Auke Bay

The view from my AirBnb in Juneau.

Domesticity and the mystery novel

After hesitating in the middle of Helene Tursten's first novel, Detective Inspector Huss, I ended up making my way through it to the end. Like many European mystery novels and crime shows, the actual crimes seem almost quaint and trite compared to what needs to get cooked up in America to rise to the level of being worth investigating. Drug smuggling? Hells Angels? Infidelity? Oh my!

But I slogged on, in some ways almost because of the detective's domestic situation. It features many of the accepted tropes of Scandinavian fiction, the husband who sacrifices career to spend more time at home with the kids so the wife can have a career, the married couple who get frisky late on a weeknight after full and stressful work days. 

But there's something compelling to the character development and the earnestness of it all. In some ways it almost makes sense to view the home life of detectives and their families as their own subgenre worth looking at in its own right. Over several decades, for instance, the marriages of Inspector Wexford and his sidekick Mike Burden in Ruth Rendell's Kingsmarkham series cover an awful lot of ground. Indeed, there's almost no other genre where an author can drag a reader along through many phases of marriage and child-rearing in the same way as can sets of mystery novels, which are published over decades. Readers and detectives age together. It's very interesting reading situation. You can almost say that, just as the plot of the mystery novel serves as the device to drag the reader through a variety of sociological settings, sets of them do the same with life phases. It's possible someone has done good work on this, or it may seem too trivial and demand too much work to grind through multiple sets of novels. But it could be interesting.

Return from Sylva

Graham, Mary and I are just back from a not-quite whirlwind tour of the mountains west of Asheville. We stayed in rather shiny new cabin up a crazy driveway in some random holler. You may hear more about that later.

But for today I would be remiss if I didn't tell you about Sylva. It's a sweet little town with not one but three book stores, though admittedly one is a friends of the library store so the selection isn't great (but the guy behind the desk was super friendly). It is more than counterbalanced by the one next door, a classic used book store of the sort one sees rarely, where the owner clearly just buys up the collections of faculty members from the nearby university (Western Carolina) and sells them. All manner of oddities and things that took me back to college. Graham ended up independently picking up a book about US-China relations that had been on my Amazon list for years.

One can also purchase food in Sylva.

But the place de resistance, no doubt, was the one in this picture, which features the world's largest collection of pieces of the Berlin Wall, some of them adorned with the original graffiti, others with newer artwork. Accompanied by a museum which gives a detailed timeline of the Cold War. It is owned by a guy from Florida who is a history buff. It's free to go in but you can buy some of the art and also T-shirts (Graham and I got a couple) and other memorabilia. There's also a range of other period stuff strewn about, like a 1979 issue of US News and World Report which promised to explain why there would be food inflation in the upcoming year. I turned to the relevant article, which proved to be a fairly detailed interview with the Secretary of Agriculture. Times have changed.

Early Wednesday I have to pick up and head to the west coast, first to Seattle for a couple of days, then on to Juneau to see Natalie for a few days before she returns to the East Coast. Then I'll be back for a week and change before we deposit Graham in the apartment he will share with Ben. This morning it occurred to me that Graham may never live under the same roof with us again for as long as a summer. My heart fell. Though, as I have attested before, there are virtues to empty-nesting, it is also nice just to have him here.

Internal vs external motivation

Adam and I almost never practice at tennis. We warm up for 5 minutes, 10 if we have a lot to talk about, then we start keeping score. I find it difficult to make myself run hard for the ball if we're not keeping score.

More serious tennis players practice all the time. They work on specific strokes, hitting cross-court backhands to one another, then forehands, then they alternate working on volleys and so on and so on. Reams of research show that such "deliberate practice" is important to making a lot of progress in specific domains.

Mary's brother Rob, on the other hand, likes to just hit the ball and says that he is so "intrinsically motivated" that he doesn't need the scorekeeping mechanism to keep him focused. Rob and I often hit with one another for a while before starting to play. I think he's not wrong to call this out as an instance of internal vs. external drivers.

I wonder if I shortchange myself by allowing myself to focus on external motivators like the score in a meaningless tennis match too often. I have written before about feeling to some extent imprisoned by numbers and metrics, mpg in the car, number of posts in the blog, more recently things like number of DuoLingo points (holding steady at 500 a day for over a year) and pushups (started the 1776 challenge (1776 in July) on July 2, an old shoulder twinge has slowed me down but am at 930 and counting -- i.e. I'm not going to make it but feel I shouldn't quit). Then there's also the question of money. 

I think by and large I harm no one but myself with my overreliance on metrics. But do I harm myself? Certainly -- and I think I've written about this before -- the fact that it's not easy to quantify progress in guitar-playing has held back my progress on the guitar. But I'm good enough that at least Mary and the cats don't suffer too much.

