The Star Hustler Passes

We were sad to hear today that Jack Horkheimer died late last week. Mr. Horkheimer did more than anybody to popularize naked eye astronomy.

There's plenty up there worth looking at with just your eyes -- or better yet, a pair of binoculars. Just dig out your binocs (the larger the light-gathering lens is, the better), Google the words "binocular astronomy," and you're set to go.

Above is Jack's last show.

In case you are wondering about the title of this post, The Star Hustler used to be the title of his little show. According to the above-linked story, the advent of the internet forced him to change it. It seems that youngsters who Googled "star hustler" got an eyeful when this led them to the web page for Hustler magazine. So he became The Star Gazer.

His seemingly indestructible enthusiasm will be missed.

Keep looking up!

Paul Samuelson, RIP

Economist Paul Samuelson died on the thirteenth. His text, Economics, was for decades the most widely used econ text, probably in the world. I once heard it described as the biggest selling textbook on any subject. His influence was literally incalculable.

Samuelson famously said: "I don't care who writes a nation's laws–or crafts its advanced treaties–if I can write its economics textbooks."

This week, a less well known quotation has been reported in the blogs. Allegedly, in the 1989 edition of his text, he said this: ""The Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and even thrive."

As every schoolboy knows, that date, 1989, indicates that Samuelson wrote this just before the Soviet Union collapsed from internal rot.

Other Samuelson quotes reported this week include these:

'It is a vulgar mistake to think that most people in Eastern Europe are miserable." [1981]

"What counts is results, and there can be no doubt that the Soviet planning system has been a powerful engine for economic growth...The Soviet model has surely demonstrated that a command economy is capable of mobilizing resources for rapid growth." [1985]

Surely, he is a tragic instance of the fact that academic prestige and technical proficiency can go together with disastrous ignorance and error in things that really matter. Indeed, the one can conceal and propagate the other.

Edward Kennedy, 1932-2009

Even on Fox News, the coverage has ranged from respectful to reverent.

What the Hell? I just drove 500 miles in the past two days, and only saw one flag that was not at half staff.* Isn't that unusual for a mere Senator? What did they do when Bob ("Mr. Republican") Taft died, I wonder?

When did this man become a saint? I don't think I got that email.

The last time I paid any attention to him, he was still a hard-drinking, philandering jerk. But that admittedly was almost twenty years ago, when he was in his fifties and his ideas about fun leisure-time activities were the same as those of certain undergraduates on spring break in Cancún. My information, I realize, is badly out of date.

Somebody on Fox said that he sponsored over 2,000 pieces of legislation, as if that were a good thing. As if what we really need now is more rules and regulations, and anybody who slaps a lot more of them on us is doing us a great service.

I would like to know how many laws he repealed.

By the way, Maryjo Kopechne would have turned 69 on July 26th.
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* I also never saw a single Obama sticker on a bumper. McCain yes, and even Kerry, yes. Also anti-Obama stickers. But here in a state that gave him 10 electoral college votes all the Obama-Biden stickers have disappeared. Sup wit dat? Have those cars all gone into that vast, potlatch-like destruction of wealth, the "cash for clunkers" program? Or have the the stickers been peeled off out of shame? (On that one I am kidding of course. Voters almost never feel morally responsible for the consequences of their votes. One of the most distinctive features of democracy is the almost complete obliteration of responsibility on the part of the sovereign, which in democracy is the voter.)

Les Paul, 1915-2009

Les Paul, one of the real geniuses of popular music, died yesterday.

The first hit song I can remember hearing on the radio was Les and Mary singing "Mockin' Bird Hill" (1951).

Here are the opening words of the song:

When the sun in the morning peeps over the hill,
And kisses the roses 'round my window sill,
Then my heart fills with gladness when I hear the trill
Of the birds in the treetops on Mockin' Bird Hill.

Tra la la, tweedle dee dee dee
It gives me a thrill,
To wake up in the morning
To the mockin' bird's trill.
Tra la la tweedle dee dee dee
There's peace and good will;
You're welcome as the flowers
On Mockin' Bird Hill

It expresses a sense of the promise of beauty and happiness in the world, a feeling most of us had as children, though many lose it by the time they become adults. Thereafter, we typically only get it in little bursts and glimpses. Words of art help us to maintain it more continuously.

Adios maestro, and thanks for the happiness you brought us. Requiescat in pace.

William B. Macomber, 1929-2009

I recently got the devastating, long-dreaded news that my old teacher and friend, Bill Macomber died. He died on Father's Day, just shy of his eightieth birthday.

To the left is a picture of him in his office, talking to students, from the University of California at Santa Barbara yearbook and dates from about 1970. I have kept it with me ever since and it is now on the wall of my office at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Below is a picture I took of him in the summer of 1991, when he was living in a cheap apartment in a scary neighborhood in Oakland. He is holding a cigarette holder, a cheap lighter, and one of his half-Camels. (Bill thought that cutting his cigarettes in half would help him to smoke less.)

