Shiloh

I got to Shiloh after a long drive south from the interstate and deep into the swamps of southwestern Tennessee. Miles and miles of trees, a clean, no-shoulder highway, no evidence of traffic in the form of litter, here and there a sign advertising Bubba’s Catfish Shack, and then, suddenly, a national park, a huge swampy, piney, national “military” park with probably more alligators than people in it, filled with ravines, bayous, creeks, humpy ridges and a damp forest  floor raising a fog of steam. Very few people there, the Visitor Center parking lot was almost empty, perhaps because the heat is stifling. It’s only slightly less deserted there now than in 1862, except the roads that the Union army hoped to travel further south are now the paved route of the driving tour.

The driving tour: a single car travels on that narrow National Park Service pavement with the clean forest sweeping away, and what looks like a widely spaced cemetery full of monuments distributed throughout. Big ones, little ones, ornate ones, simple ones. Granite monuments marking this or that headquarters, the end of this or that line, the place where 2100 federals surrendered, the location of this or that hurriedly placed battery. The memorials of many different eras all share the space; hence you see markers made of cannonballs and old cannons marking some spots(the oldest), then rusting metal plaques marking others(the not-so-old), than fancy modern NPS signs (the newest). Monuments mark the spots where important things happened or resided-- for example, where William Wallace was mortally wounded, and where Haith had his headquarters, and where the blue and gray lines first made contact.

Most interesting to me, you have a sign--within a stone’s throw of little ramshackle Shiloh church itself-- that marks the end of Buckland’s line. I saw this from the car. Buckland was the brigade commander in which Amos Laymon’s regiment was included. Amos was the brother of my great great grandfather, and Buckland was his brigade commander, part of Sherman's division. The sign sits at the corner of a parking lot and it’s hard not to notice the wet path leading away from it into the woods. Which has to be followed. Because if Buckland’s line ended there, and the confederates were coming up from the south, than Amos’s regiment must have camped somewhere along that path.

Sure enough, I tramped into the woods and found markers/memorials marking where the three Ohio regiments camped that made up Buckland’s Brigade, including Amos’s. Getting better oriented I was able to see why those outfits often turn up in histories of the battle. They were the closest to the enemy and the furthest from safety.

The leader of the regiment just to the left of Amos’s, a man named Cockerill, tried repeatedly to make Sherman understand there was a crowd of rebels before him, without success.  All three regiments got assaulted at 7 a.m., their breakfast uneaten, and continued fighting until 10, almost surrounded, when one of the Sherman’s staff ordered them back. Buckland himself was commended in Sherman’s report.

And Amos was seriously injured, according to the roster of the 48^th Ohio. I don’t know how or where. He was 39 years old and soon went back to Lynchburg, Ohio, where he had been recruited the previous October. He had boarded the steamboat Empress in Paducah, Kentucky for the trip down, and made it his home for 12 days until finally unloading at Pittsburgh Landing near Shiloh, then spread out into the woods with his regiment to loaf and invite his soul, more than two miles from the landing. It was all spring and songbirds until the morning of April 6. The Battle of Shiloh was his first and only day of war.

I traveled further south to the town of Corinth, MS, whose vital railroad junction had attracted so much union interest in the first place. There’s a great interpretive center there, with cannons on display from the battle, a research library, an allegorical fountain, a movie auditorium and a bookstore. There too, I was one of about three patrons.

The town of Corinth itself, grand as it sounds, must be one of the saddest little towns I’ve ever seen, even now. Never very big, it swelled to more than 40,000 after the battle and during the subsequent siege, most of these people wounded or dying. Every building became a hospital, the water was foul, and disease was rampant. During all this it was also the scene of two bloody battles, and upon giving it up both armies burned it. I figured it had good reason to be sad.

But the railroad junction is still there. And a lot of ghosts, I guess. You withdraw credulity when I mention ghosts, of course. But standing in the middle of the woods by the 48^th Ohio encampment, miles from the nearest soul, I swore I smelled gunpowder.

Intelligent life in California

Deserts are not just for recluses anymore. Nowadays, entirely respectable people go there and rent houses and stay, and burn stuff, and watch caloric waves shimmer off the desert floor, and feel rugged and hardy and American, and drink a lot. You might have thought the desert was just for coyotes and creepy lizards, but I’m here to tell you. Much of Los Angeles is there, goes there every year, at least in the winter.

I’m talking about the constellation of towns near Joshua Tree National Park: Desert Hot Springs, Cathedral City, Twenty Nine Palms, Yucca Valley City, Palm Springs, all of them partners-in-baking when the calendar progresses past May. Bob Hope made Palm Springs famous, mostly for the golf, I think. Dinah Shore, Gene Autry, the Rat Pack—the place has celebrity credentials. I found it mostly walled golf courses interspersed with walled condos and walled strip malls.

One day I got taken out to a mystery location in the Mojave Desert. Out we went to where the roads became rougher and thinner, and the desert began to dominate again over the futile etchy-sketchy byways of humankind. We went toward a destination my friend wouldn’t reveal, for an event she wouldn’t describe, and an experience she couldn’t calculate. Eventually, I realized why, as after I had it I couldn’t say much either.

We entered a gate like one of the many along those roads, opening to a property filled with superseded furniture, the bodies of ancient automobiles, many of them bullet ridden, antique refrigerators, antique freezers, skeletal old easy chairs, middens of colored bottles, roadside signs that formerly stood before hotels, drive-in restaurants and summer camps, forgotten children’s trampolines, the occasional jumble of go-kart and minibike parts, and other sequelae of hobby enthusiasm gone amuck, all long abandoned, all radiating slowly outward from the house in an ever-expanding pool like an oil slick.

Except this property was clean and neat and kind of enchanting. The parking lot was swept, small structures of neat carpentry stood nearby. Even the ancient automobile bodies look scrubbed.

