pk has long stuck his foot in his mouth, has long put parts of his body, parts of his mind, where not everyone agrees that they belong. After I've posted something, I too may agree that what I did was excessive, gratuitous, impolitic, counter-productive.
Today I open a new blog, pkBowdler. I plan to move questionable materials there, marking the cut with an *.
Sunday, March 27, 2005
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
Sleep Writing
Everyone's heard of sleep-walking. I don't doubt that anyone might do it on occasion. Ah, but how many people write in their sleep? I do. I "always" have. I do more and more.
Trouble is: if it's possible to lose something while you're awake, it's positively easy to loose things while you're asleep: or if you pause to pee before fumbling the first image to the keyboard. Coffee en route? Absolutely not. Get the first sentence down, the first paragraph; then make coffee.
Faith. All is faith. There isn't anything that isn't faith-based.
Skepticism betrays a faith in intellect.
That's what popped my eyes open a short while ago.
Trouble is, for the life of me, I can't now remember what had made me think they were popping a short nap before then. That faith thing was the third, or nth, thing that tried to get me vertical.
The first was a God-thing. There. I've written the word. That might trigger the memory. If I look, it won't come; if I look away, it may.
What one writes in one's sleep, I, for example, may well be garbage. At some point you have to wake up and consider it. (Contrarily, what one has written while waking well may also be garbage: you have to sleep on it. There's a saying (could it be Arab?!?) that one should think both drunk and sober before trusting a decision: I want to think both asleep and awake. (I used to think drunk, sober, sleeping, and waking, but decades ago I eliminated the drunk part: for a complex of reasons, many of which should be obvious even to those who've never met me.)
Take my creation story for example. I'd slept on it for ten years before writing word one, but once finger hit Olivetti portable key, you wouldn't believe how much of it came as though dictated. I'd tell you: so we could test your credulity; but I no longer remember myself: only that it was a great deal of it. After 1,000 words I ran out of gas and went back to sleep. Exactly the same thing happened the next night at near precisely the same time: and that finished it: two sessions, each begun with, neither concluded with, sleep writing.
Still, that's only "half" of the point: thing is: the "All right. What's next?" opening popped me out of sleep at 3 AM, after going to bed no sooner than midnight, and more full of martinis than I can decently tell you. So that story was written while I was asleep, and awake, and drunk, and sober.
(Note: pk is never done revising things; but not that story. A word or two has been revised, once or twice; but no more. It locked itself in my mind. Now I can't touch it.)
So: at that time, a decade had passed before the thing birthed. Anyone who knew I'd thought of the story (and that was no one) might think I was never going to do it. So, when I'm sleeping, and some prose pricks me, and I sleep on anyway, I don't worry about it. Just because I don't know what it is or where it is doesn't mean that it's permanently lost. (By the way, two more decades passed before a single character of the sequels got processed. My Model was conceived 1958 or '59, first written in 1969 or so, and (for the moment) "finished" in 1999!)
Sleep finds things that hadn't been lost. Sleep finds things that had been lost. Sleep also loses things, but we never know for how long. (Likewise, we never know what we're gaining (or losing) by the loss.)
That's why I leave the Mac in sleep; shut down or reboot only when nothing is pressing me. (The Mac wakes from sleep in a moment; booting takes time. The faster they make the computers, the more they decide to boot with.)
I'm pausing now, but I fully expect to know, by this time tomorrow, what that God-thing was. Or close.
2005 04 04 So good to hear from Richard Wall (who's warned his friends that he's busy). In fact I think I'll cite the whole of his response to this piece:pk, I enjoyed your little piece about the sleep writing.
In response to it I found myself just saying yes, yes and yes.
It all starts (for me) from that eternal piece of advice - 'sleep on it'.
When you sleep on it, both the pace, and the planes, change. Sleep (dream) allows the memory to be invaded, sometimes in lingering fashion, more often in a flash, by both the 'old' (that which you or I, the writer, consciously or pretentiously excluded at the time of writing while 'awake') - and the new, which is what the activity of writing-while-awake evokes in the brain afterwards, as we drift from being awake to being asleep.
As you so aptly say, the fact that you maybe don't write it down right away does not matter. It has left its imprint on your writing consciousness and it will come back.
I also found that a literal change of pace (riding on a train, with or without that which I had written earlier as I sat at the keyboard) brings new shapes, new links, new formulations to the writing.
And it's always best to wait for these things to happen, rather than rushing headlong into print just to get that desired approval. I responded:You're reminding me of something I could have added: Driving on a blank highway with a blank mind drives the muse wild: she just has to invade you.
Trouble is: if it's possible to lose something while you're awake, it's positively easy to loose things while you're asleep: or if you pause to pee before fumbling the first image to the keyboard. Coffee en route? Absolutely not. Get the first sentence down, the first paragraph; then make coffee.
Faith. All is faith. There isn't anything that isn't faith-based.
Skepticism betrays a faith in intellect.
That's what popped my eyes open a short while ago.
Trouble is, for the life of me, I can't now remember what had made me think they were popping a short nap before then. That faith thing was the third, or nth, thing that tried to get me vertical.
The first was a God-thing. There. I've written the word. That might trigger the memory. If I look, it won't come; if I look away, it may.
What one writes in one's sleep, I, for example, may well be garbage. At some point you have to wake up and consider it. (Contrarily, what one has written while waking well may also be garbage: you have to sleep on it. There's a saying (could it be Arab?!?) that one should think both drunk and sober before trusting a decision: I want to think both asleep and awake. (I used to think drunk, sober, sleeping, and waking, but decades ago I eliminated the drunk part: for a complex of reasons, many of which should be obvious even to those who've never met me.)
Take my creation story for example. I'd slept on it for ten years before writing word one, but once finger hit Olivetti portable key, you wouldn't believe how much of it came as though dictated. I'd tell you: so we could test your credulity; but I no longer remember myself: only that it was a great deal of it. After 1,000 words I ran out of gas and went back to sleep. Exactly the same thing happened the next night at near precisely the same time: and that finished it: two sessions, each begun with, neither concluded with, sleep writing.
Still, that's only "half" of the point: thing is: the "All right. What's next?" opening popped me out of sleep at 3 AM, after going to bed no sooner than midnight, and more full of martinis than I can decently tell you. So that story was written while I was asleep, and awake, and drunk, and sober.
(Note: pk is never done revising things; but not that story. A word or two has been revised, once or twice; but no more. It locked itself in my mind. Now I can't touch it.)
So: at that time, a decade had passed before the thing birthed. Anyone who knew I'd thought of the story (and that was no one) might think I was never going to do it. So, when I'm sleeping, and some prose pricks me, and I sleep on anyway, I don't worry about it. Just because I don't know what it is or where it is doesn't mean that it's permanently lost. (By the way, two more decades passed before a single character of the sequels got processed. My Model was conceived 1958 or '59, first written in 1969 or so, and (for the moment) "finished" in 1999!)
Sleep finds things that hadn't been lost. Sleep finds things that had been lost. Sleep also loses things, but we never know for how long. (Likewise, we never know what we're gaining (or losing) by the loss.)
That's why I leave the Mac in sleep; shut down or reboot only when nothing is pressing me. (The Mac wakes from sleep in a moment; booting takes time. The faster they make the computers, the more they decide to boot with.)
I'm pausing now, but I fully expect to know, by this time tomorrow, what that God-thing was. Or close.
2005 04 04 So good to hear from Richard Wall (who's warned his friends that he's busy). In fact I think I'll cite the whole of his response to this piece:
In response to it I found myself just saying yes, yes and yes.
It all starts (for me) from that eternal piece of advice - 'sleep on it'.
When you sleep on it, both the pace, and the planes, change. Sleep (dream) allows the memory to be invaded, sometimes in lingering fashion, more often in a flash, by both the 'old' (that which you or I, the writer, consciously or pretentiously excluded at the time of writing while 'awake') - and the new, which is what the activity of writing-while-awake evokes in the brain afterwards, as we drift from being awake to being asleep.
As you so aptly say, the fact that you maybe don't write it down right away does not matter. It has left its imprint on your writing consciousness and it will come back.
I also found that a literal change of pace (riding on a train, with or without that which I had written earlier as I sat at the keyboard) brings new shapes, new links, new formulations to the writing.
And it's always best to wait for these things to happen, rather than rushing headlong into print just to get that desired approval.
Stars from the Sky
A science news item today discusses the on-going considerations of physics in relation to cosmology: will we end in fire or ice? will the universe crunch? or expand? I quote: "... changes to theories about the ultimate fate of the universe, particularly whether it will collapse in a "big crunch," be completely blown apart in a "big rip" or just drift steadily until galaxies are so far away from each other they cannot be seen -- in effect taking stars from the sky."
Um, excuse me, but on earth the naked eye sees mostly only one galaxy: this one: and precious little of it. The naked eye sees about two thousand stars, most of them local. One needs a telescope, a BIG telescope, to see the hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with their hundreds of billions of stars. Even then one sure can't see them all at once.
(Such numbers are typical but not mandatory. This or that galaxy may have far fewer than hundreds of billions of stars.)
Now if the galaxies themselves expand, our neighbors moving ever further away from each other, that could take the stars from the sky; IF there's still a "we," and we're seeing with naked human eyes.
I don't think so.
Um, excuse me, but on earth the naked eye sees mostly only one galaxy: this one: and precious little of it. The naked eye sees about two thousand stars, most of them local. One needs a telescope, a BIG telescope, to see the hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with their hundreds of billions of stars. Even then one sure can't see them all at once.
(Such numbers are typical but not mandatory. This or that galaxy may have far fewer than hundreds of billions of stars.)
Now if the galaxies themselves expand, our neighbors moving ever further away from each other, that could take the stars from the sky; IF there's still a "we," and we're seeing with naked human eyes.
I don't think so.
Sunday, March 20, 2005
Bird - Dog: Learning
Learning is for the Birds
David Attenborough's The Life of Birds series moves me near weeping, even on an nth viewing. Sir David's crew filmed a snowy owl fledgling running over arctic tundra and flapping its wings, its baby down ruffling. The young owl's single facial expression is so intent, doesn't change as it bumps itself in the face with its wing. The bird leaps toward the air, but continues to fall back to the ground. Whew! Flight is hard! The owl's efforts are heart-wrenching: adorable.
