Against the Fall of Night

After many years, I re-read Against the Fall of Night recently, with the "alternate version" of The City and the Stars waiting in reserve. I hadn't remembered much about the (shared) plot of these works, even though I have at least the memory of a memory of one or both of these being among my favorite science-fiction stories read at the age of eleven or twelve. I was interested in a friend's remark, itself incompletely recalled now, about one of Clarke's versions of the story telling more than showing, and I determined to read them one at a time and react without refreshing my memory of his specific judgment, to see whether I'd notice anything similar ab nihilo. I'm guessing now that the shorter, earlier (earliest) work is the more "telling" version – one must in a matter of course "show" more in longer works – but I don't know yet whether I'll agree with my friend's judgment. I loved the short version, and marvel at how much more elegant Clarke's prose is than the run of the mill of the period. I know I'm over-reaching a little, but for me the speculative tone in this beginning of Clarke's writing career is reminiscent of Borges. While simply moving a fairly uneventful narrative forward (in the sense that conflict is not the dominant mode of creating interest in what's going to happen), he wrestles with the philosophical themes that entranced me as a boy: could a human society be created stable enough to last millions rather than thousands of years? How might the equilibrium of such stability be upset? Would we characterize the upset as inevitable, a matter of infinitesimal probabilities finally catching up with the best-laid plans, or as a wonderful matter of human initiative re-emerging – in which case, how could it possibly have taken hundreds of millions for someone like Alvin, merely requiring a stronger will than the prevalent, to be born and act?

Back from the greatest camp ever

     Back from a week in the mountains (Sierras, near Sonora) at the Lair of the Bear, the UC Berkeley alumni camp. We all had a fine time, having made allowances for living with dirt and not sleeping well at night. Jenny turned three single cots into a king-size bed, with the help of our traveling mattresses and her own ingenuity, and our tent cabin became a very comfortable hideaway. The girls painted their faces, played and swam. The college-age staff kept us well fed, and I didn't even try the Wi-Fi connection for the first four days – after which, I limited myself to an hour a day on the laptop, which seemed to strike the right balance between wanting to keep up and not wanting to work.

     I spent afternoons at camp engrossed in a book called The Greatest Trade Ever, about John Paulson and his short-trading of credit derivative swaps against collateralized debt obligations during the crash of 2007-2008. The author, Gregory Zuckerman, writes for the Wall Street Journal and is an excellent story-teller, to the point of drawing out the action perhaps more than needed to be done to make a book of adequate length. The main points of "suspense" in the book, given that we as readers already knew that the protagonists' biggest uncertainty (whether there'd be a crash) had been resolved by ensuing events known to all, was whether they'd figure out how to make money off of their analysis and expectations. The three elements that needed to conjoin for that to happen were the design of an instrument (the product that would allow investors to profit if housing crashed), finding lots of counterparties (which turned out to be banks who wanted to maintain the apparent value of their investment portfolios on their books), and timing (not getting in too early, but getting in earlier than others). All in all, a book to restore my faith in markets in the face of their most egregious failures,

The Rational Optimist

I really enjoyed listening to Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist as an audio-book. It seemed perfectly suited to the format. The reader, L.j. Ganser, had just the tone of jaunty buoyancy to carry me through the whole set of 11 CDs in just a couple of weeks of listening in the car, which is the only place I find conducive to working through audio-books. The book itself could perhaps be considered a kind of libertarian manifesto, though Ridley is a lot less concerned about the corrosive effects of "statism" and government abuse of power than most libertarians, as long as property rights are reliably protected. I'd call him a Madisonian liberal: he's all in favor of political forms that weaken and factionalize, but have the authority to defend the processes of exchange he finds magical in determining the (almost) inevitability of human progress. There's also an ingredient of engagement with science in Ridley's writing and thinking here that I find quite admirable, though it has drawn what I think is criticism of the wrong sort from professional scientists, predictably, in the area of climate change. I say the wrong sort because I see the criticism as simply an attempt to shut his argument down point by point rather than addressing it overall, and overall I think he remains convincing, as an "amateur" thinking about the implications of even the "scientific consensus" on climate change issues: namely, that there is uncertainty about the magnitude and meaning of effects of climate change, and very little uncertainty about the magnitude of the costs of simply trying to stop carbon emissions on the living standards of the world, developed and developing. To categorize him as a climate change denier is I believe dishonest.

