A summer day that looks like a summer day
21 June 2011
Tuesday
Happy summer solstice!
Today is the first day of summer in the northern hemisphere, when the axial tilt of the earth is most steeply inclined toward the sun.
In Oregon we have been having a wet, rainy, and cool spring. The past part of spring in June before the solstice people expect to begin seeing summer weather, and sometimes they do, but mostly they don’t. Sometimes we even have a cool summer, too. I can remember summers from my childhood when it poured down rain on the 4th of July, spoiling the fireworks in the process, which is the sort of thing that children remember.
Since Oregon’s population has grown rapidly over the past decades, and much of that population growth has come from people moving to Oregon from warmer, sunnier states south of us, there is not a little grumbling to be heard in the late spring when it is still raining and with no sign of the sun. The local newspaper even makes sport of the weather, referring to the “strange orange disk in the sky” when the sun does make an unexpected appearance, but this kind of humor does encapsulate a certain feeling of the sun as an alien presence.
I often tell people that they shouldn’t expect good weather until August. September is often very nice here, and there have been days in early October that I have been to the beaches of the Oregon coast and it was sunny and bright. So, if you should come to Oregon, and you want to see the sun while you’re here, I would recommend August. Don’t expect to show up in June and to see weather like southern California in June.
All the same, this year has been particularly wet. Just yesterday it was overcast most of the day, but for the first summer day itself we have a beautifully sunny day. It is, in fact, a summer day that looks like a summer day.
To celebrate the first day of summer I went canoeing.
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The red skies and steel gray waters of the North Portland Harbor, taken a few days ago from the deck of my house.
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Ernesto Sabato, R.I.P.
30 April 2011
Saturday
Ernesto Roque Sabato, 24 June1911 to 30 April 2011
“Lo admirable es que el hombre siga luchando y creando belleza en medio de un mundo bárbaro y hostil.”
Ernesto Sabato, 24 June1911 to 30 April 2011
Living just short of a century, having been born in 1911, Argentine writer Ernesto Roque Sabato has died at the age of ninety-nine years. Here is the BBC story on his passing: Argentine writer Ernesto Sabato dies, age 99. Here is the story from the Buenos Aires Herald: Sabato: a living legend dies, at the age of 99.
While not well known in the Anglophone world, Sabato’s novel The Tunnel (El Tunel, 1948) has been called an “existentialist classic” and was praised by Camus.
Like many saddled with the “E-word,” and despite the persistent claims of Anglo-American philosophy that existentialism is/was amoral, Sabato was deeply engaged with the life of his times and of his nation, and this was a moral engagement. He was appointed to lead the commission (CONADEP) charged with investigating disappearances and other crimes of the “Dirty War” during the period of Argentina’s military dictatorship.
Sabato’s fame rests primarily upon three novels, but he also wrote essays of a Borgesian flavor, replete with recondite philosophical references. His longish essay, Uno y El Universo, is available online. In fact, Borges and Sabato were brought together by the journalist Orlando Barone in 1974 for an extensive exchange which was published in Conversations à Buenos Aires.
Like many South American writers — and I am not only thinking here of Borges and his Cantorian references, but also Comte de Lautréamont, who invokes mathematics throughout Les Chants de Maldoror — mathematics plays a symbolic role in Sabato’s thought, as though the roughness of the wilderness and the frontier that Sarmiento saw as a challenge and an affront to civilized life invites one to contemplate its antithesis in the refined precision of mathematical concepts. Sabato wrote:
“Existe una opinión generalizada según la cual la matemática es la ciencia más difícil cuando en realidad es la más simple de todas. La causa de esta paradoja reside en el hecho de que, precisamente por su simplicidad, los razonamientos matemáticos equivocados quedan a la vista. En una compleja cuestión de política o arte, hay tantos factores en juego y tantos desconocidos e inaparentes, que es muy difícil distinguir lo verdadero de lo falso. El resultado es que cualquier tonto se cree en condiciones de discutir sobre política y arte — y en verdad lo hace — mientras que mira la matemática desde una respetuosa distancia.”
“There is a widely held view that mathematics is the most difficult science when it is actually the simplest of all. The reason for this paradox lies in the fact that, precisely because of its simplicity, false mathematical arguments are immediately seen as such. In complex questions of politics or art there are many factors involved, and because of the many unknowns and subtle factors, it is very difficult to distinguish the true from the false. The result is that any fool is thought to be able to discuss politics and art — and indeed we do — while looking at mathematics from a respectful distance. ”
Here mathematics goes proxy for the absolute — it is, in fact, a concrete, accessible, and vividly present absolute — and thence symbolizes all purely theoretical endeavors. In one of his last works, Antes del Fin, Sabato wrote of the absolute:
“La dura realidad es una desoladora confusión de hermosos ideales y torpes realizaciones, pero siempre habrá algunos empecinados, héroes, santos y artistas, que en sus vidas y en sus obras alcanzan pedazos del Absoluto, que nos ayudan a soportar las repugnantes relatividades.”