Brain packing

I was sitting there petting Leon and sipping coffee when I saw someone walking out at the lake. I happen to know this person quite often listens to NPR while out walking, which I really don't understand. For myself I greatly prefer being alone with my thoughts while walking, running or biking, though I am an inveterate book and podcast listener in the car.

But then again, I am almost OCD about my habits including, at that very moment, thinking I should be reading something in the spiritual vein, as I do at that time of morning. Presently I'm re-reading Abraham Joshua Heschel's Man is Not Alone. This despite the fact that it's been some time since any of those books really spoke to me in the deep way I hope for them to. I have clung to the ritual despite not getting the payout.

Meanwhile, I really do get a lot out of just sitting there petting the cat, despite Leon's pesky insistence that I scratch his belly in exactly this one spot and him putting himself at an angle and distance that is a bit of a pain in the ass to reach. But he looks so beatific when scratched there and wags his tail in such a sweet way. Discomfort or no, I should be focusing on the cat. The books will be there forever. He won't.

The truly prolific and the one-sentence paragraph

There's a guy I know from the coworking space who has now posted for like 1400 days straight on LinkedIn and is, according to him, killing it leading "social selling" seminars Monday nights on LinkedIn. I am, I must confess, intrigued. Many deride it but LinkedIn has evolved into an extremely useful platform over the years. A good way to keep in track of people, relatively tightly focused on business for the most part which keeps it largely free of the partisan rancor that infects other networks. 

But then again I find the writings a little annoying. All too many people have gone over to this style of writing exclusively in one-sentence paragraphs. If the Lord had intended paragraphs to include only one sentence, why would he have made it so easy to have more? And why would the convention stating that the one sentence paragraph should be used only sparingly have evolved. Overuse of the one sentence paragraph is an asinine thing.

So I should probably resist. Especially as it may well conflict with tennis.

Making the globe smarter

The Economist has a great leader this week about what the world can do to help more people in more places realize their potential (it's behind a paywall, but oh well). So much of it has to do with raising nutrition for infants and toddlers in places like Africa and Bangladesh and by limiting regional conflicts.

And that means multinational organizations that cooperate with one another as well as stable geopolitics. Which depends upon good leadership.

I remember back in the 90s one would often go to airports and run into groups of evangelical Christian returning from missions to Africa and feeling ashamed of not doing something similar. I had good intentions, but they in some sense were walking the walk, even if perhaps they were Bible-thumping in a way to which I might object. At least they were going over there and seeing how people lived and doing something. I'm sure they did at least if not primarily a little latrine-digging work and/or brought some food/medicine to embody their message.

Has this faded with the rise of populist nationalism? I honestly don't know. The America Firstish tone seems to imply it has. 

I do know that the left/public health/ESG world does have a focus on this stuff, if not a firm handle. And Gates has been a good leader in this regard, so it is disheartening to see him vilified. Ditto for Soros

Trump assassination attempt

On the one hand, Biden probably didn't condemn the attempt quite forcibly enough in his initial statement. The phrase "we cannot condone violence" rings in my ear. That was a little bit soft. He did a lot better in his six-minute address to the nation last night. He hit the right notes. Yes there were a couple of boo boos ("battle box" vs. "ballot box"), but it was cogent, coherent and from the heart. 

On the other, it must be owned that it was Trump who at once lowered the tone and raised the temperature* of American politics and created the combustible atmosphere that led to this. Yes Democrats have fallen into the trap here and there. The shooting up of the Congressional baseball game where Steve Scalise was badly injured and the physical attacks on neo-Nazi Richard Spencer the weekend of the 2016 Trump inauguration stand out as particularly low moments. But honestly more than anyone it is Trump who has created the conditions that came back and nipped him in the ear.

I'm glad he wasn't killed because Biden is right, that's not who we are. But I would not be sad if he were to die of natural causes. But it is too late for the death of Trump to mean that much. He has created the template for nationalist populism in America. If he dies JD Vance** or the like steps in and fills his shoes. Whether anyone else will ever have license to mouth as much virulent nonsense at that level as Trump has remains to be seen. 

*I had written that phrase before I heard Biden use it in his address, btw.

** BTW let the record clearly reflect that I wrote this before the nod to Vance as VP candidate was made. Some days I have the hot hand.

The problem with scaling mutuality through charity

There is a tendency on the right to lionize charitable giving and volunteering as a superior method for people to take care of one another relative to having the government do it. Many conservatives hearken back to de Tocqueville's eloquent rhapsodies on the way Americans participated in "voluntary associations" to help one another. Barn-raising is probably the most paradigmatic romantic instance of it. Sadly there's not much barn-raising these days, and where there is something analogous (Habitat for Humanity builds) there's often a need for people who know what they're doing to go back on Monday to fix some slapdash work done by a volunteer on Sunday.

