Daydreaming on a cloud

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils.

Every few days, a box pops up on my iPhone screen, reminding me that I haven't yet backed up the contents of my phone in the "cloud" -- access to which Apple so kindly provides.  I haven't, and I probably won't, because doing so would just make even more data about me available to the world.

(As if I don't already spill it all, voluntarily, on Facebook!)

But as I was wandering about this morning, o'er the Wordsworthian UW campus, my mind began drifting over the concept of the "cloud," and its many implications.

One of the great unknowns of modern biological science is the meaning of "consciousness."  Is there some part of the brain devoted to our being "conscious"?  Almost certainly not.  Most neurologists would probably guess that consciousness arises out of the complexity of the brain -- at some point, the tangle of perceptions mediated by the brain, resulting in the actions of the body, becomes so complex that the subjective sensation of "consciousness" occurs.

No one can be certain that anyone besides him or herself experiences consciousness -- everyone but myself may be an automaton.  But that's a topic for another day.  Assuming that bodies much like ourselves have similar subjective sensations, we can safely assume that all humans are conscious.  As well as many animals.  But as we go down the list of cerebral complexity, we certainly feel safe in concluding that at some point, we reach animals that are not conscious. 

I doubt that a mosquito experiences subjective consciousness.  Or a clam.  Certainly not a paramecium.  Birds?  Maybe.  Ravens seem to have complex behavior patterns that suggest consciousness, but a raven is too canny to ever let you know one way or the other.

Now -- let's hypothesize that a brain is an organic computer.  I realize that most neurologists would question this hypothesis, but the brain at least resembles a very complex computer in the way that it receives information and "decides" how to act on it.  We even refer to the increasing complexity of computers as "Artificial Intelligence."  As we enable our computers to become more and more brain-like -- even human brain-like -- can we  be sure that they will remain simply machines?  Merely complex mosquitoes?

And if we concede that at some point a computer might begin to experience, subjectively, consciousness, we then must admit that we will have created something at least analogous to a human being.

Now a computer's contents -- such as the contents of my iPhone -- can be copied in the "cloud" (really, just in storage on some unknown entity's servers, but I like the "cloud" metaphor, because it's how we visualize such storage).  And from the cloud, the contents of my computer can be copied onto another computer. 

If we have not just an iPhone, but complex computers with consciousness, by uploading to the cloud we will be creating not just a clone, but a clone with a memory and a history of life experiences identical to those of the original -- up to the time that the original's contents were uploaded.  If the original computer was "guilty" of harmful acts against humanity, all its clones would be equally guilty.

This post is an example of thinking out loud on paper, or at least replicating my random thoughts while wandering on paper.  Or digitally.  Innumerable arguments, scientific and philosophical, can be made against just about every point I've made so far.  But bear with me for my concluding  final observations.

If a sufficiently complicated computer has the same consciousness as a human brain, then -- in theory, at least -- a human brain also could be uploaded to the cloud.  The difficulty would be one of technology, not concept.

And now, my final leap.  What if our human brains are merely carbon-based computers that some master race -- or "deity" -- has created for his/their own ends?  And what if the contents of our computer/brains, unbeknownst to us, are being uploaded to some celestial "cloud" on a virtually continuous basis, second by second?

The purpose of backing up a computer is to save a computer's contents as a precaution against anything happening to the original.  If I'd been conscientious and had backed up my iPhone, and had then lost the iPhone or had seen it run over by a truck, what would I do?  I wouldn't lament that my Great American Novel was lost, right?  I'd buy a new iPhone and quickly download into it the contents stored in the cloud.

Similarly, assuming my fantastic hypothesis were to be correct -- that our brains are being backed up in a heavenly cloud -- then it would be no big deal if our bodies were run through a wood chipper.  Every memory, every thought, every talent, every experience, would be preserved in the cloud.  Ready for downloading into a new body at our creator's leisure.

"O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?"
--1 Corinthians 15:55

Q.E.D.

Our neighbors

Gene, age 59, lives in the toney Park Slope area of Brooklyn.  A chemist, he earned his Ph.D. at Wisconsin, and did post-doctoral work at Columbia.  He worked for many years for a major pharmaceutical company, where his work resulted in over forty patents.

Park Slope has leafy streets lined with fashionable row houses.  Gene doesn't live in one of them.  He lives in an SUV parked along the curb, where he sleeps on a mildewed futon.

The New York Times carried his story today in a lengthy feature article.  The thrust of the article was to show how his neighborhood gradually shifted from being appalled by his presence to acceptance, and ultimately became willing to help him out -- both financially and, to some extent, otherwise.  Gene has finally qualified for disability payments -- based on arthritis in his ankle -- which are keeping him afloat.  He no longer has to collect cans and bottles for their deposits, or hunt for nearby soup kitchens.

He still lives in his vehicle.  His daily search for appropriate restrooms and showers presumably continues.  But he's planning to move back to Wisconsin, where costs are lower.

In Seattle, we have been confronting the problems of homelessness.  An area beneath I-5, as it passes through the city, has been taken over by a diverse collection of unfortunates -- from criminals and drug abusers to people, with their families, who have been recently and unexpectedly laid off from legitimate employment.  Unless we avert our eyes, we can see straggly tents, damp sleeping bags, piles of debris, as we pass by.  Closer inspection, according to authorities, also reveals human waste, garbage, and syringes.

