92. Rain + Music

Previous - 91. Rambling

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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.

Next - 93. Vintage Space

78. Kant + Music + Wisdom

Previous - 77. YouTube + Alice

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Not exactly karma

I hate it when you sneer at something and then realize you are doing the very thing you just sneered at. Today it was "Retail Therapy." I was walking past the upscale Crocker Galeria where I noticed the sign suggesting that this was the place to process your trama. I sneered... just as it occurred to me that I was in the process of doing two errands that were not at all necessary and that I would have put off indefinitely a couple weeks ago.

It occurred to me weeks ago that I would have a much easier time seeing pens sitting on the black-stained counter above my desk that holds my computers, if I had a white pen. Good idea but low priority. Today I sought out and purchased a white pen. I've been wanting to replace more of my lights with LEDs for a long time, but they are expensive, I have few lights, and the compact flourescents I have last a very long time the way I use them. But last night, in the first step of this retail therapy chain of events, I purchased an air cleaner online -- now in transit -- so I have a "good" reason to try to reduce my electrical overhead by a few watts (five, I think). So after my stop at the stationary store, I hit my hardware store for a new LED lamp. I can't wait to test out my new toys. (According to the the date I wrote on the old CFL lamp I replaced, it has been in use for over seven years. I'll probably move it to an HOA common area fixture the next time a light burns out.)

Five watts doesn't sound like much, but then I use very little electricity. My refrigerator consumes the most power and I've considered replacing it with a new, more energy conserving unit, but I'm not sure I can really save that much and my current unit still works fine. The thing is, my power bill is already so low that these little improvements won't really make much of a difference. I'm just doing this to please myself.

It could be that the real reason I'm thinking about this now is that last night was our first "cold" night. Soon I will need to turn on my space heater, (I have indeed) that's the only time I use a serious amount of power. In a normal year though, I only run my space heater for three or four weeks and then only during the evening. Enough to double my power bill for a couple months, but since the base usage is so low, it still doesn't amount to much. Many people pay more per month then I pay per year. I once calculated that it would take centuries for me to amortize the cost of replacing my windows with better insulated ones, even if it cut my heating needs to zero.

That bastard Kant

It occurred to be me this morning that it is not Utilitarianism but rather a sociological interpretation of morality that stands in opposition to both Kant and Utilitarianism. And this is because a sociological interpretation has no foundation at all in reason, moral laws are simply arbitrary group rules that bind people together and exclude non-group members. 

Fundamentalism -- regardless of the religion -- is simply the formation of a new, smaller group without seeming to break the rules of the larger group they are breaking away from. My favorite example of this is the ultra-Catholic group Mel Gibson's father belongs to. As I understand it, they are such "good" and "pure" Catholics that they are forced to contradict the Pope. This is all amusing until the fundamentalists start blowing things up.

Ohhh... It occurs to me that you can hypothesize something like a Sociological Strong Force that holds these groups together until they get too large and then can spontaneously "decay" into smaller, again stable, groups. Cool.

Chemistry/physics question

Why is it that titanium, in the form of white titanium, and mercury both reflect all frequencies of visible light but mercury reflects the light in an orderly fashion while with white titanium the reflected light is diffuse? 

"Top Songs" of the '50s and '60s

I clicked on something different in YouTube and then spent the past two nights listening to popular songs from my formative years (1952-1970). How they select the songs to include is a mystery. (I had no idea Eddie Fisher and Rosemary Clooney were so big the year I was born. And how have I never heard of Joni James? It's also interesting that Tony Bennett's tone got richer over the years.) It would be impossible to produce a really complete collection unless you had hours rather than minutes for each year. Country music is short changed and the TV theme version of "Route 66" is ignored (the Nelson Riddle instrumental version. I would try to get the Nat Cole vocal version of the much earlier "Get your kicks on Route 66" on my list somehow), and the late '60s seems to be especially bad as music got more and more diverse -- almost nothing of the San Francisco bands and no Led Zeppelin! 

