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 make's 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. 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.

Autumnal bustle

For the first time in a month, Sunday did not ask that I gussy myself up even incrementally and transport myself to a memorial service. I was grateful for that. Instead, I was able to keep getting things done on Sunday, clearing the roof of leaves and also the patio, for a second time in one weekend -- as always making a mockery of me, but at least it keeps them out of the mud room, and thus Mary happy. 

I then installed new LED bulbs in the basement in place of old and dead fluorescent ones. All of a sudden, I saw the basement in a whole new light and was inspired to take action to begin the long, long delayed problem of cleaning it up. I put some things over here, others over there, all told created more usable floor space. With the aid of an old and decrepit broom, I abated a bunch of cobwebs.

My mind raced back to the pandemic when many people were posting videos on their social networks of choice showing how they cleaned out basements and sheds. "That looks like a fine idea," I thought to myself. Instead, I decided and then proceeded to increase the frequency of my blogging. But the idea never really left my mind, lingering and niggling back there in the back. As with many people, social media begat invidious self-comparison. Thankfully, I appear to be incrementally more resistent to it than most, though I seem to be falling victim at long last.

The ever-insistent clock

Right now I am due on the tennis court in 40 minutes or so, the sun goes down 5:30ish. Meanwhile, great brown blobs of leaves has settled on our roof and need to be brought down. It is, moreover, November 16, making Thanksgiving right around the corner and Christmas coming right behind that. Then in 1Q16 a guy is coming to redo our bathroom, if I can assure that Mary is organized with all of her choices for tiles, fixtures, blah blah and blah. Right now I believe she may have tabs open in her browser for those things.

With year end approaching, there are all these other year end tasks at the office. Historically though one might do tax-loss selling to lower people's income, but with income taxes at an impossibly low level given the deficit, it might not make sense to lower their tax burden now, but instead to leave that for the future. Really, with a number of people out of work, it makes more sense to get people organized to accelerate taxes from the future to the present with Roth conversions while they are in lower than normal brackets in a nonsensical tax policy moment.

The clock beats down upon me from every direction, including the blog. And the fact that post office delivered The Economist, mysteriously, two issues at once this week, having teased me mercilessly once again. So I have more reading than usual piled up.

I knocked out a number of unexpected tasks yesterday, taking a bunch of crap to the solid waste center on Eubanks and then going to Lowe's to buy more crap to replace it. Sadly, I missed out on one parameter of Mary's very detailed instructions to buy lightbulbs so they must be returned. Really I should let her do it. It is good for her to leave the house, and maybe she will look at bathroom stuff and flesh out her ideas for the 1Q16 renovation (see paragraph 1). 

Renewal

I walked from home to Auto Logic at the end of Monday to pick up my 2014 Prius V, which had been in for inspection and its annual check up. Turned out it needed a couple of things, including front brake pads, which they took care of same day.

There's nothing better than spending a little money to take care of major objects in one's life to extend their usable lifetimes. Old things trump new ones every time, though that in no way diminishes the mild frisson which comes with being forced to finally replace one, as with Mary's 2010 Prius C, aka Beatrice, which needs to be replaced because the cost of fixing the AC exceeds the value of the car. 

I had planned out my route to Carrboro cleverly, I thought. After walking up to Estes Hills School I planed to go down Caswell and drop into the path system in the wooded ravines below Mt Bolus, make my way over to the path along Bolin Creek, then take that across Airport, past Umstead Park and into Northside, and thence to Carrboro. Problem was, I had forgotten that my proposed route involved a fair amount of backtracking to get me over to the Bolin Creek trail. This may have added half a mile to my route, which made me have to walk hard to make it to Carrboro by 6. Despite the breezy autumn chill, I was sweaty by the time I made it there. But I did.

Driving toward conclusions

All too often my efforts on various fronts -- even on consumption -- are too scattershot to be meaningful. I spread myself too thin to make concrete progress, because there's so much out there to be consumed.

I have decided to push through to the end on a couple of things:

1. Season 7 of Itchy Boots on YouTube, in which our heroine Noralee of the Netherlands rides a motorcycle down the West Coast of Africa from Morocco down to Angola, then crosses to Zambia. She has currently flown to Madagascar (there being no boats on which to take her bike). I have now watched 96 episodes and am coming to the end, after two years of on and off watching (and also dipping into other seasons now and again).
2. EB White's One Man's Meat, a 1942 collection of articles from Harper's which chronicle his return to Maine from Manhattan and settling into rural life while WWII rumbles in the distance. This was given to me by my former girlfriend Hilary three years ago (I see from an earlier post), so has been lingering on my bedside table since then, taken up as palate-cleansing between other books, a practice which has robbed it of momentum and the benefit which comes from focus.

There are lots of other little projects in various domains out there. Trying to build up to more push-ups. Squatting for longer each day. And so on.

Not all of them come to fruition, but some can.

That time of year

Because I have to head to Little Washington tomorrow for Tim's memorial service, I had to get some raking done today. The leaves were pretty wet, but they need tackling nonetheless.

As my long-time readers will of course recall, raking is one of my blog's primal scenes. Here's my first reflection on the topic of raking, written just about 21 years ago. Raking and other yard and home maintenance task call forth thought, to be sure. What else is the brain going to do but meditate on such topics as evanescence and purpose?

Today my mind was drawn back to a moment a few weeks back when a client and I were settling in to eat some burritos at a picnic table out at Sidetrack. She says to me: "I am comforted to be getting to the place in life where none of it is my problem." On the one hand, I hear that and to a certain extent feel it too. Learning to let go of stuff once I leave a board or the like is undoubtedly good adulting and something I'm getting better at. On the other hand, am I ready to throw my hands up like that and abnegate responsibility altogether? For now, the answer remains no. I am probably getting to the point when I have at least the prospect of greater influence than ever before -- partially because so much of my life was fighting private wars so my accretion of influence was curtailed --  so I feel an obligation to make an effort. 

But she is right that the time is closer than I care to admit that I will be entitled to just hang it all up and eat the proverbial bon bons on the couch.

More funerals than weddings

Headed to my third funeral in as many weekends on Sunday. The first was of a friend's parents, the second a friend's ex-spouse, this last one a cousin's spouse -- but he was a decade older. Nonetheless we see a trend here.

By comparison, this year I have been to one wedding and one "wedding party" which was kind of like a mercy fuck for friends of the parents so that the lucky couple wouldn't have to suffer through the suffocating presence of the parents' friends on their Big Day. "It's supposed to be our special day, not yours!" They undoubtedly said to mom and dad. As if bride and groom have to pay any attention whatsoever to the parents' friends. I coulda told them that. You just make eye contact and give that firm grip for the briefest of interactions then pocket the loot and bustle off to Cabo.

And so we are deprived of that natural cadence, that middle-life period when weddings and births at least keep pace with if not outpace funerals in a life-affirming way. Ah well, such is life.

Hyperscaler outages, security and defense funding

With Amazon's AWS had major issues that slowed down the internet a couple of weeks ago, then last week it was Microsoft's Azure which was creaking. Officially there are denials that any kind of hacking was involved, be it by Russia, North Korea, or just plain thugs.