Maybe the best memorial I can present him here is to offer a short segment from an essay I wrote recently in which I talk about him. The essay is an attack on the current practice of evaluating university teaching solely on the basis of anonymous student evaluations:

I think I can best introduce this problem by telling a story. Unfortunately, it is a true one. During the sixties there was a professor of philosophy, William B. Macomber, whom I knew both as his student and his teaching assistant. Of all the teachers I had, he is the one who had, and continues to have, thirty years later, the most powerful influence on the way I think and the way I teach. He was, it is very safe to say, a controversial teacher. He was most notorious for his Introduction to Philosophy course, which had an enrollment of over 700 students. There was only one assigned reading: one of Plato’s “erotic dialogues” (one semester it was the Symposium and the next time it was the Phaedrus). The exams were all multiple choice, and were meant simply to make sure that students did the readings and attended the lecture. The only other assignment was to write a paper. The lectures were brilliant, but otherwise hard to describe. They were a mixture of argument, epigram, and anecdote. The anecdotes were mainly about his own life. His basic thesis was that the ideals envisioned by the ancient Greeks, especially Plato, have never been surpassed, and that our own civilization is in comparison, denatured and decadent. It has been corrupted in every aspect, but especially in its educational system, by the influence of Christianity. He frequently referred to his own homosexuality, relating it to the homosexuality of Plato, and using the very different attitudes toward homosexuality in Christianity and the Hellenic world to illustrate the (in his view) deep divide between these two civilizations. In their papers, the students were to defend their views on one of the issues touched on in the lectures, and it was expected that in many cases they would of course disagree with the professor.

Like the lectures, student reactions to Macomber are difficult to describe. As I have said, he was controversial: by this I mean that students either loved him or hated him. Someone who is universally loathed is not controversial, no more than one who is universally loved. This of course was no accident. In another of his courses he handed out copies of an essay by the classicist, William Arrowsmith, called “Turbulent Teachers: The Heart of Education,” to justify he own educational practices. In that essay, Arrowsmith argued that the principal aim of a liberal education, especially in the humanities, is to show the student that “a great humanity exists.” Since human consciousness does not normally and naturally have much contact with the ways of thinking represented by the great creators of culture, the function of the teacher must be primarily to go against the grain of our ordinary ways of thinking. Inevitably, this means they must upset us and stir us up. Obviously, this is what Macomber was doing. It was widely believed by the faculty in our department that his courses inspired more people to become philosophy majors than those of any other instructor. Partly for this reason, and also because of his having recently published a distinguished book, some of us were confident he would get tenure. He didn’t, and he never worked in the academy again.

I have often thought of him as an early casualty of the anonymous student course evaluations. At the time Macomber was fired, our department had only been using them for a year or two. All the people who were teaching at that time had developed their pedagogical styles in a completely different regime, in which teaching quality was typically either evaluated by faculty or simply ignored. Some of them were still using methods and approaches that could not well survive in the new system. Those who did not change fast enough would have to face some unpleasant consequences, such as, if one is not already protected by tenure, being fired.

Of course, it would be difficult, after all these years, to show that this is what actually happened. (For whatever this information might be worth, I asked him five years ago about the evaluations he got in those courses, and he said that all he could remember was that "they were dreadful," and that they were noticed by the people who had control over his tenure decision.) However, what is really important is to realize that this is just the sort of thing that would happen in a regime of numbers-driven student evaluation of teaching. Arrowsmithian pedagogy is not well adapted to survive in the numbers-dominated academy. The new regime rewards people who can identify, and practice, behavioral strategies that please students. But that is obvious, and it is not the point I wish to make here. The point is that not all strategies of pleasing others are the same, and the new regime systematically discriminates between such strategies. Some of the things that we do that please others are displeasing to no one. They may not please everyone, but they are inoffensive. Others are pleasing to some but displeasing to others. Macomber was a master of the latter sort of strategy. It is entirely the wrong sort of strategy to be using in the numbers-dominated regime. If one student gives me a 5 (the highest score in our department) on the question about my overall effectiveness and another gives me a 1, they do not merely cancel each other out and disappear from the world. They average to a 2.5, which is substantially below average in my department. If I make one student loathe me, I have to get at least one student to love me, just to approach the semblance of mediocrity.

When such a system is linked to pay-raises for teachers, it is obvious that it will result in a massive (if subtle on the micro-level) change in pedagogical behavior. My point is not that this change represents a shift from a superior style of teaching to an inferior style. It is rather that it constitutes an arbitrary narrowing of the array of available styles. Defenders of anonymous student course evaluations sometimes point out that they have virtually done away with a certain obnoxious method of teaching, memorably embodied by John Houseman in the film and television series The Paper Chase, in which the professor motivates students to study by humiliating the ill-prepared in front of the whole class. This, I think, is substantially true. I would only point out that it does more than that. It harshly discourages the use of any pedagogical technique that can be expected to be abrasive, annoying, or upsetting to anyone. In the current regime, the most rational course is to choose strategies that are inoffensive.

Here is the obituary that appeared in the Redlands Daily Facts for July 2:

William Burns Macomber, PhD, born in Redlands on July 13, 1929, he passed away here June 21, 2009. His siblings John, Robert, and Mary Gene preceded him in death. From childhood, he was dedicated to achieving academic excellence. Upon graduating from Santa Clara University, he served 3 years in the Army during the Korean War. He then resumed his studies abroad at the University of Heildelberg and at the Institute Catholique in Paris. Returning to North America he continued his studies at the University of Toronto Pontifical Institute where he taught for 9 years and earned his PhD. His thesis on Martin Heidegger, "The Anatomy of Disillusion," was published in 1968. He taught at UCSB from 1965 to 1973. His latter years were spent in his home town of Redlands.

