an obscure one

The measure of a machine is function to purpose in all contingencies.  Machines are tested in a controlled environment of use.  A full test would be actual use for all functions, and determination that the machine poses no danger outside its functions.  To fully test a screw, it must be set into each material for which it is intended.  If it is known that some materials receive screws in the same way, only one such actual test is required.  Many test screws may be needed because of wear from tests that exceed the purposed function.  And so on.

A contract is a machine built of language.  It differs from computer programming in only a few ways (the language used is often very old - though sometimes cutting edge, see derivatives - it is, so far, human read rather than machine read, it is governed by human forces such as civil institutions and markets rather than by electrical and other physical forces).

A contract may be tested only by thinking about it - and of course, nothing can be done with a contract except through its being thought about by individuals with power or by agents of power.

A transactional lawyer must possess a mind adept at testing contracts by thinking through their functions.  There is a mental laboratory in which deals are shaped and tested into machines.  The best transactional lawyers (as lawyers) are the best laboratory machinists.

(I say "as lawyers" because transactional lawyers are also adjunct deal makers, which a different skill - the skill of bringing resources into the laboratory and shop and knowing what impression - as well as what function - the process and the final machine should make.)

Luxembourg

To love him:
Lonely for him, when apart,
Alone in him, when here.

To love then:
Tender awareness of
His presence or absence.


To love so:
Makes no feeling or regard,
Good or bad,
Impossible -
save indifference.

parties

Outside politics - and often in - the parties polarize around action and stability.

punch

For the wages of sin is death.  And the sin of wages is?

recompense

Generally:  You pay for every cent you're paid.

manifest

We moved west, and when the west was won, we moved out - up - in.  The internet is the new world that came without warning - almost out of thin air, as if the whole earth was given a mezzanine.  So when we talk about cyber attacks, the Chinese, or us, or who have you, we feel it as an invasion but do not respond to it as if it were a true invasion.  This double sense is, for the present, apt: attacks on a frontier, on newly accessioned territory, are not felt like an attack on the heartland, even when the threat is no less serious.  And we sense that we are still the net aggressor - culturally, politically, even in terms of attack.  Later, when the internet border works like a physical border, invasion will be invasion, full stop.  Put differently, had Pearl Harbor occurred twenty years earlier, Americans at home would not have felt that we had been attacked here, but instead felt that we had been attached over there.  The internet, even control systems for pipelines, are not yet here for us.

bone dry

A surprise to find that O'Keefe was a good writer, and wrote much as she painted: with fluid lines of color, sharply edged, that gathered all dignity to the author.  The beautiful impact.  The faintly sick aftertaste.

glories

Steiglitz's photographs of O'Keefe - within one face, portrayed by one photographer, a multitude.

hue

Paris has a color - its sky, its stone, the glint of its light against its grime - of pale grey-yellow.

mean

It's all fun and games until somebody gets hurt.  Well, it's still fun and games until somebody you care about gets hurt.  'Cause somebody's getting hurt, somewhere, always - right now.  And you're still horsing around.

flick

Certainly the creation sequence in Malik's Tree of Life is spectacular.  But the brief portrayal of the end of the universe - dimmed, still galaxies, then a momentary spark of silent, white light - then nothing - that is awful and awesome.

Sunday

Most successful preaching is to the choir, sooner or later.  They're either on the platform behind you and need to be kept there, or else on the way up and needing propulsion.  The balance of successful preaching is to break or charm.

glories

election day, olympic opening ceremonies.

couple

No man is an island, all men are an ocean.

intellegent design

A reduction in the mass of evidence for something is not an increase in the evidence for its alternative.

tube

The strange glory of it: one listens to a program of Arvo Pärt's works, all familiar until the last, Adam's Lament, one of his more recent.  And suddenly Bach comes flowing through Pärt's sonorous minimalism.  Not by drops, but in a great, multiplying rush.  The 12/8 time, the walking base line, the counterpoint, the controlled chromatics, the hymnodic yearning.

And then, the next morning, to Roosevelt Island to see the new memorial to FDR, completed from the late mid-century design of Louis Kahn.  And, as suddenly, Egypt comes, like a granite spaceship from the past, in through the modernism.  A pyramid-made-plaza, of spectacularly massive, solid granite.  Construction that - at least at the tip, actually could last thousands of years.  Solid blocks of granite, perhaps two meters to the side and four meters tall, each standing just an inch or so apart, but perfectly aligned, letting the light cut through.  Smooth but unpolished surfaces, except on the trapped sides that face the neighboring blocks - forming waxy slits of sun.  Those surfaces are brought to a mirror polish, forming an aperture, as if Bach could shine through Pärt.

bene

There is a blessed earthiness to resignation.

childless

If I were a parent, it would have occurred to me long ago that a child born today might well be alive in 2100.

roots

Stereo is such a strange word to be in common use, but like other ordinary-yet-strange terms, it was delivered through past technology, whose edge of newness has worn away.  More comfortable are applications of old words or their compounds to technical items: headset, monitor, clutch.

line drawing

A string has come loose in my mind: I look at Frank Lloyd Wright's designs and see less beauty than before, and more than a little sham.  What changed?

allegro

Why is the audience to a Vivaldi concert so much more affluent?  Is it coincidence, or age, or something about wealth itself and those ritornello thrills?

Francis

If you would strike at the king, you must kill him.  Else you'll be killed, or, worse, put in jail and fed three squares a day.

shallow me

So he calls Lindsey Graham Butters.  That sums up what I like and what I don't about Andrew Sullivan.

second

Lose your home, lose your childhood, press the reset button even once - and you will never recover.  You will not catch up to those who began: at the beginning.

peachoid

This new Netflix remake of House of Cards, not so great, but here's the odd thing.  This Francis is from Gaffney.  His Lady Macbeth of a wife gets tulip bulbs from Spartanburg.  His accent is wrong but his manner - credible to this upstate South Carolinian.

better than gunfire

Development is dramatic only by event: event of cause or manifestation.