The area, appropriately, is called "The Jungle. One observer remarked that, within the enclave, you don't even feel you're still in the United States.   The London-based Guardian recently provided Seattle some unwanted international attention in its study of the problem.  And The Jungle is only one facet of the homelessness problem in Seattle.  Widespread squatting in vacant buildings is another.

No one has proposed a total solution to the problem.  No such solution exists, I suspect.  Tent cities, which Seattle sponsors, offer some temporary relief.  Cheap long-term housing is needed, but where?  Seattle, like San Francisco, is a small geographic area, hemmed in by bodies of water.  Zoning changes permitting increased population density are probably necessary, but everyone's immediate reaction is "Not In My Backyard."  It's a selfish reaction, but it's understandable.  It's my reaction.  Increased density -- whether allowing taller buildings or smaller lots -- changes the character of neighborhoods, and of the city itself. 

Increased density probably would decrease property values.  But those of us lucky enough to have bought property when it was less expensive have profited greatly by the inability of others who arrived later to do the same.  The calculus of fairness is complicated.

Unable to figure out a solution -- to either the root causes of homelessness or to its immediate symptoms -- many of us donate money to food banks and other services for the homeless.  Many of Gene's neighbors -- impressed by Gene's educational and employment history and by the complicated history of his descent to his present plight -- have done the same.  But the problem isn't just lack of money.  The homeless also need personalized help just to manage the chores of day to day life.

Mr. Wiener [a Park Slope neighbor] said getting money was simple — in all, about $5,000 was given by 10 people, and some of it remains unspent — but the nuts and bolts of helping someone with layers of problems took more attention than just writing a check: medical appointments, the motor vehicle agency, the disability application. “It wasn’t that hard to do — you just had to be willing do it,” Mr. Wiener said. “It turns out that people who mean well aren’t actually willing to do much.”

Who can blame them?  Gene may be a pleasant exception, but the homeless, in general, are often smelly, sometimes disoriented, often ungrateful, and just hard for many of us genteel folks to relate to. 

Right?

When the Good Samaritan, in the biblical parable, saw the robbed and assaulted victim lying beside the road, he could have just called 911 and even perhaps left the poor fellow some money. That would have been a lot more than the priest and the Levite did.  But the Samaritan did more and, the parable suggests, simple humanity seems to require more.

How much more, and whether -- in our more complex society -- we, as individuals, can delegate all our personal responsibility for others to the State, are the questions we need to consider.

Leap year day

Halfway down the stairs
Is a stair
Where I sit.
There isn't any
Other stair
Quite like
It.
I'm not at the bottom,
I'm not at the top;
So this is the stair
Where
I always
 Stop.


Halfway up the stairs
Isn't up,
And isn't down.
It isn't in the nursery,
It isn't in the town.
And all sorts of funny thoughts
Run round my head:
"It isn't really
Anywhere!
It's somewhere else
Instead!"

--A. A. Milne


Yesterday was February proper; tomorrow is March for sure. 
Today seems sort of -- I don't know --
somewhere else. 
Instead.

The Coroner's Lunch

When an old friend learned that I was returning next month to Laos, for another visit with family members in Luang Prabang, he was, of course, concerned that I might lack knowledgeable background in Lao life and politics.  Therefore, he wisely suggested that I prepare myself by perusal of one or more of the Dr. Siri Paiboun mystery novels, written by British author Colin Cotterill.

This was the same friend who had earlier tempted me into reading a Charlie Chan novel, set in Honolulu, and Dashiell Hammitt's The Maltese Falcon, set in San Francisco.  His reading proclivities, his studies of local cultures, had by now become reasonably apparent, but -- as evidenced by earlier essays appearing in this blog -- I had found his earlier suggestions both entertaining and conducive to written contemplation.

And so it came to pass that I've just finished reading the first of the "Dr. Siri series," The Coroner's Lunch.

I have visited Laos twice, if we don't count a third time when we sneaked ashore from a boat on the Mekong, not turning back until we drew within sight of an immigration check point.  Based on this vast experience, I would judge the Lao people to be friendly, humorous, and notably laid back, and their Communist government to be seemingly benign.  Also, the Lao appear amazingly forgiving of American visitors, considering that our military dropped over two million tons of ordnance on Laos during the Vietnam war, and that an estimated 20,000 Lao have been killed by contact with unexploded ordnance since the hostilities ceased.  Vast reaches of the country are still dangerously mined, once one's away from cleared roads and paths.

All of my visits have been since 2003.  The Coroner's Lunch, written in 2004, describes Laos as it may (or may not) have existed in 1976, one year after the Communists had deposed the monarchy and had formed the present Lao People's Democratic Republic.  It was a time when relations with the Vietnamese government, which regarded the Lao with some condescension as their little Communist brothers, were somewhat strained.  And at a time when the Communist Lao government was embroiled in a continuing struggle with Hmong insurgents -- insurgents only recently abandoned to their own devices by their American patrons.