Michael-Mania

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When I came out of a stay in the wilderness on Thursday, I checked into a private campground. Almost the the first human speech I had heard in days was the lady at the campground office, a perfect stranger, telling me "Michael Jackson died!"

Now, five days later, the news channels are starting to talk about other things. The weekend that just ended reminded me of the weekend after John Kennedy was shot (which happened on a Friday) -- a weekend in which the media seemed to have only one thing on their mind.

These have been five days during which Americans who listens to music that is not transparently easy to understand at first listening, or who occasionally read a book, has been reminded that most of the people in this country aren't like them at all.

I suppose this is a good thing to remember every once in a while. We live in a system of capitalist democracy, which means everything is driven by the voter/consumer. The tastes and interests of l'homme moyen sensuel explain a lot of what we see in the public forum. Why is Congress jamming through a crippling anti-global-warming bill, though there has been no global warming since 1998? Why did we go to war against Iraq, a country that posed no threat to us whatsoever? We have here is not the whole answer, but surely it is an indispensable part of it.

I find this rather comforting, oddly enough. The world is not really insane, as it often seems. It just isn't terribly bright. That's better. Isn't it?
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Added later: It is now a week since his passing and, turning on the TV, I see that CNN, Headline News, Fox, and MSNBC are all talking about him simultaneously. I gather that he is still dead, and turn the thing off.

A Little Poem About Mass Suicide

When my old friend and teacher Don Emblen died, I figured I should put a couple of his poems on line. Don abhorred almost everything electronic, and it is probably for that reason that there are few traces of him on the web. Such are the wages of Luddism!

The one poem I could find was posted by fellow former student Glenn Ingersoll here. It's a pretty good one, I think. So good, in fact, that I can't seem to find a better one.

Another one I liked, at any rate, is from the same book as the above one, Notes from Travels (Santa Rosa: Engdahl Typography, 1986). It has a pronounced Jeffersian tone:

Back Country

Farther out, there still are caves in the rock
where mountain lions pace
and clean their claws on the granite
before or after the kill.

Later, comes the purity
after leather scuff of pads,
whine of insects at the opening,
owls like velvet gongs haunting the old oaks.

Finally, the canyon night resorbs
the song of gnats;
the night-hunters drown in their own feathers;
the purring seeps surely into stone
and makes a silence
white as bone.

I like the way it ends with two lines in iambic, and a rhyme.

Looking for another one to post here, there was one that instantly riveted my attention. The reasons for that were mainly extra-literary, but I think they are of sufficiently general interest to justify posting it here. It's from Under the Oaks II, the second of three volumes of poems having to do with Santa Rosa Junior College (Santa Rosa: SRJC, 1995). It's dated 1978, and the dedication says: "For Richard Tropp (English Department, 1972-1978) dead in Guyana 1978." Here it is:

The People's Temple

They worked and sought and stared
and thought they say, at last, the Sun.
It was the spy-hole of a furnace
they looked through.

Better that fiery glimpse
than no vision at all,
than dull eyes fastened
on the square end of a tube
and a long safe life in a cold blue haze.

I think this same Richard Tropp was probably the author of a notorious six page long suicide note found at the scene of the Jonestown horrors. People have come up with two possible authors, one being him and the other being Jim Jones' wife. Some favor the latter alternative because there is something about the note that seems "feminine" to them. (I'm not sure what is feminine about it -- the handwriting doesn't particularly seem so to me.) There is a documentary about Jonestown in which excerpts from it are read in voice-over by a woman. I, on the other hand, am impressed by the fact that, as you can see if you read the note, the author thinks he/she should have written a book about the People's Temple community and regrets failing to do so. The sort of person most likely to feel they have a duty to write a book would, I should think, be an author or an English teacher.

Contrary to what you may have heard, academics are generally not a radical lot. They are mostly rather boring, in fact. Think Democrats, not Commies. But every once in a great while you find one who really is radical, if not outright bonkers.

Donald L. Emblen 1918-2009

I was saddened to learn this morning that Don Emblen, my first creative writing teacher, died on Friday April 24.

When I was compelled by a lack of resources to attend Santa Rosa Junior College for the first two years of my college education, I made the best of it by hanging out at Don's office. In my whole career as a student, he was one of the two teachers who made the biggest impression on me.

We disagreed about almost everything, and I'm sure he found some of my opinions horrifying, but there was some overlap in our Weltanschauungen. He introduced me to one of his favorite poets, feeling sure that I would love him too. That was Robinson Jeffers, and he was certainly right about my reaction. He had carried Jeffers' Tamar, Roan Stallion, and Other Poems with him throughout his Navy service in World War II.

More than probably anyone I know, Don followed his curiosity wherever it led. He got interested in Peter Mark Roget, father of the Thesaurus, and wrote the first biography of him. He got interested in new Swedish poets, learned Swedish, and translated a bunch of them. When he became interested in Japanese poetry, he taught himself Japanese, translated some more, and taught in Japan.

He claimed to have written over 4,000 poems, but he published none that I know of in conspicuous places. Often he printed them himself in his cluttered-but-neat garage workshop.

When he "retired" (people like him never retire!) he began publishing a newsletter called The Reader's Rejoinder, consisting of letters written to him by his many friends about whatever they were reading. He completed exactly 250 issues, the last being issued posthumously and arriving here last week.

