Variations On A Summer Day

I

Say of the gulls that they are flying
in light blue air over dark blue sea

II

Music more than a breath, but less
Than the wind, sub-music like sub-speech,
A repetition of unconscious things,
Letters of rock and water, words
Of the visible elements and of ours.

III

The rocks of the cliffs are the heads of dogs
That turn into fishes and leap
Into the sea.

IV

Star over Monhegan, Atlantic star,
Lantern without a bearer, you drift,
You, too, are drifting, in spite of your course;
Unless in the darkness, brightly-crowned
You are the will, if there is a will,
Or the portent of a will that was,
One of the portents of the will that was.

–Wallace Stevens

Roger Sandall from ‘Guardianship: The Utopia Of The New Class‘ finishes with:

‘One remembers Weber’s epitaph for the Protestant Ethic, as he contemplated a devitalised bourgeoisie spiritlessly tending the petrified mechanism their ancestors had raised. Adapted, without apology, it might also be used to depict that petrified Utopia of the New Ruling classes of the East.

Weber:

‘Rulers without honour, administrators without heart, priests without conviction, this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilisation never before achieved.’

The ‘East’ at the time of publication was what was then behind the Iron Curtain (April 1983 in Quadrant Magazine).

I suppose I’m still baffled by the the 2015 decision to let over a million ‘asylum-seekers’ into Germany:

‘Merkel said she was moved by the sight of hundreds of migrants stuck at a railway station in Hungary last week, chanting their desire to come to Germany.’

I decided to look up Angela Merkel’s wikipedia page, and found the following as well:

‘In 2012, Merkel said, regarding her faith: “I am a member of the evangelical church. I believe in God and religion is also my constant companion, and has been for the whole of my life. We as Christians should above all not be afraid of standing up for our beliefs.”^[148] She also publicly declared that Germany suffers not from “too much Islam” but “too little Christianity”‘

Hmmm….

As previously posted:

There’s plenty of German theory, pathology and overwhelming 20th-century collective guilt going on here. What many moderns and humanists can ignore are the deep impulses they have to make meaning, and to draw distinctions between the sacred and the profane, which in the West can manifest as a kind of sentimental Romanticization of Nature and Man (religious and anti-religious, truthfully, and perhaps some hybridization illuminated by German Theory).

Everyone wants to transcend and seek the timeless, the immortal, and the pure, I’m guessing.

There is also a particular myth of the ‘Noble Savage,’ alive and well in the Western World, where the local tribesman or displaced native is celebrated as an exotic but worthy adversary, or some kind of anachronistic adornment.

This stuff can be true and inspiring in the arts, synthesized as part of the Romantic school:

Perhaps the native is to be included under the net of secular human idealism or given land, a casino or a museum somewhere on the Western Estate and left to many of his own devices (many further Left likely see a fellow oppressed class of victims with whom to feel solidarity on the way to radical and revolutionary freedom).

But certainly with the triumphs of trade and commerce, the many benefits and successes of Western expansion (the thousand injustices and brutalities of State and privately funded imperialism), comes a lot of doubt, guilt, and shame.

What is true and right?

How should I live and what should I do?

I can say Orwell has caused me to think, reflect, and honestly take a look at myself in the mirror.

——–

Much as the sciences require intellectual rigor, empirical evidence and much skepticism, there are bands of Western anti-science postmodernists in their wake, too, who can sink into a kind of nebulous modern mysticism, building museums as temples.

Just as there are humanists there are anti-humanists.

Perhaps not too much has changed.

Those Germans and their Idealism!: Tom Wolfe on Max Weber on one conspicuous use of art in the ‘modern’ world:

‘…aesthetics is going to replace ethics, art is going to replace religion, as the means through which educated people express their spiritual worthiness…‘

Update & Repost-Roger Sandall At The American Interest: ‘Tribal Realism’…From Roger Sandall: ‘The Slave Girl and the Professor’

As previously posted:

Full Misguided Nostagia for Our Paleo Past here.

‘The paleofantasy is a fantasy in part because it supposes that we humans, or at least our protohuman forebears, were at some point perfectly adapted to our environments. We apply this erroneous idea of evolution’s producing the ideal mesh between organism and surroundings to other life forms, too, not just to people.’

There’s a lot of confusion out there in the popular mind, apparently. Fascinating discoveries going on right now in genetics, genome research, and evolutionary biology, to name a few.

But there are also political and ideological movements displaying many characteristics of religious movements, and seeking to make laws we all must follow.

Repost-From The American Spectator: ‘Environmentalism and the Leisure Class’

Update And Repost-Skeptical Environmentalism From Fora.tv Via A & L Daily: Bjorn Lomborg @ COP15

‘It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible…’

–Oscar Wilde

Dear reader, there’s a competition going on, extending to the poles and into space, for raw materials, mineral wealth and transit routes.

This competition will surely have some consequences in the current geopolitical realm (Cuba, Ukraine, Africa, The South China Sea) where there’s quite a bit of Russian and Chinese recalcitrance in the face of Western attempts at order.

Europe’s low birth-rates and many flagging economies (including the top-heavy trade union), aren’t looking great, but they’ve got funding and top talent.  America’s profound social and political divides don’t bode well for current national unification, but are not necessarily requirements for proper investment in this process (not clear to me if we’ve even bottomed out of the current serious problems and aren’t heading for a resurgent nationalism).

Russia’s low birth-rates and post-ish Communist order contain very high levels of corruption but can also still apply many of the country’s resources, though I doubt these efforts will be as cooperative as even getting to the ISS, and could become pretty nasty.

China’s post-ish Communist order must maintain high-rates of economic growth and Chinese civilization is still undergoing crazy rates of change.  Much of the society is deeply commercial and with quite a bit of nationalism. The political order is deeply authoritarian and global in reach.  Chinese authorities are heavily investing AI modeling, artificial intelligence, and technological advancement.

We probably shouldn’t count out other players like India and Japan either.

How much am I missing?

Too much.

Bob Zubrin at The New Atlantis: ‘Moon Direct‘.  He’s a fan of creating a moon-base.

‘If we want to explore the Moon, and prepare to go beyond, we don’t need a space station in lunar orbit — but we could use a base on the Moon itself.’

There was a pretty tense atmosphere these past generations, as the primary geopolitical contest was between the United States and the Soviet Union:

Here’s actual video:

As to the further below video regarding crazy and true-believing environmentalists (more Zubrin, recommended), perhaps this brief sketch does some work:

My limited take on a Christian view of the world-Deeply Aristotelian, it incorporates a metaphysics with Man at the top of a hierarchal order of all living creatures here on Earth (dominion and stewardship), but Man’s place is beneath a God revealing himself to Man as he discovers the divine and mysterious order to be found within Nature.

