Seasonal Eats

Winter Squash Soup
Pork Chops with Ginger Carrot Sauce
Harvard Beets

Now, see, here's why I find it so hard to imagine going to the nouveau farming lifestyle (other than the compelling fact that I suck at it). How the hell could I continue to eat this well? Well, tonight's dinner might have made the grade. Presumably, I'd have grown bushels of leeks, fennel, and root vegetables and would have made a year's worth of stock six weeks ago or so and frozen it (or else most of the veggies would have kept at least till now--we've already stipulated access to refrigeration--and even my herbs are hanging on out there), and it's traditional hog-butcherin' time--don't want to keep 'em fat through the winter, after all--which we'll celebrate with some choice cuts. I don't know where you get fresh ginger in the historical reenactment.

If you're going to make a savory vegetable soup, it is imperative that you use a tasty vegetable stock. I haven't figured out a veggie stock that works without the combination of leeks, fennel, and turnip, so I call each of those ingredients non-negotiable too. I generally eyeball the amounts, but you do have to be careful about adding too much turnip. Surely you had some delicious broth on hand, but just in case, I added the recipe I use. Someday, I'll figure out what do do with the veggie mush that comes out at the end, which is not untasty. (Maybe make a puree?)

The pork chop is a tweaked up version of an old magazine recipe I found. I am pretty sure that today's issue would call the sauce a puree instead, which the teevee suggests is trendy to serve (so I think we can safely assume that the foodie fashion world has in fact already moved on). My only issue with this meal is that the sauce resembles the soup in texture and color. I think if I make it again, I'll make it mashed potato consistency and put the meat on top, just like they would on Top Chef.

As for the Harvard beets, Mom sent up a bagful of roots, and hey, I'm in Massachusetts. (Did you know that Hahhhvid is a wealthy town in central Mass as well as a prestigious university fifty miles away?) I am sure you remember the slimy, rubbery cubes that got slopped onto your lunch tray by some gruff, hair-netted, cigarette-reeking crone every Thursday, and you know what? Fuck you, I love them. The beets are fresh, they add a nice color contrast, and the flavors fit in perfectly. Plus, of course, they are deadly serious. I served up the beets and a generously sauced chop on a plate, and garnished with a little bit of orange zest (which ties the flavors up beautifully, but matches the color of the sauce, which definitely means puree underneath next time.) A tiny dollop of cream or a wilted sage leaf probably would have been nice to dress up the soup, but the kids were getting antsy.

Winter Squash Soup
Vegetable stock:
about 3/4 cup vegetable oil (my wife swears canola makes it foul; I obey)
2 lb. carrots, diced
2 lb. celery, diced (can that be right? seems like a lot)
1 lb. leeks, diced (use the whole thing--be sure to cut lengthwise and clean out the sand first)
6-8 cloves of garlic, roughly chopped
1 fennel bulb, diced (I chuck in the tops too)
4 oz. turnip, diced (maybe 1 baseball sized one)
about 1.5 cups white wine
2 bay leaves
good handful of fresh thyme
small handful of fresh parsley (or use a bunch of stems, you cheapskate)
water to two gallons (uh, I think that's the size of my pot)
salt

I actually divide the vegetables into two pots, and saute them in oil with a little salt to help them sweat, stirring now and then, until they are really soft and there's some sticky light brown on the bottom of the pan (that's why I start a bigger batch in two pots). Add the wine to deglaze the pan(s), and then add the water, more salt, and other herbs (now I combine them, because what the hell, I've taken up enough space) and simmer for an hour or so, and strain. Make sure there's enough salt. Freeze what you don't use.

Winter Squash Soup
(makes maybe three quarts)
-2 butternut squash (or whichever), peeled and roughly cubed
-2 leeks (just the white/light green sections--I bought too many for the stock and they're like $2.50 a pound!)
-butter, maybe three tablespoons
-1 or two large apples, peeled and cored
-decent-sized handful of fresh sage
salt and pepper to taste.

In a large saucepan, saute the leeks in butter until they're nicely golden, add the apple and sage and saute until the apple is soft. Add the squash and a few cups of stock, and cover and simmer till the squash is soft. Then dump the whole thing into a blender, with more stock as needed to get the texture you like. Return to the pot (with more stock if the blender got too full) and season with salt and pepper. I made it Sunday, and it was still delicious tonight.

Pork Chop with Ginger Carrot Sauce
(or you know, ginger carrot puree)
-1 lb. carrots, cut up
-1/3 cup cream (Really? What would happen if I used half a cup? This ain't baking.)
-about a tablespoon fresh minced ginger
-a couple tablespoons honey
-salt
-ground coriander (I buy the seeds in bulk and use a little coffee grinder)
-four pork chops (The number for Chateau Keifus. We actually have a meat guy, where we can get slightly better steaks, but I think he has a similar distributor as the supermarket)
-veg. oil.

Boil the carrots, covered, for half an hour with a little bit of salt. Then into the blender with them, along with the cream, honey and ginger, and add enough of the cooking liquid to blend to the texture you like and season.

For the chops, rub on salt pepper and ground coriander, and just fry in the pan. Easy peasy.

Harvard Beets
(Shut up, that's why)
beets, enough to make about three cups when cubed
1/3 cup sugar (1/3 comes from Mom's recipe, I'd restate my aversion to odd fractions, but the beets are already pretty sweet, and lets not get carried away)
1 tablespoon cornstarch
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup vinegar
about 2 tablespoons butter ("Mounting in butter." Um...yeah.)

Cook those nice seasonal beets whole, until tender, and cool a little. The skins come off easily when they are cooked. Do that, and slice into a pleasing aspect ratio that doesn't remind you of middle school. In a saucepan, stir in the sugar, cornstarch, salt and vinegar. Heat over medium until it thickens, then add the beets and the butter.

Hunker down. It's a long time till spring.

The Rat Race, Lap 36

[Update: that's Borlaug with a B.]

I am sure I was responding to movie ads, but at eleven years old (even more than now), a book was the ideal vehicle to develop the conspiratorial air that this story about rats promised (and delivered). The technological life that the former lab rats managed to pull off was almost as cool as the lair that the three investigators carved out of the heart of the junkyard, and as a quiet kid I really identified with the idea of creating your own advanced space amid the hustle and bustle of a world that was a lot bigger than I was, and although the refugees from NIMH were still bound by their rat natures, scavengers, they were human enough, perfectly allegorical little creatures. I remember that I liked the mordant jokes they told Mrs. Frisby about the so-called rat race, but the philosophical bludgeon bounced harmlessly off of that fifth grader, who was far more impressed by the clever doodads. ("Yeah Nicodemus, but vacuum cleaners work better than brooms!") I was horrified that the rats' plan, the solution to their precarious technological existence, wasn't to better outwit the human threat, but to haul off and start an agricultural commune and leave behind the coolest fort ever. "Fuck that noise," I thought (at eleven, using the equivalent language), "Jenner's got it right." I can't say I experienced very many you-must-be-an-engineer moments as a boy but that was one of them.

Grow plants and live outdoors, or better living through technology? I just read, in a blog that will make the sidebar just as soon as I can be bothered to update it, that the cheese has once again left the can: the world has lost one of the architects the green revolution. Norman VBorlaug was a seminal (so to speak) inventor, creating some high-yield strains of wheat, and advocated scientific advancement as a means to solve world hunger, and counteract the looming threat of deforestation. It's bittersweet, of course, considering that getting more yield per acre just got us less arable acres, and his strains also assumed infinite resource availability, unable to propagate at that capacity without massive infusions of irrigation and petrochemicals, and there was the unfortunate side effect of doubling up the worlds population, getting millions or billions scythe-ready for when the oil-based feedstock gets scarce. I've aired out my difficulties with the slow-motion pileup of demographics, resource management, science and macroeconomics at tedious length (I'll spare you the links this time), and if I'm about manifestoed out, well, here I am again. The verdict on the species hasn't much changed: (respectively) two guilties, one hung jury, and one twelfth angry man trying to talk fast. Improving crop yields was the right idea, but it wasn't thought through very well in terms of the other three items. Rats!

When I was eleven, my family lived pretty close (excepting the citrus and other odds and ends) to switters' proposal. Mom helped out the farmer up the street and bought us fresh milk and meat only from animals with names, sometimes one creature at a time. She gardened for (negligible) profit and canned, raised chickens, belonged to a natural food co-op (which even in the early 80s meant bulk cheese and all sorts of nasty whole grain products). Unfortunately for the Borlaug on my right shoulder, I know what real food tastes like. For the green angel on my left, it sure looked like a lot of work. I don't know how much the local fresh food helped my family stay frugal, really. My parents got less thrifty once we kids got older and my mother got back into the regular workforce, and it's contributed to the impression that living cheaply but well was easier even 25 years ago. Most of those old farms are now housing developments for a reason, and there's big open spaces only in the communities that are filthy rich enough to afford it, at least around here.

And freeze, okay? I've been stalling right at this point for a couple of days, and not just because it's hard to anything new to say on this subject. I keep finding my own experience inadequate to describe what I'm feeling about this, and generalizations keep coming out, boring and poorly supported, like angry student polemics. I've got my own fantasies about reducing my grid presence, and I've been focusing a lot on the tyranny of employment, debt, and society in recent reading. But I can't let it go that the modern labor economy is only a hundred fifty years old. Getting on the grid was a huge societal advance. The heavily subsidized (thinking of home mortgage discounts, lucrative development incentives, employer-based health insurance, artifically cheap central food production) worker/consumer economy has stabilized pretty well to a customary inequality (despite a few hard-fought and/or fortuitous historical windows), but agrarian America fostered no shortage of inequality in its day--not the best time to be a woman, for one non-trivial example, or black, or in debt, or seasonally employed--and was its own environmental clusterfuck, for that matter, even when there was an order of magnitude less people. Are we going to start cutting all the economic breaks to landowners (again)? Going back would be a catastrophe too.

