Bracing for Re-entry

My COVID cocoon is ending soon.  Soon I will be rising earlier than usual (some of the time) and bathing with more regularity and heading to the subway station for the first time in nearly 20 months (I hope my card still works) to commute to my office.  It's not like I want to, and not that I need to, but rather that I am obliged to.  Capitalism impels me.  The prospect of this momentous transition has not only made me sick to my stomach, it's somehow put me in a pensive frame of mind.  I'm not seeking them but I keep coming across opportunities to cogitate.

For instance, I  recently had a philosophical discussion during a phone visit with an older relative, a nonagenarian, about what the new normal will mean for her.  She's a social person by nature still living independently (with assistance from neighbors and nearby family) but she has forgone in-person visitation willingly since the start of the epidemic in the interest of safety.  She's fully vaccinated and even boostered as are her friends, one of whom is encouraging her to consider an in-person indoor visit while both are still healthy enough for it.  Her instinct was to demur.  I share a bit of her skepticism about the objectivity with respect to risk factors exhibited by those who are desperate to forge ahead with the return to normality.  But as I listened to her, I wondered if she had considered the impact of a future without human contact, even at her stage of life.  

After having myself lived through several months with the risk of covid reduced thanks to widespread adherence to proper public preventions and precautions, it seemed to me that with a long winter coming, there might come a day when she would crave the company of one of her many friends, and that given the brevity of life, and the reduced risk of infection with full vaccination, especially in conjunction with the wearing of masks indoors, she might find herself wondering why an indoor socially distanced visit with the right masked person on a cold winter day wouldn't be worth the risk, and I wanted her to know that if she decided it was, I wouldn't protest.  She thought for a minute. She hadn't considered it.  The most insistent friend she thought was maybe too reckless to be trusted even fully vaccinated, but she imagined she could entertain the possibility of relaxing her standards enough to give it a try if she thought the situation was worth it someday.  

I'm not sure why I took that tack with her.  I don't think I'd have any trouble swearing off the company of other humans* if circumstances warranted it (or gave me plausible deniability for it).  But I have an aversion to commitment, and an aversion to standing on principle, so the thought of someone committing to a behavioral stance, such as abstention from having guests, on the basis of a principle, such as a notion that nothing is worth the risk of contracting COVID, is probably bound to be viewed by me with a jaded eye.  Is it really true that nothing is worth the risk of COVID?  Probably not.

I've had other excuses to wax philosophical occasioned by this new phase of the COVID era.  Recently, a call-in podcast I listen to had a series of callers who wanted to debate the host on the premise that it is  immoral to have children, not just because of COVID  but also in response to the unprecedented uncertainties of the future due to global warming and to the hostility, particularly toward the young, of stubbornly persistent neoliberalism especially as it is coupled with frantic end-times capitalism.  The solution to the problems we are facing they say is for humanity to actively give up and for the righteous among us to work toward a future that is voluntarily emptier of humans.  Many of these callers would like to see some sort of tax disincentive if not outright legislation to prevent at least the most poorly reasoned births, something that many of these folks feel is something of an epidemic given the world that children are born into.  How could planning to bring a child into this world ever be a good thing, they wonder.   No one is talking out loud about culling babies, but why go public with this proclivity if you're not willing to get serious about it?  

To me it seems a paradox: if you're clever enough to realize that when having a child is a choice it could well be an increasingly immoral one, we need more of you, not fewer.  What we don't need is a world more full of people who think the purpose of life is to populate the earth with their kind-- though with clever people abstaining from procreation, that is exactly the kind of world you get; and in light of that it may not be a coincidence that it's a hellish place in which to bring forth a child.  But my view is that the choice to have children should be just that-- in a sense it can be nothing other than that-- a choice, made possible with fullest advantage of tools for realizing the desire.  In my view it's better to focus on the tools for responsible choice -- birth control for those who choose not to reproduce; health care and child care, an amplitude of resources and a healthy, well-tended environment for those who choose (or merely happen) to have children.  