Most of the competent and educated Lao had fled across the Mekong into Thailand as the Communists were taking over.  Dr. Siri was one of the few medical doctors to remain.  Despite his being 72 years old, and having no qualifications or experience as a pathologist, the government appointed him as the nation's only "coroner." 

But wily Dr. Siri was a fast learner, and the government got more than it bargained for -- a wily detective, as well as a pathologist.

The plot is entertaining and interesting, involving relations between the new Lao Communist regime, their allies in Vietnam, and their Hmong domestic enemies, and the story is infused with the paranoia that results from living in a totalitarian state -- even an incompetent totalitarian state.  The plot is equally entangled with all the personal desires and ambitions and betrayals that the human heart -- capitalist or communist -- is heir to. 

It also seems that Dr. Siri is -- to his own surprise -- something of an animist shaman.  Which explains all those strange and scary dreams he's been having and his ability to understand languages he's never studied, not to mention the dog next door that barks ...

But I've given away too much, already.

The book also taught me more about the nuts and bolts -- the sights and smells -- of forensic pathology than I probably learned as a personal injury attorney.  Perhaps more than I wanted to know.

Dr. Siri is a good man, a clever man, an unassuming man, and a humorous man.  And yes, humor still exists, in and among odd places and people, even under Communism -- and even among Communists themselves.  At least, under Lao Communism and its party members.  Dr. Siri loves the Lao people, whatever their politics, and they love him.  But he is a man who has seen a lot in his life, and he is neither naïve nor overly concerned about legal niceties when it's time for the bad guys to get their come uppance.

So now, having a clearer idea of the Lao character, my visit to Laos should be all the more worthwhile.  Even if it took a Brit expatriate to explain it to me. 

I should add that Colin Cotterill has spent much of his life in Thailand and Laos -- not only as a writer, but as a teacher and as a volunteer performing humanitarian work -- especially combatting child abuse and child prostitution -- for various NGOs.  He is also a cartoonist.

Back to Beethoven

Six years ago this month, I returned to the piano lessons I'd abandoned in my youth.  (Actually, I had also taken lessons for a couple of years in the early 2000s.)  I had a favorite number that I'd been practicing on my own for a while.  I was having fun, and I decided to obtain some professional assistance with it. 

It was a wise decision, and the following December I played the piece, reasonably successfully, in a student recital.  The piece was the second movement to Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata.

At the end of the school year last June, I decided to take a break (although I didn't advise my teacher of this decision until September).  Weekly lessons require virtually daily practice, and I was feeling burned out.  I remember practicing daily for 1½ hours in junior high, but now, in my dotage, that seemed like a lot of work, always looming on my daily calendar.

But this week, I pulled out that first Beethoven number, and tried playing it.  My god, the first time through, it was as though I'd never seen it before, let along played it in recital.  But after playing it about four times, it's coming back quickly.  It's fun playing without the pressure of an upcoming lesson.  But -- as I recall clearly -- the incentive to keep working created by those weekly lessons was one of the reasons I returned to piano lessons in the first place.

Anyway, I hope to keep chipping away at old Ludwig and see how it goes.  I suspect I'm going to have it worked up fairly well before too long.  (But not with the same polish as if I had an imminent recital, and a teacher pushing me along.)

If that prediction comes true, I'll go ahead and begin work on the final movement as well.  I like both movements a lot.  Probably not the first movement.  It's the most difficult of the three, and although I played it well enough to satisfy my teacher that I wasn't going to get much better at it, and it was time to move on, I never enjoyed it that much.

After (if?) I'm satisfied with my efforts on the second and third movements, will I return to regular lessons again?  Maybe.  Stay tuned.

No word is an îland

Altho yu may laf, Teddy Roosevelt wanted to achiev a form of English speling that was eazier to lern, and he askt all government buros to follo the new paradim.  

The above sentence looks as though it had been written by a six-year-old, but that was sort of the point.  Andrew Carnegie founded the American Spelling Board in 1906 with a mandate to reform and simplify the English language.  The Board, packed with famous Americans, immediately prepared an initial list of 300 proposed word changes.  In August 1906, President Roosevelt ordered that all government documents would follow the new orthography.

Some of the changes have stuck -- or were already being slowly adopted even before the Board did its work.  Esthetic and fetus, instead of aesthetic and foetus.  Gram instead of gramme, and plow instead of plough.  The dropping of the "u" in words like colour and flavour.  Some of the suggested changes have gradually become a substandard or commercial form of spelling -- donut, cigaret, catalog.  Manoeuver was to be written manuver.  Modern American English has compromised with "maneuver."  

But most of the changes were too radical for public acceptance.  At the end of 1906, Congress resolved that standard dictionary spellings should be used in government documents.  Roosevelt threw up his hands and conceded the fight.  Our American experiment with government-mandated spelling ended within months of its commencement.

This battle was brought to mind by a feature article in today's New York Times discussing France's efforts to curtail to some extent the use of the circumflex -- that little hat that you often find over French vowels.  The idea wasn't to eliminate it entirely -- only in those cases involving the vowels "i" and "u."  Nevertheless, the public is in an uproar.