Americans do both give money and volunteer their time at pretty reasonable clips. But it's nowhere near enough. Charitable giving hovers around 2% of GDP, whereas the aggregate value of hours volunteered is estimated at around a quarter of that. Even if we assume that the value of hours volunteered is low by a factor of three we're still not doing that well.

Of their own free will people are willing to give to a point to their neighbors and relatives. But our willingness to do so falls off quickly when people are more distant. Which is a massive structural impediment to realizing any kinds of economies of scale through individual giving.

So there will always be a need for the state to play a major role in helping us care for our more distant neighbors. We'll never do it ourselves. We can't.

Agile war

Yesterday the Journal ran a story about how the Russians have been quickly adopting to the various technologies the Ukrainians have been throwing at them drawn from the American stockpile of goodies. Russian armies have historically been good at figuring stuff out quickly and making do with less.

This comes on the heels of reading in the Musk bio about how Elon pushed teams at SpaceX (and we've seen him do this at Tesla and try to do it at Twitter/X) to grind harder and push through walls to get things done more quickly and cheaply than others thought possible, not always but not infrequently successfully.

I have a sense that as we lurch towards different military flashpoints as China/Russia/Iran and even North Korea test our resolve, that the US, NATO, AUKUS etc will be needing to adopt ever more agile product and technology development cycles. Things will get messier and the reconfiguration of product  cycles will have odd cultural collisions with the whole concept of top down chain of command. Effective fighting forces have already figured out how to devolve authority and empower lower level officers and enlisted people on the front line. Now they will have to do something of the same with technology.

Not that I'm really saying anything new here. I guess it was just that time of day and I needed to post something.

Elon

After my brother-in-law Rob continued his full-throated espousal of Walter Isaacson's Elon Musk I decided to go ahead and read the copy Rob gave Graham for Xmas or birthday or something. Isaacson's book on Steve Jobs had been good (though the Ben Franklin got gummed up a bit in the details -- Isaacson can string along a good narrative but he is no Robert Caro).

Anyhow, I've never been a big Musk fan, as I have likely shared somewhere here on the blog. Musk seems too devoted to being a big hairy ape dedicated to demonstrating that rules don't apply to him, to being above the law. Not my people. I have too much experience with that type.

A hundred pages in, I don't yet hate Elon. The guy had a hard life in many ways and, though already having demonstrated many of the genius/asshole features that are so prominently on display, there's a boyish earnestness to the guy and a sheer bursting ambition that he channels effectively enough to get things done that has an appeal.

Flattened

Awoke rather exhausted after giving blood late yesterday afternoon. Giving blood has been a good addition to the list of things I do over the last few years, though admittedly I have fallen into arrears of late (I don't think I had given for maybe nine months) and the Red Cross phone team does call very aggressively once one is able to give again (two months after one's last donation), which is a total pain in the butt.

But it's one of those few things one can just do and know unequivocally that one has done a good thing and it's also a good way to spend time with people one wouldn't otherwise come into contact with.

At dinner last night we were talking about blood donations and Graham told a story of some point in time when the Soviets were talking about preparing for war with the United States. Some members of their armed forces said that a good indication of whether we were ramping up would be the price of blood: if the price people were being paid to donate blood jumped up, that would be a clear sign the US was getting ready to attack. Soviet intelligence told the military people that actually people in the US were not paid to give blood, they simply did it to provide a service to others. The military initially did not believe that this could be true in a capitalist society.

While there is no payment, there are snacks. I always take some Cheez-Its (now "whole grain"!) and usually some Nutter Butters, even though it's before dinner. 

Rhythms

Though we had a couple of breakfasty breads -- muffins, the walnut raisin bread from Weaver Street -- I had to go ahead and have my Monday cereal to kick off the week if only to get into work week mode. 

I am in a weird place with my rhythms now, my cycle of exercise, sleep, eating, reading and watching which form the core of my week. On the one hand, they are serving me well and have gotten me through the challenging time of this first act of Mary's health crisis, such as it is. On the other, they feel a little constraining, I sense that it is summertime and I really do need to break out a little bit.

Which is to say I need to actually sit down with my calendar and figure out when I and we are going to get in some travel: to Seattle and Juneau, to the Northeast, to Ann Arbor to see Kate, something I've never done but we've been talking about for decades. I just need to do it or Labor Day is going to roll around and I'll still be sitting here on this couch every morning. 

