The Old Neighborhood

The New York Times a few months back ran an article accompanied by some maps of the greater Philadelphia area in 1970, 1990, and 2007 with the intent of demonstrating the growth of income inequality over that period (Link gear, King Lear). On the maps the areas colored darkest green represent affluent municipalities or neighborhoods, those colored darkest purple poor ones, etc. The most striking impression one gets, no doubt intentionally, is how overwhelmingly poor the city of Philadelphia has become even since 1990. I have noticed this to an extent on my increasingly rare visits back there, in that neighborhoods on the edges of the city near where I used to live and in which I used to walk around quite frequently, such as Olney and the neighborhoods in the northeast around Cottman and Rising Sun Avenues, have gone markedly downscale in the last 15 years. Most of the local businesses, restaurants and drugstores and so on that I was formerly familiar with appear to be long gone, and the chain stores in these neighborhoods, the Rite Aids and KFCs, have grown decidedly scuzzier. The main revelation of the graphs that seized my interest was that my own ancestral stomping grounds--the Cheltenham-Abington-Jenkintown area, the exact location of which on these unlabeled maps is roughly the corner niche right on the north and west border of the city--were designated as affluent in 1970, largely affluent in 1990, and drifting downwards towards merely upper middle and even middle-middle income in 2007. Among the numerous reasons for my finding this interesting are that the area did not seem particularly affluent in the 1970s, certainly by the standards we would apply to that term today, while today it has, like so many places, seemingly become more expensive and competitive and difficult to maintain either one's former social position or even one's household; yet at the same time one senses that there is some truth in these designations. There are more highly educated and professional people, more and more of whom have no previous familial connection to the area than was common when I was growing up, but there also more seem to be a lot more people of an extremely low quality of education and culture--numerous of my own extended family members fall into this latter category as well now--then there used to be. Indeed, I can think of several families where either the ascent or descent from a common 1950s middle class origin is growing increasingly marked with each succeeding generation; and of course those individuals who have fancier educations and serious professional pursuits are much more likely to have left the area permanently.

The 'affluent' 1970 neighborhood, into which I was born, as I have noted, didn't seem all that affluent. I suppose there were a high number of professionals, a substantial Jewish population, lots of people who never went to college but were still smarter than most people with master's degrees seem to be today who worked in insurance and advertising and things like that, just like on Mad Men. In retrospect, everybody was quite comfortable, they had the finished basement with the bar and the extra fridge and four televisions and all of that, but of course that was made fun of by sophisticated people, and if you were smart you were supposed to be ashamed if you came from this kind of vulgar environment. Now it is increasingly difficult to afford to live there and make any sort of decent income without highly specialized training, at the same time that the overall quality of the population appears to be declining, and this declining segment of the population to be growing. It seems to be easier to follow a pseudo-bohemian lifestyle, provided one has some sense of how to do that, which I was never able to develop; this no longer seems to depend exclusively on social access to somewhat elite artistically and politically active groups in major cities and college towns and select rural outposts. The market has found a way to bring certain aspects of this particular need to the suburbs.

(I could only get the 2007 map to transfer to my page. See the link above for the other two) While I am on the subject, I have a few more anecdotal stories about the old economy, so many aspects of which are fascinating in the light of our current situation, where scarcely anybody is deemed to be adequate for the job he has, let alone to be hired for any new one.

In 1971, my grandmother, 50 years old and out of the labor force since the end of World War II, having no schooling beyond high school of any kind, decided, her children being grown and it having I suppose become dull hanging around the house by herself all day, decided to get a job. She was able to get a position with "the Township" in their offices. I don't remember exactly what her position was, but she used to dress up to go to it, and at Christmas she would get a bottle of booze each from the police chief and the controller and all the other local bigwigs, so I took it to be a pretty grown-up job. She worked there for fifteen years and got a pension, heaven forfend, and they probably would have given her health insurance too but my grandfather worked for Blue Cross for 39 years so he had about the best health insurance you could possibly have when he retired.

When I was a child there was this enormous house in Jenkintown that we used to drive by on occasion which my father was fond of saying he could have gotten for $11,000 in 1969 if only his in-laws, whom he liked to recount as having been hostile to him (with good reason, as it later turned out) from the day they laid eyes on him, had been willing to lend him the money for the down payment, which evidently they had not (people did used to be quite harsh that way. Nowadays no one actually has the money to lend, but back in the day they did have it, and wouldn't give it up). He developed, or at least claimed to have developed, the belief, that our lives, which were evidently less than they might have been, would have turned out completely different had we been able to live in that house. I did used to wonder if indeed this might really have been the case...but I doubt it. I wonder if the bit about the house costing $11,000 is even accurate. Probably not, as my father is fond of embellishing and telling fantastic stories. But even if it was $25,000, that still would have been a pretty good deal. The place must be worth 400 today at least.

Given all of this talk about real estate, I looked up the house we eventually did live in on the internet, and I see that it was caught up full bore in the house flipping craze. The price history, which goes back to August, 2004, shows that it was sold at that time for $197,000. This is pretty crazy, considering that this is just a typical little semi-detached house in the kind of neighborhood where Archie Bunker lived. My parents I know paid $30,000 for it in 1977, and I don't remember exactly how much they sold it for in 1985, when they had to offload it rather quickly due to their impending divroce, but I think it was probably around $60,000. Anyway, March, 2005, seven months after the previous sale: Sold, for $250,000! And it gets worse! December, 2005, sold again, to some lunkhead for $300,000! You've got to be kidding me. Whoever this was got left holding the bag. The place went on the market in May, 2008 for $300,000, and the price kept going down, down, down until it was sold in August 2010 for a $130,000, which still sounds like too much to me. The great question regarding this house, which all the real estate sights seem unable to answer, is whether the wallpaper I had in my room featuring 1910s-1930s baseball cards is still there. Something tells me it probably is not.

A Few More Notes on 'Poirot', a Modern Book Review, and a Telephone Poll


Still going through the Poirot programs; now up to 32 of the 36 episodes seen, including, most recently, "Triangle at Rhodes", which is often named as one of the highlights of the series. I did learn something I had not known before in this episode, which was that Rhodes, along with a number of other islands in the eastern Aegean, was a possession of Italy from 1912 until World War II (prior to that it had belonged to the Turks since 1522), and has only been a territory of Greece since 1947. I don't how I missed this--of all things I thought my knowledge of 20th century European territorial changes was airtight and whole. Had I actually discovered it on the internet I probably would have been annoyed, but once the program was over I pulled down my 1938 atlas, laid it open on the dining room table in the late night stillness and saw that sure enough, marked out by a fair-sized circular crimson blob with the chalklike texture of 1930s colored ink, the islands commonly known as the Dodecanese were outposts of the Italian Empire, and the aesthetic and private aspects of this discovery proved highly satisfying to me in a way that I cannot foresee the computer will ever be able to duplicate.

My favorite episodes tend to be those which pack the most extensive and various examples of my preferred types of persons, events and scenes of life into them, irrespective of the ingenuity of the plot. I like trains and train stations, art galleries, theatres, chop houses, London parties, nightclubs, the seaside, especially Brighton, explorations of high and low representative cuisine; outstandingly pretty girls don't hurt either. I suppose a top 5 to date would be (in no particular order): "Four and Twenty Blackbirds" (Artist who won't sell his coveted paintings murdered, main clue revealed in chop house); "The Mystery of the Spanish Chest" (murder at a posh London house party, jealousy over a beautiful noblewoman at center of case); "The Affair at the Victory Ball" (really awesome Venetian carnival-themed costume party, caustic show business people, and one of the foremost collections of 17th and 18th century continental porcelain in the world); "Yellow Iris" (great looking English tourist babe murdered amidst the chaos of a military coup in Argentina); and "Dead Man's Mirror" (obnoxious art snob murdered at his castle, theosophy, and a secret love-child).

Like all sidekicks, Poirot's Captain Hastings leads a most enviable lifestyle when viewed through the eyes of such as possess a similar lack of cleverness or useful job skills and have to pay for this with lower occupational status and a dull social existence (Hastings does appear to have some mechanical ability, but practices strictly at the amateur level). By tagging along with Poirot Hastings is able to scoot around an England uncrowded by motor traffic in his sports car, travel 1st class by rail, golf, shoot and ride horses while staying at country estates, eat fine dinners for he always has a tuxedo, or more likely several, to hand, lounges around Poirot's apartment reading the papers and listening to cricket matches, travels on ocean liners, visits Egypt--again always with the appropriate attire for every activity and locale. If I weren't married--for it does not appear they can be married--I might be tempted to advertise for a position as a sidekick myself.

