China Earthquake

I heard from one of my online friends yesterday who lives in Chengdu, China, which is prime earthquake territory. Here’s part of what he had to say:

“…we spent the night sleeping in an open space at a nearby university campus, braving the flat again after torrential rain forced us indoors! i’m sure we may end up there again tonight. it all feels a bit like something out of War of the Worlds, or Cloverfield, which we just watched a few days ago. my heart goes out to those caught in the epicentre though, and i pray that things don’t get worse over the following days. anyway, time to get back outside. i really, really shouldn’t be indoors. good luck to anyone else stuck in this.”

Pay him a visit to find out more. Hope things get better soon.

Word of the year….

…is locavore. I first encountered the word when reading an essay by Barbara Kingsolver, in the March/April issue of Orion Magazine:

“In many social circles it’s ordinary for hosts to accommodate vegetarian guests, even if they’re carnivores themselves. Maybe the world would likewise become more hospitable to diners who are queasy about fuel-guzzling foods, if that preference had a name. Petrolophobes? Seasonaltarians? Lately I’ve begun seeing the term “locavores,”and I like it: both scientifically and socially descriptive, with just the right hint of livin’ la vida loca.”

Great word - useful and descriptive.

Special yogurt

What a great town San Francisco is.  At some point, however, I seem to have picked up an especially persistent strain of food poisoning that won’t quite leave - bad sushi perhaps?  I’m walking along, minding my own business, and it’s as if the bottom has dropped out of the elevator for a minute.  And the bloating!  I think I might need some of that special yogurt that women eat.  But enough about me and my health issues.

The Traverse City  Film Festival is in full swing, and we have been seeing some good movies.  Only one exceptionally good movie, however, and that is Tuya’s Wedding, the only truly cinematic offering so far.  It’s beautifully done.  More later, perhaps.  Also, went to see the latest Bourne movie last night.  It was ok.  I think Bourne is now a dead horse.  There are very clear hints at the end that there will be a “Son of Bourne Reciprocity”, or something, but that would not be wise.

Summer morbidity

I was getting my hair cut yesterday and the girl who was cutting my hair happened to mention something about summer being “almost over”.  Almost over?  It’s only halfway over!  Why this morbidity?  And she’s not alone.  So many people get to this part of July and just give up.  Why?  What’s at work here?  Plenty of good times left!  True, the dew is on the grass and the sun takes his sweet time rising, but we’re not done yet!

I’ve always had this theory that summer is a metaphor for life.  We have such great plans.  We look forward to the good times.  The good times come and then they go. We see them slip away.  Damn, I had such great plans!  All those books I was going to read, all those lazy days, all the “livin’ is easy” lifestyle.  But it runs right through our fingers like beach sand and we are left knowing we blew it again.  There goes summer.  Better luck next time.

Gatsby tried to correct things by swimming in his pool for the first (and last) time of the summer.  That didn’t work out too well.  Blood in the water.  These morbid rituals are guaranteed to reinforce a sense of time passing.  I can’t make summer come back, for example, by forcing my daughter to play croquet before she leaves, like we used to do. It just didn’t happen that way.  I cut the grass today, but not before pulling out the croquet wickets and hoops which have been in place all summer. This summer we didn’t play once - not even once.  That’s the way that worked out, is all.

When I finished cutting the grass I stored the croquet set in the garage.  She will be leaving tomorrow, and I can’t bear to look at it again.  Time passes, and what do we have to show for it?

Galbraith

“Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everybody gets busy on the proof.”
–John K. Galbraith

I picked up this quote from riggsveda recently and have been using it all the time.   Seems to just about sum up the nonsense coming from the global warming deniers, especially this virulent strain of hypocrites over at the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance, a really nasty group of white guys who plaster pictures of darker folk all over their site and pretend to care about them. 

Kultur

High culture, low culture - it’s all one in America. Our sense of culture can be roughly subsumed into the category of pop culture, where Madonna, Michael Jackson and Tom Cruise are about as close as we get to a unifying notion of what is culturally important. Even new films, such as “The DaVinci Code,” are treated with the kind of serious coverage which should be reserved for something worthwhile. The church gets involved, and the church gets political. Such is the state of affairs nowadays. Church, politics, culture - it becomes impossible to separate them out.

In a review of a new book, “The Seduction of Culture in German History”, by Wolf Lepenies, Andreas Huyssen outlines how German notions of “Kultur” became the de facto unifying principle for a nation otherwise lacking in a central state organization (The Nation, May 29). Although the influence of American rock and roll, pop, jazz, and Hollywood movies have made huge inroads into the German concept of Kultur as a unifying force, it is still possible at least to have a working understanding of the difference between nonsense and serious cultural issues in Germany, and entirely possible to conduct science without catering to fringe religious beliefs. If “Kultur” is what unifies a country in the absence of real political organization, at least let it be the real thing, and not some low-brow melodrama which purports to be culture.

Ultimately, Lepenies sees this substitution of Kultur for politics as a real problem for Germans, and chronicles the results in his book. In America, where our consensus on what constitutes culture is weak at best, we have an even more serious problem: frivolous debate on “cultural” issues trumps serious debate on political issues. Huyssen finishes his review with this quote, which points up important political lessons for us:

“The intense focus on cultural issues like sex in the movies, evolution and creationism, even academic curriculums, distracts from the hollowing out of constitutional checks and balances, the dismantling of international law and domestic threats to civil rights. Even more ominous, the “war on terror” and the “march of democracy” have increasingly taken on shadings of a war of cultures. As German historian Heinrich von Treitschke argued more than a century ago, once war becomes war of cultures, there is no end to it.”