I am generally not inclined to be a big conspiracy theorist but on this one I am skeptical of the denials. With China routinely testing Taiwan with flyovers and other crap and Russia doing the same thing throughout Scandinavia, the Baltics, and even Denmark and Germany, we know they are trying to fuck with us wherever and whenever they can. My guess is that in one way or another we are being tested by somebody. Watch Google's cloud platform have similar issues next week.

Which brings us to an interesting point. Ian Bremmer advanced the thesis that the mega-tech companies need to be considered strategic actors themselves. Amazon's revenue is similar in scale to the GDP of a Poland or Sweden. Apple's is about the same size as Thailand's. The hyperscalers' data centers will become attractive bombing targets for our adversaries and will need to be defended. Eventually they will wish to have influence over defense strategies developed at the Pentagon etc. In some sense I get it, we will all depend on these data centers, to some extent we already do. It would make sense to prioritize their defense. But if our allies in Europe and Asia are being pressed to raise their defense spending, shouldn't we be doing the same for the hyperscalers? Should they not be paying more for the defense of their assets? 

"Football brings the money"

People like to talk about how big football is important to universities (like UNC) because they bring in so much money to support other things, like non-revenue sports. If that were in fact the case, you'd expect SEC schools to be wealthier than Ivy League schools.

In fact, the opposite is true. In the SEC the only schools that have endowments bigger than $3 billion are Texas and Texas A & M (both funded by oil money, not football) and Vanderbilt, which is itself an anomaly in the SEC and would probably fit better in the ACC as currently constituted, culture-wise.

By contrast, the smallest endowment in the Ivy League is Brown's $8 billion. And remember, the really important number is endowment per student. The Ivy League schools are on average much smaller than those in the SEC. What about all that football money? Where did that go? It would seem that not enough SEC alums on average make enough money to contribute materially to their alma maters. Or don't consider doing so worth their while. 

It would be interesting to compare the career earnings of, say, members of the University of Alabama football team with, say, the Columbia football team. Yes, more of the former would go to the NFL and make big money there. The lion's share (pun intended) of the members of Columbia's team undoubtedly end their careers when they walk across the stage at graduation and go on to have successful careers in a range of professions, a good chunk of them lucrative. I know which team I'd bet on.

If UNC goes to the SEC for football money it will be a monumental act of stupidity.

Holden Thorp was in town to speak last week and somebody asked him about the football question. He reportedly said something like this: "A lot of people want UNC to be Harvard five days a week and Alabama two days a week. I think UNC should be the University of North Carolina seven days a week." Very wise words indeed. The university of Andy Griffith, who wandered into a footbal stadium bewildered before declaring "what it was was football." Football. A nice opportunity for socializing, grilling, being in fall air, silly songs and dances, nothing more.

A thinning ecosystem of books

At the Chapel Hill Public Library the other day, I couldn't help but notice how the selection of books seems to have gotten smaller.* For example, there was a whole shelf section dedicated to books by James Patterson in the mystery section. Floor to ceiling, maybe five foot in width. Mostly hardcovers.

I know that libraries like everything else in our world have to cater to customers so are ultimately numbers driven. So they look at what people are reading and apparently they want to read James Patterson and the hardcovers indicate that the readers are old and prefer a larger font size, which is something I understand entirely. Perhaps I should read one of his books to see what the hubbub is about.

But there's only so much shelf space and I hate to see so many authors whose names I don't even know crowded out before I get to know them. There's a lot of quite reasonable ambient concern about how the smartphone is killing the book, among other things, but as victims go the book's the one that concerns me the most. Substacks and YouTube are great. Fora in which stories can be told abound and flourish as I type. But books rightly have a unique place in the firmament of media as profferers and conservators of complicated narratives and arguments. The more diverse, the better. One hates to see them crowded out by too much of the same.

*Re-reading this, I must admit that it's possible I am wrong and my impression was based on my small sample on that day. One thing that's true for sure is that I spend less time in the library than I did when the kids were younger, which is a little sad. It's a fine place to read and also observe and run into people.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull

As I mentioned back in July, at the conclusion of Kyla Scanlon's conversation with Ezra Klein on his podcast he asked her what books she would recommend. The first thing out of her mouth was Jonathan Livingston Seagull. I was like "what what???" Not what I would have expected.

Out of mixed delight and surprise, I secured a copy of this 70s classic from the Chapel Hill Public Library earlier this week and read through the slim tome in a couple of nights. It's not heavy going.

Rather than summarize and expound upon it at length, I will simply pass along my approval of this lovely little book, a breath of fresh air and more. 

Crunchy

In August when we went to the mountains we stopped at the Ingles supermarket to pick up groceries. Happy to have just picked up Natalie at the airport and excited to get to our mountaintop rental, I accidentally picked up a small thing of crunchy -- not smooth -- peanut butter.

But of course I took it home and, when we had finished the thing of smooth we had in Chapel Hill, I worked through it over time. Seeing that we were nearing the end, I picked up a large thing of peanut butter at Harris Teeter last week.

But when I opened it this morning to make my breakfast PBJ (I think yall see where we are going with this) I discovered, much to my chagrin, that once more in my haste or inattention to detail I had bought crunchy. So now I have a bunch to eat up. Such is life. Rather than flagellate myself I'll just have to eat it because, of course, I can't give it away and I can't throw it away. I may just have to make some peanut butter chocolate chip cookies to accelerate its consumption.

Empowering toxicity

After my Al Anon meeting on Saturday I was talking to a guy who had come to our group for the first time who had moved up from Florida to get away from the horrific drug ecosystem there that was killing his daughter, who was a fentanyl addict but was in some sort of residential facility here in NC now. He said he thought Florida was the epicenter of it all: "There are rows and rows of drug motels, they deal openly in restaurants, a dealer threatened me with a gun when I told to him to keep him away from my daughter. When I told some cops about it, one of them suggested I should get a gun and shoot some of the dealers, 'Just do it in the right way so we don't have to arrest you.'  He was a deputy sheriff."

At the Bike Loud! ride a couple of weekends ago I was riding with a neighbor I had invited to the event, a woman who doesn't ride much. We were passed by a decent-sized group of stronger riders who were riding a longer ride. Then we were passed by a truck. About half a mile up the road, I could see that the bikers were enveloped in smoke after the truck had clearly been coal rolled.

Then of course there's the Trump video showing him putting on a crown, flying a plane and taking a big crap on the No Kings protesters, which should not have surprised us but somehow did. After all, this is the same guy who would tweet about people (Fiona Hill, etc) while they were testifying before Congress. 

What he has done is created a situation where violent vigilantism -- up to and including murder -- is pretty much encouraged.

When they go this low it is hard to keep going high, but somehow we must.

Fall season wrap

Just concluded the fall men's "3.5" ladder at the Farm. Went 0-5, which sounds bad, but is less bad when you take into account that most of the people I was playing were at least 15 years younger than me and played high school tennis, so were just fundamentally better than me. One of them I had beaten twice last season so he was highly motivated to kick my ass. 

