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Inspecting County Road 47.

02-Oct-11

[On my computer the photos are not coming out where they ought to, but I’m a bit too busy to fix it right now.]

Several local roads have been closed since the hurricane, but word has gotten around that some are in fact passable: you drive around the roadblock and find that the road is one-lane in several places, and with guards washed away.  I was heading to Cooperstown, New York for an Avett Brothers concert, and wanted to see if County Road 47 – Frost Valley Road – was actually passable to Big Indian and Route 28.

Turns out it is and is not.  Driving along north of the Giant Ledge trailhead you come across a roadblock, and just past it is a giant chasm in the middle of the road.  It’s about fifty feet wide and forty deep.  At its bottom is a tiny trickle of water – it’s hard to believe that such a little tiny creek could have ripped a hole this wide in the road.

I then decided to explore the area below the road, where the creek joins the nascent Esopus.  Down there I found a remarkable sight:

A pair of culverts had been under the road; the flood washed them two or three hundred feet downstream, into the woods.  Each was seven feet in diameter, cast iron, and forty feet long.  I suspect they will be there forever now, as their current location is at the bottom of a gully inaccessible to vehicles as far as I can tell – but of course, the question is merely whether there is willpower to get them out or not.

I returned to the road, and saw a pair of amazing sights.  One was a group of well-dressed people walking down to the stream and crossing on a footbridge that had been set up there.  They were Jehovah’s Witnesses, or so I inferred when they said they were coming back from the Kingdom Hall.  They were separated from their church by the break in the road, so they had left one car at each end of the gap, and walked across the stream.  It looked like something from a much earlier era or a faraway place.

The next remarkable sight was a Subaru outback which roared past the roadblocks and at full speed went face-down into the gully, down into the stream, and up the other side – again, at full speed so as not to lose momentum in the mud.  It was quite a performance.  I considered doing the same when headed to Cooperstown, but an unloaded pickup is not a great traction vehicle – the rear wheels have no weight over them and tend to float in mud.

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The Jewish Girl’s Song, by Hjalmar Procope.

02-Oct-11

A very nice poem, part of the play Belshazzar’s Feast, where it gets a beautiful setting from Sibelius.  An improvement on the psalm.  Original text follows the translation.

I sat by the rivers of Babylon
And wept with my brothers, day and night.
And my sisters were moved by my tears,
By my brothers’ deep lament.
And Judah wept, and the daughters of Zion wept
Jerusalem!
We sorrow for all thy former splendor.

How can I smile, how can I be happy?
I am a prisoner in the city of rivers.
A stream of tears has drowned my songs,
I have hung up my harp in a willow tree.
How can I sing in the captives’ house?
Jerusalem!
How can I forget thee, extinguished light?

I want to stand, to stand up and go
Swiftly, like a spirit across the earth.
See, I will wander through the desert sand
And through Edom’s inhospitable country
Where dangers entice everywhere.
Jerusalem!
How long can the way to your gate be?

Vid alvarna i Babylon jag satt
och grat med mina broder dag och nott.
Och mina systrar rordes av min grat,
av mina broders myckna klagolat.
Och Juda grat och dotter Zion grat
Jerusalem!
Vi sorjde all din forna harlighet.

Hur kan jag le, hur kan jag vara glad?
Jag ar en fange i de alvars stad.
En tarestrom har mina visor drankt,
min harpa har jag i ett piltrad hangt.
Hur kan jag sjunga i de fangnas hus?
Jerusalem!
Hur kan jag glomma dig, du slackta ljus.

Jag vill sta upp, Jag vill sta upp och ga
med snabba fotter sasam markens ra.
Si, jag vill vandra genom oknars sand
och genom Edoms ogastfria land,
dar farligheder lura pa var ort,
Jerusalem!
Hur lang kan vagen vara till din port?

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Harvard’s 1869 Entrance Exam.

25-Sep-11

Of course I think it’s great, because I could probably pass it.  But admittedly all it is now is an indication of how much American higher education has changed in 150 years.  This without a doubt resembles exams from 169 A.D. more than the current SAT.

http://spectrum.columbiaspectator.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/harvardexam.pdf

Full blog post of which it is a part here.

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Our Third Anniversary.

24-Sep-11

Our first post, three years ago to the day.  Three years and six hundred-odd posts later, we’re still producing material for this website.  I was looking over the essays I’ve posted, and there is enough to make several full-length books.  And some of the material is fairly good.  I think I need to find a way to do more traveling; I’ve been living by the labor of my hands for the past two years, quite a bit below the poverty line, and I’ve not had as many opportunities for intellectual travel as I would like.  We’ll see what the site’s fourth year brings.

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Just For the Record.

24-Sep-11

It’s worth Obama being a one-term president, it’s worth the Mossad assassinating him, it’s worth his losing a few million donors, to not veto the Palestinian request for statehood.  It’s the official policy of the United States that the Palestinians should have their own state. For us to veto it just shows our own disgusting hypocrisy.

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Moral Progress.

23-Sep-11

Will Wilkinson on the phenomenon which makes religious fundamentalism so grotesque, and argues implicitly for the necessity of a “spirit and truth” religion if we are to have any at all: moral progress.  Our moral ideas continue to move in a definite direction, in this instance away from violence.  I am curious as to where moral progress comes from – and how we seem to know that it is progress (which I think it is).  Almost all the problems of religious fundamentalism come from the problem that it upholds traditional norms which are in fact inhumane and barbaric compared to modern mores.  To quote Bertrand Russell: “Religious precepts date from a time when men were more cruel than they are and therefore tend to perpetuate inhumanities which the moral conscience of the age would otherwise outgrow.”  But whence comes this progress?  Can we just worship that source, and skip the churches?

