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022408 When my chess game is on (not often enough for my liking) it's really on. The other day I beat my father in a long game, I as white, he as black; feeling good about things, I decided to play someone on the chess club. The fellow who responded to my seek ad was rated at 1400; I'm at a paltry 1001. I was black and he was white. Man, my game was so good I can't tell you. Within only a few moves, he was about to lose his queen or be mated or both. He just quit. He adjourned the game and when I asked if he wanted to resume, he declined. For some, it's better to quit than to to lose, and they know it when they're about to go under. *ErosAromatics* This week I tried to make an amber perfume. An amber note is achieved by combining benzoin, labdanum, and vanilla. The problem is that those are all base notes; if you made a perfume with only those, it would be "dead" on the skin. So, working with 60 drops of essence per 15 ml of alcohol (1 teaspoon to 1 tablespoon, a ratio of 1/3), I decided to give the base chord 30 drops, the middle 10, and the top 20. Conventional wisdom holds that the ideal is 10 : 20 : 30. This fact has always perplexed me, as the perfumer's palette is limited when it comes to top notes, while it's comparatively extensive with base notes. We'll see how my effort goes. I suspect I'll end up using more in the base and less on top. Next I might try 40 : 10 : 10. One perfume I made a week ago, Oz, is turning out well. Jetta thinks it's professional-quality material. It is clearly heavy on osmanthus, but comes off the skin like a dense fabric of scents. It is a very sensual aroma. Jetta says she thinks it could be a signature man's fragrance, but women will like it too. I don't feel like the recipe is quite finished, but so far, it's looking good. I'm very pleased of course because osmanthus, it's become clear to me, is like orange blossoms, one of my very favorite scents on planet earth. Another one I made based on vetiver, hay, and tobacco, is on the right track but not quite right. I like it because it's the first perfume I've made that reminds me of mainstream men's fragrances. This leads me to believe that the above three ingredients may well be indispensable in attempting to create some of those "pour homme" scents. It starts out extremely strong, like a small slap in the face, and dries down to just vetiver. I will play with the recipe and see if I can think how to make it better. There was talk on the perfumers list about the fact that France, and Grasse in particular, is not a mecca for natural perfumery as it was in days of old, with its hectares and hectares of flower fields within reach. Every house based in France these days is synthetic. While Grasse does have a natural-perfumery course of study on offer, there are no natural perfumers there. The new center of the revival of all-natural perfumery is yet to be determined, though I happen to believe Portland would serve excellently. Our climate is not unlike Grasse, with the ocean also not far away, and there are numerous suppliers for natural perfumery (in addition to a number of natural perfumers) in the northwest. In particular, lavender and roses, as well as jasmine and a host of other necessary materials, thrive here. Additionally, one of the country's best suppliers of 190-proof organic-grape alcohol is right here in Oregon, a "micro distillery" called Alchemical Solutions; there is constant complaining from natural perfumers in Europe that it's next to impossible for them to find good perfume alcohol. We, the few, the proud, the natural perfumers, truly are riding the crest of a wave of a renaissance. We are picking up where the art left off in the early 1900s, with the advent of the more economic (read, lucrative) synthetics. Ours is an art only for those with geologic patience and dedication to the comparatively difficult work of blending natural aromatics. This art is teaching me much better patience than I've ever had. *NaturalPerfume* From Anya McCoy's new natural-perfume blog on basenotes.net. Ms McCoy is an esteemed natural perfumer (visit anyasgarden.com), president of the Natural Perfumers Guild, and list-mom for the natural-perfumers list, among numerous other endeavors. I have a conference call with her on Monday, to discuss a few details of starting a natural-perfume business: "Why have you decided to be a "naturals-only" perfumer is a question we often get. The person asking the question may list the negatives: "* Your raw materials are very expensive. "We answer: because. Because: "* We're in it for the art. "There is no competition with mainstream perfumery. We're just two different art forms, like oil painting is different from digital art. There are completely different aesthetics, media and results, and so it is and will always continue to be. These parallel arts will always have things in common, such as the need to respond to market trends, sourcing, R&D, and the need to always keep learning, keep on top of the perfumery and keep current, and that is our common ground. "Natural perfumers will always create for those who appreciate hand-made items from natural sources, and they are fortunate to live in the time of the internet and global transport that delivers raw aromatics and customers orders to their studio, allowing them to develop their art and business outside of the closed world of corporate perfumery schools. "We have a pronounced advantage in our pioneering of tincturing and infusing rare botanicals for our own use. Natural perfumers are as apt to create their own jasmine bases and tuberose tinctures as buy it from the supplier, if they have a garden to grow the botanical in. Others are tincturing seeds and soil to recreate some of the more exotic scents out of India, such as ambrette and mitti, which is soil attar. "And the clincher? Our mothers, who first turned us on to the world of perfume, love our scents, and we now give back to them and their generation our liquid treasures, botanicals made liquid--naturally." *Quotations* Tell all the truth but tell it slant. --Emily Dickinson No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong. --Einstein There are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil. --Alfred North Whitehead The truth is always a compound of two half-truths, and you never reach it, because there is always something more to say. --Tom Stoppard Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it. --Andre Gide A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it. --Oscar Wilde All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them. --Galileo If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything. --Mark Twain The truth is more important than the facts. --Frank Lloyd Wright Say not, 'I have found the truth,' but rather, 'I have found a truth.' --Kahlil Gibran *Fiction* The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver is a book of tremendous breadth and power. I would say that at its core, it is a book about the strength needed for motherhood, and the sacrifices as well. It is also a tale, set with the surreal juxtaposition of Christianity and African folk religions as a backdrop, about the many various struggles of African peoples. This is most certainly a book which asks important questions about where we've been and at what junctures we went wrong. It has many opinions about where we went wrong. It spans several decades in real time, but the entire span of our existence in its scope. The final section, in which each of three sisters has their final say, I did find a bit too constructed and preachy. The rest of the book flows as a fascinating narrative; the change in perspective which comes at the end seems somewhat disjointed. But, in the end, even this somewhat questionable choice does not detract from the power of the book. The tool used throughout of switching voices between characters and chapters began to wear thin for me. I guess it didn't wear thin so much as leave me with questions: if this stuff isn't written down, are they speaking it aloud to the air? if it is their own unspoken thoughts, are the idiosyncratic grammar and spelling mistakes actually appropriate? I mean, in your own thoughts, you