Decisions

I had started reading a book on the Libor-fixing scandals which came to light following the financial crisis of 2008-9, but to read it on a Saturday feels like a violation of my shabbos ban on all things financial, so I turned to fiction. First I polished off a Lauren Goff story which I had started last night (being very observant of shabbos norms, which decree that it kicks off when the sun goes down Friday). 

Then I turned my attention back to Delillo's The Names, a book which had haunted me since the first time I read it (which may, upon inspection, have preceded the inception of The Grouse), and which I had picked up again sometime in the last couple of months and had then set it down for a spell when it seemed to be a bit of a grind. Now I believe I have my groove back and it is moving towards the spare, haunting tone I remember from my first reading.

Much of it takes place in Greece, which is making me think. As I've noted, I've been studying Italian, German and Ukrainian on alternate days on Duolingo. There are drawbacks to each of these languages, and to Duolingo as a platform. Italian is too easy, really, it almost feels like a waste of time to key my way through the exercises. German is kind of interesting, but one of the voices that reads on Duolingo has such an incredibly annoying voice I just want to shoot myself. With Ukrainian I feel almost like I'm cheating. It just shares too much with Russian. It differs enough to be a freestanding language, don't get me wrong. This is no accident. Ukrainian romantics normed the literary language around southeastern dialects so as to self-consciously differentiate it from Russian.

I am also just sick of learning how to say "sweater" and "skirt" in all these languages, upon which Duolingo just insists. 

In any case, in The Names the protagonist is studying modern Greek, which sounds like it might be a more worthy endeavor. I'll have to confer with my linguist buddy Eric about it.  

New groove, old groove

I'm in the middle of a two-day conference on tax planning, not always the most scintillating of topics. In fact, even during these two days, it's not the most scintillating of topics. Much of the focus of the conference is in fact on productivity and growing your business. Towards the end of the day, someone asked for recommendations for books from four panelists and all the books the panelists brought up were business/entrepreneurship books.

Which is interesting. On the one hand, that's probably exactly the kind of books the guy who asked the question was looking for. On the other, it's pretty narrow.

In any case, I jotted the books down and may read or listen to some or even all of them because the entrepreneurship/productivity hack culture is not all bad. More importantly, it takes me back to the early days of my practice when I was reading and listening to more of that stuff and I think it was a very fruitful period. I learned a lot, some of which I have forgotten in the intervening years. In general, it was a period of good energy during which I opened myself up to growth from unexpected sources.

One of the books mentioned was The 5am Club which, I'm sure, argues for getting up really early because it's a moment in the day of low interruption, high energy and high productivity. In principle I'm on board with all that, I just fuck around too much on YouTube at night. This morning I woke up at 6 and, instead of fighting it, rolled with it. Instead of slavishly following the morning routines I've established in recent years, here I am blogging before breakfast. But now I'm hungry.

From the cross to the commodity

My ongoing project of reading the Bible in general hasn't brought on a ton of spiritual insight. Such is life. But now and again I find a chestnut. For instance, in Luke 23:34, when Christ is hanging upon the cross, he says: "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing." This is in the Oxford Study edition of 1961. 

Of course, this sounds an awful lot about Marx's classic phrase introduced in his discussion of commodity fetishism in Das Kapital, which is later latched hold of as an encapsulation of the concept of ideology: "Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es," usually translated as "they know not what they are doing, but they are doing it."

Really I need to check the German translation of the Bible. The internet doesn't show a lot of discussion of this.

But now, I gotta hop on the clock.

North-south in India and the world

Last week's issue of The Economist has a great article about India and Narendra Modi's various programs to forge an ever-deeper union, some of them good, some bad. Perhaps the most surprising learning for me was about the tremendous north-south divide in India, and that it is the reverse of what we see in so much of the world. Globally and historically, there's been a tendency for the North, the South poorer. This has historically been the case in the US and was particularly so prior to the Civil War. Europe lorded its wealth over its colonial dominions -- though much of its wealth derived from its forcible takings from them. 

