Richard Dawkins

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

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The world and the universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more we understand about it the more beautiful does it appear. It is an immensely exciting experience to be born in the world, born in the universe, and look around you and realise that before you die you have the opportunity of understanding an immense amount about that world and about that universe and about life and about why we're here. We have the opportunity of understanding far, far more than any of our predecessors ever. That is such an exciting possibility, it would be such a shame to blow it and end your life not having understood what there is to understand.

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It is we that choose to divide animals up into discontinuous species. On the evolutionary view of life there must have been intermediates, even though, conveniently for our naming rituals, they are usually extinct.

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You see, if you say something positive like the whole of life – all living things – is descended from a single common ancestor which lived about 4,000 million years ago and that we are all cousins, well that is an exceedingly important and true thing to say and that is what I want to say. Somebody who is religious sees that as threatening and so I am represented as attacking religion, and I am forced into responding to their reaction. But you do not have to see my main purpose as attacking religion. Certainly I see the scientific view of the world as incompatible with religion, but that is not what is interesting about it. It is also incompatible with magic, but that also is not worth stressing. What is interesting about the scientific world view is that it is true, inspiring, remarkable and that it unites a whole lot of phenomena under a single heading. And that is what is so exciting for me.

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The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.

Points of Architecture

A parking structure is a type of nonbuilding structure. Nonbuilding structures (or just simply as structures) are those not designed for continuous human occupancy. The first parking structure was built in Chicago, 1918, demolished in 2005. Once cars became popular cars required storage, as voluminous objects require space in both motion and stasis.

Symmetry in architecture is typically employed to impress or intimidate the viewers: the Taj Mahal is perfectly symmetrical; the Alhambra also uses symmetry, so does Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. Parking structures exhibit spiral symmetry, which horrifies me, the violation of bilateral symmetry is like a missing eye. More on architecture: imagine a mosque. The prayer hall is called the musalla. The musalla has no furniture so as to allow as many worshippers as possible; the walls of a mosque are decorated by repeating geometric forms called arabesques. Arabesques can be infinitely extended as can all geometric patterns: the visible pattern represents therefore only the limitations of the builder. An arabesque is only potentially infinite in the visual spectrum but is literally infinite in the conceptual spectrum. An infinity has no center. Are arabesques symmetrical, that’s a good question.

Imagine the mosque again: it has a niche on the wall to indicate the direction of Mecca. There is nothing in this niche. While the cardinal direction of south, east, west, and north are absolute, this direction is relative to a central location. The word for this relative direction in Arabic is Qiblah. Qiblah is like gravity, if Mecca the core of heavy matter. If the earth is a sphere, the Qiblah from a place is the direction a bird would start flying in order to get to Mecca by the shortest possible path. One begins to see why fluency in Arabic is required: these concepts have no parallel in English.

A devout Muslim faces Qiblah when praying and is buried after death facing towards Qiblah. Archeology can indicate a Muslim cemetery or necropolis in the absence of any other context. Imagine an x-ray map of the earth with Mecca at the center point. Imagine the millions of corpses arrayed around in an orbit Mecca: their faces look the same way. Now imagine that each of those faces had lived an entire life. That's what corpses do, they first live. Each had a face to point towards Mecca.

Minor points of contention regarding Qiblah arise in North America: Do you use the great-circle route to determine Qiblah and therefore face northeast, or do you use the star-sun-wind methods of the earlier Islamic tradition and face southeast: At the two moments each year when the sun is directly over Mecca, the direction of shadows in any sunlit place points in the direction away from Qiblah. Look: their faces point the same way. Other potential issues have stopgap solutions at best: Where is Qiblah in orbit? Is it enough to kneel facing earth instead of facing the void of space?

No, I won't get on the bed, I like it on the floor.

If you want to experience inner peace, you could try eating psychedelic mushrooms, you will vomit, that will be fine, eat them with a friend, you will need to drive several miles until you get to a mountain, climb to the side so you can look into a valley, if you do this inside you will regret it, if you do it outside you will enjoy yourself, there will be clouds and things that crawl, but you will know that logically there are no clouds, no things that crawl, you will experience the physical symptoms of ego death, this is when your body falls apart like blocks of dry dirt, this will be rightly terrifying but will pass, when you get up to walk you will walk without thinking or wanting, that is a form of peace that you will remember in the taste of mint tea, that feeling will be a memory, that memory will be a goal, that goal will be a lack of desire or need or judgment, she will ask you to get on the bed with her, but you will say no, I won't get on the bed, I like it on the floor.

