Gender: Male
Status: Single
Sign: Leo
City: Crawpappy's
State: OKLAHOMA
Country: US
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Sunday, October 05, 2008
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The white man’s contribution to civilization
"Hey Jake answer me this!" Jake was all caught up in the baseball game but it was a slow night at Crawpappy's and he was eager for diversion so he indulged me and listened. "Don't you think this would be a great line to pick up girls??" As I said it had been a quiet night and I had had plenty of time to let my mind loose to roam through strange places. I'd been contemplating history and the strands that ran through it. "A sure-fire way to meet girls... wait for it.....'What is the major issue, the major problem, that runs through all of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy? All the philosophers grappled with it, in fact all the intelligent men of the day tried to solve it, and in the end no one ever did. People died for it, it split society and caused strife and schism and in fact it haunts us still.' " "Ohhhh girls will really be so excited by that... NOT," Jake said. "Just talk to them about the game."
But I was excited by that. And to his credit Jake let me go on and explain. The problem was, in what does virtue consist, in what is morality founded, and to be more specific, if science and philosophy undermine our faith in the gods, in dear old Zeus sitting on a mountaintop keeping an eye on things, why shouldn't everyone just do whatever the heck he wants, just rob and steal and pillage, so long as he can get away with it? Yes the big fear was that if people lost faith in religion, then the country would fall apart. Anomie would prevail. Wild hedonism would coexist with a strange confusion and hopelessness. It was this fear that did Socrates in. It wasn't his support for the aristocrats, I think, that made those jurors condemn him, it was the prevailing belief that he should die so that the gods could live.
Science and philosophy pushing the limits, and overhanging all, like the sword of Damocles, the threat of anomie and disintegration. Reason and the intellect free to range untrammeled, to call anything into question. So fragile... yet so glorious because of that. And suddenly it occurred to me that this is the white man's contribution to the world. People used to say that every thought that could be thought was first thought in Greece, and yet every one of those thoughts was at some point, usually long before, thought in India, in China, in Africa. (And that's an interesting unsolved historical puzzle, how much if any of Greek philosophy came from travellers who had learned it in India.) Every thought, except this: science and reason allowed to roam so far that they called everything into question. That was Greece's gift to the world.
And these culture wars haunt us still. Wherever a Renaissance flowered, in that place also rose an Inquisition. And the Inquisitors truly believed (as Dostoievsky's Grand Inquisitor more or less put into words) that without them society would fall apart. Perhaps this explains one of the great enigmas. China, in 1400, reaching the threshold of science, worldwide expansion, and industrial revolution, suddenly stopped, retreated, and closed itself off to the world. Perhaps those Chinese were wise.
I feel it too. I do admire reason and enlightenment, but how how often have I prayed, "God, please please just tell me what to do!" About a year ago I wrote about the theories of a well-known psychologist who believes that the angst that inevitably follows us throughout life is caused by the basic problems life presents: lack of meaning; isolation and the impossibility of communion; the inevitable presence of that uninvited guest, death. And it's that very angst (unknown in vast regions of the world which have not yet tasted of Eve's poisonous fruit) which is the white man's gift to the world.
Enjoy my music players!!
AMAZIN' ASIAN
SONG OF AFRICA
ARABIAN NIGHTS
LATIN EXPERIENCE
WHITE MAN'S MUSIC
2:36 PM
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Sunday, September 28, 2008
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Crawpappy’s teaches me the correct answer to what Buddha and Socrates got wrong
So I strutted into Crawpappy's secure in the knowledge that purple and gold and skyrockets and laughing rollicking good times were just ahead. And it felt like diving into grey cotton wool or cold yet liquid lead. The bar was empty. Empty deserted and dead. So I sat and drank beer and beer and it was as if all the joy had gone out of the world. And the hours passed and the crowds trickled in and suddenly people were laughing all around me and it was like being bathed in golden sunlight. I was happy happy happy and I felt the joy bursting out of every pore. So, I told myself, your happiness is contingent on how many people are in Crawpappy's bar. That's pathetic.
And then it hit me. All those Greek philosophers, Socrates not least among them but also those Cynics squatting in squalor and raggedy cloaks, and far off in Nepal the Buddha too, were desperately trying to answer the question of what is happiness, what is the good life. And they all rejected out of hand any path to happiness that was contingent on external factors. They rejected the joys and even the realm of the senses because they were transient, vulnerable, likely to be taken away. But what if they were wrong? It's an empirical question and maybe it will turn out after much observation and judicious and pleasant experimentation that the best possible life is indeed contingent on factors you can't control. Foolish to say it isn't so and rush into asceticism and denial. Better to just dive into the flow of sensation and value it all the more for its transience and likely evanescence and try to help others grab some too.
So I went all up and down that bar and told girl after girl after girl how I, Brian, had just that moment discovered something that Buddha and Socrates and all sorts of other important smart people whose names just then escaped me had got wholly wrong. So was I right? I dunno, but I sure was happy!
