Dreaming of Connections

Reading in Julian Barnes's "The Past Conditional" in this week's The New Yorker

Perhaps Grandpa would have taken his celestial pipe out of his mouth, given me an uncharacteristic wink, and murmured complicitly, "I once knew a very nice girl called Mabel."

I'm drawn back to a novel which takes the same imagery to begin as Barnes uses to close

I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool.

and I wonder if that is a good enough reason to remember Jailbird and Vonnegut, wonder if such a connection is of any value, wonder if I shouldn't be able to place Kurt is some larger context and in some more particular relationship to the larger cannon of writing that is thought to be important. Then I think, "What the Hell, self abuse is good enough." Especially after having read Oran Pamuk talking about writers

A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is. When I speak of writing, the image that comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or a literary tradition; it is the person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and, alone, turns inward. Amid his shadows, he builds a new world with words. This man—or this woman—may use a typewriter, or profit from the ease of a computer, or write with a pen on paper, as I do. As he writes, he may drink tea or coffee, or smoke cigarettes. From time to time, he may rise from his table to look out the window at the children playing in the street, or, if he is lucky, at trees and a view, or even at a black wall. He may write poems, or plays, or novels, as I do. But all these differences arise only after the crucial task is complete—after he has sat down at the table and patiently turned inward. To write is to transform that inward gaze into words, to study the worlds into which we pass when we retire into ourselves, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy.

in "My Father's Suitcase" just a few pages later in the same issue of The New Yorker. Perhaps it is all self abuse, innumerable writers pleasuring themselves spewing their words out on page after page in medium after medium.

If as I heard WFB say once eyeing the stopwatch at the top of his clipboard while interviewing an author, "If an unexamined life is not worth living then certainly I'm a corpse." and knowing fullwell that WFB intensely examines his life and that he's just not telling anyone about it, perhaps not even himself, then perhaps writers are no more or less alive or worthwhile than others they just live and measure worth differently. Thinking now about how the NOW, the current moment, is the point of tangency between God and Man, the best taste of the infinite that can be had, I settle back into the hot water of my bath, open the tap for a bit more and read Pamuk's paragraph again thinking of the writers I know, RJK, Migs, Elisabeth and Vito Esterno wondering how writers might be like painters. If writers are painters, then I am a house painter, eh? Or perhaps a madman scraping a bit of color off everyone else's canvass and saving it on my pallette for some grand canvass of my own, a grand canvass which has as yet not even a charcoal cartoon.

Yo soy un conductor, yo soy un viejo Tejano gringo puro. ¿Y, yo soy un pinturista? No se.

Tomorrow afternoon I'll be looking for a place to park my truck in Chicago as close to the Dan Ryan and West 51st St as possible until I can get it unloaded at eight o'clock Tuesday morning and all this will be a dream.

Pan-Islamism is the profound challenge to conventional ideas of citizenship and nationhood.

... non-state actors like the Hezbo crowd and al-Qaida have no interest in graduating to statehood. They've got bigger fish to fry. If you're interested in establishing a global caliphate, getting a U.N. seat and an Olympic team only gets in the way. The "sovereign" state is of use to such groups merely as a base of operations, as Afghanistan was and Lebanon is. They act locally but they think globally.

And that indifference to the state can be contagious. Lebanon's Christians may think of themselves as "Lebanese," but most of Hezbollah's Shiite constituency don't. Western analysts talk hopefully of fierce differences between Sunni and Shiite, Arab and Persian, but it's interesting to note the numbers of young Sunni men in Egypt, Jordan and elsewhere in recent weeks who've decided that Iran's (Shiite) President Ahmadinejad and his (Shiite) Hezbo proxies are the new cool kids in town. During the '90s, we grew used to the idea that "non-state actors" meant a terrorist group, with maybe a few hundred activists, a few thousand supporters. What if entire populations are being transformed into "non-state actors"? Not terrorists, by any means, but at the very minimum entirely indifferent to the state of which they're nominally citizens.

Hence that statistic: Seven percent of British Muslims consider their primary identity to be British, 81 percent consider it to be Muslim. By comparison, in the most populous Muslim nation on the planet, 39 percent of Muslim Indonesians consider themselves Indonesian first, 36 percent consider themselves Muslim first. For more than four years now, I've been writing about a phenomenon I first encountered in the Muslim ghettoes of the Netherlands, Belgium and other European countries in the spring of 2002: Second- and third-generation European Muslims feel far more fiercely Islamic than their parents and grandparents.

