Why I Ride

I once wrote a little essay trying to explain why I enjoy riding motorcycles so much. The sad truth is that if you need an explanation, none will suffice. But occasionally, someone does a very nice job of almost capturing the ineffable. Dave Karlotski got pretty close back at the end of the last millenium. I'll paste that essay below, and by all means hit the link in the title of this post to hear him read another version of the same essay.

In fact, this little essay circulates fairly frequently, usually with no author ascribed. And there are several versions out there. I first read an anonymous version of it in an e-mail in 1999. You can find different versions (mostly without authors) by web-searching [motorcyle joy machine] or [motorcycles are joy machines] or [a motorcycle is a joy machine]. But better just to read and enjoy.

To read Karlotski's largest collection of stories, point your browser to The751, but don’t do it during work hours; you won’t get anything done for a while.

MPR’s The Savvy Traveler has several of Karlotski’s essays available for reading and listening, but their internal search engine doesn’t seem to work at all. So here's a partial list:
on the Badlands
on Labrador
on Mammoth Cave
on Lonely Roads
and, of course, Season of the Bike

Enjoy.


Season of the Bike
by Dave Karlotski

There is cold, and there is cold on a motorcycle. Cold on a motorcycle is like being beaten with cold hammers while being kicked with cold boots, a bone bruising cold. The wind’s big hands squeeze the heat out of my body and whisk it away; caught in a cold October rain, the drops don’t even feel like water. They feel like shards of bone fallen from the skies of Hell to pock my face. I expect to arrive with my cheeks and forehead streaked with blood, but that’s just an illusion, just the misery of nerves not designed for highway speeds.

Despite this, it’s hard to give up my motorcycle in the fall and I rush to get it on the road again in the spring; lapses of sanity like this are common among motorcyclists. When you let a motorcycle into your life you’re changed forever. The letters “MC” are stamped on your driver’s license right next to your sex and height as if “motorcycle” was just another of your physical characteristics, or maybe a mental condition.

But when warm weather finally does come around all those cold snaps and rainstorms are paid in full because a motorcycle summer is worth any price. A motorcycle is not just a two-wheeled car; the difference between driving a car and climbing onto a motorcycle is the difference between watching TV and actually living your life. We spend all our time sealed in boxes and cars are just the rolling boxes that shuffle us languidly from home-box to work-box to store-box and back, the whole time entombed in stale air, temperature regulated, sound insulated, and smelling of carpets.

On a motorcycle I know I’m alive. When I ride, even the familiar seems strange and glorious. The air has weight and substance as I push through it and its touch is as intimate as water to a swimmer. I feel the cool wells of air that pool under trees and the warm spokes of sunlight that fall through them. I can see everything in a sweeping 360 degrees, up, down and around, wider than PanaVision and higher than IMAX and unrestricted by ceiling or dashboard.

Sometimes I even hear music. It’s like hearing phantom telephones in the shower or false doorbells when vacuuming; the pattern-loving brain, seeking signals in the noise, raises acoustic ghosts out of the wind’s roar. But on a motorcycle I hear whole songs: rock ‘n roll, dark orchestras, women’s voices, all hidden in the air and released by speed.

At 30 miles an hour and up, smells become uncannily vivid. All the individual tree-smells and flower-smells and grass-smells flit by like chemical notes in a great plant symphony. Sometimes the smells evoke memories so strongly that it’s as though the past hangs invisible in the air around me, wanting only the most casual of rumbling time machines to unlock it.

A ride on a summer afternoon can border on the rapturous. The sheer volume and variety of stimuli is like a bath for my nervous system, an electrical massage for my brain, a systems check for my soul. It tears smiles out of me: a minute ago I was dour, depressed, apathetic, numb, but now, on two wheels, big, ragged, windy smiles flap against the side of my face, billowing out of me like air from a decompressing plane. Transportation is only a secondary function. A motorcycle is a joy machine. It’s a machine of wonders, a metal bird, a motorized prosthetic. It’s light and dark and shiny and dirty and warm and cold lapping over each other; it’s a conduit of grace, it’s a catalyst for bonding the gritty and the holy.

I still think of myself as a motorcycle amateur, but by now I’ve had a handful of bikes over a half dozen years and slept under my share of bridges. I wouldn’t trade one second of either the good times or the misery. Learning to ride was one of the best things I’ve done.

Cars lie to us and tell us we’re safe, powerful, and in control. The air-conditioning fans murmur empty assurances and whisper, “Sleep, sleep.” Motorcycles tell us a more useful truth: we are small and exposed, and probably moving too fast for our own good, but that’s no reason not to enjoy every minute of the ride.

Old Fashioned

As long as there’s bourbon in the house...

Many moons ago I ate something at a conference that did not agree with me. I went to the hotel bar and asked the barman what he recommended to stop a tummy from going flippy floppy. He fixed me soda & bitters with a twist and charged me not a single dime. I tipped him and wobbled back upstairs with my beverage. It did the trick.

I remembered this recently while attending a friend’s natal day celebration and needing something that looked convivial while keeping me sober (I had arrived and was leaving again on two wheels, and while I enjoy both bikes and adult beverages, they don’t mix well.) After I got home, I was wondering what in the world bitters are, and so Lizzie & I ended up reading the relevant entry in the wikipedia. Woo hoo! Patent medicines!

A small bottle of the stuff runs ~$3 at the local purveyor of adult beverages, so I picked one up. And then I remembered where else I’d seen bitters referenced recently: in a blog pointed out to me by a colleague.

I teach Latin at one of the larger private schools in town. There’s a guy doing a similar job over at our arch-rivals. He has a friend who writes mysteries, and that friend has a blog to which my fellow Latinist directed me one day. And what should I see on that blog but a picture of a bookstore a scant half mile down the street from where the O’Cayces used to live. It’s a good bookstore, the Regulator is. So I kept poking around the site and ran into this post, which contains the wondrous sentiment, “a couple of Old Fashioneds, taken around noon on Thanksgiving, will help the rest of the day unfold in a splendid manner.”

If I ever take a turn for the autobiographical, I’ll have to post a few Thanksgiving Day memories and explain why that sentence resonates so. For now, I will restrict myself to shamelessly stealing the recipe.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

OLD FASHIONED
(makes one)

• 2 teaspoons sugar
• 2 dashes of bitters
• 2 oz bourbon
• 2 oz club soda
• slice of orange

Put sugar in bottom of a short cocktail glass and douse it with bitters. Pour in bourbon and muddle. Add club soda. Fill glass with crushed ice and joogle it around some to make sure the sugar is fully dissolved. Garnish with orange. This will help you tolerate relatives who are otherwise intolerable.

Derby Pie

OK, it's not the official, trademarked, name-protected Derby Pie (which appears to use walnuts rather than pecans). But what most people mean by Derby Pie is a chocolate-chip, bourbon pecan pie. I could find no one in Columbia making any such thing for the 133rd Run for the Roses. (And wasn’t it a thrilling run! Calvin Borel and Street Sense ride the rail from 19th place and eating dirt to a commanding 1st place win. That was a race!) So I put out a request on the school’s intra-net for anyone who knew where I could go pick up a decent pie. Nothing. But we did get a couple of good recipes.

Here’s the recipe Lizzie used, sent to me by our school nurse, who has heard Lizzie give a keynote and do a Q&A. Small world.

Derby Pie

• 4 eggs, beaten
• 6 tablespoons butter, melted
• 1 cup light corn syrup
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1/4 cup firmly packed brown sugar
• 3 tablespoons bourbon
• 1 tablespoon flour
• 1 tablespoon vanilla
• 1 cup semi-sweet chocolate morsels
• 1 cup pecans, coarsely chopped
• 1 unbaked deep dish pie crust (or two 8" crusts)

Combine all ingredients except nuts and chocolate. Mix well and then add the nuts and chocolate. Pour into pie shell and bake on the lowest rack at 375°F until set. (35 to 40 minutes)

Notes:

Lizzie has made quite a few pies over the years, and we have quite a few pie pans (metal, glass, stone, ceramic) in several sizes. She has not currently found the magical combination of heat and time to make a deep-dish pie (high walls, twice the filling) set up. For now, she either does half the filling in a single crust or all the filling in two crusts.

The co-worker who sent me this recipe notes, “I just use the roll out Pillsbury pie crust in refrigerated section of the grocery store.” It turns out that this is also what Rhudine, one of the best-known bakers on campus, uses when she makes pie (her specialties are cakes). Lizzie made her crust from scratch. I would reduce the amount of salt in the crust to ~3/4 or even 2/3 tsp; it was a very good crust, but a bit salty on first taste. You couldn’t tell at all when the crust hit your tongue with filling, but nibbling on that top edge all by itself was another story.

Lizzie made a double recipe and produced three pies, two 8" and one 10". The 10" pie filling rose more slowly and ended up with more of the fluffed-jelly consistency I’m used to in a Derby Pie or a pecan pie. It also required more time in the oven to set, although the crust was done. So Lizzie's suggestion is:

Make one recipe in a 10" pie crust. Shield the crust and bake for 20 minutes, then remove the shield and bake for another 30-35 (total 50-55 minutes).