BTW -- I'm sure there are those amongst you have may have thought "this is exactly why I shouldn't read blogs like this. Who gives a flying fuck about what he has for breakfast?" An entirely legitimate point. But of course as I have said before, this blog isn't really for you, it's for me, and in this case the choice of breakfast food is naught but a symptom or facet of the ongoing effort to maintain energy and equilibrium. Our young men and women have given their lives in foreign lands for centuries now to keep you free to not read my blog. Exercise it if you so choose.

Dr No

I just polished off Percival Everett's Dr No. We had enjoyed the movie American Fiction, based on another Everett's Erasure, then I read of profile of him in the New Yorker, so I thought I'd give it a go.

I finished it. I wasn't blown away, but it was amusing enough, if occasionally dragged down by an excess of mathy discourse (the protagonist is a math professor). I may read more in the future but I won't sprint after it. 

It was important that I finish the book because I had just gotten 100 pages or so into some random Scandinavian murder mystery I had picked up at Circle City Books in Pittsboro and I hate to quit two books in a row.

Limits on Power

The most recent Supreme Court decision concerning the court case around Trump and January 6 is disheartening. I can see some narrow legal basis for granting Presidential immunity for official acts, but I would imagine we really want that for situations like in 1978 when the Carter administration was secretly negotiating with the People's Republic of China to recognize it and grant it full diplomatic status. That was all done very secretively. I don't know if it was technically illegal. If it was, I think Carter did a good thing. Since then and since Deng presided over the opening of China more people have exited poverty than at any other time in world history. Having China as a counterweight also expedited the fall of the Soviet Union. The subsequent rise of Xi Jinping complicates matters for sure, but we were never gong to be alone on the world stage.

If the President has immunity for actions carried out as part of his official duties, what about people acting on Presidential orders? Are they also immune? This opens up an enormous can of worms.

And it elevates the role of the press. Just because the President has immunity it doesn't mean we have to approve of everything the President does. There needs to be ever more vigorous debate on what are appropriate actions of the state.

As I said right after the 2020 election, the Biden administration should have been a time when we focused as a nation on the limits of Presidential power and putting guardrails in place. Instead, we keep removing them, including by Biden continuing to look for ways to extend it by doing things like forgiving student debt (a worthy goal if it could be targeted and authorized properly) by fiat (a bad thing). This has been a huge wasted opportunity.

Sitting round at home

Just now I took a quick scan of an article on Medium entitled "10 Deadly Habits You Need to Avoid." Something like that. I didn't expect an epiphany, but figured it was unlikely to hurt me.

One of them was "sitting more than 8-10 hours a day." I have been following all the hoopla about sitting being the new smoking etc but had never seen a number like that. Shit, I got out of bed 90 minutes ago and have been sitting at least 75 of those, though perhaps I may exclude the brief period in quasi-lotus position while I meditated. I sit a lot, enough that my butt gets tired. Should I perhaps be looking into a standing desk? It's not like I can stop reading and doing the things I need to do while sitting.

It also mentioned being late as a bad habit. "How many times will you have to say 'I'm sorry' to a friend?" Also not always my strongest suit. I am fortunate that Z continues to play tennis with me, the number of times I've been 3-5 minutes late.

Anyhoo, I think Graham's up. Time to stand up and go empty the dishwasher while he eats breakfast.

The morning after

Last night was brutal. I only watched a little bit of the Biden-Trump debate. Biden fumbled things, stopped in the middle of his sentence, said something like we ended Medicaid or Medicare. It was bad.

Trump pounced on it and rightly so. He was spewing his own nonsense about how Biden was destroying the country, had done so much damage to the country.

I continue to think that Biden and other Democrats just fundamentally missed the electorate's message of the 2020 election which was: get rid of Trump but overall we aren't that enthused about the Democratic agenda more broadly and certainly not the more progressive components of it. If not for Trump's denial of the loss and then January 6, there's no way we would have picked up two Senate seats in Georgia.

And now despite the fact that Biden has done fine -- not without mistakes -- but a decent job. He has gotten some legislation through. He has stabilized things internationally after Trump shook up relationships with allies. Unemployment is low. Purchasing power has remained stable across income deciles -- though inflation has admittedly acted as an extremely regressive tax on consumption when an actual tax to sop up the excess liquidity printed during the pandemic could have bean progressive across deciles. The Republicans are politically savvy to bang on Biden about this but fundamentally they are at fault for making it what it is.

Anyhow, Biden's tone-deafness around traditional Republican concerns like regulation (where they have a point, to a limited extent) and taxes (where they are largely wrong) has created a situation where traditional Republicans are willing to do a deal with the devil and vote for Trump despite his election loss denials and other excesses. And Biden is making it easy for them to do so by refusing to acknowledge the fact that he is too old to stay in the race. Time for him to bow out.