don't think in erroneous language--you just think. I know I'm being overly analytical, but it's not a good sign if a reader starts asking questions like these. Needless to say, I was extremely impressed when, at the end, one of the sisters (no longer a girl) takes the opportunity to assess very deep-seated social criticism. She comes down hard on a point dear to my heart: self-sufficient horticulture! In describing yet another of many vast differences discovered when Europeans arrived in the Congo, she describes the Europeans' inability to accept that if there weren't a system of export agriculture in place, things were nevertheless fine and dandy. The ancient Kongo was riddled with footpaths throughout the kingdom, and every crop grown was eaten right near to where it was grown. Soon enough, we will find ourselves returning to that way of living, and not by choice All in all, this very ambitious book succeeds on many fronts. It answers questions, many unasked. It presents even more conundrums, about where we are now, what we've come through, what we aim to be, what kind of people, and what we hold precious. In bringing the reader along on this very bumpy journey of a missionary family gone astray in "the heart of darkness," this story can't help but remind you of the demons and angels in your own life. A soaring work that at times had me wondering why the poetic language was written out as prose, in lines such as: "The trilling of our neighbors' tongues set loose knives that cut the flesh from our bones and made us fall down with our shame and our love and our anger," and these to end it, "The sins of the fathers belong to you and to the forest and even to the ones in iron bracelets, and here you stand, remembering their songs. Listen. Slide the weight from your shoulders and move forward. You are afraid you might forget, but you never will. You will forgive and remember. Think of the vine that curls from the small square plot that was once my heart. That is the only marker you need. Move on. Walk forward into the light." *Science* Apologies in advance for this: I read that, "The mysterious G spot can be found with ultrasound," claim Italian scientists. It seems I'm in the dark: I didn't realize it was even possible to have mutually enjoyable sex without knowing where your woman's "G spot" is. I mean, speaking frankly, we're talking clits, right? I would have thought Italians to be more savvy--they need ultrasound to find it? It's a miracle that the Italian population has been able to maintain its numbers. There are indeed a lot of mysteries in this world, but a clit ain't one of 'em. *TheWriter* This week I've been tormented by the haze set over my brain. I KNOW I have important and necessary things to say, unique ways of saying them, and quite an array of experiences, real-life and educational, to draw on, but I find, in a similar fashion to my chess game hurting because of the MS's effect on my mental faculties, it's as if my mind can't make out clearly enough, from the world of topics and scenarios, especially at this juncture in history, which thread is the one my voice is waiting to address. I feel as though I have blue-balls as a writer--waiting for YEARS I've been, and how much closer am I, really, to taking the throne in my own writer's kingdom? I have no such kingdom, just a head full of hazy possibilities struggling to make their way out into the world. One thing has become clear to me: while my knowledge of recent history is pretty good (and contemporary science, philosophy, etc.), to write stories as detailed as The Alienist, I will have to do a whole lot of history reading. Especially if the background question is, "Where did we go wrong and how?" I am compelled to load up on history books. Really, I realize, there's no end to the history research a good writer does, in fields ranging from history itself, to anthropology, to science, to philosophy and economics, to religion, and on and on. As Carl Sagan, and undoubtedly many others through time, said, "You have to know the past to understand the present." Never before have I felt such a compulsion to know the past, the ins and outs of it, the day-to-day details, the tapestries of lives the world over. *Politics* By Matt Frei for the BBC: "Running for the job is probably more gruelling than executing it. And most presidents will want to run twice in eight years. If a man or a woman can survive this ordeal, then they are fit to be president. By the end of the campaign, we will know an awful lot about our candidates: their families, their medical histories, their beliefs, their foibles, their misdemeanours, their strengths, their weaknesses, their finances and their physical stamina. "Every nuance of every utterance will be dissected. Every awkward piece of body language caught on camera. If a man or a woman can survive this ordeal, then they are fit to be president. It is worth keeping this mind as we--voters, pundits and candidates--machete our way through the thickets of what promises to be the longest primary campaign in years. "Isn't it ironic that Super-Duper Tuesday has turned out to be So-So Tuesday? All the states that wanted to gatecrash the big block party on 5 February have been snookered by fate. Maryland, Vermont, Ohio and Pennsylvania, which all stuck obediently to their timetable, may end up being far more decisive, and they will certainly get to see much more of the candidates vying for their attention and votes. "Let's use the next few weeks, then, to explore some of the tasks the next president might face. Hillary Clinton has given us a clearer idea of her agenda and was criticised for being too wonkish. Barack Obama still prefers the cadences of a sermon to the nuances of policy. John McCain is sure-footed on issues close to his heart like the war or immigration, but decidedly wobbly on economics and healthcare. But, hey, we will have another nine months to find out what they really think. "One day, Martians will land in Virginia, Florida or California and scratch their green bald heads over the Byzantine system of primaries, caucuses and conventions. Not to mention the super-delegates, whose very existence seems to be an insult to democracy. But then they will travel to Britain, where the choosing of a prime minister was hatched over mozzarella di bufala in an Italian restaurant in a place called Islington and then completed many years later, when Gordon replaced Tony without so much as a single vote being counted or cast." _____ It will never cease to astound me that republicans are able to foist their elitist agendas on us as if they were populist. History is very, very clear about this: republican presidents favor and act on behalf of the richest few of us; democrats invariably favor the middle class, the backbone of this country. Any talk you might hear about "all the boats rising together when the water level rises" is nothing more than shameless lies; it all boils down to the trickle-down theory, espoused most notably by Reagan and the Bushes. It doesn't work; at the end of every republican tenure in the white house, we're left with a staggering deficit and real prospects of recession, even depression. The truth is that making the rich richer DOES NOT help the middle class, and it does not help the economy in general. Again, republicans act as if they know how to run economics better than democrats. One only needs to look what happened when W took over from Clinton: Clinton handed Bush a carefully balanced budget, and Bush promptly turned it on its head, leaving us now with an astronomical deficit--while Bush's and Cheney's rich friends are all thriving. This we know for a fact; money trails are the easiest to follow. Union workers in the mid-west are longing for the Clinton days. "It's a declining manufacturing state with a base of Democratic supporters who are lower-income workers and union members fond of recalling the boom economy of the 1990s when Bill Clinton was in office," says Todd Kleismit of the Ohio Historical Society. As you consider your vote, remember that history doesn't lie, and it tells us clearly that democratic commanders-in-chief are good for "average people;" republicans are good only for the richest of the rich. Don't