That's the issue: Pan-Islamism is the profound challenge to conventional ideas of citizenship and nationhood.

-read more-

BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST, August 13, 2006

Think well, write well, it's always worth your time.

Think well, write well, it's always worth your time.  Tony Blair must have an outstanding group of researchers and speech writers. In speaking recently about the current conflict in Lebanon Blair said in part

It is still possible even now to come out of this crisis with a better long-term prospect for the cause of moderation in the Middle East succeeding. But it would be absurd not to face up to the immediate damage to that cause which has been done.

We will continue to do all we can to halt the hostilities. But once that has happened, we must commit ourselves to a complete renaissance of our strategy to defeat those that threaten us. There is an arc of extremism now stretching across the Middle East and touching, with increasing definition, countries far outside that region.

To defeat it will need an alliance of moderation, that paints a different future in which Muslim, Jew and Christian; Arab and Western; wealthy and developing nations can make progress in peace and harmony with each other. My argument to you today is this: We will not win the battle against this global extremism unless we win it at the level of values as much as force, unless we show we are even-handed, fair and just in our application of those values to the world.

The point is this. This is war, but of a completely unconventional kind.

9/11 in the US, 7/7 in the UK, 11/3 in Madrid, the countless terrorist attacks in countries as disparate as Indonesia or Algeria, what is now happening in Afghanistan and in Indonesia, the continuing conflict in Lebanon and Palestine, it is all part of the same thing. What are the values that govern the future of the world? Are they those of tolerance, freedom, respect for difference and diversity or those of reaction, division and hatred? My point is that this war can't be won in a conventional way. It can only be won by showing that our values are stronger, better and more just, more fair than the alternative. Doing this, however, requires us to change dramatically the focus of our policy.

Unless we reappraise our strategy, unless we revitalize the broader global agenda on poverty, climate change, trade, and in respect of the Middle East, bend every sinew of our will to making peace between Israel and Palestine, we will not win. And this is a battle we must win.

What is happening today out in the Middle East, in Afghanistan and beyond is an elemental struggle about the values that will shape our future.

It is in part a struggle between what I will call Reactionary Islam and Moderate, Mainstream Islam. But its implications go far wider. We are fighting a war, but not just against terrorism but about how the world should govern itself in the early 21st century, about global values.

The root causes of the current crisis are supremely indicative of this. Ever since September 11th, the US has embarked on a policy of intervention in order to protect its and our future security. Hence Afghanistan. Hence Iraq. Hence the broader Middle East initiative in support of moves towards democracy in the Arab world.

The point about these interventions, however, military and otherwise, is that they were not just about changing regimes but changing the values systems governing the nations concerned. The banner was not actually "regime change," it was "values change." What we have done therefore in intervening in this way is far more momentous than possibly we appreciated at the time.   -read more-

The British prime minister delivered this speech to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on August 1.

A speech well worth anyone's time to read and ponder.

 

Taxing thoughts

A friend reviews Little Miss Sunshine today leading me to compare Mary Lynn Rajskub and Renee Zellweger, adding them both to the "Lunch Dates I'd Love" list I begin to wonder who said, "Wanting to meet the artist because you like the art is like wanting to meet the goose because you like paté."  A woman I think from around here somewhere, a novelist, passed on I believe.  Then I begin to ponder why I want

... when a grad student with whom he fell in love fell in love with the second-best Proust scholar

in my friend's review to read

... when his lover, a grad student, dumped him for the second-best Proust scholar

Taxing my brain again when what I really need to do is figure and pay my Federal and State income taxes for 2005.  August 14th draws near.  The weather here today is miserable, there's a real chance taxes might get paid today but who did say that about art, artists and geese?   Ankle deep ponds of last night's rain litter the gray streets during the sunrise walk this morning with gray overcast skies nearly hugging the ground.  Damp, close, windless, a bit more heat and New Orleans or Houston would come to mind.  Ancient gray Schnauzer snoring at my feet now.  Out the window green peppers and clusters of red cherry tomatoes tugging the vines down to where the Westie can graze.  A dog who eats tomatoes, who knew?  Pick tomatoes and peppers or pay taxes?  The morning is young still.  How many taxes could a pepper picker pay, if a pepper picker paid ... 

