Ghosts of the California Genocide, Part 2

A few feet away from the baskets is the painting Sacramento Indian by Charles Christian Nahl (California's first significant artist, according to Wikipedia, and in the Madley book, the primary documenter of Indian life at the moment of its destruction), made for Milton Slocum Latham, a Southerner and Democratic politician who sat in the U.S. House of Representatives between 1850 and 1852 (when eighteen treaties with California Indian tribes that would have allocated land to the tribes were refused by the U.S. Senate under the pressure of white Californian politicians and newspapers).

The "Sacramento Indian" is portrayed as tamed, an essential distinction for the invaders who shaped the state of California and committed genocide in the first two decades of the state's history.  Wild Indians were categorized and treated as wild animals, with no more rights than other dangerous fauna (another painting at the De Young by Nahl depicts a hunter seated with a dead mountain lion lying before him, reminiscent of the Trump brothers on African safari, but also of the way in which animals and Indian are arranged deliberately in this painting).  The man's expression seems to capture something about both his own strength of character and the impossible danger of his position, even as he sits for the portrait with dignified stiffness.

Also in the museum is the wooden mantelpiece that must have dominated the interior of the Thurlow Mansion, taken over by Latham after Thurlow's bankruptcy, and evoking the brutal aristocratic life of an English hunting lord.

And another painting made not long after the portrait of the Sacramento Indian depicts the bustle of the Sacramento train station a couple of decades later, after the end of the period of systematic Indian genocide.  There are no Indians in this painting.

Ghosts of the California Genocide, Part I

I had two tours at the De Young Museum today, neither of which had any takers.  I took for the subject matter of the second, which goes by "Three Masterpieces in Thirty Minutes" on the marquee, the spectral shadows in the museum of the genocide of California's Indians.  Not a happy subject; but appropriate perhaps for Halloween because these presences have been occupying my own mind like pipe-banging ghosts since I started reading Benjamin Madley's An American Genocide about this crucial chunk of California history, missing in my own picture of the narrative until now.

I began my hypothetical tour by looking at this large early 20th century Pomo burden basket.  Woven tightly enough to hold water or cooking coals, California Indian baskets have been seriously (passionately) collected since just after the period of the extermination of almost all the Indians themselves.  Madley dates the genocide from 1846 to 1873, and sees a reduction in population over the period of something like 80%, a reduction to invisibility as far as most of us who live in the state were and are concerned.  The large burden basket has a fantastic optical banding of overlapping and crossing spirals around a monumental form.

Another vitrine contains a series of baskets that diminish in size down to a truly miniaturist scale, barely larger than a nickel.  Like the large burden basket, all of them were made from materials available in the immediate environment of California, prepared to be suitable to their purpose.  The baskets thus speak to the primary rationale for the particular egregiousness of the California genocide, as compared to the many massacres carried out over the rest of the North American continent: the "wild" Indians, because their ways of living on the land were so seemingly unsophisticated and invisible, were regarded as animals.  The justification of murder and slavery followed accordingly and quite explicitly.  And the end result?  An invisibility, the baskets aside, that allows contemporary Californians to still doubt the claims made by the remaining descendents of survivors of the genocide.   

David Lynch, the man from another place

David Lynch: The Man from Another Place by Dennis Lim
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I loved this book, which I listened to on Audible as an accompaniment to the new Twin Peaks shows. It's defiantly middle-brow, in love with popular culture but unafraid to refer to any aesthetic or philosophic movement that might be a good point of reference for a reader (or group of readers in discussion) mulling Lynch's work over, clearly written and with a personal point of view. It's a keystone for me in thinking about the structure of art between 1974, when my English teacher Mrs. Greening put me onto the Theater of the Absurd, and the present. The other thing I really like about Dennis Lim's writing on Lynch is that it doesn't devalue failures (of different magnitudes and for different real-world and interior reasons) in describing the career of an artist -- a worthy antidote to our equally success-corrupted and failure-corrupted art culture of 2017.


