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Absalom
p59 ...In a grim mausoleum air of Puritan righteousness and outraged female vindictiveness Miss Rosa's childhood was passed, that aged and ancient and timeless absence of youth which consisted of a Cassandralike listening beyond closed doors, of lurking in dim halls filled with that presbyterian effluvium of lugubrious and vindictive anticipation, while she waited for the infancy and childhood with which nature had confounded and betrayer her to overtake the disapprobation regarding any and every thing which could penetrate the walls of that house through the agency of any man, particularly her father, which the aunt seems to have invested her with at birth along with the swaddling clothes.
That's quite a sentence. As fond as I am of Cassandra, I don't see the connection here. The name "Cassandra" seems to connote something different for Faulkner than it connotes for me. And "presbyterian" seems to be a synonym of "Puritan" suggesting much the same upright qualities as "methodist." I am fascinated by the pairing of religious abolitionism in the north with the similarly religious nature of the South. I've never been able to parse the devout Christianity I associate in particular with General Jackson and his army. Perhaps there is a presbyterian aspect of this as it reflects community values as expressed by elders of that community, and not any global -- and certainly not an Ultramontane -- religious sensibility.
In the very next paragraph we learn that he had a child with one of his slaves and named her Clytemnestra. One of the advantage of rereading is that I can say that this is puzzling. That Quentin's father should invoke the House of Atreus is natural enough -- even if I don't see the actual connection -- but where would Sutpen have encountered these stories? And, dropping back down to Faulkner, what is that name supposed to suggest here? These are awfully loaded names to drop in at random.
And I should perhaps remind the reader that I rate the story of the House of Atreus right up there with the invention of God and religion when it comes to human achievements.
p61 ...He named Clytie as he named them all... Only I have always liked to believe that he intended to name Clytie, Cassandra, prompted by some pure dramatic economy not only to beget but to designate the presiding augur of his own disaster, and that he just got the name wrong through a mistake natural in a man who must have almost taught himself to read...
That doesn't help me at all. Since Clytie doesn't even have a voice in this book, how can she be a Cassandra?
If you think of this novel as a piece of music, it would be so frustrating to listen to. Themes continually begun only to be interrupted and not to be completed until the very end.
Chapter IV
There's a throw-away line here that I didn't pay much attention to my first reading, p88 "...He [Quentin] could almost see her [Rosa], waiting in one of the dark airless rooms in the little grim house's impregnable solitude. She would have no light burning because she would be out of the house soon, and probably some mental descendant or kinsman of him or her who had told her once that light and moving air carried heat had also told her that the cost of electricity was not in the actual time the light burned but in the retroactive overcoming of primary inertia when the switch was snapped: that that was what showed on the meter...."
This reminds me of one of James Thurber's characters (family members?) who was afraid that electricity was leaking out of her outlets if the outlets weren't all filled. I think I have that right. I think Faulkner tosses this in just to remind us that Miss Rosa has survived into a very different age. (Thurber was just demonstrating what characters he was related to.)
Miss Rosa would have seen (or perhaps not) the rise of the Age of Railroads as well as the introduction of electricity. Not to mention the introduction of the germ theory of disease and Darwinism. Quentin is at Harvard a few years after Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity, though I doubt that was front page news in rural Mississippi. My point (assuming I have one) is that none of all that "progress" has had much of an effect on "the disease" which is still rampant -- much the way obesity is currently so prevalent and yet so widely ignored. The diabetes statistics are acknowledged, but seemingly without comprehension. We invest in bariatric seats for theaters and bariatric gurneys for hospitals -- and those forklifts to get patients into and out of hospital beds -- and now we don't even have George Carlin around to "joke" about the problem.
...She would be wearing already the black bonnet with jet sequins; he knew that: and a shawl, sitting there in the augmenting and defunctive twilight [in my imagination Martha Grimes swoons as she reads this and spills her drink onto her Max Mara dress]... She would emerge with it [her umbrella] when he called for her and carry it invincibly into the spent suspiration of an evening without even dew [momentarily revived only to swoon once again], where even now the only alteration toward darkness was in the soft and fuller random of the fireflies below the gallery...
This is not the first time fireflies have been mentioned. I'm a little surprised someone so immersed in Mississippi would be aware of the importance of this detail. In Louisville we called them lightning bugs and they were one of the things I most enjoyed seeing again when I returned some years ago -- but I don't actually recall them in Alabama when I visited my "kin" there back in the 1960s. Did I not see them there or did I simply not notice them, the way we don't usually notice the air we move about in?
It occurs to me, since I brought up Martha Grimes, that this novel is organized a bit like a mystery. We start with some of the facts. We get a theory -- a suspect -- that seems to make sense but is, of course, wrong because it is too early to be right. It's only later, when we get more facts and the insight of a better detective, that we figure out what actually happened.
p110 [Normally I give the page on which a paragraph starts if it continues on to another page, but since this paragraph started on page 108 and continues to page 113 I'm giving the page on which this passage occurs] "...So I [Quentin's father] can imagine him [Bon], the way he did it [told Henry about his Octaroon mistress/wife], the way in which he took the innocent and negative plate of Henry's provincial soul and intellect and exposed it by slow degrees to this esoteric milieu, building gradually toward the picture which he desired it to retain, accept..." Very like what Faulkner is doing with us, his readers.
