Tuesday, March 28, 2017

ETAOIN SHRDLU


It's crackers to slip a rozzer the dropsy in snide.
--Melvin Cowznofski

Any adult worth knowing -- at least any American adult -- read MAD Magazine as a youth.  And therefore, any adult worth knowing, with the same nationality qualification, remembers the meaningless phrase ETAOIN SHRDLU, found in various odd places in MAD's cartoon panels.  Just as Smokey Stover comics -- the pride of a slightly earlier generation -- were replete with wall decorations containing iconic phrases such as "Foo" and "Notary Sojac."

But those of us with any journalistic leanings quickly came to learn the true meaning of ETAOIN SHRDLU.  For others, yesterday's New York Times provided a refresher course.  Those twelve letters happen to be, in decreasing order, the twelve most frequently used letters in the English language.  And, more to the point, they also happen to be the first twelve letters on a linotype keyboard -- linotypes, for technical reasons I won't go into, because I don't know the reasons, used such a keyboard rather than the "QWERTY" keyboards with which we are familiar from our computers and/or typewriters.

What is a linotype?  Ah, my child.  Great hulking, noisy, moving machines that converted each line that you, the writer, had written into a solid lead line of type (a "slug") from which -- ultimately and indirectly -- a newspaper was printed.  As a sniveling, callow, high school newspaper editor, I hovered nervously every two weeks, ready to veto when necessary, as employees of the local city newspaper -- which served as our school newspaper's printer -- composed each page, fitting slugs into place on a composing table, based on our more or less approximate make-up diagrams.  The linotype machines were grinding away in the background, everywhere about us, and they were awesome!

But the important fact, for our purposes, was that once the operator began typing a line, there was no way to go back and correct it -- the beast was in motion, and the molten lead would be poured.  So, when he made a mistake, he slipped his finger over those first twelve letters.  When an editor ran across ETAOIN SHRDLU, he knew that the line was in error, and he had it pulled off the composing table.

Except, sometimes he didn't -- and the ultimate reader was treated to a line of gibberish, topped off with the puzzling name (the author, he might wonder?) of ETAOIN SHRDLU.  As a versifying journalist, writing for a Wisconsin newspaper, put it in 1903:

Some fiendish printer is my secret foe
  On the top floor.
He has a trick that fills me up with woe
  And oaths galore.
I wrote a sonnet to my lady’s hair
And said that “only with it can compare
etaoin shrdlu cmfwyp vbgkqj xgflflflfl.”
— This made me sore.


Modern technology caught up with the New York Times in July 1978, when it made its last use of linotypes.  And offered a final salute to ETAOIN SHRDLU, a phrase then entrusted to the care and handling of MAD Magazine.  

Monday, March 27, 2017

Manhattan in March


Typical post-storm
snow bank
Broadway at 84th
The city after a busy day.  The city on rainy afternoons.  The city when you take a day off, or get up at the wrong hour, or get off at the wrong stop and let yourself wander down unfamiliar streets and suddenly find a movie theater you never thought existed and can't wait to enter.   A writer's city; .... 
--
André Aciman, "New York, Luminous,"
Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere


Most of my visits to New York have been in autumn.  When the sun is warm but the air is cool.   Cool, but not cold.  When the leaves along the streets and in the parks are changing color.  When the oppressive heat and humidity of summer are history, and tourists throng the streets.

I returned home last night from four days in New York -- but this time, New York in March.  Temperatures changing radically, within hours, from mild to cold, from cold to mild.  Rain threatening hourly, but drenching the city only occasionally.  Great piles of snow heaped at every corner, left behind by snowplows a week earlier, when the Northeast was hit by an unseasonable snow storm.  Kids who couldn't figure out how to dress in March, apparently -- some bundled up in parkas and scarves, while their friends wore t-shirts and shorts. 