Slayer of Gods

     Lynda Robinson's Slayer of Gods is a mystery set in ancient Egypt, and follows her Drinker of Blood in the "Lord Meren" series. The mystery which provided the narrative drive and structure for both books, the death of Nefertiti, was resolved in this one. The structure of the "case" allowed Robinson to imagine two distinct Egyptian regimes, that of Akhenaten and that of Tutankhamen, quite interestingly. Slayer of Gods is apparently the sixth book in the Lord Meren series. I'd have to say that I really see these two in particular as one long novel, despite their being part of a perhaps continuing series.

The Soros Lectures

     I've been meaning to note that I read The Soros Lectures, by the financier George Soros, several weeks ago… It seemed an interesting mix of views emerging from different bits of his life and not necessarily finding themselves consistent with one another. First, a description of some philosophical views on the "reflexivity" of economic systems that boil down to the importance of self-fulfilling but false expectations in creating extended failures in markets to behave correctly (i.e., to process information objectively), failures that Soros himself has been able to take advantage of in some of his most profitable investing activities. All good, and anything someone makes a billion dollars off of and is willing to divulge to the world, I'm at least interested in hearing – though he didn't seem quite as original a thinker as he sees himself being. Second, a critique of what he sees as a similar form of cognitive dissonance characterizing the recent Bush administration in both the economic and political spheres – that is, his claim that the fundamental mode of that administration was deception, of itself and others. Most of this put in the kind of "isn't it obvious" terms that infuriate me in the arguments of my left-liberal Berkeley friends. Weak stuff, this, unless much better argued. Third, and perhaps most interesting, statements that the structural problems that caused the recession from 2008 on aren't even close to being resolved, that it's possible the worst of the "correction" is yet to come. He seems to be basing this third argument on a combination of solid knowledge of the degree to which bad investment positions around the world haven't yet completed their "unwinding," and the additional effects of government debt and doubts about creditworthiness. Soros' prescribed solution seems to be a combination of continued short selling of private and government securities, of the sort that has made him rich, and strong government intervention in the economy of the sort that Paul Krugman's been advocating in the New York Times, threatening a depression if his advice isn't followed (as it probably won't be). I found myself much more inclined to trust the short selling than the proposed solutions, not that I'd put any money on it myself.

Recipe - Chicken and Vegetable Cobbler - NYTimes.com

Jenny made us a wonderful dinner tonight:

Recipe - Chicken and Vegetable Cobbler - NYTimes.com

The Interrogative Mood

Padgett Powell's book The Interrogative Mood should be out on bookstore shelves (however virtual that concept has become) around now. I got an "uncorrected proof" copy from ECCO books because they were offering them on Facebook. It is a fantastic book whose genre must I think be defined as "experimental writing" even though Powell is a well known writer of fiction, and there is a temptation to regard the book as a kind of novel. It has some of the extension of a novel, certainly, but its extension revels in the absence of continuity in plot or character, except for that of the reader who receives the questions of which the book is made. I could argue for its being a long prose poem as well. In any case, part of what's fantastic about the book is its "readability," the fact that one can sit with its sequence of non sequiturs and find oneself always asking always for more. The number of themes that get addressed at least in passing over the course of the book is enormous, but I particularly enjoyed the recurring theme of nostalgia for a variety of twentieth century landscapes, and the related one of being asked over and over to decide whether to exchange one's current existence for another (hypothetical and impossible, but somehow conceivable) one. Everyone should try reading this book.

Decision making under uncertainty

Although I made my decision to go to Johnston pretty much there on the spot, and never visited another private college to compare, I don’t think I went into the experience with my eyes closed. I find it necessary to stress this because some of what I’m examining here is the whole concept of decision-making under uncertainty as mapped to the experience of liberal education. Which is to say, one can't guarantee the good outcome of even the best possible decision.

I had been taking classes at the local community college in Simi Valley and had visited two University of California campuses, L.A. and Santa Barbara, as well as having hung around Cal State Fullerton years before when we lived in Orange County. So I was comfortable with campuses as mental geographies. And U.C.S.B., in particular, had offered a direct comparison to what was offered at Johnston, in its College of Creative Studies. Whereas the Santa Barbara version of experimental education offered an austere, apprenticeship model based on the development of gifts, Johnston College appeared to place a multitude of opportunities on offer, with further opportunities available constrained only by one’s negotiating talents. CCS was the studio or the shop; Johnston was the marketplace, or the amusement park.