View all my reviews

Billionaire

The bombings in Paris: political football of the lowest order, on the part of the Republican candidates for President of the U.S.A.; possible repercussions to the absorption of Syrian refugees by the E.U. (the U.S.A. has never been about to take any significant numbers, so nothing really changes even if Trump whines about not taking any -- too expensive to bring them here, on strictly utilitarian grounds, obviously); what might someday look like the beginning of ISIS's endgame.  Urban terrorism in the West has always been really terrifying but not in any way an existential threat to our existence as a mass of nearly a billion relatively rich people.  Urban terrorism triggers technological and legal responses that ultimately reduce its effects and get the killers, at some sacrifice of liberty and decency -- but did I mention those aren't the values I bring to my analysis of our national interests?

Anyway, in the meantime I'm playing with increasing obsessiveness this marvelous little mobile game called "Billionaire," which requires the player to trade off risk, labor, and time for return in fairly intricate ways that fairly in my mind mimic real economic decision-making.  Time enables one to generate income from a variety of investments, but there is little compounding effect from any one investment: upgrades yield only marginal improvements to return, pretty much like real investments in mature industries.  Risk is represented as legal risk: the more criminal an investment option in the game, the higher its risk.  A high risk profile pretty much ensures that one will spend most of one's time in prison, not able to do anything to generate additional income (though it appears one's investments continue to accumulate in the meantime); and there is an upper limit to the amount of risk one can take on, in absolute terms, so ultimately investments have to be allocated.  Risk can be mitigated by contributing to philanthropic "social" investments with negative risk profiles.  Labor allows one to accelerate, by repeated finger taps that would resonate with any animal psychologist, the building of either money-making or philanthropic investments in order to maximize the value of one's portfolio.  The velocities of the game are two: the accumulation of cash, always slow relative to one's total wealth or ability to invest in new things; and one's personal attention to the game, making sure that not too many investments "max out" and stop accumulating, and rebalancing based on the aforementioned considerations.  It's a lot like managing real money, although there's absolutely nothing to spend it on but more investments...

Feast of All Saints (Saint Paul)

My noon Highlights tour last Sunday (November 1) had "Saints" as its theme in honor of the feast day.  I didn't mention my own atheism to the marvelous group of people who did the tour with me, certainly not wanting to influence their response to the art or my thoughts with what might be reasonably interpreted as a twist of the knife.

We started the tour with the work above, Lorenzo di Niccolo's fourteenth century image of Saint Paul holding sword and book.  The web image does no justice at all to the luminosity of the red, orange and gold of the painting, which could have been painted yesterday rather than six hundred years ago (and I don't know the extent of recent restoration, so some of that luminosity might be a result of that rather than sheer survival).  Both the coloring and the intensity of Saint Paul's face and gaze call the viewer with a kind of personal reach quite different from neighboring paintings of the Madonna or Christ.  I asked a question of the group, something to the effect of "What does this painting convey about sainthood?"  The answer of a young man matched mine: the saint is looking at me, reaching out to me, attesting to his humanity.  The paintings of saints in the collection, even in this semi-medieval period, are all portraits of a sort, meant to imagine human beings with certain capabilities or meanings, but to really imagine them, to identify them as real individuals at the same time that they are categories or types or characters.

Startups

The Wall Street Journal story on February 19 about startups valued at more than a billion was pretty fascinating (I thought).  There were a lot of stories I was already aware of -- in particular, I'd heard the founders of DocuSign, Eventbrite, and Taskrabbit (the first two in the billion dollar club) speak engagingly at a "Tech Founders Forum" event sponsored by Fortune magazine a few weeks back.  In the "fascinating" category was the claim that Jessica Alba's company Honest Co. was among those valued at more than a billion.  I had that info-bit in my mind when having a really enjoyable and inspiring conversation with the founder and owner of Magic Fairy Candles, flying from Colorado back to Oakland last Thursday, hearing her story about how her business had grown and her initial statement that she was far from that startup world, and then realizing that her business was in fact part of that "eco-system" because she's in fact part of the same world (natural beauty and spa supplies) as Honest.  Maybe the distinction that's been drawn between sole proprietor retail small businesses and the rarefied air of startups is not so hard and fast anymore, and maybe all it takes is an openness to possibilities to be part of the disruptive wave that's happening in technology, commerce and capitalism.  I'm wondering, anyway.