Internally in Europe, wealth divides regionally more by closeness to the center than strictly north-south. So Northern Italy and Spain tower over their southern regions, while the areas around London and Paris are much wealthier than outlying region (outside of Ile-de-France, France's GDP per capita is remarkably even). In Germany, Bavaria and Baden-Wurttemburg in the South are the richest regions -- though the Northern mercantile cities of Hamburg and Bremen are individually the richest. In England the triangle between London, Oxford and Cambridge predominates over the north.

But I digress. To return to the main point: the southern states of India are much richer than the northern ones, with GDP per capita around $10k per person at purchasing price parity, vs. $3k or so for the more populous Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in the north. As one would expect, the populations of the poorer states are growing faster that those of the richer ones (since family sizes tend to decrease as incomes rise since kids become more expensive to rear, longevity rises, and the ability and propensity to save rises). 

The apportionment of seats in the legislature has been legally fixed for about half a century to encourage states to adopt population control programs and provide an incentive for success. This presages fireworks, as Modi's BJP has its power base in the north... 

By now I'm kind of reprising the article and I've exceeded my allotted time to blog. Nuff to say the political economy of India is complicated and its survival as a unified country is by no means guaranteed.

Black Boys on Mopeds

Over the weekend someone reached out to me over Messenger and asked who I had gone out with in college. "Hilary," I said. Which reminded me I hadn't snooped on Facebook in some time to see what she was up to, which is something that I do of course though I also try to have lunch with her every year or two to have a proper check in. Every two years seems to be about all she can take of me, which I can certainly understand and is entirely in keeping with people's general trend to care less and less about maintaining broad networks of connections as they age.

So I scrolled down Hilary's feed and saw that there was a Sinead O'Connor song she had posted around the time of O'Connor's passing earlier this year, with a note that her husband had brought it to her attention. I listened to it, and it was indeed lovely, but I thought that O'Connor's presence and delivery reminded me in many ways of the early Sharon Van Etten, a longtime fixation of mine. Perhaps not surprisingly, when I looked for other versions of the song on YouTube I discovered a cover of it by Van Etten herself. And I love hers in particular.

But it gets better. I kept scrolling YouTube -- and I didn't have to scroll far because there aren't that many versions of this song out there -- and found one by Phoebe Bridgers, who is one of Natalie's absolute faves. Which is just too lovely, to have that much commonality of taste across generations when there just aren't that many versions of the song out there. Through much of her childhood I thought Natalie would shoot us if we played another song by Jonny Cash or Mandolin Orange or Gillian Welch or something but it seems the apple hasn't fallen that far from the tree. Then again, I was younger than her when I reencountered and fell in love with John Prine, who had been my dad's favorite and is very much in the same tradition. Even the chord progressions are the same; but of course they are.

Codicil: turns out there a lot more covers of this song than I originally thought. I like this guy a lot. Reminds me of the guy from Neutral Milk Hotel.

Growing on me

Beth sent Mary a copy of Laura Lippman's Lady in the Lake for her birthday. Or at least I think that's how this book made its way into our home. In a back jacket blurb Stephen King likens her to Ruth Rendell. High praise indeed.

So I've been reading this tale of Maddie Schwartz, a beautiful but bored Jewish housewife from 1960s Baltimore who leaves her husband and gets involved in trying to solve a the mystery of the death of a black woman from the same neighborhood Maddie's Jewish community had once occupied. Distinctively, the narrative comes from a variety of viewpoints, oscillating between that the of the victim, the detective, and a wide range of people who come into contact with the detective after she leaves her comfortable suburban nest. I was first intrigued then annoyed by this because it seemed gimmicky. But now I am coming to believe that these multiple perspectives is precisely the point.