 

Which is better

a dog who active verb ...   or   a dog that active verb ...

which is correct, does one or the other convey a different meaning?  If there is a rule, can we break it to get a different meaning?  Is it like Uncle Sid's middle aged housekeeper riding along Westheimer from downtown  between Louisiana and Montrose Blvd for the first time, fresh off the plane from Guatemala going to meet her new jefé, eyeing the crowd on both sides of the street saying softly to me, "Mira, Jorge, los femininas.", using the contrast of gender between article and noun to avoid the vulgar M word?  Can we cross languages like that and keep the mood, keep the meaning?  Subtlety, subtlety, all is subtlety except penalties and interest.

 

Taxing thoughts.

Surf's Up! Who's got that coin from the fish's mouth?

Surf's Up!, a call that always interferes with work. Work will always be there but good surf comes and goes.


A nice start from memeorandum a political news summary site with some interesting sister sites.


A few nice runs from the Washington Post, one from three years ago, one from this week

Hussein's Baghdad Falls

U.S. Forces Move Triumphantly Through Capital Streets, Cheered by Crowds Jubilant at End of Repressive Regime

By Anthony Shadid

Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, April 10, 2003; Page A01

BAGHDAD, April 9 -- Swept aside by U.S. troops who drove through the streets of Baghdad, President Saddam Hussein's government collapsed today, ending three decades of ruthless Baath Party rule that sought to make Iraq the champion of a modern Arab world but left a legacy of fear, poverty and bitterness.

As U.S. Army troops occupied the west ... -read more-

'Waiting to Get Blown Up'

Some Troops in Baghdad Express Frustration With the War and Their Mission

By Joshua Partlow

Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 27, 2006; Page A01

"How did it become, 'Well, now we have to rebuild this place from the ground up'?" Fulcher asked.

He kept talking. "They say we're here and we've given them freedom, but really what is that? You know, what is freedom? You've got kids here who can't go to school. You've got people here who don't have jobs anymore. You've got people here who don't have power," he said. "You know, so yeah, they've got freedom now, but when they didn't have freedom, everybody had a job."

-read more-

Very tubular from Time

World

Condi in Diplomatic Disneyland

Viewpoint: The Secretary of State tells the Lebanese that the blood they're seeing represents the birth of a brave new order. She's convincing nobody

By TONY KARON , Posted Wednesday, Jul. 26, 2006

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice faced a thankless, all but impossible task in trying to sell the Arab world on the U.S. policy of delaying a cease-fire so that the Israeli military can continue its anti-Hizballah campaign. But her case was hardly helped when she explained that the violence that has already killed more than 400 Lebanese and turned more than a half million into refugees represents the "birth pangs of a new Middle East." Phrases like that and her rejection of the call for an immediate cease-fire on the grounds that "whatever we do, we have to be certain that we're pushing forward to the new Middle East, not going back to the old Middle East" carry a revolutionary ring that scares the hell out of America's allies in the region. It was revolutionaries like Lenin and Mao, after all, who rationalized violence and suffering as the wages of progress, in the way a doctor might rationalize surgery painful, bloody, even risking the life of the patient, but ultimately necessary. Social engineering is not surgery, however, and its victims find little comfort in the homilies of its authors.

-read more-

One final run from an obscure SciFi author

When there is no real hope, we must mint our own. If the coin be counterfeit it still may be passed.
- Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light, 1968

Why am I having trouble sending tax money in?

OK, W-2's, 1099R's, 1009I's, bank statements, 2004 Intuit passwords, coffee ...

Ready, begin, www.turbotax.com. Who's got that coin from the fish's mouth?

Gets my attention

In Western literature, the form of the novel is coincidental with the emergence of the bourgeoisie in the late seventeenth century, and this is why, for its first century, the novel is all about birth, possible orphanhood, the discovery of roots, and the creation of a new world, a career, and society. Robinson Crusoe. Tom Jones. Tristram Shandy.

To locate a beginning in retrospective time is to ground a project (such as an experiment, or a governmental commission, or Dickens's beginning to write Bleak House) in that moment, which is always subject to revision. Beginnings of this sort necessarily involve an intention that either is fulfilled, totally or in part, or is viewed as totally failed, in successive time. And so the second great problematic is about the continuity that occurs after birth, the exfoliation from a beginning: in the time from birth to youth, reproductive generation, maturity. Every culture offers and circulates images of what has been wonderfully called the dialectic of incarnation, or in FranÁois Jacob's phrase, la logique du vivant. Again to give examples from the history of the novel (the Western aesthetic form that offers the largest and most complex image of ourselves that we have), there is the bildungsroman or novel of education, the novel of idealism and disappointment (L'Education sentimentale, Les Illusions perdues), the novel of immaturity and community (like George Eliot's Middlemarch, which the English critic Gillian Beer has shown was powerfully influenced by what she calls Dar- win's plots for the patterns of generation that structure this great novel of nineteenth-century British society). Other aesthetic forms, in music and painting, follow similar patterns.

