Sixty years ago................................

 

At the cinema.........The Good, The Bad and the Ugly

The elusiveness.................................

 

...........................................of definitions.

Love.......................

 

     But this was not the end of my love for Mattie Chatham.  After the figments of presumption and delusion had fallen away and I again saw myself as I was and my circumstances as they were, I loved her more, and more clearly, than I did before.  I became able to imagine her as she was and not as the subject of a dream.  In my thoughts of her, she stood apart from me.  I seemed to see her whole.  When I realized the futility and absurdity of my old self-begotten desire, that was when the arrow struck.  It entered my heart, and I could not pull it out.  The hopelessness of my love became the sign of its permanence.

     So it is that the life force, may take possession of a man—so that in the end he may be possessed by something greater, no longer at all belonging to himself.

-Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

Noticing....................

 

The mind is lazy.  It has trained itself to ignore everything except those things that scare it or please it.  By forcing the mind to notice things, you engage it, telling it you want to be aware of life, and to claim back that which has been lost.  By stimulating the five senses, you bridge to the extrasensory perception of the subtle body.  In addition, by stopping to notice, you place yourself more firmly inside this incarnation as a human. . . .It's important that life doesn't just wash past you—so a day becomes a week, a month a year, and suddenly you're old and gray and dead!  By stopping to notice, you are requiring the mind to come back from its world, its pleasures and needs, and enter another world—the real world of observation and comprehension.

-Stuart Wilde, Sixth Sense

making up your own rules........

 

Jackson Pollock         Convergence (detail)   1952

 

    Pollock, Naifeh told me, "was literally one of the least talented draftsmen at the Art Students League."  Naifeh argues that, as with Van Gogh, Pollock's lack of traditional drawing skill was what lead him to invent his own rules for making art.  As schools offering standardized paths in art have proliferated, "one of the problems is that artists tend to be products of those schools," said Naifeh, an artist himself.

-David Epstein, Range:  Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

Or ten or fifteen.................

 

Overnight success always takes a year or two.

-James Clear, from this episode

Love it when.....................

 

............Matt Ridley dreams of what might be possible:

Innovation saves the planet far more effectively than restraint and austerity ever could.

Speaking of dreams................................

 

Democracy, as I’ve come to see it, is a way of working together collaboratively that’s guided by ethics: dignity, compassion, communication, generosity, and an abundance of empathy.

-Ari Weinzweig, from this edition

Sixty years ago......................

 

Star Trek:  The Original TV series: Episode 1

Fifty years ago......................

 

 ......................a 1976 playlist from Any Major Dude With Half a Heart.

Joel Kotkin is always............

 

............worth the time investment it takes to read his stuff.  For instance, this substack on the Rise of the Artisan Economy:

Yet viewed in a wider lens, this artisanal economy fits well with a rebellion directed against capitalism that produces the machine-driven sameness that could be amplified by the rise of Artificial Intelligence. Even as the current economy creates unprecedented wealth, it has not created an economy which retains a more human character. The urban historian Lewis Mumford noted that our present order combines “paleotechnic purposes with neotechnic means,” an economy that produces wealth, but not much in the way of artistry or human satisfaction.

Don't often disagree with................

 

...................Ben Carlson, but I don't agree with his take on (ZIRP) zero interest rate policies.   He sites this:

    Chancellor spends much of the book railing against 
    the period of low interest rates that came out of the 
    Great Financial Crisis. He argues that ultra-low 

    interest rates are dangerous because they encourage 

    excessive risk-taking, punish savers, distort the 

    price of time, inflate asset prices, prop up zombie 

    companies and in many ways weaken the economy.

And responds with this:

    What’s strange to me is that ZIRP didn’t really lead 
    to any of those things. Sure, asset prices went higher 
    but that’s mostly because the stock market went 
    through a lost decade in the 2000s and the behemoth 
    tech companies stepped in to save the day by 

    providing actual profits.

My disagreement is this:  Low interest rates in a real estate market of high demand and low supply are extraordinarily inflationary.   In many markets, including ours, single family residential prices about doubled in the five years between 2018 and 2023.  That is not sustainable and the "affordability" crisis in housing is the result.

Nobody asks me, but the perfect interest rate is that rate which allows local financial institutions to pay savers a rate on their savings accounts just a bit over inflation.   If inflation is 3%, savers should get 3.5% on their savings accounts, which means the financial institutions would have to lend money at 6.5-7%.