Regarding the last bit above, I say tempted because I suppose these men of genius/sidekick of pedestrian ability relationships always suggest a homosexual connection, that, more often than not when they occur in real life anyway, does indeed seem to turn out to be the case. Poirot has an appreciation for well-executed feminine style that he is able to cloak in a Gallic dress, and upon meeting a great diva of the theater or opera he will even succumb to gushing; but his admiration is purely upon artistic grounds; there is clearly nothing recognizable as sexual or romantic interest at work. Hastings at times seems to be more affected by women of overpowering (i.e., unsubtle) physical charms, and will take a more aggressively chivalric attitude than Poirot does; however he has even less real rapport with them, or the nature of the mental world which they inhabit. It is not clear to me how aware Hastings is of the true nature of his friendship with Poirot. He's a pretty unsophisticated guy who tries hard to be agreeable to almost everyone. Acknowledging the sort of thing under consideration here even to oneself would not do.

My latest off-topic reading project, which took me about two and a half months to get through, was a rather clunkily executed work called A Guinea Pig's History of Biology by an Englishman named Jim Endersby. I finished it because I always try to finish books on subjects that I do know not know a good deal about. The premise of the book is to give an outline of the history of genetic studies especially, with each chapter devoted to a particular plant or animal or virus that had has been instrumental in moving these sciences forward--oenothera, drosophila (fruit flies), phage, maize, silverfish, a type of cress whose scientific name I have already forgotten. One cannot help but be impressed with the progression of this work, both the results and thought processes leading to the results of which contain much of great beauty and elegance, which are always the identifying characteristics of perceived truth. Unfortunately the processes of determining which plants or tiny animals might be suitable for experimentation, collecting and breeding various specimens of them, making meticulous records of their traits, isolating certain desired traits and breeding these apart from the rest, making more meticulous records, and so on, while the essential part of the science and doubtless important to work into the narrative, grows rather tedious over the course of a 432 page book to read about.

I have to confess that I greatly appreciated the all too brief interludes when we were given peeks into the more prosaic aspects of the scientific life. As most of the people featured in this book were identified as serious talents early in life, career progression for them was a relatively orderly affair--not everyone was always supportive of their aims, but most were able to procure good university or foundation positions--even if they themselves made the positions better than they at first appeared to be, the opportunity to do so had still been present. There was not a ton of romance--a few guys ended up marrying women who had worked as their lab assistants, but in all of these instances there appears to have been a prolonged relationship strictly relegated to the intellectual realm before evidence of a more animal attraction presented itself. While Cal Tech is not known for its party scene in most of the outside world, if you are a legitimate science genius it is a social as well as intellectual mecca; Nobel Prize winners host spaghetti and wine dinners where lighter but worthy topics such as Shakespeare and serious high level music are often discoursed upon as well as current mathematical and scientific conundrums. Scientists who complete their course of study in Pasadena and depart to take up positions in cultural backwaters where social life resolves around football such as the University of Oregon naturally long for this camaraderie and often have a great struggle to recreate some semblance of civilized intellectual life in their new locale, though, being energetic geniuses, they often succeed. Indeed it is one of the great disappointments of my own life, even moreso in some ways than the lack of having an interesting vocation, though both of these states I suppose are of a piece, that I have been unable to recreate anything like the charged and elevated mental atmosphere one can find, in pockets anyway, at a decent college even in my own home, let alone the wider community where I live. I have enough of the props--books, musical recordings, an antique house and furniture, a decent liquor cabinet--that our life need not be totally devoid of connection to the higher realms of activity and understanding; however I am not capable of transmitting the spirit of these realms in the least degree via my own agency, especially by way of discourse.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I received an automated phone call the other day that was administering a political poll. I usually go along with these polls until they come upon a question I don't like or for whatever reason don't want to commit myself to an answer for. On this particular poll I was done at the first question, which was "Do you believe marriage should be between one man and one woman?" I did not want to answer yes, because the way the question is framed annoys me--you just know that whoever decided that this was the proper form to present the matter think that they are clever as hell--how about just coming out and asking if you support gay marriage, since that is all this is about? However I could not bring myself to say 'no' either, because, even at the risk of being hateful, I just cannot muster any enthusiasm for gay marriage and the prospect of coming out publicly for it in any way makes me feel ridiculous. If it were to come up as a plebiscite in my state--which I do not believe however that it can--I suppose I would abstain from voting on it. Pretty much everyone I know is virulently pro-gay marriage and talks as though anyone who harbored any reservations about it must be completely deficient both of brains and human decency. I do not agree with this position, but one must recognize that it is how people seem to regard the matter, and to me it is not worth losing friends and family members over. It is already the law in my state as it is, and no, it has not as yet noticeably affected my life, (though neither to this point have the laws regarding abortion, torture, capital gains taxes, eminent domain and many others which we are nonetheless expected to take positions on). Yet I cannot feel any sympathy for it or take it as an institution as seriously as I would doubtless be expected to. I suspect the sense that I am being browbeaten into claiming to hold a viewpoint I would prefer not to hold, or at least am not yet ready to embrace, or risk total ostracism from such respectable society as I know feeds into this resistance a little. It will be suggested that I have not given any reasons for even this emotional opposition I seem to feel, and that therefore the opposition is groundless. I suppose someday, if I cannot come around on this issue, I will have to examine with a finer eye the basis of my attitude on this subject. But right now I am going to leave that examination for a later day.

Anticlimax: Greatest TV Themes of All Time #s 1-5 (!!!)

I am combing my brain trying to think of a way to make this worth the exercise of both doing and reading it, but I am forced to admit at this point that that likely cannot be achieved.

5. Hogan's Heroes


For the drumroll alone. Reminiscent to me also of the opening theme to Closely Watched Trains. Both have a similarly punchy mock-martial style. Obviously his program was ridiculous on numerous levels, but it did have a kind of raucous quality about it that I like, and that I don't encounter much in my own life. It is not so much that I am (other people are) deadly serious, but I (they) seem to have become deadly humorless. Real time instances of any kind of spontaneous or irreverent mirth are few and you know the rest...

4. The Munsters


I never cared for the show, the reruns of which old Philadelphians will remember to have aired on the now defunct WKBS-TV Channel 48 for many years. I associate this song with the quiet and retired life of my childhood, old people, the momentary illusion of mischief or the promise of some kind of youthful assembly or party, goldfish crackers, glasses of ginger ale, and a fleeting sense of freedom and relief from the peculiar oppressions which I have always felt to dog my life.

Al Lewis, who played Grandpa, lived in Maine for some part of his retirement, which coincided with the years I lived there in high school. He was a devoted fan of high school basketball and was often spotted at big games all over the state, though as my team was terrible and did not play in any of these, I never ran into him personally. I believe he may also have held some important official position, such as grand poobah of referees or some such thing, though my memory as regards this is hazy, and I cannot find any confirmation of this on the internet, which with regard to his involvement in youth basketball only mentions that he was a "scout". Though seeing as there is not really anyone to scout in Maine, I am not sure what kind of scouting he could possibly have been doing.

3. The Mary Tyler Moore Show



I was too young to develop the emotional attachment to this much-beloved show that the late Silent and early Baby Boomer generational cohorts did, but the song makes one remember those 70s as an almost heady time. Its anxieties were not our anxieties, and indeed the problems which dominated those years seem in hindsight either so trivial or so easily resolved that we look back at things like the comparative economic security, the ease of obtaining health insurance, the cheapness of real estate, the more carefree attitudes to eating and drinking, with more longing than perhaps they merit. It's still a great song though.

2. I Dream of Jeannie



A great number. I have added words to it to sing to all of my children and bounce them around after I've changed one of their filthy diapers and made them smell like they're supposed to smell again, which is close to what Barbara Eden no doubt smelled like when she came out of the bottle. If there is a TV hall of fame, Barbara Eden should be a first ballot inductee. There were multiple 1960s, the serious civil rights/Vietnam 1960s, the indulgent Woodstock/LSD 1960s, etc, but how about the insipid content but with really gorgeous babes 1960s? I find I'm starting to like that 1960s a lot lately.

1. All in the Family



It was not a clear-cut number 1, but the sentiments in the lyrics are timeless all around. I almost identify with them myself now. I have always found it interesting that Carroll O'Connor was only 46 when the show started, and, I am pretty certain, was supposed to be around that age in it. I am 42 and I still often feel like I am not fully accepted as a real adult by most people around me, and that my life could still take some unforeseen positive and rewarding direction that I just have not become aware of yet (unlikely). The program worked of course because he was not atypical of his generation. People who were 45 and 50 were 'older' than people are now at that age, and of course their station in life, even if it were a modest one, was also well established and conveyed meaning, which also seems a rarer occurrence nowadays. I feel (yes, I am emoting here) like people my age have little solid ground on which to relate to anyone else. Everything is discounted except for professional station, which a good many people do not have, or do not have in anything like the degree required. At least I feel that way myself.

