Now Then, About My Welsh Walkabout

I spent a glorious part of my UK time hiking the Pembrokeshire Coast Trail in southern Wales. It is the island's only national park on the coast, which I found surprising. Still, what else could beat this 190-mile trail, overlooking the St. George's and Bristol Channels, to the Celtic Sea, to the Atlantic Ocean?

Sometimes the trail wandered through coastal woods so set in an unknown time, illuminated by another world's light, that Welsh mythology seemed entirely possible.

Most times though, the trail hovered at the edge of the cliffs looking out onto the water.

Whenever there was a set of footholds or stairs leading down a cliff to a beach, the trail signs obligingly pointed it out for an arduous but worthwhile detour. What was so truly amazing about views and visits down to various beaches was the difference between high and low tides. At most beaches I know, the difference was simply several yards more or less of sand.

Not here.

This set of stairs, unusually formal for its setting, simply disappeared at a certain point during the tide. I so longed to sit there like Tiger Lily and let the sea rise to my throat.

This spectacular formation, accessible only at low tide, looked like where the world began, with a dark drill-bit heart and waves of golden rock undulating in a perfect display of centrifugal force, the most fluid, transitional movement caught in the hardest, most ancient substance.

More to come (and with apologies for the layout) . . .

Please Let Me Shout: My Photo on The New Yorker's Book Bench Blog!

The New Yorker's The Book Bench has had a great feature this summer, with contributed photographs from around the world focusing on the summertime pleasure of books and reading. My Welsh bookshop photograph, which all of you trendsetting people saw first on my blog, is the August 13th entry there.

And while we're on the subject of the manifold talents of the Rummage clan, Intrepid Theorist, one of the Chocolates, is the focus of an article in Science Magazine.

I will let you quietly guess in your head which is the greater honor. (Hey . . .)

My Summer Vacation Book Report

Vacation time travel is best if you end up behind where you started.

My time in England and Wales began smack in the 21st century with a presentation on semantics and content architecture at University College London. It ended smack in the 18th century with an antiquarian edition of The History of Sir Charles Grandison from Charing Cross Road. Most definitely the right direction!

Vision of the Future (Hint: It's broken.)

Blackwell's bookshop in London has the famous Espresso "books on demand" machine. The first image shows the "Books on Demand" center with its samples on display. The second is a close-up of the machine itself. You might not be able to see the sign saying that it's broken.

Vision of the Past

This little bookshop in Wales had sedimentary layers of books, just like the rock formations there did. It was the hidden treasure in a town with several antiseptic bookstores. This shop had odd hours, delightfully treacherous aisles snaking between stacks and layers of books, and a knowledgeable and charming owner who smelled gently of liquor early in the morning. The one other customer in the store turned around and sent huge piles of books tumbling from several directions. I bought my book of Welsh fables here.

What I Read on My Summer Vacation

I read my first No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency novel on my Kindle while on my Welsh walkabout. I was predisposed to like it because a friend recommended the series and because the possessive is always used correctly. This was probably an overwrought vacation reaction, but it reminded me a little of Trollope in its style, at once masterly and deceptively simple.

I also looked for a book that I would never see in the United States. My find this time was Madresfield, a historical biography of the house that inspired Evelyn Waugh to write Brideshead Revisited and that was subject to the lawsuit that inspired Jarndyce and Jarndyce in Bleak House (a very very favorite novel). I never imagined those two authors in the same sentence, let alone the same house!

Alas, now I am reading my bills for my trip.

Sign, Sign, Everywhere a Sign

I need to start writing about my wonderful time in London and Wales before my vacation glow becomes, um, a vacation glower, which is not the comparative form.

So I'll begin with a few UK signs. Ever since a long ago trip to Japan, where a friendly little carp icon meant "EARTHQUAKE!"--something, quite honestly, I never would have translated correctly because there's no hope for anyone if fish aren't safe from land tremors--I have paid attention to signs when traveling.

Misfortune Awaits

I loved this unambiguous little guy, telling me that if I continued on (or actually off) my Welsh hiking trail, misfortune awaited. I really like the fact that he so clearly has five fingers on each hand.

The Polite Ashtray

For some reason, this seemed so British, compared to our dirty lumps of sand.

Restaurant Dumpster

Alas, you can't really tell from the photo, but this sign reminding patrons to choose this pasta eatery was pasted on the side of a dumpster. And I think we all know why the pasta is brown . . .

The Powerful Construction Lobby

Don't you love the idea of a "Considerate Constructors Scheme"? It sounds like something from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

Sign of the Times

What could be sadder? (If I didn't bring you something from London, now you know why.)

