Lance Mannion

Every night he wrote a story. Every morning he reread it indignantly and threw it in the trashbin

Posted Monday night, March 23, 2020.

Victor McLaglen and J.M. Kerrigan in a scene from John Ford’s 1935 classic suspense drama “The Informer”, set during the Irish Troubles and based on the novel by Liam O’Flaherty.

More Borges. No special reason. Just like the paragraph. I like it for the writing. I like it for its deadpan humor. I like it for the wry way it lays out Liam O’Flaherty’s resume as a developing writer. I especially like the lines about O’Flaherty’s parents being “desperately Catholic” and O’Flaherty achieving such "distinction as a revolutionary" he had to “relinquish” the Empire. And of course the line about his rereading his own stories “indignantly” rings true. It’s every writer’s regular thought to look at their own work and demand of themself, “Who do I think I am, trying to get away with writing this crap?”

No special reason for the photo up top either. It’s just that the movie was based on O’Flaherty’s novel.

Borges:

Liam O’Flaherty is a “Man of Aran.” He was born in 1896 to parents who were poor and desperately Catholic. He was educated in a Jesuit college. From boyhood he professed two passions: hatred of England and reverence for the Catholic Church. (The first of those passions was mitigated by his love of English literature; the second by socialism.) In 1914, the two loyalties clashed. O’Flaherty wished for an English defeat, but was enraged by the spectacle of a small Catholic country, Belgium---so comparable to Ireland at that moment!---trampled by a strong, heretic nation, Germany---so much like England! In 1915, he solved the problem by enlisting under a false name to keep his family honor intact. He spent two years fighting the Germans. On his return he seized the opportunity provided by the Irish revolution to fight England. As a revolutionary, he achieved such distinction that for a time he had to relinquish the Empire. We know he was a lumberjack in Canada, a stevedore in a Venezuelan port, a Turkish agent in Asia Minor, and a suboy, a linotypist, and “subversive” orator in Minnesota and Wisconsin. In a tire factory in St Paul, he scribbled out his first stories. Every night he wrote one; every morning he reread it indignantly and threw it in the trashbin.

---Jorge Luis Borges, “Selected Non-Fictions”.

Borges on Cowboys

Posted Friday night, March 20, 2020.

John Wayne makes his appearance in John Ford’s classic western “Stagecoach” and in one shot establishes himself as a major movie star, a legend, and an icon.

Reading essays by Jorge Luis Borges, just for the fun of it, and it is fun. And funny. Borges had a wicked sense of humor and a sharp pen. One of the essays was about the place of the cowboy in American literature, of all things. But then Borges wrote of all things. In the essay I came across this line and it gave me a real kick: “to this day [cowboys] have not inspired a good film.”

Borges wrote that in 1938.

“Stagecoach” came out in 1939.

I’ll bet he saw it. I wonder what he thought of it.

Even more I wonder what he thought of “The Searchers”.

Technically, Ringo and Ethan Edwards aren’t cowboys, although Ethan did work on his brother’s ranch before he went off to fight on the wrong side in the Civil War. So I suppose those don’t count as cowboy movies. But then there’s “Red River”. I’d like to know what Borges thought of that one. I’d like to know what he thought of Howard Hawks as a director. And John Ford. And John Ford versus Howard Hawks as directors and as men. I wonder what he thought about Wayne, as a man, as an actor, and as an icon. I wonder what he thought about all the things.

I’ll go back to my reading now, and find out what he thought of Virginia Woolf...and Ellery Queen.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

"Selected Non-Fictions" by Jorge Luis Borges is available in paperback at Amazon.

"'Nothing is easy,' she said, and with that attitude she ran the whole show..."

Posted Sunday night, March 15, 2010.

Detail from “Old Lady” by Theodore Allmendinger, circa 1941. Courtesy of the Greater Latrobe School District Art Conservation Trust. Chosen as painting of the month, February 2015, by students at the Greater Latrobe Senior High.

Setting: the von Globig’s impoverished estate in East Prussia near the end of World War II in the winter of 1945 as exhausted and demoralized German forces retreating from the Russian front are passing through, with the Red Army close behind...

Another family member was ‘Auntie’, a sinewy old spinster with a wart on her chin. She was always on the go, and in summer she went around the house in a limp, washable dress. Now that it was cold, she wore a pair of men’s trousers under the skirt of the dress and two cardigans over it. Since [her nephew Eberhard von Globig] had become a special officer ‘in the field’, although in fact he was behind the lines, she made sure that everything went smoothly [in his manor house]. ‘Nothing’s easy,’ she would say, and with that attitude she ran the whole show…

When more money had been coming in, [Eberhard and his wife Katharina] had furnished a comfortable apartment on the first floor of the house, three rooms, a bathroom and a little kitchen. It had a warm, comfortable living room with a view of the park, where Katharina could write letters or read books. And when Eberhard came home they were undisturbed there. It meant that they didn’t always have to sit down in the hall with Auntie, who had a finger in every pie and always thought she knew best. Auntie, was always jumping up to fetch something, or staying put when that was was more of a nuisance.

---from “All For Nothing” by Walter Kempowski, translated from the German by Anthea Bell.

"And so grew the book..."

Posted Saturday night, March 14, 2020.