I wrote to bk, "Failure more instructive than success." No one enjoys watching Tiger Woods roll the long breaking putt into the hole more than I, but part of my enjoyment is being able to visualize the disastrous line my putt would have taken: or yours. The adult owl snatches a green goose gosling from its parents nesting nearby. That's some tricky flying. But we knew the adult could do that. It's watching baby fail, not even having all its feathers yet, that may map for us what's missing in the present equipment and execution.
In another chapter Sir David shows birds adapting to human environments. A crow learns that a nut dropped from a height may break open on pavement. A walnut, dropped repeatedly, remains intact. Ah, the crow drops the stubborn nut into traffic! There, after a time, is the meat, accessible: amid the speeding vehicles. Next Sir David shows a crow in a city in Japan dropping his walnut into the pedestrian crossing. The light is with the vehicles. The crow flies to the curb and waits. The bike misses the nut, the car misses ... Ah, the bus got it. The light changes to Walk. And the crow walks out amid the pedestrians and claims his snack.
At Highlands Hammock I see gray squirrels who used to run zigzags for safety now run in straight lines when crossing pavement: minimize their exposure to traffic. I've also told about a Palm Beach purple gallinule who, having raped on my sneaker but failed to get a potato chip from me, used its stiletto beak to untie my shoe laces. I was impressed enough that he got his potato chip. Then he nearly pierced my Nike's fabric when there were no more.
Learning is Going to the Dogs
I expect always to love that snowy owl fledgling. But it was the urban pedestrian crow that reminded me of my sorely missed German shepherd, Angus. Angus had been growing blind after being maced by a nervous, prevaricating, nitwit cop, Angus's corneas ulcerating, pk & family too ignorant to have known to wash his eyes immediately. I would go running in Riverside Park. Angus would run with me, mixing his running with a lot of canine scent marking and wool gathering. If I lost sight of him, I didn't worry. I trusted the elderly Angus to remain in the park until we found each other. Once when he was dognapped, he howled until the dognaper returned him. Angus would run like a bolt, but knew to stop short at curbs and wait for me. People would thrill on Broadway to see this German shepherd hell bent for the traffic, stop on a dime and sit right at the curb. Sure there was some risk, but pk has never lived without risk. If you're in pk's family, you're at risk too.
Anyway this one time I run to my turning spot, up around the tennis courts by Grant's Tomb, head back, get to the 103rd Street park stairs, and still no Angus. I walk back a ways, calling. Eventually I climb up to the Riverside Drive level, its 24-hour Indy transpiring on the asphalt. I don't see Angus in the upper park either. Finally I cross to my apartment: and there's Angus sitting sentinel on the top step by my building's doorway. Angus was ignoring the elevator man who taking a moment of sunshine next to him. No, poor blind Angus was on the lookout for any movement that looked like an approaching pk.
As I'd crossed the drive I'd felt ready to throttle him; but on seeing him, I was just glad he was in one piece.
It was days later that I learned what had happened. A fellow dog walker, a gal with a doberman*, came up to me and said that she could have sworn she saw Angus the other day, but it couldn't have been Angus because she didn't see me. I told her that we'd been separated during a run: and she climaxed my story for me.
She'd seen Angus running frantically in the upper park. Finally he bolted for the pedestrian crossing at 103rd Street. He sat at the curb. Some kids came, changed the light, crossed. Angus remained. After several such light changes, finally, a family arrived: kids and a baby carriage. They changed the light. Angus crossed with them: in the lea of the baby carriage.
Now: was Angus a smart dog? or what? When he was a pup I didn't see any of my teachings taking hold, but by the time he was an adult he was figuring an awful lot out for himself.
PS: Apropos of my "Failure more instructive than success," bk had responded, "... Why is this concept so difficult to communicate ..." He also said he felt "surrounded by people who think failure is always bad. Feels like something they get from too much schooling. (Artists, on the other hand, tend to know the importance of failure.)"
That is so on the money. Gore Vidal wrote, "art is mostly failure."
pk has failed so much as to get his fiction published: any of it. That's extra delicious if you realize that my first novel was about failed communications!
Realize, as Gregory Bateson would point out (did point out): contexts are ecologies: generally vaster than realized.
Failures are minimally dual. pk failed to get his novel published; the publishing world failed to publish it; the human world failed to receive it ...
I'm not going to rewrite how I have it above, but apropos of the snowy owl fledgling practice for flight: the owl didn't have all his equipment yet, didn't have all his feathers, didn't yet have the strength, or the experience. Yet the owl was learning, learning, learning: while growing. The owl's efforts showed ME how difficult flight is. I suspect the owl already knew it.
more in a minute (when I come back I'll particularly want to address the hubris involved in believing that success is clearly distinguishable from failure! Which was Jesus? Which was VanGogh? Which was Abelard? How about the human species? Isn't it a bit premature to tell?) (Even if we go extinct, deader than a doornail, it may still be too soon to tell!)
David Attenborough's The Life of Birds series moves me near weeping, even on an nth viewing. Sir David's crew filmed a snowy owl fledgling running over arctic tundra and flapping its wings, its baby down ruffling. The young owl's single facial expression is so intent, doesn't change as it bumps itself in the face with its wing. The bird leaps toward the air, but continues to fall back to the ground. Whew! Flight is hard! The owl's efforts are heart-wrenching: adorable.
I wrote to bk, "Failure more instructive than success." No one enjoys watching Tiger Woods roll the long breaking putt into the hole more than I, but part of my enjoyment is being able to visualize the disastrous line my putt would have taken: or yours. The adult owl snatches a green goose gosling from its parents nesting nearby. That's some tricky flying. But we knew the adult could do that. It's watching baby fail, not even having all its feathers yet, that may map for us what's missing in the present equipment and execution.
In another chapter Sir David shows birds adapting to human environments. A crow learns that a nut dropped from a height may break open on pavement. A walnut, dropped repeatedly, remains intact. Ah, the crow drops the stubborn nut into traffic! There, after a time, is the meat, accessible: amid the speeding vehicles. Next Sir David shows a crow in a city in Japan dropping his walnut into the pedestrian crossing. The light is with the vehicles. The crow flies to the curb and waits. The bike misses the nut, the car misses ... Ah, the bus got it. The light changes to Walk. And the crow walks out amid the pedestrians and claims his snack.
At Highlands Hammock I see gray squirrels who used to run zigzags for safety now run in straight lines when crossing pavement: minimize their exposure to traffic. I've also told about a Palm Beach purple gallinule who, having raped on my sneaker but failed to get a potato chip from me, used its stiletto beak to untie my shoe laces. I was impressed enough that he got his potato chip. Then he nearly pierced my Nike's fabric when there were no more.
Learning is Going to the Dogs
I expect always to love that snowy owl fledgling. But it was the urban pedestrian crow that reminded me of my sorely missed German shepherd, Angus. Angus had been growing blind after being maced by a nervous, prevaricating, nitwit cop, Angus's corneas ulcerating, pk & family too ignorant to have known to wash his eyes immediately. I would go running in Riverside Park. Angus would run with me, mixing his running with a lot of canine scent marking and wool gathering. If I lost sight of him, I didn't worry. I trusted the elderly Angus to remain in the park until we found each other. Once when he was dognapped, he howled until the dognaper returned him. Angus would run like a bolt, but knew to stop short at curbs and wait for me. People would thrill on Broadway to see this German shepherd hell bent for the traffic, stop on a dime and sit right at the curb. Sure there was some risk, but pk has never lived without risk. If you're in pk's family, you're at risk too.
Anyway this one time I run to my turning spot, up around the tennis courts by Grant's Tomb, head back, get to the 103rd Street park stairs, and still no Angus. I walk back a ways, calling. Eventually I climb up to the Riverside Drive level, its 24-hour Indy transpiring on the asphalt. I don't see Angus in the upper park either. Finally I cross to my apartment: and there's Angus sitting sentinel on the top step by my building's doorway. Angus was ignoring the elevator man who taking a moment of sunshine next to him. No, poor blind Angus was on the lookout for any movement that looked like an approaching pk.
As I'd crossed the drive I'd felt ready to throttle him; but on seeing him, I was just glad he was in one piece.
It was days later that I learned what had happened. A fellow dog walker, a gal with a doberman*, came up to me and said that she could have sworn she saw Angus the other day, but it couldn't have been Angus because she didn't see me. I told her that we'd been separated during a run: and she climaxed my story for me.
She'd seen Angus running frantically in the upper park. Finally he bolted for the pedestrian crossing at 103rd Street. He sat at the curb. Some kids came, changed the light, crossed. Angus remained. After several such light changes, finally, a family arrived: kids and a baby carriage. They changed the light. Angus crossed with them: in the lea of the baby carriage.
Now: was Angus a smart dog? or what? When he was a pup I didn't see any of my teachings taking hold, but by the time he was an adult he was figuring an awful lot out for himself.
PS: Apropos of my "Failure more instructive than success," bk had responded, "... Why is this concept so difficult to communicate ..." He also said he felt "surrounded by people who think failure is always bad. Feels like something they get from too much schooling. (Artists, on the other hand, tend to know the importance of failure.)"
That is so on the money. Gore Vidal wrote, "art is mostly failure."
pk has failed so much as to get his fiction published: any of it. That's extra delicious if you realize that my first novel was about failed communications!
Realize, as Gregory Bateson would point out (did point out): contexts are ecologies: generally vaster than realized.
Failures are minimally dual. pk failed to get his novel published; the publishing world failed to publish it; the human world failed to receive it ...
I'm not going to rewrite how I have it above, but apropos of the snowy owl fledgling practice for flight: the owl didn't have all his equipment yet, didn't have all his feathers, didn't yet have the strength, or the experience. Yet the owl was learning, learning, learning: while growing. The owl's efforts showed ME how difficult flight is. I suspect the owl already knew it.
more in a minute (when I come back I'll particularly want to address the hubris involved in believing that success is clearly distinguishable from failure! Which was Jesus? Which was VanGogh? Which was Abelard? How about the human species? Isn't it a bit premature to tell?) (Even if we go extinct, deader than a doornail, it may still be too soon to tell!)
