When the going was good

Lake Tanganyika

Commercial travel by jet planes put a final end to the concept of travel as "exploration" or "adventure."  We romanticists often look back on the days before Lonely Planet guidebooks, hotel reservations by internet, and instantaneous sharing of experiences on social media as the good old days of adventure travel, "when the going was good."

Such, of course, is the title of a well-known 1946 travel book by Evelyn Waugh.  Waugh is best known today as the author of Brideshead Revisited, a novel that had been published a year earlier, in 1945.  Both Brideshead Revisited and When the Going Was Good are, in a sense, studies in nostalgia for pre-war life -- for the culture of the British class system in Brideshead, and for the freedom to travel the world in When the Going Was Good.

Early in his career, Waugh wrote often of his travel experiences.  Between 1928 and 1937, he published four books that were already out of print by 1946.  In his Preface to When the Going Was Good, Waugh finds these early books to have been, for the most part, "pedestrian" and boring, filled with "commonplace commentary" and "callow comments."  He notes with satisfaction that they were out of print, and that they would remains so. 

Each did contain certain passages that he found worth preserving, however, and -- in the awful post-war world of 1946, when tourism seemed dead for the near future -- serving as a nostalgic reminder of what travel was like "when the going was good."  He therefore collected his edited travel writings from the four books under that title.

Going Was Good contains five chapters, in chronological order -- (1) travels by sea throughout the eastern Mediterranean; (2) a humorous and condescending account of an impulsive visit to Abyssinia (Ethiopia) to witness the coronation of the new emperor, Haile Selassie; (3) travels in Aden and East Africa, concluding with a frustrating crossing of the Belgian Congo as a "shortcut" back to England; (4) travels through British Guiana (Guayana) and Brazil; and (5) a return to Abyssinia in 1935 as a "war correspondent' in response to the war with Mussolini's Italy.  (His misadventures as a correspondent also formed the basis for his comic 1938 satiric novel Scoop.

Having read (several times) Brideshead, as well as several of his satirical novels -- as well as interviews with him in his later years -- I had a fairly consistent image of Mr. Waugh.  Somewhere between "Bridey" in Brideshead Revisited and Mr. Toad in Wind in the Willows.  A rather stuffy, pompous man, immaculately dressed, and casting a sour eye on whichever of several eras he was living through at the time.  A man who was once asked how a Catholic convert could be so unpleasant toward other people, and who responded, "You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic.

In Going Was Good, Waugh certainly displays his wicked sense of humor at the expense of others, and shares his compatriots' condescension toward the backwardness of "the natives" -- as well as his own interest in the cluelessness of the British Empire's bureaucrats.  But what surprised me was his eager seeking after physical adventures, enduring great hardships out of curiosity about the exotic places he visited, and displaying a willingness (not always without complaint) not only to get his hands dirty, but to live for weeks in conditions of total filth and deprivation.  He actually sounded (in his youth) like someone whose company I would have enjoyed (in my youth).

Some of his passages tend to focus on trivia of the sort that he was attempting to edit out, but more often his accounts are fascinating.  Subjectively, I liked best his Chapter Three, "Globe-Trotting in 1930-31," extracted from a book entitled Remote People (1931), (published in the U.S. as They Were Still Dancing).  On his way to the "glamour and rich beauty" he hoped to find on Zanzibar, he ended up -- without explanation in his edited account -- spending some time at the British crown colony and refueling port of Aden (now part of Yemen). 

Waugh enjoyed Aden, to his surprise, far more than he enjoyed Zanzibar.  He accepted the hospitality of many people -- both colonial authorities and local sultans.  He notes the initiative taken to organize the local children in a rational, English way -- by forming a scout troop.  He observed boys being tested for their Tenderfoot badge:

"What does "clean" mean?"
"Clin min?"
"You said just now a scout is clean in thought, word, and deed."
"Yis, scoot iss clin."
"Well, what do you mean by that?"
"I min tought worden deed."
"Yes, well, what do you mean by clean."
Both parties in this dialogue seemed to be losing confidence in the other's intelligence.
"I min the tenth scoot law."
...
"All right, Abdul.  That'll do."
"Pass, sahib?"
"Yes, yes."
An enormous smile broke across his small face ....
"Of course, it isn't quite like dealing with English boys," said the scoutmaster again.

This bit of reporting is typical of Waugh.  He doesn't point out a moral for the benefit of his readers.  He reports what he saw, and lets us draw our own conclusions.  Or, more accurately, he lets us think we're drawing our own conclusions. 

As he does in discussing local politics.

The Haushabi Sultan was an important young man, finely dressed, and very far from sane.  He sat in a corner giggling with embarrassment, and furtively popping little twigs of khat into his mouth.

After Aden, Waugh eventually shipped out to Zanzibar, whose heat he found intolerable and to which he gave short shrift.  He sailed on to Kenya, where he took the train from Mombasa, on the coast, inland to the higher and much more salubrious climate of Nairobi.  He seems to have enjoyed colonial life in Kenya -- often seen at the time as a Little England in the tropics.

By this time, Waugh was eager to return to England.  Rather than sail again back through the Suez Canal, he thought it might be faster to cross the Belgian Congo to the Atlantic coast.  He had been assured by a Belgian Congo agent in Tanganyika, while en route to Kenya, that an air service flew from Albertville (now Kalemie) on Lake Tanganyika's west coast to Boma on the Atlantic: "The fare was negligible, the convenience extreme."  Waugh therefore crossed by rail into Uganda and took a rickety steamer, through a frightening overnight storm, to Albertville.  He quickly learned that the alleged air service had never existed.  He was enticed into taking a train westward to Kabalo, then a tiny village on the upper Congo, where he was assured that air service did exist.  Arriving in Kabalo, everyone "giggled" when he asked when the next flight would be leaving.

He again was persuaded to plunge deeper into the jungle, sailing up the Congo for four days to Bukama, where a train purportedly would take him to the coast.  "I thought I had touched bottom at Kabalo, but Bukama has it heavily beaten."    Waugh doesn't mention having read Conrad's Heart of Darkness.  If he had never read it, perhaps it was just as well.

