Reading QuePasa

I went to Li Ming's last week to pick up the fixings for the New Year's nian gao, fast becoming a tradition in our household though my understanding is that actual Chinese people eat a sweet version of the rice cakes. I cooked a bunch of those for Chinese New Year's at Jonathan and Sharon's a couple of years back and was less excited about them. One thing I will say is that if the management of Li Ming's keep the place cool in summer -- and they most assuredly do -- they don't do the opposite in winter. Dress warmly when visiting, even if you plan to eat lunch there from the steam table, as Bobby and I do as often as we think of it.

On the way out I picked up an issue of Que Pasa, a Spanish-language newspaper out of the Triad (the NC triumvirate of cities, to be clear. Not the Chinese crime syndicate. To the best of my knowledge. I need newspaper both to start fires in the fireplace -- now that we don't get a print newspaper -- y tambien a practicar leer en espanol, something I don't do enough of.

I learned a fair amount from the paper. For instance, I had not been aware that the OBBBA places a 1% tax on remittances sent through cash or money transfer services like Western Union. This seems harsh given most wages remitted have already been subject to income tax. It could easily have the effect of driving immigrants into the banking system -- where they may have to commit fraud to establish accounts -- which could be used against them by ICE and make them more easily deportable. Alternately, this could fuel the adoption of cryptocurrency and stable coins as a payment mechanism -- currently helpful to Trump and his cryptobro allies. For the record, US remittances to Mexico were probably about $60 billion in 2025, something like 3% of Mexican GDP.

Also, I learned that the Mexican Government has a Consulate in Raleigh, one of about fifty spread around the US to provide services to Mexicans. Makes sense.

Substack aggregation/bundling

Somebody on Substack made the point that 2025 was the year that the whole world showed up on Substack, which probably diverges from truth only incrementally. There are so many good writers on Substack, but there's no way anyone can read all of them let alone pay for all of the ones one likes. One wishes they could be aggregated and curated into something like.... a magazine.

Given the times we live in, it's not too far-fetched to think that Substack might create an AI that customizes each of our feeds into things we might like, based on... an algorithm derived from our reading habits. Gollie, if only that were technologically possible. But of course it would need a pricing mechanism to figure out how to optimize and balance engagement vs. revenue production which might look something like... Google Adwords or the dynamic pricing models that change the prices of airline seats based on demand at a given moment. Really all Substack needs to do is throw all this together and let writers opt into it as opposed to demanding $75 from each reader annually.

I already subscribe to NYT, WaPo, WSJ, The Economist, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, the News & Observer, and Triangle Business Daily. Our household print media spend already is probably in the $2,000-$3,000 range and I can hardly scratch the surface of what I already subscribe to. How am I gonna pay $75 to one writer, however clever? 

The ponderous yoke of the book

One of the great blessings in my life has been exiting from academia at a young enough age where I was freed from believing that only publishing a number of books with prestigious presses would demonstrate that I had been an adequate human being. Unfortunately, that's how the culture of many of your higher-toned universities leads them to believe: only books really count.

In fact, even in the case of academics, they don't actually post a publication list on your gravestone. It ultimately just doesn't matter. But professors are so very deeply programmed to believe that only in publication does true glory reside. 

Given the traditional three-paragraph format of this blog, I am tempted to keep repeating the same basic point in a variety of ways until I have reached my statutory minimum of text. Instead, let me just thank you, fair reader, for taking the time to visit with me again in 2025. I'll be back next year with both more and better. 

Tipping as an opportunity to give

In recent years more and more payment screens both online and IRL have offered us opportunities to tip. I've seen various plaints about this crop up here and there, on social media, in periodicals, what have you. On the one hand, yeah it's a little annoying. At the same time, there's broad consciousness that wealth has become ever more concentrated in too many places in the world. The issue may not be as black and white as it is painted in some corners -- I've written before about how the myth of the top 1% having everything becomes an excuse for the top 20-30% of the population to paint itself as poor and be less generous than it might be.

And so, on the other hand (some of you may have been waiting for the proverbial brick to drop), I am growing to appreciate the requests for tips as an opportunity to give to others. I have to fight within myself a hard-grained belief that 15% is the appropriate tip for table service and therefore I should give less than that when picking up takeout,* but I am getting better at it. Likewise for tipping 20% or more when being served in a restaurant not to signal excellent service, but just to give more and to make the day of the server or servers a little brighter. Because I can and because the servers can use the money. 