Carroll O'Connor was almost a dead ringer for my father-in-law. The latter gentleman had many similarities of habit at least to his television counterpart, though he was staunchly liberal in his politics, far more than almost anybody I know in my own generation who is possessed of any sense where such matters are concerned.



The last video is a bonus track. Remember a few months back when I determined that 1964 had been a really good year for attractive women? I've been mining the archives of Youtube to find some further proofs for this position (I confess I've been contemplating a Dianne Lennon versus Marianne Faithfull 1964 smackdown post in which I argue, against overwhelming sentiment, the case of Dianne, which I believe to be a strong one; I fear I won't be able to carry it off in such a way as will allow those confused in the business to see the light however). As a kid and even a teenager I never thought Elizabeth Montgomery to be especially sexy--she always came across as a kind of generic 30ish mom/wife who was like to nag you to death; but boy does she look good to me now. As well as very: 1964, which was, as we have established earlier, a great year in the annals of feminine beauty.

More Pictures From My Vacation in Alabama Last Summer

I realize it is the following January. I am behind, though, after all, I do strive to be as non-topical as possible. As far as that goes, I went to a wedding last night where they had great food. Especially the hors-d'oeuvres. I imagine wealthy people as eating the equivalent of a good wedding spread every day. I would. Anyway it was a good time. Large Irish Catholic family (the bride was one of twelve children), an open bar which, for the first time in some years, numerous other people at an event were hitting as much as or even more than I was. Thus despite not knowing anybody (the bride was an old friend of my wife's), I was in my comfort zone. In recent years I have actually begun to prefer going to parties where no one knows me; such is the shame I feel upon encountering any old acquaintance worth seeing in my current state of development. The day was beautiful, around 14 degrees, with a light snowfall of around 2 to 3 inches, the temperature dropping to 6 degrees by the time we left the reception in the evening. Winter weddings in a cold climate are great (I had one myself). People are really eager to go to a party, but they usually don't realize it until they get there. I had myself forgotten all about it until the night before, but I enjoyed myself when I got there. Hopefully I still have a few parties left to go to in what remains of life to me, though certainly the vast majority of social activity for me is now behind me.

But to return to Alabama in July: Above, you can see we got in some night swimming in the pool. My children are great at swimming and diving, or at least leaping into water. I never took any pleasure in these--I was a real dud of a kid, it's no wonder my parents weren't motivated to stay together and devote themselves to promoting my wordly success--and while I can by some means struggle from one wall of a pool to the other without having to touch the bottom, I cannot really swim, and certainly not with any kind of force. So this is another physical skill that I am pleased with in the children.

Here is part of the Talladega National Forest. I believe that is the waterfall that we hiked to. This one was only a 1/2 mile along the trail. There was supposed to be a second, bigger and even more spectacular waterfall around 3-3 1/2 miles in, but we did not get there, for reasons which will be relayed in due time.

I am a poor botanist, though I am getting better than I used to be. These plants I am going to go out on a limb and identify as some kind of fern. Because the internet and modern life in general are starting to have some effect in convincing me that the only people with any solid claim to being intelligent are those with high competence in science and mathematics I try occasionally to read books vaguely connected with those subjects. One book about biology that I spent about two and half months slogging through recently in the pursuit of greater awareness had an anecdote about lab geneticists who map the genomes of plants and engineer genetically modified food and so on being unable to properly identify weeds that were the subject of years of their researches when looking for examples in the wild. I'm not really in a position to accept this as some kind of belief even if it is true, but I thought the idea was amusing and sad at the same time.

Here we are about 2 or 3 hours into the same hike, shortly before we gave up and turned around. I don't know how far we got or how close we got to our waterfall because while there was an identifiable trail there were no signs indicating whether we were on the right trail or any distances as there are in most National Parks and Forests that I have been to. I was really ailing at the time of this picture. It was well over 90 degrees, I was carrying my 2 year old boy who has the density of a computer hard drive, and unfortunately my cardio-respiratory fitness is not all it could be at this point. About five minutes after this picture however a very intense lightning storm swept through and while I did have some concern about members of our party being struck by lightning or hit by falling trees, the temperature dropped about 20 degrees and I found my energy for hiking much revived. It was the kind of outing that is fun to look back on now as having done.

This is the porch of our 1940s CCC cabin, with my then 2 month old (now 8 month old!) daughter. It is curious how these state parks in the supposedly poor southern states can stay open year round and maintain these really nice facilities such as cabins and restaurants while in New Hampshire and Vermont our parks are only open and staffed from Memorial Day to Labor Day and have very little comparable in the way of facilities, and yet our legislature in New Hampshire at least considers it practically the height of extravagance to (barely) fund this. This last summer I went to 2 parks that were not staffed at all, at which the bathhouses and toilets were locked up and the parking lots cracked and sprouting mini meadows (Clough State Park in Dunbarton, which is really starting to look skanky, and Forest Lake State Park up near Lancaster near the White Mountains, which for the moment at least is still redeemed by its beautiful setting). I believe I have read that New Hampshire is the only state in the country that expects its state parks to pay for themselves. I think it's an embarassment that a huge part of the eleectorate can't bear to even fund our state parks. What do people think is going to happen?

This is Pulpit Rock, a large promontory/lookout also right in the Cheaha State Park. A lot of people say this is the most beautiful place in Alabama. It's a prime spot.

Pulpit Rock overlooks a very long and easily mortal drop, so we kept child #4 safely away from it.

These weren't so bad. I think I am also going to do a couple of sets from when we went back to Tennessee after leaving here, which we did within a half hour of this last picture, and then I'll be all caught up, since I haven't gone anywhere else since.

Anatomy of Melancholy V

As I slink wearily over the keyword to produce this post,
With nary a spark of the human vigor of our Enlightenment forefathers,
My mind a broken shadow of a machine, vaguely recollecting images of coherent ideas now shattered.
I dreamt in confusion of old breasts and stale Christmas candies,
I gave a go at subconscious self-abandon, but my brain and vital power were not in it.
To sleep, to wallow, to procure an abacus and tally the days till death,
Is the only remaining instinct.
There are no prospects for productive action,
No universes, no signifiers to be revealed.
I am perhaps dangerous, but only to myself, and only in an absurdist state of existence,
Which we may however inhabit.
Don't tempt me, don't tempt me, don't tempt me.
But of course you won't.
Miami, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Cancun, Ibiza, Johannesburg, Bombay, St Petersburg, Beograd.
Albany, Winnipeg, Pittsburgh, St Louis, Newcastle, Glasgow, Gdansk, Kaunas, Vichy.
All offer the equivalent life, the equivalent temptations to me.
I overheard a woman say she wanted to quit her job and go to the Burning Man Festival.
If I quit my own job and went to the Burning Man Festival I would not even have any fun there.
If I checked into a Super 8 in Rochester and pulled the curtains tight with the goal of sleeping in I would be stone awake at 7:30am with nothing to do.
Whether I pay for bottle service on 5th Avenue or go to $3 Pabst Blue Ribbon night in Crown Point,
Whether I go to the concert or the exhibition or the film festival of the Earnest and the Trite,
My own proper crowd, with our shared secret knowledges and confidential intrigues, is never to be found there.
It doesn't exist.

Now that I have had my little amusement let us move onto Burton:

"...it is better to sharpen toothpicks than to beg the favour of the great with literary productions." This is true.

On the neglect of learning by the contemporary European aristocracy: "Thus they reason, and are not ashamed to let mariners, prentices, and the basest servants be better qualified than themselves. In former times, kings, princes, and emperors were the only scholars, excellent in all faculties...Julius Caesar mended the year, and writ his own Commentaries: '(from Latin--Lucan) In the midst of warfare he found time to study the stars, the heavens, and the upper world.' I would write out the Latin if I felt I understood it and had some sense of the literary quality of the passage. In most instances however, I do not.

A ten year's lawsuit, inevitably unhappy for the personage referenced by Burton, is described as "as long as Troy's siege".

There is a whole section devoted to Bad Nurses, the premise, on the authority of "Favorinus, that eloquent philosopher", being "that there is the same property in milk as in the seed", which provides several good anecdotes. Cato, for instance, "...for some such reason would make his servants' children suck upon his wife's breast, because by that means they would love him and his the better, and in all likelihood agree with them." There is also an unnamed "...Queen of France, a Spaniard by birth (I don't recognize this person offhand), that was so precise and zealous in this behalf (viz., that a mother should suckle her own baby), that when in her absence a strange nurse had suckled her child, she was never quiet till she had made the infant vomit it up again".