But there are also exceptions, examples of deviation from the overall assumed pattern to human life. One thinks of Gulliver's Travels, Crime and Punishment, and The Trial, works that seem to break away from the amazingly persistent underlying compact between the notion of the successive ages of man (as in Shakespeare) and aesthetic reflections of and on them. For it bears saying explicitly that both in art and in our general ideas about the passage of human life there is assumed to be a general abiding timeliness, by which I mean that what is appropriate to early life is not appropriate for later stages, and vice versa. You will recall, for example, the stern biblical observation that to everything there is a season and a time, to every purpose under the heaven, a time to be born, and a time to die, and so on: "wherefore I perceive that there is nothing better, than that a man should rejoice in his own works; for that is his portion: for who shall bring him to see what shall be after him? ... All things come alike to all: there is one event to the righteous, and to the wicked; to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean ...  -read more-

The text above likely tests the limits of fair use and was lifted from the first chapter of On Late Style by Edward Said, posted on The New York Times at First Chapters.  An NYT registration is required to follow the links.  I may have bitten off more than I can digest here but what I've read here will move me toward buying the book.  There is, I'm sure, a vast literature in the history of the novel of which I'm completely ignorant save for Jane Smiley and there, as is indicative of my depth, I have read only the review linked here.  I encourage your recommendations in the area to increase my resonance.

 

L'esprit de l'escalier

Mes amis,

Remorse, regret, recrimination are they of any value at all in this party we call life?  Such thoughts haunt me today.  Let the rough side drag, eh?  Ditch the past and run with the moment!

Perhaps, all I really need is a nice ride with the top down to the Bolivar Ferry and back, eh?

Un jour nous serons victorieux au dessus des escaliers, n'est-ce pas?

Le maître de l'esprit de l'escalier,

George

Something worthwhile

Finally, from the daily stream corporate email something worthwhile

On July 25th, 2006, all cell phone numbers are being released to telemarketing companies. If you have a cell phone, whether company owned or not, you will start to receive sale calls, and YOU WILL BE CHARGED FOR THESE CALLS. To prevent these calls you should do the following to get your number on the National DO NOT CALL List:

1) Call the following number from your cell phone: 888-382-1222. It is the National DO NOT CALL list. It will only take a minute of your time.
It blocks your number for five (5) years.

Or,

2) On the Internet, log onto: http://www.donotcall.gov/ and follow the on-screen 3 step instructions completely.
Again, it blocks your number for five (5) years.

I would, and you can, register any phone number, not just cell phone numbers, using this information.

Enjoy!

Elephants, Snakes, Blue Candles and Red Feathers

Elephant repellent can be anything you like from the whimsical to the outrageous, from crossing your fingers to an excuse for public flatulence. As long as there are no elephants in view or recalled in recent memory by the audience any action serves to repel elephants. Generally the audience is young and gullible. Snake repellent works about the same way as elephant repellent. Always looking out for an elephant you might miss the snake and get bitten, while always looking down for the snake you might get squashed instead. Looking out and listening for elephants and snakes is hard work but having a repellent is much eaiser. Elephant and snake repellent is great fun but only if it is facetious. Let's go back a few years and search Wikipedia - admittedly not the best reference source but a convenient one - for some recent elephants and snakes

World Trade Center bombing on February 26,1993 in New York City; The Oklahoma City bombing on April 19,1995 of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building; Centennial Olympic Park bombing on July 27, 1996 in Atlanta; The September 11, 2001 attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C.; Anthrax Attacks in the United States during the Fall of 2001 following the 9/11 event; Bali Nightclub bombing on October 12, 2002; Beltway Sniper Attacks during October 2003; Madrid train bombings on March 11, 2004; London bombings of the subways and buses on July 7 and 21, 2005.

Just a few of the major elephants and snakes in the last thirteen years or so. Some are solitary snakes that would have been hard to detect, some are either dens of snakes or herds of elephants, depending on your point of view, that should have been at least partially detected. Wikipedia has even more comprehensive lists and I'm sure better sources like LexisNexis and others could reveal a mountain of events that could be termed snakes or elephants in the context of risk here. There just seem to be snakes and elephants everywhere. Damn! Maybe we live in a jungle. Who knew?

