University of Pennsylvania website.

(The second compares a high-ranking male's call with that of a low-ranking male.)

Cheney and Robert Seyfarth's long-term study is a remarkable example of profoundly humane science. No animals are intentionally harmed: the scholars and their assistants observe baboons in the wild, relying on stool samples, for instance, to analyze stress levels in individuals.

Poem

By a Roadside

Waking from drear dreams, a dozen robins
In a bare tree.

To count them all, without wanton addition,
Address their silhouettes.

Their shivers and upruffled shoulders
Speak of spring.

An engine throbs past, robbing them
Of something spoken.

A scrub jay peers through lead leaves
Cocking his mutter.

Half a dozen now, no wetter, no colder,
Waiting for an ending.

Allen Ginsberg writing about fucking boys

All Ye Brave Boys

Come all you young men that proudly display
Your torsos to the sun on upper Broadway
Come sweet hearties so mighty with girls
So lithe and naked to kiss their gold curls
Come beautiful boys with breasts bright gold
Lie down with me in bed ere ye grow old,
Take down your blue jeans, we'll have some raw fun
Lie down on your bellies I'll fuck your soft bun.

And so on for three more stanzas full of "studs," "sturdy cocks," "tight assed," "come in your butt" et cetera. He really did produce a lot of tosh, that Ginsberg. And there's no excuse in his remark that he wrote this at 4 a.m. It's simply not a civilized time to be writing a poem.

Twenty-two years later he wrote

I am the King of the Universe
I am the Messiah with a new dispensation
Excuse me I stepped on a nail.

This is possibly even worse. He's like a photographer who elaborately printed and framed every single out-of-focus snapshot he ever took.

Destroy your cell phone

Evidence is increasing that cellular telephones are a direct line to Satan. (More fun if you start the two clips at the same time.)

Saint Valentine's Day entry

For as long as he could remember, Sam had accompanied every meal worthy of the name with a small salad of julienned baked tofu and cilantro dressed with lime juice, sesame oil, soy sauce, salt and black pepper. Today is no exception.

Last night's dream: a love affair with a soft blond woman whose front yard needed work and afterward was bare dirt and tree trunks. She knew her neighbors. I kissed her by drawing her lips into my mouth and holding them there. When I went inside she and Bono were watching her music video, which was a single close-up black and white shot of her hair being blown about. I said something about her fans.

John Updike was a fussy writer, but unlike so many of his epigones, he was able to write the occasional sentence that did not have the padding of artistic adjectives. Memories of the Ford Administration.

Is there an English word that does not rhyme with "pish"?

What Nat and I cooked

(1) Cucumber onion salad
(2) Watercress sesame salad
(3) Taro watercress soup
(4) Braised shiitakes with Shaoxing wine
(5) Lotus root stew with tomato and fennel
(6) Noodles with bean paste and shiitake sauce

We drank California wines with dinner, after Nat and I swilled a Nigl grüner veltliner as we cooked.

恭喜發財

一帆風順， 二龍騰飛，三羊開泰， 四季平安， 五福臨門， 六六大順， 七星高 照，八方來財， 九九同心， 十全十美，百事亨通， 千事吉祥，萬事如意

fuggery, aka "In the great bowling alley of your mind, I am your pinboy"

Last year I bought a biography of Allen Ginsberg and a big, handsome collection of his poems. The poetry is magnificent, funny, wild, and it goes on and on. Reading about AG, I saw he was a gentle apostle of love and pot, a tamer of Hells Angels, traveler, experimenter. One has to love him.

Two days ago, home from work a bit early, I walked over to Vinyl Planet and bought some videotapes (The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, 9 1/2 Weeks, Who Am I?) and some records (Bob Dorough, Enrico Rava, X). I got an album by The Fugs, and Allen Ginsberg, who used to open every poetry reading by chanting "Hare Krishna," does just that on this marvelous Fugs record. (It also has a picture of a naked AG inside.)

I think The Fugs are good.

Edges

I am drawn to the places where built meets natural. Gardens, the surfaces of buildings, the tidal zone under bayside houses. Such places are forever incomplete: I take on the role of finishing. Sometimes gardens work different degrees of built into a web. The statues of Cervantes, Emmet, Verdi and Key, no matter how rusticated their plinths, impress me as more fashioned even than the pollarded London plane trees on the music concourse.