Notable Acts of Vandalism Upon Several Works of Art Presently Housed in Europe, Motives Varied

Rembrandt's Night Watch (Properly titled The Company of Frans Banning Cocq and Willem van Ruytenburch, misnomer given because age blackened the varnish, resulting in daylight scene appearing twilit.). 1975, schoolteacher, unemployed, attacked it with a bread knife, results: alternating forward slash/backslash pattern of ragged cuts. School teacher (Not to be named here.) killed himself the next year. Restoration: successful. Few zig zags still visible to naked eye. More visible using microscope/reading glass.

1990, second attack on Night Watch using bottle of acid. Pump bottle concealed, indicating some prior plot. Security guards pulled attacker away and sprayed water onto the canvas: contingency plans in place for such an attack. Acid penetrated only varnish, perhaps the man was attempting guerrilla restoration, unhappy with misnomer?

Another Rembrandt, the Danaë: attacked in 1985, sulfuric acid and knife. Center of the painting made a mixture of spots, splashes, and dripping paint, like Jackson Pollock without the intent or vigor. Restored successfully.

Michelangelo’s David, 1991, smashed with a hammer. Toes of left foot damaged. Geologists used samples of debris to locate source of marble (Fantiscritti in Miseglia, valleys of Carrara). Microscopic holes in this particular marble cause deterioration more quickly. Restoration completed 2004. Level of success presumably high.

Michelangelo’s Pieta: Four fingers broken during a 1736 move. Public speculation: restorer took liberties in reposing fingers into rhetorical gesture not present in original.

1972, further aggression, Pieta: Geologist attacked the Virgin in the Pieta with a hammer, yelling I AM JESUS CHRIST. (Date: Penecost Sunday).

Da Vinci’s The Virgin and Child with St Anne and St John the Baptist (This next a painting, not a sculpture) attacked in 1987 with sawn–off shotgun. Shot penetrated the glass but not fully the canvas. Since restored.

Carl Jacobsen’s Little Mermaid, the one sitting in the Copenhagen harbor, cut and painted and damaged many times since 1961: Full list follows:

• 1961 – Hair painted red. Brassiere painted on. In likeness of painter’s lover?
• 1964 – Head stolen by Situationists. Replaced.
• 1984 –Arm sawn off, returned by the young vandals.
• 1990 – 18 centimeter cut in neck, likely due to second beheading attempt.

1998 – Beheaded a second time. Responsible parties never identified. Head returned anonymously to local television station.

• 2003 – Statue blasted off rock using dynamite.
• 2004 – This last not vandalism. Draped with Muslim headscarf. Likely statement against Turkey joining EU. Turkey still a candidate. Statement successful?
• 2006 – Plastic phallus attached to her hand. Green paint dumped on Mermaid. Words MARCH 8 written on. Related to International Women’s Day?
• 2007 – Statue covered in paint twice. First of pink. Color of second coat unknown.
• 2007 – Draped in Muslim dress and headscarf again. Second statement as re: Turkey? Turkey still candidate.

The statue in the harbor has always been a copy; heirs keep original in an undisclosed location. Copies also found in California, Iowa, Vancouver.

Velazquez’ Rokeby Venus, attacked 1914. Militant suffragette Mary Richardson, meat cleaver. Some evidence of a planned suffragette attack on the entire collection of the National Gallery. Political symbolism (beyond simple defiance) unclear. Seven slashes on the painting, especially on the area between Venus’ shoulders. Restored successfully.

Roman origin, Portland Vase, shattered 1845. William Loyd, drunk, threw sculpture atop the vase. Thirty-seven small fragments lost before initial restoration. Fragments found later, placed in specially designed box with thirty-seven compartments. Restoration degraded by 1986: Vase gently rattled when tapped. Restoration undertaken in 1987 which corrected errors of previous efforts.

Vija Celmin’s Night Sky #12, large vertical gouge left on painting by museum guard who disliked it. Restoration forewent as work a total loss. Surveillance tape footage available of defacement.

Manet’s Le Pont d’Argenteuil, showing river Seine at a rural end, bridge and boats, 4-inch hole punched in center. Early 2000s. Restoration to be attempted.

Do you know what happens when I go north on the Ballard Bridge?

I relax.

Clochard

\kloh-SHAR\
noun: tramp, vagrant

Nine times out of ten, you will find "clochard" used for not just any bum, but a French bum -- even more specifically, a Parisian bum. And, sometimes, it's even a certain type of Parisian bum -- a type that has been romanticized in literature and is part of the local color.

Nevertheless, as "francais" as this word (which comes from the French verb "clocher," meaning "to limp") may seem, its regular appearance in English sources since 1937 makes it an English word, too.

"He lives on the Pont Neuf, the oldest and most beautiful bridge in Paris, which has become a secret home to clochards while closed for extensive repairs."