John Prine

The evening’s dinner offered me a model of Johnstonian conviviality: food and conversation around common tables, then an extended after-dinner sitting around listening to guys playing their guitars. They were singing what I would later learn to John Prine songs. That the songs were ones I’d not heard before gave them a power over me they’d certainly not have had otherwise: for all I could tell, the guys performing, who had the outdoors look, moustaches and denim jackets, and had girls hanging by their sides, were singing their own songs. Psychologically, if not at the level of common sense, that’s how I must have interpreted the performance. Johnston was the possibility that I could sing my own songs, as it were, and get the girls. I was especially fixated on one particular blond-haired girl during the evening. Maybe I hoped she’d be there waiting for me on my first day of school at Johnston. At any rate, that passion was as evanescent as they all were then. She is unrecognizable in the light of present memory. It's possible I never saw her again. On the other hand, she may have been someone I saw all the time when I came to Johnston, but re-cast in the very different light of the place as my own home.

Encouragement

What I remember from my visit to Johnston as a high-schooler is not a single Johnston class, though I must have sat in on several, but discussions with two faculty and the evening’s dinner in the Commons. One of the faculty was, he revealed to me, on his way out of the school, and argued that if it was intellectual challenge I was looking for, Johnston would not be the place to find it. The other faculty was Bill McDonald, the person who then and now most represents for me the possibility of pedagogical compassion, if not rigor, at Johnston. Bill was much more encouraging than the other gentleman (who shall remain nameless because I haven’t been able to figure out his name with certainty), and presented the case for Johnston being just the place where such as I would shine, and get the education I was looking for to boot.

Of Prodigies and Pseudos

However much I might doubt the value of the SAT test, there seemed no other way for me to demonstrate my intelligence, either its current extant or its aptitudes. Thus I found myself in the fortunate position of being a National Merit scholar, with a scholarship that itself represented more money than I’d ever seen in one place, and at the same time expressing my interest in schools that offered radical critiques of the conventional educational models. To put it bluntly, I presented myself to Johnston as a young prodigy, just as I had done all through junior high and high school, ever since learning the fantastic advantages of being just a year ahead of all my classmates in math class, back in the seventh grade.

And Johnston, at least the Johnston with which I had to do on my visit, seemed quite willing to encourage my self-presentation and to market itself likewise directly to it. I use the term “market” not to evoke Madison Avenue, but simply to cast the visit as a transactional exchange of information.

Darwinian aside: I've been speculating recently that prodigies, true prodigies, may be evolutionary dead ends, or even throwbacks to earlier patterns of primate development. Any child whose intelligence appears to mature to adult levels in a small fraction of the time required by other humans might in fact be following a template of maturation closer to that of our chimpanzee cousins, that is to say our common ancestors, than the one that has proven successful so far for modern humans, which requires a maturation period as long as twenty years to perfect certain mental faculties required for life in society. Clearly, some of what has to be involved in the development of a prodigy is closely related to metabolic imbalance, even if it isn't that strictly speaking: energies that are budgeted for certain developmental purposes are in the prodigy focused to an unbearable intensity of purpose. The sociobiological question might still be asked: does the occasional outlier focusing energies in this way provide something that would be useful to a population? (I would be inclined to define "population" as a fairly small group, in terms of what we've evolved into within the past hundred thousand years: i.e., could a prodigy with some more or less random exaggeration of mental abilities, occurring very occasionally, be of assistance to a group of forty or fifty hunters and gatherers, say?)