Real threats, real risks if you will, require serious avoidance measures. Risk avoidance requires risk detection and assessment. Detection is the real problem and precedes assessment and avoidance. Quine and Wittgenstein are correct, no matter how much they are ignored, how the question is framed is crucial to getting an answer, a real answer. No one wants to get bitten by a snake or squashed by an elephant. But, poor detection methods, poor ways to see snakes and elephants, ways that are very high tech but have very poor discrimination, ways that generate mountains of data about all the animals in the jungle but are very poor at unambiguously finding snakes and elephants or even traces of them, ways like the NSA's data mining of communications records, are in the last analysis nothing more than snake and elephant repellent. 'Who is talking to who?' may not be the best question, especially when the question is more like 'who is everyone talking to?'

Until the NSA either publicly fails, God forbid, in the face of another catastrophic event or publicly succeeds in foiling such an event the current methods will serve only to set public opinion against responsible and productive detection work. Maybe, just maybe, Stephen Kappes return to the CIA as the second in command under General Haden will produce more real detection and less in the way of snake and elephant repellent. I wonder what General Alexander will do now at NSA, will he continue the mining?

Maybe trying not to attract snakes and elephants unnecessarily would be better than believing that the current actions have repelled all the snakes and elephants. It's been nearly a year now since any snakes or elephants caused any trouble. Let's sift and chain another terabyte of communications records this week and see if the elephants and snakes stay away, eh? I hear they're lighting the blue candles and using the red chicken feathers this month in New Orleans too. Nope, no elephants, no snakes, no storms here, not a one. Anyone got any more rum, my hurricane is getting a bit light?

More light reading on snakes and elephants, feathers and candles

The NSA is on the line -- all of them

LISTENING IN

Big Brother Is Listening

Wiretaps: How to Fix FISA

How the NSA Does "Social Network Analysis"

Blue Candles, Red Feathers

Mo rum, pleeze

KISS, bad ideas are reason enough

God bless Anthony Lane who in his recent review of The Da Vinci Code, both the book and the movie, points out the most fundamental and best reason to ignore the book, it is quite simply badly written.  And, the movie can be ignored for the same reason since in the director Howard's own words it is a faithful adaptation of the book.  All the press about the premises of the book, which are laughable at best,  immediately turned me away from any attempt to read it.  Like Lane I was able to see the movie fresh without being contaminated by the book experience, and like Lane I found the movie a complete waste of time except to have been well received as an entertaining outing by my mother-in-law, a retired librarian, who has read the book and found both lacking in merit.  I am sick to death of all the Christian hand wringing over the Brown's book and Howard's movie and amazed, if not envious, about the cottage industry that has grown up debunking the book.  Oh! Should I be so smart to write either the bad book or one of the debunkers.  Forty million copies, who knew? 

 

All of this hullabellew leads me ponder Lane's idea

Should we mind that forty million readers - or, to use the technical term, "lemmings" - have followed one another over the cliff of this long and laughable text?

a bit more deeply as regards the blogosphere.  Brown's work, at least from what I've seen in the movie resembles nothing so much as an extended blog entry from one of the tens of thousands of blogs claiming to have the truth about everything from Hiroshima to hemorrhoids.  Bad ideas, and from what Lane says just plain bad writing also, are more than reason enough to ignore a book like Brown's.  In the same way much of the blogosphere can also be ignored.  Lemmings, perhaps like the poor, will always be with us.  Watch the lemmings carefully and quietly move quickly out of their way.  Hell hath no fury like lemmings blocked from their journey to the edge.  Oh, by the way, did I mention the mid term elections are coming up.  Lemmings anyone?

Earthworm Tractor Co

Miserably slow here at work.  The strangest things come up when you have idle time with the Net.  I may have mentioned to you in the past my interest in reviewing old Saturday Evening Post archives to uncover the author of the Earthworm Tractor Co. fiction pieces I recall reading as an eleven year old.  Searching on Wikipedia I found a very nice entry for The Saturday Evening Post which led to the web site for the current incarnation of the magazine which is now a bimonthly.  A bit more digging found LookSmart FindArticles which produced

Botts and the biggest deal of all: the world's greatest salesman was face to face with the world's toughest customer

which revealed the author as William Hazlett Upson.  As you can see from the link on Upson's name some of the work has been collected in books.  The article linked above recalls all the flavor of what I remember reading as a ten year old, sort of Wodehouse like but not nearly as good as Wodehouse.  Armed with Upson's name finally a treasure trove of information came up on Google and other sources.  Perhaps the material is too dated to be of interest to any eleven year old today.  We shall see since I plan to turn one of the books over to my eleven year old this month.

