Fit Philosophy

THIS JANUARY...

2012-01-31T11:14:00.003-06:00

January's the month of award-announcements and presidential primary campaigning. The former are FAR more interesting, especially this year, I think you'll agree. This despite the fact that performers and reporters giving awards to one another is normally the among the most uninstructive of human activities. This year its not just the stupidity of the Republican political field that confers significance on media coverage, though. This year its the global character of the movies. Think about it. Movies are now just over a century old and they've become the only other artform besides music shared--or sharable--by every human. Then there's this, even better fact: two of the movies nominated for "best picture" of the past year are, first, an American film made in Paris about life there in the 1920s, and, second, a French film made in Hollywood about life there in the 1920s! The first is Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris;" the second is Michel Hazanavicius' "The Artist." In the first, literature is about to be transformed by the movies. In the second, movies are about to be transformed by becoming audible as well as visible. In both, the lead male characters oppose the changes they see taking place, then each finds a way of taking part in the transformations. Each of the writer-directors displays a certain nostalgia for "the way things were," as does everyone who survives at least into middle age. But both celebrate the core quality of the movie: literally making visible life-as-story. Now that everyone can "film" everything there's the appealing prospect of this development replacing all the old ways of telling ourselves stories about life, like religions. In fact, I think it's the threat of this replacement that fuels so much of the rage and fear displayed by so many, from evangelicals to islamists. Come to think of it, there are already some good movies about this...

DEBT & DEMOCRACY

2011-07-26T11:49:00.002-05:00

If you're like me, you feel despondent now, listening to the seemingly-endless Republican obstinacy aimed at destroying Obama's presidency. But consider: all this recrimination and defamation is playing out in public, verbally. As President Obama says, "It's politics." The point is, if it weren't verbal, it'd be physical. In other words, no society of humans can exist without conflict, of every sort. Interests, ambitions, fears, and needs all collide constantly. The best thing we can do is to create an order in which all these disputes are settled in public, by talking. Which we've done. The alternative to talking is stuff like you hear from Pakistan, or Zimbabwe, or China--or even Norway. So dealing with weeks or months of verbal assault, even from all the reactionaries presently in Congress--not to mention on Fox--is WAY better than the alternatives. Therefore be of good cheer. I'm trying too.

PS: I took the photo from Turn 10 while biking up Alpe d'Huez a couple of years ago, an experience I relived during the Tour de France last week...

What's to come...

2011-04-26T11:06:00.003-05:00

Last month well-known environmental author Bill McKibben discussed some books on current energy policy in the New York Review. In this month’s issue a retired physicist points out that the worldwide use of fossil fuels--petroleum, coal, methane--now approximates 10,000 million tons of oil [MTO] annually. At the present 2% average growth in fossil-fuel use per year worldwide, that total will reach 20,000 MTO in about 40 years. The estimated global total of fossil fuels is 770,000 MTO. So the finite supply of fossil fuels--forms of carbon buried more than 150M years--will be exhausted within 50 years. It’s easy to imagine the steep increases in costs as extraction becomes more difficult--many “oil spills” like the BP blowout in the Gulf of Mexico last year, for example--and the fighting over access to ever-more-remote or deep reserves. It strikes me that the current rancid and vicious politics--here and elsewhere--will seem a merely mild prelude to those levels of hostility. I'm picturing warfare at least as atrocious--if not as homoerotic--as that imagined by George Miller in his 1979 Mad Max, where the struggle, you may recall, was over an oil well. All this in my grandchildren’s lifetime...

Pleasures and Pains

2011-01-04T10:57:00.002-06:00

Filtered through the tall pines on the east side of Prentice Street, the early morning sunlight caught showers of snowflakes loosened from the pine needles by a brisk westerly breeze. My chin was chilled as I rode my commuter mountain bike south from the market toward the apartment, a fresh loaf of bread in my backpack ready to slice and toast for my breakfast. The air temperature was 10 degrees Fahrenheit, reduced to the single digits below zero by the day’s wind. My weight workout was more or less normal today, though I’m hampered by sacroiliitis: inflammation of the SI joint on my left side. I’m scheduled this afternoon for an injection to treat it. If it works as well as such treatments in the past, I’ll be relieved of the crippling pain that’s restricted my movement and training for the past three weeks. Fortunately, cycling doesn’t aggravate it, and cross-country skiing using classical technique--since it doesn’t require the same rotation and planting--is more comfortable than walking. So, despite the mysterious onset of the inflammation, I’ve managed just over 120kms of cross-country skiing since the season began with our big snowfall the weekend of December 12th. These are some of the pleasures of a winter climate and the pains of aging...

After Winter Solstice

2010-12-23T13:17:00.004-06:00

To make conversion as convenient as possible, early christians aimed to take over dates that were already holidays in the Roman calendar. So it is that christmas falls on the time of Saturnalia, the celebration of winter solstice. Even so, it was an obscure and barely acknowledged occasion until the 19th century, when it was romanticized into the homely and gift-exchange event that it's become. Nevertheless, in the spirit of renewal manifest when our sun, viewed from the northern hemisphere, reaches its lowest angle and the earth begins again to tilt southward, I send you my greetings and wish you all better nutrition and more exercise in the coming year. I leave you then with this thought:

Some wonder if the star of Bethlehem

Occurred when Jupiter and Saturn crossed;

It's comforting to look up from this earth

And know that, while all changes, nothing's lost.

I recollect that in antiquity

The winter solstice fell in Capricorn

And that, in the Orion Nebula,

From swirling gas, new stars are being born.

WHY THERE ARE SITCOMS

2010-12-19T11:46:00.002-06:00

The 06 December 2010 New Yorker contains a profile of the sitcom writer and producer Chuck Lorre, by Tom Bissell. In closing, Bissell offers the following analysis:

"Films...show us who we want to be, and literature shows us who we actually are. Sitcoms...show us people we might like to know. Because of this, the sitcom is a medium designed to reassure... Most sitcoms are about families, and, for the millions who watch a sitcom, it becomes a kind of mental family. Week after week, your couch faces the couch of characters you feel you know, characters whose problems can never quite get solved.

A lot of sitcoms are [about loneliness, alienation, and self-hatred]. To laugh at these things with our mental families may allow us to cope with out own loneliness, alienation, and self-hatred. It may be that the sitcom’s constant avoidance of any final, dramatic catharsis is its accidental strength. If so, that would make this least lifelike form of entertainment the most comfortingly similar to real life."

Of course, devoting yourself to such reassurance and comfort means not addressing your expectations, and so never confronting the source of all human conflicts and fears. Comedy bestows upon us all a kind of solidarity, but at the cost of any change. Happy new year...

EVENING AIR

2010-11-28T20:14:00.004-06:00

David Bromwich, writing in the 25 November issue of New York Review of Books, speculates that the U.S. is suffering the “southernization of American politics.” It’s been going on “since Richard Nixon in 1968” but has now become the substance (as it were) of daily and media life, represented by the reported “anger” of the far right. What are they angry about? The “loss” of “the America we grew up in.” Bromwich points out that one has to be over sixty to have grown up in an America noticeably “less chaotic” than the present, but that hasn’t prevented “the myth of the 50’s” remaining popular “ever since the 70’s”. So “southernization” is--in one convenient phrase--a compound of racism, “white fear,” fake nostalgia, and reaction against “the 60’s”. I think this is an insight.

I grew up in the America evidently fantasized by so many. (I graduated high school in 1953). It was already a “chaos” of McCarthyism, rabid anti-Communism, blacklisting, lynching, and even more open racism. And this is only a partial list. So the “50’s”--the idealization of the “man’s world” and “women’s place” and so on--was a fantasy even during the 50’s. The "ideals" were merely masks for exploitation. Maybe racism and a pervasive "victim" mentality were more pronounced in the South; Washington DC is a “southern” city, after all. In any case this masquerade has become our "government." None of this assuages my grief over the present, but it’s nice to have a theory.

I'm consoled by Theodore Roethke's lines, used as an epigraph by Aaron Copland:

I see in evening air

How slowly dark comes down on all we do...

2010-11-01T11:45:00.002-05:00

This sculpture by Beth Stichter (2009), in the Chazen Modern Art Museum on the University of Wisconsin campus, is called "Blood Rushes to the Head". Rather good pun, as well as an amusing take on all the talk about 'greater tolerance for diversity.' In the context of the widespread reaction that distorts American politics, I'm glad to see artists confronting the ambiguities of sexuality and the pious hypocrisy that so much of our media allow to dominate conversation. Eventually, all reaction fails, if only because all those people die off who pretend to be "conserving" the past. "Traditions" are largely pernicious, because they're invoked so often to perpetuate prejudices, biases, and unexamined assumptions. For instance, the coming demise of the position in American life that "white" people have occupied is fueling the reactionary politics of the "right" this mid-term election. Almost a century ago appeals to "purity" pushed an angry politician into power. His name was Adolf Hitler. I lived through what happened next. I hope I don't have to live through it again...

What's in a name...

2010-05-20T09:38:00.001-05:00

Chieri, in the Italy province of Liguria, was a textile manufacturing center in the 14^th century. There a heavy cotton fabric was developed to make trousers for sailors out of the nearby port of Genoa. Dye from the gualdo plant produced a distinctive blue that the French, when they began to manufacture their own version of the sailor’s pants, called bleu de Genes or “Genoa blue.” The English adopted the garb, pronouncing them “blue jeans.”

Loeb Strauss was born near Munich in 1829. His father sold clothing, and his son entered the trade. When Loeb was 24 he heard about the California Gold Rush and decided to emigrate. He took along several bolts of canvas which he intended to use for tents and wagon covers, but when he reached San Francisco he discovered that the miners in the fields to the north and east needed pants that would hold up in the gritty business of digging and panning for gold. So he made his cloth into work clothing. Under the impression that it made him sound more American, he had begun using “Levi” instead of “Loeb,”. His customers liked the sturdy pants, which they called “Levis,” but complained that they chafed.

So Strauss began importing a softer canvas twill made in France, called serge de Nimes.” Another tailor from Reno named Jacob Davis had begun buying material from Levi Strauss to manufacture Levis. To solve the problem of ripping seams that miners reported, Davis experimented with rivets at the corners of the pockets. Unable to afford to the cost of a patent application, Davis wrote to Strauss, offering to share his invention. Strauss agreed. On May 20, 1873, U.S. Patent No. 139,121 was issued for “Improvement in Fastening Pocket-Openings.” By this time the phrase serge de Nimes had been Anglicized to “denims.”

Another roadside story

2010-05-18T10:25:00.002-05:00

On a perfect spring afternoon, the air temp at 70F, I enjoyed a couple of hours of bike workout yesterday, including pushing into a stiff northeasterly breeze—15 knots or so—all the way to County K. Around mile 20 I turned south, so the was wind finally with me. I finished my final climb and turned west toward home.

Hammering along 9^th St around 28mph I passed a guy fishing in the irrigation canal, his car parked on the north side of the road. I didn’t see the filament of his fishing line until the sun caught it, perhaps a foot ahead and at chest level. I uttered a cry of dismay as I hurtled into it, hoping it wasn’t tipped with a big hook, which I could just picture ripping into my left arm and then tearing across my chest. Instead there was a quick thump as a lure of some sort struck me and bounced away. I stopped and rode back the hundred meters or so I’d traveled in the three or four seconds the whole episode had lasted. The fisherman was walking tentatively toward me, staying on the grass off the road, as if he expected me to ride into him with my bike. I said it was a risky thing to have done as he repeated apologies. I glanced at the end of the line in his hand, as he told me I hadn’t parted it; the line was tipped with what appeared to be a very small spoon. Good luck for me. Without discussing the matter with him, I surmised that his line had been blown back over his head and into the bushes on the south side by the strong northeasterlies.

As I headed on back again, no damage done, I thought of the surely thousands of men and boys, all over central Wisconsin, I’d passed fishing from the roadsides in ponds and streams, without ever once thinking that I might encounter one of their lines across the road, as I just had for the first time.

Nietzsche's News...

2010-05-15T09:15:00.005-05:00

The year I finished high school in Southern California, astronomer Edwin Hubble (1889-1953) died. Yes, the "Hubble" space-telescope is named after him. His working life was spent at Mt Wilson observatory in Pasadena, where he began his observations in 1919. In 1925 he published his discovery, made in the winter of 1922-1923, that comparisons of light-sources to "Cepheid variables" (look it up) proved there were thousands of galaxies outside the circumference of our own so-called "Milky Way" galaxies. Think of it. The first news that the Milky Way was not the "universe" arrived just ten years before I was born. And few believed it. Five years later, in fateful 1929, Hubble proved--this time using the principle of Doppler "redshift"--that all those galaxies were moving away from one another at millions of miles per second. This is the discovery that led to the "big bang" theory: not only does the universe consist of trillions of stars and galaxies, but they all originated somehow from a single "point". Even fewer were prepared to believe this. Nevertheless, both discoveries have become the established basis for our current science. And all this has happened virtually in my lifetime. No wonder so many people--the ignorant and the credulous--are still frightened and outraged by the fact that the entire fabric of religious cosmology has been destroyed. That's right; the source of much of the "anger" so widely chronicled is the well-founded fear that everything humans have believed--have wanted to believe--for thousands of years is false. There was an origin, but no creation; there will be an end, but no salvation. Personally, I've always experienced discovery and change as thrilling. But I'm not in the majority...

Listening to TV at the fitness center...

2010-05-07T09:36:00.001-05:00

Morning in America

What draws you to them at first is the nicknames
they have for each other and their little jokes, like
the remark the woman makes to her co-host
about his tie, then apologizes and even touches it
so she seems to more than like him, and why not,

he's handsome in a regular-guy, unthreatening
sort of way, and when they all come back
from a commercial, you almost wonder whether
the blonde who does the news might be a little
jealous, given how she keeps it up about the tie,

or maybe you think just for an instant, how is it
possible for him to watch her all dressed up in her
serious costume to read the news each morning
and not sometimes think of her "in that way,"
but when you happen to catch it the next morning,

she brings in pictures of her baby, and you say
wait a minute, she has a whole other life
off the set, this is a job and these people
are professionals, the newswoman herself,
for openers, reading right through the bad news

about all the shoppers who blew up in the open
market in Iraq and the shocking statistics about
obesity in the United States, unable no matter
how hard she tries to avoid a touch of sadness
on her face, as if what can she do besides continue

to be thin and appealing herself, which is when
you really appreciate the fat laughing guy
who does the weather because you can be serious
for just so long, and anyway there's always a silver
lining in every dark cloud, like he says, for instance

the ones hovering right here over the Midwest,
gesturing toward the cloud graphic spinning
into place, and even though everybody groans
over his corny joke including the ones behind
the camera you can't see, it sort of speaks

for the whole show, OK, the rock star can come on
to pitch her new CD but not without talking about
how she overcame depression and drug use,
and the man selling the book about his mother's
Alzheimer's has to explain how forgetting

who she was made them closer, since basically
this is all about helping you, looking in, deal with
whatever life throws at you, as the male co-host
puts it, turning between guests to his partner
while she nods thoughtfully under her hair, because

she doesn't really think of this as a job, she should be
paying the network, she says, not the other way around,
though right now they have to go to a commercial
again not just one, of course, but ten or fifteen,
the same old thing of models pretending

they are amazed housewives or sick husbands
or doctors in lab coats saying buy this,
buy that, so you can't wait to get back
to some human beings who care about each other
and about us, and who are who they really are.

--Wesley McNair, from Lovers of the Lost: New and Selected Poems. © David R. Godine, 2010.

Roadside attractions

2010-05-05T09:26:00.001-05:00

My bike workout yesterday afternoon proved interesting, not because of my hill-repeats on Sunset Drive but because of my chancing to return down N 2^ndSt and so happening upon the scene of an accident below the I-39 bridge. As I crested the rise I saw the pickup first, parked next to the northbound lane. Then I saw the people gathered along the bridgewall on my side of the road, looking north. Finally the lights of the emergency vehicles on the highway below came into view. I stopped. Crews were working to haul a small red sedan from the ditch, which seemed to be buried in the grass and mud. I assumed the car had left the highway, but the lane-edge markers were unscathed. I traced the tire-marks on the grass verge and, to my surprise, found them disappearing beneath the bridge. I crossed over to find that the car had left the pavement just before the end of the northbound on-ramp, flattened the large YIELD sign on its post, continued under the bridge on a severe slope, knocked down three saplings on the crest of a rise, become airborne, pancaked into the ditch some thirty to fifty feet further on—chewing a car-sized patch of grass into mud—then come to rest more than fifty meters along the ditch. I turned to the people I’d seen at first—the four of whom easily weighed more than half a ton—to ask if they’d seen the crash. “No,” one woman said, “we heard about it on the scanner.” Then I noticed the large walkie-talkie-like radio in her hand. “A 70-year-old woman driver,” she said, listening to the radio report, “taken by ambulance to Marshfield.” Speculation ensued, centering on a heart attack. The crash-route certainly suggested constant acceleration with no braking. I thanked them for their account, after listening to a rant about how few of the “1050s”—auto accidents involving occupant-injury, I gathered—get reported in the local paper, complete with details about two such incidents locally the previous Friday.

As I rode home I mused on the lives of such folk, who apparently spend their time at home eating while they listen for accidents to visit as spectators…

"Nothing recedes like success."

