I guess it is video week here on the green site. It’s hilarious they chose to move the Space Shuttle this way. Though I don’t know how else to do it, it sort of has the feel of moving a cow in a hot air balloon. I saw some nice snaps on fB but this time lapse movie is cool – nice pictures, graceful juxtapositions.
The iPhone 5
Some of the many problems with the new iPhone 5 were formally aired in this important exchange between makers and end users of the product.
Be Sufficient Temptation
New paragraphs are so over-rated; what’s wrong with the old one? Behold, this passage from Proust’s La Fugitive, or The Sweet Cheat Gone, often construed as Vol. 6 of À la Recherche du temps perdu, so I guess it is. This from chapter three – Venice.
Sometimes at dusk as I returned to the hotel I felt that the Albertine of long ago invisible to my eyes was nevertheless enclosed within me as in the dungeons of an internal Venice, the solid walls of which some incident occasionally slid apart so as to give me a glimpse of that past.
Thus for instance one evening a letter from my stockbroker reopened for me for an instant the gates of the prison in which Albertine abode within me alive, but so remote, so profoundly buried that she remained inaccessible to me. Since her death I had ceased to take any interest in the speculations that I had made in order to have more money for her. But time had passed; the wisest judgments of the previous generation had been proved unwise by this generation, as had occurred in the past to M. Thiers who had said that railways could never prove successful. The stocks of which M. de Norpois had said to us: “even if your income from them is nothing very great, you may be certain of never losing any of your capital,” were, more often than not, those which had declined most in value. Calls had been made upon me for considerable sums and in a rash moment I decided to sell out everything and found that I now possessed barely a fifth of the fortune that I had had when Albertine was alive. This became known at Combray among the survivors of our family circle and their friends, and, as they knew that I went about with the Marquis de Saint-Loup and the Guermantes family, they said to themselves: “Pride goes before a fall!” They would have been greatly astonished to learn that it was for a girl of Albertine’s humble position that I had made these speculations. Besides, in that Combray world in which everyone is classified for ever according to the income that he is known to enjoy, as in an Indian caste, it would have been impossible for anyone to form any idea of the great freedom that prevailed in the world of the Guermantes where people attached no importance to wealth, and where poverty was regarded as being as disagreeable, but no more degrading, as having no more effect on a person’s social position than would a stomachache. Doubtless they imagined, on the contrary, at Combray that Saint-Loup and M. de Guermantes must be ruined aristocrats, whose estates were mortgaged, to whom I had been lending money, whereas if I had been ruined they would have been the first to offer in all sincerity to come to my assistance. As for my comparative penury, it was all the more awkward at the moment inasmuch as my Venetian interests had been concentrated for some little time past on a rosy-cheeked young glass-vendor who offered to the delighted eye a whole range of orange tones and filled me with such a longing to see her again daily that, feeling that my mother and I would soon be leaving Venice, I had made up my mind that I would try to create some sort of position for her in Paris which would save me the distress of parting from her. The beauty of her seventeen summers was so noble, so radiant, that it was like acquiring a genuine Titian before leaving the place. And would the scant remains of my fortune be sufficient temptation to her to make her leave her native land and come to live in Paris for my sole convenience? But as I came to the end of the stockbroker’s letter, a passage in which he said: “I shall look after your credits” reminded me of a scarcely less hypocritically professional expression which the bath-attendant at Balbec had used in speaking to Aimé of Albertine. “It was I that looked after her,” she had said, and these words which had never again entered my mind acted like an ‘Open, sesame!’ upon the hinges of the prison door. But a moment later the door closed once more upon the immured victim — whom I was not to blame for not wishing to join, since I was no longer able to see her, to call her to mind, and since other people exist for us only to the extent of the idea that we retain of them — who had for an instant seemed to me so touching because of my desertion of her, albeit she was unaware of it, that I had for the duration of a lightning-flash thought with longing of the time, already remote, when I used to suffer night and day from the companionship of her memory. Another time at San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, an eagle accompanying one of the Apostles and conventionalised in the same manner revived the memory and almost the suffering caused by the two rings the similarity of which Françoise had revealed to me, and as to which I had