The optimist's future of food, energy, and technology really has to thread the needle. It trends both toward more local production, and also toward greater integration. Some of this kind of organization will be inevitable if energy prices climb enough, nickel and diming our way into enough energy to power vital services, and being as independent as we can, optimizing the available space, maybe even make it sustainable for more than 40 or 50 years, doing our best with the existing Imperial vias, but there's no guarantee it'll be better. The best case will take no small amount of engineering miracles, and large-scale state or economic power will have to be less convenient, so, you know, good luck with that. But when it comes to the rats' dillemma, I still reject it as a false equivalency (convenient for me, since I posed it): science and technology is only what we have learned and what we have learned to do, and we ignore that knowledge, or apply it, at our peril. There is a future for innovation, probably even in agriculture, but if it's to keep working for very long (and it probably isn't), it'll have to keep local ecosystems in mind.

See what I mean about unsatisfying polemic? This sucks. Let's return to the inadequacy of anecdote, see if I can avoid going full retard David Brooks on y'all.

Those farmers I knew growing up didn't seem to live a simple life: uncomplicated, yes, in ways I don't love, but difficult, and I've seen a lot of them ultimately, and depressingly, fail. But as I think through more recent experiences, I can spot agrarian lifestyles working in better harmony with the consumer universe, and I have to tell you, they look a lot more satisfying to me: I've got a few personal stories, some of which I've already burned through, of western MA cheese, western CT farms, eating in the North Fork, connections to a local orchard/restaurant, and the mixed blessing of living a year in an attempted suburban reproduction of rural Italy (let's say I loved the idea, but it was hard to be a renter there), and while all of these things needed the local economy to really stay alive, not all of them were wealthy, and each one basically worked. I mean, there's no reason any other rat couldn't support a few food animals and some useful greenery. Maybe there's hope for compromise somewhere in there, if you're brave enough to demand one, or can afford it, or it becomes necessary.

On the Use and Abuse of History

Even scientists making "scientific" observations know that what they see will be affected by their position.

It's a minor excerpt from Howard Zinn's book Declarations of Independence that I am currently reading (extending the political theme--sorry), which questions the content and purpose of American ideology. Now, this is an opinion I support in principle, but since he's an influential academic, and treading this close to my own thoughts, I'm going to hold his words to a higher standard than, say, rock lyrics. I've been getting stuck on the details of his argument a lot. The reading of Heisenberg wasn't relevant to very much, but it's symptomatic of Zinn's early discussion--something is askew with the presentation of how ideology works.

Here is part of the Richard Feynman passage I mentioned before, concerning measurement and cheap philosophy. (It's long, even chopped up):

So the fact that "things depend upon your frame of reference" is supposed to have had a profound effect on modern thought. One might well wonder why, because, after all, that certainly cannot have been necessary to go to all the trouble of the physical relativity theory in order to discover it…. [C]ertainly there must be deeper things in the theory of relativity that just this simple remark that "A person looks different from the front than from the back." Of course relativity is deeper than this, because we can make definite predictions with it. It certainly would be rather remarkable if we could predict the behavior of nature from such a simple observation alone.

There is another school of philosophers who feel very uncomfortable about the theory of relativity, which asserts that we cannot determine our absolute velocity without looking at something outside, and who would say, "It is obvious that one cannot measure his velocity without looking outside. It is self-evident that it is meaningless to talk about the velocity of a thing without looking outside; the physicists are rather stupid for having thought otherwise, but it has just dawned on them that this is the case. If only we philosophers had realized what the problems were that the physicists had, we could have decided immediately by brainwork that it is impossible to to tell how fast one is moving without looking outside, and we could have made an enormous contribution to physics." These philosophers are always with us, struggling in the periphery to try to tell us something, but they never really understand the subtleties and depths of the problem.

Our inability to detect absolute motion is a result of experiment and not a result of plain thought….Now is it absolutely, definitely, philosophically necessary that one should not be able to tell how fast he is moving without looking outside? One of the consequences of the relativity was the development of a philosophy which said, "You can only define what you can measure! Since it is self-evident that one cannot measure a velocity without seeing what he is measuring it relative to, therefore it is clear that there is no meaning to absolute velocity. The physicists should have realized that they can talk only about what they can measure." But that is the whole problem: whether or not one can define absolute velocity is the same as the problem of whether or not one can detect in an experiment, without looking outside, whether he is moving. In other words, whether or not a thing is measurable is not something to be decided a priori by thought alone, but something that can be decided only by experiment….

[I]f we have a set of "strange ideas," such as that time goes slower when one moves, and so forth, whether we like them or do not like them is an irrelevant question. The only relevant question is whether the ideas are consistent with what is found experimentally.

This, incidentally, is exactly the point where what seemed a fine idea for a post just wanders off somewhere, digressing itself down the precipitous road of closely-related philosophical terminology. Modern versions of empiricism or realism did struggle to work Einstein in there, but the summary that "of course you can only define what you can measure" is certainly older than that. (It's hard for me to believe that, whatever interesting reducionist attempts were made in the field over the years, that any practical person thought that rationalism or empiricism had to be an either/or proposition.) I'll echo Feynman's view that measurement is really the trump card in all this (even if we can reason beyond measurement and observe things we haven't yet deduced) and that at some level, it's synonymous with composing a question. Certainly without measurements and their consequences no one would have ever got to relativity. I'd love to believe, like Feynman, that the underlying philosophy isn't especially relevant, except here I am, treading ignorantly up against it once more. If it comes down to admitting stuff, I accept a physical reality that is independent from our mind and only somewhat like our perceptions (even though mind circumscribes our understanding of reality), and I believe that mathematics (and scientific theory) is merely descriptive, that it exists only in a medium, and is not otherwise a reality itself, even though the deductive power is amazingly rich, and speculation on where they diverge can be interesting as hell. Is there a school of philosophy that fits that in? Is it worth it to find out the history of my viewpoint? I am not sure what debt Feynman's essential modern "scientific realism" owed to the shoulders of earlier philosophers either.

I do like mashing up unrelated disciplines to see how the analogies hold--I'd better, given what I'm doing here--but like I said, the quick aside into physics didn't strengthen Howard Zinn's point very much here, and it constitutes the kind of thinking that could get the physicist into the posthumous whirligig dealie.

Everything humans undertake can be described as having a basis in some underlying idea, even when we don't care to spend a lot of time acknowledging them. (Even the notion that we don't behave as if governed by philosophical constructs is a philosophical construct, if you know what I mean.) Zinn clearly intends "ideology" as an external set of ideas, some governing set of philosophical principle that pushes society along (and I agree that the ideas can be sicker than they first look). The vernacular usually sets the ideologue in the realm of pure and simplified thought, well apart from the realist (and Zinn follows this too, a bit haphazardly), with the difference that, while realism is technically an ideology, it requires evidence to validate itself. Declarations of Independence is observational, but it calls for a new prescription, a new ideology.

Human behavior is different than physics, in that what they believe can influence the outcome, or, at least, that's the hypothesis. It's also different in that models of human behavior--even the phenomenological ones--are only accurate in the broad-brush and general-trends sense, as any of the generations of economists can tell you. History, by definition, is the data, even if we tend to be selective in what pieces of it we choose to measure. (The difference between the overview and the lives people must live is important, but it has a lot to do with why tend to ignore the little guy in historical contexts. Zinn's genius is to measure history based on the lives that more people have experienced.) On skimming the historical evidence, I'd say that actual human behavior suggests that the effects of ideology are actually fairly limited, and people tend to revert to some level of short-range decency among those with whom we identify, and a threshold for opportunism that drops as we migrate from the inner circle. I lean to a more anthropological explanation of human behavior, I guess.

Zinn spends more than a chapter complaining about Niccolò Machiavelli's ideology, and his take is infuriating. Mac didn't say that "the ends justifies the means," he said that leaders are only judged by the ends, which is important if you're trying to dissect his philosophy. Zinn could have emphasized that he thought Machiavelli was wrong, or that his advice was amoral, or that he was a woeful product of his times, or that his advice was so obviously self-serving. (I'd add that it may well have been a little subversive too.) There's a world of difference between following his advice (there, the discussion is good), and following his practice. Machiavelli may or may not have been a monster, but he was a scientist, not an ideologue. He was basing his views on measurement.

Take it away, Dr. F.:

What, then, are the philosophic influence of the theory of relativity? If we limit ourselves to influences in the sense of what kind of new ideas and suggestions are made to the physicist by the principle of relativity, we could describe some of them as follows. The first discovery is, essentially, that even those ideas which have been held for a very long time and which have been very accurately verified might be wrong. It was a shocking discover, of course, that Newton's laws are wrong, after all the years in which they seemed to be accurate. Of course it is clear, not that the experiments were wrong, but that they were done over only a limited range of velocities, so small that the relativistic effects would not have been evident. But nevertheless, we now have a much more humble point of view of our physical laws--everything can be wrong.

And here's the thing. History has shown a large diversity of human behavior, including drastic changes in how we behave, sometimes, amazingly, within a just a couple generations (agriculture, travel, communication). The aggregate behavior seems to be a response to environment, of which the pervading ideas and knowledge--not sure if we call that ideology--are only only a part. (I mean, I may seem like a reasonable guy, but you should see me when I run out of beer.) While history might exhibit observable large-scale patterns, and while our nature can't be too distinct from what it was 30000 years ago, we've messed with the environment significantly. Some of the effects of this we can predict (and it ain't looking too rosy), but as we move at new velocities, let's keep measuring.