The rail from Bukama to the coast was "out of service." From Bukama, Waugh took a long train ride to Elizabethville (now Lubumbashi), on the border of what is now Zambia.  From there, he took a number of trains to Cape Town, South Africa, and thence -- finally -- home.  Quite a short cut.

The day after arriving back in London, Waugh was taken to the "in" nightclub of the moment.  He found himself in a "rowdy cellar, hotter than Zanzibar, noisier than the market at Harar, more reckless of the decencies of hospitality than the taverns of Kabalo or Tabora."  He marveled that the colonists back in Africa would have envied his ability to "enjoy" the experience of London civilization. 

As always, Waugh never seemed quite comfortable -- whether at home or abroad.

En route to the inferno

“What is different about this approach is: we’re out of time, right?” [National Security adviser H.R.] McMaster said on Friday. “We have been kicking the can down the road and we’re out of road. For those who have been commenting about the lack of a military option – there is a military option.
--The Guardian (9-15-17)

I'm flying to Thailand next month for a family gathering.  I change planes at ... at Seoul, South Korea.  Seoul is 35 miles from the border with North Korea. 

As I noted in this blog last month, The Economist has predicted that if the United States should win a war with North Korea, successfully fighting off all attempted strikes against American territory, Seoul itself would nevertheless be the target of a nuclear attack with an immediate loss of 300,000 civilian lives, and with others dying later of radiation poisoning.  The South Korean armed forces would sustain additional hundreds of thousands of casualties.

Somehow, I don't think that commercial jets would be flying in and out of Seoul-Incheon International Airport anytime soon thereafter.

And once I make it successfully to Thailand, I still have to worry about returning -- again through Seoul -- three weeks later.

Mulling all of this over makes me think of all the American tourists who had been happily planning to visit Europe in the fall of 1939.  Hitler's attack on Poland must have caused some reflection on the wisdom of such a vacation, although I read reports that many tourists continued risking the five day transatlantic voyage (or for the very rich, a transatlantic flight) during the so-called phoney war, the period of relative calm between the attack on Poland and the attack on France eight months later. 

Germany continued to invite tourism with one hand -- while planning war with the other -- right up until their tanks rolled across the Polish border.  At least war was waged at a somewhat slower pace in those days, allowing would-be tourists to cancel plans and head for Mexico instead.  In today's world, President Trump may order a strike on Pyongyang after my plane lifts off from Seattle, and Seoul would have been destroyed in retaliation before my plane had crossed the International Date Line.

But -- like tourists in 1939 -- I'll just hope for the best and plan on having a great trip -- which I most likely will -- but I'll realize in a tiny, secluded part of my brain that the world as we now know it may go up in a mushroom cloud before my plane runs out of fuel.

Bon Voyage! (And kick that can a bit farther down the road, Mr. McMaster.)

Mister, you look like a crook

Science keeps chipping away at our comforting belief in free will.  At the very least, they say, our free will is circumscribed within limits imposed by our genetic structure.  That makes sense.  We can't decide to be an NBA center if our genes make us only 5'3" tall.

But more subtly, our genes control our minds as well as our bodies.  In 2012, I blogged a review of Richard Ford's Canada.  In that beautifully written novel, a young teenaged boy, Dell Parsons, watched his parents decide, bizarrely, to attempt a bank robbery -- a decision with devastating impact on the young lad.  Decades later, he mused that something in their inherent personalities must have compelled them to act so irrationally.

[B]ecause very few people do rob banks, it only makes sense that the few who do it are destined for it, no matter what they believe about themselves or how they were raised. I find it impossible not to think this way, because the sense of tragedy would otherwise be overpowering to me. Though it's an odd thing to believe about your parents -- that all along they've been the kind of people criminals come from. It's like a miracle in reverse.

Dell felt that his parents had committed a crime because it was in their nature.  Because they were criminals, even before committing an overt criminal act. 

They had, if you will, criminal genes.

Several news sources this week reported that Stanford researchers had developed software that, by analyzing a person's face, could determine -- not perfectly, but significantly better than could human observers -- whether that person was gay or straight.  The software had analyzed over 300,000 photographs of men and women, looking for differentiating facial characteristics related to sexual orientation, and had then applied its conclusions to photographs of test cases.

The result of this research creates privacy concerns, of course.  But it also suggests interesting future applications.

Suppose the young man in Canada was correct, and that his parents were "criminal types."  Not all genetic differences are reflected in facial characteristics, of course.  But some are.  We often read in novels that a person "looked like a criminal."  Do some people look like criminals because a lifetime of crime -- or even of criminal desires -- has caused their warped personality to be reflected in their faces?  Or, more interesting, do they look like criminals because -- whether they realize it or not, whether they have done anything wrong or not -- they are criminal types?  Because the genetic makeup that causes them to be criminal types also, at least statistically, causes them to display certain facial characteristics?

Like Dell's parents.  Like Mr. and Mrs. Parsons, natural born bank robbers, even while they were law abiding parents, even before they ever dreamed of robbing a bank.

But with a few tweaks, perhaps the Stanford software could have picked them out.  Could have identified them as inchoate criminals.  Like a conspiracy before an overt unlawful act has been committed -- not yet a crime, but still a conspiracy, still a danger. 

And law enforcement could then do ... what?  Keep an eye on them?  Force them to register as "criminal types"?  Require that they live with other criminal types in some sort of humane institution where they could live relatively normal lives, but live them apart from "normal" citizens?  Or perhaps, beginning in childhood, provide them with special training and education, designed to make it unlikely that -- despite having a tendency toward criminality -- they would ever commit a crime?

Dell Parsons's parents were good citizens and good parents -- until they got into debt.  Maybe if the state had known the danger and had made sure they never got into debt they might have remained law-abiding citizens their entire lives. They would have given Dell the decent upbringing he deserved.

Obviously, as we learn more and more about ourselves, and develop better and better software, the decisions we must make as a society become more and more complex, and the ethical issues become more and more difficult to resolve.

But I guess it's too late to return to the days of the Old West, back when black was black and white was white, when every man invented himself from scratch.  And when we could depend on John Wayne to do justice to all.

