Cosmopolitan cities

Alexandria!  I can't get that city -- or that idea of a city -- out of my mind.

It all started years ago, when I read Durrell's Alexandria Quartet -- a Proustian story set in a partially fantasized Alexandria.  Then I discovered André Aciman -- that Jewish refugee from Alexandria, whose memoir and essays on memory and nostalgia hearken, over and over, to his Alexandrian boyhood.  E. M. Forster, and his 1922 history and guide of Alexandria.  Bits of the poetry of C. P. Cadafy. 

A city of world importance, from its founding by Alexander the Great in 331 B.C.  But what is it that haunts my own imagination?  I think it's the fascination of a "cosmopolitan" city, a city shared by many ethnic groups, many religions, many languages -- all living together, not always comfortably, but reasonably peaceably.  A city where a child or an old man can see much of the world by simply walking down one of its streets.

I feel the same way about Istanbul -- or rather about Constantinople, when the city was the capital of the Ottoman Empire.  Filled with not only the ruling Turks, but with Greeks, Jews, Armenians, Serbs, Syrians, Arabs, Egyptians.  And I feel the same about -- although I know less about -- Vienna, capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  Filled not only with the ruling German-speaking Austrians, but with Bohemians, Slovakians, Jews, Slovenes, Italians, Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Rumanians, and -- of course -- Hungarians.

Constantinople and Vienna were exciting cities in which to live, but their cosmopolitan nature was each based on the incorporation of many nations within a single empire.  Alexandria was somewhat different.  It was a city within the Ottoman Empire, but it was not a capital city.  And it drew nationalities from outside Ottoman territory.  People were attracted to it for many reasons, including the very fact of its cosmopolitanism.  British and French, left over from colonial adventures in Egypt.  Jews, fleeing persecution in other countries.  Armenians fleeing violent oppression by the Ottomans, and later, by Turkey.  Many Greeks, who settled throughout the Eastern Mediterranean.  Syrians.  Albanians.  Italians.  Coptic Christians.  Non-Egyptian Arabs.  And, of course, Muslim Egyptians.

One by one, it seems, the great cosmopolitan cities of the world have collapsed.  Vienna is now the capital of a small German-speaking country, not always welcoming to immigrants.  The post-war Turkish Republic moved its capital to Ankara, and -- to a large extent -- welcomed only Turks as citizens.

Alexandria remained a fading but fascinatingly cosmopolitan city until 1954 and the Suez war.  Aciman, in his writings, recalls how -- as a result of that war -- first the British and French, and then the Jews, were expelled from Egypt.  (The Jewish population dropped from 50,000 to about 50 today.)  He doesn't describe the fate of other nationalities -- Alexandrians whose ancestral countries weren't belligerents in the Suez hostilities -- such as the large Greek minority.  But Wikipedia notes that Nasser's nationalization of private property, which reached its zenith in 1961, led almost all non-Egyptians to flee the city. 

Alexandria's cosmopolitanism, and the death of that cosmopolitanism, brings contemporary America to mind.  When the president rails against "globalization," and shouts loudly in favor of "America First" and "America for Americans," he is generally perceived as worrying that American jobs are migrating overseas.  When he decries immigration, and expresses dislike of treaties (Iran, Cuba, NATO, NAFTA), he is seen as worrying about immigrants who take jobs that citizens could be handling, and about agreements that help other nations while harming America.

And to some extent, these perceptions of his intentions are correct.  But at a deeper level, he is appealing to nativism, to nationalism, to tribalism.  Insofar as possible at this late date, he wants to limit foreign influence on what he and his followers see as "true" American culture and nationality.  He wants to make America white, or at least white in its culture and values. 

Trump doesn't get along with many foreign leaders.  Who does he get along with?  The leaders of Turkey, of Saudi Arabia, of Israel, of the Philippines, of Poland, of Hungary.  Of Russia, sometimes. Of supporters of Brexit in Britain, and of those wishing to weaken the European Union in Europe.  His every instinct is to prevent and reverse a mixing of races, religions, and cultures.  He would have understood fully Gamal Nasser's drive to make Egypt a nation filled only with Egyptians; he would have supported Nasser's successful efforts to drive the Greeks, Jews, Armenians, and Albanians out of Alexandria.

If you look at voters in "blue" states, and compare then with voters in "red" states, one way to distinguish the two is the extent to which residents in each group of states enjoy living in communities that are "cosmopolitan": the extent to which they see value in rubbing shoulders with people different from themselves.  That distinction has become one of the fault lines in American culture and politics.  It explains a number of other fault lines, and any number of disputes over public policy.