He was in the midst of rereading The Brothers Karamazov (Volkhonsky trans.) when death overtook him at age 90. His wife, Linda, was reading the Constance Garnett trans. at the same time, and when one of them got ahead of the other, he or she had some trouble not giving away what happened next in the story.

He will be missed by a great many people.

I will try to post one of his poems later today.

Yma Sumac, RIP

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Added later: I just found this note by the divine Camille Paglia, in her column on Salon:

On the culture front, I was startled to read of the death last week of Yma Sumac, the virtuoso five-octave Peruvian singer who seems like a legendary figure of the misty past. Sumac's 1950 debut album, "Voice of the Xtabay," made a tremendous impact on me as a child. My family attended her performance (with her company of 20 artists) at the Binghamton Theatre in what was probably 1951. I still have the yellowed clippings and program, which lists songs eerily mimicking the sound of the Andean winds and earthquakes. The cover image of "Voice of the Xtabay" with a glamorous Sumac in the pose of a prophesying priestess against a background of fierce sculptures and an erupting volcano, contains the entire pagan worldview and nature cult of what would become my first book, "Sexual Personae," published 40 years later. Thank you, Yma!

Wow, what a tribute. I feel vindicated. Thanks Camille!

Paul Newman, RIP

Paul Newman, blue-eyed boy from Shaker Heights, died today. He was 83, the same age my father was when he died last year.

One of Newman's most enjoyable movies, I always thought is "Sometimes a Great Notion" (1971), which he directed.

It was based on a great novel by Ken Kesey, who some thought looked like Newman. The book was the sort that reviewers used to like to call big! lusty! brawling! -- and the movie was pretty faithful to the book (except for omitting Kesey's experimental treatment of time). Indeed, the opening shot, of the rambling old house on the edge of a thickly forested river, made me gasp because it looked exactly as I had imagined the scene in the novel.

I loved the Stamper family motto: "Never give a inch."

Newman and Hank Fonda play the Stampers, small businessmen, independent loggers who arouse the wrath of a little Oregon town by refusing to support striking workers by suspending work themselves: scab businessmen, in other words, who kill trees and sell their dead bodies. Not the sort of heroes you would expect these two lefties to be playing, but I suppose they must have been more complex and multi-dimensional than that. Or, possibly, ideological lines have been drawn more clearly and rigidly since the free-spirited sixties. Today, it would be hard to imagine someone as far to the left as Newman making a movie that has so many of "wrong" ideas, attitudes, and feelings as this one does. As Nietzsche said, "convictions are prisons," and we are all doing time now.

Here is a heartbreaking scene in which the Stampers, understaffed and struggling, have suffered a devastating accident that probably would not have happened if it were not for the strike:

Thomas M. Disch, RIP

I'm still on the road, so I have no time to write anything elaborate. I was very saddened to find that classic science fiction author Thomas M. Disch died by his own hand shortly before I left home. (Hat-tip to 2 Blowhards here.) I have been a fan of his ever since my old friend Marc Kummel (alias Treebeard) loaned me his copy of Camp Concentration, circa 1972. One thing that blognotes about Disch sometimes fail to mention is that Disch was a delightful poet -- and that, always the contrarian, he wrote poems that scanned and rhymed. He was an ardent champion of "the new formalism" (ie., poems that scan and rhyme). A delightful example is this parody of Kilmer's Trees.

Poems

I think that I shall never read
A tree of any shape or breed -
For all its xylem and its phloem -
As fascinating as a poem.
Trees must make themselves and so
They tend to seem a little slow
To those accustomed to the pace
Of poems that speed through time and space
As fast as thought. We shouldn't blame
The trees, of course: we'd be the same
If we had roots instead of brains.
While trees just grow, a poem explains,
By precept and example, how
Leaves develop on the bough
And new ideas in the mind.
A sensibility refined
By reading many poems will be
More able to admire a tree
Than lumberjacks and nesting birds
Who lack a poet's way with words
And tend to look at any tree
In terms of its utility.
And so before we give our praise
To pines and oaks and laurels and bays,
We ought to celebrate the poems
That made our human hearts their homes.

George Carlin 1937-2008

George Carlin liked to tell audiences, "If God exists, may he strike me with lightning right now! [Pause.]"

When he died yesterday apparently no lightning was involved, only a simple, naturalistically-explicable heart attack.

Here are bits from his last interview.

He was one of my heroes and I will miss him.

GC quotes for today:

"I have as much authority as the Pope, I just don't have as many people who believe it."

"I'm completely in favor of the separation of church and state. My idea is that these two institutions screwed us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death."

"When fascism comes to this country, it won't be wearing jackboots; it'll be wearing sneakers with lights in them."

"The only good thing ever to come out of religion was the music."

"I love people, I hate groups. People are smart, groups are stupid."

I like to think of him as a "standup philosopher." (Hat-tip on that one to Butler Shaffer.)

Ben Hur, RIP

I found out moments ago that Charlton Heston died yesterday at the age of 84 (the same age my father was when he died late last year). He contributed his stereotypical-great-man face to some of the most watchable movies, including (obviously) Ben Hur and the underrated El Cid (one of the most sincere and dignified of movie epics), and the now-classic Touch of Evil. And then there was Soylent Green, one of the first statements of the shrieky environmental hysteria that now pierces the collective eardrums.

In 1998, well beyond the age when most men retire, he was elected President of the NRA, and began another career. Then he made one of his greatest contributions: he helped explain to people that liberty includes the right to possess dangerous weapons, that freedom means the right to be dangerous.