All I can say is that the 10" pie was about as good as a pie could be. The 8" pies were tasty as well, but the texture was better with the 10" pie.

I think that next year, we may need to try this with walnuts instead of pecans. Or maybe half each.


Pie Crust

• 2 cups flour
• 1 teaspoon salt (but see untested suggestion, above)
• 2/3 cups Crisco plus 2 tablespoons
• 1/8 cup water
• 1/8 cup vodka (Lizzie added this one Christmas 2011; too little water and you can’t work the dough properly; too much and the crust gets soggy on the bottom; she heard this trick on the radio and it worked well.)

Measure flour into mixing bowl and blend in salt. Cut in shortening until particles are the size of giant peas. Sprinkle with water, a tablespoon at a time, mixing lightly with a fork until all flour is moist. Gather dough together with fingers so it cleans the bowl. Press firmly into a ball. Roll out or keep in waxed paper in refrigerator until ready to bake.

One last note:

The 10" pie and one of the 8" pies were made in glass pie pans. The other 8" pie was made in a stone pie pan. Lizzie likes the stone pan for things like cornbread, but pie crust always wants to adhere to it. A number of the pieces of pie were damaged coming out of the stone pan. Stick to glass. Or use glass and don’t stick. Or something.

Derby Day already?

Let the hunt begin for fresh mint and a decent supplier of chocolate chip bourbon pecan pie (Derby Pie). We already have the main ingredient for the day's traditional beverage.

Speaking of which, since I pull down my copy of Walker Percy's Signposts in a Strange Land every year to check the recipe and to inflict the essay upon unsuspecting guests, I figure it must be time to store it here on the cyber-vault.

Update: I no longer destroy tea towels with my mallet to make the snowy ice. I use this machine.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“Bourbon”
by Walker Percy
taken from the posthumous collection Signposts in a Strange Land, Farrar Straus & Giroux 1991, pp. 102-7.

This is not written by a connoisseur of Bourbon. Ninety-nine percent of Bourbon drinkers know more about Bourbon than I do. It is about the aesthetic of Bourbon drinking in general and in particular of knocking it back neat.

I can hardly tell one Bourbon from another, unless the other is very bad. Some bad Bourbons are even more memorable than good ones. For example, I can recall being broke with some friends in Tennessee and deciding to have a party and being able to afford only two-fifths of a $1.75 Bourbon called Two Natural, whose label showed dice coming up 5 and 2. Its taste was memorable. The psychological effect was also notable. After knocking back two or three shots over a period of half an hour, the three male drinkers looked at each other and said in a single voice: “Where are the women?”

I have not been able to locate this remarkable Bourbon since.

Not only should connoisseurs of Bourbon not read this article, neither should persons preoccupied with the perils of alcoholism, cirrhosis, esophageal hemorrhage, cancer of the palate, and so forth—all real dangers. I, too, deplore these afflictions. But, as between these evils and the aesthetic of Bourbon drinking, that is, the use of Bourbon to warm the heart, to reduce the anomie of the late twentieth century, to cut the cold phlegm of Wednesday afternoons, I choose the aesthetic. What, after all, is the use of not having cancer, cirrhosis, and such, if a man comes home from work every day at five-thirty to the exurbs of Montclair or Memphis and there is the grass growing and the little family looking not quite at him but just past the side of his head, and there’s Cronkite on the tube and the smell of pot roast in the living room, and inside the house and outside in the pretty exurb has settled the noxious particles and the sadness of the old dying Western world, and him thinking: “Jesus, is this it? Listening to Cronkite and the grass growing?”

If I should appear to be suggesting that such a man proceed as quickly as possible to anesthetize his cerebral cortex by ingesting ethyl alcohol, the point is being missed. Or part of the point. The joy of Bourbon drinking is not the pharmacological effect of C2H5OH on the cortex but rather the instant of the whiskey being knocked back and the little explosion of Kentucky U.S.A. sunshine in the cavity of the nasopharynx and the hot bosky bite of Tennessee summertime—aesthetic considerations to which the effect of the alcohol is, if not dispensable, at least secondary.

By contrast, Scotch: for me (not, I presume, for a Scot), drinking Scotch is like looking at a picture of Noel Coward. The whiskey assaults the nasopharynx with all the excitement of paregoric. Scotch drinkers (not all, of course) I think of as upward-mobile Americans, Houston and New Orleans businessmen who graduate from Bourbon about the same time they shed seersuckers for Lilly slacks. Of course, by now these same folk may have gone back to Bourbon and seersucker for the same reason, because too many Houston oilmen drink Scotch.

Nothing, therefore, will be said about the fine points of sour mash, straights, blends, bonded, except a general preference for the lower proofs. It is a matter of the arithmetic of aesthetics. If one derives the same pleasure from knocking back 80-proof Bourbon as 100-proof, the formula is both as simple as 2 + 2 = 4 and as incredible as non-Euclidean geometry. Consider. One knocks back five one-ounce shots of 80-proof Early Times or four shots of 100-proof Old Fitzgerald. The alcohol ingestion is the same:
5 x 40% = 2
4 x 50% = 2
Yet, in the case of the Early Times, one has obtained an extra quantum of joy without cost to liver, brain, or gastric mucosa. A bonus, pure and simple, an aesthetic gain as incredible as two parallel lines meeting at infinity.

An apology to the reader is in order, nevertheless, for it has just occurred to me that this is the most unedifying and even maleficent piece I ever wrote—if it should encourage potential alcoholics to start knocking back Bourbon neat. It is also the unfairest. Because I am, happily and unhappily, endowed with a bad GI tract, diverticulosis, neurotic colon, and a mild recurring nausea, which make it less likely for me to become an alcoholic than my healthier fellow Americans. I can hear the reader now: Who is he kidding? If this joker has to knock back five shots of Bourbon every afternoon just to stand the twentieth century, he’s already an alcoholic. Very well. I submit to this or any semantic. All I am saying is that if I drink much more than this I will get sick as a dog for two days and the very sight and smell of whiskey will bring on the heaves. Readers beware, therefore, save only those who have stronger wills or as bad a gut as I.

The pleasure of knocking back Bourbon lies in the plane of the aesthetic but at an opposite pole from connoisseurship. My preference for the former is or is not deplorable depending on one’s value system—that is to say, how one balances out the Epicurean virtues of cultivating one’s sensory end organs with the greatest discrimination and at least cost to one’s health, against the virtue of evocation of time and memory and of the recovery of self and the past from the fogged-in disoriented Western world. In Kierkegaardian terms, the use of Bourbon to such an end is a kind of aestheticized religious mode of existence, whereas connoisseurship, the discriminating but single-minded stimulation of sensory end organs, is the aesthetic of damnation.

Two exemplars of the two aesthetics come to mind:

Imagine Clifton Webb, scarf at throat, sitting at Cap d’Antibes on a perfect day, the little wavelets of the Mediterranean sparkling in the sunlight, and he is savoring a 1959 Mouton Rothschild.

Then imagine William Faulkner, having finished Absalom, Absalom!, drained, written out, pissed-off, feeling himself over the edge and out of it, nowhere, but he goes somewhere, his favorite hunting place in the Delta wilderness of the Big Sunflower River and, still feeling bad with his hunting cronies and maybe even a little phony, which he was, what with him trying to pretend he was one of them, a farmer, hunkered down in the cold and rain after the hunt, after honorably passing up the does and seeing no bucks, shivering and snot-nosed, takes out a flat pint of any Bourbon at all and flatfoots about a third of it. He shivers again but not from the cold.

Bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust.

1926: As a child watching my father in Birmingham, in the exurbs, living next to a number-6 fairway of the New Country Club, him disdaining both the bathtub gin and white lightning of the time, aging his own Bourbon in a charcoal keg, on his hands and knees in the basement sucking on the siphon, a matter of gravity requiring cheek pressed against the concrete floor, the siphon getting going, the decanter ready, the first hot spurt into his mouth not spat out.

1933: My uncle’s sun parlor in the Mississippi Delta and toddies on a Sunday afternoon, the prolonged and meditative tinkle of silver spoon against crystal to dissolve the sugar; talk, tinkle, talk; the talk mostly political: “Roosevelt is doing a good job; no, the son of a bitch is betraying his class.”

1934: Drinking at a Delta dance, the boys in bi-swing jackets and tab collars, tough-talking and profane and also scared of the girls and therefore safe in the men’s room. Somebody passes around bootleg Bourbon in a Coke bottle. It’s awful. Tears start from eyes, faces turn red. “Hot damn, that’s good!”

1935: Drinking at a football game in college. UNC versus Duke. One has a blind date. One is lucky. She is beautiful. Her clothes are the color of the fall leaves and her face turns up like a flower. But what to say to her, let alone what to do, and whether she is “nice” or “hot”—a distinction made in those days. But what to say? Take a drink, by now from a proper concave hip flask (a long way from the Delta Coke bottle) with a hinged top. Will she have a drink? No. But that’s all right. The taste of the Bourbon (Cream of Kentucky) and the smell of her fuse with the brilliant Carolina fall and the sounds of the crowd and the hit of the linesmen in a single synesthesia.

