Category: On Books

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“Ho! Ho! Ho! To the bottle I go….”

Your Humble Narrator, decked out in Renfest-cottagecore regalia for an evening’s reading in Middle Earth. Note that I’m quaffing a beer, as rum isn’t a thing in Middle Earth, so far as I can tell!

Ho! Ho! Ho! to the bottle I go
To heal my heart and drown my woe.
Rain may fall and wind may blow,
And many miles be still to go,
But under a tall tree, I will lie,
And let the clouds go sailing by.

Drinking Song from The Fellowship of the Ring, JRR Tolkien.

A while back I embarked on a re-read of The Lord of the Rings. My progress has been slower than usual, because of reasons, but as ever I find myself loving this story deeply, and Tolkien’s luminous, lyrical writing continues to astonish and amaze me. I am as drawn in as ever, and this time I’m paying special attention to the poetry, of which JRRT writes many different kinds…including a drinking song or two.

The Peter Jackson movies did a decent job of incorporating Tolkien’s poetry, as much as they could for mass audiences, and here’s an artist who compiles some of the drinking songs from the films into one medley. The songs aren’t entirely Tolkien, but they contain enough of him that I don’t think he’d object to any of this.

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From the Books, for International Women’s Day

This is a repost from a couple of years ago. I chose to repost this, about a book by astronomer Sara Seager, because it has lodged in my brain since I read it.

I generally try to avoid reading grief memoirs, for various reasons that mainly boil down to…well, I’ve had enough grief in my life already and I know that more is on the way someday*, and it’s a subject I don’t much enjoy plumbing any more than I have to. But sometimes I find a grief memoir that piques my interest and I read it anyway. Smallest Lights is such a book, and I am very glad that I read it. It’s so much more than a grief memoir, really. It’s about science and love and life and death and love again and parenthood and dealing with autism.

The Smallest Lights in the Universe, Sara Seager
It’s also beautifully written.

Not every planet has a star. Some aren’t part of a solar system. They are alone. We call them rogue planets.

Because rogue planets aren’t the subjects of stars, they aren’t anchored in space. They don’t orbit. Rogue planets waner, drifting in the current of an endless ocean. They have neither the light nor the heat that stars provide. We know of one rogue planet, PSO J318.5-22–right now, it’s up there, it’s out there–lurching across the galaxy like a rudderless ship, wrapped in perpetual darkness. Its surface is swept by constant storms. It likely rains on PSO J318.5-22, but it wouldn’t rain water there. Its black skies would more likely unleash bands of molten iron.

It can be hard to picture, a planet where it rains liquid metal in the dark, but rogue planets aren’t science fiction. We haven’t imagined them or dreamed them. Astrophysicists like me have found them. They are real places on our celestial maps. There might be thousands of billions of more conventional exoplanets–planets that orbit stars other than the sun–in the Milky Way alone, circling our galaxy’s hundreds of billions of stars. But amid that nearly infinite, perfect order, in the emptiness between countless pushes and pulls, there are also the lost ones: rogue planets. PSO J318.5-22 is as real as Earth.

There were days when I woke up and couldn’t see much difference between there and here.

Sara Seager is an astrophysicist at MIT whose main body of work involves exoplanets, their discovery around other stars, and analyzing them for signs of life. Among other things, if you wonder how on Earth (literally!) we can look for life on planets lightyears away that nobody in our lifetime (or, likely, in our great-grandchildrens’ lifetimes) will ever see directly, this book will give you some hints as to how that search is currently going. (It involves ingenious analysis of light coming from those planets. It really is amazing, when you think about it, the degree to which light energy is the main carrier of information in this universe of ours.)

In her book, Seager discusses her own work and the degree to which her work has shaped her personal life, and how her personal life has shaped her work in return. Her first husband was a man of considerable energy, whom she met on a canoeing trip; their courtship progressed on more canoeing trips all over the place. But he developed cancer, which eventually killed him at a terribly and unfairly young age. Thus this brilliant astrophysicist, whose work is an important part of the current growth of human knowledge of our universe, finds herself a single parent attending meetings of the local widow’s club, figuring out the nature of this new world she’s been thrust into. It’s the cruelest of ironies, I suppose, that this woman whose life’s work is understanding the universe and seeking other worlds suddenly finds herself in a new world, one that’s familiar to people who have known deep grief, where everything is the same and yet everything is deeply different.

Throughout Seager’s book, I found myself frequently hit in the heart by some of her observations:

:: Everybody dies instantly. It’s the dying that happens either quickly or over a long period of time. Mike spent a long time dying: eighteen months separated his diagnosis and his death.

:: There have been lessons I have chosen not to teach. Not all knowledge is power; not all things are worth knowing. Max and Alex [her sons] never saw Mike’s body. They did not see him leave the house.