let anyone tell you different. And if you happen upon a victim of the republicans' false populism, make sure they know the truth. *MyJourney* A couple of months after I met Wen Ming, I witnessed something on the street which shocked me to the core, and helped me realize just how grave were the stakes I was facing. We had finished dinner at another culinary hot spot called Jia Jia Le (Everybody Happy), which I found is one of the most common names for Chinese restaurants. Wen Ming had gone to get her car from a garage across the street. There was a couple of other people standing on the sidewalk near me. Suddenly, a car came screeching out of nowhere and practically ran right into the couple standing there. Quickly, a tattooed mafia man jumped out of the passenger seat with a large machete-looking weapon. He ran up to the man standing frightened in the car's headlights, who put up his hands to defend himself, but it was no use. Mafia man sank the machete several inches into his victim's neck; the victim immediately fell to the ground, blood absolutely gushing from his wound. I stood with mouth agape wondering if I should do something. Mafia man took some effort to pull his weapon from his victim's neck. He wiped the blade on the man's shirt, stood up, and spit a big wad of betel-nut juice on the man's face. He turned and I could see his mouth was completely blood red with betel-nut juice; he looked like some kind of vampire, and that I suppose he was. Wen Ming pulled up and honked and called out to me with some urgency. She had quickly assessed the situation and knew we had to get out of there as quickly as possible. I jumped in her car, breathing heavy with fear and shock. Wen Ming drove off in a hurry. "He didn't even care who saw!" I exclaimed. "No," Wen Ming agreed. "He have no one...no one touch him." This was my very first glimpse of the ruthlessness of Taiwan's mafia. Wen Ming explained that all the police on the island were just mafia pawns. I was beginning to feel more alone than ever. I thought, 'Who will save me? We don't even have an embassy here.' All we had in the way of an American presence was an American "business office," where I'd heard the likes of us poor guest-house illegals had no sway at all. Wen Ming had something to do early in the morning, so she was dropping me off back at the Happy Family. It's true what they say: when it rains it pours. When I got upstairs, John Lee was pacing back and forth in a tizzy. When he saw me, he ran to me. "You no stay here. You no safe," he said. "What happened?" I wanted to know. The place was ominously vacant. John Lee went on to explain that a couple of police officers had just been there ('Explains why everyone's gone,' I thought). But they weren't real police, John Lee warned. They had guns, but their uniforms obviously were fake. With real urgency, John Lee told me I could no longer stay at the Happy Family. He said he warned me this type of thing would happen. "You no stay here," he told me. "I have to leave? Like, what, tonight?" "Tomorrow OK. But you no stay." We talked for quite a while; I believe we became friends for the first time. He explained that anyone who could hire men to impersonate police officers was, on this island anyway, serious trouble. He told me I had to leave Taipei; my life was in danger. I told myself I had to call Wen Ming as soon as possible; her family was almost certainly behind this. Before I did though, John Lee told me this story, in his simple Chinese (like, for a dimwit) which I've never forgotten: In ancient China, there lived a humble master in a small town. He had many students, boys who came to him, sent by their parents, to learn about the world. One student was his favorite; he could tell the boy would grow to be a great man. He taught the boy for many years, everything from language and calligraphy to philosophy and science. When the boy had grown to be 16, he decided it was time for him to travel. The master agreed and said, "I have two last lessons for you. The first I will give you now; the second when you return." "But I might not return," the boy said. "You will return," replied the master. "What is the first lesson?" the boy asked. "Just like the second and final lesson, it is simply three words: do not fear." "Do not fear. That is all?" "That is all." The two said their goodbyes and the boy walked away with a small bag over his shoulder. Looking back at his old village, he was uncertain he would ever be back. The boy traveled far and wide; never did he fear what might become of him. His master had taught him so well, he soon became much admired and much sought after in courts across the land. He did so well over the years, he was only a few steps away from becoming an advisor to an advisor to the emperor. Around that time he realized nothing would make him happier than to return to his old home village, to visit his master. He set out on the long journey home. When he arrived back at his village, it was nearly nightfall. He went straight to his master's house and knocked on the door. To his surprise it was not his master who answered, but his master's wife. "Oh," she said. "I didn't think we'd see you again." "But where is master?" "I am sorry to tell you he died a few years ago." Choking back tears he asked, "Did he leave anything for me?" "Oh, he did indeed," said the wife. "I almost forgot." She retreated into the house and returned with a letter. "This is for you," she said, handing it over. In the letter was his final lesson, and the man knew it was only now that he could understand it. Just three words, it read: Do not regret. Peace, love, and ATOM jazz 021808 This week I was trying hard for a hat trick with my father in chess. I was unable to pull it off, winning at most two in a row. I am continuously at the chess drawing board. *Grammar* I am compelled to raise this issue as I've heard butchery of the grammar involved many times recently. At first, I thought the misunderstanding was restricted only to people from certain parts of the country and of meager education. Now I see the confusion can hit any of us. The problem? Appropriate use of the word "me" and of possessive pronouns. Admittedly, if you never studied latin or other romantic languages, this area will be confusing. It seems many people have the impression you always use "I" and never use "me." The truth is that me is the objective form of I, so one uses it whenever "I" is needed in the context of being an object. The problem comes in with "so-and-so and...." There is a simple solution: in such circumstances, remove the other person; that will lead to the right way of speech. When faced with, "She gave it to Adam and...," remove Adam and the answer is clear: she gave it to me, so, she gave it to Adam and me. Or, "The problem is with Judith and...." Remove Judith; "The problem is with me," so, "The problem is with Judith and me." Prepositions take objects; words such as to, at, with, etc., all need an object like me (or us or them). More trouble comes when people aim to say things like, "He's a friend of Anna and...." I regularly hear people tripping over this situation. Here, the confusion is at least twofold. It is common to hear, "He's a friend of Harry's." The unspoken rest of the sentence is uncertain; of Harry's what? A friend among Harry's harem? In truth, strictly speaking, one should say, "He's a friend of Harry," just as one should say, "He's a friend of me." Indeed it sounds weird, but it's correct. If you're going to use possessives, the proper course is to say, "He's a friend of Harry's and mine" (again, removing Harry makes it clear: he's a friend of mine). Another place our ears hear the correct thing as odd is where someone says, "I think you did this;" the typical response would be, "Me?" If you're asking, "I did this?" you should ask, "I?" Similarly, one should say, "Amn't I? (Am I not?)" instead of "Aren't I?" As with the proper pronunciation for lingerie (lan jer ee) we know we'd be laughed out of the room if we used it. Be confident. Be sure of yourself. Speak properly even if it brings looks of confusion. From years of teaching English to Chinese adults I know that if a person of any age hears the correct way over and over, he or