never learned who had given them to Albertine. Finally, one evening, an incident occurred of such a nature that it seemed as though my love must revive. No sooner had our gondola stopped at the hotel steps than the porter handed me a telegram which the messenger had already brought three times to the hotel, for owing to the inaccurate rendering of the recipient’s name (which I recognised nevertheless, through the corruptions introduced by Italian clerks, as my own) the post-office required a signed receipt certifying that the telegram was addressed to myself. I opened it as soon as I was in my own room, and, as I cast my eye over the sheet covered with inaccurately transmitted words, managed nevertheless to make out: “My dear, you think me dead, forgive me, I am quite alive, should like to see you, talk about marriage, when do you return? Love. Albertine.” Then there occurred in me in inverse order a process parallel to that which had occurred in the case of my grandmother: when I had learned the fact of my grandmother’s death, I had not at first felt any grief. And I had been really grieved by her death only when spontaneous memories had made her seem to me to be once again alive. Now that Albertine was no longer alive for me in my mind, the news that she was alive did not cause me the joy that I might have expected. Albertine had been nothing more to me than a bundle of thoughts, she had survived her bodily death so long as those thoughts were alive in me; on the other hand, now that those thoughts were dead, Albertine did not in any way revive for me, in her bodily form. And when I realised that I felt no joy at the thought of her being alive, that I no longer loved her, I ought to have been more astounded than a person who, looking at his reflexion in the glass, after months of travel, or of sickness, discovers that he has white hair and a different face, that of a middle-aged or an old man. This appalls us because its message is: “the man that I was, the fair young man no longer exists, I am another person.” And yet, was not the impression that I now felt the proof of as profound a change, as total a death of my former self and of the no less complete substitution of a new self for that former self, as is proved by the sight of a wrinkled face capped with a snowy poll instead of the face of long ago? But we are no more disturbed by the fact of our having become another person, after a lapse of years and in the natural order of events, than we are disturbed at any given moment by the fact of our being, one after another, the incompatible persons, crafty, sensitive, refined, coarse, disinterested, ambitious, which we are, in turn, every day of our life. And the reason why this does not disturb us is the same, namely that the self which has been eclipsed — momentarily in this latter case and when it is a question of character, permanently in the former case and when it is a matter of passions — is not present to deplore the other, the other which is for the moment, or for all time, our whole self; the coarse self laughs at his own coarseness, for he is a coarse person, and the forgetful man does not worry about his loss of memory, simply because he has forgotten.
I’ve got to get back to my Venice movie.
Green car Go
Via IC, notoriously unreliable fuel source causing chaos in California. If California is the future and $5 gas prices are the present, are you still following me and I don’t mean on the twitter machine?
Unless he’s been reading the news, my neighbor probably has no idea that California is enduring a sudden, surprising and, for other people, very painful spike in gasoline prices, which in some parts of the Southland have crossed the $5-a-gallon mark. This is creating a serious economic hardship for many. After all, not everybody can afford a $35,000 electric car to replace their gas-guzzler, and $90 or more to fill the tank of an SUV is real money. That got me wondering: When you consider all the costs of owning and operating a new car in this environment of soaring gas prices, is my neighbor a genius or a chump?
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Alternative Fuels Data Center has an interesting tool on its website for comparing the costs of fuel and ownership of nearly every motor vehicle sold in the U.S. I compared my neighbor’s Leaf to seven other popular 2012 gas-powered models, including the hybrid Toyota Prius, given current local electricity prices and figuring the average current price of gas at $4.75 a gallon. Here’s what I came up with:
Fuel costs for the Leaf come to 22 cents per mile, far lower than any other car on my list (the other models I picked, besides the Prius, were the BMW 328i luxury sedan, Ford Focus compact, Honda Civic compact, Honda CR-V crossover, Mini Cooper subcompact and Toyota Camry sedan). The popular Prius hybrid, no surprise, was the next cheapest to fuel, at 29 cents per mile. Closest behind were the Focus at 33 cents per mile and the Mini at 34 cents. Turning to annual operating cost, the Leaf is again a big winner at $2,629, followed by the Prius at $3,407, the Focus at $3,985 and the Mini at $4,031. The most expensive vehicle on my list to operate was the 328i at $4,998, but I doubt many Beemer owners care.
