Cloud Atlas

Saw Cloud Atlas this evening, second run and the Deco-Moderne Riverview Theater  where we see most of our movies, with Sam and Marissa.

The film is an adaptation of a novel of the same name by David Mitchell, directed by and with a script by Tom Tykwer and the Wachowskis. It takes place in several eras, with Hanks, and actors including Halle Barrry, Hugo Weaving, playing multiple roles during periods from slave-trading to post-futuristic tribal. I thought one of the villains was doing a Hugh Grant impression, then learned from the credits that it was Hugh Grant. Cloud Atlas is the name of a piece of music written by one of the characters, during the 78 RPM era.

The reviews we read weren't good, but Cloud Atlas was nice. It's been a long time since I've seen a puzzle movie, and this one spoke well of the human soul. Joe Versus the Volcano and That Thing You Do notwithstanding, it's a long way from Bosom Buddies.

Travis McGee Depressive Existential Hero

The legend is that John D. MacDonald began writing fiction as a WWII GI so he could send something meaningful to his wife by censored mail. She submitted his detective stories to magazines, and began his career. MacDonald was a "writing machine" who cranked out over fifty books, and innumerable short stories. His prose is a little florid, but it's readable with few mechanical problems. Example: "Hefty Salvation Army Lassies in their wagon-train bonnets dingle-dangled spare change into their kettles, and fat foam Santas were affixed to the palm boles and light standards, high enough to keep the kids from yanking their foam feet off." That was from Pale Gray for Guilt, of the Travis McGee series, told in first person by Travis McGee, who is prone to describing skies as full of "smutch" and machines as going "pockety-wock." The cutesiness is usually ironic. As an informant MacDonald was only middling reliable. It's pretty obvious he knew about LSD from the inside, but he confused Monet and Manet, and I haven't been able to find online evidence of a real Dormed sleep machine -- an electronic gadget that keeps the girl in  Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper -- in half an hour of searching. MacDonald's series character Travis McGee regarded women as real humans. Interetingly, at a time when Playboy was serializing James Bond, McGee had little use for Playboy, key clubs, or Hugh Hefner. Still, sex was "full-frontal." "But her breathing changed and she pushed her hips so close she could not fail to notice what all the thought of ice and pain had failed to quell. "She sat up abruptly and unbuttoned her blouse and took it off. She kept her eyes shut as though unwilling to watch what she was doing. She made a mouth, as the French say, a mouth of resignation and self contempt. She knelt, put her thumbs inside the waist elastic of the baggy white slacks and peeled them down, rolled back an kicked them off. She had worn nothing under either the blouse or the slacks. Her body was elegant, sleek as fire-warm silk and ivory, with a deceptive flavor of immaturity about it, the nipples small and pink, the pubic hair a sofft sooty smudge." McGee longs for love, but rejects a life of punch cards, pension plans, and decimal-fraction-sized families, preferring his chosen occupation of "Ke-Ho-Tay" in tin-can armor, with broken lance and spavined steed. This is a problem for a series character, and -- somebody told me -- McGee's conquests in twenty-one books was in the fifties. Lois was murdered, Pidge jilted our hero, Dana went back into her shell, Puss disappeared (we find out in another novel that she died), Annie preferred her career, and so on. Liberal MacDonald's homophobia seems quaint, slanderous and exploitive forty years after Stonewall. Desk clerk's stifle yawns behind dainty fists, and "the butch" live in "colonies" where they guard their "brides" from "true males," dispensing beatings "stevedores