War.........................

 

     He later was struck forcefully by "how rapidly the mind adjusts itself" to new circumstances, how contingent even the most fundamental truths seem to be.  "I thought for awhile that I was dying, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world—The moment the hope of life returned it seemed as abhorrent to nature as ever that I should die."  More matter-of-factly he recalled that "one of the thoughts that made it seem particularly hard to die was the recollection of several fair damsels whom I wasn't quite ready to leave."

-Stephen Budiansky,  Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Life in War, Law, and Ideas

The above being after Holmes was wounded at the Battle of Ball's Bluff.   Holmes was also wounded at the Battle of Antietam.  Budiansky enlightens us:

      The Battle of Antietam remains the bloodiest single day in the history of the United States Army, its casualties on that hot September day in the Maryland countryside twice those it would experience even in the D-Day landings against Nazi-occupied France.  The morning of September 17, 1862, found Holmes's regiment encamped on the east side of the Antietam Creek a few miles outside the town of Sharpsburg, Maryland.  By seven thirty they were on the move . . .

The horrific casualties suffered by attacking forces throughout the Civil War was largely a result of the collision of traditional tactics with the vastly increased firepower of newer weapons; rifled muskets that could be accurately aimed to five hundred yards and lethal to a thousand yards, and cannon that could sweep the field with curtains of cannister shot.

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

 

The Byrds lip-syncing Turn! Turn! Turn! on the Ed Sullivan Show

On the sentimentalization of nature...........

 

     Human beings are, of course, a part of nature, as much so as grizzly bears or bees or whales or sorghum cane.  The cities of human beings are as natural, being a product of one form of nature, as are the colonies of prairie dogs or the beds of oysters.  The botanist Edgar Anderson has written wittily and sensitively in Landscape magazine from time to time about cities as a form of nature.  "Over much of the world," he comments, "man has been accepted as a city-loving creature."  Nature watching, he points out, "is quite as easy in the city as in the country; all one has to do is accept Man as part of Nature.  Remember that as a specimen of Homo sapiens you are far and away most likely to find that species an effective guide to deeper understanding of natural history."

     A curious but understandable thing happened in the eighteenth century.  By then, the cities of Europeans had done well enough by them, mediating between them and many harsh aspects of nature, so that something became particularly possible which previously had been a rarity—sentimentalization of nature, or at any rate, sentimentalization of a rustic or barbarian relationship with nature.  Marie Antoinette playing milkmaid was an expression of this sentimentality on one plane.  The romantic idea of the "noble savage" was an even sillier one, on another plane.  So, in this country, was Jefferson's intellectual rejection of cities of free artisans and mechanics, and his dream of an ideal republic of self-reliant rural yeomen—a pathetic dream for a good and great man whose land was tilled by slaves.

-Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

   

sensibilities................

 

      This is a case where mere fact isn't instructive.  I had taken over the rowing and we were close to shore moving through reed and lily pad beds with the dog growling intermittently on the shore.  It was already warm at eight in the morning and a slight breeze kept the clouds of mosquitoes enshrouded in the forest.  Fred was peeling a hard-boiled egg drawn from a cooler and dosing it with Tabasco.  I had just asked a mawkish theological question about Mary Magdalene, a query about forgiveness attached to this woman in part because I was a virgin at sixteen and imaged Mary Magdalene to be a haunted seductress, her robes parted wantonly for those who took interest and gave her a few coins.  This boat incident took place over thirty years ago and I see bits of eggshells floating on the shaded water.  Fred was tired and irritable from driving north all night.

      "That's your main problem," he said.  "You can't have religion without belief.  You're just using your religion to decorate your life to protect you from your father.  It's like your mother flying down to Chicago to go to a dress shop, say something pastel pink for Easter when the Lord was said to arise.  That's no better than your dad driving from Marquette to Duluth to fuck one of his fifteen-year-olds.  What I am saying is that you can't be playing around with your Christianity like it was a tool kit to keep you going.  How does that make you any better than your dad?  Right now you'd give your left nut for an hour with Mary Magdalene."  Fred was making light of my recent religious conversion wherein my soul was saved at the fundamentalist Baptist church, an event that offended my family's Episcopalian sensibilities including Fred's.

-Jim Harrison, True North

Things he's learned.......................

 

• John Wooden wrote, “ Make each day your masterpiece.” This is great advice to live by. Since you can only have one “master” piece - this also means make each day better than the last.

-more of Chris Lynch's life lessons are here

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

 

On the TV............Mission Impossible debuts

Coyote's Law...........................

 

Don't give the government a power that you would not like your worst political enemy to wield

-Warren Meyer, from this post

If only there was a system.......................

 

.........that delivered all these things.  Oh, wait....

via

The wildest bet...............

 

You wouldn’t have bet on it,
the battered rock
orbiting a star
from the discount bin
of the universe,
wouldn’t have guessed
that it would bloom
mitochondria and music,
that it would mushroom
mountains and minds,

-Maria Popova, from the opening of her poem The Wildest Bet is the Winning Bet (found in its entirety here)

Enoughness....................

 

Enoughness is a completely internal state. It stems from your past and the stories you tell yourself about who you are.

-Jordan Grumet, from this substack on the Treadmills of the Unfulfilled

via

That is some theme.......................

 

A key theme of my work in the technology critic space is that a life without serious, sustained, intentional thought is impoverished. Thinking is how we make sense of ourselves and the world, and is how we imagine new horizons and create the key elements of our future. It’s at the heart of philosophy, theology, and human empathy; the ability that separates our species from all other animals.

-Cal Newport, from this post

the freedom of getting it wrong.................

 

In both cases, language was being treated as a mere technology for completing a task or satisfying a tester, not as a route to self-expression or understanding. Once literacy is reduced to the correct ordering of words to produce sentences, it becomes unclear why one would care whether the order is one’s own. It is also unclear why one would choose to study human languages and literature, if they are taught and learned no differently from math or computer science, as a matter of right and wrong answers.

-William Davies, from this essay on reading and writing and language

via

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