I don’t wish it on you but gas prices are going to climb, just we were saying four years ago – check the archives there to your right. All of that still holds. Live where you can ride a bike, train or walk. Restart your conversations. With people.
Image: Green car from here.
Prodigious strength and generosity of spirit
Finally, some Frida reading on Friday. Since it is Banned Books week and I’m reading from Miller’s Tropic of Cancer at an event tomorrow, I’m going through that and have found some gems that I was going to remind you of. But I also found this review of what sounds like a great new book about Alexandre Dumas’ father, on whom he based one of my favorite books ever, The Count of Monte Cristo:
For Edmond Dantès, both winner and loser at the novel’s centre, is to a significant extent modelled on no less a figure than General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas – father of the novelist, French Revolutionary hero, Napoleonic warrior, and a slave-born mulatto of amazing physical strength and greatness of heart: heroic, in short, to the marrow of his bones.
Monte Cristo, it turns out, was more than just the little Mediterranean islet of the book title. Looking much further westwards in the atlas, we find it marked as a port on the island of Hispaniola, which nowadays is partitioned into Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The future general was born in 1762 in the French sugar colony of Saint-Domingue, in the western half of the island. He was the son of a black slave, Marie-Cessette, and a renegade Norman aristocrat, Alexandre-Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie, who, having paid a high price for Marie-Cessette’s beauty, fathered three more children before selling her off to a merchant from Nantes.
French Enlightenment values meant that young Thomas-Alexandre (known as Alex), brought to France in servitude by his father, was free once he stepped ashore. The pair moved into the smart suburb of Saint-Germain-en-Laye and the fifteen-year-old boy found himself addressed as ‘Monsieur le Comte’. He was kitted out by a court tailor and enrolled at the royal fencing academy, where he learned dancing, music, mathematics and philosophy.
…
On the way home from Egypt, Dumas was captured and imprisoned at Taranto by officers of the Holy Faith Army, a ragtag-and-bobtail force busy massacring republicans, liberals and Jews in the name of King Ferdinand of Naples. Two years of frantic petitioning by Marie-Louise Dumas proved useless and the dungeon door was only unlocked when French forces finally seized control of southern Italy, allowing her husband to totter homewards, wracked with the cancer that would soon kill him. Inevitably his appeals for financial assistance were ignored and, though not cashiered from the army, he was pointedly cold-shouldered by his brother officers. ‘Whatever my sufferings and pains,’ Dumas declared, ‘I will always find enough moral force to fly to the rescue of my country at the first request the government sends me.’ No such summons ever arrived.
Did Napoleon, morally contemptible as he was, effectively kill the general? Dumas’s son, a yet more famous Alexandre, certainly believed so and Reiss presents a plausible case for Edmond Dantès, Monte Cristo‘s wronged hero, as an avatar of the lost father, some of whose prodigious strength and generosity of spirit the novelist inherited. Clearly Dumas cherished memories of the relatively brief time they spent together – a mere four years, cruelly ended by his father’s death – but the devotion went far deeper than orthodox filial piety.
Indeed it did. ‘Best served cold’ in its proper context.
Eric Hobsbawm, RIP
The world lost Marxist historian (in every sense of that phrase) Eric Hobsbawm this week at 95, truly a giant of scholarship who lived through the very times that shaped him. I kid, of course. We are all doing this. It’s just that some are decidedly less swayed than others:
“Every historian has his or her lifetime, a private perch from which to survey the world,” he said in his 1993 Creighton lecture, one of several occasions in his later years when he attempted to relate his own lifetime to his own writing. “My own perch is constructed, among other materials, of a childhood in the Vienna of the 1920s, the years of Hitler’s rise in Berlin, which determined my politics and my interest in history, and the England, and especially the Cambridge, of the 1930s, which confirmed both.”