she will learn to use it. You don't even need to tell a person he's wrong; just say it properly over and over and he or she will teach himself. *ErosAromatics* Listen to this public-radio show about fragrance which includes an interview with Mandy Aftel: http://archive.wfpl.org/HomeGrown/20080203hg.mp3 _____ This week Jetta helped me realize how those old fashioned perfume bottles with glass stoppers are used. I was complaining that natural perfumers appear to prefer this type of bottle, but it didn't make any sense to me--how does one make use of them, I wondered. Jetta quietly explained it's simply by turning the bottle over, with the stopper in place, then taking the wet stopper and dabbing the end of it wherever you want fragrance. Elegant and simple, just what I want. Next week, I will have a conference with Anya McCoy, a founding member of the Natural Perfumers Guild, in which we'll discuss a few details (sizes, prices, etc.) to get me started, at least with the Six-Days-cooperative part of things, which is where I'll begin. My next task will be to finalize two or three perfume recipes and make sure I can reproduce them as necessary. Also this week I made a perfume in which I, gladly and unwittingly, featured osmanthus; I'm calling the perfume Oz. Osmanthus is an enormous floral scent (which you can smell if you go to the Chinese garden in the right season); I think of it like a combination of jasmine and lavender and honeysuckle. As an extract, it is one of those which has a strong aura (like a stealthy, perimeter aroma that you can only just barely make out) but it's not much up close. I started out wanting to feature vanilla CO2, which is supposed to smell nicer than the hexane-extracted absolute, but the final product it seems will be dominated by osmanthus. When I put the recipe together I wasn't thinking of it outright, but the combo of vanilla and osmanthus sounds appealing just on the face of things. I'll know in a couple of weeks. The potion I mixed up several weeks ago based on the combination of cocoa and pink lotus absolutes (I think I'll call it Cocoa Loco) is quite appealing, though I think it needs something to help it last longer. It starts out as a sweet, complex, edible sort of thing, and evolves more fully into straight-up chocolate over a couple of hours. The recipe needs further refining. Maybe. I'm not sure I like edible types of scents very much. One important thing I've noticed in heating my perfumes: the boiling point of my 190-proof grape alcohol is _much_ lower than water. I read that the boiling point of ethanol is 172 degrees, which is already low, but I think that must be for grain ethanol. I'm pretty sure the grape stuff boils at an even lower temperature. I'll have to do a test. I've gotten over my aversion to heating perfume ingredients; I've worked out a system which is simple enough, and just involves using the proper utensils (as so many other efforts do). The technique is to put a bottle of aromatic material in a small, heat-proof jar (with small bottles, small beakers work best) with boiling water, the two containers on a hot plate. Importantly, the key is to remove the entire vessel from the heat, not just the essence, so that the essence still sits in near-boiling water as you make use of it with a dropper. *ThePlaywright* My latest idea for a short play has to do with that robot who sits in a South American forest somewhere, waiting to sight a rare and endangered bird; it can distinguish between a host of bird types and when it sees the one it's looking for, it records the sighting and, as far as I know, sends word back to HQ via the internet. My idea is to raise many of the questions raised back in the 1920s by Karel Capek in Russom's Universal Robots, the work which brought the word "robot" into common use, in all languages. The Czech word "robota" means "compulsory labor." Capek's play asks questions about our moral obligations to those that do mandatory labor for us, machine or not. If this machine in the woods is intelligent enough to distinguish between bird species, if it is aware of itself some way and aware of its duty, if it can interact with the world, is it deserving of moral consideration? My idea for a play is that the robot becomes fed up with its lot in life and tries to call attention to itself, to no avail; because it is internet connected, it is able to pull some strings and cause a huge stock-market gaffe, losing some company billions of dollars (as has happened, for different reasons, a couple of times in the last few years). Maybe it's not for different reasons that enormous investment scandals have happened--aren't the perpetrators demanding attention and respect? *Fiction* The Alienist by Caleb Carr is a fantastic book. In its five hundred pages it touches on every conceivable aspect of human nature, from the nature of inquisitiveness, to the ever-mysterious ways of love, to the sometimes depravities of the mind, to murder, to friendship, and much more. All written in a comforting, approachable, and intelligent style. The one place I might fault it is with the ending: the narrator comes out for the first time openly and says things like, "It's been 27 years since all that happened," and mentions what has become of the lives of those in the book. This effort was gratuitous; it was unnecessary; it served no purpose. I would much rather have left the details of the various characters' futures to my own imagination. The story is juicy in all the best senses of the word. The main character and narrator is never for an instant seemingly out of place, out of time, out of stride. It all flows effortlessly from the voice of an 1890s reporter, and the reader is never left in the lurch as far as the "temporary suspension of disbelief" goes. Mr Carr does not slip up once and he takes us on a bumpy, erudite, and personable ride. Every piece of it is natural and inevitable. The many various day-to-day details of 1890s life are a joy--sometimes a likable horror--to behold. A tremendous murder mystery, with many aspects relevant to today's world, this book entertains on a high order, and redoubles one's appreciation of modern, everyday creature comforts. I have started in on The Poisonwood Bible which, by all accounts, is a classic. I'm already enjoying it a great deal. Tthe story is about a family of missionaries who has moved to the Congo. The author (Barbara Kingsolver) chooses to have the story told from changing perspectives: those of the four girls on the mission, and of their mother (this changing element is the part I like most). It is smartly funny and poignant throughout, and the reader's attention is kept by way of the voice changing from girl to girl to woman, with each new chapter. Various parallels to Christian beliefs, and the questions they ask in the context of Africa, tie the whole book, a masterwork, together. *Nonfiction* From Next Journey: Sustainability for Six Billion and More by Larry Rasmussen, from the book Ethics for a Small Planet: New Horizons on Population, Consumption, and Ecology. The following is one of my favorite passages from any book anywhere (I might have transcribed it here once a long time ago; it any case, it's worth repeating): "Faith is the name of the strong power serving as the source or moral-spiritual vigor. It squarely faces the fact that there will never be decisive proof beforehand that life will triumph. Yet it still acts with confidence that the stronger powers in the universe arch in the direction of sustaining life, as they also insist on justice. World-weariness is combatted with a surprising force found _amidst_ earth and its distress. Creation carries its own hidden powers. It supports the confidence of the gospel that a steadfast order exists which bends in the direction of life and gives it meaning. "Said differently, the religious consciousness and dream that generates hope and zest and energy _for_ life is tapped _in_ life itself. The finite bears the infinite, the transcendent is as close as the neighbor, soil, air, and sunshine itself. God, like the devil and life itself, is in the details. A turn to earth is thus also a turn to those sources that enable what has not yet come to pass to do so. "We have all been