New year's resolutions

During 2009 I hope to write an opera entitled "The Marbles," write a screenplay entitled "The Lynx," find a new job, read "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," Boswell's journals and as much as I can stand of "Capital," see spring blossoms in Point Reyes and Ring Mountain, listen most attentively to Purcell and Haydn, and look the world in the face.

A certain angle

I want to present a new ethics that responds to biological and cultural drives. I don't believe that an appeal to nature justifies human behavior. We stand outside nature, though our shadows are sucked into it. Culture with a history that stands outside of our genes, culture that involves planning and reflecting, is possible only when we forget much of our animal being. Animals are not peaceful. Animals are not wise. Animals do not settle for a reasonable amount. Animals simply are: there is no point assigning emotional descriptors to them.

I also want to appeal to scholars to remember that every document is produced for a different audience and with a different attitude toward that document. People who study books and words too often forget that it is extremely difficult to compare a book Virginia Woolf wrote when she was young to one she wrote when she was no longer young: not only had Woolf changed, her attitude toward what she was writing and who was reading it changed. This must be considered at every turn.

Not I

Ballast installation

Click on subject heading.

The sheet looks marvelously shiny in the rain.

When I saw it yesterday, the surface details were beautiful, especially along the edges on the eastern sheet.

doorkijkje

I flirt with life.

Purchase

I buy things because I like making things happen. Money moves things and people around.

Film

A few of my favorite places

I live in a town of sixteen thousand people, mostly Euro-white and Latino, with a few visas granted to those who run and staff the handful of mediocre Chinese restaurants. People drive pickups or Priuses. We're on the border between redneck and California liberal.

Years from now I'll ennoble the railroad tracks, the empty lot with oaks and fearful housecats, the footbridge over the river. For now, though, my topophiliac thoughts drift to a bay, a financial zone, a Hyde Park playground viewed from a garage roof.

There are places that lift my spirits. Places are more reliable than people because it takes more to kill them, they're always there when you need them, they never say mean things. And there's a marvelous blend of the predictable and the chance: you know that if you walk along Battery between three and four the light will enchant, the architectural sculptures will cast handsome shadows, the flags atop the Embarcadero and a few other tall towers will be backlit; but you don't know which way the breezes will twitch, who will pass you in alligator boots, what unexpected Chinatown scent will slap you.

115 million annually

The following is a quotation from a report announced in August:

The Dr Hadwen Trust and the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection have collaborated on a major new initiative to produce the first ever statistical analysis of global animal research numbers, the results of which have been published in peer-reviewed journal ATLA1.

Our research reveals that an estimated 115 million animals are used in laboratory experiments around the world each year. However even this massive figure could be an underestimate due to the way figures are compiled.

Despite widespread public and political interest in animal research worldwide, our research reveals that a mere 21% of countries (37 out of 179 countries) actually collect data on their national animal experiments. For the rest, no official record is kept of the animals used in their laboratories or the suffering that they might have endured.