Thursday, March 17, 2005
Intelligence
We won't know whether or not we're intelligent until we meet another intelligence: and can begin to make comparisons.
Can a creature alone be intelligent? She can use the word certainly: but how valuable is the meaning?
Same with any monotheistic god. Thor can run into Mars, Diana into Venus. They can begin to assess each other.
A self-described as intelligent man could run into a self-described as intelligent God. That could start something: if we actually ran into each other: not words, not stories buried in jars. (Unless we found out that his self-description was actually our description, palmed onto him. Then we'd just be back with self again.)
Until we have n intelligences, or n gods, all fighting it out, we have nothing more than a bushbaby masturbating on a tree limb.
Can a creature alone be intelligent? She can use the word certainly: but how valuable is the meaning?
Same with any monotheistic god. Thor can run into Mars, Diana into Venus. They can begin to assess each other.
A self-described as intelligent man could run into a self-described as intelligent God. That could start something: if we actually ran into each other: not words, not stories buried in jars. (Unless we found out that his self-description was actually our description, palmed onto him. Then we'd just be back with self again.)
Until we have n intelligences, or n gods, all fighting it out, we have nothing more than a bushbaby masturbating on a tree limb.
Florida's Silver Rain
Typically I'd left Florida well before the rains commenced. Winters are dry; it's the summer that's wet. Till one year some business brought me back in late spring, almost summer. I was camped near Fort Lauderdale, on the edge of the Everglades: all oolite, Australian pines, sabal palms, some saw palmetto ... (Oolite is a rubble of shell fossils.) I bopped to the coast to sell some of these really cheesy airbrush diptychs, fuel me to write another chapter of the novel, returned to my pop up, and saw ... I didn't quite know what to make of it: puddles. Water? Water on the oolite? The sun was shinning brightly. If you haven't been this far south, you don't know what sunlight can look like, or how it can display Spanish, or merely stuccoed, architecture. Suddenly the air was filled with silver. The puddles rippled with new water. Then, just as suddenly, the new rain was over. And the sun had never been obscured. Florida sunlight through rain drops. Wow.
I'd come to Florida because I was homeless, writing out of my car. When my belly was empty, and the gas tank almost empty, I'd run out and do whatever I had to do to sell another couple of graphics: hit a gallery, steam roll them. Maybe I'd turn a couple of hundred, maybe only thirty-seven-fifty, but it would hold me, keep me going for another few days if not another few weeks. (I was "saving" two dollars a day by declining the park's option of electricity, then plugging the SmithCorona in at a neighbor's.) As the weather improved, I'd head back north. I'd already oversaturated the Miami or Naples area with my type of merchandise. Then I found these airbrush diptychs. They were so bad, I could sell them in minutes. Even the gallery owners, typically over-the-hill women put to pasture by dentist husbands, could tell movable schlock when they saw it.
Not long after that, I entered Sebring: found Highlands Hammock, the lakes, creeks, and Kissimmee River, and have not yet left it. It took only another season to learn that I love the Florida summer even more than the Florida winter.
For one thing, you get the rain: every day.
But don't be misled: the sky grumbles from late afternoon into evening. Anywhere within a hundred miles of Tampa Bay, the heat lighting enlivens all horizons well into the night. But the sun shines nearly everyday, and almost all day. I haven't seen as many sunshine showers in Sebring as I saw in the 'Glades, but we have them. There are also rains that last for an hour or two.
Once or twice a year it will sock in for a whole day or more: rarely three times.
Until recently.
Right now it's rainy and has rained all day. It rained half of yesterday. It's gray. It's cool. Ugh.
I'd heard since taking up golf in my forties that Florida was windy. For years in Sebring late winter winds would spoil my fishing. Sometimes a wind will come up and the fish attack. But more often the wind shuts down whatever piscene activity there was. In recent years the wind seems much worse than previously. Global warming? Who knows? Weather tos and fros whatever we do. But I don't doubt that a good part of it is our own fault. And I don't doubt that whatever we do now will be too little too late. Our window closed.
Got cancer? Might as well smoke.
Rain socked us in a week and a half ago too. Grr.
After posting the above I went to my.Yahoo.com to check my news. Reuter science reports offer a new summary on global warming. The piece says that globel warming will continue even if we stopped all emmissions today. An hour ago I wrote, "Got cancer? Might as well smoke." But of course pk was being pk. I think. I also calculate rhetoric. Sometimes I try one communicational strategy, sometimes another, sometimes I don't give a damn about strategy, sometimes I just want to be rude. But global warming is no more a joke than is cancer. And stopping smoking may prolong an already doomed life, even when it's too late to alter the doom. Stopping smoking may further make the remaining life of the doomed more comfortable: to the doomed and to the doomed's family and neighbors. Stopping pollution may not reverse global warming, but it may slow its acceleration. Some cities will be lost in time, others may yet be spared.
Sebring is in Highlands County. We're not too far above sea level, but further than any other part of Florida. Indeed, I'm within a mile or two of the "original" Florida: the bit of spine that was above sea level millions of years ago. I can "see" the time line: This here is ancient, that there is much more recent. It will look pretty funny though if everyone in Florida comes running to all stand on the one little spine.
You'll have to leave your cars behind.
And then we can all eat each other. Till there's nothing left.
Changing Weather
Der Wind, der Wind, das himmlische Kind That Florida is windy is one of the first things I ever heard about it: from a golfer who played some minor circuit here every winter. Golfers get to know the wind, though no one knows the wind like small craft sailors: unless it's fishermen. There have been years here where I've fished every day of more than one week in every month. The canoeist feels the wind more than the bassboater. The light weight dry fly fisherman feels it more than the canepoler or the Texas-rigged worm caster. Here in Florida I cast nothing lighter than a #4 fly rod with a #12 popper. That would be heavy on a trout brook, but it's very light in Florida bass country.
Yesterday I decided to fish an entirely different technique: I'd fish red worms on the bottom for shellcrackers. I should have changed my mind the instant I saw the chop on the lake. I'd already ignored the prediction of thunderstorms, most likely in the morning. Ignoring a second sign was truly foolish. But I'd been up since hours before light practicing tying my shellcracker rigs.
It wasn't till I was on the lake, in maybe twelve feet of water, and had slowed my drift somewhat with a stern mushroom anchor, that I discovered that I hadn't replaced the bow anchor, a digger type, after "organizing" things a while back. Nothing going right I made the further mistake of leaving the one anchor in the stern. I never fish anchored. I seldom even fish from the boat, preferring to go overboard and wade, I had none of the right habits for this new adventure.
I'd tied the rigs so that a weight would take the line to the bottom. Twelve inches above the sinker an inch of tippet led to a baited #5 hook. Fourteen inches above that wriggled another red worm. You don't need much weight in the sinker to be able to feel the bottom clearly when it touches. My problem yesterday was, even holding the rod in my hand at all times, the boat was tossing about so I couldn't possibly maintain contact with the bottom and also keep the line free of slack. When nothing had been fooled within a half and hour, I wasn't surprised. After two hours of the same, the only fool was me. I also had a minnow swimming around under a cane pole in case a crappie happened by. Nada.
Go home. Organize the shed. Find that anchor and put it back where it belongs.And get a second mushroom anchor for the other side of the stern.
OK, we arrive at my target: I approach the dock. A bassboater has just tied onto the end of the south side of the dock. No one else is about: only two trailers in the parking area: mine, and the other must be the bass guy's. I give the bass boat an extra-wide margin considering the wind, and I make my approach. I'm judging the wind, my velocity, my momentum, the dock ... when I see a head in the water. The bassman is overboard. "Hold on," I call, "I'll give you a hand up."
But I see that he can't hold on. He's struggling in the water, bobbing on the chop, his reaches fail to grab either boat or dock.
Uh oh, I'd better tie on myself and help him out. But now I miss the dock. I start to shut the engine down before I have hold of anything myself, realize my mistake too late to keep the engine turning. I have to re-pull the chord as my bow smashes against the dock, the precious rods in danger of being splintered. This old hand is so used to doing things safely without a safety net, I hadn't properly stowed the rods. Practices I'd insist on for others I'd neglected myself.Things were happening too fast for it to occur to me that I didn't need to tie onto anything: the wind was stiff into the shore. The boat wasn't going anywhere far. I needed to be out of the boat and either on the dock or in the water to help the guy.
By the time I get to him, he's half-out and up on his own. I see his hat still in the water. His wallet is half fallen from his trousers, but if it drops now, it will probably hit the dock, not the water. So we can relax a little bit.
It's a good thing we arrived not far apart: we needed each other to load the boats onto the trailers.
These two decades, only once have I had trouble loading a boat by myself due to wind: a sailboat with the sails hanging free, but still on the mast.
The guy was OK, I was OK. Point is: It's March. I know. But I've fished every March. No, this year is different. Last year was different. They're worse. Each year is worse. Once I met the guy who'd been overboard I could form my impression that he wasn't a klutz. I bet he'd never been pitched overboard before no matter the wind.
Point is: even those of use who were trying (and failing) to warn others about global warming, etc. thirty years ago didn't see all the details of everything that would go wrong. And we still don't see all the details of what will be wronger thirty years from now.
Grr.
I'd come to Florida because I was homeless, writing out of my car. When my belly was empty, and the gas tank almost empty, I'd run out and do whatever I had to do to sell another couple of graphics: hit a gallery, steam roll them. Maybe I'd turn a couple of hundred, maybe only thirty-seven-fifty, but it would hold me, keep me going for another few days if not another few weeks. (I was "saving" two dollars a day by declining the park's option of electricity, then plugging the SmithCorona in at a neighbor's.) As the weather improved, I'd head back north. I'd already oversaturated the Miami or Naples area with my type of merchandise. Then I found these airbrush diptychs. They were so bad, I could sell them in minutes. Even the gallery owners, typically over-the-hill women put to pasture by dentist husbands, could tell movable schlock when they saw it.
Not long after that, I entered Sebring: found Highlands Hammock, the lakes, creeks, and Kissimmee River, and have not yet left it. It took only another season to learn that I love the Florida summer even more than the Florida winter.
