151. CBF and Sisters

Previous - 150. Original sin

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Vertigo

"Il ritorno in patria"

p193-194 The elaboration here of the furniture and necessary accouterments of the German petite bourgeois makes me wonder how these habits started. Why did the narrator's parents have a bone china tea service they never used? Why do I have my family's silver and silver plate and china that is very rarely used -- like the suburban living rooms that we all had and that I only recall my family using on the day after my father died. (And I imagine we sat there then because it lacked associations with my father.) 

I do know, or at least I have a working theory, why we have the silver spoons and cups given to bourgeois infants -- silver has natural antibacterial characteristics and should have been safer than other materials for children with developing immune systems. (I may even be right, see here.) What I don't know -- because I never thought to ask -- is if these items were actually used. Some of the little cups are pretty battered, which would argue for use, but perhaps they were only played with and not used for eating and drinking. Does anyone still do this? I can't imagine it. 

This is the part of the book where the narrator's -- Sebald's -- memory is most on display. His memory of his childhood in W., and of all the details of W., is quite wonderful, though I can't say it leaves Proust or even James Thurber behind. 

Here's an interesting passage where the narrator finally calls on someone, from his youth, still living in the village,

p210 ...He had seen me coming out of the Engelwirt [inn where he is staying] several times, he told me straight away, but although I had somehow seemed familiar, he had not quite been able to place me, perhaps because I reminded him not so much of the child I once was as of my grandfather who had the same gait and, whenever he stepped out of the house, would pause for a moment to peer up into the sky to see what the weather was doing, just as I always did. I felt my visit pleased Lukas, for after working as a tin-roofer until his fiftieth year he had been forced into retirement by the arthritis that was gradually crippling him... He would never have believed, he observed, how long the days, and time, and life itself could be when one had been shunted aside... He particularly agreed when I said that over the years I had puzzled out a good deal in my own mind, [about his past in W.] but in spite of that, far from becoming clearer, things now appeared to me more incomprehensible than ever. The more images I gathered from the past, I said, the more unlikely it seemed to me that the past had actually happened in this or that way, for nothing about it could be called normal: most of it was absurd, and if not absurd, then appalling.... [Reading Proust Was a Neuroscientist wouldn't have made Sebald feel any better.]

Cherry Blossom Festival

My weekend didn't turn out the way I had expected. I was supposed to work another day around the food court (a block of Webster Street) at CBF and then switch to Sisters in the Park (Golden Gate) on Sunday. I did start the day in Hellman Hollow, but it was raining -- not hard but steadily -- and almost no one showed up. Instead of 10,000 people we had a hundred or so and most of them seemed to be Sisters (of Perpetual Indulgence). 

I really hate just standing around, and standing around in the rain is even worse. One of my favorites was crew chiefing this event, so I suggested she check with the crew chief at CBF to see how they were doing. It seems two people didn't show up for their shifts so I was sent back to Japantown (by car service, more on this in a moment.)

So I got the mid-day shift I prefer and I still got to close out CBF, which I like to do every year. We were a little wet, it's true, but it wasn't that bad and there were no bags left to sort when I left. That's success in this business. But back to Golden Gate Park for a moment. 

I hadn't been to Hellman Hollow (formerly Speedway Meadow) since Hardly Strictly Bluegrass last October. The park is stunning at any time, but by the end of summer it looks like California -- brown except where people water. At least that's true at ground level, the trees stay green. Jump ahead almost half a year now near the end of a very wet rainy season and the park, like California in general, is lush. Green is the color of this season just as brown is the color of the dry season.

The last time I stood in that meadow (in the daylight) it was filled with a hundred thousand people and there was dust and dry undergrowth under the trees. And it was hot. On Sunday it was green and wet and cool and most of the crowd were Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence in full drag. (Not real Sisters, I'm bound to say, since they, the originals in normal nun's habits, usually roller skates, mostly died in the AIDS epidemic.)

I hope we work another event here before October, but if not I tried to capture the place as it is in April so I can call that image up in October when it's in the 90sF and I'm ready to kill the vendors and concert goers. I'm almost a Buddha.

When I was reassigned to CBF, my first thought was to take the bus over, which is how I had come to Golden Gate Park, but the crew chief suggested the car service and, being aware of how what should take 30 minutes can turn into far longer with Muni, especially on a Sunday, I agreed. It was some ride sharing service that pools riders. I was the first pickup, but he picked up two more people and dropped off one before dropping me off. It wasn't a big time saver, (over 30 minutes) but then again I was sitting inside a nice car instead of waiting (in the rain) for buses and then riding in those buses. (And the 38 line is one of the most crowded in the system.) 

But what interested me was that, years ago, I had imagined a better taxi/shuttle service just like this. It was like seeing an idea realized without having to do any of the work.

The funny thing was that the third person to be picked up was in the other side of the park where my company was working a third event -- Eggstravaganza. This is an Easter event for kids I worked several years ago. It's charming but slow. I prefer the busyness of CBF.

