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| Methuselah Tree |
Morris, a man told his doctor that he was having a problem with his health. The doctor said not to worry about it, it'll go away.As Dr. Nortin M. Hadler says in his latest book (Rethinking Aging, UNC Press), "Even Methuselah died." Laughter at jokes like these can choke a person
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| Michelle Bachmann in Sarasota |
I don't know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We've had an earthquake; we've had a hurricane. He said, "Are you going to start listening to me here?"Another member of the group said that his suitcase is packed, and he's prepared to retreat to his beach house and try to figure out how the island it's on can secede. He said he could see filling each of his cabinet positions with a member of the email group.
Why not keep the religious debate in the churches and set some limits for this section to local matters that concern all?There are so many church-related articles in the Region section of this newspaper that I almost always mis-read the section's label as "Religion."
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| On Threeriver Reach in the [Sacramento River] Delta |
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| David Deutsch |
[Deutsch] also provides an elegant analysis of two particular strategies for meme-replication, one he calls "rational" and the other he calls "anti-rational." Rational memes—the sort that Deutsch imagines will replicate themselves well in post-Enlightenment societies—are simply good ideas: the kind that will survive rigorous scientific scrutiny, the kind that will somehow make life easier or safer or more rewarding because they tell us something useful about how the world actually works. Irrational memes—which are more interesting, and more diabolical, and which Deutsch thinks of as summing up the essential character of pre-Enlightenment societies—reproduce themselves by disabling the capacities of their hosts (by means of fear, or an anxiety to conform, or the appearance of naturalness and inevitability, or in any number of other ways) to evaluate or invent new ideas.That parenthetical about fear, does it remind you of anything? It reminds me of what passes for much (or at least one side) of "political discourse" in this country, with its mean-spirited, dogged anti-rationality.
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| Richard Dawkins |
Deutsch is interested in neo-Darwinian accounts of the evolution of culture. Such accounts treat cultural items—languages, religions, values, ideas, traditions—in much the way that Darwinian theories of biological evolution treat genes. They are called "memes," and are treated as evolving, just as genes do, by mutation and selection, with the most successful memes being those that are the most faithfully replicated. Deutsch writes with enormous clarity and insight about how the mechanisms of mutation and transmission and selection of memes are going to have to differ, in all sorts of ways, from those of genes.Albert elaborated on Deutsch's view of anti-rational memes. I'm not sure that I've quite understood it yet. Maybe you can help me:
And one particular subcategory of memes—about which Deutsch has very clever things to say—succeeds precisely by pretending not to tell the truth. So, for example: "Children who asked why they were required to enact onerous behaviors that did not seem functional would be told 'because I say so,' and in due course they would give their children the same reply to the same question, never realizing that they were giving the full explanation. (This is a curious type of meme whose explicit content is true even though its holders do not believe it.)"Or maybe I do understand it, if "the full explanation" is simply that it's true: the only reason the children are to do as they are told is that...they are told. Does that explanation "pretend not to tell the truth" by being so outlandish that we at first can't believe that it could possibly be the full explanation?
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| David Albert |
[Deutsch, an Israeli-British physicist at the University of Oxford] is exactly who he is, and he is well worth getting to know, and we are very lucky indeed to have him.
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| Masthead of my son's blog |
In Japan with Pavel Zlatarov (Sofia Philharmonic concertmaster) and Milena Zlatarova (Sofia Philharmonic principal violist) for two weeks of chamber concerts with local musicians in Osaka, Kyoto, and Kochi.Sequel
Arrived Friday, Aug. 19. Slept all afternoon. Hosts treated us to wonderful seafood dinner. Handled chopsticks bravely but with multiple attempts; proudly refused offer to use knife and fork instead. The organizer’s girlfriend was very surprised and became animated when she finally realized toward the end of the meal that she had been sitting across from a Bulgarian-speaking American. A walk through Osaka’s shopping district, a maze of pedestrian-only streets, many protected from the rain by arched awnings, revealed a vibrant nightlife replete with clubs and casinos, summer-end sales, and groups of teenagers looking like j-pop stars or anime heroes.