Unlike America and Britain -- aside from our unfortunate effort in 1906 -- France has a permanent body, the Académie Française, that determines what is correct and what is not correct French usage.  The Académie can rely on its decisions being enforced in some contexts -- public advertising and signage, for example.  It remains to be seen how effective their latest efforts to simplify French spelling will prove.

French is derived from Latin, as is English to a lesser extent.  The circumflex is most commonly used to show that an "s" in a Latin word has become omitted in French pronunciation, and thus spelling.  For example, "insula" becomes "isle" in English but île in French, showing that the "s" has been dropped.  Interestingly enough, one of the American Spelling Board's 300 changes was to change isle and island to ile and iland. 

"Yuk" is my reaction, and was also the reaction of the American public in 1906.

While the average reader of English probably couldn't care less, for some of us, the clues revealing our language's ancestry are valued and even, at times, useful.  The French are far more tradition-minded than we Americans, and I imagine that the loss of the circumflex in île would be at least as painful as would be the loss, for us, of the silent "s" in island. 

Language isn't static, but it changes slowly, glacially, as people's lives change.  Over the past century or two, Americans have lost their enthusiasm for the "British u" in words like honour, harbour, and flavour.   They are now willing to countenance use of either "catalogue" or "catalog."  And while comic books and popular magazines may tolerate "alright," "altho," and "laff," none of us has become  "advanst enuf" to claim he "preferd" "iland" for "island."

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once stated that, "The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience."  So also for the life of a nation's language.

Paradoxical travel

The author of any story dealing with time travel has the problem of handling the inherent paradoxes. The most successful handling of this problem that I've seen was that of the third Harry Potter movie. But the potential time travel paradox in that movie occurred during a relatively short sequence within the movie.

Here, in The Speed of Darkness, we have the concluding volume of Catherine Fisher's Obsidian Mirror quartet -- a quartet that has been centered entirely on time travel. The paradoxes abound, and the characters openly acknowledge those paradoxes and attempt to come to grip with them within the boundaries of the plot.

I would have to go back and read all four books again to find out how successful the author was. Not all that successful, I suspect. The books were enjoyable and well-written and worth one reading. But only one such reading, I think.

Aside from my concerns with the time travel paradoxes presented by the plot -- which really is the central issue, explicit in the books themselves, and not something swept under the carpet -- this final volume is an exciting read, as we watch the fairly large cast of characters experience great adventures and continue their development as persons, their motivations becoming more evident to us, and, interestingly, to themselves as well. Even the greatest villain, the dastardly Janus, arouses a certain sense of pathos. Summer, the queen of the fairy Shee, remains remorseless, superficial and without feeling -- but still appealing to us in a perverse way.

And the changeling Gideon, to me the most sympathetic of the characters from the very first volume, finally has his wish fulfilled, although not the wish I would have wished for him.

A good read. But, of course, the first three books are an absolute prerequisite if this book is to make any sense at all.
-----------------------------------------

I've posted reviews of the earlier three volumes in the series on the Goodreads website.  I also posted a discussion of the opening novel, Obsidian Mirror, three years ago, on my Confused Ideas blog. The other two are The Slanted Worlds and The Door in the Moon.

Riding a tiger

All freshman at my university were required to take a three-term course in the History of Western Civilization.  These courses were quite common among colleges and universities a few decades ago, but unfortunately less so now.

During the course, we were required to read selections from Aristotle's Politics, and discuss our readings with our instructor in small discussion groups.  Time has eroded most of what I learned, of course, but I do recall that Aristotle divided governments into three categories:  monarchy, aristocracy and polity.  Each category had a "perversion":  respectively, tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy. 

Aristotle discusses in some detail the distinction between each category and its perversion, but in general, a "true" monarch, or aristocracy, or polity rules on behalf of the entire city-state, with the goal of maximizing the welfare of all citizens.  The perversions use the same form of government to maximize the happiness of, respectively, the ruler, the oligarchy, or the impoverished and poorly-educated masses, at the expense of the other members of the community.

This is all heady stuff when you're 18, and it made for lively discussion.  But Aristotle's concerns seemed pretty abstract.  They also seemed irrelevant, to some degree, in modern America, because -- we were confident -- we had developed a government by the entire people, with checks and balances to prevent any one group from oppressing the others.  (How we believed this so firmly, knowing at least something of the "Gilded Age," eludes me now.)

Aristotle came to mind over the weekend, watching the Republican debate.  If Aristotle wanted an example of what happens when "the masses" take control for their own purposes alone, he might have pointed to the squawking and braying of the various contenders for the GOP nomination.  All consideration of contemplative and deliberative debate was thrust aside.  The melée wasn't even a "debate," properly understood.  It was a shouting match, a hurling of coarse, personal insults at one another.

What makes the entire disgusting spectacle frightening is that what we saw on Saturday night was only partially a degeneration of Aristotle's "polity" into his dreaded "democracy."  Behind the scenes, the GOP's big business interests have encouraged this strident populism, trusting that it would ultimately play out in their own favor, hoping that the populist horror of socialism would cause the masses to give our oligarchy -- an elite not of birth but of money -- everything that it wants.  We see, therefore, oligarchy fomenting a perverted "democracy" for its own oligarchical ends.

