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Green Like Them

Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker on the literary – and I use the term loosely – phenomenon that is eco-living as an extreme lifestyle:

The basic setup of “No Impact Man” is, by this point, familiar. During the past few years, one book after another has organized itself around some nouveau-Thoreauvian conceit. This might consist of spending a month eating only food grown in an urban back yard, as in “Farm City” (2009), or a year eating food produced on a gentleman’s farm, as in “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” (2007). It might involve driving across the country on used cooking oil, as in “Greasy Rider” (2008), or giving up fossil fuels for goats, as in “Farewell, My Subaru” (2008).

All of these stunts can be seen as responses to the same difficulty. Owing to a combination of factors—population growth, greenhouse-gas emissions, logging, overfishing, and, as Beavan points out, sheer self-indulgence—humanity is in the process of bringing about an ecological catastrophe of unparalleled scope and significance. Yet most people are in no mood to read about how screwed up they are. It’s a bummer. If you’re the National Academy of Sciences or the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or the Pope or Al Gore, you can try to fight this with yet another multivolume report or encyclical. If not, you’d better get a gimmick.

And we wonder why people move onto other, more pressing matters. Writers are always looking for angles – society rewards I’ll-get-mine all the time – and as she wittily describes, this is what these folks are doing. It’s as American as the three car garage. Fine. Cashing in. You know, Green. I get it.

Yuk-yuk. It reminds me that, despite the trends, there are more interesting things to write books and make moves about* and these are the mere trifles of people who sit in writers’ workshops and mfa programs, trying to think of the next big book idea. They’re smart and well-trained so I’m not surprised that they figure out the caricature, which seems to arrive pre-mocked. Just don’t go meta and get too depressed by what they write/film; the writers, their agents and editors will lose interest with this and move onto something else before too long.

*There are even stories to write and film that have never been written about or filmed before.

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Creative Destruction

Or, what will green mean once it has been destroyed and re-cast again? At the end of this Newsweek article about IBM and how it is “detaching” from the U.S., was this:

This is the new world of global business, one in which the U.S. becomes simply a market among markets, and not even the most interesting one. IBM is one of the multinationals that propelled America to the apex of its power, and it is now emblematic of the process of creative destruction pushing America to a new, less dominant, and less comfortable position.

It’s part global rah-rah, but having heard the term before in nearly the same context – as a seeming euphemism for the kind of havoc that is endemic to business interests in such a way as to insulate them from moralistic concerns about people or planet – it made me wonder how long it had been around and, at the risk of misunderstanding it, whether it could be true in multiple directions. I mean, destruction for gain, if truly amoral, could advance along an Eco axis if that was what where the gain is, Nes Pa?

Creative destruction was originally coined by Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950) in his Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. Some choice bits on CD:

Capitalism, then, is by nature a form or method of economic change and not only never is but never can be stationary. And this evolutionary character of the capitalist process is not merely due to the fact that economic life goes on in a social and natural environment which changes and by its change alters the data of economic action; this fact is important and these changes (wars, revolutions and so on) often condition industrial change, but they are not its prime movers.

These would be new means of production and transportation, new markets, new forms of industrial organization. Sound familiar? Also note that he says capitalism can never be stationary; does this put sustainability out of play? If so, what then?

The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation–if I may use that biological term–that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in. . . .

Ah, essential facts. We quickly revert to protecting that (competition) which does not require guarding, because its forms are designed to go away, or be transformed into something else. Something which may appear unrecognizable, but only because of our tendency toward the above reversion. One more:

But in capitalist reality as distinguished from its textbook picture, it is not that kind of competition (the price variable) which counts but the competition from the new commodity, the new technology, the new source of supply, the new type of organization (the largest-scale unit of control for instance)–competition which commands a decisive cost or quality advantage and which strikes not at the margins of the profits and the outputs of the existing firms but at their foundations and their very lives.

Now, there could be something very sexy about this, but we’ll have to get over the sad-sack ‘greed is good’ paradigm in which so many have found solace for so long, which has been under seige since the minute after it was created. It’s not merely being sanguine to say it is the nature of the system to destroy itself this way, just a reminder of the very necessary likelihood of possibilities that should be injected into the project. That are indeed its lifeline, if not its blood.