But the late '50s and early '60s are surprisingly good. I've always been a fan of instrumental songs and it seemed like virtually every year from '57-'62 had at least one good one. "A Summer Place" is probably the instrumental song I recall the best, but there were others including "Canadian Sunset" which I had forgotten until I heard it again.

I had originally gone with '54 as the beginning of my formative years, but after listening to music from '52 and '53, I realized I knew some of this music just as well. I have the edition of the National Geographic from the month I was born (such a different world) but listening to the "Top Hits" from the year I was born turns out to be just as revealing.

One thing that surprised me was how much of the Everly Brothers was included in this series. They were never popular in my family and, reading more about them, I'm sure it's because they were originally from Muhlenberg county, Kentucky, so my mother would have dismissed them as hillbillies. I hadn't realized their influence on artists that followed, like Paul Simon and even Lindsey Buckingham -- who even toured with them at one point. 

I don't think my mother ever realized how fond I became, as early as my college days, of Bluegrass music. Ironically, Muhlenberg county is the subject of one of my all time favorite Bluegrass songs, "Paradise." 

There's also almost no Jazz included in these collections, which I can understand since Jazz has rarely been mainstream. 

The visuals that accompany the music varies from contemporary TV, to the bands playing their hits much later (disconcerting), to neo-Ken Burns photo montages to my favorite -- shots of 45 singles sitting on a turntable so you can see the recording label and related information. I would have done them all this way so you would also get a bit of history of the music industry. Of course I would also have added a note if either Ahmet Ertegun or Clive Davis had been involved in any way.

Getting back to instrumental songs, I can't think of many that have been "top hits" in recent years or even decades. When I started writing this, "Europa" was on the "radio" here at my favorite pizzeria -- their fondness for Santana may be a reason I like the place. I can think of (and have written about) some other guitar god masterpieces that would be on my list of hit instrumentals, but I can't think of anything similar to the orchestral pieces I mentioned above. Maybe music from special movies like Star Wars or The Godfather. Vangelis's music for "Chariots of Fire" might be the last music (I can think of) to crossover to become a radio hit? Not at all sure of this. (I just found a list of the most popular movie music but the page was so media intensive that it crashed my computer. So I'm sticking with what I think I know.)

A Century of Wisdom

Finally finished the book! She, either Alice or the author or both, chooses not to dwell on Alice's feelings about Judaism except to emphasis again her fondness for Spinoza's God who is but isn't particularly interested in us. My first thought when I opened this book and read her quote of Epictitus was that Alice is probably the one and only Survivor I could have asked my question, If you could snap your fingers and change history so that the Holocaust didn't happen, would you? In fact, I would never ask the question, but I do wonder what she would answer. 

Next - 79. Backpack + Base isolation

77. YouTube + Alice

Previous - 76. The New Financial Distric

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Same ole, same ole

Despite liking the space and having a pretty good veggie sandwich, I'm back at the Market Street Pete's because the WiFi on Pine was almost as slow as at the Bank Cafe. Too bad.

Trying to process the Trump election while reading a book about the Holocaust is either a bad or a very good idea. Still not sure which. But it certainly does get me thinking. 

A lot is being made here about Clinton winning the popular vote. Fair enough. But the difference is still tiny and I don't actually doubt Trump's claim that he could have won the popular vote if he had campaigned more in California and New York. But it's really even worse than that.

Trumps core constituency are the people who feel disenfranchised, left out of the New Economy and the New Values of our Brave New secular world. Many of these people don't vote at all. I would be willing to bet that if everyone was forced to vote, the popular vote would be way in Trump's favor. 

And it isn't just white men who bash gays or women or Jews or any other "privileged" group they feel they have social permission to attack. This is something people -- mostly, but not entirely men -- of color can participate in as well. Hate does a surprisingly good job of bringing people together.

By coincidence, I was rereading something I wrote about Ayn Rand in my previous blog (here) that is worth rereading with Trump in mind. It would be so sad if Nietzsche was again to be used to make the world an even worse place.