Locus of control

My friend Nora told me a story about meeting with Gavin Newsom and he was talking to her about making decisions about allocating funds to this or that priority. He looks at her and says something like: "This is pretty much what my job is." In recent years I have often thought that the really big questions were about how a given good, be it public or private, is funded. Government or private sector, equity/bonds/bank lending/taxes/insurance...?

But more recently I've been thinking and reading a lot more about what I will characterize as "locus of control" questions. Rather than "how is it funded?", the big question is "where are decisions made?" It is likely real political scientists/economists have an actual term of art for this which I would know if I had studied either discipline properly. Oh well.

For example, zoning has historically been a function that has been administered at the local level, at least in the USA. Many have pointed out for sometime that NIMBYism is a huge cause of the housing affordability crisis. The Atlantic has been banging the drum for some time arguing that local control of zoning is a structural cause of this problem and that therefore states should take away control of zoning from municipalities. Just in the last week it came out with a constitutional argument to this effect, which I have not yet read. The Economist has recently argued that India has too few states (27?) to efficiently administer policy for 1.4 billion people. Uttar Pradesh -- the biggest state of India's poorer north -- alone has a population of ~241 million. 

The obverse of this is the question of how big headcount should be to most effectively carry out a function. Gore Tex famously organizes its business units around the Dunbar number of 150, the maximum number of people that your average human can maintain meaningful connection with at any given time (actually it turns out much of Dunbar's research sprung from the experience of Gore Tex, but that's another story). Anyway, we all know that a department that gets too big becomes unwieldy, accrues problems and often needs to be subdivided. 

I could go on about this all day. I'm sure there's reams of thinking on this I'm just not in touch with.

The Cool Side of the Pillow

I keep thinking back to it, so I should go ahead and capture it, however faintly, for the future. At the service for Ernest Leake -- father of Mike and Pam -- in Pittsboro a week or so back, one of Mike's cousins, I think it was, fully rocked the memorial sermon. He is a preacher by profession, so one would hope he would do so, but they often don't.

Ernest, AKA Uncle Buck and a couple of other nicknames, was like the cool side of the pillow, i.e. when you turn the pillow over at night to put your head on the cool side, a "universally recognized moment of calm and refreshment," something like that. I knew exactly what he was talking about but had never heard this called out as a metaphor. Somewhere in there Mike's cousin either exhorted us, or told us that Uncle Buck did, live life as if in "atmosphere of prayer." Honestly I don't remember how he took us there but it was a great phrase which continues to echo in my brain.

Then the preacher switched gears. He took us back to being in the kitchen at family gatherings which grandma grabbed a hot tray of biscuits out of the over with a wet dishtowel and then went around the table making sure everybody got a hot biscuit. And then, remarkably, he looked out across the assembled family and pulled out a quick anecdote or attribute for each of them: "Aunt Jenny and her perfect Sunday hats, Cousin John telling stories about high school football glory days..." honestly I don't remember any specific thing he said about anyone except he touched as many people as he could, really quickly, and brought them all in. All in all he did a remarkable job doing what the best public speakers of all sorts need to do, traversing the distance between the general ("cool side of the pillow," "atmosphere of prayer" -- which Uncle Buck was and to which we should all aspire) and the specific (the call outs to family members). He blew the textbook out of the water.

I have been at memorial services in recent years in very formal congregations where the officiant clearly had not met the deceased and had barely thought about what he was saying, "in his decades at UNC Memorial he touched the lives of hundreds if not thousands of patients" (do the math moron, in decades it was clearly thousands). After a friend's disappointingly generic service at Chapel of the Cross a congregant there explained to me that the uniformity of services was meant to convey our equality before God. I've since gone to much better services there, so clearly the clergy were just slacking off in this case. The family had been shellshocked by the death.

Uncle Buck got much better, as did we.

On Reading Kareem

So much of my life revolves around deciding what not to read. There are books, magazines, newspapers... Then all the stuff that comes through my inbox. Most of which I pass over on most days.

I do read Jeff Jackson's emails. And one other thing I do typically end up reading is Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's substack, at least the free version of it. On political and cultural issues Kareem is more or less a mainstream Black liberal, albeit a very thoughtful one, but he also often has his finger on the pulse of things that might not otherwise cross my field of vision. His reflections about other sports heroes and big moments are themselves worth the price of admission. For example when Lebron topped his NBA career scoring record or, just this week, when Willie Mays passed away and Kareem shares about his fanboy glee at meeting Willie.

Mostly Kareem is just a pretty deep thinker and not afraid to put it out there and very much at peace with who he is. The recent passing of Bill Walton does make me think about how both he and Kareem became moral figures thinking about and addressing issues a good deal bigger than basketball, in a way that I really can't think of UNC alums doing -- with the local exception of the recently passed Eric Montross, who did truly seem to work hard to use the stature attained on court to do good work. In this regard I have to think that John Wooden's legacy looms larger than Dean Smith's, sadly.