Mary Antin, circa 1915. Via Wikipedia.

“I had no plan when I began...One day I found myself thinking of the time I went to school in Polotzk, and I wrote about that. Another day I kept seeing the little girls I used to play with, and I put them in. Then it was the marketplace that haunted me, or the Dvina gurgled in my ears all night, or there came into my mind a tale the women used to tell while picking feathers of a winter evening. I put those things down just as they came, and so grew the book. When it came to putting those fragments together, I found that they fitted wonderfully well, considering their haphazard origin. A little re-arrangement of the loosed sheets, an introductory sentence here, a connecting phrase there, and the story fell in chapters that named themselves. I never knew what I was going to do until it was done.”

---Mary Antin on how she wrote her classic memoir of her coming to America as a Russian-Jewish immigrant when she was a child and how she grew and thrived in Boston in the early 20th Century, “The Promised Land”, quoted in Jay Parini’s “Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America”.

Once we had a President who knew how to president

Posted Thursday night, March 12, 2020.

"You cannot believe this man": President-elect Barack Obama meeting with Vice President-elect Joe Biden and the members of his economic advisory team November 7, 2008, three days after he was elected President.  John Gress/Reuters via the Boston Globe.

This is from Reed Hundt’s “A Crisis Wasted”. Hundt was a member of President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team in 2008. Obama disappointed him. You can guess that from the title of his book. Keep in mind the book is sharply critical of Obama, then, when you read the passage.

Scene: The first public meeting of Barack Obama’s economic transition team, Obama Campaign offices, Chicago. November 7, 2008, three days after Obama was elected President. Characters: Barack Obama. Joe Biden. Theodore Geithner. Peter Orszag. Christina Romer. Jared Bernstein. Austan Goolsbee. Geithner was already tapped to be Obama’s first Secretary of the Treasury. Orszag was his first director of the Office of Management and Budget. Romer became Obama’s first chair of his Council of Economic Advisers. Bernstein served as the Chief Economist and Economic Adviser to the Vice-President. Goolsbee was chief economist for the Economic Recovery Board and served on the Council of Economic Advisers; he succeeded Romer as chair when she resigned in 2010.

Note: By “worst briefing” I take the participants and Hundt to mean the briefing that delivered Obama the worst bad news and offered him the least help, not that it was an incompetent mess...

After Goolsbee’s housing presentation, Orszag “laid out the harrowing budget situation.” Geithner “push[ed] strongly for long-term discipline in our overall budget strategy.” He felt he got “pushback” from Romer, Goolsbee, and Bernstein, but Obama took Geithner’s side.

In the meeting Geithner thought Obama was “substantive, realistic, and comfortably in command,” while he himself personally was “weary and dark...always sucking the hope out of the air in our meetings.” Romer thought, “The President-elect was brilliant. I called my husband and said, ‘You cannot believe this man.’ We were all exhausted and he was still going strong. It was lots of substance, but he didn’t really tip his hand. He listened. He asked questions. He obviously heard and understood everything.”

As the president-elect rose to leave and everyone stood with him, Goolsbee told Obama, “That’s the worst background briefing an incoming president has had since 1932, and possibly since Abraham Lincoln.” Obama answered, “Goolsbee, that’s not even my worst briefing this week." Goolsbee could not remember if the other briefing was like “Pakistan and India are about to go to war,” but it was of that nature. As the economy turned out, Goolsbee was right---it was Obama’s worst briefing.

---from “A Crisis Wasted: Barack Obama’s Defining Decisions” by Reed Hundt.

How people were politely socially unsocial before there was social media

Posted Saturday night, December 21, 2019.

“Morning News” by Francis Luis Mora, 1912, San Diego Museum of Art via Wikipedia.

Before there were smart phones and Twitter, there were…newspapers?

Then he got out his newspaper, and Johnny also got out his, and for a time there was no conversation between them…

Major Grantly had The Times, and John Eames had the Daily News, and they exchanged papers. One had the last Saturday, and the other the last Spectator, and they exchanged those also. Both had the Pall Mall Gazette, of which enterprising periodical they gradually came to discuss the merits and demerits, thus falling into conversation at last…

---from “The Last Chronicle of Barset” by Anthony Trollope.

My daughters

Posted Tuesday night, December 17, 2019.

Who needs Star Wars?: Eliza Scanlen, Saorise Ronan, Emma Watson, and Florence Pugh as Amy, Jo, Meg, and Beth March in Greta Gerwig’s film adaptation of “Little Women".

I just became the father of four quirky teenage daughters who are making the house cheerful and merry even with their bickering…

Which is to say I started reading “Little Women” this morning, preparing to see the movie which opens next week.

"Jo does use such slang words!" observed Amy, with a reproving look at the long figure stretched on the rug.

Jo immediately sat up, put her hands in her pockets, and began to whistle.

"Don't, Jo. It's so boyish!"

"That's why I do it."

"I detest rude, unladylike girls!"

"I hate affected, niminy-piminy chits!"

"Birds in their little nests agree," sang Beth, the peacemaker, with such a funny face that both sharp voices softened to a laugh, and the "pecking" ended for that time.

