2012 is Slipping Away . . .

This being my first post of the not-so-new year, I feel abashed at how time has flown.  I could have been posting!  Well, I've not been completely idle, though being idle does come very naturally to the retired.  My band has released a CD/DVD (sorry, since I'm doing this anonymously, you won't be able to find it), and that's something of an accomplishment for the young year, though we recorded it nearly a year ago. I've read a couple of hefty books, spent two weeks on a road trip to Texas, and basked another week in the Grand Cayman sun.  I never did finish The Origin of Consciousness, but I did finish the much longer REAMDE by Neal Stephenson.  All right, I know, it's not fair to compare them.  Jaynes's tome is heavy with theory, historical analysis, weighty thought.  Stephenson's somewhat heavier tome is fiction, though it also has its share of theory, historical analysis, and weighty thought. But fiction it certainly is, and what kept me going was the cliff-hanging, movie serial structure of the narrative, where Stephenson would take a group of characters, toss them into Harm's Way and then take up another group and toss them into Harm's Way.  And then take up another.  And so on.  One became breathless.  So I eagerly flipped the thousand pages and finished the thing in record time (for me, the slow reader).  It was fun.  And that's about all I can say about it.  Clever, spritely, engaging fun.  I also put away (as in "consumed") two novels by Jane Smiley, whose writing I have admired of old.  Good Faith, set in the early 80's, is an eerie evocation of Bernie Madoff and his ilk, deftly pre-figured in the midst of a suburban development and S&L scandal, narrated by a winsome realtor.  Private Life traces the arc of a woman from late 19th century Missouri to the beginnings of World War II after her star is hitched to a comet-like astronomer who winds up his selfish quest in the throes of paranoia, convinced the Albert Einstein is stalking him in the town of Vallejo, CA.  Again, wonderfully written and well worth the time.

Consciousness, or Not

The other day an e-mail arrived from a list devoted to Marcel Proust.  The writer emerged from a long period of lurking to say that he had neglected to thank certain members of the list for various services.  One such service was a book recommendation: Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Break-down of the Bicameral Mind.  A hell of a title, one must admit.  This book, said the poster (the opposite, I would think, of imposter), had strongly influenced his life.

Well, I thought.  What's this?  I had never heard of Jaynes.  Not that I have a great store of knowledge, but I'm a generally well informed chap.  I have two advanced degrees, a Ph.D. and an M.S.L.S., and I tend to read widely and often  But somehow Julian Jaynes (1920-1997) had slipped by me, carrying out his Princeton career and writing his controversial tome without my notice.  Hmm.

Since I'm a fan of consciousness and a person who mopes about thinking about it a great deal, I was intrigued.  As I consulted the Wikipedia I became even more intrigued, since Jaynes apparently had made the startling (to me) assertion that consciousness arose rather late in human evolution.  Very late, actually. And that this view could explain or at least differently illuminate certain religious practices.  Double hmm.

My questions have been things like: why did it take us so bleeping long to figure out electricity?  And steam?  And why do so many humans insist on believing in things that clearly are not there?  (These questions, I've always thought, are related.)

So Jaynes began to interest me.  Of course, my local library didn't have the book.  But in twenty-four hours, I managed to visit a library that did and leave the premises with it's spartan cover in my hand.  I've begun to read it, and, so far, I'm having fun.  Stay tuned.

Taxes (I'll deal with Death later)

A few words about taxes.  Being an old guy, I've paid a lot of taxes.  It would be amusing to add them all up and see exactly how much I've invested in local, state, and federal governments.  It would be a pretty penny.  So perhaps I can claim some qualifications for writing about taxes.

I am heartened by some of the reports I've read that Republican legislators are beginning to soften their anti-tax stand in the face of our deficit and budgetary problems.  About bleeping time, I say.  Some, apparently, are even leaning towards repudiating the idiot pledge that Grover Norquist talked them into.  For a legislator to pledge that he or she will not vote for a tax increase is beyond silly.  It's irresponsible.  The crux of the problem is that the Republicans since Reagan (who raised taxes early and often, in spite of his rhetoric) have equated taxes with evil.  Though there can certainly be "bad" taxes, the support of government operations through taxation as a function is value free.  So there can be "good" taxes just as there can be "bad" taxes.  Functionally, taxes are dues, what we must each cough up to pay for the services that we receive: defense, roads, police, fire protection, safe water, safe food, and, yes, economic security (both what we call the "safety net" and the controls and oversight needed -- nay, required -- to keep the market honest).  Dues.  Not evil. 