The intermediate range

There is an intermediate range between the child who is perceived to have no special talent, and the child whose talent is such that it must be brought to the attention of a wider public. In that range I found myself, full of potential in my own eyes and in the eyes of some of the adults responsible for getting me through high school. No extraordinary efforts had been required of me. I knew no foreign languages, played no instruments, had not gone beyond calculus, had never written anything publication-worthy. But the multiple-choice game of the SAT test (actually the PSAT, and then the SAT) opened the door to higher education to me in a way no positive effort did or would have done: by virtue of my percentile ranking (which depended, obviously, on the population of willing test-takers I was one member of) I became a "National Merit Scholar." The cash award associated with that quasi-achievement was on the order of a thousand dollars, but I discovered in the process of applying for financial aid at Johnston (my parents having no more than a few hundred dollars saved for the education of any of their six children) the pleasures of "leverage": the thousand dollar scholarship translated into a full board and tuition grant at Johnston for my first year there, a multiplier of about five on the original award. The door was opened for me to a kind of experience I'd never imagined as anything but cinema.

Tutankhamen and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs

Literally golden, yes. The opulence and state of preservation of the exquisite objects in this exhibition are without parallel in ordinary experience. Their immediacy, their conveyance of three thousand years in gilt and faience applied to carved wood, are well worth the price of admission.

That said, I'm doubtful, though willing to be corrected, that any deep student of Egypt would consider the era of the boy king the Golden Age of the Pharaohs, though the exhibition does make some claims for the greatness of Tut's immediate ancestors that seems to carry some weight, even if one excludes the strangeness and utter idiosyncracy of Akhanaten when considering the unbearable continuity of dynastic being.

But the Golden Age designation offers some distraction from the fact that the Mummy nor the Sarcophagus nor any of the glorious boxes wherein Tut resides have made the trip from Cairo. Schoolkids may complain, but I found the presentation and the selection utterly compelling. The polished faux camp chair with carved wood faux hide seat is such a contemporary piece of trompe l'oeil simulation I can hardly believe Baudrillard didn't have a hand in it. Maybe there is such a thing as reincarnation, and Tut's incredible workshop studios were the last place where all the postmodernists gathered in one place -- and in that case, accomplished something of substance for the ages.

Radical influences

I first visited Johnston as a high school senior on a sleepover visit in 1974 or early 1975. My high school guidance counselor recommended that I consider Johnston specifically because she thought I would be overly susceptible to radical influences if I were to go to Berkeley, which I must have mentioned to her as one possible place I was thinking of applying to. If asked, I would have described myself as a pacifist, and if asked again as an anarchist, in my political convictions. All the result of book-reading… I was reading books on “experimental education” that ranged from liberal excoriations of the discriminatory school system to instant anthologies of high school underground newspaper writing to absolute condemnations of all forms of education in schools as such, and skating across the muddle of positions both casually dismissive of and utterly subservient to my opportunities for achievement in high school: writing angst-filled pieces in English classes, taking lit and psychology and sociology through Moorpark, the local community college, and doing what needed to be done to get my A’s in everything else I had to take.

Back from Mendocino

We spent three days at the Cottages at Little River, very pleasant and perfect for families with small kids, though not cheap. Elena enjoyed kicking a ball around on the lawn, playing at the Wiggly playground in Fort Bragg, roasting her first marshmallows at the outdoor gas grill (we bought a S'Mores kit from the office), and watching Stuart Little with us from the sofa bed as a special treat before going to bed late... Nothing memorable in the way of meals, though the service was very good at the Mendocino Hotel and at a place called Egghead's in Fort Bragg which provided some wonderful Wizard of Oz action figures for Elena to play with while we waited for our brunch.

The great forgetting

            In spite of the great forgetting, I still find attractive the idea of texts giving a kind of derivative structure to my memories.  Perhaps it is now the concept of forgotten texts, rather than the great overarching “text” I had hoped to find and read to decipher that earlier self, but the structure of history seems surprisingly unaffected by the presence of particular facts.  And obviously, I have nowhere else to look.

 

A third explanation

            A third explanation is closely related to the previous two, and seems the most likely to me as I write.  It’s that in the first place, I wasn’t really paying very close attention to much of my reading because of the richness of the fabric of the nonliterary experiences to which I was being exposed for the first time (including, during my second year, daily exposure to certain substances at times when I might otherwise have been engaged in sober thought).  And in the second place, I really didn’t do all that much reading, and little if any of the difficult variety, because much of the focus of my “academic” life at Johnston was itself experiential, consisting as it did of classes in poetry-writing, drama, and experiential psychotherapeutic exercise, with my forays into literature and philosophy confined to the lighter classes on offer.  Others at Johnston were indeed reading the Greeks and Kant, but I breathed that smoke at second or third hand.