"Really, girls, you are both to be blamed," said Meg, beginning to lecture in her elder-sisterly fashion. "You are old enough to leave off boyish tricks, and to behave better, Josephine. It didn't matter so much when you were a little girl, but now you are so tall, and turn up your hair, you should remember that you are a young lady."

"I'm not! And if turning up my hair makes me one, I'll wear it in two tails till I'm twenty," cried Jo, pulling off her net, and shaking down a chestnut mane. "I hate to think I've got to grow up, and be Miss March, and wear long gowns, and look as prim as a China Aster! It's bad enough to be a girl, anyway, when I like boy's games and work and manners! I can't get over my disappointment in not being a boy. And it's worse than ever now, for I'm dying to go and fight with Papa. And I can only stay home and knit, like a poky old woman!"

And Jo shook the blue army sock till the needles rattled like castanets, and her ball bounded across the room.

"Poor Jo! It's too bad, but it can't be helped. So you must try to be contented with making your name boyish, and playing brother to us girls," said Beth, stroking the rough head with a hand that all the dish washing and dusting in the world could not make ungentle in its touch.

"As for you, Amy," continued Meg, "you are altogether too particular and prim. Your airs are funny now, but you'll grow up an affected little goose, if you don't take care. I like your nice manners and refined ways of speaking, when you don't try to be elegant. But your absurd words are as bad as Jo's slang."

"If Jo is a tomboy and Amy a goose, what am I, please?" asked Beth, ready to share the lecture.

"You're a dear, and nothing else," answered Meg warmly, and no one contradicted her, for the 'Mouse' was the pet of the family.

As young readers like to know 'how people look', we will take this moment to give them a little sketch of the four sisters, who sat knitting away in the twilight, while the December snow fell quietly without, and the fire crackled cheerfully within. It was a comfortable room, though the carpet was faded and the furniture very plain, for a good picture or two hung on the walls, books filled the recesses, chrysanthemums and Christmas roses bloomed in the windows, and a pleasant atmosphere of home peace pervaded it.

Margaret, the eldest of the four, was sixteen, and very pretty, being plump and fair, with large eyes, plenty of soft brown hair, a sweet mouth, and white hands, of which she was rather vain. Fifteen-year-old Jo was very tall, thin, and brown, and reminded one of a colt, for she never seemed to know what to do with her long limbs, which were very much in her way. She had a decided mouth, a comical nose, and sharp, gray eyes, which appeared to see everything, and were by turns fierce, funny, or thoughtful. Her long, thick hair was her one beauty, but it was usually bundled into a net, to be out of her way. Round shoulders had Jo, big hands and feet, a flyaway look to her clothes, and the uncomfortable appearance of a girl who was rapidly shooting up into a woman and didn't like it. Elizabeth, or Beth, as everyone called her, was a rosy, smooth-haired, bright-eyed girl of thirteen, with a shy manner, a timid voice, and a peaceful expression which was seldom disturbed. Her father called her 'Little Miss Tranquility', and the name suited her excellently, for she seemed to live in a happy world of her own, only venturing out to meet the few whom she trusted and loved. Amy, though the youngest, was a most important person, in her own opinion at least. A regular snow maiden, with blue eyes, and yellow hair curling on her shoulders, pale and slender, and always carrying herself like a young lady mindful of her manners. What the characters of the four sisters were we will leave to be found out.

---from Chapter One of "Little Women" by Louisa May Alcott.

The unforgiving partisanship of the Bishop's wife

Posted Monday night, December 16, 2019.

Geraldine McEwan as the imperious and domineering Mrs Proudie in the 1982 BBC miniseries based on Anthony Trollope's novel "Barchester Towers", with Clive Owen as her overly-accommodating husband the Bishiop of Barchester. Mrs Proudie re-appears in all her formidable glory in "The Last Chronicle of Barset".

There are partisans, and there are partisans!. Mrs Proudie was a partisan!

But to explain all this to Mrs. Proudie was beyond his power. He knew well that she would not hear a word in mitigation of Mr. Crawley's presumed offence. Mr. Crawley belonged to the other party, and Mrs. Proudie was a thorough-going partisan. I know a man,—an excellent fellow, who, being himself a strong politician, constantly expresses a belief that all politicians opposed to him are thieves, child-murderers, parricides, lovers of incest, demons upon the earth. He is a strong partisan, but not, I think, so strong as Mrs. Proudie. He says that he believes all evil of his opponents; but she really believed the evil. The archdeacon had called Mrs. Proudie a she-Beelzebub; but that was a simple ebullition of mortal hatred. He believed her to be simply a vulgar, interfering, brazen-faced virago. Mrs. Proudie in truth believed that the archdeacon was an actual emanation from Satan, sent to those parts to devour souls,—as she would call it,—and that she herself was an emanation of another sort, sent from another source expressly to Barchester, to prevent such devouring, as far as it might possibly be prevented by a mortal agency.

---from “The Last Chronicle of Barset” by Anthony Trollope.

Civility, circa 1917

Posted Monday night, November 25, 2019.

Henry Cabot Lodge, Senator and Pugilist, known to his fans as Pinky. Via Wikipedia by way of the Boston Review.