2010-04-07T11:05:00.010-05:00

That's a quote from Walter Winchell, the original gossip columnist. It's relevant to Tiger Wood's adultery-saga. Life runs through--because it emerges from--women. Men are acutely--even though mostly intuitively--aware that they therefore make a merely momentary contribution to the course of life. That moment defines a man's place in the biological process which ends, for each of us, in death. In other words, sex is more significant to a man's existence. Sex both guarantees human continuity and reveals the end. It's like a contest. Each time you play, you face losing. Every win recedes immediately into the past and you're faced the next time with the same prospect: you have everything to lose. Every man recognizes that everything is at stake for him in the moment. Only a few men have the nerve to confront this moment constantly. Most of us hedge the existential threat by locating ourselves in institutions--academies, corporations, families--which foster the illusion that our efforts abide and that therefore our lives will continue. The athlete--like the politician--is prepared to stake everything on the effort of the moment. It's a kind of heroism. That's why we like to watch it. And that's also why moments--like the expression of desire and arousal--can seem more important than all the institutional obligations and duties which you have accumulated in the vague social world. I say "vague" because, after all, it will disappear more or less instantaneously with my death. I saw an old video-clip recently from an interview with one of the women Woods was fucking. She is the widow of a man who was killed in one of the Towers on 9/11. In the interview she said, "I didn't kiss him goodbye, because I'd just put on my lipstick."...

2009-12-21T10:43:00.002-06:00

Here's an amusing poem, sort of for the season, don't you think? Whatever. Along with it, I send out my best wishes to all for an active and funny new year. As they say in Italian: Buono auguri!
The Loneliest Job in the World

As soon as you begin to ask the question, Who loves me?,
you are completely screwed, because
the next question is How Much?,

and then it is hundreds of hours later,
and you are still hunched over
your flowcharts and abacus,

trying to decide if you have gotten enough.
This is the loneliest job in the world:
to be an accountant of the heart.

It is late at night. You are by yourself,
and all around you, you can hear
the sounds of people moving

in and out of love,
pushing the turnstiles, putting
their coins in the slots,

paying the price which is asked,
which constantly changes.
No one knows why.

—Tony Hoagland, Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty

Aging well

2009-12-04T12:03:00.004-06:00

Almost every move is more deliberate now. I have to remind myself not to hold my breath against the effort or strain as I rise, reach, or bend. I regularly wonder what new limitations will appear, if I survive many more years. All this is true though I'm in excellent condition, still work out twice each day for a hour or more, and take no medications, save for the supplements glucosamine, calcium, and vitamin D. I've now been 28 months without an upper respiratory infection like a cold, or any other ailment (unless you count my knee replacement a year ago). My resting heartrate is 39 still, even though my aerobic zone is now only between 100 - 130bpm. So I'm in a tiny percentile of folks aging well, not because I'm not aging--as the above symptoms illustrate--but because I'm well. Which is to say, I stay fit. Of course, mental acuity is an ingredient in fitness, as well. I'll write about that next time. As for physical fitness, I'm aiming for "compressed morbidity", which means achieving the shortest possible period of debility prior to death. Ideally, like a friend of mine a few years ago, I'll fall from my bike on a Sunday morning breakfast ride and be dead when I hit the road. If you want the same for yourself, get out while you can...

Deranged proverbs

2009-11-02T09:48:00.007-06:00

The New York Times had a contest: submit a rearranged pair of proverbial phrases. The entries yeilded some gems, as reported in Sunday's Week in Review. Here are my favorites. See if they don't provoke some laughter and some reflection.

Living well makes the heart grow fonder.

Absence is the best revenge.

Nature abhors a home.

There’s no place like a vacuum.

Honesty is no excuse.

Ignorance of the law is the best policy.

A little knowledge is a friend indeed.

A friend in need is a dangerous thing.

Youth is wasted on a winner.

Everyone hates the young.

There is no honor among the meek.

Thieves shall inherit the earth.

Each to an island.

No man is his own.

Seeing is in the eye of the beholder.

Beauty is believing.

It isn’t over `til you’re having fun.

Time flies when the fat lady sings.

Life is the soul of wit.

Brevity is short.

It takes two to raise a child.

It takes a village to tango.

Brasstown

2009-10-02T11:12:00.002-05:00

In this photo I've just crested the climb to Brasstown Gap on Bald Mountain, near Dahlonega Georgia, where we raced in the "6 Gap Century" last Sunday. It took me 8:09 to do the 100 miles, including 11,000ft of climbing. I won my 70-74 age group, a feat no doubt in part attributable to the fact that I was the only one in it. It's an unusual event, insofar as the flat riding is confined to a stretch of about 5 miles along the Chattahoochee River. The rest consists of climbs from 4-7 miles long--the major ones being the six "gaps" or passes in the mountains of North Georgia--followed by screaming descents also up to 5 miles long. The grades on both the climbs and the descents range from 5% to 15%, making the race one of the toughest things I've done. I was glad to complete it, ending up 844 out of 1000 finishers. So, that was my weekend. What did you do with yours?

2009-09-01T10:49:00.003-05:00

On September 1st, 1939, the Nazi invasion of Poland instigated World War II. This is a picture of me near the Barbican, which forms the north entrance to the Polish city of Krakow. British poet W.H. Auden--who was living in New York that year--wrote about the moment in a poem with the date as its title. Here are the opening and closing stanzas:

I sit in one of the dives

On Fifty-second Street

Uncertain and afraid

As the clever hopes expire

Of a low dishonest decade:

Waves of anger and fear

Circulate over the bright

And darkened lands of the earth,

Obsessing our private lives;

The unmentionable odour of death

Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can

Unearth the whole offence

From Luther until now

That has driven a culture mad,

Find what occurred at Linz,

What huge imago made

A psychopathic god:

I and the public know

What all schoolchildren learn,

Those to whom evil is done

Do evil in return...

All I have is a voice

To undo the folded lie,

The romantic lie in the brain

Of the sensual man-in-the-street

And the lie of Authority

Whose buildings grope the sky:

There is no such thing as the State

And no one exists alone;

Hunger allows no choice

To the citizen or the police;

We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night

Our world in stupor lies;

Yet, dotted everywhere,

Ironic points of light

Flash out wherever the Just

Exchange their messages:

May I, composed like them

Of Eros and of dust,

Beleaguered by the same

Negation and despair,

Show an affirming flame.

"What occurred in Linz," of course, was the birth of Adolf Hitler, along with his development into one who imagined himself a victim and blamed others for his failures. He expanded this pernicious trait into an ideology, and millions of others embraced it. The 'victim mentality' is the basis for authoritarian behavior and the source of the most vicious human behavior. Millions continue to embrace it today. It's now also called "fundamentalism."

Tour Riding

2009-08-05T18:05:00.010-05:00

My plan to file daily updates during my experience of riding and watching stages of the Tour de France was wrecked by connection problems. Fortunately my iPhone worked fine, so all was not lost. Anyway here are some of my recollections of the past three weeks. Riding the course and distance--170kms--of TdF Stage 21, which is produced as a race for amateurs the week before the peloton races it, was the major event of my first week. It was astonishing to roll (slowly) out of Montelimar that Monday with some 9500 other cyclists. The big thrill of the second week was climbing the 21 virages (switchbacks) of Alpe d'Huez. The view from virage 10 is at right; the climb is much more enjoyable than that up Mt Ventoux, chiefly owing to the breathtaking vistas at nearly every turn. A

couple of days earlier our group--some 30 riders touring with Velo Echappe'--rode the time trial course around Lac du Annecy in the pre-dawn darkness. We had to complete the 40km loop before the roads were closed for the race.

I scored what everyone agreed was the best shot of Lance some 200m into his time trial. An astonishing concentration of vehicles, equipment, and personnel is deployed every day to put on the Tour. This mammoth undertaking is rivaled only by the stupendous number of people who position themselves along each stage route hours, days, and even weeks before the peloton passes that spot. It takes a little over 30 seconds for the entire field to go by. Did I mention the RVs? Each stage is lined with them, parked fender-to-fender on every possible square meter of roadside. Even when you're there, though, you get the best view of the race on TV. Jane joined me in Paris for the finish stage, which we watched from the elevated level of the Tuileries. It was a good spot, mainly because a jumbotron was set up right across from us on the Place de la Concorde. Just like being at home, if you had bright sunshine and two million people in your house.

I'm not dead...

2009-07-25T10:43:00.002-05:00

Apologies for failing to update you all. Connexion problems have kept me from both writing & posting photos, so I promise, when I get back to the US on 01 August, extensive coverage of my brilliant experience here in France for the Tour. Rode the étape du tour Monday really well (for me--oldest participant by 9yrs!); climbed Alpe d'Huez yesterday (2:04)! In Paris now to meet Jane Sunday & see the finish from the Champs d'Elysee together...

Eve of the Etape' du Tour

2009-07-19T14:12:00.003-05:00

Unfortunately for me, the window of our room overlooks the courtyard where an evidently enormous gang of wedding revelers decided to perform group karaoake until the small hours last night. The upside may be that I'll surely fall asleep easily this evening. We have to be ready to board the coach for the Etape' start-line at 0530 tomorrow. The race is off at 0700, though with 9500 riders it'll likely take half an hour to cross it myself. My number is 6305, but there won't be live feeds. Results will be posted tomorrow night at the Mondovelo Etape du Tour site. After a 30km tuneup ride this morning our bikes were transported to Monte'limar, so the rest of the day was given over to lounging by the pool and reassuring one another about being able to finish. An entirely new experience for me, so in that respect it's already been worthwhile to plan and train for this. I hope I have good news to report tomorrow...

Greetings from France

2009-07-18T17:01:00.003-05:00

Arrived Rochegude in Provence on Friday, so today was our first tuneup ride. There are 25 people here with the Velo Echappe' group and a corresponding number of mostly exotic bikes. I raised the average age of the field by a significant number just showing up. Today we finished the checkin-process for the Etape' du Tour, the stage of the Tour de France that's chosen each year for an amateur race. So Monday I have to tackle the 172km stage from Montelimar--20km from here--to Mount Ventoux! I'm scared. I'm also likely to be the oldest rider. However it works out, it will be an amazing experience. For one thing, there are over 9,500 riders registered. I've never even seen a field of bikers that large. I just hope I can hang on to a few groups to lessen the strain. At the 150km mark we reach Bedoin, whereupon the 22km climb of Mount Ventoux begins. Stay tuned to learn whether Bailiff makes it...

Biking Buffalo

2009-06-08T17:08:00.007-05:00

We spent the weekend biking in western Wisconsin, climbing from the shore of the Mississippi up to the ridgetops of Buffalo County, getting in about a 100 miles of riding despite being rained out most of Saturday. Our Sunday ride took us north to Maiden Rock in a large loop. On the way back, about seven miles east of Pepin, we stopped at the Ingalls House, setting for Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods. It is indeed a little house, about twenty by fifteen feet, divided by a log partition into a room with the fireplace, a bedroom, a smaller space, and a sleeping loft above. The marker described Wilder as a writer “beloved above all for her philosophy,” which was summarized to the effect that the principles your parents teach you are “forever true.” What a crock. I thought immediately of Philip Larkin’s This Be the Verse, which provides a bracing antidote to such treacle. It begins...

They fuck you up, your mom and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had,

And add some extra, just for you.

Sounds of change

2009-06-04T11:03:00.003-05:00

Just after sunup as I rode out the other day, when the only sound was the whisper of my bike tires on the pavement, I was watching maple seeds helicopter to the ground on the morning breeze. A cardinal announced himself with his characteristic six-note whistle. I craned to glance at the treetop to my left. The first birdcall I learned to identify when I moved to Wisconsin was that easy-to-mimic trill of the male cardinal. You can’t live here long without noticing, too, the male’s habit of perching on the highest available branch in his territory to greet the early sun with his song. So the sound and sense of a bit of cardinal life has become a familiar ingredient in my life here. As we invest our surroundings with familiarity, they seem to take on a kind of permanence. As if we could—as if we had a right to—rely upon them. But what struck me suddenly while biking that day is the fragility of the familiar. Every day I pass signs of the radically temporary—which is to say, temporal or subject to changes in time—character of all our surroundings. A day or so later I took this photo of the stump of an old highway buttress. It used to support the road I ride on, which now crosses Bear Creek on a concrete and steel bridge. I’ve passed it hundreds of times. It’s decaying at a rate far slower than my own life…

You Are My Sunshine

2009-05-03T19:26:00.002-05:00

The house is shabby and unremarkable, except for the makeshift shrine--a child's picture, some stuffed toys--accumulating at the foot of the mailbox. As we were getting ready for our ride Saturday Ray had said, "Want to see a crime scene?" So we biked around the block and I took this photo of the place where, three days ago, a laborer shot two kids and their mother, the woman with whom he'd been living and who was reportedly preparing to move out. Old story, now, though such news still delivers sadness undiminished. Ray wondered aloud how a man could do it. I asked how many popular standards he could think of containing sentiments like, "I'll never let you leave...", "I can't live without you...", I'll never let you go...", and so on.

Indeed, there's a verse of "You Are My Sunshine" that we almost never hear sung:

I'll always love you and make you happy

If you will only stay the same.

But if you leave me to love another,

You'll regret it all someday...

Frogs and wind

2009-04-24T19:13:00.002-05:00

Judging by the noise from the spring peepers, the central Wisconsin amphibian population is thriving. The sound levels were sufficient to prevent conversation on the bikes, particularly when there were marshes on both sides of the road. We rode 43m this afternoon on the `bents, in winds gusting well over 40kts from the south and air temps over 86ºF. By the time we were headed back from Rusty’s Backwater Saloon, where we stopped for dinner, clouds were massing in the western sky, heralds of the promised weekend rains, ending our day of summer.

(past) present (future)

2009-03-30T10:58:00.005-05:00

I've been thinking lately about Spinoza's advice: Put aside hope. Concentrate upon joy. One of the things he's addressing in this remark is the error of thinking that we have a future, therefore that it makes sense to hope for this or that to come about. What we call "past" and "future" are in fact memory and imagination. All we ever actually have is the present. "Hope" is the act of projecting what we imagine into the future. The more elaborate our "plans" for this imaginary future, the more "certain" we imagine it to be. But it never is certain; it's not even necessary. Yet this illusion about the future is not the worst feature of hoping. What's worse is the toll it takes on the present. Joy, by contrast, is always about the present. Even remembered joys restore me to the moment, for I experience them now and can revel in having arrived at this point. Hope thus robs one's life of the joy of the moment. Here's one of my favorite of Blake's quatrains:

Who seeks to bind to themselves a joy,

Does that winged life destroy;

Who simply kisses joy as it flies,

Lives in eternity's sunrise...

Being here...

2009-03-24T19:12:00.005-05:00

Friday last was my final day of biking in Texas hillcountry. The 65m ride wound past Enchanted Rock. The second view is from the summit looking south on FM965, the route we took back to Fredericksburg, where I was staying with 320 others enjoying what qualifies as pre-season training for people from this latitude (44.52deg N, here in central Wisconsin). It's cold and rainy on this, the first day of my 74th year, so maintaining the improved fitness I achieved by riding some 425m over 7days in TX will be a challenge for a few weeks yet.

Considering the alternative, it's great to have reached this annual marker, but this is no valedictory. Instead I feel enthused about the prospects for teaching, training, and especially cycling in the coming months. After our evening meal Jane treated me to dessert--involving a significant amount of chocolate mousse--and wine (Argentine Malbec, our recent discovery). A fitting commemoration, I think, of the accident of my birth. Receiving numerous good wishes today brought to mind a quatrain of Wm. Blake's: "Who seeks to bind to themselves a joy,/Does that winged life destroy./Who kisses every joy as it flies,/Lives in eternity's sunrise."

Being there...

2009-02-08T14:39:00.004-06:00

Now that the bloom is off and the reactionaries, in Congress and elsewhere, are attempting to stave off their status as living dead, you'll be moved again by my daughter-in-law's first-person account of that day in January. Here it is:

I must share the adventure of January 20, as Dan, Addison, Stephanie, my friend Dodie Moquin, and I traveled to Washington DC for the inauguration. Dodie called me on January 5. "How far are you from Washington?" she wanted to know, “I want to experience history.” So Dodie flew to New Jersey and we went. Dan, of course, was ready from the get-go and began planning. How could we actually arrive in DC along with millions of other people? Hotels and trains had long since been booked. It turned out to be an RV rental. Once all five of us were inside it, none of us could actually move unless everyone else stood still.

We drove down January 18 and stayed at Cherry Hill Park, about 25 miles from the city.The park was full ofinauguralists, many of whom, confusingly, had rented RVs identical to ours. The management hired express coaches to shuttle us to the metro. We spent Martin Luther King Day in the city, moving slowly down the mall, where the crowds had already started to gather. Because it took five people who woke up at 5 o'clock in the morning longer than one hour to make it out of our tiny RV space, the morning of January 20th we didn’t board the shuttle until 6:30am.

The ride proved hairy, as promised, every car packed to the hilt. I hung on by the door, claustrophobic and in a state of panic. The trains in front of us had backed up, like planes waiting to take off on a runway. As ours frequently stopped and started, jolting us along, Addy clung to a bag I luckily packed, “losing her cookies,” as she put it. We got off with profound relief at the Chinatown stop.

The city used buses to block streets and direct foot traffic. So instead of a three-block walk, we had to hike about a mile to enter near the Washington Monument. It took us about an hour but the march to the mall turned out to be pure joy. We walked along with over a million people in a state of complete happiness, asking police officers and assistance people which way and how far and is it okay to go up this street or that one.

We joked with strangers and exchanged travel tales. Vendors screamed "T-shirts for Obama" and "Barack buttons here." Chants started and everyone joined in. Spontaneous cheers erupted. On and on we walked with the same destination: the mall and a new start. One woman said, “We've crossed a bridge.” I thought, yes, but we also built it. We could look back and see it, but it is behind us now for the first time in history.