Rules

1. No parent shall ever call a child a disappointment or indicate any disappointment that is not sympathetic.

2. Strangers in need shall be assisted.

3. Efforts shall be made to avoid boring others.

4. Except in cases of immediate self-defense, nonhuman animals shall not be killed or otherwise harmed.

5. Weapons shall be destroyed.

6. Inheritance shall be abolished and gifts shall be carefully scrutinized.

7. A minister of language shall identify tiresome turns of phrase.

8. Humans who whine shall be beaten.

9. Water and petroleum shall be heavily taxed.

10. Sunsets shall be admired.

Picture of me in my Hallowe'en costume

the Truths

At every moment, in every place, a variety of incompatible truths circulate. Nowadays we've got the biological truth, the Catholic truth, the born again truth, the New Age truths, and the postmodernist nontruths. And many, many others. You can't really subscribe to more than two or three without becoming an ontological mess. I happen to be partial to mainstream, rational, academic truths. I believe in that which can be demonstrated by means of the conventional sciences and epistemologies. If the size of the universe, the speed of light, the limits of human machinations, the breadth of my knowledge can't make room for an idea, I reject it mercilessly. Hence my disdain for God, UFOs, ghosts, many conspiracies, terroir, and one thousand other jolly illusions. But I suspect that my predilection for the demonstrable is ultimately little more than class bias. When I endorse checking New Age truths against academic truths, I am baffled when I try to explain the ultimate benefit of subscribing to my truth. What is the value of finding out what an Oxonian scholar or a Nobel winner said if one is delighted by the assertions of a guy with a website? Even if I could convince every man, woman, and child who had ever stepped into the Salt Lake LDS Temple that Joseph Smith was an arrant knave, what would be the point? How would it benefit them?

Dumb Democrats

I am amused every few years by the partisan frenzy that sweeps over my otherwise politically apathetic friends. All of a sudden the Republican candidates are execrable, horrifying, satanic. No appreciation at all of how close the two big parties are, and how unlikely either of them is to undo any of the fundamental injustices and inequalities that make America great. So this year's target has been Sarah Palin. She makes even a dumbshit like Biden look good. But he has not ceased to make unfathomably asinine statements.

Juggling

Poem

She wakes me nightly at five, without fail,
Leaving the rumpled bed, drawing me in her
Trail to living room colloquy, unbelieving
Glances, the sad suspicion she might prefer
Pale moonlight to my shadowy dances.

Things I love

light on water
dancing
Yunnan tea
Taiwanese cities
cheeses of many lands
Life's Rich Pageant
running along a night beach with a dog
one dead dog & one dead cat
the word "euphuistic"

Three cheers for P. Sabin Willett & Ricardo M. Urbina

Federal District Court judge Urbina has demanded that seventeen prisoners at Guantanamo Bay be released. These Chinese Muslims, who belong to the Uyghur minority group, have been the subject of protracted legal conflicts.

Their attorney, in an article published in 2005, wrote more generally about the prisoners in Cuba:

The Vice President says they men are Al Qaeda fighters. What does the military say? Eight percent are al Qaeda fighters. Ninety two percent are not. The Vice President says these men were picked up on the battlefield. The military data show that five percent were picked up on the battlefield. How did we get the others? US forces distributed leaflets. One says, in Pashto:

Get wealth and power beyond your dreams . . .
You can receive millions of dollars helping the anti-Taliban forces catch al-Qaida and Taliban murderers. This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life. Pay for livestock and doctors and school books and housing for all your people.
Eighty-six percent were sold to us by people who got the leaflets.

Vice President Cheney says they committed hostile acts against Americans or their allies. What do the data show? Fifty-five percent of the detainees committed no hostile act against the US or its allies or any one else. By the way, wearing a Casio watch is a "hostile act." So is fleeing from US bombing.

On Casio watches.

Appaloosa

Though after The Hours I was pretty sure that I'd endured enough Ed Harris for a lifetime, I walked to the movie theater last night for the nine forty-five show of Appaloosa. The structure of the movie is fairly conventional; what makes it interesting is the characters. Harris plays a steely fellow who gets all flustered and giggly when he meets an attractive woman. The woman, a total slut, doesn't deserve him, but who else would shack up with a guy whose profession places a bullseye in the middle of his chest?
The images are beautiful, and the use of triangular compositions beautifully complements the movie's propulsive trinitarian dynamic.
Harris is excellent; Mortensen is fine, in spite of quite absurd facial hair; Zellweger is atrocious, as always; Irons is good; Spall is out of place (like Cleese in Silverado, a movie I quite like).
NB: This movie fails the Bechdel test.

Can coincidences be meaningful?

In a much read essay written in 1952, the Swiss psychotherapist Carl Gustav Jung outlined his thinking about the significance of chance events. He noted a series of anecdotal coincidences, then abruptly moved to refer to research on paranormal powers. I would move in a different direction.

What is a coincidence? It is the observed juxtaposition of apparently related events. In the examples cited by Jung, and by others fond of dwelling on such matters, coincidences are observed by one individual. There is little chance to verify the coincidences as they occur only in the mind: very few can be proven through written records. And the coincidence involves not a repetition, but a variation: an event is seen mirrored, slightly changed, in a different event.