Intimations of mortality

Monday, I felt strangely fatigued.  Just getting up and moving from one room to another took unusual will power.  Well, I reminded myself, I didn't get a lot of sleep the night before, being breathless with excitement about the 8 a.m. triennial arrival of a crew of gardeners, as described in the prior post.

Tuesday was even worse.  I forced myself to do my four-mile walk around campus early in the day, to beat the forecast 90-degree temperatures.  But once I got home, I just sat in a chair and stared into space. 

So this is what old age is going to be all about, I told myself.  Even reading is too exhausting.  Even thinking.   I'll just sit here and wait for my final moments.

Last night, I awoke with mild discomfort in my stomach.  Ah ha!  Colon cancer, I assured myself in the darkness of the early hours.  I slept fitfully, but each time I woke up my stomach hurt more, emitting great rumblings and growlings.  At about 5 a.m., a quick visit to the bathroom assured me that I either had food poisoning or a gastro-intestinal virus.

Today's been ok.  I skipped breakfast, had a small lunch, and am putting off dinner.  I've stayed close to the bathroom.  I still feel bloated.  GI infections can take several days to clear, according to my authoritative on-line sources.  No need to see a doctor, unless ... unless it lingers. 

We call it stomach flu, but it isn't flu.  Technically, it's viral gastroenteritis.  It's no biggie, at least to doctors who deal daily with heart disease and lung cancer.  To us little people, however, it's a damn nuisance.

Hang in there, the Mayo Clinic advises.  You'll get over it on your own, adding as a caveat:  "But for infants, older adults and people with compromised immune systems, viral gastroenteritis can be deadly."  How old are these "older adults" of whom the Mayo Clinic speaks, I ask myself?

I'm working on my will.

Little house in the forest

One of my earliest childhood memories was a version of "Woodman, spare that tree!"  I couldn't have been more than three years old.  We had moved into our first house, a newly-built house sold to us completely devoid of landscaping. 

Our front yard had become a mass of four-foot high, yellow-flowering mustard plants.  Using scythes (this was some time ago!), my dad and some helpers had begun leveling the mustard, in preparation for planting a more conventional lawn.

I cried.

The mustard was so beautiful, I couldn't bear to see it cut down.  

Jump ahead a couple of centuries, to the present.  Every two years or so, I reach this same crisis.  While I'm pretty good at mowing my lawn -- my aghast neighbors will at least grant me that -- I tend to let the rest of the landscaping go.  Ivy is nice, I tell myself -- around the yard, across the sidewalks, covering the brick walls.  The shrubbery is getting a bit large, I admit, but it's attractive shrubbery.  The hedge is so high that my neighbor suggests that perhaps he would like more sun in his yard, but that's his problem.

Finally, I reach the stage you see in the photo above.  Neighbors look curiously at my house as they walk by.  Kids are afraid of whatever creature lives within.  Tour buses pause in front, while a guide spins fanciful yarns about my house and its owner, and his clients aim cameras out the windows.

It's time.  I know it is.  I put it off week by week.  Soon it will be the rainy season, and branches covered with water will slap me in the face as I leave the house.  Procrastination is no longer possible.

I had a guy take a look at the yard yesterday.  His eyes lit up, flashing dollar signs.  He smiled avariciously as I pointed out things that needed doing.

He'll be here Monday.  I'm sad.  It's not the money, although I'm sad about that as well.  If it weren't for the neighbors -- the cause of so many treasons against one's better nature -- I'd allow myself to sink deeper and deeper into the beautiful, dense foliage until only dimly green, filtered sunlight would work its way down through my windows. 

It's like the men cutting down the mustard.  Woodman, spare those bushes, that ivy, that overgrown hedge.  But I fret in vain.

After Monday, I'll live in a less bushy -- and to some, more attractive -- home.  But, I remind myself, brightly, it's like a bad haircut. It always grows back!

Kid brother strikes back

Gerald Durrell and his
pet owl Ulysses

I'm the oldest of three siblings -- I have a brother three years younger and a sister eight years younger.  As the eldest, I had certain responsibilities during our childhood.  As my parents were unable, or unwilling, to administer the firm discipline that the younger kids clearly required, it fell upon me to do so.  When necessary, like Lloyd the bartender, I "corrected" them.* 

I suppose there was occasional resentment.  But I was the oldest.  Resentment happens.

Four weeks ago, I discussed in this blog the book Prospero's Cell, by Lawrence Durrell.  Durrell wrote of his three years or so living on Corfu at the end of the 1930s.  Lawrence was already a promising poet, and went on to write a number of excellent travel books (those about his life on Rhodes and on Cyprus having been discussed in earlier posts on this blog), and -- his best known work -- the Alexandria Quartet novels.

What Lawrence didn't mention in Prospero's Cell, so far as I can recall, was the fact that his family was also living on Corfu at the same time.  He spoke frequently of his wife Nancy -- who he coyly called simply "N." -- but nothing about his mother, his two brothers Leslie and Gerald, and his sister Margo.  Prospero was a high-minded book, discussing the joys and difficulties of living as an expat in a foreign culture, and the history of Corfu and its natural environment.  It was an intellectual book, describing Lawrence's long philosophical conversations with fellow intellectuals, Greek and otherwise, also living on Corfu.

And then, more than a decade after Prospero's Cell, the family struck back. In 1956, the youngest son, Gerry, published the extremely popular memoir, My Family and Other Animals.  Gerry had been ten years old when the family first moved to Corfu, and was 15 when they left at the beginning of World War II.  My Family was the first of three books about Gerry's young life on Corfu -- collected together as the Corfu Trilogy. 

Gerry is an entertaining writer both because of his precocious and intense interest in nature, and because of his sense of humor in describing the family's problems in dealing with the local Greeks, and even more their difficulties in dealing with each other.  As Gerry views the family, only he himself (surrounding himself and his family's house with a menagerie of marine and insect specimens, dead and alive) bore any semblance to normality.  The number two son, Leslie, was a total gun nut, and sister Margo was a bundle of adolescent neuroses and body image pathologies.

And Larry?  Big brother?  Larry the writer lived in his own personal cloud, watching as others worked and strived, making clever and acerbic comments about their efforts.

