But the Petunias Look Nice

Author Bill Bryson writes prolifically on everything from household objects to language; he also writes idiosyncratic travelogues. I’ve never regretted picking up a book by him, so I had high hopes for The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America. Bryson grew up in Iowa in the ‘50s and ‘60s, but long has made his home in the UK; so, for this adventure he was coming home but with an acquired outside perspective. It was a promising combination. Starting in his hometown of Des Moines, he drove a circuit around the US in search of the perfect small town of TV and movies. (I could have told him the only place this exists: Main Street in Disneyland, and it isn’t real.) He didn’t avoid the big cities completely – it would have been silly to shun a city when it was between where he was and where he intended to go – but his objective was small town America. Despite the passage of time since publication, in fundamental respects nothing much has changed about his way-stops.

To anyone who hasn’t tried a road trip around the US, I recommend it; it takes a few months to do it halfway properly, but you probably can cut this to one if you don’t mind pausing at each stop only long enough to snap a photo. I did this the first time as long ago as 1975. (See The Roxy Caution at my Richard’s Mirror site for a brief account of one stop on that journey.) Do it once and the road always will beckon.

The problem with Bryson’s book is not the outside perspective but the “coming home” part. One always feels free to be ruder about oneself and one’s countrymen than about others, and that is as it should be. And yet… By analogy, we all complain sometimes about our family foibles (or possibly even crimes), and such stories often make for funny conversation, but there is a point beyond which the complaints get off-putting to the listener. You know how some folks will carry on about the mean sister, the unfeeling mother, the crazy father, the passive aggressive brother, and so on so relentlessly that you begin to feel embarrassed for the gripers? OK, Aunt Bessie has thirteen cats and Uncle Fred is a sneak drinker, but is there nothing more to them? If there is, we never hear of it. It took only a few chapters of The Lost Continent for that kind of embarrassment to kick in. Mind you, I don’t take offense to his commentary in some touchy patriotic way. I’ve said worse things about all the places he mentions – albeit not in a cascade  one right after the other – and I would be just as uncomfortable with his tone (maybe more so) if he were writing about Romania. And yet… is there nothing more to those places?

Examples—

Regarding Iowa girls:

“Iowa women are almost always sensationally overweight…I don’t know what it is that happens to them but it must be awful to marry one of those nubile cuties knowing that there is a time bomb ticking away in her that will at some unknown date make her bloat out into something huge and grotesque, presumably all of a sudden and without much notice, like a self-inflating raft from which the pin has been yanked.”

On Ohio:

“In the morning I awoke early and experienced that sinking sensation that overcomes you when you first open your eyes and realize that instead of a normal day ahead of you, with its scatterings of simple gratifications, you are going to have a day without even the tiniest of pleasures; you are going to drive across Ohio.”

Making fun of Southern accents:

“‘Yew honestly a breast menu, honey?’...She might as well have addressed me in Dutch. It took many moments and much gesturing with a knife and fork to establish that what she had said to me was, ‘Do you want to see a breakfast menu, honey?’”

On Utah and Mormons:

“It makes you feel a little like Kevin McCarthy in Invasion of the Body Snatchers…”

On Nevada:

“What’s the difference between Nevada and a toilet? Answer: You can flush a toilet.”

On Los Angeles:

“I think it is only right that crazy people should have their own city, but I can’t for the life of me see why a sane person would want to go there.”

You get the idea. Funny? Yes. At least a kernel of truth? Yes. And, yet…

By the time he completes his 13,978 mile circuit, however, he mellows. He hasn’t found that perfect small town but he has found pieces of it scattered here and there. Sounding a curiously sentimental note after all that went before, he writes about his re-entry into Des Moines,

“There was just something about it that looked friendly and decent and nice. I could live here, I thought, and turned the car for home. It was the strangest thing, but for the first time in a long time I felt almost serene.”

The Lost Continent is worth a read despite the sighs it provokes. Bryson writes very well, he has a good eye, and his grouchiness can be amusing. But he has reminded me to keep my own carping in check – or at least to balance those complaints about Bessie’s thirteen cats with an observation that her petunias look nice.