My limited take post-Enlightenment back-to-Nature Romanticism-Deeply materialist and humanist, often collectivist, it incorporates a metaphysics of scientific materialism and an often inverted Christian morality of dominion and stewardship. In addition, there are many anti-scientific, anti-materialist, anti-humanist movements beneath the bloom of post-Enlightentment science, social-science and humanities thinking.

Look no further than the current postmodern mess.

How much am I missing?

Too much.

Via Youtube: ‘Curiosity’s First Year On Mars’

So many doomsayers in the prediction racket:

From Youtube Via Reason: ‘Robert Zubrin: Radical Environmentalists And Other Merchants Of Despair’

Addition: Mining the Moon or Mars is going to be very expensive, currently prohibitively so.  However, if it becomes economically viable (costs get low enough, travel, tourism, trade), there are reasons to so, especially survival.

Currently, I’ve been thinking about Mars on the Moon kind of like like going to Antarctica, but colder, drier, with little to no atmosphere, intense solar radiation and all the problems of confined spaces and being so far from home you might not return.

-Alan Sokal makes the case that Portland State’s case against Peter Boghossian ain’t so strong.

-Ben Sixsmith on ‘The Loomer Generation.’

‘Now, the Loomers are in their senescence. Amis has been promising a novel about Saul Bellow, Philip Larkin and Christopher Hitchens, which has created the buzz of a dead housefly. Ian McEwan has produced a series of clever books which have produced diminishing returns. Rushdie’s last novel barely made a dent in the public consciousness. Unpopularity need not reflect quality. Amis might create a masterpiece for all we know. Yet how did a group of writers who were so famous end up with such indifference?’

I picture a belly up, inadvertently praying carapace on the windowsill.

A bit harsh, no?

English writers Ian McEwan and Martin Amis have a looming discussion.

—

When one turns, as one must, from the hare-brained utterances of ideologues, existentialist afterthoughts bound sheaf after sheaf, the mystifying cant of postmodern academese, yes, one still seeks:

Bridging C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures

‘Snow did not fully appreciate that humanism was more than a collection of facts. It is, above all, a way of understanding what was valuable about human flourishing. Great literature necessarily has a moral purpose that science lacks. As such, humanism critiques aspects of the world that technology creates, reminding us that the next new thing is not necessarily the next good thing. Snow was wrong in implying that true humanists must join scientists in singing a harmonious anthem of social progress.’

As posted: A Link To C.P. Snow’s ‘Two Cultures’

Is there even a culture anyways, man?

Daniel Dennet from 1998:

‘When I was a young untenured professor of philosophy, I once received a visit from a colleague from the Comparative Literature Department, an eminent and fashionable literary theorist, who wanted some help from me. I was flattered to be asked, and did my best to oblige, but the drift of his questions about various philosophical topics was strangely perplexing to me. For quite a while we were getting nowhere, until finally he managed to make clear to me what he had come for. He wanted “an epistemology,” he said. An epistemology. Every self-respecting literary theorist had to sport an epistemology that season, it seems, and without one he felt naked, so he had come to me for an epistemology to wear–it was the very next fashion, he was sure, and he wanted the dernier cri in epistemologies. It didn’t matter to him that it be sound, or defensible, or (as one might as well say) true; it just had to be new and different and stylish. Accessorize, my good fellow, or be overlooked at the party’

Worth a read.

The arts and humantities can be given a seriousness of purpose, I’m guessing, but must that purpose necessarily be scientific?

Do creative musical/artistic geniuses really need to understand particularly well how the sciences advance? How much does it matter that a theater major understands how the sciences come to say true things about the world and predict with high accuracy how nature behaves beyond a science course or two?

I could be wrong.

Clearly, one problem is that out of the postmodern malaise comes the nihilism, moral relativism and general desperation where many can be found clinging to the sciences, or some standard of rationalism and reason that doesn’t seem sufficient in answering all the questions religion claims to answer.   Nor does it seem sufficient as a platform to understand human nature, history, tradition, the wisdom in our institutions, and the experience past generations can offer beyond its own presumptions.

Lots of people can thus make ideology their guide and political change their purpose, or the State their religion and their own moral failings or moral programs everyone’s moral oughts through the law and politics.

Who has the moral legitimacy to be in charge?

Where:  Birkenhead Lake, B.C. Canada.

No, I can’t take photos like this, but people in the family can.

This is the poem that came to mind, even though Gary Snyder wrote from here instead, where apparently he would be for 60 days at a time:

Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout

Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.

I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.

–Gary Snyder

Full piece here

‘Therein lies the central tension of Speak, Memory. Its prose is meticulous, suggesting memory as an exercise in exacting dictation from an omniscient oracle, yet its message points to memory as mutable, prone to the passage of time and the vagaries of imagination’

I merely enjoy good writing.

Michael Dirda’s review of a review here.

Book here.

“Nabokov in America” is rewarding on all counts, as biography, as photo album (there are many pictures of people, Western landscapes and motels) and as appreciative criticism. Not least, Roper even avoids the arch style so often adopted by critics faintly trying to emulate their inimitable subject.’

What’s more American than an exiled member of the Russian aristocracy intimately making his way into the English language and peering out from a thousand Motor Lodges?

===============

As previously posted an interview with Nabokov at The Paris Review.

A little bit about politics and also the politics amidst fellow writers and critics:

‘…when in doubt, I always follow the simple method of choosing that line of conduct which may be the most displeasing to the Reds and the Russells.’

and:

‘Who’s in, who’s out, and where are the snows of yesteryear. All very amusing. I am a little sorry to be left out. Nobody can decide if I am a middle-aged American writer or an old Russian writer—or an ageless international freak.’

On his professional collection of butterflies:

‘The pleasures and rewards of literary inspiration are nothing beside the rapture of discovering a new organ under the microscope or an undescribed species on a mountainside in Iran or Peru. It is not improbable that had there been no revolution in Russia, I would have devoted myself entirely to lepidopterology and never written any novels at all.’

Via Youtube: An interviewer, Nabokov and Lionel Trilling discuss ‘Lolita:’

Full piece here.

Yes, he’s a real person, and he lives in New Mexico:

‘Jack Handey is a solidly built man of 64 with a swoop of graying hair; when he smiles, his teeth are blindingly white. ‘

Jack Handey’s homepage here with plenty more.

And from this ‘Shout & Murmurs’ piece in the New Yorker:

‘Eventually, I believe, everything evens out. Long ago, an asteroid hit our planet and killed our dinosaurs. But, in the future, maybe we’ll go to another planet and kill their dinosaurs.’

Part I here

Part II here

Worth a read.

‘I have been reading this interesting book of Prof. Richard Nisbett, entitled The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners think differently… and why (2003). Nisbett is a Professor of social psychology at the University of Michigan and has written several books and articles on cognitive processes, intelligence and how the environment is an important determinant of IQ and differences in world perceptions.’

