Month: January 2009

“I once asked my students about the place that solitude has in their lives. One of them admitted that she finds the prospect of being alone so unsettling that she’ll sit with a friend even when she has a paper to write. Another said, why would anyone want to be alone?”

“…our great fear is not submersion by the mass but isolation from the herd.
“Urbanization gave way to suburbanization, and with it the universal threat of loneliness. What technologies of transportation exacerbated — we could live farther and farther apart — technologies of communication redressed — we could bring ourselves closer and closer together. Or at least, so we have imagined. The first of these technologies, the first simulacrum of proximity, was the telephone. “Reach out and touch someone.” But through the 70s and 80s, our isolation grew. Suburbs, sprawling ever farther, became exurbs. Families grew smaller or splintered apart, mothers left the home to work. The electronic hearth became the television in every room. Even in childhood, certainly in adolescence, we were each trapped inside our own cocoon. Soaring crime rates, and even more sharply escalating rates of moral panic, pulled children off the streets. The idea that you could go outside and run around the neighborhood with your friends, once unquestionable, has now become unthinkable. The child who grew up between the world wars as part of an extended family within a tight-knit urban community became the grandparent of a kid who sat alone in front of a big television, in a big house, on a big lot. We were lost in space.

“Under those circumstances, the Internet arrived as an incalculable blessing. We should never forget that. It has allowed isolated people to communicate with one another and marginalized people to find one another. The busy parent can stay in touch with far-flung friends. The gay teenager no longer has to feel like a freak. But as the Internet’s dimensionality has grown, it has quickly become too much of a good thing. Ten years ago we were writing e-mail messages on desktop computers and transmitting them over dial-up connections. Now we are sending text messages on our cellphones, posting pictures on our Facebook pages, and following complete strangers on Twitter. A constant stream of mediated contact, virtual, notional, or simulated, keeps us wired in to the electronic hive — though contact, or at least two-way contact, seems increasingly beside the point. The goal now, it seems, is simply to become known, to turn oneself into a sort of miniature celebrity. How many friends do I have on Facebook? How many people are reading my blog? How many Google hits does my name generate? Visibility secures our self-esteem, becoming a substitute, twice removed, for genuine connection. Not long ago, it was easy to feel lonely. Now, it is impossible to be alone.

“As a result, we are losing both sides of the Romantic dialectic. What does friendship mean when you have 532 “friends”? How does it enhance my sense of closeness when my Facebook News Feed tells me that Sally Smith (whom I haven’t seen since high school, and wasn’t all that friendly with even then) “is making coffee and staring off into space”? My students told me they have little time for intimacy. And of course, they have no time at all for solitude.”

If you can find a few uncluttered moments for reading the entire essay, please do so. It’s the most important thing I’ve read this year.

Coincidentally, I just dissolved my Facebook page and bid farewell to my 134 Friends. No hard feelings. It’s nothing personal. IM me?

In the seventies a wild bunch of young writers and other artists went to Key West in search of bonefish, permit, and above all tarpon. Word was that a film was made of their quest but it never surfaced. Now it has.

I can’t wait to see it. Not only for the leaping tarpon (I still want to catch one!) but for the sheer amusement of seeing people, many of whom I know and who are approaching seventy, as 30- something hippies. It also features what I believe to be the only footage of Richard Brautigan ever taken. You can also go here for an interview with Guy de la Valdene on the film’s background and genesis.

Absinthe lollipops at Never Yet Melted. As David says “For All Addams Children Everywhere”!

Chas Clifton’s dog Shelby has been making a pig of himself with pig remains. This put me in mind of the legendary Dogs In Elk, one of the funniest things I have ever seen on the webs.

“When I finally woke all the way up, it was to a horrible vision. Somehow, 3 dogs with a combined weight of about 90 pounds, managed to hoist one of the ribcages (the meatier one, of course) up 3 feet to rest on top of the swamp cooler outside the window, and push out the screen. What woke me was Gus Pong, howling in frustration from inside the ribcage, very close to my head, combined with feverish little grunts from Jake, who was standing on the nightstand, bracing himself against the curtains with remarkably bloody little feet. Here are some things I have learned, this Rosh Hashanah weekend: 1. almond milk removes elk blood from curtains and pillowcases, 2. We can all exercise superhuman strength when it comes to getting elk carcasses out of our yard, 3. The sight of elk ribcages hurtling over the fence really frightens the nice deputy sheriff who lives across the street, and 4. the dogs can pop the screens out of the windows, without damaging them, from either side.”

Searching around, I found this follow up, in which we learn that one of the culprits was a New Guinea Singing dog (which makes sense); and a tribute to Dogs In Elk— in pumpkin.