would be proud of." Travis McGee is a Florida boat bum, who lives aboard a fifty foot sybaritic houseboat he won playing poker. The loser's friends led him away before he could write an IOU with his Brazilian mistress as collateral. McGee makes his living retrieving things stolen legally, and taking half the value as fee. He does not expect to live to great age -- when he would be less capable of enjoying himself anyway -- so takes his retirement in installments. MacDonald created McGee as a kind of depressed hero, tall, strong, handsome -- if scarred and shopworn -- a former paratrooper and professional running back, who lives life on his own terms, but describes himself as living outside the light and warmth cast by the fire, unable to take part in our songs and laughter. It's a kind of fantasy fulfillment and moral caution to his readers, mostly WWII and Korea vets or their contemporaries, educated, a pipe smokers, Democrats, libertarians, cynics, thinking of themselves a s men's men, but supporting lives of dinner at the club with wife and kids. The typical Travis McGee novel begins with McGee taking his ease after making a big score. An old friend, girlfriend, or somebody he owes big makes a claim on his attention. The loss is seldom something that fits with his fee structure, and it's been taken by a sociopath, someone who has no empathy for other people, who imagines we are all as empty as himself. McGee starts looking into the case, randomly stirring things up. (In several of the books, McGee needs information from a tertiary character who is not forthcoming. McGee tortures the informant, feeling soiled afterwards. Fortunately MacDonald abandoned this device after the early novels.) He meets the villain, sort of an evil Travis McGee, alerting the villain to his presence. As McGee is set to steal the prize back, the villain attacks him, injuring him seriously before McGee can dispatch him. Every hero needs a sidekick, and McGees is a gentle, charismatic, semi-retired economist, named Meyer. McGee is not in every book. In spite of being highly moral, Meyer discovers a taste and talent for being a con man. Because of his economics contacts and curriculum vitae, Meyer can often take the con to very high levels. The thing that distinguishes the Travis McGee novels from other mystery thrillers, is McGee's soliloquizing about Florida, the environment, human dignity, and -- quoting Meyer -- economics. In 1973's The Scarlet Ruse, Meyer is telling McGee how he met the defrauded stamp dealer Hirsch Fedderman. Fedderman had helped Meyer develop an economic indicator based on the activity in markets for rare commodities like stamps. "I wanted the kind of warning they used to have in France. When the peasants started buying gold and hiding it, you knew the storms were coming." "Are they coming, O Great Seer?" "What do you think we are standing out in the middle of with neither spoon nor paddle?" Later in the same book: "...so divide everything into two hundred million equal parts. Everything in theis country that is fabricated. Steel mills, speedboats, cross-country power lines, scalpels, watchbands, fish rods, ski poles, plywood, storage batteries, everything. Break it down into raw materials, then compute the power requirements and the fossil fuels needed to make everybody's share in this country. Know what happens when you apply that formula to all the peoples of all the other nations of the world? "You come up against a bleak fact, Travis. there is not enough material on and in the planet to ever give them what we're used to. The emerging nations are not going to emerge -- not into our pattern at least. Not ever. We've bagged it all. Technology won't come up with a way to crowd the Yangtze River with Munequitas." (The Munequita -- "Little Doll" -- is McGee's twin engine speedboat, behind which he is towing his latest romantic interest, and the sociopathic villain of the book.)