He distills Nisbett’s arguments into an easy-to-read table format.

From The Independent: ‘Augustine: Conversions And Confessions By Robin Lane Fox, Book Review’

Full post here.

Lileks responds to an Atlantic piece which reflects upon the modernist influence.  From the Atlantic piece.

‘At their best, the Schiffs can be models for renewing the unquenched aspiration of a century ago, to place art and its imaginative demands at the center of an effort to build a more humane future’

Humane.  Human.  Human rights.  Make it new.  Break with the past.  Shape man’s destiny upon new foundations of knowledge, explore new possibilities, and perhaps shape men themselves.

Why, there’s a whole philosophy under there.  Not a religion necessarily, and not always moral claims to knowledge, but a whole framework nonetheless. Well, some of it, anyways.

Lileks responds:

‘There is no morality in art. There is morality in religion; there are philosophical objectives embedded in politics. The two are intertwined in a society and reflected in its art. When you sever art from its cultural moorings and make “newness” the overriding criterion by which the merits of a work are judged, then anything is possible. This results in crap. Not always’

James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, the Bauhaus, the imagists, the futurists etc.  Some of those influences have morphed into post-modernism or where such currents have flowed and keep flowing.

Lileks’ take:

‘The primary urge of the revolutionary and the modernist and the adolescent: impatience.’

So, do we aim for maturity?  Reverence?  Good old Longfellow?

Food for thought on this Friday.  Science, technology, mathematics are doing quite fine, and moving ahead, but what about the humanities?

A little more on postmodernism.

From Dr. Steven Hicks:

‘In the shorter term, postmodernism has caused an impoverishment of much of the academic humanities, both in the quality of the work being done and the civility of the debates. The sciences have been less affected and are relatively healthy. The social sciences are mixed.

I am optimistic, though, for a couple of reasons. One is that pomo was able to entrench itself in the second half of the twentieth century in large part because first-rate intellectuals were mostly dismissive of it and focused on their own projects. But over the last ten years, after pomo’s excesses became blatant, there has been a vigorous counter-attack and pomo is now on the defensive. Another reason for optimism is that, as a species of skepticism, pomo is ultimately empty and becomes boring. Eventually intellectually-alert individuals get tired of the same old lines and move on. It is one thing, as the pomo can do well, to critique other theories and tear them down. But that merely clears the field for the next new and intriguing theory and for the next generation of energetic young intellectuals.

So while the postmodernism has had its generation or two, I think we’re ready for the next new thing – a strong, fresh, and positive approach to the big issues, one that of course takes into account the critical weapons the pomo have used well over the last while’

–Want to lose an afternoon?  Visit Lileks.com.  A fine humorist with a sharp pen and a keen eye.  This is what the internet is for.

Here’s Australian art critic Robert Hughes discussing the Albany plaza, and almost hyperbolically criticizing the aims of modernist architecture.

***Fun fact, he pronounces the “Boogie Woogie”  the “Boo-gie Woo-gie.”  

———————-

Related On This Site:  They designed a city in the heart of Brazil that really doesn’t work for people: Brasilia: A Planned City

No thanks to living in planned communities upon someone else’s overall vision.: Roger Scruton In The City Journal: Cities For Living–Is Modernism Dead?…Repost-Via Reason: ‘Salvador Allende’s Cybersocialist Command Center’…From Grist.Org Via The New Republic Via The A & L Daily: ‘Getting Past “Ruin Porn” In Detroit’… some people don’t want you to have the economic freedom to live in the suburbs: From Foreign Policy: ‘Urban Legends, Why Suburbs, Not Cities, Are The Answer’

A structure in the desert…not even a city Update On LACMA, Michael Heizer And The ‘Levitated Mass’-Modern Art And The Public;..where is modernism headed? Via Youtube: Justin, The Horse That Could Paint…

Denis Dutton suggested art could head towards Darwin (and may offer new direction from the troubles of the modern art aimlessness and shallow depth…the money and the fame) Review of Denis Dutton’s ‘The Art Instinct’

Roger Scruton In The American Spectator: The New Humanism…From Nigel Warburton’s Site: A Definition of Humanism?…From The City Journal Via Arts And Letters Daily: Andre Glucksman On “The Postmoder

For those who have served our country. Thank you for your sacrifice.

Boston

(Sicut Patribus, sit Deus Nobis)

The rocky nook with hilltops three 
Looked eastward from the farms, 
And twice each day the flowing sea 
Took Boston in its arms; 
The men of yore were stout and poor, 
And sailed for bread to every shore. 

And where they went on trade intent 
They did what freeman can, 
Their dauntless ways did all men praise, 
The merchant was a man. 
The world was made for honest trade,- 
To plant and eat be none afraid. 

The waves that rocked them on the deep 
To them their secret told; 
Said the winds that sung the lads to sleep, 
‘Like us be free and bold!’ 
The honest waves refuse to slaves 
The empire of the ocean caves. 

Old Europe groans with palaces, 
Has lords enough and more;- 
We plant and build by foaming seas 
A city of the poor;- 
For day by day could Boston Bay 
Their honest labor overpay. 

We grant no dukedoms to the few, 
We hold like rights and shall;- 
Equal on Sunday in the pew, 
On Monday in the mall. 
For what avail the plough or sail, 
Or land or life, if freedom fail? 

The noble craftsmen we promote, 
Disown the knave and fool; 
Each honest man shall have his vote, 
Each child shall have his school. 
A union then of honest men, 
Or union nevermore again. 

The wild rose and the barberry thorn 
Hung out their summer pride 
Where now on heated pavements worn 
The feet of millions stride. 

Fair rose the planted hills behind 
The good town on the bay, 
And where the western hills declined 
The prairie stretched away. 

What care though rival cities soar 
Along the stormy coast: 
Penn’s town, New York, and Baltimore, 
If Boston knew the most! 

They laughed to know the world so wide; 
The mountains said: ‘Good-day! 
We greet you well, you Saxon men, 
Up with your towns and stay!’ 
The world was made for honest trade,- 
To plant and eat be none afraid. 

‘For you,’ they said, ‘no barriers be, 
For you no sluggard rest; 
Each street leads downward to the sea, 
Or landward to the West.’ 

O happy town beside the sea, 
Whose roads lead everywhere to all; 
Than thine no deeper moat can be, 
No stouter fence, no steeper wall! 

Bad news from George on the English throne: 
‘You are thriving well,’ said he; 
‘Now by these presents be it known, 
You shall pay us a tax on tea; 
‘Tis very small,-no load at all,- 
Honor enough that we send the call.’ 