I like how little Faulkner writes about the war -- since that isn't really his topic -- just enough to account for where the menfolk have been off to for those years. A wound at Shiloh. Service with the Army of Northern Virginia and, at the end, with Joe Johnston's army delaying Sherman's army. (I looked up Shiloh because the name reeks of Old Testament context. I hadn't realized how important it was in Jewish history, but I don't see any particular connection to our story.)
Chapter V
Here's something that puzzles me now. p134 ..."I [Rosa] had only to lock the house and take my place in the buggy... beside that brute [Wash Jones] who until Ellen died was not permitted to approach the house from the front..." So Sutpen's goal was not to stop this tradition but rather to be the one deciding who could come in from the front? He was not a social improver but simply envious. He wanted to be the rejector rather than the rejectee. Sutpen was a true upholder of Southern culture, just as his son Henry would prove to be the ultimate supporter of that culture. And Henry's exit, symbolic of the true end (I wish) of that culture, must needs be dramatic -- atop a funeral pyre of an equally symbolic antebellum plantation house.
p136 ...it stood [Sutpen's mansion], not ravaged, not invaded, marked by no bullet nor soldier's iron heel but rather as though reserved for something more: some desolation more profound than ruin, as if it stood in iron juxtaposition to iron flame, to a holocaust which had found itself less fierce and less implacable, not hurled but rather fallen back before the impervious and indomitable skeleton which the flames durst not, at the instant's final crisis, assail...
I think the credit here goes to Faulkner for my anticipating this foreshadowing of the ending we have no way of knowing about at this point in the telling of this story. I thought I was getting ahead of myself, but I find I was right where he wanted me to be.
There is an important passage, too long to quote, at the beginning of this chapter about Rosa's reaction to Clytie, as she rushed into the house and is stopped in her tracks by her hand. Then there is this, much later in the chapter, p153 "...here [at Sutpen's Hundred] I had for company one woman... who was so foreign to me [Clytie] and to all that I was that we might have been not only of different races (which we were), not only of different sexes (which we were not), but of different species, speaking no language which the other understood, the very simple words with which we were forced to adjust our days to one another being even less inferential of thought or intention than the sounds which a beast and a bird might make to each other...."
p156 ...Clytie, not inept, anything but inept: perverse inscrutable and paradox: free, yet incapable of freedom who had never once called herself a slave, holding fidelity to none like the indolent and solitary wolf or bear (yes, wild: half untamed black, half Sutpen blood: and if 'untamed' be synonymous with 'wild,' then 'Sutpen" is the silent unsleeping viciousness of the tamer's lash) whose false seeming holds it docile to fear's hand but which is not, which if this be fidelity, fidelity only to the prime fixed principle of its own savageness; -- Clytie who in the very pigmentation of her flesh represented that debacle which had brought Judith and me to what we were and which had made of her (Clytie) that which she declined to be just as she had declined to be that from which its purpose had been to emancipate her, as though presiding aloof upon the new, she deliberately remained to represent to us the threatful portent of the old."
Chapter VI
p176 ...she [Rosa] wouldn't have had to go out there and be betrayed by the old meat and find instead of a widowed Agamemnon to her Cassandra an ancient stiff-jointed Pyramus to her eager though untried Thisbe....
As much as I love classical references -- especially to the House of Atreus -- I don't find any of these associations particularly apt. And Shreve the undergraduate, who's speaking here, gets less credit than Sutpen for at least meaning well. Someone else is compared to Cassandra and I still do not see it.
p178 I quoted this passage before where Shreve compares Sutpen to Faustus, but now I'm thinking Sutpen also reminds me of Fyodor Karamazov -- "...until she realized that he was not hiding, did not want to hide, was merely engaged in one final frenzy of evil and harm-doing before the Creditor overtook him next time for good and all..." Sutpen shares Fyodor's lust for life with Faust's striving to construct a new world, at least for himself. Also, it is precisely the man he wouldn't let approach his house by the front door who takes a literal scythe to him.
I just went to Wiki to confirm a suspicion that Faulkner had no clue about farming (seems true) and noticed "Callie" Barr, "(the black woman who raised him from infancy)." My dad, growing up in Louisville after the Great War, had his own Callie Barr. I still have pictures of them together and he sent letters to her, as well as to his mother, while stationed in the Pacific during WW2. One of the things I've never understood about Southerners is how so many of them were raised by women like Callie, who they may well have been closer to than to their own mothers, and yet still end up racist rednecks. (I never saw any evidence of this in my dad, but then he was a city boy from a city that had sided with the Union.)
Absalom
Today is the eve of Christmas Eve, and Friday, so I'm taking advantage of the reduced WiFi traffic and sitting at the Bank Cafe. It's also raining. Poured most of the night and morning and now is down to showers, but cold and breezy showers. Feels almost Chrismasy.
I'm pausing before I commence the second chapter of Absalom. The book is mostly about events in the 1830s to 1870s; it is being told in 1909; and it was written in the 1930s. For Faulkner, the Civil War was as distant as WW2 is for us. Recent enough for us to have heard first hand accounts and for it to have shaped our everyday reality in many obvious ways, yet it still feels like it belonged to a completely different world -- though I'm not sure Faulkner's Mississippi had changed as much as the U.S. has changed in the past 70 years.