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The Fiscal Cliff At The End Of Growth

Apropos of the "fiscal cliff" legislation, MPR quoted a China Daily editorial yesterday as saying that the US couldn't continue our debt-fueled prosperity, and that the legislature couldn't continue to "kick the can down the road."

Maybe they can't help but "kick the can down the road."

The middle class, which Democratic politicians claim to want to protect, has the largest economic -- not to say ecological --  footprint. (The poor are too poor, the rich are too few.)

It all comes down to our ecological footprint. Our economy would have been fine, if we hadn't come up against the planet's limits to growth.

So dealing with the problem of keeping society going come down to operating ecologically, and operating ecologically will change the way that comfortable working-class folks live.

Not kicking the can down the road would amount to figuring out how to reduce our ecological footprint without handing your House or Senate seat over to a demagogue.

And without precipitating an economic disaster.

CBC news program As It Happens, interviewed End of Growth author Jeff Rubin. The interviewer treated Rubin's comments as novel. Maybe Rubin's ideas weren't novel to the interviewer -- they haven't been news to me since 1972 -- but might as well have been in Martian for most of the audience.

Pity, because that's what we need to talk about, if it's possible to avoid economic collapse..

Ronald Reagan, Speed Freak

My profile of Bill McKibben (with solutions for climate change) will be in Duluths's Zenith City (semi-) Weekly around the beginning of February. Don't live in Duluth? You can find archived past profiles -- including Buckminster Fuller, Dorothy Day, and hero of the confederacy John C. Calhoun --  at http://zenithcitynews.com/directory.htm. Look for Faces of Wisdom in the archived issues. It's the year after the end of the Mayan Calendar. Twelve years after 2001, and we still haven't sent a talking computer to Jupiter.. Thirteen years after Y2K. We were going to "party like it's 1999." Buckminster Fuller thought we'd have solved our problems or blown the planet to smithereens by 1985. It all seems so quaint. E. F. Schumacher published Small Is Beautiful forty years ago. The Limits to Growth came out in 1972. If four decades have passed, and Americans still haven't starved or choked on our own waste, those guys must have been wrong. Right? President James Earl Carter was curious and worried about those two books. He entertained Schumacher at the White House, and installed solar panels on its roof. Then we decided that it was "morning in America," took down the panels and suppressed Carter-commissioned plans for getting off the petroleum tit. Here's Bill McKibben's on how we  got away with ignoring the environmental Jeremiahs from  Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet: "The problem was not that Reagan's sunny disposition masked a fascist soul; the problem was Reagan's sunny disposition." How did the Reagan administration get away with ignoring growth's limits? "...there was still enough slack in the system that it wouldn't come crashing in on them. Deregulation -- the relentless notion that government was the problem and that freed from its strictures the economy would grow -- was in the short term remarkably effective. We would flog the economy back to life, give it a dose of economic amphetamine that would last for fifteen years, the years when our slide (would) gain irresistible momentum."

David Foster Wallace Wannabee Submits A Story

I used to post longer pieces. This link's to a post from a couple years back about Stewart Brand's answer to climate change, Whole Earth Discipline.

For the last few months, I've concentrated on writing profiles of systems thinkers -- Faces of Wisdom --  for Duluth's Zenith City (semi) Weekly. Here's my profile of gardener and soil builder John Jeavons

I finished my newest profile, on 350.org founder Bill McKibben, today. I tried to write it yesterday, but wound up at 1200 words. I'm usually published at 800 words, but my editor, Jen, likes me to write long. She says, "I can cut, but I can't add." Still a third is a lot to cut gracefully, so I wrote a second version, 900 words long.

(Ironically, I proposed a series like the old Ripley's Believe It or Not, with fewer than a hundred words.)

David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster (start with the fourth one down) is a collection of published essays, as submitted. It's interesting to see what wound up on the floor.

Maybe someday.

People As Subsystems

Ecologist Howard Odum noted in Environment Power and Society that what a system can do is limited by its subsystems, and by the larger system of which it is a part.

If we think of a person as a system, his or her subsystems would include metabolism, wealth, personal connections, knowledge base, intellectual firepower, etc. He or she would be a subsystem of a society, whose operations oblige and proscribe various activities and accomplishments. A Yanamamo won't build a helicopter, and a North Korean won't direct a 3D, CGI film of The Catcher in the Rye.

And, we have to wonder, how can an American find a way to live a just, satisfying, and ecologically-based life?

Buckminster Fuller: Dark Horse In The Race To Save The Planet

A wild card in the struggle to save civilization is one key idea of Buckminster Fuller's. Bucky said lots, but this probably is his most solid, and maybe useful, idea.

He said it's invisible, because it involves a kind of knowledge most of us don't have or pay understand.

Modern alloys have many times the tensile strength of rocks, lumber, or concrete -- conventional building materials -- and greater tensile strength than nineteenth century steel. Of course, conventional buildings are made by piling things on top of other things -- compressively -- and materials' compressive strengths are relatively pitiful.

Also, Fuller's geometry, which you can see in his invention, the geodesic dome, is tensile -- it hangs together. Build our structures using Fuller's tensile geometry and incredibly strong modern materials, and it only takes a tiny fraction of the material conventional techniques would. Those domes are hanging from themselves, and could cover counties without any pillars.

The combination of modern materials and a kind of building which hangs instead of stacks might be economical enough to make us the planet of billionaires Fuller claimed we are, "entirely unaware of our good fortune."

In the twenties, Fuller analyzed a model modern house, proposed by the American Institute of Architects, realizing that all of the lumber, plumbing, concrete, wires, appliances, etc. would weigh 150 tons. He designed his Dymaxion House to provide the same area and functions for three tons. The Dymaxion House would have been mass-produced, so there would have been time savings, as well.

After World War II, he built two prototype Dymaxion Houses, which operated as proposed, and weighed...three tons each.

Objections are that these structures would be unconventional and startling, compete with existing industries, aren't the kind of things individuals can do by themselves (industrial production versus craft), requiring cooperation, and the possibility that there would be hidden infrastructure belying apparent economies. But these are just questions. It would be nice if people caught on to possibilities like Buckminster Fuller's in sufficient number to start having a conversation.