Review: Our Country, by Michael Barone

Our Country (full title: Our Country: The Shaping of America from Roosevelt to Reagan) is a survey of American political history. This is different than one of your usual histories, which might more strongly stress the sequences of large-scale events, or which might suggest windows into the minds of the decision-makers or even of the poor bastards that are stuck living under them. And it's not as if those viewpoints aren't worked into Our Country, but the here the emphasis is different, something more like modern political reporting than analysis of causes and plot. It sketches out voting blocs and census demographics and the newer science of polling. The heroes are senators, decision makers, and the drama is the campaign trail, the political debate, and the swings of public opinion. It is 60 years of American politics as written by the US News and World Report editorial staff (no coincidence). It is history as written by political reporters, with the notable exception that Michael Barone, in advance of cable television news, actually had to learn to read.

And there is some service in calling out the supporting players in more detail than we casual information consumers usually remember. I recognize a number of journalist tricks, for example the tendency to offer quick physical and personality sketches, as well as notecard-level issue summaries, to shortcut our engagement to the somewhat protean characters of legislators, and he does manage to paint the ability to get anything done in those chambers as a noble undertaking. And I did appreciate that, he fleshed these things out competently. The tricks of making campaigns come alive--defining electoral factions and pitting them against one another, dramatizing defining moments--are old hat by now (the book was written in 1990), and overplayed, but are generally successful, even if no human being could keep that stuff compelling for 670 pages. Barone clearly loves the political process, and clearly respects those who devote their lives to engage in it, loves the ones who are good at it, even those outside of his ideology. It makes him a sick fuck, of course, but a species of sick fuck that we all know well enough.

[There were a few interesting things I picked up, reading in the summer of 2009. His statements that neither California's Proposition 13 nor Reagan's (don't) tax and (military) spend policies had any negative consequences were a bit premature, as was his denial that Medicare created a constituency. His characterization of Dallas in LBJ's time, how badly staged protest helped get Johnson a senate seat struck unfortunate parallels to today's clumsy and vocal dissent. I was impressed (again) by the consistency in the pattern of 20th century conflicts, starting with covert actions and a defense sector build-up. And highlighting those particular sixty years made the national economic trajectory look a lot less impressive, the entire arc of industrialization, where blue collar became white collar became dual-income became service, started to look uncomfortably bubbilicious.]

Barone makes an effort to inform us of his conservativism, which appears closer to your uncle's conservatism than that of national movementarians. He interjects more than a few comments on "big government" and supports some level foreign policy aggression, but other than that, he's no more racist or sexist, for example, than any mainstream commentator, occasionally douchey for his lack of empathy, but supportive of civil rights in a general sense. His brand of conservativism is an affirmation that the usual story is the right one. (And maybe if there's anything more manipulative going on under the surface, there might be a grand unified theory in there of Reagan-style optimism in the works, one which could include the Gipper's youthful support for FDR.) He comes out early with a handful of conservative-ish theses: stating that "big government" is bad, except when it's not (usually it's bad when foolish liberals think the government is the solution to all their problems), and that social division was more important than economic politics, except when it wasn't (like in the 1930s, or the 1950s, 70s, or 80s). These views are not supported generally by the force of argument, and within the text are often contradicted within paragraphs. For example, when he drags out that social division point, he doesn't mention the economic factors that are complicit in that increasingly politicized social chasm, and for war, he's pretty selective about its big-government economics (although he's at least smart enough to recognize war as an effective stimulus, clearly preferring the blank-checks-to-private-contractors sort of approach). He cites economic tax policy a lot, especially while winding into the later part of the century, which hardly supports the non-economic divisions he mentions.

If you read this book looking for objectionable details, then you'll fill up pages of notes (and I did), but he's got a couple things in favor of his approach: (1) they're generally presented as clauses that introduce or close an otherwise uncontroversially factual sentence, and since they're minor, and largely irrelevant, they're easy to ignore--there is more data and accounts than there is opinion--and (2) they're not much supported by the text anyway. A history of campaigns and legislation isn't exactly the strongest venue in which to develop a pointed political philosophy.

Oversized, Overpriced, and Crappy

One of the problems with being an occasional blogger instead of an occasional poster or commenter is that I need to sustain my own level of output. If nothing gets posted for a week or two, then the place doesn't go on without me. Any previously tempted reader (I kid) will simply wander away for lack of activity. Anyway, it's not a political post, even if you could parse the title that way with depressing ease. There's enough of that coming down the pipe in the form of book reviews (one turgid and one fervid), and I'm not exactly the rare writer that rises above being a bore about that sort of thing. So as I try to procrastinate my way through another rough month, are there some fallback Keifus posts I can depend on here: Recipes? Kids? Mediocre science writing? Home improvement? Colorful complaints? The last two, let's go with that.

I don't know if mentioned it in these pages, but in the last couple of years, my darling wife has re-educated herself (over-re-educated herself really), and worked her way into a new career, which, by all evidence, she thoroughly enjoys, at least for these first few months. If I don't say it enough, then let it be known--she has impressed the hell out of me. Now that we have more income, as well as less frustrating time to spend it (the mythical black positively looms), we're re-evaluating the pointlessly expensive home projects we've been putting off for seven years, things like a working drier (which could have easily paid for itself by now), replacing the tattered and filthy carpets that came with the place, replacing the kitchen chairs with ones that aren't broken and downsizing the table to one that actually fits in the room.

Pity the poor furniture shopper that doesn't live in a McMansion! All of our choices over the years have been made to creatively optimize comfort in a small space, having quickly found the overstuffed sectional with the built-in recliners and a pull-out drink holder (what a fucking mistake that thing was) isn't really designed to be tucked into a corner, or even to occupy a mere wall, or even to leave room for thoughtless family members, those who occasionally choose to disrespect the mighty altar of sedentariness, to perform the profane act of opening the door and walking out into the air. For a springy monster like that to fit, it either has to be the center of attention, or your living room has to be the size of a cathedral. And it's all like this. I want to fit a hypothetical new kitchen/dining table into a finite oblong space, but even the so-called pub tables you can buy demand to be massive centerpieces, only tall enough for a barstool. Yes, you can buy small items that are cut-rate in quality, but I want something to at least survive the kids here, without devolving immediately either into trailer-park chic or tasteless excess. The woes of the petite bourgeoisie, lemme tellya. I don't know how the city folk do it. Probably with less whining.

And let's not pretend the quality gap isn't intentional. I've lamented(in media now buried and forgotten) the extra engineering that it takes make lower-priced bathroom fixtures stay ugly, but that's mostly because it's a tube of metal without many moving parts. When there are obvious pathways to chintz, they're rarely left unexplored, even in the suspiciously sparse land of mid-level pricing. Home Depot, I want to point out, is the undisputed king of the shitty middle. Their basic hardware doesn't deviate very far from the standard (understandable enough, given the piece of the retail market they occupy), but it's the suite of more aesthetic and individual products--carpets, lighting, cabinetry, things like that--that carries that special vibe of inferiority about it. A knock in quality, but at all of the price. Even a hack like me can spot it a mile away. Back when my buddy Jay bought his suburban palace, I could identify every fixture and accent as a Depot special--it screamed. (He has since made a lot of subtle improvements that have classed the place up immensely. The fact that it's far better than my mashed-thumb, bent-nail masterpieces is only partly because he has better tools, space to work, and can sometimes afford contractors.) You will never, ever get a deal on anything at Home Depot, and its semi-exclusive product lines makes it very difficult to shop around if you do find something you like (except maybe at Lowe's, which is close enough to exactly the same to not really matter).

About four years ago, I tiled my kitchen, and it's finally looking like we can afford something comparable on the adjoining living room side, get rid of the ancient doggie damage at long last, and just in time for our own dog. We're planning on wood or laminate (i.e., fake wood) floors for the purpose, because it matches our general style (if you can call it that), and because while they might wear (or fade), I've been looking at stained carpet for altogether too long.

Flooring is an excellent window into pricing and quality standards of retail outlets. We were lured down to one discount flooring place, naturally enough, by $0.79/square foot laminate, which would have been all right as far as the thickness and durability went (sinking too much quality in this place is folly, and at that price we could just replace it in five or ten years), if it didn't look so godawful fake. There were about six samples below $3, two of which were the ludicrous choice of unfinished pine, and a big cluster of okay material between $3 and $4, before heading right off into exclusively furnishing the loathed hautes.

It turned out that matching the tile while not shrinking and darkening the bedrooms was a more difficult task than expected. (Dark wood would look great against light tile, but...) Nothing fit the bill at Discount Floors, but, God help me, the Depot had the perfect pattern. The pricing for flooring at Home Depot is, roughly, $1, $3, or $5-7 per square foot, with striking differences in quality. That rare match was a Pergo brand product, but made by subcontractors in some factory in Croatia, only for the store chain, and not exactly finding rave reviews online. Even at three bucks, I'd rather get wood, or at least get some known product that I could shop around for and compare. As it is, it looks like I'll hold out against my home improvement nemesis for just a little while longer.

Another Last Hurrah

I knew I was in Massachusetts when I visited a restaurant with a JFK room. We ate there when we were still looking for houses, I think, and still brand new to the place. (You wouldn't find a Kennedy room in the godless badlands of Connecticut.) Hey, can we sit in that roo...umm? Every wall was covered with Kennedy kitsch: commemorative plates, oil portraits, framed photographs. Positively creepy, like dinner in a church with all the saints watching you eat from the stained glass. I'm the wrong age to have idolized John Kennedy. His sudden loss, and Bobby's, shocked my parents' generation. As presidencies go, I'll just say there are better and worse interpretations, and I'm an amply rewarded pessimist when it comes to politics. As far as nobility goes, I think we could have asked for better camera fodder in the age of snapshots and video footage, but I realize I'm in the minority about that one.