Which brings me back to... The Brothers Karamazov. I bet you thought I was going to say The Magic Mountain. Start with Lizaveta (who Google doesn't even include in the list of key characters). I still maintain that she represents the Russian, Orthodox Christian, ideal of goodness in the novel, so of course she is raped by Fyodor and then dies giving birth to Smerdyakov, who represents the new man unrestrained by traditional values. He longs for, but lacks the opportunity to participate in, bourgeois success. The new, Godless, Russia (Foyodor) rapes and kills traditional Russia (Lizaveta) and spawns Smerdyakov the striving man without values or restraints.

Crash Course Philosophy

I've been watching this series of videos since they started and am having so much fun. I don't remember how many of these courses I've followed so far, several literature ones, history, parts of the chemistry one, and some others. What seems to be different about Philosophy is the community of philosophy nuts in the comments. Like me, most of the commenters are watching not so much to learn something new but to participate in a conversation about topics we rarely get a chance to talk about. Sometimes it seem like half the comments for one episode are in anticipation of what is coming next. We went nuts in anticipation of Kantian ethics -- how often does anyone get a chance to say that? The shear number of Kant puns was something to see.

I accused us of acting like fan-boys and got the usual hostile internet response, which is actually pretty funny. About the same thing is happening on another YouTube channel with military history, the difference I think is that military history seems to be a more common interest in the world at large. (When guys geek out about military history I always think of Uncle Toby in Tristram Shandy, but I can't think of a philosophical equivalent.) That there are so many people out there who know and care about Kant (and are so eagerly anticipating Nietzsche) is a pleasant surprise. 

The problem with the Crash Course Philosophy series is that it is not going into the detail we would like. And the presenter just had a baby so it's unlikely that he will jump in with a user-requested extension of the course. Our only hope is that sleep deprivation will drive him to reconsider the very nature of our perception and existence. 

YouTube travel

I also use YouTube to live vicariously though others, something that saves me a lot of trouble and expense. I'm subscribed to one couple traveling around the U.S.A. in an RV, a couple building their Tiny House, a couple sailing around the world, and, as of last night, a second couple also sailing around who just completed a transit of the Erie Canal -- something I've thought of doing -- and are currently stuck on the Hudson due to engine problems with their sailboat.

I suspect (but it would be great to know for sure) that as many people watch these videos and think, "Wow, what a lot of trouble and expense" as think "Now that's something I want to do next." This is especially true, I think, for the Tiny House series. What a lot of work it is to build (yourself) even a tiny house. The guy is an electrician, which meant that he was qualified to do all the electrical work himself, but he also took the opportunity of being his own client to add every electrical feature he had ever imagined. The house is wired like a space ship. I can't help but think how I would do it all differently, and more simply, but the thought of doing all the work he's doing also makes me think, just, no.

I fantasize about gutting my apartment and starting fresh -- a much simpler task than building a Tiny House -- but the thought of how much debris would go to the dump and of how little of an actual improvement it would be in the end, makes me sure I would never actually do it.

A Century of Wisdom

As was the case with Musicophilia (obviously) and Doctor Faustus, A Century of Wisdom is largely about music. With Doctor Faustus in mind, it is particularly interesting how important Beethoven was to Alice -- even in the camp.  Especially in the camp. While Doctor Faustus is about the "taking back" of Beethoven's 9th, A Century of Wisdom is about the survival of the 9th even under the worst circumstances. 

I'm close to the end of the book now and there has still been no mention of religion as such. It seems that music has taken the place of religion in Alice's life -- something that makes much more sense to me personally. Religion frequently uses music -- from Bach to chanting -- for it's own purposes, but one has to wonder which has primacy in this relationship. (Another question I would like to ask Temple Grandin, besides how she visualizes music, is if her appreciation of music was similarly affected by the sheep dip chemical reaction that killed her religious feelings?) 

