Sequelae

It takes energy to web-log, and I've felt bereft of it lately. That I may suffer from sleep apnea is the current possibility (suggested by my doctor and rather disconcertingly seconded by everyone I've mentioned it to, all of whom seem to know at least one person who wears a breathing mask while sleeping; see photo below). I can't say for sure whether or not I might "have" it; I just know that I've been very tired for many weeks now.

Regardless of type, the individual with sleep apnea is rarely aware of having difficulty breathing, even upon awakening. Sleep apnea is recognized as a problem by others witnessing the individual during episodes or is suspected because of its effects on the body (sequelae). Symptoms may be present for years (or even decades) without identification, during which time the sufferer may become conditioned to the daytime sleepiness and fatigue [emphasis mine] associated with significant levels of sleep disturbance. [–Wikipedia]

Anyway, I'll be spending a night in a "sleep clinic" soon. If I "have" it, will singing lessons be prescribed? I'd do them, even wear a continuous positive airway pressure device (CPAP), to feel like doing again the lonely but lively singing known as blogging.

I hope that singing exercises will suffice. Wearing a CPAP isn't pretty. The wearer shown does, however, report:

Easy; no more 1- to 4-hour naps after work, I get up in the morning easier, my family does not make me sleep in the basement any more (because of the snoring¹), no more "bad" dreams, my blood pressure is down, my energy is up, and I have not fallen asleep while driving² since getting the CPAP.

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1. For the record, my wife wakes me less often than once a month to tell me to roll onto my side (where I'm much less likely to snore).
       Speaking of rolling over, she reported reading about a strap one guy wears around his torso, with two big balls positioned about at his shoulder blades. Whenever he tries to roll onto his back, I guess he bounces back onto his side.
2. I fell asleep driving home from work in June 1990. I woke up doing fifty-five in the concave-curving median of I-40 at Chapel Hill. (That is, I was going toward the oncoming traffic.) The next week I was diagnosed as having CFS (chronic fatigue syndrome). Makes me wonder whether sleep apnea and CFS have any scientifically demonstrated correlation.
   Can Sleep Apnea Cause Fibromyalgia (FM)- and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS)-like Symptoms?

Not so plucky yesterday

Yesterday's "Word of the Day" from dictionary.com was:

plucky \PLUHK-ee\, adjective:
    Having or showing pluck or courage; brave.
Plucky is originally boxing slang from the 1800s, from the meaning "heart, viscera" as that which is "plucked" from slaughtered livestock.

My bleating yesterday like a sheep waiting to be eviscerated seems to me today to have been an expression of shame about being a member of the unregenerated human race. My friend Yvette (a pseudonym) commented that:

Physical discomfort can make us feel tired, weak, and sensitive. When we read or watch something that touches our heart, we understand it more deeply and might react more strongly to it. When we are weak physically, our brain sometimes becomes more active and we have deeper sympathy for the weak and poor. We may sense the unfairness of the world more. In turn, it can make us feel even tireder.

    Indeed, since Monday I have been very tired, owing somehow to ophthalmological (or neurological) symptoms I experienced that morning. There was a bright arc of white light in my left eye's image, with a faint, quick dispersion of black specks (like a fast-moving flock of crows). My wife took me to the UNC eye clinic when it opened. Doctors there told me that there was no evidence of retinal detachment. The younger one of them said that I actually had less chance of a retinal detachment than he did, for the vitreous fluid in my eyeballs has hardened enough that it has already pulled away from my retinas and so can no longer pull on them (a common cause of retinal detachment, I was given to understand).
    I went to work the next day, but realized immediately upon arriving that I should have stayed home to rest. Feeling exhausted and with a prominent new floater in my left eye, I worked steadily all day on a number of little tasks, one at a time as well as I could manage, until it was time to go up the hill to catch my van ride home.
    I stayed home yesterday, lying down much of the time. And, apparently, ruminating "sensitively" about being weighed down.

Not that I'm feeling any less sensitive today, but it occurred to me a little while ago that my usual attitude toward exploiters (whether of other people or of other animals—or of the earth itself) is anger and condemnation. In short, I fear, a sense of self-righteous indignation.
    I'm not sure which is worse to feel, the sadness of shame or the futile pluckiness of moral superiority. In either case I suffer an awareness of the incessant exploitation that seems to be woven into the coarse fabric of things.
    It doesn't help that Darwinian evolution is sometimes characterized as "the survival of the fittest"—not now that a presumably moral species has evolved.