I don't see Greece going anywhere good...

Greece can't finance its public expenses internally on its own (at present, and given a famously corrupt system of tax collection).

But Greece isn't willing to take the actions demanded of it to enable further external lending from the eurozone.

Further lending by the eurozone, while it would improve conditions for the Greek public which is clearly hurting so badly it'll vote for anything, won't do much of anything to make Greece better able to finance itself later (through real economic growth or real reduction in corruption).

Ergo, the eurozone shouldn't lend to Greece unless Greece does take the actions required of it.

If the eurozone doesn't lend to Greece, no one else will (look demonocracy's graphic of Greek debt over the past few years for a truly sobering view).

If the Greek government has no other sources of funding, it must either default on its promises to the population, or confiscate wealth internally (and this follows logically even if somehow Greece were to continue putatively to be a member of the eurozone).

If Greece leaves the eurozone, the Greek government will be required to confiscate wealth in the form of bank capital simply to make a conversion back to the drachma possible, in addition to any confiscations required to keep their dreamy promises to their voters.

Now I understand how communist and socialist governments wind up where they do, in complete economic dead ends, even if they don't want to (and I don't think most of them do want to).

I got up this morning

And maybe it was because my laptop was probably destroyed when I spilled a dollop of beer on it, losing all the work I've not backed up on it in the past three years, but somehow I felt free enough to check into my blogs and add to them.  For multiple years I've been staring at them occasionally, wondering how best to deal with them -- pick up a thread? delete them? start new projects as futile as the past ones?  This morning I realized these are just places to put notes to myself, relevance not known in advance, and let the connections if any happen as they will.  Which doesn't mean the connections will happen.  Nevertheless, here I am again.

Bendito Machine

You can watch the video here:

License to Sample, Sample as License

The style of animation references the work of Lotte Reiniger and her descendents, and going further back, Javanese shadow puppetry. This gives the animators license for a degree of "Orientalism" they might not get away with in a less clearly referential style.

The Image Barrage

There is real beauty in the video's collage of lightning fast throwaway television clips, musically syncopated and ornately choreographed. The parabolic storyline is far more primitive, or maybe I should say anachronistic, than the buildup of the images themselves, which proclaim that this way of seeing the detritus of imagery offers a line to the future.

The Cargo Cult of the Thumbnail

Why so? Because it's all been miniaturized, as in some medieval illuminated manuscript, but suitable for absorption via Iphone, to state immaterially that this is how we absorb the art of information now, it's all within the range of perception and conception now (after a couple of decades of absorbing this kind of pace via the work of makers like Martha Colburn). Why not just roll with the punches? It hurts so good.

#edcmooc

I'll be voting for Libby Schaaf

I'll be voting for Libby Schaaf for our open City Council seat in Oakland's District 4 this year.  District 4 is where I've lived since 2002, and covers a large geographical area and population, large enough that apparently we're as big just by ourselves as the city of Santa Clara.  So providing us proper representation on the Council is definitely bound to be very hard work as well as big city politics.  Jean Quan was our councilmember before this; now she's running for Mayor of Oakland, and an opportunity has opened up for the next generation of political leaders to take a place at the table. 

Out of the large group of candidates who've put themselves forward (which is in itself an honorable thing), I choose Libby because I know from having worked with her (briefly, maybe fifteen years ago, at a volunteer agency called the Marcus Foster Institute that she was managing) that she's smart and works hard, and because she offers that magical combination we Americans look for in our political leaders: she has a vision of what she thinks Oakland should be and at the same time she listens to her constituents' own visions (which sometimes contradict hers or each others) and is committed to somehow representing them as well.  Also, she knows the ins and outs of the city's political structures (which tend toward the byzantine, because of the overlay of city organizations with transit agencies, school districts, and the Port of Oakland), and has the capability of working with them in working for our district's interests.