Before & After

Dear Reader,

 

Rugs, that's what it's all about really. Absolutely the most amazing Dubbya piece recently. Thanks to rj for the heads up on this one. On the way home today Before and After: Telling Time by Calamity by Andrei Codrescu got me to thinking in a similar way about the ampersands in my life, the events that like an ampersand come between the befores and afters that demarcate ones life. Today the third child turns twenty one and that would get anyone to thinking, especially if, as in my case, you would be sixty five when the fourth child graduates from high school.

Before & After

High School

The living with mother of the first child

The first year of college

The first new car - a 1967 Austin Healey

The marriage to the mother of the second child

The second attempt at college

My twenty first birthday

The hospital jobs

The third attempt at college and finally the degree

The sales jobs

The marriage to the mother of the third and fourth children

The death of the mother of the first child

Driving the truck all over America and Canada

The irrepairable death at 250 000 miles of the last new car just last week

This current bout of the blues

Perhaps I just need a broader scope, say, something more like

Before & After

Dubbya

Peak Oil

GWOT

Or, maybe a narrower scope

Before & After

this next bite of birthday cake

writing the next entry in this list

Yup, that's it narrower scope.  Breathe in, breathe out, enjoy.  That's it, enjoy the moment,

Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday to you ... 

 

Don't drink to much, dear, and drive safely ...  Call, if you're not coming back home tonight, please.

at least for now while the larger scope seems to be, at least in speculative anticipation, thoroughly unenjoyable.

 

Perhaps Codrescu has it right, shared calamity is the ampersand that builds community.  Perhaps that's it, not having anyone who has shared all the calamities of my life.

 

RJ says it helps to write.  Everyday he says write everyday. For me it's like knitting, I simply enjoy the typing.  The prose suffers from that enjoyment of physically plunking down the words I'm afraid.

 

Wondering now if fifty nine is too old to go back over the road in a big truck.  The simple life, 'git 'er done', get it from A to B on time more often than not.  Two hundred and sixty nights away from home more or less but a hundred at home, maybe a few more.  Not all bad, an individual income level that begins to break into the lower levels of middle class, generally all of Christmas week and New Year's week off.  Money in the bank, relatively low stress, low oversight, see America.  Hum!?

 

Join us later for the next entry in the continuing saga of George goes on with the continuing calamity of his life.

 

Cheers,

 

G

 

 

 

 

 

Points of Interest

The careful reader ( I judge that there are perhaps as many as six readers of this blog worldwide ) of this blog will note some subtle changes in links and an increasing sparseness of postings.  I have friends who live in the blogosphere and one in particular who is a master of the art of blogging which is only to say that he has been at it, blogging, for nearly a decade and really at it, writing, for a lifetime.  Various factors have contributed to my dearth of postings over the last six months and my appraisal of these factors has changed over the months.  At first I attributed the decline in postings to technical issues not the least of which is the miserable nature of a dialup connection, and then to spam comments, spamments.  And now finally, I have come to see it as nothing more than a very delayed mid-life crisis.  I am nearing the end of the sixth decade of life and will be half way through the seventh decade when the last child graduates from high school.  From the last fact it should be easy to imagine that my history might be somewhat off the norm.  That history for me seems to demand some recounting, if not explanation, but for now any effort seems to be blocked by what at first seemed to be regret which has now turned to remorse.  Perhaps it is akin to K-R's stages of grief.  Perhaps the progression is regret, remorse and then reappraisal with final acceptance of what has been brought forward that is worthwhile and what can be left behind.  A tall order to pursue in writing for anyone but I'm sure my friend, the master blogger, would be the first to point out that the effort is well worth the time and pain.  So we begin again here today with the bare minimum, nothing more than perhaps what is diary entry, some recent points of interest from the radio and the magazines.

 

Peter, Paul and Mary Magdalene

Fresh Air from WHYY, April 26, 2006 · Religion scholar Bart D. Ehrman, who chairs the Department of Religious Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill, talks about his new book, Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene: The Followers of Jesus in History and Legend.