For one thing, you get the rain: every day.
But don't be misled: the sky grumbles from late afternoon into evening. Anywhere within a hundred miles of Tampa Bay, the heat lighting enlivens all horizons well into the night. But the sun shines nearly everyday, and almost all day. I haven't seen as many sunshine showers in Sebring as I saw in the 'Glades, but we have them. There are also rains that last for an hour or two.
Once or twice a year it will sock in for a whole day or more: rarely three times.
Until recently.
Right now it's rainy and has rained all day. It rained half of yesterday. It's gray. It's cool. Ugh.
I'd heard since taking up golf in my forties that Florida was windy. For years in Sebring late winter winds would spoil my fishing. Sometimes a wind will come up and the fish attack. But more often the wind shuts down whatever piscene activity there was. In recent years the wind seems much worse than previously. Global warming? Who knows? Weather tos and fros whatever we do. But I don't doubt that a good part of it is our own fault. And I don't doubt that whatever we do now will be too little too late. Our window closed.
Got cancer? Might as well smoke.
Rain socked us in a week and a half ago too. Grr.
After posting the above I went to my.Yahoo.com to check my news. Reuter science reports offer a new summary on global warming. The piece says that globel warming will continue even if we stopped all emmissions today. An hour ago I wrote, "Got cancer? Might as well smoke." But of course pk was being pk. I think. I also calculate rhetoric. Sometimes I try one communicational strategy, sometimes another, sometimes I don't give a damn about strategy, sometimes I just want to be rude. But global warming is no more a joke than is cancer. And stopping smoking may prolong an already doomed life, even when it's too late to alter the doom. Stopping smoking may further make the remaining life of the doomed more comfortable: to the doomed and to the doomed's family and neighbors. Stopping pollution may not reverse global warming, but it may slow its acceleration. Some cities will be lost in time, others may yet be spared.
Sebring is in Highlands County. We're not too far above sea level, but further than any other part of Florida. Indeed, I'm within a mile or two of the "original" Florida: the bit of spine that was above sea level millions of years ago. I can "see" the time line: This here is ancient, that there is much more recent. It will look pretty funny though if everyone in Florida comes running to all stand on the one little spine.
You'll have to leave your cars behind.
And then we can all eat each other. Till there's nothing left.
Changing Weather
Der Wind, der Wind, das himmlische Kind That Florida is windy is one of the first things I ever heard about it: from a golfer who played some minor circuit here every winter. Golfers get to know the wind, though no one knows the wind like small craft sailors: unless it's fishermen. There have been years here where I've fished every day of more than one week in every month. The canoeist feels the wind more than the bassboater. The light weight dry fly fisherman feels it more than the canepoler or the Texas-rigged worm caster. Here in Florida I cast nothing lighter than a #4 fly rod with a #12 popper. That would be heavy on a trout brook, but it's very light in Florida bass country.
Yesterday I decided to fish an entirely different technique: I'd fish red worms on the bottom for shellcrackers. I should have changed my mind the instant I saw the chop on the lake. I'd already ignored the prediction of thunderstorms, most likely in the morning. Ignoring a second sign was truly foolish. But I'd been up since hours before light practicing tying my shellcracker rigs.
It wasn't till I was on the lake, in maybe twelve feet of water, and had slowed my drift somewhat with a stern mushroom anchor, that I discovered that I hadn't replaced the bow anchor, a digger type, after "organizing" things a while back. Nothing going right I made the further mistake of leaving the one anchor in the stern. I never fish anchored. I seldom even fish from the boat, preferring to go overboard and wade, I had none of the right habits for this new adventure.
I'd tied the rigs so that a weight would take the line to the bottom. Twelve inches above the sinker an inch of tippet led to a baited #5 hook. Fourteen inches above that wriggled another red worm. You don't need much weight in the sinker to be able to feel the bottom clearly when it touches. My problem yesterday was, even holding the rod in my hand at all times, the boat was tossing about so I couldn't possibly maintain contact with the bottom and also keep the line free of slack. When nothing had been fooled within a half and hour, I wasn't surprised. After two hours of the same, the only fool was me. I also had a minnow swimming around under a cane pole in case a crappie happened by. Nada.
Go home. Organize the shed. Find that anchor and put it back where it belongs.And get a second mushroom anchor for the other side of the stern.
OK, we arrive at my target: I approach the dock. A bassboater has just tied onto the end of the south side of the dock. No one else is about: only two trailers in the parking area: mine, and the other must be the bass guy's. I give the bass boat an extra-wide margin considering the wind, and I make my approach. I'm judging the wind, my velocity, my momentum, the dock ... when I see a head in the water. The bassman is overboard. "Hold on," I call, "I'll give you a hand up."
But I see that he can't hold on. He's struggling in the water, bobbing on the chop, his reaches fail to grab either boat or dock.
Uh oh, I'd better tie on myself and help him out. But now I miss the dock. I start to shut the engine down before I have hold of anything myself, realize my mistake too late to keep the engine turning. I have to re-pull the chord as my bow smashes against the dock, the precious rods in danger of being splintered. This old hand is so used to doing things safely without a safety net, I hadn't properly stowed the rods. Practices I'd insist on for others I'd neglected myself.Things were happening too fast for it to occur to me that I didn't need to tie onto anything: the wind was stiff into the shore. The boat wasn't going anywhere far. I needed to be out of the boat and either on the dock or in the water to help the guy.
By the time I get to him, he's half-out and up on his own. I see his hat still in the water. His wallet is half fallen from his trousers, but if it drops now, it will probably hit the dock, not the water. So we can relax a little bit.
It's a good thing we arrived not far apart: we needed each other to load the boats onto the trailers.
These two decades, only once have I had trouble loading a boat by myself due to wind: a sailboat with the sails hanging free, but still on the mast.
The guy was OK, I was OK. Point is: It's March. I know. But I've fished every March. No, this year is different. Last year was different. They're worse. Each year is worse. Once I met the guy who'd been overboard I could form my impression that he wasn't a klutz. I bet he'd never been pitched overboard before no matter the wind.
Point is: even those of use who were trying (and failing) to warn others about global warming, etc. thirty years ago didn't see all the details of everything that would go wrong. And we still don't see all the details of what will be wronger thirty years from now.
Grr.
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
Monday, March 14, 2005
Just In Time
I suspect that justice is inevitable, with or without a God.
The impossibility is in the reliability of calling it up during the life time of a victim.
You're unjust, you'll pay; but you're not likely to pay your prey.
If I harm you, the state may sue me on your behalf. The state then pockets the fine for itself. I hope God doesn't intend to do that.
I hope for a next life so that fines can catch up to victims. Man, I'll be on easy street.
The impossibility is in the reliability of calling it up during the life time of a victim.
You're unjust, you'll pay; but you're not likely to pay your prey.
If I harm you, the state may sue me on your behalf. The state then pockets the fine for itself. I hope God doesn't intend to do that.
I hope for a next life so that fines can catch up to victims. Man, I'll be on easy street.
Steroids
We should all remember as towers fall and icons tarnish: baseball is not golf. Baseball is not a gentleman's game. In baseball, if you don't get caught, you're not guilty: just like in business (and nearly everything else).
What must it be like to be a baseball player, to get away with this and that, and then suddenly to be found guilty, years later?
And steroid use is just the latest example. Don't you bet that more than one role model told Ty Cobb to come sliding with his spikes up?
And what about racism? Who could have gotten along yesteryear if they weren't a racist?
What must it be like to be a baseball player, to get away with this and that, and then suddenly to be found guilty, years later?
And steroid use is just the latest example. Don't you bet that more than one role model told Ty Cobb to come sliding with his spikes up?
And what about racism? Who could have gotten along yesteryear if they weren't a racist?
Coordinating Mechanisms on the Cartoon Sound Track
Lots of kids can think up some Baroque questions but it's typically in college that you first bump into world-class collections of them. Flipping the tube (with PBS begging again, thinking the BeeGees would help entice) reminded me of one.
I sat out the years when music videos were coming along, never saw a single example till not long ago when Michael Jackson dropped my jaw: unbelievable production, money pumped like there was no end to it. I remember the BeeGees and disco just from my ear. Since then I've seen them on the tube in retrospectives where there's always some sort of stage bullshit going on to make people conditioned by movies and TV to expect something for their eye with their music: weird lights, colored mist, freaky costumes ... But here some sort of video had been constructed, kicky-kooky, the boys in a doorway one shot, then on a bridge, lip-synching. Where was the gondola? Barry, with his teeth and his hair, making his brothers look, er, somewhat less Barbie & Ken.image of the boys no longer at URL of post date
Here in my ear was the familiar disco music: eccentric merry-go-round, some nice hops from the bass, and there in my eye were the boys moving their mouths.
Accustomed from birth to a causal connection between mouth and sound, we want to assume one in all cases. Mommy says Coo Coo, even baby's two ears locate the sound as coming from her mouth. But the Bee Gees sound does not come from their mouths, not directly; it "comes from" the mixer, from the sequencer ... from the bank of computers: their instruments, other instruments, and a gang of engineers also involved. (All that wasn't shown in the doorway. Neither were they on the bridge.) (Maybe they were on the gondola.)
So in college the question freaked me out: If Donald Duck isn't really speaking in the cartoon, if his quacking speech is really concocted in a studio, and doesn't issue from a series of cell drawings, even though those drawings show a beak, make it seem to ''move," what makes us think that we're really speaking when we speak? How do we know that we're not the drawn cells of some demon, coordinated with sounds coming from an entirely different department? If so, might it not be foolish to attribute meaning to what we hear ourselves say?
I sat out the years when music videos were coming along, never saw a single example till not long ago when Michael Jackson dropped my jaw: unbelievable production, money pumped like there was no end to it. I remember the BeeGees and disco just from my ear. Since then I've seen them on the tube in retrospectives where there's always some sort of stage bullshit going on to make people conditioned by movies and TV to expect something for their eye with their music: weird lights, colored mist, freaky costumes ... But here some sort of video had been constructed, kicky-kooky, the boys in a doorway one shot, then on a bridge, lip-synching. Where was the gondola? Barry, with his teeth and his hair, making his brothers look, er, somewhat less Barbie & Ken.