For Quentin, on the other hand, the War of Northern Aggression was only as far back as the Vietnam War is for us. If you imagine him as a Millennial (God forbid), I'm not sure the difference between WW2 and Vietnam would seem that dramatic. Both would be events from an almost unimaginable "olden days."
And the Civil Rights Movement (that provoked the other civil war that divided my family) was still 30 years in the future for Faulkner and over 50 years in the future for Quentin. The disease had not been cured in the 1860s but rather had settled down into a chronic condition -- like Chicken Pox immediately turning into an active case of Shingles. So neither Quentin nor Faulkner are really talking about the past at all. Removing the "chattel" element of the equation didn't change all that much as the warped beliefs that underlay the "peculiar institution" remained. (A side effect of which being the Electoral College that just gave us a President elected by a minority of the voters.)
Sutpen's two pistols
I wondered about these first time through, and did a little research this time. My concern was that there was talk of an accuracy that surprised me in a muzzle loading hand gun. While Faulkner doesn't say this, there being two of them suggests they could have been a pair of dueling pistols -- possibly with rifled barrels -- and thus relatively accurate at, say, under 50 meters. Of course if Faulkner wants us to imagine something like an early Colt revolver, this would be an anachronism by a few years at least. Yes, I know that no one cares but me.
I appreciate that, to Sutpen, it's the house and not the plantation that is significant, but you'd think something would be said about the creation of the plantation, and that that would have been done first to pay for the house. In a way Sutpen's priorities are like someone settling in a hostile country and first building defenses before doing anything else.
On my page 42, Faulkner spells out what it means for the father of Ellen and Rosa to have been a Methodist steward: "...a man with a name for absolute and undeviating and even Puritan uprightness in a country and time of lawless opportunity, who neither drank nor gambled nor even hunted...."
The incident following the wedding of Sutpen and Ellen is interesting and believable. That it is the property-less classes that act against Sutpen is curious but believable. To what extent are they enforcing group norms and to what extent are they just taking advantage of an opportunity for semi-sanctioned violence? I don't know, but these would also be the men who followed Generals Lee and Jackson and who would form the rank and file of the KKK.
And that's the end of chapter two.
The one percent
The other day I heard, again, that statistic about 1% of the population (maybe less) having as much wealth as the bottom 50% of the population. Today I was wondering -- if it were quantifiable -- whether the same might be true for beauty or talent. It wouldn't surprise me.
Evanescence
The other day -- this seems to be my theme -- I ran into a top 10 list of Evanescence hits. I watched it mainly to see which of the top two they placed first. They went with "Bring Me To Life" where I would have picked "My Immortal." Evanescence kind of fascinates me. They are a "metal" band lead by a chick. I've referred to them in the past as "whipped metal." I'm pretty confident Amy Lee is a total bitch, yet she is what I like about the band. I say that ignoring the fact that I haven't liked anything they've done since Ben Moody left.
The version of "My Immortal" on the CD is not the same as the video. The video adds a tiny metal part in the middle that, in my opinion, makes the song. On my iPod I have the CD version which is nice but not at all the same.
Absalom
I've now finished... and started re-reading Absalom, Absalom! If ever a novel required re-reading it is this one.
p12 He [Quentin] was a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts still recovering, even forty-three years afterward, from the fever which had cured the disease, waking from the fever without even knowing that it had been the fever itself which they had fought against and not the sickness, looking with stubborn recalcitrance backward beyond the fever and into the disease with actual regret, weak from the fever yet free of the disease and not even aware that the freedom was that of impotence.
But are they free of the disease? Or just of the fever?
p20-21 ..."even I [Rosa Coldfield] used to wonder what our father or his father could have done before he married our mother that Ellen and I would have to expiate and neither of us alone be sufficient; what crime committed that would leave our family cursed to be instruments not only for that man's destruction, but for our own."
I don't think it's accidental that Faulkner describes her father here as "...a Methodist steward, a merchant who was not rich...." Someone who, despite strict religious feelings, still participated in, enabled, the diseased culture and economy of the South.
A very green parklet
Walking on Valencia in The Mission yesterday I came upon a particularly green parklet. The original idea of the parklet movement was to reclaim space from the car-serving streets for public space, but "park" here was both a play an "parking," since parklets occupy what were previously parking spaces, and also suggested the intention that they be park-like in bringing plants and even grass to the street. If I recall correctly, the first test case -- only up for a part of a day, I think -- included sod as well as planters.
Now public space, rather than park, has become the emphasis, yet here's an example where bringing greenery to the street has been the focus:
View approaching from the south.
View from the south.
Looking south, my cup is next to the sign.
Looking back from the north.
Sorry, this was the best I could do with the signage.
Painting
"A sane person might inquire why I waited until the coldest week of the year to paint the back of our building," I thought to myself as I shivered up on my aluminum extension ladder while filling knots in the plywood sheet that serves as our basement door. There are reasons, I tell myself. For one thing I thought our painting would have been done weeks ago. I had no idea it would prove so hard to schedule painters. And I had no idea we would be having such a wet season. Until a few days ago, it hadn't even occurred to me to worry about the unprotected wood back there -- and when I went back to check on it, I found they had used a good quality, though knotty, plywood that seems to be holding up well.