In 1919, the young family settled in Vienna, where Eric went to elementary school, a period he later recalled in a 1995 television documentary which featured pictures of a recognisably skinny young Viennese Hobsbawm in shorts and knee socks. Politics made their impact around this time. Eric’s first political memory was in Vienna in 1927, when workers burned down the Palace of Justice. The first political conversation that he could recall took place in an Alpine sanatorium in these years, too. Two motherly Jewish women were discussing Leon Trotsky. “Say what you like,” said one to the other, “but he’s a Jewish boy called Bronstein.”
In 1929 his father died suddenly of a heart attack. Two years later his mother died of TB. Eric was 14, and his Uncle Sidney took charge once more, taking Eric and his sister Nancy to live in Berlin. As a teenager in Weimar Republic Berlin, Eric inescapably became politicised. He read Marx for the first time, and became a communist.
He could always remember the day in January 1933 when, emerging from the Halensee S-Bahn station on his way home from his school, the celebrated Prinz Heinrich Gymnasium, he saw a newspaper headline announcing Hitler’s election as chancellor. Around this time he joined the Socialist Schoolboys, which he described as “de facto part of the communist movement” and sold its publication, Schulkampf (School Struggle). He kept the organisation’s duplicator under his bed and, if his later facility for writing was any guide, probably wrote most of the articles too. The family remained in Berlin until 1933, when Sidney Hobsbawm was posted by his employers to England.
The gangly teenage boy who settled with his sister in Edgware in 1934 described himself later as “completely continental and German speaking”. School, though, was “not a problem” because the English education system was “way behind” the German. A cousin in Balham introduced him to jazz for the first time – the “unanswerable sound”, he called it. The moment of conversion, he wrote some 60 years later, was when he first heard the Duke Ellington band “at its most imperial”. He spent a period in the 1950s as jazz critic of the New Statesman, and published a Penguin Special, The Jazz Scene, on the subject in 1959 under the pen-name Francis Newton (many years later it was reissued with Hobsbawm identified as the author).
Read the whole thing and don’t worry about the Marxist cooties getting on you. Sort of Friday Reading on Tuesday, my gift to you, of his gifts to us.
What Happened to the Movies
Smoking the Wrong End
I couldn’t write anything for a couple of days, but not because I couldn’t top ‘pinyon’ in the subject line, thank you very much.
With all the gloating about Romney’s Doofus Act this far out from the election, we should remember not to play in their hands. The reality of Romney, the entire dimensions of its scandalous fraudulence, is the fault of the Republican Party and its insanity refineries around the southern parts of the country, as much if not more than any of it actually belongs to him. Pierce:
The biggest problem with Romney’s campaign is its utter incoherence, which stems from the fact that he had to romance a Republican primary electorate that is clearly demented. The root of the campaign’s fundamental dishonesty, which is what has led to its incoherence in the first place, is the fact that the Republican primary electorate forced Romney to renounce the only real achievement he has as an elected politician — the Massachusetts health-care reform. Once you find you have to lie about all the good you did, what does the rest of it really matter?
Yes, do tell. And now, in a bit of very hopeful convergence, what I would really like is for some reporter to ask the President what he thinks about the NFL right about now. And I would like for the President to say that, of course he likes the NFL, likes to drink beer and watch it like some others do, and so he hates what is going on now with the owners trying to turn the refs’ pensions into 401(k)s but that this sort of thing has been happening for a while now. Let’s let that discussion burst out into the open now, too, while we’re at it.
That’s what I would like.
‘Till the pinyons get ripe
The 30th anniversary of Banned Books Week is coming up on Sept.30, and it’s amazing how scary words can be. Banning knowledge is exemplary of fear and weakness, Genesis 2:17 notwithstanding. Or sitting.
In that spirit, because it’s Friday and you’re the priest, here’s a little Upton Sinclair. I know The Jungle was banned at one time, though I don’t know about this one, maybe it’s time is coming. This is the beginning section 3 from the novel King Coal, by Sinclair.