Unfortunately, the climate in this country, political as well as geological, is just not hospitable in these times to either choice.

~~~~~~

* Don't act like you'd care if I did!

Love Poems to Things

Suburban House -  Sidewalk, lamppost, driveway, stoop. What appeals to me, walking by the curb?  It is you, suburban house.  Set amid your landscape monopoly, behind portico and bay window obscured by drapes, the mystery of how you fill your square footage beckons.  Locus of homemaking, shared address, proletarian palace, how could freedom be any freer than it is behind your façade?  Where goes your stone path?  What patio skirts you; what shed or outbuilding attends you; what yard art adorns your shrubbery?  Twilight falls.  Exterior yearnings yield to interior hermitage. What nourishing smells assault the senses from the cauldrons heated by your appliances, what fragrant artifacts line your cupboards, closets and cabinets? What mundane transpirings does your inner golden glow illuminate?  A robot could design you; only a primate troop could animate you.   

Roadside Pine Grove on a Curve - It's such a long way to the sea, that I wonder why I ever go.  When I get there I know, but the way back is so long and the road so dark that I wonder why I ever leave.  And then, when I have counted down the miles and the byway at last rounds down to the highway that will lead after a while to home, don't think that I don't see you in my excessive haste, roadside grove on the outside curve.  Your elegant array just beyond the shoulder, your members at road's edge like sentinels daunting entry to your forest, your unpeopled collectiveness receding into the enchanted blackness of night-- anomalous orderly wilderness.  I only see you in a blur when I am readiest to be home, but for that moment you remind me why I ache to wander.   

Saturday Afternoon - To the left of you is the week before. To the right of you is the week to come. Only you, deep mid Saturday afternoon endure in unactualized completeness.  While I accede to the chore I chose to spend you on, dreaming of the undetermined treat to come that I have in mind to give myself for not just lolling in you in my dreamy sloth, you seem to fleet forever.

Decay - Spring returns and green encroaches everywhere without relent.  Life burgeons like an alien invasion from every corner except yours, decaying structure.  Life abounds, expands, fills and conquers yet you wither, lifeless, neglected, defeated architecture.  Caving in on yourself in slow motion, you are the sister of the moth who came to its end trapped in a web beside your door, who once shook and strove, saying, "This too is life!" until in tatters it shakes no more except in bursts of wind.  Life insists, but you dead brown house, resist.  Your  deliberate return to nothingness--visible, beautiful, passively defiant-- is a relief.

Pegboard - Someone needed a room in the garage that they couldn't afford, so they nailed you, Pegboard, to some pine beams, and called you a wall.  Then they hinged a section of you, bolted a $2.50 cabinet handle to you and called you a door.  Hiding and seeking one day in youth, you called out to me and I popped you out of your latch, slipped through you into the dappled windowless darkness that you enclosed and pulled you quietly shut.  Then I sat amid the storage, waiting in the pinholes of light to be sought.

Everything is Obvious: A review

William of Ockham

I saw an article not long ago on the Americans with Disabilities act that said that the older you get, the more disabled you become.  I hadn’t known that, until I started aging and becoming increasingly disabled.  Then it was obvious.  

Which reminds me of the book my niece got me for Christmas a few years ago - Everything is Obvious*: *Once you know the answer, by sociologist Duncan Watts, on the pitfalls of common sense, which I had been enjoying and absorbing until it disappeared one day, which happened to be the same day that my wife had hired a maid service to come clean our house before the visit of a friend from out of town.  Having a few moments for reading that evening, I searched the house for it with no luck. How disappointing! It's not a big house.  It had been on the surface of things just that morning.  Where could it be?  I racked my brain; retraced my steps until a notion bubbled up from the depths.

My theory was that the book had been resting on the lip of the waste basket in the bathroom. Some new bric a brac in the bath-chamber had made the customary place for books in progress, the toilet tank lid, off limits and for want of a better idea, the waste basket rim had become the de facto (and piss poor I might add) substitute for it.  Anyway, I was thinking I or a maid had maybe inadvertently tipped the book into the trash can, and the maid, perhaps not being a book person, had not the tools to recognize a book in a trash can as anything other than trash, so had dumped it along with the other trash in a receptacle where, evading discovery, it was left on the curb the next day and removed for good by employees of the public works department in their usual efficient manner.  While I was disappointed at the turn of events I was very pleased with my powers of deduction for having figured that out.  

My daughter protested that it was classist and maybe even racist to think a maid wouldn’t know what to do with a book.  I countered that it wasn’t racist; it was a fact of life that some people, people of all walks of life, are not book people and for them a book is not an object to be totemized and venerated but an object that in a trash can is indistinguishable from other objects whose original identities and purposes have been superseded by that of “rubbish”.  I cast no blame; on the contrary, I was pleased that with my powers of reasoning and a mind open to the world views of a stranger who happened to be engaged in a cleaning activity in my house, I had been able without prejudice to understand where the book had gotten to.  