:: [On the Widow’s club] All of our children had become friends. They didn’t gather because their fathers had died; they gathered because it was fun. There is a reason every children’s book is written from the perspective of the child. Children don’t care about adult concerns. We think of children as helpless when they are the embodiment of resilience, more impervious to outside forces than we could ever be again. Despite their suffering, our kids still knew pure joy.

:: Sometimes you need darkness to see. Sometimes you need light.

:: I don’t think it’s an accident that there’s a mirror at the heart of every telescope. If we want to find another Earth, that means we want to find another us. We think we’re worth knowing. We want to be a light in somebody else’s sky. And so long as we keep looking for each other, we will never be alone.

I love that last one (which actually closes the book, so apologies for the ‘spoiler’). Seager casts loneliness not in terms of presence but in terms of action: we’re only truly lonely when we accept that we are alone and stop seeking others to enrich our lives. True loneliness, really being alone, comes of a permanent turning inward, of looking down and not up. And really, how else would someone who loves the stars see things?

The Smallest Lights in the Universe is a wonderful book that stands in stark contrast, it seems to me, to the view of science as cold and mechanical and mathematical, an enterprise that somehow forgets about emotion and wonder. No less a genius than Walt Whitman expressed this view, in “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”. But the numbers and the proofs surely don’t have to get in the way of the wonder; rather they inform it and give it focus. Science is not an impediment to love and life. Science is a part of those things. Sara Seager’s book shows us how.

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From the Books: NO NAME IN THE STREET, James Baldwin

James Baldwin. Image credit: The New Yorker

I have just finished reading James Baldwin’s powerful essay-book No Name in the Street, in which Baldwin describes his early life and his encounters later with many figures, some seminal and some less-so, and how he relates all of this to his larger experience as a Black man in 20th century America. It does not come as a surprise to observe how many of his observations can be, and are being by others, advanced as true to this very day. For all that we, for certain definitions of “we”, like to pat ourselves on the back for how far we’ve come, it’s very much worth the effort to look at history from the vantage point of those who don’t think we’ve come very far at all. And that view is absolutely justified, which goes a long way toward explaining the vehement degree to which many in power now are working hard to make sure this view is as hard to hear as possible.

I could say more, but…no. Better to listen to the voices we’re shouting down, and to amplify them, if possible. Here are three excerpts from Baldwin. (Page numbers are from the Library of America edition of No Name in the Street, which appears in their volume, James Baldwin: Collected Essays. (A word about usage: Baldwin wrote fifty years ago, well before some aspects of terminology were settled or adopted, such as the recent standard of capitalizing Black. Opening capitalizations of these passages are added to differentiate one passage from the next.)

WHEN THE PAGAN and the slave spit on the cross and pick up the fun, it means that the halls of history are about to be invaded once again, destroying and dispersing the present occupants. These, then, can call only on their history to save them–that same history which, in the eyes, of the subjugated, has already condemned them. Therefore, Faulkner hoped that American blacks would have the generosity to “go slow”–would allow white people, that is, the time to save themselves, as though they had not had more than enough time already, and as thought heir victims still believed in white miracles–and Camus repeated the word “justice” as though it were a magical incantation to which all of Africa would immediately respond. American blacks could not “go slow” because they had made a rendezvous with history for the purpose of taking their children out of history’s hands. And Camus’ “justice” was a concept forged and betrayed in Europe, in exactly the same way the Christian church has betrayed and dishonored and blasphemed that Saviour in whose name they have slaughtered millions and millions and millions of people. And if this mighty objection seems trivial, it can only be because of the total hardening of the heart and the coarsening of the conscience among those people who believed that their power has given them the exclusive right to history. If the Christians do not believe in their Saviour (who has certainly, furthermore, failed to save them) why, then, wonder the unredeemed, should I abandon my gods for yours? For I know my gods are real: they have enabled me to withstand you. (p. 382-383)

THIS IS A FORMULA for a nation’s or a kingdom’s decline, for no kingdom can maintain itself by force alone. Force does not work the way its advocates seem to think it does. It does not, for example, reveal to the victim the strength of his adversary. On the contrary, it reveals the weakness, even the panic of his adversary, and this revelation invests the victim with patience. Furthermore, it is ultimately fatal to create too many victims. The victor can do nothing with these victims, for they do not belong to him, but–to the victims. They belong to the people he is fighting. The people know this, and as inexorably as the roll call–the honor roll–of victims expands, so does their will become inexorable: they resolve that these dead, their brethren, shall not have died in vain. When this point is reached, however long the battle may go on, the victor can never be the victor: on the contrary, all his energies, his entire life, are bound up in a terror he cannot articulate, a mystery he cannot read, a battle he cannot win–he has simply become the prisoner of the people he thought to cow, chain, or murder into submission. (p. 406-407)

