Carnegie

Certainly Bach's St. Matthew Passion is the greater of his surviving passions - taken as whole works.  But the St. John Passion is mostly greater minute for minute.  Although greatness, at this level, is nearly absurd: it is as if I said that, taken as a whole, Earth's landmass had greater beauty than its oceans.  But that, by the square meter, the ocean is often more exciting.

Actually, that's exactly what I'm saying: that Bach's Matthew is land; his John is sea.

thank you Karl Llewellyn

What the Uniform Commerical Code does in basic situations, it does very well.  How long do I have to deliver goods?  There's an answer for that.  It is a thing of beauty, rivalling, perhaps excelling, the Bankruptcy Code for its cohesion and beauty of purpose.

windows and arms

One of the useful things I carry from philosophical reading is attentiveness to unit selection.  The mind selects units automatically in most contexts, usually correctly.  Awareness of unit selection permits both correction of the occasional error and sometimes the opportunity to shift the perspective of others to our advantage.  And it illuminates the occasional disorientation that comes from lapses in automatic unit selection.  One stares sometimes, and a written word becomes letters, or a spoken word becomes mere sounds.  On my walk to work this morning, I saw a construction worker carefully carrying a large iron pipe.  I thought: Why so careful?  And then I saw that he was protecting the relatively delicate threads at either end of the pipe from scraping against the scaffolding above or concrete sidewalk beneath.  The threads and not the pipe were at issue.  So far, so good.  But when I looked up, not at all attentively, there was a moment when the commuter in front of me was not a commuter, but only an arm floating in a sea of background.  My mind had abstracted the threads of the pipe from the pipe and then, momentarily, done the same to the commuter: disembodied his arm.  To clear this, I looked up at the buildings.  My mind persisted: floating windows, abstracted from the buildings to which they belonged.  And then, the buildings come back, the commuters come back whole, all is back.  This all occurred in less than a second.  Units.

folk biology

Somehow it doesn't suprise me that a mammal's mouth is both for eating and vocalizing: it is easy to imagine the vocal capacity as layered on.  Nor that my mouth can be used as an alternative to the nose for breathing: redundancy for meeting the most immediate need through double purpose makes perfect sense.  Nor that smell is co-located in the nose.  I could go on.

But I suppose I am suprised that ingestion and respiration converge in the throat, and that liquid elimination and reproduction converge in the same organs.  After all, each of both pairs of functions are basic - and they don't seem to do anything for one another but potentially interfere.  (We have all had the experience of nearly choking on a swallow of water that goes down wrong.)  The idea that this is a matter of merely efficient doubling up doesn't satisfy.

But it does make for an elegant double-wye symmetry.  One imagines a shape like this: >--<  ; and that is, after all, an anthropomorphic configuration.

named galleries

Art museums are inverse cemeteries.  When some rich men die, their treasures are unburied.

illiberal

Harems were, of course, an expression of someone's freedom.

401k

We are all, in some ways, refugees - did we but know it.  Full freedom is not an option.  The question is: what will I surrender to?  What I will to be is smartly in thrall.

"Look up, Hannah!"

That is how Chaplain begins the great melodramatic coda to his famous speech at the end of The Great Dictator.  Somehow I have matured into an appreciation of great melodramatic efforts.  Bach's, Chaplain's, others'.  Something in me says - for the great artists, it is nothing to be afraid of.  Only a mountain to climb.

aq!

I have what I hope is a permanent suspicion of the feelings of consumption and the corresponding determination never to identify as a consumer.  But I do understand that it is one of life's simple pleasures, and good, to enjoy buying a coffee, a rug or a ticket to see a show.

at the next turn

But then, really, what did you expect life to be.  Those who bend life to their will are served more by the blind curves than by the purpose.  Did they but know it.

the museum of lost idioms

Would you like me to place the call?  Place.

glories

The Carter family, from station XET, Monterey, down Mexico way.

of course

It is important not to show relief when things are going your way in a difficult negotiation - win almost with a yawn.

rhetoric lesson

Robert Moses, inveighing against the rigid elitism of the board of the Metropolitain Museum of Art in the early 1940s, called them:

"snooty trustees who do not know and care what the public is thinking."

The lawyer in me wants to amend this to "snooty trustees who do not know or care..."  But then read these in alternative and see why Moses had it right: the and points to the public, while the or reaches back to the trustees.  The forward-leaning emphasis is more effective: it is still cutting, but more prescriptive - there is a stronger hint of constructive principles.  My alternative is merely cutting. 

It is a small word that makes a small but perceptible difference.

loaded

It is strange to hear an investment banker tell you how much he loves gambling at casinos.

Hubble

We see color and cloud,
As we saw chalise and wafer,
Bearing the transmuted.

after Blake

Prefer wise errors to foolish perfection.

mirror

I have poor gaydar, but relatively strong ltr-dar.  If a guy - particularly a gay guy - is in a long relationship, I can see it.  There's a sort of sweet ripeness to him, just going soft.

sightings

Today in the office elevator: a well dressed woman carrying a hatbox!

and then I ran out of P words

Possession is nine-tenths of the law.
Presence is nine-tenths of possession.
Persistence is nine-tenths of presence.
Preparation is nine-tenths of persistence.
Purpose is nine-tenths of preparation.

Carousel

What I had missed - somehow - in Carousel, was the elegant symmetry of the two couples.  One afraid to begin loving but tragically loyal once in love.  The other rationally and happily ready to love, but resolutely able to walk apart when the other doesn't suit.  If I loved you versus had I loved you.