Also, there are problems like my second serve, which pretty much sucks. As much tennis as I play, it should be better. The problem is that though I play a lot, I do little of what the people in the self-help industry call "deliberate practice," or consciously working on getting better.

This is a problem in many areas of my life, including writing. I have lots of goals, lots of activities, and do a lot of things but don't really narrow my focus and try to get better at any of them. Except my job and being a good parent, family member, friend, that sort of thing.

So I muddle along and maintain a generally high level of output across a range of domains, much of it uneven.

Gotta hustle over to Graham's now to drop off my e-bike, which he will test ride for a while, before hustling back to host a joint Young Amateur Byzantinist Society/Madonna Fan Club video call.

Clarity of purpose

This morning I drove Mary to a small diagnostic medical procedure, one that we all go through when we reach a certain age. It involves some dietary restricitions for a few days which ramp up the day before and... you know the one.

At any event, driving her there I felt the somewhat rare sense of absolute clarity that I was in the right place, doing exactly what I should be doing. This sense often evades me during the day, when I have a variety of items on my task list calling out for attention like a small child at the playground. "Look at me! Look at me!" they clamor all at once.

Taking your spouse in for a medical procedure is not one of those moments. There's no ambiguity or uncertainty, which is comforting.

The virtues of strong-throated church ladies and organs

On Saturday I was at a memorial service where the music was a piano plus a couple of hymns which everyone sung. Often at these services I'm with my mom, who reads music, knows all the hymns and loves to sing. So she sings it loud and proud, which allows me to both follow along and also sing out a little myself. The volume of an organ also lets the somewhat shyer singers participate robustly.

This option was not on offer Saturday. Nobody there really took the lead and sung it out, so we were all (at least on the side where I was) reduced to shyly piping out our weak versions of the song. It was a shame. I should probably bring my mom along to more of these, though at the age of 87 she already goes to more of them than she would like. I get it. I mean, hell, I do too.

Attention as the coin of the realm

There is general consensus that attention has now become a dominant commodity and driver within the new economy and, sadly, the Trump is its master. An op-ed over the weekend in the Times argued, plausibly, that on balance the failure of Democrats to meaningfully challenge him for dominating the news cycle is a large part of what dooms us to semi-relevance and failure.

But Trump also serves as the primary exemplar of the fact that attention-seekers are fucking assholes, on average. We can't help but to hate them because they crowd out airspace that might otherwise be filled with interesting, compelling, worthy things.

So each of us has to cultivate habits of self-management to titrate exposure to all the sources of noise outside of ourselves to figure out what we want, even as we also figure out a way to ask for enough attention from the outside world to sell our respective wares and flourish. We all need some attention, we just don't want to hog it. At least, most of us don't.

Nb. On the bike ride to work I got to thinking about my conversational style and how it maps onto this whole theme. Not infrequently I walk away from conversations (for example with Sarah Lu at Alan Haig's parents' service this weekend) feeling that I learned less about the person I had been talking to than I should have because I reflexively wedged in my own experiences, tangential to what we had been talking about. For example her child (daughter?) is at McGill and I jumped in with how I had been close to Montreal this summer while in Lake Placid. Who gives a fuck? Where did that come from? We should have transitioned to talking about what her child is studying. As we can see from my hedging I am not even sure of her child's gender. Not good. 

This tendency must come from feeling like I am always competing for airtime/attention. But most likely what happens is the person I was talking to walks away thinking, at some level, "what a jerk."

I really do need to go back and watch Egoyan's early movies and revisit how he thematizes the performance of the self.

The diffusion of the grey men

After a hiatus I've come back to come back to reading through this old book on the history of CIT, which only recently I was reminded had been taken over by Raleigh-based First Citizens back in 2022. Of course many of you might well ask "why should I give a fuck?" about my reading of an old book about an old finance company we've scarcely ever heard of. Aside from the fact that CIT had its moment in the sun, albeit a storm-threatened one, as it teetered on the edge of and then finally had to declare bankruptcy back in 2009, the history of CIT offers a lot of insight into the development of the US economy during the period of rapid industrialization and consumerization of the early 20th century, culminating in the roaring twenties. CIT was early in the financing of consumer auto purchasing but also lots of other stuff, both retail and B2B. Here's a list of some of the spaces they were financing, including on a wholesale basis (i.e. buying receivables from other, local financing entities).

Step back and think about how so much of this stuff had been done (if at all) 50-70 years prior. By individuals, by hand. Value chains were just beginning to be broken out into their constituent elements as population centers grew and regions and people were made able to specialize due to mass communications and greater ease in getting people and things from place to place. It had to be financed somehow, which meant that you had to have small armies of people figuring out how to get that done, to get money from financial centers out to peripheries and back again. All without computers.

It was a lot of work, much of it super-boring. My point is that there is a tendency to decry the financialization of everything but in fact finance had to grow to let everything else get done. And the only way for it to happen right was for these decentralized armies of salesmen and collectors to spread out building relationships, understanding facts on the ground and then over time aggregating wisdom and abstracting up to get better scale and efficiency. Sure, lots of nastiness was going on too. But eventually wealth flowed out and supported broader prosperity.

Things are different now as the mega tech companies suck wealth inwards, and China's centralization may mean it never replicates this moment. Now I am scrambling to generalize and conclude so I can move on with my day, so I'll just do that.

Clarifications

Reading Heschel this morning I realized I might have been harsh the other day in decrying the tech elite. Let me clarify.

The problem is surely not that they are all bad people. Far from it. The problem is that they work so much and earn so much and -- like everyone, are subject to the limitations of 24 and 7. That's why democracy and the public bourse are ultimately better ways to fund public goods, even as they are also imperfect. Mistakes are always being made, constantly. 

I also thought a bit more about Bill Gates and his problems with women, from hanging out with Epstein to allegedly misusing his position of power with both Microsoft and the Gates Foundation to have relationships with women.

I too was a skinny nerd and my self-image was formed in that crucible. While things got better for me through puberty and braces and sports, I was never able to entirely shed my negative self-image. So when I got to college and was apparently considered attractive on the marketplace of sexual partners, I never really quite believed it. I misbehaved, got punished, and punished myself. 

Let us recall that Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg never finished college and never had an opportunity to grow through a life phase where they did a bunch of stupid shit and then realized they were assholes. They were off on the way to becoming billionaires before they had passed through puberty.

I have written before that I think the scene from Moonstruck where Olympia Dukakis says that men chase women because they fear death is the very apogee of cinematic insight. The correct solution to this problem is to figure out a way to fear death less, rather than to chase women. Philantropy instead of philandery seems like a good start.

Tea Party of the Spirit

Last week the Economist ran an article about the continued ratcheting up of the war for the very top tier of technical talent, the hunt for the Jeff Deans of the world (Google him and read up). The ever higher dollar figures attached to technical talent has in turned fuelled the messianic but likely ill-founded self-belief of many of these profoundly-talented people. Looking back over the blog I see that I had thought of and alluded to the quote below a couple of times in recent months, so here it is in full. If you are in a hurry, skip to the second paragraph (which I myself have taken the liberty of separating off).