raised on a mess of stories, including a faith in progress itself. Many of those stories no longer lead where we must go. But, with some of those stories and others not yet told, we will write our own. As we do so, we will learn that faith is the great confronter, uncovering in us a capacity to fight for life in the face of death and venture the risks necessary to be part of a radically changed world. We will also learn, paradoxically, that faith is the great UN-knowing, the experience of an active mystery that surpasses all our words for it and leaves us with either silence or song, without pretension, and accepting, without despair, the tragic limitations of the human condition." Bully! *Quotations* Scepticism is the beginning of faith. --Oscar Wilde Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible. --William James Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted in spite of your changing moods. --CS Lewis Faith is a bird that feels dawn breaking and sings while it is still dark. --Scandinavian saying Democracy is itself, a religious faith. For some it comes close to being the only formal religion they have. --EB White We do not believe in immortality because we can prove it, but we try to prove it because we cannot help believing it. --Harriet Martineau The faith of a church or of a nation is an adequate faith only when it inspires and enables people to give of their time and energy to shape the various institutions-- social, economic, and political--of the common life. --James Luther Adams Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother. --Kahlil Gibran Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch. --EM Forster Faith is a passionate intuition. --William Wordsworth *Politics* Look at this video: http://lessjobsmorewars.com/?utm_source=rgemail _____ It is an incontrovertible fact that every society on earth in which women have total control of their reproductive lives is one of the advanced societies, and every member of those societies benefits from this freedom; where women have little control of their reproductive lives, there you have societies still stuck in the dark ages. There IS a causal relationship between a lack of reproductive freedom and a poor quality of life for all. It is a fact of life that such freedom sometimes involves abortions. In carrying out safe and legal abortions, we acknowledge that the well-being of those already walking the earth takes precedence over those still unborn. To find in opposition to this freedom is to place the well-being of those still unborn before the well-being of those already alive--such is a task meant for God alone and those who would deem otherwise are at the pinnacle of sinfulness! Maybe prevention is better than abortion, but certainly not in bare moral terms. No woman in the history of the world has WANTED an abortion (in the sense they didn't set out to get an abortion), and none who has been forced to utilize abortion has found it be anything but a terrible experience (from what I gather from personal accounts). No informed woman sees abortion as a form of birth control. If you are gearing up to think that women of color appear to, such a sentiment is at the pinnacle of racism--the problem is access to information, and a lack of it doesn't care what color you are. There are already millions and millions of unwanted children suffering through this world. Unwanted kids is not what the ailing institution of the American family needs, and being unwanted is a state of being we should have left behind in the dark ages. So it is that I hope we someday see the right to a safe and legal abortion written into our constitution. Not just abortion but the whole package: family planning in all its forms. It is a mortal right. It is inalienable. It is only the forces of Evil who would conspire to stamp out women's reproductive rights. And it could only be for patriarchal ends, because, again, he who would put the well-being of the unborn before that of the living couldn't be in a more morally reprehensible position (patriarchal ends or simply ignorant ways of being, ignorant to the facts of the realities of the world). The right to take whatever steps necessary for the creation of a sound society should be a right as firmly entrenched as the right to free speech, and certainly more firmly than the right to bear arms. For all these reasons and more I must advise you: say NO to John McCain. *Science* From the BBC: "There will be virtually nothing left to fish from the seas by the middle of the century if current trends continue, according to a major scientific study. Stocks have collapsed in nearly one-third of sea fisheries, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Writing in the journal Science, the international team of researchers says fishery decline is closely tied to a broader loss of marine biodiversity. But a greater use of protected areas could safeguard existing stocks. "'The way we use the oceans is that we hope and assume there will always be another species to exploit after we've completely gone through the last one,' said research leader Boris Worm, from Dalhousie University in Canada. 'What we're highlighting is there is a finite number of stocks; we have gone through one-third, and we are going to get through the rest,' he told the BBC News website. Steve Palumbi, from Stanford University in California, one of the other scientists on the project, added: 'Unless we fundamentally change the way we manage all the ocean species together, as working ecosystems, then this century is the last century of wild seafood.' "This is a vast piece of research, incorporating scientists from many institutions in Europe and the Americas, and drawing on four distinctly different kinds of data. Catch records from the open sea give a picture of declining fish stocks. In 2003, 29% of open sea fisheries were in a state of collapse, defined as a decline to less than 10% of their original yield. Bigger vessels, better nets, and new technology for spotting fish are not bringing the world's fleets bigger returns--in fact, the global catch fell by 13% between 1994 and 2003. "Historical records from coastal zones in North America, Europe and Australia also show declining yields, in step with declining species diversity; these are yields not just of fish, but of other kinds of seafood too. Zones of biodiversity loss also tended to see more beach closures, more blooms of potentially harmful algae, and more coastal flooding. "Experiments performed in small, relatively contained ecosystems show that reductions in diversity tend to bring reductions in the size and robustness of local fish stocks. This implies that loss of biodiversity is driving the declines in fish stocks seen in the large-scale studies. The final part of the jigsaw is data from areas where fishing has been banned or heavily restricted. These show that protection brings back biodiversity within the zone, and restores populations of fish just outside. "'The image I use to explain why biodiversity is so important is that marine life is a bit like a house of cards,' said Dr Worm. 