29. Chatty

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Bad Swifty

One really should confess ones shortcomings, both to others and to oneself, so here goes: The other day I discovered a cache of longer versions of Glee covers (with lyrics) on YouTube. I finally made it to Santana's (Naya Rivera's) cover of Taylor's Mine and it was a revelation. I've heard Taylor Swift's version of her song many times and there are some great parts, but Naya's version was so much stronger. 

Mine is a classic Country song. This tune is from earlier in Taylor's career when she was still in Nashville, and it shows. But I never noticed just how good, and Country good, the song was until hearing Naya's version. Now, the virtue of Glee is that they most often framed their covers in an emotional context -- in this case the troubled relationship between Santana and Brittney -- so some of that rubs off on my reaction to Naya's singing. But I really don't think that's the key ingredient. It could also be that I'm just hearing the song with fresher ears in this new version. But, again, I doubt it. 

On We Found Love, Naya does an amazing job of capturing the little vocal things that Rhianna does that makes that song so memorable. I can't speak to her cover of I Love You Like a Love Song, because I don't know the original version, but Naya's cover, in its long form, is now one of my favorite Glee songs. 

Here's Naya's Glee version of Mine for your consideration: 

Faust

Really, Doctor Faustus. I'm re-reading my blogging of this book from February of last year. This is the first time I've reviewed this material since reading The Brothers Karamazov, and especially Ivan's dream sequence. I might as well say that it's the first time I've re-read it since the last time I read it, as you always bring that to a re-reading as well.

I envy my friend who is into the double digits of her re-readings of Proust, both because she started before me, and so can recall what it was like to first encounter this world as a quite young woman, but mostly because she can read it in French. 

Am I at four readings? I'm not entirely certain. But I can't imagine getting into it again for at least a decade. I'm much more likely to re-read Parade's End (almost certain, in fact) and even The Magic Mountain. I was thinking, after Doctor Faustus, that I didn't need to go back to TMM, but now I'm thinking it would be interesting. That was the original plan after all -- to tackle Goethe's Faust and Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy before blogging TMM. And instead Doctor Faustus and The Brothers Karamazov turned out to be even more important. 

I just realized I haven't blogged Parade's End, either. And that would be especially challenging as I would want to talk about Tom Stoppard's screenplay as well as Ford Madox Ford's original text. Just the other day I was thinking about some of the things Ford did in his final book that revised or undercut assumptions from the earlier books. And as wonderful as I think Stoppard's screenplay is, it couldn't capture the literary marvels of the text. What's compelling about Parade's End is both the story and the way it is told. 

My aunt, who passed away last year at 94, never read a book twice. She saw it as a waste of reading time. I could see going the other way and only reading books I had read before. Not that I would, there are still too many important books I've yet to read. But I do think that would be a reasonable plan. For one thing it would guarantee that you weren't wasting your time on books you wouldn't end up liking.

And, as long as I'm reflecting back on earlier blogs, a friend is traveling around the south of England and today posted photos of Exeter cathedral on Facebook. I immediately thought of the fictional Henry Ryecroft and his snug cottage not that far from Exeter. I really should go back and add links to my later posts about disease and genius in Doctor Faustus (what I was reading last night) and autism and genius in Thinking In Pictures. George Gissing and Mann, I suspect, would have gotten along just fine, but it's hard to imagine what Gissing would make of Temple Grandin, in her Western outfits, designing more efficient (and more humane) slaughterhouses in America. Would either Gissing or Mann have been receptive to her science based interpretation of her world? That is hard to imagine.

Tiny 

After attending my only boat show, in the mid-1960s, I became enamored of sailboat interiors. I still look at mid-size boat tours on YouTube, but have added RV tours and, more recently, Tiny Houses.

I think what appeals to me, beside the intimacy and efficiency of these spaces, is the attention to detail. In larger spaces you can waste space or not pay much attention to entire walls or even rooms. In a tiny space every cubic inch has to justify itself.

Of course I've also argued that often these spaces I see on YouTube are in fact over-designed. Intensely planned and crafted fixtures often mean that there is only one way to use the space. A Lamborghini is a thing of beauty and perfectly designed for its purpose, but if you need to pick-up a purchase or take friends to dinner, a Tesla X is far more flexible and -- dare I say it -- practical.

If I ever had the opportunity to design a tiny space (I forgot to mention container conversions, which may be my favorite) I would start by subtracting as many of the features you commonly see as possible. I would try to introduce functional minimalism as well as aesthetic minimalism (the decorative details of many of these designs would make the Victorians blush.) I could even demonstrate this concept in my own tiny apartment except that making marginal improvements in such an awkwardly small space simply isn't worth the bother. And so I read Dwell magazine instead.

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28. Random

Previous - 27. Reprise + Lunch

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Sk8tr girl again

I thought I had written about the woman who races around here backwards on roller-skates and who once fell and knocked herself silly, but now I can't find it. She's at it again. (I'm sitting in the window at the Bank Cafe again because I only have a short time today between when I have to let people into my building for inspections.) It's even the lunch hour so the sidewalks are even more crowded than usual. She does seem to have a better helmet than I remember her having before -- but no more sense. 

It is entertaining sitting here in the window. I just saw a very happy looking crazy person survive walking across the intersection against the light with cars nearly hitting him. I don't think the traffic really registered with him. Sk8ter girl has been by another couple times. She does see the pedestrians -- she has to to avoid them -- but I imagine she sees them as an audience she is performing for. Or maybe just as the things you avoid on a slalom course. Honestly I'm amazed she can do it as, in my experience, people move pretty unpredictably. 

Potty again

Since I'm just rambling, I may as well report the disappearance of Potty from the alley this morning. He's gone from the site entirely. He will be missed. I can only hope he's gone on to a better place... someplace with more room and perhaps something he can be chained to so that life doesn't continue to tip him over and push him around. 

I can honestly say our alley is an emptier place without Potty. And today is also the first day our contractors are doing no work in the building, which makes a sort of God-has-a-demented-sense-of-humor kind of sense. 

I really need to start a new book. 

