Berkeley’s undergraduate library currently has up a blackboard-sized piece of white paper and a bucket of markers, with a request for students to write down their suggestions on how to make the library more “green”. Among the multicolored contributions: F*CK FINALS, and Get reusable condoms for [NAME REDACTED]. (And yes, the redactions are mine.) How about “Stop wasting paper”, or maybe even “Tell the idiot administrator who came up with this idea not to bother burning the fuel it takes to drive into work next week”?
I have a conflicted and complicated relationship with Yom Hashoah — it’s a lot easier just not to go into it here. But that’s why I decided against writing something about Adam Kirsch’s poem, “Past the off-duty NYPD guard…” (it’s technically an untitled poem, I suppose) which I considered. I find the poem rather true, and rather moving nevertheless. Lately, though, I’ve been thinking a good deal about Leonard Cohen’s “All There Is To Know About Adolf Eichmann.” It isn’t much in the way of a poem, but it drives its point home. The closing lines:
What did you expect?
Talons?
Oversize incisors?
Green saliva?
Madness?
And that’s the political lesson, I believe, of the Holocaust.
This past weekend I was in Minneapolis for a conference; I flew back to Chicago on Sunday morning. Sitting in the row behind me on the plane were three siblings, probably between 4 and 10. Their mother was either across the aisle or behind them; I’m not sure. I like quiet and the ability to get a lot of reading done when I fly, so sitting in front of young children tends to make me nervous. But I was able to read quite happily, off in my own little world, until we started descending into Chicago.This was the day after that freak April blizzard hit Nebraska; the bad part of the weather system didn’t make it into Chicago until later Sunday night, but we still had to go through a good deal of cloud cover. From behind me, I kept hearing one of them telling the other two, “Look at this! Look at this!” Then I heard the others keep exclaiming, “Wow! Whoa!” and the like. By this point in life, looking out an airplane window, unless we’re flying by mountains (mountains are amazing to see from the air, by the way) doesn’t excite me, so ignored them for a while. But after about a minute of it, I closed my book and looked out the window. And, even though I’ve seen plenty of clouds from an airplane, it WAS remarkable, though I don’t quite know how to describe it to capture it correctly.
But the truly amazing part came a few minutes later, after we’d descended below the cloud cover and I’d gone back to reading. (I don’t think of landing at Midway as exactly scenic.) Again, I heard them getting excited about something outside, and, this time because it had been worth it before, I closed my book and looked out the window. Because of the weather, there was a very vivid double-rainbow that felt, more or less, like it was at eye-level. We were circling for landing, and so we circled around it, in a way. Seeing a rainbow like that is one thing; seeing it in motion (or maybe from motion) is even more stunning.
It was beautiful, and I would have missed it were it not for three children sitting behind me. I need to remember to trust in their sense of the wonderful more often. A long while ago I promised William Brafford I’d write something on Oakeshott’s contemplative mode (I’ll get around to that sooner or later) – but this, I think, has something to do with the ability to delight in something for its own sake that is an integral part of what Oakeshott discusses and I sometimes reference. And children, I think, may be better suited for it than most adults.
This one had me going until they quoted Coach Weis saying that a day of practice should be enough preparation for USC. I can’t believe I bought the line about increasing the number of NBC’s television timeouts … I’ve actually been pretty on the ball with sniffing out the jokesters today.
When top football recruits ask ND players, “who’s Bon Jovi?” the players respond, “I think he’s the guy that sings most of the songs that get played at the ‘Backer.
Actually, I’m the guy who sings most of the songs that get played at the ‘Backer. Er, was the guy.
Either American life has gotten a lot harder over the past ten years, or there’s been a massive dropoff in our ability to deal with its rigors without the help of modern technologies. Well, that or we’ve utterly lost our collective grip on what the world “necessity” means. Approximately one-fifth of us decided between 1996 and 2006 that dishwashers, home and car air-conditioners, and clothes driers had suddenly moved into the category of life’s essentials, while a quarter made the same decision about home computers and over a third about microwaves, so that now over half of the total population regards such items as among the indispensable “necessities” for coping with the struggles of post-industrial human life. To wit:
For the record, my life involves the ownership of precisely three of these items, and among those I would say of only my home computer – because it enables me to connect with you, dear readers! – that it is anything close to a “necessity”. (Exercise for readers: guess the other two.) I understand, though, that I am something of an extreme case, and that once an item becomes a regular feature in one’s life it can be genuinely difficult to imagine doing without it. But flat screen televisions?!
I’m writing to let you all know about a new group blog project which I and some worthy gentlemen have started, called The League of Ordinary Gentlemen, at www.ordinary-gentlemen.com. It’s a new group blog where we are experimenting with running strings of conversations, or Series; the idea is to have long-form dialogues about given subjects, set up by individual posts from blog members. To that end, at the right hand side of the blog you will see a drop-down menu called "Series" which groups together the various topics.
The blog’s “About” page promises – or rather expresses a hope for – “a thoughtful and searching alternative analysis” of fundamental topics, and from what I’ve seen so far, that’s exactly what they’re providing. Like I said, it’s definitely going to be worth keeping an eye on.
As Conor notes over at the über-blog, blog commenting throughout the site is a big finicky for those logged in via C11 accounts. There’s no problem if you’re logged out, though, and – so far as I can tell anyway – at least some of the time the blank screen that a logged-in user will get after clicking “Submit Comment” doesn’t mean your comment didn’t go through. In any case, hang tight – things should be fixed by Monday.
"... if someone really thinks, in advance, that it is open to question whether such an action as procuring the judicial execution of the innocent should be quite excluded from consideration -I do not want to argue with him; he shows a corrupt mind." - G.E.M. Anscombe, via Joe
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