The stakes are too high not to.

The Nation On Secession

I let my Harper's subscription lapse, and stopped listening to Democracy Now for the sake of my mental health, but I sneaked a look at the current Nation today at the library.

Calvin Trillin about post-election secessionists: We do respect your point of view/We're glad to see the back of you.

There's a more prosaic thousand words about secessionists, later in the magazine, pointing out that their states, ironically, are major beneficiaries of big federal government, and comparing the American movement with regional/ethnic movements in Europe -- Scottish, Catalan, etc.

Off the cuff: I'm torn. We're all in this collapsing world economy together, and giving Yahoos the right to self determination could sabotage reasonable people's chances. On the other hand, they seem to be doing a decent job of shooting our collective feet already.

Continuing the motif, there's also a review of John G. Turner's Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet, about the founder of the little theocracy in the basin.

Logicomix

Most humans behave irrationally. All the more reason to pursue the study of logic... Of course I am also human  and thus am no stranger to fits of non-logical thinking. But I can also discern these tendencies in myself and thus am more able to resist them...

                                          Bertrand Russell, quoted in Logicomix, Doxiadis, Papadimitriou, Pasppadatos, and Di Donna, 2009, Bloomsbury, NY

The Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker.

Barbara and I spent Christmas Day at Sam and Marissa's house. Sam is our 31-year old. I looked through his copy of The Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker.

A lot of the drawings from the twenties and thirties made me laugh, and the drawings from the twenties were great -- draughtsmanship and composition equal to high art and illustration, some of the design derived from Cubism.

Beginning in the forties, I laughed a lot less. My reaction was usually, "Oh yeah, I get it." The drawing was okay -- cartoon-level

Then sometime in the nineties, the cartoons started to get funny again. Were they really, or was it that their themes were closer to mine, and the kind of gags were ones I'm conditioned to laugh at?

And if that's true, what does it say about the cartoonists eighty and ninety years ago?

Oh, and William Hamilton's drawings are twenties quality.

Wayne LaPierre Crazy?

Wayne LaPierre met the press Sunday and said, "If putting armed police in schools is crazy, call me crazy."

Okay.

Oh, yeah, and would Colt Firearms be willing to pony up the guns? Maybe PointBlank Body Armor would come across with the Kevlar vests.

Anxiety And Alprazamalama

                EXT. HOSPITAL EMERGENCY ROOM - DAY

BOB pauses, exiting the emergency room. He wears a drab business suit, mops his forehead and looks up with visible relief.

               BOB

I thought I was having a heart attack. Thank God it was only crippling anxiety disorder.

               INT. DOCTOR'S OFFICE - DAY

               DOCTOR

Fortunately for anxiety sufferers like Bob, now there's Alprazamalama.

             STILL LIFE OF ALPRAZAMALAMA

              HURRIED VOICE-OVER

Check with your doctor to see if Alprazamalama is right for you. Check with your doctor if you experience any of the following while taking Alprazamalama: depression, thoughts of suicide, suicide, thoughts of mass murder, mass murder, chest pains, racing heart, dizziness, nausea, uncontrolled muscle movements, jaundice, hallucinations, or anxiety.

NRA:Short Deck Or Stacking It?

So...

NRA Executive Veep, Wayne LaPierre ("Help, I'm a rock."), says we should put an armed guard in every American school, and do it by the time the kids get back from Christmas. I figured those guys would be among the fiscally responsible. How many schools are there in the country? There are some cops in some schools, but LaPierre is calling for a major jobs program.

Is the NRA playing with a full deck?

Those Days Are Gone Forever

My mother's maternal grandfather worshipped Lincoln, edited a small-town, Republican newspaper, supported the community of Macomb, Illinois, and provided for a very comfortable childhood for me and my sibs. He was a die-hard nineteenth century libertarian. Once he gave Mom five Depression-era bucks for thinking for herself and writing what amounted to a socialist school theme, a theme which appalled and embarrased my Democratic Granddad.

I call myself a conservative, but nobody else does. "Pal" (my great grandfather) probably wouldn't either, but I like to think that I could persuade him. In a morally relativistic universe, I try to stay in sync with the largest morally meaningful system. Pretty good trick, huh?