This is awkward, but there's something else one needs to say about Alice's experience of the Holocaust: For almost everyone else, life in the camps terminated, or at least suspended, their "normal" life. Alice and, to a lesser extent, Victor Frankl lost their freedom, but not their avocations or even their vocations. Their lives, in the most important sense, continued in the camps. And this was especially the case with Alice. Even in the camp she continued teaching and performing. After the war, while living and teaching in Israel, she didn't talk about her past -- to the extent that most of her students had no idea that she was a Holocaust survivor. In the book we at least get an account of her experience and of how she tried to protect her child from the reality of his situation (which reminds me of the plot of Life Is Beautiful, though I never saw the film). 

She claims that, after the war, her reasons for not speaking of her past were that she didn't want her son to remember, and didn't want any special consideration, but I have to wonder if she also felt a sort of survivor's guilt, not just at having survived but at having had such a freakishly mild experience of the Holocaust. In her place, I would not have wanted to compare experiences with survivors from other camps.

Does this matter? Yes and no. Her experience and her insights are as valid as anyone else's. But when you consider the questions posed by The Sunflower, I would include her in the class of people who would be in no position to forgive because they hadn't really been there. This is a little unfair, as I said, she lost her freedom and also her mother and husband, but she didn't have to face the full brutality of the camps. She had glimpsed the "elephant" but didn't actually come face to face with it.

Next - 78. Kant + Music + Wisdom

74. Going to the Dark side

Previous - 73. Aftermath + retirement

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After the election

I probably know some Trump supporters but I don't hear much from them. I do know many people on the other extreme and I have to say that it is interesting to see how they are responding to the election results. The Kumbaya faction is itching for a fight, just like the Trump supporters. 

My Burkean conservative bias should be familiar to anyone reading this, so you shouldn't be surprised that I find this amusing. We all want The People to speak up for themselves and decide policy until The People disagree with us. Granted, Trump supporters are still a minority of the population, and a substantial percentage of those supporters are simply sexist men (and women) who won't vote for a female pack leader, but still, there's a very large number of people that Progressives would like to disenfranchise here.

And they don't see this as a problem.

A day later

People on the left continue to grow more shrill. There's no doubt in my mind that the most extreme, like the anarchists trashing Oakland every night, didn't vote for Clinton. The logic of being irate when the candidate you didn't support loses is Trumpian, when you think about it. 

I continue to think this was actually about the best outcome we could have gotten -- the worse alternatives being Cruz, Pence, or Rubio. The lesson I hope someone is noticing is that the Parties need to regain control of their nomination processes. How do we get back to the smoke filled rooms where everything was decided? No sane party would have nominated either of these people. They both have too much emotional and legal baggage. Since my Representative is the Queen of the Democratic money machine, I may actually writer her a letter. 

This also got me thinking about revolutions in general, since both sides are so eager for a fight. I know not everyone is a history buff, but have they really not noticed the results of the Arab Spring? Can they really not see that revolution almost always makes things worse?

And that got me thinking about the American Revolution -- the great exception. Or not, because the purpose of the American Revolution was really to maintain the status quo that existed in the Colonies. Technically they were part of the United Kingdom and subject to the the King, but they were mostly self-governing. Not much changed after the Revolution aside from having no one to stop their exploitation of the Midwest or trans-Appalachian area. It wasn't really a revolution in the social sense. It was more like a band of pirates deciding they could ignore the Pirate King and do as they pleased. (Maybe I should teach U.S. History during my retirement. Lesson 1: "Our slave owning, pirate Forefathers.")

La Boulangerie de San Francisco

I had my favorite bread pudding breakfast this morning. What I previously referred to as "the 2nd best French bakery cafe," has finally reopened one of their locations in my part of town following the reorganizing and renaming of the business after Starbucks' decision to close down La Boulange. 

The location near me is about 80% identical to the way it looked before -- the pastries look and taste about the same -- but, so far there is absolutely no signage, for reasons I can't imagine. You'd think they would at least have temporary signs up pending their final signage, but no. And they've been open for at least a week as I happened to walk past and noticed they were back about a week ago. Whatever. The price for my bread pudding was a little higher, but it had always been a steal. And the portion was smaller, but it had been almost too large before, so I have no complaints.