Saturday, Aug 20. Miyako picked us up at the hotel for the first rehearsals, at a small performance space a few metro stops away. We were relieved that the lighting was good and that there was a fine Steinway concert grand piano– two essential prerequisites for our work that are hard to come by in Bulgaria. (Actually Steinways are available, but good lighting is rare.) A play-through of Faure’s first piano quartet presented no problems–the pianist was very thoroughly prepared and played exquisitely. The first violinist for the Debussy quartet was also well-prepared and had clearly studied the work in some detail. She had just flown in from Kochi especially for this rehearsal–she flew back directly after it!
The pianist for the Brahms G minor piano quartet was technically flawless. She and her clarinetist colleague, with whom Milena rehearsed the Mozart Kagelstat trio, had driven to Osaka from Kochi (300 km, 5-hour drive each way).
In the evening I took the Zlatarovs to help me find a camera at an electronics mega-store. I didn’t get one because all of the menu options were only in Japanese. Pavel didn’t buy his father a watch because all of the cheaper ones looked…cheap. Milena spotted a suitcase that came folded up into a tiny package the size of a deck of cards (or of a pack of cigarettes)–I was amazed at this newest example of Japanese engineering at work and wanted to know how big that suitcase would be when you unfolded it like a reverse-oragami magic trick. “Oh," Milena realized, "it’s just a belt with a combination lock that wraps around a suitcase.” She really had me (and herself) going there….
Unlike Friday, on Saturday I slept through the night, getting in about ten hours. Still feeling exhausted though.
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| Thanks to Greg Houston and indyweek.com |
the Tea Party is increasingly swimming against the tide of public opinion: among most Americans, even before the furor over the debt limit, its brand was becoming toxic....Less popular than atheists? The Christian Right unpopular? If true, this is very good news.
Polls show that disapproval of the Tea Party is climbing. In April 2010, a New York Times/CBS News survey found that 18 percent of Americans had an unfavorable opinion of it, 21 percent had a favorable opinion and 46 percent had not heard enough. Now, 14 months later, Tea Party supporters have slipped to 20 percent, while their opponents have more than doubled, to 40 percent.
Of course, politicians of all stripes are not faring well among the public these days. But in data we have recently collected, the Tea Party ranks lower than any of the 23 other groups we asked about—lower than both Republicans and Democrats. It is even less popular than much maligned groups like "atheists" [emphasis mine] and "Muslims." Interestingly, one group that approaches it in unpopularity is the Christian Right.
Could we start, at least, by dismissing candidates who called for President Obama's birth certificate or raised the specter of Shariah law in America, followed by briskly ushering offstage lunatics who dismiss global warming as a socialist plot?....In John M. Broder's August 17 article in the Times ("Bashing E.P.A. Is New Theme in G.O.P. Race"), Michelle Bachmann is quoted from Iowa:
...When tea-stained legislators gut environmental laws to protect corporate profits, when they sneer at climate change while America bakes in its bedrock like a big green casserole, when Republican educational reform means classrooms with fewer teachers and more guns—there's a temptation for reasonable Americans to throw up their hands and succumb to despair. Is it a death wish or a scheme to kill the rest of us, when "conservatives" fight against clean air laws, or legislate to place a loaded pistol in every yahoo's holster? I've reached the second half of my seventh decade, and I've never seen such an intimidating swarm of fanatics and fools marching under one banner....
"I guarantee you the E.P.A. will have doors locked and lights turned off, and they will only be about conservation. It will be a new day and a new sheriff in Washington, D.C."Another foolishness is the role sought for religion (Christianity, strikingly in parallel with the role Islamists seek for Islam). Say Campbell and Putnam:
In an earlier debate she said the agency should be renamed the "job-killing organization of America." She has called global-warming science a hoax.
...[She] wants to padlock the E.P.A.’s doors, as does former Speaker Newt Gingrich. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas wants to impose an immediate moratorium on environmental regulation.
...In his book, Fed Up, Our Fight to Save America from Washington, Mr. Perry described global-warming science as "one contrived phony mess that is falling apart under its own weight" and a "secular carbon cult" led by false prophets like Al Gore.
But...the American people, by substantial majorities, are concerned about air and water pollution, and largely trust the E.P.A., national surveys say.
