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.