I suspect that anyone who reads about Alexandria before World War II with a sense of nostalgia is the sort of person who feels most comfortable living in a blue state.

Like those states in the Northwest Corner.

John Wayne Pioneer trail

October 5, and weather in the Northwest Corner remains beautiful.  Seattle's official high was 68, but in the bright sun it seemed warmer.

Jim B. was in town, arriving last night for a visit with me and with members of his family scattered about the State of Washington.   Jim grew up on Mercer Island, and attended the University of Washington, where I met him.  But he has spent decades as an engineering professor at Purdue in Indiana.  So he returned not as a tourist, but as a Northwesterner revisiting his roots.

To remind him of how we spend time in these parts, we went on a reasonably long but easy hike on the John Wayne Pioneer Trail.  The John Wayne trail begins from a point near North Bend, Washington, and runs some 300 miles eastward to the Idaho border.  It uses the former right of way of the Milwaukee Road ("Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad"), a legendary transcontinental railroad that ran from Chicago to the Northwest (with 2¼ miles burrowing under the summit of the Cascades)  from 1909 to 1980. In 1980, the portions of track through Washington, Idaho, and Montana were abandoned, following bankruptcy.  

The elite passenger streamliner, the Olympian Hiawatha, which competed on the Chicago to Seattle run with the Great Northern's Empire Builder and the Northern Pacific's North Coast Limited, had already been dropped from service by 1961.

What remains -- with track removed -- is the graded route, complete with trestles and tunnels.  It makes excellent biking and hiking.

Jim and I drove to Interstate 90's exit 47, where we parked at the trailhead for Annette Lake.  We hiked on the narrow, winding, and often steep Annette Lake trail for about 0.7 miles, at which point we intersected the John Wayne.  We headed westward through tunnels of forest, past views of alpine peaks and colorful fall foliage, through a snow shed, and over a steampunk-esque iron trestle, aiming for the McClellan Butte trail that intersected the John Wayne as it came up from I-90's exit 42.

The hike was easy but long, and the shadows were growing longer when we decided to turn back shortly before reaching our destination.  My phone's pedometer showed we still had about a half a mile to go, but we found a sunny spot along the trail, ate candy bars and drank water, and declared victory.  By the time we returned to the Annette Lake trail once more, that heavily-shaded approach trail was dark and gloomy.

We logged a total of 12.2 miles by the time we returned to our car.

We were tired, but hardly gloomy.  The John Wayne is a great trail for walking and catching up with a friend whom one rarely has a chance to see.  It would also be a great place to introduce hiking novices to the pleasures of walking -- but perhaps for a shorter walk as their first-time experience.

I understand the right of way was accepted by the legislature with a provision for reversion, should the route ever be needed again for rail service.  Maybe a new generation of Hiawathas will one day roar out of the Cascade tunnel and down the slope to Puget Sound.  Meanwhile -- a real boon to hikers.

Pleasure deferred

I'm not particularly crazy about candy -- but once upon a time, as a child, I certainly was. 

In our Christmas stockings, and as birthday gifts, my brother and I would be blessed at times with boxes of candy.  Really good candy.  I remember especially long boxes of chocolate mints, like Girl Scout mints but better, and square "Sampler" type boxes of chocolate cherries.  As I say, I'm no longer so crazy about candy, but if I still were, chocolate mints and chocolate cherries would be right up there at the top of my cravings.

My brother and I were equally crazy about such candy -- but whereas his entire box would be devoured within a few days, mine would still be largely intact months later.  I'm "Saving for the Future," I would tell him primly, smugly aware of my own virtue.  He would roll  his eyes and remind me of all the times I had finally got around to eating the last of my goodies, and had found them stale and nearly inedible.

And he was right.

If I had been a bit older, I could have justified my self-satisfaction by throwing around the term "delayed gratification" -- a miserly approach to candy that arguably augurs well for the future of the child who displays it.  As this week's Economist relates, Stanford researchers in the 1960s devised a cognitive experiment often called "the marshmallow test."  Essentially they put a marshmallow in front of a young child and told him that he could eat it any time he wanted, but if he waited a certain period of time, he would get two marshmallows (think 401k plans).  Data show that the older the child, the longer he's willing to wait for the bonus.  But if you take two children of the same age, the one who waits longer is more apt as a teenager and an adult to defer other forms of gratification -- and to reap the rewards.