However, they are no longer the 2nd, but the 3rd best French bakery cafe, as another wonderful bakery has opened up in the interim. Since the 1st and 2nd bakeries are not convenient to me, and since the 3rd is still quite good and now, again, only five blocks away, I don't have any problem with their not ranking as high. Interestingly, though not surprisingly, the new #2 is located in the same upscale neighborhood where the old #2 started, Pacific Heights. (I just checked and b. patisserie opened a couple years before La Boulange was shuttered.)

A Century of Wisdom

Not sure if this is the best or worst time to be reading a book dealing with the Holocaust. In chapter seven we learn that it wasn't until Alice was quite old and had moved to London to be near her son that she started studying philosophy at the University of the Third Age -- a sort of Cambridge extension program for the elderly. She seems to have been mostly interested in Spinoza, though Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are also mentioned. Alice had the advantage of reading the latter two in German but I don't know if she could read Latin. 

Spinoza is an interesting philosopher. And it doesn't hurt that I imagine he and Hume with sling-shots sending little thought missiles against the glass windows of the edifice Descartes had built. It's curious that, today, his thought is best known through the derivative writings of Mary Baker Eddy, but at least she didn't abuse his ideas as so many did with Nietzsche. 

Spinoza's writings are also not inconsistent (to put it as passively as possible) with pantheism, so, again, a reason for me to approve. Because he is was also a child of the Sephardic Jewish diaspora that Braudel associates with the development of western capitalism, I probably should read him again. I'm not sure if it is his ideas or his Jewishness that causes him to tend to stand alone in the history of modern western philosophy. It is obvious how you connect people like Descartes, Hume, Kant, and Hegel to people before and after, but I can't really think of a disciple of Spinoza. (Wiki suggests Santayana and Wittgenstein, but that isn't until the 20th century.) 

Wiki also records the following, Baruch de Espinoza became the first secular Jew of modern Europe.^[58] This alludes to his having been expelled from his Jewish community but never having converted to Christianity. This is interesting as, at least so far in the book, nothing has been said about Alice's faith during or after her time in the camps.

Her biographer claims she continued to attend classes into her 104th year. I believe that would mean she studied philosophy for around 20 years -- impressive. It would be interesting to know what classes she took over that long period of time. Toward the end was she revisiting favorite subjects or still looking for new things to learn? And what is it like teaching a class of students with that level of familiarity with the subject? Could be heaven, could be hell.

Next - 75. Life + History

71. Election 2016 + Alice

Previous - 70. A new book

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Preparing to vote

I spent a large portion of Sunday working through my Voter Information Pamphlet & Sample Ballot. At least I have an easy choice at the top of the ballot, but the rest is a total mess. I like my candidate for U.S. Senate and State Assembly. I have to vote for Pelosi, my U.S. Representative. I refuse to vote for my City Supervisor but can't really vote for the person running against him either. In the other races I have to choose the lesser evil -- as at the top -- or follow endorsements for the minor offices with candidates I've never heard of. Such is democracy. And that's the easy part.

Next we come to the State and City Propositions. There are 17 State Propositions but I've only voted (yes or no) for 13 of them -- the others I either can't make sense of or I could go either way on. Then there 25 City and BART or School District propositions where I've voted for 22. 

I'm proud to say that in a number of these cases I've voted against my inclination because the Proposition would set a bad example or cause problems in addition to what it's intended to fix. In some cases it's really hard to know if voting yes or no would reflect my true opinion or achieve what was possibly intended. And of course they throw all these Propositions at us because our elected officials can't do their jobs and settle this themselves. In some cases I'm hoping I'm sending a message about what I really want or don't want, but in other cases I'm not sure what message, if any, I'm sending. 

And if Tuesday goes as I expect, no one will be paying much attention to these local issues anyway.

A Century of Wisdom

I'm up to Chapter three and now Alice and her young son are in a camp -- though a very nice one where she continues to perform on the piano. 

Back in Prague she was raised in a quintessentially bourgeois-Jewish family with Franz Kafka as a close family friend. Most of her immediate family escaped to Palestine on the last train out of Czechoslovakia. She, and her husband and child, remained behind with her mother for what seemed like good reasons before Munich.