Finally, I kept thinking on Sunday about how I now have an event overlay for so many parts of the City. This is similar to, but not quite the same as, my City-that-was overlay. The latter comes into play when you walk out of a restaurant wondering where the car is parked and someone recalls that we parked in front of Winterland -- a famous music venue that was redeveloped decades ago. What I'm talking about is when we are in the park not for HSB yet refer to locations by what stage is there for HSB. Or when I walk through Japantown on the way to a film and see the eco stations I maintained or the mountain of bags I collected for the last, totally insane, J-Pop Festival held there. Even at Union Square in my neighborhood, every time I walk past I think of all the trash toters I've wheeled around these sidewalks and I can see, as though I had X-ray vision, where the dumpsters are down in the garage and where the restroom is that the public doesn't have access to.

QCD

I've been struggling with gluons this afternoon... I know, who isn't these days? A massless "particle" (what does that even mean) that is confined to a hadron but supposedly travels at c. Previously I had ignored this abomination when puzzling over hadrons thinking it was just a way of talking about the strong force that holds quarks together, but it seems these little nasties participate in the chromatic craziness. 

I wasn't surprised when I jumped to Wiki and noticed that Murray Gell-Mann is the man responsible for gluons. (I can't help smiling every time I run into another Feynman diagram used to illustrate QCD.) 

I so wish Feynman had tackled QCD. I'm sure he could have come up with something better than this chroma metaphor. 

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150. Original sin

Previous - 149. Candide, God, and evil

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Vertigo - the last of Dr. K

As much as I'm enjoying the commentary on Candide, I feel myself more in need of commentary for Vertigo. At the end of a passage about Kafka spending some time at a sanatorium in Riva, we get this tale of "Gracchus the huntsman" arriving in a "barque with masts of an inconceivable height and sails dark and hanging in folds" after an endless voyage. While this -- whatever it is -- is associated with Kafka, the reader who knows the next part of the book will recognize in this passage another huntsman, here we have, "...in the Black Forest, where he was on guard against the wolves which still prowled the hills at that time, he went in pursuit of a chamois -- and is this not one of the strangest items of misinformation in all the tales that have ever been told? -- he went in pursuit of a chamois and fell to his death from the face of a mountain..."

And in the next section is the other story about,

...Hans Schlag the huntsman of whom it was said that he hailed from other parts... that he had managed extensive hunting grounds in the Black Forest... 
...

...Schlag the hunter had been found dead a good hour's walk beyond his hunting ground, on the Tyrolean side of the border, at the bottom of a ravine...

And the narrator, as a child, has the body of this huntsman delivered to him on a sledge instead of a barque. And since we had just had our only sex scene in this book, between Schlag and a blonde barmaid, I suppose that makes her the "chamois."

What this means, I have no idea.
 

Candide 

"Voltaire's Escape from Pascal" by Ernst Cassirer

p167 {"Pascal tormented Voltaire, as Montaigne had tormented Pascal." The epigram is by Raymond Naves (Voltaire l'homme et l'oevre: Paris, 1942...)...

To a remarkable degree... [Montaigne, Pascal, and Voltaire] were preoccupied with a single problem, that is the relation between faith and reason, which is in effect the question of original sin. This had been the crucial controversy between Erasmus and Luther; it would be the theme of conflicts between Calvinists and Arminians on the Protestant side, between Jansenists and Jesuits within the Catholic party. Its importance is obvious. For if man's reason, no less than his will, is fatally corrupted from birth, his only hope of understanding himself or the world lies in supernatural faith. In opposition to this crucial point, all the Enlightenment philosophers united; and Voltaire, perhaps in part because the brother whom he hated was a Jansenist, powerfully impregnated with the doctrine of original sin, focused his criticism of the doctrine on its foremost Jansenist exponent, Blaise Pascal...}

The section that follows, written by Cassirer, is interesting enough, but I don't have the patience to work through the minutia of Christian theology. It's all interpretation of the shadows on cave walls to me. But Dostoevsky would be all over this.

I'm thinking the reason I ignored Dostoevsky for so long is that, while The Brothers Karamazov does a wonderful job of expressing the reality of existentialism, he himself stands outside existentialism in the philosophical tradition delineated above. I don't know (or care) what he thought of the Jansenists, but he would have opted for any of these traditions over Nietzsche. 

That said, "original sin" can be restated as our separation from nature (see also Prometheus) and this is a subject I am interested in. The problem is that it is very hard to tackle this topic from within the web of Christianity. There is always too much of the a priori (as was mentioned in the previous post, I think) which stands in the way. It's like trying to come up with a Christmas season budget with someone who still believes in Santa Claus.

My day 

I'm having a good day. An old friend's son is answering some arcane (inane?) questions about Quantum mechanics (spin, for example) and I'm dodging phone calls from Realtors about the unit for sale in our building. It seems that the Venn diagram for Realtors and People Who Prefer to Chat on the Phone Instead of Writing Emails would be a simple circle. But thanks to call screening, I can bend them to my will.

Here are the advantages of communicating by email (texting is similar):

Because it's asynchronous, both parties do not have to be free at the same time.

There is a paper trail you can refer back to when anyone gets confused about what was said.

You can easily dispatch the same information (answers to questions) to other interested parties.

It takes less time, as you don't get bogged down in pleasantries.


On the other hand, (Re: My Day) I discovered the doctor I'd been seeing before I was covered by San Francisco's single-payer health plan, doesn't accept Medicare insurance. But this is mitigated by the fact that he is also retiring this summer. This wasn't a complete surprise -- I'm also worried about losing our electrician and even the painter we liked so much, before we need them again. I suppose it would be considered discrimination if you specified you wanted to be seen by younger health care professionals so you don't outlive their careers.