 

Ehrman looks into the lives of three major followers of Christ, plumbing legend and the writings of the New Testament to illuminate facts and details about these figures.

 

Ehrman is also the author of Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why and Lost Christianities: The Battle for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew which chronicles the period before Christianity as we know it came to be.

 

Pentecostals Mark 100 Years of Worship
 by Greg Allen

All Things Considered, April 26, 2006 · One hundred years ago this month, a small house in Los Angeles was the scene of a series of religious meetings where participants had a new kind of spiritual experience. They had emotional displays, spoke in tongues, and experienced remarkable healing -- all manifestations, they believed, of the power of the Holy Spirit "filling" the participants.

 

Today, Pentecostals claim more than half a billion adherents around the world. It's one of the fastest-growing social movements ever, and one that has had a profound impact on even mainstream religions.

THE LESSON OF TAL AFAR
Is it too late for the Administration to correct its course in Iraq?
by GEORGE PACKER
The New Yorker, Issue of 2006-04-10

The lessons that McMaster and his soldiers applied in Tal Afar were learned during the first two years of an increasingly unpopular war. "When we came to Iraq, we didn't understand the complexity what it meant for a society to live under a brutal dictatorship, with ethnic and sectarian divisions", he said, in his hoarse, energetic voice. "When we first got here, we made a lot of mistakes. We were like a blind man, trying to do the right thing but breaking a lot of things." Later, he said, "You gotta come in with your ears open. You can't come in and start talking. You have to really listen to people."

All of these items made me think for awhile putting aside for a few hours ruminating over my own life history.  If you've not been exposed to any of them, I would suggest that all of them are thought provoking and well worth your time. 

 

My connections here are uniquely personal I'm sure.  What has all this to do with retrospection and mid-life crisis?  Simple, it's summed up in McMaster's words from The New Yorker article with only a change of setting from the war zone of Iraq to the war zone of the mind and its brutal neurotic dictators, ego and doubt.  And, then within that setting a consideration of hope.

 

If courage is acting correctly in the face of fear, if courage is not fearlessness, which is likely some kind of brain damage, but rather the ability to act and act correctly when the most basic emotions tend to paralyze, then perhaps faith is the sense of hope that sustains action in the face of doubt.  If faith is acting correctly in the face of doubt, if faith is not surety, which is also perhaps some kind of brain damage as well, then faith is the ability to sustain hope in the presence of overwhelming doubt. 

 

I would modify one of the pulpit pounder's favorites, "I know that I know that I know", to better reflect my reality, I know that I know that I don't know, that nothing is settled in this life, that only hope is the correct response to doubt.  Hope, an abiding, unfathomable, wordless hope not reason is in the last analysis the only counter weight to doubt, doubt which defies words.  There is likely only one correspondent who has been alerted to this posting that can even begin to see my connections here without further writing on my part.  So we have some work to do, eh?  Should you be that one correspondent with some insight, please, post a comment or write to me directly.

 

May the God of Hope fill you all with all Peace and Joy as you trust in Him so that you might overflow with Hope by the Power of the Holy Spirit!

Does it have a name? Dicami, per favore.

In a large twelve inch cast iron skillet bring about three tablespoons of olive oil to sauté heat. Quickly brown one pound of hot Italian sausage in the olive oil. Cover and reduce the heat to simmer.

 

Core and dice several medium bell peppers, one green, one red, one yellow and one orange, if possible.

 

Peel and cube, about sugar cube size, four tennis ball size Yukon gold potatoes. Place the potatoes in a covered microwaveable dish and nuke on high until tender, about five minutes. Similarly, dice, peel and nuke a softball size Spanish onion.

 

Add the cubed peppers and the microwaved onions to the skillet around the sausage, cover and continue simmering about ten minutes.

 

Add the microwaved potatoes to the skillet on top of the sausage, peppers and onions.  Salt the top of the potatoes, and grind on a good measure of mixed fresh pepper corns and a pinch of crushed red pepper. Cover and continue simmering for forty five minutes or so.

 

Drain the accumulated liquid from the skillet and discard.  Remove and reserve all the sausage.  Increase the heat and use a spatula to turn the potato, onion and pepper mixture on high heat until the potatoes are slightly browned.  Add a bit of olive oil, if necessary.  Remove the skillet from the heat when the potatoes are just beginning to brown.

 

Slice the sausage into generous medallions and combine with potatoes, peppers and onions in the skillet.

 

Garnish with a small amount of crumbled crisped bacon, a small amount of freshly grated Parmesan cheese and a tiny sprig of fresh rosemary.