These coincidences are not everyday things and they never appear to have any special significance. In other words, coincidences are no more likely to take place in the context of important events than in the context of trivial events; in the examples given by Jung, any given element of a coincidence is in itself unremarkable.

It is the observation of them that renders them remarkable. Once the brain notes a coincidence, it clings to it and interrogates the world for other, related events, which duly occur.

The human brain makes connections; that is its task. Should we be surprised that among the countless insignificant details of urban life the brain notes intersections and juxtapositions? Of course not: without such observations, we would be lost. But the question that needs to be asked, which Jung never asked, is whether the coincidences he identified are statistically significant. If we number every single datum, then pluck out those that our observant minds have called coincidences, do they occur with a frequency that suggests an unseen hand at work?

Only by answering that scientific question can the rational observer begin to understand the significance of coincidence.

What is so remarkable about coincidences, and what Jung utterly failed to appreciate, is that they attest to the extraordinary tenacity not of events, but of the human brain and its often perverse tendency to find connections.

Vote yes on proposition 2

A quiz that suggests, quite absurdly, that I'm pretty manly

I got 1100/1500.

Proofs that people suck

-war
-men referring to their profession as "masseuse"
-the decline in the population of many American birds
-Damien Hirst

The Star Ferry on film

Unless I am mistaken, the Star Ferry is the best thing in the world. Even if you've never been to Hong Kong, you can get a sense of the Star Ferry by watching Emmanuel Carrère's La moustache, an otherwise silly movie.

Israel arms the dictator

Now Israel is providing weapons to one of the nastier regimes in Central Asia.

9:21

There is a moment each morning when the sun bathes me. Reflections come off of otherwise innocuous surfaces. Each tiny facet on the backs of my parchment hands is superbly visible. Amid calamities, glory.

postscript

I feel trapped within my own history.

What is it?

Again and again, the feeling that life is something else. The feeling that in this handsome town, working with decent people, enjoying good health, loved by my family and adored by my dear nieces, I am barely alive.

Sitting in this room, looking out on an avenue, the feeling that every driver, cyclist, pedestrian is moving between groups to whom that individual is essential, while I sit here, alone, incapable of the most everyday utterance. When I hear myself speak, the sounds my words make pain me. What is lacking is any sense of being natural, comfortable in my skin.

A cat is my companion. I speak to her. I ask whether she is okay (a question I'd barely know if it were not for Won Sun), what she's been up to (sleeping, mostly), whether she remembers blackcat (another way of asking whether she'll remember me after I'm gone).

I try to make beautiful things, a daunting task. I plant flowers, they grow, they fade. I see the sky: it is often beautiful: I try to remember it, as if that will make a new beautiful object. I look at projects abandoned over the years and sigh.

What is it I'm hoping for?

Music

What I'm enjoying nowadays:
The Polyphonic Spree "The Fragile Army"
Massive Attack "Mezzanine"
an old recording on Vox of Brendel playing Beethoven variations
Haydn sonatas by Brendel (these make it impossible to listen to the Ax recordings I just got)
Fleet Foxes
Yves Montand: a collection of 100 songs, really fun

Oath

I hereby swear to boycott all movies that involve
-hitmen
-heists
-ghosts
-redemption
-dysfunctional families
-gambling
-Dustin Hoffman*
-CGI

*Understood as a shorthand for a long list that includes Robin Williams, Tilda Swinton, Oliver Platt, Steve Martin, Halle Berry, Roberto Benigni, Tom Cruise, Renee Zellweger, Nicholas Cage, Daniel Day-Lewis, and countless children.

He died.

What he liked best was being petted, I mean my magisterial scratching and kneading of his ribs, stomach, backbone, hips—above all, the scraping I gave, almost unwillingly, to the zone where his chin met his teeth. His trot, quite stiff for one so young, always amused me. His adoptive mother, a cool calico, tolerated his boyish displays of aggression; they were always halfhearted. Likewise, when I had him on his back and he decided I'd gone a bit too far with my tummy work or rib plucking, he'd make a play for my hand and arm with his forelimbs, kicking at me with aftlimbs like a kangaroo, but always with his claws sheathed.

I miss him.