Me and You and a Dog Named Boo

 

Recap: Corporal Punishers vs Brandywine Roller Girls

On Saturday April 11, Morristown’s original roller derby team, the Corporal Punishers of the Jerzey Derby Brigade, faced off against the Brandywine Roller Girls, visiting from Chester County Pennsylvania. The Corporal Punishers had lost some key skaters to other teams and other towns in recent years, but they proved fully up to speed in a very competitive bout.

In the initial jam Apocelyse put the first points of the bout on the board for the Punishers. Ultra-Shear-her returned the favor for Brandywine in the next. It set the pattern for most of the first half as the lead see-sawed from one team to the next. At 10 minutes into the bout the Punishers led 26-25. 10 minutes later the score stood at 42-49 in favor of Brandywine. It was then that Brandywine opened a significant point gap thanks to fortuitous penalties and skillful power jams, particularly one by Ultra-Shear-her. At half-time the Punishers trailed 65-102.

In derby, 37 points is not a safe lead, and as the second half began the Punishers strove to take it away from Brandywine. Apocelyse, LL Kill J, CaliforniKate, and Pretty Kayotic all fought their way through stiff Brandywine blocking. Drop Pop N Lock and Jacquelyn Heat did as much for Brandywine but Morristown narrowed the gap to 109-122 with 15 minutes remaining. Blocking on both sides toughened further, with both teams repeatedly setting up effective walls. There were more than a few pile-ups as jammers and blockers collided. Jacquelyn Heat, however, was able to reopen Brandywine’s lead with multiple laps. Morristown kept skating gamely, even knocking down Ultra-Shear-her in the final jam, but the Punishers ran out of time. Brandywine took the win with a final score 126-164.

MVPs:

For Brandywine – Kelly Krueger as blocker, Ultra-Shear-her as jammer

For Corporal Punishers – Lil Mo Peep as blocker, Apocelyse as jammer

Sapient

Histories come in different flavors in accord with the tastes of their authors. Some are detailed chronologies of events while others gossip about the private lives of key actors. Still others concern themselves with grand themes and broad analyses; any book titled Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind scarcely can be anything but one of these. Published in 2014,Yuval Noah Harari’s book begins when at least six species of humans co-existed on earth, discusses factors that may have led to the emergence of a sole survivor (Homo Sapiens), provides a global overview of prehistory and history, and ends with speculations about whether future bioengineering (or just plain engineering) will lead to our replacement by a new species of human, transhuman, or nonhuman. That’s a lot of territory to trek in 428 pages counting footnotes, but Harari still pauses here and there long enough to make some interesting arguments. Even the ones with which I disagree are valuable as thoughts to ponder.

Two themes in particular run through the book. First, Harari argues that the critical difference between Sapiens and other humans, including the equally big brained Neanderthals, was the ability to form social networks larger than 150 individuals. 150 is the limit below which modern people are able to maintain easy familiarity; above a group size of 150 we begin to lose track of names and relationships, which is to say that we can regard some of the members as strangers. There is no evidence any hominid other than Sapiens ever formed larger groups. Sapiens hunter-gatherer bands tend to split once they reach this size, but Sapiens did find a way to achieve larger associations. Harari credits a cognitive revolution by which Sapiens was able to create social fictions and believe in them: common origin stories, common mythologies, common religions, and the like allowed people to expand the definition of “us” to form tribes, alliances, and trading networks. These allowed us to accept commonality and kinship with people we didn't know personally. This was a killer app against a more fractured “them.” Such fictions continue to underlie modern societies. The fictions can be purely ideological; Harari cites the classical liberal idea of natural human rights and the socialist idea of human equality as examples. Just because an idea is fiction doesn’t mean it isn’t useful. Quite the contrary. But, he argues, it still is fiction. Money is a shared fiction; money is valuable only because people believe it is; when they cease to believe it (and this happens with some frequency) a currency will crash. Nations, too, are fictions that exist by consensual belief.