But it was also clear to me that I could handle this myself. Once I start thinking how I can do something I'm pretty much doomed to do it.
Musicophilia
I've come to the section on my old friend synesthesia. Here's a great passage that highlights a bit of what fascinates me about this condition:
p180 Synesthesia seems to go with an unusual degree of crossactivation between what, in most of us, are functionally independent areas of the sensory cortex... There is some evidence that such "hyperconnectivity" is indeed present in primates and other mammals during fetal development and early infancy, but is reduced or "pruned" within a few weeks or months after birth... behavioral observations of infants suggest "that the newborn's senses are not well differentiated, but are instead intermingled in a synesthetic confusion."
Perhaps, as Baron-Cohen and Harrison write, "we might all be colored-hearing synthetes until we lose connections between these two areas somewhere about three months of age." In normal development... a synthetic "confusion" gives way in a few months, with cortical maturation, to a clearer distinction and segregation of the senses, and this in turn makes possible the proper cross-matching of perceptions which is needed for the full recognition of an external world and its contents -- the sort of cross-matching which ensures that the look, the feel, the taste, and the crunch of a Granny Smith apple all go together. In those individuals with synesthesia, it is supposed, a genetic abnormality prevents complete deletion of this early hyperconnectivity, so that a larger or smaller remnant of this persists in adult life.
And then there's this:
...The rapidity with which synesthesia can follow blindness would scarcely allow the formation of new anatomical connections in the brain and suggests instead a release phenomenon, the removal of an inhibition normally imposed by a fully functioning visual system...
p182 Within weeks of losing his sight, Jacques Lusseyran developed a synesthesia so intense as to replace the actual perception of music...
I had no sooner made a sound on the A string, D or G or C, than I no longer heard it. I looked at it. Tones, chords, melodies, rhythms, each was immediately transformed into pictures, curves, lines, shapes, landscapes, and most of all colors. . . . At concerts, for me, the orchestra was like a painter. It flooded me with all the colors of the rainbow. If the violin came in by itself, I was suddenly filled with gold and fire, and with red so bright that I could not remember having seen it on any object. When it was the oboe's turn, a clear green ran all through me, so cool that I seemed to feel the breath of night. . . . I saw music too much to be able to speak its language.
Oddly, this reminds me of the account of blind people who were confused and overwhelmed -- and not really pleased -- when they were able to finally see after a surgical procedure. And, of course, that was in Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, before she talked about "the tree with the lights in it," which I've been thinking about this whole chapter. Whatever the thing-in-itself is in fact, we are unsettled when the way we perceive it changes.
Now we are at Tourette's. It turns out there is a "phantasmagoric" form of Tourette's where people respond uncontrollably to music. There are two different ways of viewing this and both interest me. First there's the notion that we are in some way an instrument played by music. Just as a movie score can move us against our will to feel a certain way, for some people a piece of music can force them to move and mimic and in other ways respond.
Then there's the other way:
p231 Tourette's brings out in stark form questions of will and determination: who orders what, who pushes whom around. To what extent are people with Tourette's controlled by a sovereign "I," a complex, self-aware, intentional self, or by impulses and feelings at lower levels in the brain-mind? Similar questions are brought up by musical hallucinations, and brainworms, and varied forms of quasi-automatic echoing and imitation. Normally we are not aware of what goes on in our brains, of the innumerable agencies and forces inside us that lie outside or below the level of conscious experience -- and perhaps this is just as well. Life becomes more complicated, sometimes unbearably so, for people with eruptive tics or obsessions or hallucinations, forced into daily, incessant contact with rebellious and autonomous mechanisms in their own brains....
Many of the dysfunctions Sacks has written about here are in fact failures of consciousness or "self," as we've learned about those terms in the previous blog. It is so tempting to view these cases as software app failures due to scrambled code or damaged media or maybe a failed chip.
Absalom
Well... I can't say I'm surprised. I wondered about this when it was first revealed that Sutpen put his first wife aside. It also plays into the whole question of Race that we are discussing without it being much mentioned.
I'm sitting at the window of Another Cafe. Haven't been here for a long time, but because this is a rainy day, I decided to stay close to home. Until now, the incoming storm was parting with the colorful bits (on the Doppler radar map) drenching counties to the north and south but missing us almost entirely. But now we are getting more of it. I don't mind.
Pacific War
A YouTube content provider (Military History Visualized) who covers warfare in general has started doing more episodes about the Pacific War. Recently he did some odd episodes where he merely talked to an expert in the field and created a lengthy bibliography of the war.
I was impressed with the suggestions made by the expert and added my own suggestions. The expert and I got into a rather long (geeky) chain of messages. Since the point of all this is to give MHV suggestions for future topics, my mind started working overtime.
Once again I am amazed by just how many wonderful topics and stories there are for this war. So much so that it is hard to know where to start. And most of these stories are not just "military history" but also have compelling personal aspects -- it isn't just ships and battles but the stories of the men involved. The story of Shōji Nishimura is one of my favorites.