Lodge was a United States Senator. A Republican United States Senator. Bannawart was peace activist. I’d bet he threw the first punch. Not because of the irony or the stock character nature of it---the pacifist with a violent temper. Because of what I know of Lodge. He was something of a stock character too: the war-lover who normally left the fighting to others. The hero of the moment, though, was, of course, the telegram delivery boy:

Earlier that Day, a small group of peace activists from Massachusett had called upon their senator, Henry Cabot Lodge, to ask him to reconsider his support for war. Lodge said he had been considering for three years and wasn’t going to consider anymore. The conversation, in a corridor, grew heated, and one of the visitors, Alexander Bannawart, observed that cowards were the ones supporting war. Lodge replied that if Bannawart were calling him a coward, “He was damned liar.” Then one man or the other struck the first blow. In the ensuing melee they both took punches. Bannawart, a form minor league ballplayer and executive, was bloodied and subdued by a passing Western Union messenger boy, and arrested. Lodge, who was 66, felt he had acquitted himself capitally. “At my age there is a certain aspect of folly about the whole thing in wrote in a letter to [his good friend Theodore Roosevelt], “and yet I am glad that I hit him. The Senators all appeared to be perfectly delighted.”

---from “March 1917” by Will Englund.

New York City as Leon Trotsky found it

Mined from the notebooks, Monday, November 11, 2019. Posted Sunday night, November 24.

Filthy, jostling, and always on the make: The view down East 47th Street from Times Square, New York City in 1920, not long after Leon Trotsky lived there. That’s the Palace Theatre in the center of the photo and, its sign peeking out from the photo’s far left, is the Columbia Amusement Company Building, home of the Columbia Theatre, a famous burlesque house. Via Wikipedia.

New York City values, circa 1917:

The city was a jumbled mass of contradictions...It boasted the world’s tallest skyscraper---the four-year-old, 57 story Woolworth Building---and the rank tenements of the Lower East Side. Row upon row of chocolate-hued brownstones lined Manhattan’s cross streets. It was a natural place of business for both J.P. Morgan, the financier, and Max Eastman, the radical editor of The Masses. Southern blacks were settling in uptown Harlem even as the flow of Catholics from Italy and Jews from Russia had been closed off by the war. In Yorkville, on the Upper East Side, German-Americans read German-language newspapers and ate sauerbraten and strudel in German restaurants. Irish-Americans vied for political power’ Sicilian mobsters had started to amass a different kind of power. The Catskill Aqueduct, a huge public works project that would carry clean fresh water to the city from upstate, was months away from opening. Real estate developers were casting their eyes on the uncrowded upper burroughs.

New York was filthy, jostling, physically unencumbered by seemingly any controlling vision, and always on the make…

In the winter, skaters flocked to Central Park; in the summer, Coney Island drew its millions of visitors. New Yorkers had a choice of three baseball teams to root for, one in Brooklyn and two in Manhattan. Only the Giants were any good. People elsewhere in the country looked askance at New York’s social reforms, its immigrants, its high life, its power, its New York values. Across the nation Wall Street was loathed…

---from “March 1917: On the Brink of War and Revolution” by Will Englund (6)

One must take extra care not to disturb the mountains and ruins lest you provoke the ire of the djinn

Mined from the notebooks, October 17, 2019. Posted Wednesday night, November 21, 2019.

Mount Kazbek range Caucasus Mountains, the traditional location of the land of Paristan in Persian mythology, home of the Pari—”fairy-like creatures from Persian mythology viewed as semi-angelic or as goodly djinn.” Copyrighted photo by Vyacheslav Argenberg, used by permission via Wikipedia.

For my first wish I'd like everyone who thinks Twitter is just outrage and vituperation to read this thread by Ali A Olomi, an assistant professor of history at Penn State specializing in the history of the Middle East and Islam and an expert on, among other aspects of Middle Eastern myth and folklore, the djinn making Twitter a happier place by sharing his expertise in threads like this one:

The djinn are said to be an invisible race living alongside humankind. While some inhabit our cities & even our homes, stories also tell of legendary lands & remote locations where they reside.

A thread on the realms and kingdoms of djinn in Middle Eastern and Islamic folklore

Mountains and caves are said to be regular haunts for the djinn. In particularly the legendary Mount Qaf.

Believed to be a mountain at the edge of the world, it is the home of many djinn kingdoms and mythic creatures

The mighty Roc lives on Mount Qaf while the Simurgh has its nest on its crags.

The djinn monarchs Malik Gatshan and Shahpal bin Shahrukh both host their court on Mount Qaf and the mythic mountain is said to be home to countless tribes of djinn

Some have associated Mount Qaf with the Caucasus Mountains but other descriptions place it as a range that encircles the edges of the earth, fashioned of glistening emerald

So bright is the emerald that its glint tints the sky

The idea of a distant mountain range also appear in Islamic eschatology as the barrier that holds back the apocalyptic horde of Yajuj and Majuj

Mount Qaf is occasionally associated with Paristan, home of the Pari—fairy-like creatures from Persian mythology viewed as semi-angelic or as goodly djinn.

Other times Paristan is a separate land. There is also a South Asian/ Himalayan village named after this land of fairies

The djinn are also said to live on islands, particularly those found in the Indian Ocean and China sea

One such island is WaqWaq, rich and abundant in gold. It is said only djinn and women reside on the island which is ruled by a queen. On it grows a mighty tree

And upon this tree grows babies who mature and they fall as full grown adults with a cry sounding like “wak wak.”

