Month: July 2008

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How does your garden grow?

It’s a snapshot in time. Here’s our garden today, poised to produce. There’s the clematis, finally blooming after all these years, and looking great next to the morning glory. Then the hostas, with a rouge poinsettia in full bloom. Go figure. Next is a shot of the young grapes. It should be a good year, though the peaches and the apples are not looking so good. Dill is in bloom now, the very essence of summer itself, and all things grandmotherly. The acorn squash is looking good, and will look better after tonight’s expected rain. The delicato squash are yet to form. Last but not least is a pot of basil near the door. I can assure you there is no severed head in that pot.

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Dirty Laundry

I just discovered a new blog, The Slacktivist (aka Fred Clark), who, amongst other things, is doing a great service to literate humanity by reading the ghastly Left Behind Series, “so you don’t have to.”   Also featured is a recent post on the resurgence of clotheslines, and the hassle some homeowners have in using them, due to unenlightened homeowners associations.

Clark mentions an organization called Project Laundry List, whose raison d’etre seems to be the promotion of “making air-drying laundry acceptable and desirable as a simple and effective way to save energy.”  I agree … though I can’t say it really grabs me as a cause.  Believe it or not, I had already read about this in Orion Magazine one evening – a sometimes exasperatingly sensible and, dare I say, boring publication… but not always.  In their July/August 2008 issue, p. 78, in a section called “Ear to the Ground” Alexander Lee, founder of Project Laundry List gets asked this question: “What’s the best thing you get to do?”  To which he replies, “Read postcards from people who love to hang out their clothes and find it to be their Zen work.”

Really?  What’s sadder, the fact that hanging out laundry needs to be promoted to Zen therapy status, or the fact that this is the best thing Lee gets to do?  Somebody’s missin’ out on some serious fun time.

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Obama in Deutschland

I owe this one to a guy over at Matthew Yglesias’ blog, at the Atlantic. Notice the resemblances, right down to the angle of the diagonals. Very Sprockets! Meanwhile, some nutter moron named Patrick Ruffini is complaining that Obama is using a foreign language (German) to communicate with foreigners (Germans) in a foreign country (Germany). What socialist nonsense will follow this act of depravity?! Pay him a visit and let him know what you think, why don’t you?

As Yglesias says, “Apparently it’s now unpatriotic to so much as concede that they speak foreign languages in foreign countries. Or maybe American politicians should only be allowed to speak in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and the UK.”

By the way, the last president of this country who spoke a foreign language with any degree of fluency was Thomas Jefferson. And we wonder how we’ve got ourselves so isolated and arrogant.

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It’s official, we’re stoooopid!

It’s starting to look like the truth is dawning on everyone about the shallowness of our information rich age: the wages of surfing is distractedness. In an article in the Sunday Times of London, Bryan Appleyard picks up on the thread, reinforcing the idea that we do indeed live in a depraved time.

” The opposite of attention is distraction, an unnatural condition and one that, as Meyer discovered in 1995, kills. Now he is convinced that chronic, long-term distraction is as dangerous as cigarette smoking. In particular, there is the great myth of multitasking. No human being, he says, can effectively write an e-mail and speak on the telephone. Both activities use language and the language channel in the brain can’t cope. Multitaskers fool themselves by rapidly switching attention and, as a result, their output deteriorates…

“I feel that much of my life is ebbing away in the tide of minute-by-minute distraction . . . I’m not certain what the effect on the world will be. But psychologists do say that intense close engagement with things does provide the most human satisfaction.” The psychologists are right. McKibben describes himself as “loving novelty” and yet “craving depth”, the contemporary predicament in a nutshell.”

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Obama HooHaa

So, what’s the big deal? Everybody over at AlterNet is getting all bent out of shape about the cover of the New Yorker, depicting the presidential candidate in a turban, fist-bumping his wife who has a machine gun slung over her shoulder, while the American flag burns in the fireplace. It’s brilliant, it’s humor, and surely it’s not hard to see that it’s meant to ridicule those who think narrow-mindedly about the Obamas.
Was it OK for Norman Lear to use Archie Bunker as a caricature of white racism? Sure. Did some people miss the point and see Archie as a working class hero? Yeah. But the point was to confront racial and ethnic stereotypes, and it worked. Surely we haven’t reached the stage where we can’t take the hatred and turn it back on itself this way? Come on! It’s the death of irony, and further proof that we are indeed surrounded by idiots … on both sides of the political spectrum.