Nishimura started the war as a Rear Admiral in command of one of the IJN's (Imperial Japanese Navy) wonderful destroyer squadrons. He participated in, but didn't really achieve much at, the Battle of the Java Sea in 1942. By late 1944 he had risen to Vice Admiral, though still without achieving anything of note, and was placed in command of the Southern Force in the IJN's complicated (as was their wont) plan for the Battle of Leyte Gulf. His son had recently been killed in the fighting around the Philippines and he seems to have become despondent. He refused to meet with the captains under his command and his conduct of this vital phase of the overall battle plan appears to have been a massive suicide attempt. So much so that the advance of the Southern Force in the Surigao Strait is often compared to the Charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War. If death was in fact his goal, then the operation was a success. Though if, from the perspective of Combined Fleet, the goal was a distracting demonstration on the enemy flank, the annihilation of Southern Force was also a success, as it left U.S. 7th Fleet out of position, and a bit low on munitions, for the main Japanese attack that followed within hours.
Which brings us to Takeo Kurita. Kurita had been a very competent Rear Admiral in command of a force of cruisers at the Battle of the Java Sea, and had also risen to Vice Admiral by late 1944. He was in command of the IJN main, or, Central Force at Leyte Gulf. His flagship cruiser was sunk under him as he steamed toward battle. He shifted his flag to Yamato and ended up racing away in the wrong direction, chased by a brace of torpedoes, at a crucial moment and never really managed to get back in control of the battle. (The fatigue that was such a huge factor around Guadalcanal also played a role here.)
The key part of this story is that Kurita, and the IJN in general, didn't know the 7th Fleet had a force of Escort Carriers to provide air support to the Leyte landing. This force, divided into three task groups known as "Taffy" 1, 2, and 3, was composed of sixteen CVEs -- essentially Liberty Ships with flight decks.
An escort carrier.
A full size Fleet carrier.
Compared to the Fleet Carriers of 3rd Fleet, these CVEs were a joke. When, to everyone's surprise, Kurita's ships stumbled upon Taffy 3 the morning of the Battle off Samar (the third of the four sub-battles that comprise the Battle of Leyte Gulf. In order: Battle of the Sibuyan Sea, Battle of Surigao Strait, Battle off Samar, and Battle of Cape Engaño), he assumed they were a task group of 3rd Fleet escorted by the usual array of battleships, cruisers, and destroyers.
Over the course of the battle (hours), Taffy 3's escort, of destroyers and a destroyer escort, counter attacked Kurita (hence the torpedoes that chased him away from the battle) while the aircraft of all three Taffies attacked the Japanese while the little CVEs tried to evade destruction by a larger and faster enemy force. In the end, Taffy 3's losses were less than you would expect, while Kurita's Central Force was mauled by the tiny ships and second string air groups. What isn't clear to me is when, if ever, Kurita realized that he wasn't fighting 3rd Fleet.
Because, at this time the IJN could not provide trained air groups for the carriers it still had. That the Americans, in addition to fielding the most powerful fleet the world had ever seen (the carrier divisions of 3rd Fleet designated Task Force 38), could also build and provide air groups for a deceptively powerful auxiliary fleet, would have been as disheartening for Kurita as the loss of four more of his powerful heavy cruisers. Kurita is often second guessed for not pursuing his attack that day, but if he did indeed realize the significance of the Taffies, you can easily imagine him thinking, "What are we even doing out here?" And heading home.
I should stop there but I have a favorite detail of this battle regarding the "pea shooters." The U.S. fleet possessed a wide array of naval artillery ranging from the 16" guns on the Iowa class battleships, to the 8" and 6" guns on cruisers, to the 5" guns in single and dual turrets on destroyers, cruisers, battleships and even Essex class carriers. (By the way because of the difference in the weight of the projectile, a 6" gun is about twice as potent as a 5" gun.) Because the escort carriers had originally been developed for anti-submarine warfare, they mounted a single 5" gun that wasn't even placed in a turret. It was for engaging submarines that had been forced to the surface.
At the crisis of the Battle off Samar, when Taffy 3 was caught between rain squalls and was being fired at by most of the huge ships of Central Force, the following order was given to the U.S. escort carriers, "open with pea shooters." They even claimed quite a number of hits with those little 5" guns conveniently mounted on the aft of the fleeing little ships.
And then there's my favorite angle on the war: Nimitz, Spruance, and Halsey. Really that should be Roosevelt, Nimitz, Spruance, and Halsey. When you read about the almost unimaginable dysfunction at the command level on the Japanese side -- especially when it comes to Army-Navy cooperation -- and look for why the same thing didn't happen on the U.S. side, you almost always come back to Nimitz. He placed Halsey as Commander in the Southwest Pacific where he could act as liaison with General MacArthur. Nimitz also chose Spruance, who like the Japanese officers I mentioned above, started the war as a Rear Admiral commanding a force of Cruisers, as his Chief of Staff. And how did the comparatively junior Nimitz end up in command in the Pacific, because of Roosevelt.
I don't know if it was Nimitz or Spruance who thought up the "platoon" command system for the Big Blue Fleet, but it was probably one of them. This system, one of the great innovations in military history, was crucial to maintaining the pace of the offensive against Japan starting in 1943. The U.S. main "Fleet" was designated either 3rd Fleet, and commanded by Halsey and his staff, or 5th Fleet, and commanded by Spruance and his staff. This meant that while one staff was fighting the war, the other was resting and preparing for the next operations. There was no pause in operations (as was a problem with the Allied armies in Italy, for example) while the staff decided what to do next and then prepared to execute the new plan. This tag-team approach continued all the way to Tokyo Bay where Halsey stood on the deck of the USS Missouri during the surrender ceremony while Spruance commanded from the USS New Jersey -- just in case the Japanese pulled a fast one.