It's a nice place to be in life where I have the wherewithal to think like this and to try to apply this mindset consistently. I am not always successful but I am getting to be a better and bigger tipper. 

* Also because I feel like I'm repaying a karma deficit for years when I didn't tip when picking up takeout. Maybe it wasn't a thing back in the 90s, or maybe I was just oblivious and felt economically insecure. In any case, I'm working on it. 

Trust Exercise

I just finished Susan Choi's Trust Exercise, which I encountered in the used section of Epilogue Books (cleverly known as Prologue Books) last Saturday when I was between grabbing some sushi with mom and going to get a long-delayed professional haircut from Ashlyn, something that I should really do more often. Ashlyn was running a little behind when I got there, so I started in reading the book, which ended up being another excellent excuse to not keep banging my head against the brick that is Doris Kearn Goodwin's Team of Rivals.

I had hesitated before buying it. Choi was a couple of years behind me at Yale and was someone I saw around and at parties, someone I knew tangentially but not really. When I'm reading books by people I went to college with -- be it Claire Messud whom I did know or Choi or Amor Towles whom I kinda almost knew -- there's always a vague hint of envy and the path not taken for me, I am envious of some glamorous writer's life I project onto them, of Yaddo and MacDowell and other verdant writerly retreats. I know in fact their lives are substantially grinds of giving readings and signing books to crowds of 20, 30, 50 people if they're lucky sometimes, that it's not all as fancy as it seems. But still I wonder.

But then again I've never really had much of a knack for fiction and certainly never began to hone the craft. 

In any case, it's a fine book. Unexpected twists and turns and all of that. I had initially thought it was an analog to Normal People and there's an element of truth to that, but much of that ends up being a sidebar if not an outright red herring to where the book ends up. In some ways, Choi gives us two plots (and a half?) for the price of one. I'll be back for more.

Return to Zeno

I was talking to a Tesla driver the other day, an engineer who had bought his well before Elon went full on through the looking glass and who seems enamored more than anything by the technology of his car. I asked him his opinion of the thesis that plug-in hybrids were ultimately a better societal allocation of the scarce battery-making materials to reduce our carbon footprint (forgetting for one blissful moment how we've jettisoned carbon concerns in favor of our headling dash for AI). The engineer responded with a version of the old argument that it's fallacious/delusional to think that individual action can make a meaningful impact on the world's big problems.

It occurred to me that, yet again, he had escorted me back to the realm of Zeno's paradoxes, specifically, the one which denies the possibility of motion since, to go a certain distance, you first need to go half the distance. To go that half distance, you first need to go half of it, or a quarter distance. To go a quarter, first an eighth. And so on. The infinite logical divisibility of space thus demonstrates the impossibility of motion. And so (it occurs to me), we are all Oblomovs.

Indeed, why try anything? It just doesn't matter. That's the logical conclusion from this mindset.

Unless, perhaps, one acts as part of a team, a group, a corporation.

Catching up with me

I recent weeks my weight has been creeping up, recently topping out at 189 for a brief moment. This is not an all-time high -- I think I tipped the scales as high as 193 maybe early in grad school and probably also when I was transitioning into the private sector around 2000. But we are getting on up there.

I'm sure a bunch of things are at work. For one thing, with Adam injured, it's harder to get tennis on the calendar because it all involves complex scheduling as opposed to just having it on the calendar. But there's also the problem of holiday parties and my humanities-PhD-program engraved sense of scarcity: if there is free food, my body tells me I should eat it. And then my alcoholic inner voice whispers that since I don't drink alcohol it's OK for me to eat it. So I sense that I must simultaneously keep my exercise program up and my calorie consumption an ever duller roar.

What's more, I need to do this while bearing down on the looming 6-0 just around the corner in April. Anecdotally -- and that's all I've got -- my body seems to be pushing back a little. I went running yesterday afternoon and -- as I was trying to extend the 3-mile lake loop by adding a mile or so via the Rolling Road to Oxford Hills extension -- a calf started to threaten a cramp going up Rolling, so I had to slow to a walk. It could well have been dehydration, probably I hadn't focused on water enough through the afternoon of coffee and sitting and chatting with Ashlyn while getting a rare professional cut. I'd like to think that's the case. But part of me suspects it's aging. Everything takes a little more focus and discipline.