THOSE WHO RULE this country now–as distinguished, it must be said, from governing it–are determined to smash the Panthers [the Black Panther Party] in order to hide the truth of the American black situation. They want to hide this truth from black people–by making it impossible for them to respond to it–and they would like to hide it from the world; and not, alas, because they area ashamed of it but because they have no intention of changing it. They cannot afford to change it. They would not know how to go about changing, it, even if their imaginations were capable of encompassing the concept of black freedom. But this concept lives in their imaginations, and in the popular imagination, only as a nightmare. Blacks have never been free in this country, never was it intended that they should be free, and the spectre of so dreadful a freedom–the idea of a license so bloody and abandoned–conjures up another, unimaginable country, a country in which no decent, God-fearing white man or woman can live. A civilized country is, by definition, a country dominated by whites, in which the blacks clearly know their place. This is really the way the generality of white Americans feel, and they consider–quite rightly, as far as any concern for their interest goes–that it is they who, now, at long last, are represented in Washington. (p. 462-463)

TO BE AN AFRO-AMERICAN, or an American black, is to be in the situation, intolerably exaggerated, of all those who have ever found themselves part of a civilization which they could in no wise honorably defend–which they were compelled, indeed, endlessly to attack and condemn–and who yet spoke out of the most passionate love, hoping to make the kingdom new, to make it honorable and worthy of life. Whoever is part of whatever civilization helplessly loves some aspects of it, and some of the people in it. A person does not lightly elect to oppose his society. One would much rather be at home among one’s compatriots than be mocked and detested by them. And there is a level on which the mockery of the people, even their hatred, is moving because it is blind: it is terrible to watch people cling to their captivity and insist on their own destruction. I think black people have always felt this about America, and Americans, and have always seen, spinning above the thoughtless American head, the shape of the wrath to come. (p. 474)

That last passage is one that haunts me especially, because I’m not sure that Baldwin’s “wrath to come” has unfolded yet.

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From the Books: THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS

I’m currently reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic sci-fi novel The Left Hand of Darkness, and while I rarely quote books while I’m reading them, this one passage hit me between the eyes. The story involves a planet that’s divided into two countries, and our two protagonists–one a planetary native, one an off-world visitor–are on the run in one of the two countries (“Orgoreyn”) and are trying to cross great distance to return to the other.

This exchange takes place, with the first line spoken by the off-world visitor who is a stranger to these countries:

“You hate Orgoreyn, don’t you?”

“…Hate Orgoreyn? No, how should I? How does one hate a country, or love one?…I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one’s country; is it hate of one’s uncountry? Then it’s not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That’s a good thing, but one mustn’t make a virtue of it, or a profession…Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope.”

Lots of good food for thought in this book. But then, it’s Le Guin, so this is not a surprise.

UPDATE!!! So I just finished the novel, and it turns out there’s an Introduction to the book. Oddly, in my Library Of America edition of Le Guin’s works in which Left Hand is anthologized, that introduction does not appear at the beginning of Left Hand but rather as an appendix to the book as a whole, which is a rather odd thing, I must say. But anyway, in that introduction appears this bit of wisdom:

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.

The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

I love that sentiment.

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From the Books: SEAMANSHIP, by Adam Nicolson

Subtitled A Voyage Along the Wild Coasts of the British Isles, Adam Nicolson’s book Seamanship relates the story of how Nicolson, in a moment that might be consdiered a mid-life crisis, decided to acquire a yacht and sail from Cornwall to the west coast of Ireland, then back to Scotland and through the Hebrides and ultimately to the Faeroes. The yacht is acquired, a skipper (named George) is hired, and off they go.

It is, as you might expect, a voyage fraught with difficulties. Nicolson’s status as a novice sailor is exposed almost immediately as he struggles with seasickness before they’re barely out of port, and more struggles come along the way, such as a disastrous attempt by Nicolson to take their inflatable raft and go ashore at one point. Along the way the personal relationship between Nicolson and George suffers, with the two men unable to bridge the gap between novice sailor on a trip that’s basically a whim and the experience seaman who is grappling with the awkwardness of being both Captain and employee to the same man.

Along the way they make many stops at the stunning locations along those particular seacoasts (the book could really have used a photo section), and Nicolson’s descriptive passages are all evocative and well-written. They meet people along the way–a French sailor here, a cloister of excommunicate monks there–but the encounters are over almost too quickly, and the book always seems to be skirting around the level of depth and thoughtfulness that I found myself expecting. I really kind of expected more from this book, which manages to fall on the wrong side of the oft-cited rule of showpeople everywhere: “Always leave ’em wanting more.” If you do that, sometimes it really is the case that you didn’t give ’em enough.