Burton is those authors who is fond of making a very long argument on behalf of some point, to which the average reader will long have submitted, and then switching and making an equally long and persuasive argument against it.

Burton seems fascinated by the idea of Iceland. He refers to it a lot.

"...milk in gold cups, wine in silver, beautiful maidens at his beck..." When the rich man goes a-visiting.

On the learned and noble but impecunious man: "'If he speak, what babbler is this?', his nobility without wealth is more worthless than the seaweed on the beach, and he not esteemed." The expression and the expansive understanding of man's unhappy lot--not much is neglected--is what makes for the appeal of these otherwise long-acknowledged truths.

There is much that is wise in the depiction of the lives of slaves and servants, but I am going to pass over it because taken out of context the examples come over as crass and gratuitous, I think.

"A Sybarite of old, as I find it registered in Athenaeous, supping at the public tables in Sparta, and observing their hard fare, said it was no marvel if the Lacedaemonians were valiant men; 'for his part, he would rather run upon a sword-point (and so would any man in his wits) than live with such base diet, or lead so wretched a life'."

"If we may give credit to Munster, amongst us Christians in Lithuania they voluntarily mancipate and sell themselves, their wives and children to rich men, to avoid hunger and beggary; many make away themselves in this extremity". My people.

These last few examples are all from the section "Poverty and Want". Continuing in that vein:

"Dante, that famous Italian poet, by reason his clothes were but mean, could not be admitted to sit down at a feast." The citation for this is Gomesius (no, I haven't heard of him either; he does turn up on internet searches on pages that are basically catalogues of antique books, but I don't see any casual information about him). This (Dante) besides being perhaps the greatest Western poet of all time other than Homer, is the personage Ruskin called "the central man of the world". Yet even he was unrecognizable as such in inferior clothes, which is to me really a major point to be grasped here.

I don't like to recount atrocities, which sorts of things people know to happen even if they usually suppress that knowledge in their conscious daily life. But I suppose I need to remind myself of what people can really be like more frequently than I do. Because even if Burton's anecdotes are not completely accurate, one knows similar actions of the sort happened sometime.

"Alexander commanded the battlements of houses to be pulled down, mules and horses to have their manes shorn off, and many common soldiers to be slain, to accompany his dear Hephaestion's death; which is now practised amongst the Tartars, when a great Cham dieth, ten or twelve thousand must be slain, men and horses, all they meet..." This is from the section "Loss of Friends".

"Conradus the emperor would not touch his new bride till an astrologer had told him a masculine hour".

The Anatomy of Melancholy IV


It's been a while, but I thought a few book-notes might make for a good space-filler right about now.

Theory of the aid of pictures in conception, with examples: "Persina, that Ethiopian queen in Heliodorus, by seeing the picture of Perseus and Andromeda, instead of a blackamoor, was brought to bed of a fair, white child. In imitation of whom, belike, an hard-favoured fellow in Greece, because he and his wife were both deformed, to get a good brood of children...hung the fairest pictures he could buy for money in that chamber, 'that his wife, by frequent sight of them, might conceive and bear such children.'" Should I have put up pictures of geniuses? Or hipsters?

"...Tully (Cicero) confessed of himself, that he trembled still at the beginning of his speech; and Demosthenes, that great orator of Greece, before Philippus." This would be surprising to me if it were true. I tend to think of fear as one of the many unfortunate qualities of which superior men are blissfully unburdened, particularly in their especial areas of superiority. Nervousness suggests doubt of success, which largely means doubt of one's own superiority; which it would seem impossible a truly great thinker would be capable of feeling, especially when one becomes accustomed to the bombast and self-assuredness of the more prominent men of intellect at work in public life at any given. The longer view assures us that this is not always the case however.

The book is a compendium of human life, or at least human life as understood by a certain kind of male intellectual mindset, which formerly was often mistaken for the thing itself. I am not as yet always persuaded that it is not the thing itself, but it is true that old habits die hard, especially in the aged.

Of envy: "...the Sicilian tyrants never invented the like torment." That's funny. Sort of.
Alexander's ambition to emulate Achilles is described as "modest", followed up by this observation: "'Tis a sluggish humour not to emulate or to sue at all, to withdraw himself, neglect, refrain from such places, honours, offices, through sloth, niggardliness, fear, bashfulness, or otherwise, to which by his birth, place, fortunes, education, he is called, apt, fit, and well able to undergo..." This should be read as a lesson at my funeral; preferably by a winner, if any can be found to show up at it.

The brazen bull, the horrors of which were oft-reported by Roman authors--now that was a torture device. For anyone not familiar with it, this was a hollowed-out bronze cast in the shape of a bull in which the victim would be placed while the bronze was heated over a fire. Seems to have been frequently employed as entertainment at dinner parties, I presume among the more rapacious segments of the Roman elite, as the writers pretty clearly disapprove of the practice.

"This for the most part is the humour of us all, to be discontent, miserable, and most unhappy, as we think at least...Hadst thou Sampson's hair, Milo's strength, Scanderbeg's arm, Solomon's wisdom, Absalom's beauty, Croesus his wealth...Caesar's valour, Alexander's spirit, Tully's or Demosthenes' eloquence, Gyge's ring, Perseus' Pegasus and Gorgon's head, Nestor's years to come, all this would not...give thee content and true happiness in this life..."

"For particular professions, I hold as of the rest, there's no content or security in any...To be a divine, 'tis contemptible in the world's esteem...to be a physician, 'tis loathed; a philosopher, a madman...as he could find no tree in the wood to hang himself, I can show you no state of life to give content." He is honing in on the essence of the case in these last two snippets..

The life of royal courts with its attendent ambitions, jealousies, lusts, etc, is described as "the suburbs of hell itself", which I thought not only humorous, but consoling, that a person who lacked not some capacity of force should state the idea. Of course I am only just now figuring out that in their own lifetimes most of these now celebrated writers were not substantial players in the power games of their times, and that that does matter to a greater extent than is often allowed for, for even if the writer is telling truths, it is usually only a small and limited view of matters that does not reflect how even the vast majority of clever people experienced at the time; which I think is more problematic than perhaps I was wont to formerly.

"Others, I say, are overthrown by those mad sports of hawking and hunting; honest recreations, and fit for some great men, but not for every base, inferior person..." The problem here of course is that ultimately most of civilized, or at least advanced life is not properly fit for inferior people, which is inevitably most of them.


There are a lot of quotes about the desperate quest for fame, the multitudes of books that died with their authors, and the like, which I am going to skip over as ground well-covered. It is never tedious however to be reminded that Xerxes was a moron:

"Such a one was Xerxes, that would whip the sea, fetter Neptune, in his stupid pride, and send a challenge to Mount Athos; and such are many sottish princes, brought into a fool's paradise by their parasites."

There is an extensive section on excessive devotion to scholarship as a source of insanity and a sapper of general vigorous powers. The anecdotes here include a Thomas Aquinas at dinner story, which is always promising (Aquinas is usually depicted in paintings as having the physique of a small tank):

"Fulgosus...makes mention how Th. Aquinas, supping with King Louis of France, upon a sudden knocked his fist upon the table, and cried (in Latin), 'This proves the Manicheans were wrong'; his wits were a-woolgathering, as they say, and his head busied about other matters; when he perceived his error, he was much abashed."

Sanicidae. = killers of healthy people. Funny name (I thought) for notoriously incompetent physicians and other quacks.

Knife In the Water (1962)I don't have anything personally unique to say about this movie, which I do however think is quite good. It is, rather incredibly in a way, the first film of the controversial director Roman Polanski's that I have seen. As most people know, it is also his first full-length movie, and the only one he made before leaving Poland. Successful movies are more collaborative affairs than is sometimes acknowledged by hack fans like me, and there was a good amount of artistic talent collaborating on this one. Still, cinematic and theatrical talent seems to flourish best under superior direction, and it is apparent that Polanski in his youth at least had something of the soul of an artist. The movie is distinctive, forceful, bracing, and, most importantly, attractive. Doubtless many people possess these qualities, or the germs of them, in youth; few however seem to benefit enough by technical instruction or the association of comparably talented artistic or near-artistic spirits to make any kind of real artistic impression.

Idle thoughts about the movie:

It would have been interesting to have one or two more films from this director made in Poland before he left the country, though I guess his first few movies after his emigration are among his better ones, and among the defining movies of their time. He was not bound to a particular place or system or culture--I suppose we are all bound to a particular time to some extent but he at least exerted a greater influence over the direction and character his time assumed, for better and for worse, than most people do.