This was the surrounding ground of The Integratron, which the signs there began to instruct us.

There were neatly carpentered benches, a wall of clean chalkboard with large cylinders of chalk waiting below, and a full length mirror displaying the picture of you over the words You Are Here. There was a cluster of hammocks beneath a gauzy shade, and free standing outbuildings in warm colors.

At the far end of the property was The Integratron itself. It looks like an observatory, about 60 feet high, a big white dome colored a metallic-looking white but in fact built of plywood and other non-magnetic materials. This you learn when you see the pictures of it under construction in the check-in office beside it. 

What you also learn, reader--something I’ll wager you didn’t know but not many people do in this age of distraction and ignorance of our heritage. What you also learn is that the Integratron was one of the first places on earth we made contact with the wisdom of other planets. Since then, owing to its highly unique resonance and geological anomalies, it has served as a place of cellular rejuvenation and the first stop in anyone’s education wishing to prolong life indefinitely.

Again, reader, please don’t reproach yourself for not knowing this; it’s rather poorly known, for whatever reason.

This contact, I might as well tell you, was made between an aerospace engineer from California in 1953, and a Venusian man who was dressed in a very dapper one-piece gray body suit. The Venusian, whose name was Solganda, told the engineer, whose name was George Van Tassle, how to construct a building that would extend human life and enable time travel. It would do a lot of other things, but unfortunately Van Tassle died before getting it finished. Three sisters bought it 14 years ago and now it’s a tourist attraction and—if you can believe this—recording venue for musicians.

We entered, on the ground floor, removed our shoes, underwent ritual purification, endured a body search—actually I made the last two up. But it did have the feeling of a preparation to enter holy space, with its formal ablutions and suppression of hilarity. We went upstairs. There were sleeping mats laid on the floor, and a series of bowl-looking things at one end of the room. Signs asked us to not touch them, though we never thought of doing so until we weren’t allowed. We lay down. A man began speaking.

I have no doubt he spoke English. But what he actually said I have no idea. He talked about this location being at the intersection of three rivers beneath the earth’s surface; and about how the height of the building is a number the reverse of which is the exact coefficient of pi at sea level. He spoke of the 17 rafters in the ceiling and their cosmic meaning. He spoke of cosmic meaning of every last joint, and why it was titanically significant. The room was a superb place for the “sound bath” he was about to perpetrate upon us, and we should be prepared to experience, in sound, the exact vibrational level that was known to rejuvenate human cells. It was all very mystical and numerological and, if you ask me, more than a little psychotic. Yet it stands to reason that earthlings like myself won’t understand these things.

After he had professed this incoherent scripture for 15 minutes, he began—I think he got a signal from someone in the audience—to bow his bowls, and the meat of the experience was arrived at last. These were quartz bowls, and when rubbed with a bow, made a rich and interesting sound. We lay back and closed our eyes, and the capsule-like room that had been built with the help of Venusians resonated with warm tones. The notes were full, disarming, relaxing, sustained as long as the gusts of wind and steady as the rock that produced them. I think I dozed off for a while.

The thing wore on for about twenty minutes and I cannot say that it—the sound bath/cellular rejuvenation/electrostatic irradiation—was unpleasant. I didn’t snore and I didn’t laugh, and when the whole thing was finished we wandered out further into the desert among the scattered properties and scattered lives, and looked for somewhere to eat.

Fragment From a Voyage

We set out from San Pedro with a boatload of Boy Scouts, and things went according to plan: Up to Smugglers Cove on Santa Cruz during the day, around to Painted Cave next morning, back down the other side in the afternoon. Nearing evening, we heard a distress call coming from our intended anchorage. A boat had gone up on the beach and the skipper was frantically calling for help. His words were poorly differentiated but his tone sang through. Panic. No one, he would have acknowledged in a calmer moment, could have appeared suddenly by his side, on an island 30 miles at sea, at least an hour from the nearest tow boat, to stop his sailboat from grounding higher on the beach with every breaker. After 10 minutes of shouting to the Coast Guard, he had established that he and a crewmate were safe on the beach, but their sailboat was grinding away in the surf, hard aground.

By this time we were opening the cove in question, a 100 foot line of sand bookended by tumbled falls of boulders, with the suggestion of a widening of the beach behind this landing. It was in fact an attractive place for cruising sailboaters, who liked to anchor there close enough inshore to relish the secret, empty beach. The first mate peered through the binoculars and at last saw the boat, a big cruiser whose distant mast swayed lazily in the swell. He didn’t see the former occupants, but they saw us. The frantic voice haled us soon after we radioed the Coast Guard of our proximity and readiness to help.

“Are you the big white sailboat a couple hundred yards out?” he said. The relief was already coming into his voice. “Thank god.”

Our inflatable boat was speeding shoreward.

“Are you able to bring the others aboard from the beach?” the Coast Guard asked.

We were.

“Are you able to carry out these operations without risk to yourself or your vessel?”

We believed so.

We came to anchor.  The next half hour we spent relaying information from the beached boat to the Coast Guard as the beached captain had only a handheld radio. We gave the vital information the Coast Guard always gets in cases like this, and then stood by for further need. Though our inflatable boat had stayed near the two men on the beach, eventually we recalled him when it was clear that rescue boats were on the way.

Meantime the scouts had gone swimming off the boat. And while they swam, and leapt, and swung from the tacks, we observed while the rescue boat from Santa Barbara arrived, and discussed with the stranded owner the cost of the salvage—as it was by now a salvage operation and not a simple tow—and then labored mightily with his 400 horses to drag a 10 ton boat off the sand. It was a tricky job as the tide was now falling and the next chance would be more than 24 hours away. But at last he succeeded, a cheer went up from the deck of the Exy Johnson, and tower and towed set off for home. For a moment before they left, a group of adults met at our bow to watch the goodbye, and to bid farewell to the little train. But also to possibly fend it off as it floated close.