It was Larry, of course, who started it.  The rest of us felt too apathetic to think of anything except our own ills, but Larry was designed by Providence to go through life like a small, blond firework, exploding ideas in other people's minds, and then curling up with catlike unctuousness, and refusing to take any blame for the consequences.

Gerry nails the flavor of Larry's personality.  Or at least he nails the impression he wishes to convey of Larry's personality.

"I ask you!  Isn't it laughable that future generations should be deprived of my work simply because some horny-handed idiot has tied that stinking beast of burden near my window?" Larry asked.
"Yes, dear," said Mother, "why don't you move it if it disturbs you?"
"My dear Mother, I can't be expected to spend my time chasing donkeys about the olive groves.  I threw a pamphlet on Theosophy at it; what more do you expect me to do?"

Gerry is a very funny writer, and he went on to become a distinguished naturalist, zoo curator, and advocate for wildlife.  But he was also, in my big brother's opinion, a sniveling little liar.

Gerald Durrell never mentions in his book -- in fact he describes totally to the contrary -- that Lawrence was married and living on Corfu before his family moved there, and that he lived with Nancy some distance from the rest of the family.  In the book, Larry is always skulking about the house, muttering complaints and issuing airy intellectual fiats. Larry cannot abide his young brother's fascination with smelly animals and creepy insects, especially whenever said naturalist's exhibits tend to touch upon Larry's tender sensibilities.   

I suppose that Gerald would argue that his description of his big brother conveys some larger truth, some evaluation of Larry's personality based on close observation before Larry married and fled the family home in England for life on Corfu.  The "Larry" persona is too well-drawn and consistent to be totally a product of a resentful younger brother's imagination.

I, of course, relate to Larry/Lawrence not only as an older brother, but as an older brother who likes to stand around making witty observations while my siblings and other relatives do all the work that I am commenting upon so cleverly.  Can't help it.  I yam what I yam and that's all what I yam.  But Lawrence perhaps gave his younger brother unknowing permission for the liberties the young twerp takes with the facts.  Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet is a study of the same facts as observed by three different individuals, with the fourth volume presenting in part a (possibly) more objective view. 

Every person sees life from his own perspective, as the Quartet emphasizes, and family life is no different.  A 23-year-old intellectual and writer will necessarily view family life on Corfu differently from a 10-year-old naturalist.  Luckily for Larry and Gerry, neither Leslie the gun nut, nor Margo the girl with "spots," chose to write from their own viewpoint.

A friend has described my own family as a group of disparate individuals with nothing in common but a bunch of collective memories and the same weird sense of humor.  That's been enough to hold us all together.  But, of course, none of us so far has chosen to write a book about it.
----------------------
*I'm fantasizing. Wildly.

Travel agents

My sister and her cousin -- born within a month of each other -- celebrate a landmark birthday this autumn.  When you combine those birthdays with the fact that my sister's middle son and her granddaughter are living in Chiang Mai, Thailand -- well, a party in that part of the world seemed in order, with various relatives and friends invited.

Actually, we will be based most of the time in Chiang Mai, with a one-week expedition to Bali, where the actual birthday festivities will take place.  And we'll stop for a couple of nights to explore Angkor Wat in Cambodia, on the way "home" to Chiang Mai. 

Some birthday.  I'm lucky to get a mylar balloon on mine.

Everyone's getting himself to Chiang Mai on his own, but we've tried to coordinate the move to Bali so we're all traveling more or less in sync.  On behalf of five of us, I made a number of flight reservations today, after some on-line cogitation, figuring out which flights offered the best times and the cheapest rates.

I love doing stuff like that.  I'm clearly a frustrated travel agent.

And the dying term "travel agent" reminds me of how different travel planning was before we had the internet.  When I was a kid, if my family was traveling anywhere other than by car, it was done through a travel agent.  My mother might have bought railway tickets directly from the railway company's agent, but for anything else -- certainly any travel as grandiose as a stay in Hawaii -- we visited the travel agent.

It was kind of nice.  The agent developed a relationship with regular customers, much as a stock broker might still do today.  My mother would sit down at his desk, and be handed various dazzling brochures as they discussed what she wanted to do, and how much it would cost.  The agent didn't handle just the transportation.  He put everything -- hotels, tours, shows, bus travel --together as a package.

My parents' first visits to Europe -- as were the visits of most Americans -- were arranged as package tours, such as those run by American Express.  A bus, traveling from town to town, staying at a different hotel each night.  Sort of like cruise ships today -- everything was prepaid and pre-arranged.  The best surprise was no surprise. 

By the time I was throwing discretionary income into travel, Americans were more self-confident about getting around on their own.  All-inclusive tours were considered for "old folks."  The very young might just head to Europe on a charter flight, and then live off the land for a few weeks.  Older, but not "old," adults might want the security of hotel reservations when they arrived in a city;  travel agents continued to put together ad hoc packages of transportation and hotels, leaving the reasonably sophisticated traveler to figure out for himself what he wanted to do once those details were taken care of.

I was a pretty independent traveler, used to finding a hotel through local tourist offices once I arrived in a city.  But for airline reservations, I still always called a travel agent -- Doug Fox was a major agency in Seattle.  Actual in-person visits to an agency continued to be available for people, like my mother, who enjoyed chatting with "her" agent, but if all one wanted was air travel, it was easier to call an agent on the phone.

Then the internet eliminated the need to even talk to an agent.  I can pick a flight and make a hotel reservation in five minutes on my computer -- no visit downtown, no being placed on hold by a busy agent.

And yet -- part of the excitement of travel for folks in my parents' generation was the pre-travel experience of being greeted by the agent, enjoying the dreams evoked by colorful travel brochures and the agent's stories of his own travels, and working out with an expert in whom they had confidence how best to spend their precious two or three weeks of vacation time.

I'd never surrender the convenience of today's digital world, but I can't deny that the more leisurely and convivial planning that working together with a (now nearly extinct) professional travel agent allowed did have its charms.