But maybe I'm sick of focus and discipline and want to chill out. Is that the siren song of senescence? Arghh, it's all so maddening. Certainly many naked eyes would observe me and my laptop-staring, YouTube-gorging ways and fail to see in me an exemplar of anything other than a very muddy middle. And who's to say they would be mistaken?

The Story of Music

Not long ago it occurred to me that not only did I have the most threadbare sense of the history of music, what with never having studied it much (save for one class on jazz I took the spring of my senior year), but that this problem was in principle quite easily redressed with the help of YouTube. It just took a quick query and I was off and running with Howard Goodall's 2013 six-part The Story of Music.

To be clear, I had never heard of Goodall and did not pause to check his credentials, but he seems to know a lot about music. He narrates. He plays the piano. He even sings. It's all very BBC, to be sure, and his focus for the most part is very much on what we refer to as "classical music," orchestras, violins, oboes, all that whatnot, though he does address popular music and music in the age of mechanical reproduction.

There were some surprises.

First, from the perspective of musical form, he doesn't seem to think of either Mozart or Beethoven as huge innovators. Bach, yes, to be sure, but not the two that we most often think of as the big boys. He gives them credit for changing the status of the composer in the world and how composers could earn a living, making them more self-sustaining than vassals of this or that court or patron, but not much else. Maybe he's right.

There's barely any mention of Schubert, Haydn, Chopin. I guess six hours just isn't a lot when you've got a lot of ground to cover.

Also, he spends a good chunk of time talking about how Liszt was really the innovative one and that so much of what Wagner did just derives from innovation done by Liszt. To which I'm like, OK, don't really have a dog in that fight. But Goodall clearly does.

Anyhoo, it was six hours well spent. I learned a lot. I have more of a timeline in mind now for the history of music, which is what I was after. I did snooze a little on my couch while listening/watching, but then again that's what couches are for. Onward.

Megabroods

Today there's a story in the Journal about Chinese billionnaires trying to build massive families for themselves using American surrogates. Of course there are a wide range of reactions about how morally regugnant it is, whether it's illegal, immoral, etc. My reaction tends to be more in the range of ick/good luck with that and, ultimately, sadness for the children of these colossal, raging assholes. Raising children should be the most engaging, engrossing and rewarding things one ever does, really the most if not the only meaningful thing many of us do, not some volume play.

It merits noting in passing some of the variants of the schemes these guys have in mind. One wants to create a corps of sons who can take over his businesses. Another wants a bunch of daughters who carry intermarry with other rich people. Each of these variants has its own ick factor, but at least the second guy has some imagination and sees the value in cross-fertilization and combining with others.

At the end of the day (i.e. the end of the post), I can only wish the best for these poor little rich children, and hope that they find love and fulfillment somewhere along the way on this often harsh planet. And I hope that those born here in the USA are not denied their birthright American citizenship and that it will provide them opportunities for edification and growth, lest they all be subjected to the ruthless discipline of the gaokao, on top of the demands of an asshole father who will most likely smoulder just outside the ashbin of history before being ingested by worms.

A new tune

We have had an issue of Christmas music staleness over the years. We've tried to refresh, with some limited success, so as not to overplay our household classics (many of which I've posted here over the years).

One thing we've had around for years is this CD of Mary's, which we've never listened to consistently. I put it on the other night when we were putting up the tree, and somewhere in there this song comes in. First I recognized Jackson Browne's voice and I thought, "Oh, Jackson Browne," which I might have realized was coming up had I looked at the cover. As the song went on it dawned on my that it was a rather lovely tune. 

Last night I was listening to it after Mary got home and I just started crying, from whatever, joy, relief, holiday spirit. In general I am not good at processing joy. I can have fun, I can joke around, whatever. But mostly I am just grinding a lot, knocking things out, getting things done, pushing myself to do more, trying not to impose too much on those around me, especially my kids.

