COMMONPLACE BOOK

Who really discovered America?

noreply@blogger.com (Alexander Gail Shermansong) — Sat, 21 Sep 2013 13:02:00 +0000

What we think of today as the American dream -- where you can be all you can be, where people are good looking and good -- come from the golden age of movies. And those movies were made by Jews. Outside Hollywood, Jews were threatened with anti-semitism and international nazism. Inside Hollywood, they created an idea country -- the country we call America. In a sense, Jews discovered America.

As David Denby writes (New Yorker 16 September 2013) summarizing an argument from Neal Gabler's "An Empire of Their Own":

"The future moguls came from the backwaters of Eastern Europe and arrived in the United States with nothing . . . they worked at whatever trade lay at hand: peddling scrap metal, furs, gloves. Then, soon after the emergence of storefront nickelodeons, in 1905, they threw in their lot with a new, primitive art form that many regarded as a passing fad . . . [and] built their enterprises with a speed that even now, in the age of venture capital and mobile-app entrepreneurs, seems remarkable. And yet, outside their domain, . . . they acted as if all their power and their personal wealth could be taken away if they made a mistake.

"Their fears were not entirely irrational, since anti-Semitism was widespread in America in the twenties and thirties. It could be found in the radio broadcasts of demagogues like Father Coughlin, in the street rallies of Nazi and pro-German groups in New York and other cities. The Jews were blamed in some quarters for the worldwide economic crisis. . . .

"In response, the studio bosses wrapped themselves in Americanism, generating in their movies . . . an ideal country: 'It would be an America where fathers were strong, families stable, people attractive, resilient, resourceful, and decent.'"

Why bother sleeping?

noreply@blogger.com (Alexander Gail Shermansong) — Sun, 05 Aug 2012 22:17:00 +0000

William Dement, one of the leading researchers of the last century and co-discoverer of Rapid Eye Movement sleep, concluded from his fifty years in the forefront of the field that "the only reason we need to sleep that is really, really solid, is that we get sleepy."

Notes Towards a Philosophy of Sleep | Philosophy Now
http://philosophynow.org/issues/91/Notes_Towards_a_Philosophy_of_Sleep

Reading with a knife?

noreply@blogger.com (Alexander Gail Shermansong) — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 16:37:00 +0000

500 years before the first online wiki, when books first came out, you read them with a knife and they gave you plenty of room for notes. Not so different from today's "share" or "comment."

Adam Smyth writes (LRB 5 July 2012): "The gusto with which readers intervened in texts, adding annotations (ticks and crosses; sketches of flowers; heckling commentaries) or even physically remaking them (knives and scissors were reading props alongside spectacles and candles) suggests that the book was thought of less as a finished, coherent object and more as an ongoing process: often sold unbound, and frequently including blank pages, the material book had the capacity for endless revision."

Renaissance printing prefigured digital age wikis.

We can also find antecedents to the "death of books" diatribes today. And what we find is that the new technology renews interest in the old: "Popular printed texts such as almanacs actively encouraged handwritten interventions: one from 1566 offers itself as a space for anyone 'that will make & keepe notes of any actes, deedes, or thinges that passeth from time to time, worthy of memory, to be registered.' Far from killing off scribal activity, printing functioned, in Stallybrass's words, as 'a revolutionary incitement to writing by hand.'"

Similarly, digital book technology increases reading: ebook readers go through 60% more books a year than traditionalists (Pew).

Usually today, we pride ourselves on how different our new things are. Ads emphasize the different. Reviewers comment on the novelty. But just like our Renaissance forbears, our new book technology strives to be like the old:

Amazon prides itself on a computer that looks just like a printed page: "Kindle's E Ink screen reads like real paper, with no glare. Read as easily in bright sunlight as in your living room.
"Early printed books – including the first of them, Gutenberg’s Latin Bible of 1455 – tried very hard to look like handwritten texts."

