---For Immediate Release---

The Northwest Corner will be closed until August 12, while Rainier96, (its publisher) sets off on a quixotic quest, hiking coast to coast across England. Rainier96 observes that, at this very moment and for the next few weeks, the climate of Seattle and its surroundings has (and will have) achieved its peak of perfection. Few places on earth can equal the Northwest Corner for beauty. Few places have a better and more elaborate network of hiking trails.

Rainier96 also takes care to point out that the forecast over the next two weeks for that portion of England to which he adjourns calls for rain showers virtually daily, with temperatures never to exceed 65 degrees.

His dampish hike, and his departure from the Northwest Corner, thus become what can only be called a bitter and dismal study in irony.

But a man's got to do what a man's got to do. Stiff upper lip, and all that. Note your calendars for mid-August.

Amor vincit omnia

When I was a lad I served a term
As office boy to an Attorney's firm.
I cleaned the windows and I swept the floor,
And I polished up the handle of the big front door.
I polished up that handle so carefullee
That now I am the Ruler of the Queen's Navee!

In a song that may sum up the careers of more than one cabinet minister (and not just in Britain), The Rt. Hon. Sir Joseph Porter, K.C.B., describes how -- by assiduously polishing apples as well as doorknobs -- he rose from lowly office boy to First Lord of the Admiralty.

Yes, it's July and it's Gilbert and Sullivan time again. Two years ago I reported on the Seattle Gilbert & Sullivan Society's production of The Mikado. This year, they are doing H.M.S. Pinafore, which I viewed last night.

As noted in my earlier post, you don't show up at a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta expecting either musical experimentation or philosophical profundity. These musicals were written as escapist fare. They served the mid-level tastes of Victorian society, just as Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical comedies served middle brow audiences in mid-twentieth century America.

But the operettas are unforgettably tuneful, they give a snapshot photo of the social and political currents of the day, and they both satirize public figures and parody the peculiar conventions of grand opera. Most of all, Gilbert's lyrics are just plain funny, even to us today. Think, perhaps, of an amalgam of Glee and Saturday Night Live, if that thought is even thinkable.

The entire production takes place on the deck of the H.M.S. Pinafore. The plot? Well, in a nutshell, if a large one: Ralph Rackstraw, a deckhand, is in love with Josephine, the captain's daughter (who, of course, lives aboard ship). She secretly returns his affections, but the romance is impossible because they are not of equal classes. Then Sir Joseph arrives to inspect the vessel, and -- being an absurd dandy, and a member of a (no doubt) Liberal cabinet -- reminds both captain and crew that class distinctions are only an accident of birth. ("A British sailor is any man's equal, excepting mine.") Sir Joseph also has a personal, non-official reason for his visit: to seek the hand of fair Josephine in marriage. The captain is delighted, Josephine is appalled, and Ralph is devastated.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Cripps (aka "Little Buttercup"), a woman of a certain age who brings supplies in a "bumboat" to peddle aboard ship, has her matrimonial eye on the captain. Her attentions are secretly reciprocated ("A plump and pleasing person!" he muses, as she walks away.) But, again, a loud and jolly vendor is hardly a proper spouse for a ship's captain -- class again stands in the way of true love.

Sir Joseph, his affections unaccountably rebuffed by Josephine, is about to leave in a huff, when the captain suggests that his daughter may well have felt too dazzled by his superior rank to accept his offer of marriage. This is an argument that is highly agreeable to Sir Joseph, and so he assures her, in his official capacity and as an "official utterance," that "love is a platform upon which all ranks meet." Thus reassured, Josphine turns away from Sir Joseph and throws herself into the arms of the delighted Ralph.

The outraged father shouts "damn," and the First Lord of the Admiralty, shocked at such language from an officer in Her Majesty's service, confines the now-disgraced captain to his quarters. He then commits Ralph to the ship's dungeon for his presumption in wooing a lady of gentle birth.