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Not a Human Anything in Sight.

23-Sep-11

Except for my shadow, of course.  A view into Woodland Valley from the top of Slide Mountain, the Catskills’ highest peak.

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Compost Tomatoes.

23-Sep-11

This spring I had a compost-pile full of tomato seedlings.  Apparently the seed has no trouble overwintering.  I pulled three or four of the largest plants out and put them in good soil, and still had a number remaining.  So I decided not to turn over the compost pile at all this year, and let them grow in situ. They didn’t have the four- or five-week greenhouse head start my other tomatoes had, but they all have fruit, and the fruit is starting to ripen.  Today I ate the leftmost tomato of those pictured here, which were harvested from a compost tomato plant.

These stray seedlings represent chance combinations, so you never know what you’re going to get.  Last year I had a tomato plant grow up in the middle of my “lawn” – or rather, the meadow in front of my house – it must have come from a tomato fragment I tossed out my front door.  It produced little cherry tomatoes, which tasted utterly awful.  They were inedible, in fact, and after trying three of them I gave up.

The compost tomatoes above clearly have some “Jersey Red Roma” parentage – one of the tomatoes I grew last year – although unlike other Romas these are juicy, have lots of seeds, and more of a beefsteak flesh.  The flavor was good, though the flesh has a bit of that mealy quality you find in Romas.  They’re good tomatoes – probably a Roma-beefsteak cross.  The foliage of the plant, however, was very droopy and some friends, looking at the plant, despaired that anything good would ever come of so sorry-looking a tomato plant.  It lost all its ornamental qualities in the crossing.

I could just save seeds from this plant – which I might do just for kicks – but it won’t necessarily come true from seed.  Since there are other tomatoes in my garden, it’s likely that it was pollinated by some other variety.  If you want reliable seed, you have to isolate the varieties from each other.  Barring some kind of planned intervention, every generation is the chance sport of the last.

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“Fundamentalism is Rationalism in Religion.”

22-Sep-11

I still find Sullivan good on most topics beside religion, but his defense of religion as transcending tenet is worth a look.  It contains the nugget “fundamentalism is rationalism in religion.”  Moralism and rationalism don’t wash too well with a God conceived of as a union of is and is not. The transcendent God tends to shed predicates, or gobble them up, making all Phariseeism of tenets a bit silly.  Aquinas’s Summa Theologica is considered the ne plus ultra of defining tenets, but he himself gave it up for religious reasons and left it unfinished:

He took his time at Naples to work on the third part of the Summa while giving lectures on various religious topics. On 6 December 1273 Thomas was celebrating the Mass of St. Nicholas when, according to some, he heard Christ speak to him. Christ asked him what he desired, being pleased with his meritorious life. Thomas replied “Only you Lord. Only you.” After this exchange something happened, but Thomas never spoke of it or wrote it down. Because of what he saw, he abandoned his routine and refused to dictate to his socius Reginald of Piperno. When Reginald begged him to get back to work, Thomas replied: “Reginald, I cannot, because all that I have written seems like straw to me” (mihi videtur ut palea). What exactly triggered Thomas’s change in behavior is believed to be some kind of supernatural experience of God.

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Greenwald on Propaganda.

22-Sep-11

Glenn Greenwald has a cynical piece on Obama’s corporate-shill economic team, well worth reading in full – as they say, Wall Street spent more to elect Barack Obama than any previous candidate – but particularly valuable is Greenwald’s little gem of advice for interpreting propaganda:

Geithner wasn’t chosen and hasn’t remained despite being “associated with the deregulatory policies of the past” and despite being the bankers’ “man in Washington.”  He is empowered precisely because of those facts, as was pointed out even before Obama’s inauguration.  That Geithner and Summers were empowered after enabling the financial crisis through Wall Street subservience isn’t a mystery; it’s the explanation. (And just by the way, replacing the word “despite” with the phrase “because of” is — in general — one of the most valuable tools for translating Washington propaganda into reality; here is an excellent example showing how that works, from the first paragraph of a New York Times article two weeks ago:

“Documents found at the abandoned office of Libya’s former spymaster appear to provide new details of the close relations the Central Intelligence Agency shared with the Libyan intelligence service — most notably suggesting that the Americans sent terrorism suspects at least eight times for questioning in Libya despite that country’s reputation for torture.”

Note how the paragraph instantly transforms from misleading nonsense into obvious truth simply by changing “despite” to “because of”; this repeatedly is an effective instrument for deciphering propaganda — e.g., the U.S. continues to brutalize people in the Muslim world “despite” the fact that doing so produces more Terrorism and thus ensures Endless War.)

Oppositions implied by words like “despite” or “but” are entirely in the mind of the observer, and depend on some kind of presupposition.  This is one of the reasons why reading the newspaper, or listening to political commentary or news, can be so frustrating: if you don’t share the guiding presuppositions, the logic and even the language will make no sense at all.  I often wonder at the way people can listen blithely to an hour of NPR or read through a good chunk of the newspaper without feeling at least a little bit angry at the way their consent and agreement to any number of propositions is presumed by the presentation, but who knows, perhaps they do consent and do agree.  But the nature of these sorts of things is, the less you expose yourself to it, the less you agree with it.

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