Another million people greeted us at the mall. We screamed in disbelief at the numbers. Then we were standing next to the World War II Memorial, in the shadow of the Washington Monument, and Aretha appeared in that amazing hat. We watched the Supertrons, we cheered. Occasionally, Addy asked someone to move over a bit so we could see. They obliged.

When Bush appeared, people started softly singing, "Na Na Na Na, Na Na Na Na, Hey Hey, Good-bye." Someone behind me said, “Well, he brought us to Obama.”

When it was over, the crowd dispersed quickly, still smiling and pretty cold. As I tried to get the numbness out of my toes, a woman handed me some footwarmers that saved the rest of the day and the long walk back to the metro. All two million of us shuffled along, a little less giddy than before. We stopped at a So Ho buffet, got warm and ate soup and drank tea. At the metro, we let lots of packed trains go by until one pulled up that had a bit of breathing space. We weren't in such a hurry now. We made it back to Cherry Hill about 4:45. The parade was still going on, so, along with some fellow RVers, we watched it on a big-screen TV in the lobby next to a roaring fire. Then, despite the 10,000 chartered buses and the millions of people, the traffic home along the northeast corridor just hummed along.

The crowd made the day. I have to say that in my life, as with most lives, there have been few peak moments. But on January 20, 2009, no matter the age, the color, the ethnicity, the cold, we had stood together, united in purpose and mind. That's as good as it gets.

Thanks to Dodie and Dan for making it happen.

Love to all, Anita

BLACK MAN GIVEN WORST JOB IN WORLD

2009-01-20T09:57:00.004-06:00

Even though I think The Onion got it right with this headline when Obama won the presidency last year, I'm filled with a sense of promise now, for the first time in nearly fifty years. I'll be glad when the inauguration is over, though. Memories of assassinations obtrude, despite the fact that Obama's very success is testimony to the changed American society over that period. No event since 1960 has evoked such positive feeling. I look forward to the fulfillment of Robert Frost's benediction on the occasion of John F. Kennedy's inauguration:

A golden age of poetry and power
Of which this noonday's the beginning hour.

What else happened...

2008-12-31T10:52:00.003-06:00

Anybody want to read another review of the events of 2008? I didn't think so. Instead, let me tell you about some of the best films of the past year. Between traveling, biking, and surgery, I fell slightly below my usual average of 12-15 movies a month, but some great art was produced in 2008. The most remarkable fact is that, while many films aimed to be topical, only two were convincingly so. I'll talk about those two last. The Coen's Burn after Reading, Maher's Religulous, and Nachmanoff's Traitor tried too hard to address issues in contemporary culture and managed only to be opinionated. Anderson's There Will Be Blood was more subtle and featured an extraordinary performance by Daniel Day Lewis, but was limited by the Sinclair novel that was its source. Marjane Satrapy's Persepolis is a highlight, at least for non-Persians, for its rendition of Iranian life. My vocabulary is strained by the effort to praise the brilliant composite of 18 short movies that make up Paris, je t'aime. Released in France in 2006, it came out on DVD in the U.S. this year. You must see Margo Martindale's performance in the last segment, Alexander Payne's 14th Arrondisment. Shanley's Doubt is an affecting movie featuring some of the finest acting you will ever see by Philip Seymour Hoffmann and Meryl Streep. Which brings us to the best of 2008: Sidney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead and Tom McCarthy's The Visitor. These two films don't make the error of telling you what's been done wrong, they show you. Lumet's story exposes the self-serving and criminal behavior that has been encouraged for years, only to produce the current economic failure. Even more perfectly, The Visitor dramatizes the equally criminal policies instituted since 9/11. I won't give you a long review. You have to see it. I do want to make one point, though. The acting of Richard Jenkins and Haaz Sleiman, playing the professor and the immigrant, perfectly embodies the affection and understanding that will eventually redeem us. The political change that the majority of us have contributed to creating can begin, in 2009, to restore integrity to our nation and our lives. Not to mention our economy. I look forward to that, and to our friendship for another year...

Climate change

2008-12-17T11:06:00.004-06:00

One of the homilies I enjoy repeating at this time 0f year, here in Wisconsin, is that "the climate guarantees it'll never be too crowded." As long as we have snow for xc skiing, the winters at nearly 45deg N are great. And there's plenty of free parking. For the most part, you don't even need to drive. (Yes, you can bike in the winter. As with everything else, all you need is the right gear.) Of course, for more than ten years now, we haven't had reliable snow all season. The climate has changed. The average temperatures at our latitude are now what they were 100m south of here when I moved to Wisconsin over 40 years ago. This warming trend, as even reactionaries have been forced to agree, is global. So there's general agreement that we have to do something about it. I'm all in favor of reducing our carbon footprints. It might make a difference for some future generations of humans. But not us. Twenty-five years ago three German hikers above Innsbruck came upon what turned out to be the corpse of a 5800-year-old Italian, nicknamed "Oetzi" after the Oetztal glacier where their discovery was made. I highly recommend a trip to see the corpse and fascinating details about his life--and murder--in the South Tyrol museum in Bolzano. The corpse was exposed because the glacier was melting. Six thousand years after that death we're taking notice of glacial melting worldwide. But the process has actually been underway for nearly 20,000 years. In that global-warming "window" the whole of human history has unfolded. Around 12,000 years ago it closed a little; that was the last "glacial age". Wisconsin gave its name to the ice sheet that was one mile thick here where we live now. Some years ago Jane and I climbed up to the limestone caves at Settimemama, near Guernica, in Spain's Basque country. I looked around and realized that humans then must have got good at spotting such outcroppings, where water was sure to be found seeping through the porous rock and deep shelter could be had. These are skills we'll evidently need again in a few generations. I'm practicing...

The difference...

2008-12-16T12:04:00.003-06:00

Malcolm Gladwell's revisionist Outliers has been receiving deserved attention and commentary. Gladwell--in his inimitable way--subverts the sentimental fantasy that each of us can "be whatever we want to be" by demonstrating that the most successful among us are always the beneficiaries of fortunate social circumstances. I agree with him. But that's not the whole story. There's another quality that distinguishes not just the "successful" individuals (for "success" is also socially-determined) but the most creative humans. That quality is skepticism. Specifically, it's the power and tenacity to question the conventional. This distinctive ability--which really is nevertheless available to all of us--characterizes all the people who's work has endured, from philosophers to physicists, and includes not only artists but uncategorizable individuals like Jesus. If you don't believe me, mention anyone you care to and I'll show you how they illustrate my point. As I like to say, answers can only be enforced, while questions can always be asked...

CRISIS AND PROSPECT

2008-12-05T11:29:00.005-06:00

Isn't it great that years of Republican misrule have left us in economic, diplomatic, and military crisis? Nothing could bode better for the future--given the imminent resurrection of government behind the efforts of Obama and company--than the creative management of these troubles and failures, not to mention the likely dominance now for a generation of active policy in the public interest. Politics is exclusively about interests. Advocates for the public interest have been in short supply for a generation. Despite some good intentions, Bill Clinton was a disappointment in this respect. Now we can look forward to a rebuilding on the scale of the last disaster of this magnitude back in the 1930s. And I'm doing great, too. Now within weeks of meeting Jane's test for a successful year--no ER visits--my rehab is 80% complete following arthroplasty on my right knee two months ago. I'll be testing my newly-aligned joint tomorrow in the Frostbite 5Mile. Predicted snow overnight will help moderate already low expectations.

The children and grandchildren are as well as can be. Jane and I begin teaching our Healthy Relationships course again next month, in the interim before the spring term begins. We've been presenting it twice a year now for some time and the two sections are always oversubscribed.

I'm sympathetic in the face of the suffering this economic distress will inflict all over the U.S. and the world. It will affect many more people than the--admittedly large--number of self-serving reactionaries who perpetrated the conditions for this collapse, both by their policies and by their votes. You know who you are. But now the rest of us can pull together for the first time in several generations. Our recovery and our future will be all the better for it.

I recall the eagerness with which I pitched in for the many kinds of "war efforts" the population was called upon to contribute when I was a schoolchild in the 1940s. Once again now we will be called upon and I expect we'll achieve something much greater in consequence than the mere expansion of consumption that followed World War II. I look forward to it here at the end of the year, and I hope you do, too. Best wishes...

2008-10-31T15:10:00.005-05:00

Stanford University hosts reunions for its graduating classes every October. It was the 50^th this year for my class of 1958. I attended. My daughter Megan came with me. I expected a mildly boring event characterized by a good deal of forced camaraderie and the

pretense of recollecting people you’d long since forgotten. That was what I remembered of our 40^th reunion, which my son Jon had attended with me ten years ago. I was wrong. The weekend was lively, emotionally satisfying, and even instructive. Saturday after

noon of reunion weekend always features the diversion of a home football game. We went to that, too. To everyone’s surprise, Stanford beat Arizona, adding an unexpected note of triumph to the whole activity.

So what made this one different? The big, round number 50 had to be a factor. We all of us expect in a lifetime to live through a 50^th anniversary of this or that. Few experience 100 of anything. So the 50^th attracted a crowd of at least 400 survivors from the 900 or so that sat in Frost Amphitheater with me on the occasion of our commencement that June of 1958. It was hot. My wife was pregnant with what proved to be our son Jon, born that August. In addition to the pull of the number 50 we have to add curiosity. Will anyone there remember me? Will I recognize anyone? Finally, there’s the comparison-factor: how have they aged?I met a few classmates who had fared poorly, suffering strokes, for example. I met some people I remembered. But I found it most affecting to be greeted with detailed and enthusiastic descriptions of events and comments of which I had no recollection at all. The experience dramatized the selective character of memory. We construct our lives by choosing to embody particular actions and relations. I became aware of many such choices I’d made in those college years, and I welcomed the recollections others brought me.

Food-service work at Stanford was called “hashing.”

Of the jobs I did to pay room and board, I enjoyed the friendships amongst hashers the most. One of the people I hashed with, Sam Courtney, paid me a singular compliment by announcing, when we met, that he decided to attend the reunion primarily because he noticed—in the biographic l volume compiled from our submissions—that I was coming. “You’re the only person I’ve ever know who did exactly what he said he’d do,” Sam said. “In our last conversation before leaving campus I asked you what you planned for your life and you said, ‘I’m going to be a professor of philosophy.’ And that’s just what you did.” This was a revelation to me. I’m grateful to Sam for having brought me something of myself I was unaware of having lost. I wish you all such a gift…

Correction...

2008-09-29T15:25:00.002-05:00

One of my former students is a historian now and kindly posted me a correction to my last entry. It's embarrassing to have relied upon my memory--admittedly growing more faulty with age--instead of checking. Anyway, the main error is my suggesting Musharraf conducted his military coup against the government of Z. A. Bhutto (father of Benazir Bhutto, assassinated earlier this year while campaigning against the Musharraf government). That's wrong. Musharraf actually acted against the then prime minister Nawaz Sharif, who was a protege of an earlier military dictator--Zia ul Haq--before being elected to the leadership. Ever since its formation in 1947, and especially during the past twenty-five years, Pakistan has oscillated between military rulers and elected leaders, unable to develop a politics independent of military influence--not to mention intervention--or in any way balanced amongst competing ethnic, religious, and political rivalries. My point in the last entry, of course, remains unchanged: it was silly of McCain to maintain that negotiation equals ratification. On NPR's Talk of the Nation today, Ted Koeppel, referring to the same McCain claim, pronounced it "foolish". Case closed...

Parsing the first debate

2008-09-27T11:01:00.002-05:00

Barack Obama once again displayed last night his talent for calm argument and effective rhetoric, but he failed to dramatize several of McCain's claims and implications for their questionable or silly implications. I'm not sure why. Was Obama also exhibiting his judiciousness? Was he being gentle? Did he fear his listeners finding him mean or arrogant? Did he just miss the opportunities? I don't know, but here are two of the many things McCain said that I would have liked Obama to highlight. Once McCain defended the Bush administration's support for Musharraf bymuttering "Pakistan was a failed state," when Musharraf came to power. What's wrong with this? Firstly, Musharraf staged a military coup to overthrow the Bhutto government, then had Bhutto executed. So McCain implies support for military rebellion against popularly constituted governments. Worse, McCain's statement says the U.S. gets to decide when another government has "failed," rather than leaving that decision to the people that live there. This is what the Bush administration did by invading Iraq. It's what the U.S. did in Vietnam. It never works. The second thing I want to single out is McCain's repeated insistence that negotiating with others implies you approve of their actions. This is profoundly silly. I wish Obama had said, "If that were true, you'd never talk to your teenager." I think that would have been enough...

MORALITY AND RELIGION

2008-09-10T10:18:00.001-05:00

In a New Yorker essay on the influence of evangelicals in American politics (Peter J. Boyer: “Party Faithful”, 08 Sep 2008) a professor of constitutional law is quoted saying: “Religion necessarily is a source for morality, and morality necessarily is the place we draw laws from.” Ignoring the clumsy grammar, I want to explain why the second clause is correct, but the first one is wrong. Morality is the name for practices that are customary in a community or society. “Mores” means “customs” in Latin. (The same word in Greek is ethos, from which we have “ethics.”) So morality is always relative to a community. To be educated in this, you need only live for a time in another community, especially one where they speak a language different from yours. Religions grow up in and are sustained by communities or societies. So religions always reflect the moralities of the communities in which they originate. When a religion migrates into a new community, it takes on the morality of those people. It adapts, as it must, to become acceptable to new adherents. Now you might be thinking to ask, “What about religious opposition?” Of course, opposition to prevailing morality arises. That’s because morality, like language, is historical. Everything changes with time. One of the ways change occurs is that old interests lose their authority; new interests emerge. People frequently invoke religion to justify replacing old authorities with new. Martin Luther King, Jr. is an example. Mohandas Ghandi is another. But you don’t have to do this. The philosopher from whom both Ghandi and King learned the principle of “non-violent resistance—Henry David Thoreau—did not appeal to any imaginary “higher authority” when he argued for his insight in Civil Disobedience. But people like authority. So it’s still popular to imagine that some kinds of morality are supernaturally justified. It’s still popular, but it’s false.

Abortion rights

2008-08-28T10:57:00.004-05:00

Obama was asked "when does life begin?" He replied that he could not answer with specificity. He should hire a philosopher. It's easy an easy question to answer. Life does not begin at conception. A living, developing embryo requires a living mother. Life does not begin, it continues. But reactionary opposition to voluntary abortion insists that a "new life" begins at conception. Of course it does. Induced abortion, like every miscarriage, ends a potential human life. It's true that a woman's ability to choose to abort a pregnancy means she has life-and-death power. But we give that power to men all the time. Even ignorant and mendacious men like George W. Bush. So what fuels the rage over women having the power of life-and-death? Fears about death. The fact that each of us must give up our lives constitutes the deepest human anxiety. For human beings alone are aware of their own inevitable deaths. Thus everything that openly addresses the fact of death triggers this anxiety. People want to pretend that somehow we can individually persist. But we can't. We die and we're replaced. Just like the leaves on the trees. Choosing whether to have a baby dramatizes this process. Hence the rage...

Woody Allen v. Jane Austen

2008-08-25T16:30:00.005-05:00

I once mentioned to a young woman who was working for me at the time that Allen Woodrow Koenigsberg (aka Woody Allen) and I are the same age. "Yes, but he's a genius," she said. Point taken. But artists need people to appreciate their work, and I've been a fan of his films since before Bananas. So we, Jane and I, made a special trip yesterday to see Vicky Cristina Barcelona. (Not on our bikes; the photo was taken during a climb through "les Dentelles" in Provence.) "More of a chick flick than I'd expected from him," was Jane's assessment. I think so, too, and for the same reason that period movies based on Jane Austen's novels have been popular since Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility. In ...Barcelona, Allen gives Rebecca Hall's character "Vicky" the sort of speeches he used to give his own characters in movies like Annie Hall: appeals to the rational and logical, like the sister with "sense" in Austen. Scarlett Johansson's "Cristina" is the sensuous one of the two friends who go to live and study in Barcelona one summer. There they both meet and are serially seduced by Javier Bardem's character, a handsome and engaging painter. Thus is framed the contest over choosing between the predictable (Vicky's businessman fiance back in New York) and the passionate (the sexually-charged and emotionally volatile artist). Patricia Clarkson's dissatisfied-wife character (after 20-plus years with another self-involved businessman) offers a caution: choosing the safe path will leave you regretting your life. I'm leaving out a subplot involving Bardem's petulant and explosive ex-wife, played by Penelope Cruz. The subplot is cautionary, as well: a life of sensual indulgence also has its regrettable aspects, some of them near-fatal. This modern form of this story of a romantic/rational dichotomy is over two centuries old, yet still attracts artists and engages audiences. In fact there's no such dichotomy. What's called "romantic" is nothing more than the projection of one's desires upon another. There is no doubt that dissatisfaction is the rule in long relationships. The dissatisfaction is caused, however, by the collision between projected fantasies and the actual person opposite you. Men are as prone--perhaps more so--to preferring fantasies over the complex character of the other. All of us are inclined to cling to the imaginary. Allen ends the film on an interesting note, suggesting "Cristina" is "certain only of what she does not want." Personally, I regard "wants" as the problem, not the solution...