One time in Holland when the market was rather dull for spices the merchants had several cargoes dumped into the sea to peg up prices. This was a pardonable, perhaps a necessary device for deluding people. Is it something like that we need now in the world of spirit? Are we so thoroughly convinced that we have attained the highest point that there is nothing left for us but to make ourselves believe piously that we have not got so far-just for the sake of having something left to occupy our time? Is it such a self- deception the present generation has need of, does it need to be trained to virtuosity in self-deception, or is it not rather sufficiently perfected already in the art of deceiving itself? Or rather is not the thing most needed an honest seriousness which dauntlessly and incorruptibly points to the tasks, an honest seriousness which lovingly watches over the tasks, which does not frighten men into being over hasty in getting the highest tasks accomplished, but keeps the tasks young and beautiful and charming to look upon and yet difficult withal and appealing to noble minds. For the enthusiasm of noble natures is aroused only by difficulties. 

Whatever one generation may learn from the other, that which is genuinely human no generation learns from the foregoing. In this respect every generation begins primitively, has no different task from that of every previous generation, nor does it get further, except in so far as the preceding generation shirked its task and deluded itself. This authentically human factor is passion, which also the one generation perfectly understands the other and understands itself. Thus no generaton has learned from another to love, no generation begins at any other point than at the beginning, no generation has a shorter task assigned to it than had the preceding generation, and if here one is not willing like the previous generations to stop with love but would go further, this is but idle and foolish talk.

Soren Kierkegaarde, Fear and Trembling, tr. Walter Lowrie 1941

Kierkegaarde writes of "generations," but what he says applies to individuals as well. The monumental arrogance of thinking that young tech gazillionnaires could, by virtue of reading Peter Singer and talking late into the night about it, figure out the optimal scheme for distibuting their wealth through "effective altruism" is ultimately ill-founded. Likewise Elon Musk's at once messianic and onanistic idea that he should aggregate untold riches with the goal of getting to Mars in case mankind can't figure out how to save itself. If mankind can't work together to save itself we all deserve to die. The earth will soldier on in our absence, largely indifferent to our momentary (from its perspective) presence. 

Technical, commercial and spiritual genius rarely coincide perfectly, and even more rarely in an individual's life. Bill Gates passed along a bumpy road of bare-nuckled capitalism and sexual poor judgment (to be gentle about it) to get to where he is today, and he hasn't fully nailed philanthropy, as MacKenzie Scott's challenge to his model (and Melinda Gates tacit acceptance thereof) has made clear. Gates should certainly be given lots of credit for his level of seriousness, effort, and recognition of the genius of others as he tries to give his money away.

Change in the air conditioning

We recently took our 2010 Prius, known as Beatrice within the family, to Auto Logic for her inspection and also a few more things. Most importantly, Mary had discovered that the AC didn't seem to be working. The cost to fix it and do a couple of other things that needed to be done exceeds the car's value. Plus, the stupid car still smells a little from an incident a few years back, discussed here. It is time to let her go where all cars eventually go. 

Checking through the archives I can see that Beatrice has been with us almost exactly thirteen years. Here is the first mention of her in the historical record.

Mary has rejected my suggestion that we try being a one-car household for a while and just lean on my e-bike, arguing that I need my car too often. We could limp on with Beatrice without AC through the winter, and we may well end up doing that, but I'm pretty convinced that the thing to do is just bite the bullet and buy another car. But what will it be? Straight electric or plug-in hybrid? By now I find it hard to justify going with a straight gas car.

But the problem is that now we have to figure out what to get, and I am a little intrigued at the prospect. As much as I pretend to be indifferent to car fetishism, I have lived as a male in the United States of America for almost 60 years now and it is difficult not to be infected by it all. So what should we get? A newer model Prius PHEV seems like the best idea but I am reading that rear visibility isn't great and that it's lower-slung nature makes it a little harder to get into and out of. Maybe a small Lexus PHEV SUV? I have always resisted the SUV AWD thing but maybe this will work. I will have to sell Mary on the higher list price, though. I like the looks of the Hyundai EVs but it seems like they have a lot of recalls, some of them major.

In any case, change is afoot. Here's a song for the moment. A fingerstyle masterclass, despite low production values. The actual song starts at the 0:53 mark if you want to skip some warm up.

Letter, spirit, and the Global Order

This week's Economist has an article about how Russia and China seem to be using shadow fleets of commercial ships flying under the flags of an ever-shifting array of small countries to conduct asymmetrical warfare. Launching swarms of drones like those we've seen in Denmark and Germany recently. Accidentally dragging their anchors on underseas data cables ("Oops!"). And so on.

As a refresher, the shadow fleet has been expanding ever since the Ukraine war started in 2022 and the US and allies imposed sanctions on Russia and pushed Russian banks out of the international settlement network SWIFT. So as we've stepped away from our post-WWII role as primary underwriters of a rules-based order and security guarantors thereof, we've created fertile ground for a shadowy world not just of commerce but of martial action that ignores, taunts and disdains us.

We never really had the wherewithal to fully impose any kind of order. But at least making an effort put in place frameworks, to give voice to and listen to others to optimize what those frameworks looked like, and to promote contexts in which those frameworks could be implemented, ultimately I think this was a much more fruitful way to go. The whole enterprise moreover fostered a spirit which sought good.

We are now sinking into a chaos where systems clamor for power. Or, rather, this primordial state of being which we sought to repress and contain is reemerging, swamp by swamp.

(honestly this post didn't go where I thought it would 45 minutes ago before I got distracted by work email and client issues. But the blog begged to be tossed a few scraps of meat nonetheless, like the seals at an acquarium, hungry beasts) 

The Morning Thief (or Thieves)

As I'm pretty sure I have written before, Duolingo has sucked up some of the time and energy that used to be devoted to the blog. This provides me with a bit of an ongoing quandry: is it better to allocate time to an artefact that will outlive me (my mind immediately races to Pushkin's riff on Horace's ode to a monument) or to an activity aimed at maintaining brain plasticity and functionality in the present?

A lot of thoughts swirl here. First and foremost, who cares? Since I have spent only marginal time and effort promoting my blog, the distinction between attention-craving and strictly edifying activity is pretty much effaced on first blush.

Then again, I care. The blog is much more me than are the languages, which are just another way of interfacing with the world and others. But language study is, by its nature, highly respectful of and inviting to others, it facilitates outreach and going out. That in the end is why I should not let it go.

Though both activities, it must be owned, stop me from actually getting out and meeting other humans at this time of day, which is something I used to do in the earlier days of my financial planning practice and which is in fact really horizon opening. Duly noted.

Rocking bow and scrunchie

Behold my most recent YouTube minor obsession, Summer Woods, whom I've been digging into mostly via her Tool covers. I should start by saying that Tool's not a band I have known a lot about, though I've learned a little since falling for Summer's work and am impressed. While they're not something I'm going to spend a lot of time listening to now, just because I don't rock that hard anymore, I can see that they do and are a good deal more serious about making their videos express something than most. And they've sold a bunch of records without appearing to compromise much. I'm sure there's something to hate about them, I just don't have time figuring out what it might be.