I've seen this device before, notably in Maryse Conde's Crossing the Mangrove, which was one of five or so books from Natalie's shelf that she recommended that I read before going back to New Haven one year. But in Conde's case it was sort of a Rashomon-type device, multiple perspectives on one event.

The case of Maddie Schwartz is different. Where in the mystery novel in many cases (one things of Raymond Chandler) the mystery plot allows a detective to range across society so the reader can be exposed to various of its corners (just like old quests like Huck Finn's or Chichikov's in Dead Souls did similar things), in the case of Maddie Schwartz it's more like the detective is unleashed and, because a beautiful woman unmoored from husband and home is such a departure from the norm, she acts as a perturbation element in society. So the detective, instead of a plot device to show us society from a 3rd person perspective instead disrupts a number of individual consciousnesses, which the reader accesses. Though it's quite possible that the mystery may come to an interesting end too. I'll keep reading.

Experiences

Got on a Zoom yesterday evening of people from my college class. It's been going on since the pandemic started every Thursday night and has been spearheaded by the woman who has been our class secretary forever and who has taken the lead on organizing reunions. Great staying power, great work, great person.

Last night a woman was on there talking about things she had bought her fiance for his birthday. I initially expressed envy in the tone of "he's a lucky guy," then I kinda backtracked by saying we had plenty of things, which is true. Someone else piped in that "experiences" are more important.

Lots of people, nay society in general has been trending towards "experiences" over "things" for some time, and at a high level it seems healthy. But I am actually retreating from that. All too often "experiences" denotes first and foremost travel, which is of necessity rather carbon-intensive on average. When it's not about travel, it may be about food or perhaps even seeing somebody in concert. Even those two are often about display: sharing about them on Facebook to say "I did this or that, look how cool I am."

I am moving away from "experiences" and towards joy and serenity as goals. Each of them are elusive and evanescent, but you know them when you have them. By and large, others also know when you have them, but they can't come to know it by you telling them. Intrinsic qualities are not designed for display, they can only be divined.

Send off

Here we are, scarcely three weeks after having returned from Europe. I'm getting ready to take Mary to RDU to go back to Alaska with the sole intention of shooting pictures with her real camera.

She has geared up for this mission: new laptop, suitcase and all manner of little stuff. Not without reason, she's a little apprehensive about things like weather and light. I'm a little apprehensive about bears, though she'll have a bear bell and bear spray and in principle knows what she needs to do if she sees one of the big fuzzy guys. She has downloaded all manner of apps to her phone and knows for instance that she really needs to predownload maps for AllTrails before going out in the woods. She just needs to remember to do it.

It's an exciting moment. My little girl's going out in the world on her own. She did a road trip with her collaborator River in support of their A Positive Life book on HIV-positive women many years ago, maybe '95-96 or so. I remember her talking about how exciting it was to be driving across a bridge in Tampa out on her own. That was a long time ago. This is really her first major instance of professional travel since then. We'll see how long it takes for the romantic sheen to wear off of it.

Then there's also the small matter of packaging, pitching, and selling the work. Finding venues and distribution channels. This is true as well for her Gamelands series she did last year. A whole corpus waiting to be shown to the world. There's still time for that in the grand scheme of things

In the short run, it would be nice to get some revenue in the door for tax year 2023 so that we can expense all of her costs without the IRS deeming her art work a hobby as opposed to a profession, so if anybody needs a print or a book, holler at me.

Guys walking with books

Our neighborhood is packed to the gills with professors from the colleges around here. Always has been, I hope it always will be. One of the great things that brings with it is eccentric walkers, including the guys with books.

There's one guy, pretty sure he's Bulgarian because I met him one time at a lake social. He seems to work at Fidelity because he's always got on a Fidelity T-shirt, which would make him like me some kind of lapsed academic. He always has a nice paperback of some sort.