Why the Jews turned inward
It was 200 BC and Judaism was dying. Throughout and around the land of Israel were thirty of forty flourishing Greek cities. They offered any Jewish youth who wanted to visit a chance to learn and debate Greek philosophy and science, to join Greek festivals and athletic games, to dally with beautiful and compliant Greek women (or men if they so desired). The older Jewish priests and zealots exhorted the young not to abandon the austere and puritanical life of strict Judiasm. They didn't have a chance. The young Jewish men bought artificial foreskins the better to blend in with the nude parades and nude athletic contests.
And then occurred what is surely the most shameful event in the long and glorious, albeit often melodramatic and sometimes quite shameful, history of Greek civilization. Israel, for decades ruled by Egypt, had just been conquered by a vast and long-forgotten country called the Seleucid Empire. It stretched from Afghanistan through to the Mediterranean and ever since the death of Alexander the Great was ruled by the descendents of Alexander's second-best general (the best general got Egypt). Around 165 BC the Seleucid Emperor was Antiochus IV: brilliant, able, cunning... and certifiably insane. (Sometimes at state banquets he would rip his clothes off, call for music, and cavort in wild dances around the banquet hall.) He decided to conquer Egypt and while he was so occupied the Jews rebelled against his rule. Furious, and soundly defeated in Egypt, Antiochus stormed back to Jerusalem. For starters, he had his army seize a few thousand Jews and kill them. Then his troops captured every inhabitant of that great city and sold them into slavery.
Antiochus then decided that it was the Jewish religion that caused the people to rebel against him. And so began what was perhaps the first religious persecution in the history of the Earth. Greek soldiers were sent to every village and spot where Jews lived. Every man woman and child was required to pray to Zeus and eat a pork chop.... or die. Anyone seen observing any Jewish rituals or holidays would likewise die. To the amazement of the Hellenic world -- because ironically at that time no one believed in Zeus and certainly no one would die for him -- many if not most of the Jews preferred death to abandoning their God. One group of several thousand hid in a huge cave. The Greeks waited until Saturday, when the Jews wouldn't fight back, and then marched into the cave and killed them all. Others sneaked back into the hills and began a guerrilla resistance that, as the years passed, fought off army after army of battle-hardened Greek veterans, and ultimately prevailed. This victory is celebrated every December in a holiday called Hanukkah.
And after it was all over, the Jews turned inward and didn't want to learn a thing from Greek civilization.
The appeal of the primitive
Lately I've been drawn a lot to early painting. I'm a great fan of the oneiric, and those early works seem to be woven from the tissues of a dream. A great artist is one who transcends his limitations, and often obstacles placed in the way of art result in works far greater than had the hurdles not been there. Unable to depict the world around them with perfect realism, the painters diverged into a magical, blazing realm that, in the end, portrayed the transcendent magic of the cosmos far better than realism could. So perhaps those whom I've always thought of as the heroes of the art world, people like Ucello, even Masaccio, who discovered perspective and how to paint with photographic fidelity, instead clipped art's wings.
All these thoughts came to mind today while looking at some early Flemish painters. They were right at the cusp of it all, suspended between magic and the mundane. And their art still burns with the fire of angels.
Monet is the root of a profound insight
I'm really tired and hungover so I don't know if I will express this properly. But I was blasted by a thought last night that I just gotta try to capture before butterflylike it flies away. I e-mailed a photo (not the one below) to some of my friends. Swirling colors, it looks like epiphany-level abstract art. The kind that would make an Abstract Expressionist proud. But what it is is, I took a small part of one of Monet's later paintings and blew it up to fill the page. It's based on real-life water lilies. So abstract art and realism converge. There are patterns as abstract as a mathematical equation that lie behind all of nature, and maybe our mind (which is a part of nature) and aesthetics too. The job of art is to find them, or at least hint at them, to expose the bare underpinnings of the world and let the viewer marvel at and maybe transcend it.
Problems an unknown author faces
Someone told me I should try to get my stuff published in The New Yorker. I wrote this in reply... it illustrates the problems authors face... and it also shows the problems READERS face, because it limits the books they get to choose from when they go to even the biggest bookstore...
The problem an unknown author faces with the New Yorker is the same problem he faces with getting a major top-quality newspaper to review his book. There are 50 thousand books published a year in the US, the same number in Britain. Most send copies to the New York (or London) Times. Probably an even bigger number of authors send articles to the New Yorker. Now ideally these publications would get a literary expert to spend an hour or two with each of these, rank them, and consider the top one in a thousand for publication. Now if they paid those experts $20 an hour, a low salary, this would cost two million dollars a year. Not surprisingly, they don't do that. What they do is give all this stuff to the lowest-ranked employees. They might glance at each one for 60 seconds and then throw them away. Or they might not even look at all, just sell the book to a second-hand bookstore for $5 each, unread. (The Strand bookstore in NY buys a lot of review copies like that.) Those low-guy-on-the-totem-pole employees are EXPECTED to do this. If an employee goes running to a top editor with some submission that he rescued from what is contemptuously known as "the Slush Pile", unless the rescued submission is the best thing ever seen by eyes of man, that employee will be laughed at for weeks for bothering the top editor. Most articles published by the New Yorker are things sent by famous authors, usually solicited by the magazine. Most books reviewed by major newspapers are either by known authors or are those very few books especially recommended by the publisher. A publisher who prints 500 different books a year might pick two of these and phone his friend at the Times and say, take the time to read those two, you'll be able to review them... and that's what the Times does.
