189. Reading and writing

The problem with my new irregular pattern of blogging is that I forget to post. Sorry about that. Will try to be more regular in the future.

Writing 

Medium suggested this piece about Feynman and writing that I loved. (Here.) I can't believe I'm still learning new things about Feynman. I've been saying for years that if you really want to learn about something you need to write about it, or better yet, teach it to someone. And I could have gotten that from Feynman. 

What really surprised me is how the advice here overlaps with what you get from Strunk & E.B. White. It's also a variation on my technique for helping programmers debug their own code -- making them explain it to me so they have to question all the assumptions they forgot they were making. 

He even has the "reading the text aloud" bit that is the advice I most often give to writers (no indication that they pay any attention). I'd like to think that what is said here about using simple language and explaining things as if to a child, are the reasons Feynman had so little patience for practitioners of the Liberal Arts, who are famous for obfuscation. (Of course this is also the same reason I hate Gell-Mann and QCD. Any clever child would listen to the bit about "up" and "down" and seemingly randomly "colored" quarks and conclude you were just bullshitting them by pulling random terms our of your ass. Though I may be flattering myself here.)

More New Yorker 

I picked up the next New Yorker in the bag and was relieved to find more ads in this one -- I do think I may have caught the Summer doldrums issue.

This issue has a total of 34 full pages of ads, compared to seven in that other issue. (This one even has the hearing aid ad.) 

And it has a "Critic at Large" piece by James Wood on W.G. Sebald titled "The other Side of Silence." Wood was "stuck by how much funnier his work is than I first took it to be." I've talked before about how I would like to be able to click on a word to get an explanation of what, exactly, the word means to the author or to the character. In this case, I wan't to know what pharmaceuticals (or other drugs) the author is on now and was on for his earlier reading.

Though, to be fair, in this piece Wood and Sebald are talking about the difference between British and German humor and Sebald describes German comedy shows on television in this way, "They are simply... indescribable." So perhaps there is a Germanic form of comedy in Sebald's writing that I simply missed. 

I've now finished Wood's piece and it's interesting, but is consistent with Sebald's writing in that it is suggestive but without resulting in a flash of insight that suddenly makes all clear. The final paragraph is quite fine,

Sebald has some beautiful words in "Austerlitz" about how, just as we have appointments to keep in the future, it may be that we also have appointments to keep in the past, "in what has gone before and is for the most part extinguished." We must go there, he writes, into the past, in search of places and people who have some connection with us, "on the far side of time, so to speak." That last phrase puts me in mind of a famous passage from "Middlemarch," in which George Eliot says that if we were truly open to all the suffering in the world it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we would die "of that roar which lies on the other side of silence." Most of us, she finishes, manage to live by wadding ourselves with stupidity. We survive only by ignoring the faint but terrible roar. In his great work, Sebald visited that far side of time which was also the other side of silence. He could not ignore it.

Middlemarch is on my heels like the Tristero. What to do, what to do? If I was Sebald I would probably catch a train for either Vienna or Venice.

Crane 

It's hard enough to swap out the HVAC equipment on top of a nine or ten story building under normal circumstances, 

but when you toss in an SF slope, it gets really interesting,

A truly 21st century moment

A man got on my bus with a screaming child and sat next to me. Then he got out his smartphone and quickly distracted and silenced the kid. Not a peep out of him for the remainder of the ride.

Don't know what the app was, but it gets my vote for App of the Decade.

The problem with the New Yorker...

...is that it sucks you in. I only intended to scan the cartoons but then I hit that piece on Sebald, and in the issue I picked up today (I seem to be drifting backward in time, Sebald's influence, no doubt) there's a critique of the new Hamburg concert-hall, the Elbphilharmonie. 

This is the structure that, when I first saw it nearing completion in one of the Architecture magazines, my first thought was, "Another Herzog & de Meuron project." Along with their museum in Madrid, these two projects are architectural variations on a theme.

CaixaForum, Madrid

Alex Ross isn't overly impressed with the "Elphi" as a musical venue, and he says less about the architecture than I would have liked -- still have no idea what the brick podium is used for. 

And in this same issue is a "Life and Letters" piece by Thomas Mallon titled "Jack Be Nimble" and subtitled "Trying to remember JFK." Mallon seems to be about my age, maybe a year older. (Wiki is more precise than the author, Mallon is under a year older.) 

We are in sync as members of our cultural cohort. The only differences are that he was attending Catholic schools and his parents were Republicans. I, and my family, were more enthusiastically pro-Camelot at the time. However, my parents drifted into the Republican party as they grew senile, I'm, sorry, I meant to say as they aged. And I was forced to revise my youthful faith in JFK along with my youthful faith in God and the American Way of Living Like the World Is A Store We Can Loot and then Set on Fire. 

Today, as I said when writing about The Road To Character, I'm more impressed with Eisenhower than with JFK and have long been aware that there are issues where I agree even with Barry Goldwater (drug policy, for instance). Though this is really just acknowledging that JFK was a politician and it is the job of politicians to compromise. FDR and Eisenhower made embarrassing compromises as well. 

To be honest, what kept me reading this political/biographical piece was not the politics but the nostalgia. Now I have nostalgia for decades I share with more recent age cohorts (the '90s seems to get short shrift in this regard. The music of the '80s is almost as big a thing as the music of the '60s, but no one but me seems to miss the '90s) but there is something fundamental about one's first decades, or even the first decade and a half. 

By coincidence, just the other day I was talking to a friend of a neighbor who had moved to Boulder, CO the year (1964) we moved away to SoCal. There must be a person out there somewhere who hated living in Boulder, but I've yet to run into them. Reminiscing about Boulder with people always ends up like talking about the One-who-got-away. And for me, thoughts of JFK and Camelot blend in with memories of the Flatiron foothills, the snow, the ungodly wind storms, and the general feeling of suburban American at it's zenith (based on auto styling, of course.)

Of course it is also mixed up with youth. With that period of your life where you consistently grow in most every way from one year to the next. And this was a few years before my fondest dream was personal emancipation from my family -- something that wasn't even a thing then (to my knowledge) but that I consistently dreamed of as my parents argued elsewhere in the house (mostly.)

Since this is the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love, I've been reminded that that was also the summer cities burned across America. The assassinations were bad news that shocked and saddened us, over the hills in the San Fernando Valley we were aware of the Watts Riots in 1965, but it wasn't until I was faced with the draft in 1970 that the public side of life really affected me personally. For most of these years, the latest car models or the Fall TV programming were bigger news for me.