Next - 151. CBF and Sisters

148. Kafka and memory

Previous - 147. Certifiably a Geezer

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Candide

"Voltaire and Candide" by I.O. Wade 1959
...

p151 Candide is thus in its substance not wholly optimistic, or pessimistic, or skeptical, or cynical: it is all of these things at the same time. Since every created thing resembles its creator and the moment of its creation, it is precisely what Voltaire and his time were: optimistic, pessimistic, skeptical, and cynical, a veritable "moment de la crise" {moment of crisis}. Facts had produced ideas, it is true, but ideas had not yet produced ideals, and no one knew what to do.
...

...The world had become a paradox and Voltaire responded with a revolt.

p152 It is imperative to understand the nature of this revolt, since the whole eighteenth century and subsequent centuries have derived from it. Voltaire's response was born of both anger and despair. He was "fâché" {angry with kings}... with earthquakes... with God...

Voltaire's attitude toward Providence must be considered very carefully if we are to grasp the meaning of Candide...

If to be specific, Voltaire felt that Pope's arguments no longer "justified the ways of God to man," and Leibniz's were equally deficient, did he thing that he had better ones, or that he could find better ones elsewhere? In other words, was his quarrel with the optimists whose arguments could not justify Gods ways or with God whose way could not be rationally justified? ... It is undoubtedly true that his act was not a critique but a revolt, a titanic revolt [that's nice as it is a revolt against the Gods] brought about by a breakdown in the power of critique... he could only attack the irrationality, the ambiguity of the universe by annihilating rationally all rationality. In that respect his wit is a spiritual, not a rational, instrument for assailing the ambiguity, the clandestinity of a universe which refuses to make itself known. 

This would make him de Sade's precursor.

p153 This state of things explains why one never knows in reading Candide whether to laugh with Voltaire or at him, whether to laugh with the philosophers or at them, whether indeed to laugh with or at Providence... 

Vertigo

Dr. K Takes the Waters at Riva

I assumed this was Kafka, but it's hard to find anything about him being in Italy through an online search. I did find this interesting (to anyone obsessed with The Magic Mountain) quote in Wiki,

Around 1915 Kafka received his draft notice for military service in World War I, but his employers at the insurance institute arranged for a deferment because his work was considered essential government service. Later he attempted to join the military but was prevented from doing so by medical problems associated with tuberculosis,^[54] with which he was diagnosed in 1917.^[55] In 1918 the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute put Kafka on a pension due to his illness, for which there was no cure at the time, and he spent most of the rest of his life in sanatoriums.^[5]

One can almost imagine a novel in which Hans Castorp's place at the Berghof is taken by Kafka when Hans rushes off to the war.

On the cover of my copy of this book is the following quote, "Think of W.G. Sebald as memory's Einstein." -Richard Eder, The New York Times". Yes, I'm procrastinating getting back into this book, but what can he mean by that. What would a General Theory of the Relativity of Memory be? What is "space" to "time" here? 

The Proust chapter in Proust Was a Neuroscientist, did establish the relativity of memory in that what we recall is not absolute or unchanging. Perhaps it's "time" and "memory" that combine, at least in Lehrer's view. But Sebald -- at least some of the time -- is imagining the memories of other people. 

And, to reference the chapters in that book on music and painting, what engages me about this book is that, as with Stravinsky's music or a canvas by Cezanne, I struggle to make sense of what the author is doing and it's that struggle that attracts me.


Perhaps I should have my head looked at, I now see that Part II, All'estero is the account of the author gathering the material for Part III, Dr. K Takes the Waters at Riva. This is amusing as Part III is so much shorter than either Part II or Part IV. The author travels (twice) through central Europe and northern Italy to research an extremely un-dramatic episode in the life of Kafka, and then pads his tale with a much longer account of his own un-dramatic travels, and only slightly more dramatic childhood.  
 

Almost Easter so time for a resurrection of my blog

I'm going to keep this one short as the next will be quite long.

Next - 149. Candide, God, and evil

135. August Escoffier

Previous - 134. Neural plasticity

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August Escoffier - From Proust Was...

I'm going to take this from the top later, but I have to record this first impression,

p70 ...Our human brain has been designed to believe itself, wired so that prejudices feel like facts, opinions are indistinguishable from the actual sensation. If we think a wine is cheap, it will taste cheap. And if we think we are tasting a Grand Cru, then we will taste a Grand Cru... our expectations of what the wine will taste like "can be much more powerful in determining how you taste a wine than the actual physical qualities of the wine itself."

I had to note this passage because of its obvious political and sociological implications, but the wine aspect is also interesting. What I left out is the experiment in which wine experts were unable to notice that what was served as a red wine was actually a white with food coloring, or that what was served to them as a Grand Cru and a vin du table, was in fact the same wine. 

Because I know I don't have any taste when it comes to wine, I tend to order either the house wine or the cheapest wine on the list, just to see if it's drinkable. Often I find the cheapest wine is the one I like best (not always). So, is that because I'm determined to find it a hidden gem, or simply because I have no taste when it comes to wine? 