Here in my ear was the familiar disco music: eccentric merry-go-round, some nice hops from the bass, and there in my eye were the boys moving their mouths.
Accustomed from birth to a causal connection between mouth and sound, we want to assume one in all cases. Mommy says Coo Coo, even baby's two ears locate the sound as coming from her mouth. But the Bee Gees sound does not come from their mouths, not directly; it "comes from" the mixer, from the sequencer ... from the bank of computers: their instruments, other instruments, and a gang of engineers also involved. (All that wasn't shown in the doorway. Neither were they on the bridge.) (Maybe they were on the gondola.)
So in college the question freaked me out: If Donald Duck isn't really speaking in the cartoon, if his quacking speech is really concocted in a studio, and doesn't issue from a series of cell drawings, even though those drawings show a beak, make it seem to ''move," what makes us think that we're really speaking when we speak? How do we know that we're not the drawn cells of some demon, coordinated with sounds coming from an entirely different department? If so, might it not be foolish to attribute meaning to what we hear ourselves say?
Saturday, March 12, 2005
Nothing ... Change
Second cup of coffee, half my waffle eaten, I flick on the tube, flip from snow board half-pipe through college basketball, and catch this from some TV pitch-doc, pitching I don't care what:If you do nothing, then nothing in your life is going to change. That's what they thought just before the tsunami. That's what they thought in Pompeii. That's what Noah's neighbors thought.
The running rabbit, the sleeping rabbit, the panther crouched in ambush ... are all subject to the one avalanche.
The running rabbit, the sleeping rabbit, the panther crouched in ambush ... are all subject to the one avalanche.
Friday, March 11, 2005
Audiences, Time ... Reviewers, Critics
My grade school teacher papered the classroom with Van Gogh reproductions cut from a magazine. Those I remember most clearly formed a frieze above the blackboards on the front wall, continuing the same position on the adjacent wall. A bridge I now know to have been at Arles was one. My favorite there in the second grade or so was of boats pulled up on the beach.
They were bold, colorful ... there was extremely odd rigging on both bridge and boats: the shapes were odd: to this young American. By highschool I was reading Irving Stone's biographical novel about Van Gogh. Somewhere in there I learned that Van Gogh was obsessed with painting, but that few during his life much seemed to care: then, after his death, there have been eruptions of acquisition wars: among collectors, museums ... thieves.
I recently had my first viewing of Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev. Russian icons have never been my daily study, Rublev was not a familiar artist name to me. But by the time I had finished with that DVD I knew that Rublev's reputation varied from non-existent to high in his own day, then fell, then, within a century, became THE standard: a position from which his reputation has little faltered.
Two evenings ago I watched a DVD of M. Night Shyamalan's The Village. I was very taken in the opening minutes, then less taken. I'm handicapped these days by not hearing the sound track very well, missing I can't know how much dialogue. Neither do I see as well as I once did, nor can I concentrate on movies as, between college and teaching, I once could. Thus I have to take my own reactions with a few grains of the same salt with which I consider the reactions of others. Nevertheless, by the end, I was sure I'd seen a very interesting movie. Then I learned that both audiences and reviewers hated it.
Last night I watched a DVD of Michael Powell (and Leo Marks)' Peeping Tom. I vividly remember a number of movies from 1960: Psycho, La Dolce Vita ... I don't remember ever hearing of Peeping Tom: and realize, remember: I followed movies around that period. (1958 - 1965 ...) By the time it was over I was resolved to watch it again before returning it, to let time pass, then rent it again: just as I intend to see The Village again before long.
Poking between the DVDs' Extras and imdb.com I am astonished by how little official recognition The Village was so much as nominated for. Bryce Dallas Howard received some entirely appropriate attention. Some technical areas, the music, received some recognition. But neither audiences nor reviewers seemed willing to consider the extraordinary collaborative art they had witnessed: or I guess failed to witness.
Bryce proves to be Ron Howard's daughter: and by God she looks like a female Opie! (much better than a male Opie). (Opie was hardly a hero (little as I saw of that show); Bryce's Ivy Walker is definitely a hero!) Peeping Tom's Karlheinz Böhm proves to be the son of conductor Karl Böhm. Indeed, the DVD Extras suggest that Powell may have deliberately cast the son of a possibly overbearing man to play the fictional victim-son, Mark Lewis. (Michael Powell cast himself as the fictional overbearing Lewis senior: and his actual son to play the young Mark Lewis. And the actress playing the girl who falls for the wretched Mark Lewis is played by the daughter of Raymond Massie!) Decades later, the film eventually become legend, the sadder, older Karlheinz Böhm recalls the reviewers filing out of the premier without allowing the reception line of principles a single glance. That hurt! hurt still.
In 1960 the audience was offended by Michael Powell's (latest) masterpiece. Now we line up to agree with Martin Scorsese's praise of this gem. Perhaps I should see them side by side, but I'm tempted to suggest, despite the single (& handicapped) viewing, that Peeping Tom is a "better" film than Psycho.
They were bold, colorful ... there was extremely odd rigging on both bridge and boats: the shapes were odd: to this young American. By highschool I was reading Irving Stone's biographical novel about Van Gogh. Somewhere in there I learned that Van Gogh was obsessed with painting, but that few during his life much seemed to care: then, after his death, there have been eruptions of acquisition wars: among collectors, museums ... thieves.
I recently had my first viewing of Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev. Russian icons have never been my daily study, Rublev was not a familiar artist name to me. But by the time I had finished with that DVD I knew that Rublev's reputation varied from non-existent to high in his own day, then fell, then, within a century, became THE standard: a position from which his reputation has little faltered.
Two evenings ago I watched a DVD of M. Night Shyamalan's The Village. I was very taken in the opening minutes, then less taken. I'm handicapped these days by not hearing the sound track very well, missing I can't know how much dialogue. Neither do I see as well as I once did, nor can I concentrate on movies as, between college and teaching, I once could. Thus I have to take my own reactions with a few grains of the same salt with which I consider the reactions of others. Nevertheless, by the end, I was sure I'd seen a very interesting movie. Then I learned that both audiences and reviewers hated it.
Last night I watched a DVD of Michael Powell (and Leo Marks)' Peeping Tom. I vividly remember a number of movies from 1960: Psycho, La Dolce Vita ... I don't remember ever hearing of Peeping Tom: and realize, remember: I followed movies around that period. (1958 - 1965 ...) By the time it was over I was resolved to watch it again before returning it, to let time pass, then rent it again: just as I intend to see The Village again before long.
Poking between the DVDs' Extras and imdb.com I am astonished by how little official recognition The Village was so much as nominated for. Bryce Dallas Howard received some entirely appropriate attention. Some technical areas, the music, received some recognition. But neither audiences nor reviewers seemed willing to consider the extraordinary collaborative art they had witnessed: or I guess failed to witness.
Bryce proves to be Ron Howard's daughter: and by God she looks like a female Opie! (much better than a male Opie). (Opie was hardly a hero (little as I saw of that show); Bryce's Ivy Walker is definitely a hero!) Peeping Tom's Karlheinz Böhm proves to be the son of conductor Karl Böhm. Indeed, the DVD Extras suggest that Powell may have deliberately cast the son of a possibly overbearing man to play the fictional victim-son, Mark Lewis. (Michael Powell cast himself as the fictional overbearing Lewis senior: and his actual son to play the young Mark Lewis. And the actress playing the girl who falls for the wretched Mark Lewis is played by the daughter of Raymond Massie!) Decades later, the film eventually become legend, the sadder, older Karlheinz Böhm recalls the reviewers filing out of the premier without allowing the reception line of principles a single glance. That hurt! hurt still.
In 1960 the audience was offended by Michael Powell's (latest) masterpiece. Now we line up to agree with Martin Scorsese's praise of this gem. Perhaps I should see them side by side, but I'm tempted to suggest, despite the single (& handicapped) viewing, that Peeping Tom is a "better" film than Psycho.
Wednesday, March 09, 2005
Top Down vs. Bottom Up
I can't write it now, but I promise a piece on top-down social (and political) organizations versus bottom-up organization. Meantime I hint at part of it: pk's ideals basically tend to favor bottom-up organization. Certainly. My leanings are and have been lower-case libertarian (a term I haven't used much) and anarchist (a term I have). But I am not altogether uninterested in results. And sometimes, it must be admitted, that a centralized, top-down authority can do good as well as evil: can do it better than waiting for the grass to grow.
Balaguer in the Dominican Republic, for example. Rich people were squatting their mansions in the national forest: he bulldozed them out. China has a bear of a population problem, related to all their other (dealable) problems: China hasn't reversed its population growth, but it has hobbled the acceleration.
This anarchist used to joke that he sometimes wished some not altogether stupid tyrant would conquer the world – and then act intelligently selfishly: a parasite instead of a pathogen. I wouldn't care if it were the Mafia so long as they did something to keep their livestock alive.
Food for thought.
The trouble with historical attempts at dominance is that they've never finished the job. Even Hitler might have done some good if his Reich really had endured: as a one-world hegemony. Even Stalin might have gotten tired of murdering his best friends. I don't believe Idi Amin would have eaten all of his people.
Balaguer in the Dominican Republic, for example. Rich people were squatting their mansions in the national forest: he bulldozed them out. China has a bear of a population problem, related to all their other (dealable) problems: China hasn't reversed its population growth, but it has hobbled the acceleration.
This anarchist used to joke that he sometimes wished some not altogether stupid tyrant would conquer the world – and then act intelligently selfishly: a parasite instead of a pathogen. I wouldn't care if it were the Mafia so long as they did something to keep their livestock alive.
Food for thought.
The trouble with historical attempts at dominance is that they've never finished the job. Even Hitler might have done some good if his Reich really had endured: as a one-world hegemony. Even Stalin might have gotten tired of murdering his best friends. I don't believe Idi Amin would have eaten all of his people.
Subsidies
If God is really God, if the good is really good ... then seems to me they shouldn't need my help: either to endure or prevail. Or, if my help is needed and would be welcomed, then please ask nicely for my help; don't commandeer it.