 

 

A second explanation

            A second explanation for the library of Johnston textbooks lost to conscious memory is that the missing books really weren’t very good or important, and that this is in fact demonstrated by my inability to remember anything from them of a substantive nature or applicable to my recollection of my life at the time.  This hypothesis grants a wondrous power of judgment and discernment to the mechanics of my remembering, and gives my unformed eighteen-year-old mind the great tribute of presuming it capable of understanding anything of significance that might have passed before it on paper.

Possible Explanations (the First)

            Several possible explanations for the lacunae in my readings at Johnston as now recollected occur to me.  The most obvious is just that over thirty years have gone by, and that’s long enough to bury most memories under the sheer volume of succeeding events, even if those events consist largely of getting up in the morning, going to work, and having a couple of beers in the evening.  The hope contained in this first hypothesis is that only a Proustian catalyst is required to bring back the lost memories whole and having a freshness which the stories I’ve told and re-told myself in the meantime are wholly lacking.

Archaeology of Knowledge

            Between 1975 and 1977 I attended Johnston College, a hippie school associated with the University of Redlands which at that time had its own independent accreditation.  I dropped out of school because of concerns about money and ideas about ideals, and within a year or two after that Johnston College was re-absorbed into the University as the Johnston Center, where it has thrived ever since.  I begin with the notion that the whole account of this, my purest attempt at a “liberal education,” might be structured through the books I read both inside and outside of classes while there.

            But in setting out my list, I discover that I’ve forgotten many if not most of the books I read in classes, especially the ones that would lend this exercise a certain kind of intellectual credibility.  What remains are for the most part either books that were best-sellers in 1976 and 1977, and justified in classes either by instructors or students like myself for their “relevance,” or more abstruse works that are the most obvious displays of the period’s intellectual fashion (post-structuralism rolling steadily into deconstructionism).  I find no foundational texts, nor even rigorous surveys of the fields of my interests except perhaps for Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism.

The Black Hole Wars

I listened to Leonard Susskind's The Black Hole Wars on CD in the car, meaning I probably didn't get half of what I was supposed to get, but on the other hand that I might have absorbed more (consciously or unconsciously) than I normally do when reading a book of popular science. The question of what the popular reader actually gets out of a book like this, which is really trying to communicate the content of the science as well as how the science is done, interests me a lot. Something like ten years ago I listened to The Origin of Species on tape while driving, and although again there was a lot that I missed (sometimes while struggling to maintain my alertness on I-5...) the experience of listening to Darwin's arguments "in their entirety" aloud was transformative, something like what I imagine it must have been like for citizens listening to philosophers in the agora. Susskind is attempting to convey the doing of science in the same way. It's a different kind of popular science from either Brian Greene, who as I see it is working to convey the beauty of the vision as a kind of done deal, a vision as it were of how everyone will see the universe working once string theory and its cosmologies have been proven out somehow; and different again from that of Not Even Wrong, whose argument derives from being "inside the argument" but not able to convey all of the things that make the string theorists wrong except at some point in a qualitative way (convincing as one reads long, convincing because of the philosophical holes the author seems to be illuminating in the Landscape theory, the basic weakness of the possibility that it might not be possible to ever verify or disprove the theory).

Nixonland

The town I grew up in, the city of Orange, was very close to Yorba Linda, where Nixon was from before his family moved to Whittier, and I tend to think of it in retrospect as part of "Nixonland." But that would be "Nixonland" in a different sense from that used in Rick Pearlstein's fantastic book of history of the sixties and early seventies. I don't know whether the adjective to apply to this epic is "Tolstoyan" because of its scope and moral vision, or something more comic because the times inherently have an aspect of slapstick and Rabelaisian excess. Either way, the book is an epic, the best recollection of all the insanities of the era I've seen. When I started reading the book a couple of months ago, I read (or skimmed through, rather, looking at the pictures) Barry Miles' book Hippie in parallel. Nixonland was a terrific antidote to the fundamental dishonesty of looking at publicity photographs and self-presentations as history; though on the other hand, the Miles book provided pictures where they were wanting in Pearlstein's, so all in all the less substantial and more one-sided book was still helpful. But Pearlstein's book is a non-fiction novel about both the character of Richard Nixon and the character of American democracy. He allots responsibility between the hippies, the liberals, and the right-wingers in a way that seems to me fundamentally just, though because he does it through storytelling, perhaps being deliberately reminiscent of the sixties' New Journalism (certainly Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson come to mind ) I'm not sure he can claim to have done so as a historian rather than as a brilliant novelist.