“Harsh reality is a desolate confusion of beautiful ideals and clumsy achievements, but there will always be some diehards, heroes, saints and artists who in their lives and works attain the absolute, which helps us to support the repugnant relativities.”
This is a deeply charitable way to characterize the human achievement so far — beautiful ideals and clumsy achievements — and a writer (equally and no less the thinker) must first of all be charitable to the world in order to learn from it and to reflect the world back upon itself, which is the task of the literary art.
What is charity? In the tradition of Christian civilization, charity is love. To be charitable to the human condition is to love the human condition for what it is. Love of the world is the condition of all elevated thought, often wrongly understood as thought that has rejected or surmounted the world. Thus the absolute seized by a few diehards, heroes, saints, and artists is not attained in spite of the harsh realities of the world, which we accept in the spirit of charity, but because of them.
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Top Ten Hair Metal Guilty Pleasures
25 April 2011
Monday
What’s a philosopher to do, alone late at night, with The Absolute on one hand and The Void on the other hand, wracked by existential despair and feeling just a little bit sorry for himself? Well, of course, he should formulate his top ten list of hair metal guilty pleasures. If you don’t know what hair metal is, then don’t ask. You don’t want to know. But I find that after I have indulged I have usually laughed until I have cried, and possess a better appreciation of the ultimate absurdity of the world. For that select fellowship aware of this particular guilty pleasure, and perhaps themselves guilty of past participation, here is my list, in reverse Lettermanesque fashion:
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No. 10 of the TOP TEN HAIR METAL GUILTY PLEASURES is Vixen’s Edge of a Broken Heart. Girl bands were important in 80s metal, and indeed I saw Girlschool live in Portland, opening for Iron Maiden and the Scorpions. While Girlschool had the music down, they don’t quite qualify as Hair Metal, whereas the girls of Vixen look exactly like the men of Hair Metal bands.
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No. 9 of the TOP TEN HAIR METAL GUILTY PLEASURES is Aldo Nova’s Fantasy. Now, I’m not certain that Aldo Nova counts as hair metal, and Aldo Nova himself has more like a Princess Di bob than the flowing, permed locks we expect from hair metal, but I include him here as exemplifying the spirit of the times — the leopard-print jumpsuit with cowboy boots guarantees that. Watching Aldo Nova is the metal equivalent of being “RickRoll’D.”
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No. 8 of the TOP TEN HAIR METAL GUILTY PLEASURES is Masi’s God Promised a Paradise. Alex Masi is a serious guitar player, so I don’t mean to demean his work by calling it hair metal, but one comment on Youtube nails it: “OK, I really like this song, and I’m not knocking it. If you’re into metal or hard rock, you expect a certain level of cheese. Hilarious: 2:36-2:43. First the hair flip, then the ultra-earnest closeup. It’s great!”
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No. 7 of the TOP TEN HAIR METAL GUILTY PLEASURES is Loverboy’s Turn Me Loose. I must admit that while Loverboy was at the height of their fame I didn’t take them seriously and regarded them as a “puff” band, but this is of course an essential constituent of hair metal. Frontman Mike Reno doesn’t qualify as a hair metal maven, but he does manage a very respectable scream in Turn Me Loose, and the other members of the band sport the requisite hair to qualify.
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No. 6 of the TOP TEN HAIR METAL GUILTY PLEASURES is The Scorpions’ Rock You Like a Hurricane, proving that the Germans, too, can do hair metal, though it must be admitted that their hairdos aren’t quite the glorious bouffant styles that one expects from the genre, and one suspects that they need to use a different brand of shampoo and conditioner, though it can be said that it is a very European look.
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No. 5 of the TOP TEN HAIR METAL GUILTY PLEASURES is Whiteshake’s Still of the Night. If there’s any such thing as a “traditional” hard rock band Deep Purple would have to count as a charter member, and Whitesnake founder and frontman David Coverdale sang for Deep Purple after Ian Gillan, thereby presumably earning his bona fides in pre-hair metal hard rock, but during his Whitesnake years he exemplified the hair metal ethos as perfectly as anyone (despite said previous bona fides).