One of things to go right in the American experiment was the abolition of royalty, and this whole Camelot thing really bugs me. Pushing privilege through generations may be another inevitable pimple on the pizza-face of governance, but I refuse to celebrate it. Although if there were titled aristocracy here, I admit I could see the Kennedy family as a good Yankee version. Count old Joe Kennedy as the American product of balls, charisma, amoral investment strategy, and political networking, raising himself to the level of raucous nouveau noblesse, inventing tradition on the fly, but meaning, without question, to make it stick in the family through his heirs. What the family did with the power, once established, was as interesting as these things always are.

Ted Kennedy was a senator for longer than I have been alive. Young, irresponsible Kennedy was well before my time. Memories of a failed presidential contender are also vague. The Ted Kennedy I "knew" had the physique of a life-long drinker (who'd have guessed cancer would do him in?), spoke large, seemed sincerely and indiscriminately genial, and supported government programs without apologizing to conservatives, which is impressive for his time. Leave the political eulogy for the people who actually love this stuff.

For his efforts to help out the people, a sense of noblesse oblige is often thrown around, but while it gets to the point, it doesn't feel like the right term. Ted's grandfather was a Boston machine politician, and the give-back tradition is as much a system of an elaborate patronage, a dynamic, connected, interaction with the community, than it is a duty of the aristocracy. A political machine used to move, power had to be bought, and the system had to be maintained--city machines were run by bosses, not lords. Ted Kennedy's unapologetic caring for the little guys as he saw them, his garrulousness, his chumminess and comfortable movement within the bureaucratic sphere, seems like a throwback to the old urban versions. Ted strikes me as the Frank Skeffington of a modern age, now connected to a bigger web, better educated, evolved past the city, and incorporating contemporary electoral mechanisms and national avenues of power, but still able to gladhand every Joe on the street.

Like in Edwin O'Connor's novel, it feels like some era is passing with Ted Kennedy's death. I'd be hard pressed to tell you what era it is though. Politicians operating on some straightforward model of public morality? Political family legacies? Personable bureaucrats? These don't really seem to have left us. You can never quite shake out the last hurrah.

On the Median

April 9. I find many unusual things along the edge of the grass, many of the clothes I wear, for instance, and food sometimes, and other useful items. Today may have revealed the best find yet, or at least the best thing since I picked up my watch that tells me the days. It's a rigid folder with a lot of happy colors and animals on it, and inside there are three blue pads of paper bound with little spirals of wire, and several writing tools in a clear pouch. I am writing with it now.

I don't know if I will keep the folder, but I like pad and the pouch, and I have often thought I should keep more solid memories than the little marks I make on my tree to note the days.


April 10. One thing I can describe is my home. It is a small lean-to, packed tight with pine boughs, which keep me dry even when it rains hard. I can hardly see it even when I am looking right at it. At the very front opening, there are a few stones where I sometimes have a fire.

This lean-to is nested in a small stand of trees. This in turn is tucked into a little fold of hill, a narrow ridge on either side of me, as if I am in the center of a large "M". At the feet of the M, of course, are those long, black boundaries that define my space. My trees rise almost to the top of the ridge, it is one of many bunches of them. Swathes of grass weave in between, as if the little clusters of oaks and hickories and maples are bubbles in a green stream. There are stretches of bushes and scrub too, and in the summer, blue flowers pop up in the grass. My bubble has several nut trees, and it is cool (and sometimes a little muddy) at the lowest point inside. On the east side, there is a sandy bridge, a turnaround maybe, for the travelers on the blacktop, but a white plaque on a metal pole indicates that this use is forbidden.


April 11. When I walk straight west from my home, the peaks of the ridges rise for a few dozen paces, and the middle valley spreads out. There is a little white molded streambed that fills up when it rains, and empties into a pond in there that is not large, and not deep, but it teems with frogs and turtles. The water is very still on it today, and the sun is very bright and high in the sky, and I spent a few minutes looking at myself just now. My eyes appear very deep and dark against my wide face. My hair and my beard are the color of bark. I think they used to be blacker.


April 14. Did not leave my lean-to today. Was not hungry, and it feels like it will rain.


May 5. A lucky find this morning: a deer, nearly whole, resting a few short steps from the shoulder. It must have happened in the night, but nothing woke me up. The poor creature's hips were shattered, but he was otherwise intact. I wonder how long he managed to survive after he was hit.

As I sit here, I can smell the meat roasting on my small fire, and it is nearly too tempting to wait. Up near the top of the hill, where the breeze comes, many strips are hanging from my makeshift drying rack (just some sticks really, that I stripped bare of their bark), still glistening a little in the sun, and the deer's hide is spread out over a rock, also drying, close by. I will boil the heart and kidneys tomorrow, and I may have some meat to smoke too, but I will have to move up the hill for that as well, if I don't want water to seep into the hole, and I do not know if I want a fire that high up.

I am worried that so much meat will draw rats or crows, but I will camp near there for a few weeks, and maybe I can catch some of them if it does.


June 13. I woke up panicked this morning. The buzzing and shouting was not another nightmare, it turned out, and as I crept up the bank, I could see unhappy men dressed in orange crowding the bank, swinging around machines on rods in the open space between the blacktop and the treeline, sending clumps of grass, still wet from the dew, flying from the business ends, offering tiny glints in the morning sun. A hundred paces behind them, a large green vehicle growled near the edge of some of the closer trees, with a great arm that reached up to the branches and rent them horribly, with a ripping sound, as much animal as it was mechanical. I could see two men in yellow hats in the cockpit of the machine, pointing up in my general direction, and I froze.

I don't believe I am highly visible in my deerskin, but I felt that these men and their horrible machine were going to cut through straight to my home. Moving carefully, and as quickly as I dared, I crept backwards into the shadow, out of the immediate reach of the thing.

The rock that my hand closed on was about half the size of my head. When the monster finally approached, I felt the sound would deafen me, a hundred times worse than the big boxes that pass by so frequently in the night. When it was nearly upon me, I looked up a moment at the end of the arm, and it was less a fist than a mouth, spinning with brown and gray teeth, chewing up the branches and spitting bark and leaves. I hurled the rock where I thought the cockpit would be, and abandoning caution, I flew back to hide under the branches. As I write now, the sound is fading.


June 18. They cut the other side today. The crews are not hard to avoid when you watch out for them. On this side, I didn't find any sign of my rock, or of anything else but piles of cut grass, now drying and brown, and speared through with new shoots.


August 28. Laying down last night, I could see stars peeking through the breaks in the trees. I am sure I have looked up like that a thousand times, but last night, there was something about how the canopy was broken open and I could see the ragged line that separated the black of the underside of the leaves from the black of the sky, the nearby darkness from the darkness that surrounds the stars, and I felt somehow big enough to reach through it, walk up that shimmering corridor to the endless reaches. It was very quiet, and maybe that was the difference, and no lights went by. Looking out under my stand of trees, I could see the thinnest sliver of moon, hanging low in the sky. I swear I'd never seen the moon before either, not really seen it.

It was a good night for sleeping, dry and comfortable with the faintest crisp taste of autumn mixing in with the air, but I couldn't sleep, worrying about the hole in the trees. I moved out to the edge of the copse, and that helped.


September 19. I am not in my little stand of trees anymore. I feel like I have been restless for many months, but looking here, I can see it hasn't really been so long. It didn't feel like there was a decision made, but this morning, I stuffed my odds and ends into my little pack, what was left of the jerky, my hoard of nuts, and a pastry, now very hard, that I found last night still in the bag. (The bags are excellent for starting fires.) I kicked away my little ring of stones and started walking, clomping over the rough surface of the turnaround, and then on through the grasses, the gray and beige tops of the plants gently brushing my knees.

Maybe I will read this later and wonder what I was thinking. But I am sure I don't know.


September 29. I am standing on an overpass, and have been looking down at the world below me. I have seen many of these continents that intersect my own, both over and under, and crossed them in the manner as the circumstances have demanded. (Usually, like now, they don't even touch.) On these overpasses, my long island has often been cut off by a sudden canyon--and I am forced to navigate along the shoulder if I want to cross. Sometimes I'll wait for night to do this, and I'll sprint along the edge, dragging my hand on the rail while trying not to peer over the other expanse. But now it is not so dark yet, and I have stopped halfway.

Below, another path stretches out perpendicular to mine. It shares the air as my path, and without doubt, leaves blow back and forth and up and down the gorge. Maybe an acorn rolls over the pass and germinates into a little oak, grows, is cut and pruned sometimes, and its roots tangle with the roots from my trees through the mass of soil which is shared too, pulling at the same rivulets of groundwater running through the common earth like veins. I can imagine a man like me walking the lower way, looking up at the overpass. I squinted into the dusk to see if I could see anyone. Did I imagine a flicker of orange? A fire? At this point in the season, it's just as likely to be bears as anything else. I should move into the trees, I think.


October 4. Another turnaround, but this one apparently in use, or at least sort of. The machine is blue and white, and I was surprised to see it occupied, by a clean man, keeping very still. As close as I was, I could see many neat bumps and buttons and clocks on the inside. The man was faced outward, and he was holding a smaller item, although it was not really that small. He supported it with both of his hands.

It took me a long time to creep up to him, but I never saw him move. I think he was asleep. Or dead. But if that was the case, he couldn't have been there that long. I moved quietly past him anyway, crossing from behind. He could have just as likely been sitting at my turnaround.