My first thought, upon arrival Thursday night, was that tourists must abandon or avoid the city in March. But maybe not weekend tourists, I later discovered, and not basketball fans. Hordes poured out onto the streets the following evenings, on Friday and Saturday nights.  Especially in Times Square.  And in the blocks around Madison Square Garden, dressed in school colors, in town for the NCAA playoffs.

What do I do in the city on a short visit?  If I had been with family, hours would have been spent eating, talking about eating, and debating where to eat.  Alone, eating is primarily a rapid exercise in re-fueling.

New 96th Street Station

I had only two pre-planned activities.  One -- to the derision of some friends back home -- was to ride the newly opened first phase of the Second Avenue subway -- a Second Avenue line planned for over a century and opened -- a short stub of it, that is -- just this year.  At present, the three new stations on Second Avenue, between 63rd and 96th, are served by an extension of the Q line.  Attractive stations, and the ride to the end of the line gave me a chance to walk back down to Midtown from E. 96th. A West Side kid (by self-adoption) braving the streets of the East Side!

My other explicit objective was attending the Metropolitan Opera's production of La Traviata.  This production was unusual in that the settings and costumes were more or less contemporary (although the score, of course, was totally traditional -- in Italian, with English subtitles on the back of the seat in front of you).  I always question updates of classic works, although I thought the 1995 motion picture production of Richard III, set in the 1930s, was interesting and well-done.  Unfortunately, the story of a high class prostitute with a golden heart, a fallen woman, surrounded by devoted flocks of partying men, who falls in love with one man for the first time and then sacrifices her romance at the behest of his family -- a story that may seem marginally conceivable in its original nineteenth century setting -- seems ludicrous when staged in a room sparely decorated with 1950s style furniture where the heroine entertains mobs of adoring men dressed in black tie.

But the singing was great, Lincoln Center is always fun, and I defer to the critical reviews that swoon over the production.

The rest of my visit -- like most of my visits around the world, starting with my travels as a 21-year-old student -- was devoted to wandering, looking at people passing by, and absorbing the architectural surroundings.  These pursuits are perhaps more rewarding in Manhattan than they would be in, say, Kansas City.  My hotel was on West 87th, in the heart of my favorite part of the city, where the people and families passing by all look worth knowing, and the ornate brownstone row houses turn me green with envy.

Art imitating art
Metropolitan Museum of Art

Each time I visit New York, I try to get a better feel for the Upper West Side, from Central Park to Riverside, and up to and including the surroundings of Columbia University.  And I get that feel by walking.  My phone's pedometer tells me that I walked a total of 32 miles in three days which -- considering that I also spent a number of hours in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as eating, and sitting on benches, and riding on subways -- was a fairly impressive total.

As Aciman likes to say, an ideal way to enjoy New York is to "let yourself wander down unfamiliar streets."  In this respect, he sums up that which for me, at least, is much of the joy of travel.  At least, urban travel.  And especially travel within New York City.

Wednesday, March 22, 2017

Spare change?


He looked like a typical panhandler.  Shabby parka and pants.  Weary, as he watched the cars make U-turns past his location on the center meridian of Montlake Boulevard at Hamlin Street.  Watching them pass by, one after another, without stopping.

And then I noticed the canvases -- four or five -- at his feet.  I was walking at some distance, and was in no position to judge their artistic merits, but they were bright landscapes, done in oils or acrylic, that showed at least a basic understanding of technique.   They weren't the impulsive splashes of someone who merely ran across some art materials in a dumpster. 

I've seen him several times now, in the same location.  I haven't approached him or looked at his work more carefully.  I don't really intend to.  But he makes me think about begging and homelessness in America.

This post isn't the usual call for compassion, although I certainly urge compassion.  Nor for far greater efforts by government to provide a safety net for those in trouble, although I strongly support such a safety net.

Instead, I feel surprised at how surprising it is in today's America to see a panhandler offering paintings.  Or to see anyone -- other than a slumming young artist or musician -- offering any inducements for passers-by to stop and help, for any reason other than pure charity.