Andrew Wyeth, Portrait of Dorothy Barnard

John Singer Sargent

Mary Turner Austin I


Miss Elsie Palmer


Lady Agnew of Lochnaw

Amtrak

If you go to Portland, Oregon, you should take the Amtrak, because it has ample seats of the sort you will have dreamt of if you have spent much time on airplanes, if you take the Amtrak, walk south down the street several blocks from the rail station in Portland until you arrive at the Portland Art Museum, which I recommend visiting; the Portland Art Museum is a short brick building separated from tall brick building by an underground tunnel. But if you do go to the Portland Art Museum, I recommend that you do not walk through the underground tunnel from the Belluschi Building to the Jubitz Center for Modern and Contemporary Art, because in the Jubitz Center for Modern and Contemporary Art is a room dedicated to paintings by Ed Ruscha, and while paintings by Ed Ruscha sometimes weave whimisical turns of phrase with interesting interpretations of light, the paintings by Ed Ruscha in the Jubitz Center for Modern and Contemporary Art at the Portland Art Museum in Portland Oregon are woven of other things, and if, like me, you have felt very proud because you have never had a panic attack, despite being a prime candidate for panic disorders, then these paintings will upset you greatly, because they will trigger a panic attack and you will no longer be proud. But if you do go to the Portland Art Museum, I recommend that you walk up every flight of stairs (with the exception of the many flights of stairs in the Jubitz Center for Modren and Contemporary Art), because at the top of one of those flights of stairs (I don't remember which flight) is a sculpture by John de Andrea called Dying Gaul. Dying Gaul is a copy of a Roman sculpture of a dying man, it is life-size and modern and the skin is painted to mimic the skin of a man, the hair is slicked back, his face is in pain; you don't need to know the name of this sculpture to know that it is a sculpture of a dying man, all you have to do to know that Dying Gaul is a sculpture of a dying man is to lean down to look into his eyes, which are downcast, there are very few good photographs of de Andrea's Dying Gaul available, the ones I have seen do not do it justice, justice in this case means conveying the humanity and fear in the face of death of the sculpture, if those photographs do not do it justice, neither does this description.

Madeleine L'Engle

Chronology, the time which changes things, makes them grow older, wears them out, and manages to dispose of them, chronologically, forever...again the Greeks were wiser than we are. They had two words for time: chronos and kairos. Kairos is not measurable. Kairos is ontological. In kairos we are, we are fully in isness, not negatively, as Sartre saw the isness of the oak tree, but fully, wholly, positively. Kairos can sometimes enter, penetrate, break through chronos: the child at play, the painter at his easel, Serkin playing the Appassionata are in kairos. The saint in prayer, friends around the dinner table, the mother reaching out her arms for her newborn baby are in kairos. The bush, the burning bush, is in kairos, not any burning bush, but the particular burning bush before which Moses removed his shoes; the bush I pass by on my way to the brook. In kairos that part of us which is not consumed in the burning is wholly awake.

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If our usual response to an annoying situation is a curse, we're likely to meet emergencies with a curse. In the little events of daily living we have the opportunity to condition our reflexes, which are built up out of ordinary things. And we learn to bless first of all by being blessed.

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I wrote A Wrinkle in Time when we were living in a small dairy farm village in New England. I had three small children to raise, and life was not easy. We lost four of our closest friends within two years by death — that's a lot of death statistically. And I really wasn't finding the answers to my big questions in the logical places. So, at the time I discovered the world of particle physics. I discovered Einstein and relativity. I read a book of Einstein's, in which he said that anyone who's not lost in rapturous awe at the power and glory of the mind behind the universe is as good as a burnt-out candle. And I thought, "Oh, I've found my theologian, what a wonderful thing."

Taiyewo

The first twin born is usually named Taiyewo.

The catoblepas has the body of a buffalo and the head of a hog, he can kill with a look but his head is so heavy he must always face down.

Azrael’s body is made of eyes and tongues, their number corresponds to the number of people on earth, he has four faces and four thousand wings, he separates the soul from the newly dead, if the person was righteous, the soul is spearated like a drop of water dripping from glass.

Theli is the great dragon who holds his tail in his mouth, he constantly seeks entrance into heaven, and even heaven is not safe.

Fulu is a tortoise and the wisest, kalulu is clever and a hare, chimbwe, a hyena, is the villain.

Most people sleep with their beds raised on bricks to avoid the Tokoloshe; this is perhaps cowardly, because if you defeat the Tokoloshe in battle, he will teach you how to heal.

Tirigusuusiit are things to avoid.

Gamab is also named Haukoin, and also Gauna, the stars are between him and the earth, he shoots arrows down towards us.

Bumba vomited forth the sun, the moon, the earth, plants, animals, and then humanity.

Oludumare, who has no gender, is the owner of all heads.

Maligait are things to follow.

Agaskw is our grandmother; she is a very wise woodchuck.

Raven never makes anything, he generally moves things around.

Ta’xet rules violent death.

Dzalarhons is the goddess of frogs and volcanoes.