This is how the islands’ inhabitants reproduce 

In other tellings the tree births men and women alike

Another island is the home of the djinn king, Sakhr upon which is a great apple tree and the giant, Sharahiya, guardian of the tree.

On a different island and it’s cave one can find the Queen of Serpents, whose body is that of a snake but face of a beautiful woman

On the Island of Zaneh, winged djinn of multiple colors make their home. Some of them human-looking with wings and others more bestial 

Colors aren’t just used to depict djinn visually but also used to describe their kingdoms

The red djinn reside in a palace of copper ruled over by their martial king, Al Ahmar

The blue djinn live in a vast city made of carnelian, brass, and gold, ruled over by Barqan

The green kingdom of djinn live in a palace made of emerald and decorated with bronze and copper. They are ruled over by Zawba

The kingdom of the black djinn is said to reside among the clouds as they have mighty wings that let them fly. Their palace is made of obsidian & gold

The colored kingdoms of the djinn are also associated with the djinn kings of the days of the week

The djinn also make their home in ruins and desolate places. The Quran references Iram with its Pillars, a lost city of legend. In folklore it gains a reputation as the place where djinn make their home now 

They also make their home in historic ruins visited by pilgrims

Anand Vivek Taneja writes, in India the ruined Tughlaq fortress, Feroz Shah Kolta is believed to be the home of saint-like djinn who are petitioned by locals to intercede in various matters

While the Berber village of Aroumd is home to a shrine of the djinn, Chamharouch

Flags decorate his shrine while supplicants make sacrifices to him in the hopes that he will work miracles.

Among the Berber near Meknes, wells are the abode of the djinn mistress, Mimouna

In Mecca, there is the Masjid al Jinn, a mosque built on the spot where the djinn reputedly gathered to hear Prophet Muhammad recite the Quran and converted to Islam

Additionally we find natural formations as home of the djinn

The Bab el Mandeb, a strait in the Red Sea known as the Gate of Tears is said to have been been hewn by an ancient king and now is the home of tumultuous marids and ifrits

In Iran the great sand dunes of Rig e Jenn is home to countless djinn who lead travelers astray

Similarly the red dunes of Egypt are home to Ifrit who appear as sudden sandstorms and twisters of dust

There’s a claim that so ferocious were the ifrits of Egypt that Napoleon warned his colonial forces to be wary of the desert and its guardians

Finally whole countries are said to be haunted by djinn. Oman, Yemen, & Afghanistan are all home to vast scores of djinn

In Yemen, trickster djinn govern the water flow of Wadi Daw’an, while other djinn forged the gates of Aden under King Solomon’s orders for the Queen of Sheba

In the Red Sea, Kudummul is a small volcanic island formed from the petrified body of three giant djinn

In Afghanistan the mountains and caves are believed to be the home of many djinn and beasts. Some of the mountains are said to be the petrified bodies of mighty dragons

Other legends say the original inhabitants of Afghanistan’s mountains were djinn and pari, long before humans lived there.

One must take extra care not to disturb the mountains and ruins of Afghanistan lest you provoke the ire of the djinn

Bayonets and Blood

Posted Friday night, November 8, 2019.

Finished listening to “Hell and Good Company” this afternoon. Even when you know going in how it ends, even when you remind yourself Spain's been a democracy a decade longer than it was a dictatorship,even when you know that forty-four years later---This just in!---Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead, it’s still gut-wrenching…

Past the Ebro, Franco’s forces pushed into Catalonia, Barcelona fell on 26 January 1939, Valencia on 30 March. On 1 April 1939 the Spanish Civil War ended in Republican defeat. In May the Nationalist armies paraded Franco’s victory on Madrid’s Gran Via while Spanish, Italian, and Condor Legion aircraft in formation spelled out the Caudillo’s name. Reprisals followed, firing squads manning machine guns, long years in prison, slave labor put to draining swamps and building monuments. “Our regime,” Franco announced grandly, “is based on bayonets and blood, not on hypocritical elections.”

—-from “Hell and Good Company: The Spanish Civil War and the World it Made” by Richard Rhodes.

Before the age of electronically propagated hysteria

Posted Saturday night, October 19, 2019.

An Android statue with Oreos outside the Googleplex, Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California. Photo credit: MariaX/Shutterstock via World Atlas.

Last night I reached the chapter in “Quichotte”, Salman Rushdie’s contemporary reboot of Cervantes' “Don Quixote”, where Quichotte, the Quixote character, introduces his “son” Sancho to his estranged sister, a successful entrepreneur, feminist writer, activist, and philanthropist. Sancho’s “aunt” tells him how she and his “father”---I’m using quotation marks because Sancho is a figment of Quichotte’s imagination come to life and his familial relationship to anyone in the physical world, including his “father” are questionable, at least to himself---fell out. It happened when they were young and she was just establishing herself. She wrote an op-ed for the New York Times that made her all kinds of influential enemies among the public intelligentsia who set out to destroy her reputation and her budding career. Quichotte, a writer and intellectual himself, didn’t come to her defense and even suggested she was to blame for bringing the trouble on herself. What saved her, her business, and her name, she tells Sancho, was when it happened:

“What saved me was the date. Let’s just say, B.G., which is to say, Before Google...The world before the age of electronically propagated hysteria, in which words have become bombs that blow up their users, and to make any public utterage is to set off such explosions. Our age, A.G., in which the mob rules, and the smartphone rules the mob. Back then the most advanced technology was the fax machine. Old technology saved my business and my life. It was too slow to kill. The howls of outrage spread, but they spread slowly. My character was assassinated, but it was a slow assassination, which allowed time for a defense to be assembled, for resistance to be organized…

---from “Quichotte: A Novel” by Salman Rushdie.