Everyone assumes that kids have become increasingly self-indulgent over the past fifty years.  But a researcher at UC Santa Barbara has examined reams of testing data and has discovered that there has been a steady increase, decade by decade, in the amount of time kids are willing to wait for that second marshmallow -- and that this is true of all kids, "good" and "bad."

No one knows why the increase. 

But think twice before you tell your child or grandchild that kids back in the day were thriftier, or better disciplined, or more apt to "save for the future."  Unless, of course, you're like me.  And have some old bars of Snickers in the back of a cupboard that have solidified to the point that you can no longer bite into them.  Or bottles of wine -- long-ago gifts from friends who didn't don't know my habits -- that have turned to vinegar.

I wonder ... I wonder if they still make chocolate cherries?

Blowing its top

Mount Agung is a 9,944 foot volcano on the Indonesian island of Bali.  It is an active volcano.  It last erupted in 1963, killing over 1,100. 

Experts say another eruption is imminent -- perhaps within hours as I write this.  Three days ago, the government declared a 12-kilometer exclusion zone around the volcano.  Nearly 100,000 refugees have moved to other parts of the island, or to neighboring Java.  The volcano experienced 844 earthquakes on Monday, and a proportionately similar number by mid-day yesterday. A decision hasn't yet been made whether to close the two airports.

I find this situation particularly interesting, because my family and I have arranged to be relaxing on Bali from October 22 to 29.  On the east coast.  Twenty-eight kilometers (about 18 miles) from the volcano.

Back in 1980, my family lived 36 miles from Mt. St. Helens.  That was fun.  We seem to have a genetic affinity for eruptions.  If we had lived back in Roman days, our home would have been located in beautiful downtown Pompeii.

Will we still go to Bali?  If so, will we return?  Stay tuned.

The Wizard

Big week coming up for our nation.  And for Mr. Trump:

1. Repeal of Obamacare scheduled for a vote.  Last chance for the Republicans to avoid a filibuster.  As I write this, repeal appears doomed to defeat, as at least four Republican senators will vote "no."  Trump has pushed big for repeal, and it looks like Trump will lose.

2.  Republican primary election in Alabama between two survivors from the nineteenth century.  Against the desires of most of his supporters, Trump has put his prestige on the line in favor of the least insane of the two.  He admits committing his prestige may have been a mistake.  Looks like he will lose.

3.  Trump has hurled repeated insults at the hyper-sensitive head of North Korea, in effect double-dog-daring him to attack the United States.  Threatening him with the total obliteration of his nation in a rain of fiery hell.  China is nervous.  Japan is nervous.  South Korea is very nervous.  Most countries in the world are incredulous ... and nervous.  There now appears no way Trump can avoid, without looking weak, keeping his promise to unleash a nuclear attack on North Korea in the near future.  Trump would rather see millions die than look weak.  Whether he attacks or backs down, he will lose.  As will America.

4.  When the Senate completes work, one way or the other, on Obamacare, it will face the next critical issue on Trump's agenda -- tax reform.  The Republican party is highly divided.  It seems unlikely they can agree on anything except cosmetic changes to existing law.  Trump will lose.

5.  Special Counsel Mueller is clearly closing in on matters that will result in indictments.  Maybe not for Trump personally, but for many members of his administration.  Or -- maybe for Trump personally, as well.  When the indictments are announced, Trump loses.

How has Trump responded?  He has spent the week attacking the NFL, the NBA, the officers of the conferences, the players (mainly but not exclusively black players), and the teams and their coaches themselves.  He has "demanded" a boycott of NFL games.  He wants dissenting players to be fired.  He has tweeted 18 times on the subject since Saturday.  He has thus attacked one of the most popular institutions in America -- professional sports.  Trump says that red-blooded Americans will watch -- in person or on TV -- only real American sports like golf and NASCAR racing.  White folks' sports.  A poll shows that 61 percent of Americans oppose his demands.  He loses.

But maybe he doesn't lose.  While 61 percent of Americans oppose his attacks on the NFL, 65 percent of Republicans support him.  His Base.  His Hallowed Base.  "Hey fellow Republicans!  Keep your eyes on the shells -- which one is the NFL bean hiding under?  Ignore the other small matters bothering my administration, ignore those mushroom clouds -- I'm going to save you and the flag and the National Anthem from being despoiled by the Evil Ones."

I am the Great Trump and I bring you Greatness.  Pay no attention to that scared, weak, insecure little man behind the curtain.