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Light From a Fire

That James Baldwin does not occupy more of a place in the canon of twentieth-century American literature says much more about us than it does about him. While I have been hard on him at times, it is not – nor could it be – to the detriment of his remarkable talents. My complaints focus on the nature of his contributions – I wanted more novels, less polemics – but again, this is more my problem than his.

And I’ll admit that he was reaching for something, aspiring to something, as well – a power across the forms of which I see him to have chosen one over the other. In this struggle for plainspoken offense on behalf of truth, it is possible to both let him pass and grow hostile with impatience. Instead of trying to support my argument, I’ll present evidence against it, or rather, take the liberty of ceding the floor to him on the very subject. From Notes of a Native Son, this is the beginning of his essay, Everybody’s Protest Novel:

In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, that cornerstone of American social protest fiction, St. Clare, the kindly master, remarks to his coldly disapproving Yankee cousin, Miss Ophelia, that, so far as he is able to tell, the blacks have been turned over to the devil for the benefit of the whites in this world – however, he adds thoughtfully, it may turn out in the next. Miss Ophelia’s reaction is, at least, vehemently right-minded: “This is perfectly horrible!” she exclaims. “You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!”

Miss Ophelia, as we may suppose, was speaking for the author; her exclamation is the moral, neatly framed, and incontestable like those improving mottoes sometimes found hanging on the walls of furnished rooms. And, like these mottoes, before which one invariably flinches, recognizing an insupportable, almost indecent glibness, she and St. Clare are terribly in earnest. Neither of them questions the medieval morality from which their dialogue springs: black, white, the devil, the next world – posing its alternatives between heaven and flames – were realities for them as, of course, they were for their creator. They spurned and were terrified of the darkness, striving mightily for the light; and considered from this aspect, Miss Ophelia exclamation, like Mrs. Stowe’s novel, achieves a bright, almost lurid significance, like the light from a fire which consumes a witch. This is the more striking as one considers the novels of negro oppression written in our own, more enlightened day, all of which say only: “This is perfectly horrible! You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!” (Let us ignore, for the moment, those novels of oppression written by Negroes, which add only a raging, near-paranoiac postscript to this statement and actually reinforce, as I hope to make clear later, the principles which activate the oppression they decry.)

Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a very bad novel, having, in its self-righteous, virtuous sentimentality, much in common with Little Women. Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, in inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty. Uncle Tom’s Cabin – like its multitudinous, hard-boiled descendants – is a catalogue of violence. This is explained by the nature of Mrs. Stowe’s subject matter, her laudable determination to flinch from nothing in presenting the complete picture; an explanation which falters only if we pause to ask whether or not her picture is indeed complete; and what constriction or failure of perception forced her to so depend on the description of brutality – unmotivated, senseless – and to leave unanswered and unnoticed the only important question: what it was, after all, that moved her people to such deeds.

But this, let us say, was beyond Mrs. Stowe’s powers; she was not much of a novelist as an impassioned pamphleteer; her book was not intended to do anything more than prove that slavery was wrong; was, in fact, perfectly horrible. This makes material for a pamphlet but it is hardly enough for a novel; and the only question left to ask is why are bound stil within the same constriction. How is it that we are so loath to make a further journey than that made by Mrs. Stowe, to discover and reveal something a little closer to the truth?