But like I said, there are a lot of really fine passages in Nicolson’s book, most of which come as he grapples with the enormity and the indifferent nature of the sea itself. This passage comes from when he has managed to capsize their raft and is struggling just to get back to the surface:

Down deeper this time into the roll of the surf, suddenly alarmed at the idea of the dinghy itself, its protruding outboard, coming slamming on to my head as I was down there, and the feeling of enclosure, of wanting to shout, but the water of course clogging me into silence, a wet muddled claustrophobia like the worst of a bad dream, a fear like a nightsheet twisted around your head, into your mouth and nostrils and neck, a gag on your life, a garrotting by water.

This was the idea of the sea in its killing horror, the death element, the antithesis of life. This moment, seen face to face, was the reason that people have always, from the very beginning, loathed the sea. The Odyssey, which is not only the first but the greatest sea poem ever written, as old as the tumuli in which chieftains lie buried on the hills of southern England, and old then the great hillforts that straddle the skyline beside them, is suffused not with love of the sea but fear of it. Odysseus–the first great middle-aged hero in literature; his poem the story of the Middle-aged Man and the Sea–longs to go home, to the sweetness of land and the stillness of a house. But the loathing of Poseidon, the sea god, encloses him in one near fatal sea-trap after another. That is one of the Odyssey‘s central meanings: the sea itself is the element of death.

A few pages later:

The condition of the sea is murderous. Homer calls it “wine-dark” not because that is its color, even in the Aegean, but because that is its nature. It is thick with the intoxication of darkness. It is loved, sentimentally, by the ignorant and by romantics because death is the moment for which Romanticism longs, and because, as Homer knew, as my own panicked crisis now told me, no moment is more vivid than one embraced by death.

That is why death as sea is such a casual affair. Death has no need to approach. It doesn’t need to gird itself up here. It doesn’t come rolling like a swell, proceeding grandly towards you with its bosom before it and its intentions clear. Death is already there, a few feet away, resting beneath the table, its head on its paws and a smile in its eyes, happy to accept the scraps that fall.

Perhaps it’s a spoiler to note that nobody actually dies at sea in Seamanship, but Nicolson seems to feel death’s nearness at each point anyway. That’s probably wise. The sea can, after all, take us and never give a single tiny hint as to where we’ve gone.

 

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EA Poe, Nature Writer

I woke up early yesterday morning–quite early, in fact, well before sunrise and well well well before I had any intention of getting out of bed–so I reached for my Kindle and looked for something to read. I landed on a short essay by Edgar Allan Poe, about a stream near Philadelphia. Called “Morning on the Wissahiccon”, I found it a fascinating little piece, parts of it appealing to me on a number of levels.

Poe:

Indeed, in America generally, the traveller who would behold the finest landscapes, must seek them not by the railroad, nor by the steamboat, nor by the stage-coach, nor in his private carriage, nor yet even on horseback — but on foot. He must walk, he must leap ravines, he must risk his neck among precipices, or he must leave unseen the truest, the richest, and most unspeakable glories of the land.

Now in the greater portion of Europe no such necessity exists. In England it exists not at all. The merest dandy of a tourist may there visit every nook worth visiting without detriment to his silk stockings; so thoroughly known are all points of interest, and so well-arranged are the means of attaining them. This consideration has never been allowed its due weight, in comparisons of the natural scenery of the Old and New Worlds. The entire loveliness of the former is collated with only the most noted, and with by no means the most eminent items in the general loveliness of the latter.

I looked up the Wissahiccon, which is now more commonly spelled “Wissahickon”. It is a stream that rises north of Philadelphia and flows into the Schuylkill River (and then to the Delaware, Delaware Bay, and finally the Atlantic Ocean). I am unfamiliar with the Wissahiccon personally, though looking it up on the map I see that I have almost certainly ridden by it more than a few times, first many years ago when we were frequently traveling from home in NY to the Philly area to visit relatives, and more recently when we drove past its mouth at the Schuylkill as we drove through Philly to New Jersey for vacation.

Looking through some photos the last day, the Wissahiccon looks like exactly the kind of stream I love most: rocky, with occasional waterfalls and vestiges of very old industry now abandoned and returned to nature. As urban as this entire region is, the Wissahiccon has largely been allowed to remain parkland; I’m sure for people in the North Philly region and those suburbs, the Wissahiccon forms a lovely place for respite.

Poe, again:

A singular exemplification of my remarks upon this head may be found in the Wissahiccon, a brook, (for more it can scarcely be called,) which empties itself into the Schuylkill, about six miles westward of Philadelphia. Now the Wissahiccon is of so remarkable a loveliness that, were it flowing in England, it would be the theme of every bard, and the common topic of every tongue, if, indeed, its banks were not parcelled off in lots, at an exorbitant price, as building-sites for the villas of the opulent. Yet it is only within a very few years that any one has more than heard of the Wissahiccon, while the broader and more navigable water into which it flows, has been long celebrated as one of the finest specimens of American river scenery. The Schuylkill, whose beauties have been much exaggerated, and whose banks, at least in the neighbourhood of Philadelphia, are marshy like those of the Delaware, is not at all comparable, as an object of picturesque interest, with the more humble and less notorious rivulet of which we speak.