Good cancer news, but also some major freaking annoyances

I realize that I have been remiss in passing along news around Mary's cancer. Nothing concerning was found in her lymph node and we met with her oncologist the day before yesterday. A surgical oncology nurse practitioner had led us to expect that Mary would definitely get Herceptin (an immunotherapy) perhaps together with chemo. When we actually got to the medical oncologist, he informed us that for a tumor as small as Mary's was there was no data supporting the effectiveness of Herceptin if not paired with chemo. So instead she will, as Ted Knight says so famously in Caddyshack, "Get nothing and like it!"

As we proceed along on this cancer journey, we are gaining ever deeper appreciation for the value of specific specializations. Why in God's name should we be listening to the medical oncological treatment speculations of a nurse practitioner (strike 1) in surgical oncology (strike 2). She was way outside her zone of expertise in saying anything.

Then again, I must disclose that we are sitting here in the hospital waiting for Mary to get scheduled in for a procedure to deal with the pesky cellulitis that has been afflicting her for a month now. 13 hours ago Graham and I were sitting down for our hastily cobbled together dinner when Mary calls me and tells me that they won't let her eat because they might get her in the OR overnight. That didn't happen. She was scheduled for 7:30 this morning and when I was driving in to the hospital this morning Mary texts and tells me that's the current plan. Then I get here and the senior plastic surgeon resident comes in and tells us that the surgery actually isn't happening because the surgeon's plane was delayed. By now Mary is totally freaking starving.

The real question is: why do we produce so few good doctors? There is a lot of demand for the product. There's clearly a lot of supply of smart and hard-working kids because medical school admissions are so competitive. A discussion a month or two again suggested that a large part of the problem is a lack of Federal funding for residencies, which was ballparked at about $15 billion, which is not even real money. We should just educate more freaking doctors.

The Story of Lucy Gault and literary ramblings

I continue to make my way through the novels of William Trevor, this time his 2002 The Story of Lucy Gault. As to be expected, it wasn't a page-turner. Trevor crafts and portrays beautifully but ultimately he's not plot-driven. Most of what goes on is interior to the characters. I tend to liken him to Vermeer in that it's all about the play of light on surfaces, but in Trevor's case it's the surfaces of souls. I will no doubt continue reading him but won't start another novel next week.

In other literary news, I was at a fundraiser yesterday evening where a lot of excellent food from Kokyu was served: fish tacos, coconut-fried shrimp, pork-belly and brisket sliders (not on one little bun, that's two separate sliders). Money was being raised for Jeff Jackson, with Roy Cooper present to pump up the crowd. It was hot and I ate a lot, so towards the end of the function I felt like sitting down and I sat with an older fellow (yes, older than me) who's a poet after retiring from something else and another guy who looked vaguely familiar. I was talking to the poet about his routines and I asked if he wanted maybe to be the next Wallace Stevens, in the sense of being a poet whose career really takes off late in life. The two guys then went off trying to one up one another in telling the best Wallace Stevens stories: Wallace picks a fight with Ernest Hemingway and gets pummeled. Wallace drily insults Robert Frost. And so on.

The poet guy did choose to make a snide remark about Stevens's role in insurance companies and not knowing what management did and how he and his team of merry programmers would try to ignore management as best they could. I was tempted to point out to him that it was only when people started to question the value of my work that I realized that I was getting somewhere in life because it is the nature of things that more complex managerial and leadership work is harder to grasp and harder to do and that's why people grip their lunch pails with ever whiter knuckles and thereby limit their scope and potential. Instead I said nothing.

Not for the money

The Journal ran an article today about the grueling economics of the influencer economy of TikTok/YouTube etc. It sounds utterly brutal. I have long admired the incredible discipline of musicians like Joshua Lee Turner and Mary Spender who seem to have carved out a way to make a living on YouTube, though I have watched some of their videos about the amount of focus and upskilling (making videos, marketing and promotion on top of playing and mixing music video flawlessly) and continual hard work it has taken to build their attention bases and businesses. It is hard to compete for and command attention against pretty much everyone on the planet. There are a very few 

So if they're not getting paid most people out there(here?) in social media land are just competing for views and likes, which reminds us that we all really just need attention. Like the kids on the subway continually calling out "Mira mama, mira!" I know I truly appreciate the 20-25 hits I eventually get on most blog posts. But it can't be about that.