At this point -- deux ex machina -- Little Buttercup steps forward with a dreadful confession. She had cared for both the captain and Ralph in their infancy, and had mixed up their identities (cf. the absurd plot of Verdi's Il Trovatore, first performed just 25 years earlier). Ralph, therefore, is actually of upper class birth, while the captain belongs to the dismal lower classes. This changes everything -- Ralph emerges from the dungeon wearing the captain's uniform; the captain appears with a mop to swab the deck.

Sir Joseph immediately loses interest in Josephine. (When reminded that love levels all ranks, he replies, "It does to a considerable extent, but it does not level them as much as that.") Josephine, now being free of her unwanted suitor, joins Ralph in singing of their divine love for each other. The former captain, instantly reconciled to his new estate in life, joins hands with Little Buttercup as they sing a somewhat earthier serenade.

The entire cast sings a reprise of one of the best known songs of the production, a hymn to their common status, a status that transcends all bounds of birth and breeding.

For he might have been a Roosian,
A French, or Turk, or Proosian,
But in spite of all temptations
To belong to other nations,
He remains an Englishman!

For he is an Englishman,
And he himself has said it,
And it's greatly to his credit
That he is an Englishman!

On that high note, last night's entire cast, now on stage, broke into a rollicking chorus of Rule Britannia! -- as a gigantic Union Jack descended from above and the audience whipped itself into a frenzy of applause. The subsequent curtain calls were rousing, but, by that time, could only be viewed as anti-climactic.

We all staggered out of the theater -- exhausted and not quite clear in our minds how the plot had arrived at Point B from Point A, but nevertheless exhilarated, our heads full of melodies, and untroubled by any doubt whatsoever, as I suppose intended, that the late lamented British Empire was indeed the best of all possible worlds.

Consider the Lobster

There they were, still stacked on my table, those partially unread books I mentioned a couple of posts ago, and so I thought I'd try to find places for them on my bookshelves. But -- like a child supposedly cleaning his room -- I quickly got sidetracked. I just had to re-read an essay in one of them, an essay I'd read while traveling, four months ago. On re-reading, I find it stands the test of time. At least the test of four months' time.

I don't read as much fiction as some of you, and so I'd never heard of David Foster Wallace when I bought the little paperback volume of his essays, Consider the Lobster. But Wallace has been considered one of the finest young authors of our time. According to Wikipedia, he was a regionally ranked tennis player as a teenager. He went on to study English and philosophy at Amherst, where he graduated summa cum laude. His philosophy senior thesis was a discussion of modal logic (Richard Taylor's "Fatalism" and the Semantics of Physical Modality), and his English senior thesis became his first published novel (The Broom of the System). Three novels, three collections of short stories, numerous essays. An endowed professorship at Pomona.

Mr. Wallace: A young man of some considerable talent.

But I knew nothing of him. The book I hold in my hand contains a number of essays, all quite amazing for varying reasons. But most memorable -- to me, when I read it earlier -- was the eponymous essay, "Consider the Lobster," originally prepared for and published as an article in Gourmet magazine.

Wallace was asked to tell Gourmet's readers something about the Maine Lobster Festival, which had recently been praised on CNN by an editor of Food & Wine magazine. And so he did. He certainly did. His article began like a typical travel article discussing a typical American event, an event like a county fair. The MLF organizers couldn't have been too pleased, however, as he described in detail the tackiness, the discomfort, the long lines awaiting one at the festival, his description winding up memorably:

Nothing against the euphoric senior editor of Food & Wine, but I'd be surprised if she'd ever actually been here in Harbor Park, amid crowds of people slapping canal-zone mosquitoes as they eat deep-fried Twinkies and watch Professor Paddywhack, on six-foot stilts in a raincoat with plastic lobsters protruding from all directions on springs, terrify their children.

In a footnote, he admits that he probably was not the best person to describe the tourist-packed lobster festival, since he detests tourism in general: "As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing."

As for lobsters, he notes that they are essentially large, sea-going, insect-like creatures dating from the Jurassic -- related to spiders and centipedes (in Maine, they call them "bugs") -- that were considered food for the poor, folks who couldn't afford anything decent to eat, by the early New England settlers.