Two Days Ago, There Was a Little Incident Involving Flip-flops and 3 Miles

I am going to write about my own stellar trip to England and Wales soon, but first, I want to share a few details coming in from the Chocolates, currently in France after a sojourn in Italy.

The title of this blog comes from a postcard that Cupcake of the Chocolate family sent me. I must wait for details of the "incident," but the postcard otherwise tells me that pastries and art are the order of the day.

I also have a postcard of Louis XIV that Rat of the Chocolate family sent me. He has been given big red lips, fishnet stockings, and eyelashes because Rat admired this painting until she discovered it was actually supposed to be a painting of a man.

Sacher Mom of the Chocolate family tells me details of the eclair tasting that the family conducted in the heart of Paris. Or the heat of Paris.

It's good to be related to the Chocolate family.

Art and "Art"

Social engineering is a funny thing. I usually think of it in terms of government policies where people with families get more benefits from their employers, people with mortgages get tax deductions, and things like that. Rewards for certain behavior.  

In Brazil, according to the Washington Post and Inter-American Development Bank, telenovelas--the super soaps--are responsible for social engineering: lower fertility rates, higher divorce rates, and other social and family life phenomena. What's the corollary in the United States? Will people become really diligent about vacuuming up their hair and fibers after watching all those CSI episodes? That might not be too far from the truth, now that I think about it, because some studies have shown a change in jury behavior because evidence is always so fully determinative on shows like CSI. 

This isn't quite social engineering, but a neat experiment about art and news. The Haaretz newspaper in Israel, which is like the Economist, with a small but very elite readership compared to other newspapers, used National Book Week to create a day where almost all of its news was reported and written by novelists and poets. You've got to love a TV column that begins, "I didn't watch TV today," a weather report written as a sonnet about summer being an unsharpened pencil, and a business report written by a children's book and cookbook author. One of the only beats not surrendered to artists was sports. I will brush up on my Hebrew and report further. 

יום אחד

And in other Kindle-related news, there are some funny tweets from Mark Glaser who is being tormented by the crappy teenage material being "whispernetted" to his stolen Kindle.

My Week Was So Bad that THIS Is What Cheered Me Up

Newspapers accounts of 

• a "Parents Council" listserv war where one woman called the leaders "purveyors of evil" and "inebriated beavers"
• a Humane Society report on a "tormented guinea pig," where the reporting officer had to rescue said pig from a child trying to groom and dress it like a doll
  
• a nearby restaurant closed by the Health Inspector because of a "gross unsanitary occurrence"
  

I guess this is the fun side of newspapers no longer having a lot of real reporters to provide stories. I guess that doesn't cheer me up so much after all. 

Duel, Citizenship

Chorus vs. Diva

Who beeped at me while I was walking in the giganto-mart parking lot the other day? I need to know so I can apologize for delaying your trip to the stop sign by 5 seconds. 

I am by no means a gritty urban person, but industrialized suburbia is not my culture. Cities, like my fair city of 97% Obama, are choruses.  Yes, often it is practicality and not brotherhood that makes it so, but still. Industrialized suburbia, though, are a bunch of greedy soloists who beep at you when you dare to wander into their spotlights. 

Homo sapiens vs. Homo Xapian

A dear friend once said that I had a novelist's imagination, his delicate way of pointing out that I might not remember facts, but I could always be counted on to supply the analogy or metaphor for what a fact should mean. Imagine me now in an environment peopled by H. Xapian. A literal world of cause and effect, where dots need to connect. A world that does not recognize that declaring a positive or a negative should also convey something about its opposite state. A world of the trivial and the non-trivial, where trivial is the positive. A world of the eye-roll for H. sapiens.

It's a marriage that needs to work, even if it can't be saved. 

Silicon Valley vs. Feudal Lords

It's open plan and open ideas until the fiat. 

The DX Version: New-Fangled Devices and Old-Fangled Human Nature (suckers!)

Now that you might have invested some mindshare in reading my earlier post, I hope you won't feel duped at the new larger DX version I'm posting mere hours later. 

It's been fun to follow all the articles and debates about the Kindle lately, or rather, ever since I bought one a few months ago.  Apparently, the Kindle can't pronounce Barack Obama correctly in the "text to speech" function, the same way Microsoft Office thinks I meant to type "barrack boatman." Of course, I checked this out directly, and it's not that bad. It just sounds like the kind of McCain supporter that embarrassed even McCain. I happen to use the "text to speech" function mainly for New Yorker poetry, which can be vastly improved with an inept vocalization, so I hope that any fixing of the Kindle won't fix the poetry too. 