But it is hard for me to just be and be happy and sometimes to insist on the things I need to do to be happy.

I had my last meeting with a doctor yesterday. He is retiring at 71, taking counsel from a mentor who worked till he was 92 before dying at 95, who told my doctor not to make that mistake.

I am a good ways from that point, but I will be mindful of it as we roll forward.

Fresh keds

Coincident with the demise of my longtime office loafers -- about which I have already reported in these pages -- I got the clogs shown below. This morning it occurred to me that I had refreshed almost every element in my shoe portfolio over the last year or so -- walking shoes (shown below with the clogs), running shoes, tennis shoes, flip flops, hiking boots, pretty much everything except for dress shoes, where I continue to sport the the Alfred Sargent* boots I bought in 1995 right when Mary and I started going out and in which I was married. Also some mid-cut Blundstones I wear many days that are maybe 2 years old. 

I am very pleased with this state of affairs. It has been some time since I have been enthusiastic for each pair of shoes I own, with the caveat that the ASICS tennis shoes I picked up this summer seem to be contributing to my jumper's knee/insertional tendonitis, which implies I should order another pair of the cushier K-Swiss for actual tennis playing and downgrade the ASICS into walking around sneakers. Which is fine because I honestly bought them to be more for their after-tennis life anyway.

It is a fine thing to have a quiver of fetching footwear. It takes me back to 8th grade and all of its associated joys. 

* I was saddened to learn just now, from the so-called internet, that Alfred Sargent filed for liquidation in 2021. Somebody has evidently bought the brand name and is selling shoes under it, but it is far from the same thing, which was readily apparent by the low prices they're asking for the shoes. Also they're not very nice looking.

Union College

I finally got the gumption to pull from my shelf the copy of Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals that had been taking up space there for some time, since whenever I paid $9 for it at some lucky used bookstore.

Reading about William Seward, who will later in the book become Lincoln's Secretary of State, I was pleased to learn that he was a graduate of Union College in Schenectady. Over the years I visited many colleges and universities with Graham and Natalie, maybe thirty of them all told. Union's experience for prospective students was far and away the best. I can't believe I failed to memorialized it here on the blog, but I will do so now.

It was the summer of 2021. The tail end of the most restrictive portion of the pandemic. Most of the schools we visited with Graham didn't bother to actually offer tours and most of them wouldn't let visiting students into buildings.

Union was not like that. Being situated up in Schenectady, just north of Albany, Union understood full well that it was outside of the mainstream of small colleges geographically and that it lacked the brand power of the Wesleyans, Williamses, and Bowdoins of the world. We went inside buildings. Wearing masks, to be sure.

So there we are sitting in a little auditorium on Union's picturesque campus, getting a little welcome talk from the Director of Admissions. Up behind him on a screen was a screen with a scrolling presentation: "Welcome Graham, from Chapel Hill, NC" it said, and it cycled through all the kids in the room (maybe 12-15 plus parents) before going back to the beginning of the list. A warm glow descended over me. This was good marketing.  

The tour of the buildings was solid, led by a rising senior who was a big fan of her alma mater. Pretty much par for the course, but no complaints. When the tour was done we went back to the admissions building where we had started. It was hot out and we needed to hit the head and refill our water bottles. When we passed through building's front room where the receptionist was she asked us, very earnestly and positively: "Did you guys enjoy the tour?" She may even have asked if we had any other questions. 

It was all just perfect pitch. Super welcoming. Good salesmanship. I am glad Graham ended up at UNC but if Union had been 45 minutes away I would have been delighted for him to have gone there. Though Schenectady is a freaking hike to get to from here, so it's all for the best

For the weak

"Patents are for the weak." Elon Musk says a lot of stupid stuff, but this one is interesting. Patents, in his mind, stifle creativity and hinder the flow of ideas. A good company or productive scientist should be able to come up with new ideas to keep getting better. It's an extreme position but an interesting thought experiment.

What then shall we say of tariffs? Who are they for? What would be the fate of Tesla, for example, if we let BYD sell cars in America? Things would get interesting fast.