Other nations have far more poverty.  And yet -- with the possible exception of India -- you rarely see a beggar simply sitting or standing passively, waiting for a handout.  Instead, as a tourist, you are besieged by offers of many kinds, most perhaps scams.  The guy who offers to guide you, and whom you can't shake.  The guy who starts talking to you about the cathedral you're visiting, and then asks for payment.  The guy who wants to talk with you "to improve my English," and moves the conversation into his need for a little help, or his suggestion that you accompany him to his "brother's" excellent hotel where you will be lodged royally.  Or the young person juggling or singing or playing an instrument or posed as a statue or doing acrobatics.  Or the fast talker who persuades you to make your fortune at a few quick hands of three-card Monte..

The variations are endless, but the common thread is the poor person's active effort to separate you -- the presumably wealthy traveler or local resident -- from some of your money.  These efforts may be more or less admirable, but they all at least involve the swindler's active efforts.  With many of these folks, you feel that with a little capital and a little luck, they could become successfully businessmen -- i.e., swindlers at a level that confers higher status and better meals.

From my folks' stories of the Great Depression, I gather that desperate Americans once made desperate efforts to pay for their next meals -- by hook or by crook.  By honest work when it could be found, but by less exemplary methods when it could not.  The fact that today's panhandlers seem so passive compared with those in foreign countries and with those in Depression-era America may simply be a function of today's American affluence -- no one in America these days has to beg on the streets unless he either enjoys begging or totally lacks ambition and competency. 

Or, I sometimes worry, it may reflect a general tendency of Americans in general, an increased inability to be inventive and assertive in finding ways to survive.  Passive panhandling cannot be particularly lucrative.  And it is far more deadening to one's self-esteem than perpetuating a good healthy scam, taking satisfying advantage of one's "marks."

So I'm happy to see our local artist offer his paintings.  I hope some motorists are inspired to stop and look at them.  Maybe buy one or two.  If nothing else, such a painting might make a good conversation piece.

Monday, March 20, 2017

Decennial


Ten years ago today, I jumped head-first into the wonderful world of blogging -- posting my first words on this blog.  It was a short post, announcing the arrival of my new blog, accompanied by what has now become an annual tradition on this date -- the boy on a haystack.

A very bright teenager from Colorado, on whose blog I had recently commented, left me my first comment.  He suggested that I write something "more profound," something worthy of his youthful critique.  And so my second post compared the waning days of the Bush administration with the rule of Big Brother in Orwell's 1984.

We are often blessed by our inability to see ahead to the horrors of the future.

Anyway, Confused Ideas has flourished, in its own small way, over the decade.  Daily readership reached a peak in 2012 and 2013, and has gradually declined since.  I have no idea why.

Over the past year or so, I've noticed that readers tend to come onto the blog and read a number of posts at the same time, rather than hitting on a particular post by use of a search engine.  Therefore, in looking over the past year, it's difficult to pick dramatic popular favorites.  But some posts did receive more hits than others -- I'll leave it to social scientists to determine their attraction.

And so -- this year's stats.  Over the past twelve months, I published 102 posts, the highest number by far since 2011. 

In absolute terms, the post that received the highest response was a description of my "adventure" taking the passenger ferry from downtown Seattle to Alki Point in West Seattle.   Almost as popular was a post suggesting that Sound Transit install turnstiles on its light rail system, to deter scofflaws from not paying their fares.

Other posts, in no particular order, that seemed to receive an unusually large number of hits compared with others published in the same time frame were -- ones expressing fear of the new Trump administration; reviewing the novel Lincoln in the Bardo; recalling the childhood horror of receiving inoculations at school; describing a hike on Rampart Ridge near Mount Rainier; waxing nostalgic over fireworks; describing my cross-country hike in Yorkshire; denouncing Brexit; regaling readers with a description of waking up with a bat flying around my bedroom; admiring a chamber music performance; and reviewing a novel about life in India written by a teenaged Anglo-Indian (Ruskin Bond).