Reliving history

2008-08-08T10:07:00.004-05:00

I was teaching in Munich in the fall of 1973. One of the things I enjoyed there in Germany, though, was listening late at night, European time, to broadcasts from the U.S. about the congressional revelations of criminal conspiracy by the Nixon administration and the administration's desperate attempts to cover it up. You see, back then I still hoped that the turmoil of the 60s would issue in some transformation of American politics. The corruption of Nixon's regime looked like it might be that longed-for turning point. He resigned. on this date, less than a year later. The Vietnam war did end in another year. And then there was Carter, who's pieties were no match for the reaction that was underway. That reaction to the 60s triumphed in Reagan's election and has shaped our politics ever since. So Nixon's corruption and incompetence was a turning-point after all. After JFK's assassination the political promise of his leadership began gradually to decay; but after Nixon the decay just accelerated, drowning Carter's efforts and hurtling downwards through the excesses and greed of the Reagan years, continued by the hapless Bush 41. Clinton revived those old 60s ideals, only to squander his prospects in the kind of self-indulgence that seemed to vindicate the rage against the 60s still nursed by reactionaries like Dick Cheney. Clinton's weakness returned those reactionaries to power and they've used it to perpetrate malefaction on a scale that makes Nixon's seem mere misdemeanors. It's tempting to think that now, a full generation later, this is at last a real turning-point. But I've been wrong before...

Playing and learning

2008-08-06T11:33:00.002-05:00

For most of the forty plus years I've lived and taught here I've listened to small children practicing outside in the summer on tiny violins the Mozart melody we know as "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star". They were students attending "Suzuki Week" (as we locals called the actually two-week summer camp), named for Shinichi Suzuki's method of teaching music. The beginners are known as "Twinklers" and their music constituted my entire knowledge of the work of the American Suzuki Institute, headquartered here on our campus of the University of Wisconsin. Until this year. Last week my granddaughter Addison came to practice and perform on her cello. She's been at it a year, together with her dad, my son Dan, and has reached Book Two. Now I've been to three of her solo and choir recitals. Besides being charmed by her playing and that of her cohort, I discovered that musical training has the admirable side-effect of teaching respect and appreciation. In mixed audiences of parents and numerous children as young as two I saw no fidgeting and heard no whispering during the recitals and concerts. I recalled an occasion during my undergraduate study when my poetry professor declared it a virtue of learning to read and write poems that you could then appreciate the work of others. So I found it, and so it appears, too, to apply to learning to play music. This is clearly a quality missing in those who insist upon classifying the arts as "extra-curricular", and then cutting their funding.

Replacing religion

2008-07-29T20:00:00.008-05:00

Out running the other morning, I recalled the time I first realized that belief in god is an example of wishful thinking. I was 18 or so, a sophomore at Stanford. I was walking back to the house from my job doing pots and pans following dinner at Branner Hall. The time was twilight, that moment before nightfall I still experience as beatitude. In that moment I recognized how we are inclined to wish that sense of completion or connection to be reciprocated. That is, people wish to imagine the world answering our sense of connection, or actually causing it. Religio, the Latin root of "religion," means "being bound"--from religare, to bind or tie--in the sense that we are bound within or tied into the world. So the word religion accurately renders that sense of belonging within the world I experience at twilight . Of course, religion now names numerous elaborately codified systems of belief in things "supernatural." Why? Because people have, apparently forever, wished it so. Yet it isn't so. Nothing in the world--or out of it--answers to human need. It's easy find evidence for this fact. Just this past spring a tornado in Tennesee did not destroy a parochial college, but did strike a nearby elementary school as well as other structures. A pious student was reported to have said his college survived owing to "god's will." Nonsense. Vicious nonsense, in this case, inasmuch as the student's pronouncement entails that god prefers Baptist colleges to elementary schools. But it goes to show that our desire for absolute answers to our needs is strong enough to overcome all logic. Might this need, this longing for certainty or support from the world, ever wane? I don't think so. In the course of a lifetime of study I've learned all there is to know about world religions and taught courses on their historical systems of belief and practice. (As an atheist, I'm ideally suited to such teaching, for I've no personal need that any of them be true.) Religious literature is filled with artful and ingenious interpretation, but it is all transparently in the service of human desire. This was Buddha's insight: there is neither "self" nor "god" and all our problems arise from desire. Thus did Buddha's teaching do away with wishful thinking. But after his death, people instead did away with the Buddha's teaching; they turned it into a religion...

What do pictures show?

2008-06-09T09:48:00.009-05:00

Biking in France this year I got to thinking about the pictures people take. I began to take notice because I was particularly conscious, after last year's accident, of how few such travels there may yet be for me. My initial notion was that the typical images are intended to show you were there. These are the ones you see being taken at every historical or scenic site, with the attraction being used as background for a shot of you, or your companion, or your children, or all of the above. One morning I came across an Italian fellow with his camera on a tripod, posing his wife and kids against a view of Gordes across the valley. I imagined it was destined to be on a christmas card. That would certainly be true if they were Americans. This is surely OK, though we all know how few such pictures are tolerable when you're asked to watch someone's slides of their trip. We become bored with images of people smiling or cavorting in this place or that because there's nothing to learn; mere pictures of people have little aesthetic content. One important element of aesthetic content is the possiblity of picturing ourselves in this landscape, or in relation to this scene. If the natural or architectural context is reduced to nothing more than background, we are, as viewers, deprived of this experience. For the same reason, mere landscape shots quickly become tedious, as we are provided no sense of human scale. Therefore, images which incorporate people in relation to their setting are of intrinsic interest. Now I can see the context in human terms, and I'm also invited to imagine my own possible participation in the scene. So at the very least we ought all to limit depicting ourselves to, say, a half dozen or so images and for the rest offer our audiences plenty of opportunities to see themselves in the places I've been. This changes the import from a kind of gloating--"Look! I'm here and you're not!"--to something more like an invitation--"I'm glad we can share this experience"--which may then contribute to our joint enjoyment. I hope I have more adventures to share...

"Please vote for Obama..."

2008-06-06T09:04:00.006-05:00

We'd taken shelter from a brief shower at a table under the awning of a coffee shop on the plaza of the Palais du Papes in Avignon and found ourselves next to a German couple, as I realized when the man heard me ordering in French and asked, "Sind sie Nederlaender?" I was pleased not to have been identified immediately as American, but informed him we were from the USA. He then muttered something in English. We caught the phrase "Bush country" and laughed, assuring him we also despised the current administration. I think he was testing waters, for he then added, again in English, "Please vote for Obama." More laughter, and more assurances.

We'd moved to Avignon that Monday 02 June to drop the rental car, pack the bikes, and leave by TGV for Paris to fly home the next day. The other famous site in Avignon is the stump of the Pont de Benezet, mostly destroyed by the flooding Rhone in 1668. The original 22 arches had in fact, however, been repeatedly damaged and repaired since its construction in the early 12th century. Medieval builders thus demonstrated their inferiority to the Romans. During our last week we'd ridden from St-Remy up to the Pont du Gard, an aqueduct built in 50CE across the gorge of the river Gard to carry water from nearby Uzes to Nimes. Its almost 50 surviving arches are perfectly aligned and intact after more than two millenia.

We enjoyed the biking from St-Remy as much as any on this trip. While waiting for Jane to make her selection one day I felt a touch on my shoulder. I turned to find Edye Pankowski, bike club friend from Point, beaming at having found us by accident. She and Dallas had been traveling in Italy and decided on an excursion to Provence. Of course, if you want to run into anyone in France, your best chance is the nearest boulangerie (bakery) or patisserie (pastry shop). Its humanly impossible--or at least I find it so--to pass one without stepping in for a purchase. The Pankowskis had their bikes along, so the next day we rode up to the Abbaye St-Michel de Frigolet. Jane was delighted, as we strolled the grounds of the Augustinian abbey, to hear the bells on some goats that appeared to be herding the sheep that had moved into the meadow just over the wall. A magnificent ram strode up and planted his forefeet on the parapet to look us over. Reaching Boulbon some kilometers on it was time for--what else?--something from the boulangerie on the town plaza. We sat on the steps of the Hotel de Ville (city hall) to savor both our bread and the pleasure of watching life in a village along the flanks of the small range called the Montagnette. Completing the picture, the promontory above was crowned by the ruins of an ancient citadel.

Van Gogh country...

2008-05-29T14:37:00.006-05:00

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

We moved north here to St-Rémy yesterday, into charming rooms in a 19th c villa—Le Castelet des Alpilles—about ½ a km south of the old town. The camera has got misplaced, so I’ll sprinkle in some shots from the past few days. This view of Les Baux—taken from across the valley as we biked north toward St-Rémy a couple of days ago—is so cool I’m giving it space enough for you to see some detail.
Unfortunately my riding is on hold, since I evidently tore my left lumbar over the weekend. Jane and I had enjoyed one of our best rides and I noticed no problems when I went swimming later that afternoon. But the next morning I was suffering pain sufficient to all but prevent me from walking downstairs to breakfast. Ibuprofen produced only moderate relief, so yesterday I saw a physician—“Dr Phillippe Eric” as MDs advertise themselves—who, after a cursory orthopedic check, seemed to agree it was muscular. His prescription of a combination of paracetemol and something called “tramadol” (along with the familiar muscle-relaxant diclofenac sodium) has me comfortable enough to sleep and get around. So this afternoon we’ll do the “Van Gogh Walk” when Jane gets in from biking some more routes in les Alpilles. I hope I recover for the planned ride to see the Pont du Gard on Friday. (I tried to get some Vicodin but evidently the French have never heard of hydroxycontin; hard to believe, I know.)

Here are a couple of shots of our riding around Mt Ste-Victoire. I’m writing about my interpretation of Cezánne’s lifelong study of the mountain. It’s quite easy to understand his fascination, and to experience it.

Mercredi is “market day” in St-Rémy, so every square—along with the municipal parking lot—was filled with stalls of goods this morning. The wares, however, were the usual mixture of cheap clothing and housewares with a sprinkling of jewelry and food. Except for local vegetables—the garlique and artichauds looked great—I’m convinced the crap on display comes from the same suppliers in Singapore and Sri Lanka that fill the stands in the U.S. and no doubt everywhere else on the planet. I got a copy of today’s International Herald Tribune and enjoyed a cup of tea in the sunshine that’s returned, following several nights of thunderstorms violent enough to be remarkable even at home in the U.S. “Unusual weather”, as people everywhere usually say…

Good though...

2008-05-28T05:21:00.004-05:00

Saturday, May 24, 2008

Last evening was a typical French dining experience: too long and too late. Good though. We walked into Fontvielle—the village north of Arles where we’re staying for this leg of the trip—and chose Le Table de Meunier. The patron proved to be a clown who introduced himself as “Chierry”. At least that’s what I gathered; it sounded rather like “Jerry”. He hustled us into the garden dining area, in what he seemed proud to announce was originally the chicken coop of the house, built in 1792. Voltaire was still producing his plays in Paris. Two hours later we had long since finished eating. The women had tired and left; I was waiting for l’addition and listening to the Germans seated across the room. I thought to speak to them but changed my mind when I made a departing error. By way of expressing gratitude I shook hands with the patron and said, “Merci beaucoup, Msr Cherie”. The room erupted in laughter. Only then did I realize I’d instead pronounced the name I approximated above as cherie. I would have laughed, too, on hearing someone say, “Goodnight, Mr Dear”. I walked out, since it would have been even more embarrassing to attempt to acknowledge my error. Funny though.

Today we rode up to the citadel called Les Baux [pronounced “bow”], built in the 9th c atop one of the many limestone outcroppings—aluminum is smelted from “bauxite”—in this region called Les Alpilles (“Little Alps”). Jane bought a lavender stuffed animal we dubbed “Gustave Faux Bear” and nicknamed “Baux”. It joined the moose (acquired on our bike ride through New Hampshire about 12 years ago) in of Jane’s mesh pockets, which now contains “Baux & Errol”.

Descending to the valley again we biked north to St-Rémy. The town was Saturday-busy and the day, which had begun threatening rain, gradually brightened. The mistral wind—which prevails from the south this time of year—was coming up when we reached the archeological site of Glanum, a city built in the 8th c BCE by native Gallics (the people for whom the Romans named the region “Gaul” when they overran it 700 years later). I reflected on the fact that the original city, largely obliterated by the Romans overbuilding the site, nevertheless lasted more than three times the 200 years of U.S. history…

Weather or not...

2008-05-28T05:02:00.004-05:00

Monday, May 26, 2008

We lost a day of cycling to rain here Sunday in what is substantially a coastal climate. Arles is only 35kms from the Mediterranean Sea, to the coast of which we drove, reaching the town of Stes-Marie-sur-la-Mer on the bouche du Rhône—the delta formed by “mouth of the Rhone river”—in time for lunch at the Hotel Thalacap, a big spa devoted to the French belief that bathing in heated seawater—Thalassotherapie—is especially good for your health. No one ever actually goes swimming in the ocean, right across the street. True, it was rather choppy and forbidding in the rain, but I’ve sampled its waters from Spain to Greece and Turkey and always enjoyed myself. Once, memorably, in a bay of the volcanic island of Lipari just off the coast of Sicily, but that was another trip.

We stopped at the Abbaye du Mt Majour on the way back, the locale for several of Van Gogh’s paintings, most dramatically his last work—“Crows over Wheatfield”—upon whose completion in 1889 he shot himself painfully in the side with a small bore pistol borrowed from his host, then walked the 8kms back to Arles, where he died.

This morning the rain had ceased but the storm front was still producing high winds and overcast, so the plan switched to hiking overland from Les Baux to St-Rémy. The marked trail begins just off the D27 below the ancient citadel, traverses the mountain and begins descending the valley toward St-Rémy, which is the locale for the sanitarium where Van Gogh spent nearly a year before moving into the home of Dr. Gachet in Arles. The sites for several of his most-reproduced works of the period—150 paintings in the 53 weeks he was a patient—are well-marked on a “Van Gogh walk” through the town. It’s a measure of the disdain for his art while he was alive that there are only three of his paintings in France, one—a study of sleeping field hands done near St-Rémy and modeled on a similar work by Manet—is in the Museé d’Orsay in Paris. It was the progressive patrons of the Chicago Art Institute at the turn of the 20th c who appreciated French impressionism. The Art Institute owns the world’s finest collection of expressionists and impressionists. Score one for the Americans.

In another indication of the character of foreign art appreciation, it was an American critic and a British curator who raised the funds in the 1950s to preserve the studio of Paul Cezánne just outside Aix-en-Provence; they formed a foundation for its maintenance and gave the building and its grounds into the care of the municipality, which now owes much of its prominence to its association with the artist, also little appreciated by his fellow citizens while he lived and worked there. What’s that saying about how we scorn the greatest among us during their lifetimes?

L’un des plus beaux villages en France...

2008-05-27T15:52:00.003-05:00

Friday, May 23, 2008

“One of the most beautiful villages in France” reads the sign on the road leading up to Gordes. But there’s one just like it on the approach to Roussillon. We had the chance to compare the two on our first day’s bike, beginning from our Hotel Domaine de L’Enclos—“Garden Spot”—and going past the 13th c. Augustinian Abbaye Notre Dame de Senanque. We never did find out what “Senanque” means. There are lots of hills in this part of Provence and we got to test ourselves on several grades up to 13% right away. We passed the test, but I was maxed out a couple of times and so was Jane. Descending with a disc brake—which we have on the rear wheel of the Volaes—is a real bonus in these mountains; you can ride them as long as you need to without fear of over-heating.

Did I mention we’re both riding recumbents on this trip? At Jane’s request last year, Rolf Garthus, with his design and fabricating partners, created a new “Escape” model that’s coupled; the halves of the boom-frame fit into an oversized suitcase along with the wheels. They thus travel as one of our pieces of luggage for no additional fee.

The next day was the planned assault on Mt Ventoux. I found it a real test last year. The serious part of the climb is 15kms up a continuous grade averaging 10% with occasional steeper sections and no relief for the full 1906 meters of elevation-gain; so it was no surprise when Jane reached her limit before we reached the summit. We turned back and enjoyed a leisurely lunch down in Bedoin, saving the ascent for another year.

After comic misadventures locating the shop in Avignon that had agreed to store our bike cases for the duration, we moved down to Aix-en-Provence, staying at a lovely maison d’hote (French for B&B) in Meyreuil southeast of the city. I think you’ll agree the view of Mt Ste-Victoire from the steps of the Domaine Naís was trés génial (French for “awesome”). I was especially excited about biking along the flanks of this massive upthrust of granite, made familiar to everyone who appreciates painting through the devoted work of Paul Cezánne (1839-1906), the most famous native of Aix. We rode up to Beaurecueil the next day, then east through Puylibier to Pourrieres, the views of the mountain constantly shifting with our traverse and the changing light. Seeing it now for the first time, I suddenly realized what it was Cezánne saw and exactly what he sought to convey in the more than eighty views of it he left us.

2008-05-25T03:17:00.003-05:00

Goodbye, mother...

2008-04-11T16:25:00.003-05:00

Roberta Hindes Bailiff

[1911-2008]

Mother won’t be sending me any more cookies. Of course, the last time she actually did this I was still in my first year of college. That would be 1955. But I still vividly recall the instant popularity with my roommates when another Quaker Oats box arrived for me, wrapped in a couple of sheets from the San Pedro News-Pilot and tied with string.

Despite the fact that we were together for no more than a few days or weeks at a time since I left home more than 50 years ago, that capacity for care, and the connection it forged and maintained between us, is what I miss—and will continue to miss—now that mother is gone. But she passed on other qualities which also distinguished her life and made possible whatever it is that I have achieved.

The most prominent of these were curiosity and adventuresomeness. Under circumstances now lost to memory, a young engineer named Agne Lundgren met my father shortly after he and my mother were married in 1932, while they were living on a houseboat in Rio Vista, north of San Francisco Bay. Agne and his wife Esther bought a derelict 22ft sloop in 1933, which they refitted, christened the Enthus—the Latin root of “enthusiasm”—and on which they taught my parents to sail during the 1934 season. The next year Agne was hired by Douglas and had to report for work in Santa Monica. They all agreed my father would skipper the Enthus down to Southern California with a crew consisting of Esther and my mother—who was then three months pregnant with me. They sailed on September 27th, 1935. Twice that day, actually. They had just reached Mile Rock outside the bay, when dying winds and currents drove them back under the Gate. Mother, already a bit seasick, had gone below. When she came back on deck, Esther wrote, she looked around and said, “My goodness! This looks exactly like San Francisco Bay!” That afternoon the Enthus passed under the bridge for the third time. Then, despite fog, storm, calm, and lack of navigational skills, they arrived safely two weeks later.