The Halsey/Spruance back story, their friendship extending back to their earliest commands, makes this story all the better and the fallout from Halsey's "swallowing the bait" at Leyte Gulf and sailing into two typhoons even gives it a tragic coda. What more can anyone ask for?
Van Ness
I'm at yet another Peet's, sitting at a very nice granite window counter looking out over Van Ness where I just avoided the first fake Buddhist monk I've seen here in months -- I guess they're back for the holiday season.
I'm doing my Christmas shopping for presents that have to be mailed. A tin of baked goodies from Tartine -- so a delightful lunch there, of course. And then I had a very hard time working a list of five kid's picture books down to just two. I passed on the book I really liked the best because another was just too beautiful to not buy.
There's actually a Peet's adjacent to that bookstore, but it was too crowded, so I walked about seven blocks toward home until I noticed this cafe, which while smaller, wasn't as crowded.
In between, I passed the new Tesla store and I don't think it's my imagination that there are now more Teslas cruising Van Ness. I saw two right in front of the store, but I just noticed another while sitting here. For a long time, Van Ness was lined with car dealerships and a number of them remain, though there are now more ex-dealerships that are vacant or converted to another use. Tesla is the only American made automobile represented on the street now.
Musicophilia - Absolute Pitch
This is so interesting to me that I'm going to have to quote a bit:
People with absolute pitch can immediately, unthinkingly tell the pitch of any note, without either reflection or comparison with an external standard...
The precision of absolute pitch varies, but it is estimated that most people with it can identify upwards of seventy tones in the middle region of the auditory range, and each of these seventy tones has, for them, a unique and characteristic quality that distinguishes it absolutely from any other note.
..."At five [Sir Frederick Ouseley -- that doesn't sound right does it?] was able to remark, 'Only think, Papa blows his nose in G.' He would say that it thundered in G or that the wind was whistling in D, or that the clock (with a two-note chime) struck in B minor..." For most of us, such an ability... seems uncanny, almost like another sense... such as infrared or X-ray vision; but for those who are born with absolute pitch, it seems perfectly normal.
...
...to those with absolute pitch, every tone, every key seems qualitatively different, each possessing its own "flavor" or "feel," its own character. Those who have absolute pitch often compare it to color -- they "hear" G-sharpness as instantly and automatically as we "see" blue. (Indeed the word "chroma" is sometimes used in musical theory.)
Well that complicates my desire to replace the "chroma" in QCD with music.
...
When people with absolute pitch "hear a familiar piece of music played in the wrong key... they often become agitated and disturbed. . . . To get a sense of what it is like, imagine going to the produce market and finding that... the bananas all appear orange, the lettuce yellow and the apples purple."
Transposing music from one key to another is something which any competent musician can do easily and almost automatically. But for someone with absolute pitch, every key has its own unique character, and the key in which one has always heard a piece is likely to be felt as the only right one. Transposing a piece of music... can be analogous to painting a picture with all the wrong colors.
I skipped the following passage, but want to include it now,
The Finnish entomologist Olavi Sotavalta, an expert on the sounds of insects in flight, was greatly assisted in his studies by having absolute pitch -- for the sound pitch of an insect in flight is produced by the frequency of its wingbeats. Not content with musical notation, Sotavalta was able to estimate very exact frequencies by ear. The pitch made by the moth Plusia gamma approximates a low F-sharp, but Sotavalta could estimate it more precisely as having a frequency of 46 cycles per second. Such an ability... requires not only a remarkable ear, but a knowledge of the scales and frequencies with which pitch can be correlated.
Musicophilia
Reading Oliver Sacks' chapter about all the various forms of amusia, mostly caused by injuries to the brain from accidents or strokes, I couldn't help thinking about all the time Sacks spent roaring around on motorcycles when he was young. Would he have continued this later in his life after realizing all the damage head injuries could do? I think he had more physical reasons for stopping, from non-head injuries.
The next chapter is the one on absolute pitch that so struck me when I first read Musicophilia. Already we have had accounts of very musical people who make me very aware that we are not all dealt the same hand when it comes to appreciating music. Even laying my dear friend synesthesia aside for the moment, people are born with a facility for music that is as astonishing to me as the defects such as amusia. I had also missed, the first time, the note about a child's aptitude for rhythm narrowing -- to suit his culture -- between the ages of six and twelve months. As a parent, this is the sort of information that would have driven me nuts. You are crippling your child's possible future as a percussionist, for example, by not exposing her to a variety of rhythmical options during that first year.
Vintage Space
This is an interesting combination of my interests. Vintage Space is a YouTube channel about Space. A young woman of "today" interested in the space technology of my youth, and turning it into books and an online presence.
Since my mother was interested in astronomy and, apparently, anything happening above the surface of the planet, I was roused to "see" Echo and then the Mercury launches -- that seemed to always take place around dawn our time in Boulder. (Why I recall watching these launches in our "family room," next to the garage, at the lower level of our trendy, split-level home, I can't recall. I know we usually watched TV in the living room a level up.)