Weighing on me

A pervasive sadness has lain on me lately. The 2009 Oscar-winning documentary, The Cove, which describes the annual killing of dolphins in a national park in Japan, went back to the library yesterday unwatched. I told the librarian, "I just didn't have the courage to watch it."
    As I waited in line at Costco's optical shop on Friday, I had, on several huge HDTV screens, watched the complaisant exultation of two overfed fishermen who had just landed a huge fish on their boat and were displaying it for the videographer.
    For several days, I've been listening to Timothy B. Tyson's 2004 account of the racially motivated 1970 murder of Henry Marrow, a black man, in Oxford, North Carolina, Blood Done Sign My Name. Forty years later, we still haven't seen the last of white supremacy in this country, and we may be as unlikely ever to see it as we are to see the last of the human presumption that dolphins and fishes and other creatures have less right to live than we do.
    I don't know why the weight of this racial immorality should be lying so heavily on me precisely now, but its balance could have been tilted on Saturday night by my watching Michael Moore's 2009 expose, Capitalism: A Love Story. I think that its incontrovertible thesis that Jesus would not have approved of capitalism thrust a sword into my breast for having theretofore had little reaction to the causes of the financial crisis of 2007–2010. I suspect, that is, that I'm suffering remorse for my own apathy, as well as despair that the weak and powerless of the earth will continue to come in last.

More Clematises

From a garden in the village of German, near Sofia, Bulgaria, courtesy of my son

A crowd of Clematis

Siegfried and Friends

Three visiting Shar Pei pups, two girls and their brother, blue-nosed Marco

Flowery Saturday

First peony blossoms of our spring

Flowery Thursday

Review readers unanimous

Readers across America (or along a portion of the eastern seaboard, at any rate) seem to agree with me about Walter Kirn's April 18 review of Ian McEwan's latest novel. At least, all four letters to the editor printed in this mornings New York Times Book Review criticize his review sharply.
    From Pennsylvania, Ms. Robinson and her husband spent a weekend reading Solar and laughing. He called it a "delicious romp." She says, "The novel we find so smart and hilarious bears no resemblance to the one Walter Kirn described...."
    The author of the letter from New York "was seriously taken aback by Walter Kirn's review...The tone was so venomous and vitriolic, it read as if a personal vendetta were taking place on the front page...."
    In Virginia, the letter writer was thankful that she'd already read Solar because Kirn "relentlessly...exposed significant plot turns...that extend well into the book's heart."
    The writer from Massachusetts says she has "been reading book reviews for 48 years, and I don't recall another quite as hate-filled as his."

Jealousy on Kirn's part was what I posited; nothing in these letters is inconsistent with that.

Весела пролет [happy spring]

Our son sent us a card from Bulgaria with the traditional greeting for March 1. Inside, he writes:

Happy 1st of March and best wishes for the coming Spring!
    P.S. This card is a production of school children from the town of Rila.

    In subsequent email he explains that "Chestita Baba Marta is like Happy Grandmother Marta, or Greetings for the 1st of March." "Chestita Baba Marta" is phonetic, I think, for the "Цесмчма Баба Марма" in the photo—I'm impressing into service, as well as I can manage, letters found on the web¹, as Cyrillic is Greek to me, alas, despite having a Bulgarian grandson whose father has lived in Bulgaria almost twenty years.
    My son explains that "the Martenitsa (the red and white yarn ornaments) are like good luck charms for meeting the spring. People wear them until they've seen a stork and then hang them on a blooming plant or tree."

So, why am I publishing this greeting on May 1? The card arrived only a couple of weeks ago and I had accordingly misread "March" in my son's note. But I see now that it is dated 2.28.10. All the fortnight I've planned to wish my readers a happy 1st of May! I must have figured that "coming Spring" was appropriate for Bulgaria on May 1, but now I remember how like California's climate I thought Bulgaria's when I visited there. Or, more likely, secure in my assumption that I was receiving a May 1st greeting, this never even occurred to me. As I've said more than a few times on this blog, we humans have little trouble deluding ourselves.
    Well, let the joke be on me. You, certainly, may you have had a Baba Marta, and have a happy May! And no jokes on you in either month.