When I realized this chapter was about the origin of "modern" French cooking (and isn't it interesting that Escoffier was publishing his works at the same time Einstein was publishing his works on Relativity? I would have thought this kind of cooking went back much further than Special and General Relativity) I thought this was something I could probably skim since I can't even eat any of this food. Instead, it was amazingly interesting and the neurological aspects of smell are a great extension of other things about the brain I've learned in the past year. Now to resume at the beginning,

p53 At the heart of Escoffier's insight... was his use of stock. He put in it everything. He reduced it to gelatinous jelly, made it the base of pureed soups, and enriched it with butter and booze for sauces... "Indeed, stock is everything in cooking. Without it, nothing can be done. If one's stock is good, what remains of the work is easy; if, on the other hand, it is bad or merely mediocre, it is quite hopeless to expect anything approaching a satisfactory meal." What every other chef was throwing away -- the scraps of tendon and oxtail,the tops of celery, the ends of onion, and the irregular corners of carrot -- Escoffier was simmering into sublimity.
...

p54 Escoffier's emphasis on the tongue was the source of his culinary revolution. In his kitchen, a proper cook was a man of exquisite sensitivity, "carefully studying the trifling details of each separate flavor before he sends his masterpiece of culinary art before his patrons." Escoffier's cookbook warns again and again that the experience of the dish -- what it actually tastes like -- is the only thing that matters...

p55 Deglazing was the secret of Escoffier's success. The process itself is extremely simple: a piece of meat is cooked at a very high temperature -- to produce a nice seared Maillard crust, a cross-linking and caramelizing of amino acids -- and then a liquid, such as a rich veal stock, is added. As the liquid evaporates, it loosens the fronde, the burned bits of protein stuck to the bottom of the pan... The dissolved fronde is what gives Escoffier's sauces their divine depth...

The Secret of Deliciousness
This is the story of Kikunae Ikeda and the discovery of "umami" and MSG. In short, despite the prevailing wisdom that the human tongue can only taste sweet, salty, bitter, and sour, Ikeda was convinced there must be something else, which turns out to be umami -- Japanese for delicious. 

p56 ... To be precise, umami is actually the taste of L-glutamate (C5H9NO4), the dominant amino acid in the composition of life. L-glutamate is released from life-forms by proteolysis (a shy scientific word for death, rot, and the cooking process)... [Escoffier's] genius was getting as much L-glutamate on the plate as possible. The emulsified butter didn't hurt either.
...

p57 Glutamic acid is itself tasteless. Only when the protein is broken down by cooking, fermentation, or a little ripening in the sun does the molecule degenerate into L-glutamate, an amino acid that the tongue can taste....
...

p59 Everything from aged cheese to ketchup was rich in this magic little amino acid... (Salted, slightly rotting anchovies are like glutamate speedballs. They are pure umami.)... Umami even explains... Marmite... (Marmite has... a higher concentration of glutamate than any other manufactured product.)
...

p60 And of course, umami also explains Escoffier's genius. The burned bits of meat in the bottom of a pan are unraveled protein, rich in L-glutamate. Dissolved in the stock, which is little more than umami water, these browned scraps fill your mouth with a deep sense of deliciousness, the profound taste of life in a state of decay.
...

p62 ...We love the flavor of denatured protein because, being protein and water ourselves, we need it. Our human body produces more than forty grams of glutamate a day, so we constantly crave an amino acid refill...

The Smell of an Idea
Now we get into how important smell is to the enjoyment of food. And he starts with Marie-Antoine Carême who didn't care what his fancy meals tasted like if they looked spectacular.

p62 ...Before Escoffier began cooking in the new restaurants of the bourgeoisie (unlike his predecessors, he was never a private chef for an aristocrat), fancy cooking was synonymous with ostentation. As long as a dinner looked decadent, its actual taste was pretty irrelevant...

p63 ...While Carême feared heat (his lard sculptures tended to melt), Escoffier conditioned his diners to expect a steaming bowl of soup... "The Customer," Escoffier warned in his cookbook, "finds that the dish is flat and insipid unless it is served absolutely boiling hot."

What Escoffier inadvertently discovered when he started serving food fresh off the stovetop was the importance of our sense of smell. When food is hot, its molecules are volatile and evaporate in the air. A slowly simmering stock or a clove of garlic sauteed in olive oil can fill an entire kitchen with its alluring odor...

p64 ...Escoffier aspired to a level of artistry that the tongue couldn't comprehend. As a result, Escoffier's capacious recipes depend entirely upon the flourishes of flavor that we inhale. In fact... the hint of tarragon in a lobster veloute, the whisper of vanilla in a creme anglaise, the leaf of chervil floating in a carrot soup -- are precisely what the unsubtle tongue can't detect. The taste of most flavors is smell.

Here there is a lengthy description of smell from the neurological perspective, most of which I'm skipping.

p66 ...the demi-glace our nose knows is actually composed of many different aromas. Neurons all over the brain light up, reflecting the hodgepodge of smells simultaneously activating our odor receptors... Within a few milliseconds of being served the demi-glace, the mind must bind together the activity of hundreds of distinct smell receptors into a coherent sensation. This is known as the binding problem.