Like Natalie Tran (AKA CommunityChannel) Amy Teitel has turned an interest and a camera into a lifestyle and career. (I would be hard pressed to define what Nat's interest is, maybe humor.) But I think it is so cool that she can do this. That people with an odd (from a normative viewpoint) interest can share their enthusiasms and that people -- like me -- all around the world can benefit from this. I'm pretty familiar with the space program and remember a good deal from when it was happening, but I learn something new from most of her episodes.
(In an episode I just watched she referenced sounding rockets from the International Geophysical Year -- 1957-1958 -- which I followed with keen interest at the time.)
Absalom
Another novelty, a story told by a man who is guessing at the truth. Then again, no one seems to really know the truth. Quentin has a story from his father, who was told by his father, who got parts of it from Sutpen and witnessed certain episodes. Who better than Shreve, apparently only as well informed as we are ourselves, to try to make sense of all this.
Rain
Last winter was our El Niño winter, and we did have more rain than in the previous drought years, but it wasn't what I had been hoping for. Now this winter is supposed to be a La Niña winter, yet we've been having even more rain than last year. Today it rained most of the day. So nice.
We had been warned about all the rain, so I had planned to stay in, which I did. There was nothing I really had to leave for, and with the steady rain I wasn't tempted to run out for anything. I even had jobs planned, most of which I did -- or at least got started on. But I'm going to be so happy to get out tomorrow to get a bunch of errands in before the rain resumes next week.
Not that I'm going to cower in my apartment all week because of rain. I really don't see how people who rarely leave their homes do it. I'm reminded that even Henry Ryecroft in his imagined Devon retirement, was constantly walking about the countryside like a good Jane Austen daughter. Maybe Gissing's real life lung problems played a part in Henry's endless walks, or maybe Gissing's boredom at being housebound (I imagine) also played a part.
Alice Herz-Sommer didn't seem to be much daunted by her lack of mobility near the end, but then she still had her music. Music gave her the ability to leave her surroundings behind both in the camp and in old age. And that was one of the lessons of the Buena Vista Social Club, how music could keep people lively in old age. Unfortunately I am like Jane Austen's Lady Catherine de Bourgh in this respect, "If you are speaking of music...it is of all subjects my delight. There are few people in England I suppose, who have more true enjoyment of music than myself, or a better natural taste. If I had ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient.... "
Musicophilia
This is a very poorly named book. Musicophilia would have been a much better title for the book about Alice Herz-Sommer. ("Chem-ophilia" would have been a better title for Uncle Tungsten.) This is largely a book about neurological dysfunction and oddities relating to music.
I just read the section on musical hallucination -- which is when the music you "imagine" is so real sounding and so out of your conscious control that it usually takes time, sometimes days, for the subject to realize the music is coming from inside their head. On the one hand, it's not so surprising that the brain can generate music without the aid of the senses. As we've seen in other perceptual contexts, what we "hear" is not what our ears detect but what our brains do with that data. Musical hallucinations are just our brains replaying -- or sometimes playing with, as a sound designer might -- the music it has performed in the past.
What interests me, as in the case of dreams, is all that our brains are capable of doing on their own. Our brains, according to Sacks' multitude of anecdotal accounts, can reproduce music we heard long ago and have forgotten about and with a degree of fidelity that is often better than what those subjects can obtain from actual music -- often due to hearing loss.
And sometimes the music seems to be original and composers write it down and we have new art. (There is a footnote in the book that is so close to Adrian's story in Doctor Faustus as to make you wonder how common things like this are.)
Going further with what the brain is able to do "on its own," I come back to the always fascinating Multiple Personality Disorder. Because I also live in an open-air psych-ward, I've been thinking in recent days about the relationship between MPD and schizophrenia. The latter would seem to be a variation on the former in which the primary identity is aware of a 2nd identity but only through hearing its voice. (I mean the voice has to be coming from someplace. And is this the origin of the notion of demonic possession and exorcism? That would certainly make sense. People talking to themselves often seem like they are struggling with something trying to "possess" them, as was the case with some of the secondary personalities in the MPS examples I read.)
You could do a very interesting variation on the movie Lucy with a subject developing the ability to control some of these powers our brains seem to have. Or, to fall back on Robert Pirsig's analogy of our brain as the hardware (or OS) and our consciousness as an app running on top of that system, the underlying "intelligence" running the show could become dominant with full control of all its neurological powers.
I just did a bit of research on schizophrenia (Wiki is having a really annoying fund drive which makes their site inaccessible to me -- since I just gave them money last month), I found this interesting tidbit on another site, "It is interesting that people who are born deaf and later go on to develop schizophrenia can also experience hearing voices.11" And they report there are people with benign voices in their head, as opposed to the usual "command" and "persecutory" voices. The "persecutory" voices are the ones that reek of being MPD related, as they seem to know so much personal and embarrassing stuff about the subject. Here's a key passage, "Because they come from inside you, they have a perfect understanding of your whole psyche.2
"They understand all of your strengths and weaknesses, all of your secret fears and hates. All of the things you most love and care about, and because they know you so well they can attack you where they know that you are most sensitive and where they can do the most damage. For instance, the person may be told by the voices to harm the family members they most love. They may be told to give up their studies, sports, or the career they have worked at all their life. They may be told to harm themselves in the most painful ways.2"
An interesting question is, Are the people with schizophrenia, who at least retain control of their consciousness, better off than MPS sufferers who suddenly find themselves in surprising places? Would you rather be harangued in your head or completely lose control of your consciousness?