Next - 29. Chatty

27. Reprise + Lunch

Previous - 26. The Sunflower part 5

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Swifties

Yesterday someone on my Buffy forum posted a video about teenagers reacting to music from... the 2000s! I didn't play it since I find these videos annoying, but Lamey, the one who posted it, added "I feel so old" since she is in her 20s and can't believe the kids today don't know her music. 

I've written about this before. I keep embracing newer music, generation after generation, only to find that the "new" music so quickly becomes "old" music. Though, OMG!, since I only a few days ago proclaimed myself a "Swifty," (my hair is almost long enough to flip) this feeling old doesn't apply to me, of course.  

The Sunflower - last

Yesterday I thought there was either a good deal or nothing more to say about this book. The final commentator -- and they are in alphabetical order -- actually does the best job of expressing my take on the situation and saying what I think I would have done in Wiesenthal's place. Harry Wu was a Chinese academic imprisoned by the Communist Party from 1960, when I was in second grade, until 1979, when I was a college graduate working in a bookstore after spending time after college driving a taxi, running a copy store, being a volunteer coordinator at a social services center, and spending a year repairing and selling typewriters. So a long time.

p274 "... the society that the Communists founded was designed to drain any remnants of humanity out of a person. Like Mr. Wiesenthal, I would not have forgiven the Nazi soldier on his deathbed, but I would have been able to say to him: 'I understand why you were a part of a horrible and vicious society. You are responsible for your own actions but everyone else in this society shares the same responsibility with you.' "

Potty

This is the sequel to FUBAR from #20. a week later.

Yesterday I was anticipating some Keystone Cops potential in the alley in the morning when both the garbagemen and porta-potty service guy were both due around the same time. Last night we moved up to DEF-CON 2 (2nd highest level). And what a colorful tale it is...

I've mentioned the painting of the facade of the building next door (with the difficult scaffolding) and how lucky we are they aren't also painting the alley side. They too have a porta-potty which was sitting out on the sidewalk and kept getting shifted about. Saturday it had been moved in front of the building next door to them. Saturday morning it was flipped on its side, no doubt the act of yobs. 

When I put our landfill and recycling toters out I discovered they had pushed the porta-potty up into the alley where it sits against their building but blocks a fair amount of the roadway, since there is no sidewalk. I didn't think there was enough space for the service truck to back past it to our end of the alley, where our porta-potty really needed to be pumped.

This sets the stage for this morning when, if the timing was less than perfect, the service guy would overlap with ether the garbage collectors or our contractors and slapstick would ensue.

Around 6:30am I jumped out of bed at the first notes of the rolling toter chorus, and was in the alley in time to receive the empties back from the Recology guys. After bringing our toters down the stairs and putting them back in their usual places, I took a morning pee break.

By the time I returned to the alley I could hear, and then see, our porta-potty service truck just starting to pull into the alley. I ran up and caught him and we ran through the options, deciding to push the vagrant porta-potty further back into the alley rather than out into the street where there were curbs (and scaffolding). So we pushed it back past where his truck needed to park. Then we rearranged the toters which had been placed in an awkward position in the lee of the toilet. He backed in, irritating the human vagrant sleeping behind a planter on the other side of the alley (and actually chasing him out... yay!)

I had unbolted the wood frame around the porta-potty before I went to bed -- just in case I didn't make it out there in time -- so the service guy made quick work of finally doing his job. He was going to help me return the wandering porta-potty to its previous location (now I'm thinking there might be a children's book here) but I told him I would get our contractors to do it, as they needed to park where Potty (the adventurous porta-potty) was now sitting in the middle of the alley. He, the service guy, not Potty, was happy with this plan.

I then ate my breakfast standing out in the alley waiting for the first contractor to arrive. Just as I was finishing my orange juice, the guy with the nice black ride started backing in. I used sign language and loud English to communicate the need to shift Potty precisely "here." That accomplished, I returned to my kitchen as he delicately backed his car around Potty.

It all worked perfectly. Having just read (and written) about the 2nd Commandment and sacrificing to totems, I'm considering leaving an offering of tofu out in the alley for Potty. No babies left in the building to shovel anywhere. (Thank Potty.)

Hardly an hour later and I'm sitting in the Bank Cafe and Potty has already taken yet another trip down the alley (to make way for our contractor's big truck.) I'm now thinking, and this may be related to my reading The Sunflower, that Potty might not be so much adventurous as Jewish... driven here and there by forces beyond his control. A tale of adversity and spiritual awakening perhaps. I mean, think about it, he's literally shit and pissed on! And since I'm still reading Belle Ruin, I'm thinking I might want to go beyond just the children's book to a musical. I'm now working on new lyrics to Don't Cry For Me Argentina.

UPDATE: hours later and Potty continues to be shifted back and forth in the alley. Now I'm remembering a scene in a (Ken Russell?) movie where an actress was rolling back and forth in the back of a car or carriage. Not sure if you could do that while singing. And portraying a porta-potty. (Ha! I actually found the scene. It's Glenda Jackson on the floor of a train in The Music Lovers -- where Russell subtly hints that Tchaikovsky might be just a tad gay.)

Lunch

I just had a very interesting lunch. No, that isn't quite right. I had my usual Bun Mee crispy tofu with jalapeno (delicious, and my mouth is still tingling), but what was interesting was my reverie while sitting at the window counter looking out over Market Street and the Palace Hotel across the street.

You can't get much more "San Francisco" than this location. The Palace Hotel has been an SF tradition since way before the 1906 earthquake and fire. The stunning hall where today you can enjoy a very expensive brunch was at one time the coach entry and there are photos of actual coaches navigating the space. 

This is the image I was thinking of but it is actually a previous building. But what I said could have been true if we weren't sitting on the San Andreas fault.


The building that houses Bun Mee (a great Vietnamese sandwich and salad place) sits on the hypotenuse side of this flat-iron shaped block. Directly behind us, on what would be the heated surface of the iron, is the Mechanics Institute and their interesting library. At the end of the hypotenuse on my right is the De Young Building that has been converted into the Ritz-Carlton Residences -- a very upscale condo conversion with an ugly steel and glass excrescence rising out of the restored stone grandeur of the old De Young. Right in front of that building, in a little island where Market and Kearny Streets meet, is Lotta's Fountain, one of the most famous monuments in the city.