If the universe truly is God's private, personal property, if land and other resources truly are God's to give, to lend, to take away, and if also God wants to give his, God's, land that the Canaanites have been living on for who knows how long to the Jews, who've never even seen it, why by all means, let God give it to them.
But he shouldn't have to ask for my help. And absolutely he shouldn't allow any help from the Jews. No, let God himself take the land away from the Canaanites, clear all Canaanites off of it, then, he should give it to the Jews. And the title too: or at least a lease: signed by God in a way that even Taoists, Jainists, atheists would have to recognize: Yep, that's God's signature: the landlord. There's no question: that document is official.
On the other hand, if the Jews take the Canaanites land, saying God gave us your land, well that simply stinks of the false.
Legitimate things shouldn't need subsidizing. If people are willing to pay to hear Beethoven, to drive cars, to build roads, to burn gasoline in order to get to the performance, by all means, let them listen, and drive, and build, and burn. If then there are hidden costs that come later, by all means, let those hidden costs come: and be paid. Beethoven wrote nice music for the voice. We all have one of those: dandy. He also wrote nice music for the piano: a big, clumsy, expensive instrument, hard to carry around. He also wrote a lot of nice big famous music requiring lots of big famous professional musicians to play. You need a hall for it: the stage is here, the audience is there, the audience has to sit still and listen, whether they like it or not. Those compositions were paid for, when they were paid for, by remnants of feudal kleptocracy: land holding, land management (all without God's signature). I believe that people who want to sit in an audience, and behave themselves, and who are willing and able to pay the full costs of the big famous musicians, and the hall, and the stage, and to clean up afterwards, and the royalties to Beethoven ... should be able to listen to all the Beethoven they want: so long as the existence of the hall, the roads leading to it, the cars that do the transport ... don't harm any other creatures: not gypsies, not nematodes.
Or, if say gypsies are harmed, or worms, or the nests of insects, then let the Beethoven listeners declare openly, We listen to our Beethoven on the corpses of others. We are kleptocrats, genocides, colonizing. We listen to our Beethoven flying our flag of conquest: red, white and blue: red for blood, white for the blank of our conscience, and blue: what we'll beat you to if you don't like it.
If the universe truly is God's private, personal property, if land and other resources truly are God's to give, to lend, to take away, and if also God wants to give his, God's, land that the Canaanites have been living on for who knows how long to the Jews, who've never even seen it, why by all means, let God give it to them.
But he shouldn't have to ask for my help. And absolutely he shouldn't allow any help from the Jews. No, let God himself take the land away from the Canaanites, clear all Canaanites off of it, then, he should give it to the Jews. And the title too: or at least a lease: signed by God in a way that even Taoists, Jainists, atheists would have to recognize: Yep, that's God's signature: the landlord. There's no question: that document is official.
On the other hand, if the Jews take the Canaanites land, saying God gave us your land, well that simply stinks of the false.
Legitimate things shouldn't need subsidizing. If people are willing to pay to hear Beethoven, to drive cars, to build roads, to burn gasoline in order to get to the performance, by all means, let them listen, and drive, and build, and burn. If then there are hidden costs that come later, by all means, let those hidden costs come: and be paid. Beethoven wrote nice music for the voice. We all have one of those: dandy. He also wrote nice music for the piano: a big, clumsy, expensive instrument, hard to carry around. He also wrote a lot of nice big famous music requiring lots of big famous professional musicians to play. You need a hall for it: the stage is here, the audience is there, the audience has to sit still and listen, whether they like it or not. Those compositions were paid for, when they were paid for, by remnants of feudal kleptocracy: land holding, land management (all without God's signature). I believe that people who want to sit in an audience, and behave themselves, and who are willing and able to pay the full costs of the big famous musicians, and the hall, and the stage, and to clean up afterwards, and the royalties to Beethoven ... should be able to listen to all the Beethoven they want: so long as the existence of the hall, the roads leading to it, the cars that do the transport ... don't harm any other creatures: not gypsies, not nematodes.
Or, if say gypsies are harmed, or worms, or the nests of insects, then let the Beethoven listeners declare openly, We listen to our Beethoven on the corpses of others. We are kleptocrats, genocides, colonizing. We listen to our Beethoven flying our flag of conquest: red, white and blue: red for blood, white for the blank of our conscience, and blue: what we'll beat you to if you don't like it.
Tuesday, March 08, 2005
Death ... Extinction ...
An organism develops. Subparts continue to grow even as the whole declines. At some point, by degeneration or by accident, the organism ceases, looses its viability. There's a word for it: death.
Meantime, populations of such organisms, self-similar, able to reproduce, develop: develop and grow, decline. There's a word for them too: species. When species die, there's a word for that as well: extinction. Extinction is the death of all members. No more reproduction, no more such organisms.
Populations of species have names too: genus, family, class, phylum, kingdom: the old KPCFGS concept.
What do we call it when a genus dies? A family? How many genuses or families or classes have already died?
I don't know. But I think we should start thinking of names. I think we're going to start seeing a lot of it: whole symphonies of extinctions: meta-deaths, meta-extinctions.
Of course when I say "we," I'm speaking by extension beyond species, beyond genus ... I certainly don't mean the Homo sapiens will "see" it. I mean that life will see it.
Meantime, populations of such organisms, self-similar, able to reproduce, develop: develop and grow, decline. There's a word for them too: species. When species die, there's a word for that as well: extinction. Extinction is the death of all members. No more reproduction, no more such organisms.
Populations of species have names too: genus, family, class, phylum, kingdom: the old KPCFGS concept.
What do we call it when a genus dies? A family? How many genuses or families or classes have already died?
I don't know. But I think we should start thinking of names. I think we're going to start seeing a lot of it: whole symphonies of extinctions: meta-deaths, meta-extinctions.
Of course when I say "we," I'm speaking by extension beyond species, beyond genus ... I certainly don't mean the Homo sapiens will "see" it. I mean that life will see it.
Saturday, March 05, 2005
Fuzzy Marble: '50s versus '60s
pk is nearly as proud of being behind the times in some matters, way behind, as he is of being ahead of the times in his pet interests, way ahead. March 2005 I decide to catch up on some Roger Corman: namely his 1964 The Mask of the Red Death. In no time I'm annoyed by a too cute for anyone's good redhead,
Francesca (Jane Asher).
pic missing, sorry, I'm looking for a substitute:
This black and white still, shared with Vincent Price, shows neither why I found her too cute nor what annoyed me, but perhaps it will recall the movie to those who know it. I'll try to detail what I mean even for those who don't have current acquaintance with the movie, but it's no substitute for a lecture theater with a pause button. The oxymoron of my title attempts to suggest my subject in two words; now I'll take it one facet at a time.
When others were watching Roger Corman, listening to the Beatles, following baseball, pk was sacrificing his immersion in jazz for too much Elizabethan literature. In those days I even more avidly read gobs of Marshall McLuhan. Indeed the Beatles were illustrating McLuhan's point that our TV culture had passed from the hard-edged visual imagery of slick magazines and the silver screen to the cartoon-empty lo-res fuzz of the tube. In the 1950s Hollywood cast its starlets in brasiers made of plaster: look, but don't touch (or you'll bruise your fingers, fracture your pecker). Doris Day's outline would cut like a knife. Her hair could be silhouetted without missing a single stray. I myself wore a hair gel that was like glue, my pompadour hardened into something like cooled sugar drizzle. Come 1964, come the Beatles, and everything, magazines, the movies, turned to fuzz: long hair, frizzy. The hair may not have strayed, but it did heft: like a bird's nest.
(I never heard of Jane Asher 'till I watched the DVD of The Mask of the Red Death last night. That was one of the times that I pause the DVD to visit imdb.com, where I quickly learned that the too cute redhead was Jane Asher, that Paul McCartney visited the Corman film set and immediately took up occupancy of Jane's life. (Apparently all four of the Beatles proposed marriage to Jane within twenty-four hours of meeting her, but Paul took center stage.) (She could though have compared hair with any of them.))
I wouldn't want to judge the red of those Asher tresses from The Mask of the Red Death: that film conception, film stock, and processing was false color from the get go.
I swear to you that Jane's coif reminded me of the Beatles (as it reminded me of McLuhan) before I saw the biographical connection. But, if her hair made me think TV age, her face (and how Corman was using it) reminded me of Mad comics' Wally Wood. Specifically, one of the early numbers had a science fiction post-war fantasy where society has become so machine-dependent that its members have all regressed to big baby faces with only vestigial bodies. When the machines break, the infantile citizens are totally helpless – and spider webs grow from wall to eye. Whatever Disney learned about rendering Mickey Mouse ever more juvenile, Wally Wood also knew. And Roger Corman uses Jane Asher as a huge-eyed infant (innocent as in Experience makes no impression on me): with big hair and jutting '50s plaster boobs.
If only she could have acted as well as "looked," her part at least of this garish, absurd movie might have worked.
OK: that's the "fuzzy" part of my title; but I've also just hinted at the "marble" part. Information is difference, significant difference: "any difference that makes a difference." [Bateson] You look at Tom Cruise's face and you instantly know, in your innermost fibres, that his face is more normal than any normal face you've ever seen: more ideal: therefore, attractive. You look at Denise Richards' lips, and you know those are big lips, yet still symmetrical, beautiful: irresistible. Looking at those lips any male can "see" how her bottom must feel to the hand.
In shot after shot Corman shows Jane Asher's breasts as more perky than any breasts have any right to be. Gravity is cancelled in the area of her chest.
Now I know that photographers for the skin magazines have an arsenal of tricks to give merely real human boobs the illusion of lift. They Scotch-tape the tits to the shoulders so they'll seem to float, then erase the tape from the negative. That's one trick. But what does Hollywood do? Above I tried to suggest that area of the filmed illusion business with my exaggerated metaphor of "plaster" brasiers.
This movie shoves two sets of mammaries in our faces from beginning to end – Jane's are always covered, she's a nice girl; Juliana is always low cut, busting out. In a scene well on in the movie, Juliana is having a nightmare, a satanic visitation, something, and we watch her boobs move through the sheerest material. Breasts like that, the film cannot be Horror (or, it couldn't be "Horror" without them!) But Jane? No. Her lift is rigid, ridiculous, impossible; but also impossible to take your eyes off. No breasts ever looked like that.