Please listen to my new Myspace music players, just click the link, you don't have to download anything!!
AMAZIN' ASIAN
SONG OF AFRICA
ARABIAN NIGHTS
LATIN EXPERIENCE
WHITE MAN'S MUSIC
3:42 PM
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Monday, September 08, 2008
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Jungle Passion
I don't think anyone ever considered W. Somerset Maugham a great writer. He was too popular for that. I think that at one point he was the most highly paid writer in England, if not the world. And yet lately I've been rereading some of his short stories for the fourth time with pleasure, whereas it's hard to think of any of those truly great writers which I'd venture to reread without anguish and trepidation. I think those short stories are his greatest work. They are simple, the words just flow, there's none of the pretension and self-consciousness of, say, "The Razor's Edge". Those short stories (like Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories) have a charm that defies analysis. It's always the same story being told. A grand and all-consuming passion where you'd least expect it, and then someone dies.
Perhaps those plot similarities are an asset. What otherwise would be a series of trifling vignettes add up to produce and reinforce a consistent, compelling view of the world. In Maugham's world, people are neither completely good nor completely evil. Grand and majestic passion can arise in any man or woman, passions which like a rampaging flood sweep away all obstacles, and it's those passions which give life its savor. The closest Maugham seems to come to condemning something as evil is when he describes people who try to uproot and repress those passions when they arise in others. (In his tales of the south Pacific, most of the missionaries are like that.) "A virtue that only causes havoc and unhappiness is worth nothing," Maugham said at one point, and a bit farther down the page, "I prefer a loose woman to a selfish one and a wanton to a fool." Maugham was homosexual, and in those days that sort of passion had to be kept a secret and perhaps this contributed to his tolerance, and to his belief that every individual, even the most mousy and forgettable, had a hidden life roiled by emotion.
But I didn't read all those stories so many times because of the passion. It's the language, the slow, incredibly leisurely beginnings -- the stories are short, but, at about 15 thousand words each, far from cramped -- and most of all the setting. All the best of Maugham's stories are set in what is now Malaysia. Not in the bigger cities either but in some remote plantation deep in the jungle or a district station way upriver. To some extent this setting was merely a plot device. It heightened the drama to have the characters marooned and totally alone, trapped in exotic and alien surroundings. Yes, alone... for it is surely the least appealing aspect of Maugham's stories that, though in the midst of thousands of people -- Malays, Chinese, Tamils, Dyak -- Maugham's characters felt as alone as if they'd been in a rowboat in the south Atlantic. It was the height of the British Empire, and those were the people running it, ruling those "natives", and the thought of actually talking to them never entered their heads. Maugham's compassion, it seems, extended only so far. Although in Maugham's defence, it had to be so, or the stories would have failed. Those doomed hothouse characters had to be alone, adrift in an impossibly fertile yet inscrutable and hostile world. If they'd each had a hundred Chinese friends to run to, the stories just wouldn't have worked.
Whatever its social merit, Maugham's Malaya manages to work its magic. Upon reading his stories for the first time, I was ready to pack my bags and go .Indeed, not much later, I did. But the real Malaya has little in common with that described by Maugham. That's a vanished world... or more likely, one that never existed. It's a world of Maugham's creation, a world so vivid that it makes even the wonderful, vibrant real Malaysia seem a bit pallid. Perhaps that is Maugham's greatest achievement.
4:38 PM
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Tuesday, September 02, 2008
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Paradise forgotten
1.
Once again Pakistan's North-West Frontier, that wild, rugged and untamed land hard on the fringes of the vast mountain ranges and plateaus known as the Roof of the World, is in the news. But the most fascinating and inaccessible part of the Tribal Zone hasn't been mentioned. Long ago, when I tried to infiltrate that forbidden area, everyone agreed that the fiercest of the Pathan groups that kept all outside authority at bay was the Afridi. The area they controlled was called the Tirah, and in the center of that was a valley, mythical almost in its reputation, spoken of with awe, lush and verdant in the midst of the arid plains, called the Maidan. Now no outsiders had ever penetrated its hidden fastness. I tried. I went in disguise, wearing a shalwar qamiz. I didn't even get within twenty miles. I shouldn't say "no outsiders". Apparently a British expeditionary force managed to march through the Maidan about 100 years ago, during the Tirah Campaign of 1897. During that campaign, in effect a war, Afridi resistance was so fierce that at least two British soldiers won the V.C. The Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, written a few years later, carries this description of the Maidan based on those soldiers' awed recollections:
Maidan, the summer home of the Afridis, lies close under the snow-bound ridges of the Safed Koh at an elevation of about 6,400 ft. It is an oval plain about seven to eight miles long, and three or four wide, and slopes inwards towards the centre of its northern side, where all the drainage gathered from the four corners of the plain is shot into a narrow corkscrew outlet leading to the Bara Valley.
Centuries of detritus accumulated in this basin have filled it up with rich alluvial soil and made it one of the most fertile valleys on the frontier. All its alluvial slopes are terraced and revetted and irrigated till every yard is made productive. Here and there dotted about in clusters all over the plain are square-built two storey mud and timber houses, standing in the shade of gigantic walnut and mulberry trees. Up on the hillsides surrounding the Maidan basin are wild olives in wide-grown clumps, almost amounting to forest, and occasional pomegranates.