1941: Drinking mint juleps, famed Southern Bourbon drink, though in the Deep South not really drunk much. In fact, they are drunk so seldom that when, say, on Derby Day somebody gives a julep party, people drink them like cocktails, forgetting that a good julep holds at least five ounces of Bourbon. Men fall face-down unconscious, women wander in the woods disconsolate and amnesiac, full of thoughts of Kahil Gibran and the limberlost.

Would you believe the first mind julep I had I was sitting not on a columned porch but in the Boo Snooker bar of the New Yorker Hotel with a Bellevue nurse in 1941? The nurse, a nice upstate girl, head floor nurse, brisk, swift, good-looking; Bellevue nurses, the best in the world and this one the best of Bellevue, at least the best-looking. The julep, an atrocity, a heavy syrupy Bourbon and water in a small glass clotted with ice. But good!

How could two women be more different than the beautiful languid Carolina girl and this swift handsome girl from Utica, best Dutch stock? One thing was sure. Each has to be courted, loved, drunk with, with Bourbon. I should have stuck with the Bourbon. We changed to gin fizzes because the bartender said he came from New Orleans and could make good ones. He could and did. They were delicious. What I didn’t know was that they were made with raw egg albumen and I was allergic to it. Driving her home to Brooklyn and being in love! What a lovely fine strapping smart girl! And thinking of being invited into her apartment where she lived alone and of her offering to cook a little supper and of the many kisses and the sweet love that already existed between us and was bound to grow apace, when on the Brooklyn Bridge itself my upper lip began to swell and little sparks of light flew past the corner of my eye like St. Elmo’s fire. In the space of thirty seconds my lip stuck out a full three-quarter inch, like a shelf, like Mortimer Snerd. Not only was kissing out of the question but my eyes swelled shut. I made it across the bridge, pulled over to the curb, and fainted. Whereupon this noble nurse drove me back to Bellevue, game me a shot, and put me to bed.

Anybody who monkeys around with gin and egg white deserves what he gets. I should have stuck with Bourbon and have from that day to this.

POSTSCRIPT: Reader, just in case you don’t want to knock it back straight and would rather monkey around with perfectly good Bourbon, here’s my favorite recipe, “Cud’n Walker’s Uncle Will’s Favorite Mint Julep Receipt.”

You need excellent Bourbon whiskey; rye or Scotch will not do. Put half an inch of sugar in the bottom of the glass and merely dampen it with water. Next, very quickly—and here is the trick in the procedure—crush your ice, actually powder it, preferably with a wooden mallet, so quickly that it remains dry, and, slipping two sprigs of fresh mint against the inside of the glass, cram the ice in right to the brim, packing it with your hand. Finally, fill the glass, which apparently has no room left for anything else, with Bourbon, the older the better, and grate a bit of nutmeg on the top. The glass will frost immediately. Then settle back in your chair for half an hour of cumulative bliss.

1975

SC-1000

The more autobiographical O'Cayce posted the report over on her blog.

Be sure to also read about what was going on with the rest of the family while I was out converting erstwhile dinosaur chow into harmful pollutants.

MSF Acronymns

Speaking of motorcycle safety and useful mnemonics...

These are from the MSF, which (despite their current Borgish behavior) will teach you skills that (if practiced) will save your life.

T-CLOCK stands for:

• Tires
• Controls
• Lights
• Oil level
• Chassis
• (Kick)stand(s)

FINE-CC (start-up checklist; things to check when starting the bike)

• Fuel valve (irrelevant on fuel-injected bikes)
• Ignition switch (the key)
• Neutral (where to put your gear shift)
• Engine kill switch (what your buddies are always fooling with at gas stops)
• Clutch (pull in the lever, even if you ARE in neutral)
• Choke (also irrelevant on fuel-injected bikes)

On a fuel-injected bike like my GL1800, I would edit this to NICE

• Neutral
• Ignition on
• Clutch level pulled n
• Engine switch on

or perhaps NECK

• Neutral
• Engine switch on
• Clutch lever in
• Key on

The current SEE

• Scan the environment
• Evaluate the situation
• Execute your maneuvers

used to be the far more useful SIPDE

• Scan the environment
• Identify possible hazards
• Predict what is going to happen
• Decide what you're going to do
• Execute your move

PLP = Parking Lot Practice; going out, finding a big empty place, dropping your bricks, and working on low-speed skills. I don't do this nearly often enough.

Honda provided a nice little booklet for PLP with my bike. There's a great page of advanced stuff from the Alameda County Sherrif's pages available as both html and ad a pdf. But I'd try to get good at the basics first.


Having been taught the Smith system of defensive driving way back in the day, the MSF emphasis on watching people around you and always predicting what will happen and knowing what your reaction should be was marvelously useful. I still remember the pop quizzes in drivers' ed where the instructor would cover the rear view mirror and ask me what was back there. Always be aware; always know what your route to safety is.

BTW, the Smith system is basically:

• Aim high in steering (look way down the road)
• Big Picture (what is happening and how does it all relate? How will this one guy's actions affect everything else?)
• Scan (keep your eyes moving; know what's everywhere)
• Know your out (always have an escape route)
• Visibility (make sure everyone sees you)

This is as good for motorcycling as it is in a cage.

Chromed Tires?

On 10 July 2006, I rode 1200 miles to see my brother in Austin, TX. The next morning, when I did my morning T-CLOCK exam on the bike, I noticed that my rear tire had cracks in the carcass. So as well as catching up with a brother I hadn't seen in over a decade, I spent part of Skylab Day 2006 getting new rear rubber. It was a Metzeler ME880, the only rear tire for my bike that was in stock. It has been a decent rear tire. Good grip in the rain, and it was wearing quite well. Was.

Last Thursday night, I changed my spark plugs and checked the tires. It looked to me like I was going to get another 10K out of the rear, and it had not lost a single pound of pressure (I've only had to add air once since I got the thing, and I think that was only from the little bit that escapes every week when I check.) Little did I know.

While riding in to Lake Lure to pick up a couple more riders (Phil & Barb), I thought my leg was twitching. Then I realized that it was my foot peg that was pulsing against my foot, and not vice versa. Cruising slowly through Chimney Rock, I noticed a wobble. It was not the dreaded decel wobble. It happened most severely ~20 mph, accelerating, decelerating, or holding steady. As we headed up NC 9 toward Black Mountain (and coincidentally crossing the eastern continental divide), I rode more conservatively than I usually do and paid closer attention.

I wondered if maybe the front tire were severely out of balance, and was dreading the talk I was going to have to have with the shop that only a couple thousand miles ago rebuilt my 80K front end. Tapered bearings gone loose? There was no clicking, so I didn't think it was wheel bearings. But those handlebars sure did want to dance. By the time we got to Black Mountain, I was wondering whether and how we would be getting home.

I mentioned this over a lunch of some fine smoked brisket (really; you HAVE to go to Perry's) and there was a good bit of discussion as to possibilities. I didn't want to actually put hands and gauges on the tire until it had cooled down and I had filled my belly, so this was a good delaying tactic. And people suggested the things I had been mulling over. Phil mentioned a possible de-lamination, which I had NOT considered, but which has been a problem with E3 fronts (built by management during the recent Dunlop strike). My front is a Stone.

A couple of us poked & prodded the front end a bit and found nothing obvious. It took Dan walking up from behind and asking, "what's on your back tire?" to spot the trouble. What Dan was seeing were the steel belts on the left side of the tire. I HAD had a de-lamination and had thrown the tread off the rear. Steve mentioned that while following me over 9 at one point he had though that I had picked up some road trash when he saw something fluttering on my rear tire. Ah.

I had had well over 1/8" of tread in the center of that tire a day and a half earlier; a good 1/4" toward the outer edges. Now I had steel belts. How do you measure thread depth? Does steel grip well in the corners? Can you have it chromed as the ultimate Wing accessory?

After a brief discussion of best course of action, we put Lizzy behind Jim (sorry, Dixie) and Phil took point toward MR Cycles in Asheville. I rode second, and the other seven bikes rode behind, making sure no one ran over me should the worst happen. We even took some of the BRP this way to get around Asheville traffic. MR had an E3 in stock, and 90 minutes and $221 later, we were back on the road.

For the record, that tire had 9774 miles on it. (Yes, I know -- only 10K miles in 8 months; I'm not going to make my average this year. I blame it on the new commute; only 20 miles a day instead of 50, and I won't have as much chance to catch up this summer, given the nature of our vacation plans.) I ran it at 42 psi.

And thinking about it now, I'll bet that this explains why the back end has felt so squirrelly in a lean lately. I was just talking about trying to sort this one out last Saturday at McGuire's in Summerville. Every time I've leaned aggressively lately, the back end has slid a bit to one side. I haven't touched a peg down in months.