One thing you wouldn't immediately think about their songs is that they'd make for good acoustic covers. 

Enter Summer Woods, with her bows, barettes, and scrunchies. A cute little rich girl with whom I can imagine conversing lucidly at a reception about the relationship of Anselm Kiefer to Egon Schiele. But reaching deep, she owns this song. It's not a complex song to play, but she plays it perfectly, cleanly, no buzzing frets, no nothing. From way down. "To feel, to breathe, to know I'm alive." The irony between how she looks and how she plays is far from accidental. Somewhere down in there, she intimates, in each prim-looking suburban girl, something expansive hides. I love her.

 

Friends

Went to AA this morning and the topic was friendship in AA. It seemed like I might be called upon as a matter of course (due to this meeting's specific format), so I thought about it for a while.

First off, it must be owned that despite its intentional and admirable quasi-anarchical amorphousness, there is a strong institutional pressure within AA for people to say nice things about it. It makes sense. People are there for the most part because they want to be there -- certainly that's true for an earlyish Saturday morning meeting -- and they want to support one another and be positive. So there's a tendency to say nice things about all aspects of the Program (as we say).

So is there something qualitatively distinct about friendships in AA? To an extent, maybe. Certainly one's early relationships in the Program are forged in flame, everybody is to some extent in crisis and in need when they come in. The people who are there for them and get them through the difficult early years become special.

But as time rolls on, I'm not sure there's a meaningfully deep distinction between friendships in AA and out of it, in my life at least. Everybody has some kind of issues with which they struggle and needs some kind of support that calls for moments of radical honesty and vulnerability of the type one sees in AA. AA relationships maybe distinguish themselves by the amount of cant and dogma upon which one may rely in supporting another, but I'm not sure that's necessarily a good thing in all cases.

It's a good question, though I'm not sure of the answer. Ultimately we are all constrained by the 24/7 problem and have to figure out how to allocate and load balance attention over these constraints.

Whirring demons, strolling Buddha

When I went out on the screened porch this morning to enjoy my Sunday pancakes -- a pleasure that may fade with the season any week now -- I settled in and heard a quiet but insistent high-pitched buzzing sound out over the park. Drones. Drat.

For the most part people around here seem to have internalized the sensible proscription on mowing lawns or blowing leaves on Sunday morning. Even if people aren't churchgoers, the sabbath has some kind of residual status and people at some somatic level get that Sunday morning is special. Drones aren't that loud but if they're nearby they still make an annoying sound.

Finally they stopped, and my attention was diverted to an older -- certainly septua if not octa-genarian -- guy who slowly and deliberately walked lap after lap of the park circut. I must credit that this is actually a pretty brilliant strategy to maximize hill workout, water views and, due to others circumnavigating the lake and passing through the parking lot up top -- random social possibilities. I may have to try this some evening, perhaps mixed with juggling a soccer ball. It would appear to beat jogging. 

Ted Lasso -- in conclusion

So I'm done with the first three seasons of Ted Lasso and await the fourth, though with modest expectations. It's hard to come back with a bonus season after a hiatus (as we saw with Arrested Development or even, indeed, Sex Education). But I eagerly sopped up seasons 1 thru 3. And sop is the right word, because I will confess to crying a fair amount as the show wound up in the last few episodes. I am like that, a pretty easy mark for that kind of thing when I'm tired at the end of the day, which is usually the case.

Then there was the very last scene when we find ourselves serenaded by... Cat Stevens. Didn't see that one coming. Hadn't heard this song in years. Simple but lovely and on point. It made me wonder -- and I have pondered this before -- whether it would be worth going back to watch Harold and Maude again. I remember seeing it the summer of '82 when we were at Andover and being taken by it, then I think it was in rotation for a while in the early years of HBO and the Movie Channel so we'd catch smidgeons here and there. Would it hold up? Part of me thinks it would be best watched with my kids around a holiday, but then again if it doesn't hold up, it would be yet another black mark on my record as a recommender, which has been besmirched by some failures in recent years...

BTW I'd be interested to learn how many of the 67 million views this video has are post-Lasso. That's a lot for a classic acoustic song.

Larkin and Lasso

I guess I haven't discussed it, but in recent months I've been catching up with the rest of the world by watching Ted Lasso. I missed it when all the world was excited about it because we were too cheap to have Apple+ and even now I have to watch it alone because of Mary's intractable enmity towards sport spectating in all forms.

The show is all that was promised and more. Much more serious than I thought, and humane, a super-serious soap opera with buckets of laughs and sports and attempts round characters, in Forsterian terms, though within the constraints of a TV show (i.e. it can only do so much).

In the penultimate episode Ted is at the pinball machine in the show's favorite Richmond pub while his mom talks to his friend, the assistant coach. The female bar owner brings him a pint and asks him why he's only pretending to play. He says he wants to give them some time to catch up. The bar owner looks over at them and says this.  

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don’t have any kids yourself.

I was like, wait a minute. She's not speaking there, that's verse. I rewound it and then, using the preferred search engine, looked it up. Lo and behold, she was reciting "This be the verse," by Phillip Larkin, the name of a British poet I had heard before but knew little about (1889-1951, Oxford grad, librarian, it turns out).

Honestly there's a lot of truth in the poem but I am far from in accord with Larkin's conclusion. Au contraire. 

But alas, professionalism beckons me on.

Normal People

A few weeks ago I read Sally Rooney's Normal People. While I wasn't blown away by the novel, I also had a difficult time putting it down. Basically, I just really wanted the protagonists to make it through, be together and be happy. I was totally rooting for them. If Rooney decided to write a sequel which follows the characters a la Richard Ford and the Frank Bascombe novels or Richard Linklater and the Before trilogy of films, I would 100% watch it. I'm still rooting for them.

Then a couple of days ago maybe I was listening to a Smiths song or something and the YouTube algorithm served me up this video, which I watched, transfixed, not realizing it was from the BBC/Hulu adaptation of the Rooney. Takes me back to my college years, though we weren't this precious, I hope. But I mean, young love, who doesn't want to wallow in it,  now and again? The one thing the TV show gets wrong is just how pretty the actress, Daisy Edgar-Jones, is. In the novel the character Marianne is not supposed to be that attractive, in my reading. Anyhoo. Good stuff. At least in a small dose.

 

Flying home

Coming back from the west coast I got seated next to a 14-year old boy traveling with his mom and two toddler siblings. They had a ton of stuff coming on board, two car seats and a mess of snack bags, iPads, etc. The guy and his little brother sat next to me, his mom and his sister were in the row behind. For someone his age, he was incredibly capable and responsible in how he handled himself and helped his mom get the kids situated and then how he entertained his little brother. I thought the toddlers could be difficult flying companions, whining and making noise etc. They were not. Turns out he had flown out to Washington the day before expressly to help his mom get the kids home, just as he had flown out with her two weeks before to get them there (she was visiting her sister who had just had a baby). His school wouldn't let him do fall sports if he had missed more classes. A total trooper.