Getting back to musical, or auditory, hallucinations, there is often a connection with exposure to silence, either a particularly silent environment, like a boat on a still sea or someone in the middle of a desert, or the silence of hearing loss. Which reminds me of the "voice hearing" Sara Maitland and her passion for silence... while driving and flying all over the place. She never elaborated on her voices, that I can recall, so we don't know if they were something she wanted to hear or not. (Now I'm imagining myself meditating in the desert hoping to be told where I put that SciFi manuscript I can't for the life of me find, though I know I wouldn't have tossed it. Or so I can hear again that "Eclectic Mouse" LP I can not find even on YouTube. I should look again, things do turn up there... Found it! Here. I recognize the sound but not the songs. It's possible I had a later LP -- I would have guessed around 1972 instead of late '60s.)
I've read another chapter now (the one about people either having or not having a musical ability) and am wondering if there are instances where one personality does and other personalities don't.
Falling
Walking to the gym this morning I saw what looked like a small tree lying on the sidewalk outside the Sutter-Stockton garage. I assumed it was a branch knocked off a tree by a truck, this happens frequently. But as I came abreast of the fallen foliage, I saw that it wasn't a tree or a branch but a mass of vine that had come off the side of the garage, I know not how. It seems to have fallen from at or near the top, maybe seven parking levels up.
It was raining yesterday, but it wasn't stormy. I can't even imagine how a crazy person could have detached it from the wall. A mystery.
Speaking of the gym, I ran into one of the few people there I know by sight (a long time ago he got very bitchy when I started using a machine he was still "using," along with the machine he was actually on at the time. This is one of those situations where you say something like, "Sorry, I didn't realized you were still working here" when you actually mean, ""Fuck off, you can't claim multiple machines at the same time" or "Is it okay if I use any of the machines here or are you "using" all of them?"). Anyway... seeing him reminded me that I haven't seen three regulars I often saw him interacting with. They were all serious bodybuilders (the three, not the guy I saw) who seemed to be in every day, or at least they were always working out when I was there. Did they OD on Muscle Milk? Was there a tragic "spotting" accident that prematurely ended their lives?
For years I avoided popular gyms (like mine) because I assumed they were places attractive people went to meet other attractive people. I only work out during the quiet times -- maybe at the busy periods there is more of that -- but I haven't noticed it at all. And the bodybuilder crowd seems to be mostly focused on their "work." It's hard to imagine them being distracted by, or even noticing, potential mating behavior. I could be wrong.
Back when I was driven from the Chinatown YMCA by their renovation program, my cardio time was spent on a crude stationary bicycle (40 minutes each session, if I recall correctly). My current gym has nicer stationary bikes (these will give you your heart rate) and there are TVs to distract you. I still use the bikes for ten minutes at the beginning to get warmed up, but I soon moved to elliptical machines for my real cardio work -- so much nicer, and easier on your butt. I've reduced my time to 25 minutes (with the longevity of my joints in mind) and recently shifted to Cross-Ramp machines, a kind of elliptical machine where you can configure the machine to work on particular muscles in your legs. (I originally spelled that "Crass-Ramp machine". No idea what that would be like but I would love to see one.)
Shifting gyms is another of those life changes -- like buying my condo -- that wasn't my choice but that has really worked to my advantage. The strangest way this is true is probably that I wouldn't have discovered my global, online Buffy community if I had stayed at the YMCA since I discovered Buffy only after having run into Charmed on the TVs here. Charmed is not as good as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but it is really a great distraction while using a cardio machine.
Musicophilia
I'm currently re-reading Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks for my book club. I thought I had written something about the book, but can't find a word. Surprising. I thought I had written about absolute pitch because I hadn't known that was a thing. Will have to look around some more.
But speaking of music, my recent musical trip to the '50s and '60s made me very aware, the other day, that my gym was playing a strange mix of popular music from both today and the 1950s. And none of the songs from that decade that I had enjoyed, either.
YouTube has preserved that musical trip of mine in the form of playlists it keeps offering me. One, that I did play last night, is mostly Brazilian influenced though it does branch out into other Lani Hall music, which is fine with me. I was thinking about this because I just read Sacks about earworms, or, as he prefers, brainworms. (Something else from the book that I would swear I have written about.) I think of earworms (Sacks has a point about "brainworms" but, ewww) as being derived from popular songs and jingles, so it's nice to know that Sacks has gotten something similar from classical music.
Just yesterday I was reading about people trying to decipher (quite literally) the amazing (and amazingly loud) sounds made by sperm whales. The sounds are so complex as to be daunting when it comes to trying to interpret what they could mean. With music, we have some idea how to translate at least some notes into an emotional language. Wagner, tone poems, and movie scores in general, demonstrate that music has an inherent ability to convey meaning. It would be interesting to know if the musical "hooks" most likely to get caught in your ear, have anything in common simply as sound. I'm not even sure if it's primarily the tune or the lyrics. The song I've had trouble with most recently is an Adele tune and is unusual for her in that I can understand almost none of the lyrics. Unless it's subliminal, it would seem to be just the repetition of sounds that gets stuck in my head.