So... Good news: 1) I've still been sensitive enough to notice when there's trouble and to adapt my riding style as necessary. 2) The steel belts held well enough to get us up NC 9 two-up and then over to MR Cycles solo. 3) No get-off, no harm, no foul. 4) MR was fast, friendly, and reasonable. I can see why Phil & Barb ride up from Brevard to use them (aside from the fun roads betwixt & between). 5) We didn't hold up the group ride too long. 6) Mike Parks bought a new helmet. 7) We met some new riding friends. 8) Excellent brisket. 9) Fun roads. 10) 400 miles with an average 40 mpg for the day, with lowest top up at 38 and highest 42.

Bad news: 1) I would have sworn that the problem was in the front. I should have been able to tell that it was in the rear. My backside used to be more sensitive than that. 2) The frikkin rear tire threw off half its tread! We coulda died!

Next steps: 1) Write a letter and send a picture to Metzeler. 2) If there's a ride next weekend, sit it out and give our guardian angels the time off. They must be exhausted.


Izzy

Update: Lizzy has also blogged about this, and has included a couple of pictures. She has also put in her linked photo album some of the pictures sent by Jim and Mike.

Cicero on the nature of graduate studies

Cicero is referring here to training in oratory, which was the Roman equivalent of going for a professional degree. If you wanted to take your place in and make your mark upon Roman society (upper-class male variety, of course), you had to learn to persuade groups of people; you had to study oratory. I think the parallel is obvious.

Pro Caelio sec. 19/46

"An vos aliam causam esse ullam putatis cur in tantis praemiis eloquentiae, tanta voluptate dicendi, tanta laude, tanta gratia, tanto honore, tam sint pauci semperque fuerint qui in hoc labore versentur? Obterendae sunt omnes voluptates, relinquenda studia delectationis, ludus, iocus, convivium, sermo paene est familiarum deserendus. Qua re in hoc genere labor offendit homines a studioque deterret, non quo aut ingenia deficiant aut doctrina puerilis."

"Or do you suppose, in the face of such rewards for eloquence, such pleasure in speaking, such praise, such favor, such honor, that there is some other reason why why there are and always have been so few who turn themselves toward this endeavor? All pleasures must be obliterated; all pursuit of enjoyment left behind; games, jokes, bonhomie, nearly all conversation with friends must be forsaken. It is for this reason that this sort of endeavor is offensive to people and turns them away from its pursuit, and not because the youth are lacking in either ability or prliminary education."


Think on this as you apply for grad school.

Izzy

Eco on the 'Puter Wars

While I'm filing good stuff from Eco, here's a nice piece on the state of Mac -v- PC wars from the mid-90s. Remember, aging readers, that back then Windows still had a lot of command-line work to do, and that the old MS-DOS was still seen lurking behind the Windows darkly. This was pre-Windows '95. This was Windows 3.x.

Pax,
Izzy
who still remembers CPM dot commands and WordStar, which were the de facto standard in many offices when the Mac showed up


English translation of excerpts from Umberto Eco's back-page column "La bustina di Minerva" in the Italian news weekly Espresso, 30 Sept. 1994:

*********

Insufficient consideration has been given to the new underground religious war which is modifying the modern world. It's an old idea of mine, but I find that whenever I tell people about it they immediately agree with me.

The fact is that the world is divided between users of the Macintosh computer and users of MS-DOS compatible computers. I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counter-reformist and has been influenced by the 'ratio studiorum' of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory, it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach - if not the Kingdom of Heaven - the moment in which their document is printed. It is catechistic: the essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons.

Everyone has a right to salvation.

DOS is Protestant, or even Calvinistic. It allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can reach salvation. To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself: a long way from the baroque community of revellers, the user is closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment.

You may object that, with the passage to Windows, the DOS universe has come to resemble more closely the counter-reformist tolerance of the Macintosh. It's true: Windows represents an Anglican-style schism, big ceremonies in the cathedral, but there is always the possibility of a return to DOS to change things in accordance with bizarre decisions; when it comes down to it, you can decide to allow women and gays to be ministers if you want to....

And machine code, which lies beneath both systems (or environments, if you prefer)? Ah, that is to do with the Old Testament, and is Talmudic and cabalistic...

Umberto Eco

A recent e-mail question about Umberto Eco provoked the following response, which I'm storing here for later reference.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Well, I'm a big fan of Eco in all three of his guises: semiotician (and literary critic), novelist, and columnist. I'll paste one of his columns/essays into the end of this note.

Eco the Semiotician
For anyone who has about had it with modern literary theory, I highly recommend Eco's LitCrit works. He has given us back Intentionality -- although he agrees that the author's intent (intentio auctoris) is not the best guide to interpreting a text, he argues for the intention of the work itself (intentio operis). That is, he makes a credible argument that a work of literature is trying to communicate, and that the best method of interpretation is to try to listen to what the work WANTS to tell us and how it achieves (or fails to achieve) that intended communication.

For my money, far too much time is spent with tools like Deconstruction, which has, I have to admit, its uses. The ability to gain anthropological insight from literary texts is especially attractive to people who work with the ancient world. But I just know that some day at a conference some deconstructionist is going to ask me a question and I'm going to treat their question like a text and deconstruct it rather than answer it. This would make absolutely clear something that I believe about deconstruction: it's rude; useful at times, but essentially impolite.

[*he slips into a fantasy*

Question from the floor: I agree with your presentation overall, but wonder how you would distinguish between gendered issues and power issues in the Late Republican period.

Answer from the lectern: Notice that this very brief text, a questioning text, begins with a first person singular pronoun. This reveals the academic's self-involvement; she has given the self-referent a privileged position, and so privileges herself. Further...

*he comes back from the world of dreams*]


What was I saying? Oh, yes. The primary focus of deconstruction is on what the work gives away about the culture in which it was produced. This is fundamentally rude. It ignores what it trying to be said in favor of what the reader's agenda might be. It is a useful anthropological tool, but should not be the first, and never the only, tool brought to bear in interpreting a text. The first question should always be, "what is the message? what is being said?" And Eco has given us back the right to ask such questions.

The best introduction to his work in this area is a seven lecture series in which Eco gives the first three, three LitCritics from other schools respond, and Eco replies. It's a slim volume published by Cambridge UP entitled Interpretation and Overinterpretation. From there, take a peek at The Limits of Interpretation and his earlier work, The Role of the Reader.



Eco the Novelist
As for the novels, they are all very different. Easily the most accessible (and the only one made into a movie) is The Name of the Rose. A mystery set in a medieval abbey with riffs on Dante, assumed knowledge of theology and Classics, and footnotes in Latin. Look for the edition that has Postscript to the Name of the Rose in it. It's a nice essay.

If you're into conspiracy theories (like Dan Brown's ubiquitous book), Foucault's Pendulum might be the place to start. It is set in a modern vanity publishing house, but ranges throughout the late medieval and early Renaissance periods. Don't try to follow the evolving logic of the knights-templar-ridden plot; I think you're supposed to feel disoriented while thinking "that makes sense". If you read and like this one, try his non-fiction The Search for the Perfect Language.

The Island of the Day Before is set in the same age-of-exploration world as Dava Sobel's Longitude. It dabbles in alchemy and is a great introduction to the errors of courtly love. I used to have a sig from this one:

"He thought that he would become accustomed to the idea [of being orphaned], not yet understanding that it is useless to become accustomed to the loss of a father, for it will never happen a second time: might as well leave the wound open."
-Umberto Eco, Island of the Day Before, end of Ch.7

There are also Baudolino (which Otter once described as "Forrest Gump for Medievalists") and his memoir for an entire generation of Italians, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. (Which, for a change, does NOT turn out to be a father-quest.) For a long time, I had as my sig a line from Bishop Otto in chapter 4 of Baudolino:

"The world condemns liars who do nothing but lie, even about the most trivial things, and it rewards poets, who lie only about the greatest things."


Eco the Columnist
Eco used to write a weekly column for a local (to him) paper. Some of his best essays have been collected in several volumes. Travels in Hyperreality, which includes a great piece on the semiotics of wearing pants; Misreadings, the shortest and funniest if you have a background that includes lots of academic nonsense -- several good pastiches of scholarly papers here; and How to Travel with a Salmon, probably the best for a general audience. The entire essay that I'm going to paste in below is from that collection.

But first, my favorite take on postmodernism, from the PttNotR. Enjoy.