It was too dark to read so I settled in to watch some movies. First I watched a Korean film, A Normal Family, It was a solid film, serious, thoughful, the kind of thing you can't really make in America any more. But it was dark, so I decided to follow it with Bridesmaids to lighten my mood a little. Unfortunately, the movie kicks off with Kristen Wiig having sex, albeit in a humorous fashion. At least she was wearing a bra, because I could sense the kid to my right checking it out and I was pretty sure by how nice and responsible he was that he was from a Christian family (turns out they were military) and his parents might not want him watching this kind of thing. I glanced over at him and he was indeed a little transfixed by it and we each blushed a little. At least that was extent of the sex scenes.The movie held up pretty well, good performances all around. It was nice to see that the cop was one of the guys from The IT Crowd which you should for sure watch if you haven't. Absolute classic British comedic genius. 

Black cat and crows

At the AirBnb where I am staying in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood there is a sweet 18-year girl kitty who lives on the front porch, mostly on this little love seat. She's pretty much there all the time and I hear her prowling about giving a little gravely meowl in the morning when I first get up.

There is a food bowl for her down at the end of the porch. Yesterday when I was working inside I heard crows out there cawing about, making quite a ruckus. I had a quick look and saw that the cat food bowl was spilled, then quickly realized that it was the crows' work. When I asked my two hostesses about it they told me that cat and birds pretty much share the food. 

 

(Google has long since abandoned the blogspot/blogger platform so there's no easy way to rotate this image. There's HTML out there for it but I'm too lazy to muck about with it)

Rough out here

I stopped at a rest stop off of I-5 on the way to Centralia, Washington from Seattle. Apparently they have some problems with crime. Here's what the vending machines there look like. I've never seen anything like this in my life. Apparently folks out there really need their soda and snacks.

The Years

Not long ago I read my first Annie Ernaux book, The Years. I learned about Ernaux only after she won the Nobel, and then from a New Yorker retrospective on her career. When I was younger I might have thought this was an uncool way to learn about a writer but by now long articles about writers is one of the few reasons to keep our subscription to the New Yorker, which seems to have been superseded by the Atlantic as the best longer-form magazine in America. But that's another post.

The Years is s special book. Flipping between first person plural and third person, Ernaux tells the story of her life and that of her generation, year after year -- not, to be sure, 1952 followed by 1953, but period after period, in as great a degree of granularity as possible. Looking at pictures of herself and describing, in third person, how she felt then. Recounting macro historical events and how they framed her emotional life. Discussing relationships between generations and how they changed from her childhood to those of her kids and then grandkids. Reflecting on how the desire to write the book germinated, took root, and grew. And so on.

As with reading Knausgaard, for me as an American reader the great surprise was just how much commonality there was. The way the all mod cons of post war life made women's lives easier by taking a way work but in so doing rending so much of the fabric of life. The fears brought on by cataclysms like 9/11 or assassinations...

Honestly I should have written this note sooner after reading the book, while it was still in hand (on the road now). Such is life. Worth reading. I will pick up more of her writings in bookstores here and there.

Cheap money and cheap data

If, per Edward Chancellor, Schumpeter et al., cheap money is not a boon but a bane, to the extent that it encourages laxity and indiscipline, what about cheap data? Both in terms of storage and throughput, Moore's law and it's corollaries have dramatically expanded access to data over our lifetimes. Geometrically and constantly. It seems like a good thing.

But is it? 

Cheap data's omnipresence has created the world in which we have handed our lives over post by post, picture by picture, to the social networks and those who have thought hard about how to use them to control us. As virality and affinity dominate our lives evermore and drive us deeper and deeper into opposing camps, we've seen online conflict irrupt thence into the once quasi-autonomous Real World, both in elections and killings. Even wars.

But what if data were more expensive rather than cheaper? Might this not have beneficial effects, just as higher interest rates encourage creative destruction, innovation, capital efficiency and, over time, higher productivity? Indeed, why not tax data flow, instead of just monetary flow?

I know it sounds crazy and there are lots of reasons not to, but it's worth gaming it out in our minds. It's a debate worth having. Do we really benefit from the ever more readily and cheaply available data? Or do we suffer?

Spoon River

As I mentioned some time before, in the mornings I have been dipping into Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology in my initial, spiritual reading slot with my first cup of coffee. Reading maybe four of his "epitaphs" each day. While it's maybe not a great, great book and it has been left behind by the canon, it's nonetheless a very singular work.

The Anthology consists of the voices of a couple of hundred residents of the fictional town of Spoon River, Illinois. Men, women, kids. Bankers, gamblers, priests, scorned wives, outcasts, doctors, poets. Certainly there appears to be greater breadth of erudition than I would have expected in a random small town in the midwest, but what the hell, I was born a lot later and this was a time before radio, television, film, the internet, all of that. Pretty much all people had was books, and public libraries, and both book and library were esteemed.

Putatively all these many voices, but somehow they are united in a narratorial voice. Masters was thoughtful about how various people may have thought than perhaps he was to their idioms. But, again, the absence of lots of filmed and TV footage of various people and the unifying center of a more written culture might have meant that dialects and idiolects were less well-developed and less ossified than they are now. People might also have tried to self-define less with their language.

Qua project, the Anthology seems deeply akin the genre of the physiology which flowered in the 19th century in the hands of Balzac and other lesser writers. In photography the best analog is August Sander's "People of the 20th Century." 

It's very interesting to read a book in which the largest stock of metaphors derives squarely from nature. This is something we have long since lost.

In short, I could probably teach a whole course around this book. I don't know if anyone would take it, but it would be fun.

Sierra rambles

Yesterday was Mary's birthday. I won't say which one, but it was not her sweet 16. To commemorate it we got tickets to see Sierra Ferrell at the Red Hat Amphitheater. For those who don't know her, watch her Tiny Desk concert presented below. So very talented.

But I digress. As we were getting ready to go we received news that Charlie Kirk had been assassinated. This cast a pall over the evening. Though we were not fans of Kirk by any means, we cannot go around shooting people we disagree with in a civil society based on the free exchange of ideas. It's just wrong and not who we are.

Now, there are entertainers who are very good at telling short amusing tales between songs, at talking to the audience. Sierra has never been one of them, as is apparent from many of her live videos. Last night she was at her worst, rambling, gently moralizing, though not in an offensive way, just an incomprehensible way. She said that the internet was both full of blessings and "curseful," she invoked Jesus, she mentioned therapy and even massage as good things to do. She said that though we don't all have to like each other we have to love one another.

Maybe she was just rambling for all of us, at a loss as we all are. Words are spilling out to describe where we are, none of them adequate. 

Language uptake

Over the dinner table recently somebody was accusing me of being particularly good at languages. I tend to demur on this question, ascribing whatever language proficiency I may have more to continual hard work than anything else.

However, recently Duolingo has started offering me the option (in my Japanese course) to "repeat back" type exercises in concentrated blocks of ten. I have discovered that I can do much better at this if I just close my eyes and listen than by looking at the characters. This suggests that I have strong aural/oral pattern recognition relative to reading.

It could of course also be that the Japanese writing system is such a cognitive stretch, which it is. I continue to try to learn all the characters but golly does it tax the old brain. Or maybe I'm good at listening and mimicking, which could also explain whatever musical talents I may have, many of which lie fallow as the whole reading/writing/languages project continues to soak up time. As does watching sports highlights and, sadly, work.