But wait: it gets worse. The binding problem occurs when we experience a sensation that is actually represented as a network of separate neurons distributed across the brain. In the real world, however, reality doesn't trickle in one smell at a time. The brain is constantly confronted with a pandemonium of different odors. As a result, it not only has to bind together its various sensations, it has to decipher which neurons belong to which sensations. For example, the demi-gace was probably served as a sauce for a tender fillet of beef, with a side of buttery mashed potatoes. This Escoffier-inspired dish instantly fills the nose with a barrage of distinct scents... Faced with such a delicious meal, we can either inhale the odor of the dish as a whole -- experiencing the overlapping smells as a sort of culinary symphony -- or choose to smell each of the items separately. In other words, we can parse our own inputs and, if we so desire, choose to focus on just the smell of potatoes... Although this act of selective attention seems effortless, neuroscience has no clue how it happens. This is known as the parsing problem. [Synesthesia! And autism.]

p67 Parsing and binding are problems because they can't be explained from the bottom up. No matter how detailed our maps of the mind become, the maps still won't explain how a cacophony of cells is bound into the unified perception of a sauce... Neuroscience excels at dissecting the bottom of sensation. What our dinner demonstrates is that the mind needs a top.

I'm going to break here and finish up this chapter in my next post.

Vertigo

I've already quoted (122. Venice) the passage where the guy talks about how, "The audience no longer understand that they are a part of the occasion..." but this is such a huge part of how the world has changed since the introduction of recorded music, then radio, then TV. Life has gone from being a performance to being a media stream. The average person -- by which I mean someone who can't be described as the "talent" -- has left the stage and, at most, occasionally takes a seat in the audience. And this isn't just about "society" as it also includes poor people who used to congregate on stoops and porches -- so we should probably add air conditioning and the automobile to the evils contributing to the new reality. 

In general, today it is only young people eager to mate that take the trouble to venture out onto the stage in this way. And a vestige of "society." I'm as bad as anyone when it comes to staying home and minding my own business. It takes something really special to get me out. And it's not like there aren't things to do here. I'm not even sure I would have been different in the past. I do identify with characters like Mr Bennett in P & P who's content to retreat to his library and has to be dragged to the occasional ball by his wife.

Next - 136. The wine-in-itself

130. Proust Was a Neuroscientist

Previous - 129. Travelers

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Call me Nostradamus...

Yes, I am sore today. Putting on and taking off my jacket now comes with sound effects. 

I compounded Having finally made it to the gym; Being sore the day after the gym; and Discovering that the local (Chinatown) branch library isn't open until 1pm on Fridays (noticed when I tried to open the door at Noon) to excuse my ignoring both my budget and diet for lunch. Since I needed to hang around for about an hour, I went to my usual North Beach haunt (Caffe Puccini) for something different (their eggplant sandwich) and a glass of red. Now I'm worried about the place as it was empty at the lunch hour.

Proust Was a Neuoscientist

By Jonah Lehrer - Houton Mifflin Company 2007

My reason for going to the library was to pick up a copy of our next book club book. I would have been happy if the book had only been about Proust, but in fact Proust is just one of the artists sampled for their contributions to neuroscience.

From the Prelude
The author writes about his days as a lab technician,

pix It was simple manual labor, but the work felt profound. Mysteries were distilled into minor questions, and if my experiments didn't fail, I ended up with an answer. The truth seemed to slowly accumulate, like dust.

At the same time, I began reading Proust. I would often bring my copy of Swann's Way into the lab and read a few pages while waiting for an experiment to finish. All I expected from Proust was a little entertainment, or perhaps an education in the art of constructing sentences. For me, his story about one man's memory was simply that: a story. It was a work of fiction, the opposite of scientific fact.

But... I began to see a surprising convergence. The novelist had predicted my experiments. Proust and neuroscience shared a vision of how our memory works. If you listened closely, they were actually saying the same thing.
...

pxi We now know that Proust was right about memory, Cezanne was uncannily accurate about the visual cortex, Stein anticipated Chomsky, and Woolf pierced the mystery of consciousness; modern neuroscience has confirmed these artistic intuitions...

pxii The moral of this book is that we are made of art and science. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, but we are also just stuff.... 


Walt Whitman
I learned two interesting things reading this first section: The phrase "Leaves of Grass" is a printing term where "leaves" are pages and "grass" is "compositions of little value." The other interesting thing is that Whitman continued to revise both his poems and his book (adding more to it) from 1855 until just before his death in 1891. When his body was examined after his death it was discovered that nearly every organ in his body was ravaged my tuberculosis.

So what I now want to know is how does what he wants to say in 1891 differ from what he wanted to say in 1855, and how much of the change is a result of age and illness? Has anyone published an edition that includes both versions so you can see the young and old poet juxtaposed?

This would be interesting for any writer, but the reason he is included in this book is because he is "a self-described poet of the body..." who argued that "... the soul is made of flesh." To the extent that this is true, the soul -- and thus the poetry -- of a young and healthy man must vary a great deal from the soul of an old and very ill man. How could it be otherwise? 

Vertigo

Have I mentioned how interminable Sebald's paragraphs are? They sometimes go on for pages. And they may cover a number of subjects and include what could be many transitions. You come to a point that should be a good place to stop and resume later, but there is no paragraph break to make it easy to relocate your place. It occurs to me now that I just need a post-it to use to mark where I'm stopping. 

We just came to the point where he finally makes his way to Verona and checks into a hotel under the name of someone from the 19th century, Jakob Philipp Fullmerayer. Fullmerayer was from a town on the other side of the Alps (and Austria) from Sebald's hometown in Bavaria. They certainly have something in common, though I'm not sure what Sebald is getting out here. (As usual.) Fullmerayer is an interesting character but Sebald merely adopts his name for a moment. He doesn't say any more about him.