I like the depiction of the men in this movie. They have personalities, everything they do in the film, and one supposes in their lives, has a purposefulness to it; the direction of the young man's life perhaps is still in doubt, but one is certain that it will not be totally devoid of assertive action, conflict, sensuality, all of which are certainly hallmarks of the director's persona.

While the film is most handsome to look at, and contains a lot of outstanding camerawork, it still consists entirely of three characters who are on a small sailboat on an otherwise empty lake for 95% of the movie, so that most of the interest of it has to be generated by the dialogue. The skill with which this was accomplished I found admirable.

The DVD, which I believe was from the Criterion Collection, had 8 of Polanski's short student films, some of which were clearly exercises in shooting conventional type situations, others of which were narratives told in a pretty conventional form, and others that were early attempts at expressing something of his distinct spirit. None of them were anything great, though a few had bit parts for Polish college girls, which is always appreciated. While it did not exactly show how he progressed from having conventional instincts to be able to illustrate a more interesting vision of humanity, it is important to be reminded that that is a process that even talented people have to struggle through.

I don't have anything else to add about Knife in the Water.

Despite the long break from movie reviews I don''t have anything else to write on at this time because I have gotten bogged down watching the Poirot television series from the late 80s and early 90s, which one of my video guides rated as 5-star fare. It is not that, but is bearable and often entertaining enough, and the break from cinematic films will have me raring to go when I start up with those again. I believe there are 36 50-minute episodes of this series, and I have gotten through 23 of them. I am pretty confident in saying that I am not much of a fan of the murder mystery genre either in literature or film, or at least not of the Agatha Christie portion of that genre. I don't usually figure out who the murderer is, but I don't actually care all that much. The interest for me in the Poirot program, of which I can watch about two or three episodes a week with modest enjoyment, is in its nostalgia for 1930s Britishness (even though the title character of course is a foreigner), which comes across as an especially pure and well-developed strand of that historical phenomenon, and which the series does a good job of evoking.

I noted to my wife that the world of the Poirot stories, echoing those of other writers of the time like Waugh and Graham Greene, was for the most part almost entirely devoid of children, the prospect of which seems odd to me now, to which she made the sensible rejoinder that children and murder mysteries are not a natural mix, and probably wisely avoided.

The murder rate of aristocrats and other wealthy men with ambiguous wills or lines of hereditary succession while being visited by/attending a social event with Poirot is so stratospheric that one wonders after a while how the man can get invited anywhere. It is also remarkable that despite the high incidence of murder that takes place on properties where he is known to be present, he himself never comes under scrutiny as a potential suspect. I know this is arguing along the same lines as to say that in real life Sir Topham Hatt would be fired as director of the Thomas the Tank Engine railway if his trains kept continually plowing into buildings full of people like they do on the TV show, that (adherence to certain aspects of reality--there is a better word for this idea that however I cannot remember now) is not important in this particular instance. However I find this aspect of the stories to be so incongruous as to diminish my sense of their quality considerably.

Other than Poirot, who is distinguished and talented and non-needy for acceptance enough to be generally accepted, foreigners are depicted uniformly negatively. At first I thought the Americans were the only ones getting the cringe-worthy treatment, but since then there have been equally gruesome representations of Egyptians, Russians, Italians, Germans of course. The Argentines got off all right in their individual depictions. People seem to like them.

It is a good series for fine-featured Anglo-Irish actresses wearing beautiful clothes, if you lke that sort of thing.

End-of-Year College Football Post

This has been an annual event the past few years, despite the circumstance that I never actually watch any of the games. Old readers will know that most of these reports include a recap of my favorite team's season, that being (*cough, cough*) the Nittany Lions of Pennsylvania State University. The scandal there so overshadowed everything else that went on this season that nearly the whole of this year's review will be in reference to it.

As I often note here, I am a native of the state of Pennsylvania and lived there for most of my childhood. Almost all of my extended family, including both parents and siblings, though most of these are estranged from some part of the rest in various ways, still live there, and many of them, as well as numerous other old family friends and other acquaintances, are alumni of the University that Joe Paterno built, most retaining a comparatively high degree of school spirit many decades after graduation. While I did not attend PSU myself, I did apply there, and they actually did accept me. While the place held some appeal to me, deep down I knew I would be eaten alive socially and that this would cause me to be depressed and probably to flunk out of school. Indeed I barely functioned socially at my eventual alma mater, of which a friend of one of my classmate's visiting for the weekend declared while perusing the scene in the cafeteria during Friday night dinner, "I have never seen so many unhip people in my life." But I digress. Even later in life, up to as recently as 6 or 7 years ago, I was given to contemplating the possibility of taking the whole family down there for a couple of years to get some kind of master's degree, the subject of and purpose for which, other than as an excuse to get away from my routine work and home life and be once again, temporarily at least, in an academic environment as a plausible actual participant in the life of the mind, always remaining nebulous, nothing ever came of it.

Nationally the school, which is of course humongous, came in for a scourge of consternation, mostly focused on the culture surrounding the football program and the fecklessness of the administration or anybody else in a position of potential moral authority to stand up to it, but there were certainly plenty of voices suggesting that the whole atmosphere of the place must be infested with spiritual and moral rot. I appreciate that it is easy when one has no previous positive sense for a place to imagine that the whole culture must be awful. I felt something of the sort regarding Virginia Tech after the mass murder there, my reaction being heavily influenced by the extreme distaste I felt for the people and lifestyle in the D.C. suburbs in the northern part of that state during a brief period when I lived there, and which general area I knew the murderer and doubtless many of the people he perceived to be a major cause of his misery to be from. However tenuous and fanciful my emotional ties to Penn State are, I was nonetheless unable to react to the crisis there with the same instinctual repulsion as regarded the place as a whole.

Once the story broke, it reached an extremely high degree of intensity within a few days. Large numbers of people were furious, not merely at all of the parties implicated in abetting the crimes, but at seemingly anyone in the general public who was not sufficiently indignant and unforgiving on every point regarding those above-named, and in some instances the entirety of the university as well. Obviously as a soft person by nature, I felt myself to be implicated among those not responding with proper heat to what I was hearing. This is not simply the result of toadying to Joe Paterno and the football team, of which I am not exactly the most devoted fan--I have never attended a game, or any college game, in person, and I don't think I have watched a full one on televsion since probably the mid-90s--it is more the curse of my havinga mild temperament. I know very well that people who sexually abuse children have to be imprisoned and ostracized and disgraced--but I do not seem to be able to feel the same release or sense of vindication at seeing this comeuppance exacted that others do. A person in shackles is almost always a wretched spectacle, depressing, in most instances emblematic of civilizational failure. I can take no relish or sense of satisfaction in it.

Regarding Joe Paterno's demise as a result of the scandal, unhappily revealed to be necessary the more the story played itself out, there is little I can say. While I had been for the most part ambivalent towards what I took to be his setting a good example for the New America by never retiring even though he was well into his eighties, in hindsight it is clear he probably should have stepped down a decade ago at least; the picture painted of the program and the administration of the university as a whole was sclerotic, hidebound and sheltered in a way not only unbecoming but unsettling; especially in terms of the dynamic, cosmopolitan, and forward-looking ideals which are supposed to govern institutions such as major universities in our time. I do not know that this would have prevented his former assistant coach from committing the crimes alleged against him, though perhaps the university would not have been so intimately entwined in the case as it finds itself now. I know that one of the main thrusts of the public outrage was that no one, including Joe Paterno, called the police immediately upon discovering what was happening, though I have never heard of an instance in any powerful, high-status hierarchical masculine endeavor where someone in any position of prominence turned over to the police a high-ranking associate of long-standing who had demonstrated loyalty and professional competence and been instrumental in any substantial degree to the group's success for any crime not personally directed upon the associate's own persom, and not even always then. Such things are not done in that kind of environment. I must admit, I find the idea myself of turning an ancient friend, or, God forbid, one of my children over to the police and legal system even though I knew them to be committing unacceptable crimes to be highly distasteful. Is there no other means of reform? No, there isn't, I suppose, and I shall have to be on guard as to what my conscience is telling me about the seriousness of what I am privy to in the thankless event that anything of this unpleasant nature ever comes to my direct knowledge.