But that battered word, truth, having made its appearance here, confronts one immediately with a series of riddles and has, moreover, since so many gospels are preached, the unfortunate tendency to make one belligerent. Let us say, then, that truth, as used here, is meant to imply a devotion to the human being, his freedom and fulfillment; freedom which cannot be legislated, fulfillment which cannot be charted. This is the prime concern, the frame of reference; it is not to be confused with a devotion to Humanity which is too easily equated with a devotion to a Cause; and Causes, as we know, are notoriously bloodthirsty. We have, as it seems to me, in this most mechanical and interlocking of civilizations, attempted to lop this creature down to the status of a time-saving invention. he is not, after all, merely a member of a Society or a Group or a deplorable conundrum to be explained by Science. He is – and how old-fashioned the words sound! – something more than that, something resolutely indefinable, unpredictable. In overlooking, denying, evading his complexity – which is nothing more than the disquieting complexity of ourselves – we are diminished and we perish; only within this web of ambiguity, paradox, this hunger, danger, darkness, can we find at once ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves. It is this power of revelation which is the business of the novelist, this journey toward a more vast reality which must take precedence over all other claims. What is today parroted as his Responsibility – which seems to mean that he must make more formal declaration that he is involved in, and affected by, the lives of other people and to say something improving about this somewhat self-evident fact – is, when he believes it, his corruption and our loss; moreover, it is rooted in, interlocked with and intensifies this same mechanization. Both Gentleman’s Agreement and The Postman Always Rings twice exemplify this terror of the human being, the determination to cut him down to size. And in Uncle Tom’s Cabin we may find foreshadowing of both: the formula created by the necessity to find a lie more palatable than the truth has been handed down and memorized and persists yet with a terrible power.

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Showing Initiative

Excellent rant at Grist on how sustainability conferences are ubiquitous and incredibly boring. More grave than the ennui, however, is the other ‘how green saves you green’ schmack that is really the dumbing of the smarter part of such klaches, and reveals, again, how doing anything for money gets you to a place where you’ll only do anything if its for money. Pathetic and sad.

Seems like every single conference just HAMMERS on the idea that sustainability is a good idea but it’s also green both ways, and affordable. But it’s not. It’s friggin’ difficult, more like trench warfare than surgery, and sometimes ROI doesn’t exist. We still need to do it, but let’s not delude people about the on the ground reality. (One of the reasons lots of consultants think it’s cheap and easy and fun is that … they haven’t actually ever done the work!) This has been my consistent message, but this green is green thing is so much the sterotype that someone recently blurbed one of my talks as “Schendler talks about how sustainability is easy, simple, and cost effective,” even though my message is actually the exact opposite!

And the conferences’ issues with conflicts of interest from presenters is actually just as problematic. But this cheap and easy thing, that’s the major issue that obfuscates some of the real possibilities with the subject, especially if the connection to saving money could otherwise be an intro to or expansion on the triple bottom line concept.

Granted, watering down the profit stream is not a welcome idea; but neither is the fact that sustainability is not just about saving money. In fact – it’s not about saving money, right now, at all. It’s about saving your ass and that of your grand kids, which is usually cost prohibitive. The cba will tell you it’s not worth it – and in these terms, it’s not! But this is exactly the thinking that landed us in the place of having to discuss the dread prospect of sustainability in the first place! Onward! No. Just stay right here! Yay? That’s sustainability. And it’s… really not the word or theory we should be attempting to enshrine.

Relatedly, it reminds me of the general phenomenon of sustainability initiatives – which largely amount to discovering innovative methods for saving money at the corporate or institutional level within the guise of saving energy. There’s nothing wrong with saving money, and the case for energy efficiency can be made in exactly these terms. But many such measures could be much more effective as diktats to turn off half the lights in your office or work four ten-hour days, e.g., they don’t require in-depth conceptualizing. Retro-fitting buildings to be more energy efficient would be a lot less problematic if innovative elements of original, late-model designs (skylighting, cisterns) were not allowed to be stripped from the buildings plans, usually by outside consultants, to cut expenses. This happens everywhere as much as you probably imagine. And then, said institution concocts an initiative to find ways to do what the initial, supposedly more expensive design would have done (which, ex post facto, usually turn out to be way more expensive and in need of conceptualizing).

But it’s our nibbling-at-the-edges way of doing things. And now something’s nibbling at our edges. Ah, prophetic capitalism.

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Conceptual World

“He’s an idea man.” And this is not a pipe. So be it.

Fine, if that’s your line. I’m not recommending or blaming LeWitt, but when wondering as we may what has happened over the last however long to deposit us right here, well… there’s your art over the last forty years, and your world over the last fifty-five. Your artworld? I’m  not saying who’s following who, but… Well, fine, it’s just another idea: but let’s see you and what army take the subjectivity out of that little construct. S’whatifigured.

Uh oh.

Art that is meant for the sensation of the eye primarily would be called perceptual rather than conceptual. This would include most optical, kinetic, light, and color art.