Huh. I wonder if Rushdie has read Siva Vaidhyanathan's "The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry".

[Clicking on the book titles will take you to Amazon’s website. I’m an Amazon associate and earn a (very small) commission from purchases made via this blog.]

"Normal doesn't feel normal to me," says Sancho

Posted Friday night, October 11, 2019.

In “Quichotte”, Salman Rushdie’s retelling of “Don Quixote”, set in the United States in the 21st Century, the title character isn’t driven mad by too much reading of the wrong sort of books, like his 17th Century counterpart. He’s driven mad by too much television. His Sancho is a figment of his imagination come to physical life, a fifteen year old boy who is partly a dream of the son he never had, partly an idealized version of himself as a teenager, and  mostly a typical television sitcom character. Sancho, who takes over as narrator a quarter of the way through the book, shortly after he materializes in the passenger seat of Quichotte's car, is aware of himself as a fictional construct and doesn’t much care for being one. He wants to be a real live boy. (Sancho is also aware of himself as a literary allusion, and refers to himself at one point as having been “Pinochicco-ed” into existence.) He and Quichotte are traveling across the country, on a quest to find Quichotte's Dulcinea, a talk show host he fell in love with while watching her on TV. He and Sancho stop at motels for the night, where they don't have much to do but watch television. Sancho tries to learn what it’s like to be a real live American boy from TV. It’s not a satisfying learning experience, and asking his “father” for help doesn’t help….

I’m new here. I’m trying to understand how the world works, his world, the only one available to me. The world according to Quichotte. I’m trying to get a sense of the normal, but it keeps dissolving around me. On TV, because (having no option) I’m watching a lot of myself now, everybody seems to know what normal is, and at the same time nobody agrees. I’m using the remote to find out.

“Is this what’s normal?” I ask him. “A couch in the living room with a staircase behind it and an armchair to the side, and a father in the armchair and a mom in the kitchen and teenage children rushing in and out wanting sandwiches and quarreling but every thirty mintues minus commercials there’s a group hug?”

“Yes,” he says. “Life is like this for normal people.”

“Or,” I say, “is normal a couch in the living room with a staircase behind it and an armchair on the side and loud woman’s big comeback killed by a tweet referencing Muslim Brotherhood and Planet of the Apes?”

“That’s a less normal normal,” he says.

Zap. Sports channel. Normal is nine innings, four balls, three strikes, somebody wins, somebody loses, there’s no such thing as a tie. Zap---

---Normal is unreal people, mostly rich unreal people, having sex with rappers and basketball players and thinking of their unreal family as a real-world brand, like Pepsi or Drano or Ford. Zap. News channels. Normal is guns and the normal America that really wants to be great again. Then there’s another normal if your skin is the wrong color and another normal if you’re educated and another if you think education is brainwashing and there’s an America that believes in vaccines for kids and another that says that’s a con trick and they’re all on TV depending where you look, so, yeah, it’s confusing. I’m really trying to understand which this is America now. Zap. Zap. Zap...a fat man in a red hat screaming at men and women also fat also in red hats about victory, We’re undereducated and overfed. We’re full of pride over who the f*ck knows. We drive to the emergency room and send Granny out to get guns and cigarettes. We don’t need no stinkin’ allies..We’re Bevis and Butt-head on ‘roids. We drink Roundup from the can. Our president looks like a Christmas ham and talks like Chucky. We’re America, bitch...Zap...Zap…

“Normal doesn’t feel so normal to me,” I tell him.

“It’s normal to feel that way,” he replies.

This is what I get instead of fatherly wisdom. (Rushdie 131-133)

---from “Quichotte” by Salman Rusdie.

"This glinting hint from a dead man’s grin is almost unnecessary---for this is a painting about transience"

Monday evening, September 23, 2019.

Detail from “Vanitas Still Life” by Maria van Oosterwijck. 1688. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Via Wikipedia.

A typical still life of the time, painted [by Maria van Oosterwijck] in 1688, shows a gray-marble table with a slightly chipped edge. Assembled on it are household items that appear to have been picked up carelessly and left there: a bunch of flowers, a carafe of aqua vita (brandy), letters, an accounts ledger and some books, a celestial globe, an hourglass, a ginger jar being used as an inkwell, a purse---and a skull. This glinting hint from a dead man’s grin is almost unnecessary---for this is a painting about transience.

The finely executed flowers...will soon wilt, and even now the composition gives the impression that the flowers are sprouting from the bony hollow that once contained a brain. In the left corner, a head of wheat is being eyed by a mouse that will soon devour it, while the rattle, used by plague victims is a reminder of the fragility of happiness. The recorder receives its voice only from living, human breath, which will soon expire. The cob of corn...is already half eaten and the ginger jar...which once contained a rare delicacy offered to select guests, has come down in the world to less exalted service.