On the other hand, following my conscience may not do any good either, since I do believe that Joe Paterno had a real blind spot concerning the seriousness of what was going on. The impression I got from his body language and his statements in the aftermath of the breaking of the scandal was, initially, bewilderment, followed by a steadily dawning realization that this was a much bigger deal than it had ever occurred to him. I may be wrong, but I do not have the sense that whatever knowledge he had of the crimes were tormenting him on a regular basis over a period of years, that his mind was constantly uneasy with the fear of being exposed. The whole thing really seemed to catch him somewhat by surprise. I have observed in other instances people of his generation not responding to confirmed reports of child sexual abuse with the horror that it is now expected a respectable adult would feel instinctively. When the Catholic priest abuse scandals first began to break I remember that my late grandparents, who were around Joe Paterno's age, were indeed outraged--at the accusers. I do not know whether they were simply unable to visualize apparently normal-functioning adults, especially ones in respected positions, performing the acts they were accused of, or if their instinct was not to trust the word of an adolescent or much younger person against an adult of proven responsibility, especially when the incidents were alleged to have taken place many years previously. I think we do underestimate how strong this latter instinct was in people of that generation, since we do not hold it very important in our own time.
Having been listening to Joe Paterno speak and watched him coach the team most of my life, while I obviously cannot claim to know him, and have always recognized that like all human beings he obviously has multifarious limitations which previously did not seem overwhelmingly important to dwell upon, I confess that I had always had a generally positive opinion of him, considering him as a football coach, as opposed to followers of other professions, and while I find the end to his career disheartening to say the least, he was I think at his best a genuinely positive force in his field, his sport, his university and his state; certainly he tried to be these things, and succeeded in them to a greater degree than most people are able to do.

My one non-Penn State note in this year's review refers to the first LSU-Alabama game which I saw about a half hour of between either falling asleep or performing one of my endless domestic duties. I am generally anti-SEC in my football sentiments, though in a sporting kind of way, and as the traditional poster child of old-school southern football, Alabama's team has always been especially pernicious to my northern eyes. As I noted previously on the site, I finally went to Alabama for the first time this past summer, and while I admittedly only saw about 20 people, they were decent and well-mannered and presentable enough, and the state-run park and facilities I stayed at were beautiful and well-maintained, so while I still can't abide the football program, I have a more positive impression of the state than I had formerly. All that acknowledged, I have to give some credit to the many Alabama fans and students (the game was in Tuscaloosa) who turned up smartly groomed and dressed, which outside of the Army-Navy game, you almost never see. Almost all of these people I am talking about of course are the kind of white, wealthy southern Republicans that make most of the people I would know reflexively gag, and I would probably think they were evil myself if I actually met most of them, but truly, young people who take some pride in their appearance and dress with some sense of a classic style really look great and stand out as above the crowd whether you like them or not.

This will close the posting year, which was a weak one. There is no direction where this site is concerned, so we will probably continue to go on in 2012 pretty much as we have been.

Post-Mortems

Christopher Hitchens: I used to read him and listen to him on television quite a bit around the time of the buildup to the Iraq war, of which he was of course greatly in favor. Since he was the most forceful and apparently most intelligent advocate among the prominent pro-war government or media figures, as well as the only representative of that type whose enthusiasm was not compromised to my sense by blatant self-interest. My thought at the time was that the whole episode was a great test of the ability of the people, or that significant portion of them who were opposed to George Bush and the agenda of his administration, to resist, not just politically but intellectually, this course of action, in which, needless to add, said people--or at least their ideas concerning right policy--were routed, humiliated and exposed as impotent and insignificant in the current configuration of society. As such I was quite anxious at the time about the outcome of the controversy. Hitchens was very convincing not only that he understood the case thoroughly and that military action was necessary beyond all reasonable doubt, but that anybody who did not arrive at the same conclusion was likely stupid, certainly cowardly, morally bankrupt, obtrusive to the progess of history, had completely missed the important lessons of the whole of western civilization in school, and other imprecations besides which such a hapless reader as myself was hardly going to be able to offer much of a defense against in his own behalf. At one point I actually considered writing him a personal letter in which I would try to explain reasonably the various objections to the war which I seemed constitutionally incapable of overcoming, well aware of the constant drumbeat from half of society, and apparently the more vigorous half, that anybody who had any objections to the main points in the case had something severely wrong with either his mind or his spirit, because for some reason--probably because he had a good literary education and sensibility--I did regard him as the sort of reasonable person who would be able to recognize that surely there were grounds on which another reasonable person could be skeptical of the war. But I got over that idea pretty quickly.

After a while I stopped reading him regularly because however clever he was, his main interest seemed to me to be to demonstrate on nearly every occasion that he was right on some matter relating either to literary interpretation and world affairs while various other people were wrong, and not merely wrong, but wrong in such a way as to render them stupid or contemptible, usually both; which perhaps they were but I came to find it tiresome after a while.

In spite of a few detractors I have come across who claim to be unimpressed by his literary education, I'm sure he had a pretty good one, certainly by any standard that prevails in the present English-speaking world. While the large range of his reading and the extent of it he committed to memory have been frequently attested to as well as demonstrated, it was his success in incorporating this knowledge into both his professional life as well as his social persona such that it seemed an inherent part of his character that served to inform and enhance it at all times that made the greatest impression, as this effect is something a great many people would like to project themselves, but very few, especially perhaps Americans, ever seem to be able to no matter how many years they devote to reading. Of course the formal education of the Hitchens-like people is perhaps a little broader than the typical American English student, such as to include history, with a strong emphasis on political and military affairs, elocution, probably some philosophy and European belles-lettres, as well as carries a greater expectation that the student will attain a serious proficiency in these areas useful for adult thinking, which is a very rare expectation to be found among American professors...I could go on about what appear to me the myriad glories of Hitchens's social life, especially the carefree and evidently brilliant London set he ran with in his early 70s youth, which included Martin Amis, at that time handsome and irresistible to women of an intellectual bent in a way that seems to have no parallel in our own age (at least that we know of yet), but I have already written more about him than most of his actual friends did.

Vaclav Havel. I had the impression when I was in his country--he was still the president at the time, though that office was considered to be politically largely ceremonial--that most people trusted him and respected him enough to consider whatever he had to say worth listening to even if they disagreed with him. There was not to my knowledge a substantial portion of the population which absolutely hated him on either personal or political grounds, which needless to say would be almost unthinkable for either a politician or a substantial literary figure in this country. At the same time Havel's image in the Western mind, so far as one exists, probably has more of a heroic, and certainly a more romantic, tinge than that which his own countrymen have of him. Being a small nation speaking an obscure language and without even any delusions of grandeur on a global scale, the Czech conception of a hero, if they would even call it that, is a lot more subdued than certainly Americans would be accustomed to thinking of it. His signature qualities as an author were a concern with the manipulation and corruption of language an advanced and particularly subtle sense of the myriad ways in which human existence, when subjected to pointed consideration, does not make any sense (I would have said absurd, but that word in English has connotations of lightness which do not always capture the sense intended). He struck me as having a mind that was not necessarily spectacular and was certainly not bombastic, but was well-organized and uncluttered by the excessive nonsense that has been the intellectual Achilles heel of the English-speaking world probably since the Restoration. Of course the price of that mind was having to grow up under oppressed circumstances, such that he himself would argue it was not worth it, though the writings and other artistic products of the people who had them contributed particular insight and beauty and seriousness to 20th century culture that was absent from their counterparts in the free West which I consider important.

Kim Jong Il. I know these guys are pound for pound maybe the worst people in the world. I of course find their country fascinating, because unlike a place like Afghanistan, where the whole mode of existence is somehow mentally inaccessible, a lot of aspects of North Korean life are superficially similiar to that in Western countries, or Western countries fifty or seventy-five years ago anyway, albeit in a kind of fake way, as if the whole society is a kind of giant model train set. Of course like most people who do not know how to hold bad opinions and still be cool and the object of fascination by women, without which qualities such opinions really are not worth having, I sincerely want the regime to fall and for North Korea to become a regular country with global banks and cell phones and a modern airport and all the rest of it, because I know the people are suffering terribly and unfairly. The more the rest of the world becomes more tied together and alike in its social and economic values however, the more interesting North Korea will continue to become to people who desire a respite from all of this modernity.

Merry Christmas II



One could fill up many posts on the subject of Christmas music--I was just revisiting 'Christmas in Hollis', another blast from my youth that I don't expect I will ever be hearing on a regular basis in these parts--but I have had my eye on this song for this spot for several months, and as it's still working for me, it will stay. This is a good number for them. Their interpretation embodies the spirit of the song.