Today there was a guy walking around with a hardcover book. He passed me twice while I was mowing the yard, meaning he was doing loops on the Markham Drive hill, not for the faint of heart. Later I ran around the lake and he passed me going the other way when I rounded the bend onto South Lake Shore. Still reading. Gotta admire that.

Languages and effort

Last week I sat in on a call on the changes in college admissions and financial aid practices and the college counsellor who led the admissions portion of the call quoted the head of admissions from Lafayette as saying "we want to see four years of a foreign language on kids' transcripts because languages are hard and sticking with them shows fortitude." Exactly.

I've seen speculation in recent weeks/months that the continued improvement in AI and its ability to provide dynamic translations will do away with the need to study foreign languages. That misses the point of studying foreign languages entirely. One doesn't study them for the instrumental ability to communicate with others. One studies them to make the effort to come closer to others and to show respect for them. If you have made an effort to study and you speak to them in their language -- even if they know English -- they appreciate it. It is the quintessence of diplomacy.

As for me, after backing off on Duolingo for a little while (I missed a few days while in Europe and got demoted one league) I am back on it and hae been re-promoted as far as the Diamond League (the top league) and have made my way into the playoffs, which I think you need to win three weeks in a row or something to achieve Champion status. I'm not sure that ever happens. There's some crazy kid in my group of 15 that looks like he spends five hours a day on there. After studying French and Spanish in the summer I have moved on to alternating Ukrainian, Italian and German. It's all kind of a time sink, I know, but it feels like it's good for the old noggin. 20-25 minutes a day seems to keep me afloat in the upper echelons.  

Organic husbandry

Yesterday morning I was sitting here with my laptop late in the monring, trying to figure out a game plan for the portion of the day that wasn't already promised to others (coffee with a friend's kid who wanted to learn about financial services careers, get birthday cake, drop something off at a client's house, birthday dinner and presents with Graham, Granny and Matt). Mary came in and said it was supposed to rain soon.

Having run one day and biked the other earlier this weekend, I opted to chop some wood. I had trunk sections from a tree next door which had been sitting around since Mike and Ian came over earlier in the year and cut a tree which had fallen in a neighbor's yard into sections. 

It was a good plan. The sections were primed for splitting. The new maul felt great. I even got some work out of this David Cronenburg-esque spike thing designed to be driven into the heart of really big sections that take too much work to split with a maul. You just have to use the sledgehammer face on the other side of the maul. I figured out some techniques, though I'm sure I could get better.

It's the kind of work one needs to take frequent breaks from, so I gathered some branches for kindling and added them too our already bulging piles of kindling (we really need to burn more fires this winter) and flipped the compost. Not so mysteriously, the compost had almost none of the food scraps I dump on it from the kitchen. There's not much of a mystery to solve here: this is clearly the work of the bands of marauding dear in our woods. We have essentially been feeding them. Honestly, I can live with it because the poor things have relatively little to eat, having denuded all the underbrush for miles around. If we can't get our shit together to cull their herds, they might as well have something in their belly so they are less stressed and out of it when they cross the roads. Perhaps by feeding them we save a car or two.

The lowest rungs

Yesterday afternoon I went to a conference for the Recovery Alliance Initiative, an NGO that convenes conferences from people across the spectrum of the substance abuse community (law enforcement, clinicians, rehab people, state and county employees, people like me in recovery, drug court, clergy....) to talk about holistic and all-embracing approaches to addressing the needs of individuals with substance use disorders. After a couple of great talks including one from a judge who does both drug court and criminal court, from which I learned that drug courts were defunded at the state level back in 2011, a fact both shocking because it's so stupid and perfectly rational given that Phil Berget got it done.

Late in the day we were doing roundtables on specific use cases. Our table took up the case of a hypothetical 18-year old who had been in and out of foster care and also had some juvenile run ins with the law who gets busted for breaking and entering. He is also meth dependent. In discussions, pretty much everyone at the table agreed how integral the role of Peer Support Specialist (PSS) is for someone like this who really doesn't have family or well-formed relationships to fall back on. Peer Support Specialists are basically people in recovery themselves who help support others in rehabs and other in- and outpatient navigate the recovery process. There's a certification program with criteria.