Tell it to the reinsurers

Today the Journal's op-ed page published a bit of fluffernuttery by Stephen Koonin, the most serious-looking scientist of the five the Department of Energy could cobble together to put their names on its position paper which argued that claims of human-caused climate change were spurious and couldn't be used as a basis for policy. Amongst the claims they make are that: 

"Data aggregated over the continental U.S. show no significant long-term trends in most extreme weather events. Claims of more frequent or intense hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and dryness in America aren’t supported by historical records." 

Honestly I don't know why they even bother to try to convince general readers and voters that this is the case. We're not really the important audience. Instead, they should really focus on convincing insurers and, in particular, reinsurers. That's who sets our insurance rates, and it is the cost of insuring our homes, autos, shopping centers, roads, etc. where the costs of climate change are made real.

Save your breath and tell it to the reinsurers.

Roadside America -- The Adirondacks

Overall roadside culture up here seems relatively undegraded compared to what we have seen in recent road trips, including not just NC but also Graham's college tours back in '21 and other trips. There are old motels up here in the North Country that have seen better days but a higher proportion of them seem to be doing just fine than in other regions.

I have to wonder whether it's a regional thing. Maybe NYC and to a lesser extent Boston metros have lower regional Gini coefficients relative to other regions. Certainly there have always been a lot of middle- to upper middle-income people in and around Wall Street. For now, at least before the onslaught of AI at skilled office jobs, finance seems to be holding on as a regional cornerstone industry.

Also, though much ink has been spilled about how the NIMBYism of the dense NE corridor metros has constrained housing supply and thereby supported housing prices for now, another feature of the regional economy is that people in the NE will willingly trade down in terms of square footage for career options, good schools and convenient entertainment amenities. Economists often talk about how people will substiture, typically a generic for a brand name product, in an inflationary period or difficult economy. People in high density metro areas actually do the same with space. They live in conditions that would not seem agreeable to people further out. You see it in all major metropoles, NYC, London, Paris, Moscow, probably Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo and Lagos too. It is a valid consumer choice. 

As Morgan Housel pointed out in a book or blog post or something, that the average size of the original Levittown houses post-WWII was 750 sq feet, 2BR, 1 BA. And it seemed luxurious at the time compared to the apartments in Brooklyn the houses replaced.

I think this space constraint in the cities -- esp the NE Corridor -- could well create excess disposable income for middle-income people wanting to get away, for example to the Poconos or Adirondacks and the cute little motels.

The North Country

Mary and I are in New York's North Country this week, the area north of Syracuse and Albany and which, excluding towns extending their conurbations (Rome, Schenectady) houses about 300,000 people in an area comparable in size to Vermont and New Hampshire combined. Hell, just west of where we are right now (near the town of North Creek, population 562), there are wilderness areas with no paved roads roughly the size of Rhode Island. There are innumerable lakes.

Drilling down on Google Maps, I saw a place name (Robinwood, on Bog Lake) deep into one of these wilderness areas and googled it. Apparently there is some kind of hunting-fishing club/communty association of families who have "camps" or cabins there. There was a post about a temporary culvert that is holding while a new one is on order but not yet delivered. The post was dated 2017 and not followed up on.

It is, in short, a blissfully quiet area. Our little Airbnb "chalet" looks out over a beautiful marsh area. Everything here is rustic and cute, in places a little bit too kitschy but what are you gonna do. It is pretty much perfect. When we sit on the screened in porch the only thing you hear is insects, birds and the occasional dog or twelve in the distance. Today we head off to Lake Placid where we are gonna stay in a swanky hotel/ski lodge. It will be funny when we roll up in Mary Lee's old Prius with duct tape over a dent on the side where somebody banged it up somewhere in the dead of night. 

The economics of gate checking

One cannot help but wonder whether airlines would actually prefer that passengers gate check bags, instead of paying $30-$40 to check back at the check in counter in the main terminal. It could well be that the economics of the transaction are actually favorable to the airline because 

1. Staffing needs at the front of the airport are reduced, also you need fewer people moving bags between there and the tarmac

2. There's a lower propensity of bags to get lost

3. Passengers pack less stuff, saving on fuel costs and even perhaps allowing for less luggage space on the plane as a whole and more seating

4. The costs of scanning bags is more externalized to the TSA if passengers get them to the plane.

There are probably many more reasons. I bet it pencils out. Time to board.

Painting, the bridge

There had been little spots on our screened in porch where the white paint was flaking away, spots that are exposed to the storms that blow in from the mini-lake effect that amplifies storms on our lake. Crazy to think 47 acres of water would do that but I am pretty sure it does.

Of course I had been procrastinating on this task but finally this last weekend I tackled it. Went down to the basement and found some exterior white. Tracked down a little bit of sandpaper (note to self, running very low). Brought around the ladder. Scraped, sanded and painted. Certainly not a professional job, very Pareto, but it will suffice for a little while and certainly it's better than having done nothing.

As always, I was reminded that one of the initial themes of this blog was the staving off of entropy and disorder generally as a primordial human activity. Certainly as Graham begins his senior year at UNC I have to reflect on whether I may have failed by not passing on many basic home and yard maintenance skills to my kids. 

But maybe not. Maybe I don't outsource appreciably more than my mom did. Certainly it's hardly worth dragging my dad into this because this kind of thing was never his bag at all.

Talked to Dorothy yesterday and scheduled dinner with her when I am out in Seattle in a couple of weeks. As I recalled, she is now a grandmother and I look forward to hearing about her grandson. She assures me that nobody really wants to hear about other people's grandkids. I disagreed because I do want to hear, but she is probably correct that few people want to hear as much about the grandkid as the grandparent is willing to share. At any rate, it's kind of a new chapter, hearing about peers' grandkids. Bring it.

Learning Japanese

Most of my focus these days on DuoLingo remains on learning Japanese, but depending on my degree of exhaustion or boredom or how much time again I may still deviate into Italian, Polish, German, French, Spanish or even, when I am being really slack, Russian. I keep waiting for Serbo-Croatian to show up.

But my real project is Japanese, and it is a project indeed. All these characters! No common morphology with English! No spaces between words! It has really turned into an ongoing exercise in acceptance of my own limitations and the necessity to just keep plugging away.

Recently I have reached the point where DuoLingo has at long last made available to me a set of exercises where I just have to listen and repeat back what it says. Quite interestingly, I have discovered that this is easier for me if I close my eyes and just listen instead of looking at the characters on the screen. I am better able to divine the spaces between words this way.

If, indeed, the concept of "word" even applies in Japanese in the same way that it does in English and in Indo-European languages generally. It seems like it might be easier to frame Japanese in terms of "semantic units", insofar as one can insert a concept (pastness, conditionality, negation) more easily into a Japanese phrase. Or does this just apply to verbs? 

Must keep going.

Changing every day

Stopping in to Harris Teeter after my Saturday meeting has become part of my weekly routine. In recent months the store has been playing this Cranberries song every single time. I swear.