No real pattern, is there?  This is not a blog with a focus.  A little something for everyone.  Which is one reason (among many) why this blog does not rank high on the best blog lists.  Although it should.

And so, head held high and with no change in policy forthcoming, we storm into our second decade.  Thanks for reading!

Saturday, March 18, 2017

The drama of defeat


College athletics is weird.  I usually ignore it.  I'm disturbed by all the resources that are devoted to it, and I'm bothered by the illogic of universities' having, over the years, essentially developed semi-professional teams to play on their behalf for the amusement primarily of non-students.

And yet, at times I've gone crazy supporting a university team.  As an undergraduate, I followed both football and basketball avidly.  As an adult, I can ignore college football when my school's team is mediocre, and become a fanatic in years when it shows promise.  I admit to having -- during those good years -- actually clicked on ESPN repeatedly on a Sunday morning, so eager I've been to get the week's rankings.

Basketball?  Nah.  Not so much.  Not since high school.  My university's never been particularly good at it, and -- in addition -- I've never particularly liked or been knowledgeable about the sport.

But today I was bored in mid-afternoon and noted that the Gonzaga Bulldogs -- a team from the Northwest Corner, albeit the boring "east of the Cascades" side of said Corner -- was playing in the NCAA playoffs.  The Zags nearly always have a decent basketball team, and I thought I'd show a little home-state spirit and watch the last ten minutes or so of the game.

When I tuned in, Gonzaga seemed comfortably ahead of the Northwestern Wildcats, but I kept one eye on the screen.  And then occurred something that -- to the national TV audience -- was more memorable than the ultimate Gonzaga win, or the fact that Northwestern seemed to have been cheated by some seriously bad officiating.

I refer, of course, to "the kid."  There was a skinny blond boy, apparently between 9 and 11 years old, sitting immediately behind the Northwestern bench, a boy on whose face played in extreme caricature every feeling, good or bad but mainly bad, passing through every Northwestern fan's soul throughout the game.  His hands were all over his rubbery face as he portrayed anxiety, horror, disbelief, supplication to the gods, fear, anger, and despair.  His face reddened.  His eyes brimmed with tears.  And when the refs totally missed an interference call on Gonzaga, instead calling a technical foul on the Northwestern coach -- his eyes overflowed as he slowly and distinctly mouthed the easily-read words "OH MY GOD!" 

A career as a great stage actor, perhaps.  But not a poker player.  The plasticity of his face enabled observers to read every thought crossing his mind, every emotion gripping his heart.

The network cameramen couldn't keep their cameras off the kid.  He was more fun than the game itself.  And he wasn't showing off -- he was totally oblivious to the fact that his every emotion was entertaining the entire nation. 

At the end of the game, the network's cameras skimmed quickly over the Zag celebration and the quiet disappointment of the (well-mannered) Northwestern team.   They lingered lovingly on the boy, his entire body drooping as, hope abandoned, he gave way to tears.  

And no one who has ever followed a team will ever laugh at him.  His face projected the deep emotions -- for some of us, somewhat shameful emotions -- of joy or depression that arise unbidden in the course of a game, in the course of a season.  We've all been there.  We may not have displayed our feelings for the entire stadium, let alone the entire TV viewing public, but we've at times felt those feelings every bit as strongly as did that young man.

The young man who, as it turns out, is the son of Northwestern's athletic director.  Wildcat alumni can rest assured that their alma mater's athletic director cares as much about the team's success as they do -- and that goes double, nay triple, for his kids.

Wednesday, March 15, 2017

Escaping the rez


Homes on Spokane Reservation

Washington contains 29 Indian reservations.  They range in size from the giant (over 2.1 million acres) Colville Indian Reservation in the northeastern corner of the state, down to the 13.49 acre Jamestown S'Klallam Indian Reservation on the Olympic peninsula.

A couple of reservations have, at present, no population -- including the Cowlitz Reservation near my hometown.   