Like public school teachers PSS is a low-paid job but one acknowledged as a keystone. My initial thought was that it would be important to be sure that they spend a certain amount of time learning about the ecosystem of services above them that they can bring to the table for the people they're helping. I think in practice what happens is that good PSS folk end up staying in the recovery world and migrating into other better-paying (but still not particularly lucrative) roles. 95% of the people I meet at these events are in recovery themselves and all are strongly motivated to help others. The rest of the people there are very senior, sherriffs, judges, etc., people who know the deal and know what they are seeing in a room like that. Gold.

.... 

The public and the private in Europe

In a number of places I've called out the waning of retail offerings in Europe, or at least obvious retail offerings (almost all but the very richest historical sites are keen on capturing any dollars they can from visitors through sales of coffee, cold drinks, snacks, trinkets.... So a 14th century chateau can easily have many of the features of a convenience store if you go inside). Often it's difficult to find a place to buy thinngs. Some of it is a function of the aggregation and economies of scales I wrote about recently. Some of it is legislative: with very rare exceptions, all shops in Germany are closed by law on Sundays. In the Basque provinces all grocery stores closed at 3pm on Sundays. I guess this is more or less uniform around Spain.

So it turns out that much of Europe feels intensely closed and much is always happening behind the closed walls of homes. The public domain, at least in summer, is ceded to the tourists that prowl the landscape like locusts but in fact feed the place. Roughly speaking, 10% of GDP in France is tourism, in Spain it's 12%, in Croatia 18%, in Greece 26%. If you figure that most of the tourist dollars come in in the summer, multiply the above numbers times 3-3.5 for a rough approximation of how much "summer GDP" is attributable to tourism.

People's homes then, are pretty much their castles where they hide out from us tourists, and I for one am always curious about people's homes. One indication of the seriousness with which they take their homes is the dominance of home design and furnishing providers along European highways and at the edges of towns.   

Between friends who've settled there and AirBnb I've now had opportunity to go inside more and more of them over time and they have a lot of good features, perhaps best epitomized by their windows. European windows are marvels. Thick, heavy, triple-paned or whatever. But the incredible thing is the seamlessness with which they alternate between opening on a vertical hinge (to let in lots of air) or a horizontal one (to lean in and just let in a little). The windows really seem to epitomize the solidity of the homes, or maybe they just take me in.

One mystery, however, is the near universal absence of screens. Where are all the mosquitos? Are they ruthlessly and systematically exterminated wherever there are tourists? 

The buried bodies

This morning I had a refrain of dreams I've had in recent days and weeks: some combination of dream events was bringing to light skeletons in my closet from back in the day. They seem to revolve around Emerald Isle and pot dealers that I was involved with, with hints of actual bodies that may be sprinkled here or there.

For starters, let the record clearly state that there are no such skeletons in my closet. I never sold any weed in North Carolina, only briefly at Yale (3/8ths of a pound spread across two instances my sophomore year) and doing so made me so nervous that in each case I unloaded my stash within a day by pre-selling it and then delivering it as soon as I got it so as to not have it in my possession for long.

Probably the dreams are mostly about my dad, who did have a lot of unsavory business associates that he picked up from being a defense lawyer and who did party with them and, perhaps, do non-lawyer business with them. I have heard whispers to that effect, never confirmed, but it does haunt me a little.

Also, my back pain from moving the piano, which was pretty strong Saturday though largely absent Sunday, has returned a little. Our bodies are so interesting.

Mary's birthday present

Today is Mary's birthday. For her main birthday present we got her a MacBook Pro for her to take on her return visit to Alaska in a couple of weeks, where she will revisit places we went to in June but take pictures with her real camera instead of her phone. Beyond that, like many adults, she's become a difficult person to shop for. Of course I can't buy her clothes, we won't even start that. She mostly reads on her phone or laptop. We get all our music from streaming services. And so on.