And don't tell me 7% is a high interest rate.  We started our commercial real estate brokerage in 1982.  Mortgage rates were 15%.   When we started buying investment properties in 1983, rates were above 13%.   For half our career, we would have killed for a 7% rate.

I feel like an old man yelling at the kids to get off my lawn.

Sixty years ago..................

 

Lou Christie....................................Lightnin' Strikes

Leadership 101.......................

 

Leadership is not a job title: it’s a state of being.

Silly season is in full swing.............

 

Fifty years ago.............................

 

Al Stewart..........................Year of the Cat (album)

unappeasable...........................

 
Anger at humans, my own kind—
I remember how it carried me,
joyous in self's self-exaltation,
through a narrow opening as at birth
into the great hollow of the dark itself
where the unappeasable, in unending
revenge for revenge, tread each
alone the circle of no known
beginning or end.  And that is Hell.

-Wendell Berry, Sabbaths 2010 X

Life its ownself........................

 

Sixty years ago........................

 

Young Rascals.....................................Good Lovin

Opening paragraphs..........

 

My name is David Burkett.  I'm actually the fourth in a line of David Burketts beginning in the 1860s when my great-grandfather emigrated from Cornwall, England, to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan which forms the southern border of Lake Superior, that vast inland sea of fresh water.  This naming process is of no particular interest except to illustrate how fathers wish to further dominate the lives of their sons from the elemental beginnings.  I have done everything possible to renounce my father but then within the chaos of the events of my life it is impossible to understand the story without telling it.

-Jim Harrison, True North

something worthy of notice..........

  

     Burley Coulter himself was one of the best perquisites of my office.  Burley was nineteen years older than I was, old enough to have been my father, and in fact he was the same age as my father would have been if he had lived.  He was the most interesting man I ever knew.  He was in his way an adventurer.  And something worthy of notice was always going on in his head.  I found him to be a surprising man, unpredictable, and at the same time always true to himself and recognizable in what he did.  I had lived in Port William several years before I realized that Burley was proud of me for being a reader of books; he was not himself a devoted reader, but he thought it was excellent that I should be.  It must have been 1940 or 1941 when he first came all the way into my upstairs room and saw my books in my little bookcase,

"Do you read in them?"

"Yes," I said.

He gave the shelves a long study, not reading the titles, apparently just assaying in his mind the number and weight of the books, their varying sizes and colors, the printing on their spines.  And then he nodded his approval and said, "Well, that's all right."

-Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

Sixty years ago......................

 

Frank Sinatra..............................Strangers In The Night

Uh-oh............................

 

With chatbots, the negative impact is immediate. The high generated by side-stepping mental effort using LLMs is so compelling that, with only a short exposure, hard thinking quickly becomes intolerable.

-Cal Newport, from his post The Good Thing About Hard Things

the slightest idea................

Ledger of the head’s transactions, 
log of the body’s voyage,
it rides all day in a raincoat pocket, 
ready to admit any droplet of thought,
nut of a maxim, 

narrowest squint of an observation.

It goes with me 

to a gallery where I open it to record 

a note on red and the birthplace of Corot,
into the tube of an airplane 

so I can take down the high dictation of clouds,
or on a hike in the woods where a young hawk 

might suddenly fly between its covers.

And when my heart is beating 

too rapidly in the dark,
I will go downstairs in a robe, 

open it up to a blank page
and try to settle on the blue lines 

whatever it is that seems to be the matter.

Net I tow beneath the waves of the day, 

giant ball of string or foil,
it holds whatever I uncap my pen to save:
a snippet of Catullus, 

a passage from Camus,
a tiny eulogy for the evening anodyne of gin,
a note on what the kingfisher looks like when he swims.

And there is room in the margins 

for the pencil to go lazy and daydream 

in circles and figure eights, 

or produce some illustrations,
like Leonardo in his famous codex —
room for a flying machine, 

the action of a funnel, 

a nest of pulleys,
and a device that is turned by water,

room for me to draw 

a few of my own contraptions,
inventions so original and visionary
that not even I — genius of the new age —
have the slightest idea what they are for.

-Billy Collins, Journal

Now tell us how you really feel...........

 

........................about the digital world:

The business logic of these platforms, the relationship they forge with their users (who are not customers, in the traditional sense), is essentially extractive, parasitic, vampiric. As a form of entrepreneurship, it more closely resembles… manufacturing highly addictive Tianeptine (“Gas Station Heroin”) for general sale, than it does the selling of cars or refrigerators.

-from Matthew B. Crawford's substack as he looks at the simultaneous rise of “surveillance capitalism” and of attention engineering. 

When governing (effectively)................