All hail, Kindle the Third

I've been a compulsive reader since the age of six.  That's no brag.  That's just a statement of fact. It may be good or bad. "Reading" satisfies one's curiosity about the world, and that's good.  But for some of us, reading's also a way to avoid unnecessary contact with the sometimes boring, often frightening, always confusing creatures who surround us.

Reading is the default instinct of the congenital introvert.

I welcomed -- with some trepidation -- a new reading paradigm in December 2011, a new paradign about which I of course blogged.  Averting my eyes from the shock and horror expressed on the faces of books lining the walls of my home, I bought a simple Amazon reader.  I won't say that I stopped buying hardbound books, but since 2011 I have downloaded 199 books from Amazon.  And unlike the case with some hardbound books I've purchased over the years, I've actually read all 199.  Draw your own conclusions as to the impact Kindle has had on my life.

At some point following 2011, I also purchased a Kindle Fire, which has a larger backlit screen, a camera, and the ability to connect with the internet.  Before I got around to signing up for an iPhone, the Fire served as a way to keep in touch with Facebook and other sites while I traveled.  I really never used it for book-reading, however, because it's heavy and bulky, compared with my original basic Kindle, and the backlighting causes it to gobble up battery power prodigiously.

Nevertheless, Amazon refers to my Kindle Fire as my "2nd Kindle" and makes sure that my all my Amazon book purchases are available on that device as well.

All was well and uncomplicated until last week, when my original Kindle jammed up for unknown reasons.  I finally ordered a replacement -- henceforth officially denoted my "3rd Kindle" -- which arrived today.  Same size screen as Kindle the First, still no backlighting, but slightly smaller in overall dimensions.  Plastic rather than metal frame, and so slightly less heavy.   Looks good; feels good.

Kindle the Third is now charging from my wall socket.  I stopped the charging long enough to ensure that it would hook up to my Wi-Fi, which it does, and that all of my books from my original Kindle, books that also float dreamily about "the cloud," would be available.  They are, and the new Kindle instantly downloaded the book I'd been reading and opened it to the last page I'd read. 

I still have new bells and whistles to investigate, once I get it fully charged, but clearly the new Kindle will be able to handle with aplomb, at a minimum, all of the functions of my original Kindle, with none of the angst and irritation one so often encounters in replacement purchases of this sort.

In fact, it becomes clear to me that Amazon really knows what it's doing, and is fully capable of taking over and ruling the world.  And I don't say that just because it's a Seattle company, which is already taking over and ruling Seattle..

Although the fact that Amazon is an offspring of the Northwest Corner certainly doesn't hurt.

It is in the stars!

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings."
--Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

I will be in Challis, Idaho -- within the "zone of totality" -- for Monday's eclipse.  It will be my second total solar eclipse.  I witnessed my first in my home town, here in the Northwest Corner, in 1979.  It was impressive.

I remember reading a science fiction story -- maybe one of you readers recalls the author and/or title, but I don't -- about a civilization similar to ours on a planet in a multi-star solar system.  Because  more than one sun beamed down, the sky was always well lit.  Always day, never night. Scientists speculated -- but had no way of knowing -- whether there were any stars in the universe other than their own two or three "suns."

Geological and archeological studies showed that about every 40,000 years, a fairly highly developed civilization had ended overnight with no apparent cause. Their present civilization was getting close to the 40,000-year mark.  But they were also excited, because their suns were finally reaching a point of being so configured as to be all on the same side of the planet, thus allowing darkness on the other side, a night just like ours on earth.  (Somehow, they weren't disturbed by the fact that this also happened about every 40,000 years.)

And so it happened.  The sudden darkness revealed to the planet's inhabitants for the very first time the vast immensity of the universe and the billions upon billions of stars that swirled across the sky.  They learned in one night what it took us centuries to learn -- that their friendly little world didn't make up the entire universe. 

Every single person went stark raving mad.  And thus ended another civilization.

I can assure the uninitiated, based on my 1979 experience, that you will not go mad at the moment of totality, even if the experience does "blow your mind."

However, astrologers -- "learned" guys sort of like the Three Wise Men -- suspect bad things in store for President Trump, as a result of the eclipse.  They claim that the stars have been excellent for the Orange One throughout his career.  Until now.  Now he has problems looming ahead.  (Duh!)  Why?

[Astrologer Wade] Caves notes that the position of the August 21 eclipse in relation to the star Al Jabhah, which is located in the mane of the constellation Leo, typically "brings loss and danger," which, in the case of "a military officer" -- such as the Commander in Chief -- could mean "danger of mutiny and murder by his soldiers."

Yeah.  How about that, eh?  But that's just the beginning.  Astrologer Stephanie Iris Weiss points out another problem:

To get technical for a minute: This eclipse is at 28 degrees of Leo, the sign of kings. Trump's ascendant (or rising sign, the place where his chart begins) is at 29 degrees of Leo. So that's considered an exact match. The eclipse is also just a couple of degrees from his Mars—Mars is the sign of anger, aggression, rage, violence, and power.

Caves sizes it all up:

I'm not sure that I want to say this all points to Trump's death, although I feel I'd be well within my bounds astrologically to make such a prediction given the symbolism. To me, it's equally possible that there will be a sudden health issue that lands on Trump's shoulders, pulling him out of the Oval. It's also quite reasonable to suspect ousting, either through official channels (i.e., impeachment) or a mutiny behind closed doors.

Well, that sounds exciting.  Maybe a little too exciting for me, at least for a few days.  That's why I'll be hanging out in Challis -- about as far away from Washington, D.C., Western Civilization, and the consequences of Mad Donald's horoscope as possible. 

See you next week.  Maybe. 
--------------------------
All quotes are from an article by Alex Lasker on AOL.com.

A kind act

Suppose I had given twenty bucks to the tearful man with the beard, the guy I discussed in yesterday's post?  Would it really have helped him?  Beyond buying him a couple of meals?  Or, more cynically, a bottle of booze or some drugs?

Who knows?  The effects of a kind act are unpredictable.

My brother and I were 15 and 18.  We had pitched our tent the night before in the back yard of a willing but somewhat puzzled family, and were now biking toward Centralia, Washington.  We had spent two weeks by ourselves, a final bonding experience before I left for college, biking around southwestern Washington. Biking on two old, beat-up, one-gear bikes that would be curiosities today.  We still had a long way to bike, but if all went well we would be home that night.