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No. 4 of the TOP TEN HAIR METAL GUILTY PLEASURES is Motley Crüe’s Dr. Feelgood. While early Motley Crüe isn’t hair metal in my judgment, by the time the Crüe arrived at Dr. Feelgood they were doing pretty much what the other hair metal outfits were doing, although with their own outrageous sense of “style.”
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No. 3 of the TOP TEN HAIR METAL GUILTY PLEASURES is Def Leppard’s Photograph. While Def Leppard started out in the vein of a quasi-traditional hard rock band, as the band’s fortunes improved they came to embody every stereotype of the culture industry, producing musical “entertainment” utterly lacking in any musical value. While the song is ostensibly about an unconsummateable obsession with a photograph of Marilyn Monroe (a potentially poignant theme), the viewer is urged to note that the “prop” girls in the video (i.e., the ones in the cages) look like the prop girls in every hair metal video, which is to say that they look like a Patrick Nagel painting and not in the slightest like Marilyn Monroe.
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No. 2 of the TOP TEN HAIR METAL GUILTY PLEASURES is Guns-n-Roses’ Welcome to the Jungle. Yes, indeed, Guns-n-Roses is hair metal. Although Axl Rose is more like a unkempt version of The Cult’s Ian Astbury’s stick-straight 70s era hair, the other members of the band unquestionably deliver the hair metal goods.
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No. 1 of the TOP TEN HAIR METAL GUILTY PLEASURES is — drumroll please! — Winger’s Madalaine. Now, for the Number One hair metal spot I could have chosen something that exemplified hair metal to the point that nothing counted at all except the hair, but there is enough residual musical value here that I find I can listen to Madalaine with some level of interest. I did, after all, refer to these as “guilty pleasures” (though I had to force myself to watch a lot of less-than-pleasurable videos in order to compile this list). I couldn’t embed the original video here, so I’m putting a different video below, but if you click on the above link it should take you to the unembeddable video. It is always worthwhile to watch the original hair metal videos as they are careful to put on obvious display all the hackneyed elements you expect to find in a hair metal performance.
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Hair metal lives on courtesy Youtube! Who would have have suspected that twenty-first century technology would allow us to re-live a lapsed historical era with such immediacy, and in the comfort of our homes?
Nietzsche wrote that when he discovered Spinoza that his lonesomeness had become a “twosomeness.” It is an interesting coinage, and now applies to all of us whose only companionship is a computer and an internet connection. With that minimal connection to the world, we have an entire historical era at our fingertips.
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Nature Morte
3 April 2011
Sunday
Today I took the dogs for a walk into the woods, expecting to see (and to photograph) some signs of spring. The air was thick with the scent of skunk cabbage, and I did see them in bloom, but spring seems to be coming late this year.
It has been rather wet, though far from the wettest spring I can remember. While in Portland many cherry trees are in full bloom (I saw several blossoming trees yesterday), here in rural Clatsop County, on the other side of the Coast Range, it is both cooler and wetter and spring comes later.
Though I went looking for signs of spring, I saw more signs of death left over from the previous year (and sometimes from a hundred years previously, as in the case of the old growth cedar stumps that are still scattered around the woods) than signs of new life from this year.
The signs of death were everywhere I looked — dead leaf litter covering the ground, dead leaves at the bottom of a puddle in the road, dead branches littering the road, and a rich mass of decomposing conifer needles under the trees, slowly and silently transforming themselves in loam.
One might formulate this distinction between new life and old death as the distinction between natura naturans and natura naturata. And while I few tender shoots of new growth poked up from the death littering the ground, natura naturata definitely predominated over natura naturans.
The biomass covering the forest floor will soon feed the new growth of life. The lifeless husk will feed the next generation of life in a recursive food chain that is the true Great Chain of Being. Life comes from death; death comes from life. Natura naturans comes from natura naturata; natura naturata comes from natura naturans.
And for Chloe the outing was a pure joy.
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Grand Strategy Annex
8 March 2011
Tuesday
Today, on the spur of the moment, I started a second blog on the micro-blogging service Tumblr, Grand Strategy Annex. I imagine this to be a spontaneous and less formal adjunct to this present blog, where I try to post longish and (hopefully) carefully reasoned pieces on matters of both strategic and intellectual concern. Wish me luck!