It is later now, and I am lounging all the way out near the rail and thinking. The blacktop has become much more crowded and faster than I remember. I have grown comfortable walking just the same. I am getting hungrier faster, which is very inconvenient, but there are also many more containers that I can scrounge.


October 19. Thankfully back with some grass around me, with rocks and squirrels.

I kept walking even after my continent shrunk to a strip only twice as wide as I am tall, with a white divider, waist-high, running right down its center. With my feet on the grass, I could still pretend everything was normally sized, and that wasn't so bad. After a day or so of this, however, my grass walkway squeezed in too, and the barrier spread out slightly, and soon all that was left was a solid raised path that I could walk on. As the world closed in, traffic and signs seemed to come from everywhere, and large structures loomed in the distance. There were light poles stuck into the hard surface, and I counted a hundred of these before I gave up.

Far enough along, there were objects that spanned the macadam, a row of little blocks with people in them. I got just far enough see the last lightpost on my walk, where the path finally gave way to nothing at all. The end of the world as far as I'm concerned. I turned back.

The return was much worse, with the lights glowing above me, and also streaming at me fast from both directions. It made my eyes hurt, and I almost lost balance. I slept for a while leaning against a pole, I don't know for how long, before continuing on. Now I am here again, back in some normal space. It's getting a little cold, but I feel safe, and I am thankful for my deer skins. I miss my old camp, but I am happy that I can read about it.


November 5. I know that the world doesn't end there. Obviously the machines are filled with people, and I know that the surfaces are passable--I have crossed turnarounds and bridges made from the same material, and I have retrieved items sometimes a few steps out. I can read signs, and I can see landscapes like mine on the other side. Nothing stops me, and other than the remote fear of getting broken like a deer, there is nothing to even harm me.

I walked out almost to the center line tonight. That far, and I stood for a second before coming back to the comfort of the brown grass and coarse sand. I am sitting now on that edge, having gone that small distance, which is only a tiny fraction of all I have wandered. Vehicles pass by one after the other, humming, and they sound like the wind. They flood my eyes with yellow beams, they light up my dirty and yellowing notepad for a moment before receding red points in the washed-out aftermath. It is dark, and I am sure that they can not see me.

Blogger's Résumé

Blogging bores you;
Email's choked with spam;
The news depresses you;
And op-eds ain't worth a damn.
Titillation is nsfw-al;
The boards are full of jerks;
Facebook quizzes are awful;
You might as well work.

(with apologies, etc.)

Pierre Menard, author of Keifus Writes!

These days, it takes a true scholar to remember the work of one Pierre Menard (not the frontier politician, the other one). His legacy consists primarily of a few monographs published at the turn of last century, noted for their utter typicality and general existence within the academic circles of his own time, which to the wider world, not noted at all, even in the early 1900s. He did manage to achieve some passing fame, or notoriety perhaps, for generating a few original reproductions of a few paragraphs of Don Quixote, although most records of that have been unfortunately destroyed. I have frequently wondered about Menard the scholar in an abstract sense--I am sure I have referred to him before--and lately have considered that his legacy may be more significant than is commonly believed. Certainly he is no Cide Benengeli, but perhaps his painstaking transferal of cultural idiom went beyond the medieval Spanish that is normally considered his masterpiece.

Undertaking an anachronistic instrument of no small degree of futurity is a task with it's own set of challenges. The author must presuppose not only entirely new media (and the written forms appropriate to those media), but also a complete future history of war, civics, immigration patterns, communication, and all the other things that can inform a work fiction, memoir, criticism or commentary. By contrast, the task is significantly relieved by the fact that Keifus Writes! has little ambition for, and even less evidence of greatness or, even, any particular relevance. For Quixote , Menard called out in his letters as influential but sufficiently removed from his canon so as to allow premeditation. In the case of Keifus, additional difficulties arise in imagining any seriousness at all, divining the literary bona fides as they say, of a work that is so hopelessly amateur. Regarding Keifus' significance, one is tempted to quip about the legendary ingenuity of fools. (Timid and serous by nature, Menard was never known to pursue cliché or cheap humor, which is one point for the continued integrity of this blog, such as it is. But it must be kept in mind that any accurate transcription of Keifus Writes! would include a necessary element of low humor as well.) A prospective author of Keifus may further attempt a larger challenge, and write the blog through an entirely personal set of attitudes and histories, much as Pierre Menard did with the Quixote, which resulted in an impressive (or embarrassingly inaccurate, if you prefer the Beauchamps criticism) supra-textual nuance of the familiar words.

As for me, the first curious behavior was with Blogger's spell-check software. (That Menard might anticipate spell-checking, as well as the neologism-heavy verbiage of an M-list blog sounds impressive, but, I reiterate, nowhere near as impressive as creating an alternative presentimental mindset from which Keifus, and whatever he'd decide to write, including references to spell-checking, would emerge of necessity.) Several weeks ago, the program began identifying errors, but suggesting identical replacements. Now, I will frequently misspell words like "Massachusetts" (it has the opposite rule as all those English words), "receive" (except after c, dammit) and "manufacturible" (I am still not sure this is the correct way, frankly), as well as commit typographical errors with words like "radiation" ("radiaiton") in a maddening fashion that is clearly wrong in a way that is difficult to follow the lazy i (Menard was known to disparage puns as well), but lately, the computer has prompted me to replace the alleged error with the exact same word. And I have complied, every time.

Furthermore, anyone who knows me, or is familiar with "Keifus," realizes that I put a lot of myself into my blog. Not just for the boring anecdotes, or the vicarious naturalism, or the literature of the nerd that I so love. No, it's more: when I, for example, get worked up about the facile analysis of other commenters, it comes from what I see as an awakening of my worldview, that grew to include more situations than my own, while keeping some notions of fairness, pragmatism, and open-mindedness, at least when it's been convenient to. I like to think it's all been tempered by a well-cultivated tradition of distrusting true believers as well as a lot of deep, independent thought and observation, and even if I flatter myself with that interpretation, it doesn't matter. The point is that these observations, pointed and otherwise, the very language I use to describe them in fact, I have always considered to be in a fundamental sense a product of myself. Pierre Menard's upbringing did not include a modern science education that he would view as a vital tool in his personal crusade to entertainingly abuse of metaphors (Menard hated allegory, but by all accounts was entirely indifferent to the art of metaphor), nor did he suffer the scars of being rejected by Amy Johannsen in the seventh grade (a bachelor, he had a lifelong male roommate), and we can say with authority that he never watched Superfriends. When I create a post, it's with these accounts, as well as a thousand others, all deeply implicit, the product of a unique experience that lends Keifus Writes! my own shading, which simply can't be compromised. None of this mystical ghost-writing crap!

But more or less contemporaneously with the mystery of the spell checker, the blog has been going downhill. Or at least so it seems to me. Even I can notice that there have long been a few recurring themes and repetitive language patterns that I have always thought trivial, but perhaps those things make Keifus Writes! more predictable than similar publications. Maybe that's how Menard gets at it. When I type many of the same sort of text as awlways, it has a tendency lately to come out, well, wrong. The meaning of of the words skirls dismayingly away from my fingertips, so that even though the language is the same, all that I read on the screen is intellectual gibberish of the worst grade, with none of the wit or occasional clarity that I have come to associate with Keifus, nor even that had sounded clever as I recited it to myself moments before. Damn you Menard, why do you torture me like this! That's not what I meant to say at all!

Random

1. I figure at 36 years old, I'm finally ready to buy a personal item like a watch all by my own self. Specifically, I want something that has a timer that I can use while swimming (more for bunches of laps than individual laps, because, well, look at me), but also which I can wear with my usual office-casual hobo look, as well as with a shirt and tie, when those circumstances arise. Basically, I want something that doesn't look out of place in the gym or when I'm giving a presentation, and can take a beating in chlorinated water. Unfortunately, almost all of the sports watches I've seen look like something I'd think was really cool when I was in eighth grade. (Look! The date flashes!) Any suggestions for an attractive men's watch that fits the bill? Twif, I know you're a man of high fashion.

2. Vacations and summer fun are over, the Missus is gainfully employed, and we are all getting close to the new version of everyone's miserable normal schedule--it's really been time to get back to those healthy habits that've been so hard to keep alive this last year. And jumping in for the last ten days, I just ain't been right. I've had this awful, listless, tired, outside-myself sensation, less intensity of feeling, slightly anxious where I'm not normally, a shitty night's sleep more often than not. It's most likely some combination of the sudden change in work habits (getting back), diet (better), exercise (more), and schedule (why am I doing all the cooking? how the hell can it be 5 AM already?!), but if I'm being really honest with myself, I can't quite rule this out either. Never worried before.

3. Just so you know: I'm not a fig plucker, nor a fig plucker's son, but I'll pluck the figs till the fig plucker comes.

4. I would have thought I'd drifted much further to the flaming radical end of the political spectrum, but I guess I don't trust any authority enough for that. (I came out strongly non-interventionalist and culturally liberal, so don't ask me how the silly quiz calculates the political vector. Probably the confusion is that I am not very emphatic about many of my opinions, especially when they don't match the offered wording. They should have a "difficult" axis, I'd nail that one.) I'll say that as my fearless leaders continue to drift toward full-on corporate whoredom and a militarized state, who won't spend a dime to actually help people even when the data is in that the programs are effective, and remain basically unresponsive to the various externalities the private owners ain't paying for, then those conditions make me feel like a fucking socialist. Anyway, I don't think this has changed very much at all since last time I took it a couple years ago, which was a surprise.
My Political Views
I am a centrist social libertarian
Left: 0.89, Libertarian: 3.66

Political Spectrum Quiz


5.I looked over some old posts quoting that old quiz (failed to find it, of course). The posts are about 70% of them godawful. And really, next time I feel the need to cough up yet another general statement of my political beliefs, the exact same hairball I apologetically presented six months ago, feel free to just smack me upside the head.