I am reminded here of one of Pynchon’s proverbs for paranoids: “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.” The political shell game that is being perpetrated on the American public is symptomatic of a process that has successfully substituted “culture” for politics.

Roger Angell, David Blaine, and the South Beach Diet

I heard Roger Angell interviewed on NPR this evening. He has a new book out, a memoir, excerpts of which I have been reading in the New Yorker over the last year or so. Roger Angell is 85, so he knows his days are numbered. He sounds, by the way, as if he is 35. Angell is responsible for some of the best baseball writing ever to be written. Along with Ernie Harwell, voice of the Tigers for 50 years, Angell exemplifies the nostalgic yearning for summer which baseball brings out in so many of us. Angell’s stepfather was the writer, E.B. White, who wrote (among other things) “Once More To the Lake”, a heart-rending piece about attempting to step back into time during a trip to the summer cabin resort of his youth.

Angell seems to have been close to E.B. White, and much of his memoir seems to feature stories which concern White. Angell is the consummate writer himself. What caught my attention in the interview was when he said that the memories which he brought up and wrote down - captured, as it were - were now trapped and inaccessible to his active memory. Like a lark’s tongue in aspic, the memories have been preserved, but also made inaccessible. Angell did not complain about this, but went on to emphasize the provisional nature of the “truth” of a story. Anecdotes are a vehicle for remembering family stories, but anecdotes are rigid. Likewise stories, once written down, become official, like anecdotes, but are none the more true for that. The memoir, then, for Angell (and I am working from my own memory of the interview here) is a highly subjective exercise. Moreover, in writing down the remembered stories as they come welling up and flickering past, the writer lays the memory to rest, which is sad for Angell, because the memory is now out of him and inaccessible to his imagination. In effect the writer has written the memory away.

As for those family stories which Angell mentions - they are a damn nuisance. They are handy little filing cabinets used by loved ones to pigeonhole and limit us. It becomes almost impossible to rise above them. And you know what Philip Larkin had to say about families.

David Blaine, the amazing illusionist who recently attempted to hold his breath for nine minutes, was being interviewed on Larry King last week, and I happened to see the tail end of the interview. In the interview, Blaine hinted broadly at his intention to try the stunt again, but with a twist, somewhere down the road. King asked Blaine to elaborate, or risk being called a tease, but Blaine refused to elaborate, claiming he “did not want to talk it away.” The phrase struck me, and Blaine repeated it later, insisting that his reticence had more to do with determination than showmanship. So, the talking would tend to dissipate the action. Like Roger Angell, Blaine was aware of the power of the word, written or spoken, to limit, to frame, to take away from the active imagination.

I am on the South Beach Diet. It’s the second time. There is something exhilarating about making the commitment. It’s been a week now and it is working, and damn it.. this time I will make it last. It’s actually very empowering to commit to change. I feel good about it. There, I have said it (and written it). I have taken the risk of “talking it away”. But no, this time the talk is different. It’s not empty, not hopeful, just a statement of intention, made public. No pressure, just intention, finally, after months of passive drifting. In this case the action and the words support each other, and it feels good to be moving toward clarity.

Leviathan

Excellent stuff over at Whiskey Bar - an extended and erudite essay on Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, and how Hobbes’ philosophy could really serve as the underpinings of the Bush administration .. the state as hungry and unrestrained beast, and all that, finishing off with a marvelous quote:

“The creature doesn’t know all the things it can do, but only because it hasn’t tried to do them yet. But it’s starting to figure this out, and it’s going to take more than an election and a few corruption probes to make it back down. Having entrusted their security and their liberties to the beast, Leviathan’s subjects will be lucky not to wind up like Jonah, lodged in its belly.”

Read it. And thanks to Riggsveda for the tip.

Sixty odd percent of the great unwashed masses think it’s “OK” for the government to be administering the full rectal probe into our lives. Mention 9.11 and you can justify anything. As an educator, this is when despair kicks in.

Where is Corrente?

One of my favourite, most literate, hard edged blogs is corrente. I logged on last night to read the outraged comments of some of my fellow patriots, only to find this picture. Immediately I started thinking the unthinkable. What about all those incendiary comments I have posted, comparing G.W. Bush to an evil moron? Is this the end of Rico?

As of this morning, still no Corrente.

Mayday

We saw an eagle being chased by three crows this morning. The eagle swooped low over the road and down to the left, low over the water, trying to shake the crows. Quite a sight, and I wonder if it’s an omen? Mighty eagle pestered by crows.

Today is May Day, and what is interesting is the way things will play out when all the illegal aliens stay home. Meat packing plants will be crippled. Construction in L.A. will come to a halt. And sooner or later this government will have to deal with the issue of illegal immigrants in the work force.

Bush and co. are not known for their “tolerance for ambiguity”, to use a phrase which has recently become synonomous with “intelligence”. The mass demonstrations are good, I think, because they will force our lawmakers to come terms with the situation, and stop being ostrich hypocrites. Or phony eagles.

Happy May Day!