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A Bulletin from the Ministry of Silly Walks

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John Cleese of Monty Python Shows You How

He’s not just one of the funniest men who have ever lived. He also has a brain, a very good one, in fact. For a number of years, he served as a Professor-at-Large at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. During that time, he showed up occasionally and delivered some fascinating talks, which were collected and published in a book entitled Professor at Large: The Cornell Years.

His first talk was about his reactions to a book by Guy Claxton about creativity. It was called Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind:

It’s a book that addresses a danger that has been developing in our society for several years. This danger is based on three separate wrong beliefs. The first is the belief that being decisive means taking decisions quickly. The second is the belief that fast is always better. The third is the belief that we should think of our minds as computers.

Now, of course, there are situations where you have to think fast, like how to avoid a car driving on the wrong side of the freeway. It seems, however, that many American businessmen have made something of a fetish out being articulate and quick on the draw.

Creativity just cannot be made to order:

The point is, we just don’t know where we get our ideas from, but it certainly isn’t from our laptops. They just pop into our heads. The greatest poets and scientists freely admit that they have no control over the creative process. They all know that they cannot create to order. They can only put themselves in favorable—usually quiet—circumstances, bear the problem in mind, and … wait. Indeed, the whole creative process is so mysterious that academic psychologists who studied creativity in depth in the ’60s and ’70s eventually just gave up because they couldn’t get any further—they literally couldn’t explain it.

Seeing as how John Cleese and his five Monty Python associates are among the most creative comics of the last half century, I can only assume that the man knows what he is talking about. Even if he walks silly.

The End of the Tether

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This is a difficult subject to treat because I myself am reaching the age at which one can pay most grievously for mistakes made earlier in life. I have just finished re-reading Joseph Conrad’s The End of the Tether, about a British sea captain in Malayan waters who has passed up a peaceful retirement to help out his daughter, who had married unwisely.

Although Captain Whalley in his youth was one of the most brilliant sea captains in the South Seas, he has grown old and forced himself to take on a rickety steamship in need of repair. The owner is a nervous former lottery winner who serves as the ship’s engineer. While he spends every spare hour evaluating possible winning lottery numbers, Captain Whalley, with the help of a native serang, handles the sailing of the vessel.

Unknown at the outset is that Captain Whalley is going blind, and it is primarily the Malay serang who is responsible for captaining the ship. As one can guess, things do not end well.

As I approach eighty years of life on earth, I see many of my friends in their retirement years similarly afflicted as a result of difficult situations that over time have gone critical. I earnestly hope that I will not be one of them.

For one thing, I did not save up enough money for retirement, having spent obscene amounts of money on books. Today I have a fantastic library of five or six thousand volumes. But what happens if I should suddenly die? That would leave Martine in the position of trying to find out how to turn my library into cash, if possible. This at a time when there are precious few bookstores around that could buy hundreds of books at a time.

At least I don’t buy books any more. The Los Angeles Library and my Amazon Kindle account for most of the books I read.

I owe it to the people I love to whittle away at my library, however it pains me. Alas, I am mortal. I have made mistakes. I will pay for those mistakes.

The Opinionator

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We all have opinions—in fact, lots of opinions. Some of them are based on actually existing situations, and many are so wrong-headed as to be laughable. And yet, try to go up against someone else’s opinions, and you are likely to make an enemy for life. Attack an opinion, and you are in effect attacking the person who holds it.

I have been wrong about many things. So much so that I tend to regard my opinions as penciled on a scratch pad rather than cut into stone with all capital letters. At age 21, I was all gung-ho for the American participation in the Viet Nam War. I was also a devout Catholic who attended Mass every Sunday. I thought that seafood was terrible (understandable when one was raised on the shores of Lake Erie).

Nowadays, if you impugn any of my opinions, you are likely to be met with a shrug. I do not see an attack on what I believe in as an attack on me. All my friends think some of my opinions are out of line. They’re just different. That’s all.

I look back and find that many of the people I’ve loved in this life held (and still hold) beliefs that were opposed to mine. I guess not everyone I meet is a carbon copy of me. For that I am thankful!

Devoirs

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Yay! I Survived Turkey Day!