His second argument is that determinist theories of history are pleasing but wrong. Random events and the whims of individuals can have vast long-term consequences: “the better you know a particular historical period, the harder it becomes to explain why things happened one way and not another.” Humankind, he says, forms a second order chaotic system. A first order chaotic system is one that is not affected by predictions – e.g. the weather. A second order chaotic system is one in which predictions change the outcome; a respected investment firm that makes a prediction about a commodity price, for example, will affect the price by that very prediction. So, whatever current trends might seem to be, things easily can take unexpected turns. In the 1990s, for example, many folks argued the world was moving inexorably toward secular capitalist liberal democracy (remember “the end of history”?); nowadays that looks doubtful.

That human myths are flexible and arbitrary is not a new idea. Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil and elsewhere remarked that prevailing ethical systems have no inherent truth but were invented to keep the current elite in power while rival ethical systems are invented by those who want to transfer power from the current elite to themselves. (This simple and, in retrospect, obvious argument unsettled my ideological confidence when I was young.) Myths nonetheless are enormously effective tools for social organization, and Harari may be onto something when he points to Sapiens’ capacity for them as a key advantage as opposed to just a capacity for language per se (of the practical “a lion is over there” variety), which we possibly shared with other human species.

Harari doesn’t convince in every chapter and even some of his “facts” are debatable, but his book is an intriguing read. Besides, anything that can prod folks to question their own mythological certainties in our world of clashing true-believers is welcome. Recommended.

pity this busy monster, manunkind - e.e. cummings

 

Degrees & Dollars

My old college alma mater once again has sent a mailer informing me of an opportunity to send a donation. Once again I’ll forgo the opportunity. I appreciate my experiences there, but I paid for them once and will leave it at that.

My years at GWU in truth were rewarding ones. Not financially. It just so happened that that my subsequent work required no degree and was utterly unrelated to anything I had encountered in college. But college did offer something: it pointed out to me just how much I didn’t know about how many things. My classes provided modest amounts of information about this subject and that, of course, but far more importantly they provided a framework for learning more on my own should I be so inclined. Without such a framework, it is difficult to know where to start. That has been of lifelong value. For this reason alone I recommend the experience to anyone who can afford it. For most people who attended college at that time (I was an outlier) the degree was financially valuable too, at least in the long run. A degree – almost any degree – from that era has been associated with higher lifetime earnings. Besides, college years were fun in other ways.

Most people enjoy their college years, of course, often primarily for reasons less associated with academics than just with being in their late teens and early 20s. A line from Gregg Araki’s cult scifi/college film: “College is just an intermission between high school and the rest of your life – four years of having sex, making stupid mistakes, and experiencing stuff.” For many this apparently is all there is to it. Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses describes a look at 3000 students on 29 American campuses – a large sample. Among the findings: after two years 45% of the students were no more knowledgeable or capable of critical thinking than when they graduated high school; even after a full four years 36% showed no improvement over high school. The students in the survey studied only half as much as students four decades earlier though somehow they maintained an average overall grade-point average of 3.2. Professor Arum of NYU, lead author, calls the numbers “kind of shocking.” There has been one noteworthy increase: cost. Tuition in inflation-adjusted dollars has doubled since the 70s – in some cases much more than doubled. So have associated costs such as board and books. Accordingly, the net financial rewards to a degree have become less certain. Degrees in engineering and the hard sciences still pay off, even with higher student debt, but a liberal arts degree (like mine) is far more problematical, with unemployment rates among graduates double that of the science majors. A recent Brookings Institution report notes the importance of distinguishing among degree types when asking “Is college worth it?” (Their answer: overall yes, but in some categories not necessarily.)

Do I have any advice for anyone college-bound who does not plan to pursue a hard science? Yes. Don’t go to college for the money, because there might not be any. There might be less. Do it to try to become a better rounded person. If that outcome doesn’t seem probable or, if achieved, an adequate return on the investment, maybe one should drop the idea and look in the want-ads instead.