‘Not so,’ said Boston, ‘good my lord, 
We pay your governors here 
Abundant for their bed and board, 
Six thousand pounds a year. 
(Your highness knows our homely word,) 
Millions for self-government, 
But for tribute never a cent.’ 

The cargo came! and who could blame 
If Indians seized the tea, 
And, chest by chest, let down the same 
Into the laughing sea? 
For what avail the plough or sail 
Or land or life, if freedom fail? 

The townsmen braved the English king, 
Found friendship in the French, 
And Honor joined the patriot ring 
Low on their wooden bench. 

O bounteous seas that never fail! 
O day remembered yet! 
O happy port that spied the sail 
Which wafted Lafayette! 
Pole-star of light in Europe’s night, 
That never faltered from the right. 

Kings shook with fear, old empires crave 
The secret force to find 
Which fired the little State to save 
The rights of all mankind. 

But right is might through all the world; 
Province to province faithful clung, 
Through good and ill the war-bolt hurled, 
Till Freedom cheered and the joy-bells rung. 

The sea returning day by day 
Restores the world-wide mart; 
So let each dweller on the Bay 
Fold Boston in his heart, 
Till these echoes be choked with snows, 
Or over the town blue ocean flows.

–Ralph Waldo Emerson.

-Click through for more photos.

Via Curbed Detroit. (via David Thompson)

70 photos of the abandoned, foreboding Temple.  Mysterious symbols and a certain sad grandeur that’s come to represent Detroit these days.

-Photographer Ben Marcin has a series called ‘Last House Standing.’ Solitary row-homes…the only ones left on the block.

Also On This Site: From Buzzfeed: ‘Why I Bought A House in Detroit For $500:’

How did Detroit get here? Very comprehensive and easy to navigate.

More from Megan McArdle on the behavior that comes with pension bonuses.Charlie LeDuff, Detroit’s populist, citizen journalist’s youtube channel here.  At least he’s sticking around.

Are you looking at beautiful photos and feeling sorry for Detroit, and yourself?  See Time Magazine’s photo essay by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre (less porn-like, more thoughtful).

Hipster hope, artists, collectivists and small business types can’t save it either:  A Short Culture Wars Essay-Two Links On Detroit & ‘Ruin Porn’

GM is not a municipality, but good money got put in, probably after bad and it reeks of politics: From The Detroit News: ‘How The Treasury, GM Stock Deal Got Done’

Modernism At The Movies.

Flying Over The Nebraska Of My Life

So much of our lives dissolves.
What did I do the day before
I met you? You remember
what I was wearing that holiday.
What did I wear the next morning?
What did I write the day my mother died?

I fly at night over the plains.
There is a cluster of lights,
a starfish shape glittering. Then
darkness and darkness.
Then another clump bearing
long daisy petals of roadway.

Then nothing again. How much
of my living has fled like water
into sand. The sand is not
even damp to the hand.
Tears and wine and sparkling
water all vanish the same.

I know looking out the plane’s
dirty window that there are houses,
barns, roads, trees, stores
distinct in that darkness I once
drove through. I knew them and will
never know them again.

The plane is flying from lighted
place to lighted place, but
our arc is from the dark into
brightness then back into darkness.
I want to possess my own life like a
necklace, pearl by pearl of light.

–Marge Piercy

A repost-For a special friend, you know who you are.

Via kotte.org, some of New York’s iconic, modernist structures placed in new surroundings…

On that note, Land Art is often about removing the monetary value, commodification and fungibility of a piece of art and making something big enough, weird enough, useless enough; maybe making a beautiful/ugly enough imitation of Nature or man’s design within Nature.

Here’s Wikipedia, keeping it simpler:

‘Land art, earthworks (coined by Robert Smithson), or Earth art is an art movement in which landscape and the work of art are inextricably linked.’

Sometimes, maybe, it doesn’t really inspire the imagination:

Or maybe it’s a little gimmicky, as I imagine ‘Christo’ revealing his work with a magician’s flourish of the hand.

‘Essential’ art?:

Moving along, a reader links to W.S.  Merwin’s ‘Tergvinder’s Stone,’ where you get some weird metaphysical notions of space/non-space, subjectivity/objectivity going on.

Abstract Modernism? Mid-Century Modernism? Relentlessly rhythmic, ambitious and (P)rophetic pieces looking to reshape not Nature, but how readers should think about Nature?

(addition: Plymouth Rock? Uh-oh…what is the poem being asked to do? What about the reader?):

‘One time my friend Tergvinder brought a large round boulder into his living room. He rolled it up the steps with the help of some two-by-fours, and when he got it out into the middle of the room, where some people have coffee tables (though he had never had one there himself) he left it. He said that was where it belonged.

It is really a plain-looking stone. Not as large as Plymouth Rock by a great deal, but then it does not have all the claims of a big shaky promotion campaign to support. That was one of the things Tergvinder said about it. He made no claims at all for it, he said. It was other people who called it Tergvinder’s Stone. All he said was that according to him it belonged there.’

As previously posted, of the land artists, Richard Serra seems quite substantial:

Click through for a Serra-released photo of four metal pillar-forms aligned in the deserts of Qatar, designed to inevitably rust.  The piece has a slight ‘2001: A Space Odyssey‘ feel, but that could just be me.

‘The Qatar Museums Authority is estimated to spend about a billion dollars per year on art. At its head is the young Sheikha al-Mayassa Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, a sister of the Emir of Qatar and a Duke University graduate, who was recently named the most powerful person in the art world by ArtReview.’

Get while the getting is good, so long as the Sheiks have the dough.

Check out Hyperallergic’s visit to ‘Shift,’ a series of concrete forms he left in an Ontario field.

Here’s Serra discussing a piece of his at 21 West Gagosian, or a densely-packed, carefully measured series of metal forms in a room.  What does the viewer experience in this space?:

Related On This Site:A structure in the desert…not even a city Update On LACMA, Michael Heizer And The ‘Levitated Mass’-Modern Art And The Public

Denis Dutton suggested art could head towards Darwin (and may offer new direction from the troubles of the modern art aimlessness and shallow depth…the money and the fame) Review of Denis Dutton’s ‘The Art Instinct’

No thanks to living in planned communities upon someone else’s overall vision.: Roger Scruton In The City Journal: Cities For Living–Is Modernism Dead?…Repost-Via Reason: ‘Salvador Allende’s Cybersocialist Command Center’…

For a philosophical friend, with similar doubts:

“Space, it follows from the Kantian analysis is empirically real; that is to say, it is real ‘with respect to everything which can be given to us as an external object’.  It is also transcendentally ideal; which means, in Kantian nomenclature, that ‘ with respect to things…considered in themselves ‘ space is not real.  Time, too, in which all perceptions are situated, is empirically real, that is to say it is real ‘with respect to all objects which could ever be given to our senses; and it is transcendentally ideal.  ‘Once we abstract from the subjective conditions of perception it is noting at all and cannot be attributed to the things is themselves.”