Do I want my tax contributions spent wisely, efficiently, and well?  Of course I do.  I try to exercise my vote carefully to make that happen.  Does it bother me that I may pay more taxes than someone earning less than I?  Not in the least.  Does it bother me that I may pay more taxes than someone earning more than I?  You bet your life it does.  Dues should be fair. 

Bawlamer

I've been reading Laura Lippman's early crime novels, and she's bringing back all kinds of Baltimore memories.  I loved the city and lived there a total of nearly twenty years from the time I entered grad school in 1964 until I left in 1988, with some interruptions in the late sixties and early seventies.  Since I worked at the city's public library and was also a musician, I visited a great variety of Baltimore places and lived in a number of very different neighborhoods from Forest Park, lower Pennsylvania Avenue, and Charles Village to the northwestern edge of the city, a couple of blocks from the Baltimore County line.  I played in an amazing collection of places, once splitting the afternoon with an Al Jolson imitator who actually sang in black face.  I played at black social clubs in the West Baltimore ghetto and at the Baltimore Country Club and the Baltimore Museum of Art.  At one point or another I visited every one of the then 30 branches of the library and walked their neighborhoods.  And I stood in the Board Room at the Central  Library one afternoon and took a call from the Hollins-Payson branch, telling me that neighborhood kids had driven every stray dog they could find into the library, driving the staff in turn onto the table tops.

What a town!

The meditations of my heart

This morning, in church, I found myself near tears during the choir's anthem.  It was a setting of the blessing, "May the words of my mouth and the mediations of my heart be acceptable to you, my Rock and my Redeemer," in both English and Hebrew.  The Hebrew (that I can only transliterate as "Yi yu l'ratzon") struck a deep chord in my memory.

Once being a part of a Jewish family (although not Jewish myself), I was a member of a Reform congregation in Baltimore that was graced with the presence of an exquisitely talented cantor named Melvin Luterman.  I see, thanks to Google, that he is still around, still performing, though he no longer seems to be affiliated with a particular congregation.  He was a classically trained singer who performed from time to time with the Baltimore symphony, and his renditions of the Reform liturgy were heartbreakingly beautiful.  When our tenor soloist's voice soared this morning with the "Yi yu . . .," it was suddenly Luterman  whom I heard, and my tears welled for the loss of that time, of the wife who brought me into her family.

The feeling passed, as these things do, but for a moment I had stepped through time's window.

After the Armistice

The holiday that we celebrated (observed?  passed? ignored?) yesterday was something that we used to call Armistice Day.  At least I remember that my parents regularly referred to it that way.  It celebrated, it memorialized  the end of World War I, the "war to end all wars," though that end was, in the phrase of David Fromkin, a "peace to end all peace."  Back then we remembered the veterans on another day, a day at the end of May called Memorial Day, which, of course, we still have.

I have no problem with remembering veterans on both days.  Perhaps because I never served in the armed forces, I have great respect for veterans, and for current members of the military.  Respect for their sacrifice.  Yet I fervently wish that we didn't need them.  I once visited a country that had no army.  No army.  A strange state of affairs.  I wonder if there's another country in the world like that.  War never produced anything but more war.  How silly we are to think that it will produce peace.

I'll always have Paris . . .

The wife and I saw a lovely movie this evening: Les Femmes du Sixième Etage.  The story begins in 1962 and follows the adventures of several Spanish maids working in a Paris building and living in the chambres de bonne on the sixth, well, we would call it the seventh floor.  I haven't seen such a collection of wonderful faces in a movie since the sailors in Master and Commander (faces recruited, I understand, from Eastern Europe).  Marvelous dialog, a delightful plot.  My only reservation is that I can't love the old man getting the young chick (as much as my id cheers for that dénouement.)

I know very well what a chambre de bonne is because I once came very close to living in one.  The lady from the apartment agency showed me a couple as I looked for a place to live after arriving in Paris in 1966 to study at the Ecole de Hautes Etudes, 6e Section.   She finally found me a room in the apartment of a stately lady, Madame de Cautine, the widow (or so she claimed) of a minor minister in the Schuman government shortly after WWII.  The apartment was on the rue Vaugirard near the Porte de Versailles, and after Mme. de Cautine drove me out (I lasted about two months), I lived for a while in the Hôtel Molière in the rue de l'Ancienne Comédie.  A real dump, but perfect for the impecunious grad student.  Ultimately I lived in a closet on the sixième, so I probably should have grabbed the chambre de bonne while I could.