 

Serve hot in broad shallow bowls with a good strong red wine and garliced or plain French bread.  Excellent on bitter cold days under gray snowy skies for lunch.

 

What is it, does it have a name?  Got me, but it tastes great.  It came to me in a dream.

Goda!

Giorgio

 

 

 

Bumbling along

So, my friend writes the other day about reading these Cheever short stories

Just a thought

Late the other night, I was reading a John Cheever story, "The Wrysons," in which a suburban woman is afflicted with a recurring dream of nuclear holocaust. The dream winds up with a sort of yacht-club immolation scene in which boaters are drowned as they over-crowd the waters of refuge. In the dream, she weeps "to see this inhumanity as the world was ending."

Well, it isn't the world that is ending. The post-holocaust planet will go on spinning somehow, and opportunistic life-forms that have been waiting for the opportunity will flourish. (For example, a virus that replicates through the digitized memory of chatted vacuities such as "I'm standing outside your building, where are you?") Life will begin the long trek back to Descartes. This much we know. But I found myself wondering this evening about cultural extinctions in our own long past. One hundred fifty thousand years is no time at all on the geological scale, but it's plenty of time, I imagine, to scrub the traces of human artifact from the face of the earth. We think of the time between the moment of homo sapiens's unmistakable arrival (whenever that was) and the composition of the first granary account as a long, boring and unrecorded progression toward us. But what if we've done this already a few times? What if there were was a New Yorker seventy thousand years ago - and all record of it has been obliterated by natural processes, just as natural processes would clear Earth of our record in, say, fifty thousand years? What if, far from living in savannahs and bumbling our way toward speech, we've done this sophisticated cultural thing a few times already, but with such catastrophic results that We Don't Remember?

As you know, my mind doesn't drift toward science fiction. But I found myself plausibly wondering...

(But it's another Cheever story altogether that I urge you to read, a lovely tale called "The Duchess.")

And, I tried to respond with a comment

RJ,

From the World of Unintended Results

I know you intended to point me to Cheever here and just might not be interested in where the images in your note here have taken me but indulge me for a moment, please.

bumbling our way toward speech, we've done this sophisticated cultural thing a few times already, but with such catastrophic results that We Don't Remember?

My head is still reeling from finishing Sam Harris's End of Faith last night. Harris deserves a good rereading with substantial note taking, but that will wait, I think, until we've finished Freeman's Closing of the Western Mind. End of Faith creates for me its own special flavor of intellectual and spiritual vertigo which is only amplified this morning reading your note here and being led back to Augustine, Manichaeism, Origen and the issue of reincarnation. Spooning out some of the bigger chunks from this soup pot of philosophical rememberances we find the tasty morsel of

THE SENTENCES OF SEXTUS AND OF THE PYTHAGOREANS CHADWICK J Theol Studies.1960; XI: 349

wherein we find

Whatever you honour above all things, that which you so honour will have dominion over you. But if you give yourself to the domination of God, you will thus have dominion over all things.

and

The greatest honour which can be paid to God, is to know and imitate Him.

causing us to remember how in the eighth grade we posed questions to the dear Sisters of the Incarnate Word and the Society of Jesus Fathers about Constantine's influence on the early church and Neo-Platonist influences in Augustine's writings. And, causing us particularly to remember how irritated they all were by these questions. Fortunately for the fathers and the sisters but unfortunately for us we didn't know much about the Buddha then. We really thought we had put all this to bed after the debacle of the first college year in Austin. Perhaps, we are reincarnated but we can only hope that it comes without the memory of the troublesome issues while still somehow preserving and transmitting forward the benefits of whatever positive accomplishments occurred in previous steps. We are perhaps a bit micro-reincarnated every year of the current life and there is much We Don't Remember for good reason. Meanwhile, later that same lifetime we have put "The Duchess", which appears just after "The Wrysons" in The Stories of John Cheever, on the reading list. Page 347 in my copy, how about yours? Likely it's time now to do a bit of sitting, eh?

Bumblingly yours,

George

But, his antispam measures have taken over and everything is now subject to approval.  Approval, the bane of my bumbling life.

Git 'er done!

"Git 'er done!", seems to have a venerable history.

Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and however early a man's training begins, it is probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.

Thomas H. Huxley
English biologist (1825 - 1895)

from The Quotations Page

Perhaps this year we will progress further in a more thorough understanding of this principle.