 

Focusing on basics, and on developing a sense of community, is far more effective than emphasizing partisan politics.

-Joel Kotkin, from this substack effort

willingness.................

 

     What's important to recognize is that risk and reward are attached at the hip.  If you cannot deal with uncertainty and volatility, you should expect to earn lower returns.  If you desire higher returns, you need to become comfortable with drawdowns and unexpected events vaporizing a piece of your portfolio on occasion.

     If there's one lesson this book hopes to leave you with, it's that risk cannot be avoided—it's something you have to manage, understand, and ultimately respect. . . .

    The real secret to investing, as it turns out, is no secret at all.  It's the willingness to accept that pain and progress are two sides of the same coin.  It's having the courage to hold when others sell, the humility to admit what you don't control and focus on what you do.

     You don't need to outsmart the market.  You just need to outlast it.

-Ben Carlson,  Risk & Reward

Sixty years ago...............................

The Four Tops......Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever
 

noticing..................

 

Have you ever noticed when you're driving that anyone who's driving slower than you is an idiot and anyone driving faster than you is a maniac?

-George Carlin

a new momentum......................

 

The first real grip I ever got on things
Was when I learned the art of pedalling
(By hand) a bike turned upside down, and drove
Its back wheel preternaturally fast.
I loved the disappearance of the spokes,
The way the space between the hub and rim
Hummed with transparency.  If you threw
A potato into it, the hooped air
Spun mush and drizzle back into your face;
If you touched it with a straw, the straw frittered.
Something about the way those pedal treads
Worked very palpably at first against you
And then began to sweep your hand ahead
Into a new momentum—that all entered me
Like an access of free power, as if belief'
Caught up and spun the objects of belief
In an orbit coterminous with longing.

-Seamus Heaney, Wheels within Wheels

On irrational knowledge...........

 

Leo Tolstoy's struggle with life's meaning seemed quite bleak.  He had searched far and wide, through his own work and that of hte greatest scientists of his day, and come up empty.  Fearing that life might, in fact, be meaningless, he was poised to kill himself.  He didn't, however, because he hadn't given up searching.

     He tried one last strategy.  Not finding life's meaning among the greatest and most sophisticated people and ideas, he ran away to a small Russian village filled with uneducated, simple farmers.  They were not scientists and scholars but ordinary working people who didn't know he was a famous author and couldn't even read his books. They didn't know that the weird guy who had moved into their town was the world-renowned Leo Tolstoy.  Day after day, he got to know them. He watched them work, talk to one another, and pray.  Here's what he noticed:  They had no crisis of meaning in their lives at all.  The lived at peace with the universe in the simplicity of their love for God and each other.  They seemed untroubled by the existential crisis that tormented him.

     Perhaps, he thought, that was the secret to living well: to embrace the irrationality of life itself, without asking questions.  Ignorance is bliss, as they say.  But on reflection, he found this perception was incorrect.  The peace of the faithful unschooled, he learned, was not that they didn't wonder about the meaning of life.  They wondered plenty.  It was that they did not insist on finding neat answers someplace.  Through the way they lived, they sought instead an understanding of life beyond what any intellect could articulate, and this understanding brought peace.  He called this "irrational knowledge."  As he concluded, "Rational knowledge, presented by the learning and wise, denies the meaning of life, but the enormous masses of men, the whole of mankind, receive that meaning in irrational knowledge.  Irrational knowledge is faith . . . It is God."

-Arthur C. Brooks, The Meaning of Your Life:  Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness

an ongoing responsibility.....................

 

     Yet populist manners are all for show, are they not?  The pretense grows thinner as the state thickens.  If the call to "drain the swamp" does more than repopulate it with creatures amenable to the party in power, it will be a miracle.  Government grows because the people ask more of it, and officeholders once in power seek to increase their powers and tenure and multiply their colleagues.  Lafayette's friend James Madison thought that each of the many parts of government under the Constitution—legislature, executive, judiciary, federal, state—would keep jealous watch on all the others.  Sometimes.  At other times they unite to maintain themselves over against their constituents.  The only remedy is vigilance, inspired when it is not disgraced by spasms of resentment.

     Lafayette was a friend of liberty in America and in the world.  He believed America shared his sentiments—more than it did. . . .

     So it goes with popular institutions founded on the plain rights of man.  Heroes cannot defend them for long, or alone.  The people have to take care of their institutions and their rights.   That is our ongoing responsibility.

-Richard Brookhiser:  The Hero Returns: Lafayette and the Legacy of Revolution