Alright, I know that sounds nutty, but look at it this way. Just admit that you have no right to be dangerous and you will soon have no rights worth having. Freedom of speech itself would surely have to go. No handgun could ever do the damage done by the words of a Hitler or a Marx. The human brain itself is proving to be an incredibly dangerous force.

Now that Nazism and Communism have had wooden stakes pounded through their hearts, the greatest threat to freedom is probably the mirage of security, the foolish hope to be made safe against everything. Just as humans are developing new ways to be dangerous to each other, they are at the same time -- perhaps it is no coincidence -- also yearning more and more for a Total Security State, for a Nanny State.

Heston's brilliant strategy, if strategy it was, was to go straight to the heart of this issue, and occupy the one position from which you can't be dislodged through your own contradictions. He declared the right to be a threat.

American Conservatism, RIP?

On the occasion of the recent death of William F. Buckley, libertarian David Boaz, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, wondered if Conservatism itself has died:

In the 1994 Contract with America, conservatives declared that they would deliver "the end of government that is too big, too intrusive, and too easy with the public's money." Then in 2000, for the first time Republicans took control of both houses of Congress and the White House. At last, conservatives believed, they would be able to deliver on the agenda they had been advancing for decades.

What happened? Republicans increased federal spending by a trillion dollars in six years. They passed the biggest expansion of entitlements since the LBJ years. They federalized education. They gave unprecedented power to the executive. They launched a massive nation-building project thousands of miles from home, to do in Iraq what conservatives would never expect government to do in the United States.

Even worse, the conservative intellectual movement abandoned its limited-government roots. The neoconservatives, who drifted over from the radical left, brought their commitment to an expansive government intimately involved in shaping the social and economic life of the nation. They transformed conservatism from rugged individualism to "national greatness." The religious right demanded that government impose their social values on the whole country.

I just ran into a sort microcosm of this phenomenon. I happen to be co-director of something called the Center for the Study of Liberal Democracy, the organization that sponsored the Wendy McElroy-Harry Brighouse event the other day. Someone I know, a conservative activist prominent in the area of academic issues, called me to ask me to write a letter in support of a bill now passing through a committee in the US Senate. I had to warn him that I am not a political conservative; I'm basically an anarchist. With that understood, go ahead and make your pitch. I figured I would interrupt him if I realized that he was wasting his time on me. The bill, it turned out, would make public funds available to centers like ours. The idea seemed to be: ones that are doing things that conservatives can support. He was telling running through the names of some good people from my own state who are behind the bill when I interrupted him. I'm sorry, that's not the sort of thing I can support. "May I ask why," he said politely. Well, I'm against governments giving tax money to things like this (for several reasons, but I didn't go into that), and I'm also against the Feds getting any further into education than they already are (notice the tactful understatement!). I admitted that if such a program already existed, I might apply for funds, but that's only because, having been subjected to the injustice of being forced to pay for such things, I would want some of my money back... He interrupted me. I think he could remember hearing this line of thinking somewhere before.

After we hung up, I realized what was so odd about this: a conservative promoting what basically amounts to a welfare scheme.

Back in 1959, when Buckley wrote Up from Liberalism, American conservatism was lean and scrappy. They had some good ideas -- less government, with constitutional limits on state activity and more individual initiative -- and they took a lot of abuse for it. It was the heroic age of their movement. Over the years they forgot about self-reliance and the constitution, and morphed into one more gimmie-group, another piglet sucking at the teats of the welfare state. What the hell happened to them?

They came to power, of course. Acton, as everyone knows, said that power corrupts. I'm starting to see why it does so. It's not just because power is power. It's also because with power comes loot, and loot corrupts.

States are giant extraction devices. They enable one to consume the products of human effort without producing anything oneself, and without winning the voluntary consent of the producers. Once you start living this way, it is very hard to stop. State power is one of the most highly addictive substances known.

After 14 years with its snout in the public trough, the American conservative movement stands, hideously bloated, sadly no longer what it once was. They say that Buckley died after a long illness. Maybe it was a broken heart.

Photographs: Telescopes of Time

When a loved one dies, you get all sorts of weird stuff. I just became the owner of my father's entire collection of bow ties. But what for? I wear ties all the time, that's true, but only cravats.

I also got a couple of bags of photographs.

There is a theory that seeing a photograph of a thing is an indirect way of seeing that thing. Just as I can see you by seeing an image of you in a mirror, so I can see you by seeing a photo of you. The photo image of you is formed by light rays landing on the the film, and then my retinal image is formed in more or less the same mechanical way. Just one more falling domino in the chain of causation.

So looking at a photo is completely different from looking at a painting. With a painting, I am decoding the painter's interpretation of the subject of the picture. Every painting is a comment. A photo doesn't comment. It exhibits. Dziga Vertov said that photos are time-telescopes.

I don't think I buy this as a general ontological theory of photographs, as a theory that is about the real relations between real objects, but it sure gets something right about the phenomenology of viewing photos -- about what it is like to view a photo. Every photograph is like a transparent window into a lost world.

The sepia print above (click to enlarge) is picture of dad in the inconceivably remote world of his childhood. Those wooly chaps! That pony's frightwig mane! And how did they ever afford to put him on a pony? This must have been before his father died, leaving the family of ten almost destitute.