Similarly, borders and immigration controls. If there was a free flow of people and products across them, would chaos really ensue? Or would we just end up with markets and pricing governing a lot more things. Yes, it would be messy at first. A lot of people would come to places perceived as attractive. But pretty soon an equilibrium would be established. As labor costs got dragged down and workforce housing bid up in the developed world, and as wages were sent home to family members, the advantages of leaving home would diminish. If border enforcement could just concentrate on stopping drugs and other contraband rather than people, they might even get better at it.

I'm dramatically oversimplifying things and my time allocated for blogging draws to a close, but it's worth pondering.

The perils of attention at the highest level

One gets the sense these days that the Big Men of the world are playing for posterity, in the worst possible way. Globally the network economies of attention and the ability of social networks to concentrate it at scale have contributed to a general rash of them breaking out all over: Trump, Putin, Xi Jinping, MBS, Modi, Erdogan and so on down to the Mileis, Maduros, Musevenis and Bukeles of the world. Everybody jockying for position on the big board and trying to siphon eyeballs away from the Zuckerbergs, Bezos, Elons, etc. 

An article in The Economist this week noted that Ayatollah Khamenei of Iran is now 86 and that he probably wants to cement his legacy in a big way. Hell, they all do. Right now I think in their respective minds they are all playing chess with Hitler, Stalin, Mao etc and trying to figure out how to inscribe themselves into history indelibly. While they are also competing for eyeballs with Mr Beast and Sydney Sweeney's breasts.

Not a good situation. On the flip side, I continue to be impressed by people working hard to build low level connectivity across domains. My former client at the University of Georgia who works building relations with other universities globally. YouTubers traveling the world (and the US) on foot, on bicycle, on motorcycle to the deepest nooks and crannies of places insanely far off the beaten track and posting testimonials to the hospitality and ingenuity of others everywhere. It gives me hope.

Things fall apart. But which things fall apart most quickly, that's the question.

One last time

Up at the UNC Surgical Hospital for one last cosmetic little touch-up procedure* which will hopefully bring Mary's little cancer journey to a full and final conclusion. When did we start down this road? 20 months ago? Hard to say. It's all a bit of a blur.

To be sure sure we have thrust into a whole new level of adulting and have been offered fresh perspective on things in general. It is much harder to get bent out of shape over little things, though, as our kids can attest, it's not like we're fully immune from all of our historical petty squabbles. Rather, our immunity has been boosted to a level not likely to cause severe illness, as with a COVID vaccine, for example.

In the autumn the '83 Tigers had a collective 60th birthday party out at the Farm. I found out when this grey-haired guy greeted me as I was getting in my car after tennis. It was Doug Rose, who told me to stop by the party. "We're in the 4th quarter," he told me. I am not a fan of that metaphor. I prefer to think of the years after 60 as the third trimester. For one, with life expectancy for American 60-year olds hovering around 86, with a higher skew yet for the affluent, the trimester metaphor is more mathematically accurate. Cosmologically I think it is perhaps less accurate than the sports analogy, as I have not yet gone to church enough times to have bought into the whole rebirth in Jesus/New Life construct. 

Keep reading. We'll see which way it goes.

*The surgeon just came out and gave two thumbs up

Anarchy and Old Dogs

And so, as I said, a mystery novel. To wit, Anarchy and Old Dogs, the fourth novel in the Siri Paiboun mysteries set in Laos in the 1970s, written by Colin Cotterill, a British guy who has spent much of his life in Southeast Asia. I picked it up more or less randomly at Flyleaf, though I had read books from the imprint which published it and liked them.

This one too has many merits. As with so many mystery novels, it is less about the mystery itself and more about moving a bunch of characters through space and allowing them to have interactions and adventures. In this case, in Laos, a country one tends to think about rather rarely, the smallest and poorest country in Southeast Asia, landlocked and mountainous. Perhaps one could view it as the West Virginia of Southeast Asia. 

Perhaps a mystery novel written by a Brit isn't the best way to get me thinking about the place, and almost surely many objections can and should be made to how he depicts Laos, but at least I'm thinking about it a little and I did a little perusing of the region on Wikipedia to contextualize it all. Better than nothing.

The texture and flow of the novel differ from that of most. In the end I was barely aware of the main contours of the mystery as such and really didn't care that much. I liked the characters a lot and want to spend more time with them, so I will, by going back to the first novel in the series, which extends out to fifteen or so. We'll see how many I read.