Like Wes Jackson says, we all live in the extractive economy.

But, like Barbara says, degree matters. What passes for conservatism these days is a bunch of what Stephen Gaskin calls "plungers" and "bet-the-farm-on-a hunch-boys." (And their dupes).

That was okay for Pal, who lived on the upslope of peak oil. During the Great Depression, he backed his hunches, and new oil reserves backed them too. It even seemed, especially with the Green Revolution, a dozen or twenty years later, that his plunging helped improve the commonweal.

Those days are gone forever.

To Heck With The Dialectic

Post-presidential election, a guy I know, a skilled craftsman, asked me if it had turned out the way I wanted. It had on one level, but, on another, there was no way it could have turned out the way it needed to. I tried to explain, but my friend said very nicely that he wasn't interested.

His own politics are Independent, or at least adamantly moderate. Sad, because we're in a bind, and the extremists know it, and further, we, on all sides, are serious about surviving and thriving. You can compromise about things where people have different interests; everybody gives a little. You can't compromise on whether or not civilization persists.

Sort Of A Sacrament

And then there is that other relationship which is emphatically not "sort of." Many men have gone to the stakefor the proposition that the bread and wine are not "sort of" the body and blood.

Gregory Bateson, "Metalogue: Why a Swan?" Steps to an Ecology of Mind

We're All A Little Crazy

We all make errors [in recognizing metphor, humor, fantasy, etc.] at various times. I'm not sure that I've ever met anybody that doesn't suffer from "Schizophrenia P" more or less.

Greogory Bateson in "Epidemiology of Schizophrenia," Steps to an Ecology of Mind

The Problem With Ronnie

The problem was not that Reagan's sunny disposition somehow masked a fascist soul; the problem was his sunny disposition.

Bill McKibben in Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

Quote For the Moment

Error must be corrected. It doesn't have to be acknowledged.

Dee Hock, creator of Visa

Tolerate The Second Amendment

My own gun ownership -- a .22 caliber target pistol in the late 1970s -- was symptomatic of a then-loose screw. The Second Amendment is unique in the right's apparently being contingent on the necessity of a "well regulated militia," and in being so object-specific. Swords and flintlock rifles. The arms we may bear preceded even Eli Whitney's mass production. The argument I've heard most frequently for preserving private arsenals has more to do with fear of government than supporting it as part of a militia. In fact, in an interview with Talk of the nation's Neal Conan, More Guns Less Crime author John Lott said that Columbine High School shooter Dylan Klebold had written to his state representative objecting to proposed anti-gun legislation, and that the law went into effect on the day of the shootings. I'm sure Conan had to restrain himself from asking if that were a threat. Be all that as it may, the current clamor for gun control seems mistaken: Everybody has guns. When I was a Minneapolis energy auditor, poking around in people's houses to save heat. I saw many guns. Among friends, I know three machine guns, and they aren't going anywhere. Their owners, Vietnam-era vets, will hide them and vote Tea Party. That's unfortunate because one of them, at least, is a sensible and humane guy, and you don't have to dig very far to see it. We're looking at some nasty weather. I believe that dealing with the limits to growth will require some restrictions on personal liberty, and I don't want to alienate anybody who can help. Let them keep their well oiled security blankets. More immediately, we might be able to keep guns out of the hands of the nation's Adam Lanzas, but I'm betting that mass shootings will continue at a rate of about twenty a year. Whatever goads somebody to put innocent strangers to death -- children for pete'ssake --  will remain, and gun-control nuts will be disappointed. It ain't gonna be easy, but if we want to stop violent grandstanding, we'll need to go deeper.