Some of the most fun books of the past decades obsess with text standards. Think Pale Fire or If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. Turns out these concerns come from the early publishers too, just like the "the deletion sign derived from the Greek δ": "a broader stress on uniformity, accuracy, standardisation and ‘a new sense of responsibility towards the transmitted text.’ We see this in the overheated title-page boasts that use a rhetoric of accuracy to out-jostle rivals: the third edition of Lancelot Andrewes’s A Pattern of Catechistical Doctrine (1675) was ‘corrected and perfected … and thereby purged from many thousands of errours, defects, and corruptions, which were in a rude imperfect draught formerly published.’"

So much of the online culture comes from Renaissance publishing. I wonder when I'll see the laptoppers at Starbucks web surfing with a knife?

Why is politics a dirty word?

noreply@blogger.com (Alexander Gail Shermansong) — Sun, 27 May 2012 19:19:00 +0000

"Whereas morals are for ever, politics is just one damn thing after another, says Glen Newey (LRB 9 Jul 09). I used to think politics was a dirty word.

Growing up, we could say "shit," we could say "ass." We could say anything we wanted. We couldn't say "politics." Politics was what was wrong with everything -- with our country, with where my dad worked, with our building, our playground, the beach, even.

Newey explains my family dynamic: "The idea seems to be that morality is grander than politics, because it is more amenable to reason, for example, or has a longer use-by date."

Growing up, I've come to think of politics as fun. It started with the Greeks, for whom politics is the way of the city. In Greek, city is "polis" and the way of the city is "politikay." Reading Greek showed me that my love of the city is politics in its original sense.

Despite being born into the New York City of Deathwish, I've always thought cities are the greatest human invention.

Working in the city and for the city, I started to see that how interesting the political questions are. In Newey's review of Raymond Geuss, the second political question is fascinating: "What is the thing to do here and now?"

When you read philosophy and you read history, you learn a lot of interesting ways of looking at things. When you practice politics, you get to apply them. Applying the theories makes them fun: given everything you know to be right, how do you make it work?

While it's nice to read about them, the other questions don't strike me as interesting: "Geuss isolates three kinds of question that are distinctive of thinking about politics. Lenin’s celebrated query – kto kovo?, or ‘Who whom?’ – is, in Geuss’s view, the primordial political question. Second, ‘What is the thing to do here and now?’, which is very different from asking what it would be best to do from an imaginary eternal or universal standpoint. Third, there is a question about legitimacy, derived from Max Weber, but which has also bulked large in Skinner’s analyses of historical texts. What forms of legitimation are available to political actors?"

The first question seems like more of a national politics question. In a city, it should be -- and often is -- "us us." But some people feel perpetually left out. I suppose for them the "who whom" question is more meaningful. I always find these questions of "voice" frustrating. Given my history and Aristotle's maxim, this will likely be my main focus in a few months.

"There are no moral skyhooks from which politics can be hung. It is quite hard to understand, except perhaps as a relic of state-of-nature theory, why anyone should think that morality is given, while politics remains to be constructed."
I don't know. The eternal truths still seem more valuable. As to do the artistic achievements. Monumentum aera perennius.

"In the old days theologians had the task of explaining how God could permit evil to happen, to which the least bad answer was that He had to lump it, as the price of human freedom. No human agency, including the state, can do a remotely plausible impersonation of the Almighty. By keeping that in mind, we might even come to see politics, and its forlorn theodicy, not with despair, but muted celebration."

Hip hip hooray?

Who am I when I'm all alone?

noreply@blogger.com (Alexander Gail Shermansong) — Sun, 27 May 2012 18:28:00 +0000

"Neither intimacy nor solitude is quite what it used to be" writes Lidija Haas (LRB 23 Feb 12). I go through withdrawal when my cellphone is far away. When it's near, I can't concentrate for long. If I'm reading the Iliad, even this edited version by Mitchell, I wonder when the next email or text is coming, or if I should look up more about Deiphobus or Idomeneus.

Haas explains, "The network we now carry around with us saves time yet uses up much more of it. It makes us so available to each other that sometimes we need to withdraw, but the result is that neither intimacy nor solitude is quite what it used to be."

Her essay recalls for me the times I could spend hours with lego or crayons learning who I am:
"With a doll, even the most imaginative child knows that he or she is playing alone. The prototype for My Real Baby was designed to cry out in pain when handled roughly, but when Hasbro put it into mass production they decided that it should instead shut down in such situations, so as not to 'enable' sadistic behaviour. Nobody would want 'to see their children tormenting a screaming baby,' but what might they learn from one that doesn’t react to torture?"