Exy Johnson at Santa Cruz Island

The scouts, who had encircled the boat with all manner of aquatic capers, and mounted upon unsteady kayaks to search for distant caves, now slowly returned aboard. The tacks were brought in and restored to their rightful duties, likewise the rescue rings and floating lines. The galley, already warm, heated up to business strength, and dinner loomed ever closer. The first mate took the deck, and afterwards reported that we had received a thank you from the Coast Guard.

Next morning we weighed at eight and were out of soundings before breakfast was clear, turning 2000 and steering for Isthmus Cove on Catalina. At 1330, the breeze finally stirring the ensign, the squares all came up and the main went down. Our speed dropped from six to under four, though it rose again as the day waned. We had never dropped the main while running downwind and it came off well, the agile deckhand tip-toeing forward on the boom guiding down the sail and the scouts folding it there as neatly as they rolled their neckerchiefs. 

But I fear that with so much sailing talk the sensory parts of the thing, the memorable parts--the smell of jasmine, the barking of sea lions, the white crash of breakers on rocks, the peachy creamy morning of a deserted island cove—might be left unnoticed. To show a fair picture of our lives, this will not do. So then, be it known:

On the approach to these islands, they never simply appear. Rather, at some perfunctory point, oh, they are there. They are a less vivid brightness against the horizon, a pale outline between the sea and sky, a looming, a species of cloud. Many hours pass between first awareness of them and the first meaningful assessment. After a long time in the back of consciousness, thoughts turn at last away from the stowage of deck stuff and overhauling the ground tackle, and, once again, to them, to those sudden great presences-out-of-nothingness. Now regions of color are discernible, tan fields of sun-baked island grass, brown ledges of igneous rock, and lighter brown cliffs reaching straight upward from the ocean. Withal there is now a heaviness to the view in that direction, a heavy stolidity to what before was empty as ether.

Moving closer you begin to feel the mass of the land, like an object of gravity in blank space. Now the froth and cream of surf appears as a changeable white line at the bottom. Boulders of blue-gray jut up from the surf. Seabirds wheel above the worried shores, darting in and out among the wet boulders. Browner tufts of scrub bushes and trees populate the hillsides, with here and there a scar of ripped earth where a crag or promontory fell anciently into the sea. The outline of the land describes a sudden, thrusting aspiration skyward from the ocean, and among the sea caves at water level you hear the roar of crashing currents against the rocks and the voices of seals.

The Drumming Life

I've really suffered no lingering effects from being a drummer.

Eh?

WHAT?

You'll have to talk louder if you expect me to hear you. I was saying I've suffered no lingering effects from being a drummer most of my natural life - though it's pretty weird seeing "drummer" and "natural life" there in the same sentence like that.

The truth is, I was a drummer for many years and I'm here to tell you that all that stuff you've heard about drummers being users of major hallucinogenic drugs is pure baloney. In fact it's a GIANT CHARTREUSE BALONEY, and it's humming "Somewhere Over the Rainbow"!

Drummers are just a little offbeat, that's all. This is because the constant subdividing of time actually severs the brain fibers by which one thought is linked to another, with the result that drummers are very good at misunderstanding everything in great detail.

You folks who have some connection to drummers, such as a parent-child or other professional relationship, know what I mean.

And you know the next thing I'll say about drummers - the most salient and important thing that you could all just scream out in unison: Drummers must tap on everything! (All heads nod rapidly.)

There is no object in the world, anywhere, any time, that will not be drummed upon by a drummer, if it can be reached. There is no object, however rough, ugly, moldy or covered with insect carcasses, that will not be given at least and experimental roll in passing, if not a full-blown Carl Palmer solo

with two-minute bass drum roll and gong hammering.

And you know how this can lead to trouble, such as when your drummer goes to church, and all heads are bowed, and a persistent noise begins to fill the silence, emanating from your bench.

"What is that?"

"What is what?"

"That tapping."

"Tapping? That just happens to be 'Channel One Suite' by Buddy Rich!

"Well stop it!"

"But I'm not even to the cymbal work."

Yes, it gets annoying. But, looked at another way, it's at least excusable: Drumming is a drummer's basic mode of interaction with the world. Newton saw a world of mass and velocity, Einstein of light and energy. But drummers know the world only as rhythm and tone. Freud showed us the personality consisting of Id, Ego and Superego. In drummers there is a fourth component: walking bass.

In the long run I suppose that drummers are more than offbeat. Maybe through their constant tapping they're trying to syncopate with the Rhythm that holds us all together. Maybe, deep down, they hope we'll all get in touch with the same beat. There are worse hopes, it seems to me.

(Tappitta tap tap tap...)

The Fighting Shy Rules of Stuff

1. The acquisition of stuff must be monitored with vigilance, and whenever possible avoided.
2. It is perfectly acceptable, and better than acceptable, to diminish your load of stuff periodically. 
3. You usually don’t need to buy something to solve a problem. This statement is necessary as thoughts of buying are almost a reflexive reaction to any new problem faced in daily life, whether a rusty chain (buy some oil) or a fresh new anxiety (pay a therapist).
4. The urge to buy can usually be satisfied through circumvention, through making the thing wanted, for example, or renovating an old one, or borrowing one, or finding a lay alternative, rather than by buying new. The desire for a particular experience is often construed in the imagination as a desire to buy, probably because buying a thing, for so long associated with enjoyment of the thing by preceding it, has come to be imagined as the enjoyment itself.
5. Yet, with very few exceptions, the enjoyment of new acquisition soon wears off, and the soul returns to the humdrum quotidian.
6. The price of an object seldom includes—as it should when making the purchase decision--the cost of storing the item for years, the commensurate loss of living space, the psychological toll of schlepping it around, the embarrassment of seeing it sit idle, the worry of finding a big enough place to hold it, and others that should be obvious to the reader.
7. The accumulation of many possessions diminishes the appreciation of few. One faces a choice: Many and worse or fewer and better.
   