After my father died in 1987, mother ventured once again at 76 to do things she’d deferred through decades devoted to raising children, caring for aging parents, and seeing my father through the years of his decline. When I was teaching in Poland in 1990, she recruited my cousin Midge for a traveling companion and flew to. When I picked them up in Warsaw, mother, clearly exhausted, could hardly talk fast enough—another quality of hers I inherited—to report everything they’d already experienced since passing through Frankfurt. For nearly two weeks I drove the three through the countries and capitals of Germany, the Czech Republic, and Austria, before returning Krakow Easter weekend. Mother’s curiosity never flagged, though her sense of humor was tested several times, not least when we found ourselves sleeping on mattresses on the floor of a hotel storeroom in Berlin, a consequence of late arrival and lost reservations.

I know I’ve lived my own life more fully because of her gifts and her example. So it is with a mixture of grief and gratitude that I now say goodbye...

The myth of "experience" and the worth of words...

2008-02-18T21:00:00.002-06:00

I've lost count of the number of people complaining that Barack Obama "doesn't have enough experience" to become President. Dick Cheney is the most experienced person in the Bush administration. If that fact is not by itself enough to ratify Obama's candidacy, consider the following. The best presidents in U.S. history have all been "inexperienced" in the sense people are complaining about now. Lincoln, for example, and both Roosevelts, and John F. Kennedy, to name most of them. Another example: Martin Luther King, Jr. He was an inexperienced 27 year-old new PhD when he answered the invitation to go to Montgomery Alabama. But he had what the men listed above who became presidents also had: words. Words, and minds to forge them. We've endured and suffered at the hands of "experience." We've prevailed and triumphed as a people when some among us have found the words to embody our powers and invoke possibilities. Over the past 40 years we have suffered such a dearth of thoughtful words from the realm of our politics that some people still idolize a simpleton like Ronald Reagan, who was nearly as uninitelligent and ideologically rigid as the present occupant of the White House, but could act. All he could do was deliver a script convincingly. It's a measure of the transcendent importance of words that some degree of elevation can be produced even by competent acting. How much better, though, to have the opportunity to elect someone actually competent to think and to speak well? We're fortunate that the times have produced Barack Obama.

HEALTHY RELATIONSHIPS

2008-01-09T20:18:00.000-06:00

A couple of times a year Jane and I teach a course entitled Healthy Relationships. We're halfway through our winter class, in fact. We use the book Loving Well we wrote together some years ago. The course teaches how to take care of yourself first, why events or others' actions do not cause feelings, the reason couples most often have different temperaments, why conflicts cannot be eliminated from relationships, and--most importantly--our technique for healthy conflict resolution. Relationships tend snag on unresolved differences and unexpressed expectations. Affection is eroded by resentment. We teach how to maintain affection by learning how to enjoy the differences that attracted us to our partners in the first place. With a reliable way to resolve the conflicts that always arise between two (or more) people, everyone can have more fun living or working together, as humans need to do.

Good news, bad news

2007-12-31T11:14:00.001-06:00

My mother turned 96 in October. Here she is in her backyard just before her 95th birthday last year. She's been bedridden since February after repeated episodes of transient ischemia. Her slow decline has colored my experience this year. We taught our Healthy Relationships course together in January, but, as we had no snow to speak of last season, biking in west Texas became the first event of the year and where Jane switched to a Volae recumbent to be able to continue riding in the face of arthritic changes. The major bike trip for the year was riding in Provence in May with a couple of old friends. It began ideally and the first week was capped by climbing the fabled Mt Ventoux. Unfortunately, that also turned out to be the climax of the trip, because the next day I fractured my left femur in what should have been only a minor fall on some gravel. The resulting surgery, hospitalization, and "medical repatriation" both taxed Jane's patience and demonstrated the importance of checking that little box labeled "travel insurance" when booking your tickets. When we got back I was on crutches while we taught our course again in the summer session. As you can imagine, I was a little tentative getting back on two wheels toward the middle of July, but was riding well enough to bike with club members again for the August tour of western Wisconsin. Then at the end of the month I was asked to teach philosophy courses again aboard the USS Cole during September and October. The ship was deployed off Scotland and England after crossing the Atlantic from Norfolk VA. Space is at a premium on destroyers, but I had a large proportion of excellent students among the crewmembers and officers in my classes. It's been a decade since we had December snow, but we got it on the 1st this year and additional storms have meant steady cross country ski training. After xmas in Tucson hiking with friends, we were both looking forward to a full season. That outlook was canceled for me while cross country ski training yesterday, in what surely is the last bad news in this year so fraught with political and social distress: I crashed on a descent, causing several small non-displaced fractures to my left tibia and fibula. Crutches again, for at least a month. I know, I know. Don't say it. Next year has to be better, right? Instead of another shot of me in a cast I'm closing with this photo of moonrise at Cape Sounion in Greece, silhouetting the temple of Poseidon...jb

`Tis the season...

2007-12-14T12:05:00.000-06:00

Ever wonder why xmas is celebrated on December 25th? It's because that date began the weeklong events of Saturnalia, the Roman yearend festival. That's right. Roman, as in ancient Rome. When xtianity began to flourish in the 4th c. CE the celebration of Jesus' birth was put on the festival day still familiar to the peoples of Europe. If you want make something popular, link it to what's already so. It's still a common advertising practice. Until recently, however, xmas was not a significant date on the xtian calendar. In his detailed 17th c. diary, for example, Samuel Pepy's does not even mention annual activities on December 25th. By "recently," of course, I mean the 19th century. It was in the 1800s that commercial life in the cities began to be the standard, in America as in Europe. Then the gift-giving associated with December 25th appeared as an opportunity for profit. Exchanging cards and presents became popular and around this popularity images ("Santa Claus," borrowed from the German and Dutch "Sankt Nicholas") and mythology (the Bethlehem story) rapidly accumulated. So rants about "losing the true meaning of Christmas" are entirely wrong. "Christmas" as we know it originated as a commercial holiday. To make this even clearer, here's why Thanksgiving is on the 4th Thursday in November: in 1939 President Roosevelt proposed, and Congress agreed, that making it a federal holiday four weeks before xmas would create a lucrative shopping-period for U.S. retailers. And so it has become, children. It's not by chance that the majority of family conflict is now concentrated in the last month of the year...

Owner loyalty

2007-11-14T10:49:00.001-06:00

Biked up to Stan's Body Shop this morning to pick up our VW. Last month I backed into a parked Honda. I know. Don't say it. Mike called last night to say the crushed bumper was replaced. When I got to the shop the car was out front in the sunshine, the new bumper in place, so the vehicle looked good as new. To me. Mike wasn't satisfied. He asked me whether I'd be willing to wait for a few minutes `til the guy from NAPA auto parts showed up with the spectrometer. Spectrometer? "You're going to check the paint-match scientifically?" Yep, said Mike, it looks just a shade dark to me. If it is, I want to take it off and repaint. "How are you going to get paid for all that extra work," I protested. Hey, Mike said, look at all the years you've been bringing your cars here for me to repair, even bike frames to paint. I call that customer loyalty. So think of this as "owner loyalty." I could think of nothing to say to that except thanks. So I said it.

(The `39 woodie, incidentally, belongs to my friend Harry Linden in Santa Barbara.)

Veterans

2007-11-12T10:12:00.000-06:00

Miguel Cervantes, having lost his left arm at the age of 23, during the 1571 naval battle in the Gulf of Lepanto (Greece), went on to write Don Quixote in 1605, effectively creating the modern novel. Yet, to the end of his life, he prized above all his military experience above all. Engaging in combat, especially for young men in their `teens and twenties, seems undeniably to fulfill some elemental male need. (Women have performed military service for two generations now, but one never reads or hears of their cherishing the experience.) Oliver Wendell Holmes, twice severely wounded in the Civil War, maintained throughout his stellar judicial career that following military orders, even when you know them to be misguided or wrong, was the highest form of honor. And he had no illusions about courage in battle. So it would appear that war expresses human needs more than it serves political ends. Clearly the glorification of combat serves our need to bask vicariously in feelings of superiority. I say vicariously because those who glorify it haven't experienced it. Combat veterans evidently miss it, but they never glorify it. I suggest that the intensity created by the immediacy of death is what charges the experience. We all fear death, but suppress our fear. The harsh fact, however, is that death--in combat or not--cannot be made "meaningful." As soon as we're born, we're old enough to die. Death is the condition of being a living thing. Each death just ends a life. So talk about conferring meaning upon the sacrifices of all those already killed and wounded fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan by "winning" the wars is stupid and mendacious. Rudyard Kipling perfectly captured this point in a couplet he wrote after his son was killed in World War 1: If any question why we died/Tell them, because our fathers lied.

Intellectual clarity

2007-11-09T10:50:00.000-06:00

I've been debating a friend about meditation. He wants to maintain that intellect is limited and that there are forms of awareness that transcend thinking. I maintain that everything passes through intellect. As Pascal remarked, "thinking makes the whole dignity of the human." Here's my recent reply:

"Intellect" at root covers everything from perception & sensation through comprehension & analysis. In fact, however, we now use it primarily to mean the latter type of functions. Awareness covers more than consciousness, of course. But in order to argue for your claims, you must, like everyone, think about "awareness", etc. There's a tradition of attributing significance (another form of thinking) to the kinds of awareness which precede or underlie conscious thinking, i.e., the kind that takes place in words. What I want to stress is that this act of attribution is itself thinking, i.e., an intellectual action. I agree that restrictive kinds of thinking--e.g., analysis, classification--do not exhaust experience or encompass it.

But everything we actually do, including arguing for the importance of anything, is an instance of thinking. This includes evoking things like "context," which is itself a decision about classification ("What surrounds or contains this experience?"). So the whole history of dhyana is inevitably a history of thinking about it--including Buddha's original invocation of it as the ultimate stage of the path. Buddha makes this point himself and in general appeals to his audience to think, about what causes (an analytical term) dukha, and so on. Finally, I suggest what meditation achieves is the revelation of thinking, as a process, not the suspension of it. Remember that the other key claim Buddha makes is that there is no self--that is, the "I" we construct around our memories and desires is fictional. Strictly, then, any appeal to "my own experience" is a kind of illusion. Meditation reveals that thoughts just go on--localizable in the active brain, of course--but "mine" in only a temporary and fragile sense, sooner or later to be dissolved...jb

Tin ear

2007-11-08T17:12:00.000-06:00

NPR carried a piece today about the release in Baghdad of hundreds of Sunni prisoners held by the US. The reporter described the scene at the airbase: the men are seated, squinting against the harsh sunlight, dressed in "new white shirts" provided by the US Army, listening while "a military band plays." My attention was caught. The sound of the music was brought up. I wondered how an Arab song might sound played by an army band. It took about three notes for me to recognize the melody. "Onward Christian Soldiers!" What were they thinking? It's unlikely, of course, that any of the prisoners realized what they were hearing. The reporter didn't even comment on it. What an amazing insult, though...

Shadows

2007-11-07T10:59:00.000-06:00

At our latitude--44deg59min N--the earth's tilt has by this time of year sent the sun well down in the southern sky, so that riding out on late afternoons my shadow, visible in my helmet mirror, captures in silhouette my riding position and pistoning legs. There's something irresistibly engaging about this image. Part of the attraction lies in the occasion seeing one's shadow provides to glimpse oneself from the standpoint of another. It offers the same secret thrill we get viewing photos or films of ourselves. Of course a shock accompanies the latter: is THAT the way I look? It's the same shock we'd get by looking in the mirror, if we could look at the image of ourselves without editing out the evidence of aging. But your shadow is not shocking. That silhouette edits the details, leaving only the action or the pose. So that must be part of the attraction, too, adding to the pleasure of riding my bike into the sun, along the river, and out into the countryside, with miles yet to go...

Be the bunny...

2007-11-03T10:51:00.000-05:00

It’s a bright, calm day again. On the way in from my run this morning I was thinking about the little rain so far this fall and the dim prospects for winter snow. My thoughts are reminiscent of the rather prescient “drought” premise of the Greg Kotis musical Urinetown we saw staged last night at the university. It was as dull as most musicals, though the song “Don’t be the Bunny,” was hilarious. The performance was enlivened by spirited dancing and a good cast, but the conceit is even more politically relevant than when it opened in 2001. The theme is the rapacious “privatization” of public services. It reminded me of this picture from a batch of California-fire photos my daughter Megan sent. Like this little rabbit, the American public is now rightly fleeing the corrupt and destructive distribution of public funds to "contractors" favored by Republicans, the administration, and the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security. It can't happen too fast...

COMING HOME

2007-10-26T18:44:00.000-05:00

The first thing you notice after months aboard ship are all the luxuries of daily life ashore, like showering without holding on and going outside to run. Looking out the window and looking in the refrigerator. I've been back a week and the delight in such things has still not worn off. I missed swimming and cycling the most. Thanks, apparently, to global warming, it's still cycling weather here in Wisconsin. Everything has its upside, even the carbon dioxide buildup in our atmosphere.

If you read any comments you've noticed a couple of cowardly self-appointed patriots have been critical of my observations of navy operations and people. I say cowardly because they hide behind pseudonyms while excoriating me for not appreciating military life and it's "sacrifices." It's amusing to read timid loudmouths like these two complain about my writing, published under my name for all to read, including the officers and crew of the USS Cole, whom I invited to do so. None of them found my opinions objectionable. Reading over my writing for the time underway it seems to me I devote about ten percent of my comments to personnel, duties, and behavior. A good deal of that is about the crewmembers who were my students, most of whom did excellent work while fulfilling all of the demands of watches, duty calls, and drills. I salute them again for their efforts and wish them well in their careers.

Most of those careers will not be in the navy. My anecdotal survey of young officers and crew revealed that fewer than half of the officers intended to continue after the years of their required first tours--even those educated at the Naval Academy--while something like eighty percent of the crew intended to leave after their initial four to six years. The reason I heard most often was that enlistment meant payment for college afterward; the very appeal you see made on the recruiting posters. So our military is filled with young people trading years of their lives for college funds, a government program to educate those who couldn't otherwise afford higher education. The Department of Defense is running a huge college scholarship program.

Confused Seas

2007-10-15T07:45:00.000-05:00

Saturday, October 13, 2007 08:27
USS Cole - 33°16N 48°45W

It would have been fun, when I went on the bridge this morning, to watch the launch of one of the RIBs to investigate a smoke flare--fired, I presume, from the frigate John L. Hall standing off to our port at the time--except that the launch was more-than-usually slow. When the first “Warrior” proved to have a malfunctioning solenoid the number two was swung into action, slowly, and eventually sped off toward the target.

The decks were drenched and the seas confused after running through a squall earlier this morning. The sun had happily broken through, though, and it felt good on my face. I’ve decided just to excerpt my journals for the final blog entries, so that’s what you’ve been reading for this week.
...jb

Nothing Else Like It

2007-10-15T07:19:00.000-05:00

Friday, October 12, 2007 12:26
USS Cole – 33°15N 041°16W

Storms that had been far off moved south overnight, bringing rain and roughening the seas. The ship has passed into mid-Atlantic time, causing me to wake an hour before reveille—again. The next time-change will be to EDT and we’ll be into U.S. waters, there to linger at sea for the sake of “qualifying” tests and drills. Air temps have risen above 70°F as the Cole wallows through swells up to eight feet. Even planting one’s feet farther apart than normal negotiating the p-ways, one’s passage still has the drunken quality caused by up becoming down within the space of a stride.

Today’s relatively unceremonious commemoration of the small-boat attack on the ship—October 12, 2000—was not memorable, though an interesting example of forced solemnity, with its attendant sentimentality and excess of piety. Playing some country song over the 1-MC seemed to elicit the greatest feeling, at least in the wardroom where I was reading at the time.

I wrote the following piece in response to the question implied by the first sentence, which came up during the discussion of Heidegger yesterday. Perhaps it will occasion some insight.

A reflection on death and life:

“I believe in life after death.” This claim conceals part of its meaning. What is concealed is the recognition that death is the end of life. In order for there to be anything “after,” what is has to end. This awareness of the necessity of a life’s ending, of its coming to a close with death, is uniquely human and carries with it concern for my life. The sense of my own life contains the realization that I must give it up at some point in its course. My life comes to an end. It is this sense of ownership which misleads us. Even if there existed some other condition, some form of existence other than life, it would not diminish the distress of giving up my life. For the conviction that my life is a possession supposes there is a distinction between my actions, my life as led, and me. But there is no such distinction. We are what we do. This life is mine only in the sense that it is completely described by my actions. Otherwise it is a finite but unknown span of days and years. So it cannot be augmented or diminished in any way by anything after it. Insofar as it must remain just the whole of whatever span it proves to be, there can be nothing else like it, or after it.

My brother Bob wrote last night about my mother’s failing condition. I wrote the following for him to read her, in case I never see her again…

I send my thoughts to you mother, to tell you how your love and support have shaped my life and made possible what I’ve made of it. More than anything your curiosity and sense of adventure encouraged me and enabled me to devote my life to search, to study, and to teaching. Your dedication and graceful service have inspired generations now, but your sense of fun and joy in experience have been just as important to me. I cherish the memories of our travels together; as I cherish the good fortune in being your son. Goodbye, mother. I love you. John.

