“The Divine Felicity of His Style”

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Marcus Tullius Cicero

When I was a boy, I was fonder of Seneca than of Cicero, and till I was twenty years old could not bear to spend any time in reading him; while all the other writers of antiquity generally pleased me. Whether my judgment be improved by age, I know not; but am certain, that Cicero never pleased me so much when I was fond of those juvenile studies as he does now when I am grown old; not only for the divine felicity of his style, but the sanctity of his heart and morals: in short, he has inspired my soul, and made me feel myself a better man. I make no scruple, therefore, to exhort our youth to spend their hours in reading and getting his books by heart, rather than in the vexatious squabbles and peevish controversies with which the world abounds. For my own part, though I am now in the decline of life, yet as soon as I have finished what I have in hand, I shall think it no reproach to me to seek a reconciliation with my Cicero, and renew an old acquaintance with him, which for many years has been unhappily intermitted.—Erasmus, Letter #499 to Johannes Ulattenus

I Am a Jonah

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No, It’s Not Me ... But It Could Be!

No, It’s Not Me … But It Could Be!

I usually take lunch by myself at 11:45 am, just before the rush begins. I like to find myself virtually alone in a restaurant, deeply buried in my copy of The New Yorker or The New York Review of Books, with a glass of plain, unsweetened iced tea in front of me. Sometimes, I think that I am something of a Jonah to the dining establishments I frequent: Not for me the gay, bubbling crowds. I like it quiet so that I can read. What restaurant can long survive an influx of diners such as me?

Today, I read reviews of books about Hugh Trevor-Roper and Simon Leys, wondering to myself whether I could craft a blog out of these articles. Not without difficulty, because I have read nothing by the former and only one novel by the latter. I thought instead I would write about my lone wolf lunches during the work week. They give me a chance to catch up on the two magazines that mean the most to me, and they preserve my freedom of choice to eat at a place which would not send my glucose reading soaring skyward. ( Anyway the rest of the staff usually takes lunch about an hour after I do.)

Because I am a sort of back-room character at the accounting firm where I work, I rarely have “business lunches,” which is fine with me. I don’t like having to explain a diabetic meal regimen to strangers if I can help it.

Diabetes really doesn’t have much to do with it. Even forty years ago, I liked to lunch alone. It was around then that I discovered The New York Review of Books, which was on sale at the drugstore next to Marshall’s Coffee Shop at the corner of Olympic and Barrington. That building has since collapsed in the 1994 Northridge Earthquake. It was mostly a medical building. I remember reading in the L.A. Times that the doctors were unable to evacuate their medical records because the building was likely to pancake without notice. I wonder what happened to those records….

When it comes time for me to retire, I will probably eat almost all of my lunches with Martine, as I do now with my suppers. That would be fine with me: The quiet reading time won’t be necessary for me then as it is now in the crazed atmosphere of a Westwood accounting firm.

 

 

And Now the Lawsuits!

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It Was Bound to Happen!

It Was Bound to Happen!

There have been some new developments since the quasi-filibuster of Ted Cruz in the U.S. Senate, which ended up proving nothing more than the man has no excretory functions:

  • White Castle has decided to declare a Chapter 7 bankruptcy. “I had no idea,” said CEO E. W. Ingram III, “that we were so downmarket.”
  • The Moon has decided to seek a more appreciative planet as a satellite. It is now somewhere between Venus and Mercury.
  • The two or three Democrats who spent the night listening to the Cruz-o-Matic Rant were dismayed to have no access to duct tape.
  • Ashton Kutcher hanged himself from a Baltimore lamp post with an extension cord,
  • Ted Cruz is now the answer to twelve questions in the latest edition of Trivial Pursuit, all of which include the word “moronic” in them.
  • The Estate of Ted Geisel (Dr. Seuss) is suing Cruz for misappropriating Green Eggs and Ham.
  • The World Wrestling Federation has released a white paper explaining that their matches are less rigged than Tea Party candidate elections.

If you don’t understand all the above references, you might want to see this slideshow.

No Atheists in the Foxholes

David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.—David Foster Wallace, “This Is Water”

 

Cruz (Unguided) Missile

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Why Do I Suddenly Feel This Is the Weimar Republic?

Why Do I Suddenly Feel This Is the Weimar Republic?

Who is this man and where did he come from? Oh, yeah. Texas. Well, I should have known.

One interesting phenomenon about all these Tea Party darlings, from Michele Bachmann to Sarah Palin to Rand Paul to (now) Ted Cruz, is that they rise up suddenly from the backwoods and hit the news media with a sudden and glittering éclat before they sink into the malodorous miasma of bad reputations.

I suppose there are people who subscribe to the Tea Party principles of “That government governs best which doesn’t exist.” If you’ve read anything I’ve written over the last year or so, you know I don’t hold with that brand of anarchism. The sad thing is that many adherents of those beliefs are dependent on the same government programs that they oppose on quasi-ideological grounds. It wouldn’t be the first time that large masses of people shot themselves in the foot.