Harold Kushner: Good Insight Comes From The Basilica

I listened to Harold Kushner's October talk at St. Mary's Basilica. I heard it on the radio, but I know that, for non-liturgical events, they put signs on the confessionals directing people to the bathrooms downstairs. Kushner spoke about his recent book The Book of Job: When Bad Things Happen to a Good Person. Job, the original, is one of five books of the Bible that I've read all the way through. I've read it twice, once twenty years ago because Gregory Bateson quoted it, and again more recently and with greater understanding. (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Revelations are the others; I tried Genesis but it wore me out.) Kushner said he believes that the story -- God sorely afflicts a devout, virtuous, and prosperous man, who remains steadfast, and is rewarded with new prosperity -- was a folk tale. About 2500 years ago, some brilliant theologian and poet became dissatisfied with the story and used it to bracket a more nuanced examination of doubt, faith, and what it means to love God. The message, according to Kushner, is that a world without suffering would be a world without growth, and if we can't get mad at God, it's a lifeless kind of love. God's message to us is that we will suffer, but He will not abandon us. I'm more of a not-peace-but-the-sword kind of guy, but I enjoyed hearing Kushner. During the question period, somebody asked about virtuous atheists and agnostics. Kushner said that God wants us to behave well, but isn't interested in the credit. He said that the people the questioner asked about are probably not really atheists and agnostics. The thing that keeps us doing good and avoiding evil is a notion of God. That reminded me of a quote from Samuel Butler, a mostly forgotten nineteenth century British author, and critic of Darwin: The argument between the theist and atheist is over whether we shall know God as God, or by some other name.

St. Paul Chamber Orchestra And The Social Contract

The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra is on strike . Money is the issue, and I'm sympathetic. these are skilled artists, with neurosystems and senses of beauty (probably a false distinction, but just "neurosystems" seems too cold) developed far beyond those of the people for whose pleasure, and especially, at whose pleasure, they perform. Maybe the occasional surgeon in the audience operates at that level, but mostly, it's just us duffers.

As the economy contracts, this is how it happens: faced with fewer resources, the MBAs who control the budget will reduce expenses where it's easiest. They know they can't get very far, asking for give backs from suppliers, bankers, and taxmen, and audiences and grantors are contributing at their limits, so they relieve the pressure on themselves by demanding help where it's easiest: subordinate (!) members of the team.

Quick review: There are twice as many mouths to feed as there were forty years ago, and there were a lot then. Also forty years ago, it took one unit of oil to drill eighty, now it takes twenty; we're pumping a lot of what's, near as I can figure, the real basis for our currency, but we burn a fourth of it for the privilege. Global warming and other forms of pollution (and pollution control) take a bite out of our wealth. Borrowing made sense as the economy expanded, because we could expect to service debt with wealth we planned to create with borrowed capital; now, as the economy contracts, payments to creditors will come from society's operating budget. And there has been a major concentration of wealth in the same forty-year period, so capital that might have gone to innovation and compensation, feathers the already plush nests of the SPCO's directors and major supporters.

I don't believe that workers, even workers as noble and virtuous as classical musicians, can justly expect compensation commensurate with "world-class music." But neither can performers in New York.

And neither can MBAs, and the venal lightweights who get rooms at the Crowne Plaza because it's too far to drive back to fucking Wayzata after the concert.

What the musicians, and other workers going forward, need to realize is that we're on the brink of the precipice, and we're in a struggle for standing room as it crumbles. Some old fart in a thousand-dollar suit, hundred-dollar haircut,  and a one-of-a-kind pair of gold cuff links is gonna try to knock you into the abyss, but the ground really is crumbling.

Forget ticket prices. Negotiate the social contract.

Report From The Path To The Grave

What's it like to die?

There's no reporting after the critical moment, but we can describe the "technology of dying" that Gregory Bateson dreaded. Maybe there's even value to that. Fewer surprises.

In my early forties, wrestling with my son and his contemporary uncle, I thought I felt frail. Maybe I was mistaken. Either that or I adapted and accommodated. Anyway the boys grew out of wrestling.

At forty-five, my damaged knee suddenly went lame. The orthopedic surgeon thought I would need a replacement in "fifteen or twenty years." TAking care not to irritate it took some learning, but that and exercise seem to be preserving it. Eighteen or nineteen years on, the replacement still seems years ahead.

At fifty I was at my college weight and bench-pressing almost that much. In spite of a melanoma, removed the day after Arnold Schwartzenegger was elected Governor of California -- and in spite of driving and dispatching interstate buses, sleepless work -- I managed to kid myself through my fifties that I was defying age. (Melanomas can kill you, but treating one that hasn't grown too far is roughly equivalent to a root canal.)

In my sixties I'm beginning to feel mortal. I have to baby tendonitis in my elbows; biceps curls aggravate the right one; triceps curls aggravate the left. A rotator cuff impingement in my left shoulder doesn't always respond to stretches and compensatory resistance exercises. Sometimes lower back pain will cancel workouts, in spite of a pretty rigorous program of physical therapy exercises. There are hints of arthritis in the joints between my thumbs and wrists, and weird, what's-that-about aches and pains here and elsewhere. They tell me I have cataracts, but so far, I can't notice, although I do require distance correction now.