Pax,
Izzy

~~~Begin Quotation 1~~~

Umberto Eco on postmodernism:
But the moment comes when the avant-garde (the modern) can go no further, because it has produced a metalanguage that speaks of its impossible texts (conceptual art). The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently. I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her, "I love you madly," because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, "As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly." At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he will nevertheless have said what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her, but he loves her in an age of lost innocence. If the woman goes along with this, she will have received a declaration of love all the same. Neither of the two speakers will feel innocent, both will have accepted the challenge of the past, of the already said, which cannot be eliminated; both will consciously and with pleasure play the game of irony.... But both will have succeeded, once again, in speaking of love.
Postscript to The Name of the Rose [Harvest combined edition 1994] 530-1
~~~~End Quotation 1~~~~



~~~Begin Quotation 2~~~

"How to Justify a Private Library" from How to Travel with a Salmon & other essays (HBJ 1994) by Umberto Eco

Generally speaking, from my childhood on, I have been always subjected to two (and only two) kinds of joke: "You're the one who always answers" and "You resound in the valleys." All through my early years I believed that, by some strange chance, all the people I met were stupid. Then, having reached maturity, I was forced to conclude that there are two laws no human being can escape: the first idea that comes into a person's mind will be the most obvious one; and, having had an obvious idea, nobody ever thinks that others may have had the same idea before.

I possess a collection of review headlines, in all the languages of the Indo-European family, going all the way from "The Echo of Eco" to "A Book with Echoes." In the latter case I suspect the printed headline wasn't the first idea that came into the subeditor's mind. What probably happened was this: the editorial staff met, they debated some twenty possible titles, and finally the managing editor's face lighted up and he said, "Hey guys, I've had a fantastic idea!" And the others responded, "Boss, you're a devil! Where do you get them?" "It's a gift," he must have replied.

I'm not saying that people are banal. Taking as divine inspiration, as a flash of originality, something that is obvious reveals a certain freshness of spirit, an enthusiasm for life and its unpredictability, a love of ideas--small as they may be. I will always remember my first meeting with Erving Goffman, whom I admired and loved for the genius and penetration with which he could identify infinitesimal aspects of behavior that had previously eluded everyone else. We were sitting at an outdoor café when, looking at the street after a while, he said, "You know something? I believe there are too many automobiles in circulation in our cities." Maybe he had never thought this before because he had had far more important things to think about; he had just had a sudden epiphany and still had the mental freshness to express it. I, a little snob infected by the Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen of Neitzsche, would have hesitated to say it, even if I thought it.

A second shock of banality occurs to many people in my condition--that is, people who possess a fairly sizeable library (large enough in my case that someone entering our house can't help but notice it; actually, it takes up the whole place). The visitor enters and says, "What a lot of books! Have you read them all?" At first I thought that the question characterized only people who had scant familiarity with books, people accustomed to seeing a couple of shelves with five paperback mysteries and a children's encyclopedia, bought in installments. But experience has taught me that the same words can be uttered also by people above suspicion. It could be said that they are still people who consider a bookshelf as a mere storage place for already-read books and do not think of the library as a working tool. But there is more to it than that. I believe that, confronted by a vast array of books, anyone will be seized by the anguish of learning, and will inevitably lapse into asking the question that expresses his torment and his remorse.

The problem is that when someone says, "Eco? You're the one who always answers," you can reply with a little laugh and, at most, if you want to be polite, with "That's a good one!" But the question about your books has to be answered, while your jaw stiffens and rivulets of cold sweat trickle down your spine. In the past I adopted a tone of contemptuous sarcasm. "I haven't read any of them; otherwise, why would I keep them here?" But this is a dangerous answer because it invites the obvious follow-up: "And where do you put them after you've read them?" The best answer is the one always used by Roberto Leydi: "And more, dear sir, many more," which freezes the adversary and plunges him into a state of awed admiration. But I find it merciless and angst-generating. Now I have fallen back on the riposte: "No, these are the ones I have to read by the end of the month. I keep the others in my office," a reply that on one hand suggests a sublime ergonomic strategy, and on the other leads the visitor to hasten the moment of his departure.
1990
~~~~End Quotation 2~~~~

Brie in pastry with red onion confit

Among the things we served on the last night of our Winterim cooking class was crostini with goat cheese mousse and a red onion confit. The goat cheese mousse was dead simple:

• set out a six ounce tube of goat cheese to warm
• chop about a tbsp of parsley
• whip up about a quarter cup of heavy cream
• fold everything together
• season with kosher salt and freshly ground pepper

The confit went like so:

• slice 2 lbs red onions (about 4 large onions)
• simmer in a pan with
• 1/2 c. honey
• 1/2 c. red wine
• 5/8 c. (1/2 c. + 2 tbsp; 5 fl. oz.) red wine vinegar
• until the mixture is the consistency of marmalade
• S&P to taste

Upon tasting the confit, Lizzy proclaimed that it would be good with brie. So last Sunday night, that's what I did. I cheated with the pastry and used a small thwack packet of croissant dough.[1] I just twacked the tube, pulled out the four ready-made croissants, and instead of rolling them up, I rolled them out into one big sheet. (I used a small tube because of Lizzy's diabetes-induced bread restrictions, but next time I will probably use a regular-sized tube of dough.)

I made a quarter recipe of the confit (one huge red onion, 1 oz each of the honey & the wine, and splash more than that of the vinegar).
I took one six inch brie wheel and cut it in half.
I set the brie in the middle of the croissant dough to make an impression, then took it off and set it aside.

I put half of the confit within that circular impression on the dough, put half the brie down, put on the rest of the confit, then the rest of the brie, then wrapped the dough over the brie and pinched it closed. I then flipped it (smooth dough on top) and baked it in accordance with the instructions on the thwack tube.

It was very tasty.

Next time, I will do at least two things differently (apart from more dough, which was requested by SWMBO). 1) Chop the onion instead of slicing it. 2) Add some walnut pieces to the confit that ends up on top (the bottom layer as it is assembled). And Lizzy suggested adding raisins to the confit close to the end, but this is getting very close to a chutney, don't you think?

Izzy

[1] Are Lizzy & I the only ones who call those biscuits that come in tubes "thwack biscuits"? I think that Pillsbury is the best known purveyors of these things. You know the ones. You peel the outer layer off the tube and then there's that cardboard with the line tha says to press here with a spoon. But why press when they usually pop open on their own? And when they don't, isn't it much more satisfying to thwack the tube sharply against the edge of the counter?

Speaking of omelets

There's a scene in the movie Deep Blue Sea (about intelligent sharks and an isolated research station; essentially a haunted house story) where LL Cool J's character (Sherman 'Preacher' Dudley) believes that he is about to die, and all he has is a video camera, so he figures he should record his last words. What does he have to say in this, his final hour? He looks into the lense and says, "We will start with the perfect omelet, which is made with two eggs not three. Amateurs often add milk for density. This is a mistake."

Truer words were never spoken.

Among the few good things I'm known for is my ability to turn out a tasty omelet. So in the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that the cream in the omelette Lyonaise was a departure for me; I did it only because the recipes all said to. My usual omelet procedure runs thus:

• Put a hefty skillet on medium heat (a heavy pan makes for more even heat transfer; lower heat & longer time make for a fluffier omelet).
• Whisk two eggs.
• Prepare your fold-ins (cheese, olives, whatever).
• Toss a lump of butter into the pan, and slide it off-center on the burner (if your stove isn't level, you'll want the uphill side of the pan on the center of the heat).
• Pour in the egg and give the pan a quick wobble to spread the egg evenly.
• Put your fold-ins on the side of the omelet that will stay down.
• As soon as the side directly over the heat will no longer run, fold it over the other side.
• Slide the skillet over so the other side of the pan (with the folded omelet) is over the center of the heat.
• When it starts to puff up, slide it onto a plate. It's done.

The keys for me are 1) medium heat and 2) not bothering it too much. Just let it sit there and cook. (This despite that wonderful reconciliation omelet scene at the end of Big Night.)

A word about spinach. I like it. I like omelets. It was inevitable that I would try a spinach omelet. The recipes had me wilting the spinach in the skillet and pouring the egg on top of it. I didn't like the way this dried the spinach that stayed in contact with the pan. I tried wilting the spinach, removing it from the pan, and treating it like any other fold-in, but I found the spinach just a bit too moist this way for my tastes. What I do now is

• whisk 2 eggs and set aside,
• wilt the spinach in a skillet (throw a lot in, it shrinks way down),
• remove it from the skillet and whisk it into the eggs,
• pour eggs and spinach into the pan, and
• cook that omelet.
• I often fold in a little cheese (brie or a sharp cheddar both work admirably well).

That's a spinach omelet I can eat.

Omelette Lyonnaise

Also known as a half-baked onion omelet. Well, half-broiled anyway. But half-baked sounds better.

The first step will take the better part of an hour. The finish will take less than ten minutes.

Step one: carmelize a pound and a half of onions. I used sweet onions, cause we have quite a few in the fridge. I was going to slice them with a knife, but decided that I could get them thinner with a mandoline. Now a pound and a half of sliced onion looks like an awful lot, but it will cook down to a large handful. To carmelize 'em:

• melt a few tablespoons (it looked like ~3 to me) of butter in a large saucepan on medium
• add the onions
• let 'em simmer until the onions start to sweat out their liquid
• make sure you have nothing else to do for a long while
• turn up the heat
  
• stir continuously until the onions turn dark brown
• remove from heat

Now at this point, all the recipes say to put the onions into a pan and pour the beaten egg mixture onto them. I did not do it this way.

I had previously whisked up four eggs and a three tablespoons of heavy cream and set this in the fridge. When the onions were ready and I could finally stop stirring, here's what I did:

• remove onion pan from heat
• place large skillet on heat, turn down to medium
• turn on broiler to preheat
• whisk onions into eggs & cream
• pour into now-warm skillet
• let cook for ~3 minutes (until the bottom is cooked and the center is starting to firm)
• remove skillet from heat and put under the broiler for about 2 minutes (until the top is browned)

The recipes say that the omelet should be slightly runny, but Lizzy doesn't care for eggs that flow downhill, so I cooked 'em a little firmer.