That history, while watching the variety of people walking past me on the sidewalk, is what got me thinking about the multiverse. The "multiverse" is an interesting concept in theoretical physics that, I suspect, would be very hard to either prove or disprove. But there's another kind of multiverse that exists without a doubt. The multiverse of the people strolling that sidewalk. 

But first let me add a bit more about the setting. Under Market street -- where old photos show horses pulling carriages and wagons, where really old photos show plank walks lining dirt streets -- two levels of train tracks are buried. This Bank Cafe is in the next block to the right, and a block past that is the Phelan Building, another of SF's grand old buildings (and a favorite of mine) that is now home to Medium. This area is both the past and the cutting edge of the internet economy, where start-ups come to rub real and virtual shoulders while sniffing out venture funding the way pigs sniff out truffles.

But now to the sidewalk. It's summer so there are the tourists, most obviously the family groups. There are new economy workers going someplace trendy (like Bun Mee) for lunch, but also the people who work all the back-of-the-house jobs that keep everything moving. There are a few older people still dressed for when this was the edge of the Financial District and "The Wall Street of the West." All these people inhabit different universes and see the place and the other people a little differently. But we're only getting started.

What really got me thinking were the feral people, mostly individuals, who seem to wander past every few moments... or less. For a while there was almost always at least one of them in sight. One was bare chested and walking not on the sidewalk but in the street (that phenomena again.) Most were poorly -- and filthily -- dressed. One was in his socks. (Something else I notice frequently.) The universe these people inhabit has so little in common with the others they may as well also have different laws of physics.

I will grant you that many people would question my own sartorial choices (and, while in many cases I would question their's as well, in at least some cases I could only respond with mea culpa.) But given the state of our sidewalks and streets, even Diogenes the Cynic would have somehow kept sandals on his feet.

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26. The Sunflower part 5 + Autumn

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Deborah Lipstadt - Wiki

p193 "... In the Talmud we read: 'In a place where people who have... [repaired their relationship with God and man] stand, the purist... (righteous person) cannot stand...' [Maimonides] Citing the verse from Genesis, after Adam and Eve eat from the forbidden fruit, God says: 'Now Adam is like one of us... knowing the difference between right and wrong.'

"The simple explanation that after humans have sinned they become Godlike seems puzzling. In the Mishnah Torah Maimonides reads the verse differently... 'Now Adam is... unique... From within himself, he knows the difference between right and wrong.' The human species is unique in the world, in that humans use their own intelligence and reason to distinguish good and evil. [Or we invent "good" and "evil." As we have invented the days of the week and the hours of the day which have no reality independent of us.]

"So too those who have done wrong and then... [repaired their relationship with God and man] have reached a new level: from within themselves, they know the true difference between right and wrong. It is this unique human ability to know the difference between right and wrong which makes... [repairing their relationship with God and man] transformational...."

If you are reading the book while reading my blog, you are aware that I'm leaving out all the -- to me tiresome -- examination of the process of forgiveness and contrition and penance and atonement, and the details of each cult's views on these subjects. While religions provide valuable insights into the moral instincts of humans, I'm more interested in the root of these instincts than I am in how many Acts of Contrition you need to say for a Crime Against Humanity. In fact, I see this focusing on the minutia of the various beliefs as a sort of coping mechanism -- you don't have to think so much about what the Holocaust says about man and God if you are calculating exactly what your religion requires from the sinner in this unusual case.

Why aren't there publication dates for these commentaries? You really need to know when they were written.

Cynthia Ozick - Wiki

p213 "The SS man had a Catholic education...

"Does the habit, inculcated in infancy, of worshiping a Master -- a Master depicted in human form yet seen to be Omnipotent -- make it easy to accept a Fuhrer?

p214 "... The commandment against idols [the Second] is above all a Commandment against victimization, and in behalf of pity.

"Molock springs up wherever the Second Commandment is silenced. In the absence of the Second Commandment, the hunt for victims begins...

"In Germany, did the Church say, 'Hitler is Moloch'?

"Moloch's appetite for victims cannot be stemmed. Begin by feeding it only Jews, and in the end it will eat even the little boys who are servers in their church.

"There are no innocent idols. Every idol suppresses human pity. That is what it is made for...

p216 "...forgiveness is pitiless. It forgets the victim. It negates the right of the victim to his own life. It blurs over suffering and death. It drowns the past. It cultivates sensitiveness toward the murderer at the price of insensitiveness toward the victim...."

I'm not sure Ivan Karamazov's "Grand Inquisitor" understood the Second Commandment in quite this way, but it is an interesting interpretation. The Church -- especially the Roman Catholic church -- has historically been quite fond of sacrificing victims to its own idols. And, again, sociologically sacrificing a few victims of other groups (or even the laggards of your group) has always made Darwinist sense.

I thought Ozick was finished but she continues,

p219 "The intelligent man of conscience also shovels in the babies [to feed Moloch, just as the brute does], and it does not matter that he does it without exaltation. Conscience, education, insight -- nothing stops him. He goes on shoveling. He knows what wickedness is. By now he has been shoveling for so long that he knows what Moloch is, he is intimate with Moloch. He is a morally sensitive man, and he shovels babies to glut the iron stomach of the idol...

p220 "I discover a quotation attributed to Hannah Arendt: 'The only antidote to the irreversability of history is the faculty of forgiveness...' She is the greatest moral philosopher of the age, but even she cannot make a Lazarus [not sure if this is meant to be Luke's Lazarus or John's Lazarus] of history.

"Graham Greene explains the Catholic idea of hell -- no longer the medieval site of endless conflagration; instead, an eternal separation from God.

"Let the SS man die unshriven.

"Let him go to hell.

"Sooner the fly to God than he."