On Chesil Beach

I finished reading Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach two nights ago, a short, beautifully constructed novel with the resonance of a Philip Larkin poem.  The plot is not intricate, but the manner of its telling is, without being unnatural.  The past seems to take its rightful place in a movement toward an outcome in the present, the "present" being almost fifty years ago (the same general time period as the setting of Mad Men), the past reaching no more than two decades beyond that.  In the past, we are given both a development of character, and information about what might have shaped it, that information never conclusively tied to the characters' fates, which play out here to their sad end. Psychobiography is possible, even encouraged, but never necessary, for an evaluation of the protagonists' moral qualities and failures.  I liked this book very much.

The Plot Against America

We bought Philip Roth's The Plot Against America right after it came out, and I started reading it then, but somehow got distracted, both by what seemed an opening that was dictated by the overall historical setup of this alternative history, and by some reviews that deflated my enthusiasm enough to cause me to put the book down fifty pages in and not pick it up again for a year. Reviews will do that, even if I don't have any idea of whether the reviewer shares my tastes, thinks like me, etc. (That's the thing about "good" rhetoric -- it's effective on a primate level even when one is attempting to resist its irrationality.)

When I finally did give the book another try, I found it enjoyable and deep, though it still carries the baggage of Roth's trying to imagine a different route through the years leading to and through World War II. But over and above all of that "political" stuff (and it is by no means "political" in the formulaic way most politically correct fiction is now -- it's not, for example, an attempt to directly parallel a fictitious Lindbergh fascist presidency to Bush's terms in office) The Plot Against America reads as a memoir, of a time and place, and of a child's understanding of what his parents are and what they are able to do in the world, for themselves and to protect him. The book is an absolutely essential counterpoint to all the other pictures Roth has given of his parents, many of them comic and seemingly unsympathetic. Here he finds the heroic in the imagined actions of his father and mother under circumstances that never happened -- but what if they had? I tried to make the case to Jenny after reading this book that much of Philip Roth's moral vision has to do not with what people actually end up doing, but what they have the potential to do -- a potential that can only be explored through the medium of fiction, and best through the expanse of something like a novel, where the full case in all its ambiguity can be made.

On the Difficulty of Starting Again

There are no rules about what one needs to add or say. In spite of that, I've been thinking of adding an entry as an obligation I've been unable to get around to for a couple of months now. And after a certain period something like a hardening occurs, and it's no longer a question of adding an entry, but of starting again, re-starting if you will. Blogging is now something I've dropped and am attempting to get back into, like exercise. Starting again has none of the redemptive overtones of starting over, and in a sense I need a little redemption to really feel myself back in the swing of it. Instead of which, I have the suspicion that I may not get around to this again regularly, and that the activity has passed into the great pool of things I do or have done very occasionally, spend a lot of time thinking about as potentiality, but never realize. I guess we'll see.

Cate Blanchett as Elizabeth

We went to see the new Cate Blanchett as Elizabeth I movie a few weeks ago, and enjoyed it enough to finally get the old one (as old as 1998? that was a surprise -- and to see that it was made the same year as Shakespeare in Love when we looked it up to see whether it had received any Oscars) and watch it on DVD last night. Jenny stayed up late to watch the special features, and pointed out to me just as I was going to bed that the director made no bones about historical accuracy not being the point of the movie(s): he started with the icon, and made the story fit the icon. Elizabeth I as super-hero, as it were.

Our famous doctor

Jenny's ob-gyn, Laura Minikel, is in Time magazine because of the long-distance relationship she's had with her husband for years. The image of her is in consequence a specially interesting one -- her face on TV, with her husband in Denmark looking on.

White Chalk

I got P.J. Harvey's new album, White Chalk, a few weeks ago, and have been listening to it in the car when there's an opportunity (Elena is very clear about her listening preferences right now, and if it isn't Raffi or Music Together or Les Garcons Joufflus, she wants me to change the music or turn it off). I have to admit that although P.J. Harvey's more raucous music has an energy I like, and which can become mesmerizing in concert (I saw her at Slim's with Stevie some years ago, and then at the Warfield a few years later with Richard Retecki), I can't listen to that side of her oeuvre over and over the way I can her more melodic work, like the very first album, To Bring You My Love, and the one she did with John Parish and now this one.