The outrage over the newer bigger Kindle is kind of interesting because it proves the law where the scope of indignation is inversely proportional to the magnitude of the actual transgression. (And this is from a journalist who kept silent for years about all the real outrages being perpetrated on Americans.) There's another fascinating article about how Kindle users actually skew much older than Amazon thought or wanted, and for some reason, I see a connection. What this means for the coveted student audience, I can only guess. What it means for Amazon is that they might have scorned their pool of finicky retail-Americans. 

The new Kindle is called the DX just like it's a car, so I'd love for Amazon to act like a carmaker (let's say Fiat, not Chrysler) and roll out its different skins for the same chassis: the CX, the DX, the high-end S series, and then the Hummer series, which can be the final generation when the screen is actually the same size as an opened newspaper. Seriously, technology-makers need to version differently and to understand that there isn't one vanishing point in the horizon. I don't want one Ring to rule them all, although clearly others do.  

If you have a good name for the "high indignation to trivia" law, let me know. I would also like to propose the occasional return to "inrage," where you stay quiet outside your head when you know you're being seriously ridiculous.

New-Fangled Devices and Old-Fangled Human Nature

It's been fun to follow all the articles and debates about the Kindle lately, or rather, ever since I bought one a few months ago. The outrage over the newer bigger Kindle is kind of interesting because it proves the law where the scope of indignation is inversely proportional to the magnitude of the actual transgression. (And this is from a journalist who kept silent for years about all the real outrages being perpetrated on Americans.) There's another fascinating article about how Kindle users actually skew much older than Amazon thought or wanted, and for some reason, I see a connection. What this means for the coveted student audience, I can only guess. What it means for Amazon is that they might have scorned their pool of finicky retail-Americans. 

The new Kindle is called the DX just like it's a car, so I'd love for Amazon to act like a carmaker (let's say Fiat, not Chrysler) and roll out its different skins for the same chassis: the CX, the DX, the high-end S series, and then the Hummer series, which can be the final generation when the screen is actually the same size as an opened newspaper. Seriously, technology-makers need to version differently and to understand that there isn't one vanishing point in the horizon. I don't want one Ring to rule them all, although clearly others do.  

If you have a good name for the "high indignation to trivia" law, let me know. I would also like to propose the occasional return to "inrage," where you stay quiet outside your head when you know you're being seriously ridiculous.

The Last Single Taskers

Saw first professional soccer game last night, just after the rain, at a 50-year-old stadium holding 20,000 fans and families in a space for twice that many. 

For a neophyte like me, I was in the perfect group: Friends who knew soccer and played soccer, with the added bonus of knowing the history (and suspecting the future) of the team. I lucked out on this score. We live in an age where knowledge often substitutes for experience, and when the experience of playing is limited (football or hockey, for example), people heckle because they think they could do better or coach better, never having tried. 

Before the  game, the announcers ran through a litany of elementary and junior high school soccer teams as the players and coaches walked around the stadium. My favorite team was the Midnight Turtles, perhaps channeled from Marianne Moore. But the list was truly so long and so repetitive that you could hear the announcers lose sense of the words within the rhythm: blah blah blah grade 4 girls, blah blah blah grade 4 girls, blah blah blah grafergirls, blah blah blah grafergs. And that might be as close to a petscan of my own brain functioning as I'll ever get for free.

When the game started, each player walked on the field holding the hand of a small boy or girl from a school soccer team, which was so sweet. How cool must that have been for a little player? 

The game itself was really fun to watch, punctuated by smart comments and funny anecdotes. (Not mine!) These athletes play an amazing full-on 45 minutes each half, with very few player substitutions allowed throughout the game. Who does anything for 45 minutes at a time these days? Are these the only single taskers left in America? 

And we won, thanks to two goals by a player considered past his prime just a few years ago and traded away before being brought back.  What can't Obama do??

I have to compare this to other sports I see live: No voiceovers throughout the game: Yea! No statistics blinking at you from around the stadium like the eyes of some virulent spider: Yea! No dancecam, kisscam: Yea! No plastic blaring trumpets or horns: Yea! A mad hatter walking around beating a huge drum for us: Yea! (This last guy, Salvatore, was a well-known fan with his own fan base and a drum the size of a tractor tire. He paused in front of one man on the aisle who was totally dead to the world and pounded and pounded and pounded his drum--to no avail. Blessed medicated sleep.) 

It's also interesting to be in a place so unrefurbished. (Is there another word capturing more truly the opposite of onomatopoeia than "refurbish"?) Many things speak of an older age: The best views are still for the fans and not the corporations. The seats are narrow, built before the golden age of the American butt, but the leg room is vast. The seats are simply for sitting, watching, and disparaging or encouraging the teams--your choice--and not mini-cockpits with food and drink consoles.