Oxford commas

As the Economist discusses this week, proper use of the comma is a contentious subject.  The magazine (or "newspaper," as it prefers to call itself) notes that American writers use commas more liberally than do British writers.

Well, we're a wealthier country, I guess.  We can afford to squander commas.

The Economist claims that commas were originally used not for grammatical purposes, but as indications of places where the oral reader could pause to take a breath.  Therefore, their use should be considered stylistic and optional.

Well, maybe.  Without conceding the "pause for breath" hypothesis, I agree that their use in a given context is often optional, not bound by fast, never-to-be broken rules.

The exception is the "Oxford comma" -- sometimes called the "serial comma" -- that comma following the penultimate item of a series.  For example, "He enjoyed doing w, x, y, and z."  That comma after y.  Got it? 

I maintain that the Oxford comma is mandatory -- even though I have a hunch that my elementary school teachers discouraged its use.  In fact, if you find it omitted in any of my blog posts, it was omitted in violation of my own (unwritten) style sheet, and probably because of lazy comma habits instilled in me by those same elementary school teachers.

The Economist begins its article with an anecdote about the proper construction of a Maine labor statute that excluded a series of activities from a requirement that the company offer overtime pay.  The statute was completely ambiguous if one assumed that the drafter of the statute had considered insertion of an Oxford comma to be unnecessary.  The company argued that the court should find that an absent Oxford comma was implied; the court disagreed and applied the statute exactly as written -- with the two items following the final comma joined together as one item.

Despite this evidence of possible ambiguity when the Oxford comma is omitted, the Economist brazenly refuses to consider its use mandatory.  It urges instead that copy editors should read copy carefully, and take steps to eliminate ambiguity when it actually exists.

Not all of us have editors, least of all British editors with the infinite time and exquisite patience to test the ambiguity or lack thereof in sentences containing series.  And there's no downside to tossing in one more comma. We therefore insist in imposing an absolute rule on ourselves.

The Oxford comma is mandatory.

Sailing to Ithaca

Father and son:
Odysseus and Telemachus

Always keep Ithaca in your mind;
to reach her is your destiny.
But do not rush your journey in the least.
Better that it last for many years;
that you drop anchor at the island an old man,
rich with all you’ve gotten on the way,
not expecting Ithaca to make you rich.
--C. P. Cavafy* (1863-1933)

The second of Homer's two great epics is, of course, the Odyssey -- the story of how the hero Odysseus (Ulysses in Latin) struggles to return to his island of Ithaca after the conclusion of the Trojan War. 

Because Odysseus gets on the bad side of Poseidon, it takes him ten years to return, losing all of his warriors during the process.  His son Telemachus, an infant when Odysseus left for battle, is now an adult seeking to learn if his father is still alive, or dead.  "Suitors" have descended on Ithaca, seeking the hand of Penelope -- Odysseus's wife -- and essentially being terrible guests.  Telemachus -- Odysseus's heir -- doesn't know how to handle the insult the Suitors pose to Penelope, to Odysseus, and to Ithaca.

One theme of the Odyssey is (or may be) the relationship between father and son -- a son who feels inadequate and inexperienced compared with his heroic father, a father he never had a chance to know.  The son seeks his father, and the father looks forward to seeing the son he last saw as an infant.

Daniel Mendelsohn is a professor of humanities at Bard College in New York, where he specializes in Greek studies.  He has written a memoir of his experiences teaching a one-term seminar on the Odyssey, meeting with a small group of freshman students once a week for two hours around a seminar table.  His book, The Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, is a week by week, chapter by chapter, study of the Odyssey by an expert in classical Greek and of Greek literature. 

But because the author's own 81-year-old father asked to audit the seminar -- and ended up participating at length and with strong opinions in class discussions -- it is also a memoir of a father's relationship to his son -- an often fraught relationship in this case, between a stern, impatient parent and a son who had always felt inadequate and unloved.

The two themes mesh amazingly well in Mendelsohn's book -- Telemachus's search for his father, their eventual meeting, their learning to appreciate each other, and an analogous development in the relationship between Mendelsohn and his own father.

The Odyssey is full of stories, many of which are known by many children -- the Cyclops, Scylla and Charybdis, etc. -- but the epic itself is complex in its development.  As Mendelsohn points out, it is written as story-tellers often tell stories -- with long digressions to other periods of time to explain the event that was originally being described.  Mendelsohn adopts an identical "circular" approach to his own memoir -- a mention of something his father has said, for example, may lead to a long digressive recounting of events decades earlier that explain the father's comment. 