Somewhat orthogonally, I had been reflecting on the relative paucity of Graham's lunch options working from the Carolina Population Center (in the new building by Granville Towers, behind the old University Square). Particularly as I saw that Capriotti's, a relatively new and perfectly decent sandwich/sub place, a regional chain, had closed on Franklin St. It seems like it should be easier to make money offline than it is. Yes I know the rents they are asking for on that block of Franklin St are high and labor availability and pricing (well, pricing at least, because there is ample labor available on Franklin St, so much of it is just panhandling) are huge issues. But given that space is the one of the few things that is in as short of supply as people's attention, eventually commercial space has to find the correct pricing. People do want to see each other, and the real world should eventually triumph over the notional one.

Thank God it's Monday?

It has been a stressful couple of weeks. Last weekend when I was in New York for Corinna's memorial Mary went back into the hospital because some cellulitis at one of her incision sites had gotten a little worse after she had gone off of antibiotics. Honestly I'm not too sure how much of this story I've told but didn't want to write about it here because somehow Mary hadn't spoken to Natalie about it and it was important that Natalie not read about it here on my blog, which she visits now and again. Maybe I'll get back to a more detailed accounting later but maybe not.  One of the secrets of advancing age is that beyond a point other people's medical detail is a little boring though nothing is more present and pertinent to you. Though when you are speaking to friends everyone understands how important it is and listens and offers support because they get it. They just don't need but so much. Certainly not on a blog.

So I will spare you all of that detail but we woke up today and Mary looks better than she had Friday or Saturday evening (and she's always felt fine) so we are taking our wins.

Meanwhile, our cat Rascal had a rough night with a fair amount of meowing and other stuff too. I will definitely spare you all of those details because it's not pleasant but she is also getting on up there in years and having health challenges. Hence all of our furniture is covered in blankets and towels and whatnot. And rightly so.

So in many ways I am pleased for it to be Monday and yes, I am going to the office. I am also not sad that it is the week of Juneteenth, a holiday. We will find a way to commemorate, certainly by not working.

Sightings

Yesterday evening when I went to pick up our Vietnamese food at Pho Happiness on Franklin St there was a convoy of people out flying Palestinian flags, driving along in big SUVx with their hazards flashing.

Today when I was heading out to my Al Anon meeting first thing in the morning there was an older guy who had on so much zinc sun block that he really looked like a ghost. He was getting on a recumbent bike with a pennant mounted on its rear for visibility and he also had a wide brim floppy hat that appeared attached to his helmet. I had to admire the guy's thoroughness. 

Just now when I went out to the mailbox I saw the tiniest deer I have ever seen standing next to what must have been it's mom. It wasn't even as tall as my knee. By the time I got Mary out there to check it out, they had both vanished, making me look like a bit of a fibber.

Purpose

It has been a whirlwind since my last post. First, I went to New York for a client memorial service held Saturday afternoon in the Quaker meeting house near Borough Hall in Brooklyn. I guess that's downtown.

It was not that hot outside, but then again the space wasn't air conditioned either. Unfortunately I had not really calculated how boho my client's people were, so when I showed up in a light summer jacket (I really should buy a new one), a nice shirt and trousers, I was amongst the most formally dressed. Luckily no tie. I guess it was all "professionally appropriate."

Outside of the family, I didn't really know anybody there. And the family were all busy mourning the loss of their beloved matriarch (strange though it may seem to refer to my client, who died a very young at heart almost 60-year old). And the family was busy being consoled by all their people in the community. So I was on my own socially. 

But as I looked out over the assembled and thought about my role in things I was aware of how almost sacred it is to do my job right and be as professional as possible. It's not about the money. I'm not getting rich off of the people in that room, except to the extent that I am continuing to learn to do my job better and keep at it. She was my first reasonably sized client and now my first client to pass on. Not to mention my first girlfriend after getting sober.

Later, at the house, I took a selfie with her son (who is headed to Bard) and sent it to my friends on the faculty there, telling them to be on the lookout for him this fall. They said he should email.

Onwards.

Please Look After Mom

Somehow a novel by the Korean novelist Kyung-Sook Shin had made it onto my list (thanks Mr. Bezos for giving us the useful functionality!), but when I was in the wonderful Circle City Books in Pittsboro whenever I was last there they didn't have a copy of the one I was looking for. There was, however, a copy of Please Look After Mom, Shin's 2012 novel which was a finalist for the Man Asian Literary prize. So I bought it and have been making my way through it over the last couple of weeks.

It's a solid novel. It didn't blow my doors off, but I'm glad I read it. Written from the perspectives of a woman's children, her husband, and her (spoiler alert!) wandering spirit, the novel tells the story of a small-town peasant woman who is separated from her husband and goes missing in Seoul on the way to visit her kids, or maybe to a medical appointment. The novel traces the family's passage in one generation from a hardscrabble rural existence to urbanity. One daughter is a writer, suggesting some autobiographical echoes.