There is always a danger, not so much in being wrong, but in being facile, to make some comment such as that 1959 was likely one of our sweller Christmases. I am quite certain that by the standards of the people who love the American-style Christmas the most, the 1959 season played out as close to that ideal as any other (in my family either '65 or '66 was the template for the perfect Christmas because it snowed a beautiful powdery snow in Philadelphia, nobody on either side of the family had any significant problems, and my parents were young, beautiful and in love, which must indeed have been something to see). While I have heard some bad words about things individual people did in the year 1959, I have never heard anybody speak poorly of the year itself, and heard many people affirm it was a good year for them. I even once met a guy hiking in the woods in Maine who it turned out had grown up in Concord and graduated from the high school in 1959, which was the same class as my father-in-law, whom of course he knew, and his parents and brother as well, as which revelation my wife turned to me and said, 'didn't you just know he was going to say the class of '59?' to which the man said 'yes, I guess I just have the look about me that says 1959. It was a good year.'

Merry Christmas I




I have noticed in recent years that the radio stations where I live at least have largely dropped this song, and indeed most of the 80s contributions to the holiday canon. A few years back I noticed when I heard this song around December 21st that it was the first time I had heard it the whole season, and I made a point of looking out for it during subsequent Christmases. The next year it made its appearance early, around the 10th, but last year I went right down to the wire again, not appearing until the 22nd or 23rd, and this year, as of 9:46pm on the 23rd, I have yet to hear it on commercial radio, Rite Aid radio (I spend a lot of time at Rite Aid), other stores. I haven't been to a party in years but they probably aren't playing this at the parties I would be most likely to be invited to either. Yet for some of us d'un certain age, this is as much a part of the fabric of the season as White Christmas and Dick Clark on New Year's Eve. Granted, the scenario in the video of being stuck in a cabin in the mountains with a bunch of 80s yuppies couples, two of which include George Michael and Ridgeley, his erstwhile Wham! bandmate, approaches very close to my worst nightmare not involving prison or homelessness or starvation. In fact, I actually hate it. I don't even really like the song that much, to be honest, but I find I am unable to fully engage with the spirit of the season until I hear it in a public setting, where it must set loose several vital associations with Christmases past that enable me to move forward.

Along with several other Wham! songs--"Careless Whisper", "Everything She Wants"--which describe romantic strife in much more detail than is ordinary in popular music songs, I was at the age of 14 greatly impressed by the sophisticated adult relationships I imagined George Michael and Ridgeley must have. They argue, they cry, they are way beyond expressing any kindness for the other person, she's having his baby even though she doesn't seem to like him and he is openly indifferent about the matter as well. This was heavy stuff to me, who primarily related to the traditional trifecta of boy-meets-girl-boy-asks-girl-out-girl-likes-boy-they-get-married-and-live-happily-ever-after, boys-sees-hot-girl-boy-wants-hot-girl-boy-gets-hot-girl-hot-girl-starts-to-annoy-boy-so-he-shows-her-the-door, and the one I was most partial to, boy-sees-girl-boy-wants-girl-boy-cannot-get-girl-boy-is-wretched. So Wham! seemed to be operating on a totally foreign level. Which ultimately of course they were.

The Rally Against Hate

The Rally Against Hate I have been debating whether or not to write about this incident which took place in the town where I live around three months ago. It struck me at the time as being revealing about the psychic state of current respectable society; and as that sense has not substantially diminished, I have decided to do a (hopefully) short posting about it. The backstory: Sometime around the middle of September, some racist and xenophobic graffiti was discovered written on the walls of three houses where families of African refugees were living (Article here). The perpetrator(s) of this deed remain, as far as I know, unidentified to this hour. The ordinarily sedate local professional class immediately rose in impassioned and unified outrage to denounce this action and express to the all immigrants and people of diverse cultures and races in the community, how truly welcome they were, and how much the town had already been, and could expect to continue to be, improved in every conceivable way by the newcomers' presence. The incident was a godsend--no pun intended--for the creatively strained clergy at our family church, providing fodder for over a month's worth of sermons. Area schools held panels on the disturbing event in which such students as might be considered to be most impacted by it were encouraged to express their thoughts and feelings on the matter, and reassured that all of the school and other civic authorities were 100% on their side in opposition to the evil lurking among us. No less than two full blown demonstrations on the state house grounds were organized. The first and more impromptu of the pair, staged in the first flush of heat a couple of days after the story hit the papers, was dubbed the "Rally Against Hate"; while the second, held about a week afterwards, under the influence perhaps of slightly more sober deliberation, went by the sobriquet of "Love Your Neighbor". Among the distinguished speakers at the second event was the Episcopalian Bishop of the state of New Hampshire.

 I have to confess at the time I found the response a little over the top, and partaking of perhaps a slight--very slight--portion of phoniness, as well as somewhat amusing. As usual my wife put me in my place by asking if I would rather live in a town where people did nothing, which naturally was not how I had been looking at the matter. Of course I do not approve of scrawling anonymous racist messages on the sides of houses and recognize the importance of demonstrating that such acts are unacceptable and will be unambiguously and publicly condemned whenever they occur and all the rest of it. But still. Even though there are apparently no leads as to who the criminal was, one presumes almost automatically that it was a white male of a low social origin and level of education, possibly a kid (meaning roughly anywhere from a teenager up to an especially developmentally arrested 22 year old), possibly a generic 30 to early 40-something failure of a person, but in general somebody whom the class of people making up the bulk of the rally participants (who, as you may have gathered, were educated white professionals) would have found easy enough to despise and feel anger towards. On the occasion of both rallies I took care to drive by the state house at the time of day when they were in full flower with the intention of observing them up close and attempt to feed off the emotions that had overcome most of our town's leading citizens, but both times once I got to the site the idea made me uncomfortable and I neglected to get out of my car. Partly this was because each time I had my three youngest children with me, aged (at the time) 4 months, 2, and 5, and the prospect of carrying or monitoring them amongst a decent sized crowd brimming with righteous intensity was suddenly daunting in a way it had not seemed to be at home. But partly it was also because I knoew I could not bring myself to really identify with the crowd and the instinctive revulsion that they were tapping into, though at some level I obviously desired to. I had read quotes and, by the time of the second rally, seen pictures from the first in the newspaper, which featured several people I had a passing enough acquaintance with, and several others who seemed to me representative of a type, whose generosity of spirit in the context of day-to-day American society, however sincere their regard for the refugees might have been, and I have no reason other than my own personal prejudices for doubting that it was, I cannot help having some reservations about. So having determined that I was not going to be able to enter the necessary spirit, from whatever angle I would approach it, for engaging with the event, plus having all the children to take care of, I elected to sit it out. All this said, I still think the response, while perhaps noble after a way, was a bit overwrought. I am convinced that the way people immediately jumped on this was as much an expression of their frustration and dissatisfaction with present political life than outrage at some racist grafitti written in the greatest likelihood by a totally inconsequential lowlife. Present day progressives especially do not know how to effectively combat the business interests and their political representatives on the economic and social justice and environmental issues, among others, that are dear to them. But everyone of any significance knows, and more importantly agrees upon, exactly what to do when an open display of racism, especially one by some hapless individual, rears itself, and they waste no time mobilizing all their available forces for action. I was surprised by how many serious and busy adults well into middle age felt that this incident called for their involvement and leadership in order for it to be gotten through satisfactorily. I am convinced there is some compensation happening here--guilt over not being able to prevent, or even disturb, the war, imposition of the security state, the concentration of wealth and the cavernous disparities of income, the total implosion of the lower third of the population, the decline of education, of culture, etc, etc. A protest against racism--which officially no one condemns or dares to ridicule--takes the form of an assertion of one's own relevance and virtue... This essay is mostly complete. I was unable to nail the ending, but I have run out of time (self-imposed).

Is New England Dying?

The political leadership in my state has lately embarked on another lame campaign to try to persuade young people, especially recent college graduates, not to leave at the first opportunity. Several of our neighbors have started their own initiatives along these lines, or at least have openly expressed similar concerns about their own rotten demographics, and the ongoing exodus of the best of their young people. Good luck with that. In addition to those referenced in the article above, here are some pertinent numbers: Maine and Rhode Island were both estimated to have declined in absolute population in the year 2009, which given the current low death rate, is generally regarded by demographers as indicative or forboding of catastrophe; the under-18 population during the decade of the 2000s declined in every New England (indeed every northeastern) state, led by Vermont (14% decline), Maine (10%), Rhode Island (9%) and New Hampshire (7%--this is even with my own children figured); Vermont has had the lowest birth rate (around 1.6-1.7 per woman) of any state in the country for most of the last decade, with the rest of the New England states making up most of those right behind it, usually around 1.7-1.8, meaning that barring much more substantial migration/immigration into these states than has already occurred the child population will continue to decline for the foreseeable future. The largest age cohort in all of these places in the recent census was that in the 45-54 range, and the 55-64 range is still the second largest. Even to bring in anecdotal evidence, until about 2 years ago, when I was 39, and had been on staff for 12 years, I was still the 3rd youngest person out of about 20 in my department at work, which included more people over 70 than under 40. This age distribution seems to be pretty typical throughout the organization, with the exception of the excessive number of septuagenarians. My particular city, which has no college or youth-oriented cultural scene to speak of at all and is dominated by sober professionals, seems to suffer especially from a dearth of people between the ages of 23 and 35. Though while this situation is not quite so extreme everywhere, and there are certain towns that appear to be attractive to decent numbers of relatively energetic, if not world-changingly innovative young people (Brattleboro; Portsmouth; Burlington (VT)), most are even worse off than the place I live, which at least has a few possibilities for achieving a modestly prosperous career.