Even though they were during the last bloom of hippiedom and psychedelia, my college years were a bit less weird than this. Kaboom (2010) trailer:

 

Jersey Bounces Opponents in Derby Double

A new season of roller derby has arrived in Morristown NJ. It began last night with a women’s bout between the home team NJRD (New Jersey Roller Derby) and the Jersey Shore Roller Girls; it was followed by a men’s match JBRD (Jersey Boys Roller Derby) vs Toronto Men’s Roller Derby. The New Jersey Roller Derby Small Stars (the local kids’ league) sang the national anthem.

The Jersey Shore has a strong record including a victory over another Morristown team on its most recent visit to the same track in 2014. The NJRD steadily has been building strength since its formation a few years ago, however, and it showed on the track last night. The team’s blocking has tightened and it has acquired a depth of experienced jammers.  NJRD’s Maulin Rouge put points on the board in the first jam; Shannanigunz, Miss USA-Hole, Tuff Crust Pizza, and Chase Windu followed in quick succession. Despite game jamming by the Shore, notably by SoCo who persevered through tough blocking, only 10 minutes into the bout NJRD led 59-7. NJRD continued to dominate, though Shore was able to gain points, notably by Emma Effa and Hodan. At halftime NJRD led 131-27. The second half was rough-and-tumble but continued on the same path. Despite some impressive individual jams, including a 15 pointer by Soco, NJRD built its lead, taking the win 211-99. MVPs were Maulin Rouge (jammer) and Rosa Ruckus (blocker) for NJRD, and Emma Effa (jammer) and Pinky and the Pain (blocker) for Jersey Shore.

In the second bout a Jersey team once again showed its strength in the first jam. Robert Brawlson for JBRD made multiple passes through the pack while Señor Weiner from Toronto ran into determined JBRD resistance for a first jam score of 23-1 in favor of Jersey. Despite occasional strong jams by Toronto, notably by Sleeper Cell, Ford, and Weiner, the first jam had set the pattern. Barndt, Scooter McGoot, and Brawlson added to the Jersey totals. Blocking stiffened toward the end of the first half; a ref was caught in the action and was helped off the track. At halftime the score stood 196-54. In the second half both sides upped their blocking. Toronto with some effect employed a blocking formation that originated in Australia, and tried alternate jamming tactics including a star pass from Flyin Bryan to Ford. It wasn’t enough to alter the general trend of the bout. The clock ran out with the score at 411-90 in favor of JBRD.

Benny Goodman Jersey Bounce

 

Goodbye Again to Berlin

I’m not a rabid theater-hound. For one thing it is too expensive to be one, and for another the simple hassle of getting in and out of NYC is a deterrent. So, I seldom attend more than three or four plays per year on or off Broadway – sometimes fewer, but occasionally more if I have ulterior motives (i.e. dates). Still less often do I see a play a second time. The exceptions are…well…exceptional.

Cabaret, which is ending its current run this weekend, is very exceptional. It has had four Broadway productions, and I’ve seen three of them, witnessing such unlikely performers of the Sally Bowles role as Natasha Richardson, Brooke Shields, and Molly Ringwald. (I was 13 when the first production opened in 1966, and the New York theater wasn’t really on my radar or in my budget.) Whenever guests – especially from out-of-area – during one of its runs asked me an opinion about what Broadway musical to see, I’d point to it, and as often as not end up in one of the seats next to them.

The play has its origins in Goodbye to Berlin, a quasi-memoir by Christopher Isherwood published in 1938 about his time several years earlier in Weimar Republic Berlin, a city renowned for its easy unashamed decadence. Though the homosexual elements in the book should be obvious to any but the blindest of readers, Isherwood in later years regretted not making them far more explicit. There was a sound reason for his earlier reticence: the 1930s English-speaking world had shame in spades and a more blatant presentation might have prevented publication. He corrected his caution in the graphic 1976 memoir Christopher and His Kind, written oddly in (most of the time) the third person. Nonetheless, the central character of Goodbye to Berlin is the cabaret entertainer Sally Bowles, based on Isherwood’s real acquaintance Jean Ross, whose amorous issues are with men; Jean supposedly gave her OK to the book but declined to see the show. She died in 1973. Sally Bowles first came to the stage in the 1951 play I Am a Camera (a line from the book) and then again in the musical adaptation.