It's happened before, and in recent times.  In Weimar Germany, business interests encouraged the populist Nazis, on behalf of the frightened petit bourgeois masses, to destroy not only socialists but the labor unions.  Once the Nazis had done away with the leftists, the "right sort" of upper class leaders believed, the "establishment" would quietly ease out the bumbling Nazis and restore government by oligarchy.

Things didn't go well for the Germans.  As the Chinese proverb puts it, "He who rides a tiger is afraid to dismount."  I'm afraid that the business-oriented "establishment" of the GOP may discover that they have mounted a tiger they can no longer stop riding.

I hope only the GOP ends up being eaten, not the entire American people.

Travels of an expatriate

Street scene in Fez

We often travel to seek the strange and the mysterious, which sometimes means simply seeing how other people in other cultures live their lives.  American writer (and musician) Paul Bowles spent his life traveling and observing other peoples.  His fiction evokes the strange, the mysterious, and even the frightening and bizarre.

His best known novel, The Sheltering Sky, follows an American couple into the Sahara, where they find more than they sought, in writing that casts an almost hypnotic spell on the reader.  Bowles's best known short story, perhaps, The Delicate Prey, also set deep in the Sahara, is a horrifying tale of crime and punishment among residents of the desert, desert dwellers whose ideas of justice are untempered by mercy.

I was introduced to Bowles through his fiction, his stories of the Sahara and its effects on those who lived in, or visited the life of, the desert.  I had also heard stories of Bowles's private life -- stories of a man who spent most of his life as an expatriate in Tangier, who lived for years in an interesting marriage to a lesbian writer, and who was a friend and confidante of many American writers including members of the Beat generation.

I was unprepared for the writing to which he evidently devoted much of his time -- travel writing for mainstream publications.  His book, Travels, contains some 39 essays, most of them published in the late, lamented Holiday magazine during the 1950s and 60s  -- a magazine that was to travel writing what the New Yorker is to general literature.   His writing presents scenes and vignettes almost as strange as those in his fiction, but in a first-person narrative form  that is far more accessible to the uninitiated first-time Bowles reader.

Tangier was his preferred residence, and Morocco his preferred country, and some of the best essays describe experiences in Moroccan cities, in the mountain areas (the Rif, the Atlas), and in the bleak (but always surprising) expanses of the Sahara.  Bowles first moved to Tangier in the early 1930s as a youth.  Tangier -- for many years an "international city" under French and Spanish administration --  has no major "tourist sites," he acknowledges, but, in a 1958 article, he found much to love.

In Europe, it seems to me, the past is largely fictitious; to be aware of it one must have previous knowledge of it.  In Tangier, the past is a physical reality as perceptible as sunlight.

 He saw both the city and the country evolve from a primitive residence of Berbers and Arabs, governed by French and Spanish colonial powers, to a far more modern and independent nation. 

Bowles (who died in 1999) was no sympathizer with colonial rule.  He was even less, perhaps, a sympathizer with the "modernizing" (read "Europeanizing and Americanizing") ferver of Moroccan nationalist leaders.  Where Morocco's rulers saw progress, Bowles saw foundering attempts at globalization -- the gradual replacement of local crafts and foods with mass produced imported goods and services.

The last essays in this book were written in the early 1990s.  I'm not sure to what extent Bowles's fears for the future have come true, although "McDonaldization" continues unabated in many parts of the world.  In an article written in 1984, he wrote about the medieval medina in Fez:

Yet with the increasing poverty in the region, the city clearly cannot continue much longer in its present form.   ...  A house which formerly sheltered one family now contains ten or twelve families, living, it goes without saying, in unimaginable squalor.  The ancient dwellings are falling rapidly into disrepair.  And so at last, it is the people from outside the walls who have taken over the city, and their conquest, a natural and inevitable process, spells its doom.  That Fez should still be there today, unchanged in its outward form, is the surprising phenomenon.

I visited Fez, for my first and, so far, only visit, in 2012.  I have nothing earlier in my own experience with which to compare it.  All I can say is that the city, when I visited it, was magical -- magical and apparently non-ersatz, thriving, and packed with local manufacturing (e.g., leather tanning) and shops, and local residents.  (It also had its share of tourists, of course.)   I would love to find a place to stay overnight within the medina on a future visit.

So the death and decay of Morocco is all relative, I suppose.  The past was always better.  I'm not being entirely ironical, because by Bowles's standards the past no doubt was better, more true to local culture -- even though the Moroccan residents probably had less money, less food, and worse housing.

Bowles's travel articles aren't limited in topic to Morocco.  He writes about locales as disparate as Paris, Seville, Istanbul, Algeria, Central America, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Kenya, Madeira, and Thailand.  He writes a series of articles about a project he undertook under a grant, recording tribal music throughout the mountainous areas of Morocco -- at a time when the Moroccan government was hoping to stamp out "folk music" as an indication of non-modern backwardness.  Always, Bowles has an eye for the strange, an ear for the good story, an empathy for the people with whom he speaks, a sensitivity to their music and to their lives.