Candide

P109 ...He [Voltaire] has been inspecting his new estate at Ferney and finding that there is more involved than the cultivation of plants. He has acquired peasants who depend on him. What is the state of the community? Half the land lies fallow, the curé has celebrated no marriages in seven years, the countryside is depopulated as people rush to nearby Geneva. Taxation (especially the salt-tax) destroys those who remain; either the peasants pay and are reduced to abject poverty, of they evade payment and are clapped in jail. ‘It is heartbreaking to witness so many misfortunes. I am buying the Ferney property simply in order to do a little good there. . . . The prince who will be my liege lord should rather help me to drag his subjects out of the abyss of poverty, than profit from his ancient feudal rights....

P110 This is a new voice in Voltaire’s letters. We have seen how many times he had sought to intervene on the social or political scene and been frustrated. Here at last the right opportunity in time and place comes to hand. By acquiring seigneurial rights he is freer, he says, than when he possessed only his home in Lausanne and his ‘country cottage {guinguette}’ in Geneva, where the people were ‘a little arrogant’ and the priest ‘a little dangerous’... Already before he is even installed at Ferney he has taken up the cudgels against the curé of Moens, who is the malefactor extorting money from Voltaire’s peasants and forcing them to sell their own lands...

P111 At the end of 1758, Voltaire tells d’Argental with pride that he has created for himself ‘a rather nice kingdom’ (D7988). At last he has his new principality: he is now both roi and philosophe. His installation at Tournay on Christmas Eve 1758 was of fitting dignity and pomp,with sound of cannon, fife and drum, all the peasants bearing arms and girls presenting flowers to his two diamond-bedecked nieces. ‘M. de Voltaire’, writes a spectator, ‘was very pleased and full of joy . . . He was, believe me, very flattered’... As Candide begins to enjoy, a few weeks later, the success which has never deserted it, so too does Voltaire enter at last into his kingdom. In his sixty-fifth year, François-Marie Arouet has finally realized himself as M. de Voltaire. [Footnote: François-Marie Arouet is the name of an insignificant Paris bourgeois; M. de Voltaire (wherever his name comes from) is a gentleman, a seigneur, a person of European repute.]

So when Candide speaks of cultivating his garden he really does have in mind a good Tory existence. And I suppose Ford Madox Ford’s having Christopher turn his back on Groby is to make his point that, in the bourgeois age of the Great War, there is no longer a place for the seigneur. In the 20th century one can only cultivate a very small, private garden and even then it must be supported by trade (the antique business).


But now I must turn to the other book that shares the name of its protagonist: Faust. You can see Goethe ending his book with Faust also cultivating his garden -- ripped from the sea and funded by piracy. What I haven’t repeated above are the passages about how Voltaire disliked the British Navy because they were interfering with his trade -- capturing and selling either ships he had an interest in or ships carrying cargo he had an interest in. I also skipped the passage about his attack on the slave trade (and the sugar trade) which was inserted in Candide at the last moment. Ferney wasn’t ripped from the sea, but I suspect Voltaire’s wealth (all wealth) came with some unsavory write-offs. Mephisto’s Violent Men always have a hand in these transactions. Still, to give Faust his due, his intention was similar to Voltaire’s. But just as Voltaire was participating in the economic system that would soon lead to the French Revolution, Faust’s efforts caused as much harm as they offered future promise. Faust really is Goethe’s Candide in some ways.

Next - 131. Walt Whitman

129. Travelers

Previous - 128. Well, Everything Is Well

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Vertigo

P53 ...when I am travelling I often feel as Grillparzer did on his journeys. Nothing pleases me, any more than it did him; the sights I find infinitely disappointing, one and all; and I sometimes think that I would have done far better to stay at home with my maps and timetables...

Now I'm thinking of Sebald not in the tradition of novelist but in the tradition of travel writers. He's not Bill Bryson. Bryson has referenced Paul Theroux in the past, but it's been too long since I've read Theroux to recall his style. 

Sebald curtailed his 1980 trip after he had a vaguely unsettling experience in a deserted Verona restaurant. Seven years later he is attempting to repeat and complete his trip but is transfixed by the view of Verona from the train and can't get off, and so continues on to Limone. 

(The young woman sitting next to me at this counter -- having a meeting with another woman sitting next to her -- has a magnificent mane of hair which she habitually flips back so that it hits me. I can't identify her accent.)

Bryson doesn't always end up where he intends, and sometimes changes his plans due to, for example, the birth of a grandchild. But it's hard to imagine him being chased from Europe by a thoughtless restaurant proprietor, or being so transfixed by contemplating something that he misses his stop. 

Who does Sebald remind me of? Mary Elliott from Persuasion? Marianne Dashwood (in the novel version of Sense and Sensibility)? Cousin Charlotte from Room With a View? Not sure.

P57 I hadn’t noticed before that Casanova’s confinement in Venice overlapped with the Lisbon earthquake that was so shocking to Voltaire. The account here gives no indication of why Casanova was detained, but his situation seems to me to be of more moral interest than the earthquake. 

At least twice in this volume, our narrator "sees" a historical figure during the course of his travels. He recently saw King Ludwig II of Bavaria in Venice, and near the end he sees some queen (Elizabeth, the Winter Queen) on a train on his way home to England. This is pushing the unreliable narrator idea rather far.