Poe’s entire essay can be found here. I’ve always loved Poe as a writer, but even having read much of his poetry and his prose fiction, I’ve read very little of his essaying. Fascinating man, Edgar Allan Poe.

(Image credits: 1, 2, 3)

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A lovely haul

One thing I forgot to mention the other day (aside from citing a visit to a specific Barnes&Noble) is that a big part of our Ithaca vacation each year is a book binge. I save up for quite a while and then…well, here’s what happened this year. This is from three different bookstores: the afore-mentioned B&N in Pittsford, and Ithaca’s Odyssey Books and Autumn Leaves (the latter being a wonderful used bookstore).

And then what did I do on Monday? Why, I went to the library and checked out five books! Because, well, it’s what you do.

Time to do some reading before vacation ends….

 

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“Can you love someone you don’t remember?” (A book review)

How can love persist in a world without memory? That’s the question posed by author Sarina Dahlan in her debut novel, Reset.

A while back I received an advance copy of a this novel, and I’m happy to report that it’s a very good book indeed, with a premise that is haunting and intriguing.

The setting is a human future, set an indeterminate number of years from now, in which humanity has been reduced to living in just four very large cities after a cataclysmic conflict leaves most of the world a scorched wasteland. In order to keep the seeds of such a conflict from sprouting and taking root again, a devilish new process has become the norm: every four years, everyone’s memory is wiped. Children are not raised by families but rather in institutions. All this was set in place by a single figure, in an attempt to quell the natural passions that are apparently the root causes of the conflict that nearly destroyed everything.

But there are some in this world who don’t want to forget, some who simply don’t forget at all. There are some who are tortured by their dreams and by a constant sense of deja vu, and some of these people are cursed to remember who they loved the last time around.

Reset asks questions like “What point is there in love if you’re going to be made to forget it all?” These are hard questions, and it leads to a memorable and haunting read that doesn’t offer a series of pat answers at its end. The novel explores ideas of memory and its permanence; it’s hard to separate the idea of Reset‘s “tabula rasa” (the process by which all memories are erased every four years), a science-fictional concept, and the very real-world problems posed by neurological conditions that rob people of their memories in a slow and inexorable process.

Dahlan is very focused here on love and the question of how it can endure when so much of our concept of love is bound up in memory. Are we simply going to move from one partner to another the next time around? Is what we feel actually love, if it’s so easily removed like a stone is removed from one’s shoe? Dahlan keeps the focus on the love story and the small cast of characters centrally involved within it, which is probably a wise choice. Some of the standard dystopia-story tropes are here, like the secret society of people who want to defeat the dystopian regime and restore something of the earlier world; at times the novel has chase scenes that put me in mind of Logan’s Run and THX-1138. But those aren’t the focus of the book; the main focus is, in fact, on lead character Aris and her confrontation of the idea that “tabula rasa”, which she has always supported because it’s simply what she knows, might have a dark underbelly to it.

Reset walks a fine line, in spinning a dystopian story in which the people are actually not slogging through grim lives of despair in wrecked cityscapes of bleak filth. The world of Reset is actually appealing in some ways, though I am not always clear on how everything works in this world. It seems to me that an essential part of a functioning society is continuity, and even if many of the underlying mechanistic jobs of society are handled in automated or robot fashion, the erasing of all memories every four years would damage that very continuity. I found the world-building of Reset not entirely convincing, but then…that’s not really the kind of tale Dahlan is trying to tell, in the first place. Her focus is on just a few characters and how they live and confront the issues posed by the very world they inhabit. If you’re looking for the kind of dystopia story in which the heroes lead a revolution against the powerful (or The Machine), this isn’t that book. If you’re looking for a solid love story set within the framework of a cold and rather heartless dystopia, Reset may well be your cup of tea.

 

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“And there was evening, and there was morning—the fifth day”

Yeah, I’m pretty much back to normal this morning. I’m not planning on testing myself again until tomorrow, but it’s really looking like I’ve weathered my own personal COVID storm pretty well. I’m one of the lucky ones for whom it was “just a cold”. Since the worst of my cold passed on Monday, I’ve basically been enjoying what is turning out to be a lovely August week–albeit, a week when I can’t interact with anyone except my immediate family. It’s like house arrest, but without the ankle monitor. Oh well! Writing is also starting to go passingly well again, but more on that in another post.