8. Love of less can be cultivated, is nobler in spirit, and cheaper.
9. In modern life, very few tools—very few tools—are truly necessary to perform the tasks of daily living. What tools are not possessed can often be improvised.
10. A borrowed item is a more efficient item, as because it is used by more users it is more often used.
11. A truly needed and not-to-be-borrowed item can be purchased with others and shared in a group.
12. The concept of private property is not considerably diminished by the loss of exclusivity. That is to say, you don’t lose possession of something because others get to use it. It is no less your possession simply because you have lost the exclusive use of it.

 Conclusion: The theory of private property is a powerful, a civilized, and a not-to-mention necessary idea. But it can be taken too far.

More Tips for Happy Living

The Way of the Superior Man, A Spiritual Guide to Mastering the Challenges of Women, Work, and Sexual Desire 

By David Deida 

Debates will never end about what’s right behavior in love. Answers will always be contested, proposals always countered, disagreements always rise. But it always helps if when you fight you sound like a new-age troubadour. 

Here we have The Way of the Superior Man, A Spiritual Guide to Mastering the Challenges of Women, Work, and Sexual Desire, talking about What Women Want in a way that would lead to violence at cocktail parties. You know the talk: When women say this they really mean that. You want to respond to her this way but you should really respond that. Dangerously general statements, you see. But because they sound so Jungian and mytho-poetic here, they seem to work. They seem to get away with it. Thus: 

“A man shouldn't tolerate bitchy and complaining moodiness in his woman, but he should serve her and love her with every ounce of his skill and perseverance. Then, if she cannot or will not open in love, he might decide to end his relationship with her, harboring no anger or resentment.” 

Or: 

“The feminine is the force of life. The more masculine a man is, the more  his woman's feminine energy (as opposed to other qualities) will be important to him.” 

Because I am long out of school and far past concern for logical rigor I will skip the griping, and only say what I often say in cases like this: These ideas are interesting whether or not they are true. Meanwhile they might be fun to try. 

Know your facts, then distort 'em as you please

Random notes on Bill Bryson.

Bryson manages to be suspenseful and desultory at the same time, something not many thoughtful people would ever strive for. He relates the history of a certain common home feature—quite rivetting in the telling, actually--by first emphasizing the strange niche in his hallway wall, a niche clearly not part of the original house, because the object it was designed to hold did not exist in 1765. We don’t learn he’s talking about the telephone until many pages later, after the suspense has gotten heavy.

Then we turn to Alexander Graham Bell and his odd story, and then to his assistant Thomas Watson, and his even odder story, and then to the reason why Bell didn’t have his invention stolen from him by his competitors, as happened so often, and then how the telephone was designed, and then why there are letters on the dial, and so on. There is apparently no guiding principle at work, but a smoothness in segueing between nuggets of interest. In some cases there is not the faintest causal connection between his contiguities. There is danger in this, of course. One is led almost to infer a chain of causality from the the chain of events, as if the events actually unfolded in the order Bryson relates, and not the order he has chosen to enliven his story.

I have caught Bryson in some stretchers. In The Lost Continent, an account of his driving tour of America, in the section where he visited Philadelphia, he threw down scorn about the place that stood out in a book already wretched with it. He was describing the block in town that had been consecrated to the memory of Franklin—a section of Market Street, where Franklin’s old print shop still stands, and where the outline of his house, long since demolished, has been rendered in tubular steel. Almost every tourist in Philadelphia visits the place. There’s a museum devoted to Franklin there, and a Post Office that still handles mail, where Franklin’s signature forms the cancellation mark. That’s where he said he was, anyway. The problem was, he was describing Franklin Square, a rundown and derelict old square several blocks away, where the west end of the massive Benjamin Franklin Bridge comes to earth, and where weeds grow, and debris drifts, and a general air of abandonment and decay makes this the least congenial spot in Old City. Whether he knew he was in the wrong place or not is a good question. It makes the difference whether we should call him a fibber or just plain dense. In any event he did not concern himself to learn why, in a place where it was advertised he would find a museum, a print shop and a post office, he found only trash and desolation. Only very accomplished writers have this kind of privilege.

And Those Who Study History Are Doomed to Misconstrue It

  
How Should We Live?: Great Ideas from the Past for Everyday Life
 

by Roman Krznaric

It’s tempting to say—so I’ll go ahead and say it—that this is one of the first bold thrusts of a no-doubt-soon-to-be-popular kind of thinking, and we shouldn’t carp that it grows straight out of self-help literature. I’m talking about “lifestyle philosophy,” the attempt to find a way of living, though it be unconventional, that maximizes personal fulfillment and remains friendly to the planet.

Lifestyle philosophers—god forgive my language—lifestyle philosophers go beyond your typical self-help fare—remain positive, work and play well with others, exercise frequently—to question why we might wish to follow this advice—to ask, indeed, if it be the best advice after all.

A lifestyle philosopher is willing to question certain always-unquestioned premises—more is better, easier is better, faster is better, a rewarding job is naturally the best way to spend one’s life, entertainment is the best recreation—and, after a gentle tap with a hammer, knock them to the ground. Lifestyle philosophy promises the twilight for some very popular idols--if anyone takes it seriously. And it is not stamped out by the police.