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Rose

In an act of extraordinary generosity and kindness, a friend has seen fit to give me one of his paintings, a little number I fancied when I first saw it at one of his showings, and came very near to buying… but ultimately (due to peevish sloth and inertia) did not. So imagine my delight when Dan (I’ll call him) decides to up and give me the very painting, to thank me for trying my best to be professional in my job. I’ve had the painting for a few weeks now, and I am liking her more and more each week. I didn’t know where to put her at first, trying out various poses within the house, until finally realizing that she was crying out to be placed discretely, near a north facing light.

So I’ve taken “Rose,” as I’ve come to call her, away from the hustle and bustle of the quotidian life, and sequestered her under the stairs, in front of the bookcase. And there she stands, inviting me, as it were, to sit and have a “good read” ….. aaaannnd a good deal more, old chap: some privacy and peace in a hidden corner of the house, out of the stream of things.

Look at her. Look at the way she’s framed in the canvas, and then look at where she’s hung, and you’ll see it: she has left a spot open for you, and here it is. You can sit here if you want – it’ll take them at least a half an hour to find you. Come on, it’s ok.

Yep, that ol’ “negative space”, with its “negative entropy” – works for me every time. And with essentially only two colors at work, its Picasso-like classical simplicity and elegance make it fit right in. I love it!

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Are we dumber?

Well, I think so, and so, apparently, does fellow curmudgeon Mark Bauerlein, who has written a book entitled The Dumbest Generation:

“Increasingly disconnected from the “adult” world of tradition, culture, history, context and the ability to sit down for more than five minutes with a book, today’s digital generation is becoming insulated in its own stultifying cocoon of bad spelling, civic illiteracy and endless postings that hopelessly confuse triviality with transcendence. Two-thirds of U.S. undergraduates now score above average on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, up 30% since 1982, he reports.”

They’re depraved, man, these snot-nosed kids!!!

I seem to be reading a lot of this stuff lately. Over at the Atlantic, Nicholas Carr writes of a similar phenomenon in an article entitled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”:

“As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

Yep. I see it happening, every day. Skimming the surface, missing the point. Then there’s this, from Slate, entitled “Lazy Eyes: How We Read Online”:

“”You, my dear user, pluck the low-hanging fruit. When you arrive on a page, you don’t actually deign to read it. You scan. If you don’t see what you need, you’re gone.”

Yeah… I read the first part of it, but then lost interest. Gotta go!

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Mind games

“We all realize, now that the Internet is humming all around us, that in one way it’s a blessing and it helps us, and that in another way it enslaves us. To give you an example, I recently became aware that I was in a dream, and I realized that by the fact that the transition from one dream scene to the other looked exactly like the way I click from one website to another. So, working with all these computers and new technologies does something to the brain itself.”

Thomas Metzinger

How true it is that technologies shape our stance towards the world, even in our dreams! Tivo, for instance, has infected my brain, making me think momentarily that I can pause and rewind other events, like radio, like conversations. Maybe this could explain why kids nowadays (am I sounding like Andy Rooney yet?) always blurt out the word “Wait!” when what they really mean is “Could you say that again, please? I wasn’t really listening the first time. I was multitasking.”

“To a man with a hammer everything looks like a nail,” wrote Mark Twain. We are shaped by the tools we use. Edgar Lee Masters put it this way in Spoon River Anthology:

Griffy the Cooper

The cooper should know about tubs.
But I learned about life as well,
And you who loiter around these graves
Think you know life.
You think your eye sweeps about a wide horizon, perhaps,
In truth you are only looking around the interior of your tub.
You cannot lift yourself to its rim
And see the outer world of things,
And at the same time see yourself.
You are submerged in the tub of yourself–
Taboos and rules and appearances,
Are the staves of your tub.
Break them and dispel the witchcraft
Of thinking your tub is life
And that you know life.

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Highway to Hell

Highway to Hell

An article in today’s Daily Telegraph about Australian trends in funeral song choice:

Highway to Hell among most requested funeral songs

Cool! Also popular are “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life”, from Monty Python’s Life of Brian, which features the lines, “Life’s a piece of shit, when you look at it”. And then there’s “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead”, from Wizard of Oz. Hey, any one of these has got to be better than those ghastly, never-ending, amorphous organ dirges which usually get airplay.

I can think of a few other songs I might consider, including one from Neil Young called “Why do I Keep F….g Up?” How about you? Why not have some fun at your funeral?