Reading the essays and articles in Travels is as close as most of us will get to obtaining a feel for many various cultures in the world, and especially for those cultures as they existed before and a decade or two after World War II.  And learning about the world's hidden places and cultures from a gifted writer with a clear sense of perception renders them no less intriguing or mysterious.  Intriguing and mysterious to us, as they were even to Bowles himself.

Return to Laos

Mekong Riverview Hotel

Getting there may or may not be "half the fun," but planning a trip almost always is.  Most of my travel is thus planned long in advance, with various aspects of my trip meticulously considered, and bookings arranged early on.  Not that I don't value spontaneity -- I just like to tackle early those details of the trip that are necessarily non-spontaneous.

Rarely do I decide to take a major trip a mere six weeks in advance.  But when advised that my sister and my nephew were going to Laos next month, visiting with family members for a couple of weeks, what could I do?  I said sure, me too, I wanna go, when will you be there?

Maury celebrates fifth birthday with

Luang Prabang classmates in 2004.

My six-year-old great niece and her mom have returned to Luang Prabang, after an extended stay in the Bay Area. Maury's mom is writing travel articles for Southeast Asia publications.  Maury, my great niece, originally began first grade in Luang Prabang in the fall of 2004, but then switched to a Sonoma county school last fall.  Now she's back in Luang Prabang, at an international school where most of her classes are taught in English, but some in Lao.

So yesterday I decided to go.  No time to ponder schedules for weeks, as is my wont.  Within an  hour I had booked round trip flights from Seattle to Bangkok, via Seoul (surprisingly inexpensive), and round trip flights on a local airline (not quite so cheap) between Bangkok and Luang Prabang.  I also booked six nights at the Riverview Hotel, overlooking the Mekong river -- the hotel where I stayed with delight on my prior visit to Luang Prabang in October 2014 -- and a single night between flights at the airport hotel in Bangkok.

My parents would have gone downtown and engaged in lengthy discussions with a travel agent, with a number of subsequent phone calls confirming various aspects of the trip.  Through the magic of the internet, I can do the entire thing myself with minimal fuss.  That sounds totally natural to most of my readers, but to me -- who began his travels in an earlier world -- it still instills awe.

All one needs now is enough available credit on your Visa card, and the world is your oyster.  Hopefully, you will have reached a nation that has no extradition treaty with the United States before your Visa bill arrives.

Just a little light travel humor.

So I leave Seattle on March 20, spend six nights in Luang Prabang, and return home on March 29.  A whirlwind trip, but travel causes time dilation, as Einstein well knew.  My time in Laos will seem lengthy and full of event -- but once I get home, I'll marvel at how quickly the time flew. 

Such is the sad way the world works -- and that our lives pass!

Groundhog Day

I just feel moved to expound on the subject of Groundhog Day, noting that today is indeed the Feast of the Purification, a/k/a Candlemas Day a/k/a Groundhog Day.  But long-time bloggers,  like old-timers in general, find themselves apt to tell the same story over and over.

In fact, a perusal of my archives reveals that I've already discussed the subject.  Twice, in fact, in 2009 -- at the beginning and at the end of the six-week prescriptive period of additional winter.  And in 2010, I added a macabre touch to the day, publishing a recipe for Groundhog Stew.

What can I add to our annual celebration of the rites of Marmota monax that I haven't mentioned before?  A little poetry, perhaps?  Recall that a groundhog is also known, depending on whence you hale, as a woodchuck:

How much wood would a woodchuck chuck
if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

A woodchuck would chuck all the wood he could

if a woodchuck could chuck wood!

There you go, readers.  You get rhyme, alliteration, homonyms, and scientific knowledge all in one fell quatrain.

Recall -- by the way -- that groundhogs not only go about their business under the name of woodchuck, but also use the varied monikers of whistler, thickwood badger, Canada marmot, monax, moonack, weenusk, and red monk. 

Long before anyone began badgering (!) the benighted woodchuck each year at this time, his powers of prognostication were attributed to mere forces of nature.  From pre-groundhog England we have the verse:

If Candlemas be fair and bright,
Winter has another flight.
If Candlemas brings clouds and rain,
Winter will not come again.

From Germany (in translation):

For as the sun shines on Candlemas Day,
So far will the snow swirl until May.
For as the snow blows on Candlemas Day,
So far will the sun shine before May.

Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Today was sunny and bright.  Any Seattle groundhog who popped his head above ground definitely saw his shadow, foreshadowing six more weeks of winter.  Alas!

But hark!  There are no groundhogs in the State of Washington!  They live and thrive east of the Mississippi and northwards into Canada.  But not in these parts.  We do have their distant marmot relatives: the hoary marmot, the yellow-bellied marmot, and the Olympic marmot.  But no one would mistake these friendly, intelligent and generally magnificent mountain animals with the common groundhog.  Our mountain marmots are far superior to that peculiar beast held aloft by the mayor of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, in the movie Groundhog Day. 

Having no resident groundhogs, and clearly not being physically attached to England or Germany, we in Seattle are free from all Groundhog Day traditions, superstitions, old-wives tales, and/or empirical observations. 