Her big birthday present was getting rid of the piano in our rec room that nobody has played for a decade. Mom saved the piano when it was being hauled out into the street in Durham back in the early 60s, then she and Mary Lee paid to have it refurbished when Natalie showed (quickly passing) interest in the piano back in grade school. It was time for it to find a new home, which was quite a project in itself. I will spare you the details of that, save to say that it was ultimately a somewhat eccentric piano tuner (if that's not a foregone conclusion) from Hillsborough with whom Mouse connected me who found a new home for it.

But I needed something more. A little pondering made me decide to go through the 20-odd years of digital photos in my archives and find all the pictures of Mary that I could. You see, Mary has often complained that I don't take enough pictures of her. It is of course hard to satisfy a woman who has an MFA from photography at Yale. That said, some of her critiques are valid: I do tend to take pictures from too great a distance, don't think enough about lighting, and sometimes they end up blurry. Oh well. But we also have different conceptions of when pictures should be taken. She chides me for not taking pictures when she has a nice dress on, has make-up on, when we're out at an event, etc. But taking pictures is the last thing on my mind at those places. I am talking to people, snarfing appetizers, etc. And I also just prefer pictures of her at home as I see her all the time. Or on vacation. What I'm really looking for is a nice smile and/or signs of love and warmth. Or just her in a classic pose where I remember her being happy. Then there's the problem of her having a phone in her hand taking a picture pretty much constantly. Here, then, are a select few good ones.

Managing my battery

Before heading to Europe I got a new phone, my first in six years. I replaced my old Motorola with a Samsung. Not this year's Samsung, mind you, last year's, and in a stupid color (lavender), but that doesn't matter because it's covered in a big honking Otterbox so I can drop the thing on the ground and not worry about it. Of course I got last year's because they didn't charge me any money for it, they just had to lock us in to another couple of years with the mobile carrier, which we were gonna do anyway.

I had always been one of those people who charges my phone more or less incessantly. If it's no up above 70-80%, I'd start to get nervous. If you can have it at 100%, why not, I figured. This was mostly driven by a couple of near death experiences with the Motorola, including one in 2022 around the time of Natalie's graduation which came from letting my battery get too low.

Turns out, keeping your phone fully charged all the way doesn't help it last longer. In fact, the opposite is true. I won't attempt to explain the physics of it all because even if I could string all those words together I wouldn't actually understand them. Google that shit. Mary had told me this but of course I had to look it up myself because, sadly, I don't always trust her to be 100% authoritative. But if she says something and then the interweb confirms it, that seals the deal.

Of course the underlying issues here are clear: I have a lack of overall trust in the universe and a tendency to overcompensate through compulsive behavior correlated with simple numerical metrics (how charged is my phone?), but that doesn't necessarily serve me well. Had I managed my battery better, maybe I could have held onto that Motorola for 7 or 8 years and thereby avoided going to that store for longer.

The aggregation of retail vs Jane Jacobs

The countryside, both European and American, has been horribly denuded by the endless rolling up and aggregation of retail, from Sears through Price Club/Costco, Carrefour, Walmart, Amazon, Dollar General... When Mary and I went on our honeymoon back in '97, we came upon this lovely agriturismo place -- a converted chateau or whatever they call them in Italian -- as we were traveling from Arezzo towards Siena. We stayed for three nights for a price that was expensive at the time, but it was magical. We went to a small store nearby and got fresh mozzarella, prosciutto, bread, peaches...

Today I doubt the store exists. In so many small towns in the French countryside there's barely any retail operating at all. Maybe a bar-tabac if you are lucky. Everybody seems to drive 10 or 15 minutes to a supermarket or hypermarket to buy everything.