Meanwhile, the open tabs are starting to pile up, so let’s clear out some stuff. That’s right, folks, it’s a GRAB-BAG POST! Yay!!!!

Pitter patter, let’s get at ‘er:

::  The value of owning more books than you can ever read.

I love articles like this, because they justify this book-buying lifestyle of mine. I make no apologies. None! Give me all the books! (I do need to do some weeding soon, though. That’s a project for my annual Autumn Vacation.) This article justifies large numbers of unread books in a way that I’d not thought of before in quite this way, however:

These selves of unexplored ideas propel us to continue reading, continue learning, and never be comfortable that we know enough. Jessica Stillman calls this realization intellectual humility.

People who lack this intellectual humility — those without a yearning to acquire new books or visit their local library — may enjoy a sense of pride at having conquered their personal collection, but such a library provides all the use of a wall-mounted trophy. It becomes an “ego-booting appendage” for decoration alone. Not a living, growing resource we can learn from until we are 80 — and, if we are lucky, a few years beyond.

A large personal library as an expression of acknowledgment of our own ignorance? I like that.

::  On lesbians and overalls. (“Dungarees” in the article; I believe the author is British and that’s the word they use over there.) I don’t have much of anything to add, but I did note during the 2000s and the 2010s–when overalls almost completely disappeared after a solid three decades of their being somewhat common, and downright ubiquitous in the 90s–that the only people really keeping them alive were the gays. I thank them for that! I couldn’t do all the heavy lifting myself, after all.

::  Loose lips sink ships. A typically superb essay by Jim Wright, a former Naval intelligence officer who now writes about politics and current events on his own.

What did Trump take?

I don’t know. But the very fact that he could walk out of the White House with classified material shows you that we as a nation need much better oversight and control of this process.

Trump’s own supporters often talk about “our way of life.”

And that’s ironic, because the very foundation of our way of life is that the president is not a king and he can’t just wave his hand and make it so.

This material does not belong to him, it belongs to us.

The president is not above the law.

Shortly after the 2016 election–and by “shortly”, I mean, minutes later–I started believing that that single election might well turn out to be the biggest self-inflicted wound in American history. The ripples from 2016 will be echoing through history long after I’ve joined the Choir Invisible, and I see to this day a reluctance on the part of Americans to admit that in a democracy, the blame always should go to us.

::  The real home run record is 73, not 61.

I’ve been paying more attention to baseball the last few years than I had basically from 2000 to, oh, 2015 or thereabouts. In the 90s I loved baseball and I almost always had a game on the teevee if there wasn’t something else we were watching (and it was baseball season, of course). While I’m not much for televised sport anymore, I’ve found it appealing to follow sport the way people probably back in the days before television: they read about it! You can do this, after all. I find that I can know just as much about what happens without spending three hours watching various sporting events by reading the work of all the fine people out there who write about sport. And then there are the box scores! I’ll let Fox Mulder explain:

 It’s like the Pythagorean Theorem for jocks. It distills all the chaos and action of any game in the history of all baseball games into one tiny, perfect, rectangular sequence of numbers. I can look at this box and I can recreate exactly what happened on some sunny summer day back in 1947.

Of course, no box score is perfect; sometimes you just have to see the weirdness that the box score can’t capture. Like this moment, which I just saw this morning: a minor league batter takes a swing at the ball, makes contact, and the ball goes…nowhere.

Well.

Back to the link above, this year there’s a player named Aaron Judge who plays right field for the Yankees. He’s already been known as a good power hitter, having hit 52 home runs in his rookie season in 2017. But this year he’s on an even more torrid (“torrider”?) pace. As of this writing he has 46 home runs already, which roughly translates to 64 home runs if he maintains that pace for the balance of the season. The famous single-season home run record for many years was Roger Maris’s 60 home runs in 1960, a record which stood until the late 1990s, when it was first broken by Mark McGwire and then also superseded by Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds, who set the current record at 73.

But.

Those players were all implicated in the steroid scandals that swamped baseball in the early 2000s, and therefore, a whole lot of people view their accomplishments and records as being tainted. None of those players has been elected to the Hall of Fame, despite near-universal acceptance that Bonds was one of the very greatest players in the entire history of Major League Baseball. This has led many to simply set aside the numbers Bonds and the others put up, and re-establish Maris’s mark as the real record to beat.

The linked writer, Will Leitch, disagrees. Strenuously.

You could make a plausible argument that Judge is having the best home-run-hitting season of all time. McGwire, Sosa, and Bonds all accomplished their feats during an age of unprecedented home-run and scoring rates. And in 2022, nearly every pitcher in the game is throwing 95 mph cutters with late movement, and ultra-specialized relievers mean your final at-bat of the night is usually against some 23-year-old kid who throws 102. Pitching right now is as good as it has ever been. The leaguewide batting average this year is .243, the lowest since 1968, a.k.a. the “Year of the Pitcher” — making Judge’s mammoth blasts all the more impressive. If Bonds and company had to face the caliber of pitchers standard in today’s game, would they have broken Maris’s record? I doubt it.