Since the function of conception and perception are contradictory (one pre-, the other postfact) the artist would mitigate his idea by applying subjective judgment to it. If the artist wishes to explore his idea thoroughly, then arbitrary or chance decisions would be kept to a minimum, while caprice, taste and others whimsies would be eliminated from the making of the art. The work does not necessarily have to be rejected if it does not look well. Sometimes what is initially thought to be awkward will eventually be visually pleasing.

To work with a plan that is preset is one way of avoiding subjectivity. It also obviates the necessity of designing each work in turn. The plan would design the work. Some plans would require millions of variations, and some a limited number, but both are finite. Other plans imply infinity. In each case, however, the artist would select the basic form and rules that would govern the solution of the problem. After that the fewer decisions made in the course of completing the work, the better. This eliminates the arbitrary, the capricious, and the subjective as much as possible. This is the reason for using this method.

When an artist uses a multiple modular method he usually chooses a simple and readily available form. The form itself is of very limited importance; it becomes the grammar for the total work. In fact, it is best that the basic unit be deliberately uninteresting so that it may more easily become an intrinsic part of the entire work. Using complex basic forms only disrupts the unity of the whole. Using a simple form repeatedly narrows the field of the work and concentrates the intensity to the arrangement of the form. This arrangement becomes the end while the form becomes the means.

Good to know. Color art… I love it. Only serious amounts of Contract Bridge crosstalk could make a cloud fall from this rain. And speaking of miracles, objective amusement has unleashed upon us all the most resplendent of logical exponents. After all, before long.

And people need jobs, don’t forget; you can’t just stand around all day scratching your head about some damn color art cryptogram one-act. Unless it’s really good.

Limited resources and contracts signed and molding in a safe somewhere are not, conceptually speaking, cases which can be rescued by beautiful execution. And though this may seem like an incoherent digression, you didn’t see what I didn’t write.

At any rate, enemies closer.

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Spending Earning Giving Fighting

What does it look like? At Information is Beautiful, this picture generated from the idea of a Billion Dollar Gram. Click the link to get the breakdown.

On a related point, Grist features a new book, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, with an interview with the author. Says she:

IKEA names all its products to make stuff seem cute, but then they’re telling you, “You’re not really attached to this, are you crazy?” They’re getting you to laugh at and make a mockery out of the idea of durability. They make durability seem like an old-fashioned, passé idea. And it works. I think it’s really juvenilizing: “Oh, come on, you want a new toy. You always want a new toy.”

Particularly in the marketing of cell phones. You have a cell phone that works really well for you, and then you have a friend who has a cooler one, and you want it. That’s kind of 4-year-old behavior. When you have 3- or 4-year-olds, they want the new shiny thing. But as you get older and a little more mature—and I don’t mean 50, I mean 16 or 17—you learn that that’s not what it’s about. It’s about what works for me. Marketers obviously don’t want you to think that. In the case of the cell phone, they assume you’re going to use it for a year or less, and it’s not durable. Even if it is, they assume you’re going to junk it. I say, “Screw them!” If it works for you, hang on to it. Don’t buy into that, because basically, it’s all about them making a profit. It’s not about you and what you really want.

Progressive, Scandinavian company drugging us with disposable goods. Who can you trust?

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Managing the Advantage

I bring your attention to that least-sympathetic subset, the born rich. That would be you.

There is a difference between earning your living and doing what you’re supposed to be doing, e.g., that which challenges you and brings fulfillment while affording bread and shelter. This is a touchy subject, and many no doubt confuse one with the other. After all, aren’t we only meant to provide for ourselves and our children? For much of the world, securing this line of provisions is a great challenge. But just like finance, debt, food choices and room colors, we have expanded the meaning of this concept to cover much more than the essentials. Or rather, we have re-defined the essentials to include things and people other than those specifically ours.

Like it or not, this is a society characterized by distinct advantage, and advantage comes at the expense of someone or some thing. We get more food, more education, more attention as children, more time with family, more opportunity to pursue what we want than we likely deserve, especially in relation to people who happen to be born other places. And what do we do with all this advantage? Mostly waste it, zapping pixel spacemen and frightening ourselves that someone’s going to take something away from us, snorting garbage, building walls, worrying about taxes going for welfare (but not war). Expensive educations that only teach us how to make more money are a useless fraud and undermine our innocence at its most vulnerable point. We systemically remove that which is our only hope, and hence must fall back to dismal goals like mere sustainability.