6. This is one of those things that looks like a possible upside to all the senseless killing, but is almost certainly batshit retarded in its own right. Turning the Monsanto corn crop into a global monoculture (the stuff is everywhere!), especially in some of the more bizarre climate zones, sounds like a recipe for worldwide food disaster. Here, it's being established at gunpoint (soldier farmers?), so score another one for the profiteers. What are the words to the Workers' Marseillaise again? (Via, uh, Newshoggers? I can't find the linking article. I suck.)

Why You Shouldn't Become Politically Aware

"Federal court injunctions became one of the standard tools of management...[F]or Taft, the growth of unions was not synonymous with progress, was perhaps antithetical to it...This change [in standard of living near the turn of the century] had been produced by a wondrous growth of industry and commerce, nurtured by a small but energetic government and made possible the freedoms, political and economic, that seemed at the heart of the definition of being American. Interfering with these freedoms or vastly changing the size and role of government might be attractive in some momentary crisis, Taft understood, or might commend itself to believers in some radical theory; but to a man who had seen the system work over time, to tamper with it was the height of folly, and the duty of men like himself was to preserve and strengthen the framework which had made this progress possible."

One of the worst passages in the book, right there on page six. I'll review the thing before very long (to the unfettered delight of all), but the short version is that Michael Barone would have been better off if he didn't try and pepper in these observations as if they were occasional theses. (Here, he's only channeling William Howard Taft, but those interjections are a running theme.) The basic issues with the quote shouldn't be hard to spot: (1) government's emphatic union busting obviously meddled with freedoms (2) standard of living may well have improved (especially by measure of consumption), but industrialization also brought new forms of pollution, workplace hazards, indebtedness, required specialization at the expense of other skills, and it mucked up family life and settlement patterns--it's a mixed bag even now, and in those days, the failures of the system vis a vis personal freedom were pretty stark; (3) interference in worker demonstrations isn't really the action of a "small government," the obvious fact of which isn't much relieved by his use of the word "energetic". A better sense of the passage might come from the phrase, "men like himself."

I suppose I remain a technological optimist. I subscribe to the idea that technological progress does increase the standard of living, and it's exciting for me to imagine the hypothetical limits of what progress can accomplish (and why I'm so pleased with novels like Steel Beach or Player Piano, which seem to get at some truths of it). I'd add that my starry-eyed vision isn't so rapinous as the early technological models, and next-generation solutions, in the unlikely event we are lucky enough to develop them, would require some harmonious development under the constraints of biodiversity, available energy, population, space, and, perhaps even, human spirit. But that's all happy-talk, and a tangent. In the case of industrialization, we have a few important leaps in medical science (that I wouldn't throw away), physical mobility and communications drastically eased (likewise), an immense increase in firepower, and a slew of innovations ultimately became labor-savors, but it took some hundred years for that set of benefits to seep in the direction of the many (thanks in part to the unions Taft mistrusted), and doing more with a bunch of souped-up waldoes hasn't freed us much, and the glorious convenience is overplayed. Since most of the population still has to work to live, the labor saving (and labor trading) has made Americans more than a little frantic. As it is, I don't know how I, with nine years of science education, can possibly afford to get the kids through college, and it's a shame they'll never afford a house, even if they have a relatively cheap tv.

(You can find a good discussion at the site of the incomparable IOZ, here.)

Does economic growth require innovation? I am disinclined to use the word when it comes to new financial, managerial or political developments (the recent unpleasantness looks less like real innovation and more like rediscovering ways to cheat, and I've had too many managers, followed too much politics), but there appears to be a correlation even there, one we wouldn't deny given enough historical perspective. Over on Sadly, No!, D. Aristophanes scored a good point regarding medical innovation: the "delivery of health care to more people at less cost" is a medical innovation. Certainly it improves the standard of living for more people, which, at the end of the day, is the exact same argument for capitalism. Why does the fact that it has such a good chance of being better piss off the alleged capitalists off so much?

You can correctly complain about means, but it's the ends that are a measurement of a system's worth, not that they are so easy to tell apart. Is a fair chance in a given economic framework the same as liberty when the "free market" systematically produces drastic inequality? Of course no market is free: usually, the capitalist political argument tends to ignore the tendency of power to accumulate by economic means, and ignores the reality that an economic/political advantage, once gained, is damnably difficult to dispel. That rising tide has tended to lift some boats a lot higher than others. If the failure to deliver meaningful freedom is intrinsic, then what the hell do we want that system for? I am by no means suggesting going full Commie here either, with an undisputed political/economic mandate as a non-rebuttal to the economic/political one. The point is, what the hell is the difference when the government and the titans of industry intermarry so fully anyway? As someone just trying to get by, unless you're on top of it, you're pretty damn frantic.

The advocate of conservatism considers that hey, the system works for me, sometimes with considerable effort, and it shouldn't be changed. I can be sympathetic with the desire to not give up even that much ground. Libertarians, best I can tell, think that hey, the system works for me because I'm just that fucking great. Thinking in terms of "men like yourself" is one thing when you're young, your future looks bright, and you don't really know anyone outside your social circle, but I'm finding the whole business tiresome these days. (Too much time on the internet. I didn't need to know what my old friends think about stuff.) It would be nice if personal success correlated better with effort and aptitude, maybe a little less egregiously with connections. It'd be nice too, if in this affluent country at least, there was enough embedded security that hitting the bottom didn't knock you right out of the game. In those markets models, the glib ones that have been irritating me anyway, it's generally a matter of assumption that we are working with roughly equal odds in life, but that's not really true. That condition could be considered the ends as much as the means.

Let me know if you figure out how to get to it.

(Update: also this.)

Review: Steel Beach, by John Varley

Okay, let's play a game that writers have been at since forever, centuries before Hugo Gernsback started churning out "scientifiction" and imaginary perfect human environments proliferated in the popular culture. What would the world be like if you could solve humanity's more obvious problems: What if you could defeat death, remove hunger, take away the basis of racial and sexual inequality, and the worst of economic want? What would you have to change to do it, and what would the world be like?

What separates the good from the great at this game (cutting some slack, perhaps, to the earliest utopian authors) is a certain depth of scale, one that maintains a real fidelity to the human spirit. The absence of this can be particularly frustrating, when the author is trying to prove some philosophical point or other that requires characters to forget to be corrupt and foolish (or maybe forget to be wise and generous) when under the influence of some airy Ism or other. Fiction based heavily on the setting can more mundanely fail to imagine its environment very thoroughly, where no conversation fails to allude to the warp core, star drive, or some damn thing. Better authors will employ various tricks to evade these shoddy universalisms, of course, and we've been in the business of imagining idealized places for a while, and some authors these days are quite good indeed. But how perfect an environment could we devious apes really devise?

And that's what I like about John Varley, or at least what I like about his "eight worlds" stories. It's got all the science fiction settings you've seen before--it's a colony on the moon (and a few other bodies), medical science is nearly perfected and computer science is through the roof, cheap energy has been figured out--but I want to convince you it's better. The difference between Steel Beach and a hundred other pieces of space-colony wankery you could name, is just how well thought out it is. Or maybe how strange it's not. This world is built to the level of complexity that a humanity, with all its endless banality, requires (and provides some avenues for new deviations just for fun). Things happen (or fail to happen) for economic or bureaucratic reasons, not based on some eggheads working against the clock, or some pilots aiming their proton torpedos just right. People are ruled by the bread and by the circus and mostly live for fostering their shallow individual desires and idiosyncracies. The serious trappings of life are treated with some appropriate cynicism by those who bother to pay attention. Our hero (or heroine--medical body alteration of all kinds is feasible, and transsexuality is simple, complete, and relatively routine), Hildy* is a reporter, well versed in the differences between what people consume and what matters. She (let's go with "she," accurate for about 2/3 of the book) is a character who loves life, but who also observes life, and after a long run, that dichotomy has been dragging her down from cynicism into real depression.**

There are kludges in this world of course, and the big one is that shit works, but by and large, the technology (at least at the beginning of the novel), while extrapolated to near-perfection, is nothing we wouldn't recognize today. To keep track of the mind-boggling details of it all, a computing system was implemented and has since evolved to the level of ubiquity and benevolent control that a whole society perching on the cusp of the airless void would need to actually function. The central computer is often a character in these stories, and generally a good one, which (since its archicture, purpose, and learning modes were originally engineered by humans) succeeds in being human-like in its thought and manner, while still being computer-like in it's thoroughness, precision, and scope. He's both more complicated and more capable than your typical emotionless robot, convincingly so.

I really enjoyed Hildy's narrative style (and if it's very similar to Sparky Valentine's in the sequel, The Golden Globe, it's entertaining enough to forgive). It's full of wit, exagerration and what seems like an unintentional honesty, the voice of the loveable wiseass. Her observations appear to belie technical and philosophical grounding on the author's part too--unreliable narrators can be used to imply a lot more than they show--and Varley gets tagged as a "hard" science fiction writer sometimes, but what I find much more important, is that the perspective is less about providing the answers than it is naturally rich in observation, and in Hildy's case, observational humor.

And when you get to the thematic meat of the book, the light tone helps. There's a lot going on in the novel (and this is already a long review), but the recurring thing is that Hildy has gone down past jaded. There have been suicide attempts, one obvious complication of a long, safe life. When everything is solved, what do you live for? The idea that we might need risk is thrown around, or some sense of living life with consequences maybe, but the undiscussed truth about Lunar society is that it's a fragile bulwark against an environment perfectly inimical to life, maintained by something complicated enough to go wrong. Which is damned depressing in a different sense. And what happens if the enormous mind running everything starts sizing up the hose against the exhaust pipe as well?