To the right is a telescopic view into my own past. From left to right: My buddy Gerald Campbell, my oldest and best buddy Ricky Brazeau, me, my brother Al. My God, I'd forgotten that Gerald was so beautiful. Well, we were all awful cute. But kids don't notice junk like that. That's another aspect of the phenomenology of the time-telescope. You see the past, but you see it in the present. If its a picture of your past, this can make for revelations. You aren't the same person you were then. Seeing a photo of your own past involves a sort of double vision, it brings it back, but it also makes it different.

The other sort of photograph, the one that is not a window into your past, is the remote world photo. On the back of this sepia print, in Dad's unmistakable block printing: Dottie + myself/taken in May 1944/Inglewood, California. (This was before he met my mother.) Who was Dottie Dimples? I don't think she was ever mentioned in our house. Did he get as lucky that night as he obviously thought he would? Is she dead too? When I showed this to my brother and sister, they both said "Eeeew!" But it's one of my favorite pictures of Dad. Most people don't like thinking of their parents as sexual beings. [Here insert obvious comment about how if they weren't, you wouldn't exist.]

Speaking of which, here is Dad at the downstairs workbench at Gensler-Lee Jewelers, on Main Street in Stockton California, circa 1959. He's so young! And thin! And that patent-leather hair! At the time, he was having an affair with the woman you see smiling at him from the rear doorway. Mom never suspected a thing. I know because her talk was often a flood of complaints, threats, and verbal abuse, and she never complained about this. Odd that with all her complaining she never noticed the one worst thing he did. People are certainly odd, aren't they? It's like Nietzsche said, man is the insane animal.

Here is another double vision one. A ninth grade dance, with a girl named Melanie. At the far left is Page, who is now a professor of literature at the University of California. (I believe she is still on the extreme left, come to think of it.) Melanie doesn't look as glad to be with me as Gerald and Ricky do. Sigh. She sure was pretty. Now that I did notice.

Okay, one more time-telescope. Here we are, about to begin a bicycle trip from our home in Stockton to the old gold rush town (almost a ghost town) of Jenny Lind, on the banks of the Calaveras River, a distance of 29 miles. It was the adventure of a lifetime, so far. Ah youth! Ah mortality! Ortega y Gasset defined nostalgia as "the feeling of missing the nearness of the distant, ... a sorrow at being where one is not." It has the same double minded, two places at once phenomenology as the photograph. For us, photos and nostalgia are inseparable. Photos are the nostalgia-junkie's hard stuff. With photos, you can mainline that aching sense of there and not-there.

Humans have only recently acquired this sort of access to the past. Before Louis Dagerre (1787-1851) people could only remember the dead with relics, like the bow ties. Or, if you were wealthy, you had a painting, maybe a miniature, showing what the person looked like to the artist (if the artist was skilled enough to convey even that). Now we have raw, uninterpreted pastness, bags and boxes of it, enough to haunt you with ghosts, enough to shatter your preconceptions, to make you laugh, to make you cry.

Bobby Fischer, RIP

Chess immortal and onetime child prodigy Bobby Fischer died two days ago. (NYT photo to left. Please don't sue me! I mean well!) Inevitably, much of the writing about his passing has acknowledged the existence of the elephant in the middle of the room: Fischer's long, long tenure as a screwloose crank. Scroll down this article by the excellent Edward Rothstein and you'll see that some of BF's public pronouncements about the Jews make those of Hitler (if you can forget everything else you know about Adolf) seem mild by comparison. And then there was his hailing the 9/11 attacks as "wonderful news." And calling for the assassination of G. W. Bush.

Rothstein raises an interesting question: does BF's amazing weirdness have anything to do with chess? He thinks it does. Chess, like music and mathematics, is a field in which one can excel at a very early age. But it is also unlike them in a crucial way, he says:

Great music attains its power not simply through manipulation and abstraction, but by creating analogies with experience; music is affected by life, not cut off from it. Mathematics also comes up against the demands of the world, as the field opens up to understanding; early insights are tested against the full scale of what has been already been done and what yet remains undone.

But chess, alone among this abstract triumvirate, is never tested or transformed. The only way expertise is ever tried is in victory or defeat. And if a player is as profoundly powerful as Mr. Fischer, defeat never creates a sense of limits. Seeing into a game and defeating an opponent — that defines the entire world.

I have my doubts about this, for two sorts of reasons:

Sort #1, Empirical: This would imply that the chess world contains more nut jobs than those of music or math. Does it? I certainly don't have any supporting evidence here. Chess has BF, and it had Paul Morphy (the genius who was the unofficial first world champion, and quit chess because it is "only a game" in order to become a mediocre lawyer). But music had Wagner. And Michael Jackson. And don't get me started on how many nutty mathematicians there have been.

Sort #2, A Priori: The argument seems to be that music and math include some kind of reality-check for your ideas, whereas chess does not, unless of course you lose. Which, generally, Fischer did not.

Do music and math involve checking your ideas against extramusical and extramathematical reality in the way required by this argument? I'm really not sure. If I develop a theorem that there is/is not a highest prime number, and my proof is fine according to the rules internal to the practice of math, what reality check am I ever going to get?