Candide

"Voltaire at Les Delices and at Ferney" - Gustave Lanson

p98 On the propaganda that flowed out of Voltaire's estate at Ferney ...These "little pot-pies," these portable scandal-sheets easy to read, and continuously exciting, came out of the factory at Ferney for twenty-three years; they emerged in all forms, on all subjects, in verse, in prose, dictionaries, stories, tragedies, diatribes, extracts on history, literature metaphysics, religion, the sciences politics legislation, Moses, snails, Shakespeare, and notes written by a gentleman... they became nothing more for him than a means to an end. Tragedies and verses served to hasten the spread of his ideas.

He repeated himself, he went over the same ground again and again... For he knew that ideas enter the public mind only by dint of repetition. But the seasoning must be varied, to prevent disgust; and at that art he was a past master.

He has all the qualities, with many of the faults, of the journalist...

This passage caught my eye because, just today, I commented to one of the teachers of science I follow on YouTube that nothing was more important to teaching difficult subjects (quantum mechanics, for example) than repetition. I even used a painting analogy... you need to brush or roll multiple times from a variety of angles before you can finally cover the surface. 

Also, wasn't Voltaire trying to create, hundreds of years in advance, what can be done so easily today with Twitter and social media in general? He was propagating facts "alternative" to those of the Church -- both in Rome but also in Geneva. Breitbart can be viewed as trying to undo his Enlightenment using the latest version of the very tools he mastered. 


"Gestation: Candide Assembling Itself" - Hayden Mason

Reading page 100 got me interested in the history of Portugal during Voltaire's life and I ran into the very interesting account of the life of Sebastião de Melo (Count of Oeiras after 1759.) He's certainly a mixed bag. On the one hand he seems to be almost a puppet of Voltaire, and yet also an autocrat. Now I'm curious what Voltaire had to say about him.

p100 ...He tells Elie Bertrand (another of the Genevan clergy)... that the myth of the Fall of Man... is more reasonable in human terms than the Optimism of Leibniz and Pope, which beneath the disguise of a consoling name simply removes all hope: 'if all is well, how do the Leibnizians admit of a better?'... It is the fatalistic quality of Optimism that is so cruel, for it invites man to acquiesce and therefore give up all striving for improvement... To Thieriot he makes a touching confession that he is writing about the sufferings of his fellow-men out of pure altruism, for 'I am so happy that I am ashamed of it' (D6875, 27 May {1756}).

I admit that it is something of a problem, if you believe in God, that life can smash you like a bug at any time. And not just you but entire ant hills of people, like Lisbon. But then again, from a devoutly religious position This Life if nothing special in any case. The victims of Lisbon just meet their maker a little quicker and in a large party.

In part of that paragraph I didn't quote, Mason shows that Voltaire quickly moved from Lisbon to the greater evil of war. (I was going to say that the 18th century was a good time to consider war, but then what century isn't?) So Voltaire quickly returns to the evil in man, where I think his opposition to the Optimists is on a surer footing.

p105 Pennsylvania is the model for Eldorado?!

p108 Unless Candide were virtually finished before Voltaire's visit to Schwetzingen, which appears unlikely, one must view it as written not simply in a state of ambivalent feelings about Paris and Geneva nor as a work of detached irony by a happy man but as a composition of someone who was once more plunged into despairing gloom. When he returned to Geneva he received definitive news from d'Argental that Mme. de Pompadour had declared him persona non grata at Court. Besterman rightly notes: 'it is from this moment that can be dated his spiritual severance from his fatherland'...

p109 ...Voltaire is disheartened by the decline of French prestige and influence in the world. Concern is often expressed about cultural and military affairs together... since the battle of Rossbach 'everything has been in decline in our armies, as in the fine arts in Paris'... The philosophe has long been persuaded that belles-lettre in France were degenerating and that the French were living on past credit...

...He has taken a new decision, to renounce urban life... [after buying his estates at Tournay and Ferney] 'I do not know of any situation preferable to mine'... and that he can now cultivate his garden in tranquility.... 

Finally

After over a month -- and almost a week longer than I can quite justify -- I returned to the gym today. I expect to be sore tomorrow, even though I reduced all my weights. Early on, I heard someone coughing and was happy I waited until I was completely over my illness, but then I found myself struggling with even some reduced weights and wished I had come back a bit sooner. I have my work cut out for me to get in shape by mid-April. The problem now is the weather which continues to be colder than normal (though not today) and there is still more rain forecast.

Next - 130. Proust Was a Neuroscientist

126. That problem of evil

Previous - 125. Books for Living

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Candide - commentary

We start with an excellent summary by Robert M. Adams of "The Intellectual Backgrounds" which covers the philosophical/theological arguments that shaped Voltaire's thought. (This would also be useful for anyone reading The Brothers Karamazov.) We start with our old friend the Problem of Evil. This is probably the most stubborn problem for the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Where does evil come from?