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Another Bachelor Abomination in the Kitchen
28 January 2011
Friday
Second in a series
The Norwegian-Italian Sandwich
People who know what they’re doing in the kitchen — that is to say, people unlike myself — know that you don’t inappropriately mix cuisines. Mere eclecticism has little to recommend it; a synthesis of flavors should be based in a thorough-going knowledge of the palate. In matters of food, which are also matters of taste, eclecticism is sometimes forced upon us simply in virtue of what we happen to have in the cupboard when we are hungry. This, however, was not the case with my Norwegian-Italian sandwich. For this I have no excuse whatsoever.
I use only four ingredients: 1) focaccia bread (Italian), 2) pesto (Italian), 3) Jarlsberg cheese (Norwegian), and 4) cold smoked salmon (Norwegian, although you can, of course, get smoked salmon that is not from Norway, but why would you want to?). Cut the bread in half, liberally (and I do mean liberally) spread on as much pesto as you can handle on both pieces of bread — I usually smear it on about an eighth of an inch thick — then top both pesto-smeared halves with lots of Jarlsberg. Heat until the cheese is melted, and then after the bread, cheese, and pesto have been heated, put the smoked salmon on, still cold.
Eat it while its hot! That way you can not only enjoy the intermingling of strong flavors like salmon, pesto, and Jarlsberg, but you can also enjoy the contrast in temperature between the cold salmon and the rest of the sandwich. Also, an additional incentive to eat it right away is that the pesto is largely constituted by olive oil, and the longer you wait the more the olive oil soaks into the bread. It’s very filling too.
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Weather Report
21 January 2011
Friday
One of the fun things about the internet is being able to effortlessly check the time and the weather anywhere in the world any time. I routinely use Timeanddate.com to check the weather in places I might be considering visiting. There are, of course, a great many weather resources, and I just recently happened upon another. Next Media Animation TV, which I gather is based in Taiwan, now has daily weather presented by the Weather Girls, appropriately dressed for the Year of the Rabbit.
Mini on Fridays is my favorite Bunny Girl.
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The Cognitive Value of Walking
9 January 2011
Sunday
When Thoreau said, “I have traveled widely… in Concord,” I have always assumed that he meant that he walked a lot around Concord. In the same spirit, I could say, “I have traveled widely… in Brownsmead.” And so I traveled in Brownsmead today, walking in the woods of rural Clatsop County, Oregon. I know the area in that intimate way that you can only know a piece of ground if you have walked over it for more than forty years. Philosopher and historian Darren Staloff referred to William Cronon’s book Changes in the Land as “beaver dams over the longue durée,” and while Cronon concerned himself with the land of New England, I have come to a similar appreciation from the perspective of the Pacific Northwest.
Last May, when I was riding in Argentina, I wrote The Cognitive Value of Horseback Riding, about the meditative character of bumping along on the back of a horse, slowly taking in the scenery as it passes by at a modest pace. There is also a cognitive value in walking. Rousseau and Nietzsche were at one in the cognitive value of walking. Nietzsche said of walking, in response to Flaubert’s remark, on ne peut penser et écrire qu’assis: “There I have caught you, nihilist! The sedentary life is the very sin against the Holy Spirit. Only thoughts reached by walking have value.” (Twilight of the Idols, section 34) And, in a more damning aside, in a remark that I have carried with me throughout my adult life: “The poet presents his thoughts festively, on the carriage of rhythm: usually because they could not walk.” (Human, All-Too-Human, section 189) I would not want to be a poet who presented thoughts that could not walk on their own two feet.
Rousseau devoted an entire book to walking, his Reveries of a Solitary Walker. I read this many years ago; indeed, it was among the earliest books of my self-education. I recently re-read the book, last summer I think. It is one of Rousseau’s later works, more mature and meditative than his earlier books, which have about them the restlessness of a “young man in a hurry.” It is easy to dislike Rousseau’s somewhat overwrought literary persona, but the Rousseau of Reveries of a Solitary Walker is a bit more likable, and one can imagine walking with Rousseau on his rambles. I suspect that Rousseau would have been a better friend out of doors than in. Rousseau was not really at home anywhere, but I suspect he was more at home out walking than in any other pastime.
It is not difficult to imagine the judgment of Nietzsche or Rousseau upon Descartes, who, while in winter quarters, shut himself up with a stove, away from the world, and attempted to think through that same world, entire, ab initio, all within the confines of a single room. This is, even more than Shakespeare’s sly take on Marlowe’s unfortunate end, “a great rec-koning in a little roome.” It is the reckoning of the world, and different thinkers have reckoned differently.