But these observations were all preparatory. Although the festival was a nightmare, and lobsters somewhat suspect as a food, he acknowledges that he is writing for gourmets who profess their love for the refined and nuanced flavor of the giant crustaceons. Gourmets, by definition, love fine cooking. So, he discusses in exquisite detail how lobsters are cooked. Or more specifically, how they are boiled. Alive.

Wallace admits that he's no vegetarian himself. He acknowledges that he loves meat as much as the next man. But he's uneasy. He's uneasy about the claims that lobsters feel no pain as they are thrust into a pot of boiling water. He discusses in some detail -- with some scientific sophistication -- the neurological system of the lobster. He observes its neurological differences from a human, and its similarities. He observes that arguments could be made either way, neurologically, as to whether and to what extent the lobster senses pain in the same manner as we sense pain. He observes the philosophical impossibility of knowing whether even highly evolved mammals sense pain as we do, in the absence of their ability to speak.

He does note disturbing lobster behaviorial traits, however, for what they're worth:

However stuporous a lobster is from the trip home, for instance, it tends to come alarmingly to life when placed in boiling water. If you're tilting it from a container into the steaming kettle, the lobster will sometimes try to cling to the container's sides or even to hook its claws over the kettle's rim like a person trying to keep from going over the edge of a roof.

I'm just saying, Wallace seems to say.

The lobster seems intelligent enough -- sentient enough -- to be expressing a preference, Wallace notes. A preference -- a preference we might expect, a preference we might express ourselves -- that it not be boiled alive.

And yet, he muses, boiling a lobster really is no more cruel than what we do to cattle, pigs, sheep, all the animals we eat daily, is it? In the final paragraphs of his essay he asks Gourmet's readers, essentially, how do you people live with yourselves? Do you have an ethical system that justifies inflicting this massive amount of suffering on innocent creatures? Or do you just not think about it? And if you just don't think about it, why not?

I'm genuinely curious. After all, isn't being extra aware and attentive and thoughtful about one's food and its overall context part of what distinguishes a real gourmet?

The article was paid for by Gourmet, and it was published. Its editors got far more than they bargained for, I'm sure. I can't imagine the reader reaction. But they're probably sophisticated readers; maybe they recognized a great piece of writing.

Four years later, David Foster Wallace hanged himself. He suffered from severe depression, it's been reported.

Now, back to sorting my books. You know, I really do need another bookcase.

Oh, by the way ... Bon Appetit!

Arcadia lost

For a number of years, a musical highlight of the summer has been attending performances of the Seattle Chamber Music Society's summer festival at the Lakeside School in north Seattle.

As I discussed three years ago, a major part of the attraction (for me) has been wandering around Lakeside's bucolic campus -- reminiscent of a New England prep school -- on a warm summer evening, enjoying a picnic before the concert, and mingling with the many non-paying music lovers who chose to sit on the lawn outside St. Nicholas Hall, enjoying the music as it was piped out to them over speakers.

Unfortunately, those days are now over. Lakeside now needs to use its campus facilities for its own students, even during summer. The relationship with the chamber music festival ended at its close last year. For the first time, the summer festival, like the society's winter festival, is being held downtown at the Nordstrom recital auditorium in Benaroya Hall.

I attended a performance last night. Nationally prominent musicians performed works by Kodály and Frank Martin, and an especially beautiful quintet by Dvořák. The performances were outstanding and the acoustics are reportedly improved, but the ambience is that of a more formal winter concert, not that of a summer quasi-outdoor festival. Rather than pouring out of St. Nicholas Hall into the warm summer air at intermission (where free lemonade awaited us), we poured out into the cramped second floor lobby where we found the traditional wine and $2 Starbucks coffee being offered for sale. Before the concert, rather than stroll around a silent campus, aglow in the dying rays of sunset on a warm summer evening, we strolled around the less pastoral streets of downtown Seattle.