...jb

When Duty Calls

2007-10-13T17:48:00.000-05:00

Thursday, October 11, 2007 08:16
USS Cole - 33°54N 031°15W

Rain at sea. Storm clusters are visible to port and starboard when I come onto the bridge wing this morning. Overnight the ship has turned onto 270° at 33°N instead of the 30° planned a few days ago. Now we have about 40° of latitude to traverse, which will bring us off the U.S. coast for the couple of days of drills that will consume Monday and Tuesday next week. When I come in off the quarterdeck after shaving—now that I’ve run out of the pressurized cream I’ve taken to finding a spot on the weatherdecks to use the electric razor—Palmer meets me in the 1 deck p-way and volunteers brightly, “Five days and counting.” It’s pleasant to find her adopting a more comradely demeanor, ever since the impromptu conversation last week about teaching careers. I’m counting the days now, too.

The short makeup session with one of my Intro students yesterday was a pleasant surprise. He’d reflected on the range of philosophers we’ve read to advance his personal thesis about the “principle questions” addressed by philosophy: the problem of death, the question of meaning, and the possibility of an afterlife. I didn’t dissuade or correct him. It was fun to watch him attempting a philosophical exercise of his own. Unfortunately our conversation was cut short by his being called to duty on his station in CWC, command and weapons control.

...jb

RAS

2007-10-07T23:51:00.000-05:00

Sunday, October 07, 2007 13:02
USS Cole -- 48°58 N 5°13W

On a SW course of 240° the ship this morning was some 49nm N of the island off the coast of Brittany called "L'Ouessant" or "the westerly" [map]. It lies next to the busy shipping lanes used to take maritime traffic E onto the route to the Straits of Gibraltar as well as W out into the Atlantic. Where we're headed now, enroute to another RAS--replenishment at sea--appointment for fuel to take the ship on the remaining eight day journey to Norfolk. It's remarkable that the historically significant enterprise of sailing out of sight of land can, and has, become routine. Even for me. Despite the enormous number of things that have to be done rightly and constantly monitored to sail even a heavily armored warship across the sea, it is in fact much safer--much less likely to involve accident or injury--than driving to the supermarket.
...jb

SMELLS OF YOUTH

2007-10-07T23:14:00.000-05:00

Wednesday, October 3, 2007
USS Cole -- Portsmouth, England

The odors of fish and fuel oil. Ports smell the same the world over. It’s the first thing I notice as the tugs work the ship up to "the hard," as the British call a mooring. That smell recalls for me my first seventeen years, growing up in San Pedro--the Port of Los Angeles--and reminds me why I so enjoy the sea. Despite the indignities we’ve visited upon it and regardless of the criticisms that can be rightly leveled at human carelessness, the messy, constantly changing interfaces between humans and the oceans that we call ports are among the places in the world most charged with history and possibility.

Ever notice that the Jews never mention the sea? There they were, living right on the Mediterranean and speaking the language of the Phoenicians--legendary maritime traders from such cities as Sidon and Tyre on the coast of what is now Lebanon—and there’s not a word about it in their treasured histories. Even their creation myth mentions the ocean only as what has to be separated from the sky to make space for land. Evidently their desert heritage was too enshrined in their thinking to allow "the waters" a place, other than as a metaphor for some sort of primordial disorder: "...and darkness was upon the face of the waters," as the panel, convened by James I of England to translate Genesis, decided to phrase it.

Now those others with a heritage as desert dwellers--the adherents of Muhammad and Islam--are some of them threatened by the vast civilization that was spawned by sea-going migration and trade and intent upon threatening it in return. Despite their formidable and efficient use, a thousand years ago, of the oceans of the "center"--the Mediterranean, the Red, the Persian, the Indian--the Arab peoples have completely abandoned the seas. Standing on the bridge wing, overlooking the traffic in Portsmouth harbor, I can’t help but think the way the oceans connect us all will prevail.
...jb

New Port; New World

2007-10-02T05:42:00.000-05:00

Tuesday, October 02, 2007
USS Cole – Bournemouth, Cherbourg 50°10N 001°50W

I make it to the bridge just before six bells. There’s a mammoth container ship a mile to starboard, it’s great bulk black in the foggy dawn, save for the row of lighted ports along its hull. Through the big, mounted binoculars on the wing I can make out “Evergreen” on its side; it’s making some 25kts. We’ve arrived at the mouth of the English Channel, between Bournemouth and Cherbourg. It’s exciting to read these names on the chart. I feel like arriving in home port, even though I’ve never sailed these waters. A curious atavism of heritage and language.

Awoke reasonably alert about 0530, glad for the good sleep. At the wardroom table I listen to recapitulations of the measures taken during the night with respect to many “contacts” in this crowded sea. I’m looking forward to the day. At long last, we’ve reached the end of the 19th century this semester [in my classes]. There are few things more appealing than talking about the end of absolutes and the origins of Christianity, for the historical facts are sure to undermine most of the students’ comfortable conventions. I’ve been stressing the role of philosophy, since its beginnings, in challenging social and intellectual conventions by asking questions. Unappreciated, even reviled, when they’re asked and explored, the most penetrating of these questions eventually destroy the existing world-picture and create a new language. At long last everyone learns to speak it, giving rise to a new set of conventions. And then, by chance, another philosopher comes along to ask the key question. In the middle of the 19th century, it was Darwin who filled this honorable—but rarely honored—role. The explication of his insight into evolution was more explosive even than the Copernican revolution, for it ended millennia of fantasies about god and dreams of absolute realities. Now humans live in a universe of chance, open as never before to imagination and discovery. Still, most people continue to speak the old language. Nietzsche was the first to notice the time it takes for the majority to receive the news that the world has changed. People are less modern than the times they live in.

...jb

THE CALF OF MAN

2007-10-01T09:03:00.000-05:00

Monday, October 01, 2007

USS Cole – Bristol Channel 51°29N 006°04W

A three-quarter moon was halfway up a clear night sky to the northeast. With the lights of Belfast to starboard and slight glimmers from the Calf of Man to port, the ship slid southward through the Irish Sea. I was sorry to find we were making the passage in the dark. I’d hoped for a shot of the Isle of Man—with it’s little SW peninsula called the Calf—which I haven’t seen since 1984, when I visited from London, accompanied by Jon, and we looked up the surviving records of Abraham Bailiff’s arrival, marriage, and fatherhood in the early 19th century. One of his descendants arrived in California in time for the Gold Rush of 1849, eventually to establish a lumber business in Santa Rosa, Sonoma County and to become my great-grandfather, John Delaware.

When I happened upon a Bailiff website in 1999 and learned of a “gathering of the clan” planned for the next year near Nashville, I told my mother about it. She was eager to go. Thus, improbably, I found myself driving her and my brothers to an out-of-the-way resort for a weekend among what proved to be a large number of people to whom we seemed completely unrelated. John Delaware was the only one of four brothers to make it to the West Coast; the others migrated to places like Pennsylvania and Virginia, leaving hundreds of descendants, in sharp contrast to our tiny branch of the family tree. I don’t recommend it, but it was a memorable lesson in genealogy.

This morning we’re driving through choppy seas and thickening fog on course 197°, some fifty kilometers west of Bristol Channel, a light rain being driven onto our bows by the ship’s fifteen knots of headway. “Low visibility detail” had just been called when I arrived on the bridge. The captain was in his chair. A bit earlier at breakfast he mentioned being tired after a night during which he was called upon to make judgments about a the Cole’s transit through many “contacts,” the term for any vessel picked up on ship’s radar, especially those whose direction-of-travel is likely to intersect ours. Standing watch on the port wing the lookout was laughing at the gulls. About a dozen of them hung in the air, “hoping we’re a trawler,” I said. Each was angled into the southeast wind, reliable directional indicators every one, yet keeping pace with the ship by slight adjustments in wing-angle. Remarkable.

...jb

Point of Contention

2007-10-01T08:24:00.000-05:00

Sunday, September 30, 2007 18:05
USS Cole – Ailsa Craig 55°19N 006°10W

I’ve been away from home the entire month of September. It seems far longer, as I told Jane on the phone in Edinburgh. The humor of the junior officers—even the not-so-junior—is becoming stale. I’ve no reason to be dyspeptic, though. I’ve just dined on steak and lobster—albeit the steak tough and dry, the lobster nearly tasteless— complemented by baked potato and sweet corn, and the excess protein affords me great pleasure at the moment. And I have to keep reminding myself that most of the officers aboard are in their 20s, barely past their undergrad training.

Sea and anchor proceeded slowly today, but eventually the ship was eased away from the pier of the sprawling Faslane Royal Navy Base. I watched the process for awhile, then went back below to work on student papers. I napped after lunch to catch up from last night’s fitful sleep. Once you’ve become used to the motion of the sea at night, the comparative stability of the ship when moored seems to become an unconscious irritant. Of course the long travel day in Edinburgh may have contributed.

There was a great deal of tension about the bridge when I went up before dinner, aiming to see Ailsa Craig again. The navigator, actually an ensign in training, was in some sort of conflict with the experienced bridge crew, evidently over the timing of our passage out of the Firth of Clyde and projected time for concluding the maneuver. I was focused on the enormous rock. Even at more than 20kts, the strange outcropping came up very slowly. Finally, Ailsa Craig once again some 1000 meters to port, the USS Cole slid out of Scotland’s waters into the Irish Sea. It will be nearly all of two days before we thread our way into Portsmouth harbor, since we must wait for high tide to enter the mouth of the Thames, as do most ships of significant draft (9.5 meters, in the case of the Cole). At dinner the junior officers were talking excitedly about taking a trip to see Stonehenge. One of them—the young ensign from Spooner—remembered reading the scene in Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. I mentioned the more ancient megaliths a little further west, but no one asked me any questions about the archeology, let alone discoveries about the construction and use of the 3500 year old site.

...jb

Priyanka and Susha

2007-09-29T04:17:00.000-05:00

Thursday, September 27, 2007
USS Cole – Strait of Pratee 58°14N 005°40W

In the interests of simulating all the features of contemporary warfare, journalists are also “embedded” with the forces. Two fledgling members of the fourth estate were helicoptered aboard yesterday. Armed with cameras and laptops they were eager to stage the requisite interviews and practice writing the stories we all want to read. Priyanka and Susha (left to right)—the first born in Mumbai, the second raised in Bahrain—are both masters graduates of the journalism school at University of Westminster in London. Their casual assumption of their role and their personal histories are surely a more interesting story than anything they’ll report about the “air attacks” and other details of these war games. Two kids, fluent in Hindi, Arabic, and English, learning the trade in the UK but planning on careers at CNN-IBN—the Indian Broadcasting Network CNN affiliate—in New Delhi. In conversation at dinner I learn that all the popular TV in India is in English.

It’s not by invasion that the planet is being globalized. Language and the movement of people is doing it much more completely and effectively. The British abandoned India to its independence and paroxysms of internecine killing exactly sixty years ago this month. Now the people of India all watch television in English and work nights to provide tech services for U.S. businesses. Marx was right.

…jb

One Chance

2007-09-26T09:02:00.000-05:00

Wednesday, September 26, 2007
USS Cole – Rum Island, The Hebrides 57°02N 006°14W

The USS Cole is on station for tomorrow’s war. According to the scenario, diplomatic and other negotiations are to have failed, so the naval and air forces of the contending nations—“Albinistan” in the case of the squadron of which the Cole is a part—begin action against one another. The aim? To defeat the forces of the “invader” state and to defend the “mineral resources”—imaginary oil platforms (what else?) represented by the replenishment oiler Laramie—supposedly the property of the state that’s been invaded.

Sound familiar? Of course. What’s concealed by all this planning and practice is the certainty that such classic military operations—“surface warfare” in Navy terminology—will never again take place. Just as they are not in the current “war” caused by the invasion of Iraq. No other countries have, or ever will have, the naval and air forces of NATO. It’s both a triumph and a relic of the cold war. Invasions will likely continue to be perpetrated, surely. But even they will not result in classic “surface warfare.” A fact which the current administration of the U.S. has learned, but refuses to believe.

For if it’s acknowledged, the continued expenditure of time and money on present enterprises—like the maintenance and training of surface warfare forces—becomes not only questionable but futile. All of the young officers aboard are studying for their “SWO” (Surface Warfare Officer) badge, an ornate embroidered insignia patch worn over the left breast pocket of one’s coveralls. For the enlisted crew, the comparable badge is the “ESWS” (Enlisted Surface Warfare Specialist). And in the midst of all this strategic planning and tactical maneuvers, the humble work of daily ship maintenance goes on. From the standpoint of an observer like me, the contrast is frequently comic. However exalted—or fanciful—the plan or purpose, the actual work is always routine.

Indeed, unless one practices the work until it is routine, the performance of which it’s a part, however grand, will most often fail. In the end, as in the moment, what you’re doing now is all. One of my older students, who has advanced from enlisted to warrant officer, spoke this morning of the importance of goals. Taking advantage of my role, I pointed out that, however pleasing or fulfilling the completion of a plan may prove to be, it’s never achieved on account of the planning—or “dreaming,” as another popular metaphor has it—but on account of the daily work one does. We set goals for the same reason that we find ourselves training and maintaining a navy which will never be used for its supposed purpose: in order to conceal the inevitability of loss and death.

If my goals are far off, surely I have to survive to reach them. To admit this is nonsense is to face the fact that all accomplishment—and all potential for joy—must take place now, or never. To delight in what you’re doing now is the only chance you have.

...jb

Balancing Acts

2007-09-26T08:38:00.000-05:00

Tuesday, September 25, 2007
USS Cole – The Minches, North Uist New Hebrides 58°47N 006°48W

A pod of Atlantic porpoise were cavorting off to port when I came onto the bridgewing this morning, appearing to race in the bow wave as they typically do. To be able to swim that fast looks like fun. Although we’re not going that fast. “Five knots to nowhere” is the phrase for the position we’re in at the moment, making right-angle course changes periodically to stay in our assigned “box” in the channel between the Hebrides and the coast of Scotland. The winds are more than 30kts out of the NW, but the seas show merely choppy whitecaps here in the protection of the islands.

My courses are now passing the halfway point in this compressed six week semester aboard. The students have now sorted themselves into the outstanding, the competent, and the passive. It’s the time when, with rare exceptions, you know the outcome. So teaching becomes a balancing act, in which you free the best as far as possible to do what they can and speak to the others as encouragingly as you can. You never know—despite experience—when that one more may rise from amongst the others.

I had a really good class on Kant just this evening, for example. Several students were skeptical, not to say scornful, of the possibility that one might revolutionize human experience—as Kant did with his insight into the formative character of consciousness—without ever having any “experience,” like travel. I enjoyed pointing out that the reason the rest of us are not innovators is that, especially when we travel, we drag along the apparatus of our personal culture and perceptions like Cratchit’s ghost, not only not open to discovery but positively armored against it, for the most part. Someone mentioned Darwin’s travels. “Perfect example of my point,” I said. For Darwin’s greatness rests on his willingness to abandon his (and his culture’s) presuppositions about biological forms, revealing—but only after he was home thinking through his questions—knowledge of living process until then concealed by “experience.”

I also argued that the reason philosophers’ claims seem either obvious or outlandish is that the insights of the greatest of them change the language. Almost everyone now speaks, for instance, the language of Descartes. In the 17th century his picture of the mind or self as interior to the lived body and senses was a threat to the existing intellectual—not to mention ecclesiastical—order. Now it’s conventional to talk and think of ourselves as somehow inside ourselves; the “real me” beneath this exterior appearance. Yet in this convention we’re all four centuries behind the times. Kant’s insight made possible everything that people now have in mind when they think of science and technology, but the changes he wrought on human thought and speech are still on the way, like light from distant stars, to use Nietzsche’s metaphor. People are less modern than the times in which they live. It will always be so. It’s one of the things that makes teaching such an adventure.

...jb

Neptune Warrior

2007-09-26T07:57:00.000-05:00

Monday, September 24, 2007
USS Cole – Orkney Islands 57°47N 004°17W

There’s nothing like the sea to occasion thoughts of mortality. On deck this morning the southernmost of the Orkneys was just visible off the port bow. We were on an easterly heading, still in the “box” assigned the ship prior to commencement of the war games tonight and for three days to come. In principle the military exists to address threats to the security and independence of its government. The promise of such confrontation animates the enterprise, especially of the officers, most of whom (women not excepted) see themselves as warriors, subject to the specialized division of labor that characterizes the contemporary warship. Yet the sea is all around us. Capt. Geoff Bowker, one of the British officers aboard to coordinate the land-based aircraft participating in the “Neptune Warrior” exercises, remarked that the bay just to the south on the coast of Scotland was the scene of the scuttling of the ships of the German fleet trapped there at the end of World War I. So many humans have followed their debris into the sea.

The motile yet uniform character of the ocean dramatizes the transient character of life. Not only do we each of us have to give up our lives, sooner or later, but we alone have evolved the capacity to notice this is so. In addition, we are all painfully conscious of the fact that life itself—and the processes of which it is a part—will go on without us. There is no more forceful experience of this to be had than to be out at sea, land only a memory over the horizon. It’s not that it’s dangerous, either.

Of course I would survive less than thirty minutes were I accidentally to be thrown into this cold sea. The chances of this, however, are astronomically smaller than the likelihood of my death in traffic pretty much anywhere I might be driving. So it’s not the danger. What’s brought home is the fragility of human existence, dependent as we are on the vast processes of the world providing for and protecting our existence. This train of thought is altogether welcome and one of the benefits of this travel. Under the conditions of daily life and familiar routine it is rare to find the world that contains and supports us so immediately present to the sense.
…jb

Escaping Storms?