I don't know if this situation can have any satisfying resolution. Varley gives us some good closure at least, appropriate to his imagined setting. [Note: spoilers follow--you may not want to me to kill 450 pages of buildup here.] Hildy comes off (and is) a bit selfish in her fickle will to live, but she makes it through. She learns loss from several angles, and redisovers the preciousness of her own life. The central computer, however doesn't fare as well. It's explicit in some sections, but Varley runs some rather clever parallels with the computer's mood and Hildy's. The computer ("he") is faced with an intimate knowledge of, and, since the population is in no small sense himself, love for humanity, even with all its nasty streaks, much as Hildy goes on about it below. That love is bumping up against his more analytical sense of justice (which so far as the locals is his application of the law, and in the reach of the CC's many governing arms) and duty (which is to keep the species, and himself, alive for the long haul), and he reacts badly to these conflicts. His growing suicidal urge results in negative attention (observed by some, including Hildy), and by injuring himself. And he goes through with the suicide, or lobotomizes himself anyway (at least in a monster-movie fashion***), letting the autonomous functions continue. Ex-Deus Machina as it were, and damn if there wasn't some real pathos in those moments. That broken symmetry of fate betwen the two characters is one literary twist, but there's more: for the computer, death really was the solution, it was a sacrifice for the species, no matter how his mind felt about it all. The absence of his gentle authority gives humans some sense of the survival challenge they're really living, and the collective spark they need to realize it matters. And it may also doom them all.

*Something of a scholar, the character Hildy Johnson named herself from the movie His Girl Friday, which was an ancient movie by then. Looking this up, I was pleased to learn that the character in the movie had undergone a sex change as well, from a man in the original play. Clever reference.

**A quote I particularly enjoyed, in its context, and a little long for up there. I hope the author doesn't mind me excerpting a couple paragraphs:

"And that's the thing really, I can't imagine [killing myself]. You know me; I get depresed. I have been since I was ...oh, forty or fifty. Callie says I was a moody child. I was probably a discontented fetus, lord love us, kicking out at every little thing. I complain. I'm unhappy with the lack of purpose of human life, or with the fact that so far I'le been unable to discover a purpose. I envy the Christians, the Bahais, the Zens and Zoroastirans and Astrologers and Flackites because they have answers they believe in. even if they're the wrong answers, it must be comforting to believe in them. […] I'm generally pissed off at the entirely sorry existential state of affairs of the universe, the human condition, rampant injustice, and unpunished crimes and unrewarded goodness, and the way my mouth feels when I get up in the morning before I brush my teeth. […]"

"[But] by and large, I find life sweet. […] I keep living for the same reasons I think so many of us do. I'm curious about what happens next. What will tomorrow hold? Even if it's much like yesterday, it's still worth finding out. My pleasures may not be as many or as joyous as I'd wish them to be in a perfect world, but I accept that, and it makes the times I do feel happy all the more treasured. Again, just to make sure you understand me ...I like life. Not all the time and not completely, but enough to want to live it. And there's a third reason too. I'm afraid to die. I don't want to die. I suspect that nothing comes after life, and that's too foreign a concept for me to accept. I don't want to experience it. I don't want to go away, to cease. I'm important to me. Who would there be to make unkind, snide comments to myself about everything in life if I wasn't around to tackle the job? Who would appreciate my internal jokes?"

***His complete loss is unlikely. And he shows up in later version of this universe (which has shitty continuity by the author's own admission. Some of the computer's sins were unethical--in his own eyes--experiments to accurately transcribe memories of a conscious being.

Review: Teranesia, by Greg Egan

I read Diaspora by Greg Egan ten years ago, which was filled with the sort of speculative geometry (if you can believe such a thing--from low-dimensional thinking beings to the challenges of navigating a universe with a few extra directions in which to move) that would have been a fine followup Feynman's real-life physics of geometrical transformations. I dug through the shelves and came up with what looked like the next-best thing, another Egan novel that I bought at the same time, but Teranesia, I soon discovered, gets down with speculative biological juju instead of funny math, doesn't really follow the physicist at all. And so I've been forced to change this month's reading theme to "books with insects on the covers." It's not like it's an exact science.

The plot of Teranesia is half discovery, and half family story. We are introduced to a nine-year-old Prabir Suresh as he accompanies his parents and baby sister to live on a remote Indonesian island (to which Prabir has felt compelled to claim some ownership, naming it Teranesia) to research a recently-discovered species of butterfly. Although the family is isolated, their existence is known through contact with the closest inhabited island, and Prabir's (foolish) online correspondences. The local revolutionary politics catches up to them just enough for tragedy, and Prabir spends the middle of the book escaping from the island, from a refugee camp, from idiot relatives, protecting his sister from these environments, and generally cultivating a bounty of shame and guilt. It's a decade later, and also quite late in the book, when his sister decides to return to Teranesia to chase some more recent biological finds, and Prabir chases after her, coming to grips with his own past, as well as rooting out the mysteries his parents were just beginning to uncover.

Egan's scientific ideas are out there (it's fiction!), almost certainly extending past the plausible, but characteristically for this author, they're based on some of the loopier ideas in actual science. In Teranesia, Egan imagines some accelerated evolutionary mechanism at play that goes beyond the slow, generational processes of natural selection. The butterflies and other organisms, Prabir hypothesizes, have somehow begun selectively expressing ancient genes, long buried in their junk DNA, to best adapt to their new (and changing) environment. (Prabir has become a banker, a quant naturally, but has remained remarkably well-read in the normal family trade. In the islands, he latches onto an independent biologist, who, the reader must assume, is doing most of the investigative brain-work.) With a speed of progress that only happens in plot devices, a rogue protein is soon discovered by another research team, which interferes in the transcription process in normal cell reproduction. The going theory by novel's end is that the protein is somehow implicating DNA in quantum computation, sampling eigenstates for an optimum biological reality before wave function collapse. The various scientist characters have the good grace to find this frustrating.

This faster evolution doesn't treat Prabir very well, but he complains often enough about the limits of evolutionary reality that we can call it something of a theme. Prabir is depressed about his mere genetic destiny, and digs up some rationalizations about even the biological utility of a Darwinian conscientious objector, depressing him further. Egan (who is Australian) makes a fair stab at political reality, both in terms of Indonesian politics, the operations of a diffused war, and in Australia's lackluster support for the refugee community. The brief highlight of the Indian Rationalists Association is mildly interesting and doesn't threaten any American sensibilities. By the time the story does get to North America, however, he has made up a gang of liberal (as in "arts") academics that is just irritating. It's not that you can't make fun of the jargon-babbling lit-crit and gender studies crowd, but you need things like humor and accuracy if you're going to pull that sort of thing off. Beating on straw people isn't classy.

And here's the thing: it's hard to write well. I get that Egan's an idea man, a computer scientist before he was a writer, and that's fine, but the failures here are primarily artistic ones. His storytelling aspires to competence, which sets him way ahead of Diaspora (though behind some of his short fiction), and certainly ahead of any hypothetical novel I could churn out, but if all he had here was Prabir's chase scenes and character development, I'd have a hard time finding anything to say about it at all. Whenever I have read this guy, only his scientist characters ever manage to approach a third dimension, and then, only when they're working. His prose and pacing are adequate, but with the occasional abrupt breaks, leaden metaphors, and general awkwardness of an adolescent stylist. As creative writing, it's solidly okay, in other words, and maybe under the circumstances, he could find better villains than people who study the arts. Maybe he should be listening to them.

Review: Six Not-So-Easy Pieces, by Richard P. Feynman

I have, over the years, spent a lot of time on the internet, and the sort of argument styles you find online have started to grate after awhile. Not to say it's surprising, you'll meet ten people a day whose self estimation exceeds their capability, but the digital fields have propagated a certain strain, the self-styled Vulcans or the Slans finally given their opportunity to shine in a purely intellectual medium, and okay, a few of them do shine, even in political arenas, but I'm increasingly convinced that quality thinking is a rare flower even among the Comic Book Guy set, that intelligence and a penchant for declarative sentences may not be sufficient to overcome the various self-deceptions, inappropriate generalizations, faulty logic, bad weighting of counterargument, inability to distinguish hindsight from foresight, and all the rest of the bestiary of cognitive curlicues that obstruct most minds from grasping the nature of things in a broad but generally accurate and consistent sense.* Now and then, a great or even exceptional thinker will emerge, and rarer still will that thinker be able to communicate with accuracy, humor, and humility. Feynman was a gem.

Of course, one of the side effects of reading Feynman is that once that high of uncut understanding wears off, your own brain feels a little muddier afterwards. I think that the audience that evolved to love this guy is primarily composed of scientists looking for deeper meaning into what they already know. (I suppose I could put myself into this group, although without doubt, relativity isn't something I already know in a meaningful way.) These lectures were great at communicating insight, but they're actually lean on facts. I not at all certain that I'd have wanted to learn freshman physics from this guy. I wouldn't have been left with the tools to do the problem sets.

What I didn't realize when I picked this up, is that they're six connected pieces. The progression here, examining the laws of physics through geometrical transformations, holds together cleverly and proceeds naturally to relativity. I further appreciated the discussion of the contemporary setting of Einstein's theories, what he was specifically trying to address with them, and that the Lorentz transformations (which in special relativity, Einstein explained the validity of) had already been thrown out there as fudge factors to explain the discrepancies between predictions of Maxwell's equations (where it falls out as a constant in the simplest EM wave equation) and what's expected by conventional expectations of relative motion, as well as the confusing experiments that were going on when the great man was busy theorizing. The context makes relativity seem a lot less weird, frankly.