Granted, "different" isn't always "worse," and shouldn't be sensed that way. "Different" is merely "different," and I know we'll all learn to love the festival's new urban surroundings. After all, who'd complain, when attending a concert at Carnegie Hall, that the building's not surrounded by acres of green lawn?

Still, I feel nostalgic. The final two weeks of the festival continue to be held at Overlake School, east of the lake in Redmond. I may struggle across the bridge next year for just one of those performances. I've heard the campus is beautiful.

Commonwealth Basin

It's been a long road to summer. It's been long, at least, for us hapless folks living in the damp Northwest Corner. Until this week, we'd enjoyed just one day in nine months when the thermometer reached 75 degrees (and that was 77° on June 23).

Our Fourth of July was cool and wet.

But then the skies cleared, the clouds perhaps blown asunder by all the fireworks. On Wednesday we reached 80°, and on Thursday it was 95°. It's cooled off only slightly since then. Today, we felt, the time had obviously arrived for a hike in the mountains.

Pat M. and I drove east on I-90 to Snoqualmie summit, took the Alpental off ramp, and arrived at the Pacific Crest Trail parking lot by 8:30 a.m. A beautiful day, and we were one of the first cars to arrive at the lot.

We began the hike to Commonwealth Basin, hiking through dense virgin timber. The mountains received late, heavy snowfalls this year, and the run-off was blasting across the trail at several points. We picked our way gingerly across these torrents, mindful that a slip would wash us across a number of sharp rocks before we eventually came to rest. A couple of miles in, we came to a stream blocking the trail. Downed logs obviously would make the crossing easy later in the season, but the increased width of the stream at this time of year made our chore more problematic. (This hike is recommended for late July.)

Pat took off his boots and found a place to wade across. Too lazy to do this myself, I crashed my way downstream through a hundred feet or so of prickly underbrush, finally finding a place with downed logs long enough to allow me to make my crossing dry-footed.

A long series of switchbacks later, the path opened up onto what our guidebook blissfully described as "heather gardens." "Snow fields" would be more accurate, and we slogged our way cross-country, edging our boots into the snow slopes as we searched for some sign of the trail. We were finally successful, and hiked a short distance farther before finding a rocky outcropping overlooking Red Pond (see photo¹⁾, nestled scenically in a glacial cirque. We ate our lunch, enjoying views of the Snoqualmie Valley and of dazzlingly white Mount Rainier looming in the distance.

The path continued another half mile steeply uphill to Red Pass, on the ridge above the cirque. Because of the snowy conditions, however, we ate lunch at Red Pond and proclaimed it as our destination. "Mission accomplished."

We hiked nine miles, round trip, with a net elevation gain of 1,860 feet. We were back at the car by 1:30 p.m. Not a seriously difficult hike, but challenging enough to leave our legs scratched and wobbly by its end. I've never hiked into Commonwealth Basin before, but it would be well worth doing again.

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¹Because your befuddled author did not discover that he'd forgotten to bring his camera until we reached the parking lot, this is a stock photo, but one that accurately shows the view from our lunch spot.

De-evolution

As you enter my tastefully disheveled living room, your gaze might well fall upon a half dozen paperbacks stacked carelessly on a small table -- books I've finished and haven't reshelved or, more likely, books I've started and haven't finished. If you'd visited me six months ago, those same books probably would have presented themselves for your inspection. A couple are guide books; a couple are fiction; one is -- for lack of better description -- a contemplation of the interaction between technological change and social evolution. The only book whose reading I'd consider as requiring the reader's serious, focused attention would be Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe.

The Elegant Universe stands out from the others by virtue of its clean, shiny, unwrinkled cover. The book -- although having perched on my table for many months -- has obviously never been opened.

Nicholas Carr, author of -- among other works -- The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains -- wouldn't be surprised. What the internet is doing, he argues, is dumbing us down.