As for humans' deluding themselves, it's so easy to do, one must wonder whether it was an evolutionary adaptation, perhaps to enable us to look at things in a hopeful light and avoid seeing stark reality (so as to lessen the chance that we would kill ourselves before producing offspring). God's in his heaven, suicide's a mortal sin, and all that.
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1. From the website:

   THE BULGARIAN ALPHABET—БЪЛГАРСКАТА АЗБУКА
   Before you start learning [the] Bulgarian language, you need to learn the Bulgarian alphabet.
       In Bulgarian, we use the Cyrillic alphabet. The same alphabet (with some modifications) is used in other languages [such] as Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Serbian, Macedonian, and some Central Asian Altaic languages.
       Every Bulgarian letter has an English equivalent close enough to give you a clue as to its pronunciation. In the first few lessons, every Bulgarian word I use will be followed by [a] phonetic transcription of its pronunciation. For this, I will use Latin letters—the ones in the column "Symbol" [not shown in this footnote].

Aging doesn't change your attitude

This morning, I had an email from a friend of fifty years, one of my college roommates, who noted that:

One interesting thing is how old age impacts one's attitude towards religion. At [a recent] luncheon, someone reported on two former...executives who upon retirement had gone into the ministry. [A mutual friend of ours] and I have certainly become more active in terms of church groups. You on the other hand, have become a complete atheist. I am certainly not consistent in my beliefs because I belong to the Anglican Church of North America (which has split off from the Episcopal Church) although I have neither supported the secession nor the opposition to gay marriage. Religion as well as politics makes strange bedfellows.

    Hmm, I wonder whether aging per se is the operative factor in one's attitude toward religion. I'd say it's more a matter of whether and how a person spends his time thinking about it. There's the believing way of thinking and the skeptical way. As a teenager, I chose the latter, although I didn't come to a conclusion until many years later.

Another, very recent friend, also emailed me. He wrote:

A brief sidebar on religion—a line I've always considered one of the simplest and yet most humorous and profound thoughts on the subject: "If a baseball hitter thanks God when he hits a homerun, shouldn't he blame God when he strikes out?"

    The baseball example has occurred to me a number of times in listening to people thanking God for this and that. They choose not to condemn God (or come to doubt that He exists) for bad things that have happened to them, but they're quick to fall down and worship Him for the good things that happen. That is, they (1) chose up front to believe that God exists and (2) continually cherry-pick what to attend to in order to ensure that they don't begin to doubt that existence.
    This is a prime example of something I've surely said somewhere on this blog, if not more than once: For most people (and for all of us to some extent or other), thinking is mostly a matter of looking for reasons to "prove" what we have already chosen (on other than rational grounds) to believe.
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Thanks to Paul Ygartua for Wizened old man - Lithograph

Why commandments, anyway?

A reader's recent question about my "New Ten Commandments" occasioned my reading them afresh to reconsider doing something about the fact that several of them can be combined.¹ The only reason for specifying precisely ten originally was of course an allusion to The Old Testament (ignoring Mel Brooks's suggestion, in his 1981 film, History of the World, Part I, that Moses had actually received three tablets from God, with fifteen commandments, but had clumsily dropped and shattered one of them). And, as I admitted on July 8, 2008, George Carlin did Moses, Dawkins, and me eight better by pretty cogently (for a stage entertainer) boiling the ten down to two. I don't propose to compete with Mr. Carlin, however.
    In fact, I'm still very much in cogitation mode about this. Why have commandments anyway (over against civil laws)? What purpose could such a list serve, if little general assent could ever be gained for them, in competition as they would be with a multitude of local customs variously at odds with one another, even if they shared some common evolutionary features? In what sense would they be commandments, anyway? I suspect that this whole business of Mel Brooks's and George Carlin's satires, as well as of Richard Dawkins's revisionist suggestion in The God Delusion [p. 263], is about coming to terms intellectually with human cultural history. We want to understand who we are, in the best (truest) terms we can. And we want to help by sweeping out discredited understandings and recommending progressive insights. (And, of course, the folks rabble-rousing for displaying The Ten Commandments in our court houses want to continue to rail against us progressive upstarts.)

    By the way, the accompanying pictures are of The Georgia Guidestones, a large granite monument in Elbert County, Georgia. Says Wikipedia:

A message comprising ten guides is inscribed on the structure in eight modern languages, and a shorter message is inscribed at the top of the structure in four ancient languages' scripts: Babylonian, Classical Greek, Sanskrit, and Egyptian hieroglyphs.

For example, Guide #4:"Rule passion – faith – tradition – and all things with tempered reason."
    The monument has been attacked by Christian fundamentalists as "The Ten Commandments of the Anti-Christ." Of course, a self-reinforcing principle of fundamentalist belief is that the less sense something makes, or the more difficult it is to believe it, then all the more glorious is the faith that it is true.