Next to being a Republican, the strongest predictor of being a Tea Party supporter today was a desire, back in 2006, to see religion play a prominent role in politics. And Tea Partiers continue to hold these views: they seek "deeply religious" elected officials, approve of religious leaders' engaging in politics and want religion brought into political debates....
This inclination among the Tea Party faithful to mix religion and politics explains their support for Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and Governor Rick Perry of Texas....
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| Robert Conquest (b. 1917) |
There once was a man of Stoke Poges,all from my old college friend Jon:
Entirely resolved to poke Doges.
So this elderly menace
Took steamship to Venice....
________________________________
We did it in a bed and said "Oh, yes."I like these, but I'm disapponted by Oh, yes's and togas's failing to include a rhyme for "Stoke" and "poke," and, of course, the clever third line repeats the given first line.
And all that was required was togas.
Straight sex, rats, does not rhyme with Stoke Poges.
Where he did it in bed and said [choke] "Oh, yes!"(I think togas came in men's and women's styles!)
Where they managed the deed in bloke togas.
I already knew in principle that word games, like limericks and acrostics and acronyms and crosswords, are good training in and of themselves. I could not then guess at the harvest of such marvels that lay ahead....[p. 130]There's probably another blog entry to come of this. I see that on p. 435, the index entry for "word games" also gives reference to pp. 264-266.
I boldly assert, in fact I think I know, that a lot of friendships and connections absolutely depend upon a sort of shared language, or slang. Not necessarily designed to exclude others, they can establish a certain comity and, even after a long absence, re-establish it in a second. Martin [Amis, son of Kingsley] was—is—a genius at this sort of thing. It arose—arises—from his willingness to devote real time to the pitiless search for the apt resonance....[p. 164]
Something of the same was true of the "Friday lunch" that has now become the potential stuff of a new "Bloomsbury" legend...There was never the intention or design that it become a "set" or a "circle," and of course if there had been any such intention, the thing would have been abortive. The Friday lunch began to simply "occur" in the mid-1970s, and persisted into the early 1980s, and is now cemented in place in several memoirs and biographies. Let me try and tell you something of how it was.
It began, largely at Martin's initiation, as a sort of end-of-the-week clearinghouse for gossip and jokes, based on the then-proximity of various literary magazines and newspapers. Reliable founding attendees included the Australian poets Clive James and Peter Porter, Craig Raine (T.S. Eliot's successor as poetry editor at Faber and Faber), the Observer's literary editor Terry Kilmartin (the re-translator of Scott Moncrieff's version of Marcel Proust, and the only man alive trusted by Gore Vidal to edit his copy without further permission), the cartoonist and rake and dandy Mark Boxer, whose illustrations then graced (for once the word is quite apt) all the best bookcovers as well as the Time's op-ed page. Among those bookcovers were the dozen volumes of Anthony Powell's masterwork [A Dance to the Music of Time] and among Mark's aesthetic and social verdicts the one I remember being delivered with the most authority was his decided and long-meditated conclusion that: "It's the height of bad manners to sleep with somebody less [sic] than three times."...The critic Russell Davies, the then-rising novelists Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes, James Fenton and Robert Conquest when they were in England, Kingsley when he wasn't otherwise engaged with yet more lavish and extensive lunches, and your humble servant help to complete this dramatis personae....[pp. 168-169]
...but Robert Conquest, the king of the limerick [emphasis mine]...always thought that if a job was worth doing it was worth doing well....
Simple "versified filth"—Amis senior's crushing condemnation of most popular limericks—was not allowed.
Indeed insistence upon the capacious subtleties of the limerick was something of a hallmark. Once again Conquest takes the palm: his condensation of the "Seven Ages of Man" shows how much force can be packed into the deceptively slight five-line frame. Thus:
Seven Ages: first puking and mewlingThis is not the only example of Conquest's genius for compression. The history of the Bolshevik "experiment" in five lines? Barely a problem:
Then very pissed-off with your schooling
Then fucks, and then fights
Next judging chaps' rights
Then sitting in slippers: then drooling.
There was an old bastard named Lenin
Who did two or three million men in.