'All parts of it are integral to the structure; if you remove parts, particularly at the bottom, it's detrimental to everything on top and threatens the whole structure. And we're learning that in the oceans, species are very strongly linked to each other--probably more so than on land.'" *Music* Jose Gonzalez--A Swedish folk musician, guitarist/singer, who has produced a number of recordings in the last few years, Mr Gonzalez's style is unmistakable and quite memorable. I have several titles of his; while he never veers very far from the simple solo style he's always had, he has definitely carved out his own sound. One can tell within only a few seconds of hearing a given track that it's Gonzalez. His singing is understated (always in English) and the music is always highly rhythmic and pleasing. It's almost as if he uses the guitar as a springboard for rhythmic exploration. Check out Veneer, Stay in the Shade, and his latest In Our Nature. *LyricsbyAndrewBird* I dreamed you were a cosmonaut _____ When I was just a little boy, _____ Turnstiles on mezzanine, *MyJourney* Back at the hotel where we'd met for lunch, things were quite uncomfortable at first, up in our room. There was silence. Wen Ming started to shuffle some papers--as if she were preparing for an English lesson. I walked up behind her and put my arms around her. She immediately turned and before I knew it we were kissing passionately. It occurred to me that I was kissing an Asian woman for the first time in my life. She did not object at all as I began to remove her clothes. Underneath her fancy attire was an astounding body. We soon made our way onto the bed and under the covers. She quite literally cried out when I licked her nipples; I would soon be of the opinion that small-breasted Asian women have nipples that are much more sensitive than the large-breasted American women I was used to. As I removed her panties, I was so randy I was about to burst. I went down on her--something she clearly had never experienced before, judging from her delight. I came up for air and prepared to put myself inside her. Much to my chagrin, I found that Wen Ming was so tight, it didn't matter at all how wet she was--there was no way I'd be inside her that night. Frustrated, with blue balls soon to be upon me, I finally did burst. Somehow, I managed to keep that fact from Wen Ming. She seemed altogether frightened by the idea of penetration anyway, so I went down on her again. After a short while, we were both asleep. When I awoke, I was on my back and Wen Ming was sleeping with her head on my chest, my arm wrapped around her. I got out of bed and dressed. Wen Ming woke and stretched and went to brush her teeth. When she came back out of the bathroom, she was positively beaming. I realized that despite my feeling somewhat sheepish about the night before, as far as Wen Ming was concerned, I had done everything expected of me and more. I had done my job, as it were, a job I would ply, happily, for the next couple of months. During that time, because my wealthy and happy girlfriend didn't speak much English, what had been a total lack of Chinese-language ability on my part became deft facility. I was soon speaking Chinese better than the people I knew back at the Happy Family who'd studied it, majored in it, in college. Scott, Space, and the manager, John Lee, were fully cognizant of the reasons for my quick study--they'd seen it a hundred times before. I was feeling quite lucky, and was pleased to note that there had yet to be any reappearance of our stalker. I no longer slept at the guest house; Wen Ming and I stayed in a different fancy hotel every night (why, I didn't quite understand yet). I simply kept a bed reserved at the Happy Family, and kept my most important belongings at the bottom of my large rucksack which stayed in one of the bunk rooms. Whenever Scott saw me returning for whatever reason, he just groaned and walked away. Space was more welcoming and encouraging. John Lee, however, was ceaselessly suspicious of the whole affair. Whenever I paid him the next week's rent, he advised me to take every precaution. It seemed he understood something about the situation that I couldn't yet fathom. I would soon comprehend his worry; my life would soon be forever changed. Peace, love, and ATOM jazz 021108 *Chess* The day after my Tysabri infusion, I won a game against an anonymous person on the Internet Chess Club (chessclub.com) for the first time. My opponent was checkmated at the beginning of the seventh pair of moves. I took this as a good sign, though it appears to have been something of a fluke: I played the same guy the next day and ended up resigning (it became a cat-and-mouse game with no real chances for either of us to win--I have a low tolerance for such circumstances). While my game is fine, I didn't have a "got good" experience a la the 11-year-old Bobby Fischer. My brother, a neurologist, tells me the two key functions used in Chess--pattern recognition and memory--are the work of various parts of the brain, so there can be no one part of my brain whose impairment makes my chess game suffer. This is a whole-brain problem of lucidity. I have come across an opening (the first few moves for white) that I feel holds promise. It's called the Catalan Opening and involves some unconventional moves to start which throw the opponent off, because a completely standard defense just wouldn't work very well. I beat my father with this opening the first time I used it on him. Now he will recognize it and so will know how to stave off certain attacks, like the one I checkmated him with. As black, I have taken to using a defense (that's what the opening moves for black are called) which Bobby Fischer invariably used. *ErosAromatics* This week I made a perfume in which I wanted to highlight vetiver. I added blond tobacco and hay to start, along with 16 other essences. I suspect this blend will change a great deal as it matures. It's a dark-green liquid with a name like Fall Grasses or something. I've found in the past that tobacco in particular can be a finicky ingredient--it is not one of those, like rose, that fits nicely with pretty much anything. It wants specific partners. I have a hunch it will like being with vetiver and hay. The results, only a few days into it are promising. I think I need to hone the composition a bit; its character is a little vague at the moment. It is unusual and likable though. It reminds me some of India. I've decided that Joni has too much costus root, which lends it a little bit of a stinky characteristic that overpowers the lavender. I think cutting out just one drop of costus should do the trick. I definitely do want to have a lavender perfume (Joni is meant to highlight lavender), which will be my flagship. Because of where I live, I'm inclined to use what materials are readily available locally. In addition to roses, this is lavender territory. For cosmetics, I will use locally-produced lavender distillate water. I had been going along thinking I would offer my perfumes with a range of cap types: screw cap (so you can use the perfume as a "splash"), atomizer, and roll-on. I myself greatly prefer roll-ons; no waste and just the amount you want, where you want it. I'm thinking I, in turn, will offer my perfumes in roll-on only. I can't imagine someone preferring an atomizer, with its waste and imprecision. If a person wants an open top she or he can simply remove the roll-on apparatus. Atomizers be damned! Another issue I'd been concerned with as far as packaging is concerned is labeling. I had been leaning toward round bottles because they're easiest to put a label on--but my mother helped me realize a "hang tag" is the way to go. What I might do is order roll-on bottles with customized lids, with an art-nouveau E for Eros imprinted on the caps. The hang tag will be a folded card with info about Eros Aromatics, and about the particular scent in a given bottle. Partly because Chris, owner of The Perfume House, led me on with totally preposterous fairy tales (and in so doing made me realize that story telling is an integral part of the legacy of perfumery), I aim to play up the mystery and allure of my perfumes. A card might read: "The Groves--We acquired this recipe from Bacchus. He was at a big party in Florida some time ago and smelled the scent of orange blossoms in the air for the first time. So taken was he with it that he had his underlings concoct this potion. After the party, at which he became historically inebriated, he lost a game of chess to one of our minions. On the game was wagered this recipe, if Bacchus lost, and one of ours if he won." And stuff like that. Fanciful, fun. *Fiction* I am now making my way through The Alienist by Caleb Carr. It's a period piece about a serial killer in 1890s New York. It takes place in what is now the Village (Gramercy Park is uptown which, to a New Yorker, is pretty funny in itself). It's really neat to be able to picture particular locations mentioned in the book. A brothel on the corner of Mott, a gay night club south of Houston, etc. It is fascinating and macabre. One of the main characters is Theodore Roosevelt, who was in fact on the New York police force before he became president. "Alienist" is the old word for psychiatrist/psychologist; they were seen to be studying those considered to be entirely alien. During