Our toys, our phones, our gadgets, they're all so "thoughtful" on their own, what are really our own thoughts. Just as Google knows what you're thinking as you're typing a search, and as a result, you don't know what you really wanted, just so the doll that cries, or the coloring book that has a drawing premade, or phone that interrupts your thoughts every few minutes -- who knows who I am when I'm all alone?

What did Raymond learn in prison?

noreply@blogger.com (Alexander Gail Shermansong) — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 14:06:00 +0000

When he was 18, Raymond Harris was sent to prison for robbing a woman at gunpoint. When he was 23, three weeks after getting out of prison, he was arrested for rape and setting his victim's home on fire.

Now, six months after a 13-year prison term, Raymond beat an old woman to death, stole her wedding bands, and proposed to his girlfriend with them. (Sun-Times 11 Nov 11)

What sort of school or home or friends did he have that, as a teenager, Raymond was mugging people with guns?

What did he learn in prison that, right after getting out, he raped and stabbed a woman?

How was prison life, that the parole board released him? That Raymond thought it was OK to kill a woman, take the rings off her fingers, go to a party, and, romantically, give the rings in a wedding proposal?

How could we rear such a child, and grow such a man, and unleash him on so many victims?

When did you start wearing pants?

noreply@blogger.com (Alexander Gail Shermansong) — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 15:35:00 +0000

Gibbon writes (1.XI note 87) about the European pretender-emperor Tetricus, conquered by Aurelian in 274, that he was paraded through Rome in trousers:

"The use of braccae, breeches, or trowsers [sic], was still considered in Italy as a Gallic and Barbarian fashion. The Romans, however, had made great advances towards it.

"To encircle the legs and thighs with fasciae, or bands, was understood in the time of Pompey and Horace to be a proof of ill-health or effeminacy.

"In the age of Trajan, the custom was confined to the rich and luxurious. It gradually was adopted by the meanest of the people. See a very curious note of Casaubon, ad Sueton. in August. c. 82."

Where do fonts come from?

noreply@blogger.com (Alexander Gail Shermansong) — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 14:19:00 +0000

Simon Garfield writes (WSJ 3 Sep 11) that Steve Jobs introduced fonts to the contemporary world:

"Shortly after he dropped out of college, Mr. Jobs found that he had the freedom to attend classes on subjects that pleased him rather than bored him. At one of thse he discovered the joys of calligraphy and typefaces. He found the experience 'beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture,' he said.

"And so when the Mac was born a decade later, Mr. Jobs gave its users something novel, a choice of fonts -- everything from Times New Roman to the original Chicago and Venice -- a revolutionary act that loosened our dependence on the professional designer. (Whether your nice new printer could cope with them was another matter.)"

Good at everything that doesn't count?

noreply@blogger.com (philometro) — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 17:01:00 +0000

Gibbon writes (Chap X) "It is difficult to paint the light, the various, the inconstant character of Gallienus, which he displayed without constraint as soon as he became sole possessor of the empire. In every art that he attempted his lively genius enabled him to succeed; and, as his genius was destitute of judgement, he attempted every art, except the important ones of war and government."

Does your mother love you?

noreply@blogger.com (Alexander Gail Shermansong) — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 13:48:00 +0000

Unloved Girl in Spokane WA writes (Dear Abby 28 July 2011)

"Dust and clothing have started to build up in my bedroom. I have told my mom, and she doesn't do anything about it, and I'm tired of telling her! The mess makes it hard live in.

"I think she does not love me since she will not do anything about the mess. What should I do?"

When is obstinacy your best bet?

noreply@blogger.com (philometro) — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 10:54:00 +0000

Torquato Tasso writes (Jerusalem Freed V.3) "so fickle and changing is this world, we find that to be constant we must change our mind."