The...theme continues in the ledger, even if the astute observer already suspects that it contains not the bookkeeping of a wholesaler but rather a more existential tally, a register of sins…

The carafe of the left is filled with a red liquid not at all like clear, distilled alcohol. What then is this aqua vita, this elixir of life, that is kept inside? Is it liqueur or does the glass, fragile as the human body, contain a more precious liquid?...

The artist’s emblem is also part of the scene a Red Admiral butterfly, which has found life after death in the chrysalis...its quivering, powdery wings show their beautiful pattern but will soon be dust again. For a moment, the butterfly is sitting on the book that contains the accounts of people’s deeds and misdeeds. One moment later it will be gone.

---from “Nature’s Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age of the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed the West and Shaped the Present" by Philipp Blom.

"To him who feels the hailstones patter about his ears, the whole hemisphere appears to be in storm and tempest…"

Posted Monday night, September 16, 2019.

"Winter landscape with skaters and bird trap" by Pieter Breugel the Elder. 1565. Via Wikipedia.

When the vines of my village are nipped with the frost, my parish priest presently concludes, that the indignation of God has gone out against all the human race...Who is it that, seeing the havoc of these civil wars of ours, does not cry out, that the machine of the world is near dissolution, and that the day of judgment is at hand; without considering, that many worse things have been seen, and that in the meantime, people are very merry in a thousand other parts of the earth for all this? For my part, considering the licence and impunity that always attend such commotions, I wonder they are so moderate, and that there is no more mischief done. To him who feels the hailstones patter about his ears, the whole hemisphere appears to be in storm and tempest…

---Michel de Montaigne, from “Of the Education of Children”.

Carl Sagan's objection to objections to astrology

Very early Monday morning, September 2, 2019.

Sagan again. This time on his way to making a deeper point. But I’m using it as an excuse to let you know that I know what the precession of the equinoxes is because I do my homework and looked it up. And as an excuse to post the painting up top because any excuse to post tasteful nudity. The painting is titled “Astrologer observing the Equinox and a scene of parting Adonis and Venus”. It was painted in 1684 or thereabouts by a lesser known Dutch contemporary of Vermeer, Domenicus van Wijnen. I looked him up too. The young man in the turban is the astrologer. The couple, um, dancing in the air in the background are Venus and Adonis. That they’re doing a parting, um, dance tells you the equinox in question is the autumn equinox. Zeus allowed Venus and Adonis to spend half the year together, ‘spring and summer. Adonis had to spend the other half of the year in hell. The demonically smiling nude rising out of the water is supposed to be Charon come to collect Adonis’ soul for his half a year in the underworld.  I don’t know why Charon didn’t take his boat. Anywho. Sagan...

Many valid criticisms of astrology can be formulated in a few sentences: for example, its acceptance of precession of the equinoxes in announcing an “Age of Aquarius” and its rejection of precession of the equinoxes in casting horoscopes; its neglect of atmospheric refraction; its list of supposedly significant celestial objects that is mainly limited to naked eye objects known to Ptolemy in the second century, and that ignores an enormous variety of new astronomical objects discovered since (Where is the astrology of near-Earth asteroids?); inconsistent requirements for detailed information on time as compared to latitude and longitude of birth; the failure of astrology to pass the identical-twin test; the major differences in horoscopes and such psychological tests as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory…

---from “The Demon-Haunted World”.

I also looked up the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. You’ll have to do your own homework and look it up for yourself, as well as the precession of the equinoxes (if you need to) and Domenicus van Wijnen. Just follow the links.

So...the point Sagan was on his way to making was this: astrology we'll always have with us and the reason for that is that science and skepticism don't do as good a job of addressing the fears and anxieties of people living in a troublesome and unpredictable world:

In the middle 1970s an astronomer I admire put together a modest manifesto called “Objections to Astrology” and asked me to endorse it. I struggled with his wording, and in the end found myself unable to sign---not because I thought astrology had any validity whatever, but because I felt (and still feel) that the tone of the statement was authoritarian. It criticized astrology for having origins shrouded in superstition. But this is true as well for religion, chemistry, medicine, and astronomy, to mention only four. The issue is not what faltering and rudimentary knowledge astrology came from, but what is its present validity. Then there was speculation on the psychological motivations of those who believe in astrology. These motivations---for example, the feeling of powerlessness in a complex, troublesome and unpredictable world---might explain why astrology is not generally given the skeptical scrutiny it deserves, but is quite peripheral to whether it works…

What I would have signed is a statement describing and refuting the principal tenets of astrological belief. Such a statement would have been far more persuasive than what was actually circulated and published. But astrology, which has been with us for four thousand years or more, today seems more popular than ever. At least a quarter of all Americans, according to opinion polls, “believe” in astrology. A third think Sun-sign astrology is “scientific.” The fraction of schoolchildren believing in astrology rose from 40 percent to 49 percent between 1978 and 1984. There are perhaps ten times more astrologers than astronomers in the United States. In France there are more astrologers than Roman Catholic clergy. No stuffy dismissal by a gaggle of scientists makes contact with the social needs that astrology---no matter how invalid it is---addresses, and science does not. 