Holiday readings

It seems only appropriate to subsume Thanksgiving into my general shabbos rule of no financial reading or activities, so I noted with delight that this week's Economist (which, as per usual, had arrived belatedly but just in time to my work mailbox on Tuesday) contains the magazine's books of the year section, historically a fine source of good additions to my book list, which Herr Bezos continues, bless his heart, to maintain for me free of explicit charge, though of course it just makes me spend more time on his platform.

So after breakfast I began reading an Ann Patchett piece in the New Yorker (never really read much by her though I think I have a book of hers around here somewhere) when I thought I had in fact better press forward in my mystery novel. Then I heard the voice of Blue echoing in my head "if you're reading, you're not writing," a true fact if ever there was one.

In any case, Natalie has now joined me on the couch post-breakfast and happily accepted my offer of half of this fuzzy blanket that covers my legs. Graham came over for dinner last night but had, not atypically, failed to pack clothes or anything to stay with us and went back over to his place after reading in the living room with Mary till around 11. Mostly I think he went back there so as not to leave alone Saber, the free-range cat that the UNC Quiz Bowl house has adopted as its own. She is a fine cat.

More numbers to pressure myself with

DuoLingo has recently started more consistently offering scoring for language attainment based no CEFR standards. So now I have scores in a bunch of languages which let me benchmark where I am. None of my scores are particularly high, which is particularly vexing in Russian, where my score is 45 or "pre-intermediate." The problem is that DuoLingo doesn't offer Russian training above that level for English speakers.

Next DuoLingo enabled (in principle [spoiler alert]) integration with LinkedIn, so you can broadcast your proficiency in your various languages to the whole world, or at least the trivial, pathetic corner of the world that cares who you are or what you know or do. So not only might I have another set of numbers by which to judge myself but a set by which to let the world judge me. Which would of course be in the back of my fevered and silly mind.

Yesterday evening, acting against the counsel of the inner voice in my head insisting that I should under no circumstances publish my language scores on LinkedIn, lest the publicness of it all goad me into spending even more time on DuoLingo, I pressed the button. 

It didn't work. My guardian angel had swooped in at the last moment to protect me from myself. Thanks dude!

Requiem for some hideous loafers

Sometime back in Princeton Mary told me I needed to get some kind of casual, non-business, non-athletic shoes I could wear to social events. Being my normal happy-go-lucky, ever-obliging self, I skittered off down to the nearest DSW Shoe Wearhouse and picked up the loafers shown below. I shopped for them diligently for as much as 15, perhaps even 20 minutes.

When I brought them home Mary said that they weren't at all what she had in mind, which was in fact some Blundstones. In any case, I did not take them back to the store, because I was a busy man.

At some point in time after we got back to NC I got an office of my own and took the loafers up to it. They and I have traveled from office to office and enjoyed one another's company ever since, with no need for Mary or her nasty words.

Admittedly, she was not altogether wrong about the shoes. Despite the length of time we were together, they never became fashionable. Something about the square toes and visible stitching somehow just never became the rage. But they were very comfortable. 

Over time, the soles got holes in them, then the right one cracked right in two, as shown below. After a while, it was clear that their time had come.

Today was the day. I tossed them, having replaced them with some very fetching nubuck Blundstone clogs as my office shoes, actually the fourth pair of Blundstones I've had since I got these office loafers. 

I'm not all that sad.

The iota of difference, again and again

Went to church for the first time outside the context of a memorial service or a 12-step meeting for a very long time. Honestly I can't tell you when it was. I remember trying to go to church back in July of 2009 when I was alone in Princeton getting our house organized to move and Mary and the kids were in Larchmont while her dad was dying. I tried to go, but I got there and somehow I had gotten the time of the service wrong. Maybe my feelings about going were more mixed than I let on to myself.

In any case, I went. I'll probably have a separate post about the overall experience of going later. 