Are you as catty as an ancient historian?

noreply@blogger.com (philometro) — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 10:52:00 +0000

>
> Polybius writes (XII 15) "Agathocles in his early youth was a common prostitute, one willing to associate with the most licentious characters, a jackdaw, a buzzard, a man who would face in any direction on request. Besides all this, Timaeus says that when Agathocles died, his wife, as she was lamenting him, cried out: 'Ah, what have I not done to you! What have you not done to me!'. . . . And yet Timaeus' description of Agathocles makes it clear that the man must have possessed some remarkable natural advantages."

When does a fire burn down?

noreply@blogger.com (philometro) — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 01:38:00 +0000

How do you make money here?

noreply@blogger.com (philometro) — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 00:30:00 +0000

Candace has taken me to a casino -- my first time ever. Buffets, blinking lights, chips, craps, slots, tiles, Niagara Falls.

Would you rather fly into battle or a goat?

noreply@blogger.com (philometro) — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 18:42:00 +0000

Most people name their aiports after artists, generals, hamlets, mayors, and other nice stuff, like goats.

Chicagoans prefer to name their airports after killing fields. Two of the busiest airports in the world and both martial themes.

O'Hare is named after Butch O'Hare, who shots down more zeroes than anyone else. Would you name your airport after a mass murderer?

Midway is named after the Battle of Midway, the turning point in the Pacific war during World War II.

Incidentally, one of the Japanese admirals thought their battle plan doomed for failure and wrote in his diary: "He who pursues two hares catches neither."

Can you recapture the days gone by?

noreply@blogger.com (philometro) — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 00:49:00 +0000

Candace and I sit in her watering hole of yore, her home of her first debauchery. She looks around and she sees her teenage years. She can't go home again; she sees the bar through eyes, through the eyes of one who's seen too many bars. Is it as fun as the freshman felt? Is it as sensational as the sophomore said?

How hot can you cook without cooking yourself?

noreply@blogger.com (philometro) — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 03:04:00 +0000

In Korea, dining and washing both require cooking yourself.

In Korea, when you eat, you cook it yourself. You sit down by the seashore. They bring you boiling broth. You place it on a flame and boil and boil until the fish is soupy and the soup is fishy.

Each bite is special. Each bite is prepared just so. (This explains why Candace eats her fajitas just so, lining each tortilla with sauteed onion and then pepper and then steak and then salsa, so each bite bites just right.)

You eat your kimchee wrapping up a bite of rice, for the perfect combination of salty and sugary, spicy and chewy.

You eat your eel wrapped in sesame leaf, wrapped in romaine leaf, filled with spicy tofu- miso paste with a slice of garlic with a slice of pepper with slices of ginger -- all in one bite.

All in one just so bite.

In Korea, when you bathe, you cook yourself -- in hotter and hotter water, sometimes with salt and sometimes baking soda. This dish is called jimjilbang.
Jimjilbang comes in many courses.

The first course of jimjilbang is removing your shoes and securing them in #257. Then removing your clothes and securing them in a separate locker, also #257. (Shoes and clothes must be locked in separate lockers in Korea.) You cover your head with a towel. You tie the towel in buns at either side of your head (so your head is just so). You dress yourself in a toga t-shirt and loose culottes. (Don't wrap too tight so the salt seeps in. You need to be just so.)

The course concludes when you see Candace at the foot bath.

At the foot bath, you soak your feet in salt water to loosen your foot skin. You walk on hot rocks to loosen your foot muscles.

Jimjilbang continues with yellow ochre room. The clay hut of yellow ochre room and the ionized heat of yellow ochre room remove the tension of city from your skin and the tension of the city from your body and the tension of the city from your brain.

The next jimjilbang is hotter and saltier. You place yourself prone atop yellow bricks of Himalayan salt glowing clear with heat. As they say, it's not the heat, it's the salt.

To tenderize your corpus and remove the toxins, you "foment" at 80 Celsius amidst red bricks. You freeze at 10 Celsius amidst blue tiles and jelly fish. You foment and freeze alternating every five minutes. It's like basting a Thanksgiving turkey.