Oh sure, the coffee cup that I suspected a maid must have broken without telling us that same day showed up a day later on the bookcase in the bedroom where I’d left it, as did the bag of dog food that I was afraid might have tempted one of the maids (whether for her dog or her family or herself I did not care to judge or to speculate) when I couldn't find it right away.  So of the 3 missing items, 2 turned up within a day, but not the third, and somehow my confidence in my powers of deduction remained bolstered by the stories I’d concocted for the 2 missing items, even when they were proven wrong.  I mean the stories were good.  But as I say the book remained gone and I kept feeling that pang of knowing a tragedy that maybe could have been prevented had occurred in spite of a premonition I seemed to remember having that day.  

You probably can see where this is going-- last week, my wife was digging around behind the computer for something and found, right where I’d left it a month before, the book.  Of course it was behind the computer!  That’s where I put it to avoid any mishaps with the maids.  The end.

Cattle Call

Kicking off the lonesome Hallowe'en season, here from 1956 is Eddy Arnold with Tex Owens' Cattle Call, an adaptation of Pawel Walc (St Paul's Waltz) first recorded by Bruno Radzinski in Poland in 1928.  Owens wrote the song one snowy winter night in Kansas City and recorded it in 1936, but Eddy Arnold made it his own.

 

 

Forty years later, Arnold teamed up with another formidable yodeler, Leann Rimes, for some harmony:

And speaking of yodeling:

Numbers

According to Rolling Stone Magazine, The Eagles' Hotel California is the 311th best song of all time.  That makes it almost but not quite as good as Bill Withers' Ain't No Sunshine (#309) but 2 better than Smokey Robinson and the Miracles' Tears of a Clown (#313).  

Rolling Stone has updated their list of the 500 best songs.  You might think the definitive music magazine would have a pretty good handle on the best music ever.  But the last time Rolling Stone compiled the list in 2004, Hotel California was Number 49.  Had 5 million more plays on Classic Rock radio made the editorial staff come to their senses this time around?   As testament to advances in taste since the first list was compiled, Tears of a Clown didn't even make the 2004 cut.  Can we at least agree that Bill Withers' 1971 classic is objectively better than Bob Dylan's Visions of Johanna, which rose from 404th place in 2004 to only 317th in 2021?  Let's not be hasty.  Ain't No Sunshine had fallen 29 spaces in the intervening years, from 280th place in the earlier ranking.

The top 10 alone reveals the loose nature of what is great according to the magazine.  Hey Jude was 8th on the list in 2004.  In 2021, at number 89, it's not even in the top 3 Beatles' songs.  Two songs in the 2021 top 10 (Missy Elliott's Get Ur Freak On from 2001 and Fleetwood Mac's Dreams from 1977) existed in 2004 but appeared nowhere on the earlier list.  In all, 49 slots in the new list were assumed by songs that were released after the original list was published; 207 songs from the original list were replaced by songs that already existed but were passed over the first time around.  Both lists reinforce the prejudice of the elderly that the quite distant past is top heavy with greatness.  While the newer list is slightly more relaxed about more recent songs, two decades later, the epicenter of greatness has shifted forward from 1971 only to 1977.  Songs appear twice on both lists (e.g., both Bob Dylan and the Byrds' versions of Mr Tambourine Man appear on both the 2004 and the 2021 list) so it’s clear that the category the magazine is ranking is not actually composition but production. 

Given the flux of the rankings, it's worth a ponder: are there 500 songs that belong on any list?   Five hundred of anything is a lot; and a look at some of the titles that made one or the other of the lists (Tiny Dancer, Tears in Heaven, Kelly Clarkson's Since U Been Gone, a song called Springsteen by someone named Eric Church) strongly supports a notion that standards may have been overextended to pad things out.   But looking for songs that didn't make the cut in either year (Nat King Cole's Route 66, Parliament's Knee Deep, Laurie Anderson's O Superman, Beethoven's Ode to Joy, the B-52's Give Me Back My Man) you quickly come to the realization that if you are going to take the idea seriously, there aren't enough places on a 500 place list for the greatest songs of all time.   

Granting that the nature of the task is arbitrary, Rolling Stone has taken a canonical approach, updating their criteria to reflect tastes and advancements (and regressions) in the culture, taking care to pander to a variety of sensibilities while ensuring an appropriate diversity in representation of the artists and genres selected.  The cumulative effect is one that could be expected from so prominent an institution: the cultivation of a conventional taste.  