Of course, it was nowhere near so bad as I imagined it would be. I tend to get a bit crotchety about holidays. They tend so often to make for bad feelings because there are all those things one has to do to make for the perfect holiday. If it turns out to be less than perfect, one is floored by feelings of inadequacy.

The French have a word for it: devoirs. Check out the Alpine French School website for a discussion of the different meanings of the term, particularly the second meaning. The devoirs for Thanksgiving include:

  • A turkey dinner with mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, etc etc etc
  • Getting together with as many of your family that you can sit around your dining room table
  • Discussions about politics with that uncle with whom you do not wish to converse

If you think that’s a lot, let’s take a look at thge many devoirs pertaining to Christmas:

  • Expensive and thoughtful gifts for everyone
  • A tree in the living room with ornaments, tinsel, and lights
  • Multi-colored lights festooning the front of your house
  • Maintaining harmful myths about Santa and elves to your underage children
  • Sending Christmas cards to family, friends, acquaintances, and just about everyone else

Just remember one thing: You don’t have to buy into all the “oughts” connected with the holidays. Your more conventional friends will probably think you a bit of a Grinch. Note, however, that it is better to be thought a Grinch than to be depressed and broke.

I took Martine out to Cafe 50s so she could have her Thanksgiving turkey, while I, of course, ordered something other than bird. She also had her favorite Hawaiian Tropic milk shake, so she is quite pleased with our quasi-celebration of the holiday.

The Man Who Killed Thanksgiving

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The Famous 1975 Cartoon by Ron Cobb About Thanksgiving

Even back in 1975 when I saw the famous R. Cobb cartoon depicting a family saying grace over a Thanksgiving turkey while the ground beneath them is littered with the bones of massacred Indians. Of course, even back then I didn’t like Thanksgiving. I had too many memories of dry bird carcasses drenched in fat to make them palatable.

Curiously, we never had Thanksgiving turkey at home. Turkey just wasn’t a Hungarian meat; and my father, like me, didn’t want my Mom to ever cook any. So we always went out for Thanksgiving.

The whole nonsense about the Pilgrims making nice with the Indians before wiping them out in King Philip’s War and other conflicts. The holiday is based on a myth designed to make us feel good about violently supplanting the indigenous peoples of the New World. If you want to get a more balanced picture of what happened, I suggest you read Eduardo Galeano’s trilogy entitled Memory of Fire. I read all three volumes in the 1980s, which served only to solidify my dislike of the holiday.

On this and many other issues, I find myself in the minority. So enjoy your dry bird. And think of all the football games you can watch this weekend!

By the way, Martine loves turkey; so I’ll be taking her out for a turkey dinner tomorrow. Needless to say, I will order something else.

The End of Coat and Tie

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What Ever Happened to Men’s Coat and Tie Fashions?

Up until the 1960s, the wearing of coat and tie, and usually a white shirt, was de rigeur for American men. When I started working on my first full-time job around 1968, I noticed for the first time that men were no longer 100% certain to wear a coat and tie to the office. What happened?

From the point of view of Los Angeles, I noticed the weather slowly started heating up, such that the traditional wool men’s uniform tended to be on the uncomfy side during warm weather.

When I started working in an accounting office in 1992, we were all required to wear a coat and tie every day. It was only a few years later that it was no longer required, even when clients were due to visit our offices. By the 2000s, I rarely had to wear a tie, except perhaps when I had to visit a client’s premises.

I watch a lot of noir films of the 1940s and 1950s, which makes me particularly aware of changes in the way men dress today as compared to then.

This evening I watched two Humphrey Bogart films that showed the star in a flashy dark suit in both The Maltese Falcon (1941) and The Big Sleep (1946). Whether playing Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe, Bogie looked ready for the big time even as he was supposed to be a cheap detective in a not-too-swank office. In the latter film, he even carried a pocket flask full of rye.

Was it climate change that doomed the wool suit? Or was it the swinging 1960s and 1970s that made casual a viable option? Probably it was a combination of the two.

Attaining Isness

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The Los Angeles Central Library at 5th and Flower Streets

Four years after the Covid lockdown put it on hold, seemingly permanently, the Central Library has restarted the guided mindful meditations on Thursday afternoons at 12:30. The meditations are conducted under the auspices of UCLA Health’s Mindfulness Education Center.