Also, insofar as there is an external check, it might not be the sort of thing that would influence the mind of the individual practitioner. Maybe the check is on the realm as a whole. I don't think music could exist if all would-be musicians were as emotionally stunted and out of touch as Michael Jackson. Take one look at him and you know: this guy has no idea how weird he seems to others. His ability to perceive other people's emotions is probably very poor. The sort of music that Jackson does is both simple (compare it to a string quartet, say) and structured by traditional rules and practices, so he can do very well indeed by getting around in that self-sufficient parallel universe: the world of music. He doesn't need to know much about how to get around in the emotional universe of actual, concrete human beings.

But Rothstein does have a point. As Aristotle pointed out long ago in the Nicomachean Ethics, there is a difference between the fields in which the young can excel, and those in which they cannot. The difference, he said, is that the former do not need the sort of wisdom that can only come with experience of life, and the latter do. That's a big difference. Very big.

David L. Hunt 1923-2007

My father died very suddenly one day last week. He died as he had often lived in his later years, as he had come to prefer: alone and unnoticed. In life, he could be a fairly annoying person. I think my mother really hated him, and it would be hard to say that she was simply wrong to do so. She had reasons, maybe even one or two good ones.

He was a member of the so-called "greatest generation," a veteran of World War II, Pacific Theater of Operations, and one of his many racial prejudices was the Japanese -- a pigheaded idée fixe that mere facts and logic could never budge. His heroes were John Wayne, Johnny Cash, Mark Twain, and H. L. Mencken. There were no women in his pantheon, and all his gods were very white.


So why do I miss him as much as I do? What are these tears about? I guess I'm writing this to figure that out. Friends and lovers are chosen, and show what you want to be. Relatives are assignments given by Nature. They remind you of what you are. This of course can be unpleasant. Conversations with my Dad could be tests of my liberal virtues, such as they are. His phone calls were sometimes pop quizzes in tolerance. My grades improved as I got older. I eventually realized that being insensitive and something of a bigot are shortcomings that can be balanced and outweighed. Also, I stopped arguing with him when I developed my now-overwhelming aversion to wasting my time.

I suppose his virtues were just the obverse side of his shortcomings. He and his twin sister Doris were the last of the nine children in his family, and born prematurely. As he told the story many times, he almost died in infancy. This made him especially precious to his mother, who always treated him like a little prince (how Doris fit into this I never thought to ask). He got used to doing things his own way, with relatively little need to take the preferences of others into consideration.

He always did just what he wanted to do, not what he was supposed to do or what people told him he had to do. His character was sharply focused. What he really wanted to do at any one moment was, well, something constructive, it didn't seem to matter what. He was no "workaholic," but he was always up to something. If nothing else was happening, he would go out into the backyard and pave part of it with concrete, or rip out one variety of plant and install another. His backyard was written up in the local newspaper, with a big color picture of his magnificent shrub roses and delicate, translucent begonias. This is a trait I failed to inherit, as you know if you have seen my yard. (Or maybe it just took other forms, like this stupid blog.)

He always said that he chose his trade, repairing mechanical watches and clocks, because it's a thing you can do when you are old and feeble, so he would not have to retire. And he didn't. He kept it up, pottering away and listening to angry right-wing talk radio (he eventually came to regard Rush Limbaugh as some kind of semi-liberal sissy) to the very end. He almost literally died at his bench. An eighty four year old man, decades older than most people when they retire, dies at work. As near as we can determine, he was coming in the side door of his shop, going from the work bench in the garage to the one inside, when he dropped his Nat Sherman cigarette and keeled over backward, stretched out on the floor, and never got up. Being a Sherman, the cigarette simply went out, instead of burning the place down.

His shop always smelled powerfully of gear lubricant and good tobacco, and always had at least fifty mechanical clocks in it, the rustle of their ticking as calming as forest murmurs. Their hourly discordant clanging and dinging was an experience I will surely miss.

I think I loathe death for two reasons. For one thing, it comes too early. Humans should live twice as long as they do. Seventy or eighty years is enough to do about half of what one brain can accomplish. Dad left a shop full of unfinished projects, as no doubt will I. The other thing is the waste of knowledge. When that brain hit the floor of his shop and faded out, a lifetime of unrecoverable knowledge faded out. His trade was a handicraft, Medieval sort of thing, and could only be passed on by way of apprenticeship. He had once hoped one of his grandchildren would become his apprentice, but it never happened. If only there were some way to just download all that experience and pass it on to others through a cable! So much of it just goes to waste. (This, by the way, is a problem that traditional immortality does not solve. This knowledge would be equally wasted if locked away in a sexless, bloodless, dirt-free heaven where there are no watches and clocks because there is nothing to do and nowhere to go.)

I was surprised to learn that his will requested "no service." An agnostic in his earlier years, who seldom entered a church unless some woman brought him, I think he ended up a believer of some sort or other. I suppose he just found funerals creepy and depressing, and didn't want to inflict one on anyone else. My brother and sister and I decided that what we will do is have a wake instead. Eat his favorite foods, drink his vodka (he left three gallons in the pantry), tell stories, cry, laugh. Maybe read some letters and poems (his favorite was Robert Service). I think I'll barbecue some ribs with a cherry-based sauce I'm working on, and cook up some fish steaks with orange zest and white grapes. That's the way to remember someone whose motto seemed to be: Life comes around once. Deny yourself nothing.