the time this book concerns, psychiatry was not held in high esteem by many people, public or private. Enjoying this book as much as I am, savoring the details of this older, more innocent time, I was struck with a most dire realization: the richness and joy we take from hearing of the past is precious and unique. There will be no joy or comfort in the future. The future no doubt will be very much as Cormac McCarthy portrayed it in The Road--desolate, impoverished, hopeless. I realized, for myself, any speculation as to what the future will be like which is not appropriately dark and terrifying is an exercise in denial. Therefore, works of literature, I believe now, to serve their purpose in helping people to live outside themselves, to entertain and satisfy, must focus on the past. More specifically, what have we learned, along the road of our 10,000-year-old civilization (anthropologists say agriculture began about 10,000 years ago)? What have we learned as a species and as individual peoples? How have we learned it? Would we do anything differently if we could start over--or rather, what would we do differently, knowing what we know now? At which junctures did we make choices that were wrong choices? What exactly, in reality, is most precious to human beings? Has it ever really changed, since the beginning of time? Many of these questions have answers...in the past. *Quotations* You have to know the past to understand the present. --Carl Sagan Stop acting as if life is a rehearsal. Live this day as if it were your last. The past is over and gone. The future is not guaranteed. --Wayne Dyer We need not destroy the past. It is gone. --John Cage The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. --Leslie Poles Hartley No man is rich enough to buy back his past. --Oscar Wilde The past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it. --Wendell Berry Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title. --Virginia Woolf The distinction between the past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. --Einstein There is no past that we can bring back by longing for it. There is only an eternally new now that builds and creates itself out of the best as the past withdraws. --Goethe I tend to live in the past because most of my life is there. --Herb Caen "Nonfiction* From The Mystery and Lure of Perfume by CJS Thompson (1927): "The word perfume is derived from the Latin words "per fumum," "through smoke," from which it would appear that man's first idea was to offer up fragrant perfume thus given off, by burning aromatic gums, to his deity. He may have thought that in thus giving pleasure to his god, his prayers would ascend with the sweet aroma from the altar and his supplications be received with greater favor. Thus we find that perfumes in the form of incense formed part of all primitive rites of worship among the earliest civilizations. "The ancient Egyptians offered incense as an important rite, and prayer was made to Ra that he would draw the soul up to heaven on the smoke of incense. It was the earliest method of perfuming the interior of a building. On the walls of nearly every Egyptian temple representations are to be found of the smoking-censer placed before the presiding deity of the temple. The Egyptian priest is generally represented holding the censer in one hand, and feeding it with the incense in the form of small pellets with the other. "The Egyptians worshipped Ra at sunrise with an offering of resin, at midday with myrrh, and at sunset with Kyphi, the famous perfume composed of many ingredients already mentioned. The incense burnt in the temples before the altar was made of small pellets or pastilles, and the censer was not swung, but held with the arm outstretched, and replenished with the left hand. It was also burnt in a vessel with a cover perforated with holes through which the smoke could escape, something like the censers in use today. "The compounding of the incense was a ritual of importance surrounded with mystery, the sacred books being read aloud while Kyphi was being prepared in the Egyptian temples. "In Assyria and Babylonia the ancient kings offered incense to the "Sacred Tree," and it was customary to purify the dwellings after sickness with torches and incense of cedar, calamus, cypress, myrtle, and fragrant herbs to their deities. Its use is frequently mentioned in their texts, and in one, the King Nabonnedos is described as "filling the temple with the odor of incense." "Fumigation by means of strong-smelling and pungent smoke appears to have been a method generally employed throughout the world for purifying the person and for driving away all kinds of evil spirits and demons that bring trouble. The Andaman Islanders still believe that the smell of beeswax is offensive to the demon that brings epidemics and diseases, and that he may be kept away by stakes painted with it. The Kei Islanders of New Guinea also burn the scrapings of buffalo horns to drive off demons, and juniper is burnt by the Indians of Thompson River to keep ghosts from troubling them." *MyJourney* Wen Ming arrived at the Happy Family to take me to dinner. She was driving her nice white Chevrolet. She rang the buzzer downstairs--I couldn't imagine a classy girl such as she was wanting to sully herself in a dirty place like a foreigner's guest house. When I arrived downstairs, she had already gotten into the passenger seat. I climbed into the driver's seat. "I don't need a license?" I asked. Wen Ming laughed a little. "Where are we going?" Wen Ming said she would give me directions and that we were going to a nice Vietnamese restaurant on the other side of town. I drove off when she told me to go straight. I wasn't prepared for the whole driving thing. Here I was driving along in the underworld, neither my parents nor my government aware of my location. And so far as I could tell, not one of the myriad people on the street or in other cars gave a rat's ass about some foreigner driving around, with or without a driver's license. On the way to the restaurant, Wen Ming explained that if we were to be stopped for any reason it would be a simple matter of paying a fine right there on the spot. I came to understand that every official body in Taiwan, including the police force, was corrupt to the core, and that bribery was a long-standing part of Chinese life. I parked the car very near the restaurant and we walked a short distance to dinner. I had never had Vietnamese food before and I was treated to some truly delectable items. We started with a shrimp dish: the idea was you took a piece of lettuce, wrapped up a deep-fried shrimp in it, dipped it in sauce, and consumed it. This delightful appetizer was followed by some spicy soup which had chunks of a reddish substance in it. I assumed it was liver. I picked a piece of it up in my spoon. "Liver?" I asked. Wen Ming looked confused for a moment. Then she said, "Blood." Later I would find that she was not mistaken: it was indeed coagulated pig's blood, a standard ingredient in hot-and-sour soup. Just after this exchange, an angry middle-aged man entered the restaurant and came to sit at our table. I was confused and worried. I looked at Wen Ming and she appeared more afraid than I was. The stranger and Wen Ming exchanged some words in what I would soon learn was Japanese. He seemed extremely angry and Wen Ming seemed to know him. She certainly engaged him in the argument he brought to the table. As they began to scream at each other, a waiter came and said a few words. Though I didn't yet know the words, the context and his urgent tone made their meaning plain. I looked around. Every customer in the busy place was staring at us. With that, the increasingly belligerent man stormed out. Wen Ming and I finished our tasty meal. Afterwards I asked her about our recent visitor. The most I could make out was that she was telling me he had something to do with her father. All I could think was that her military father was already messing things up--and I hadn't even gotten any yet! When we were finished, we walked back to the car. Someone, and I assumed it was our mystery man, had smashed it up. Whoever it was went out of their way, with some kind of heavy-duty tool. All