I never really listened to the Cranberries that much, their heyday was during my early sobriety when I was away from music and they were too poppy for someone as music snobby as me, so I didn't really know this song till it was featured in the soundtrack of Derry Girls. It's a sweet and lovely song and maybe the best showcase* of Dolores O'Riordan's soaring vocal exploits.

O'Riordan said the song was about young love and it sounds like it, but that opening line, "Oh my life, changes every day, every possible way," resonates on other vectors. As the seasons change and we go back to empty nesting a trip to the grocery store immediately brings up the problem of needing to be mindful in the purchasing of bread, lest we end up with too much and have to throw it in the freezer.

Abstracting up a level, it makes me think that maybe this is why Mary's dad George Sr was always focused on not having too much food when guests came over, lest it spoil, whereas when we were younger I was always focused on being sure we had too much, on the principle that the only way you could be sure you had enough food when hosting was to have too much.

Again, I am struck by the mild melancholy of September encroaching, offset by the comfort of knowing that the holidays are for all intents and purposes next week.

*Just went back and listened to "Zombie." I retract this claim. 

Ingles in Waynesville

On the way from Asheville out to our place in the hills above Whittier/Sylva last week we stopped at an Ingles grocery store near Waynesville. We were shopping for several days so we had a pretty full cart. There was no way in hell I was ringing all that up myself and bagging it.

So I directed our cart through one of the aisles with a cashier and found myself talking to a nice lady, maybe a few years older than me, named Kim. "Are you an Ingles club member?" She asked. I was not, I responded. She pointed out that with the amount of groceries I was buyting there might be a tidy savings, that the application was very easy to fill out, and that it could easily pay for itself many times over if my family came out to the mountains each year... 

She had me. I filled it out, and while doing so she rang us up and gave me a good deal of detail about how I could use it for this and for that and how I could get a discount on gas purchases... It was all rather lovely and delivered with enthusiasm and care. All in all it was a very pleasant experience, very hometowny and welcoming, which she clearly enjoyed. If that place is sensibly managed she will get a bonus.

The First Thing

Back when I was at the very early stages of building my planning practice I was of necessity deeply ensconced in learning to sell. After all, nobody else was going to do the selling for me. Therefore I had to dive pretty deeply into the literature of sales. Of course it exists. There's a literature for everything.

One of the content creators (I hesitate to call them writers since writing isn't really their point per se) who made the biggest impression on my was a guy named Brian Tracy, who is the ultimate white guy from central casting (says the pot, calling the kettle black). Not all of his oeuvre stands out, but some of it does.

One of the things he advocated in his book The Psychology of Achievement was that people should get up and jot down 10-15 ideas first thing in the morning, while the brain was the freshest and least inhibited. I never quite got to doing that. My morning routine has been meditation/stretching/strength then reading then later writing my blog, which sometimes suffers from the hungry attention hippo of DuoLingo. But my reading, and perhaps my routine as a whole, has gotten a little stale. Perhaps it's time to change it up a little.

The End of Summer

And so, here we are again. Graham has moved off to the Quiz Bowl house and UNC's school year has kicked off. Natalie has returned to NYC, soon to begin her new job at the City and Country School in Greenwich Village and continue with her M.Ed. program at Hunter. Mary and I, once more, find ourselves empty nesters. Things are, admittedly, easier.

The worst of the heat seems to have past, at least for a week or so. Right now I'm on the porch in shorts and flip flops and my toes are, it must be owned, a little chilly.

If we've made one mistake this summer, it's the same one we made last summer, a typical parent mistake. That is, because we were bending our schedules to match Graham's work schedule in Raleigh, we didn't get out to a family vacation or even really any vacation till late in the game. Yes, we are making up for it at the tail end with last week's trip to the mountaints, Mary and I will have a week of remedial vacation in the Adirondacks right after Labor Day before a wedding 9/6. Even the week or so I will spend in Seattle in the 2nd half of September will have some leisure aspects mixed in, with Mary there at the beginning before continuing up to Alaska to take more pictures.

But as we learned last summer, September travel, though it has the advantages of fewer people and easier access to services (restaurants, parking, traffic, etc) also has the disadvantages of mostly being populated by older people. You see fewer people, most of them older. So you miss out on the joy of seeing children and other families and the access it offers to the memories of what it was like to be at those life stages ourselves. 

All the same, the lack of traffic lines at restaurants and brutal heat has a certain charm to it.  

Formulas -- the international assassination syndicate

Picked up a Max Sjowall-Per Wahloo novel at Downtown Books and News in Asheville. One of the series of books I saw around a lot at used book stores in the 70s-80s (and maybe my dad's shelves at home) but never read. Snapped one up for a little retro mystery.

One of the tropes here is the international crime syndicate, specifically the shadowy global group of "assassins for hire." This is a motif that has had legs through the years, surviving as far as Killing Eve on Netflix and even the Mr and Mrs Smith mini-franchise, first a movie with Brangelina, then a show with Donald Glover (apparently there's a season 2 coming, though we stopped after two episodes. Kinda forgot about it).

It's hard to figure out what gives this trope its legs. Graham posits that it may be because attributing persistent criminality to one country/ethnicity or another could be dangerous to a brand/franchise in a shifting geopolitical/moral environment. "Those Mexicans" or "those Chinese" could quickly be a commercial liability, but who will find fault with an amoral international syndicate composed of a mix of people? We can all hate and fear those. (As an aside, remember how the bad guys in the initial Die Hard were Germans, of all things?). I think that's as good a suggestion as any. I must read on.  

Cherokee and roadside culture

We drove through Cherokee yesterday on our way to Kuwohi AKA Clingman's Dome. Although the place still seems to be hanging on, there were a lot of classic motels, putt putt golf courses, diners and gem mining stores that are suffering from the same waning of traditional roadside culture that is visible in so many places around this great land of ours. Places that used to be exciting or at least worthy vacation destinations that now survive at best.

I used to think it was that cheap airline tickets meant that they were being outcompeted by the Vegases, Bransons, Orlandos, Londons, Parises and Grand Canyons of the world. And there is no doubt some of that going on.

But I also think it's a function of the waning of the working and middle classes in a America...

But then I thought of checking the data. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park remains one of the most visited of our national parks, garnering 12 million visitors or so a year for the last decade, peaking at ~14 million in 2021. Cherokee and Gatlinburg, TN remain key points of entry, and there are bigger population centers on the eastern side. I think people are coming through Cherokee. Maybe we caught it on a bad day. But it looks a little forlorn, certainly it compares unfavorably to Sylva, which is more or less the Chapel Hill of Western Carolina U, scaled down appropriately.

Whittier, NC

It is very pretty here and we are relaxing at 3,473 feet (DC and Mary live yet higher, at 3800 feet). Today, I was able to convince the family that -- instead of packing lunches and then hopping in the car and driving an hour and change to find a trail where we would walk up to a view and then back down to the car, we should just walk down our driveway and the other gravel roads leading to it and then back up and have lunch here at our rented view. They were swayed by this logic. Now we are reading and cooling off. There will be laundry and, perhaps, naps.