Number 1 this year is Aretha Franklin's Respect-- rising with a bullet from Number 4 in 2004.   I've liked Respect and Aretha Franklin since I first heard the latter belting the former the very year that Rolling Stone was born.  But I find myself bristling at the notion that the Number 1 Best Song of All Time is an actual thing.  What makes a song the best?  Surely it can't just be the one most people like or the one that has made the most money.  Should it be the most technically and musically complex?  Or should it be devastatingly simple?  Should the lyrics be challenging, persuasive, poetic, novel or  should they be immediate, already in your head?  In my experience 'best' is an attribute that has no relevance to the impact a piece of music has in in my life.  As a dabbler in song-making myself on occasion, the best of mine have a strong accidental element to their construction.  If in some parallel universe one of my personal favorites were selected for the Rolling Stone list I don't know whether I'd  recognize it as a personal artistic achievement or as something more akin to winning a lottery.

This summer, I confess I was wrapped up for a bit in the controversy over Sarah Brand's Red Dress.  While most of the discussion around it centered around whether Brand, a Californian working on a Masters of Science in Sociology at Oxford was offering the unconventional tune sincerely or as bait in a cruel and twisted experiment, I was easily won over by the confident originality of it.  I enjoyed the challenge of the listen and found Brand's microtonal performance hitting my ears like honey.  More than once it has infected my brain and inspired me to cogitate on its theme of society's resistance to irrepressible outsiderhood.  It defies ranking, certainly by the likes of Rolling Stone.  Is it a great song?  In my book, maybe.  

Pandering to conventional taste, performatively diversifying while remaining true to the soft rock core on which the institution was built, Rolling Stone presents the list for discussion, in the process padding their content and most importantly generating clicks and selling magazines.  While the list abounds in examples of excellence and includes many of my favorites,  I would say exclusion from it gains a deserving song extra cachet.  

Creeping Solipsism

I realized today re-reading a couple of emails that I seem to have developed severe OCD of the mouth when it comes to business communications.  My sentences seem to end with the assumption that the reader has already forgotten how they started, so I keep repeating words—I shun pronouns and substitutions.   This is a bit extreme but it’s something like this:  Instead of saying “Skippy asked me to bring the book I borrowed from him when I come to visit.”  I say something like  “Skippy asked me to bring the book that I borrowed from Skippy in the past which is currently at my house, so that  when I next come to visit the house that Skippy asked me to visit I also bring Skippy’s book to it, it being the house that belongs to Skippy also that he asked me to visit and I said yes to, i.e., to the visiting question, and I also said yes to the bringing of Skippy’s book when I come to visit question as well.  Thank you.”   

This is yet another example of my dwindling faith in and growing questioning of the givens of social interaction (along with my increasing uncertainty about a growing list of many other previously assumed pillars of reality: the weather, politics, entertainment,  science).  The manifestation of the corrosion of my faith in sacreds and standards is not necessarily always going to be conscious, but on the contrary is more likely these days to be an unconscious organic outgrowth of a crumbled foundation.  To take spelling for instance: once upon a time I was a paragon of the art.  Now I find my writing is prone with errors.  I make mistakes of speed and carelessness like everybody, but more and more it's an excess of care and attention that's the culprit.  It's not that I don't know how to spell a word, but that I find myself second-guessing, and third and fourth and even fifth guessing, and all too frequently as I discover only in retrospect coming down on the wrong side again and again.

It's not as if I'm wrong about the arbitrary nature of orthography and grammar.  In the absence of an authority in whom to place your trust, how do you decide what's right?  I blame authority for my crumbling trust in authority.

By the way, in case I didn't make clear, in my example above, the "he" in the second sentence refers to Skippy.  Not to Truman Capote.

Word of the Day

I've developed a habit of watching a daily youtube vlog in which the proprietor solves the day's New York Times crossword puzzle.  Puzzles debut, courtesy of the app that provides them on my phone, the eve of the day they are dated, so I have done them by the time I watch the vlog.  For me it's painless therapy in a way to watch someone else struggle with a theme or with the idiosyncrasies of a puzzle constructor's clues when my struggle is behind me.  Sometimes it's akin to group therapy for post traumatic stress disorder. The host of the vlog is a slightly faster solver than I am, especially considering he is talking his way through each clue and publicly exposing his strengths and weaknesses to a variously indifferent group of strangers.  He's a much younger fellow, an expatriate who lives in London and I've observed that he has expertise in areas that I lack and vice versa.  Popular culture references that I require every cross for fly off his fingers.  On the other hand, he was flummoxed recently by how a "Latin American spread" could be a "HACIENDA."   He had heard of a hacienda, but "spread" to his way of thinking had nothing at all to do with it; and I admit when he passed up "_ACIENDA" for the 5th time refusing to throw down an H  in the blank until he was sure it could be nothing else,  I was yelling at my screen.  It wasn't until the next day, when he shared a youtube comment someone had posted on the prior day's video explaining the sense that the constructor intended for "spread"-- a sprawling farm or estate-- that he half-heartedly accepted the legitimacy of the clue, although he insisted the usage was in his experience expiring.  This was news to me.

