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.