Back to Monterey for a day

We drove down last night, stayed at the Munras Lodge which is maybe a block from the much more expensive Casa Munras (justified only by its bloodwarm pool). The night manager was a friendly Pole who allowed me to practice my two Czech phrases on him after he noted that my name meant "freedom" in Czech, and that he was from Czech's "northern neighbor." We drove by Mexcal, hoping to have dinner there again, but the banner had been removed from the building and the place looked very closed, although there were no notices posted indicating it had closed for good -- just nothing that would indicate the restaurant was still a going concern. We went to Denny's instead and had food that was probably prepared from chubs. To the Aquarium today, where it turns out the area known as the Splash Zone, most suitable for toddlers, is closed for refurbishment and won't reopen until March 17 of next year. However, we did see a lot of wonderful fish, including the young great white shark, and had some enjoyable conversations with volunteers who know the place intimately. Then we had lunch for the second time at the Bistro Moulin, which makes a very tasty French onion soup and a fine platter of mussels. Finally, before leaving we played for an hour at Dennis the Menace park, where we met other parents and kids, including a woman from Czech with her two kids.

Before the Dawn

After reading Klein's book The Dawn of Human Culture I jumped right to a more recent book on the same subject, Nicholas Wade's Before the Dawn, in hopes of learning where the science has gone in the three or four years since Klein's book was published. Although there was some good information about what has been happening in the field, chiefly due to the separate lines of scientific development going on in the application of genetics to the field, the presentation was totally different, and it took me half the book before I realized that what I was reading was journalism, not science. What it comes down to in my view is that journalists are willing to cut corners on science for a good story, whereas for a truly good popular scientific writer the science always is the story. There are intermediate cases: Brian Greene would be one such in my experience. His books about physics and string theory are meant to be popular scientific arguments, but it's possible that when the subject gets too close to the cutting edge that he too is guilty of cutting some corners. I mean, the guy in my opinion was almost single-handedly responsible for string theory being seen as scientific orthodoxy by the general public.

Anyway, Wade is ever anxious to point out the ways in which concepts like "race" actually do have scientific validity. His game seems to be to go over areas that touch on a lot of political sensitivities and see whether anything explosive, and yet "proven" by some combination of genetic evidence and probabilistic reasoning (which is never made explicit enough to be understood in the book itself), can be drawn out of applying natural selection to modern human history. Whereas an author like Klein is always willing to describe the paucity of evidence involved in getting to the prevailing view of human history, Wade always leans toward a sophisticated version of "the scientists tell you so" when discussing why a particular scientist's view is or is not orthodox, confirmable, or based on evidence that is still in a state of flux. Wade's book left a bad taste in my mouth, as much as I appreciate and agree with his foremost argument, which is that the idea that natural selection stopped when human culture arose is absurd.

Joseph Mitchell and Joe Gould

I finished Up in the Old Hotel, the collection of Joseph Mitchell's works, last night. The final piece in the book is "Joe Gould's Secret," which qualifies in my mind for the category of nonfiction novel and is a kind of depressing, but Borgesian, masterpiece. Joe Gould and his vast work-in-progress, the Oral History, both are and aren't (because the guy, and his secret, were real) stand-ins for the reader's and Joseph Mitchell's own highest aspirations. Mitchell doesn't simplify the moral dilemmas he finds himself in at any point, and there's a sense in which the reader becomes implicated as well, in his relationship with a mentally imbalanced, self-promoting homeless person who's capable of flashes of wit as well as delusions of grandeur. Where most of us would "do the right thing" in terms of what seems to be asked of us today and pull away (we've been taught by a kind of weakened, and evil, but comfortable, version of Alcoholics Anonymous theology that we are actually being most moral when we do nothing to support or interact with an alcoholic or person of similar disorder), Mitchell is unable to do so, and conveys a palpable sense of being besmirched by his choices with regard to Gould, no matter what they are. It's a marvelous, and still morally relevant work that Dostoevsky would be proud to have written, I think.