You can speak with Lagua’s voice if you clench your teeth very hard.

Piqujait are things to do.

Winago was destroyed a long time ago, her blood is still falling, the drops are called mosquitoes.

A Warak ngendog is a rhinoceros with eggs on its back, its head is like a dragon, its body like a buraq, and its feet like a goat.

Livyatan was once a monster, now he’s just a whale.

Tia rules peaceful death.

Renart is the fox and Ysengrin the wolf; they fought a difficult, lengthy war.

A vardoger mimicks and precedes you before your arrival, like déjà vu but in reverse.

Taqiya is the practice of concealing one’s beliefs when necessary.

Blacksmithing is hereditary, all blacksmiths are bouda, men who can turn to hyenas.

The crocotta lures dogs to their death by imitating the sound of a man in distress, because of this he is the enemy of both mankind and dogs.

Preterism is the idea that the prophecies of the end times came true long ago.

The last twin born is named Kehinde.

Loafers

Do you understand what I mean when I talk about the men's loafers that you find in thrift stores; these shoes all about the same age, probably thirty to forty years old, designed in the 1960s or 1970s, and while there are probably still companies that make them it's likely their plateau of popularity when downhill in the mid 80s, uniformly wide and uniformly of the same tonal range of patent leather, and if you try to imagine the type of guy who would wear them you can feel his heavy handshake and his thick hands, and if you think about his face and hair he's got thick hair and a heavy face, and thick and heavy are the adjectives that permeate your perception of him, other ways to put it are that he's fat and gone to seed, or he's lived a nightlife or a life of glorious mid-range success, because the loafers are a bit too gaudy and flashy for your average successful professional to wear?

from So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, Douglas Adams

They looked at each other for a moment.

The moment became a longer moment, so long one could hardly tell where all the time was coming from.

For Arthur, who could usually contrive to feel self-conscious if left alone for long enough with a Swiss cheese plant, the moment was one of sustained revelation. He felt on the sudden like a cramped and zoo-born animal who awakes one morning to find the door to his cage hanging quietly open and the savannah stretching grey and pink to the distant rising sun, while all around new sounds are waking.

He wondered what the new sounds were as he gazed at her openly wondering face and her eyes that smiled with a shared surprise.

He hadn’t realized that life speaks with a voice to you, a voice that brings you answers to the questions you continually ask of it, had never consciously detected it or recognized its tones till it now said something it had never said to him before, which was ‘Yes’.

I Am Holding Your Hand, Myfanwy Collins

It was Christmas Eve and Jessie was hallucinating. She was ten and her tonsils were infected, but she would not be one of the lucky ones who had the operation to remove the dangling bits and then live on ice cream afterwards. No, she would suffer through with the help of antibiotics. Her tonsils would not have a chance to grow back.

Jessie's mother had her tonsils removed as a girl, but they grew back, a fact Jessie found both disturbing and titillating. That humans might have body parts which grew back. Could this mean there was a cure for death?

When she was much older Jessie would be on a subway with a fellow from Germany. He would tell her how his body had become covered in lumps when he was nineteen. Upon investigation the doctors found that the lumps contained hair and bone and teeth. He had absorbed his own twin while he was in the womb.

But Jessie had no twin, absorbed or otherwise.

Her throat ached, her fever spiked. It was the first year her father was not there on Christmas Eve channeling Louis Armstrong on their way back from midnight mass. Instead, he was in his apartment across town. Earlier in the day he'd had the girls over and brought them one after the other into the bathroom and showed them the presents he had gotten for each. Jessie's big sister would receive a stuffed kangaroo, which Jessie coveted. It was small, its fur velveteen. She thought it would work nicely with her Barbie's. They might travel to Australia. Skipper might meet a priest in the Outback. Fall in love.

Jessie would spend Christmas day on the couch, sweating, seeing things that were not there, listening to her mother play the new Neil Diamond record over and over until it seemed Neil Diamond had been absorbed into their living room and family.

When her father came, he would bring her a present. A Bert, but no Ernie. Bert was not too much smaller than she was, his head pointy, his clothes removable, but best not removed as underneath he was featureless-a stuffed pillow.

How old was Bert? Wasn't he a grown man? What an odd choice. His expression was curmudgeonly, unlovable. She feigned appreciation, though her only feeling toward Bert was pity. He was like her father now, living a life without the company of women.

Her father would die in May, in the night and alone, with not even Ernie by his side to hold his hand, to tell him to hold on. No Ernie to remind him of those times when he was loved.

Remember when you were a boy? You had a white pony and a wide-brimmed hat. Think about that pony, that hat. Focus. I am holding your hand.

Nemesis

Nemesis is a painful response to someone else's undeserved good fortune, when written with a capital, Nemesis is also the goddess of retribution.