So you will find nowhere a list of bullet points saying smell this or eat that. Or reach your target weight by June. Or smile as you claw your way to the top. Instead you will find discussion, always interesting though sometimes off track, that serves as prelude to the hints he offers for living a richer life. The suggestions he offers, I have no doubt, will provide a rich trove of new possibilities to those unsatisfied with their current lot, and will no doubt go down in the annals of lifestyle philosophy when such annals come to be written. (I suggest writing them in pencil.)

To name a few:

•    Try to lessen the “tyranny of the eye,” and develop the other senses. This will bring a fuller love of that ambrosia of life we so often quaff without tasting.

•    Carefully evaluate the place of market activities in your life, including paid employment. We all believe that time is money, that time is wasted if not exchanged for some improving medium, such as cash. At least we act as if we do. But this concept has captured us only very recently. Before the Industrial Revolution self improvement had nothing to do with labor, or money accrued. Perhaps a better quality of life is available to those who search this question.

•    Give your traveling a deliberate meaning. Don’t be in thrall to your guidebook. Travel in the guise of a nomad, a pilgrim, an explorer. Krznaric offers suggestions how to do this,  but the baseline intention is to add a spiritual component to your journeys.

“We ought to spend time travelling, giving ourselves enough headspace for contemplation and going at a sufficiently slow pace to appreciate the beauties and sorrows of the landscape, whether it is a mountain range or an inner-city slum. Forget the car: put on some straw sandals and start walking under an open sky.”

•    Be brave enough to challenge your beliefs. As Nietzsche said, it’s nothing to have the courage of your convictions; what takes courage is to attack your convictions—an edict this book clearly takes to heart.

•    Reject the social norms and develop your own perspective on the art of living.

•    Find satisfaction in doing more things for yourself. In other words, be creative where you can. Cooking, for example, is a great channel of creativity and a means of self expression. And it hasn’t been taken out of the individual’s hands by an industry.

“Creativity does not require the bestowal or inheritance of genius. Above all it requires the self-confidence to believe that we are capable of finding ways to express our uniqueness.”

•    Bring the shrouded aspects of life—in other words, death—into the light of day. Why can’t funerals be as creative as marriages? Why can’t we develop our own rituals of death to substitute for the festival approach to death that is now in steep decline?

It’s not difficult to range Krznaric’s book among others Instructions For a Happier Life. The difference is, he claims history as his justification. And I’m not sure it works.

I am all in favor of sleuthing out how civilization has stolen a person’s means, and eventually his desire, for expression. Commerce has co-opted the creative. Singing in public is now rarely done except before a karaoke machine. The creativity once exhibited at Halloween within living memory been replaced by a shopping opportunity. But how history can justify personal behavioral changes--how vast chronicles of the political and military movements of a people can suggest one small twitch for modification—goes beyond me. One might as well say history justifies dumping sewage in streams

Nevertheless, Krznaric is onto something big. He has opened some big questions it behooves all of us to ask. How many of our social conventions disrupt the quality of our lives? How much of what we’re taught isn’t true? Can we reject these unquestioned conventions and live better? Most important, he has rescued history from inclusion in that squash-all-debate refrain about how, no matter how awful it is now, in the past it was worse.

As Krznaric shows, it often wasn’t. For that we owe him a lot.

Manly Men Doping Around

The Sea Wolf by Jack London

I like Jack London. I really do. But sometimes you gotta wish he paid closer attention to what he was doing.

The Sea Wolf is supposed to be a sea tale, a kind of Moby Dick with the focus on Ahab. And it works, to a point. To a very limited point. This Ahab happens to be "materialist," in the language of the early 20th century--meaning he doesn't care much for deep thought and sentiment and stuff that can't be measured. If Ayn Rand had been to sea she might have come up with this character, Wolf Larsen. As it is, he's disjointed composite of Howard Roark, Gordon Gecko and a poor understanding of Nietzsche's superman. He takes what he can get, kills when he can, cares nothing for convention, for morals, for "sentiment," as he calls it. He is strong and intelligent.

We meet him after the narrator, a literary critic named Humphrey, falls off a ferry and gets rescued by him in his seal-hunting schooner, the Ghost. Of course, a man like Wolf Larsen probably wouldn't rescue anyone just to save a life, but he needs a foil, someone to banter with. Humphrey provides that.

I won't go further with the plot, except to say it is as unbelievable as any you will ever see. I would rather talk about London's peculiar style in this work. Somebody needs to.

There is hardly a page in The Sea Wolf where the author does not botch a decent effect by undermining it with some contrary idea a little later. There is hardly a page where a good description is not negated later by a poorly chosen and mitigating word. I call it inattention.

In Chapter 9, for example, we are told that Mugridge, the Cockney cook, is a coward, shortly later that he is brave. His was “the courage of cowardice,” I kid you not. His intimidation of Humphrey by sharpening a kitchen knife in his presence is "ludicrous"—until a few lines later when it is "serious". He is far too timid to actually use the knife, but this very timidity might prompt him to do it. A paragraph later, when he stabs another man rather than Humphrey, who had been the object of his wrath, his face is livid with fear and so he becomes—I am not making this up—domineering and exultant.

“The psychology of it is sadly tangled,” Humphrey tells us, “and yet I could read the workings of his mind as clearly as though it were a printed book.”

Possibly. But if so, he is the only one.

At one point in Chapter 12, several men are chasing Mugridge so they might seize him up and tow him behind the ship. Mugridge resists by running away. He had little stomach for a dip, we are told, “as the water was frightfully cold, and his was anything but a rugged constitution.” Two lines later he is flashing along the deck with a “nimbleness and speed we did not dream he possessed.”