One thing we can say for Ozick is that she doesn't equivocate. But you already know my sociological interpretation of all this, so you should guess that I see Ozick as being desperate to defend the moral order of her God. The God who was so evidently "on leave." She can't forgive "the SS man" because if it wasn't his fault it must have been part of God's plan. Or, worse, there is no plan. What we have here in the Holocaust is not men feeding Moloch but a Twilight of all Idols (play on English translation of a title by Nietzsche) including her own.

But I really do like the way she tore into this question. And what she says about how Karl's sins are actually worse because he is sensitive and educated is an interesting echo (echo in reverse?) of the notion that the repentant sinner has a special status and understanding of both God and sin. 

Which reminds me of something I forgot to mention when Deborah Lipstadt was talking about that "unique" understanding of good and evil possessed by the recovered sinner. This special status of the sinner was brought up repeatedly in The Brothers Karamazov. The prime example is Father Zosima himself, but there's also his mentor from when Zosima was in the process of leaving the military for the Church, and even Dmitri -- though that transformation is still in doubt, and I have little faith in it. (Ha! to "little faith.")

Dennis Prager - Wiki

I'm not going to quote him, but he does a wonderful job of describing the differing views of Jews and Christians when it comes to forgiveness. Christians -- and their God -- forgive everyone regardless. Jews -- and their God -- cannot forgive a murderer... only the victim can forgive a crime and in the case of murder the victim is dead.

Having recently read The Brothers Karamazov, I fully understand the Christian position. But as a person outside both religious communities, the Jewish view makes more sense to me, just as Draco's Code makes more sense to me, as I've written about before (yes? I didn't label it so I can't find it now. Briefly, Draco's aim was to end honor killings in ancient Greece, so his laws called for the death of anyone -- or anything, trees that dropped a limb on a person had to be cut down as well -- whose actions resulted in another's death, regardless of intent.)

Joshua Rubenstein - Bio

I'm going to quote his quote of Heinrich Himmler, speaking to a group of Nazi officers, in 1943, p237 "Most of you will know what it means when 100 corpses are lying side by side, when 500 are lying there or when 1000 are lying there. To have stuck this out and at the same time -- apart from exceptions due to human weaknesses -- to have remained decent, that is what has made us hard."

Himmler addresses the difficulty of individuals serving the best interests of their social group. As Marius's Roman legionnaires could have told the Nazi's, massacring even unarmed women and children is hard work. (I just realized how apt this is as the Roman victims were the Nazi's Aryan ancestors... or related to them.) 

Sidney Shachnow - Wiki

p242 "...Karl managed to overcome the voice within him that said a person cannot murder innocent men, women, and children and still call himself a human being. He allowed himself to be changed into a foul beast who did the unforgivable. He gave up his moral life -- his soul -- to his leader and his state. He believed it when he was told that his victims were less than animals an that he was a superior being who was obligated to torture and annihilate them. What he did was the ultimate and irreversible denial of his humanity...."

This is all the more damning coming from a career military officer and Green Beret. However, I return again to what I said about the U.S. (and U.K.) bomber crews in both Europe and Japan, who participated in fire bombings and nuclear attacks on civilian targets. How you would distinguish between Karl and these airmen I really can't imagine.

Autumn... 

...is coming. The Japanese maple has gotten the news, there's not that much green left up near the top, but the poor, nearly naked tree in the alley is in full denial. The days are getting shorter but, what with it's having been shifted from place to place the past several months and all the damage it has suffered, perhaps it hasn't been able to compare the morning and afternoon light as trees are said to do and arrive at the correct inference. It really should be bare of leaves by now, but instead the few leaves that remain look more like June leaves then almost September leaves. 

The scaffolding came down yesterday across the alley, so the tree -- and the entire end of the alley -- is suddenly getting more light. And in a week or two, we may even have some fog free mornings and afternoons. So far, August has managed only a single day when the temperature rose as high as 70F, but September tends to be our warmest month. Things should be changing soon. 

Next - 27. Reprise + Lunch

25. Pop music

Previous - 24. "I can't fight this feeling..."

Pop music, because.

I'm willing to go so far as to admit that I'm a fan of both Abba and Ace of Base. Happy? (I'm still working on the next section of The Sunflower and my planned half bottle of organic Chardonnay has expanded to the full bottle. (Seismic retrofitting is to blame!) 

For whatever reason (bottle of Chardonnay) I'm watching THIS and I blame Glee because I had no interest in Britney prior to Brittany S. Pierce. Carpool Karaoke is so amazing.

Next - 26. The Sunflower part 5

24. "I can't fight this feeling..."

Previous - 23. The Sunflower part 4 + Feeling off

"...anymore"

I've written about my fondness for Popular music before. I wonder if there's an AA type group for this. Now it's gotten even worse. My iPod is still free of the Big 4 (Lady Gaga, Adele, Katy Perry, and Taylor Swift) but that's just because the radio plays so much of them. What, specifically, I've stopped fighting is my resistance to Taylor Swift. Every time the radio starts playing yet another of her new songs I think, "OK, now this one is a dud." And then a week or two later I'm turning up the volume every time that song comes on. Suddenly I'm thinking, "Well, it isn't 'Style,' but it does have its moments." This has happened now with her latest three hits. 

I can't even confess this to my online Buffy the Vampire Slayer community and they are mostly in their twenties. I'm living a lie!

The Sunflower

I'm still working through the various commentators. This is more like my previous blogs and it takes me more than a day to put something together. I'm still really enjoying the process, though. This is what I missed when seismic retrofitting took over my life. 

I suspect I only have about another week of that process. (There is some denial there as I'm ignoring the painters and work on the back "yard" that needs to be arranged as soon as the retrofitters are finished. Also, I need to reorganize our stuff and put the laundry room back together.) I may actually be finished with The Sunflower by the time I'm finished with our retrofitting. I could live with a week or two to catch up on my Medium reading and the like.

