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A Terrible Mistake

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The Temptation to Kill the Wrong Person Can Be Overwhelming

The Temptation to Kill the Wrong Person Can Be Overwhelming

Right off the bat, I don’t know whether Oscar Pistorius is guilty of deliberately murdering his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp (shown above) South African cities are in fact dangerous, and the rates for murder, assault, robbery, rape, and other crimes are so high that many who leave the country do so for that reason. In the weeks to come, we shall see if the runner can convince the courts that a terrible mistake occurred.

A terrible mistake … that is an expression that frequently occurs in gun death cases. One of my former co-workers had a son in high school who found one of his father’s guns and accidentally shot himself to death. I knew the boy and thought it highly unlikely that he entertained any thoughts of suicide. His mother and father are now divorced, and the mother left California to be as far as possible from her ex.

A terrible mistake … It could well be that Oscar Pistorius thought the person in the bathroom was an intruder. In South Africa, the chances of that are fairly high. But, I’m sorry, if I had a gun, I would squirrel it away in an all but inaccessible place and use it only for target shooting. Spur-of-the-moment judgment is too chancy a faculty to use for deciding whether or not to take a life—any life. I think I would rather be killed by an intruder than, for example, to shoot Martine accidentally—an act which would forever darken my life.

A terrible mistake … No, I don’t think one out of a thousand shootings, especially within the home, are anything but a terrible mistake.

Perhaps the biggest cost of having guns ready at hand is the loss of the people we love. I think Reeva Steenkamp was a rare beauty. It’s a pity she won’t be around any more.

“Dipped Into Oblivion”

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A Poem by D. H. Lawrence

A Poem by D. H. Lawrence

I have always had a kind of love/hate relationship with D. H. Lawrence. On the minus side, he has said stupid things about writers I particularly admire, such as this excerpt from a letter mentioning Anton Chekhov: “a second-rate writer and a willy wet-leg.” On the plus side hew has written some great novels (Sons and Lovers), essays, and poetry. Here is a particularly nice poem entitled “The Phoenix”:

  Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, cancelled,
  made nothing?
  Are you willing to be made nothing?
  dipped into oblivion?
  If not, you will never really change.
  The phoenix renews her youth
  only when she is burnt, burnt alive, burnt down
  to hot and flocculent ash.
  Then the small stirring of a new small bub in the nest
  with strands of down like floating ash
  shows that she is renewing her youth like the eagle,
  immortal bird.

What Day Is It Today?

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This Is a Trick Question ... So Beware!

This Is a Trick Question … So Beware!

If your answer was “Presidents’ Day,” you are only partially correct. Unofficially, that’s what the holiday is called, but according to the National Archives, it’s Washington’s Birthday. There is even an explanatory footnote:

This holiday is designated as “Washington’s Birthday.” Though other institutions such as state and local governments and private businesses may use other names, it is Federal policy to always refer to holidays by the names designated in the law.

If your answer was, “Monday, February 18,” you are an unspeakable literalist. But you are also correct.

Of course, my answer is, “Another damned working day in tax season.” For people in the accounting profession, there are no holidays between New Years and the end of tax season.

 

“The Divinity of the Groves”

Tree Cutting

Tree Cutting

Then we went to work to cut down the trees. The slim stems were an easy task to a good woodman, and one after another they toppled to the ground. And meantime, as I watched, I became conscious of a strange emotion.

It was as if someone were pleading with me. A gentle voice, not threatening, but pleading—something too fine for the sensual ear, but touching inner chords of the spirit. So tenuous it was and distant that I could think of no personality behind it. Rather it was the viewless, bodiless grace of this delectable vale, some old exquisite divinity of the groves. There was the heart of all sorrow in it, and the soul of all loveliness. It seemed a woman’s voice, some lost lady who had brought nothing but goodness unrepaid to the world. And what the voice told me was that I was destroying her last shelter.