S. Korner ‘Kant’ Pg 39 Pelican Books 1955.

So, why follow Kant out to such a limb…on his mission to put metaphysics on a more sure footing (when even greater minds can’t put the epistemology of mathematics on such a sure footing, though mathematics is an a priori and synthetic form of reasoning ((by Kant’s analysis)) and Kant’s metaphysics doesn’t even reach that standard)?

I am stuck with the contradiction of saying that objects are really there, and exist as I perceive them by my senses and by my reasoning…. but then also saying that I can not ever know them as they really are, and may never be able to know them.

Why should these be the limits by which I pursue knowledge?

Also On This Site:  A Few Responses To Kant’s Transcendental Idealism…Link To An Ayn Rand Paper: The Objectivist Attack On Kant…A Few Thoughts On Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts Of Liberty”

The Grauballe Man

As if he had been poured
in tar, he lies
on a pillow of turf
and seems to weep

the black river of himself.
The grain of his wrists
is like bog oak,
the ball of his heel

like a basalt egg.
His instep has shrunk
cold as a swan’s foot
or a wet swamp root.

His hips are the ridge
and purse of a mussel,
his spine an eel arrested
under a glisten of mud.

The head lifts,
the chin is a visor
raised above the vent
of his slashed throat

that has tanned and toughened.
The cured wound
opens inwards to a dark
elderberry place.

Who will say ‘corpse’
to his vivid cast?
Who will say ‘body’
to his opaque repose?

And his rusted hair,
a mat unlikely
as a foetus’s.
I first saw his twisted face

in a photograph,
a head and shoulder
out of the peat,
bruised like a forceps baby,

but now he lies
perfected in my memory,
down to the red horn
of his nails,

hung in the scales
with beauty and atrocity:
with the Dying Gaul
too strictly compassed

on his shield,
with the actual weight
of each hooded victim,
slashed and dumped.

–Seamus Heaney

Digging through the past and digging at the thing, a body almost lovingly rendered, made alive on the tongue, looking inward and trying to look forward.

Wikipedia’s Grauballe Man page.

Dirda reviews Paul Mariani’s new biography.

‘During his lifetime, Stevens was certainly admired — by fellow poets William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane and Marianne Moore, among others — but many early readers saw him as essentially a verbal dandy. Some critics likened his work to figure skating or tightrope dancing. His chief rival, Robert Frost, even declared that Stevens’s merely wrote about “bric-a-brac.” What’s more, as time went by, the poems grew increasingly abstract and their meaning more and more elusive. They all seemed to have something to do with the power of the imagination or could be construed as gorgeous meditations on time and mortality. In long works such as “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” — and even more so in his talks and essays — Stevens can be well nigh incomprehensible.’

As previously posted:

Helen Vendler here.

Vendler reviewed John Serio’s new “Selected Poems”  of Wallace Stevens.

“Stevens’s conscience made him confront the chief issues of his era: the waning of religion, the indifferent nature of the physical universe, the theories of Marxism and socialist realism, the effects of the Depression, the uncertainties of philosophical knowledge, and the possibility of a profound American culture, present and future.”

and

“Stevens’s poetry oscillates, throughout his life, between verbal ebullience and New England spareness, between the high rhetoric of England (and of religion) and the “plain sense of things” that he sometimes felt to be more American…”

See Also On This Site:  Trying to stick something against his poems: Wednesday Poem: Wallace Stevens-Anecdote of The Jar…Wednesday Poem: Wallace Stevens, The Snow Man…Friday Poem: Wallace Stevens And A Quote By David Hume

“Public opinion, I am sorry to say, will bear a great deal of nonsense. There is scarcely any absurdity so gross, whether in religion, politics, science or manners, which it will not bear.”

–Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. He who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or decisions possible or impossible to execute.”

–Abraham Lincoln

Maybe wisdom can be spun out of quotation sites.

When I went looking for a good hard-boiled detective novel, adrift in Spain and the Spanish language, longing for some raw American English to hold onto, I found Chandler’s High Window.

Here are some quotations of his, if you’re interested.

A lot of writers end badly; and according to the review, Chandler was no exception, though he did give us observations like these:

“Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but good-hearted and peaceful. It had the climate they yap about now. People used to sleep out on porches. Little groups who thought they were intellectual used to call it the Athens of America.”

Here is the link.   It’s been a long time since they just reviewed the book and not the author.

‘I am not young enough to know everything.’

–Oscar Wilde

Midsummer Tobago

Broad sun-stoned beaches.

White heat.

A green river.

A bridge,
scorched yellow palms

from the summer-sleeping house
drowsing through August.

Days I have held,
days I have lost,

days that outgrow, like daughters,
my harbouring arms.

–Derek Walcott

Hey, other people know much, much more and can explain what they know more clearly…but I had some spare time today.

A long time ago on Mars, according to the evidence, there was intermittent liquid water in many places, and near Gale Crater, where the Curiosity Rover has been traveling:

‘The data indicate the Yellowknife Bay area the rover is exploring was the end of an ancient river system or an intermittently wet lake bed that could have provided chemical energy and other favorable conditions for microbes. The rock is made up of a fine-grained mudstone containing clay minerals, sulfate minerals and other chemicals. This ancient wet environment, unlike some others on Mars, was not harshly oxidizing, acidic or extremely salty.’

As posted:

Conditions don’t look terrible for having once harbored some sort of microbial life, but finding such evidence of that life is another matter.

——————————

Why is the atmosphere so thin and how did it get that way?  Why is any water now locked, frozen, beneath the northern polar ice-cap?

What happened?

3.8 billion years ago, according to a new paper and press release, it’s possible to explain why an atmosphere a little thinner than that of Earth at one point, could eventually thin to just 1% that of Earth.

‘Modeling the long-term effects of this “ultraviolet photodissociation” mechanism, the researchers found that a small amount of escape by this process leaves a large fingerprint in the carbon isotopic ratio. That, in turn, allowed them to calculate that the atmosphere 3.8 billion years ago might have had a surface pressure a bit less thick than Earth’s atmosphere today.

“This solves a long-standing paradox,” said Bethany Ehlmann of Caltech and JPL, a co-author of both today’s publication and the August one about carbonates. “The supposed very thick atmosphere seemed to imply that you needed this big surface carbon reservoir, but the efficiency of the UV photodissociation process means that there actually is no paradox. You can use normal loss processes as we understand them, with detected amounts of carbonate, and find an evolutionary scenario for Mars that makes sense.”

The atmosphere is so thin liquid water would either immediately freeze or ‘boil’  due to lack of pressure.  Standing at the equator, the temperature at your feet could be 70 F and at your head 0 F.