And yet, the average Washington resident may go for years -- or a lifetime -- without ever knowingly entering a reservation.  Except, perhaps, to stop at a roadside stand to buy fireworks. 

These thoughts occur to me because I'm half way through a book* about an Indian teenager -- recommended to me by a Facebook friend -- who lives on the Spokane Indian Reservation.  The semi-autobiographical novel is classified as Young Adult fiction, and the boy's narration is often funny.  But his background is appalling in its poverty -- poverty both in physical amenities and in the mental and emotional lives of his family and of other Indians living "on the Rez."  Alcoholism is almost universal, and the alcohol leads to cruelty, child abuse, fighting, and lethargy. 

The boy, a bit of a misfit from birth, inspired by an elderly teacher's words, tells his parents he wants to leave school on the Rez and attend school in Reardan, a town just off the eastern border of the reservation.  His parents don't object, but he becomes the object of hatred from everyone else.  He has betrayed his tribe.  He's going white.

The kid is obviously smart -- smarter than most of the students at Reardan which is -- in the book and in reality -- an above average high school, especially for a town of only 571 population (the school draws from a wider area than just Reardan itself).  He has the expected problems in finding acceptance from an overwhelmingly white student body.

But what impresses -- and depresses -- me is the other part of his problem.  The rejection, the hatred he faces each night when he travels the some 20 miles back to his home on the reservation.  Life on an Indian reservation -- at least in this book -- is beyond dysfunctional.  It's pathological.  It's a life led without hope, without ambition, without the simple joys of family and friends one usually finds in even poor societies.  It's a life of hating oneself and one's ethnicity, of total belief in one's own inferiority, and a resentment of anyone who dares to stand out.  It's a life where drunkenness is life's only real solace.

I realize this is a work of fiction (although based on the author's own childhood).  And even if based on familiarity with the Spokane reservation, it's about life on only one reservation.  One shouldn't generalize.  And yet, I can't help the suspicion that America's experiment with "managing" its Indian tribes on reservations has been badly mismanaged for generations.
------------------------------------

*Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

Saturday, March 11, 2017

Change your clocks


"The cows all stay on Standard Time."

Fortunately, in today's non-agrarian age, we nowadays rarely hear that complaint about daylight savings time.  Maybe I'd hear it more if I wandered over to the east side of the Cascades.

But twice a year, I do read continual griping on Facebook and in comments to news stories about the apparently arduous task of changing clocks twice each year. 

Some -- those tending toward libertarianism -- feel that this is just one more governmental interference with the laws of nature.  Why should they have to change their clocks just because the government so dictates?  I suppose a few generations ago, they would have griped about the imposition of standard time within standard time zones.  Why shouldn't my "noon" be three minutes later than the noon perceived by someone a few miles to the east?

More frequently, the complaint is not about DST, but about the switch back to standard time.  Why not stay on daylight savings time all year around?  These people live at lower latitudes, I suspect.  They don't have to contemplate wintertime life in a city where dawn wouldn't break until about 8:30 a.m., especially on the usual cloudy morning. 

Me?  I'm happy changing from PDT to PST in the fall, and back to PDT in March.  I'm just a happy dude, except when I read stupid arguments.

When I was a kid, daylight savings was a perennial ballot topic, Washington being a voter initiative state.  All the time I was growing up, daylight savings time in Washington was local option.  There were a number of years when my city was on daylight savings time, and our adjoining city was on standard time.  You walked across the street, and you changed your watch (at least in theory).  In 1960, the voters finally approved Initiative 210, which mandated statewide daylight savings time from the last Sunday in April to the last Sunday in September.  The official voters pamphlet provided the following reasons to vote "No":

1. Farming, logging and many other industries would suffer heavy financial lost under Daylight Savings. DO NOT jeopardize jobs in Washington.

2. Children do not get their proper rest under Daylight Saving Time.

3. Seattle has 13 minutes more evening daylight under STANDARD TIME than Los Angeles has on DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME. What more do we need?