Cogitating a bit on the difference in our perceptions of this sense of "spread", I developed a theory about why the word might have struck a millennial as out-of-date.  Could it have anything to do with the way that student debt has meant that many of his generation are not purchasing homes until much later if at all?  For my generation, by the time we were his age (I assume he's in his early to mid 30's), many more of us were homeowners*.  Many of us had probably ironically referred to our dwellings as "spreads" taking a post modern cue from our parents for whom the concept was familiar from the formerly more ubiquitous genre of the Western, and from whom we'd already overheard the joke when we were youngsters.  Had his generation not been paying attention at their parents' boring get togethers with other parents or, had they, simply by having no opportunity to wield it, let the usage atrophy?

Hours later, I myself encountered a word I'd never heard in a passage from Naomi Klein's 2007 paradigm changer, The Shock Doctrine:

Ajay Kapur, the former head of Citigroup Smith Barney’s global equity strategy group in New York, encourages his clients to invest in his "Plutonomy basket" of stocks, featuring companies like Bulgari, Porsche, Four Seasons and Sotheby’s. "If plutonomy continues, which we think it will, if income inequality is allowed to persist and widen, the plutonomy basket should continue to do very well."

Kapur and colleagues revived an obscure word coined in the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, 'plutonomy', for use in a number of bullish reports for upmarket investors circa 2005, highlighting the novelty of the weird effects of unfettered growth in wealth at the very top in contrast to the very bound and constricting prevailing conventions of economy so familiar to the rest of us down here in the trickle down gutter.  One massive financial meltdown later-- that as usual came out of the hides of everyone but the culprits whose amoral greed made it happen-- and the word fell out of favor.  Those papers have been disappeared from the web, but not before they could be recapped by John Sidor at Leadership Thoughts Blog.  The Shock Doctrine for those who may be unfamiliar tells the story of how this lopsided distribution of the planet's wealth wound up in one very small corner of the population-- it was essentially through years of violent application of a particularly religious ideology, the fundamentalist sect of neoliberalism whose pope was Milton Friedman.  Folks of my generation may remember the kindly old elf of capitalism from his Nobel Prize in Economics (the annual vanity prize that economists award to themselves to try to persist the notion that they are actually contributing something valuable to human knowledge) which seemed to entitle him to a best selling book and PBS series, Free to Choose,  in which he pimped the free market to an America as yet reverberating ever more faintly with the more equitable Keynesian effects of FDR's New Deal.  They may not recall how he cut his teeth advising Chile's General Augusto Pinochet on how to combine the brutality of a regime wrested in a violent coup (with the participation of the CIA at the formerly secret urging of Henry "Dr. Kissinger" Kissinger on behalf of Richard Nixon) from the popular and popularly elected socialist Salvador Allende in 1973 with a particularly brutal austerity that ravaged what had been a democratizing Chile for nearly 2 decades.  For Chileans who had wanted Allende and not a Generalissimo, it was hell; for Friedman it was an experiment, and to his mind, a successful one.

Closer to home, Friedman fucked with the rest of us thanks to the aggressive ascension of true believers and useful idiots of both parties, from Reagan, through Clinton, the Bushes and beyond.   With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the painful implementation of neoliberal capitalism  across the globe including in the last remaining communist superpower China, and the defeat of organized labor in the US,  free market capitalism was declared the victor, and history was declared to be over. After 50 solid years of living under this theocracy, I've decided that caring that people get what they need even if they are poor† is for chumps.  Also that I'm a chump. 

Wish I knew who to credit.  Wish I'd thought of it.

~~~~~

* Mentally put scare quotes around the "owner" portion of that word.

† As an undergraduate in a large university at the dawn of the Reagan era, I knew an older fellow, a regular presence in the circle that revolved around a roommate who was vastly more social than me.  Andrew was a bachelor and perpetual auditor of classes who made his living playing piano for the recitals and auditions of instrumentalists in the music school.  While most of us were destined for other places (even though some of us like myself didn't know what we were doing and would never figure it out) he had been there for years and you could be certain would be there years longer, surely drifting in and out of whatever circle of cool people he found himself invited into.  I'll never forget and have long wanted to work into a post a comment he uttered in frustration one day discussing his latest tribulations with some creditor or bureaucracy interrupting his pursuit of a well lived life to grub for money or to place a financial obstacle in front of a modest ambition.  "They won't let you be poor," he said.  He was right.  They won't let you be poor.  To be happily poor in this wretched age is the most beautiful and insane and doomed ambition.