He liked to crouch at the edge of the gravel pit and ogle the birded branches of the overhanging tree. As the towhees and mockingbirds hopped from nest to branch, he'd helplessly mew. Did he ever kill one? I don't know. The only victim I saw him with was a Polyphylla decemlineata, and that awkward stridulating beetle I quickly separated from its tormentor. He often meowed for no apparent reason; on that occasion he meekly and mutely received my scolding.

I don't know what killed him, but that morning he was out of sorts, later that day he vomited, and then he was simply gone.

He was black, with a slender white V on his breast and a similar pattern near his groin. When his mouth was shut, the tips of his upper canines sometimes protruded just slightly beyond his lips, so I fondly addressed him as Blacula.

His adoptive mother seems cool as ever since his disappearance on August 4. But she does warble an odd meow I never before heard from her.

Omer Fast, "CNN"

My movies

I have borrowed a lot of movies from the library. The pile on my floor is
ABC Africa, directed by Abbas Kiarostami (2001)
Life and Nothing But, directed by Bertrand Tavernier (1989)
Marius, written by Marcel Pagnol (1931)
Fanny, written by Marcel Pagnol (1932)
César, written by Marcel Pagnol (1936)
Muriel, directed by Alain Resnais (1963)
Hiroshima mon amour, directed by Alain Resnais (1959)
Shadow of a Doubt, directed by Alfred Hitchcock (1942)
The Island, directed by a hack (2005)
La belle noiseuse, directed by Jacques Rivette (1990)
Le professionnel, directed by Georges Lautner (1981)
La guerre est finie, directed by Alain Resnais (1966)
Kings & Queens, directed by Arnaud Desplechin (2004)
The Wind Will Carry Us, directed by Abbas Kiarostami (1999)
Deserted Station, directed by Alireza Raisian (2002)
Crimson Gold, written by Abbas Kiarostami (2003)
Clean, directed by Olivier Assayas (2004)

Borrowing from Gavin

An article on the front page of today's Financial Times reported that twenty-five thousand people showed up at Tian An Men to witness the arrival of the Olympic torch at the south entrance to the Forbidden City, only to realize, as the hours crept by, that the authorities had smuggled the torch past them, into the imperial compound, where a small and carefully vetted audience applauded. That's really mean.

A friend replies, number 17

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?

Loneliness, isolation and/or alienation: as often experienced when living in surburbia.

Where would you like to live?

San Fran, Beijing, Tokyo.

What is your idea of earthly happiness?

Too difficult of a question to answer. Many things make me happy. All of them sound corny, and the list is always growing.

To what faults do you feel most indulgent?

The deadly sins of greed and gluttony.

Who are your favorite heroes of fiction?

The Tibetan Monk in Journey to the West: patient to a fault, motivated by good intentions, courageous, all while being entirely spiritual.

Who are your favorite characters in history?

Hmm, I'd like to rewrite this question, if I might: Who is my least favorite character in history?
E.L. Bernays--the father of public relations, a dastardly man who founded an industry based on manipulation and dark tactics of persuasion.

Who are your favorite heroines in real life?

Frida Kahlo: amazing artist, lived without apologizing.

Who are your favorite heroines of fiction?

Hmmm, drawing a blank here. Could that be because the canon is based on a patriarchal system??? (wink)

Your favorite painter?

I could answer Frida Kahlo, but that would be too easy, wouldn't it? Let's say, instead, John Singer Sargent, who had an uncanny talent for combining realism with a touch of impressionism.

Your favorite musician?

Oh, gosh, I don't know. There's too many to choose from. Ummm, I can't do it!

The quality you most admire in a man?

The combination of two qualities: uninhibitedness and kindness.

The quality you most admire in a woman?

Same--it's genderless.

Your favorite virtue?

Honesty (from the perspective of Kant). Difficult in practice, interesting in theory.

Your favorite occupation?

Hmmm, perplexing question. My favorite as in, favorite thing I've done in my life, or the one that I might not have ever done but has captured my imagination somehow? I'll answer the latter: farmer.

Who would you have liked to be?

Foucault.

A friend replies, number 16

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?

If someone believed that I had done something bad and I couldn't clear my name.

Where would you like to live?

Anywhere Mandarin speaking. Or Hong Kong.