Our brains continually re-wire themselves to meet our demands. For the past thousand years and until recently, Carr points out, brains of educated men¹ have been wired to read, to reflect, to analyze, and to synthesize. Reading reflectively places information and ideas into the brain's long term memory, a region where it's available for analysis and synthesis. "The Educated Man" -- the man whose brain had so developed -- was responsible for all the advances we've enjoyed in the arts and sciences since the bleak days of the Dark Ages.

The internet, on the other hand, does not demand reflective reading, and does not result in an organized body of information being stored in our long-term memories. Instead, Carr argues, our recently developed "hypermedia" encourage "clicking, skipping, and skimming." We look for fast, one-paragraph answers to specific questions. We find the answer on-line, for either our use or our amusement, and then we go on to something else. We still see and enjoy all the individual pretty trees, so to speak; we're losing, however, much of our capacity to notice -- as our ancestors, reading for long hours in a library would have noticed -- that the trees join to form a forest.

This long-term memory consolidation that today's brains are failing to achieve, in Carr's opinion, is the physiological basis for true intelligence. As a result -- we're getting dumber. Those of us who completed our formal education before the seductive lights of the world wide web danced about us with their many distractions have been only partially dumbed down. Our real concern should be with today's students -- kids writing supposedly critical school essays from Wikipedia and its hyperlinks, while at the same time multi-tasking with iPods, Facebook, cell phones and TV. How much information ever works its way very deeply into their young brains -- and to what extent have their brains even developed the tools to absorb, to analyze, to synthesize?

The Elegant Universe is critically acclaimed as perhaps the finest, clearest description of string theory -- the theory of our own universe's fundamental structure -- available to the general lay reader. It sits on my table, unread, because I find it more exciting -- less hard work, more immediately gratifying, less difficult to accomplish while subjected to constant distractions -- to look up stuff on Wikipedia, to check out people and their lives on Facebook, to read the barrage of news stories found on-line.

To write my blog.

Brains, like muscles, make constant adjustments to the demands placed on them. They build up; they build down. Carr says that today, brains in our digitalized society are building down. The allures of the internet are the primary cause.

Based on what I know about myself, I sure couldn't say he's wrong.

Oh, by the way. I didn't, of course, read Carr's book. I just read a two column review of the book in the Economist (6-26-10). Who has time to read an entire book? I have a blog to write.

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¹Throughout this essay, I use "man" and "men" in their antiquated, neuter gender, non-sex-specific sense. I do so intentionally, without discriminatory intent -- elevating hoped-for elegance of expression over clumsier language that some may deem more politically correct. Please try to live with it.

War toys

From behind the headboard slipped a tiny hunter-seeker no more than five centimeters long. Paul recognized it at once -- a common assassination weapon that every child of royal blood learned about at an early age. It was a ravening sliver of metal guided by some near-by hand and eye. It could burrow into moving flesh and chew its way up nerve channels to the nearest vital organ.

The seeker lifted, swung sideways across the room and back.

--Frank Herbert, Dune

A Defense Department agency is funding development of a new weapon, a "nano aerial vehicle (NAV) called the "Nano Scout," an acronym for Nano Sensor Covert Observer in Urban Terrain. The Scout will be a tiny flying instrument, the size of a hummingbird, that actually can fly and maneuver in the same manner as a hummingbird. The Scout can be directed to fly into buildings, explore the interior, and report back on enemy activities.

The device will be about 3 inches (7.5 cm) long, and weigh about the same as a couple of nickel coins. It will have a maximum forward speed of about 20 mph. Researchers are studying the nervous systems of insects to develop ways to give the devices the necessary intelligence to function with the least weight.

According to the report, Scouts will be used for observational purposes, and will be ready for the battlefield in 10-15 years. On-line commentators suggest other uses:

How about having a little hypodermic in it's [sic] nose instead, loaded with a powerful poison like potassium cyanide? That way the entire NAV becomes the bullet. You just ram it into the enemy kamikaze style and the payload is injected.

Our very own "hunter-seekers." Assassination by remote control, without the messiness of flying drone bombers!

Life imitates art. And life just gets more and more interesting.

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Ted Smith, Tech News Daily, re-pub. MSNBC (7-2-10)