4. The State of Washington, in the past five years, has had a record increase in tourists - 20% since 1955 - with Standard Time. Tourists are not interested in time, their time is their own.

5. Washington voters have twice rejected Daylight Saving Time, in 1952 and 1954, by decisive margins. Don't let "The Playboys" wreck the economy of your State . . . VOTE NO on Daylight Saving Time.

Those were "stupid arguments," but had worked for a number of years. To my relief, they finally ran out of steam in 1960.  Washington has remained happy and prosperous under daylight savings time each summer ever since.  (A Washington member of Congress did introduce a bill in 2015 to except Washington from daylight savings, but it went nowhere.)

National daylight savings time, with a couple of states excepted,* was mandated by the Uniform Time Act of 1966.  The dates for daylight savings have been changed several times, including a year in the mid-'70s when -- because of the petroleum crisis -- we stayed on daylight savings time all year around.

We may continue to tinker with those dates in the future, but nationally-mandated daylight savings time is here to stay. 

Unless, of course, Steve Bannom decides it's a crime against nature.
---------------------------------------------

*Arizona is the most interesting of the states excepted, and remains all year long on standard time (which is the same as California's daylight savings time in the summer).  The huge Navajo reservation within Arizona, however, follows the national change to daylight savings time.  And the smaller Hopi reservation, entirely enclosed by the Navajo reservation, complies with Arizona law and remains on standard time.

Wednesday, March 8, 2017

South and West


In New Orleans in June the air is heavy with sex and death, not violent death but death by decay, overripeness, rotting, death by drowning, suffocation, fever of unknown etiology. ... The crypts above ground dominate certain vistas.  In the hypnotic liquidity of the atmosphere all motion slows into choreography, all people on the street move as if suspended in a precarious emulsion, and there seems only a technical distinction between the quick and the dead.

These opening lines of Joan Didion's new book, South and West -- perhaps "proto-book"1 is the better term -- are perhaps the most vividly descriptive lines in the entire volume.  In a few sentences they conjure up images of New Orleans -- which I've never visited -- that are unforgettable, and that also reinforce my preconceptions of that city's appearance and atmosphere. 

I found much of the remaining book -- with a number of excellent exceptions -- to be just what they purport to be:  rough notes written down by the author in 1970 during a road trip from New Orleans through Mississippi and Alabama.  They are, in general, notes and observations that she hoped eventually to work into a finished book.  She never wrote the book, and it's not entirely clear why she has published them "prehumously," although novelist Nathanial Rich proposes an answer in his Foreword.

 I had never heard of Joan Didion until 1970 when I read an essay published in Life Magazine.2  She recalled a Saturday afternoon in 1953, hanging around after lunch at a friend's fraternity house in Berkeley, while the friend went out to watch a football game.  From this small kernel, her essay blossomed into an expression of her amazed realization of how much university life had changed -- the "silent" generation becoming the "hippie" generation --  during the intervening 17 years.  As a guy who had myself been at college just before the cusp of that change in generations, I was dazzled by both her perceptiveness and her writing style.

Didion still remains a favorite author.  Her writing style is unique, and she often evokes a sense of the uncanny from her observations of the most apparently mundane events and situations.

In South and West, much of what Didion finds unusual and bizarre about the South was not unique to the South.  She seems to be simply unaware of the facts of everyday life in rural and small town America everywhere.  For example, she talks to a past acquaintance at a New Orleans party who has read her essay describing time spent among the hippies in San Francisco.  The man asks her

... why I had been allowed ... to "spend time consorting with a lot of marijuana-smoking hippie trash."
"Who allowed you?" he repeated.
I said that I did not know quite what he meant.
Ben C. only stared at me.
"I mean, who wouldn't have allowed me?"
"You do have a husband?" he said finally.  "This man I've thought was your husband for several years, he is your husband?"