This was the first Korean novel I've ever read and it reminds me to read more, as well as more Japanese ones and ones from elsewhere in the world. I did a good job of pushing myself to do so when I was working on my dissertation many moons ago but have faltered a little over my decades of earning money. Although novels (and the classic narrative movies that have sprung from them) are definitely a Western construct, they do offer us a unique window into how the rest of the world lives and let us reflect on human commonalities, even as the form admittedly elides differences through the imposition of a Western model of consciousness. Such is life. They are better than nothing. 

The Innovator's Dilemma

I picked up a copy of The Innovator's Dilemma, by Clayton Christensen ex-of HBS, on the cheap somewhere some years ago. Published in 1997, people in the tech world still talk about it and apply his thinking, so I figured there must be something there. When my office was out in RTP I had it by my desk for a long time and it was one of those books I really meant to read. But I never actually read books like these. They are just too boring. What I will do is listen to them in the car. We had a ton of credits on Libro.FM (long story, which I will spare you) so I snapped and up and listened to it there. 

Alas, the guy who was reading it had one of those ridiculous generic would be avuncular white guy voices, which didn't spice it up much. Nonetheless, I learned a fair amount. Christensen's main question is why well-managed profitable organizations continually get their legs cut off by disruptive innovation. Looking at examples from the disc drive, mechanical excavator, automotive, motorcycle and other industries, he cooks up a framework which shows that big organizations are under-incented to take risks to go after small, low-margin, emerging markets, and that their employees are therefore similarly disincented to take risks on them. That's the short of it, roughly.

It was not the best book I've ever listened to but it didn't kill me.

On the upswing

Mary went in for her lymph node biopsy yesterday. It all went well and smoothly, we were out of there by around noon and I even talked her into getting sandwiches at Merritt's on the way home, arguing that because she had had some low blood pressure events following the prior procedure and needed to keep her electrolytes up that bacon was clearly right in the strike zone. Success!

Overall the doctors made good noises about everything that was going on so we're not fighting it. Today for the first time in a little while I slept straight through to 7 am without even taking at short detour at 6. Really there's not much more to say or that needs to be said.

I will add that at 4 pm I was supposed to go to a Zoom board meeting but, having been the only board member on a finance call the week before and having told them I might miss, I just flat out played hookie and caught up on work before going to the grocery store. A good call.

Rough Day

With Mary's lymph node extraction/biopsy coming up tomorrow, I'm having a hard time staying focused and productive today. I keep waking up early, around 6, even when our cat Rascal isn't meowing at the door.* The fact that her cellulitis has not fully resolved yet vexes me particularly, though we think it's getting a little better.

After lunch with Nathan today I still was in a funk so I decided to heed received wisdom and walk around the block, which seemed a particularly good idea because the weather remains pretty durned mild for NC in June. That was a good idea. About a quarter way out on my walk I passed an old truck in dire need of a paint job that had a rusty axe hanging in the spot where rifles usually hang in pickup trucks. It probably didn't enhance his rearward visibility, but I have to give the guy credit for some pretty bad-assed styling, particularly here in the most liberal place in NC. He had carved out his little stylistic niche. Hopefully he has a muffler on that thing.

Back here at my desk with a fresh cup of coffee, I'm feeling a little better. Probably I should do some more work.

*Adjusting the cats' feeding time to 5:45 on their new automated feeders seems to have worked wonders.

Rage against various machines

On my way to my meeting yesterday around 8:15 I looked over that the Cook Out parking lot and saw that the cones it leaves out in its parking lot to manage its tremendous drive through volume were scattered all around. Looking more closely at them, I could see that they were also torn up. Clearly some genius in a vehicle had seen fit to express his entirely justified rage with engine and tires. There was no other explanation. It must have been alcohol related because it makes no sense for people to be mad at Cook Out, since it's the only place on this side Chapel Hill offering drive thru fare.* The late night crowd needs that place.

Out for a walk the other night I was passed by an incredibly loud Jeep Wrangler driven by a guy in a beard with a fuzzy pink steering wheel cover. All except the decibels are cool. He was headed for the lake, where he stayed still maybe 10:30 before pulling out while revving his engine. A night or two later he was there again and offered us the same symphony of testosterone right around bedtime. I'll be watching for that jeep in the evening and if I see it there after dark, the CHPD will be getting a call immediately.

It's one thing to break the law, another to flaunt it and taunt it because you think you are bigger than it.

*It seems unlikely that Cook Out's policy for nickle and diming you for each condiment, 25 cents for cheese, 35 for slaw, etc., annoying as it may be, would have elicited this degree of rage.