Cut that baby in half, toss it onto a couple of plates and splash on some balsamic vinegar.


Note that this did nothing to diminish our supply of strawberries. We had some for dessert with coffee. Lizzy made a couple of quicky drop-biscuit shortcakes for hers (bread may now be her enemy, but she still needs some), and I whipped up a little cream for mine. (Why would you ever buy that stuff they call whipped cream in tubs and tubes when it's so darned easy to toss a little sugar, a splash of vanilla, and some cream into a bowl and whip it up all tasty and fresh?)

I have a feeling my next recipe might be for a shortcake. It kind of depends on how tomorrow's ride down to McGuire's in Summerville goes.

Yet another use for little-visited blogs: Recipes!

I've been experimenting a bit lately and thought I'd put here a few recipes that have worked well. It beats leaving them on the hard drive until a catastrophic crash. We'll start with last night.

I brought home a mess of strawberries from the Freshman Strawberry sale at school (for two people, half a flat is definitely a mess -- not a half-mess, a whole mess). They smell very ripe and on the verge of going bad. They are, sadly, not local, but shipped up from Florida. So despite their smell, they are very hard and not very sweet. Be that as it may, I knew we needed to use some. We also have a hefty supply of spinach, so I figured it was time for a salad.

I've made berry vinaigrettes before for other sorts of salads (berries, white balsamic, sweeten to taste, stick blend till pour-able; toss with olive oil on the salad). But berry vinaigrette on a berry and greens salad seemed like too little variation. So I went searching for a different dressing. Some of the ingredients I found recommended seemed verrrrry odd. Nevertheless, it came out quite tasty. Here's what we had:

Salad

• 10-12 oz. spinach, washed & large stems removed
• ~2 oz. goat cheese, tossed into the spinach to evenly coat the leaves (just use your hands and mash that stuff all over the leaves. It really is the best way to manage this step.)
•  enough thinly-sliced red onion to make a nice spider’s web covering the top
• 1.5 hard-boiled eggs, sliced (If I’m only making enough for a few of us, I do 10 oz spinach and only two eggs. If I’m doing this for a big gathering, I typically do at least 24 oz. spinach, 4 oz. goat cheese, and anywhere from four to six boiled eggs.)
• 1.5 cups whole strawberries (1 qt. for 24 oz. spinach), sliced after measuring
• pecan pieces, toasted (2 minutes in our convection toaster oven does the trick, or around 20 minutes at 220°F)
• layer it all up in more-or-less this order

Dressing

• 1/2 c. sugar
• 1 Tbsp. minced onion
• 1 Tbsp. poppy seeds
• 1/2 Tbsp. mustard powder (I added this improvement to the recipe later.)
• 1/4 tsp. paprika
• 1/4 tsp. Worcestershire sauce
• 1/2 c. light olive oil
• 1/4 c. red wine vinegar
• 1 Tbsp. balsamic vinegar

Blend to a smooth emulsion. I use an immersion blender / stick blender. You could also use a regular blender or a food processor.

I know it sounds odd, but trust me on this one. It's quite tasty.

It Beats Drunken Exhibitionism

There ARE a million monkeys sitting at a million keyboards, but the internet looks nothing at all like Shakespeare.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Why are we here? And by "here" I don't mean the big existential question. I mean here in cyberspace? Is it, perhaps, to collect our fifteen?

No, not the fifteen minutes promised us by Warhol, but the fifteen people promised us by Currie.

It turns out, Nick Currie was only partly right. Reflecting on the technological innovations of the early 90s, he issued a now-famous riff on Andy Warhol's already-famous maxim that "in the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes." Warhol had been commenting on the nature of celebrity and the inability of the public to intentionally focus rather than to flit from amusement to amusement. A generation later "fifteen minutes of fame" was part of our cultural psyche, and Momus / Nick Currie was able to repurpose the tag. He decried the control of the suits and the tyranny of "units sold" over the music industry. Looking forward to the end of the industry's hegemony and the rise of innovative, creative musicians through relatively simple and inexpensive self-production, he predicted that "in the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen people." How one would make a living with such a small fan base he did not speculate. Presumably, a pure artst doesn't care about such things. In 1999, Currie revisited his theme and saw the revolution nearly realized, with artists controlling both the means of production and global distribution. He says, "the era of stars... is over, and that worries the critics."

Currie was at least partly wrong. The age of stars goes on, it's just that those who previously would have been completely ignored or crushed beneath the big wheels' roll now move in a parallel track on MySpace or in the blogosphere, famous for fifteen people and sometimes getting called up by the suits who hope to profit by them. I think Rabo Karabekian hit much closer to the mark back in 1987.

Early in Chapter 9 of Kurt Vonnegut's Bluebeard, Rabo Karabekian says this:

I was obviously born to draw better than most people, just as the widow Berman and Paul Slazinger were obviously born to tell stories better than most people can. Other people are obviously born to sing and dance or explain the stars in the sky or do magic tricks or be great leaders or athletes, and so on.

I think that could go back to the time when people had to live in small groups of relatives--maybe fifty or a hundred people at most. And evolution--or God or whatever--arranged things genetically, to keep the little families going, to cheer them up, so that they could all have somebody to tell stories around the campfire at night, and somebody else to paint pictures on the walls of the caves, and somebody else who wasn't afraid of everything and so on.

That's what I think. And of course a scheme like that doesn't make sense anymore, because simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but the world's champions.

The entire planet can get along nicely now with maybe a dozen champion performers in each area of human giftedness. A moderately gifted person has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until, in a manner of speaking, he or she gets drunk at a wedding and tap dances on the coffee table like Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers. We have a name for him or her. We call him or her an "exhibitionist."

How do we reward such an exhibitionist? We say to him or her the next morning, "Wow! Were you ever drunk last night!"

So now with the mass-media superstars AND Currie's fifteen people, we are all being compared not only with the world's top dozen, but also with the moderately gifted stars of the internet. And you know what? I think if I had to choose just one form of fame, I would take the drunken exhibitionism. Because that way, at least we're in the same room with one another, physically present in a community. This cyber-stuff can be a useful adjunct to, but is no replacement for, a real life.

So log out, and go share a meal with some friends.

Horace and the Thunder: notes on a recension

I’m a fan of Seamus Heaney. I’m also a Latin teacher who has on occasion set his classes an exercise in which they must rewrite the preamble to the US Constitution using no Latin or Greek roots. They complain about how hard it is and how impoverished Anglo-Saxon must have been. Then I read them some Seamus Heaney, usually something from his Beowulf. It is astounding to hear those old Germanic roots thundering off the page. (BTW, does anyone know of an unabridged edition of Heaney reading this epic? I have the two disc abridged version and lust for more.)

I also tend to trot out Heaney’s resetting of Horace’s Odes 1.34 at least once a semester -- on 11 September and when we start a unit on Horace. It is an astounding poem -- not a translation but a cathartic reworking. It is apparently also a work in progress and has been published in several different forms.

I first saw a version of this poem early in 2002 and scribbled it down by hand. I did not then note from where I was copying it, but some scruple kept me from either tearing it out or taking the magazine / newspaper with me. Were it on the web, I would have mailed myself a copy & paste. Whatever the source, what I wrote down was virtually identical to the text as it subsequently appeared in Alexander Nehamas’ comments at Princeton on the first anniversary of the September 11 attack. One difference I take as an uncorrected typo on the Princeton website, where line 6 reads “the clogged underneath” instead of “the clogged underearth.”* (I ignore this variant in my tiny little app. crit.) The other difference between my handwritten version and that on the Princeton website is in line 10, where Nehamas’ version has “hooked-beak Fortune” rather than the usual (and far better) “stropped-beak Fortune.”

While poking around in late summer 2003 for a more authoritative version to use with my classes on the second anniversary, I came across a free-lance Armenian translator whose website has a version of the poem nearly identical with my handwritten version. The single difference is in the final two words, “boil away” instead of “darken day.” (Pipoyan’s Armenian version does not appear in the Amnesty edition, which is a shame; it would have made a nice diptych with Turkish.)

When I got my copy of the Amnesty International edition (ISBN 186059235X), I found two English versions. One entitled “Horace and the Thunder,” dated 2001; the other, “Anything Can Happen,” dated 2004. Aside from internal differences, both have differences from the poem as I had known it up to that point. The “esteemed” of line 10 has been wisely changed to “regarded,” lines 11 and 12 have undergone significant revision, and line sixteen has two new versions.

And now I’ve received (as a birthday present to myself) a copy of last year’s District and Circle (ISBN 0374140928), where I find yet another version of “Anything Can Happen,” one that is (oddly) more in agreement with Amnesty’s “Horace and the Thunder” than with Amnesty’s “Anything Can Happen.” It also has a unique variant, “tallest towers” at the end of line 8 instead of “tallest things.”