What do I mean by "quintessentially bourgeois-Jewish family?" They were well educated, very musical, well connected, involved in trade. Her mother was raised Orthodox, her father was a merchant. A year or two ago I would have thought nothing of this, but now I can't help viewing them -- along with Primo Levi's family in Turin and Oliver Sacks' family in London -- through the eyes of Dostoevsky and Ford. Thus I have to ask, To what extent were the Jews hated for being ur-bourgeois as opposed to being religious. (Sorry for the German prefix to a French adjective.) 

I know this sounds far-fetched, but stick with me a moment. I've never paid much attention to what anti-semites were saying, going all the way back to that Austrian red-neck Morton covers in A Nervous Splendor. So what do I know? First, there's Fernand Braudel's argument that the origin of European capitalism is intertwined with the history of the Jews displaced from Iberia after 1492. Then there's an account I read a long time ago of anti-Jewish riots in the south of Germany back in some earlier century. (Sorry I can't be more specific.) There was a pattern to the violence against the Jews back then: The wandering Jews would settle in a community and offer credit. Things would be fine for a time but then the economy would go south, and when the local Christians could no longer keep up with their payments, it would be discovered that some Jew or other had tricked a Christian into smuggling a wafer (the body of Christ) out of a church and giving it to the Jew who then proceeded to torture it. The Jews implicated were attacked and the rest of the Jewish community fled. 

Now this sounds completely nonsensical, of course, but what I read into it is that religion was just a tool the locals used to attack people they had a grudge against for economic reasons. Dostoevsky and Ford are not blatantly antisemitic, but it is clear in both The Brothers Karamazov and Parade's End that Jews are a part of -- and possibly a symbol of -- the bourgeois values they see as undermining the natural, Tory order. And, with Braudel in mind again, this is not wrong. (Mann is less interested in this line of reasoning -- Naphtha not withstanding -- because he was raised in an equally bourgeois, though, gentile, family.) 

I really don't want to do the research -- read antisemitic writings of the time, and Nazi dogma -- but I'm curious about how much the Nazis were opposed to other aspects of bourgeois life like science and technology and the importance of merit vs birth. 

A Faustian history of WW2

It would be impossible to pick the strangest section of Part 2 of Faust, but the battle section right after Faust returns to Germany from Greece would have to be in the running. If we accept that Faust (with Mephisto's assistance) represents the bourgeois spirit, then you can almost see this passage as an allegory for the Allied victory in both theaters in WW2. Wait, stay with me for just a minute...

The Allied victory was based largely on technological/scientific magic: The Bomb is the most obvious example of this, but there's also crytoanalysis, radar (by the end of the war radar sets small enough to fit in artillery shells), and the by then routine magic of modern industry with the exploitation of coal, oil, and everything else that can be mined from the Earth. 

And it's worth remembering that deception played an important role in both Faust's battle plans and in the Allied battle plans (the British at the 2nd Battle of El Alamein and the American crossing of the Rhine being two good examples.)


Faust - Part 2 - Act IV Scenes I-III (Headland:Battle)

FaustNow, powerfully, streams pour on streams,10725

Sweeping from gorges with redoubled gleams,

A river now throws up an arching veil:

Pours over the rocky level in a tide,

Runs foaming down, on every side,

And, stepwise, hurls itself into the dale.10730

What use their fine, heroic resistance?

The vast wave roars, and fills the distance.

I shudder myself at this wild waterfall.

MephistophelesI can see nothing of these watery lies,

They only serve for fooling human eyes,10735

I delight instead in wonders that befall.

In companies, their men plunge down,

The fools imagine that they’ll drown,

While free to breathe, on solid ground,

With swimming strokes, they run around.10740

It’s bewildering them all.

(The Ravens return.)

I’ll praise you to the noble Master: but see,

If you’d like to display your own mastery,

Hurry to the glowing smithy,

Where the dwarf folk never weary,10745

Hammering sparks from steel and stone.

Ask for, once you’ve chattered first,

A fire to shine: sparkle, and burst,

The finest that man’s ever known.