This exchange sounds funny now, but in the small Northwest town in which I grew up it would have seemed totally normal in 1970.
But Joan Didion, who has lived many places, but primarily in fashionable areas on the two coasts, was appalled.  At another point, she reminds herself

It occurred to me almost constantly in the South that had I lived there I would have been an eccentric and full of anger, and I wondered what form the anger would have taken.  Would I have taken up causes, or would I have simply knifed somebody?

I suspect that she would have been overcome by the same anger had she lived in sleepy towns in virtually every state.  An anger shared by many women, certainly by 1970.

During their travels, she and her husband stayed at a variety of motels, most frequently at local franchises of mid-price national chains.  After a day of interviewing local figures, both town leaders and average folks, she felt relief checking into a motel.

Sitting by the pool at six o'clock I felt the euphoria of Interstate America.  I could be in San Bernardino, or Phoenix, or outside Indianapolis.

No doubt she was surrounded by a more cosmopolitan group at a Howard Johnson, say, than she had been at the local courthouse.  But I suspect that much of her relief came from being around people from a somewhat higher socio-economic level, from wherever they came, whose manners and opinions were therefore closer to her own.

I've never been to the Deep South, so my feelings about Didion's observations are entirely conjectural.  I don't doubt that -- aside from the peculiarities found everywhere in small town America -- the South presents its own peculiar differences -- certainly racial differences -- from conditions found in the northern and western states.  I feel this difference, as noted above, most deeply in Didion's observations of New Orleans, and the surrounding areas of Louisiana, an area that is perhaps not typical of the Deep South..

When I think now about New Orleans I remember mainly its dense obsessiveness, its vertiginous preoccupation with race, class, heritage, style, and the absence of style.

These are all preoccupations which, she claims, are antithetical to the preoccupations of the West, of Californians.

In New Orleans they also talk about parties, and about food, their voices rising and falling, never still, as if talking about anything at all could keep the wilderness at bay.  In New Orleans the wilderness is sensed as very near, not the redemptive wilderness of the western imagination but something rank and old and malevolent ....

Sounds creepy, just as I suspected.   I'm tempted to visit!

In his Foreword, Rank suggests that Didion's rough notes from 1970 are worth considering today, because she even then realized that America's destiny might not always be to serve the world as the beacon of rationality and progress -- the virtues of California -- that it was assumed to be in 1970.  She sensed that tribalism, small town virtues, ignorance and fear of the unknown -- even of the next county -- had deep roots, not just in the Deep South but in America in general.  That these atavistic fears and impulses were gradually creeping -- like the kudzu she saw climbing over everything in the South -- over the coastal virtues of  rationality and globalism and cosmopolitanism. 

In  other words, Rank claims that Didion foresaw the coming of Trump, or at least the forces that made Trump possible.

I think that interpretation is possible.  At one point she describes her growing sense that

... the South and particularly the Gulf Coast had been for America what people were still saying California was, and what California seemed to me not to be, the future, the secret source of malevolent and benevolent energy, the psychic center.  I did not much want to talk about this.

She interviewed the southern novelist Walker Percy, a gracious host who touched on this subject

"The South," he said, "owes a debt to the North ... tore the Union apart once ... and now only the South can save the North."

This theme was certainly present in Didion's notes and contemplations.  I'm not sure it was a major theme. In any event, it wasn't a theme on which Didion cared to dwell.  She expressed her immense relief when she finally boarded a plane back to Los Angeles.

An interesting collection of notes from an earlier stage of Joan Didion's career. I would prefer to have read a finished book in which she had incorporated some of this material in a polished manner.
-----------------------------------

1A very short book with an estimated Kindle reading time of two hours.  Priced at $10.99 on Kindle.

2Republished as "On the Morning after the Sixties" in her collection of essays, The White Album.

Tuesday, March 7, 2017

Just grumbling in the rain


Outside, the pitiless rain fell, fell steadily, with a fierce malignity
that was all too human.