For today, some thoughts. The first striking thing was in the reading from the Gospel of Luke: "When they came to the place that is called The Skull, they crucified Jesus there with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left. Then Jesus said, 'Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing'." And my brain popped, being reminded that Marx alludes to this when articulating the process by which commodity fetishism and reification proceed through the concept of value:

If men relate their products to one another as values insofar as these objects count as merely objectified husks of homogeneous human labour, there lies at the same time in that relationship the reverse, that their various labours only count as homogeneous human labour when under objectified husk. They relate their various labours to one another as human labour by relating their products to one another as values. The personal relationship is concealed by the objectified form. So just what a value is does not stand written on its forehead. In order to relate their products to one another as commodities, men are compelled to equate their various labours to abstract human labour. They do not know it, but they do it, by reducing the material thing to the abstraction, value. This is a primordial and hence unconsciously instinctive operation of their brain, which necessarily grows out of the particular manner of their material production and the relationships into which this production sets them.

Again, Marx goes back to the Bible for his words (the difference here is in the translation, the German rendering of the passage in Luke is "sie wissen nicht, was sie tun", which Marx lifts. Slavoj Zhizhek, by the way, has a whole book riffing on this). This process of forgetting the individualness of human labors through their equation through value (objectified of course in money) is likened to Christ's crufixion. That Christ's sacrifice on the cross is not a tragedy for all mankind but in fact the act that makes mankind as a whole's salvation possible (at least to the Christian way of thinking) seems largely lost on Marx.

So that was fun.

Anyhoo, the preacher said that after the service Boykin Bell would be talking about the Nicene Creed afterwards in the social hall or whatever they call it and I was like, woot, Boykin! I had been delighted to have seen her husband Greg on the way in as he bustled off with his guitar to do music for the children's service. The preacher noted that the Nicene Creed was turning 1700 this year, which made it even more auspicious.

So I went to hear Boykin talk. It was mostly old folks (not youngsters like me) but I stayed nonetheless. And Boykin sets to talking about the Nicene Creed and the arguments with the Arians (who argued that Christ was of like substance with the Father homoiousios instead of one substance with the father homoousios) and I found myself once more right at home. Somewhere in there she used the word "cosubstantiation" in reference to the Arian debates and I was reminded of the great Reformation tussle between the Catholics who believed in transubstantiation (turning bread and wine literally into Christ's flesh and blood) as opposed to the alternate theories of consubstantiation (in which the substance of Christ's body and blood are considered to be present alongside that of bread and wine -- still doctrine in high church Anglicanish) and the idea that there is a "sacramental union" between the bread/wine and body/blood, more a symbolic thing. That's how most Christians think of it today, I think.

The point is, the same things are being argued. The word made flesh. On the one hand we're back at the magical basis of religion. On the other, as with Marx's shift from Christ's sacrifice to reification and exchange of value via money, the movement is towards ever greater abstraction. 

OK. This ended up taking longer than usual and came out a bit of a jumble, but the point is: it was interesting.

One last bonus point. In the course of Googling the German of the quote from Luke ("for they know not what they do") I discovered that the German "...denn sie wissen nicht, was sie tun" was actually made the title of the classic James Dean film Rebel Without a Cause. A baffling transition if ever there was one, from the sublime to the utterly ridiculous. I never quite understood that film and why it was significant though Dean was certain a striking dude. How "they called me a Chicken, dad" has anything to do with Christ on the Cross I will never know.

Departing Maine for a bit

As I recently mentioned, the end of EB White's One Man's Meat was at long last drawing nigh, and I was determintd to reach it. Which I have now done. 

Towards the end of the book, as momentum built, I at long last fully caught White's gestalt, his deep appreciation for the rhythms of nature and history, the arc of his own life, and the intertwinedness of the whole thing. Though my life is resolutely suburban and mostly devoted to outsourcing the making and doing of many things and tasks to others, White embraced the making, doing, fixing, preserving, husbanding necessary to live on a farm. My life, in short, is a good deal more abstracted up, where his was concreted down. Though it must be owned that he thought deeply and wrote elegantly about the relationships between himself and the worlds he lived in, at home, in community, the globe, and the cosmos. And that my often forcible reintegration into the manual tasks of preserving and managing matter -- as with Tolstoi and his broom and Shklovsky's reflections thereupon -- was my blog's primal scene. 

In the end I can only be deeply flattered by the likeness sensed by Hilary which caused her to send me the book a few years back. To be honest, I am tempted to begin the book again or to go get more of his stuff. But first, a mystery novef.