Really, it's just the same dynamic as Robert Moses vs. Jane Jacobs back in the day, except the countryside had no intellect as powerful as Jacobs nor a villain as outsized as Moses. But people in the country are at least as dependent on the informal social fabric of neighborhoods as those in the city, thought they interact with neighbors less frequently.

We see small exceptions in some affluent places where boutique retail can be run at a loss or at low margin for nostalgic purposes. Going back into the 80s I remember how the general store near Mark's parents' house in Warren was owned by a Wall Street type and run as a labor of love. In most places that just doesn't work. Nobody has the stomach to run the losses.

The wrong focus

The Wall Street Journal has just come out with a new college ranking system that explicitly focuses on the return on investment that colleges provide, as measured by the amount of income that a degree from the college adds. This is a wrong-headed focus, because the amount of money people have is really important only in relationship to the amount of money people feel they need. If a college can help students develop value systems which explicitly deprioritize material needs, it can be argued that it does just as much to enrich them as if it helps them earn more money. Moreover, to the extent that a college helps students be satisfied with less, it helps them trim their footprint on the planet and make more goods available to others both in the present and in the future.

Let's be clear, Yale comes in 3rd in the Journal's rankings, well above Harvard, which we always like to see, but UNC slides down to 83rd, which is not the kind of treatment we want to see for the university of the people. But I was surprised to see Babson sneak into the top 10. OK, Babson's a cute little undergrad business school, fine. I'd send my kids to St John's in Annapolis or the desert to read great books long before I'd send one to Babson, and I'd probably hire from St John's too. Kids have the rest of their lives to learn business. The odds that another life phase will expose them to Plato or Bronte is low.

My high level criticism aside, it's undoubtedly positive for there to be a variety of ranking systems out there for colleges, as for anything. There needs to be ongoing dialog about what we want from institutions.

Equilibrium

Back in the saddle here in NC and I must say, all is fine. Yesterday I had a bunch to do but I was so grateful to have had a competent team putting out the small fires that arose while I was gone, so there weren't any big things hanging over my head. This week promises to be hot, but next week should be milder. In a shift of potentially seismic proportions, Mary has been coming to bed a little earlier. Time will tell if this is just a lingering effect of her COVID and jet lag.

Really things are relatively stress free right now and I don't have a to write about. Which is an odd place to be. I'm behind on reading the Economist, to be sure, and have some client stuff to do, so I guess I should go ahead and hop on that.

Minari

Mary had for some time been intermittently and half-heartedly advocating that we watch Minari, a 2020 film about a Korean family that moves to Arkansas from California in the early 80s to found a farm and get out of the drudgery of working in poultry mills "sexing" chickens (i.e. distinguishing useful female chicks from useless male ones, which are incinerated. I'm guessing this is for egg producers). It's a good not great film, slow, focused on tension between the spouses about being out in the middle of nowhere, with additional plot tension furnished by a son with a heart defect and the wife's mother, who's a bit of a wild one: cursing and generally being coarse, playing cards with a verve atypical of a grandmother, etc. It's to the director's credit that the film doesn't really build out and elucidate the grandmother's deviance from the norm. We have to infer here that the wife comes from something like peasant stock so that achieving a veneer of bourgeois respectability is important to her. At least that's how I read it. Though she never really criticizes her mom. It's the kids who are a little baffled.

In an atypical move, Mary laid down on the couch after we had finished eating our dinner (a chicken soup with nian gao and bok choy that I had made and was pretty tasty and needed after weeks of eating tons of bread, cheese and ham in Europe). She hasn't really laid back like that for a long time while watching. So often she's clutching her phone scrolling the Instagram, the Times or the Post when we take a bathroom break or the plot slows. It was good to see, took me back to our early days, before cell phones had become the center of the universe.