I bring up the art of living very often on this site for a reason – its inescapable importance to contributing to some kind of forwardly manageable society – including its natural environment. You can learn how to do it but the window is tiny and requires a lot of unpleasantness like history, literature, science, philosophy, aesthetics and language. Relative unhappiness in your work might be the operative predicate for an effective sale pitch, but it’s a lousy reality. The backside of the Puritan work ethic on which this country was ostensibly built is that we come to naturally despise work – the implication being that if you love what you do, you’re not really working. If you doubt this, consult our lust for lotteries and other avenues to unearned riches. These are heinous and self-administered tricks, designed, like so much, merely to separate you from your money, and the cause of no small amount of suffering. Having the laugh on that count should be the whole point; revel in a seamless transition between work and life.

If we have to sell ourselves on a concept like altruism, enact laws – or worse, dangle the carrot of eternal salvation – just to get us to do the right things, we might as well just set the blender to puree, devolve into anarchy and start over again. There is a blatant self-interest in living well and actively supporting the same for others as a constituent part thereof. But it’s decidely not the self-interest we’ve been taught to admire and protect. The point is to expand the advantage. Do you know what that means?

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You and the Food You Rode In On

Over the course of six months living in rural France some years ago, I mysteriously lost about twelve pounds – without trying. Not only was I not trying to lose weight but, being on our second tour in the Vaucluse, Mrs. Green and I were in the throes of all of the delicious meats, vegetables, cheeses, fruits and local Rhone wines that were such an important part of living there. It can’t be overstated, the importance of the food to that place. In fact, besides the inexplicable late afternoon light, there is really not much else going there at all. Which is one reason why it’s a great place to write, among other things. Exercise consisted of mowing the acre out front of the farmhouse twice a month and biking 2 km to the village most every day. Which, when you think about it, is plenty.

But the point is, with all the chipolatas, Camembert, rose’, apricots and creme fraiche, coupled with a largely sedentary lifestyle,  I was baffled about the weight loss until I shared this with a friend upon our return. Without skipping a beat, she pointed out the obvious – that I had largely stopped eating processed food.

All that is to lead-in to this thoughtful post on the same subject, with some sliced media criticism on the side, by Juan Cole. Just go read it. Highly relevant to the current health care debates and everything green you might need to consider. At least on a quiet Sunday.

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Grace to Utility

John Ruskin was the pre-eminent Victorian art critic whose impact is precisely as diverse and long-lasting as the tenants on which any concept of ‘the art of life’ should be. His Fors Clavigera is a series of letters, published as pamphlets, addressed to the working men of Britain during the 1870’s; his Unto This Last was translated into Gujarati by Gandhi in 1908, after Ruskin’s ideas on the value of work inspired him to change his life.

The following is from his lecture, the Relation of Art to Use, part of his Lectures on Art, delivered at the University of Oxford in 1870.

Our subject of enquiry to-day, you will remember, is the mode in which fine art is founded upon, or may contribute to, the practical requirements of human life.

Its offices in this respect are mainly twofold: it gives Form to knowledge, and Grace to utility; that is to say, it makes permanently visible to us things which otherwise could neither be described by our science, nor retained by our memory; and it gives delightfulness and worth to the implements of daily use, and materials of dress, furniture and lodging. In the first of these offices it gives precision and charm to truth; in the second it gives precision and charm to service. For, the moment we make anything useful thoroughly, it is a law of nature that we shall be pleased with ourselves, and with the thing we have made; and become desirous therefore to adorn or complete it, in some dainty way, with finer art expressive of our pleasure.

And the point I wish chiefly to bring before you to-day is this close and healthy connection of the fine arts with material use; but I must first try briefly to put in clear light the function of art in giving Form to truth.