Confidence Game

I've been reading a few books about the credit crash recently.  I previously mentioned The Greatest Trade Ever.  Another that I finished in the last couple of weeks was Confidence Game, by Christine Richard.  I headed my Amazon review of it "A superb account of the end of the credit bubble," though of course that should have been "a credit bubble" as it's surely not the last one.  The review itself reads:

Christine Richard has managed to make a story whose end we already know, about a topic that is still arcane to most (bond insurance), a page turner as good as any suspense novel I've read lately. She combines an ability to explain the big picture and the details of the economic story with a timeless David and Goliath pitting Ackman and herself against the monstrous con that was not only MBIA, but all of the multitude interested in preserving MBIA's public image because a downgrade would be so consequential to the corruption of credit: Democratic congressmen who wanted housing for their uncreditworthy constituents, Republicans who wanted to take credit for false prosperity and keep the money coming, and especially the ratings agencies, other bond insurers, and banks. This is one of the books that should endure to tell the story of the "oughts" fifty years from now.

I sent Christine Richard a fan letter, which regrettably reuses that over-used adjective "superb" – but I did mean it:

Ms. Richard --

Your book was superb, not only a clear account of the failures and duplicities of companies most ignorant people (such as myself) thought of a "regulators" rather than financial corporations, but a lesson in how such accounting should be done, how a case should and can be made in spite of the other side's accusations, and a testament to moral courage on your and Bill Ackman's parts.

One seemingly tangential change in my own politico-economic prejudices obtains from reading your book: I'm now convinced that Obama's predecessors were guilty of an artificial economic stimulus that dwarfs those attempted in the past couple of years, and that in the future I'd prefer a straight Keynesian transfer of funds to the corruption of credit, especially if the end result in either case is to give houses to people whether they can afford them or not.

Thanks for your stellar effort!

To which she kindly responded:

Alva,
Thanks so much for writing! I'm glad you enjoyed the book.
I found your comments very insightful. Looking back it does almost seem that some universal decision was made to spread money around the economy through the "corruption of credit." Definitely a very damaging strategy!
All the best,
Christine

There's nothing better for a reader than receiving a note like that from an author one has enjoyed, is there?

Whole Earth Discipline

I've stopped sampling newspapers on the Kindle for the nonce – it was taking too much of my free reading time, I guess.  Instead I've been finishing some of the books I'd bought for the device, some of which, like the wonderful Richard Holmes book I mentioned in my previous post, I'd been reading from the library even before I got them electronically.  Another example of such was Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Discipline, finished a few days after the Holmes.  I've been reading Brand's books for a long time, since The Last Whole Earth Catalog in high school defined every nook and cranny of what "counterculture" could mean in Orange or Simi Valley in 1974.  I'd argue that there was always a kind of "fannish" (as in science-fiction fandom) element to his writing; certainly a sense of wonder has always been communicated, and certain of his speculations, as in The Media Lab, have been as important to my concepts of what the future might hold as a lot of science fiction.  Whole Earth Discipline continues in both the countercultural and futurist veins; most of all, it makes wonderful arguments for the virtues of being willing and able to change one's mind as one looks at the world.  Though I appreciated (and agree with) his "new-found" support for nuclear power, I found his writing on the benefits of global slums and genetic engineering more challenging and stimulating. 

The Age of Wonder

I made my way, always with much pleasure, through Richard Holmes' The Age of Wonder over perhaps half a year.  I checked it out at one point or another from both of my fabulous library resources (San Francisco Public and Oakland Public) and in both cases kept the book until the overdue fees started to hurt.  Finally, at something like the halfway point, I bought it for myself on the Kindle.  It's a book perfectly suited to such an occasional approach to reading because, I think, it's a large and fairly incoherent story (the rise of British and modern science in the early nineteenth century) told as a series of marvelous smaller and very coherent stories, namely, short biographies of great men.  Beginning with Joseph Banks took me right back to my first enthrallment with Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels.  Banks then becomes a presiding benefactor over the whole period, and the meat of the story, for me, is in the extended biographies of William Herschel and Humphrey Davy, both of whom exemplify that intersection of artistic and scientific practice we've been discussing in incidental comments recently.  Lots of proto-science-fictional speculative thought going on in the minds of all the central figures of the period, too, from Herschel's looking for intelligences on the Moon to Humphrey Davy's final writings about consciousness in the outer planets…