The Moirae are the three fates, one spins the thread, the second measures the thread, the last cuts the thread, the thread is one's life, the Moirae are women.

Amor fati is a love of fate; it is almost identical to the idea expressed when a man says Gam Zu Letova.

Gam Zu Letova means this too is for the best.

Recklessness is a disregard for the consequences of one's actions.

Hubris was once used to describe the actions of those who would challenge the gods or their laws, today it means overbearing arrogance; the Greeks also had a word for the ruin which comes from hubris, that word is atē.

Hamartia is an error that starts a chain of events that ends in disaster; when she said that she would never marry me she did not mean that she did not love me; today hamartia means character flaw.

Victory disease afflicts military commanders and armies after winning a battle, while the winning side grows complacent, the enemy adapts, disaster ensues; while victory disease does not foretell failure, it is a strong indicator thereof.

A self-defeating prophecy is a prediction that prevents what it predicts from happening; if I told you that you were going to fall in love with me and the hubris of it stopped you from doing so, that would be a self-defeating prophecy, it might also be ironic, it would certainly be tragic.

A paradox is a true statement that leads to a contradiction; contradictions can also be non-dual truths.

Nondualism implies that things appear distinct while not being separate, if the singular essence of all existence were to be made fully manifest to us we would not bear it and would immediately cease to exist as individuals.

Buridan's Ass is a donkey who stands exactly between two equal stacks of hay, the donkey starves to death because he cannot decide which to eat; elsewhere someone writes of a man who is as thirsty as he is hungry and who remains unmoved, positioned as he is exactly between food and drink.

Dialetheism is the viewpoint that some contradictions are true.

The ekkyklêma was a cart hidden behind the scenery in Greek tragedies which was rolled out to show the aftermath of some terrible event that happened out of the view of the audience, the killings happened offstage; a stage was a holy place, to kill them on stage was to kill them in the real world.

Poshlost is untranslatable, it is the Russian version of banality, with a characteristic national flavoring of metaphysics and high morality, and a peculiar conjunction of the sexual and the spiritual, it encompasses triviality, vulgarity, sexual promiscuity, and a lack of spirituality.

Maybe all men are all things in all stories.

The Human Being, Amie Barrodale

And then one day, you sit down at a restaurant in a neighborhood you’ve never been to before. The tablecloths are white. The waiter is wearing a simple, clean uniform. At the table across from you is an old lady in a yellow dress. She orders a lunch in three courses, and when the waiter brings her first course to her left side, she looks at him slightly askance. You order a salad and he asks you if you want wine, and you think, “Yeah, I do want that.” He brings you half a carafe of rosé, which you’d never order, and when your salad comes, you thank him a lot, craning to get his eyes, but he just nods and goes off, and you just let the whole plate kind of sit there, and you drink, and you try to catch his eye, and maybe he sees you once or twice, and the old lady takes a bite or two of her food, and she yells at him and he nods, and an hour or an hour and a half pass, and it’s time to go, and back out in the world of wraiths leaning on phone booths sucking down paper plates of hot grilled street meat, you can take refuge in the warm feeling left by your lunch, for a minute or two.

From Pan, Knut Hamsun

The other one he loved like a slave, like a crazed and like a beggar. Why? Ask the dust on the road and the falling leaves, ask the mysterious God of life; for no one knows such things. She gave him nothing, no nothing did she give him and yet he thanked her. She said: Give me your peace and your reason! And he was only sorry she did not ask for his life.

From Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, Carl Wilson, 33 1/3

As for hypocrisy: certainly, dressing Nazism up with rosy-cheeked mothers and children frolicking on German hillsides is disgusting, but what’s wrong with rosy-cheeked mothers and kids if they’re not Nazis? Taking mere mawkishness as propaganda is paranoid, absent a specific evil it’s complicit in, unless you extend that indictment to any art not made explicit as protest.

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A more thoughtful question is one of proportion: is the problem that kitsch sentimentality (in musical terms, schmaltz) takes everyday hopes and affections and inflates them into life-or-death melodramas? Consider Zen scholar R. H. Blyth’s elegant definition: “We are being sentimental when we give to a thing more tenderness than God gives to it.” This is the antisentimentality John Cage enacted by composing music based on random rolls of the dice, to subtract his own will from the outcome – his silent piece, 3’33”, is just a frame to focus the ears and mind on the sounds of existence already in progress. His music is beautiful in its willingness to surrender itself to that objectivity. Like Cage’s silence, God’s love is unspeakable, implacable its gaze matter-of-fact. But human love is something else: we love in excess of God’s love if we love at all. We love by heaping meaning on objective fact. If I believed in God, I might imagine this is what He created humans for, to give things more tenderness than He granted them, amid nature’s unblinking harshness and the cruelty of fate…God or no God, it’s hubris to pretend to know the correct amount of tenderness it is ours to grant.