I think the appeal of Cabaret, quite aside from its production values, is the sense of uneasiness it instills. The uneasiness stems from the realization that decadence and reaction are intertwined. Authoritarians demanding to sweep out the trash can come from unexpected ideological directions and can be supported by the most surprising people, all convinced of their correctness. The 1960s accordingly was the right time for the musical to find its first audience. It is hard to convey to those who weren’t there in that decade just how much to my parents’ generation (still in their 40s) society seemed suddenly to have gone crazy; the Weimar excesses were looking familiar. Would it all end the same way? Fortunately, it didn’t. There was a pushback, but it was pretty mild in the way such things are measured. There is no guarantee, though, that the next one will be.

Since it still speaks to us, I don’t believe the show has seen the last of Broadway. Another production will be back one day. But until then, goodbye to all that.

Local news report from last year on the 2014 opening

Twelve Reasons Why Romans Didn’t Live in Glass Houses

Anyone who has tried a hand at fiction [I’ve made a few stabs at it – see my other two blogspot sites] has had the experience of a story going off in in an unplanned direction and finishing in an unexpected place. This is usually because a character acquires a personality that refuses to cooperate; he or she demands to speak and behave in a way that differs from whatever is in your initial outline. It is at least somewhat comforting to know that this happens to first-rate authors as well as to those further down the scale. Mark Twain, for example, tells us that Pudd’nhead Wilson was supposed to be a minor character in a story featuring the Capello twins, but he kept butting in front until Mark finally gave up, handed the plot over to him, consigned the twins to a supporting role, and titled the novel Pudd’nhead Wilson. He explains this in an introduction to the short story Those Extraordinary Twins which he gave to the shortchanged twins in compensation. This kind of divergence from plan doesn’t usually happen in nonfiction blogs though, but it did today, thereby prompting me to double back and write this introductory paragraph. No strong-willed fictional character took command, but a strongly opinionated historical one beckoned down a side road. You’ll see what I mean. Maybe I can’t blame him though; perhaps I just lost focus from a lack of sleep.

As that may be, last week’s musings on concrete brought to mind another material so common we don’t think much about it: glass. There is a direct connection, albeit a minor one, to concrete. One of the less important methods of recycling glass is to grind it into pebble-size pieces and use it as aggregate in concrete or asphalt (“glassphalt”). The primary uses for glass weigh more heavily in the scheme of things of course.

Glassmaking goes back to Sumeria. The process is pretty straightforward. Heat up a silicate (SiO2) rock (typically quartz) to 1200 degrees C and its crystalline structure will break; the rock will turn into a sticky liquid. Cool it fairly rapidly and the crystals won’t have time to reform; the molecules will retain an amorphous pattern – or rather nonpattern – which is to say the material will be glass. By adding a flux, such as potash, you can lower the temperature at which this happens. Occasionally, but only occasionally, glass forms naturally as in the case of obsidian. Perhaps the most fun natural glass (assuming you are not there at the moment of formation) is fulgerite, tubes or filaments of glass ranging from several centimeters to several meters long that can form when lightning strikes desert sand. You have to make glass on purpose, though, if you want industrial quantities of it.

While making glass is uncomplicated in principle, giving it the properties you want is more difficult; just figuring out how to make it transparent took centuries. To work it into something useful takes art and skill. Glass production didn’t really go into high gear until the Roman Empire. Romans not only made cheap everyday glass bowls and drinking vessels, but elaborate cut glasses that we still would have trouble duplicating. The Romans also were the first to make common use of glass windows. An ancient Roman window typically had a lot of small panes set in lead mullions. Making large panes was still a problem for them. Glass windows are easy to underrate until you don’t have them; they let in the light and they keep out the bugs. Before glass people used fabrics or shutters – or they just left the hole in the wall open. None of those is very satisfactory.