My Commandment #1, Imagine that "God" exists if doing so somehow comforts or inspires you, but don't fall down and worship it, was my wry, finger-in-your-eye take on belief in God, implying that nothing that followed emanated from "Him" because "He" didn't exist and so never issued any. That Book of Moses was brilliant creative writing, though.

My Commandment #2, In all things, try to do no harm, is suspect from the get-go with its "try," revealing that doing no harm is practically impossible. Even the Jains occasionally step on a bug, try as they might not to. Someone who trys to do utterly no harm surely harms himself occasionally in his attempts, if only in inner turmoil.

With #3, Do not do unto others as you would not have them do unto you, I was opting for the negative version of the Golden Rule, but I personally like the positive version better, with its call to take action (positive) rather than refrain from action (negative). I like to "do good," to help others, more than I like to simply avoid harming them. Obviously, both versions are worthy and have an august history (not that I'm intimately familiar with it). But it may make more sense to command avoidance than to command commission. I think that Jesus wasn't commanding people to do good (positive), but mainly trying to show them a way to live better, to realize "the Kingdom of Heaven" within. He didn't command anyone to love, he was giving them loving advice for personal betterment.

In the case of #4, Don't rush to judgment but give everyone the benefit of an open mind, I overlooked that mammals have evolved to act automatically, for self-preservation, to not give everyone the benefit of the doubt. I'm not sure I can advise anyone to try to reason with a desperate person who has dynamite strapped around his (or her) torso, whether for religious or other reasons. People do tend to be more closed-minded than they "ought" to be, however, for living harmoniously and progressively in civilized society.

About #5, though, Formulate laws as if you didn't know what your position in the pecking order would be, I cannot be too enthusiastic. Political philosopher John Rawls's principle of the "original position" was a brilliant concept for social justice. But who of us here on the street ever formulates a law?

My #6, Treat all living creatures humanely, is as noble a principle as there is and, in our age of caged animals raised for the commercial food industry, more dishonored than heeded. To stand on a corner with the principle lettered on one's sandwich boards would be a foolish use of one's time and energy. If "God" actually created the food chain (and was thus the first entity to dishonor this principle), then the captains of the food industry are his devoted disciples.

Ha, #7, Always be willing to revise your beliefs according to evidence and reason! Don't we wish! Few of us are able to cast the first stone. At sixty-seven, I've won my beliefs by effort and have waning energy and power to continue revising them, although I have read (in a science article in The New York Times) that "continued brain development and a richer form of learning may require that you 'bump up against people and ideas' that are different." Still, I hope I have the sense, until the minute of my death, to change my mind because of new evidence or consideration.

#8, Do not indoctrinate your children, but teach them how to think for themselves, is the chicken or the egg of significant cultural advance. If the huge majority of parents could and would stop indoctrinating their children against reason and evidence, religion could die a painless death in a generation or two. But what are the chances of that? Crying The Eighth New Commandment is pissing into the wind. No one is listening, no one will be commanded in this. Or few, anyway.

Speaking of pissing, #9, Support your country when it is right, oppose it when it is wrong, was another pee-pee of mine on the administration of George W. Bush. See my post of December 27, 2006, "Some Dogs I've Known."

And, finally, #10, Question authority; challenge authority that appears illegitimate, is just eighth-grade civics. Still, it's sad that so many downtrodden people (and peoples) of the earth haven't the power to challenge authority, they are so firmly under its boot.
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1. The version currently displayed in my sidebar I formulated on December 29, 2007.

Students!

A problem for some university administrators is that "students almost never actually take the courses they agreed to on their official programs of study."

A finding of graduation audit
Is that students so often defraud it;
    The courses of study they swore for
    Are rarely the ones that they chore for,
And no one of us can applaud it.

Nemerov's myth revised

World photographer Paul Calhoun recently said that he was "intrigued by [my] New Ten Commandments; do I detect a Wicca undercurrent there?"
    Ah, no, not intentionally anyway. I'm not that familiar with the nature religions. I had to research what a Wicca undercurrent might be. In the Wikipedia's entry for "Wicca," I learned that

Wicca (pronounced [ˈwɪkə]) is a Neopagan religion and a form of modern witchcraft....
    Wicca is typically a duotheistic religion, worshipping a Goddess and a God, who are traditionally viewed as the Triple Goddess and Horned God. These two deities are often viewed as being facets of a greater pantheistic Godhead....