There then takes place a bit of stage business that demonstrates Mugridge’s agility, though not in the way London probably hoped. Mugridge is being chased by one Harrison, and is springing like a cat to the tops of cabins, shinnying down scuttles, racing through rigging, and in all ways moving like a young and agile ape, to avoid being thrown in the water. Harrison is “at his heels and gaining on him.” Then:

“Mugridge, leaping suddenly, caught the jib-boom-lift. It happened in an instant. Holding his weight by his arms, and in mid-air doubling his body at the hips, he let fly with both feet. The oncoming Harrison caught the kick squarely in the pit of the stomach, groaned involuntarily, and doubled up and sank backward to the deck.”

Now I am as credulous as any reader, but in this case I must crave an explanation for how a man being frantically chased can suddenly grab hold of a line above his head, double at the hips, and kick the man behind him in the stomach. I have run through this action many times in my imagination and can only conclude that 1. Mugridge was a contortionist and could double himself backward or 2. London was eager to finish writing for the day and get drinking.

And as for Harrison groaning involuntarily, well, yes, I imagine he did. I am certain it was involuntary and I’m certain it was more than a groan—more like a bark or a grunt or a shriek—some expostulation more urgent than a groan and entirely beyond the groan category. It was a sound that was punched out of Harrison, kicked out of him, not squshed by slow pressure as a groan would have been. I also don’t wonder that Harrison “doubled up and sank backward” after being kicked in the stomach, though people in that situation more often fly backward than sink. Let that pass. This is a story thick with unusual characters exhibiting unusual behavior. Perhaps this is the proper way to behave aboard the Ghost.

There are many more examples, but we need not continue. I’ll only say I’m glad there is plenty more of London's writing to represent the man. If this were all he would never have gotten out of Oakland.

An End to All Your Worries

This week, a new feature: Ask Cosmopolitan Magazine.

Dear Cosmopolitan Magazine: I'm an independent young woman trying to be more sociable. I don't know much about your magazine except that it contains many photographs of extremely beautiful couples who appear to be about to have sex, so I thought you might have some advice. – Unsure

Dear Unsure: We have all kinds of advice for you. We publish 12 issues a year of advice just for you, dear, sweet, upwardly mobile but still insecure Cosmo Girl. Please refer to our special 21-page section in the May issue, called "Understanding Men," which contains such interesting articles as "The Joy of Polarity Sex," which does not involve electrical sockets no matter what it sounds like.

Also read articles such as "The Mysterious Male Ego (Yes, it's Big)," wherein we give you many examples of women having trouble making their men function properly because they, um, because they - well, it's not clear why, but you'll love the snappy graphics.

Also please find the article wherein we discuss the four male personality types - Bad Boy, Good Guy, Brainy Man and Sexy Hunk - based on the four celebrities we happened to have pictures of this month, including, if can believe this, Microsoft President Bill Gates.

This should clear up any insecurities you may have and replace them with entirely new ones.

Dear Cosmo: I'm looking for a way to spruce up my appearance. Any tips? -Feeling Drab

Dear Drab: Fashion and appearance tips are a crucial part of our monthly fare. Any time you need inspiration, please consult our cover photograph, which every month features a beautiful woman constructed mostly of petrochemical products.

Environmental tip: Many of the beauty products advertised in our pages may also be used in home renovation.

For those on a budget: You can save money on fragrances by rubbing the magazine directly against your chest.

Dear Cosmo: What is the biggest challenge to you as a magazine? - Curious

Dear Curious: I would say it's finding two or three hundred different ways to run the same story about breaking up.

Dear Cosmo: What is the most bizarre insecurity you can find to write a story about? - Still Curious

Dear Still Curious: This month it would be the story about dealing with jealous bridesmaids on your wedding day.

Question: What about bizarre advice?

Answer: That would have to be the story on page 166 about how to faint in moments of high emotional drama. This article cautions, however, that you shouldn't attempt to fake faint unless you've practiced at home on a rug.

Question: How many subscriptions did you say you sell?

Answer: So many it's scary, friend.

How to Speak Good

Greetings English speakers! Today we'll talk about getting orientated toward language, so that next chance you get you'll speak real good in public and absolutely wheeze all kinda class and refinement, and have a positive impact (KABOOM!) on your listeners.

It's very important to speak good, when speaking to others. Fluency in speech confers upon the speaker a sense of education, earnestness, sobriety--a sense that this person actually paid attention in English class, and is therefore probably a starchy little weasel-eyed prig.

If you get beat up because of this, speaking clearly on the phone to the ambulance people will increase your chance of getting quick medical care. So. A few points and pointers for effective speaking in public:

When speaking to another person, it's important to use correct word forms--and we're not talking about just in public but anywheres. You should use the proper word forms irregardless of what your friends say. Hopefully, you'll also use correct grammar, not just any old grammar laying around. 
In constructing your sentences, try not to be redundant, saying the same thing twice or even three times, thus repeating yourself over and over and over again.

Use words that have some legitimate history of use in the English language, and not words you've completely made up, such as "tribiculate."
 
(To "tribiculate" is to write on something using three ballpoint pens.)

While we're on the subject, do not use other words you've made up, such as:

- Wieroin. (noun. A kind of weathervane.)

- Nastacular. (adj. Un-amazing, un-excellent. Vehemently ordinary. Used to describe disappointing events, events which did not live up to their advance press, such as national elections.)

- Spondacious. (adj. Delightful, delicious, often used to describe ice cream.)

- Elgoto. (A Peruvian hotel chain.)

Also, don't use words people think you've made up but didn't, such as:

- Conglobatio. (adj. Gathering into a globe or ball.)

- Callipygian. (adj. Having shapely buttocks.)

When delivering a public address, follow this procedure. First, get the attention of your audience somehow, either by clearing your throat, or by holding your breath and making your eyes go white like Li'l Orphan Annie, or by shaking your (callipygian) behind around, or by holding up a large automatic weapon. Then, wait a judicious interval. (A judicious interval is the space between Jewish people.) 