What is your idea of earthly happiness?

Reading.

To what faults do you feel most indulgent?

Lying to yourself about the small things. I totally understand. It's still stupid, but I understand.

Who are your favorite heroes of fiction?

The un-sung hero. The best example of which is Sydney Carton. "It is a far far better thing I do now than I have ever done, a far far better rest I go to than I have ever known..."

Who are your favorite characters in history?

Normal people. If a person is still remembered, they probably did something spectacularly bad. Or if they are academics, I dislike the fact that we just remember one name when it takes an entire entourage (with many females) and loads of money to support someone doing research. A named person? Not interested.

Who are your favorite heroines in real life?

My female friends.

Who are your favorite heroines of fiction?

Sadly, there are not many to choose from. Heroines are a pretty sad lot and I can't really identify with them, for the most part. All of them are pretty or want to be pretty, and all of them are far too aware of their sex to be anything but limited by it. I'm with Virginia Woolf; the female sex will be nothing so long as she is a heroine first and a hero second.

Your favorite painter?

I have a favourite painting - The Necklace by William McGregor Paxton. No favourite painter.



Your favorite musician?

Impossible. More like an era - "Alternative" music from the mid-80s. The Bryan Eno, Bobby & Cynthia, Japan, XTC kind of stuff.

The quality you most admire in a man?

An interest in others besides himself.

The quality you most admire in a woman?

A strong ego.

Your favorite virtue?

Kindness.

Your favorite occupation?

I don't understand the question. No job is good in itself, it depends on the context. The 'best' job can be the worst if you are not cut out for it.

Who would you have liked to be?

An astronaut, if only it were possible.

A friend replies, number 15

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?

Lost of anyone you love.

Where would you like to live?

Heaven but I do not know where it is.

What is your idea of earthly happiness?

Have fun with friends and your families.

To what faults do you feel most indulgent?

Food. (I forget the word begin with a g.)

Who are your favorite heroes of fiction?

I cannot think of any because I forget all I have read.

Who are your favorite characters in history?

Sima Qian because he was a castrated historian.

Who are your favorite heroines in real life?

My wife because I am so afraid of her.

Who are your favorite heroines of fiction?

Probably I should read some pornographic fictions.

Your favorite painter?

林布蘭. but I do not know painting/

Your favorite musician?

I cannot remember anyone because I do not listen that much and because I cannot remember.

The quality you most admire in a man?

Someone like Sima Qian who was dare to complain and was castrated

The quality you most admire in a woman?

I cannot think of any.

Your favorite virtue?

[No answer given.]

Your favorite occupation?

My occupation now.

Who would you have liked to be?

A historian.

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is not all that

Declaring its moody, arthouse intentions from the first out-of-focus shot, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance has little to say. It piles grotesque acts of violence up until everyone's dead, then fades to black. And has it been noted that some of the movie's salient plot elements were lifted from Chungking Express? A kidnapping in which the child does not know she's been kidnapped; a protagonist who uses baseball to vent frustration. And Bae Doona, the actress who plays the anarchist girlfriend, is channeling Wong Faye throughout.

Going

Sotheby's is having lots of auctions. Some involve wine, others involve paintings. Here is a painting by Andy Warhol.

It's not very good. But this Redon is gorgeous.

And the page below, from a late fourteenth-century Latin book of hours, shows at the bottom a figure known as a "drollery creature," or what I'd have called a chimera.

And a gouache by Hans Bol, one of my favorite painters.

A tribute

Laurie, Adrian Belew, David Van Tiegham

Guns

The question is not whether the second amendment to the Constitution limits the ownership of firearms to certain groups—clearly it does not. The question is what limits may be placed on the ownership of guns by local and national laws. And if the limits necessary for the preservation of certain unalienable rights infringe on the second amendment, then the time has come for a twenty-eighth amendment.

The real crime

Okay, so some good liberal lawyers were passed over by the DoJ in favor of some not-so-good ones with conservative credentials, big deal. The real tragedy is the use of the word "deselect" throughout the report.

What does "deselect" mean? It means "reject." If ever there were a case for insisting on etic terms, this is it.

Omygawd

Omygawd omygawd omygawd.

REASON TO LIVE!