So what’s a Latin teacher to do when it comes time to talk about Horace’s influence on other poets and / or the usefulness of poetry in processing these dark days? Simple enough; use the variants he prefers to construct his own recension. Which is what I’ve done below. As far as I know, the version that I’ve posted below exists nowhere else, and is in no way authorized by the poem’s author. I’m enough of a pinhead that I’ve even included an app. crit. to remind me what and where the variants are. In those notes, I’ve used the following abbreviations:

Aa “Anything Can Happen” as printed on p. 11 of the Amnesty edition, 2004
Ad “Anything Can Happen” as printed on p. 13 of District and Circle, 2006
Ha “Horace and the Thunder” as printed on p. 20 of the Amnesty edition, 2004
Hn “Horace and the Thunder” as printed in Nehamas’ comments, c. 2002
Hp “Horace and the Thunder” as printed on Pipoyan’s website, c. 2003

This is meant to be neither exhaustive nor authoritative; it is entirely idiosyncratic, and all I’ll ever do with it is use it in my Latin classes. If anyone wants to talk about which variants you prefer and why, that’s what com boxes on blogs are for. But as far as I’m concerned, poems are better savored than dissected.


*Postscript: Be careful to avoid reading lines 5 & 6 as “It shook the earth / And clogged the underearth.” Sure, that rhythm works better, and your mind naturally wants to read clogged as a verb instead of as an adjective, but the and is joining earth and underearth, not shook and clogged. It’s NOT “and clogged the underearth”; it IS “and the clogged underearth.”

Horace and the Thunder: an Unauthorized Recension

HORACE AND THE THUNDER
after Horace, Odes I, 34

Anything can happen. You know how Jupiter
Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head
Before he hurls the lightning? Well, just now,
He galloped his thunder-cart and his horses

Across a clear blue sky. It shook the earth
And the clogged underearth, the River Styx,
The winding streams, the Atlantic shore itself.
Anything can happen, the tallest things

Be overturned, those in high places daunted,
Those overlooked regarded. Stropped-beak Fortune
Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing off
Crests for sport, letting them drop wherever.

Ground gives. The heaven’s weight
Lifts up off Atlas like a kettle-lid,
Capstones shift, nothing resettles right.
Telluric ash and fire-spores darken day.

by Seamus Heaney

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
8 things Aa Ha Hn Hp; towers Ad
10 regarded Aa Ad Ha; esteemed Hn Hp -- Stropped-beak Aa Ad Ha Hp; Hooked-beak Hn
11-12 tearing off...wherever Hn Hp; tearing the crest off one / Setting it down bleeding on the next Aa Ad Ha
13 heaven’s Ad Ha Hn Hp; heavens’ Aa
16 Telluric ash and fire spores Ad Hn Hp; Telluric ash and fire spore Ha; Smoke furl and boiling ashes Aa -- darken day Aa Hn; boil away Ad Ha Hp

Not Quate Adequite

Another in a series of articles to use with students. (hat tip to Lizzy, who stayed home sick today so she could find this)

Lohan sends her condolences to Altman's family
Updated 11/21/2006 7:26 PM ET
Lindsay Lohan released a statement Tuesday extending her condolences to Robert Altman's family:

"I would like to send my condolences out to Catherine Altman, Robert Altmans wife, as well as all of his immediate family, close friends, co-workers, and all of his inner circle.

"I feel as if I've just had the wind knocked out of me and my heart aches.

"If not only my heart but the heart of Mr. Altman's wife and family and many fellow actors/artists that admire him for his work and love him for making people laugh whenever and however he could..

"Robert altman made dreams possible for many independent aspiring filmmakers, as well as creating roles for countless actors.

"I am lucky enough to of been able to work with Robert Altman amongst the other greats on a film that I can genuinely say created a turning point in my career.

"I learned so much from Altman and he was the closest thing to my father and grandfather that I really do believe I've had in several years.

"The point is, he made a difference.

"He left us with a legend that all of us have the ability to do.

"So every day when you wake up.

"Look in the mirror and thank god for every second you have and cherish all moments.

"The fighting, the anger, the drama is tedious.

"Please just take each moment day by day and consider yourself lucky to breathe and feel at all and smile. Be thankful.

"Life comes once, doesn't 'keep coming back' and we all take such advantage of what we have.

"When we shouldn't..... '

"Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of yourselves' (12st book) -everytime there's a triumph in the world a million souls hafta be trampled on.-altman Its true. But treasure each triumph as they come.

"If I can do anything for those who are in a very hard time right now, as I'm one of them with hearing this news, please take advantage of the fact that I'm just a phone call away.

"God Bless, peace and love always.

"Thank You,

"'BE ADEQUITE'

"Lindsay Lohan"

Find this article at:
http://www.usatoday.com/life/people/2006-11-21-lindsay-statement_x.htm

(Two) Million-Dollar Comma....

I just have to save a copy of this for use in classes.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Business
Million-Dollar Comma May Aid Canadian Company

Listen to this story...

All Things Considered, October 25, 2006 · A contract dispute in Canada centers on what's being called a million-dollar comma. Canada's telecommunications regulator has decided that a misplaced comma in a contract concerning telephone poles will allow a company to save an estimated 2 million dollars (Canadian).

The current exchange rate is around .88 cents (U.S.) on the Canadian dollar.

The contract between cable company Rogers Communications and telephone company Bell Aliant allowed Rogers to use Bell Aliant's telephone polls. Bell Aliant sought to get out of the deal.

Canada's telecommunications regulator said the case hinged on the placement of the second comma in this clause:

"This agreement shall be effective from the date it is made and shall continue in force for a period of five (5) years from the date it is made, and thereafter for successive five (5) year terms, unless and until terminated by one year prior notice in writing by either party."

Rogers had insisted the contract was good for at least five years; Aliant said the comma denotes that the deal can be terminated at five years -- or before, as long as one year's notice is given.

The ruling commission said that the comma should have been omitted if the contract was meant to last five years in its shortest term.

The case is now being appealed; Rogers claims that in its French version, the contract has a different statement clarifying the point.

Robert Siegel talks with Robert Janda, a law professor at McGill University in Montreal about the case.

Another use for blogs

Aside from just giving me and identity to use when leaving comments on other people’s blogs, I’ve discovered the usefulness of blogs as a filing cabinet. Things I’ve sent to several people in recent months I can post here. This will save me from searching my e-mail for whatever I’m looking for.

So while I still don’t really have anything new to say, I might occasionally stick some stuff up here from the days when I did have something to say.

But I’d still prefer it if you just came over and shared a beverage.

Izzy

Tolle Lege: Winter’s Tale

This is an introduction to Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale that I wrote some time back. It was written to go with copies of the book that I gave to a couple of people, including my then headmaster. At the point where I tell the recipients to turn to a particular page, you can jump down to the previous post, where I’ve pasted in that whole chapter (it’s a page long) and a quotation from an Image interview with Helprin. My apologies for the awkwardness of jumping back and forth. Enjoy anyway.

Izzy

~~~Begin Quotation~~~
Churchmen... burn themselves up in seeking, and they find nothing. If your faith is genuine, then you will meet your responsibilities, fulfill your obligations, and wait until you are found. It will come. If not to you, then to your children, and if not to them, then to their children.
-- from Mark Helprin’s A Winters Tale (italics mine)


X and Y,

I got suckered into Classics and into teaching in large part through my love of reading. Every now and again I come across a book that reminds me why I do what I do.

You are holding in your hands one of the most luminous novels I've ever read. When people ask why I teach, I want to hand them this book and say, “because books like this exist.” I even once used a chapter as part of devotions here at Trinity. It was the short chapter entitled “Nothing is Random” that stands at the beginning of section three. It’s about a page long and starts on p. 359. Go ahead and turn to it now and give it a read.

[cf. previous post]

~~~~~~~~~~

All done? Is it not a fine attempt at reconciling free will and predestination? And that final line, “...justice becomes apparent not as something that will be, but as something that is.”

Now, you will have noticed that I underlined a few words in your copy of that chapter. My one complaint about this book as an object is that the editor and publisher really should have sprung for italics in a few places where the emphasis makes the reading clear on a first pass. Be that as it may, while I was reading this novel for the first time, I never put my pencil down, but marked passages left and right and kept running indices of particular themes and great quotations. Be warned and keep a pencil handy.


Why do I like this novel so much? Normally, I need good characters to hook me into a story. But here, I didn't really care about the characters and yet I read on avidly. I think perhaps it was the story itself that carried me along.

If that’s the case, if this is a plot-driven novel with (what seem to me to be) broadly drawn characters without a lot of depth, in fact a sort of sideshow of stock characters and off-stock characters who’ve been languishing on a shelf waiting for a story they could actually work in... If that’s the way this novel is put together, it may be that my background makes me a bit more receptive to it than most people are. I spend a fair bit of time in ancient literature, where it is the plot and the language that carry things along, rather than the psychology of the characters.

I suppose that what I’m trying to avoid saying is that I found this to be an ancient epic of a story.