Next - 25. pop music

23. The Sunflower part 4 + Feeling off

Previous - 22. Restoration vs wabi sabi

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Rebecca Goldstein

p149 Rebecca Goldstein [worth following that link] on Karl, "... He is not a selfish creature who devotes himself to the gratification of his own personal desires. No, he is a dutiful sort, one who submits his will to the imperatives he sees as serving the greater good. A model boy, as his grieving mother recalls him, the parish priest's favorite.

p150 "His submissive posture before the demands of normative abstractions [it seems this is Ayn Rand jargon. Something to consider.] does not alter when he turns from Christianity to Nazi ideology. In some fundamental sense, horrible to say, his moral nature does not change at all.... It seems to me, that his 'conscience,' his normative makeup, remains essentially the same both before his Nazi conversion and after." A great observation and I will expand on this myself later.

Me

And here's my observation: As presented, I don't believe that Simon speaks in the presence of Karl. How would Karl have known that this Jew understood the story, I assume in German, he was telling? It seems to me that this is really more of an ethical thought experiment than a real life anecdote. This is important because quite a few of the commentators try to parse the selection of Simon by Karl and the way Karl addresses Simon. I think it's a mistake to focus on the details of this story.

Hans Habe - Wiki

p159 "... Those who are born murderers are the pathological exceptions -- their deeds, as a matter of fact, are more pardonable than those who were born 'healthy...' "  Karl is worse because he started out with ethical (Catholic) standards and "fell" into Nazi sin.

p161 "For the [Nazi] regime we are discussing there is no 'problem' of forgiveness. The crimes of the regime were unforgivable, the regime has been tried and destroyed. Meanwhile we are faced not with Mephistopheles, but with Faust. [My ears perk.] Corruption, though a force of permanent duration, cannot exist without collaboration from the corrupted. The corrupted, in a word, are not victims of the corrupters, but collaborators. With the words 'Terrible vision!" Faust turns away, but the ghost rightly defends himself: 'You invited me cordially, you have long dabbled in my domain . . . You have passionately striven to see me, to hear my voice, to gaze on my countenance . . .' 

"The firm is Faust & Co. or, if you prefer it, Mephistophelies & Co., partners just like Hitler and Karl S. The proof lies in the counterproof. The devilish Nazi regime did not corrupt everybody, and of those whom it corrupted most stopped at murder. I cannot accept the excuse that the system relieves the individual of responsibility... Resistance to evil is not heroism but a duty. [But see Me below.]



As I've pointed out in my earlier blogging of Faust, what people write about Faust is mostly interesting in revealing something about themselves, rather than giving us any insight into Goethe's confusing creation. So what does this passage tell us? 

In the passage Habe quotes, Faust, in a moment of Romantic, existential despair, invokes the "Spirit of Earth" but is frightened, just as he is later blinded by the direct light of the sun and has to fall back on an indirect view in the prismatic mist of the waterfall. In this case Mephisto is the indirect contact Faust can handle. So is Habe suggesting that Karl, while attempting to be a good Hitler Youth and SS volunteer, is undone by the reality of the burning Jewish family? That he is not enough of an Übermensch for the stark reality of the Nazi ideal?

This distinction between victim and collaborator, while I don't entirely reject it, I question as it is precisely the seduction of the good boy Karl into the, ultimately failed, SS volunteer that is the form his victimization takes. 

And since Habe has introduced Faust to the conversation, this is the kind of thing Mephisto repeatedly does to Faust: Giving him the means to seduce and ruin Gretchen; to lead the Emperor into (new levels of) fiscal disaster; and finally setting him up to create a new City on the Sea (my play on City on a Hill or even City of God) leading to acts of cruelty strikingly similar to the fate of Karl's Jewish family. Wow. If this is really where Habe was going why wasn't he this explicit... the spirit of Goethe, perhaps.

And yet I don't buy Karl as a "Faustian" character in the striving sense of that term. For one thing he isn't an "agent" in any of this. This also relates to what I said in my post #16. about U.S. service men during WW2. They may have been appalled by the reality they were contributing to, but they themselves were not the agents of these atrocities. (Atrocities I've argued elsewhere you might not want to undo even if you could.) Which is not to say individual U.S. servicemen weren't agents of their own intimate scale atrocities that were at least as morally questionable as the better known Crimes Against Humanity. But we aren't through with Habe yet.

p162 "... in the history of man since the beginning of Creation, love and justice have opposed each other. At one period justice was the human ideal, at another, love. The divine idea of justice in love, love in justice, mankind has magnanimously left to the Creator.

"Forgiveness is the imitation of God. Punishment too is an imitation of God. God punishes and forgives, in that order. But God never hates. That is the moral value worth striving for, but perhaps unattainable."

Now this reminds me of The Brothers K. Dostoevsky repeatedly talks about the forgiving nature of true Orthodox Christianity. This is the substance of that discussion about the RC role in jurisprudence in the West. That the Church should never be in the position of judging and condemning criminals but always in the position of forgiving them.  

p162 "One of the worst crimes of the Nazi regime was that it made it so hard for us to forgive. It led us into the labyrinth of our souls. We must find a way out of the labyrinth -- not for the murderer's sake, but for our own... "

Interesting that he should choose one of Michel Foucault's favorite words. If you view Foucault as one of the victims -- or collaborators -- as a result of his childhood during the occupation of France, than this certainly would apply.

Jose Hobday - Wiki

p174 "...the words of my Seneca mother to me when I was badly wronged and wanted revenge and retaliation stay with me: 'Do not be so ignorant and stupid and inhuman as they are. Go to an elder and ask for the medicine that will turn your heart from bitterness to sweetness. You must learn the wisdom of how to let go of poison.'

p175 "Forgetting and forgiving... are of a piece... From my experience, wrongs will return to the mind for years and years and years. Each recall asks for forgiveness, and you stay in the power of that act until you let go. Compassion is all-embracing, extending to all creation -- to plants and to animals, including the two-legged variety. Forgiveness is of the heart. I would have forgiven, as much for my own peace of mind as for Karl's... No one, no memory, should have the power to hold us down, to deny us peace. Forgiving is the real power...."

This Native American perspective is strikingly similar to the Tibetan Buddhist perspective. 

Christopher Hollis - Wiki

"The Sunflower, whether wholly autobiographical or in parts fictional, is an intensely moving and vivid book..." Someone else doubts the reliability of this story.