Heart, blood pressure, and blood chemistry are good, due as much to genetics as to virtue. When I take those surveys to determine how long I'm going to live, the early nineties seem the target.

Benjamin Spock wrote a book at ninety, but said that it was the last one he had energy for. Jack Lalane made it to ninety-five, and was lifting weights until shortly before his death. At eighty, Clint Eastwood said that he didn't feel obliged to add pull-ups each workout. BKS Iyengar, on the other hand, claimed at ninety-two to still be making progress.

Send Not To Sandy Hook

No man is an island

Entire if itself.

Each is a piece of the continent,

A part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea,

Europe is the less.

As well as if a promontory were.

As well as if a manor of thine own

Or of thy friend's were.

Each man's death diminishes me,

For I am involved in mankind.

Therefore, send not to know

For whom the bell tolls.

It tolls for thee.

Still, it seems like in a nation of 300 million, in a world of seven billion, in a world of genocide and famine, mass shootings like today's in the Sandy Hook Elementary School are of questionable consequence. The number of  Connecticut deaths is equivalent to a bus accident's, and the news focus on the Sandy Hook horror sounds like a gawker slowdown.

But here I am gawking.

Consequence would come because murders like this are are of a pattern, examples of something larger that afflicts us, or that come from something we, as a culture, are doing very wrong. Something that we can learn and fix.

Usually the murderers do not themselves survive. They kill themselves, or die at the hands of police who want to protect innocents.  If some future shooter does survive, his life should be forfeit, not to the executioner, but to researchers who will try to find out what pathology was at work.

The penalty for murder should be to be turned inside out, and into a clockwork orange. Call me brutal, but if there is any meaning in senseless violence, I want it..

Memento Mori At An Unexpected Place

I'll be 64 in February. I think I'm one of those guys about whom younger men say they hope they'll look "that good" when they're "that old." I eat my vegetables, and stay trim with weights, yoga, and lots of dips into the new skills pool. After all is said and done though, I'm still "that old."

I met a high school friend's mom at a funeral Tuesday, frail, but entirely compos mentis. She didn't recognize me.

It's sobering, because I figured that, except for the white beard, I look like I did fifty years ago. Tall, all my hair, flat bellied, and, pretty obviously, "one of the Roarks."

Believe it or not, I hadn't expected a memento mori at a funeral. The emotion I've always felt at funerals is a sympathetic grief for the family, and I did lose a little bit of "it," when the deceased's nine- and fifteen-year olds delivered wine and water at the Offertory.

Life is short.

The Mayan Calendar And Buckminster Fuller

I picked up Buckminster Fuller's Cosmography, the book he was working on when he died, and which was published in 1992. Thumbing through it for inspiration, I found the diagram on page 160 startling.

Imagine a circle standing for the globe. At nine o'clock there is drawn a Mayan step pyramid, at twelve, a Greek temple, at three, an Asian building with curved peak-ridge and eaves. The Greek steps are drawn with sloppy curves, more or less concentric with the circle representing the Earth. The Mayan steps are crisply drawn with a straight edge, ninety-degree t-bars for a line radiating from the circle's center.

This is the caption:

FIG. 6.31 Earth surface considerations around the world. Greek temple builders used plumb bobs, and their temple steps, if longitudinally sighted, will be found to be inadvertently following the curvature of the Earth. Mayan foundations were correctly engineered to be tangent to Earth and were conscious of the planet's spherical surface curvature. Many buildings in Asia were derived from ships drawn up on land; thus, their lines are reflection patterns of a ship's lines.

Let's ignore the Asian building. This is typical Fuller speculation. We'll say, "Sure. Whatever."

Of course we agree that the Greeks built the way Fuller says. It's the way we would. It's hard to imagine a different way of laying broad stone slabs on the ground. I haven't done it yet.

But the Mayans! How did they do that? How did Fuller know they did? Where can I find out more?

It's tempting to write the notion of the Mayans building tangents to the Earth's spherical surface as an eighty-nine year old's delusion, especially within two weeks of December 21, 2012. I read enough Fuller in my thirties, though, to say that I think I can recognize Bucky's bullshit, and this ain't it. That substance smells more like the Asian-boat thing.