Higher still are the blue pines; but below on the shelving plains are nothing but fruit trees.
That was in 1897. For over a hundred years, no one has visited this forgotten Shangri-La, and even today, with war heating up all around it, it escapes all mention. What happened to it?
2.
Deep in the impenetrable jungles that form the center of the island of New Guinea live a people called the Hewa. I spent a fortnight there some years ago. They played, sang, hunted, told stories, and it was all so far, far far from the madding world. So unused were they to outsiders that they thought I was a god or at least a spirit.
I just looked up Hewa on Google and found these two items. Not all change is progress.
1)
from New Tribes Mission news
After seven weeks of evangelistic Bible teaching in a remote Hewa village in Papua New Guinea, several people made professions of faith in Christ when they heard what His death, burial, resurrection and ascension accomplished for them....
"I now realize that I have been Satan's child my entire life," one Hewa woman said.
2)
from Goway Tours, Inc. brochure
Day 7. Karawari to Hewa Village. Flying from Karawari to the extremely remote Hewa of the Lagaip valley. Climbing from near sea-level over the massive central ranges and descending into the Lagaip Valley. The Hewa were first studied as a cultural group by anthropologists in the 1960's. Prior to 2001, the Hewa did not even have an airstrip and the only access was by foot -- several days walk to the nearest road. Overnight Hewa Village BLD
Day 8. Hewa Village. A full day is spent amongst the Hewa people, learning about their culture, language and traditions. The Hewa, being on the edge of the highlands, have a culture that is an extraordinary mixture of lowlands and highlands cultures. Being extremely remote, they live very traditional lives and very few people speak Pidgin (the lingua franca of Papua New Guinea); let alone English. Overnight Hewa Village
Someone once told me that it doesn't matter if a language dies. I wrote the paragraphs below, and I think it applies to culture too. If a culture dies, a great treasure is lost forever.
Benjamin Whorf was all the rage with my friends when I was in law school, so I grew up with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which states that language determines culture and even thought. People think in forms and categories because those categories are named and thereby recognized by their language. . Why do we think of a river, which is really a series of events (moving units of water) as a thing? Because it is denoted by a noun. (There could be a language wher everything is denoted by verbs, or gerunds -- water- flowing)
Anyway, if you believe any of this -- and I do, to some extent, though less now that I've traveled around the world and also now that I've read Chomsky -- then the loss of a language is the loss of an unexplored universe of thought, one which may contain new ways of thinking and seeing the world.
3:40 PM
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Sunday, August 31, 2008
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Lunch in Utica Square
Get me drunk and you'll hear a lot of wild talk. Chances are I'll boast about the fine literary quality of my blog. Well, this piece ain't great literature. But I think it will, unlike most of my blog work, actually be of use to lots of my friends. It can feed you! So if it's good writing you're after, read my blog on Proust. CLICK HERE to read it!
My mom has just returned from an extended stay in St John's Hospital and my daily visits to her gave me an unprecedented opportunity to try just about every one of the twelve or so restaurants in Utica Square, that verdant and tony shopping plaza just to the south. Here's what I found.
Stonehorse Cafe
Always my favorite. Some of the dishes would be well-received in New York's finest restaurants. The halibut, for example, crusted in pistachio in the style Wylie Dufresne made famous, served on a bed of minced shallots, tomato and huge shrimp, and surrounded by a wonderful sauce that was little thicker than consomme, the color of lobster bisque with flecks of cream, but was redolent with flavor -- a tart citrus vied with Chardonnay. It's $15 at lunch and about $30 at dinner. Most of the lunch entrees are $14 or less, change daily, and often include house-made sausages atop a hearty ragout of spinach, wine and white beans, or sliced steak adjacent to a marvelous medley of a salad. Hamburgers, big and dreamy, are $8.50. Lunch is served till about 4:30PM, closed Sunday and Monday. The Stonehorse Market, just next door, has just been expanded, that's a retail store where the restaurant sells food that's raw but prepped for cooking. Two and a half inch thick pork chops brined and marinated, huge chickens brushed with a garlic and rosemary paste, and prime-quality steaks, all from small farms and ranches in Colorado or Okla., and all excellent
Wild Fork
Hearty pastas such as linguini in an anchovy cream sauce with mushrooms and pine nuts ($11), stellar sandwiches like catfish (a huge hunk of fried fish swims atop a hero roll)($12), and simple entrees, such as a good version of chicken fried steak ($12), or grilled pork chop with caramelized apples ($15) Lunch till 5, closed Sunday. A pleasant, airy setting with outdoor dining too. www.wildfork.com
Olive Garden
Slightly cheaper lunch dishes served till 4 on weekdays. Olive Garden has come up in the past 10 years. The food used to be downright inedible. Now it's sometimes quite good, and comes with a mountain of salad. (If you eat all the salad and breadsticks, that's probably about 800 calories) Braised beef and tortelloni has ribs braised in wine surrounded by cheese-filled dumplings, topped with a small amount of a yummy cream sauce. Pasta might be soggy unless you request al dente, and the tomato sauce is not their best feature. From time to time, about once a year, they have all you can eat pasta for only $9. Now is that time; it's available lunch and dinner until October 12, 2008.