To tenderize your brain, jimjilbang doses you with Wave Dream Room and 52 Degree Pyramid Room (the angle of the walls, not the degree of the temperature) and Electron Light Room and even the much renowned Mind Sound Room, with patented Korean rays to induce meditation and sometimes prestidigitation. (It's Zamfir muzak from walls that flow from neon yellow to neon blue to neon red to neon yellow to . . . )

All these courses of jimjilbang desiccate the typical western human (while humecting his skin to mouth watering salty smooth softness). Like a dry turkey, the typical western human at this point in jimjilbang requires rehydration with multi-mushroom stew and bone-dry beer.

Now your jimjilbang is ready to cook. Boil it in salt at 47 degrees for 4 minutes. Bake it in baking soda at 57 degrees for 5 minutes. Bubble in "bade" at 67 degrees for 6 minutes. Dissolve in steam (77 degrees).

Thus is one cooked in Korea at jimjilbang. Koreans call it relaxing. I call it dissolving. Who wants to join me tomorrow?

What can you see on the street?

noreply@blogger.com (philometro) — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 13:09:00 +0000




	2010-10-22 22:09 강남 미디어폴 8 번에서

Guess what? Chicken butt!

noreply@blogger.com (philometro) — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 08:44:00 +0000

Guess what this restaurant serves.

"Tastes like ass."

Yea or nay?

noreply@blogger.com (philometro) — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 13:17:00 +0000

Short hair, yea or nay?

Did I disturb you?

noreply@blogger.com (philometro) — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 13:17:00 +0000

It was a bit of a bender yesterday. No makole. Just . . .

Beer with raw snail (of two varieties) with complimentary sea squirt and sea penis, as we were sitting on the docks watching the fish boats unload and the fish trucks load

Beer with walking and then kogi mandu, id est, steamed bun stuffed with meat and cabbage

Soju with maewoontang, Korean spicy cioppino

Beer with strolling through jewelry stalls and buying Alex a "Nike" hoodie "made in Thailand" and "made in El Salvador" (two labels, for extra authenticity)

Beer with billiards

Beer while searching for a cocktail, unsuccessfully

Imported beer in a bar with darts and fusball with movie-making Swedes

Jaeger booms (sic)

Beer strolling to dukpoki (rice cakes in sweet chili sauce) with odang-duk (fish tempura broth)

After all of which we arrived at the hotel and were surprised not to see our "do not disturb" sign hanging on our door knob.

You see, we'd talked with the maid that morning. We didn't want her mussing through our stuff when we weren't there. So we exchanged our own towels and emptied our trash before leaving our room.

To keep the maids out while we were out, we hung a sign to leave the room undisturbed.

Imagine how disturbed we were to find "do not disturb" not on our door but on the floor of our room!

Candace even photographed the evidence, up close so you can see the disturbing words.

As further evidence, CJ documented how each bed has two pillows apiece, not the three and two as we had left.

We had evidence. We were disturbed.

What just crawled off my plate?

noreply@blogger.com (philometro) — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 23:37:00 +0000

Koreans eat octopus as ubiquitously as Americans eat corn syrup.

octo-on-the-street

Americans offer corn syrup on the street corner as a refreshing drink. Koreans offer octopus on the street corner as a refreshing snack.

The octo-monger heats dried delectables over coals. As the octo-roma warmly wafts, the octo-monger neatly nips into a small snack bag a . . .

Three-foot long leg of octopus?
Small, fat cluster of octopus?
Flattened sheet of octopus?
Eight-legged, body-and-all, whole octopus?
Thick round dried tentacle of octopus (the kind that sunk Nemo's Nautilus)?

Whichever you choose, strolling away, you contentedly munch on bites of smoky, chewy, sea flavor.

octo-lunch

Americans eat their lunch with corn syrup. Koreans eat their lunch with octopus.

In some cases, the octo-chef sautes and then serves the octo-lunch. If so, it goes like this.

Octo-chef reaches into the octo-tank, the glass walls covered with sticky tentacles. The octo-chef pries a wiggling writher and slips it quickly into bubbling chili paste. Not many seconds later, the octo-chef scissor-slices throughout the octo-stew and brings it to your table, tender, ready to mix with rice and lettuce and seaweed and onions and oh-so-delicious.

In other cases, the octo-chef just serves the octo-lunch. If so, it goes like this.