Hal Warner started to drag himself down the road, but was unable to make it. He got as far as a brooklet that came down the mountain-side, from which he might drink without fear of typhoid; there he lay the whole day, fasting. Towards evening a thunder-storm came up, and he crawled under the shelter of a rock, which was no shelter at all. His single blanket was soon soaked through, and he passed a night almost as miserable as the previous one. He could not sleep, but he could think, and he thought about what had happened to him. "Bill" had said that a coal mine was not a foot-ball field, but it seemed to Hal that the net impress of the two was very much the same. He congratulated himself that his profession was not that of a union organiser. At dawn he dragged himself up, and continued his journey, weak from cold and unaccustomed lack of food. In the course of the day he reached a power-station near the foot of the canyon. He did not have the price of a meal, and was afraid to beg; but in one of the group of buildings by the roadside was a store, and he entered and inquired concerning prunes, which were twenty-five cents a pound. The price was high, but so was the altitude, and as Hal found in the course of time, they explained the one by the other--not explaining, however, why the altitude of the price was always greater than the altitude of the store. Over the counter he saw a sign: "We buy scrip at ten per cent discount." He had heard rumours of a state law forbidding payment of wages in "scrip"; but he asked no questions, and carried off his very light pound of prunes, and sat down by the roadside and munched them. Just beyond the power-house, down on the railroad track, stood a little cabin with a garden behind it. He made his way there, and found a one-legged old watchman. He asked permission to spend the night on the floor of the cabin; and seeing the old fellow look at his black eye, he explained, "I tried to get a job at the mine, and they thought I was a union organiser." "Well," said the man, "I don't want no union organisers round here." "But I'm not one," pleaded Hal. "How do I know what you are? Maybe you're a company spy." "All I want is a dry place to sleep," said Hal. "Surely it won't be any harm for you to give me that." "I'm not so sure," the other answered. "However, you can spread your blanket in the corner. But don't you talk no union business to me." Hal had no desire to talk. He rolled himself in his blanket and slept like a man untroubled by either love or curiosity. In the morning the old fellow gave him a slice of corn bread and some young onions out of his garden, which had a more delicious taste than any breakfast that had ever been served him. When Hal thanked his host in parting, the latter remarked: "All right, young fellow, there's one thing you can do to pay me, and that is, say nothing about it. When a man has grey hair on his head and only one leg, he might as well be drowned in the creek as lose his job." Hal promised, and went his way. His bruises pained him less, and he was able to walk. There were ranch-houses in sight--it was like coming back suddenly to America!
Move on
The original idea behind the name of the group Moveon.org was aimed at Congress to get past nominal indiscretions perpetrated by Bill Clinton in the Oval Office and deal with more pressing issues. Balance on climate change is largely the same problem for PBS, which cannot seem to accept global climate change as settled science and so must continually provide denialists a counterpoint to…? I don’t know what but it’s very annoying.
Last night, PBS NewsHour turned to meteorologist and climate change contrarian Anthony Watts to “counterbalance” the mainstream scientific opinions presented by the program. This false balance is a disservice to PBS’ viewers, made worse by the program’s failure to explain Watts’ connection to the Heartland Institute, an organization that receives funding from some corporations with a financial interest in confusing the public on climate science.
While PBS mentioned that 97 percent of climate scientists agree that manmade global warming is occurring, it did not reflect this consensus by giving significant airtime to Watts’ contrarian views. The segment presented Watts as the counterbalance to scientists that believe in manmade global warming — every time a statement that reflects the scientific consensus was aired, in came Watts to cast doubt in viewers’ minds.
As Revkin explains and is mentioned in the MM piece, the goal of groups like the Heartland Institute is segments just like this. They don’t exist to further the science, but to distract from solving the problem. That’s a story; that the fossil energy industry doesn’t buy AGW is not. I’ll soon be hosting an interview show on PBS affiliate and so don’t know whether this makes my criticism more or less valid. But come on.
And this is the rubber-glue Romney strategy as employed by Watts in the PBS piece, accusing global warming of becoming a big business as Watts does when it’s denial that has actually become an industry in its own right, funding astro think tanks and employing former TV weathermen to further a controversy that serves the interests of more of the same, in terms of polluting, non-renewable energy.