P F Chang's
Upscale decor, Chinese-inspired food can be surprisingly good. They have a few cheap lunch dishes until 4, including salmon fillet served atop a bed of asparagus surrounded by a lovely lemon-soy sauce (more French than Chinese) ($9.50) and shrimp with lobster sauce that is redolent of a good black bean flavor. ($8.50) Good things on the dinner menu too. I finally tried mu shu pork ($11), which for years I avoided on principle, and it was excellent. See http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/437668
Peppers
Peppers has the same menu all day but it's one of the least expensive places in the area. It's shamelessly Tex-Mex... no subtle moles here, just lots of melted cheese... but if that's what you want, it does a good job, and prepares the burritos and chimichingas lovingly and with care. Most dishes under $10.
Polo Grill
Lunch menu till 4:30. Most of the lunch dishes are fairly uninspired in creation, but the execution and presentation makes them well worth ordering. One of the best chicken fried steaks around. ($13), good hamburger steak covered in wine sauce ($13). My favorite was an enormous chicken breast. The skin was removed and the inside stuffed with a tangy cheese sauce, then the skin was put back. ($15). Usually I loathe chicken breast but I loved this. http://www.pologrill.com/
McGill's
Lunch till 4. Their pasta with lobster ($13) is worth a lunchtime trip. Farfalle, ziti and spirelli pasta with a yummy red cream sauce redolent of lobster (with a few chunks of meat too) Their fettucini Alfredo ($10) is quite good too. Their specialty is steaks, though, which are $25 and up. www.dinemcgills.com
Places I haven't been
Queenie's is a wildly popular lunch spot with outdoor dining and sandwiches, soups, salads under $7. I've never eaten there and I think its draw is being a pleasant place to have a snack between shopping. The food does not look all that inspired (except for the wonderful desserts) I've never been to Fleming's. It is a chain steakhouse and with prices there about as high as Peter Luger's I don't plan to go. But it's always crowded. Perhaps the most crowded place of all is the Starbucks. If you want a Starbucks, this one has a better location, with tables opposite the central and luxuriant garden, than most.
3:51 PM
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Monday, August 18, 2008
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Eternal China
An ad exec in New York sent me a lovely essay describing Jonathan Spence's latest book, which chronicled the life and times of a scholar living in Shaoxing, south of Shanghai, in the early 17th Century. Exhilarated upon exposure to a new world, he showed how that made him apprehend for the first time the wondrous scope and richness of Chinese art, philosophy and culture. I sent him this in reply:
Jonathan Spence does wonderful work. He was one of the first to take sheaves of documents from remote times and regions and create a portrait of life in a remote corner of China. He seems most fascinated by that late Ming period and by the Yangtze River basin, the region around what is now Shanghai. I've often thought of the period around 1630 as one of gentle decline, and so arguably it was... influenced by the decision taken by the Ming rulers around 1430 to shut China off from the rest of the world...just when Chinese navies were beginning to explore the waters around Africa. Had this decision not been taken, China might have ruled the world. But in the region around Shanghai, where Zhang Dai (Spence's hero) lived, the decline was far less apparent. In fact, cities like Suzhou were a lot like London or Manchester 200 years later. China was on the verge of an industrial revolution. Ill-paid workers toiled in huge factories (mainly producing silk) to support a rich, elegant factory-owning class of capitalists. It was a time of artistic and intellectual ferment, producing some of the greatest examples of, for instance, painting. My favorite artist was Dong Qichang, whose view of painting (he once said that a landscape painting was mountains and trees, but it was also pen and ink) was very much like Cezanne's.
But there are many peaks of artistic and intellectual achievement, and the amazing thing about China is that none was ever forgotten. They are all related -- like an infinite symphony, the same themes and motifs are played again and again -- and the culture of 1630, and today for that matter, springs from the culture of 1300, of 750, and for that matter from 200 BC. Those dates are roughly those of previous peaks. 1300 (well, maybe 100 years before) saw a great surge in philosophical and scientific thought known as neo-Confucianism, which produced a view of the cosmos a lot like modern physics. It was also a time of artistic excellence (painting and porcelain) 750 was also a peak, the greatest poets lived then (Li Bai and Du Fu), and perhaps the first of the scholar-gentlemen of which the hero of Spence's book, a thousand years later, was one. Although the rise of the scholar, the Mandarinate and the exams, can be traced back to that other peak, 200 BC. The big city then was Changan, now Xi'an. It was the largest city in the world in 750 AD, and perhaps the most cosmopolitan. Scholars and traders flocked from all over Asia, and in the huge palaces of the sybaritic aristocracy, fetes and revels were held that might have put Versailles to shame.
What a fascinating world you have discovered, Mike. It's like the poet felt when discovering Chapman's translation of Homer.
"Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific – and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise–
Silent, upon a peak in Darien."
One book that might guide you is my guidebook to China, long out of print. Before writing it, I read as much as I could about China, and the first 35 pages are long essays on Chinese history, politics, economics and culture, essays which I wrote to synthesize in my own words, and with my own theories, all that I had learned. You can probably find it secondhand really cheaply .