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

Another book read on the Kindle: Philip Pullman's The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, which falls like Moorcock's Behold the Man into the category of re-renderings of the Jesus story that appear from the perspective of unbelievers to be ultimately respectful, even devotional, though there's of course a difficulty for believers in seeing that to be the case.  Pullman has presented himself publicly as an atheist, but as in Dark Materials he keeps that case in the background; in both stories there is a requirement for mysterious evil persons that have something to do with institutional religions to also have powers that can't be explained, that in fact have overtones of the Satanic, and therefore to cast the worlds in which they occur as magical in ways that Pullman's real atheism wouldn't allow.  In The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ it seems that the Devil is directly involved in the construction of the Christian narrative as we know it, from birth to resurrection through death.

The particular wit of the "Pullman version" of the Gospels is that it makes as much use as possible of the materials of the originals, but split between the stories of Jesus (which amount to the kind of nonbelievers' redaction that has a fairly long history I believe, where claims to divinity are not only discarded by rejected and the "hard sayings" to the rich and hypocritical are brought to the fore) and the back story of Christ, in such a way as to make Pullman's retelling almost credible.  As you might expect, though the character of Jesus is powerfully distilled, the character of Christ, composed shall we say of more contemporary literary glues as well as bits and pieces of the Passion narratives, held equal interest, at least in my reading.

The Possessed

Elif Batuman's The Possessed was a very funny book, with some tinges of real seriousness.  Batuman's vignettes of eccentric academic life, especially among grad students, seemed truer to me than most popular portrayals of that world.  She captures that combination of posturing and intellectual dead seriousness that I always found intimidating at academic conferences and among graduate students in the humanities myself (as an engineering, or pseudo-engineering, grad student in Operations Research at Berkeley).  Batuman interleaves the academic story with an extended account of her stay in Uzbekistan, which I found less successful both because I didn't understand the need for the device of telling the story at such length and in three separate instalments, and also because I didn't trust that the kind of comic exaggeration of events and characters in these segments, though very much like that in the "academic parts," bore much relation to truth.  I don't know that the factualness of the events she writes about is even very important, but I couldn't get rid of the suspicion that I was reading something heavily doctored, something like journalistic stand-up comedy, in the Uzbek parts.  That said, I enjoyed the book and I think Elif Batuman has a lot of potential as a New Yorker writer in the grand manner of my favorites (among whom I count Joseph Mitchell as the absolute pinnacle of both style and content).

The Big Short

I recently finished reading Michael Lewis's The Big Short, another of the books I've been going through having to do with the Crash of 2008.  Lewis is quick and pleasurable reading, not a detail man and not having any major ax to grind as far as I could tell (though he certainly has his prejudices, generally inclining him to the "blame greed" school of economic interpretation as far as I could tell).  The anti-social hedge fund manager Michael Burry is probably the protagonist of the book, though other "heroes" run their stories in parallel with his.  Burry, anti-social and obsessive, got his edge on the rest of the investment community by actually reading through the unreadable prospectuses, or whatever you call them, describing the detailed makeup of collateralized debt obligations and other toxic assets.  Now I believe he's buying up farm properties, according to something I saw on MSNBC a couple of weeks ago…

I'll be voting for Jean Quan

I'll be voting for Jean Quan for Mayor of Oakland this year, 2010.  She has represented the district I live in, District 4, in the Oakland City Council for years, much of it in leadership roles on the Council.  During the most recent period of Ron Dellums' mayoralty, which might be characterized as an absence of formal leadership, she has often served as Vice Mayor and been a crucial constructive force for moving toward a solution to the city's seemingly intractable budgetary problems. 

Jean Quan is an extremely hard worker, an attender to her constituents' retail details as well as to the city's big picture, that is to say its future and its long-term well-being.  Though a reliable liberal and Obama supporter, her approach to the affairs of the city has always been problem by problem, with full disclosure of the potential impacts of both budgetary and tax proposals on the people of the city. 