Much that I have hitherto tried to teach has been disputed on the ground that I have attached too much importance to art as representing natural facts, and too little to it as a source of pleasure. And I wish, in the close of these four prefatory lectures, strongly to assert to you, and, so far as I can in the time, convince you, that the entire vitality of art depends upon its being either full of truth, or full of use; and that, however pleasant, wonderful or impressive it may be in itself, it must yet be of inferior kind, and tend to deeper inferiority, unless it has clearly one of these main objects,—either to state a true thing, or to adorn a serviceable one. It must never exist alone—never for itself; it exists rightly only when it is the means of knowledge, or the grace of agency for life.

Now, I pray you to observe—for though I have said this often before, I have never yet said it clearly enough—every good piece of art, to whichever of these ends it may be directed, involves first essentially the evidence of human skill and the formation of an actually beautiful thing by it.

Skill, and beauty, always then; and, beyond these, the formative arts have always one or other of the two objects which I have just defined to you—truth, or serviceableness; and without these aims neither the skill nor their beauty will avail; only by these can either legitimately reign. All the graphic arts begin in keeping the outline of shadow that we have loved, and they end in giving to it the aspect of life; and all the architectural arts begin in the shaping of the cup and the platter, and they end in a glorified roof.

Therefore, you see, in the graphic arts you have Skill, Beauty, and Likeness; and in the architectural arts, Skill, Beauty, and Use; and you must have the three in each group, balanced and co-ordinate; and all the chief errors of art consist in losing or exaggerating one of these elements.

For instance, almost the whole system and hope of modern life are founded on the notion that you may substitute mechanism for skill, photograph for picture, cast-iron for sculpture. That is your main nineteenth-century faith, or infidelity. You think you can get everything by grinding—music, literature, and painting. You will find it grievously not so; you can get nothing but dust by mere grinding. Even to have the barley-meal out of it, you must have the barley first; and that comes by growth, not grinding. But essentially, we have lost our delight in Skill; in that majesty of it which I was trying to make clear to you in my last address, and which long ago I tried to express, under the head of ideas of power. The entire sense of that, we have lost, because we ourselves do not take pains enough to do right, and have no conception of what the right costs; so that all the joy and reverence we ought to feel in looking at a strong man’s work have ceased in us. We keep them yet a little in looking at a honeycomb or a bird’s-nest; we understand that these differ, by divinity of skill, from a lump of wax or a cluster of sticks. But a picture, which is a much more wonderful thing than a honeycomb or a bird’s-nest,—have we not known people, and sensible people too, who expected to be taught to produce that, in six lessons?

Well, you must have the skill, you must have the beauty, which is the highest moral element; and then, lastly, you must have the verity or utility, which is not the moral, but the vital element; and this desire for verity and use is the one aim of the three that always leads in great schools, and in the minds of great masters, without any exception. They will permit themselves in awkwardness, they will permit themselves in ugliness; but they will never permit themselves in uselessness or in unveracity.

And farther, as their skill increases, and as their grace, so much more, their desire for truth. It is impossible to find the three motives in fairer balance and harmony than in our own Reynolds. He rejoices in showing you his skill; and those of you who succeed in learning what painter’s work really is, will one day rejoice also, even to laughter—that highest laughter which springs of pure delight, in watching the fortitude and the fire of a hand which strikes forth its will upon the canvas as easily as the wind strikes it on the sea. He rejoices in all abstract beauty and rhythm and melody of design; he will never give you a colour that is not lovely, nor a shade that is unnecessary, nor a line that is ungraceful. But all his power and all his invention are held by him subordinate,—and the more obediently because of their nobleness,—to his true leading purpose of setting before you such likeness of the living presence of an English gentleman or an English lady, as shall be worthy of being looked upon for ever.

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Science… So What?

principal drawing of a caisson. cc wikimedia
principal drawing of a caisson. cc wikimedia

So Everything. Thus spaketh this fancy new U.K. site. Whether you’re wondering why the sky is blue or arguing with your friends at the bar over what a caisson is*, it seems like a good place to go for answers, as well as explanations for why science is important. As if anybody would possibly need that. The site seems to be predicated on being a destination/resource for kids, but I really don’t see how we’re availed of such distinctions.

*Actually, if your barman isn’t handy with a Webster’s Dictionary to settle such fraci – which can escalate – you should seek improvement in your level of watering hole.