Painting by Dong Qichang, 1597
Addendum:
Actually, thinking about it, there are a lot of times when China rushed to the verge of an exciting new breakthrough... and then retreated. So there are several fascinating what-if questions for historians to ponder... along with the more interesting, why didn't it happen? Some examples:
1. What if China had decided in 1420 to occupy, send its bureaucrats to rule, and give the benefits of civilization, to all the lands its ships could reach.... and to send its ships north on the Atlantic, straight toward Britain?
2. What if the neo-confucian thinkers of 1300 had taken their theories toward physics and hard science?
3. What if the big silk factories of 1600 had been combined by simple weaving machines, jump-starting an Industrial Revolution ... and flooding Europe with cheap Chinese textiles?
And why didn't these things happen?
3:13 PM
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Sunday, August 10, 2008
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World Music
Lately I've been entranced by the singing of a young woman from Mauritania whose voice blazes like the desert sun. Before that it was a girl in the marshlands of southwest Ethiopia whose nomadic love songs will haunt your nights. And I hereby confess to being shamefully hooked on those strangely hypnotic melodies coming out of North Korea.
My house is filled with music from all over the world, uploaded from starry deserts cruised by nomad caravans, from tiny jungle shacks within sound of temple bells, from tundra, forest, grassland, from every town and city known to man. On the Internet, great things are built by millions of tiny contributions. All you need is a good search engine to pull it all together. I've discovered one in the process of emerging, but it's hard to search around, and you need to spend a bit of time. It's Myspace music, and anyone anywhere in the world can put up a page and some songs. Here are some of my finds. You have to go to the URL and then click on the song you want to hear on the player that you'll see on the top right corner. It's not easy to get to Nouakchott or Gambela, but you can hear the sounds of those far-off lands.
LINKS to Music:
3:25 PM
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Tuesday, August 05, 2008
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A great book left forgotten
I've spent the last few months happy, squirreled away with all those books that I hoarded away when I was a kid, planning for sure to read someday, but somehow, until now, never did. And then, after trudging my way through Proust and joyfully romping through Ulysses, I got a book cheap from a guy down the street who was selling off some of his library along with miscellaneous crockery and kitchen equipment in that joyous Tulsa impromptu neighborhood gathering that we call a garage sale. So there I was, still high off the word-slinging epiphanies of Joyce (and yes, Proust) and faced with a book I'd never heard of and bought just because it was big and had a nice cover. I never expected it to thrill me but it did.
Dawes Williams is an eight year old kid kicking around Iowa in the summer of 1949. He hangs out with a boy named Ronnie Crown who is a hardcore juvenile delinquent already on the road to the criminal life. Summers spent at the farm with his grandfather, who tells him the history of that barren, once-prolific ghost-hanuted land and lets him run free with his prize greyhounds, and with a crazy old woman neighbor who teaches him the joy of running through night grasses and reaching for the crazy epiphanies that lie in the sky, immanent yet invisible to all civilized men but but all too hypnotically visible and seemingly just beyond grasp to those with the knowledge to look. So there's a triangle here, with one corner being the pull of family history and society duty, the other being just crazy wild juvenile-delinquent fun, and the third the vague, humming, overpowering transcendent things that burn beyond our everyday reality. This triangle persists through the three sections of the book, and in the end pull our hero apart.
The second part is teenage Dawes doing amazingly wild things with his crazy pals, things that make you laugh out loud. Reading that part of the book is a lot like going to Crawpappy's and getting drunk. You learn a lot about joy. In the third part, the style fragments and becomes totally metaphorical and, not to mince words, crazy. But still understandable and moving. Dawes, angry with himself, angry with the world that's pulling him to pieces, makes his way down to Mexico, is brutally attacked by a band of Peace Corps sociologists, crawls off down a nameless beach to find redemption -- no, of course not redemption, that's something those straight-arrow sociologists Dawes is itching to escape would dream up -- but he does find something. Or maybe nothing.
The Stones of Summer was written by a twentysomething guy in Iowa named Dan Mossman. It was published in 1972, and at about that time the author went insane, got a bed in an Iowa loony bin, and quietly dropped off the map. Meanwhile, the publisher went bankrupt. So the book disappeared and sank without a ripple. A documentary filmmaker discovered it a few years back and made a film about Mossman, and a few copies were reprinted. I think the point of the documentary was how amazing it is that a great work of art could in this day and age be created and then forgotten. But that happens all the time in the dog eat dog world of modern publishing. Still, the thing to be learned from that film is, it is a great book and will give you a hell of an electric ride. Go read it and wreck your mind. I'm 8 pages from the ending, so let me get back to it and see if Dawes dies in the end, which, as Dawes himself would be the first to tell you, would make perfect sense given the way he is going.
7:55 AM
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Thursday, July 31, 2008
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Attack of the killer elites!
When I was at Oxford, which was back in the days when Oxford's main railway station was lit by gas lamps, the expression in vogue was NOCD -- though no one actually SAID it except for journalists. Not our class, darling. You see, the loungin' shootin' fast-talking smart set who had evolved from the robber barons of the Middle Ages had developed a complex set of unspoken rules for verbal and non-verbal behavior, and so the moment that someone opened his mouth, and usually even before, they could tell with certainty whether or not that someone was one of them.