That's a lot to have done in
But where he did one in
That old bastard Stalin did ten in. [pp. 173-174]
Religious war burns on and beleaguerswas pretty darn good, and maybe it isn't bad, but it compresses far less into itself than either of the examples from Conquest.
Iraq's Sunni and Shiite besiegers,
But it brings no relief
From dogmatic belief
But for stone-dead dogmatic believers.
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| [review] |
Tom Driberg in the last years of his life was still a true legend on the journalistic and cultural left. In youth, he had been an original member of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead set, while also maintaining good relations with the more radical forces clustered around W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender. He had, indeed, given the young Auden his first copy of The Waste Land, and joined him in reading it aloud...Anyway, he was sometimes invited to contribute the "Londoner's Diary" to the New Statesman, and one week issued an appeal to readers to help him complete an indecent limerick the first line of which ran: "There once was a man of Stoke Poges." This highly respectable town in Buckinghamshire seemed to cry out for the rhyme "poke Doges," which in turn meant that the remainder of the limerick would have to be Venetian in flavor.Anyway, I invite you to submit your nomination for what the final line of the limerick concocted by Mssrs. Driberg, Hitchens, Fenton, and Holden might have been:
Fenton and I [poet James Fenton], assisted by our dear friend Anthony Holden, accepted the challenge and were duly invited to a lunch by old Tom held at the Quo Vadis restaurant in Dean Street, above which Karl Marx had once kept his squalid lodgings. How we completed the task I don't entirely remember ("entirely resolved to poke Doges. So this elderly menace / Took steamship to Venice..." But what was the last line?). At all events [I continue quoting beyond what's necessary simply in able to get to Hitchens's mention of the actor who played Lawrence of Arabia; like Frank Harris, Hitchens seems to have known everybody]...
At all events, by the time the restaurant had finally insisted on throwing us out—this in the days when the pubs in London were not allowed to stay open in the afternoon—Tom simply took me down the street and up a flight of dingy stairs and made me a member of the infamous "Colony Room Club," an off-hours drinking establishment run by a tyrannical Sapphist named Muriel Belcher. Renowned to this day for its committed members, from Peter O'Toole to Francis Bacon, the joint at that epoch gave off an atmosphere of inspissated gloom, punctuated by moments of high insobriety and low camp.... [pp. 151-152]
Left hand panel from
Francis Bacons' 1966 triptych
Three Studies for a Portrait
of Muriel Belcher
There once was a man of Stoke Poges,
Entirely resolved to poke Doges.
So this elderly menace
Took steamship to Venice....
________________________________
Now a composer and classical musician, Geoff Dean started out as a cellist in the fourth grade. He continued to play the cello throughout elementary school.I said that Geoff's childhood prophecy was more accurate than mine. He did continue, and continues to this day, to play the cello. He is a professional musician. He has composed a few pieces. He has transcribed many pieces (mostly Bulgarian compositions) for performance on the violoncello.
In high school, he became an excellent classical musician and played in the school orchestra. While in college at Yale University [alas, no, he wouldn't even apply to Yale, but would attend the North Carolina School of the Arts], he studied music composition, plant taxonomy [his mother's particular interest], and chemistry. In his spare time, he took piano lessons.
After graduating from college, Geoff wrote a short piece called, "Moonlit Music," for violin, clarinet, cello, bassoon, French horn, and viola. It was to be in C minor. It happened to catch the attention of a conductor whose manager wanted to buy a short piece of music to play during intermissions at an opera house in New York City.
The conductor told the manager, who offered 3,000 dollars for it. Geoff accepted the offer, on the condition that he get 5.00 dollars for every two times it was played. The piece was played during all of the intermissions of 50 plays, and was heard by millions. Soon it was being played all over America and Europe. Geoff was becoming known everywhere, and making a fortune.
In 1990, he wrote a short symphony. It was heard by more people than ever before when it was played in concert tour with a collection of selected musical pieces.
Geoff has decided that he has overstayed his welcome in the musical world. Other composers aren't very friendly with him; they make fun of his age and the bow ties he wears. Now he is going to write music to play on his piano and cello at his home in Los Gatos, California. Besides playing his instruments, he also likes to work on his tree and flower gardens. He thinks that he's got a prize peach tree growing in his back yard! –Herman Grablow
[Card 1] Tonight in unison, you have heard the graduating class recite the theme of the graduation, The American's Creed.Well-indoctrinated eighth-grader. Recycled.