Octo-chef reaches into the octo-tank, the glass walls covered with sticky tentacles. The octo-chef pries a wiggling writher -- and meanwhile, at your table, salad is steaming on a stove. Atop the salad steaming on the stove, the octo-chef deposits the octopus. It crawls off. A daintily dressed diner plies her chopsticks to drag the tentacles to top the greens again. It crawls off. It sticks to the table. She plies again. It crawls again. She plies again. It crawls again. She's enjoying her lunch. Soon she'll eat it, too.

octo-appetizer
(not for the squeamish)

As all Americans know, sushi is raw fish and it's best without corn syrup. As all Koreans know, sushi is good food and it's best to start with octopus. Yes, the very best sushi-starter is octopus. Mmm, octo-appetizer.

And the very best octo-appetizer is living octopus. Crawling octopus. Squirming octopus.

You sit down at the sushi restaurant. The waiter brings the water. The waiter brings some beer. You eat some salad. You dip your ginger in soy sauce and in wasabi.

You're waiting for your appetizer.

The waiter brings a dish that's white and wiggly. Not the dish itself. The heap of squiggly. The pile of squirming, wirming tentacles. The mass of mouth-size, cut to pieces, living moving octopus.

You grab a tentacle with your chopsticks. The tentacle crawls away.

You grab a tentacle with your chopsticks. The tentacle suction-cups to the plate.

Your grab a tentacle with your chopsticks -- and the tentacle holds onto all the other tentacles!

You grab a tentacle with your chopsticks. The tentacle crawls away.

Koreans like live octopus as an appetizer. Live octopus is appetizing because it takes so long to eat. By the time you wrangle a wiggle to your waiting mouth, you're so hungry, it's so good.

So tender.
So tasty.
So squirmy.

What happened to yesterday?

noreply@blogger.com (philometro) — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 01:30:00 +0000

Pochangmacha (late night bars) serve makole, along with beer and soju. Apparently makole is also served to rice farmers midday.

Apparently they serve makole to keep the farmers from caring about their work -- or caring about anything else for that matter.

Makole keeps away cares with 38-proof sprite-flavor drunk from soup bowls.

When you gulp makole in this way at a pochungmacha, you don't care about the next day. In fact, you don't even know there is a next day.

How does grandma karaoke?

noreply@blogger.com (philometro) — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 23:55:00 +0000

Family dinners in a Korea differ from family dinners in the U.S. -- and it's not just the food.

But let's start with the food. You eat rice, of course, and then you share all the other dishes, reaching into the middle of the table with your chokura (chopsticks) to grab bite by bite:

Steamed octopus dipped in sweet chili sauce
Boiled uncured bacon dipped in salty-salty-salty fish dip
Cabbage pickled in garlic and chili paste
Greens with chilis
Skate wing pickled with garlic stems and chili paste
Blue crabs, raw with garlic and chili paste
Beef short ribs sliced thin and broiled in garlic

You don't drink wine or water or beer or even sparkling apple cider (as we did as kids at pesach). Every few minutes you have a shot of soju (rice vodka) -- everyone reaches into the middle of the table and says kombae or cheers.

Soju has a lots of its rituals too. For example, you never pour your own. When a more senior person pours for you, you hold your glass with two hands. Similarly, if you pour for him, you hold the bottle with two hands.

The next course is fruit and rice cakes.

The whole meal is had at a pap-sang, or short table set in the middle of the room around which you sit cross-legged.

Or rather at two pap-sangs -- one for the men, one for the women.

After dinner, everyone goes to the nooraybong or karaoke. Except the two youngest daughters-in-law who have to stay home and do the dishes.

Below is grandma singing at the club:

Quo vadis in Chunang Park?

noreply@blogger.com (philometro) — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 08:26:00 +0000

Chunang Park is not central Seoul, despite its name.

Surrounded by skyscrapers in a far out neighborhood, it has art, badminton, biking, bands, cards, crowds, drumming (traditional Korean), eating, football, gingkos, go carts, happy families, innovative exercise machines, kites, lounging, water sculptures to walk through, the biggest swing ever seen, and even clean bathrooms.

In fact, the only part of the park not brimming with activity is below.