We were out of money, but I had phoned our parents when we were back at Lake Quinault, and they had agreed to send a ten dollar check to us, c/o General Delivery, in Centralia.  More than enough money to feed us and get us home.  We arrived in Centralia before noon, and eagerly located the post office.  Oh no! No check from home!  I think I frantically phoned the folks; they said the check should have arrived.

We had eaten no breakfast.  It was now lunch time.  Nevertheless, we decided to see if we could make it home, biking the shoulder of I-5 (it had much less traffic back then!).  We got as far as Chehalis, about 4½ miles south of Centralia, and knew our teenage bodies needed food.  What to do?

We found the Chehalis police station and described our plight.  We were two small, skinny kids -- we both looked about 15.  We hadn't had a bath in two weeks.  We had this wild story that our parents had cheerfully allowed us to bike all by ourselves all over Western Washington.  The desk officer explained patiently that the Chehalis Police Department simply didn't have funds for that sort of "emergency." 

But then he looked at us again.  He rolled his eyes and pulled out his wallet.  "Here's a dollar of my own money; hope it helps.  Pay me back whenever your check arrives." 

We dashed off to the nearest café.  A dollar then was worth about $8.50 in today's money.  We gorged on hamburgers and milkshakes.  Food had never tasted so good!   We then biked back north to Centralia and revisited the post office.  Yes!  The check had arrived!  We cashed it at a bank (how we persuaded a prudent banker to cash a check for us two wild Indians, I don't remember).  Then, back to Chehalis. To the police station, of course. We never considered doing otherwise.

Our desk officer had gone off duty.  I handed a dollar bill to his replacement, and began to explain what it was for.  I hardly said two words before he grinned and said he knew all about it.  The entire police department knew all about it.  There was an office pool as to whether the "sucker" desk officer would ever see his dollar again.  "Oh.  Well, tell him thanks," we said, politely, and bid him farewell.   We still had 40 miles of freeway biking ahead of us.

My dad was incredulous that, first, we would have asked the cops for money, and, second, that they would have given us any (as opposed, I suppose, to locking us up for vagrancy).  Was I equally surprised?  Not really.  They'd always told me that the police were our friends.  My experiences during our two-week travels assured me that most folks were good. Now I knew that cops themselves would help kids who needed help.

Dropping a small pebble in a pool gives off ripples, ripples that spread a long distance. A few years later, my generation was deeply involved in a struggle over the war in Vietnam.  Demonstrators and police were  at each other's throats.  Like most young people, I was strongly opposed to the war and supported the demonstrations. 

Many of my friends hated the cops, and sneeringly called them "the pigs," throwing in an expletive or two.

I never could. I never did.

Lost

He was sitting on a bench as I got off the train at the UW light rail station, three long escalator rides beneath the surface.  He looked a bit older than the mobs of UW students passing around him, maybe 30, and a bit scruffier, but not terribly so.  He had a beard.  I hardly glanced at him, until I heard him crying.

A security guard was bent over him, speaking sternly.  The guy with the beard was sobbing, but he wasn't hysterical.  Not combative.  Not argumentative.  He just looked and sounded like a guy who had worked through all his options and had no idea what to do now.

I had a bit of a line to work through before boarding the escalator, and I kept my eye on the bearded man and the security guard.  Was he traveling without a fare?  Had he simply been sitting too long in one place?  I have no idea.  Strangely, the guard insisted that he enter the train from which I'd just unloaded.  He was entering the door, still crying, as the escalator carried me up and out of sight.

For many of us -- certainly for nearly all of the students hurrying around the bearded man -- life progresses easily.  We may think we have tough decisions to make, but we make the really significant decisions almost automatically.  Decisions like studying hard for grades, applying to college, finding a job.  Keeping our clothes clean and our bodies washed.  Looking people in the eye with at least some degree of confidence, real or feigned, when we speak to them.

We absorb these lessons from our parents and our peers.  But not everyone does -- not, at least, at the time when they would do the most good.  And if you miss one of those steps, you find yourself shunted off the main line track.

"There are no second acts in American lives."   F. Scott Fitzgerald was wrong, I think.  America gives more second chances -- and third and fourth chances -- than just about any other developed nation.  But the "second act" is harder to perform than a "first act" would have been.  And the third and fourth acts often become almost impossible.  Especially when all of your enthusiasm and self-confidence have been drained by the consequences of not successfully performing that "first act."

I know nothing about the bearded guy's back story, although I tend to make up stories for people in my head.  But I'd say he was a gentleman who had no further physical or emotional resources available, regardless of what "act" of his life he was contemplating.  I suspect we are surrounded by people like him.  Maybe they still have enough pride not to cry.  In public.  But they want to.

After I reached the surface, adjacent to Husky Stadium where all the lucky kids cheer their school's football team on autumn Saturdays, something occurred to me.  Too late.  How easy it would have been to break away from the line at the escalator for just a second, walk onto the train, hand the guy a $20 bill, smile, and say good luck.  Maybe that one act of kindness -- more than the money itself -- would have kick-started his ability to cope again.  But I didn't.

I try to make up for having done nothing by writing about it.  But, of course, things don't work that way.

Sick of it, sick of him

David Brooks -- the New York Times's resident conservative columnist -- has had enough.  He can't read -- let alone write -- another word about the President's latest bizarre tweets or actions.

For the past two years Trump has taken up an amazing amount of my brain space. My brain has apparently decided that it’s not interested in devoting more neurons to that guy. There’s nothing more to be learned about Trump’s mixture of ignorance, insecurity and narcissism. Every second spent on his bluster is more degrading than informative.

Instead, Brooks proposes to conjecture and discuss in writing about what comes after Trump, what America of the future will look like, now that we apparently have exhausted the "moral capital of the past."

I fully sympathize.

This blog of mine used to be a beehive of political comment and speculation.  Jeering and sneering at Bush the Younger.  Analyzing the conflicting merits of Hillary and Obama in 2008.  Cheering Obama on for eight years.  Gasping with amazement at the moral collapse of the Republican establishment in the last political campaign.