It could be objected, of course, that New England, especially the New England in which the laconic, industrious and resourceful character of the Yankee is the predominate figure, has been pronounced to be dying before, that indeed the sense of imminent death is a permanent feature of the local zeitgeist. The literature has certainly inclined in this direction. Hawthorne's gloomy depictions of a hidebound, mirthless society hounded by doom on all sides were set in the period when Europeans had scarcely been settled in the region for fifty years, in some instances less than 20, come to mind. Though Hawthorne was writing at a distance of two centuries, such specimens of literature as do survive the early colonial era as Michael Wigglesworth's The Day of Doom and Jonathan Edwards's epic sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God reinforce the idea that this was not the most optimistic, life loving and earthly future directed people, though in reality of course they were to some extent. Immigrants poured into Massachusetts and diffused all over the region throughout this era, while the birth rate was around 6-9 children per women over a period of several generations, which is one of the highest credible numbers found anywhere in history. Moving on to the post-Civil War Go-West-Young-Man era, in concert with the ascension of New York to melting pot colossus and one of the handful of most important cities in the world, New England comes to stand in symbolically as a graveyard for the living dead for literary types once again. Does American literature contain a more grim community and landscape than the town, presumably in western Massachusetts, in which Ethan Frome is set? Eugene O'Neill milked these themes to good effect throughout his illustrious career; the stunted sons hopelessly tilling the rocky soil of their overbearing father's farm in Desire Under the Elms and the beautiful but faded and oppressive summer home in Long Day's Journey Into Night being two notable instances of this. In this era immigrants from Ireland and Italy and French Canada streamed into the region in large numbers and the population consistently grew from 10-20% every decade. In the recent (Post World War II) era the New England = death motif in literature and movies has hardly abated, though the sense where it appears has become more of nostalgia for some more refined ideal that possibly existed in the past and to which the vulgarity of modern existence will not permit ascendance. A Separate Peace, the 'haunting' nostalgia films Summer of '42 and its underappreciated sequel Class of '44, even by my reading more highbrow efforts like the poems of Robert Lowell partake heavily of this quality. In my later teens and early 20s when I was living outside the region and confused about where I should tell people where I was from, when I would say Maine/New England the response of my interlocuter would frequently be to express the sense he or (rarely) she had that the region was dead, that they had felt the deadness viscerally on some visit or even collegiate stint there, implying then of course that the future dynamism of the country--this was before everybody had adopted the globalist mindset--both cultural and economic, would come from elsewhere, Texas and California and the southwest and west generally being considered the favorites for this leading role at that time. People are comfortable with the idea.

At bottom of course all of this concern is about the increasing desperation to grow the tax base--especially via the much vaunted entrepreneurship/innovation that a properly educated young workforce is supposed to spawn if congregated in substantial enough numbers--bring consumers into the economy who need to buy houses and furniture and baby clothes and so on, and to subsidize, or at least ease the burden that the needs of the increasingly aging population are threatening to overwhelm the various states with. Anybody who reads the papers knows that all hope for maintaining the living standards that North Americans have become accustomed to is invested in attracting entrepreneurship and innovation to one's community, with the holy grail being any kind of industry that will produce thousands or at this point even a few dozens of middle class jobs. Trends and statistics would seem to indicate that in the current situation (much-maligned) theater graduates have about as good a chance of making a living in their chosen fields as the would be entrepreneur does of seeing his business succeed to the point of providing him with a middle class income for himself over a period of several years, let alone one that will come to the economic rescue of entire regions, yet unlike in almost any other field with a similar rate of professional failure (most estimates seem to agree between 80-90% of new businesses), the leadership of society continually calls for more people, smarter people, harder working people to direct their energies towards innovative and imaginative business creation--as the only possible solution to all our problems.

With regard to myself, after finishing high school I too left the region for about 8-9 years, and returned when I was 27. Looking back, I should have made a greater effort to spend another couple of years overseas; even though I was out of money and was not having much luck getting jobs, it's something I should have forced myself to do, as it might have had the effect of shaking me out of my lethargy and enabled me to join one of the energetic and interesting segments of society. There was certainly no reason to rush back and grasp hold of a lowly position in the regular workforce that could not have been put off for a few more years. Anyway I came to New Hampshire for romance--my wife is from here--and because at the time I was not in an immediate position to find any better arrangement in the US. Plus I did retain a general affection for the area as I had lived in Maine, and entertained some idea at the time, as I have noted before, of eventually settling there. I was still technically one of these young graduates that are always supposedly so much in demand, though not an entrepreneur, and without any verifiable job skills. Still, I thought must be intelligent enough to eventually figure out the game of the professions, or make a positive impression on somebody who would be in a position to "set me up" somehow (this is one of the drawbacks of reading too many novels--characters in them are always getting "set up" by people they have made an impression on). Also it must be remembered that I was still expecting at the time to finish writing my book within a couple of years, and for the book to be both good and recognized as such. I suppose I ought to be embarrassed to have actually ever thought this now, and to offer a different and more reasonable explanation for what I expected to happen with my life, but I don't see what it matters. Of such conventional careers as might have been realistically open to me, I still cannot think of any that I have any great desire to have now.

But I have gotten a little off track. The object was to examine what a state like New Hampshire offers to an enterprising young person. My answer, even though I personally seem to have stagnated in many ways, is still, I think, quite a lot. Of course there are a lot of careers that it would be impossible to pursue here to any great height, or even at all, but there is enough proven substantial brainpower deposited around the state to demonstrate that one is not dooming oneself to a life devoid of meaningful accomplishment in many fields by staying here. The overall quality of life is very high, especially once you get past your early thirties--every time I go to visit any of my other old haunts in the Mid-Atlantic I am reminded how many extra years of life I have managed to preserve by not having to spend several hours in traffic jams every day--and largely accessible. The last time I checked the statistics, which was within the last 5 years, New Hampshire had the lowest income inequality of any state in the country. While this might sound distasteful to super-achievers, this is mostly due I think to the comparatively low numbers of absolute wastrels in the state compared to almost everywhere else. There is certainly a healthy population of rich people, though evidently they are not quite as rich as rich people are in other states, or else they leave the state, which is not hard to do, to indulge in any extreme high-end consumption; for I am not aware of any restaurants or stores or leisure activities anywhere in New Hampshire, or the southern half of Vermont for that matter, that it would be completely impossible for me to contemplate going to even once due to their expense (I'm sure some probably exist, but I do not as yet know about them). The unemployment rate is much lower than elsewhere in the country--officially 5%, maybe double that in reality. That number is deceptive though, I think, because a lot of people do leave the state because the job situation is limited, and the economy being on such a small scale it is easy to perceive when that is the case. If you live in a town of 15,000 people surrounded by woods and the largest employer in it closes down, it doesn't require the acumen of John Kenneth Galbreath to see that waiting around for things to pick up again is probably not a smart idea, as might be the case in a place like California or Florida. There is a notable influx of professional people who come back in their mid-30s after having failed to make it really big/burned out on the super-competitive lifestyle in Boston and New York, especially if they have children. One of my children's friends' father spent his youth trying to make it as an actor in Hollywood (he is an energetic and active Republican in the comminty now). They still want to impress upon each other that they played and achieved no small success in the game of life though.

The population of New Hampshire it should be noted did increase by 6% during the last decade even though the child population declined substantially. We seem to be becoming a popular retirement/late career destination for baby boomers fleeing the oppressive taxes, and, some assert, the diversity that have overwhelmed their native haunts to the south. There is also a libertarian movement called the Free State Project whose goal is to get libertarians to settle in the state in large enough numbers to be able to begin getting elected to office, which has apparently attracted a few people...

This essay is garbage and it is incomplete but it has been 8 days, my kid won't go to sleep and I have to get ready for an appointment, so I am letting it go now.