The thing is, though: They did. The record is not 61: It is 73. Unlike in Maris’s case, there is no asterisk. There is no footnote in the record book reading, “Sure, Barry Bonds is technically the man to beat, but a lot of people didn’t like him and he probably took cow tranquilizers and had a huge head, so not really.” If Judge doesn’t get to 73, he doesn’t get the record. It’s pretty cut-and-dried.

I tend to agree with Leitch. I always found MLB’s tippy-tap dance around PEDs rather disingenuous–“There’s a thing we’d like you to not do, but we’re not going to actually make it a rule that you not do it, nor are we going to undergo any procedures to verify that you’re not doing it, and if you happen to enjoy spectacular success that brings good teevee ratings to us in a time when wow, we could really use some good teevee ratings, well, what’s the harm!”–and I find the resulting annual moralizing bullshit by Hall of Fame voters really cloying and ultimately nauseating. Every year we’re subjected to thinkpieces about “Why I’m not voting for the steroid guys again“, and every year–even moreso, really, with the passage of time–this crap reads more and more like the protest nonsense of self-appointed gatekeepers and guardians whose mission in life is to make sure that baseball’s history is always and forever whitewashed with just the right shade of sepia.

(I also have some suspicions as to the degree to which the public’s distaste for honoring Barry Bonds’s accomplishments stems from his being a black man who, let’s be honest, never put much effort at all into being what white people consider “pleasant”.)

(Oh, by the way, the X-Files episode I reference above, “The Un-natural”, is one of my favorite episodes of any teevee show, ever. If you can track down just that episode, watch it. It’s a stand-alone that requires zero knowledge of that show’s weighty mythology.)

::  OK, I gotta talk about this a little.

I’m not going to get into all the many ways this “I am TOO a man of the people!” Dr. Oz moment is a campaign gaffe for the ages (but seriously, it reminds me of the 2000 Senate NY senate race when that nitwit Rick Lazio thought that storming across the debate stage to force a pen into Hillary Clinton’s hand to sign his bullshit compaign-tone pledge was a great idea). You can read about his failure to even know what store he’s in (resulting in his mashing together the names of two real stores into one name of a store that doesn’t exist), and his absurd notions of what constitutes a veggie tray, and his goofy ideas about prices and how to shop, in lots of other places. You can also dig elsewhere into the current Republican trend of ignoring that inflation is a global trend because they want to blame whatever they can on Joe Biden.

I just want to focus on…Oz’s shirt.

Who the hell wears a Henley shirt with all the collar buttons done up?!

The whole point of a Henley is that the collar opens! It’s why you wear one! There is literally zero point to wearing a Henley shirt if you’re going to button up the collar. At that point you’re better served wearing a long-sleeve tee or a sweater. Just go with a friggin’ button-up shirt, you weirdo–or, if you must, a polo or a golf shirt. (My own personal suspicion of men increases directly with the number of golf shirts in their wardrobes, but that’s just me.) It’s just one more detail in a campaign video in which every detail screams out, “OK, guys, I gotta go where and do what, now? OK, how do I dress for that? Fine, is that my size? Does this look OK? It does? OK, let’s go!”

After this, Oz said something about his bungling of the store’s name along the lines of “Getting the names right doesn’t say anything about my ability to lead the Commonwealth.” This shows that he doesn’t even understand what he’s running for. Senators don’t lead their states, Doc. They represent them.

Seriously, at some point Oprah Winfrey has to account for giving this clown the public life he’s enjoying now.

::  Finally, here are two cats being jerks.

That’s Carla’s bed.

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From the Books: “Measure Twice, Cut Once”

I saw a news item the other day that carpenter Norm Abram is retiring from his decades-long job on the teevee show This Old House, which he has been on for over 40 years. I haven’t watched a lot of This Old House, but I have caught it now and then, and it’s always an enjoyable show from which I learn things when I do catch it.

Abram is also an author, and one of his books is a favorite of mine: Measure Twice, Cut Once: Lessons from a Master Carpenter. This small, short book is just what the subtitle says: a series of practical lessons from a person who has been practicing their particular trade for many years. Abram doesn’t go in for a lot of preachy “what it all means” motivational stuff in this book (with a couple of exceptions); he just writes clearly and succinctly about tools and their use and how to approach jobs. This is not an “intro to carpentry” book, but rather the kind of thing you might want to read if you know your way around a toolbox but don’t feel like you know your way around a toolbox, know what I mean?