I recall reading that one of Einstein's proudest achievments was his index notation for vectors. Basically, he simplified the math symbols so that you don't have to write big brackets, or unit vectors, or summations. It's pretty intuitive and handy, occasionally adopted formally by fluid mechanics nerds (which Einstein dabbled in), and frequently informally by any hack engineer who's tried his** hand at primitive excuses for number crunching. If you ask a mechanics guy and a computer guy, both inclined to use index notation, what's the meaning of a "vector," you'll probably get two different answers, and thinking this way, I'd have rather seen Feynman move down from the general, in which a vector is a column of numbers of arbitrary length, which is merely limited to three when it needs to describe Euclidian space, or, presumably, four when describing Minkowski space. (How dare he present this subject forty years ago!) It's not immediately clear that the innovation couldn't have been constrained to new algebraic operations specified to describe relativistic effects in 4-D space, rather than specifying a new sort of space in which the fourth dimension has separate properties. I will say that the geometrical analyses that Feynman described struck me as very clever. ("Clever." I mean it's Einstein here--this is like a mosquito calling a jetliner sort of large.) I suppose I'd have to do problem sets to get the real scoop on it all (and I've no interest in that).

In one of the lectures, Feynman had a great bit about using measurement as a tool for explaining the universe, and took an entertaining poke at fly-by know-it-alls who'd pretend it's intuitive (he's favoring empiricism over pure rationalism I guess, but he didn't frame it that way). That discussion of how the geometry of space time could be deduced from within the system was the most animated, and, I think the most successful application of his grand insight, and it occurs to me I've seen a dozen explanations along the same lines (usually with graphics of marbles making dimples in a computer-generated 2-D grid) that, unlike Feynman's analogies, were not terribly intelligible at all. I've caught the bug's-eye thing before too and the jumpy speaking style too (I don't usually "hear" when I read, but I could feel Feynman speaking in this one), and it occured to me that many of my professors were among the generation of (inevitably lesser) Feynman copycats.


* Alternate theory: I'm projecting.
** For a possible theory about my use of gendered pronouns, see note 1.

Review: Fragile Things, by Neil Gaiman

I don't completely know what to make of Neil Gaiman. I like his stories, and I appreciate his eye, and certainly he's got sort of a flashlight-under-the-covers charm about most of his efforts, but I keep wondering when he's going to turn out anything that really feels essential. Fragile Things includes some author's commentary, and Gaiman reveals that many of the shorts were written by invitation, on an assigned theme more or less, which is very good and all, but it also feels like they were written to cultivate someone else's idea. Very few of the shorts felt like they really needed to be written, like there was very much internal drive to their creation. (And it's no surprise that the exceptions were very much the better stories.)

Take A Study in Emerald. It's the first story, the one I picked up the anthology for (hi twif), and which won Gaiman a Hugo award. It's a hybrid of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and H. P. Lovecraft, written on request for an anthology. Gaiman did spin some gold out of the concept, basically fusing the two universes, putting the Old Ones into the political sphere and letting the people go on with their lives (while they can), and, playing coy with naming some of the characters, packs in some clever twists and revelations (the detective, of course, is not Holmes), but the story lacked a certain potency. What's missing from it is some awareness of the fact that Doyle and Lovecraft do fit naturally together. God knows that the styles are similarly pulpy and overwritten, but more than that, both authors traded heavily in rationalism. Lovecraft's world is unnatural but explainable, and his protagonists are always scientists and skeptics, if particularly histrionic ones and inevitably out of their league. Putting Sherlock Holmes against a Lovecraft horror is an elemental battle, pitting an irresistable force against an unstoppable object, and a brilliant idea with a lot of inherent power in it. That Gaiman told another good story with it was both highly enjoyable and frustrating.

I got a similar head-scratching vibe from Monarch of the Glen, the longest of the collection, and the closer. Actually, the problems bled over from the novel that preceded it (American Gods), namely that I can't make the sense out of it that Gaiman is trying to convey. It's a clever (if not rare) idea of giving life to gods by the will of their believers, but Gaiman has now let them emigrate, taking on some character of new lands along with their people, and, uh, reincarnating themselves or something. Whatever it is that brings them to being is a little inconsistent, as what they are still doing here and what releases them, and there are plenty of curious omissions, which, to be fair, feels less egregious in a novella than it did in the novel (and finding misty natural backwaters on the Scottish coast feels natural enough, and it helps that I don't really know how much he's muffing the cultural history). On the other hand, there's great stuff in it--a fine protagonist in Shadow (and now Mr Boy-Under-the-Mountain has let us see his birth certificate), dangerous villains that are nearly likeable (Gaiman does wonderful villains--Mr Smith has his own short too), and a really great take on the Beowulf myth. There is a love for the old stories that comes through, and in this case, Grendel's mother is outstanding. If only I could make more sense of her context.

The ghost stories were really the best of the bunch (and "Bitter Grounds" about Haitian coffee girls, and "Closing Time" about what might have been a passage were the best of the best). Gaiman is good at finding the places where everyday life meets Spookyville, and finding some beauty and humor in the contact between those worlds. I liked his short-shorts too. There is an art in making a story in just a few paragraphs (and to his credit, Gaiman doesn't overwrite anything), and if the poetry wasn't high art, it was pleasant enough. There was a bomb or two, but what do you want from an anthology, and I was reassured in the notes that the author agreed with me on at least one of them. The Problem of Susan works in the general milieu, but deserves a special mention for just being so unsettling. For anyone who ever loved Narnia: did Susan get a fair break being, basically, damned for being a girl? What kind of God picks favorites and tortures the rest (and never mind the sexism)? As the author notes, it was meant to be as fundamentally unsatisfying as Narnia ultimately was, and it succeeds.

In all, I like Gaiman's brushwork and use of color and shadow, and the composition seems to be almost there. Now when's he going to give us the masterpiece?

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

(Or at least my first one.)

Hey New Englanders, just think: it could have been worse. Last week could have been your long-planned summer vacation. Back on Friday, the predictions of mere afternoon thunderstorms could have been optimistically read to imply the hopes of morning sun, with nothing more unpleasant in store than the usual sort of oppressive humidity that makes the beaches of the east coast seem like a good destination. But as mere threats of showers turned into the reality of a week-long deluge, those hopes sputtered like the incessant sizzle of rain on a gray sidewalk, a not-uncommon view from the front door of our rented cottage, as three sodden generations of eyes stared hopefully for a sufficient break to make one of our doleful processions to the seawall, in which we could descend to the lonely beach in a line, like the bedraggled priests and priestesses of some lugubrious god*.

Hampton Beach in New Hampshire is an attractive little strip of sand across the street from a seedy midway (complete with a selection of junk souvenir shops and inedible food), but it dies out pretty quickly. North of the beach, and past a little settled outcrop, there's a long stretch of concrete barrier behind which lies an expanse of shore that is only beachy at low tide, and, on the other side of the road, summer cottages, where we rented a place with the kids and the parents. The cottages comprise a much nicer neighborhood than the tourist trap, and winding still further north along the shore finds you some lovely state parks and the homes of the really rich. In the North Hampton stretch, where we were, the waves at high tide sometimes crash up over the jersey wall, which is an impressive sight, but they can also strike incautious pedestrians, which isn't so great when you've only brought one sweatshirt. Along the upper reaches of the beach, below the wall, rough-cut granite obelisks have been dumped unceremoniously everywhere, to prevent erosion I imagine, lying at all angles in a bed of rocks, which are weathered like river stones. (So the erosion prevention is temporary--gotta be rough on the concrete.) As the waves retreat, the gravel sounds an immense and satisfying clatter like a blues man riffing on a gigantic washboard. As the tide ebbs, a beach is revealed below this, with firm, dense sand that is great for walking and throwing a football around, which we did infrequently last week. I have no idea what it's like when it's crowded.

It wasn't just rainy, but also cold. On July 1, we went out to a restaurant and asked to sit near the roaring fireplace. The first night, I walked down to the beach with my wife (perhaps thereupon to investigate one of these long romantic walks of which I've heard mention), and nearly went into teeth-chattering convulsions. It feels like the temperature drops about 20 degrees when you go past the wall, and for much of the week, mist picked up from the ocean and blew across the strand in great billowing sheets. It was a great scene, and quite eerie. With only 50 yards of visibility or so, you could look three ways and pretend that you were the only person on earth. (I did actually snap a triptych like that, and intended to post it with some other photos, but that will require my mother solving enough digital mysteries to extract the photos from her camera and email them to me. Might be a while.)

Fortunately, nerds can keep themselves occupied without a lot of fresh air and exercise. The kids had their own loft, which eased the awful space constraints, and we revved up our family jug band once a day or so, playing the same five songs all of us know until we couldn't stand it anymore (or until the booze made us too clumsy). And we broke off into shopping parties, and for a cultured night out or two. What beachgoers there were were almost exclusively surfers, and that might have been an outlet for my wife and me (there was a rental place up the street), but we were intimidated by a distinct lack of thirtysomething pudge threatening the seams of all the wetsuits.

On the Friday we headed out, the weather--it's been about a month of rain here--finally broke into a beautiful, dry, post-card of a summer day. So we stuck around and did beachy things in the still-frigid water, and laid about to dry on the scattered monoliths. About long enough for me to get a fine crop of sunburn on all that virgin expanse of forehead, as it happens. We packed up under threatening thunderheads (and also big rain clouds), and were thrilled to come back to the dull comforts of home, where at least I have enough sweatshirts.

Which I guess is what vacations are for.

*it's been done.