 Not one of these things is a bother. 

OhFatalCrumb

OhFatalCrumb,Now

LodgedInMySpaceBar,YouMake

BreathImpossible

ohfatalcrumb,now

shiftedlefttomyshiftkey,

silencedmycursing

Oh Hallelujah!

To Be Free Again to Say:

%#*@#

(ForToastandSP)

Cursing Sasha Frere-Jones

Yesterday, I had to sit in my car for a few minutes until the song I was listening to came to an end. A common occurrence for me and for all of us, I'm sure, except for the highly disturbing fact that it was only playing in my head. 

This song isn't one I would ever have heard on the radio, and the artist isn't one I would ever have found in my head absent a seductive piece by Sasha Frere-Jones. His articles and blogs always teach me something about a singer or a band, but they are often a closed loop, piquing and then satisfying my interest. What he wrote about this particular singer and his music was no closed loop, but more like a rabbit hole.

Generally speaking, I hate singer-songwriters, too confessional or too genteel. But this singer-songwriter is raw and elemental, not merely naked. His harmonies are thrilling, not merely surprising, even after so many listens. I cannot come to understand how he writes what he does. He is an addiction, costing me a good 45 minutes and 46 seconds at least once a day, for many many days. I bless Bonnie "Prince" Billy, but I curse Sasha Frere-Jones. 

Punctuated Equilibrium

There are incidents that make us know ourselves. And there are incidents that make others know us. Thankfully, these are not often the same incidents. 

Once, I was baking a cake, late, the night before a dinner party at my house.  The oven kept smoking a little, and I kept taking the cake out and trying again. Then, to my shock, the whole oven caught on fire. (Unfortunately, the guest list was all carnivore, but civilized carnivore, the most difficult kind, so "raw" was out.) I called my sister, the professional sacher mom, to ask if there was any way to salvage a cake that had been slightly baked three times for 5-10 minutes only, and she knew the way. And she said something that made me think about cleaning the oven, which I have to admit had not occurred to me. And I don't mean, had not occurred to me in light of the fire, but had not occurred to me since I'd moved in and started using the oven. I dug out the manual and studied the "judgment day" self-clean option that promised to turn all to ash. I was nervous because of the fire at a much lower degree, so I set my alarm for every half hour, just to be sure to catch any fire before it spread to the rest of my house. And again to my shock, it worked, and all was fine, including the cake baked four times. 

All was fine, except for what I finally understood: That it had never occurred to me to clean because at some point I just saw it as too dirty to clean. And that was an analogy that traveled far and wide and deep.

I think about this now as I get ready for visiting dignitaries, usually defined as new man, parents, or certain kinds of acquaintances. In some ways, that early epiphany is a corollary to the algorithmic life, but it is more insidious too. You need geologic time to understand what you have trained yourself not to know and not to see any more. You may never know why.    

No Geriatric Pandas Here

Gustavo Dudamel came again to My Fair District of 97% Obama, conducting the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela. Tickets to the concert itself had been snapped up in nanoseconds eons ago (if that phrasing doesn't rip the time/space continuum), but some of us were lucky enough to get tickets to the dress rehearsal 4 hours before the concert itself.  

When we walked into the concert hall, the stage was all activity -- setting up, chatting, stretching. It was the largest orchestra I'd seen in a while, made larger by the sheer activity, which you would never see in context of the true concert. (The program listed close to 200 names, including my favorites, Elvis on the French horn and Galaxia on the harp.)

Then Gustavo Dudamel walked out, to great applause. He was casually dressed, wearing a pullover sweater that let us see the strength and beauty and effort of his shoulders and back when he conducted. He began by talking to us directly about the happiness and privilege of returning to conduct here in My Fair District of 97% Obama. He mentioned the program of Ravel, Castellanos, and Stravinsky and a few other things. And then it was all Rite all the time. 

I'm not the kind of listener who can provide a knowledgeable rundown of the musical treatment and authenticity of The Rite of Spring. I can tell you that the orchestra conjured Nijinsky and made us see both the modernity and the primitivity of the work. Actually, Dudamel himself conjured Nijinsky with his conducting style, even leaping into the air at one point. 

The orchestra played each part through, with Dudamel drilling them on certain passages over and over at the end, which often had to do with complex percussion or pizzicato or overlapping rhythms. During these drills, he talked directly to the orchestra in Spanish, so we couldn't understand even the little that we could overhear. And I was sorry. And then I wasn't sorry, thinking that maybe it was best this way, the same way that praying in Hebrew, where you don't always understand what you're asking for, seems more profound and spiritual.  

The Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela is part of a great larger musical initiative focused on helping children and teens living below the poverty line. The child and youth orchestras throughout the country give over 250,000 children the idea and support and knowledge for a better life. I cannot think of any similar initiatives in the United States, where sports and the military seem to be the acknowledged ways out of poverty.

Maybe Gustavo Dudamel can rekindle a love of classical music and a recollection of the importance of the arts as both standard of living and quality of life. I remember going to the zoo once baby pandas had arrived and being amazed at how active and unpanda-like they were. It took me a while to realize that all those earlier years of geriatric pandas had given me the wrong idea and now I was seeing the real thing. Here's to Dudamel. 

The Algorithmic Life (or Reflections for April 15th)

The algorithmic life always finds me, but it is never one I want to lead. In order to do Y, I must have done X-- not thought about doing X, but done X. Which often shines the spotlight on W and other troublesome earlier letters. 

The trick, everyone advises, is not to procrastinate. The trick, everyone advises, is to make the change slowly, so it sticks. So was I wrong to take all this advice seriously and apply the smart starting strategy of not waiting so long to procrastinate, but procrastinating earlier? Yet, here on April 13th,  I fear that there is a fallacy in this logic. I will look into looking into it tomorrow.  

Living the algorithmic life can also necessitate finding a longer alphabet. Cambodian, here I come, with the hope one day of Rotokas.   

Why Do People Have Faces?

This is the question that arose during the first seder, when we were talking about the wise son, the wicked son, the simple son, and the one who is just too young. The Haggadah (Passover seder book) used a kind of abstract paper tearing (in a Wiggles meets South Park kind of way) to show that the four sons were all stages or aspects of each of us.  No one had a face, prompting the question from 4-year-old McQueen, Why do people have faces? 

The adults explained that faces hold some of our most important senses, like eyes for seeing, ears for hearing, noses for smelling, and mouths for tasting. McQueen pointed out that chins were for thinking and showed us how, adding that he also liked to think with his cheek. 

This Blog Is Not Kosher for Passover

The night before Passover--that is, right now--Jews conduct the search for chametz, to rid their households of all foods forbidden during that holiday.  I have done that in my kitchen. I have done that in my living room. I have done that everywhere in my house that is snackable.  There is just one place that will always remain out of reach.  

I realized how bad it was some months ago. My keyboard went on strike--that is, it refused to strike--and the Apple Genius Bar was just the thing to put it right. When I started to pack up the keyboard, though, I really saw how many loaves of bread and pieces of poptart were in there, and I knew that it was better to buy a new keyboard than to show a genius how I actually lived and typed. (I'd call it a bad habit, but let's be real: It's a routine, not a habit.) Before I had to do anything drastic, though, my keyboard recovered. And now it has many many more months of crumbs in its little ecosystem. 

So this blog will not be kosher for Passover. But once there are more matzah crumbs in there, I think it's an open question.

These are the words I own: "Are," "I," "own," "the," "these," "words"

If you pay to photograph a quilt at a museum to use in a book, do you own the rights to the names sewn into the quilt? Apparently, at least one person thinks so. This was the most interesting story I heard at a recent conference, where one panel addressed digital copyright. 

The whole episode came out of a student's using the photograph in a paper, which was then hosted on a website, which was then taken as inspiration for another researcher to investigate the names sewn into the quilt. (It was a World War quilt.)

What a fabulous concept!

I am adapting this to let you know that, from now on, I own all the words that I use on this blog. Violate at your peril.  Contumely. (I just want that word too.)

Poop Is the True Memory

Talking at lunch today about childhood memories and how different they can be for us compared to our parents. Sometimes, it's because how we feel about a memory becomes stronger than the memory itself, which is either a saving grace or just an untethering. 

My parents were always really good about having the family experience "culture," and when we first moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, they took us all to see our first Chinese New Year's parade. They remember our seats curbside for the closest view possible, and the dancing lions, and the drums, and the regional costumes, and the Chinese food afterward. We remember that it was the Year of the Ox, and that very fellow, live in the parade, pooped right in front of us. 

Ode to Jaywalking

I really miss jaywalking. I changed jobs at the beginning of the year and am just getting used to commuting to another city, rather than taking a long 2-mile walk through my own. Industrialized suburbia, where work is now, is made for cars, and for parking lots, and for grass growing only through a fault in something or someone else. I knew all this, but I didn't realize how important jaywalking was to the way I start my day. Something about the strategic hunt for that golden hypotenuse on a city road was an absorbing puzzle and let me believe that I already had a leg up on outsmarting the day. Now I run for a train that always defeats me, to end up in a place where cars never stop for breath.