Toolboxes

Working with my father, I didn’t have a toolbox of my own at first. He had plenty of tools, and I borrowed what I needed. Leather toolbelts hadn’t yet come into fashion; when they did, I was an early convert. My dad never wore a toolbelt. He wore bibbed overalls with loops and pockets for various hand tools sewn on them. He wore them over his work clothes all year, even, to my astonishment, in the worst heat of summer. I wore a cloth nail apron and carried the tools I needed at the moment until I graduated to my own toolbox and leather toolbelt.

There are several kinds of toolboxes, each with advantages and disadvantages. Some carpenters carry triangular wood boxes with pole handles but no covers. These days, I often see carpenters lugging around five-gallon drywall compound buckets with drop-in dividers with slots for tools. They’re not very elegant, but every tool is visible and easily reached. There is almost no stacking, which leads to pawing through layers to uncover the desired tool.

My dad carried a metal carpenter’s box with square corners. Its hinged cover swung open to reveal a shallow removable tray sitting over a larger storage compartment. His toolbox was long enough that a 28-inch level could be stored on the underside of the vocer. A level is delicate and doesn’t benefit from being stacked with other tools inside the box. The level fit over two blocks of wood that were secured to the cover with screws; it was then held firmly in place with homemade metal clips. The tray had limited space for smaller items, such as nail sets, a chalk line, pencils and other marking tools, a plumb bob, and drill bits, which we put in an old metal bandage container.

Measure Twice, Cut Once, but Don’t Measure At All If You Can Avoid It

Never measure unless you have no choice. Instead, base your marking and cutting on the actual situation. For example, I would never measure an exterior wall for a piece of siding, then go off and measure a length, cut it, and bring it back to install. It doesn’t matter how long the siding needs to be: I hold up a length where I intend to install it and mark it in place for cutting. It’s the actual length that’s important, not the numerical symbols on my tape measure.

Tape measures vary. The longer they’re used, the more they stretch. The hook at the end gets gummer up or bent enough to cause slight variations in readings. I don’t assume that my own tape is perfect. If I’m working along, I know that all the measurements are taken from my own tape and therefore profide uniform variations from a true standard. But if I’m working with other carpenters and each of us uses his own tape, with a unique variation from true, the consequences take on real importance. I’ve often seen carpenters argue at a lumber pile about whether a piece was cut to the right length, only to find out that their tapes were not equal.

The Right Way

I saw a funny movie recently about a carpenter and his three sons. The father, who had just died, spoke some of his best lines form his coffin. For instance: “There’s only two ways to do things. There’s the right way and there’s my way. And they’re the same way!” The line reminded me of my somewhat autocratic grandfather. He was a supervisor in a woolen mill, but he knew carpentry and performed it well. In his generation, the family was large and close, but my grandfather was boss and no one dared disagree with him. My dad, on the other hand, never said or implied that his way was the right way. But since he hadn’t come from a tradition of open discussion, he and I didn’t talk about carpentry as much, looking back, as I wish we had.

…

In my generation, technology has changed many hand tools and introduced the power tools that have largely superseded some of them. Yet many aspects of carpentry are very much as they were in my father’s day or in my grandfather’s. Even if the tool has evolved, the method is the same. There are many situations in which nothing works as well as a hammer and a chisel. I can’t imagine technology reaching the point where there would be no need for the deceptively simple technique of scribing.

What has declined from my dad’s generation to mine is the prevailing standard of skill in carpentry. My father could do many things by hand that I’ve never practiced enough to do, such as ripping a long board by hand in an admirably straight line. Recently I helped renovate an old house in Salem, Massachusetts. A number of handsome frame houses in Salem’s historic district have overlapping clapboards on their sides and backs; the facades, however, are made of very long boards butted square against each other to make a flat surface. An overlapping clapboard can be less than perfectly straight, but there can’t be much divergence when the boards are butted. In Salem, many facades reveal an excellent fit everywhere in long boards sawn and planed two centuries ago–by hand.

Carpentry was once a classic trade in the sense that techniques were treated as secrets to be revealed only to the chosen few, handed down from one generation to the next. Much of my time during the past two decades has been spent demystifying the skills of carpentry and woodworking so that any interested person can acquire the tools, learn the techniques, and practice them to a desired level of skill. Hence this book. It will discuss the contents of the ideal toolbox of today, not the tools that sufficed for my father’s superior carpentry. But as I describe hand tools and offer tips on techniques I’ve adopted, I never forget that much of what I know and practice was handed down to me from my dad and others of his and earlier generations. I hope these lessons will give you the confidence to use more tools, to augment your toolbox and workshop, and to share your experience and wisdom with others.

I find that I tend to respond most positively to people who view knowledge as something to be shared widely and often. Carl Sagan, Norm Abram, Anthony Bourdain…these kinds of people are the guiding lights of my world.

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