That was the pathos of it—the voice was homeless. As the axes flashed in the sunlight and the wood grew thin, that gentle spirit was pleading with me for mercy and a brief respite. It seemed to be telling of a world for centuries grown coarse and pitiless, of long sad wanderings, of hardly won shelter, and a peace which was the little all she sought from men. There was nothing terrible in it. No thought of wrong-doing. The spell which to Semitic blood held the mystery of evil, was to me, of the Northern race, only delicate and rare and beautiful. Jobson and the rest did not feel it, I with my finer senses caught nothing but the hopeless sadness of it. That which had stirred the passion in Lawson was only wringing my heart. It was almost too pitiful to bear. As the trees crashed down and the men wiped the sweat from their brows, I seemed to myself like the murderer of fair women and innocent children. I remember that the tears were running over my cheeks. More than once I opened my mouth to countermand the work, but the face of Jobson, that grim Tishbite, held me back.—John Buchan, “The Grove of Ashtaroth,” The Moon Endureth: Tales and Fancies

Sunday Morning Walk

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Along Broadway in Santa Monica

Along Broadway in Santa Monica

This morning I got up early and prepared to take a walk into downtown Santa Monica. My ultimate destination was a Barnes & Noble Bookstore about three miles from where I live. It was a sunny, cool morning, with the temperature predicted to top out at 64° Fahrenheit (approximately 18° Celsius).

The stretch along Broadway between Centinela Avenue and 26th Street is particularly attractive, with lush plantings of palm trees, cacti, and other decorative flora. The photograph above is looking north on Yale Street as I headed west along Broadway.

At Barnes & Noble, I picked up a book about Iceland. I am trying hard to talk Martine into coming to Iceland with me this summer. Back in 2001, I went alone. I resolved at that time that I wanted to return with Martine: She would love the puffins, the waterfalls (seemingly thousands of them), the glaciers, and the volcanoes. It is a truly strange landscape, and a largely treeless one.

There is an Icelandic joke that runs: What do you do if you’re lost in an Icelandic forest? The answer: Stand up. Because of the strong winds, few trees are very tall. Whole forests, such as the extensive one at Asbyrgi, near Húsavik, look as if it were miniaturized.

I have my work cut out for me. Martine is still suffering from back and shoulder pains, which I am beginning to think are symptoms of fibromyalgia. On one hand, the activity would do her good (she has a tendency to be a couch potato). On the other, I cannot survive the rigors of a tax season without planning for an escape, and Iceland strikes me as a good one.

 

Finding Old Books Has Changed

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It’s Become Easier to Find Old Rare Books

It’s Become Easier to Find Old Rare Books

There was a time when I would have paid a hundred dollars for even a ratty copy of Sir Francis Galton’s The Art of Travel, or Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries (1872). This book was a vade mecum for Victorian explorers, such as Sir Richard Francis Burton, whose works I collect and love to read. Other books that Burton and his fellow Victorian explorers took with them on their jaunts into the wild places of the world are Randolph Barnes Marcy’s The Prairie Traveler: The 1859 Handbook for Westbound Pioneers (Burton himself edited later editions) and Harriet Martineau’s How to Observe: Morals and Manners (1838).

Now how much do you suppose these rare titles would cost you today? Remember, these books (even the one on the Prairies of North America) were taken into the darkest parts of Africa and South America. According to Monte Reel’s article entitled “How to Explore Like a Real Victorian Adventurer,” reprinted in The Best American Travel Writing 2012, the answer is Zero. Zip. Nil. Provided, of course, you have a Kindle e-reader.

If you do, you can easily put together a library of works which are no longer under copyright for nothing or next to nothing.

Oh you can expect to pay for the latest Stephenie Meyer twinkling vampire books or the latest New York Times best-sellers.

Now, you ask yourself, why would I be interested in these old general guides on travel to unexplored areas? The fact of the matter is that I love old travel books. Burton’s own First Footsteps in East Africa, or An Exploration of Harar (1855) and his voluminous A Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Mecca (1855-56), in which he disguised himself as an Arab and did all the Holy Places of Islam, are two of the most exciting books ever written.

Going farther afield, there are writers like W. H. Hudson on Argentina and Uruguay, H. M. Tomlinson’s The Sea and the Jungle (1912) about a voyage to the interior of Brazil; George Gissing’s By the Ionian Sea (1901) about a trip along the heel and sole of the Italian boot; and Captain Irving Johnson’s The Peking Battles Cape Horn (1932) about the last big sailing ship through the storms of Cape Horn.

These are just a few authors and titles that come to mind. How can I forget Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana (1937)? Or Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia (1977) or The Songlines (1987)? Or Paul Theroux’s The Old Patagonian Express (1979)?

One of these days, I will put together a more organized list of my favorite travel books—but that will take a little time!