It occurs to me – in the way that one thought leads to another – that the Romans by the first century already were so accustomed to glass that they scarcely bothered to mention it in surviving texts. The only reference that comes immediately to mind is by the boorish nouveau riche character Trimalchio in Petronius’ first century novel Satyricon. Google churns up the quote swiftly: “But I prefer glass, if you don't mind my saying so; it doesn't stink, and if it didn't break, I'd rather have it than gold, but it's cheap and common now.” A quick look inside a Penguin translation from my shelf of Suetonius' The Twelve Caesars to see if windows are mentioned in the description of Nero’s Golden House turns up nothing, but I’m afraid that in the pages of the book I’ve gotten distracted from glass. Repeated shattering of something far more fragile is on display: elementary human decency. The Twelve Caesars is an engrossing read even if you’ve read it more than once before.

Suetonius (c. 69 – 122 AD) was a reactionary, which in the context of his time meant he favored a return to governance by the Republican institutions which Julius and his nephew Octavius had turned into rubber stamps. (Roman emperors were surprisingly unperturbed by Republican-leaning historians; they don’t seem to have bothered to suppress them so long as the writings were about their predecessors.) Accordingly, he is happy to trot out the vices of the first twelve Caesars. It therefore is tempting to dismiss his account of imperial depravity as propaganda; yet, so much of it is backed by multiple sources and evidence that we have to take it seriously. When he is unfair he still tells enough of the facts for us to decide this for ourselves. For example, he quotes the fatally ill emperor Vespasian as saying, “I feel I shall soon be a god.” This is presented and often regarded as jaw-dropping arrogance, yet Suetonius’ own biographical account shows Vespasian to have been down-to-earth (rare for a Caesar) and to have had a taste for sarcastic humor. This looks to me to be an instance of it: a reference to the Senate’s habit of voting divinity status for dead emperors, something the hardheaded non-superstitious former general was unlikely to have taken seriously. Besides, the imperial vices Suetonius recounts are, under the circumstances, all too credible.

Several of the Caesars were reasonably good imperial administrators – or at least had the wisdom to delegate the task to unsung freedmen who were – but in their private lives their behavior broke all bounds. In fact, there were no bounds. How do people behave – how would you behave – when there literally are no restrictions? When there are no legal consequences? When your word is law? The answer pretty clearly is that they behave badly. One of the milder passages about Nero:

“Besides the abuse of free-born lads, and the debauch of married women, he committed a rape upon Rubria, a Vestal Virgin. He was upon the point of marrying Acte, his freedwoman, having suborned some men of consular rank to swear that she was of royal descent. He gelded the boy Sporus, and endeavoured to transform him into a woman. He even went so far as to marry him, with all the usual formalities of a marriage settlement, the rose-coloured nuptial veil, and a numerous company at the wedding... It was jocularly observed by some person, ‘that it would have been well for mankind, had such a wife fallen to the lot of his father Domitius.’”

In accordance with Freud and Kinsey rather than 21^st century sensibilities, one might note, the Romans didn’t define their sexuality in narrow or divisive terms such as straight or gay – they accepted that a person had a range rather than a niche. An apparently disquieted Edward Gibbon in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire nonetheless comments that of the first fifteen emperors, “Claudius was the only one whose taste in love was entirely correct."

The issue, of course, is not what is “correct” but what is assault – whether the object of physical affection had any choice in the matter. Yet Nero wasn’t so very unusual in this regard: his depravity didn’t hold a candle to that of the pedophile Tiberius, never mind the outright insanity of Caligula.

Suetonius remains a convincing warning about the hazards of absolute power. The hazard also applies to the tyrant himself who may discover the hard way that power is never entirely absolute after all: eight (maybe nine) of those twelve Caesars were murdered.

Suetonius wrote numerous other books on everything from grammar to timekeeping to natural history to fashion. (The titles are listed in other sources.) Snippets from a few survive, but most have been lost completely. Among the lost works (I kid you not) is another biographical work, Lives of Famous Whores. Pity.

Heart of Glass