This is beyond the level of hostility found in even extreme environments here on Earth (summit of Everest, Anarctica). Survival here would be no joke.

A few missteps, or a simple error in judgment could lead to death.  An unfortunate series of malfunctions in critical systems could lead to death.  No cargo transport’s on the way.  Any life we send must be able to sustain and provide for itself.

Aside from these rovers, this planet is beyond all known human experience.  There would be no signs of life; bleak, stark, alien and beautiful.

Let’s do it!

Via The Mars Science Laboratory At NASA: ”Mount Sharp’ On Mars Links Geology’s Past And Future’…Via Youtube: ‘The Challenges Of Getting To Mars: Selecting A Landing Site

NASA Via Youtube: December 21st, 2012 Mars Curiosity Rover Report

NASA Via Youtube: ‘The Martians: Launching Curiosity To Mars’…NASA Via Youtube: ‘Mars Science Laboratory (Curiosity Rover) Mission Animation…

Part of Bryan Magee’s series:

Nietzsche directed his thought against Christian morality, secular morality (Kantian and utilitarian), was quite anti-democratic, and anti-Socratic Greek (the beginning of the end).

A Few Thoughts On The Stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy Entry: Nietzsche’s Moral And Political Philosophy..A Few Thoughts On Allan Bloom–The Nietzsche Connection…Dinesh D’Souza And Daniel Dennett at Tufts University: Nietzsche’s Prophesy

Full post here.

Some cool photos at the link.

‘Each photograph, despite its location, is of some place only recently abandoned, and while the intended social relevance of Beyond Ruin Porn is subtle, each artist captured some ephemeral scene from our recent ruins. The moments in these photographs are likely now gone as the buildings continue their decline, or are destroyed, and like painters of the past considering Roman ruins, mark a fleeting moment in time.’

Beyond Ruin Porn Exhibit.

Meanwhile in Detroit, there’s a little bit of that ‘ruin porn’ aesthetic going on, but it’s also for sound:

———————-

As previously posted:

-Photographer Ben Marcin has a series called ‘Last House Standing.’ Solitary row-homes…the only ones left on the block.

-From Popular Mechanics, ‘Creepy Abandoned Military Sites From Around the World.‘

I love the delivery.  Here’s Robert Hughes on Modernism And Politics:

———————-

-Click here to experience ‘The Gobbler.‘

‘If you’re ever wondering what the War Room of “Dr. Strangelove” would look like if the movie had been directed by Prince, here you go.’

————————-

Full post here.

Click through for a Serra-released photo of four metal pillar-forms aligned in the deserts of Qatar, designed to inevitably rust.  The piece has a slight ‘2001: A Space Odyssey‘ feel, but that could just be me.

‘The Qatar Museums Authority is estimated to spend about a billion dollars per year on art. At its head is the young Sheikha al-Mayassa Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, a sister of the Emir of Qatar and a Duke University graduate, who was recently named the most powerful person in the art world by ArtReview.’

Get while the getting is good, so long as the Sheiks have the dough.

Serra is a quite accomplished modern artist and sculptor often working in the ‘land-art,’ category, or site-specific pieces interacting with the viewer and the natural surroundings. Check out Hyperallergic’s visit to ‘Shift,’ a series of concrete forms he left in an Ontario field.

Here’s Serra during an interview at 21 West Gagosian:

—————————-

Serra, I think, more than other land-artists, turns that discussion a little more inwards, towards the abstract, the body moving through a space of his design as he tries to bring something across to the viewer.

Or so says me.

Interview with Serra here.

—————————-

Pastoral

When I was younger
it was plain to me
I must make something of myself.
Older now
I walk back streets
admiring the houses
of the very poor:
roof out of line with sides
the yards cluttered
with old chicken wire, ashes,
furniture gone wrong;
the fences and outhouses
built of barrel staves
and parts of boxes, all,
if I am fortunate,
smeared a bluish green
that properly weathered
pleases me best of all colors.

No one
will believe this
of vast import to the nation

–William Carlos Williams

They designed a city in the heart of Brazil that really doesn’t work for people: Brasilia: A Planned City

No thanks to living in planned communities upon someone else’s overall vision.: Roger Scruton In The City Journal: Cities For Living–Is Modernism Dead?…Repost-Via Reason: ‘Salvador Allende’s Cybersocialist Command Center’…From Grist.Org Via The New Republic Via The A & L Daily: ‘Getting Past “Ruin Porn” In Detroit’…

A structure in the desert…not even a city Update On LACMA, Michael Heizer And The ‘Levitated Mass’-Modern Art And The Public;..where is modernism headed? Via Youtube: Justin, The Horse That Could Paint…

Two ways around postmodernism, nihilism?: One is Allan Bloom Update And Repost: ‘A Few Thoughts On Allan Bloom–The Nietzsche / Strauss Connection’…  Here’s a suggestion to keep aesthetic and political judgements apart-Roger Scruton In The American Spectator Via A & L Daily: Farewell To Judgment…

Repost-Via Reason: ‘Salvador Allende’s Cybersocialist Command Center’

First Snow In Alsace

The snow came down last night like moths
Burned on the moon; it fell till dawn,
Covered the town with simple cloths.

Absolute snow lies rumpled on
What shellbursts scattered and deranged,
Entangled railings, crevassed lawn.

As if it did not know they’d changed,
Snow smoothly clasps the roofs of homes
Fear-gutted, trustless and estranged.

The ration stacks are milky domes;
Across the ammunition pile
The snow has climbed in sparkling combs.

You think: beyond the town a mile
Or two, this snowfall fills the eyes
Of soldiers dead a little while.

Persons and persons in disguise,
Walking the new air white and fine,
Trade glances quick with shared surprise.

At children’s windows, heaped, benign,
As always, winter shines the most,
And frost makes marvelous designs.

The night guard coming from his post,
Ten first-snows back in thought, walks slow
And warms him with a boyish boast:

He was the first to see the snow.

–Richard Wilbur

A sad day.

After the terrible explosion in 1986, Richard Feynman was included on an independent panel to find out what went wrong.  He discovered a profound difference between engineers’ and managements’ probability estimates for number of flights without failure.  One potential (and very important) reason that a system-ending failure can go unnoticed is the tendency of managers to believe top-down explanations.

It’s vintage Feynman, inconoclastic, penetrating and brilliant:

“for whatever purpose, be it for internal or external consumption, the management of NASA exaggerates the reliability of its product, to the point of fantasy.”

“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.“

Rand Simberg has a different take:

’30 years after Challenger, NASA needs to finally be allowed to instead focus its funding on continuing with what has been working — to help private industry continue to reduce the cost of access to space, and to locations beyond earth orbit, and to make its plans on that basis going forward

Eventually there’s conflict not only between managers and engineers, but bureaucrats and politicians trying to bend institutions to their aims, too.