Pretty much a perfect day

Got up, made pancakes, then went to an AA meeting -- where I ran into someone I hadn't seen in decades. Then I picked up Graham at his dorm, had lunch, took an actual nap on the couch in my study and had an iced coffee, followed by tennis with Adam, which saw me coming back at the end to beat him 7-5. Talked to both Leslie and Natalie. Now it is time to grill.

No complaints.

Reviewing our vacation

When I set goals for myself for the year, one key one was to have two uninterrupted weeks of vacation, something I really hadn't accomplished in years. I more or less did that. I monitored my email but mostly didn't answer it. Those emails I did answer were done so very succinctly and in the "I'll get back to you when I'm back in town" vein. For the most part I didn't look at markets and I didn't read the news or even the finance or policy sections of the issues of The Economist I brought with me.

Which isn't to say I wasn't occupied. I had logistics to attend to: I drove a thousand miles or so, took a couple of train trips, planned and shopped for a bunch of meals (Mary insists that this is burdensome work at home). Some of this had some stress associated with it, especially with Mary laid up with COVID when it was hot as fuck outside. And then there was finding restaurants Mary would eat at which means navigating the proscription against seafood and beef, no mean feat in mostly coastal areas of France and Spain (try it, I dare you).

Reflecting on the whole journey this morning at Al Anon, I decided I'd check with Mary and see how she thought I did on managing stress and generally being a pleasant person to travel with for a couple of weeks. Bear in mind that we hadn't been on the road like this since our honeymoon. She said I did OK.

Right now I'm continuing to decompress and prioritize things. I am for the moment largely taking a break from the rate race of Duolingo competition. Part of me wants to quickly ramp back up on Ukrainian and push myself to the top of the Diamond League, but I know that's kind of silly, especially since most of you are probably sitting there thinking: "what the dickens is he even talking about?" Which is a perfectly reasonable question and really not even worth answering. The one thing I am not letting go of, it goes without saying, is the Grouse. I have a long-term track record over here that must be maintained, for obvious reasons.

But if vacation was ok for me, it did mostly kind of suck for Mary. We will have to go on another one soon.

Some reflections on El Prado

For our last day in Europe Mary mustered up the strength to visit El Prado, which was (by no means coincidentally) quite close to our hotel. We spent 3-4 hours there.

Of course in museums of this size you really just have to graze and take what you can get. They are too big to try to take it all in. Like good tourists we tried to visit with the greatest hits (Velazquez, Goya, etc) but also were drawn in by other stuff. I hadn't been there since '88 so it was pretty striking to see just how much distance was traveled by Goya. The Black Paintings are so strikingly proto-modern, unlike anything else to come for 80-100 years. I'm not saying anything new of course, but it was striking. 

I was in particular taken by these portraits by de Ribera of Heraclitus and Democritus. In all of my years I don't think I've ever seen an artist try to render the pre-Socratic philosophers. Sure they are anachronistic, but what are you gonna do. Apparently he's also got a Protagoras somewhere, as well as a Plato and an Aristotle.

Heraclitus (a personal fave)

Democritus (forgive poor quality, technically I was breaking the rules by shooting these even without flash but I was able to avoid the gaze of the only somewhat vigilant guards).

We also took the time to go up to the corner in the 3rd floor where the floor plan said the museum's Rembrandt was found. Indeed, there was only one, but it was an interesting one, portraying Judith with the head of Holofernes on a plate. This was pretty striking, because most Renaissance painters seem to focus on very little Old Testament material outside of Adam and Eve. Moreover, the Judith/Holofernes episode actually comes from the Apocrypha, not the canonical Old Testament, though the canon was of course shifting around a lot.

There was also a passing reference in another Dutch painting of the iconoclastic habits of early Dutch Protestants, i.e. they were actually destroying art. Physical iconoclasm a la the Taliban isn't something I had thought about a ton as a component of European history, though Anna had also mentioned how a chateau she and the family had visited in Brittany had been destroyed by French Revolutionaries, presumably Jacobins, and what a bummer that was. 

Much to ponder.