“The Demon-Haunted World” is a collection of essays published in 1995. But the essays were written over a period of years and this one I’m quoting---”The Marriage of Skepticism and Wonder” appears to have been written in the late 1980s. I wouldn’t bet that astrology has become less popular in the thirty odd years since, although I can’t help cynically hoping that there are even more astrologers in France than there are priests now, and everywhere else, but only if that signifies a decline in the number of celibates in backward collars and not an increase in the number of astrologers. Astrologers have done less harm. But we do live in a complex, troublesome, and unpredictable world, we are mostly powerless to do anything about it, and people don’t like feeling powerless. Astrology is something people can turn to to help them figure out, as Sagan puts it an another part of the essay, how that world works and what their place in it might be. Oh well. It’s not the most pernicious belief system going at the moment.

"If you're only skeptical..."<---What came before. What follows--->Silence conveys assent.

______________________________________________________________________________________________

"The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark" by Carl Sagan is available in paperback and for kindle at Amazon and as an audiobook from Audible.

"If you're only skeptical..."

Posted very early Monday morning, September 2, 2018.

Detail from “Philosopher in Meditation” by Rembrandt van Rijn. 1632. Louvre via Wikipedia.

If you’re only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. You never learn anything. You become a crotchety misanthrope convinced that nonsense is ruling the world. (There is, of course, much data to support you.) Since major discoveries at the borderlines of science are rare, experience will tend to confirm your grumpiness. But every now and then a new idea turns out to be on the mark, valid and wonderful. If you’re too resolutely skeptical, you’re going to miss (or resent) the transforming discoveries in science, and either way you will be obstructing understanding and progress. Mere skepticism is not enough. 

---Carl Sagan, “The Demon-Haunted World”.

None of us come into this world fully equipped<---What came before. What's next---Carl Sagan's objection to objections to astrology.

None of us come into this world fully equipped

Posted very late Sunday night, September 1, 2019.

Trying to figure out how the world works and what their place in it might be: Detail from “Consulting the Oracle” by Henry Nelson O’Neil. Circa mid-19th Century. Courtesy of Glasgow Museums Media Resource Centre via Art UK.

Have I ever heard a skeptic wax superior and contemptuous? Certainly. I’ve sometimes heard, to my retrospective dismay, that unpleasant tone in my own voice. There are human imperfections on both sides of this issue. Even when it’s applied sensitively, scientific skepticism may come across as arrogant, dogmatic, heartless, and dismissive of the feelings and deeply held beliefs of others. And, it must be said, some scientists and dedicated skeptics apply this tool as a blunt instrument, with little finesse. Sometimes in looks as if the skeptical conclusion came first, that contentions were dismissed before, not after, the evidence was examined. All of us cherish our beliefs. They are, to a degree, self-defining. When someone comes along who challenges our belief system as insufficiently well-based---or who, like Socrates, merely asks embarrassing questions that we haven’t thought of, or demonstrates that we’ve swept key underlying assumptions under the rug---it becomes much more than a search for knowledge. It feels like a personal assault…

...In the way that skepticism is sometimes applied to issues of public concern, there is a tendency to belittle, to condescend, to ignore the fact that, deluded or not, supporters of superstition and pseudo-science are human beings with real feelings, who, like the skeptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our place in it might be. Their motives are consonant with science. If their culture has not given them all the tools they need to pursue this great quest, let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped.

---Carl Sagan, “The Demon-Haunted World”.

What follows--->If you're only skeptical...

 

Poor and lonely in the Texas Hill Country

Posted Wednesday night, August 21, 2019.

Somewhere on the LBJ Ranch. Lyndon Johnson National Historical Park. Photo courtesy of the National Park Service.

When I look through the notebooks in which I took my notes from the interviews with those men and women, I find over and over the word “poor” written. There was a level of poverty there that a city person could hardly imagine. Some of the families who lived outside the little towns that dotted the Hill Country---Dripping Springs, Blanco, Junction, Telegraph---still lived in the log dwellings called “dog-runs,” which were two separate rooms or cabins connected under a continuous roof, with an open corridor that had been left between them for ventilation. That was where the dogs slept. When Lyndon Johnson was growing up, there was very little cash in Johnson City. Very little. You could get a dime for a dozen eggs, but you had to sell them in Marble Falls, and Marble Falls was twenty-three miles away from Johnson City. One of Lyndon Johnson’s boyhood friends, Bed Crider, relates how he rode horseback the twenty-three miles between Johnson City and Marble falls keeping the horse at a walk and carrying those dozen eggs in a bos he held in front of him so they wouldn’t break, just for a dime. “Lonely” is a word that I found over and over again in my notes...Lyndon Johnson didn’t even grow up in Johnson City, small and isolated as it was; he grew up on the Johnson Ranch, which was fourteen miles beyond Johnson City, farther out into the hills. One corner of that ranch came down next to what they called the Austin-Fredericksburg Road, which was really not a road but only a graded, rutted path between these two places. Lyndon’s little brother, Sam Houston Johnson, would tell me how he and Lyndon used to sit on the fence at that corner for hours when they were little boys hoping that a rider or carriage would come by so they’d have a new person to talk to.

---from “A Sense of Place” in “Working” by Robert Caro.