Fine. They were a bright, attractive lot, that bygone jeunnesse dore, and they did get me to read Proust. (They never mentioned Joyce.) The problem is that mind-set has infiltrated every professional, academic and social field, at least in New York, and where New York goes, so goes the nation. Talk to the people who work at the Museum of Modern Art, or Sothebys, or the leading fashion magazines or design houses, or ad agencies, or law firms, or architect firms, and if you don't have the patter down exactly right, you are stigmatized as an outsider, and whatever you say just won't be taken seriously. In fact, they will think that you are socially, morally, and intellectually inferior to them. And quite quite often, this just isn't true!!
Yes, the elite in the hard sciences is inundated with communications from, to put it kindly, crackpots. And they need to screen those out. But even in the hard sciences someone who just doesn't talk in the right way may have insights worthy of note. And this is far more likely in such softer realms as art, music, design etc. But in those realms, if you don't talk the talk you will be considered a part of "the great unwashed", along with bag ladies and Midwesterners. The insouciant snobbery of all of this would make a diehard Tory blush.
One of New York's leading chefs, now long retired, treated everyone at his restaurant as a celebrity. If someone came to him and asked him for a job, he paid no attention to whether the applicant's behavior was congruent to that which is indoctrinated at the leading cooking schools. He didn't care if the guy talked of "elegant presentation" or just said, "looks cool on the plate" Instead he'd take the guy into his kitchen and say, "Make me an omelet." But people like that are rare.
Sassetta
A few months ago, to pass the time, I read a detective novel. All I remember of those lost hours now is that one of the characters had found a painting by Sassetta. I grew up in a world of art, and here was a name I had never heard of.
Sassetta was born, lived and died amidst the buff-colored walls and modest palaces of Siena. He started painting around 1420 and died around thirty years later. That's all I know.
To see one of his paintings is to enter a world of magic. Perception, line and color, is subtly simplified, skewed. I don't know (and this is true of a lot of art from this period) if this is because he was trying to paint something that would look like a photograph and couldn't, or because he was trying to convey a tranquil and subtle epiphany, an alternate reality, a place of mind. If the latter, he succeeded.
Long walk with food
Someone on Chowhound asked about long walks in Queens, preferably with food. I wrote this in late 2004, not mainly about food but totally about the multinational kaleidoscope that is Queens.
Years ago I did two hikes of marathon proportions. I had Belgian beer in Park Slope and walked to Coney Island and ate in Totonno's. Another time I ate in Jackson Heights and walked to Broad Channel and found an Irish bar. My favorite walk is much shorter: start off at 61 st, Woodside and walk along Roosevelt Av to Junction, then turn right, walk to Corona and down that to the park, eat Italian ice while watching old guys play bocce.
Here's a description of food neighborhoods found along the Roosevelt Av part of the walk:
You can start off in Woodside, and the sun hits your back as you walk by the guys standing outside the many bars. Ten years or more ago it was construction workers looking for jobs you'd see, now it's computer programmers talking into cellphones. Ireland's changed. But they're gone as you walk through a tiny Thai neighborhood and then a cluster of crowded Filipino hangouts and then a tiny Indian shopping street thronged with women in graceful swaying saris. There are men too of course, and they mix more than they do on the subcontinent -- I've seen a turbaned old Sikh eating in a Pakistani restaurant -- but they also gravitate to separate corners. One patch of sidewalk is a Nepali hangout, a block or so down you'll hear Bengali gossip until late into the night.
Leave India behind as you walk on, through a long Colombian neighborhood. In that wonderful film "Our Lady of the Assassins", filmed in Medellin, one character says "Lets escape, far away, to New York City. No...too many Colombians there." And much of another recent Colombian movie, "Maria Full of Grace", was filmed here. They're restaurants with home-longing names like "Pequena Colombia", "Mi Colombia" and "Tierras Colombianas", and they're all packed.
A few blocks down the neighborhood changes again, and its Mexicans that fill the cantinas, young workers drinking beer, missing home, and hoping for something approximating mama's cooking. And then come Peruvian places, Ecuadorian, whatever people comes to these shores you'll find them here. And it's all along one street, Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, New York City.
And yes, some of the storefronts are gritty. There's an elevated train line right above. But remember what one of the characters in that Maria movie says when asked how she can live in Jackson Heights: "Yes, when I first got here, I called my parents back in Colombia and they were celebrating my sister's birthday and I heard all the laughter and wanted more than anything to be home. And then I got my first paycheck and realized what I could do for my sister, for all my family. Four years later, I'm still here."
Brian
Photos of what you can see on the walk: Indian, Indian, Colombian, Irish, Tibetan. All in New York!
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I wrote a Wikipedia article!
Someone sent me an article about a film released in 1919 that apparently drove audiences literally insane. I say apparently, because the article was in German. I got the name of the director from the article and looked it up. Not much, but I found enough to see he was a great and more or less totally forgotten director. It's a rare thing indeed to find a notable film director who doesn't even have an article in Wikipedia. And Robert Reinert didn't have an article ten minutes ago. But he does now.