One of the main things I love about this novel is its sense of language. The prose is quite nice, and at times nearly breathtaking. Take the sections where the winter scenes are evoked with such beauty that you can almost see the cheesy Currier & Ives (or even Norman Rockwell) illustrations trying to capture the stark beauty of a time gone by. Into the midst of at least two of those scenes, the story tosses in a simile that breaks the illusion, makes me remember that the setting is not from some Capra film, but from the post-atomic age.

For example, on p. 542, in a long description of the spontaneous street fairs that arise on the ice, you can almost see the skaters trailing their scarves, stopping at the stands for quaint snacks, behaving like a pre-television community. Listen:

The nine-year-old boys seemed to be the fastest and the most daring. They were as skinny as elastic bands, knew no danger, and stopped only long enough to shovel fruit pastries into their mouths. Then they were off at a hundred miles an hour, dodging, darting, and continually raving in squeaky voices for everyone to move out of their way.

Can’t you see them? Can’t you hear them? And what are they dressed in when you see them? Lots of wool; no nylon or synthetics in bright colors, just natural fabrics and earth-tones. Even they velocity is evoked with a the rather old-fashioned hyperbole a hundred miles an hour. But this illusion is shattered with the very next sentence:

“As speedy as pions, muons, and charmed quarks, they were all places at once, the possessors of pure boundless energy.”

And we are jerked forward into our turn-of-the-millennium era. But I can’t help but notice that those bygone boys who zip ahead so post-atomically aren’t simply like quarks; they're like charmed quarks. And what sort better.


And of course, in a novel so propelled by language, there are the characters who are tied up in language. There’s Craig Binky, editor of the Ghost, and his riotous malapropisms. There is Hugh Close, a virtual throwaway, but still a man far overqualified to be a rewrite editor: “Words were all he knew; they possessed and overwhelmed him, as if they were a thousand white cats with whom he shared a one-room apartment. (In fact, he did not like cats, because the could not talk and would not listen.)” (229-30).

And there is Mrs. Gamely, my favorite -- an illiterate with an extraordinarily fine command of precise usage, a woman who welcomes foreigners so she can soak up their words and who requires a team of lexicographers to keep up with her vocabulary. Read pp. 201-204, right down to the hysterically incongruous and jarring “Who knows? The point is, he thought he was a cat.”

Another thing I really liked about this novel is its sense of humor. There are the ironic touches like those above, the screwball touches like the telegrams fired back and forth on pp. 141-2 (cf. Mrs. Gamely's advice on finding someone in NY, p. 288). There’s even the profoundly stupid, like world’s worst outdoor guide, Jesse, who seems to be whittling himself to death -- “But he never thought that he would die in a bark suit, strapped to a shock pancake, next to an incompetent midget.” (267).

And the humor and language combine in some brilliant descriptions. In the ice scene I refer to above, with the squeaky nine-year-old pions, is a description I will probably always remember, especially since I’m so fond of hard-boiled eggs. -- “Above innumerable fireboxes, caldrons steamed and boiled, lobsters tumbled, and many grosses of eggs jigged in the hysterical dances of the legless bald.” (542)


For the language and the humor alone, I would love this novel. But I think there’s some meat to chew on as well. For example, most of those notes that I scribbled were on such themes as bridges, justice, balance, loss, and rebirth. But rather than give you a run through one or the other of the themes of Winter’s Tale, I’ll give you a quick taste of the meat of it through those stock characters. This will also allow me to give you a question to mull over as you read.


One way to discover whether a person has understood what they’ve read is via a diagnostic question. I was delighted to discover that Walker Percy held this same view, and that he had a diagnostic question for the readers of Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Liebowitz, a book for which I, too, have a question. If you’ve read CfL, then perhaps you’ll recognize the value of these two questions.

Percy’s: Who or what is Rachel? (the second head on the woman at the end of the book)

Mine: Is this book fundamentally optimistic or fundamentally pessimistic?


My diagnostic question for WT is more like Percy’s character question for CfL:

Who or what is Peter Lake?


It will give away nothing to warn you about another character, Jackson Mead. Who is Jackson Mead? It becomes clear that he’s trying to bridge heaven and earth, trying to make heaven accessible on earth, and this is nearly always assumed within the novel to be a laudable goal. Yet in the epilogue, I read “But Jackson Mead was convinced, as always, that the next time, a new means at his disposal would allow him to return from the high place from which he had been cast.” Cast from a high place, trying to get back, plenty of time to bide... Now who could this be? And if my suspicion is supportable, what does this do to the notion of the bridge and Mead’s stated goals, always presented in a favorable light within the novel?

So as you read, pencil in hand, ask yourself: Who or what is Peter Lake?


Pax Christi vobiscum vestrisque,
Izzy

Mark Helprin on Predestination and Free Will

Nothing is random, nor will anything ever be, whether a long string of perfectly blue days that begin and end in golden dimness, the most seemingly chaotic political acts, the rise of a great city, the crystalline structure of a gem that has never seen the light, the distribution of fortune, what time the milkman gets up, the position of an electron, or the occurrence of one astonishingly frigid winter after another. Even electrons, supposedly the paragons of unpredictability, are tame and obsequious little creatures that rush around at the speed of light, going precisely where they are supposed to go. They make faint whistling sounds that when apprehended in varying combinations are as pleasant as the wind flying through a forest, and they do exactly as they are told. Of this, one can be certain.

And yet there is a wonderful anarchy, in that the milkman chooses when to arise, the rat picks the tunnel into which he will dive when the subway comes rushing down the track from Borough Hall, and the snowflake will fall as it will. How can this be? If nothing is random, and everything is predetermined, how can there be free will? The answer is simple. Nothing is predetermined; it is determined, or was determined, or will be determined. No matter, it happened all at once, in less than an instant, and time was invented because we cannot comprehend in one glance the enormous and detailed canvas that we have been given -- so we track it, in linear fashion, piece by piece. Time, however, can be easily overcome; not by chasing the light, but by standing back far enough to see it all at once. The universe is still and complete. Everything that ever was, is; everything that ever will be, is -- and so on, in all possible combinations. Though in perceiving it we imagine that it is in motion, and unfinished, it is quite finished and quite astonishingly beautiful. In the end, or rather, as things really are, any event, no matter how small, is intimately tied to all others. All rivers run full to the sea; those who are apart are brought together; the lost ones are redeemed; the dead come back to life; the perfectly blue days that have begun and ended in golden dimness continue, immobile and accessible; and, when all is perceived in such a way as to obviate time, justice becomes apparent not as something that will be, but as something that is.

“Nothing is Random,” the first chapter in the 3rd section of Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I see no contradiction between free will and predestination. Why is this? It is because I believe that time is an illusion, that, given our mortal limitations, it is the artifice by which we struggle to perceive a reality that has no time. In other words, it all happened and is happening, at once. Take, for example, the sequential progress of a movie. It seems to be rooted in linear time. Frame after frame passes in forward motion. And yet, before and after the show, the film is in the can, absolutely still, all in one place and position, immobile. If it is true that time is a function of the speed of light, and if it is also true that a point, as in Euclidean geometry, is illusory, then light on a course from the earth outward, when apprehended from far enough away--from infinite distance, from God's perspective--would not possess the attributes of motion. And therefore there would be no time. In the absence of time, there need not be a contradiction between that which is predestined and that which is chosen. And, by the way, this would also explain the close connection between time and death. Perhaps death is the condition when the illusion if time loses its grip on us. In life, people frequently report not only deja vu but sensations of time slowing, or even stopping. Please do not misinterpret me or draw the wrong conclusions about my seriousness when I remind you that I do not wear a watch.

--from an interview with Mark Helprin published in Image #17

God Squashed; NBC Steams VeggieTales fans

If I were the sort who blogged, this is the sort of thing I might blog about.

AP via CNN

(also featured at hotair.com)


I can see the re-worked first episode now:

WHERE'S my courage WHEN I'M SCARED?

with that great song:

my courage IS BIGGER THAN THE BOOGIE MAN


It's just sad.

The key word was Normally

I still don't normally participate in these sorts of things, but...

A certain Rogue Classicist followed Glaukopis' lead on this Myers-Briggs-style Mythological personality test. I can't say I'm all that happy with the site that hosts the quiz, and so despite it's mythological content, I won't be putting up a link for my students to follow. But it's nice to have some place to file my own oddball results.

Because so much on the web is so very ephemeral, I'm going to paste in the blogger code and then, below that, plain text of the results.

Izzy / Nemesis

Edit: I'm scraping out the code and leaving the plain text. I dislike the spacing in the html and don't want to waste time fussing with it.



Nemesis

33% Extroversion, 66% Intuition, 72% Emotiveness, 23% Perceptiveness

You are a normally quiet person with very strong convictions and a marked activist streak. You have a clearly defined sense of right and wrong, and you like seeing people punished for their transgressions. You are Nemesis, goddess of punishment. You are a champion for the defenseless, you love poetic justice and, if karmic retribution doesn't have its say, then you'll have yours. You are astute, rarely fooled, and idealistic.

Famous People like you: Goethe, Voltaire, Susan B. Anthony, Robert Burns

My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:
You scored higher than 99% on Extroversion
You scored higher than 99% on Intuition
You scored higher than 99% on Emotiveness
You scored higher than 99% on Perceptiveness