Carl Zimmer is not pleased with some science writing, especially this piece in Esquire.

Says Zimmer: “I…I just don’t know where to begin with the opening to this article in the latest issue of Esquire. “Pretty lady”? “The new poor part of town”? A noxious martini of mixed metaphors topped with an olive of ridiculous hype. (Forget it–I can’t compete with this stuff.)”

You think he is exaggerating? Let’s take a few random paragraphs.

“First thing that happens when you have a heart attack, an unlucky part of your heart turns white. The blood’s stopped pumping to that spot, so it becomes pink-speckled bloodlessness, coarse and cool like grapefruit gelatin.

“This is the moment when, if they could think, these heart cells in this new poor part of town would go, “Well, shit.” Mortal things have a godly way of knowing when they’ll die.

“Next comes the back-alley bruise of organ death. The cells turn from white to black, all shitted up like a body pit in a war, two weeks after. Suddenly, soldier, this part of your heart is dead, only it’s still in your body, attached to the good section — the 90210 ventricle — and the good part is smirking, it’s saying, “Come on, rebuild yourself, man!”

(Snip)

“But now look here, a woman. She is a pretty lady of Pakistani heritage who highlights her soccer-mom layers, which you don’t expect from a lab-worn doctor-lady.”

(Snip)

“For years, stem cells were this scream of a promise. A kitten-faced controversy that was going to be worth all the protest. The idea was that since they could become any cell in the human body, you could inject stem cells into diseased hearts and they would regenerate the dying meat. They were the bloody rope, the unholy cure.”

KITTEN FACED CONTROVERSY?? WTF?? I would flunk this in a high school writing class, never mind a workshop for adults like I used to teach.

While it is hilarious, I also find it utterly depressing that I struggle to get published anywhere while this woman gets paid for writing in a magazine that once published the likes of Hemingway and Harrison. Arnold Gingrich must be spinning in his grave.

A few “serious” ones first, and then some funny and/or insane…

I really like this recycled column from Terrierman Patrick Burns, which I missed the first time around. It is called “Hunting and Fishing Like Adults” and was prompted by a note from regular reader Matt Miller about “canned hunts”. It is a long and thoughtful post and you should read it all, but these lines might be a quick summary:

“A lot of people will find some of these questions easy to answer, but will pause at others.

“The brain dead Vegan and the knuckle-dragging slob-hunter will find all of these questions easy to answer.

“So too will the older, thoughtful, skilled hunter who hunts only wild lands and who only fishes wild waters. He knows what he chooses and why.”

Is the city bad for your brain? Apparently! Some of the data here are fascinating.

“Although Olmsted took pains to design parks with a variety of habitats and botanical settings, most urban greenspaces are much less diverse. This is due in part to the “savannah hypothesis,” which argues that people prefer wide-open landscapes that resemble the African landscape in which we evolved. Over time, this hypothesis has led to a proliferation of expansive civic lawns, punctuated by a few trees and playing fields.

“However, these savannah-like parks are actually the least beneficial for the brain. In a recent paper, Richard Fuller, an ecologist at the University of Queensland, demonstrated that the psychological benefits of green space are closely linked to the diversity of its plant life. When a city park has a larger variety of trees, subjects that spend time in the park score higher on various measures of psychological well-being, at least when compared with less biodiverse parks.”

(HT Steve Armstrong).

Two coyotes, apparently healthy, attack a woman in Colorado. As Valerius Geist has been saying for years, acclimated predators are dangerous. And if coyotes can be, how much more so for lions and wolves? Keep them shy! (By reasonable hunting).

Gail Goodman sends this excellent article by John Yates of the American Sporting Dog Alliance on how to fight local AR groups on dog (and other animal) legislation. A must- read.

Walter Hingley sent this nice essay on the French Darne shotgun, still one of my favorites– and I own a London Best. A sample:

“Now that I’m standing next to it, I realize that the shotgun is in-the-white — the stainless-steel appearance forward-looking yet faithful to the side-by-side pedigree.

“The breech is slid open, the lever that operates it raised like a Crucifix displayed in a jeweler’s case.

“Mesmerized by the design, it dawns on me that the barrels don’t swing down. You load the shotgun by sliding back the breech with a lift of the lever, then push down the lever to close it.

“The streamline action flows into a straight stock void of the heavy figuring that could detract from the elegant silhouette.

“The shotgun could easily stand on its own in the Museum of Modern Art in homage to industrial design along side a 1937 Bugatti Drop Head Coupe, an Eames-Saarinen potato-chip chair or a Caran d’Ache “1010” fountain pen.”

Next, some sillier stuff…