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It’s often assumed that audiences for schmaltz are somehow stunted, using sentimental art as a kind of emotional crutch...isn’t it equally plausible that people uncomfortable with representations of vulnerability and tenderness have emotional problems?

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Sentimental art can be a rehearsal, a workout to keep emotions toned and ready for use. This doesn’t dictate that those uses will be appropriate ones, and emotions alone are not solutions to issues, but sympathy and compassion are prerequisites to charity and solidarity.

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What self conscious aesthetes might be guilty of sentimentalizing is ambiguity, that shibboleth of our postidealistic age. Which can make us dupes of another kind, prone to taking surface complication and opacity for depth, and apt to overlook the complexity that may lie even within the sentimental on more patient, curious inspection.

The Mammalian Diving Reflex

The mammalian diving reflex is found in all mammals, especially in whales and seals; this reflex is triggered by submerging your face in water colder than about 70°, it protects your body by reallocating its resources in order to maximize the time you can stay under water, the strength of the mammalian diving reflex is greater in colder water; there are three principal effects; the first is bradycardia, this is what we call it when your heart rate slows, which is the opposite of what happens when you get scared; the second is peripheral vasoconstriction, which is when blood is restricted from flowing to your fingers, toes, arms, and legs and instead flows around your vital organs; and the last is blood shift, the shifting of blood to your chest to stop your lungs from collapsing under high pressure during deep dives; the mammalian diving reflex is automatic, because of it you survive longer without oxygen under water than in a comparable situation on dry land, this means if you are badly hurt, you will live longer in cold water than you would if you were on land; the mammalian diving reflex points to an evolutionary past involving lots of swimming; I read this in an article in a medical journal: the classic image of a victim helplessly gasping and thrashing in the water rarely is reported. A more ominous scenario of a motionless individual floating in the water or quietly disappearing beneath the surface is more typical; if you have ever floundered in the water you know that it is terrifying; the name of that article was Drowning, in a water park I once became stuck under the water for several minutes, I accidentally freed myself; rising panic, flailing limbs, and luck are what I remember; the term drowning victim is not quite accurate because it implies a villain and water is not a villain; in the United States drowning is the second leading cause of death for young children; the first is car crashes; if you are a man you are three times more likely than a woman to drown, this is because men are reckless and drink more alcohol than women; almost half of the adults who drown have drunk alcohol before they drown; kindling is the word for when a binge drinker who at first experiences no withdrawal has seizures and hallucinations after many cycles of drinking and abstaining; alcoholics who have seizures during hospital detoxification stays usually have been through detox before; the philosopher Zhuangzi wrote that a drunken man who falls out of a cart, though he may suffer, does not die, this is statistically and medically incorrect, Zhuangzi goes on to compare the security offered by wine to the security of faith; I will not repeat that passage here; if you drink a great deal you may be confused, disoriented and agitated and have a fever and a racing heart, and you may see things that are not there; this set of symptoms is called delirium tremens; they can lead to death; alcoholism is the only addiction I know with withdrawal symptoms that can be fatal; delirium tremens is also shortened to the DTs; that phrase uses an article unnecessary; I once lived with a woman whose father was an alcoholic, while I was drunk one night she said I am not going to watch another man go through the DTs; abusing alcohol is also associated with an increased risk of stroke.

"You pay for the show. The food is free." That's what the guy next to me said the first time I ever went to Thai Tom, which was in 2002. How do I remember the year? Well, I separated from my then-wife in the summer of 2002 and I decided I was going to eat as much Thai food as I felt like eating. So I'd head to Thai Tom several times a week, sit by myself at the counter, and forget my problems for an hour.

When given a red marker and a black marker, this young man did the sensible thing and drew a fancy French mustache and a bloody nose on himself.

I am completely convinced he is a genius.

Aimee Mullins

This is model Aimee Mullins.









These are not Aimee Mullins' legs.









These are Aimee Mullins' legs.

Essay on Intelligence: One, Alison Hawthorne Deming

The female digger wasp
maintains several burrows
for developing offspring.
As the day begins, she visits
and inspects each tunnel
determining which contain
eggs requiring no food,
which contain larvae
needing two or three
caterpillars to eat, and which
the pupated offspring sealed
in for metamorphosis. On
the basis of her inspection,
the wasp knows how much
prey to capture and where
to deliver the food. If the
occupants of burrows
are switched in the night,
the mother adjusts to the change,
stocking each nursery
according to its need. But if
the offspring are switched
after her inspection,
she will spend the day
stocking with caterpillars
a burrow containing eggs
and will seal off young larvae
to starve. She will touch
and examine an egg many times
without realizing it needs no food.