I see it as a human organizational thing.  Nature can’t be fooled, and takes no prisoners.  Even the best among men, and in man, makes for politics; even well-designed organizations can outlive their usefulness.

Is this really where NASA is?

Via The Mars Science Laboratory At NASA: ”Mount Sharp’ On Mars Links Geology’s Past And Future’…Via Youtube: ‘The Challenges Of Getting To Mars: Selecting A Landing Site

NASA Via Youtube: December 21st, 2012 Mars Curiosity Rover Report

NASA Via Youtube: ‘The Martians: Launching Curiosity To Mars’…NASA Via Youtube: ‘Mars Science Laboratory (Curiosity Rover) Mission Animation…

Antonio Machado, sent in by a reader, years ago now.

El ojo que ves no es
ojo porque tú lo veas;
es ojo porque te ve.

The eye you see is not
An eye because you see it
It’s an eye because it sees you.

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leafs a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

–Robert Frost

***This poem is very seasonally inappropriate. I realize that now. It was posted in the midst of a fever after leaving work, having already taken some NyQuil.

‘Cling tooth and nail to the following rule: Not to give in to adversity, never to trust prosperity, and always to take full note of fortune’s habit of behaving just as she pleases, treating her as if she were actually going to do everything it is in her power to do. Whatever you have been expecting for some time comes as less of a shock.”

–Seneca The Younger

‘What can I know? What ought I to do?  What can I hope?’

–Immanuel Kant

—————

There’s always been a bit of the showman about Jeff Koons; the kind of young man who could put on a bow tie and try to give many museum-goers their time/money/aspirations’ worth at the membership desk.

This blog forgives people trying to explain what their art ‘means,’ exactly, but confesses to pleasure in seeing Koons put on the spot under the suspicious eye of an ornery old Robert Hughes.

I don’t fault Koons for finding himself firmly within modernism, searching for universal forms and broader historical context within those confines, but I admit it’s nice to see him held to account for his bullshit, and perhaps the broader, deeper bullshit he shares with many modern and postmodern artists: Pursuing novelty and recognition and thus making art into a business and often commercializing it, aiming for celebrity while offering meta-critiques on celebrity, making the personal and private very public (masturbation into social commentary, sex into meta-critques of religious shame, ‘culture’ and pornography).

Two quotes by Hughes that stood out:

‘Religion is diminished into celebrity..a kind of reverse apotheosis.‘

‘This alienation of the work from the common viewer is actually a form of spiritual vandalism.’

It’s tough to say that art is really about religion (though much clearly is), but rather more about an experience Hughes wants as many people as possible to have, and that such experiences can elevate and expand.

Aside from the above, there’s something that strikes me as not just late 20th century-modern about Koons, but also very American.

As previously posted:

Is street-art, or the use of graffiti & mixed-materials performed illegally out in public (on public and privately owned property) partly due to the success of capital markets?

-Banksy’s website here.

-Newsweek’s piece: ‘See You Banksy, Hello Invader.‘

Response To A Reader On ‘Radical Chic’ And A Link to Banksy’s ‘Dismaland’

I’d argue that it’s possible, especially with the constant cries of modernism to ‘make it new,‘  I think this is one way we’ve arrived at pop art, and the desire to blend conceptual art and popular music together.  This is in evidence from The Talking Heads to Lady Gaga to Jay Z promoting his new album alongside Marina Abramovic at MOMA.

Many modern artists, from Andy Warhol to Jeff Koons to Damien Hirst are people with some artistic talent and native gifts, but not as much in the way of classical and/or formal training.  They may be trying to have a conversation with the old masters, but they are clearly also the products of, and speaking to, ‘modern’ audiences.  Much of this has become a world of shallow depth, especially among the less talented. Drawing and drafting can be underdeveloped skills while ‘mixed-media’ presentations, celebrity, marketing, money and fame are all thrown into the same pot.

Also On This Site: Roger Scruton says keep politics out of the arts, and political judgment apart from aesthetic judgment…this includes race studies/feminist departments/gay studies etc.:  Roger Scruton In The American Spectator Via A & L Daily: Farewell To Judgment

Goya’s Fight With Cudgels and Goya’s Colossus.  A very good Goya page here.

Joan Miro: Woman… Goethe’s Color Theory: Artists And Thinkers…Some Quotes From Kant And A Visual Exercise

A Reaction To Jeff Koons ‘St John The Baptist’

Denis Dutton suggests art could head towards Darwin (and may offer new direction from the troubles of the modern art aimlessness and shallow depth) Review of Denis Dutton’s ‘The Art Instinct’

Losing Steps

1
It’s probably a Sunday morning
in a pickup game, and it’s clear
you’ve begun to leave
fewer people behind.
Your fakes are as good as ever,
but when you move
you’re like the Southern Pacific
the first time a car kept up with it,
your opponent at your hip,
with you all the way
to the rim. Five years earlier
he’d have been part of the air
that stayed behind you
in your ascendance.
On the sidelines they’re saying,
He’s lost a step

2
In a few more years
it’s adult night in a gymnasium
streaked with the abrupt scuff marks
of high schoolers, and another step
leaves you like a wire
burned out in a radio.
You’re playing defense,
someone jukes right, goes left,
and you’re not fooled
but he’s past you anyway,
dust in your eyes,
a few more points against you.

3
Suddenly you’re fifty;
if you know anything about steps
you’re playing chess
with an old, complicated friend.
But you’re walking to a schoolyard
where kids are playing full-court,
telling yourself
the value of the experience, a worn down
basketball under your arm,
your legs hanging from your waist
like misplaced sloths in a country
known for its cheetahs and its sunsets

–Stephen Dunn

by Colin Angus Mackay

“I must take the view, your Grace, that when a man embarks upon a crime, he is morally guilty of any other crime which may spring from it.”

-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

A discussion of deductive and inductive reasoning here, as it might relate to solving crimes (which is highly dramatized in our culture, perhaps partly due to Holmes).

Strange Maps has this.

221B Baker Street page here.

Rachel Cusk at The New Republic on Kingsley Amis:

Don’t let the title scare you away:

‘Amis’s fear of art being viewed as pretense and the artist as lazy or dependent is clear from these remarks; and who would accuse an artist of being lazy? The answer might be: a working man. With his talk of product and workbenches, Amis is trying to create the image of the writer as an ordinary worker, to dispel art’s associations with foppishness and pretentiousness and self-aggrandizement.‘

===

Do you recall that massacre at a Tunisian resort by an ISIS savage?  The Tunisians sure don’t, because the tourists aren’t coming back:

Michael Totten:

‘I’ve been almost everywhere in that country more than once. It felt solid. Kick the walls if you want. They won’t buckle. It will not come apart like Syria, Iraq or Libya. It was obvious from the very beginning that, post-Arab Spring, Tunisia would not explode in civil war like Syria, rupture into fragments like Libya, or devolve into another police state like Egypt. It sure as hell wouldn’t go the way of Afghanistan. That was clear.’