Sometimes a sunny day is just a sunny day, as Freud once observed.  A sunny February 2nd in Seattle is (1) a miracle, and (2) simply a day to be enjoyed in shorts and t-shirts.  We may or may not have six more weeks of winter.  But "winter" in Seattle isn't what most of the nation -- especially those parts of the nation subject to the reign of the groundhog -- call "winter."  To us, it's just a little more rainfall than usual.

Happy Groundhog Day!

First Hill Streetcar

One more quick report on a subject dear to my heart -- public transportation in Seattle.  On Monday, I hopped an introductory free ride on our city's newly-completed second streetcar line. 

The First Hill line runs from Broadway at Denny (in front of Seattle Community College), south on Broadway to Yesler, east several blocks into the Central District as far as Fourteenth, then back west on Jackson through the International District, past King Street Station, and ending up in Pioneer Square.

I rode the streetcar through rush-hour traffic (about 4 p.m.).  The ride took 29 minutes.  As I've mentioned to others, I probably could walk from SCC to Pioneer Square in less time than that, following a more direct route.

But the streetcar isn't intended as a fast ride from terminus to terminus.  It will pick up passengers at a number of intermediate stops, giving them faster transportation than is provided by existing bus routes. 

Besides, well, shucks, street cars are pretty cool!  It remains to be seen whether the First Hill route will be as successful as the existing South Lake Union route, which passes through the heart of the Amazon building boom.  In any event, I welcome the opening of the new route.

And in a further note on the mass transit front -- since my discussion a couple of weeks ago of the extension of Seattle's existing light rail line north to the University of Washington, South Transit has announced that service will begin on the new 3.1 mile tunnel segment, with its stations on Capitol Hill and at Husky Stadium, on March 19. 

Life is good when you live in Seattle.  And find yourself fascinated by public transportation.

Endorsement

You've all been waiting for it.  I've been plagued with telephone calls from the New York Times and the Washington Post asking for it.  National editorials continue to question my -- to date -- refusal to speak out.  So here it is.

 I support Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee, and as the next President of the United States.

I have nothing against Bernie Sanders.  He's a courageous guy.  You'd have to be, to ask for the Democratic nomination, when you've never been a Democrat until now.  I would have no difficulty in supporting him, if he were the nominee.  But I hope he's not.

Bernie Sanders wants us to "send a message."  Sending a message is important, but not as important as holding the presidency.  Regardless of which party wins the presidency, the Republicans almost certainly will hold at least one, and probably both, houses of Congress.  The difference between what Clinton and Sanders would be able to push through a Republican Congress is miniscule. 

What a Democratic presidency can accomplish in the next four or eight years isn't really the important issue in this election.  The critical concern is what a Democratic president can prevent from happening.  The likely choices for Republican nominee have promised to dismantle Affordable Health Care immediately, and to cancel the agreements with Iran (and possibly Cuba) on "day one." 

Essentially, the Republicans plan -- should they win the presidency -- to return the country to 2008 within weeks of occupying the White House.  As just a first step on their march backwards to the McKinley Administration. 

And don't forget the appointments they would make to the Supreme Court.  No more wishy-washy liberals like Chief Justice Roberts.  Nine little Justice Scalias scowling from the bench.

Bernie would stop the Republicans dead, just as readily as would Hillary.  But I don't think Bernie Sanders can win -- not with a "Socialist" -- or even "Democratic Socialist" -- label hanging from his neck.  Granted, maybe he can, but the stakes are too high, and the advantages in his winning are too small for me to be willing to risk it.

The Democrats lost elections they should have won in 1968 and 1972 because they nominated an unelectable candidate (McGovern in 1972) or split the party badly before electing a potentially electable candidate (Humphrey in 1968).  We can't afford to do it today -- not with a Trump or a Cruz, or even a Rubio, salivating at the thought of occupying the White House.

Therefore, I'll support whichever Democratic candidate I feel has the best chance of capturing the independent vote as well as unifying his or her own party, regardless of difference in nuance between the candidates' political messages.

To me, it appears obvious that Hillary plays that role.

Teaching with humility

When we think we know something about interstellar space, or the inside of a knife blade, so well that we can whistle it backward, we may feel sure we are quite wrong.  Nothing in the real world is ever so simple.  In the world of books, life and the universe are often quite simple, but books are merely diaries of our explorers, and the latest chapters in these diaries indicate that electrons, instead of being little hard round balls of electricity, are more like little clouds of particles which behave like waves and are influenced by waves. 
...
When we talk about the stars or the inside of a knife blade, we must get accustomed to talking about things we don't understand; because our explorers bring back such imperfect maps, and also because we all have minds too feeble for the real wonders of the world.

These lines come from a book for children published in 1931 -- The Stars for Sam, by W. Maxwell Reed.  My folks gave me the book when I was about ten years old.  My recent reading of Oliver Sacks's memoirs reminded me of the book, which I no longer seem to have (although admittedly the boxes in my basement contain many mysteries).  Amazon put me in touch with a used book dealer, however, and I was able to purchase a used copy for $20.

I loved the book as a kid, but I recall feeling that it was a difficult book.  And I can see why.  The Stars for Sam is written very clearly, using concrete examples throughout, and is written with a humorous tone in places.  But it resolutely refuses to "dumb down" modern science for lazy children. 