The Enlightenment aphorist Lichtenberg wrote that, “I have remarked very clearly that I am often of one opinion when I am lying down and of another when I am standing up” Life can be like this; our posture may well influence our thought. Moreover, sedentary thought has a particular character. I have written about the sedentary thought of societies in Settled Life, Settled Thought. We could think of this as the phylogeny of sedentarism, and once we are thinking in these terms we can immediately see that there would also be an ontogeny of sedentarism. Sedentary thought is static, immobile, almost involuntary, and this is Platonism. Peripatetic thought is vital, dynamic, directed outward, and this is Aristotelian.
It is an irony of history that Plato is the more vital writer, while Aristotle is dry to the point of dessication. It is another irony of history that Plato referred to Aristotle’s home as “the house of the reader,” implying a certain bookishness to Aristotle’s disposition and pursuits, and further implying Plato’s own approach to scholarship, which was more embedded in discussions at his Academy — an essentially social enterprise. I suspect that these historical ironies are interrelated, and that Plato’s irrepressible personality, that comes through so vividly in his dialogues, must have outshone the less colorful Aristotle on several levels, literary and social among them. But while Plato’s milieu was discussion at the Academy, as the milieu of Socrates was the marketplace, Aristotle’s milieu was the world itself. Aristotle is supposed to have lectured to his pupils at the Lyceum while walking, which is why we still use the adjective peripatetic to describe all things Aristotelian as well as to describe all things rambling. Although the Allman Brothers wrote the song, Aristotle was the original Ramblin’ Man. Who knew that they were singing about Aristotle?
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Bachelor Abominations in the Kitchen
3 January 2011
Monday
One of a Series
Since I recently shared my lentil soup experiment with my readers, I thought I might also offer an exposition of some of my other creative “cuisine.” In the photograph above you can see the miniature pizza crusts that I purchased at Winco for $1.98 (which buys a package of four) as well as pizza sauce and the ham that I sliced up as a topping. I invested less than fifteen minutes in meal preparation, and two miniature pizzas filled my stomach.
Given the time and the motivation, I can actually make a pretty good pizza — better than anything available at a pizza restaurant, and much more expensive. I get good quality Romano, Mozzarella, and Parmesan cheeses, and liberally lace the pizza sauce with many Italian spices. This makes for a thick and robust pizza, quite filling and quite tasty.
No doubt there are some wonderful bachelor cookbooks out there, but to consult them out one must be sufficiently motivated to seek them out, and after seeking them out, one must bother to read them. I would be unlikely to do either. I know that there are some men who cook quite elaborately for themselves, but I am not among them.
Of course, on the weekends, when I go to my mom’s house, I dine like royalty on Swedish meatballs and freshly baked rye bread and a traditional Scandinavian dessert made from rendered berries picked earlier the same day in the woods. Again, much better than anything available in any restaurant at any price, and I have learned to appreciate it as I was incapable of appreciating it as a child.
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My mom's salmon with white sauce.
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New Year’s Night
1 January 2011
Saturday
Dusk on the North Portland Harbor, with some of my neighbor's holiday lights.
It would be more conventional to offer a meditation upon New Year’s Day, but my schedule is a little eccentric (which I previously discussed in Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome), and it is only becoming more eccentric over time. I routinely stay up all night long only to go to bed as the dawn is breaking. I enjoy working in my office through the quiet of the night. So, for me, it is really New Year’s Night, rather than New Year’s Day that is significant. And after the revelry of New Year’s Eve, which I avoided yesterday, it is another quiet New Year’s Night.
As I drive around the Portland area late at night (or early in the morning if you prefer) the streets are empty, the stores are empty and dark, the city is quiet, and only the parking lots of apartment buildings are full as their residents slumber silently within. Transients sleep in doorways, undisturbed for the time being. After three in the morning, even the drinking crowd has made their way home and the bars are closed. This is the quietest time, from about 3:00 am to 5:00 am. Often I am the only person on the road, the only activity in sight, the only movement to be discerned, apparently the only one in the city — as though I had the whole metropolis to myself. It is a profoundly solitary time.
Sometimes I am amused to receive confirmation that, in a world of more then six billion people, I am the only one engaged in a given activity. For example, like most businesses in the US, I must make my payroll tax deposits by electronic transfer. I do this by calling a phone number for my bank, punching the information into the phone keypad, and listening to the prompts. After I have completed the various categories of deposits I get confirmation numbers. When I do this during the day it is often the case that a hundred numbers might elapse between the different deposits, but when I made the tax deposits tonight for the payroll I just completed, I got a perfect sequence of numbers: 20001, 20002, and 20003 as my confirmation numbers. No one else in the world — no one — was making the payroll tax deposits through this particular bank at this time.
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Happy New Year!
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