Brian
Poster for one of his movies:
3:49 PM
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Monday, June 16, 2008
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A rocket scientist comes to Crawpappy’s
I've known Richard Juday for as long as I've been a member of Prometheus, and so I was thrilled when he said he'd stop by my house last night. He was driving from Dallas to Denver and Tulsa was only a few hundred miles out of his way, and he wanted to see Crawpappy's. But I've never met him before and all I knew about him was that he had worked for NASA for years, so brilliant that NASA basically set up an autonomous department just for him and let him research whatever he wanted, so I didn't know what to expect. What I didn't expect was for a huge rental van to pull up and out pops a wiry guy, grizzled beard and all, looked like he'd spent a lifetime riding his horse on the prairie. But that was Richard and I got to meet his wife too. She'd just earned her PhD in geology. So I got thim fed and showered and there we were outside waiting for a taxi. I stepped in the house for a moment and came out to find the both of them staring at our fountain, deriving equations that would model the complex flow of the water. Lucky the water isn't turbulent, I said.
Quick as that we were in Crawpappy's, pretty empty last night but at least my waitress friends ran over to surround us. And just as I was expecting drunk times and chitchat, Richard called for paper. "Let me show you in graphical, non-mathematical format one of my exciting discoveries in optics!" And he drew complicated multidimensional graphs to prove that at least in theory you could build an optical recognition device that could recognize, say, a specific face or person or object, using nothing but two incredibly complicated lenses. He then drew a ROC curve to show the different criteria for recognition, and then told me how the same curve could apply to psychometrics and Prometheus score criteria. Eric, bartender, TNS member, and engineering PhD student, followed all of this. I followed a lot of it too. I wandered off in search of girls and came back to find Richard engaged in animated conversation with the bouncer, a crusty old ex-Marine I've never even dared talk to.
They left before I did. I stayed till closing time. The place got packed and I met lots of girls. I came down in the morning to say goodbye. He was talking with the night nurse, an older lady who generally doesn't talk to anyone. Oh, look at this, he said, pulling from his rucksack a 50,000 Ngultrum gold coin from Bhutan that weighed a quarter pound. That can buy a whole village in Bhutan I said. After he left I said good night to the night nurse. He's a really smart guy, I said. He's a really NICE guy, said the nurse.
two old cowboys
Rejoyce
I found a tiny thing written by Joyce while looking something up. In it, a cloud is blown by the wind, and as the cloud moves, this guy sees the area lit by the sun moving toward him on the pavement and the glow moving on the sidewalk reminds him of a girl running. (A lot of things remind him of girls.) I said that the guy is reminded of a girl running, and I said this because Joyce is famous for "stream of consciousness" writing. But if you view it as an accurate description of the stream of a person's consciousness, I think you are missing the point. Joyce uses stream of consciousness the same way as Proust uses his long descriptions of Vinteuil's symphonies. Like Vinteul and his symphonies, Joyce's character is fictional. Joyce uses that fictional guy's stream of consciousness as an excuse to put another pretty shape in the complex kaleidoscope, another motif in the symphony -- or should I say another really cool riff into the jam session, for if Proust's Vinteuil (and maybe Proust himself) is a classical composer like Beethoven, Joyce is a jazz musician just blowing improv on his horn. It fits into the symphony -- jazz symphony -- that riff does, it adds a whole 'nother dimension to that wonderfully complex work, and if in the process it also helps us perceive and explore the wonders of the world around us, all the better.
"Quick warm sunlight came running from Berkeley road, swiftly, in slim sandals, along the brightening footpath. Runs, she runs to meet me, a girl with gold hair on the wind."
Science and metaphor
I've sometimes thought that ideas and concepts trickle down from mechanical science to social science by the power of analogy. For example, invention of hydraulic lift, or elevator, inspires Freud's theory of libido. Or the jumbled streetscapes that began to emerge around 1900, with skyscrapers cheek by jowl with 300 year old churches, inspires cubism and the dissassembly of reality generally. Surely something happened around 1900... or perhaps a bit later. (In large part, the Great War... but it began around 1910) Picasso, Proust and Joyce were all living right near each other in Paris then, and moving in parallel directions artwise, though I don't think they ever met (except that Joyce met Proust for a few minutes and asked him if he liked to eat truffles).
Oh and just looking now I found this written by Joyce about reality, the identity of objects, etc. He is describing a walk on a gritty beach by the Atlantic:
"INELUCTABLE MODALITY OF THE VISIBLE: AT LEAST THAT IF NO MORE, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure."
Hot ass!
I've written about Joey from time to time. She's a girl I admire. But I never see her. Either she has become a total hermit or else she's found a new secret bar that I don't know about. I think a lot of my friends have found that bar. But last night, a slow night -- though it got packed later -- in she walked. Boyfriend in tow. Lucky man, I offered to buy her from him but he's not selling. Anyway we all three sat at the bar and he got up to do something or other in the men's room and I leaned over his seat to talk to Joey. This guy must have a body temperature of about 11,000 degrees which incidentally and by coincidence is, I learned on "Who Wants to be a Millionaire", the surface temperature of the sun. I could feel waves of clammy heat radiating from the stool on which he sat. "God, your boyfriend has a hot ass," I told Joey. And of course to my utter shame and degradation, the minute he came back she yelled for all to hear, "Tim, Brian says you have a hot ass!!!"
8:58 AM
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