You don't skim Fuller. Anyway, I can't, and I haven't found any exposition in the text that references FIG. 6.31. The Mayans don't pop up in the index at all.

I wonder if "Kiyoshi Kuromiya Adjuvant" remains alive. I'll google him and send him a snail mail.

Liberty Or Moose Turd Pie

There's a commons of liberty we all draw from, and the way we manage that commons determines the "net liberty" for those of us who graze on it.

"Okay, enough," says some glib fascist, "That's doublespeak." Then he'll go off on a tangent about Orwell and the totalitarian left.

Ron Paul makes a net-liberty calculation when he talks about the Confederacy. The great Russian philosophical novelist Ayn Rand assumes a commons of liberty that would serve all of us best if we let the Hank Reardons and Frisco D'Anconias of the world plunder it. (Didn't it creep you out just a little that Dagny, the novel's eyes, winds up as prize for the top libertarian in the book?)

And we make that calculation when we condemn to the Third Reich's struggle for lebensraum. And a nice new sofa and coffee table.

There's gotta be some accommodation to living in a finite world with other people. I would rather a representative government call the plays, so that I have some say. The libertarian plan has interested parties, with superior ways of organizing to protect those interests, make the call. Or worse, has the planet's new dominant life form, the corporation, ordering my life.

Climate Or Economic Catastrophe: Rock Or Deep Blue Sea?

If a major industry -- fossil fuels -- has to write down $20 trillion dollars, it's a disaster.

So we're offered a choice of disasters: a climate catastrophe or an economic one. Which one might we manage?

Edgar Lee Master's Dead Grandmother Talks Through Hat

I've been re-reading Edgar Lee Master's the Spoon River Anthology. Really, reading John Hallwas's introduction to his, 1992, annotated edition, and dipping into the poems, and the gossipy notes to each poem. Spoon River is a fiction, based on Lewiston and Petersburg, Illinois. I'm from the next watershed west of The Spoon.

In the Anthology, the poems are speeches of the dead in a small-town cemetery, and each gives an account of his or her life.

"Lucinda Matlock" is based on the poet's paternal grandmother, a long-lived pioneer wife and mother. The poem ends,

What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness
Anger, discontent and drooping hopes?
Degenerate sons and daughters,
Life is too strong for you --
It takes life to love life.

Lucinda doesn't know what she's talking about. Spoon River is about the decay of the American vision. People are trapped in a system rigged by villains. Lucinda lived the vision, was born on the prairie, suffered of course, but did what was appropriate and meaningful. Her children had Lucinda's legacy snatched from them, but she can't see it -- not because she's dead, but because she's adapted to pioneer times. She thinks that things are the way she lived them. Her degenerate sons and daughters are ensnared by the Thomas Rhodeses, Editor Whedons, Mrs. Pantiers, and John M. Churches of the book. These people -- and Spoon River Anthology is a roman a clef -- robbed Lucinda's offspring, notably her grandson the author, not only of bread and land, but of the wherewithal to live meaningfully.

Bill McKibben In Rolling Stone

I'm not that big on climate change rhetoric. Sure, it's true, but it gives complaisant numbnutzes a controversy to distract us from doing what needs to be done.

And what we need to do, we need to do, climate change or no.

The controversy's on the back burner, and seems to be abating there. Sandy, etc. seem to have convinced people like NY mayor, Michael Bloomberg. He doesn't get it all yet, but he's started to think about it.

Somebody who does get it, is Bill McKibben who was recently in the Twin Cities, and whom I missed. Friends did go to hear McKibben, and conversations with them made me go to the library and read McKibben's piece, The Reckoning, from the August 2 Rolling Stone:

* We've decided that two degrees celsius is the warming increase we can stand;

* We're at 0.08, and the weird weather has been weirder than predicted;

* We can add 565 gigatons of carbon dioxide to the air between now and midcentury without pushing ourselves over the two-degree mark;

* Oil and coal companies have 2, 795 gigatons of future CO2 emissions in proven reserves;

* These reserves are their capital, and if we did what we need to do, the carbon companies would have to write off $20 trillion of their assets.

The article has a Tragedy-of-the-Commons angle, and I won't give away McKibben's way of resolving it.