The book contains descriptive chapters, describing for readers what was known at the time about the sun, each of the planets (including recently-discovered Pluto), meteors, comets, the Milky Way, galaxies, and how it was believed that the solar system was formed (now outdated).  But it also tackled the nature of elementary particles, sound, light, temperature, Doppler effect, color, gravity, Einstein's general theory of relativity, and the bases and results of Einstein's special theory.

This is pretty heavy stuff for a child's book, especially one written in 1931.

But I imagine that other books for young people also attempted to cover some of these subjects, although probably not as gracefully and elegantly as did Mr. Reed.  But what really impresses me about The Stars for Sam -- as suggested by the quotation above -- is the author's intellectual humility.

Relativity was a subject that was giving adults problems decades later.  The nature of the electron and of light is understandable only in terms of quantum theory and mathematics.  Reed describes, clearly and at an elementary level, relativity theory.  He does not use the term "quantum," but he explains clearly some of the experimental difficulties that  quantum theory helps to explain. 

Above all, he insists that all knowledge is provisional.  We form models of the electron, of space, of time, based on the knowledge that we have.  Our understanding of any physical phenomenon is always provisional -- subject to revision by new experimental data.  (Of course the theory of evolution is "just a theory," Reed would say, if that were his subject.  Everything is "just a theory.")

And no matter how much we learn, the ultimate nature of reality will always escape us, just because of the limitations of our intelligence and because our imagination is tied to our limited perception with five physical senses.  We simply do our best to form images of reality that are as close to "true reality" as possible. 

In his Preface, Reed observes

When the author went to school he had the impression that his teachers and the libraries together represented almost complete knowledge.  He appreciated that there were some things to be discovered, but not many.  Now he finds himself trying to impart to the next generation exactly the opposite doctrine.  He wants to make clear not only that we are on the verge of making great discoveries as yet unsuspected, but that due to our limitations in the three dimensional world we can probably never really understand the space-time-life world. Our three dimensional minds must ever have distorted ideas.

Pretty impressive for a child's book in 1931.  Few of my teachers (or texts) a quarter-century later shared that humility.

The Stars for Sam was worth my twenty bucks.  The book probably isn't an appropriate book for a child today -- too many of the facts discussed have been revised by subsequent work in astronomy -- but it's an appropriate reminder to adults of how best to teach science to the young.

I Fidanzati

Last night at the Seattle Art Museum's Italian film series -- after watching I Fidanzati -- I told my companion, "Well, I don't think I'll be writing in my blog about this one."

The 1963 film by director Ermanno Olni seemed to go on forever.  And it had no plot, which is to say, nothing happened.  Well, that's not true.  Lots of things "happened," but they didn't seem to add up to any recognizable story line.

But now, the day after, I've reconsidered.  Here are just a few words about the film, in case anyone has the opportunity to see it.

The plot, such as it is:  Giovanni and Lilliana, probably in their late 20s, are a long-time engaged couple -- "fidanzati" -- living in Milan. They act bored and irritated with each other.  Giovanni has received a job offer, a chance to advance his career, working on industrial construction in Sicily.  Lilliana doesn't want him to go.  He goes.  He spends weeks wandering around the coastal construction site listlessly, observing with occasional interest the peculiarities of Sicilian life. 

The two exchange letters.  Giovanni confesses how much he loves Lilliana and misses her.  She replies that she had been desperately scared that he was leaving her for good, that the job was just an opportunity to get away from her.  Their letters become increasingly open and self-revealing, in ways that their face to face conversations had never been.  Finally, Giovanni telephones her.  The phone call is brief and awkward, and they exchange simple small talk.  He wanders around the construction site in the midst of a storm.  End.

The story is boring, but the photography is excellent and the scenes of northern Italy and Sicily around 1960 are fascinating just from an historical point of view.  Italy by then was well beyond the poverty of the post-war days, but still remained uniquely Italian -- Italy did not yet derive much of its national personality from the rest of Europe, let alone from America, as it has increasingly since.

Nevertheless, the corporate life of Giovanni's employer -- airline flights, modern hotels, tight schedules, quick decisions, work to be accomplished -- already contrasted to an enormous degree with the slow, rural, traditional life of its local Sicilian workers.  The bemusement of Giovanni, and the northern Italian company bosses, with local customs and festivals is obvious.

The film reveals Giovanni's growing homesickness by his rapid flashbacks to scenes with his girlfriend in Milan, and -- by its focus on the minutiae of his daily life in Sicily -- demonstrates his loneliness and boredom.  It is this very loneliness that enables him to pour his heart out in his letters to Lilliana. 

But do Giovanni and Lilliana really love each other?  Absence has clearly made their hearts grow fonder, but how will they feel once Giovanni returns to Milan and they once more find themselves together daily.  The awkward telephone call may portend doom -- but, on the other hand, phone calls are often awkward, especially when the participants haven't seen each other for a while and -- for that matter -- rarely use telephones.

I suspect that Olmi intends for us each to write our own ending, to draw our own conclusion as to the couple's  future happiness -- a conclusion that hinges on how optimistic or pessimistic we each feel individually regarding the prospects of romantic life.