the windows were smashed, and there were big dents like huge welts up and down the sides. Wen Ming wasn't very surprised. Without really skipping a beat, she suggested we call a taxi. We went back into the restaurant so Wen Ming could make a few phone calls. In the first, she clearly was talking to a friend or family member, judging from the very animated nature of the conversation. Several waiters began to hover around us with eyebrows raised. The next phone call was for a taxi, then, surprisingly, a hotel. It was seeming I would get some after all. Peace, love, and ATOM jazz 020308 Much to my chagrin, I've noticed that toward the end of the month, about four weeks after my Tysabri infusion, I get to the point where I can't play chess to save my life. Just after the infusion, I tend to have good form, can see patterns and combinations with ease. At the end (like now--the infusion is tomorrow) the part of my brain that sees necessary patterns is severely impaired. I wouldn't even want to waste a chess player's time with my pathetic noodling. The problem is very apparent to other people, my father, Mark. It's like I'm a different person and it shows in my chess game. _____ I've been a bit jammed up this week so this installment is brief. *Society* If geography is an "environmental social science," I want to talk about the geography of "community." I am unbelievably tired of the abuse I hear regularly of the word community. It is simply not possible for there to be a national community of anything. A community sleeps together, eats together, argues together, LIVES together. There is no national community of LGBT people; there may be one here in northeast Portland, and there's certainly one in greater Portland. But to talk about the so-and-so "community" in a national context is to me an abomination. The members of a community are by definition close to one another. A nurse in Portland is not in community with nurses everywhere--he or she COMMUNES with those he or she can COMMUNICATE with. Call me crazy, but I don't believe that people who cannot freely communicate with each other should ever be considered to be members of the same community. When I first transferred from Seattle Central Community College to Fairhaven College at Western Washington University, I was struck by a similar dilemma. Fairhaven is quite progressive and on the first weekend "retreat" where all Fairhaven students convened, I was told that my input was needed regarding the future of the Fairhaven "community." Always the voice of dissent, I voiced my opinion that I could offer nothing to the Fairhaven "community" because I could not concede that it existed. I could and would offer all I was able to the students and teachers with whom I developed bonds. Committing time and energy to people all scattered across the local geography, bound only by a name, was an exercise in futility I wanted nothing to do with. My views were not well received by the teaching staff; they were, however, well received by other students. Whenever I hear talk of supposed communities spread across the nation, or even the globe, my mental faculties simply shut off. Dictionaries tell me use of the word in this sense (a group sharing a common race, national heritage, job, etc.) is acceptable. Not to me it's not. *Quotations* Any idiot can face a crisis; it is this day-to-day living that wears you out. --Chekhov Crises refine life. In them you discover what you are. --Allan K Chalmers Conflict builds character. Crisis defines it. --Steven V Thulon These are the times that try men's souls. --Thomas Paine The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis. --Dante Because art's lie is preferable, in truth, to life's beautiful terror. --Robert Coover, about why he wrote Poetry is a natural energy resource of our country. It has no energy crisis, possessing a potential that will last as long as the country. Its power is equal to that of any country in the world. --Richard Eberhart A crisis is an opportunity riding the dangerous wind. --Chinese proverb When written in Chinese, the word "crisis" is composed of two characters--one represents danger, and the other represents opportunity. --JFK Let us show, not merely in great crises, but in every day of life, qualities of practical intelligence, of hardihood and endurance, and above all, the power of devotion to a lofty ideal.
--Theodore Roosevelt *PoeminProgress* I attempted to do justice to my friend Tara's statement in a recent email, "We learn but we hope we are wrong." That We be Proven Fools We learn and we hope that *Politics* I, along with many other progressive people, have decided Barack Obama is the candidate deserving of our support. It is a tough call; Edwards dropping out certainly clarified things. I'm convinced Mr Obama believes in his hopes for our country. I'm convinced he will do his best to bring the necessary changes to America to restore our good standing around the world, to save the working-class, to prepare this country for the unpredictable 21st century. I see him now as a politician, in a corrupt system, with integrity; I see him now as an effective, intelligent, and inspirational orator. Check out this hip music video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjXyqcx-mYY&3 *Music* Citizen Mix 0208, Take Heart: 1. Trouble, Ray Lamontagne _____ I downloaded one album by Andrew Bird from Emusic, Armchair Apocrypha. Enjoyable stuff; complex enough that it takes a few listens to sink in--a good sign in my book. The "ideaphoria" evident in this recording reminds me of Bowie in some ways, a little bit of Rufus Wainwright too: one can make no predictions or generalizations about Bird or his music. This is pop/rock in many incarnations, unafraid to use whatever instrumentation is needed, rich, intricate, orchestral. Bird's humble and appealing voice accompanies everything, and there are a number of tracks which might well become personal anthems; in this way I'm reminded of The Decemberists. This is a 2007 release; I will try out some of his earlier recordings. *Fiction* Last week I read The Road by Cormac McCarthy. It's a quick read. It is stark, dark, and heartbreaking. It is the telling of the inevitable story of a father and son, at the end of the world, fleeing along an anonymous road searching for an anonymous coast. Where some have chosen to write epics about the apocalypse, this is a small, humble story about the love of a father and son. It does not address bigger issues. One is never quite sure what happened. All the reader is sure of is that the two protagonists must have blankets and tarps, canned food, and their pistol if they are to remain alive. Never before has one realized so viscerally that when our various systems break down, the systems which sustain us, our very lives will depend on such commonplace items as tarps and blankets. McCarthy's style is seminal. The narrative is sparse and haunting. He borrows, I believe, from contemporary German in his mashing of words together to make words not normally thought of as one word, things like "ashenfaced." He eschews many of the common tools used in novel writing. At the beginning of a conversation, for example, he uses "the man said" so that you know who is who. Afterwards, each successive line has no such mundane grammar-oriented verbiage; once a conversation is begun, it's simply one character speaking on one line, and another character speaking in the following line. He uses touching, idiosyncratic turns of phrase, such as, "Each the other's world entire." He asks the most important and moving questions: Will the sea still be blue? Will "the good guys" be the ones who choose not to be cannibals? Will we be able to hope for anything more than just survival? There is a moment toward the end of the book when the father is examining the black ocean, black with ash; he nears the tide line and sees in the shallows, where the tide meets the beach, millions upon millions of dead fish washed ashore. That image hit me hard; I know it's not an idle prediction--renowned scientific bodies has asserted that fish are not much longer for the earth. This is not a fun book. It is excellently written. It is prescient. It is necessary. Peace, love, and ATOM jazz |