2007-09-25T23:50:00.000-05:00

Sunday, September 23, 2007
USS Cole – Orkney Islands 57°34N 004°07W

The ship is heading west again, after cruising eastward over the top of Scotland overnight, to avoid predicted 50kt winds from the south up the narrow channel called the Minches off the NW coast, where we’ve been for nearly a week. We reached the fabled fishing grounds of the Orkney Islands before turning. There’s a brilliant sunset view from the port bridge wing, produced in part by the massed cumulus, suggesting the storm we ran from awaits us still.

The view astern is in sharp contrast. If you look closely, you can see the trash bags bobbing in our wake. Watching them drift I thought about all the debris the oceans have absorbed since humans became complex enough to discard our waste into the rivers and seas. One of the British officers on board for the exercises remarked on enjoying scuba diving off the south coast of England. “What are you diving on?,” I asked. “Wrecks,” he said, “which are really plentiful in Dorset waters.” And the oceans go on absorbing everything that flows or falls into our waters. Seventy percent of the planet, of course, but a recent study estimates the amount of degraded plastic is six times the volume of plankton. If you’re not certain about the meaning of “plankton,” you can [click it], look it up, or email my daughter at meganbailiff@earthlink.net.

...jb

Rude Awakenings

2007-09-25T23:30:00.000-05:00

Friday, September 21, 2007
USS Cole – Isle of Lewis, North Minch 58°13N, 005°33W

The ship is awakened by a loud rendition of a crappy rock song via the lousy fidelity of the 1-MC, in place of reveille this morning. The experience is not inductive of a pleasant mood. I’m told it’s the choice of the bridge watch and apparently the captain allowed it to be known that it was all right with him. Too bad.

I watch all alone, from the starboard bridge wing, the shifting headings of several of the ships in the group, including the unusual profile of the French destroyer La-Touche-Treville. The oiler Laramie is serving as the “protected asset” for the next couple of days, so the Cole bridge team works to match her speed and headings. I watch a gull skimming about the bow and another trawler working its way south, plying a difficult trade in the midst of these war games.

I think about war when I’m down in the fitness gym, attempting to keep my balance on the treadmill as the hull rolls 10° or more to port, then back to starboard. I’ve found that one of the attractions of the elliptical trainer—there are two of them on board, too—is that you can maintain balance better with your shoes in their foot cradles. Plus they do get your heartrate up. What’s war got to do with workouts? Last week, walking along the pedestrian mall in Glasgow, watching the strollers and and shoppers, I thought, “These people aren’t killing each other.” Sectarian strife and factional violence resolved by shopping? Think about it.

...jb

CHENG, WEPS, AND SUPPO

2007-09-25T22:47:00.000-05:00

Thursday, September 20, 2007
USS Cole – Cape Wrath 58°13N 05°33W

Like every human group, profession, and institution, the Navy has developed its own lingo, consisting of acronyms, abbreviations, and, most distinctively, words compounded of individual syllables from a phrase or description. Examples of the latter are COMNAVSURFLANT and SIGUMS and our old friend UNREP. The most unusual impression, however, is the abbreviated form of address amongst the officers. Crew refer to themselves, and are referred to, by their ratings—“ET2” or “MC1,” and so on—while the officers greet and converse using contractions of their duties. Though they sound together like a comedy troupe, for example, “CHENG” for “chief engineer,” “WEPS” for weapons officer, and “SUPPO” for supply officer. Wardroom etiquette requires that the officer entering for each meal request of the senior officer already present permission to be seated. So “May I join you, SuppO” is a typical line when one of the lieutenants enters the room. The effect, intended to be formal and deferential, is irresistibly comic. The commanding officer, however—though known throughout the ship as the “CO”—is always called “Captain” when addressed.

The CO is Capt. Cary Krause and the other night he came into the wardroom while medical officer Cmdr. John Fallon and I were in the lounge. Fallon was watching a movie and I was writing. Krause began speaking as soon as he saw us, eager to talk about the dangerous maneuvers he had been directing all day. “The closest I’ve come to risking my ship and my command,” he said, obviously both relieved and exhilarated by the experience. The Cole, together with the two British, one French, and one Danish ship in our group, had been making approaches and course changes in relatively confined waters between the islands off Cape Wrath, part of the Orkney cluster, in the course of which they also had to determine whether small craft, assigned by the warfare exercise to appear and circle the vessels, were hostile intruders. “I’m never comfortable if we have to be closer than 500 yards to anyone else,” the captain said. “On top of that you’ve got these shallow waters,” he said, “and all these other potential threats to watch out for.” Today the schedule calls for British jets to simulate missile attacks, coming for the ship at low angles before veering away. Should be exciting to watch. I’m sure it’s literally the closest anyone aboard any of these ships will ever come to surface warfare. At least I hope so.
…jb

Through the Scuttles

2007-09-25T19:40:00.000-05:00

Wednesday, September 19, 2007
USS Cole – Cape Wrath Orkney Islands 58°40N 05°13W

The ship was heading up into the 40kt winds this morning, standing at flight quarters to receive a pair of Royal Marine gunnery specialists, coming aboard to coordinate firing practice later today off Cape Wrath. Helicopter landings on heaving decks in buffeting winds are apparently routine for these pilots. Looks hard to me, not to mention risky. Though not more so than attempting to unship or retrieve small boats. Winds and seas yesterday scrubbed just such an attempt. Exposed as the ship is now to unimpeded winds over the North Sea, movement of the hull last night was extreme. But since we’re scheduled to be on station for this exercise most of the day, the routine may be less onerous. Perhaps I’ll have some students able to concentrate for the class meetings and somewhat less sleep-deprived.

Seas never look as rough as they feel. The North Sea has been rolling and pitching the hull through 15° and more, but when you’re on the weather deck the waves scud blandly past with only spindrift to indicate their force and direction. Part of the ship’s motion is induced by the mast, of course, a massive tripod jutting more that 60ft above the waterline and studded with multiple arrays of radar and other equipment. When the ship is underway the regulation is “condition modified Zebra,” which means that hatches at and below the waterline—six of the total of ten decks—are closed and dogged with only the “scuttle” left open. The scuttle is a smaller circular hatch with its own to allow it to be quickly sealed. This is a daily reminder of the fact that flooding, one of the two dangers aboard ship—the other is fire—is an ever-present possibility. My classroom is on the 2 deck, so to reach it I have to descend through the scuttle at least twice a day. Sometimes more, because the laundry is one deck further below and aft. I effect that descent cautiously every time, catching every handhold available, especially the short bar welded above the final few steps on the ladder. With my big feet I’ve frequently found myself hanging from that bar when I’ve lost my footing.

If flooding does occur, the ship—already compartmentalized by the many airtight hatches along the p-ways—can quickly be made safer by isolating sections of the hull. When this has to be done, safety is provided by “escape shuttles:” ladderways with their own scuttles to allow you to climb to higher decks from many points fore and aft. In the navy they say “every sailor is a firefighter.” The p-ways are hung with heavy suits and gear at the ready and practice sessions are frequent.

So there’s plenty to be concerned about at sea, apart from any action or attack that might require the use of the plentiful weapons aboard. On a warship the officers and crew talk and think almost entirely about the prospect of attack. Having weapons, I’ve noticed, turns everything around you into a possible threat.

...jb

Into the Cold

2007-09-18T16:36:00.000-05:00

Tuesday, September 18, 2007
USS Cole – Little Minch, Outer Hebrides 158°13N, 06°48W

Something there is about a bow coursing into the sea that fills me with Robert Frost-like feelings of celebration. Even when that bow is the leading edge of some 9000 tons of steel. Yesterday the ship was still clearing the Firth of Forth, heading for the turn north toward our present position. Climbing the ladder to the bridge I encountered the young female officer in charge of sea and anchor. “It’s cold out there,” she said, then, as we passed one another through the airlock hatches, added, “I’m warning you.” I smiled in acknowledgement, but was secretly smug. I live in Wisconsin, after all, I thought to myself, and continued up into a brilliant scene.

The sun was filtered through a scattering of cloud but not reflecting, for the sea was whitecaps to the horizon. Waves of more than a meter were being driven before a wind off our starboard bow. The “relative wind”—true windspeed plus the ship’s—buffeted the starboard bridgewing around 20knots. Clouds trailed tendrils of rain here and there over the receding hills that form the coast of NW Scotland. I climbed up to the deck holding the ship’s “flashing lights”—two large signal lamps—to get to the enormous binoculars mounted on a pedestal aft. I trained them on a speck astern, which proved to be a trawler bouncing it’s way across the wakes of the four other
warships forming our current squadron. But the best sight was from the port wing. Bathed in the sharply-angled sunlight, Ailsa Craig sprouted from the sea like an enormous green-topped fungus, certainly one of the most remarkable formations I’ve ever seen.

The Cole is now part of a group containing French, British, and German ships, one of two representing the hostile “countries” into which the UK has been divided for these semi-annual exercises called “Neptune Warrior”. You can’t justify maintaining large fleets of warships if you don’t train them to fight. So the exercise is constructed around the following scenario: “Hibernia”—basically Scotland—has invaded a state to its south (the English midlands); this conquest is being contested by “Albinistan”—the southern third of Britain. Our group is the Albinistan navy involved in this conflict. The aim is to repel attacks—including aircraft—while avoiding open war. Sound familiar? It’s supposed to. The object is to test the responses of radar teams, weapons groups, and the other military functions aboard. A pair of British air traffic controllers came aboard in Faslane to coordinate the “air attacks,” being simulated by a wing of Falcon jets flown by retired Royal Air Force pilots. So, at surely impressive annual cost, NATO forces are being trained to wage a form of surface warfare certain never again to take place. For no other countries, now or in the future, are likely to possess navy and air forces on the scale the Americans and Europeans have attained. That includes Russia and China. Teaches ya’, eh?
...jb

Interesting Debris

2007-09-17T18:08:00.000-05:00

Sunday, September 16, 2007
USS Cole – Faslane RNB Scotland

The most interesting sight at sea is something other than sea. Even debris. But especially land. We made landfall early Friday morning, entering the famed Firth of Forth. “Firth” is a degeneration of “fjord”—for the deep coastal indentations produced by rivers and glaciers—applied locally by the Norwegian marauders who came “Viking” (Norse for “pillaging”) in this region centuries ago. Above the Forth is the Clyde, into whose narrows the ship was threaded during the early hours of the day. The River Clyde divides the city of Glasgow [map], some 40kms E of the Faslane Royal Navy Base where we’ve been pierside all weekend.

The first person off the ship Friday afternoon, I headed to Helensburgh, the port town about 10kms south of the base, where I enjoyed a pleasant meal alone in the charming Café 19 I found on the harbor street. The management allowed me to plug in my EU `phone, whose SIM card I’d replaced earlier for UK service. As soon as it was charged I left a message for Jane so we could talk on Saturday. There’s never much to convey in telephone conversations, but the sound of another’s voice in one’s ear, most of all the voice of someone beloved, is irreplaceable.

By the time I reached her I was in Glasgow, having enjoyed some of the sights of what is now a bustling city, it’s traditionally grimy character offset by flowering shrubs and a thriving retail center created by a mile-long pedestrian zone from the opera house to the riverbank. I walked about looking for a shop that might have some men’s knit fingerless gloves. I forgot to bring the ones I bought in London years ago. But none were selling such a humble product. The Contemporary Art Museum had a rather nice permanent collection. I called Jane from a Starbucks and we talked while I sipped my decaf latté. Starbucks? Right. Any other coffee place in Europe will make you a powdered drink when you ask for decaf.

It was raining by the time I went down the Queen Street station to catch the train back to Helensburgh. I was reading Saturday by Ian MacEwan when one of a group of three US sailors who’d taken seats around me asked about it. As conversation ensued they learned that I was teaching aboard the USS Cole and I learned one of them was from Watertown. Today it was raining more steadily than last night, so I decided against a two hour trip to Edinburgh. Instead I got in my first swim workout since Norfolk in the “SportDrome” here on the base, a mammoth facility about a half mile up the hill, which also boasts an indoor soccer pitch and a ski hill. I not only had my own lane, I had the pool to myself. Evidently not many people get up on Sunday morning, even on a military base, perhaps since it usually falls right after Saturday night. Good workout.

Two-a-day workouts are one of the things I give up for this job aboard. Since reveille is 0600 and I have to eat before 0700 I wait `til 0930 for my workout forward on the 1 deck on the treadmill or stat bike crammed into a corner between the Battle Dressing Station and the ammunition elevator. Now that the courses are fully underway I have to see students later in the mornings, if they’re forced by their work schedules to miss a class meeting. After lunch I teach a two-hour section, which last `til dinner time (0400 when we’re underway). Then another two-hour section at 1800. Four hours of teaching a day, six days a week. It’s a good thing it’s a short gig.
...jb

Electronic Media Woes

2007-09-17T00:03:00.000-05:00

Friday, September 14, 2007 8:27 am
USS Cole--In port at Faslane on the Firth of Clyde (about 40k W of Glasgow)

Pretty busy with ship's mooring and related activities. I hope to have a full report of these activities published here soon.

As you may remember, I've been having trouble getting photos that I've been taking of my experiences onboard the Cole published to this blog. The problem has to do with the size of the photo files created by my camera--they are so big they can not be easily uploaded given the limited bandwidth* available to us on the ship. Based on a suggestion of my friend Jack who is helping me to post these entries in my blog, I have recruited one of my students, an ET (electronics tech), who I think will help me to shrink the files. We'll attempt next week to get some photos to a size that can be emailed and posted.

I miss biking with my partner and friends in Wisconsin. I get relatively restricted workouts aboard ship, and the TV is broken in the "gym" where the stationary bike is located. The ship has a rudimentary TV network on the decks; movies are broadcast aboard from somewhere down below. So it's dullsville on playing DVDs or VHS tapes on the TV near the stat bike. Sigh.

My courses are going OK, though, and I have some good students. Cheers.
...jb

* Bandwidth note: The military (somewhere) allocates bandwidth by squadron, etc., e.g., 256mHz for a group. This is then parceled amongst the ships by size. So this destroyer gets only a tiny fraction. Hence, no news. Onboard, the email works fine, but filesize for sentmail is restricted.

Sea Legs

2007-09-13T21:14:00.000-05:00

Thursday, September 13, 2007 07:44
USS Cole – Off UK W coast 49°02 N 19°30 W

By 1200 today the ship’s average NE course will take us approximately 40nm W of the Isles of Scilly. Too far to see. On clear days the horizon at sea is about 10nm away. I’m hoping when we pass to the E of the Isle of Man it will be within range. I’ve forgotten how far out in the Irish Sea it is from the English coast. More likely, first landfall will be the W coast of Scotland, which we will reach tonight, entering the Firth of Forth. The torturous approach to the River Clyde and eventual pierside will take place Friday morning at sunup and occupy a couple of hours, according to the most experienced hand amongst the crewmembers who are my students. So the ship is scheduled to be moored outboard of another of the destroyers in the squadron—the Elrod, I believe—by around 0930. From what I recollect, the process of securing from sea and anchor and otherwise preparing the ship for port will take until noon. Perhaps I can leave the ship before then, or whenever the gangways are in place.

I anticipate more than the usual clumsiness when first setting foot on stable land again. Seas have not seemed to me remarkably rough on this passage, but there is certainly plenty of ship’s motion. I feel much less engaged than I was aboard the Emory S. Land. It may be familiarity. I know how the courses will go now, and I’m already anticipating concluding the process.

The emphasis aboard a warship on preparedness for engagement—especially the continuous stream of information fed to the complicated and darkened Combat Operations room—added to the myriad tasks of maintaining the ship and practicing for emergencies, leaves little room even for sleep, let alone reflection. Even when my students report that in fact simple duties like promptly relieving the watch and recording and transmitting orders and position are regularly, if not constantly, ignored or performed inadequately, it’s clear there’s not much time for anything else to occupy their minds. Nor do most of them appear to know it. In this they don’t differ at all from the general population. But they’re busier.
...jb

Plugged Ears

2007-09-12T07:28:00.000-05:00

Tuesday, September 11, 2007
USS Cole – North Atlantic POS 42°33 N 21°35 W

DAY SEVEN

The bridge comm announced, “Service action to port.” The next sound was a loud thud, followed by a white shell clattering to the deck. I felt the sounds, rather than hearing them, as, like everyone else, I had plugged my ears. The five inch gun on the fo’c’sle had just sent a 76mm round nine miles to port. The force of the recoil rocked the ship to starboard. The round was a harmless concrete dummy instead of a high explosive with a proximity or impact fuse. It was fired for practice and to test the gun. Those of my students whose ratings are gunnery or fire control are eager to explain all these details. Their faces—at least the men among them—become animated as they describe the loading mechanisms and the fact that the weapon can fire up to 80 rounds per minute.

The test had been delayed for more than an hour owing to the passage to port of a commercial freighter bound for North America. The ship was jokingly described as a “sled,” which the term for a drone towed downrange for target practice. I absorbed all this watching on the bridge after breakfast this morning, an overcast and blustery day in the North Atlantic, all four of the other ships in the squadron visible just a few hundred yards to starboard and riding the five foot waves.

Shortly after testing the gun battery, the captain ordered, “Man the boat decks.” Crew materialized below donning life vests and hard hats to prepare the RIB (for “rigid inflatable boat”) to be winched from its chocks on the starboard quarterdeck. As tiedowns were released a crewmember tested the pressure on the inflated gunwale of the boat and then comically added pressure with a hose and foot pump exactly like one you’d use for an air mattress. Soon the RIB was hanging next to the lifelines and all was in readiness for launch. Time passed. Nearly an hour later it was lowered into the choppy seas with one man at the helm and another in the bow. They did a couple of loops to test the engine and rudder, then came back alongside. The movement to starboard was deemed too great, so the RIB came around to port. And waited. Another half an hour passed. Then the folding ladder was deployed and a dozen officers in camo and body armor, sidearms strapped to their thighs, descended clumsily to sit on the gunwales. Shortly it motored off toward one of the frigates just ahead, where they were scheduled to climb back onto the deck.