It’s true that far off lightning flashes,10750

And stars that fall in sudden dashes,

Can happen any summer’s night:

But lightning in the tangled bushes,

And stars that fizzle in the rushes,

They’re not such a common sight.10755

Don’t trouble about my command,

Ask first, then afterwards demand.

(The Ravens fly off. All takes place as ordered.)

Darkness cloaks the enemy!

Their footsteps meet uncertainty!

Everywhere are wandering flares,10760

And those sudden blinding glares!

It’s all beautiful indeed,

Now some noise is what we need.

-Source

Next - 72. Election night 2016

70. A new book

Previous - 69. When cities work

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Alice Herz-Sommer

I may be reviving my Regieren blog soon, but not quite yet. The reason is the latest book for my book club, that I started reading yesterday,

A Century of Wisdom: Lessons From the Life of Alice Herz-Sommer, the World's Oldest Living Holocaust Survivor 

by Caroline Stoessinger, Spiegel & Grau, 2012

I have to admit I didn't think this title sounded promising, but, as usual, it's a mistake to generalize about people, even Holocaust survivors. That at 108 she sites the Stoic Epictitus as a guide to life, in particular his statement, "He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things he has not, but rejoices for those which he has," quickly won me over.

Philosophy

Being me, you can't just drop this quote into my mind without it having consequences. (Yesterday I only read the Forward by Vaclav Havel and the Prelude by the author.) When Epictitus enters my mind he brings along his buddies Epicurus and Diogenes. After a tasty lunch,  I started thinking about Epicureanism -- in the academic, not the popular, sense.

Being cheap, I have a natural affinity for the principles of Epicurus. The cafes I frequent tend to have decent (veggie) food at reasonable prices (and usually good WiFi.) Even my favorite Burmese place has comparatively cheap prices (it's location half way to Hawaii helps with this.) My regular pizzerias are not places I would take an out-of-town visitor devoted to sampling the best pizza. 

A purest Epicurean (a vegan to my veggie) would opt for even simpler and cheaper cuisine. In fact you could probably make a philosophically Epicurean argument for Fast Food. But what's the point of living a life spent trying to elude cravings you can't easily satisfy? If you are that keen to keep disappointment and longing at bay you should probably opt for suicide as the perfect (and simple) way to avoid all future problems. I can't believe Diogenes never suggested this, so this probably isn't an original notion. 

And speaking of the most famous Cynic, while a modern Cynic would probably be a dumpster diver, I think she would have the sense to prefer dumpsters behind upscale restaurants. 

Need + meaning + story

But all this was yesterday and I had almost forgotten about it when I ran into an article written by the Dalai Lama today on Facebook. (Dalai Lama: Behind Our Anxiety, the Fear of Being Unneeded.) I think this is completely true, though I would like to add a Victor Frankl note and add the importance of meaning. While being needed can give a life meaning -- in either the superficial sense of having a reason to get up in the morning, or the more profound sense of the suicide bomber who wants his death, and therefore his life, to have a meaning to some cause or other -- this relationship between need and meaning is not always present. (And this sense of meaning for the suicide bomber connects back to the philosophical advantage of death vs all the contingencies of life.)

But in addition to "need" and "meaning" there is also my old friend "story." Riding the bus this morning to my favorite breakfast place -- while thinking about all this -- I noticed an advert on the side of a bus for the latest TV show by an English actor (Hugh Laurie) who recently wrapped up a long run on another, very interesting, show ("House").  I could come up with a list of other actors who have made similar transitions recently, but why did they have to leave good shows with established audiences? I would argue the reason is that the long running shows had run out of compelling stories. The material had played out, like a vein of gold in a mountain.

What people (and we may as well say Trump supporters, since that's what we're really talking about), want is to be needed, for their existence to have meaning, and to participate in a compelling story. I still hope they will be satisfied with scaring society to the point that society is forced to address these social requirements, but this is the same level of hope I have that the California drought will end or that all the people in my building will suddenly compost their waste properly -- more of a wish than an expectation.

Next - 71. Election 2016 + Alice