But after nearly seven months of the Trump presidency, like Brooks, I'm exhausted.   I'd be happy to debate Republican versus Democratic proposed policies, but that's no longer the issue.  The issue is that we have an ignorant, incurious, crude, barbaric, and self-centered habitual liar roaming about the White House -- when he isn't residing at one of his own many properties, at government expense. 

But it goes even beyond that.  We now have a sizable minority -- at times approaching a majority -- of the American public who profess to love Mr. Trump.  Trump bragged during the campaign that he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot people, and that his "Base" would still love him.  He has come close to fully testing that hypothesis.  Although his Base does want him to push his "program" through Congress -- whatever that program may be at any given moment -- they mainly just love him.

They love him apparently because he is tearing down everything that we thought all Americans supported -- representative democracy, judicial independence, courtesy, tradition, a spirit of compromise, acceptance of diversity, a welcome to immigrants.  Some of them may support "white supremacy," but most of them just want to shout down and eliminate all the "elitists" -- meaning educated and/or experienced officials -- who have managed the country for generations. 

This populist urge doesn't lend itself to debate.  It's more a food fight, a rumble, a storming of the Bastille.  When I write, I can slug it out on a gut level for a while, but I've about had it.  Until something comes along that invites a little intelligent discussion, I'll turn my attention to more satisfying topics.

Like the fact that it's getting mighty hard to find a good Sears store anywhere near my neighborhood.

Nuclear war

World War III!  As a young lad, a seventh grader, I read with fascination a prediction of how such a war might occur and be fought, and how it might end.    A war that would result in horrific casualties on all sides, but would end up with the U.S.S.R. under United Nations occupation.  The good guys won, if  -- considering the casualties -- you could call anyone the winner.

The entire October 22, 1952, issue of Collier's Magazine -- a general interest magazine similar to its competitor, the Saturday Evening Post -- was dedicated to describing the war that no one wanted.  The cover showed a redrawn map of Europe, following the war, with the Soviet Union's Eastern European satellites, the Baltic republics, and the Ukraine -- as well as the city of Moscow -- under U.N. occupation.  Always a lover of maps, it is this map on the cover that I remember most about the issue.

This week's issue of The Economist reminds me of that long ago doomsday Collier's issue. The magazine has dedicated much less space (three pages) to a scenario of how, in 2019, we might blunder into a nuclear war in Korea. North Korea is not the Soviet Union -- it is far smaller and less populated.  But relative to its size -- or maybe even in absolute terms -- its nuclear capacity is far greater than the Soviet Union's was in 1952.  Both the Collier's war and the Economist's war were "accidental" -- as always feared, the parties drifted into all-out
war by a series of miscalculations and misunderstandings of each other's intentions and conduct.

In the Collier's war, the United States sustained nuclear attacks, from missiles fired from submarines, against Chicago, New York, Washington and Philadelphia, Detroit, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Norfolk and other US cities.  America responded by dropping multiple nuclear bombs on Moscow, and sending 10,000 suicide paratroopers into the Urals to destroy Moscow's remaining nuclear stockpile.  The war ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1955, after three years of warfare.

In the Economist's scenario, the United States escapes nuclear attack.  After sustaining enormous initial damage, and realizing he and his nation are doomed, Kim Jong Un decides to fire everything he has left, ending the war in as much destruction as possible.  But his last two ICBMs are destroyed on the ground, and American Patriot missiles shoot down North Korean intermediate range missiles aimed at Tokyo and Okinawa before they can reach their targets.

Seoul had been nuked, with 300,000 deaths -- and many more doomed to die from radiation exposure.  Military losses were in the hundreds of thousands.  North Korea was in total chaos, facing starvation.  China was facing a critical Korean refugee problem, together with radioactive fallout crossing the border.

The article ends with China's reaction still unknown.

President Trump tweeted:

Nuke attack on Seoul by evil Kim was BAD!  Had no choice but to nuke him back.  But thanks to my actions, America is safe again.

The world reeled economically, on the brink of a worldwide recession.

In both the Collier's and Economist nuclear war scenarios, war came through miscalculation, and victory was won at an awful price.  Such victories bring to mind King Pyrrus's lament: "If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined."

In 1952, the Collier's war seemed like a reasonable forecast of the future.  Through common sense by both American and Soviet leaders, it never happened.  Do today's American and North Korean leaders possess similar common sense?

As the Economist likes to end provocative articles, "Only time will tell."

Prospero's Cell

PBS portrayal of Durrell
family on Corfu (2016)

"This is a supercool place to have a music party," said Simona Dimova, a 27-year-old marketing researcher who attended the festival -- a concert followed by a 16-hour techno party.  "I'm sick and tired of all the mainstream bars and clubs in Sofia, where you meet the same crowd of people.  Sofia needs more underground venues like this one."
--New York Times

I read this morning of techno parties and bars and clubs in Sofia, Bulgaria.  The wild and woolly Balkans.  So much for exoticism.  So much for travel to get away from it all.

'Twas not always thus.  I've just finished reading Lawrence Durrell's Prospero's Cell, a poetic description of places and people, based on Durrell's journal that he kept in 1937 while he lived on Corfu.  Prospero's Cell was the first of Durrell's travel writings.  It was written in 1941-42, after the fall of Greece, while Durrell was stationed in Alexandria.

Corfu (Corcyra, or a number of related Latin spellings, in Greek) is a crescent shaped island in the Ionian Sea, offshore from the point where Greece borders Albania.  Lawrence and his wife Nancy (N. in the book) lived for a time in a "white house" at the northern-most tip of the island, facing Albania across the strait.  Their house was 20 miles from the nearest town, a distance much easier to cover by small boat (caique) than by vehicle.

Lawrence was a poet before he was a travel writer or a novelist, and Propero's Cell is a compilation of poetic descriptions.  As with Reflections on a Marine Venus (an account of his post-war experiences on Rhodes), only more so, his language is lush, repetitive, impressionistic.  Perhaps too much so, but for Durrell, Corfu was an isle of magic, and magic can be expressed only through poetry.