Harold Kushner - Wiki

p186 "Forgiving is not something we do for another person... Forgiving happens inside us. It represents a letting go of the sense of grievance, and perhaps most importantly a letting go of the sense of victim...." 

This, again, is similar to the Dalai Lama's position.

Lawrence Langer - Wiki

p188 "...Of course, Wiesenthal and not Bolek records these words for the reader, and this raises a question of narrative authority in the text of The Sunflower that would require separate investigation."

Langer points out several other questionable aspects of the tale we are told. I mention this because I don't think we can take this tale as literally true, but as an ethical thought experiment. 

p189 "Deep in the bowels of Dante's Inferno is a sinner whose presence must have confounded Dante's readers, because they believed that this sinner was still alive. In fact, he was; but Dante the poet invents the heretical idea of acts so outrageous that they condemn the soul of the sinner to eternal damnation before his death. Hence the possibility of an unrepentable and thus unforgivable crime is not a new one, though Dante could not have known how this quirk in his orderly design for Hell might herald our current threatening impasse about atrocities that are beyond guilt and atonement."

p190 "...The vital question to ask about this text is not whether Wiesenthal should have forgiven the SS man. It is rather why the SS man, as a young boy, against his father's wishes, joined enthusiastically in the activities of the Hitler Youth; and, again presumably against his father's wishes, he volunteered for the SS... why he then pursued a career in that murderous league of killers without protest, including the episode he tells of on his deathbed; and most important of all, why he had to wait until he was dying to feel the time had come for repentance and forgiveness. On these issues, the SS man is deftly silent."

Me

I can't hold off any longer. Too many people are raising issues I need to respond to.

Several of these commentaries have talked about the guilt of all Germans living under the Nazi regime. This brings up the question, not of the nature of good and evil, but of what constitutes sociological good behavior. I think you can argue that "good" behavior on the part of an individual is behavior that benefits your group and that solidifies your position in that group. I realize this is influenced by The Righteous Mind.

Yes, in this relativistic interpretation Nazi behavior is only "wrong" because the Germans (and Japanese) lost. In the Nazi world, and also in the world of the Camps where God was viewed as "on leave," the Final Solution was neither good not evil, wrong or right. This is the ultimate expression of Ivan Karamazov's "everything is permitted." 

(For Dostoevsky there would be nothing really new in this story -- though the shear scale of Nazi evil would take some getting used to. And I'm pretty sure his response would be an Orthodox version of the Dalai Lama's, expressed in the words of Father Zosima.)

Even worse, to not behave as Karl did -- to remain aloof as Karl's father had or as the author both of and within Doctor Faustus did -- is sociologically wrong behavior and can only be justified with an appeal to arbitrarily derived moral codes and "Gods." Or, to be a little more fair, it can be justified by the sociological claims of a religious group... whose identity is based on arbitrarily derived moral codes and "Gods." Even then it is easier to demonstrate why Hitler Youth behavior is "good" within a nationalistic context than to justify behavior based on cult dogma.

Jesus, everything I read from here on out really is going to be informed by my reading of Faust, The Brothers K, Doctor Faustus, and The Righteous Mind.

What I would really like to know (if I truly believed there was a Karl) is what exactly caused him to abandon the ethical beliefs of his parents and join the Hitler Youth. This process must be documented someplace. There must have been tens of thousands of people after the war trying to justify themselves and showing how they were seduced in such and such a way.

Feeling off

This afternoon, after going to the gym this morning and running around all afternoon only to come home to discover the contractors were leaving early (when I'm here before 4pm they don't get away until close to 4:30, if I just barely make it by 4 or am a few minutes late they are invariably on their way out) and they didn't do half the things they are supposed to do before leaving. So I had to do them.

At any rate, when I finally sat down I was feeling off -- almost like I was coming down with something. So I did all the things I do at a time like that including making soup. But I also had cravings for some things I don't usually have around (yogurt, English muffins, Orange Juice), and I didn't feel like walking 12 blocks to the supermarket, so I went to one of the little markets scattered around my block. 

I chose the 2nd closest one which is tiny and sits under a building maybe 70 meters away as the crow flies. Their stock is pretty amazing, considering the size of the place, so I found everything I wanted. It's not cheap, but I like being able to give them at least a little business from one year to the next. Also it makes me feel smug about my neighborhood. If I'm looking for something specific and uncommon (this has happened) I can follow this nautilus-like route where I hit six different markets and am still less than two blocks away from home. The two slightly bigger market options are just over two, maybe three in one case, blocks away. Try finding that in a "planned community."

And everything was delicious. 

Next - 24. "I can't fight this feeling..."

22. Restoration vs wabi sabi

Previous - 21. The Italian Connection

Restoration vs conservation vs extreme wabi sabi

The scaffolding and netting recently came off the Orpheum Theater here in San Francisco after being covered up for months as they worked on the exterior of the building. I thought it looked pretty great, so I called it to the attention of a friend of mine who has been involved in the restoration business. She had already seen it and didn't think much of it.

Rather than a full restoration, they had basically stabilized the decorative elements and given it a shiny new coat of paint. This got me thinking... what doesn't?

When it comes to Seattle's King Street train station or our City Hall, I'm all in favor of full tilt restoration where the building ends up looking just as it did when new, or perhaps a little better, as it has to adjust to new building and accessibility codes.

But I don't object to what they did with the Orpheum, which I am going to call "conservation" without looking up what the actual technical terms should be. To the untrained eye (mine) the decorative elements look great and thanks to the work they just did, will probably be preserved for another generation. If I were to notice a little deterioration in the carvings, I would not be displeased. Rather, my wabi sabi tendencies would kick in and I would appreciate seeing the flaws, how time and weather were completing the work of the original designers and craftsmen.

At pier 70, where I showed you the photos of the old cranes I wish would be preserved, I am torn between loving the dilapidated condition that has reigned there for decades -- what I am calling "extreme wabi sabi" -- and the desire to fix it up just enough to live again as part of the productive built environment. I wouldn't mind if a building or two were restored to the way they looked at the end of the 19th century, but I would rather see a mix of old and new. Of laser-cut, powder coated steel next to steel so rusted it looks organic.