Well, having read that, I'd now say there's not even any unintentional Wicca undercurrent here! Basically, I'm a scientific naturalist; the supernatural is a figment of the evolved brain's marvelous making. Or, as Howard Nemerov's "Creation Myth on a Moebius Band" puts it: "This world's just mad enough to have been made / By the Being his beings into Being prayed," where I understand "Being" to refer to the natural world, the natural cosmos.

My logic there, I see, is a bit convoluted (in suggesting that the world made itself, even in the beginning). Given the use to which I wish to put Nemerov's clever couplet, I see that it needs adjustment. How about:

This world's just mad enough to have done made¹
The beings who their Maker-Being into being prayed.

That's how it stands at the moment. Thank you, Howard Nemerov.

Paul also asked whether I designed this blog myself ("it has a lush, professional texture to it," he said).
    No, it uses a template supplied by blogger.com. I did change the background color (borrowed from Brooklyn artist Matthew Moss's cover art for Jingle Jangle) and arranged the order of stuff in the right column. I put links in the masthead to the current post (for when people come to a specific post by way of its link address) and my sidebar table of contents. And I routinely use embedded styles in posts for certain modest effects (like the lead-in in bold lower caps).
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1. "Done made" is a quotation of two titles: Alice Randall's 2001 novel, The Wind Done Gone (based on Margaret Mitchell's 1936 classic, Gone with the Wind), and Timothy B. Tyson's 2004 autobiographical work of history, Blood Done Sign My Name.

Walter Kirn up in the air!

I'm concurrently reading Walter Kirn's 2001 novel, Up in the Air, and enjoying it no less than I'm enjoying Ian McEwan's Solar. Up in the Air is a romp, though a story much different from that told by the George Clooney movie (much darker, yet funnier), and a novel much different from McEwan's (its dark action concentrated into a tiny fraction of the decade taken by the tragicomic action of Solar).
    With what dismay, then, did I read this morning, in this coming Sunday's New York Times Book Review, Kirn's front-page review of Solar, which is about as total a dump-on of another writer's work as a reviewer writes. It opens:

According to the perverse aesthetics of artistic guilty pleasure, certain books and movies are so bad—so crudely conceived, despicably motivated and atrociously executed—that they’re actually rather good. Solar, the new novel by Ian McEwan, is just the opposite: a book so good—so ingeniously designed, irreproachably high-minded and skillfully brought off—that it’s actually quite bad...There’s so little wrong with it that there’s nothing particularly right about it, either.

    Fortunately for the discerning reader, the illogic of "so good it's bad" undermines Kirn's position from the get-go. But Walter Kirn's standing, both as novelist and as "a regular contributor to the Book Review," will browbeat the unwary into thinking that there might be something to his quasi-logical argument, so maybe they should just skip Solar. So much the worse for them.
    Kirn more or less writes off the boot room, which I blogged about the other day: It

devolves [emphasis mine] into a model Hobbesian jungle as the supposedly liberal junket­eers steal the best gear for themselves, placing their own survival before the group’s and putting the lie to man’s altruistic posturing.

Why does it "devolve"? It doesn't. Kirn's just miffed. His underlying complaint about Solar may be that expressed in his paragraph:

There’s little that’s lifelike about Solar, despite its relentless pretensions to relevance. The story is structured like a crossword puzzle, in rows and columns of little empty boxes that McEwan helps us fill in by providing witty riddles whose solutions flatter our intelligence. The process feels pleasantly antic and cerebral, but in time its premeditated quality becomes preposterously artificial, as do its swerves into heady slapstick humor.

As a reader of the book, I find none of this justified. To say that Solar is "structured like a crossword puzzle" is just silly. "Premediated...preposterously artificial" suggests a formula for summing up Kirn's review: Preposterous! Whatever McEwan might have published, I suspect that Kirn had premeditated to put it down, however artificial the logic of his put-down would have to be.

I think there's a clue to Kirn's pique in his statement:

What makes Solar such a noble nullity is that it answers these challenges so easily, with such a quotient of stress-free mastery that they feel less like challenges than like problems in a literary exam the author has devised as a means of proving his own prowess. This may be Beard’s story, but it’s McEwan’s vehicle, constructed to let him pull all the showy turns of the major contemporary novelist and ambitious public intellectual: personalizing the political, politicizing the personal and poeticizing everything else.

    The clues, I mean, are so easily, major contemporary novelist, and ambitious public intellectual. Kirn appears to have been suffering a serious case of jealousy!