The whole thing was a boarding exercise, practicing stopping and searching another vessel at sea. I wondered about the effectiveness of the process carried out in circumstances with the pressure of an emergency. I’ve seen faster action on a movie set. Perhaps it’s a fitting reminder of the level of our military preparedness on this sixth anniversary of 9/11.
...jb

Digging 7 Foot Seas

2007-09-09T08:24:00.000-05:00

Saturday, September 8, 2007 08:48:55 -0200

We're something over 1000mi E of the No American coast and some 5days from making our 1st port at Faslane Scotland.
Here's an example of my experience at sea:
One of my children wished me a safe passage and return to shore. Ships are safer than cars--more people died in traffic in Norfolk over Labor Day wknd than in all the Atlantic fleet in the past 5yrs, but it doesn't look that way, gazing down from the bridge this morning as I was, watching the bow dig in to 7ft seas crossing from our port stern quarter, remenants of a large storm then visible well off to starboard and east. As the hull rolls away from each swell it produces a wave you could surf on that rolls out 10meters or so in a boil of foam. Yet a moment later there's no mark of our passage.
...jb

WAY slow

2007-09-09T08:13:00.000-05:00

Thursday, September 6, 2007 07:49:59 -0500

"uwsp.edu" email WAY slow aboardship. "gmail.com" blocked by onboard server. Too bad.
PLEASE USE bailiff@ddg67.navy.mil as primary email for me `til 17 Oct 07. I won't attempt to reply to the other addresses after today. Thanx, and apologies again for being unable to use "Bcc..." for address-suppression [on emails]. Hope to use a friend's method to upload blog entries. Check out "fitphilosophy.blogspot.com" next week to see if it succeeds.
Meanwhile, all well here some 700mi E of the US coast. My courses begin today, with relatively mild seas, upcoming simulated battle manuevers, and anticipated crew liberties in port. The last are the hardest to deal with, believe me.
...jb

NREPS

2007-09-09T08:11:00.000-05:00

Tuesday Evening, September 4, 2007 23:51:07 -0500

Please use the email below for the time being. I'm attempting to update the blog but it will be slow going. I may revert to email, but downloading photos is going to be difficult. Begin teaching (3 sections of Intro & 2 of Phil of Religion) tomorrow. Rough seas are predicted, so that should be an adventure.
Since the ship is powered by gas-turbine, "NREPS" (replenishments) will occur about every 3days, so we get mail aboard at sea. My address: Prof John Bailiff, DDG-67, FPOAE 09566-1285
...jb

DDG-67

2007-09-04T20:06:00.000-05:00

Well, friends. it's not going to be as easy as I'd imagined to update you here. Net access aboard this ship, the guided missle destroyer (which carries missles, rather than destroying them) USS Cole (DDG-67). For all its costs, the DoD lags woefully in equipping its minions with computers. So, no pictures to speak of, despite lots to show you. I'll have to post a BIG file when I'm ashore again in the U.S. We left Norfolk VA Naval Station this morning and are some 100mi E now, joining a group of five other ships enroute to Scotland and Ireland, engaging in "Neptune Warrior" battle drills in between. The ship is 9000 tons, 502ft, with 270 crew and 20 officers, complemented by about 50 "riders" like me. I'm the only teacher aboard, however. There's just one small "Training Classroom" that barely holds 15, so I'll have a bunch of sections and be meeting the classes 4-6hrs/day for the next 6wks. I'm teaching Intro to Phil and World Religions, the latter as history and philosophy of religion, rather than comparative. I enjoy the opportunity to undermne the conventional beliefs of so many young people. Send me your comments and questions. My email onboard: bailiff@ddg67.navy.mil

more soon...jb

NAVSTA

2007-09-02T12:28:00.000-05:00

I'm assured by my driver when I arrive that the Norfolk Naval Station--"NAVSTA"--is "the largest in the world." A sprawling mix of faux-colonial brick buildings and peeling warehouses, its laid out with a sense of unlimited space worthy of Montana. I'm housed in the "BOQ" until I go aboard the USS Cole tomorrow. Meanwhile I'm whiling away this desolate weekend writing my course outlines and checking out the standard-issue downtown. The most amusing feature of the base is the elevated ductwork carrying steam and utilities; shades of Terry Gilliam's 1986 Brazil. See it if you want a prescient glimpse of a possible surveillance-friendly future.

The feeble wi-fi connection won't let me upload any more photos. Sorry. I'm going to the pool for a swim workout. It's a 20min walk...

Anchors aweigh...

2007-08-28T14:37:00.000-05:00

Didn't know it was spelled "aweigh," perhaps? Lifting ship's anchor is called "weighing" it, for the obvious reason. Anyway, I expect I'll get to witness this (now complicated) process again soon, as I'll be teaching aboard the cruiser USS Cole for September and October. I'll be posting my impressions and photos and stuff here, so drop in daily or whenever you feel like catching up...

End of life....

2007-08-15T10:45:00.000-05:00

Last week a friend committed suicide. We--Jane and I--were in Oregon when we got the news. His wife said he had been missing since the night before, so we flew to California to be with her. We found the note the next morning. Later that day, search dogs tracked his scent to the river's edge. His body has still not been found. So I've been reflecting on death, emotion, and identity. We each create a self--by which I mean the complex we refer to when we say "I"--from a varied set of details and images and descriptions. This creation takes twenty years or so, which is why the period from our late `teens to early 20's tends to remain the most vivid of our lives. It's in these years we feel we've come into our own. I've finished the story of my self. But since this story is compounded from so many occasions and over so many years, it's filled with inconsistencies. Even contradictions. Nevertheless, it's my story, and I cling to it. But eventually a crisis threatens my story. In my case, it was the end of my twenty-five year marriage, now over twenty-five years ago. That's when I felt suicidal. To go on, I would have to give up central parts of my story, of my self. I was forced to choose between my familiar story and a new one that had yet to be written, and I was afraid. In my case, affection and love convinced me I could construct a new story. But that didn't erase the pain of having to give up my original self. It's terrifying to face a future without a familiar structure. Terrifying enough to choose death instead. I'm glad that love saved me. I'm sorry that it couldn't save my friend...

Stage Two

2007-07-19T09:49:00.000-05:00

There are two stages with every injury: getting through it and getting over it. Stage Two is in sight for me now. Xrays this week revealed substantial healing, warranting my return to two wheels. A nice parallel that. My orthopedic surgeon here warns me, however, to ride flat pedals instead of clipless. For non-cyclists, "clipless" pedals allow a cleat on bottom of your riding shoe to lock into a spring-loaded slot, so your foot is positively bound to the pedal. The lightest and safest--as well as most efficient--system to ride, whether mountain- or road-biking. You release the cleat by twisting your heel out slightly. There's the rub. The leg-strength this move requires is still beyond my level my left leg has reached. Then there's the fact that one normally mounts from the left side of the bike, opposite the power train. Add to that my still-tentative feelings and you can imagine that I've not got a lot of miles on yet. So far about 60, as a matter of fact. And all on one of my mountain bikes, chiefly because the 2.25in tires are more stable and the riding position more relaxed than my road bike. Come to think of it, crises of every sort share those two stages. I can tell you I'm glad to be moving on to the next one...

Better days...

2007-07-04T16:20:00.001-05:00

That's the ascent to the peak of Mt Ventoux you see behind me. Yep, that's me. The day before I fell in Gordes, just to the southeast, I reached the peak--1909 meters or 6472ft--with Harry Duval, who took this shot. I confess that, after the 2hr climb, I had just enough strength to hoist my bike in triumph. I rode easy on the 25km descent to Malaucene--which still took only 20 minutes!--treating it as a dangerous stage of the day's biking. Little did I know what awaited me the next afternoon, when my rear wheel slipped into a crack no bigger than my thumb and put me in the hospital with the fractured femur. The good news is, the bone is healing well, supporting about 60% of my weight now. Do accidents happen when you least expect them? Of course. Should we live every moment as if it were our last? We all do that anyway...

Day 27

2007-06-27T18:10:00.001-05:00

Last Friday was the first day of summer. It was also Day 27 since my injury and the day I got back on the bike. Well, the trike, to be more exact. I'm renting the tricycle recumbent pictured--a German Kettwiesel Hase--from the head mechanic at my LBS, the Hostel Shoppe. Jane took the picture on the riverfront path by the Clark Street bridge. The unit is heavy, slow, and--I've found--a bit boring to ride, but not as much as my indoor trainer. Once I'm off the crutches in a week or two, I'm looking forward to getting back on two wheels. For now, I can enjoy the sunshine and variety of road-riding even though I can average only 10-12mph. Even Jane found, after the first day, that she couldn't stand dawdling along at that pace, so now she heads off on her own workout by the time we're up on Old Wausau Road or so. Sunday we rejoined for dinner at the Hilltop--because I can grope my way onto the deck via railings and tables--so I can still enjoy some of the benefits of biking together. Thanks to everyone who's sent expressions of sympathy and support. I'm slowly catching up on replies to each of you...

PROVENCE & BUST

2007-06-07T17:16:00.000-05:00

Provence, the fabled southern quadrant of France, deserves its reputation as a great place for cycling. We arrived on a Wednesday and took the TGV--Train Gran Vitesse, the high-speed French line--to Avignon, where we met friends, loaded the bikes onto the rental car, and headed for Vaison la Romaine.

We biked the "Dentelles" the first day, in preparation for the assault on Mt Ventoux, the major attraction of this region. I climbed it with Harry Duval, starting from Bedoin on the mountain's southern flank. We stopped to rest and refuel--in the form of tomate e fromage baguettes--on the deck of the chalet at 15kms, then headed up the final 7km, which rises 500meters at a rate over 12% to the peak at 1909meters. I stopped at the Simpson memorial, where a couple of strangers snapped this shot for me.

The next day we moved south to Isle-sur-la-Sorgue and on Sunday rode through Fontaine Vaucluse, the town near the underground source of the River Sorgue. From there our route crested the ridge whose underbrush--maquis--gave its name to the guerillas of the French resistance who hid in its environs to harry the Nazi and Vichy troops during WWII. We arrived in Gordes in time for a pleasant lunch on the square. Jane fell back on a difficult turn riding out of Gordes on our way to Abbaye Senanque, so I decided to wait for her. Instead of going back down the hill I turned into the drive of the Domain de L'Enclos hotel. Fatal error. The drive was packed clay and gravel. Glancing about I turned around and so came nearly to a halt. Standing on my right pedal to accelerate, my rear wheel slipped off a very small shoulder under the gravel, dropping me instantly onto the trochanter bend of my left femur.
The blow was the most terrific I've experienced, not excluding getting hit by a car in London about 25yrs ago. The gendarmes who showed up to get the accident details were careful and sympathetic, as was the crew of the pompier who loaded me gently into the ambulance for the ride to the hospital in Cavaillon, a town that was not on our itinerary but was to be my home--and Jane's for the next seven days.The xrays showed that the fracture had not gone all the way through the trochanter, which meant that it would heal with less likelihood of the necrosis that is the greatest danger after such an injury. (Floyd Landis' hip replacement resulted from the more severe version of my broken femur.)
Memorial Day is a holiday in France, too, but because of the danger my fracture represented, Dr Laubenthal--a German female orthopedic surgeon--assembled a team to do the operation on Monday. Her work was pronounced good by my orthopedic surgeon after we returned. So I'm on my way through the six- to eight-week process of building bone around the titanium "dynamic screw" that now holds my femur together. Jane was saintly during my hospitalization, staying in a hotel alone, negotiating the daily tasks of living in a strange town, locating the Collines de St Jacques on one of her run workouts, buying fruits and vegetables to supplement the relatively meager and frequently unidentifiable food the hospital served, dealing with offices in two countries and materials faxed between hospital and U.S. insurance company. By day three I was able to get out of bed on crutches--also found and purchased by Jane--as well as lower myself into a ward wheelchair for outings to the front patio.
I was dreading the 7hrs of transatlantic flight, but they proved the most comfortable of my "medical repatriation"--as its' known--ensconced as I was in a first class "sleeper" seat, with my own DVD viewer and 20 movies to choose from. It was the three flights home from our east coast entry, as well as the crazy set of wheelchair "assistance" personnel, non-functioning elevators, and other airport obstacles that took a real toll. Next time you're enduring the indignities of airport "security," imagine doing in on crutches. And in pain.
Well, the sutures--actually a set of 26 stainless steel staples--are out now and I'm getting about much better. I've devised a way to bungee the crutches onto the bike rack on the roof of our VW since I found that by last weekend I could exert the required force to clutch our manual transmission. We're already planning to go back to Provence to complete our interrupted travels by bicycle. See you there...

Off to France

2007-05-20T20:06:00.000-05:00

We're off to France on Tuesday 22 May for a couple of weeks of biking in Provence, beginning NE of Avignon near Mt Ventoux--of Tour de France fame--and traveling in a circle to take in the canyon of the Verdon, St Raphael on the Cote d'Azur, Aix-en-Provence, and concluding around Arles--last domicile of Vincent van Gogh--and the Camargue to the south. So I'll have some shots to post while we're there. I'm especially looking forward to the climb up Mt Ventoux, 22km from the traditional start in Bedoin. Check out the area on GoogleEarth; there are some great photos of the Verdon "Corniche Sublime" posted on its "panaramio" feature. If you've been there, or want to go, let me know. Perhaps I can learn something. I'll certainly have lots to report when we're back in June...

Aquisitions

2007-05-14T10:02:00.000-05:00

Walking along the Lake Michigan shore just at sunup yesterday with Jane, a mile or so south of Baileys Harbor in Wisconsin's Door County, I began surveying the frequently very large and obviously expensive homes lining the waterfront. I pictured each of them filled, most of them surely like the homes the owners occupied the other months of the year, with the accumulation of things Americans routinely call their "stuff." The stuff we all have is directly proportional to the space we have to store it. I learned this again last summer when we moved to a smaller--1000 sq ft--apartment. Shrinking our living space by a third meant jettisoning a like percentage of our stuff. All of which, I can now report, we do without quite comfortably, mostly because the stuff was stored in the spaces we had before, and therefore mostly unused. Perhaps you've noticed that construction of "storage units"--buildings of garages and closets in various configurations--has been a growth industry for years now, in and around towns and cities of every size. These units are for the stuff that overflows the storage spaces in Americans' ever-larger homes. When I'm out cycling I regularly note cars parked on the driveways of residences with three and even four garages, the stalls too full of stuff for the vehicles to be driven in. I conclude that acquisition--of "experiences" just as surely as of stuff--is worse than futile, unless you convey to others what you've gathered. One of the things I most enjoy about my work as a teacher, whether of philosophy or fitness, is that my learning is for the sake of giving it away to others. And learning is the loveliest of enterprises. The more you give away, the more you possess...

Spring bike training

2007-04-02T12:51:00.000-05:00

For the first time since 2000 we returned to West Texas for spring bike training, riding some 400mi over eight days of near-perfect weather--a first in my experience out there in Big Bend country. I was elated to find I could still climb all the routes I've done in the past (despite aging and surgery), including the "Big Hill" shown here; it covers one mile of 15% grade, topping out at 17% with the Rio Grande and Chinati Mountains in the background. Flying back on my 71st birthday I felt ready for the season...

Partisan of plagiarism

2007-03-02T10:15:00.000-06:00

Jonathon Lethem, writing in the February issue of Harper’s, makes a convincing case for plagiarism. He begins with a plot-outline for Lolita, then reveals that it’s that of a novel by Hans von Lichburg, published in 1916. Lichburg became a Nazi journalist and his works disappeared. But not before Nabokov, who lived in Berlin until 1937, presumably encountered the story. The plot is all that Lichburg’s book shares with Nabokov’s masterpiece. The lesson is obvious. If this be plagiarism, “bring it on.” Of course, he’s extolling the creative transformation of elements—wherever they’re found—and not the craven substitution of others’ work for your own. He goes on to survey surrealism, the blues and jazz, as well as photography, before observing that the development of a commercial, technical culture of image and sign has so saturated our experience of the world that art is now compelled to appropriate the most ordinary and pervasive of materials and undertake to make the familiar strange. Lethem compares the surrealist’s conviction that ordinary things have become concealed by their familiar uses—hence producing their art by placing obects in unexpected contexts—to the concept of “enframing” [Gestell] Heidegger develops in The Question Concerning Technology. I’m sure he’s right.

What it takes...

2007-02-19T10:59:00.000-06:00

"At present, when belief in the witches of Endor is displacing the Darwinian theory... people's minds appear...to be moving backwards rather than on." That's Thomas Hardy, writing in 1922, at the age of 82. He was dismissing the fantasies of fellow poets--Yeat's visions, Eliot's piety, and Pound's politics--as well as displaying his own singular atheism and rationalism. The post-WW1 era, we now know, was the birthplace of the reactionary and fascist atavism that produced the prodigious atrocities of the 20th century. That reaction is still with us, only now in the enfeebled forms of Christian and Muslim "fundamentalism." Simpletons like Bush, Cheney, and bin Laden are the benighted heirs of narcissistic pyschopaths like Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, but still capable of inflicting violence and suffering. Yet they can do so only because their fantasies still appeal to the meanest and most ignorant. The influence of such people will dwindle in direct proportion to the rate at which humans abandon religion and all its forms of wishful thinking...