===

3.

You tossed a blanket from the bed
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed’s edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.

Has there been a better poet writing in English in the past 150 years?   Probably not.

The depth of commitment to his metaphysical vision and the breadth of that vision is remarkable.   Look at the rhyme and meter!  Sinful.

Free audio here (tolerable). Uncle Fred Flits By print here. I could not find the print for free, but you can check out the first few pages at the above link.

==================

As previously posted:

“You can’t be a successful dictator and design women’s underwear. One or the other. Not both.”

—————–

Also, this piece discusses some of Wodehouse’s darker characters.  There’s a polished musicality and a keen ear that leads to superb comic timing and great depth.  It’s farcical and moves along nicely, but also a provides a look at a whole society and generation through the goings-on of a lovable fop.

You don’t have to be Anglo, nor an Anglophile, to appreciate such writing I don’t think.

What a ghastly Youtube still:

So you’ve decided to invest in a money market fund instead of your 401K?  or perhaps be an artist instead of a doctor?  or take that spontaneous hike across the country?

Well, good for you but……..

you might want to read the poem again.

The Road Not Taken

===================

Different colors represent different voices, the length of each bar/spaces between bars represent the duration of notes in time.

Is this kind of visualization helpful for players? for you as a listener?

Addition:  Music Animation Machine webpage here.

Full review of the review here.

Book here.

“Nabokov in America” is rewarding on all counts, as biography, as photo album (there are many pictures of people, Western landscapes and motels) and as appreciative criticism. Not least, Roper even avoids the arch style so often adopted by critics faintly trying to emulate their inimitable subject.’

What’s more American than an exiled member of the Russian aristocracy intimately making his way into the English language and peering out from a thousand Motor Lodges?

===============

As previously posted an interview with Nabokov at The Paris Review.

A little bit about politics and also the politics amidst fellow writers and critics:

‘…when in doubt, I always follow the simple method of choosing that line of conduct which may be the most displeasing to the Reds and the Russells.’

and:

‘Who’s in, who’s out, and where are the snows of yesteryear. All very amusing. I am a little sorry to be left out. Nobody can decide if I am a middle-aged American writer or an old Russian writer—or an ageless international freak.’

On his professional collection of butterflies:

‘The pleasures and rewards of literary inspiration are nothing beside the rapture of discovering a new organ under the microscope or an undescribed species on a mountainside in Iran or Peru. It is not improbable that had there been no revolution in Russia, I would have devoted myself entirely to lepidopterology and never written any novels at all.’

Via Youtube: An interviewer, Nabokov and Lionel Trilling discuss ‘Lolita:’

Napoleon was not really worse than many, not to say most, men. He was possessed of the very ordinary egoism that seeks its welfare at the expense of others. What distinguished him was merely the greater power he had of satisfying his will, and greater intelligence, reason and courage; added to which, chance gave him a favourable scope for his operations. By means of all this he did for his egoism what a thousand other men would like to do for theirs, but cannot. Every feeble lad who by little acts of villainy gains a small advantage for himself by putting others to some disadvantage, although it may be equally small, is just as bad as Napoleon.”

–Arthur Schopenhauer

The quote is from On Human Nature.

============

If you like this, check out the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet.

Is There Any Island Left For Islanders Like Him? From The New Yorker On Billy Joel: ‘Thirty-Three Hit Wonder’…Scott Tennant-Couperin’s ‘The Mysterious Barricades’

Full post here.

Well, you probably know that people rarely make rational decisions, but did you realize how easy it is to be wrong?

…the additional information skews the odds, and with Cardano’s method you can make a rational, though counterintuitive, decision.

We have all probably “trusted our intuitions” in crucial moments but haven’t had rational explanations for why we did so, or for that matter, we probably don’t have a good definition of what intuition is either.

The Nikzor site has some good fallacies and Marilyn Vos Savant’s (of Parade and Jarvik fame) page has some as well.

*Check out Johnson’s garage band science page if you’re interested in simple experiments, especially to do with electricity.

See Also:  Marilyn Vos Savant:  The Game Show Problem

Not Ideas About The Thing But The Thing Itself

At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.

He knew that he heard it,
A bird’s cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.

The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow…
It would have been outside.

It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep’s faded papier-mache…
The sun was coming from the outside.

That scrawny cry–It was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,

Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.

–Wallace Stevens

1

But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief
That thou, her maid, art far more fair than she. . . .

…The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars
As daylight doth a lamp; her eyes in heaven
Would through the airy region stream so bright
That birds would sing and think it were not night.
See how she leans her cheek upon her hand!
O, that I were a glove upon that hand,
That I might touch that cheek!

From one of Shakespeare’s most famous passages…

185

“Faith” is a fine invention
When Gentlemen can see—
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency.  

–Emily Dickinson

“That’s the difference between governments and individuals. Governments don’t care, individuals do.”

–Mark Twain

“Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.”

–H.L. Mencken

“The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.”

–P.J. O’Rourke

Someone’s got to do the horse-tradin.’    There’s a fine line between ego-gratification and public service.

We’ve got to send them the right incentives and feedback.

IV

My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.

–William Butler Yeats

Whole poem here.

Map here.

County by county map, in case you’ve ever wondered…

    “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation…”

The rest here.

Great weather here in Seattle.  To most people it might mean a day off work, family and friends, fireworks and backyard barbecues, but it’s worth thinking about just how much the colonialists had been through to get to that point.

Addition:  From Maverick Philosopher:  The Difference Between Patriotism And Jingoism.

It’s not a fancy photo, but it’ll do:

Do you have a particular idea or type of blog post that you would like to see me post?

I get a few emails each week with good links and suggestions, but I don’t usually have the time to follow-up.  There are some really good ideas out there.  If you don’t respond in the comments, just shoot me an email.

Thanks in advance, and to everyone that’s stopped by.  It’s appreciated.

“Government can easily exist without laws, but law cannot exist without government.”

–Bertrand Russell

“It is necessary for him who lays out a state and arranges laws for it to presuppose that all men are evil and that they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope.”

–Niccolo Machiavelli

“We hold these truths to be self-evident:

 That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

From the Declaration Of Independence.

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Maybe Machiavelli was just really an artist and writer working well within the bounds of traditional moral thinking (Catholic and Aristotelian through the church), but just wanted an audience? to be little shocking?

See Also: Garrett Mattingly On Machiavelli-The Prince: Political Science Or Political Satire?