Bitterness

Bitterness is an emotion similar to resentment, less than anger but more than contempt, both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche have written about bitterness, it is one of those feelings that everyone knows but very few people understand, what I understand about bitterness is that it is a set of extremely powerful shackles that binds you to a memory or regret or person; but bitterness is also a taste; coffee, citrus peels, and quinine are bitter things that I enjoy; quinine is what gives tonic water its taste, and why I will order a gin and tonic but not a gin and soda, soda is too sweet with the gin; cocaine is bitter when it drips down the back of one’s throat; many people dislike bitterness, and infants and small children do not like the taste at all; when I was nine my uncle told me that when I grew up I would learn to like olives and champagne, and he was right, I do enjoy olives and champagne, but not unsweetened chocolate, which is also bitter; the most bitter substance that anyone knows of is an artificial chemical called denatonium; some people are more sensitive to bitter tastes than others, this fact is fascinating to geneticists; anger is not bitterness but angry people are often bitter, and bitter people are often angry, so perhaps bitterness creates or allows anger; I am rarely angry, I am not often bitter, bitterness is painful to me, it often comes after heartbreak; perhaps there is an emotional equivalent to denatonium, but it is not worth it to find out; it is very hard to spit out the emotion of bitterness; many things that naturally taste bitter also contain poisons, bitter flavoring is often added to poisonous substances to discourage ingestion.

Animals, Frank O’Hara

Have you forgotten what we were like then
when we were still first rate
and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth

it’s no use worrying about Time
but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
and turned some sharp corners

the whole pasture looked like our meal
we didn’t need speedometers
we could manage cocktails out of ice and water

I wouldn’t want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me
O you
were the best of all my days

Aurora Bridge

The Aurora Bridge is a cantilever-and-truss bridge that crosses Lake Union in Seattle, which means it joins the neighborhood of Queen Anne with the neighborhood of Fremont; Lake Union is full of very pretty yachts; cantilever and truss is a nice-sounding phrase; it is upstream of the Ship Canal Bridge and downstream of the Fremont Bridge, upstream is west towards Puget Sound, downstream is inland; its designer died of a brain hemorrhage while the bridge was still under construction; there is a sculpture of a troll under the north end of the bridge, I think that is meant to be funny, but I am not at all sure it is humorous, because encounters at troll bridges are the most terrifying of all fairytales; officially it is called the George Washington Memorial Bridge, but we call it Aurora Bridge because it carries Aurora Avenue; it is about 3,000 feet long and precisely 167 feet above Lake Union; that is very high, and many people jump to their deaths from it; the local police will no longer release the number of people who have jumped from the Aurora Bridge, there is too much dark glamour, the Aurora Bridge is second to the Golden Gate Bridge in suicides; the Codebook of Federal Security Agencies calls someone who leaps from a bridge a jumper, the Centers for Disease Control are responsible for suicide prevention initiatives in the United States; in a city there are no cliffs so a bridge is where we go to confront the open clear and void, to build one is to invite dread into our hearts alongside progress, a minister called the Golden Gate Bridge a symbol of human ingenuity, technological genius, but social failure; just being there, he said, left him in a suicidal mood, he was speaking in support of an anti-suicide barrier above the railing, I think of him when I see photographs of the Aurora Bridge; there are six emergency phones on it; sometimes jumpers jump onto the street, not onto the water, I worry about the people who find these bodies, these jumpers are called dry jumps, there is a parking lot for a software company under the bridge, and about eight bodies are found there each year; some jumpers change their minds halfway down, if they are especially lucky they survive the fall, and while they live with chronic back pain, digestive problems, and difficulty breathing, they also approach life differently and more positively, so perhaps confronting the void is a way to appreciate life again; I do not know if jumpers who have survived one jump ever jump again, that is too tragic to research; a shoe salesman leapt to his death from the bridge in 1932 before it was complete; if my understanding of physics is correct, he covered the 167 feet from the top of the bridge to the water below in about 2 seconds and hit the water at a speed of 55 miles per hour, 55 miles per hour is a fine speed at which to drive down a state highway, but a terrible speed at which to hit Lake Union; Aurora Avenue is also called State Highway 99, I have driven it many times.