The Peril from Outer Space

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More Obscure Things to Worry About

More Obscure Things to Worry About

Today, the notion of destruction from outer space impinged on the news in two separate stories. First of all, at 11:24 am PST, an asteroid named 2012 DA14 came within 17,100 miles of earth over Sumatra, center of the giant 2006 tsunami that killed hundreds of thousands of people. DA14 was approximately the size of two football fields end to end.

Then, the same day, a meteor about the size of an SUV and weighing some 10 tons struck the Ural Mountains of Russia near Chelyabinsk, blowing out the glass of thousands of windows and injuring hundreds if not thousands of people.

The two events were not connected in any way, except insofar as their timing made me think once again of how fragile we are.

If 2012 DA14 had struck the earth, it would have created widespread atmospheric disorders along the lines of the Tunguska meteor or comet strike of 2008 in remote Siberia north of Krasnoyarsk. After more than a hundred years, this event is still shrouded in mystery, as no identifiable pieces of the extraterrestrial object have been recovered to date.

It’s no accident that Russia has seen so many major events of this sort. Despite the secession of some dozen Soviet Socialist Republics (SSRs) when Communism fell around 1989-1990, Russia is still the largest country on earth, constituting some 11.46% of the earth’s total land mass.

It would be nice if events such as the ones described here made us tread a little more lightly over the earth, knowing that we could so easily be atomized by a piece of space junk.

I wonder.

If Books and Reading Are Important to You …

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... Then You Belong Here!

… Then You Belong Here!

After dinner, most people repair to their television sets and begin the process of becoming one with their couches or La-Z-Boys while a host of pundits, would-be stars and celebrities, and announcers with expensive hair-dos fill the hours of their lives with … noise. Just noise. Nothing much else but noise.

What I do after dinner is sit in my library and read. And you can track all the books I read by visiting my website at Goodreads.Com. There you can obtain my own personal review of every book I read. Right now, I am reading two short Fyodor Dostoevski novels, Poor Folk and A Little Hero. When I am finished, you can see the review.

Generally, I read between eight and twelve books a month, depending mostly on their length, The whole first half of January was taken up with Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, which was worth the trouble at any length.

There is an excellent New York Times article on Goodreads.Com, which you can bring up by clicking here.

Some people say that the reading of books as an activity is dying. No, I do not think so. I think that people who don’t read are finding a way to kill off their brains. Every hour in front of a TV set kills off several hundred brain cells. Every hour reading a good book stimulates your brain cells and—most especially—your imagination.

 

The Problem With Fantasy

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I Like It As Much As the Next Man, But ...

I Like It As Much As the Next Man, But …

There is one problem with the fantasy genre. Because anything can happen in any which way, it is impossible to remember exactly what happens in a fantasy unless you have just finished it. There is a trivia quiz on Goodreads.Com of which approximately half the questions relate to Harry Potter or the Stephenie Meyer twinkling vampire romances. Now I have not read Meyer, but I have read all of the Potter novels. The trouble is, I can’t remember more than a few basic situations.

All those games of Quidditch, all those supernatural events concerning He Who Must Not Be Named, all those spells and magical devices and such—they have quite vanished from my mind. I ascribe this not to any rotting of my memory, but to the arbitrariness in the arrangement of events depicted in the novels.

The same goes for Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, though not quite so much, and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy.

I think you you really like a particular fantasy novel or series, you will eventually have to read it multiple times. During the process, you will probably discover that it is almost like reading it for the first time. That can be good … or bad.

 

The ObliterAd

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Corporations Obliterate Your Favorite Websites to Get Their Message Across

Corporations Obliterate Your Favorite Websites to Get Their Message Across

Within the last year or so, there has been a proliferation of what I call ObliterAds, advertisements that shove your website contact down or just cover it with some otiose message which you have to close in order to see your website. I first saw this phenomenon at Salon.Com, and now it’s part of CNN’s news website as well (see above screen capture).

Don’t people in the advertising industry realize that tactics like this irritate Internet users and result in some antagonism. I for one would not buy anything advertised in this way. In fact, I close the ObliterAd as fast as I can so I don’t even get to see the message being promulgated.

Websites, unfortunately, are hungry for ad revenue and don’t seem to mind irritating their loyal visitors. (Please note that this website, tarnmoor.com, has no intention of selling ad space to corporations: They can tattoo their messages on their butts for all I care.)

I may decide to give up on CNN.Com, especially since it seems at any given time that most of the news stories are several days old or send me to videos. (I’d rather just read the story thank you!)