(Especially not Jane Asher's. Having searched for the above photograph, I now have a sense of the real actress: an attractive enough looking woman who does not look like the Francesca character!)
So that's why the film's Francesca annoyed me: I saw a (to me) unpleasing contradiction between the '60s hair and the rigid, ridiculous '50s bust. The damned thing is those '50s breasts, however spectacular looking, also look like they'd feel terrible: like the kid disappointed in feeling up the statue in the museum: it's just marble!
If I watch more Corman I'll keep my eyes open to see how he treats boobs in later movies. I bet he'll let them get fuzzy too: at least as the '60s progress.
PS: I assure you that it wasn't merely overlapping / "contradictory" periodicities that annoyed me about the Francesca construct, and Francesca was the far from the only thing annoying about the movie. But to stick with Francesca: she and her fellow peasants are indignant at Prince Prospero's cruel tyranny, yet having accompanied him to his castle she parades about on his arm as though she were his willing date. Prospero utters unending threats against one and all: Francesca's lover and Francesca's father will have to duel to the death. Francesca's big round eyes and symmetrically infantile face express annoyance more than blood-outrage. Then Prospero announces that he's having her lover and her father drawn and quartered: she receives it as though he's noticed that it's beginning to sprinkle outside. Meantime, Juliana brands the exposed top of her own breast, with an obliquely upside-down cross: "the mark of Satan." Francesca sees it. Now she's truly outraged. "Prospero did this to you?" Drawing and quartering is OK. Maybe Francesca simply didn't know what the words mean. She visits the dungeon where she's merely revolted by the ubiquity of torture ... Ah, but a self-inflicted mark on a breast: now she's ready for revolution.
Francesca (Jane Asher).
pic missing, sorry, I'm looking for a substitute:
This black and white still, shared with Vincent Price, shows neither why I found her too cute nor what annoyed me, but perhaps it will recall the movie to those who know it. I'll try to detail what I mean even for those who don't have current acquaintance with the movie, but it's no substitute for a lecture theater with a pause button. The oxymoron of my title attempts to suggest my subject in two words; now I'll take it one facet at a time.
When others were watching Roger Corman, listening to the Beatles, following baseball, pk was sacrificing his immersion in jazz for too much Elizabethan literature. In those days I even more avidly read gobs of Marshall McLuhan. Indeed the Beatles were illustrating McLuhan's point that our TV culture had passed from the hard-edged visual imagery of slick magazines and the silver screen to the cartoon-empty lo-res fuzz of the tube. In the 1950s Hollywood cast its starlets in brasiers made of plaster: look, but don't touch (or you'll bruise your fingers, fracture your pecker). Doris Day's outline would cut like a knife. Her hair could be silhouetted without missing a single stray. I myself wore a hair gel that was like glue, my pompadour hardened into something like cooled sugar drizzle. Come 1964, come the Beatles, and everything, magazines, the movies, turned to fuzz: long hair, frizzy. The hair may not have strayed, but it did heft: like a bird's nest.
(I never heard of Jane Asher 'till I watched the DVD of The Mask of the Red Death last night. That was one of the times that I pause the DVD to visit imdb.com, where I quickly learned that the too cute redhead was Jane Asher, that Paul McCartney visited the Corman film set and immediately took up occupancy of Jane's life. (Apparently all four of the Beatles proposed marriage to Jane within twenty-four hours of meeting her, but Paul took center stage.) (She could though have compared hair with any of them.))
I wouldn't want to judge the red of those Asher tresses from The Mask of the Red Death: that film conception, film stock, and processing was false color from the get go.
I swear to you that Jane's coif reminded me of the Beatles (as it reminded me of McLuhan) before I saw the biographical connection. But, if her hair made me think TV age, her face (and how Corman was using it) reminded me of Mad comics' Wally Wood. Specifically, one of the early numbers had a science fiction post-war fantasy where society has become so machine-dependent that its members have all regressed to big baby faces with only vestigial bodies. When the machines break, the infantile citizens are totally helpless – and spider webs grow from wall to eye. Whatever Disney learned about rendering Mickey Mouse ever more juvenile, Wally Wood also knew. And Roger Corman uses Jane Asher as a huge-eyed infant (innocent as in Experience makes no impression on me): with big hair and jutting '50s plaster boobs.
If only she could have acted as well as "looked," her part at least of this garish, absurd movie might have worked.
OK: that's the "fuzzy" part of my title; but I've also just hinted at the "marble" part. Information is difference, significant difference: "any difference that makes a difference." [Bateson] You look at Tom Cruise's face and you instantly know, in your innermost fibres, that his face is more normal than any normal face you've ever seen: more ideal: therefore, attractive. You look at Denise Richards' lips, and you know those are big lips, yet still symmetrical, beautiful: irresistible. Looking at those lips any male can "see" how her bottom must feel to the hand.
In shot after shot Corman shows Jane Asher's breasts as more perky than any breasts have any right to be. Gravity is cancelled in the area of her chest.
Now I know that photographers for the skin magazines have an arsenal of tricks to give merely real human boobs the illusion of lift. They Scotch-tape the tits to the shoulders so they'll seem to float, then erase the tape from the negative. That's one trick. But what does Hollywood do? Above I tried to suggest that area of the filmed illusion business with my exaggerated metaphor of "plaster" brasiers.
This movie shoves two sets of mammaries in our faces from beginning to end – Jane's are always covered, she's a nice girl; Juliana is always low cut, busting out. In a scene well on in the movie, Juliana is having a nightmare, a satanic visitation, something, and we watch her boobs move through the sheerest material. Breasts like that, the film cannot be Horror (or, it couldn't be "Horror" without them!) But Jane? No. Her lift is rigid, ridiculous, impossible; but also impossible to take your eyes off. No breasts ever looked like that.
(Especially not Jane Asher's. Having searched for the above photograph, I now have a sense of the real actress: an attractive enough looking woman who does not look like the Francesca character!)
So that's why the film's Francesca annoyed me: I saw a (to me) unpleasing contradiction between the '60s hair and the rigid, ridiculous '50s bust. The damned thing is those '50s breasts, however spectacular looking, also look like they'd feel terrible: like the kid disappointed in feeling up the statue in the museum: it's just marble!
If I watch more Corman I'll keep my eyes open to see how he treats boobs in later movies. I bet he'll let them get fuzzy too: at least as the '60s progress.
PS: I assure you that it wasn't merely overlapping / "contradictory" periodicities that annoyed me about the Francesca construct, and Francesca was the far from the only thing annoying about the movie. But to stick with Francesca: she and her fellow peasants are indignant at Prince Prospero's cruel tyranny, yet having accompanied him to his castle she parades about on his arm as though she were his willing date. Prospero utters unending threats against one and all: Francesca's lover and Francesca's father will have to duel to the death. Francesca's big round eyes and symmetrically infantile face express annoyance more than blood-outrage. Then Prospero announces that he's having her lover and her father drawn and quartered: she receives it as though he's noticed that it's beginning to sprinkle outside. Meantime, Juliana brands the exposed top of her own breast, with an obliquely upside-down cross: "the mark of Satan." Francesca sees it. Now she's truly outraged. "Prospero did this to you?" Drawing and quartering is OK. Maybe Francesca simply didn't know what the words mean. She visits the dungeon where she's merely revolted by the ubiquity of torture ... Ah, but a self-inflicted mark on a breast: now she's ready for revolution.
Friday, March 04, 2005
Million Dollar Girlfight
Michelle Rodgriguez impressed me enough in some military movie that I used imbd.com to look her up. That led me to Girlfight: which I liked well enough to watch half-way through a second time.
If we hear turn the other cheek on Sunday, then how do we root for the mayhem of Friday nights? I don't know: that's why we need seven different days of the week. Some people could maybe get by with only one or two different days for different moralities, different psychologies; others need more than seven. All I know, in my own case, is: Christianity seemed good in one context, Joe Louis seemed good in another. Christianity got my idealist passions up, Joe Louis got my blood passions up: way up. Then Mohammed Ali. Now I see a dozen beat the shit out of everybody movies for any one about the Passion: beat the shit out of God.
My enjoyment of Girlfight made me all the more receptive to rumors that Clint Eastwood was doing a women's boxing movie. I was all the more happy that Hilary Swank would be playing the boxer. I saw Million Dollar Baby within days of its playing locally, watched it win Oscars the other night. I liked it; but I certainly don't agree that it's Clint's best work. One thing that it did for sure though was make me want to see Girlfight again.
Half-way through, not quite to the same spot, this "third" viewing, I bail out again. I have no intention of watching the rest. I'll just look at stills of Michelle Rodgriguez instead. Million Dollar Baby shows women boxing women; Girlfight shows more co-ed than women-only boxing. I have no objection to men and women, boys and girls, working out together – if everybody is willing. Sparring is fine. Maybe amateur bouts for no big deal prize. But I absolutely cannot countenance men and women competing against each other for anything but laughs: absolutely not in a blood sport. Women can fight. Women can bleed. Women can take knocks. And obviously men can.
But women and men take enough blood knocks from each other within the family. I think they should both be spared outside the family.
For one thing, when Johnson fought Jeffries, or Clay Liston, or Ali Forman ... one has no difficulty believing that both men tried, neither was shy, neither held back: because the other had his period or something, because one felt sorry for the other. Neither held back because he had been trained to hold back since he was in diapers.
Now in war for territory, as in predation for meat, fairness doesn't matter. Wars for markets, wars for propaganda, wars for hegemony have rules. Wars for territory do not. In no way could Genghis Khan make his point better than through total extermination.
If I'm fishing for dinner, I don't care whether my lure snares a male or a female. If I want to kill all the rats in the pantry, I don't need to check genders first. If you're robbing a bank to feed your family, who gives a shit if the teller you rap with the sap is Mr., Mrs., Miss, or Ms.?
But a boxing match is neither predation for meat nor war for territory. Dominance, not annihilation, is the point. Athletic sports are kin to stags butting heads for mating rights far more than to lions killing zebras for dinner: or than to lions killing lion kittens that aren't his. A buck doesn't butt the does, he butts the other bucks.