--W. Somerset Maugham

Winter in the Northwest Corner, 2016-17.  Some days it's cold.  Some days it's wet.  But usually, it's wet and cold.

Today, again, it's wet and cold -- raining steadily and 37 degrees at 10 a.m.

Sure, if you live in North Dakota, that's not cold.  And if you live in nations with monsoon seasons, our total inches of rain won't seem impressive.  But in Seattle, this has been the coldest winter since 1985, and February's total precipitation (8.85 inches) was nearly three times normal (3.63 inches).

I can recall winters when we've had cold spells with temperatures down below 10 degrees.  But those cold spells were relatively short-lived.  Our minimums this year have rarely been much below freezing.  And while our rain has been steady, it's rarely been torrential such as you might experience in the Northeast.

It hasn't been the extremes that have tried men's souls.  It's been the monotony.  Not that we never get any sun and blue sky -- we do.  But for short periods, before the rain and the clouds return.  And while some University kids persist in wearing shorts and t-shirts as soon as the temperatures work their way above 40, you can tell they don't really mean it.  And you suspect they aren't out-of-state students from California.

We did have one memorable day, when the sun shone brightly.  Yes, that would have been February 2.  The mythical and non-existent Northwest groundhog took one look at the sun and dove back underground.  Six more weeks of winter.

Those six weeks run out in another nine days.  It won't be too soon for me.

Saturday, March 4, 2017

Moving on


The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

--Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam


Yesterday, I mailed in my tax return.  I also composed on-line and submitted a personal page for my university's quinquennial classbook, a publication that comes out every five years at the time of the class reunion.

What these two activities have in common, of course, are evocations of the moving on of the "Moving Finger." 

Completing my tax return gives me a financial summary of my past year.  But I also have kept a copy of every tax return I've filed since I was 30, and these returns -- taken together -- give me a financial summary of my life.  Some ups and downs, of course, but generally -- as with most middle-class American lives -- a steady improvement financially.  And then, with retirement, a struggle to balance an abrupt ending of wages against increasing value of investments.  Luckily, I retired just as a pleasantly strong upswing in the stock market began -- but no upswing ever lasts forever.

More interesting are my class pages, beginning with a simple typewritten paragraph or two back at the time of my tenth reunion, up through increasingly sophisticated printed pages with varying formats of text and photographs. In each, we present ourselves to our classmates in a manner as self-congratulatory as possible, depending on how it is that we want to congratulate ourselves.

But the astute reader can read between the lines.  My alumni association on-line ID -- selected in my 20s -- was and still is "wanderer."  At the time of my tenth reunion, unlike many of my more clear-minded classmates, I had spent time floundering through periods of graduate school and uninteresting employment, and was only now finishing my first year of law school.  No doubt a bit embarrassed, I emphasized my more interesting experience with wilderness backpacking.  Subsequent five-year periods showed increasing confidence in my professional activities, but even more increased emphasis on outside activities, and especially on travel.

By my 25th reunion page, I was talking about overseas hiking in Kenya and Norway, and my pages continued to emphasize similar experiences around the world as the years went by.  My most recent page, submitted yesterday, may well be the last page of its sort that the school will request -- I suspect the alumni association fears that our personal experiences will be increasingly depressing from this point forward, and that it would receive a rapidly decreasing number of submissions.  (Maybe they don't fear that at all; maybe that's just my gloomy "Eeyore" take on life!)

At any rate, my submission this year was primarily photographic, and my text was a short summary of my life -- not as an attorney, not as an investor, not as a loving family member, but as -- you guessed it -- as a traveler.

When I was 14, I traveled alone by train from Seattle to Chicago to visit a school friend.  Ever since, I've been hooked on travel.  [My school's overseas program in Italy] sealed the deal for me. 

Then followed whatever I could brag about in the small space allotted me.

It's been fun.  My life's far from over (I trust), but if it were over today, I'd be satisfied with what the Moving Finger has "writ."  I'd shed no tears to "wash out a Word of it."