Feeling at ease

It takes me a while to get used to people. My social skills are possibly below average: I don't chat much with strangers, despite a sort of general feeling that I ought to. And quite often I have no idea what to say to people I've known for years.

Part of the problem is that for a long time I've known almost nothing about sports, television, video games, the cost of living, health care, politics, and many other things that pass for acceptable conversation topics. I abhor mindless chatter--unless it's very funny. And I'm no good at giving easy answers.

Sometimes I'm a bit scared that I'll end up utterly alone.

Boring bug

Over a year ago, I planted lantana and salvia along Pepper School Alley. They thrive with no water at all, in lots of sun. This morning, on my rounds, I noticed once again a big black winged insect, a bumblebee without the fuzz. When I stopped to observe, I saw that the nectar-lover had settled close to the base of a salvia flower's long scarlet pitcher. It hunkered down on that solid support, head toward the juncture of stem and blossom, and as I watched it produced a tube from its oral cavity, which slipped sharply through the flower tube to get right to the bottom of the nectar cup. Neat. The bee has outfoxed the angiosperm DNA, which created flowers to lure pollinators. The bee in question, if it's a bee, never comes close to the pollen.

Note that another naturalist noticed this behavior some time ago.

Take that, Giorgio Agamben!

“The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times."

But since their votes are utterly predictable from the outset, I'm puzzled as to why Supreme Court justices even show up to hear cases. They could learn a lesson from California State Assemblyman Kevin de León.

Brad Mehldau Trio, Herbst Theatre, San Francisco, 6 June 2008

A phenomenal concert.
-No Moon at All (Redd Evans & David Mann)
-Airegin (Sonny Rollins)
-I Concentrate on You (Cole Porter)
-untitled Mehldau original
-Wyatt's Eulogy for George Hanson (Mehldau)
-Aquelas Coisas Todas (Toninho Horta)
-Holland (Sufjan Stevens)
-a Monk tune

Here's what another blogger wrote about going to the concert and speaking to Mehldau afterward.

I am a very lazy person

This morning I woke early and walked from my house in Petaluma to the river. That's all of four blocks, though I took a sidelong approach and so walked a bit further. In the fields north of the Washington Street bridge (which is hung with netting), I saw tall slender plants with blue radial flowers and coyote bush, as well as much forgotten asphalt and concrete and plastic. A man by the river's edge acknowledged me. I walked a bit further upstream, so that I might watch birds and bugs without disturbing him or being disturbed. Cliff swallows swooped and darted up along metal siding that rises from the water: it makes a convenient anchor for their nests. Paddling up and past me went a quartet of mallard drakes; then a sextet of mallard hens flew by. In the cloudy brown and green water eight feet below me, I caught at intervals that magical flash of silver that speaks of fish. Although I could make out the sounds of automobiles from the freeway less than a mile away and from Washington Street, mostly I heard the swallows, singing sparrows, the rustle of plants in a gentle breeze.

So much of this sort of beauty can be had just a short walk from our homes. And yet I am so disastrously lazy that I walk along the river no more than once a season.

On my way past the converted warehouses and feed facilities that show their asses to the river, I watched a great egret fly over and, minutes later, a black-crowned night heron. They have the most marvelous wings.

Why I hate New Age thinking

Here is a typical example of the sort of drivel spouted by those who embrace New Age philosophy:

S. and T. collaborate to create art which inspires, calms, and nourishes. They come together for “art retreats” to create new images and paintings. They are both influenced by spare, clean Japanese design and are inspired by artists like Hiroshige, Hokusai, David Lance Goines, and Mucha. The collaboration of these two artists brings out their best work. They continue to work together to bring affordable art to everyone. They are truly following their passion and wish that for all beings.

I think that S. and T. can rest assured that tapeworms and coelacanths are "following their passion."

I also hate stupid Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Daoists and atheists, but their epistemologies are not nearly as compromised as New Age thinking, which is utter drivel, root and branch. It's based on intuition, hence preposterous. It makes room for a range of competing beliefs, so it's inconsistent and incapable of rendering evaluations. And it gives rise to disastrous fashion choices.

Funny

But maybe not as funny as I think.

This asshole

At 0:33.