Today I attended for the third straight week and hope to continue. I find that the guided meditations ground me. Instead of endlessly planning the future or being swept up by my unfulfilled desires, I ground myself in the present. There is time for planning and for desires, but it helps first to immerse yourself in what I call the “isness” of your being.

This form of meditation is not connected with any religion or even any culture. It is presented solely as a discipline to free your mind from endless distractions. There is no required lotus position or any other position. You merely have to sit or lie down comfortably.

If you want to get a feel for what this is like, you can select one of the following prerecorded guided meditations from your computer, or select from a list from the UCLA Mindful website:

Many a times when, while trying to sleep, my mind is swirling around with plans for the next day or frustrations or unfulfilled desires, I’ve found the practice of meditation helps me drift off to sleep.

Steps

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The Inca Ruins at Machu Picchu

I knew I was getting old when I was at the ruins of Machu Picchu ten years ago when I was 69 years old. There was a light drizzle, and there were hundreds of rough slightly wet steps without guard rails. I envisioned myself stumbling and pitching down the mountain into the Valley of the Urubamba below.

For me, getting older is not what I thought it would be. In general, my mental acuity has not suffered, but I do lurch a bit when I walk. And going down a flight of stairs requires a firm grip on the handrail and a slow, somewhat painful progress to the bottom. (Going up a flight is not as bad, so long as there’s a handrail.)

Now that the Los Angeles Central Library has resumed its mindful meditation sessions, I take the light rail to the 7th Street Metro Center and walk three blocks to the library. There is an escalator going up to the street level, but on the return trip, I must take the elevator. Downtown Los Angeles has a large homeless population, so it is rare to ride the elevator when it is free of various bodily effluvia. Today, it wasn’t. But it was still better than taking the stairs, especially when there are people sitting on the stairs that have to be gotten around without access to the handrails.

Yes, there are some problems about getting old. The good news is that, for me, they are not insurmountable. I could probably even go to Peru again, but next time I’ll take a collapsible cane.

Winning

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I have never been one of those smiley-faced individuals who always have to be on the winning side. It’s even got me into trouble when I was a Director of Corporate Communications for a computer software company. I always saw things from both sides, unlike those corporate marionettes who advertise “ask your doctor” pharmaceuticals on television.

It’s probably due to my Hungarian ancestry. Hungary was on one of the two main invasion paths from Asia into Europe (the other being Poland). I have perhaps an ancestral memory that pretending to have happy thoughts will not prevent Attila and Genghis Khan from their accustomed pattern of rapine, looting, and murder.

Winning is nice when it happens, but it’s not a permanent condition. After all, we all will eventually sicken and die. If you live long enough, your skin will resemble the craters of the moon; and your days will be accompanied by bouts of pain and even suffering. Oh, and you can forget right off about drawing admiring glances from hot young women. Unless you pay them well.

So if your days, like mine, are a strange mix of winning and losing, you can find some fleeting happiness in small pleasures. In my retirement years, I feel gratified in not having to spend 40+ hours a week dancing to the tune of some megalomaniacal boss, of which I have had several. I read books; I cook; I do chess problems; I travel when I can. Maybe that’s as close to winning as one can get in this life.

Standing Tall at the Podium

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Height Is the Only Advantage for This Mental Midget

Today I watched the debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and her opponent. There couldn’t possibly be two candidates who were more different from each other.

Trump’s only advantage is that he is almost a foot taller than Harris, and America is a country which tends to over-reward candidates who are tall. I myself am of medium height (5 feet 8 inches, or 1.75 meters), though because of a pituitary tumor I had from an early age, I was the shortest male in class throughout my elementary school years. It was only after the tumor was removed at age 21 that I grew to my present height.

There have been statistics to the effect that greater than average height is a clear advantage in politics, business, and wooing. My own thinking is that the height advantage, while real, is no guarantee of success.

At today’s presidential debate, it was Kamala Harris who stood tall. She was quick to react, made frequent eye contact, and even began by going to Trump’s podium and shaking his hand, which no doubt surprised the ex-president to no end. Trump, on the other hand, looked like the grumpy old man that he is, wanting to chase all the darned kids off his lawn, and speaking with a cold, constipated rage that made me think we probably wouldn’t live out his term if elected.