Then, speak forcefully, in a resonant (full of resin) voice, building your arguments carefully, pre-empting objections, covering the premises thoroughly, and arriving at your point with that strong, reverberant, elephantine certainty which signals that this speaker, indeed, has taken the audience in his hand, and made them go to sleep.

While they're dozing, take their wallets. 

One last point on speaking to others. Remember the old saying: You have two ears and only one mouth. What does that say about the ratio of talking to listening? 

Of course. You've got to talk twice as much as anyone wants to hear.

Virginia City

Now it’s true the place looks the part--both exactly as you’d expect and startling.

As you arrive over the last little swale into the mountain town, 1875 is suddenly spread out before you, like a late chromo of Currier and Ives, if Currier and Ives had been western prospectors: Long wooden sidewalks, their planks athwart the now-invisible muddy trenches, covered with sloping roofs to make a long colonnade down both sides of the street. Big airy rooms inside grand picture windows, with high patterned ceilings and chandeliers of tinted glass, a flamboyant saloon every 50 running feet, gaudy storefronts emblazoned in the grandiose lettering of the gold rush.

And it’s true you get howdy’s from folks in the street, from folks who probably have a right to say howdy, and wear cowboy hats and dungarees, though stricter gun laws won’t allow the revolver at the side, which would complete the picture. And, oh yes, it’s true that Virginia City plays the part of the wild west mining town, wild in action and wild in speculation, the greatest American boom town of the 1870s, to perfection for the tourists.

But a great deal remains unexplained.

Lookit. Here’s a town lodged high on a mountainside, away above the clouds, like Machu Picchu or Shangri-La, connected to the outside world by a couple of steep grades almost useless in the winter, occupying its own atmosphere. It’s one of those places where the meridians cross or the vibrations resonate or the chakras align, or however you might want to account for the fact that people arrive here and their eyes go wide and they settle down in an old shack or a hut and go to work in the library and depart nevermore.

Perfect example: Diamond Jim, manning the Visitor Center desk most days of the week, came here after a double homicide next door in Stockton California persuaded him it was time to leave. Ditto Terry down at the Silver Queen Hotel, who also came from California but without a double murder for persuasion.

Something cozy, something close. Like the wooden sidewalks and their covering of roofs. Or the narrowness of the street. Or the compactness of the locale, its size constrained by the rakish angle of the earth at this spot. Or the isolation of being alone on a mountainside with the world far below, the all-for-one-and-one-for-all of an exclusive commonwealth whose membership requirement is only that pair of wide eyes.

Oh yes, there is history. One of the great silver strikes of the world took place on this spot, the Comstock Lode, discovered in 1859 and not entirely mined out yet. Remember the Hearsts, as in William Randolph? That fortune started here. Ever heard of San Francisco? The money made here largely built it, and then rebuilt it after the earthquake. Do you know the state of Nevada? Statehood arrived soon after Virginia opened its first saloon, and largely because of the money here.

And there is fame, yes, there is fame. Step right up to the curb in the Crystal Bar saloon and view the tourist brochures mounted on the very wood where George Hearst, Dan DeQuille, Joe Goodman and Sam Clemens all contemplated the first happy drinks of the evening. Across the street is the office of the Territorial Enterprise, at one time the most influential paper in the west, where most of these gentlemen worked. Clemens devoted a big part of a later book to life in boomtown Virginia in the early 60s, when mining shares were trading like quarters and a chance encounter in the street could make you rich.

But the place has other sorts of appeal.

In the current office of the Territorial Enterprise, for example, you will find scaling the north wall a pair of parallel panels and the remnants of a pulley system. These are all that is left of the dumb waiter that for many years moved copy, printing plates, galley proofs, and probably whiskey among the three floors of the building. The foot of this dumb waiter resides in the basement, among artifacts of the small Mark Twain museum and the ancient printing press, still anchored like grim death in the bedrock of the basement floor.

It is this dumb waiter that lets all the ghosts in.

Ghosts, spirits, phantomlike entities, ectoplasmic exhalations, whatever you might want to call them, and whatever might be their provenance: Ghosts invest the town as thoroughly as any deluge of tourists. It is thought—at least by the ghost hunter TV shows that have made this place a favorite—that the dumb waiter is their portal.

Well, for some of them, perhaps. It depends what kind of ghosts you’re talking about. Clearly the portal would be handy for the dozens of miners still lying in the 750 miles of mine tunnel beneath the town. But you must assume that many of the ghosts, like their living co-inhabitants, just found a place in town they liked and settled down.

The Washoe Club, the most haunted place in town, during the silver boom the home of the Millionaires Club, now boasts a museum devoted to many of the ghosts who apparently do not commute from below but who live in the building year round. The ghost of the prostitute in the Silver Queen Hotel clearly needs no portal from the underworld, but can remain cozy and ensconced in the room where she killed herself, and never trouble to leave the building.

None of the spirits in the Washoe Club travel so very far outside their domain, though they do remain quiet for long periods. Perhaps the museum now devoted to them gratifies their ghostly egos enough that they need not stir nor rattle nor shake but for part of the year, and can kick back all the rest of it.

Spirits or humans, ectoplasm or protoplasm, long-term resident or recent arrival, there is an agreement here that life should pause for a while and progress no further. And so far it has kept the spirits of all worlds content.

A Tale of Heroism and Chili

Captain, on the quarterdeck: Well, shipmates, the time has come to tell you the full story of the recent dashing and heroic exploits that culminated, amid great throb and hubbub, in my glorious injuries last week. Sit back, for I shall recall for you such an exploit of courage and derring-do that you shall not soon regain your normal vision, probably.

Crew Member Na'eem: Oh, please, derring-don’t.