In Girlfight Diana is supposed to fight Adrian for a championship. Diana and Adrian are supposed to be in love. What's being contested? Are we sure it's boxing?
Michelle's Diana has already knocked her father down. That's one thing. Plenty of guys have knocked their mother down. Plenty of fathers are falling down before your touch them. But male / female knocking should take place after mating has succeeded or failed. Now war can really be war.
PS This will get another session: extension, revision ...
2005 03 17 Another point about Girlfight I'll develop at InfoAll blog. 2005 03 30 I censor some rude observations: by moving them to pkBowdler blog.
If we hear turn the other cheek on Sunday, then how do we root for the mayhem of Friday nights? I don't know: that's why we need seven different days of the week. Some people could maybe get by with only one or two different days for different moralities, different psychologies; others need more than seven. All I know, in my own case, is: Christianity seemed good in one context, Joe Louis seemed good in another. Christianity got my idealist passions up, Joe Louis got my blood passions up: way up. Then Mohammed Ali. Now I see a dozen beat the shit out of everybody movies for any one about the Passion: beat the shit out of God.
My enjoyment of Girlfight made me all the more receptive to rumors that Clint Eastwood was doing a women's boxing movie. I was all the more happy that Hilary Swank would be playing the boxer. I saw Million Dollar Baby within days of its playing locally, watched it win Oscars the other night. I liked it; but I certainly don't agree that it's Clint's best work. One thing that it did for sure though was make me want to see Girlfight again.
Half-way through, not quite to the same spot, this "third" viewing, I bail out again. I have no intention of watching the rest. I'll just look at stills of Michelle Rodgriguez instead. Million Dollar Baby shows women boxing women; Girlfight shows more co-ed than women-only boxing. I have no objection to men and women, boys and girls, working out together – if everybody is willing. Sparring is fine. Maybe amateur bouts for no big deal prize. But I absolutely cannot countenance men and women competing against each other for anything but laughs: absolutely not in a blood sport. Women can fight. Women can bleed. Women can take knocks. And obviously men can.
But women and men take enough blood knocks from each other within the family. I think they should both be spared outside the family.
For one thing, when Johnson fought Jeffries, or Clay Liston, or Ali Forman ... one has no difficulty believing that both men tried, neither was shy, neither held back: because the other had his period or something, because one felt sorry for the other. Neither held back because he had been trained to hold back since he was in diapers.
Now in war for territory, as in predation for meat, fairness doesn't matter. Wars for markets, wars for propaganda, wars for hegemony have rules. Wars for territory do not. In no way could Genghis Khan make his point better than through total extermination.
If I'm fishing for dinner, I don't care whether my lure snares a male or a female. If I want to kill all the rats in the pantry, I don't need to check genders first. If you're robbing a bank to feed your family, who gives a shit if the teller you rap with the sap is Mr., Mrs., Miss, or Ms.?
But a boxing match is neither predation for meat nor war for territory. Dominance, not annihilation, is the point. Athletic sports are kin to stags butting heads for mating rights far more than to lions killing zebras for dinner: or than to lions killing lion kittens that aren't his. A buck doesn't butt the does, he butts the other bucks.
In Girlfight Diana is supposed to fight Adrian for a championship. Diana and Adrian are supposed to be in love. What's being contested? Are we sure it's boxing?
Michelle's Diana has already knocked her father down. That's one thing. Plenty of guys have knocked their mother down. Plenty of fathers are falling down before your touch them. But male / female knocking should take place after mating has succeeded or failed. Now war can really be war.
PS This will get another session: extension, revision ...
2005 03 17 Another point about Girlfight I'll develop at InfoAll blog. 2005 03 30 I censor some rude observations: by moving them to pkBowdler blog.
Tuesday, March 01, 2005
Sinister Survival
Women! Bah, who needs them? Well, even most men will agree that females have some function.
Fags! Freaks! Lefties! Who needs them? Actually, a big world needs practically everybody.
Yesterday a Reuters article caught my ire of the moment. Clown economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, complaining that some Harvard guy had dared to discuss science abilities in relation to gender, declared that "scientists are made, not born." Sure: by magic, by fiat. State institutions can stamp anything out like cookies: money, doctors, teachers, experts ... "scientists."
I shared a quote from that article with bk who responded, "Ass holes and idiots ... Egalitarianism makes differences seem like barriers rather than guides and opportunities."
The whole shmear reminds me of some Leonard Shlain hypotheses that I was celebrating at Knatz.com while reading his book on Sex, Women, and Power. Today though I come in on a different angle, parallel to the angle I started with above:"Leonardo terrifies me," says Otto, the postman, in Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice. Otto finds Leonardo to be sinister. The movie has started with its nose detailedly in Leonardo's Adoration of the Magi. Sure. Leonardo is weird. Point is: where would we be without weirdo's? that is, without difference! without diversity.
Even enemies. Alan Watts said that societies should pay their enemies: they couldn't define themselves without them.
Clever. But Shlain is onto the nitty gritty. Shlain finds statistical correlations among some classes of genetic difference. Among males, any population will yield about 8% homosexuals. same number as people who are left-handed. same number as people who are colorblind. That means that in a small band of humans – our very background after all – there will be on average one lefty among many a rough dozen of righties. The lefty's arrow might hit the one bird the righties all missed. The one colorblind guy on patrol might see the enemy's camouflaged position that all those with "better" sight missed. Usually an embarrassment, the queer might save the day: some weird day, when normalcy won't do.
Any type of talent may have a blindspot. Team complementary talents so they overlap and the blindspot may be penetrated.
Pierre Curie was a smart physicist, could do all sorts of heavy mental lifting. But who discovered radium? Not Pierre. And not Fritz. No, it was Marie.
Was she a dummy? Was she as smart as Pierre? It doesn't matter. No doubt it was part luck: any discovery is at least part luck, any hit, any good stroke to the green; but don't discount advantages that can accompany some deficiencies. Maybe she was twice as smart as Pierre. Point is, we need more than one type of mentality, more than two.
Leonardo was weird. Leonardo would be weird if he were alive today: wouldn't fit into any group. Community Colleges, don't even bother to think of him on your faculty: and Harvard qualifies no better. Leonardo could screw the King of France, Leonardo could screw anybody. If you lend him money, don't expect it back. Thank god for Leonardo.
Emily Dickinson was short. Maybe she had bad breath. Thank the void for Emily Dickinson.
But those are acknowledged geniuses: what about the turd who can't button his shirt, has pee on his shoe tops? Could he save the day?
I don't see how, but that shouldn't matter. I don't see everything. Don't count anybody out.
The wino, drunk in the gutter that you kick as you go by, could be Jesus, remembering you.
PS
Can this be the same pk who says he wishes he could wake up and find everybody else dead? the same pk who'd push the button and get rid of most of us? Yes. But that's purely a question of population size in relation to resources; not of population content. Too big a world may not be too good.
Then again, if I could tailor the button, make destruction selective, I would be tempted to exercise extreme prejudice not against kikes or gooks, Philistines or Ruskies, but against civilized people: people who think that kleptocracy is normal.
Fags! Freaks! Lefties! Who needs them? Actually, a big world needs practically everybody.
Yesterday a Reuters article caught my ire of the moment. Clown economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, complaining that some Harvard guy had dared to discuss science abilities in relation to gender, declared that "scientists are made, not born." Sure: by magic, by fiat. State institutions can stamp anything out like cookies: money, doctors, teachers, experts ... "scientists."
I shared a quote from that article with bk who responded, "Ass holes and idiots ... Egalitarianism makes differences seem like barriers rather than guides and opportunities."
The whole shmear reminds me of some Leonard Shlain hypotheses that I was celebrating at Knatz.com while reading his book on Sex, Women, and Power. Today though I come in on a different angle, parallel to the angle I started with above:
Even enemies. Alan Watts said that societies should pay their enemies: they couldn't define themselves without them.
Clever. But Shlain is onto the nitty gritty. Shlain finds statistical correlations among some classes of genetic difference. Among males, any population will yield about 8% homosexuals. same number as people who are left-handed. same number as people who are colorblind. That means that in a small band of humans – our very background after all – there will be on average one lefty among many a rough dozen of righties. The lefty's arrow might hit the one bird the righties all missed. The one colorblind guy on patrol might see the enemy's camouflaged position that all those with "better" sight missed. Usually an embarrassment, the queer might save the day: some weird day, when normalcy won't do.
Any type of talent may have a blindspot. Team complementary talents so they overlap and the blindspot may be penetrated.
Pierre Curie was a smart physicist, could do all sorts of heavy mental lifting. But who discovered radium? Not Pierre. And not Fritz. No, it was Marie.
Was she a dummy? Was she as smart as Pierre? It doesn't matter. No doubt it was part luck: any discovery is at least part luck, any hit, any good stroke to the green; but don't discount advantages that can accompany some deficiencies. Maybe she was twice as smart as Pierre. Point is, we need more than one type of mentality, more than two.
Leonardo was weird. Leonardo would be weird if he were alive today: wouldn't fit into any group. Community Colleges, don't even bother to think of him on your faculty: and Harvard qualifies no better. Leonardo could screw the King of France, Leonardo could screw anybody. If you lend him money, don't expect it back. Thank god for Leonardo.
Emily Dickinson was short. Maybe she had bad breath. Thank the void for Emily Dickinson.
But those are acknowledged geniuses: what about the turd who can't button his shirt, has pee on his shoe tops? Could he save the day?
I don't see how, but that shouldn't matter. I don't see everything. Don't count anybody out.
The wino, drunk in the gutter that you kick as you go by, could be Jesus, remembering you.
PS
Can this be the same pk who says he wishes he could wake up and find everybody else dead? the same pk who'd push the button and get rid of most of us? Yes. But that's purely a question of population size in relation to resources; not of population content. Too big a world may not be too good.
Then again, if I could tailor the button, make destruction selective, I would be tempted to exercise extreme prejudice not against kikes or gooks, Philistines or Ruskies, but against civilized people: people who think that kleptocracy is normal.
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