By a very strange coincidence, I had to brave the local Nike Store to buy socks this morning. I say strange because it's the day after I walked past the Orpheum again and started thinking about this, but also because the reason I needed to shop is that the laundromat washer or dryer ate most of my socks -- or something, I still have no idea what happened to them. (There's nothing unusual about losing a sock or two but I think there were either two or three pairs in that load of wash.) Being suddenly sock-less in San Francisco, I thought, "Oh, an opportunity to buy those low cut socks I've been thinking might be more comfortable." So I did.

The Nike Store here is in an older, pretty nondescript, building just off Union Square. When Nike acquired it they gutted it and left it a fairly bare industrial looking space with the steel reinforced concrete ceilings, and all their utilities, sprayed black. (If my memory serves, which I'm beginning to doubt what with my socks escaping, this is actually a remodel from their original store design.)

I really like what Nike has done with this space but I now need a fourth term to describe it... radical minimalism? Perhaps what was there before was lovely, but I don't think I was ever in the building and I tend to doubt it. Some buildings don't require restoration or conservation. For example Trinity Plaza on Market street and that motel on Van Ness at Washington begged for demolition and I'm happy to see they got that. I just wish they had used explosives. (Just recently I've seen photos of the stunning Victorian house that was on that corner of Washington and Van Ness before the motel, which makes it even worse... though I have to admit that a house like that on that corner would be a poor use of the location.) 

Next - 23. The Sunflower part 4 + Feeling off

21. The Italian Connection

Previous - 20. "My weekend?"

The Italian Connection?

SF is full of European tourists at the moment. Mostly I hear French and German but twice in the past few days I've noticed chaotic groups of Italians. First I noticed their strange behavior: Both groups were in or near a line but not really of the line. Only after I noticed the disorder did I pay attention to the tell-tail music of their language.

My thought both times was: Why didn't Italians discover quantum uncertainty? If I were teaching this subject I would be tempted to use a group of Italians (either a family or group of friends) as an example. 

I'm thinking of the individuals as electrons. You might, after a period of observation, be able to describe the "shell" each individual inhabits but it would be impossible to predict exactly where they would be in the next instant. You can even demonstrate quantum tunneling as an individual suddenly strays out of their shell in an apparently random direction.

So now I come to my follow up question: Was Werner Heisenberg one of those Germans who traveled to Italy for inspiration? (Pithy Goethe quote goes here.) Did he observe Italians -- possibly even in Italy -- before his uncertainty principle came to him? I can imagine him viewing a group of Italians -- maybe even tourists like I was observing -- and thinking, "What does this remind me of?"

Italians wouldn't notice their own behavior. The English would be too bothered trying to defend their queue. The French would be too involved in some strike or scandal. So it would be left to the Germans.

Next - 22. Restoration vs wabi sabi

20. "My weekend?"

Previous - 19. QCD musical speculation

"... I'll tell you about my weekend." (Extreme violence)

Another Blade Runner reference. Honestly it wasn't that bad. I'm not on a ventilator for example.

The Art & Soul Festival in Oakland was a little smaller in area -- not a bad thing for us -- and the performance stages were shifted around this year. I didn't hear as much music as in the past. (Last year there was a great set by Sheila E and the entire Escovedo family including her dad, who was on stage celebrating his 80th birthday. I just happened to be sorting the back stage area when they were performing -- just as I just happened to be working the center of the audience area for Kelly Clarkson's set at Summerthing and for Emmylou Harris's set at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass. It could happen.)

But this year my focus is working the food vendors, and most of the food vendors were a street over on Sunday, so I didn't hear much, but I did pretty much stay on top of the vendors trash sorting needs.

Let's go back and start with Saturday. Who better to assign to sort the BBQ competition area than the vegetarian? Actually this was not an accident or mistake, a block lined with semi-professional BBQers was the obvious place for me, because they required the most help since -- compared with the usual vendors who don't understand and don't really care about sorting their waste -- these guys had no fucking clue.

We are supposed to do "education" as well as divert waste, but, having done this now for over eight years, I know educating vendors is like strangers trying to educate toddlers on good manners. "Don't throw the latex gloves in with the compost" is translated in their heads (I can see it happening) to "Don't let the people in green shirts see you throw gloves into the compost." They invariably save up the worst shit and either drop it off at one of our stations just as they are leaving or else leave it semi-hidden behind where they were set-up. It's like Easter in hell trying to finding where they are keeping the stuff we will eventually need to sort. That's the professional vendors, the people and organizations who enter festival BBQ competitions are worse.

For every BBQ vendor at an event there is a certain amount of wasted meat. Maybe it wasn't prepared correctly, maybe the health inspector called them on some violation, maybe they just over estimated demand -- whatever the reason, lots of cooked meat goes into the trash (almost never into the compost where it belongs) and we have to fish it out. In addition to the meat, there's also bones and a surprising abundance of viscera. Cooked meat is at least easy to handle, but viscera is a slimy mess and is inevitably at the bottom of any bag it's placed in -- so it's the first thing to fall out if the bag tears. (I'm not speculating about this.) So that's the norm with one or maybe two BBQ vendors at an event. On Saturday there was a block lined -- both sides of the street -- with BBQ vendors, each with their own contribution of viscera and bones and left over cooked meat. Damien Hirst could have built a whole heard of mutant cattle and pigs with the meat that passed through my hands.

On Sunday I was a block away working two clusters of regular food vendors separated by almost a block of the usual street fair non-food booths. This worked fine until the end when I had to choose the busier cluster to focus on and leave the other area to others. The area I chose also had the busiest trash stations for the public, so I kept them sorted and eventually closed them down (with everything sorted) while making forays behind the vendor booths to find and retrieve the black bags of everything-mixed-together they inevitably leave us. 