Adopted by our government in 1918, The American's Creed was written by Wm. Tyler Page.
Being a list of the things people believe, it is a statement to keep in mind and never forget....
[Card 14] ...Communism flourishes in places of poverty and ignorance. If we keep our country's standards high, communism will have less chance of gaining control in the United States. We should help other countries in education and their home life.
We also are fighting a never-ending battle against disease and the forces of nature....
[Card 15] The United States is here today. But look what happened to Rome, to Greece, Assyria, and Babylon, one-time world powers. Where are they today?....
[Card 16] We know all of our educational facilities are the result of tax payers' generous offering, the long-working [sic] hours of the unpaid school board, the never-finished job of our teachers, and the painstaking love and sacrifice of our parents. We feel greatly indebted to these people for their sincerity and perserverance [sic] in fulfilling their duties.
I hope that you, graduates, feel as I do that we are obligated to these people to do something in return. I hope that you feel that you should strive to become the peace-makers of tomorrow.
Do you "therefore believe it is your duty to your country to love it; to support its Constitution, to obey its laws, to [Card 17] respect its flag; and to defend it against all enemies"?
Helo, dear good sweeat prety Marsie was i. glad to get your good letter bless your good heart to thank you thout of your Mama Voss bless you how i do wish you hear whitte me to night i get so lonely hear buy my self [my namesake grandfather, Morris Voss, had died in June 1960, right after I graduated from high school] but i stay busey most all time got a prety garden 8 head cattle mare one dog 3 cats quiet a few chickens so you i stay busey most all time but isent a day are night i dont thank of my good Marsie see we can thank of the Pass but we dont now the feauture wish you hear an [over] spend the sumer with me i would bee so glad i shure dont no much news i havent eaven been to Russellville since the 29 lase Sept do you have the fim of me you tuck of me in the yard if you do i like to have it so whin you have time rite me a gain i love you so much will sa good night till we meeat bey xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx i do love you Mama Voss rite me a gain can see you in mind pulling your little read wagion me you picking to matoes picking cucumbers on Porter Sandra place [my father worked for Porter Sanders, who provided a house on his farm outside Farmersville, not far from Tulare; my first experience with school was at Outside Creek Elementary School in Farmersville; I believe that was its name] We shur had a good time xxxxxxI kept a few of these items.
A girl on the flying trapeze,
Going through her performance with ease,
Was suddenly frozen.
Her partner had chosen
A terrible moment to sneeze.
"Would you open the door for me?" she said. She was carrying a cup of milk and a plate containing her English muffin.
"This door?" I asked for clarification.
"No, this one," she said.
I stepped forward, but by now she had already gotten out okay.
"Would you turn the fan off for me?" she said.
"The fan inside?" I asked for clarification. "No," she said. "This one. Put it on speed two."
Ah, turn it on, of course. I stepped to the controls for the porch fan. Unfortunately, they're different from the controls for the fans inside the house.
"How do you turn it on?" I asked.
"Never mind," my wife said. By now she had set her cup and plate down and joined me at the controls for the porch fan.
"You need a new brain," she said.
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| A shell among many collected at North Carolina's Outer Banks in May |
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| Her picture of Jesus (detail) |
She saw Jesus just as he is depicted in her picture, with a white robe and looking slightly toward the right in the center of the shell. She handed it back to her husband.She doesn't seem to be ready for adult content.
"He looked again, and he saw it," she said.
When she put her picture of Jesus beside the shell, the image seemed even clearer.
"I guess you have to be a believer to see it," she said....
It makes perfect sense to her that her husband first saw the flame of a candle inside the shell.
"Any way you look at it, he's the light of the world," she said.
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| Christopher Hitchens |
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| Jonathan Franzen |
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| Antonio R. Damasio |
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| Sam Harris |
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| Jonathan Safran Foer |
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| Stieg Larsson |
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| Richard Dawkins |
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| Ayaan Hirsi Ali |
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| John Le Carré |
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| Philip Roth |
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| Martin Cruz Smith |
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| Daniel C. Dennett |