This section starts with the Manichees (the world is divided between good and evil); then Saint Augustine (we have the freedom to struggle against the apparent evil of this period); Blaise Pascal (we see evil because of our flawed nature); Pierre Bayle (who reasserts Manicheism at the end of the 17th century); Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (see Pangloss); Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury (similar to Leibniz but based on "natural instincts"); Bernard Mandeville (contra Shaftesbury argues that man is inherently vicious and selfish); Henry St. John Viscount Bolingbroke (reasonable men can reach all the truth they need by studying natural religion); Alexander Pope (similar to Pangloss, "partial evil" is actually "universal good" though we have a hard time seeing it); Jean-Jacques Rousseau ("Providence works, not for the benefit of this or that individual, but through general laws to which we must reverently submit"); the Marquis de Sade (screw it, God is evil, or better -- the distinction between good and evil is specious).

Vertigo

It's possible that reading three books at the same time, and this book over a very long period of time, with a long break in the middle for bronchitis, is not conducive to getting the most out of this particular book. Starting the second chapter I now see that this and the last chapter share the same narrator and this makes clear at least some of my confusion. He is rambling around Europe, from England to Vienna to Italy and then back to England to, "...help me get over a particularly difficult period in my life...." 

His description of his time wandering aimlessly around Vienna has the feeling of a David Lynch film. I wonder to what extent this is autobiographical, or if it might be at least in part based on dreams, as is usually the case with Lynch.

So far (not very) rereading this is like taking a trip by day that you have previously only taken at night while drifting in and out of sleep. 

Another odd thing about this book is that it includes very poor quality photographs and other images. It would appear his editor might have said, "Do you have a photo of x?" and he responded, "I do. I'll make a cheap photocopy at the corner store and then fax it to you." And his editor said, "Perfect." 

Next - 127. Time in dreams

124. Cultivating our garden

Previous - 123. Drifting off

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Candide

I've just read the penultimate chapter and am hesitating before reading the conclusion. To no one's surprise, both Pangloss and Candide's love's noble brother have both turned up alive, and Candide has freed them all from slavery with his remaining wealth from Eldorado. It is a pity there are no more red sheep. The no longer enthusiastic lover has offered to marry Cunegonde but her brother the Baron refuses this notion because of Candide's low birth. Pangloss continues to believe this is the best of all possible worlds since changing his mind would be poor form for a philosopher. Both Pangloss and the Baron have experienced every imaginable loss and yet have learned nothing at all. 

I like that Voltaire portrays the nobleman and the philosopher as equally stubborn and prejudiced. I can't wait to learn if Candide has changed. Tomorrow.


"...we must cultivate our garden." These are both the final words and the conclusion drawn by Candide, and presumably by Voltaire. (This can also be seen as the conclusion of the fourth volume of Parade's End.) 

Since this is the Norton Critical Edition I'm reading, we are now less than half way though the content. We'll see if these commentators are as interesting as the ones who commented on Faust.

Sugar and oil

In the news at the moment: A Swedish woman is preventing her child from consuming sugar because it affects the child's behavior and sleep; and activists are trying to resume the fight against the oil pipelines Trump is supporting. These stories resonate for me as a veggie and as someone who has boycotted cars for 47 years. 

I gave up my car for environmental reasons and I gave up meat for ethical reasons. But it turns out that there were just as valid ethical reasons to boycott oil (it has funded Islamic fundamentalism), and just as valid environmental reasons for boycotting meat (the process of raising meat and delivering it to the consumer includes a heavy cost to the land and the air. Including a high carbon cost.)

I'm sympathetic to the Swedish woman's position, I think it would be hard to argue that sugar is good for children and there are plenty of reasons to suspect that we are currently underestimating the damage it does to everyone, but especially children. However, as a veggie of 47 years, I'm also aware of the social costs of a decision like this. (This applies to both meat and oil.) It can be done, and there's little doubt you will end up healthier and, if done right, you will be no less happy, but it's also not a trivial change. In this mother's place, I would want to do the same thing but I'm not sure I would. Though banning sugar long enough to see the effect certainly makes sense. Perhaps there can be a generation of children who are "social" sugar consumers -- though that means going through the detox process again every time. There's no easy answer here.

Both on Facebook and in my Webmail, I'm currently inundated by requests to join the fight against the oil pipelines planned or being built up in the border Red States. I've been fighting oil pipelines since 1970, bitch! To what extent are my liberal friends incensed about this issue because they know these pipelines are being built to supply their need for gasoline? It's like a drug addict protesting the crimes of his dealer and his dealer's source of supply. Give me a fucking break.

Vertigo, again

I should have known this would happen. I thought I'd just start again from the beginning to see what it was like after having finished the book once, and of course there's lots I didn't notice before. Here Beyle (Stendhal) is recovering from a serious illness following the retreat from Moscow in 1812, p23 "... A curious lightness such as he had never known took hold of him, and it is the recollection of that lightness which informs the account he wrote seven years later of a journey that may have been wholly imaginary, made with a companion who may likewise have been a mere figment of his own mind." This description could apply to this book as a whole, especially the chapters after this one.

Bank Cafe

I realized I didn't need WiFi this afternoon so I decided to take advantage of the Bank Cafe dollar discount on iced tea. So of course the WiFi is actually working for the moment. (Still slow as shit, so not that much of a change.) I've only been here twice since early October but I recognized the entire crew behind the Peet's counter -- I'm surprised how stable their workforce is. The only noticeable difference I see is that there's now a security guard by the front door. I'm actually surprised it took this long for them to make that change -- would be interesting to hear the story of what finally provoked this addition.

Sorry for the delay

This should have been published last night but I did my taxes instead.

Next - 125. Books for Living