At any rate, for a young poet, one still not much more than a teenager, untroubled by a need or desire for money, an isolated house on beautiful Corfu with a loving wife was heaven.  His bliss was only compounded by the company and friendship of a number of amateur philosophers and other intellectuals, Greek and foreign, who hung about the nearest town.  Long evenings were spent in conversation while the moon rose over the Albanian shoreline and the stars wheeled overhead.  The food was local and simple, and the wine -- although hardly French in quality -- was good. 

Durrell's book tells us far more than we need to know about Corfu's history and geology and crops and festivals and demographics.  Most of what he tells us -- unless we are perhaps already well familiar with Corfu -- will go over our heads and be forgotten.  But these subjects are but a pretext for the poet to exercise his facility with prose, to demonstrate his love of words.  

And the poetry, the prose, reveals to us the delight to be found in an almost total isolation from the "real world," in the immersion in a local culture that had not yet felt the effects of  modern culture and technology.  A culture where the people, including the local clergy, still believed in vampires -- the "Vrikolas" -- as the fate of those who had led exceptionally evil lives.  A culture untouched, as he remarked darkly in a speech* he gave much later, by the leveling effects of television.  A world that could be understood not so much by rational thought as by the senses and the emotions.

If I wrote a book about Corcyra it would not be a history but a poem. 

World of black cherries, sails, dust, arbutus, fishes and letters from home.

And a world yet untouched by tourism. 

In Alexandria, after fleeing the German invasion, he wrote his eulogy for Corfu -- for the villagers who were killed in the invasion, for the "white house" that was bombed to rubble, for his tiny boat that was sunk.  And for Greece itself, and especially for the ageless traditional peasant life that he and his friends had so enjoyed observing and joining.

Before the German disaster, one of his friends described Durrell to his face:

You are the kind of person who would go away and be frightened to return in case you were disappointed, but you would send others and question them eagerly about it.

I sympathize.  I'd be the same sort of fellow.

Lawrence at least had a chance to experience an unspoiled world, a world not yet overwhelmed by mass tourism, by mobs descending from giant cruise ships, a world that required no 16-hour techno parties to avoid boredom.  For the most part, we today have lost that opportunity; it was lost before we even arrived on the scene. 

Lost not just on Corfu, but everywhere on earth.
----------------------------------

* L. Durrell, Blue Thirst: Tales of Life Abroad (1975), the transcript of a speech given at Caltech in California.

Dog days

First day of August.  A strange month, to my way of thinking.  Still summer, but pointing the way toward fall. 

Sextilis, the Romans called it.  The sixth month in the Roman calendar.  But then Caesar Augustus came along,   He noted that the Senate had honored his non-imperial predecessor, Julius Caesar, by converting Quintilis into July.  What's an emperor to do?  August it had to be, especially since Julius Caesar's Julian calendar had already increased Sextilis's days from 29 to 31, making it a worthy choice for honoring the first emperor. 

Luckily, this re-naming fad didn't continue, or our October would now be known as Caligula.

As a boy, I found that the first day of August inspired both anticipation and alarm.  Anticipation for the next school year, because the joys of a small town summer had already begun to pale; alarm for the same reason, because my relationship with school was one of love-hate.  My brother was far less ambivalent.  I could provoke him into a tantrum merely by pointing out, in early August, that the stores were carrying "Back to School" fashions.

August 1st is well past the summer solstice, and the days are already perceptively shorter.  My bedroom's no longer flooded with sunlight at 5 a.m., and the twilight is deepening by 9 p.m.  And yet, the weather always lags behind the length of days.  August, along with July, is a hot month.

I type this post in early afternoon, as the house is beginning to heat up.  Outside, the temperature will reach a predicted 86 degrees today, 91 tomorrow, and 95 the next two days.  The highs will not dip below 85 for any of the next ten days.  We are told that the temperature this week may reach the three digit mark.  Only three times in the past 120 years -- the period during which records have been kept -- have we reached 100 degrees or higher in Seattle.

So 100 means nothing to you folks in Phoenix or Las Vegas?  Well, bless your fevered little hearts, but we in the Northwest Corner don't live in Phoenix or Vegas -- or aspire to.  But in August?  In August, sometimes, we begin to understand what you feel.  Except we don't have residential air conditioning.

In my home town, it wasn't only the "Back to School" sales that prompted thoughts of waning summer, of school days, of the coming of the autumn rains.  There was also the mint.  Large mint farms lay between our town and the Columbia.  About this time of year, the mint ripened, or whatever mint does when it's ready for harvest.  A breeze off the river brought whiffs of the mint tang into town.  "A hint of mint," we called it.  For my brother, another treasonous harbinger of school days to come.

The dog days of August.  These days now projected to lie ahead -- with temperatures in the 90s or higher -- were the dog days that we envisioned as kids.  Days fit only for lying in the shade, hoping for a breath of a breeze, staggering into the house hoping to find some Kool-Aid to quench our thirsts.  We felt like dogs -- tongues lolling out of our mouths and panting. 

But "dog days" -- however appropriate to describe the heat of August -- actually gets its name from the fact that Sirius, the "dog star" is first seen each year in August rising above the horizon just before dawn.  Sirius is part of the constellation "Canis Majoris" -- the big dog -- which follows Orion the hunter across the sky.

 Sirius rises late in the dark, liquid sky
On summer nights, star of stars,
Orion's Dog they call it, brightest
Of all, but an evil portent, bringing heat
And fevers to suffering humanity.

--Homer, The Iliad

Surely Augustus knew his Homer, and knew of the "evil portent" of the dog days?  And yet, he recklessly chose Sextilis as his month.  As reckless and unheeding, I suppose, as making a wild call to a New Yorker reporter and assuming nothing bad would come of it. 

For Augustus himself, nothing much bad did come of it.   But it augured poorly for Rome -- his family, by descent or adoption, gave the world Caligula and Nero.

But all that is history.  Today's dog days, uncomfortable as their heat may feel, have little cosmic meaning.  They merely suggest -- especially when combined with a hint of mint -- that school days, while not yet upon us, are peeking, like Sirius the dog star, over the horizon.