These digressions are neither frustrating nor unpleasant.  They seem very natural, as did the digressions in Homer's epic to his own listeners.  After all, we have a full book to discuss the 24 "books" of the Odyssey.  There's no rush to hurry to the end, anymore than ancient Greeks were in any hurry to "get to the end" of an epic.  We can wander leisurely through the Odyssey, through Mendelsohn's recounting of how he taught the semester seminar and of his discussions with his students, and through the gradual revelation of the history of tensions between the Mendelsohns, father and son.

This is a wonderful book, and a painless way not only to learn the "plot" of the Odyssey, but to experience a classical expert's analysis and interpretation of the many themes in the epic that might well pass over the head of the casual reader. 

Mendelsohn also, obviously, loves the Greek language, and he repeatedly explains how a Greek term was used in the Greek original of the epic, and how English words have derived from the original Greek.  In the very first chapter he identifies the term arkhe kakon -- the "beginning of bad things" -- as describing how Helen of Troy's abduction initiated the entire Trojan tragedy.  We should know the words, he suggests -- from arkhe, we get the "arche-" words like archetype; from kakon, we get cacophony.

If etymology isn't your idea of cool (it is mine!), that's ok.  The etymological passages are frequent, but brief.  Feel free to read right past them!

The book ends, after the seminar concludes and after the author and his father go on an "Odyssey Cruise" in the Mediterranean, with the death shortly thereafter of Mendelsohn Senior.  The son's account of his last days with his father, and of the increased understanding and appreciation they had developed for each other's very different characters, is intensely moving, one of the most moving descriptions of a father's death I've ever read.

A man -- track his tale for me, Muse, the twisty one who
wandered widely, once he'd sacked Troy's holy citadel;
he saw the cities of many men and knew their minds.

Estimated reading time is six hours.  This book is well worth the investment of six hours.
----------------------------
* "Ithaca," translated from Greek by Daniel Mendelsohn.

Send it C.O.D.

C.O.D. --  Collect on Delivery.

When I was a child, Amazon did not exist.  Nor did credit cards.

You shopped in stores on Main Street, and paid cash.  But those stores didn't carry everything that a child -- or an adult -- might want.

Magazine ads were full of dreams, dreams you couldn't satisfy wandering through the Five & Ten.  You ordered by mail.  Not by going on-line.  Not by dialing an 800 number.  But by cutting a coupon or order form out of the magazine, filling it out with your name and address, copying the address given on the coupon onto an envelope, sticking on a 3-cent stamp, and mailing it.

How did you pay for your order.  Coupons generally had three boxes for you to choose from.  One was "cash."  One was "check or money order." And the third was "C.O.D."

I never used C.O.D.  Nor did anyone in my family.  In fact, I've never talked to anyone who ever used C.O.D.  What was it?  It was the closest available method to ordering on credit, to using a credit card.

The advertiser filled the order and mailed the purchase to you.  The postman collected the purchase price from you before handing over the merchandise, and sent the amount back to the seller.  C.O.D. bought you a little additional time to get the money together to pay for the order.  Maybe it also reassured suspicious purchasers that they would actually receive something in exchange for their payment.

Now we order on-line.  Or by 800 number.  And we pay by credit card.  Who needs C.O.D.?  I was thinking about this while stalled in traffic this morning.  I wondered when it was that the postman stopped acting as a financial middle man between the buyer and the seller.  On reflection, it sounded like an odd task for a government postal worker to undertake.

But lo and behold: To my surprise, the USPS still offers C.O.D. service.  Or did, as of the end of last year.  News services reported at that time that the postal service was planning to phase out C.O.D. home deliveries, although you would still be able to pick up a C.O.D. parcel at the post office and pay for it there.  But no more convenient home deliveries.

If the Postal Service has its way, a service that has been around for over one hundred years will come to an end.

I was surprised that there was still any demand for this service, but there were 346,000 C.O.D. deliveries in 2015.  The change is expected to have the most impact on low income customers living in rural areas.  Many such customers either prefer to make purchases using this method, or do not have the credit necessary to purchase by credit card.

The change will have no impact on me.  I assumed the service had died off long ago.  Its survival illustrates how diverse our population is, and how many folks still feel most comfortable using methods of commerce that they learned to use in their childhood.

I guess companies must still provide coupons or order forms with a C.O.D. box waiting to be checked.  I never see them anymore, but I find their continued existence to be oddly comforting.
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If this post has piqued your interest in the use of C.O.D., the USPS has a full page of instructions on its use posted on its website.

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.