In the end, I think that Ted Cruz will be one of the people responsible for the latest demolition of the Republican Party. In the past, the GOP has come back Phoenix-like from its previous devastations—only to blunder into even more destructive ones. What can one do with a party that is paid for by uncaring CEOs for the sole purpose of lightening their own personal tax loads and that of their business enterprises? The Tea Partyers are merely low speed bumps on the road to where the 1% wants to go.

 

Digital Isn’t Everything

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Design on Turn of the Century Orchestrion

Design on Turn of the Century Orchestrion

Yesterday’s visit to the Nethercutt Collection in Sylmar (q.v.) has convinced me that the Smart Phone has warped our aesthetic sensibilities. The automobiles and music machines collected by J. B. Nethercutt and his successors are large and, for the most part, beautifully designed. Now our new automobiles are much more boring—even the Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs don’t look much better than most standard-issue American and Korean cars. I get the feeling that the app-loaded Smart Phone is our new criterion of success. It is as if where we were evolving over the last hundred years is toward Dick Tracy’s wrist TV (see illustration below).

Is This All There Is?

Is This All There Is?

If we want to listen to music, we download the music ourselves, either from a free or a pay website, and load it onto an iPod or MP3 player. Of course, since the music is now completely portable, we usually need earbuds or an earphone. The Mighty Wurlitzer and other orchestrions at the Nethercutt produced a big sound without any digital amplification. Most notable is the top-of-the-line player piano on which I listened to George Gershwin’s own recording of Rhapsody in Blue. Trust me, it was better than the best digital I ever heard.

Perhaps we have taken digital about as far as it can go. At some point, Moore’s Law will run into some natural barrier; and researchers will start to take another look at analog. I’m not saying we’ll return to records: Toward the end of the long-play record era, I had a hard time finding vinyl records that weren’t warped. What will probably happen is a combination of digital and analog in new media. The CD is almost out of date; the MP3 player will be next. Who can say what will be the next medium for conveying music?

A Jaw-Dropping Moment

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The Grand Salon of the Nethercutt Collection in Sylmar

The Grand Salon of the Nethercutt Collection in Sylmar

One of the best places to visit in Southern California is the Nethercutt Collection in Sylmar. a world-class museum of rare automobiles and mechanical musical instruments, including the private railroad car of Clara Baldwin Stocker, millionaire heiress of tycoon “Lucky” Baldwin. Martine and I met up there with my best friend and his sons. We took the tour in the larger of the two buildings, and then saw the additional cars and music machines in the museum building.

On one hand, the cars and other objects on display are easily worth an admission price of ten dollars or more. But both the tour and the museum are free of charge, thanks to a foundation set up by J. B. Nethercutt of Merle Norman Cosmetics. There is one jaw-dropping moment when, on the tour, one enters the Grand Salon (illustrated above), where the Collection’s rarest and most beautiful cars are located. Perhaps the single most distinguished rarity is a silver Duesenberg shown near the center of the photograph.

Among the music machines, I was most impressed by a superb player piano that played a recording of Rhapsody in Blue played by the composer himself, George Gershwin. Mr. Gershwin’s interpretation of his work was nothing less than superb, and was a great accompaniment to viewing the cars in the Grand Salon.

Some of the best places to see in Los Angeles were the result of bequests from millionaires, including Descanso Gardens (Manchester Boddy), the Huntington Gardens and Museum (Henry E. Huntington), and the Getty Museum and Villa (J. Paul Getty). It somehow smoothes the rough edges on these otherwise rapacious tycoons, to enjoy the bounty of their collections.

This is the third or fourth time that Martine and I have visited the Nethercutt, and hopefully far from the last.

 

 

On Being a Grown-Up

David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace

I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful. But since it’s my own choices that’ll lock me in, it seems unavoidable—if I want to be any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them.—David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again

Don’t Shop for Fakes Here

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Spammers Want to Sell You Junk

Spammers Want to Sell You Junk

I have deleted some 4,500 bogus comments which have attempted to use my WordPress website for selling counterfeit goods and dubious services. These range from fake Rolexes, to fake Louis Vuittons, to prom dresses (of course, all the major débutantes follow my posts with bated breath), to fake alternatives to dialysis, to fake NFL and World Soccer Cup jerseys.

All these comments make some bland generic comment about what I write (though even more are attached to the photographs I use), accompanied by links to where you can spend real money for fake goods. Many of these comments originate in Brazil and Eastern Europe.

I am fairly confident that I haven’t let any of these junksters through; though, if by mistake I do, please feel free to not buy the proffered merchandise. Please note that I am not selling anything except, perhaps, for some slightly moldy ideas and notions.