When you get ready to sleep

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How it is a very fine and private secret to undress yourself in a dark bedroom with someone awake and waiting for you in the bed, and as you take your clothing off you can hear her rustle in the sheets, and maybe as you undress you talk to her, and maybe she’s half asleep so she just murmurs back, and she says something about her day in a slightly groggy voice, or maybe she’s awake and she laughs, and the high peal of her laugh breaks through in the silent room, and after you unbuckle your belt there’s the unmistakable sound of jeans softly and heavily dropping to the floor, and for a moment you’re standing on the floor in the dark, and if it's any season except summer it’s a little chilly, and you pull back the covers from the bare side of the bed and climb in, and after this prolonged state of sensory deprivation in which all you could sense were the cold and the silence and the feeling of the buttons on your pants and shirt, you’re so thankful for the comfort of the bed beneath the covers and for the softness and warmth of this woman whom you share a bed with and who, if you’re lucky, loves you, and who, if you’re really lucky, you love back, and you kiss her, either softly on the mouth if she’s laying on her back, or maybe she’s laying on her stomach or on her side, in which case you can’t reach her mouth to kiss it without bending your neck in an awkward manner, so you kiss the nape of her neck instead or maybe you kiss her cheek, but in any case after you kiss the two of you adjust yourselves so that you can hold her, if you’re laying on your back she will lay on her side and put her head on your shoulder, if you’re laying on your side she will lay on her side too, and you will put an arm across her body, if you are both facing the same direction this is called spooning, if you are facing one another it is wonderful to wake up in that position, but once you have settled on a sleeping posture and the rustling of the sheets and blankets has stopped, you can feel her breathe and hear the way she hums as you nuzzle her neck, and soon she falls asleep, which is something she didn’t do before because she’d been waiting for you to come to bed.

David Beckham

I know the following things about David Beckham; that he plays the midfield position in professional soccer and can curve a soccer ball in a free kick; that he has a lot of tattoos, one of which is a line from the Song of Solomon, several of which are the names and portraits of his three children and his wife; that his wife, who is a rather severe looking woman, once went by the name Posh Spice, which fact the English tabloids love, except their marriage seems pretty happy to me, at least judging by the fact that he and Posh Spice (whose proper name is Victoria) have the same smile; that because he is in extremely good physical condition and is very handsome and dresses expensively and flashily he was called "the ultimate metrosexual" by the man who coined the term metrosexual; that he lives in a mansion that is purported to cost 7.5 million pounds and is called Beckingham in the press, which makes me wonder if he and his family also call it that, as I can see the argument both ways; that he once played on the same professional soccer team as Zinedine Yazid Zidane, another European soccer player whom I'm kind of curious about but not enough to watch soccer games; that he now plays soccer for the Los Angeles Galaxy, the existence of which makes most people, including me, feel completely out of the obsessive loop the rest of the world is in vis-a-vis soccer; that he wanted to make a cameo appearance in the film Bend It Like Beckham, which is named after his aforementioned ability to curve a soccer ball in a free kick but is more importantly about teenage girls and how they relate to one another and has strongly positive overtones of acceptance and homosexuality, but he couldn't due to time constraints, so the filmmakers used a lookalike instead, and when he is asked about further films roles he usually says no, he is too "stiff"; that he spends a lot of time as the spokesman for many luxury goods, for which he gets paid quite a lot of money, and that seems unnecessary but predictable for a famous athlete, except he also spends a lot of time doing charitable work, so perhaps he's just one of those people who enjoys being busy; but about David Beckham I have only one really unshakeable opinion, and that is that usually celebrities give the camera a fake smile, often by opening their mouths widely as if they're laughing, which doesn't work and in fact makes them look like aggressive apes, but when David Beckham smiles for the camera, there are deep folds leading into his eyes, which we call crow’s feet, and the part of his eye between the eyebrow and eyelid moves downward, and the ends of his eyebrows dip slightly, and those are very hard things to fake, perhaps impossible, and they mean that he is using a genuine happy smile, and that makes me like him.

The Weekly Conference Call...

...is where my co-author and I will talk about things that we really like. That is the entire criterion.


This week, we're talking about clothes: The Emotional Value of Dressing Well.

Excerpts from an Exclaim interview with Daniel Johnston

What are your current fixations?
Well, I like comic books a lot, and I watch a lot of DVDs, and it’s fun to, you know, watch a movie, you know?

How do you spoil yourself?
Um, just about everything I can buy, from popsicles to uh, fruit juices.

What is your vital daily ritual?
Well, what it’s all about is art and music. I try to keep it goin’ as much as I can, you know, but I do enjoy, like once during the day, a DVD or somethin’ to entertain me, you know, keep me goin’, you know. You know, I just have basically a pretty good day and behave myself and then once or twice a week I’ll go shoppin’ with my relatives and stuff, to get more DVDs. So, uh, yeah, that’s about it, you know, I guess. Besides eatin’ n’ sleepin’.

What should everyone shut up about?
I think there’s too much evil. They should just shut up and pretend to be good, or something like that, you know?

What advice should you have taken, but did not?
Uh-huh, well… My parents told me not to do drugs. And I really didn’t do that many of ‘em until I joined a carnival once and I had some and I went: “Man, this is unreal!” You know, I couldn’t believe it, I was so happy! Because I was a little bit depressed when I joined the carnival and it sure cheered me up, but uh, I’ve since pretty much given it up.

Given the opportunity to choose, how would you like to die?
My head chopped off by my love.

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