About black bags. I was very wrong before when I compared vendors to toddlers, they are really more like under 12 month infants in that if they put something inside a black bag so you can't see it, they think it's now gone. If a vendor ever really did sort their trash properly into a black bag, we would still have to open up the bag because we can't see what's inside. So I grab the black bags and drag them to one of our compost/landfill/recycling stations and sort the bags into those bags. Usually I can dump the black bag into the landfill container and fish out what doesn't belong. The black bag itself is then added to the landfill. Everything ends up in the proper bag which, when full, I mark with my initial so that when it is hauled to the dumpsters our people know it can be tossed -- or emptied in the case of recycling -- into the proper dumpster with no further sorting.

More than you wanted to know about waste diversion.

"Home Again, Home Again Jiggity Jig"

After eight hours of this on Sunday (15 hours over the weekend), I arrived home around 9pm and had to take out the trash and recycling for my building. This shouldn't have been a problem except that someone moved out at the beginning of last week which means our toters were full to overflowing. The landfill toter was too heavy for me to pull up the steps -- I made it up two steps before realizing this wasn't going to work. So I took it back down and had to empty out a bag full of trash to get it light enough to pull up our stairs. I can't tell you how much I hate sorting through the trash of the residents of my building. Most of what is in the landfill shouldn't be there, but they are as bad as the food vendors as far as paying attention to instructions. 

Here's the funny part: One of the things I pulled out of the landfill was a nice case full of a virtually new, and very elaborate, BBQ set -- all the tongs and knives and brushes and specially made thingys you can imagine. And heavy, too. I put a "Free" sign on it and left it where our contractors can see it. A waste diverter's work is never done.

You probably think that's it. That that is the reason I (as Leon) am primed for extreme violence. Not quite.

FUBAR

Here's the way it's supposed to work: I drag the large toters of landfill and recycling up to the alley on Sunday night. On Monday morning, usually between 5 and 6am, guys from Recology race around our alley collecting our toters and similar toters from three other buildings. They then empty the toters into their giant truck out on the street (with the charming cable cars passing them up and down the hill) and return empty toters to more or less where they picked them up -- but not the same toters because they rotate them to save themselves a trip (think about it). This is what I was expecting to happen this morning and I set my alarm so that I could fetch the empty toters back down into the laundry room before the contractors started parking their cars and trucks in the alley. None of that happened this morning.

First I realized that it was 7am and I hadn't heard the Recology symphony in the alley. I went out to confirm I hadn't slept through it (as I often do, but usually not when the seismic contractors are part of the picture) -- the toters were still full. I went back to bed. Next I heard the distinctive beeping of the porta-potty pumper truck backing down the alley toward our building. This was an unexpected piece of bad news as I hadn't expected them until Wednesday. 

This is why it's generally a bad idea to generalize from a single sample. For Phase 1 they serviced the porta-potty on Wednesday so I assumed that was the norm for this neighborhood. Instead (generalizing from a sample of two) I now think they make a first service call three days after installing the porta-potty so they can judge how much it's getting used. 

In any case, I went out in the alley (again) to talk to the guy, first because I was concerned he would be blocking the alley when Recology finally showed up, but also because I assumed (correctly) that he would not have a power tool to undo the bolts our contractor is using (this time?) to secure the porta-potty over night. My plan had been to charge up my driver Tuesday night so I could remove the bolts if necessary. Even when you foresee a problem and devise a back-up plan, if your timing is off you're still screwed -- though not me personally in this case. 

So I went back to bed, again, only to hear another vehicle in the alley. The electrician arrived early to beat the commute traffic. I explained the situation to him and staged him in one of the few street parking places out by the cable cars. Still not having noticed the pattern, I got into bed one final time before I had to get up again to deal with another contractor vehicle. This time two guys with very little English in a really nice car. The best I could come up with was to pull all four toters at my the end of the alley out to near the middle and then let him back in again to the end. (Neurosurgeons could learn a thing from the care this guy took backing his ride between the plants on either side of our narrow alley, with scaffolding on one side.)

When Recology finally did arrive, the guy with the nice ride had to pull forward again so I could drag in our toters and place our neighbor's toters next to the porta-potty where they had originally been. Then all I had to do was return the bag of trash to the landfill toter and open all the doors, turn on the lights, and turn off the alarm for the contractors. 

The other owners in our HOA are always saying they don't know what they would do without me, but they really have no idea.

And yet, a very good day

Given how my day started you might think today was a bad day for me, but no. This is also the anniversary of my mother's death, so I went out to Lincoln Park and sat on the bench -- where my mother's ashes fell out of their container... whoops -- overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge. Some foreign tourists arrived at almost the same time I did and were snapping photos. Since they hung around for longer than the usual quick snapshot, I volunteered the information that this was a good place to spot hawks. I even pointed out where they tended to hunt. Less than a minute after the tourists drove off two hawks appeared exactly where I had pointed. I would have been viewed as a sage of the natural world if only they had been more patient. 

Fog

For years I've thought that San Francisco needed a special language for fog -- like the Eskimo language for snow. Today, for whatever reason, the terminology came to me.

In the spirit of the Emperor Norton (I may have to concoct a uniform) I HEREBY DECREE that fog passing entirely over the towers of the bridge will now be called SOPRANO fog; fog hiding the tops of the towers but not the deck, is ALTO fog; fog covering the deck but not the top of the towers, or approaching the water, is TENOR fog; and fog passing entirely under the deck is BARITONE fog. There will, obviously, also be medleys when these fog conditions overlap.


This decree will be enforced by the spirits of Bummer and Lazarus.

Another world

The essence of both In Search of Lost Time and Parade's End is that the world that was, was gone forever after the Great War, and it's hard to argue with that. A friend of mine recently posted an image from Czechoslovakia from 1927 that, along with that National Geographic with photos from 1937 or 1938 I've alluded to before, makes the same argument for the 2nd World War. 

When we read these books (or A Nervous Splendor) we long for the imagined past just as National Socialists and Communists longed for an imagined future. But just as Michel Foucault was constrained in his Marxist enthusiasm by his forbidden homosexuality, I, being white and male and, at least nominally, protestant, when viewing the past reject it because, as a vegetarian, there would be almost nothing for me to eat. 

Next - 21. The Italian Connection