As a moderate Republican, I feel no hesitation in supporting her nonideological liberalism, which occupies an area of potential agreement and problem solution that might unite people with diverse perspectives.  And Oakland is after all one of the most liberal cities in the country; I have no desire to see someone who matches all of my own opinions elected to the city's highest office, because I don't believe such a person could get the city's varied interests to work together.

Years ago, I wrote a generic letter to Councilmember Quan, opining about this or that local issue, I don't remember exactly what, as part of some e-mail list's letter-writing campaign.  It might have had to do with our continuing need for more traffic controls on the nearby main road, but whatever it was, I do remember that Jean Quan wrote me back with a full explanation of why she wasn't able to follow "my" advice, and that she had no hesitation about explaining why her views differed from mine.  I really liked that forthrightness, and I've seen that continue throughout her term of service to the district.  I've only met her once, in passing at a Montclair Christmas shopping event, and while she seemed likeable, and not at all egotistical or sanctimonious, she wasn't what I would call charismatic.  But charismatic is not what I want in leadership of the city during this period of hardship. 

Nor do I think the kind of attempts at large-scale deal-making that Quan's main competitor, Don Perata, would probably bring to the mayoralty are the ways in which I see our problems being gradually resolved.  We've now got "ranked choice voting" in our local races, so I will put Perata down as my second choice in spite of his less preferred approach; I do think he'd do a better job than Dellums has done, at least.  But Jean Quan offers a mode of big city government that actually does give neighborhoods the power to work on their problems, and taxpayers a say in whether they'll pay more, and for what.  She is a terrific exemplar and practitioner of democratic (small d) politics.

I'll be voting for Jerry Brown

I'll be voting for Jerry Brown to be governor of California in the November election.  I think he was an excellent governor during the late 1970's and early 1980's, and was prescient about the energy and environmental issues that would be central to our state's politics and economics for the thirty years since.  Most importantly, he was always a fiscal conservative, which in my mind is not an ideological label but simply a certificate of public sanity.

Did Jerry Brown "fix" the state of California?  No.  We don't live in a world where "philosopher kings" can do the job that's really up to the rest of us, acting as economic and political agents.  The divisions in California between cultural liberals and cultural conservatives have evidently existed at least since the election of Ronald Reagan, the governor before Brown, and they're not going away anytime soon.  Brown did ride the tiger well, crafted deals that crossed the cultural dividing line, and left a productive legacy that continues to serve us well.

I lived in Oakland for the whole period of his being mayor during the second half of the 1990's and the first half of the 2000's, and think he was the best mayor we've had here in the almost thirty years I've lived in Oakland now.  He supported a variety of approaches to revitalizing the downtown area, some of which came to pass, and was always a political realist in trying to achieve his vision.  The art and military charter high schools in Oakland are positive legacies, I think, and demonstrate his ability to be truly inclusive, as contrasted with the sanitized rhetoric of inclusiveness that prevails among "progressives".

Did Jerry Brown "fix" the city of Oakland?  No.  But he set the tone for a rejuvenation of the city that continues today in spite of "bumps in the road" like conflict between youth and the police, or the severe recession we're in today.  (In contrast, I think Ron Dellums has done absolutely nothing for the city during his term – and that contrasts with Dellums' having done plenty of good for the area, despite his ideological reputation, during his long tenure in Congress.)

Brown has kept his feet in the water by serving ably as the state's Attorney General over the past four years.  Now he's offering his services as governor once again, and I think he'll do a good job with the slim pickings offered by the still-conflicted polity.  Unlike Meg Whitman, he's not in hock to his political party – in fact, he's made no promises as to how he'll work with the Legislature on solving California's intractable budget problems.  I expect creative deal-making and principled defence of education spending and anything that would bring capital, venture or otherwise, to the state.  Maybe that's what a Republican like Schwarzenegger would also bring to the process, were he running, and maybe Whitman would be led to the same trough were she (if she should be) elected.  But right now Meg is promising tax cuts to the Republican faithful that are completely politically infeasible unless there's a Tea Party firestorm in California (and I'd be praying for that not to happen every bedtime if I prayed at all), and that and her undoubted executive abilities aren't enough to sway me to consider voting for her.

Brown is the man of the hour, again.  I'm voting for him.

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.