Added later: The picture at the head of this post is taken, without permission, from the site of a local newspaper (scroll down their page to see a charming write-up about Dad) [photo credited to Rory Mcnamara.] I hope they accept this link as just compensation for swiping their excellent photo. I don't seem to have any decent digital pictures of him of my own. I like the expression in this one. He seems to be saying, "Yes, I got your joke. I just didn't think it was funny." This shows him in the last year of life, aged 83 or so. To the left is a much earlier one, which I scanned. On the back he has written: "11-2-46 / To Mother / With Love / from David on his 23rd Birthday." That would be about two weeks after I was born. It was probably in the mountains east of Los Angeles. That's a guess, based on the fact that at that time L. A. was our home.

Ingmar Bergman Dies at 89

The great film maker died today at his home on the Swedish island of Faro, as reported here.

I have mixed feelings about this man. Pauline Kael says somewhere that he is the favorite director of people who don't like movies. If the thing that annoys you about the movies is that they aren't existential novels or turgid philosophical disquisitions, if they are just too darn interesting a too damn much fun, if you hanker and yearn for the gloomy and the depressing, then Bergman is your man. The fact that he idolizes Bergman has always seemed to me an expression of the neurotic side (is there any other side?) of Woody Allen.

On the one hand. On the other hand, he did make The Magic Flute, one of my two favorite opera movies (the other being Powell and Pressburger's immortal The Tales of Hoffmann). I also loved The Virgin Spring -- But then I'm a sucker for Medieval revenge tales, so consider the source. (I once read the entire Nibelungenlied while on a camping trip. What a nut!)

The thing about Bergman that is often overlooked is that he was a master storyteller. He also had a wonderful sense of humor, when he would allow himself to use it. Like all the great film makers, he told stories -- not in marks on a page or words around a campfire -- but in light. The level of interest in Bergman's work today is be a tiny fraction of what it was in the sixties, at its height. If he does survive, which he well might after all, it won't be because of the profundities his admirers see in his works, but because he was a great story-teller.
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Added later: I later found out that Michelangelo Antonioni died the same day.

Remembering Robert Solomon

Robert C. Solomon, 1942-2006

I was saddened and shocked to get an email from Texas on Sunday, saying that American philosopher Robert Solomon had died suddenly last week. It happened on Jan. 2, as I later found out. He died in Switzerland, while on his way to Italy, which is fitting given his lifelong interest in Nietzsche. You can find a nice obit with a picture here.

Bob has always been one of my favorite people in American philosophy, always doing interesting, divergent, ahead-of-the-herd kinds of things. Whenever he gave a paper at convention I was attending, I would go to his paper, and he seemed to do the same for me. It was always a pleasure and an honor to see his face in the audience. It always made me want to do a good job (and feel crummier if I didn’t!).

When I first heard of him, I think he was a Visiting Assistant Professor at UCLA, and had just edited an anthology of essays on Nietzsche. It’s one of the great anthologies of its kind – and still in print, I think! So I’ll always think of him as that youngster who did that interesting anthology, which might be one reason his death is such a shock.

Of course he went on to do many other things, including a pioneering, classic, and just plain fun to read book on the emotions that I have taught a number of times.

Way back in 1982 I brought him out to give some talks at the place I was teaching at the time, the University of Minnesota campus at a hole-in-the-prairie called Morris. For my business ethics students he did basically the same presentation he did for corporate executives, only this time for a lot less money. It was obvious why he was such a beloved teacher – he was a very engaging speaker, but in a no-bullshit way. It was clear one was dealing with a thinker, not an actor. He did not practice the usual, authoritarian (I talk, you listen and maybe ask questions) teaching method that has dominated university teaching for a thousand years. He got the students to talk. And, I can tell you, in rural Minnesota, that ain’t easy.

It’s a heardache to think I’ll never see him at the podium or in the audience again.

Milton Friedman, RIP

Milton Friedman died today at the age of 94. He was a very smart person who used his considerable talents to fight for everybody's freedom. He is one of the people who ended the horror of military conscription in America, and he did more than any one person to spread the idea that the "war on drugs" is simply wrong. He was a great man.

Here is a story about him from the Chicago Tribune obituary:

When Nixon appointed Friedman to a panel examining whether to abolish the draft, Friedman found himself at odds with Gen. William Westmoreland, the Army chief of staff and former Vietnam commander.

At one point, Westmoreland declared that he did not want to command an army of "mercenaries."

"I stopped him and said, "General, would you rather command an army of slaves?" Friedman later recalled. "He drew himself up and said, 'I don't like to hear our patriotic draftees referred to as slaves.' I replied, 'I don't like to hear our patriotic volunteers referred to as mercenaries.'"

The most sophisticated of the many obits I've seen is Charles Goodhart's, in the Guardian.

Friedman's grandson, Patri Friedman, has some links to delightful videos of Friedman here. To view them is to see how one participates in public discussion with both brilliance and urbanity.

I met Prof. Friedman just once. It was over lunch in Berlin, at the Mont Pelerin Society meetings of 1982 or 1983. He had just come from a trip to the USSR. His impression of the then-extant workers' paradise were, as you might imagine, not favorable. Of course, he had expected as much. But he also noticed that other visitors had similar reactions. On the return flight, when the pilot announced that they had crossed the Finnish border, the passengers burst into applause. Later, a Finnish cab driver gleefully told him, by means of broken English and hand-gestures, "Oh yes, I've been to Russia! I've dropped bombs on Russia!" referring to the brief period in 1940 and 41 when tiny Finland humiliated the Red Tsar, Stalin.