Captain: Why, it was at Isthmus Cove’s fair harbor we lay, the wind blowing strong from the fan, and all about us were the telltales of great disasters about to befall. We hove up our anchor, and she cast starboard toward the reef, The jibs rose with alacrity, and the--

Crewmember Lucia: Excuse me, Captain. Did you say we have more creamer? I couldn’t find any. I can’t even find the powdered stuff.

Captain: It’s in the galley refrigerator, the upstairs one. Look on the lower shelf. You might have to look under Captain John’s high fiber cereal.
Lucia: I’ll look again.

Captain: The jibs rose with alacrity, and perhaps also a fine powder of guano, and round she came, missing the reef by mere inches, her nose at last toward the open sea. Sail upon sail we piled upon her, with the breeze fresh on our--

Crewmember Jay: Pardon me, skipper, toilets in B are clogged again.

Captain: What? How can that be?

Jay: Dunno. Pump handle is stuck as a rod. I tried pumping it through but it got hard enough where the water starts to seep out around the hoses, like it did before it exploded on you last time, you remember?

Captain: Yes, I remember.

Crew Member Jay: So I quit that and put the sign up saying use the head in A. The head in A is getting a good workout this trip.

Captain: Well I hope not too much. That’s my favorite toilet, very peaceful in there.

Jay: I’ll keep an eye on it.

Captain: Well, so! With a fresh breeze on our quarter! Our boom was a-laying far out at port, with that breeze wafting us straight--straight, my friends--into the arms of danger! For as we exited that fair green harbor and she felt the first stirrings of the vast pacific beneath her, and the westerlies on our beam, our good ship—

First Mate Connie: Captain? The adult leaders want to land the trainees at Avalon at 5, but that’s not going to work if we want to serve dinner at 6. I figure it’ll take two hours to offload and onload the groups. Plus we don’t have nearly enough chicken salad.

Captain: What do you suggest?
 
Connie: Well, I’ve worked out a few possible scenarios and printed them out in full color using the printer I built from seine twine and old radio parts. Now you’ll see using the first method that we send the first group ashore right at 5, and they immediately deploy to the store for emergency chicken salad. Then they return to the boat while the second group--

Captain: Very good, very good. Do what you think is best, Connie. I cannot possibly come up with a better plan I am sure. Also I find that chicken salad is a strange and not-entirely-attractive concept to me just now. Please you take care of it and tell me what I have decided to do.

Connie: Aye aye!

Captain: And the, um, westerlies on our beam and…Oh yes, and as our fair ship felt the first stirrings of the vast Pacific beneath her keel, and there gloomed the dark, broad seas before as, and we smote the sounding furrows with our counter, then it was that--

Crewmember Eric: Captain? What do you say I mix in some chocolate with the chili we’re cooking?

Captain: Chocolate?

Eric: Chocolate deepens the meaty flavor of the chili while giving a strong base note to the peppers. They do this all the time in the south at chili-baking contests. Sometimes they--

 
Captain: Yes, Eric, yes, yes, yes, put whatever you like in the chili. Put in colyrium, and coriander, and tears of mastic, and unguents and fragrant balms. Throw in a couple pounds of horse radish and some vanilla extract. I know it will be delicious. Go now, Go with my blessing and we’ll meet at dinner and compare notes on our digestion.

Eric: Okay!

Captain: Smote the sounding furrows, and…and….our good ship—

Adult Leader: Captain, when do you think we’ll get back to port tomorrow? The kids want some time to go the candy store, and if there’s a chance they can sing karaoke at the Fish Market they’d like that too.

Captain: CONNIE! Please take over for me, I’m going below and not coming out until September.

Connie: Aye aye! 

 

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis

Michael Lewis somehow tells the huge story of a collapsing mortgage market--and all the related disasters we know too well--from the perspective of the dweebs, cranks and geniuses who saw it coming, and who profited from it. You can't call it a cautionary tale, because the author, like the reader, finds it too interesting, too outlandish, to moralize over. And it will no doubt happen again, the great boom, the confident knowledge of infinite increase, and the inevitable crash, in some other guise. It's gratifying that the good guys in this story, at least in Lewis's telling, are the ones who refused to join the rush and chose to believe their own eyes. In this age of stampede and chicanery, that's something worth moralizing about.




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Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War by Nathaniel Philbrick


Why is it hard to read this book, especially the second half?

Is it because it describes a bloody war between previously peaceful Indians and colonists, a war that sealed apparently forever the antagonism between the two races, and relegated native Americans to outsider status in their own land?

Yes. And because of the horrendous slow-motion details Philbrick provides of this war, and the convincing case he makes that it might not have happened this way. For emphasized by the author's excellent scholarship is the unmistakeable fact that Indians and colonists lived peaceably together for more than 50 years after the Pilgrims landed. That they eventually came to fight was not foreordained, unless the Anglo Saxon greed for land and the increase of one's material wealth really does shape destiny. Well, no doubt it does.

Americans owe it to themselves, at long last, to get some corrective for the Pilgrim history they learned in high school. For many this will be their first time seeing more deeply into native American character than the textbooks allow, and that depth will surprise them.


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Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before by Tony Horwitz

Let this wonderful book be your introduction to Captain Cook and the culture of love and vitriol surrounding him, even today. Cook was not an American, of course, and so there is nothing absolutely great he could have accomplished in the way of daring and understanding and prudence when exploring both poles and every latitude between on three unprecedented voyages. However, for an Englishman he did pretty well. He charted previously uncharted waters with a thoroughness and precision unmatched until the 20th century. He made friends with most of Polynesia, and opened lands as far-spread as Australia and Alaska to further European exploration, for better or worse. His story deserves to be better known, and what better time than the current age of historical counter-revisionism to know it. And who better than Tony Horwitz to tell it. Horwitz is such an engaging writer and storyteller it's a toss up whether his retelling of Cook's story, or his own modern travelogue and search for the real Cook, is more entertaining. Readers can't lose either way.



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